The film cuts to a scene later that night, with Smiley coming out of the kitchen with Slater’s daughter Felicity, lit by candles on a cake he had made from scratch for Lisa’s birthday. “Where did you get this great cake?” Lisa asks. Felicity squeals excitedly, “He didn’t get it; he made it.” Smiley demurs in his baritone. “Okay, I frosted it, Felicity and I frosted it.” Cut to a few minutes later, jazz music playing as Forbes and Lisa slow-dance together by themselves in the dining room.
—
EVEN BEFORE HE HAD a child of his own, Smiley doted on the children of Fischer, Slater, and the other friends who came to stay with him in Maine. He carried the kids on his shoulders on hikes around the property, and he towed them on inner tubes from the back of his speedboat. As they got older, he began spearheading more elaborate activities for their visits. One night at the dinner table, the kids were lamenting how they couldn’t catch the larger frogs in the middle of the lake. The next morning, they awoke to find “Uncle Forbes” constructing a raft out of large logs. He went with them that afternoon, helping maneuver it with a long pole while the kids grabbed up the frogs.
Another time, it was a moose sculpture that the kids built out of spare wood, which graced the back garden for years afterward. Another time, Smiley helped the kids turn the barn into a haunted house, complete with an elaborate maze of booby traps. To the children, Smiley seemed like a magician who could make anything possible. “It was like entering another world,” remembers Felicity Slater of the magical summers she spent up in Maine. “Every night we’d go wild with speculation about what we wanted to do the next day.”
When Felicity’s brother Gordy said he was into King Arthur’s knights, Smiley disappeared into the barn for an hour. He emerged with a wooden suit of armor, complete with shield and sword with beveled edges. When Gordy was later stricken with a rare form of cancer that confined him to a wheelchair at age fourteen, Smiley continued to include him in activities, bringing model airplane kits to the cottage and helping him in and out of the speedboat for private rides.
The fantasy world for the kids wasn’t without its rules. They couldn’t just help themselves to snacks, for instance. When they were hungry, Uncle Forbes or Lisa would prepare platters of cheese or fresh-picked berries with fancy crackers, placing them on the table next to a vase of wildflowers. There were other rules too; for example, no one was allowed to touch Smiley’s records or disturb him in his study. “When he was ready to engage with the kids, he was totally there and super-jovial,” remembers Felicity. “But if you ran into his study, no way.” That just, in her mind, added to his mystique—that this magician had his own private workshop where he performed work they didn’t understand.
At night, Smiley held court on the front porch, overlooking the lake, where the rushing sound of the waterfall from the milldam was soon joined by the bass thrum of bullfrogs along the shore. Fireflies winked in and out of the trees while Cassiopeia and the Summer Triangle wheeled overhead. Felicity remembers falling asleep to the sound of blues music while her father and Uncle Forbes continued to sit with big glasses of beer, laughing and telling stories into the night.
—
IN SEPTEMBER 1993, Smiley invited Slater and Statt to Sebec for the weekend, and the three spent hours drinking beer and whiskey and bullshitting about literature and history, kids and marriage. The next year, they repeated the outing on Columbus Day Weekend, inviting Bennett Fischer as well. After that, the Boys’ Weekend became an annual tradition, with the four of them taking long hikes on logging roads, on the lookout for moose, or taking freezing-cold dips in the lake. Smiley brought up special bottles of scotch and cases of craft beer, and eventually their college friend Dick Cantwell, who ran a brewery in Seattle, started sending a special keg for the weekend (though he didn’t attend himself). After a few years, Slater’s brother-in-law Bob von Elgg began joining them to make it five.
Smiley handled the cooking, pulling out his two favorite French and Italian cookbooks. He started roasting a turkey in the antique stove upon arrival, filling the house with smells of roasting meat and butter and providing pickings throughout the weekend. He’d follow it up with Provençal beef stew, potatoes with poached codfish and cream, smoked ham, or bread and tapenade—sometimes all at once. After dinner on Sunday, the group moved into the living room for annual readings of humorous clippings in front of the fireplace. Sipping scotch and port, they regaled each other with favorites from The New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” or Harper’s “Readings,” or excerpts from Ian Frazier or Martin Amis. As dawn neared, they’d close with “Auld Lang Syne” led by Fischer, a fan of Robert Burns.
Throughout the weekend, Smiley played music nonstop, bringing obscure 78s of blues musicians he’d had shipped from London. Von Elgg, who counted himself a blues aficionado, had barely heard of most of them. Smiley explained their importance to the genre as if he were describing a rare map, noting records that existed in only five or six copies. Eventually the rest of the guys began teasing Smiley for his newfound love of blues—which they’d been listening to since college.
No matter how much they protested, Smiley insisted on paying for everything whenever his friends came to Maine. He carried around a bankroll in his pocket, peeling off hundred-dollar bills to pay for groceries and liquor. The habit bugged Slater, who continued offering to pay his share, until he eventually just gave up. He started mockingly calling Smiley, “the Squire,” envisioning him as an English lord in a manor house, benevolently caring for his village. Something about the way Smiley choreographed their weekends, however, began to bother him.
As much as Smiley worked to create a magical realm for the children, he also worked to conjure a carefree refuge for adults. Having a good time wasn’t enough; he wanted his guests’ time to be exceptional—always stressing the importance of “becoming relaxed,” though he seemed so little capable of it himself. When he wasn’t cooking or shopping, he was puttering around the house, building a fence or working on a project in his study or workshop when the others were out taking a hike.
He almost never talked about his work—in fact, none of the men did. Sebec was a place apart from all that, where Smiley could get away from all the stresses of the competitive New York map trade. None of his friends knew just how much he was struggling in that world.
