The Ross Forgery

by William H Hallahan

  “Just like baseball.”

  “Just like baseball, Ross. Now—you know how Pickett plays the game? I’m going to tell you—so you’ll never forget. If he were a pitcher, and he had the bases loaded, two down in the ninth with a one-run lead, and he was behind the batter three-two, Pickett would get a machine gun and kill the batter, the umpire, and the three base runners; then he’d wipe out the spectators. That little train-truck push-and-shove match he and I had, that was corporate gamesmanship at its best. I thumped him. But it didn’t make him laugh. He just got a machine gun. It’s not a game with Pickett, Ross. It’s war.”

  “So how come a silly little pamphlet—”

  “Because he can’t have it! Because then his collection has a flaw in it! And if I have the key piece—me, in particular—he will go right out of his mind. I could lead him around like a dancing bear with a ring through his nose.”

  Ross nodded. “He could even kill you for it.”

  “Or you, Ross. Or you.”

  2

  Service built a little mound of marmalade on a square of toast with his knife. He paused before biting it. “When can you deliver, Ross?”

  Ross watched him put the square of toast into his mouth and chew. “Three or four days,” said Ross.

  “What?” demanded O’Kane. “You can?”

  Ross shrugged. “Maybe five days. No more. The worst is behind us.”

  O’Kane leaned back and looked at Service. “We’d better warn that laboratory. They want forty-eight hours minimum to test.”

  “Who’s going to test?” asked Ross.

  “Haddon Labs, up on West Seventy-Third Street. They’re affiliated with several universities.” O’Kane looked curiously at Ross. “Why?”

  Ross shrugged. “Who are they putting on it besides this Aldridge?”

  Service held up his huge hands and began tolling with his fingers. “Aldridge is the literary expert. The typographic specialist is Lawrence. And the chemist is Haddon himself.”

  “Lawrence,” said Ross musingly.

  “You know him?”

  “A clod. He’s perfect.”

  “How about the other two?”

  Ross shrugged. “Maybe Townsend knows them. They’re more in his field than mine.” He looked at O’Kane. “What are you going to do? Wave this at Pickett and say ‘Look what I found’?”

  O’Kane shook his head at Ross. “No. We’re going to have a sale.”

  “Sale?”

  “An auction.”

  “Maybe we’re boring Mr. Ross,” said Service.

  O’Kane looked at him. “Yes. Maybe.”

  Ross looked at O’Kane. “I’m anything but bored.”

  “That’s OK,” said O’Kane. “Maybe we’ll talk about it later. Let’s talk about the test.”

  “What happens if we flunk the test?” asked Ross.

  “You’re out of the money, Ross, if you flunk.”

  “How about expenses?”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “You have any idea how much this is costing?”

  “No good, Ross. I’m not getting involved in expenses. I figure the whole wad rides on the report. Maybe it’ll make you try harder. Now, what are you going to have with that coffee?”

  3

  Police detective Spengler carried the brown envelope to his desk and pulled out the contents. There was a typewritten report and a small white envelope.

  He dumped the contents of the white envelope into his palm. He looked at a sliver of blond plastic and the ball of a bullet. He glanced at the report, already familiar with it, and then drummed his fingers.

  Another detective stopped at his desk. “You got problems, Spengler?”

  “I need a body.”

  “Oh, yeah. What did the lab tell you?”

  “This piece of plastic was found on the rear floor of the car we derricked out of the river. It is part of an imitation horn handle for a pistol. The lab man even gave me the name of the maker and the caliber.” He pointed at a name on the typewritten report. “It’s a cheap gun that’s sold in the Southwest, with a cowboy holster. Thirty-eight caliber, all gussied up in chrome. This bullet was part of a .38 caliber shell, and may have been fired from the same gun that this piece of plastic came from. The blood type on the dashboard was B negative. The owner of the car was or is Oscar Rudemeyr. He’s a thief, a perjurer, a fence, and a wise guy with a long record. He’s also missing. His type blood was, or is, type B negative. It looks like he was driving, when someone in the back seat smacked him over the head with a fancy cowboy pistol and broke the handle. Then that someone shot Rudemeyr through the head, splashing blood and brains onto the dash. The bullet dented the dash after it came out of Rudemeyr’s head, and ended up on the seat next to him. Then someone drove into that pier shed, put the car in gear, and let it drive right off the pier with the windows open. If Rudemeyr was in there, he must have floated out. How’s that sound?”

  “OK. Where do you go from there?”

  Detective Spengler lit a cigarette. “I figure if I wait a while, a very wet body with a big hole in the head may turn up down near Sandy Hook. Then I’ll have another Murder One indictment for John Doe for the DA to play with.”

  4

  The shop was in darkness.

  Disembodied like the smile of the Cheshire cat, a cigarette glowed, seemingly hung in midair.

  Ross sat, smoking and waiting and listening thoughtfully to the wind. He felt it wrapping itself around the brick building, heard it rock a window upstairs now and then. He heard the wind and remembered a wind in Maine that came off the sea at night, to prowl through the barn he was sleeping in. In a six-foot bed of hay, wrapped in two camping blankets, he had listened to the wind squeeze through the barn boards and talk to him, wafting the smell of the salt sea and telling him night secrets about his great career in type design. It was magic, and he’d lost it. Years ago, he’d lost it.

