The Ross Forgery

by William H Hallahan

  The first patrol car to arrive pulled halfway into the alley, behind the disabled car. As the two policemen got out, another patrol car arrived and stopped behind them. A third car entered the alley from the other street, sped down the alley, and pulled up in front of the disabled car. A fourth patrol car arrived and blocked off the open end of the alley. The police searched the car. They searched the alley with flashlights. They studied Ross’s car and Townsend’s, peering inside with flashlights. They tried the front door of the building, apparently, then backed away from the door and studied the windows of the building. Ross and Townsend watched in darkness.

  The wind was sharp, the evidence was nominal, the trail cold; and the police cars left, one by one, except the first car. Two patrolmen backed their car into the street, then pushed the disabled car in a backward curve out of the alley, and left it at the curb.

  They stood talking, huddled in the relentless air, filling out a form, noting the license, then lifting the hood and finding the block number. Satisfied, they returned to their patrol car and drove slowly off into the night.

  Not one spectator had appeared.

  “I wonder,” said Townsend, “who called the police?”

  7

  The plates were now ready. The ink and the rollers were ready. The paper, the priceless Dodgson paper, was ready.

  Ross knocked wood with a knuckle and pressed a button. The first copper plate rolled forward on its bed and passed under an inking roller. The grippers plucked the first Dodgson sheet from its pile and drew it over the copper plate. A printing roller passed over the paper, pressing it firmly against the inked copper plate.

  Ross and Townsend recovered it from the basket where the grippers dropped it. They looked at it.

  It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable.

  Townsend read the famous words, a masterpiece of styling and structure, a perfect example of the writing techniques he taught. A single declarative sentence, followed by a compound complex, structured with deftly balanced parallelism. In two sentences, a perfectly rendered snowstorm.

  Ross looked at Townsend, and Townsend nodded. Townsend felt like a thief.

  He nodded again. “Just right,” he said.

  8

  It was two-thirty when they finished. They washed the copper plates and wrapped them, still unmounted on wooden blocks, in various thicknesses of newspaper. Then, one by one, they carried them to the locker of the men’s room.

  The printed sheets of Dodgson paper they assembled with great care. First a large sheet of corrugated paperboard, then a sheet, then carefully, a glassine sheet, then another Dodgson sheet and more glassine—ten printed sheets, ten glassine sheets. They capped the sandwich with another corrugated paperboard.

  Ross carefully slipped the corrugated board sandwich into a large brown envelope and sealed it with masking tape. Holding it forth like a pillow with a royal crown on it, he presented it to Townsend.

  “We did it,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  Townsend nodded and smiled. “Yeah.” He hefted the package and nodded again. “Yeah.”

  “Fantastic,” said Ross.

  “Yeah,” said Townsend again. “If it just passes the test.”

  “Mr. Townsend, let’s get the hell out of here. I need a drink.”

  They descended in the painfully slow elevator to the street. As they walked to their cars, Ross pointed. “That’s that guy’s hat.” It lay, wind-pinned, against a tire. Ross picked it up. He opened the door to his car and held the hat under the dome light. “Know anyone with the initials J. V.?”

  Townsend considered, then shook his head. Ross scaled the hat in the air.

  They got into their cars and drove off. The package went with Townsend for baking in the microwave oven.

  In the deserted streets of the business district, the disabled car stood alone, abandoned like a derelict corpse, while the wind dried up the puddle of radiator water. The hat went slowly tumbling across Manhattan.

  Twenty minutes later, the lights in the engraving shop went back on. They remained on for nearly two hours.

  EIGHT

  1

  The bartender stood at the end of the bar in a shaft of sunlight. He was idly reading the Daily News.

  He licked a thick thumb and turned a page of the tabloid. “A bum,” he said to the patron. The patron nodded—a short man who hung his elbows and upper arms over the bar, like a felon recently flogged.

  The bartender licked his thumb and turned another page wetly. “He goes eight innings like King Kong, then blows it in the ninth. In every game. Every single game. Eight perfect innings, then, in the ninth—’bye-’bye ball game. That man wants to lose. You know that? Wants to lose. He’s like a guy on a tightrope. Wants to fall off so he can end the suspense.” He licked his thumb and yanked another page over. Wearily: “A bum.”

  Emmett O’Kane sat in a booth in the tobacco-brown shadows of the saloon. He waited for Ross. The pendulum behind the glass door of the old saloon clock ticked with the arthritic pace of a wading stork, a pace commensurate with its age and wisdom. Calmly, it ticked. Wisely.

  O’Kane drummed his fingers to the beat of the pendulum and watched the bubbles rise in his glass of beer. From a cardboard box by the cellar door, recently born kittens cried thinly. They waited for milk. He waited for Ross. And worried that he might have picked a ninth-inning typographer. Wants to fall. Wants to lose.