  The wind talked to him now, but he’d lost the ear to hear and decipher.

  Anyway, it was after midnight. Time to go.

  5

  This was the third night that he’d worked in the photoengraving plant, and he drove through the streets of Manhattan, feeling the newness of the year in the fresh spring wind, feeling the sense of rejuvenation and the promise of beginnings.

  The copper engravings, each with two pages of “A Lodging for the Night.”

  He parked his car in the parking space designated H. W. Ross, President. He walked up the windy alley in the darkness and wondered if he could recapture, with the money and the freedom, the dreams he’d dreamed in the barn in Maine in the wind, feeling the wind, smelling the salt water and the hay.

  A middle-aged cabin boy, running away to sea. Ha.

  Ross let himself into the office building with a key and put on the light in the elevator. He took the elevator up to the engraving floor, tired of the ancient joke, Creeping Jesus, on the button panel. He walked through the shop to the locker in the men’s room where the partially finished copper plates were locked up. Ten copper engravings, each with two pages of “A Lodging for the Night.”

  From there, he carried the heavy copper plates to the finishing room, where he set them on a workbench before a large, segmented tray of engraving tools. He spread out the copper plates, then removed the original typeset sheets and a matching set of photographic negatives from their envelope. He put out all the lights except the one at the workbench.

  He set himself to burnishing the plates by hand, carefully working irregularities into the too-perfect metal surface. The silence was pervasive, except for the wind occasionally at the windows.

  Suddenly, a loud bell rang. It seemed to fill the shop with its noise. It was followed by a second ring, and a third.

  Ross sat up. Listening. Counting. He walked to the window and looked sidewise down into the dark alley. There was a car parked next to his.

  Ross crossed the shop, past the huge photoengraving cameras, past the stripping room and the
metal-routing machines, and walked along the long, four-color proving presses to the elevator. He rode it down to the first floor.

  Through the iron barred glass of the door, he saw Townsend’s face. And he smiled.

  “You look like you’re in jail,” he said, as he opened the door.

  Townsend smiled. “I hope that’s not prophetic.” He followed Ross to the elevator, and they rode up.

  “How is it coming?”

  “Fine,” said Ross. “Fine. Three nights in here already. Tonight we’ll finish all ten plates and pull a proof on the Dodgson paper. Then all we have to do is bake it and bind it.”

  “OK.” Townsend followed him across the plant. He studied the first of the huge cameras, the camera they’d used to photograph the stolen Matthews pamphlet, “How do I love thee?”

  He entered the finishing room behind Ross and glanced at the copper plates. “That’s a hell of a lot of metal.”

  “You have any idea how much those ten plates cost us? That’s copper, and it’s almost as expensive as gold. Wait till you see the bill.”

  Townsend picked up a negative and held it to the light.

  “See?” asked Ross. “I shot the negatives in line. No screen, no dots. Good, sharp reproduction from the original typeset. I etched and re-etched to get sharp edges that will bite into the paper the way the old hand-set type did. Come here. See the engravings? I routed out all this dead metal here. If I etch any more, I’m afraid I’ll eat holes right through the copper plate itself.” He held a large magnifying glass over one of the plates. “See? I’ve burnished in surface irregularities. This ought to look like old hand-set type, printed on an old press.”

  Townsend sat down and began to st the plates under a magnifying glass. Then he went over to the original photo-typeset pages and studied them. “Beautiful stuff,” he said at last. “You’re a blooming artist, Edgar.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s still some burnishing to do. You sure we copied the right manuscript?”

  Townsend nodded. “Professor Aldridge is going to go to the same bibliography on Stevenson I did, find the same printing history, pull out the same facsimile of the original manuscript you set type from, and compare it.” Townsend opened a paper bag and pulled out a metal can with a nozzle on the cap. “Here’s a quart of the ink I concocted.”

  Ross studied the burnished area under a hand glass. “Let’s pull some proofs and see what we have. I can mount these plates type-high on a temporary set of blocks.”

  Ross and Townsend carried the plates into the proving room. It took them twenty minutes to pull several sets of proofs. They brought them back to the finishing room to study them under bench lights. Ross circled several spots on one plate.

  “This type specialist,” he said, “Lawrence. I know him.”

  Townsend squinted one-eyed at a proof. “Yeah. You told me.”

  “He’s no dummy. And he has a good reputation.”

  Townsend nodded. “It’s the chemist who has me worried. He’s got more tools available.”

  “The more accurate the tools, the better for us. What could go wrong?”

  Townsend shrugged, peering through the magnifying glass. “Who knows? Maybe he can prove that the paper was ninety years old before the ink was put on it.”

  “Ah. Don’t borrow trouble. We’ve worked too hard. Like I said”—he circled another spot on the proof—“what could go wrong?”

  6

  Ross spent another two hours burnishing the plates before he was satisfied. They cleaned all ten plates with typewash, took another critical look at them, then carried them back to the proof presses.

  That’s when the bell rang.

  It seemed loud enough to carry all over lower Manhattan, and after it stopped, the sound echoed in their ears. Long in dying, it had filled the entire shop.

  The two men studied each other’s eyes, astonished.

  “The lights!” Ross ran up to the wall switch and snapped off the bank of lights in the proving room. Only the small bench lights in the finishing room were on, and they were very feeble beyond a few feet.

  “Who the hell can that be?”

  Ross walked down the aisle between the proof presses to the window and looked down into the alley. He could see his car parked diagonally near the entrance, and next to it, Townsend’s. At the other end of the alley, blocking the entrance from the street, stood a car with its headlights on.

  As Ross watched, a man leaned on the hood of the car to brace his arm, aimed a hand gun, and fired at a target in the alley.

  Just as suddenly, another gun sounded, louder and closer to Ross. One of the automobile headlights shattered and went out.

  The man stood up from the car’s hood and looked up at the rooftops. Two other men came out from behind the car and looked up.

  Another loud report, and the engine of the car gushed water. It puddled under the grille and steamed. The three men, still scanning the rooftops, backed away from the car. One of them took aim with his hand gun at the rooftop above Ross, and fired. The wind caught his hat and shot it spinning away down the alley. The gunman put a hand on his bare head and punched another shot at the rooftop. The three men then backed around the corner of a building, still peering upward.

  A third shot from the roof shattered the windshield, and it collapsed inside the car. A trickle of fluid flowed like a shining snake into the street. A figure appeared at the other end of the alley, holding a hand gun. He waved an arm toward the roof.

  Ross looked around for Townsend and found him behind, staring down the alley.

  “Did you see what I saw?”

  Townsend nodded.

  “There’s someone in this building,” said Ross. “Up on the roof. Or one of the upper floors. He must have a rifle.” Ross took several steps away from the window, rubbing his hands, then returned. “Maybe we’d better get out of here.”

  They both looked at each other with astonishment as the elevator began to whine.

  “Holy God,” said Ross.

  The whine stopped. They stood listening intently. Then the elevator started again. Involuntarily, almost unconsciously, they backed away from the window, watching the door to the elevator shaft. The whine carried clearly. They backed into the stockroom, still watching the elevator door.

  The proving room showed like a time-darkened oil painting, lit by a pale desk light of the finishing room, distant and feeble as a star. A strip of chrome on one of the presses gleamed. A large thumbscrew caught an asterisk of light. Dully, a nozzled can of type cleaner stood in solitary silhouette. And slowly, the whining elevator moved in its shaft.

  The whine stopped. Ross heard himself breathing stertorously, and he held his breath. Townsend tried to see the elevator door in the darkness.

  They watched and waited. The sound of the metal door rod sounded. Slowly the elevator door slid aside. The car was dark. Yet there was someone in the car, a form barely defined, and it moved. A hat? Yes, a hat; it moved.

  Then the door slid slowly shut. The elevator whined again.

  Ross exhaled sharply. “I thought we were dead men.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Ross didn’t answer. He stepped back to the window and looked down into the alley. Townsend followed him.

  The elevator’s whine stopped again. And a moment later, a figure in a hat exited from the building and walked away. As he moved, he held a rifle at the ready in the standard infantryman’s position.

  He reached the end of the alley and spoke quickly to his partner, and they disappeared. The three other men were already gone.

  Ross walked into his brother’s office and found a bottle of whiskey in a cabinet. He brought it back with two glasses, and poured unsteadily from the bottle.

  “I’m too nervous for a life of crime,” he said.

  Townsend watched him without moving. “What the hell was that all about?”

  Ross downed two fingers of whiskey neat, then blew violently. He looked at Townsend. “We had better g
et the hell out of here.”

  “Wait, wait,” said Townsend. “We can prove up on the Dodgson paper in a half hour and be out of here. The action is over, whatever the hell it was. That guy on the elevator could have potted us right then.”

  “Let’s come back tomorrow night.”

  “We can’t. We have to finish tonight—”

  Ross poured another three fingers of whiskey into his glass.

  He considered, then nodded his head. “OK. Let’s do it.” He walked over to the elevator and pressed the button. The elevator, answering, whined in its shaft. The car was empty and dark, a vertical coffin, and Ross reached in and snapped on the light. Then he groped and found the cleaning man’s wooden block up on a ledge of the car and stogged it in a slot in the floor to block the door. The captured elevator now threw its light into the dark proving room.

  Townsend flipped on the banks of overhead lights and began to work again, then paused. He cocked his ear.

  “What’s that?” demanded Ross.

  Townsend listened again. He walked down the aisle between the proving presses to the window and looked down. Ross followed him.

  “Sirens,” said Ross.

  Townsend nodded. Quickly, he walked back to the wall switch and turned off the overhead lights.

  Ross sighed angrily. “We’ll be here all night.”

  The radiator fluid from the disabled car had flowed out of the alley and into the middle of the street, where its light-silvered surface rippled in the wind. The street and the alley were empty.