  O’Kane looked over the green baize curtains of the tavern down at the cat in the window. The cat lay curled like a comma in a huge, sun-filled china bowl. White cat. White bowl. White sunlight.

  O’Kane sat back into his dark brown shadows. Might even be the same cat, thirty years later. He looked at the mosaic tile floor. Had to be the same tile. God, how I hate to wait.

  2

  Ross arose, fluttering, from the subway exit. The bone-numbing wind swirled around his bald head and tossed his coattails. Hands pocketed deeply, he walked across the sunny street to the tavern. Under his arm, a plastic portfolio bowed slightly in the breeze.

  O’Kane watched the habitual sourness on Ross’s face. A pose. There was something excited and quick in Ross’s step. It’s the ninth inning, Ross. Ross entered the tavern, and his eyes quickly found O’Kane. He walked up to the booth, watching O’Kane smirking at him, fingers slowly drumming, clock slowly ticking.

  “A penny for your thoughts, O’Kane.”

  “Penny? What are memories worth? I was thinking I had my first legal drink in here. On my eighteenth birthday. A beer, it was, and my uncle John paid for it.” O’Kane sat up. “I’ve never had a better beer since.”

  Ross nodded, uninterested. He sat down heavily.

  “It’s not what you expected me to say, is it?”

  “No.”

  “The mind in reverie, Ross, never stays on the subject.”

  “So much for today’s philosophy lesson.”

  “Have you always been such a snotty bastard?”

  “Only around money.”

  “You must have always been around money, then.”

  “I’m always snotty when I feel I need more money.”

  O’Kane’s fingers stopped drumming for a moment. “More money?” O’Kane’s fingers began to drum at a gallop now.

  Ross looked at the relaxed body and the unwavering eyes, then at the only sign of tenseness—the drumming fingers. He unzipped the plastic portfolio. He removed a brown manila envelope, lifted a brown envelope from it, then slipped out a small pamphlet.

  He watched O’Kane’s eyes as he slowly raised it and held it forth with both hands and put it down on the table before O’Kane.

  O’Kane studied it, then looked at Ross. “Looks old enough.” Gingerly, he half-opened a pamphlet. He read the first page. And his mouth gaped
in silent astonishment.

  It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window; was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus? or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honour of the jest and the grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when he was Villon’s age.

  The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping towards the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind, there was a dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.

  O’Kane smiled. “I know the story,” he said. “I remember it now! It was in a collection of short stories, and I sat reading it in the Newark Library, waiting for my mother. It was snowing like a blizzard, and I remember how I compared the snow with Stevenson’s description. He captured it exactly. All these years—and I never knew who wrote it.” He looked up at Ross with his imperturbable eyes. “So.” He nodded and waited.

  “So what?”

  “Fill me in, Ross.”

  “What’s to fill in? If everything goes the way it should, this should be authenticated as a Wise forgery of a first edition of a Stevenson short story. Your snowstorm is worth about two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Oh? Is it?” O’Kane placed a hand thoughtfully over his mouth and sat back to study Ross.

  “I’ll bet Pickett would pay two for it.”

  “Oh. I see. Pickett.”

  “When do I get paid?”

  “When the purchase is made.”

  “What? What purchase? I want to get paid the day this piece is authenticated.”

  “Are you giving me a guarantee that it will be authenticated?”

  “Me? Guarantee? Are you out of your jar? There’s a whole battery of tests—equipment much more sophisticated than—what the hell does that have to do with it? I don’t need to give you a guarantee. If the laboratory authenticates it, you can have it. That day. And I want to get paid. That day. What’s all this crap about a guarantee?”

  O’Kane picked up the pamphlet and with two hands reached it across the table and laid it before Ross. “You want two hundred grand, and you want it the day the piece is authenticated. Good. Good luck. Try Pickett. You might interest him. It takes at least ten years to learn how to negotiate with him, so I’d recommend you hire a go-between who knows him.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you I don’t want it.”

  Ross sat, squinting shrewdly at him. “If I walk out of here, you’ll wet your pants.”

  “Walk. Try me, Ross. Walk.”

  “Nah. I know one thing about you. You want this so bad you can taste it.”

  O’Kane slowly shook his head. “I don’t want that. I don’t want any literary masterpiece or collector’s item. I know nothing about the subject and haven’t the slightest interest in it. That’s not what I’m buying. I’m buying a look on Pickett’s face. I’m buying a monumental rage. I’m paying to see Pickett completely thwarted. By having the one thing on earth that Pickett wants and can’t have. I want him mad enough to kill. That’s what I’ll pay one hundred thousand for.”

  Ross shook his head. “Come on, O’Kane. I’m not that dumb. You’ve figured out how to have your cake and penny too. You’re ready to spend a hundred grand to stick a needle in Pickett, but don’t forget that after you stick the needle in him, you have a piece of property easily worth twice what you offered me for it.”

  “Then take it elsewhere. I don’t want it.”

  “How about one fifty? You’re still fifty grand to the good.”

  “No dice, Ross. I’m running out of patience. Either take the one hundred grand as a firm deal—not negotiable—or take a walk. Right now.”

  “Why don’t we wait until after the testing?” said Ross. “Maybe we’re having a purely academic argument.”

  O’Kane watched the cat poke its head through the baize curtains and stretch. Luxuriously, she yawned. The mewing of the kittens in the box was louder.

  O’Kane shook his head. “Take it or leave it, Ross. One hundred is my best and final offer.”

  Ross massaged his jaw with a hand, scowling painfully. “One hundred on the day it’s authenticated.”

  “No. On the day it’s sold.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Legitimacy. I want to buy this in the open market as a literary treasure and pay for it the day I buy it. Not before. I don’t want any impediments to its pedigree or my acquisition of it. You get one hundred thousand dollars from me on the day you sell it to me. Service has made arrangements for the sale.”

  “Yeah? How are you going to prevent Pickett from stepping in?”

  “That’s part of the plan.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, O’Kane. If Pickett gets in the act and outbids you, I’ll sell to him.”

  “Am I to take from that your intention of informing him of the impending sale?”

  “Nope. I don’t play that way. I won’t tell anyone anything. But if Service bungles it and Pickett gets in, I’m out for the highest buck.”

  “We’ll see.” O’Kane studied Ross with deadly eyes. “I hope you don’t make any mistakes, Ross.”

  “Don’t worry. And don’t you make any.”

  O’Kane watched him a moment longer. “The next step,” he began slowly, “is the laboratory test. As you know, Service has selected three outstanding experts in their respective fields.”

  “Bravo.”

  “Ross, like Caesar’s wife, this piece has to be above reproach,” said O’Kane.

  Ross nodded. “Do we get a chance to make another if this one flops?”

  “Do you think you could? Is there any way to make this one better?”

  “No.”

  “Then the answer’s no.”

  “OK. Where do we go from here?”

  “To the lab. And you take it, Ross. You’re just a nameless messenger to them, and none of Pickett’s people know you. Today is Monday, so you go back to the laboratory at one on Wednesday and pick up the report. Bring it back here.”

  The cat rose languidly and stretched again.

  “But first, Ross, let me hear it. Do we have a deal or not? One hundred thousand, payable on day of sale.”

  Ross sighed and looked down at the pamphlet. He looked at O’Kane with slow anger. “OK. A deal.”

  O’Kane held out a piece of paper. “This is the address. Take it there now. Don’t say boo to anyone. Ask for Dr. Owen Haddon. Give it only to him. Don’t say a word. Just hand it to him. Let him look at it. Then leave. Not a word.”

  Ross nodded. He sat looking unhappily at the pamphlet a while longer. Then he lifted it and placed it in its two envelopes and put the whole item in his plastic portfolio.

  He got up.

  “Now I know two things about you, Ross,” said O’Kane.

  “What’s that?”
<
br />   “You’re a lousy crapshooter. That’s one.”

  “Yeah? What’s the other?”

  “You’re a bad poker player.”

  Ross frowned. “What’s that mean?”

  “Think about it.”

  3

  The cat, Henry Fielding, peered from the Port-a-Pet carrying cage. He placed one foot out of the cage doorway, then another. His bandaged head turned from side to side uncertainly. Then he stepped completely out of the cage.

  He meandered across Townsend’s apartment to the front window and looked up at the sill behind the fish tank. The disc-shaped angelfish sinuated through the Sagittarius grass amid slow bubbles.

  Henry Fielding sat down sadly, gazing at the ledge.

  Townsend gripped the cat by the rib cage, just behind the front legs, and raised him to the ledge. The cat sagged sideways and lay still.

  Townsend shook his head at the cat. “Hero cat, eh? And I’m telling everyone, ‘You ought to see the other cat. Henry Fielding made mincemeat of him.’ Seventeen stitches to sew that ear back on, and what is it? A female.”

  The cat licked his chops and clearly wished to die.

  Townsend looked at him with disgust. “That’s what the vet said. You were ripped up by a female of your species. Seventeen stitches and twenty-four dollars. Guarding her litter—that’s what he thinks.”

  Townsend picked up the cage and stowed it on a shelf, then removed his topcoat. He got out a can of beer and sat down to think. It was 7:30 Monday evening, and the report was due at 1 P.M. Wednesday.

  He picked up the airline schedules to London and dropped them. Where was the pleasure in it? To walk the streets of Pepys’s London. In the spring of the year. The thought failed to start his pulse pounding.

  A terrible transgression.

  Townsend walked along the banks of books and tried to sort it all out again. Column A If It Succeeded: There would be no road back. The piece would enter the history of English literature under double false colors. And like Tommy Wise, he would await the day when a future literary detective, armed with new scientific apparatus, declared “A Lodging for the Night” a literary fraud masquerading as a literary forgery. Wheels within wheels.