—
THE TRUTH IS that even as Smiley was working hard to build collections, he was still finding it difficult to keep up with a changing marketplace. As the prices of maps continued to soar, new dealers entered the business, competing with established players to find a small number of rare items for a limited number of high-end clients. “In the old days, you’d go to auctions and pick out diamonds from piles of coal,” Harry Newman told me. “It has gotten a lot more cutthroat.”
In such a small circle, dealers had to be friendly with one another, since they were often one another’s best sources. But as supply tightened, they frequently found themselves squaring off over rare material at auctions in London and New York—the same dozen or two dozen dealers chasing the same items. “At an auction, it’s fifty-fifty whether I’m going to bang someone over the head or get out of the way and let you have it,” I was told by Barry Ruderman, a San Diego map dealer who entered the trade in the mid-1990s.
In private sales, cooperation was everything. When an estate was broken up, a dealer would often get on his cell phone to call colleagues and competitors, selling off the whole collection on an IOU basis before he’d left the house. “There is a lot of money out there, and it is all based on trust,” said Ruderman. Since Smiley had gotten the reputation as a “slow pay or no pay,” he was locked out of that circle—not that he wanted to be a part of it anyway. He preferred to go it alone, seeking out auctions in hidden corners of the trade and using his knowledge to beat competitors.
But such tactics began to fail in the face of the new aggressiveness of the trade. While up front auctions may appear
democratic, with a set number of bidders fighting one another over prices, behind the scenes deals are being made; alliances are formed and broken before the first blow of the auctioneer’s hammer. Some dealers began banding together in mini-syndicates to bid on expensive atlases, breaking them up and dividing the spoils.
“With more people you make less profit, but you take out some of the competition,” said Newman, adding that he generally stayed out of such alliances. Other times, dealers made mutually beneficial agreements to stay out of each others’ way. “Someone else has a client, and unless I really want it, I’ll back off; it’s an honorable thing,” said Newman. “Unless it’s going for absolutely nothing, in which case I’ll kick it a couple of times.”
While wheeling and dealing on the sidelines had always been a part of auctions, it seemed to Smiley that the gentility and sense of honor that characterized the trade in the early days had completely broken down. “When I was in New York, we played hardball,” he told me, sitting at the picnic table in Martha’s Vineyard. “You are swimming with sharks, and it is seriously cutthroat.” Smiley faulted himself for the go-it-alone attitude that caused him to resist cutting deals with people on the one hand, and then resenting other dealers when they outbid him on the other.
“If I had taken the time to really talk to people and work with people instead of not trusting anyone, I would have done better,” he said. “It was business first and maps and atlases second. With the old-timers, they struck a deal and shook hands and stuck to it. In New York, people would do anything, say anything, to win.” The new aggressiveness frustrated Smiley, who constantly worried about getting played by fellow dealers.
“You have people approaching you ten minutes before the auction, offering you ten thousand dollars to stay off the lot. I’m pretty savvy about wheeling and dealing, but not savvy about knowing when it’s real, or when I’m being screwed, and it’s very stressful. There are guys who are good at this, who shook hands with each other and walked away knowing the other guy was full of shit. They just had a feel for it. Now imagine, you’ve got five good clients depending on you to manage that shark pond; that’s why they are paying you all that money, to win.
“I just wanted to do it the old way of targeting certain things and going after them and having a reputation that once this guy goes after something, he can’t be bought off. But I’m sure people ran the price up on me all the time, and I didn’t know how to get that worked out. I did it because I wanted to build with these clients, I wanted to handle the material, I loved the material, and I wanted to do well and make money—because I wanted to win as much as anyone.”
The obsession with “winning” often caused Smiley to overextend himself. In the mid-1990s, he began bidding more on behalf of Barry MacLean, the Chicago collector who had once been Arader’s client. By his own admission, Arader began “running” Smiley at auction, bidding up the price to force Smiley to pay out more than he was prepared to pay. “Forbes didn’t like going to auctions, because I don’t care about the money,” he told me. “So I go to an auction and I didn’t care what I was paying. So I kicked his ass. And yes, if I saw Forbes bidding, I’d give it an extra two or three.” At one auction, he remembers Smiley leaving the room and continuing to bid by phone so Arader wouldn’t know it was him. “But I could see him.”
Unlike other dealers who had retail businesses and could make up for times they overpaid at auction by charging more to customers, Smiley was usually buying on commission for clients who depended on him to get the best prices. If he went above what they expected, he often had to take the difference out of his own commission or kick in money of his own to keep them happy.
Smiley kept this to himself, even as his resentments against other dealers continued to grow. A certain amount of secrecy was always built into the map profession. Dealers played their cards close to the vest—rarely letting rivals know what maps they had acquired and how much they’d paid. On the one hand, clients could get upset if they knew you’d sold a map they wanted to another collector. On the other, rival dealers could undersell you if they knew how much you’d paid. To some extent, that secrecy was necessary, but it also led to unintended consequences. That became suddenly apparent in 1995, when the profession was rocked by scandal involving one of their own.
Chapter 7
UPWARD DEPARTURE
FIGURE 10 JOHN FOSTER. “A MAP OF NEW ENGLAND.” BOSTON, 1677.
1502–1996
GILBERT BLAND WAS no map scholar. A computer programmer from Florida, he got into the map trade in 1994 after apparently stumbling across a cache of antique maps in a storage center. He set up a small-time business out of his home, selling to other dealers, and was surprised by how much he was able to earn. Once he ran out of his initial stash, however, he had no idea how to get more maps.
He soon found a solution: theft. Bland’s tool of choice was a single-edged razor blade, which he concealed beneath his fingers and casually ran down the pages of books while he pretended to be scanning text. In reality, he was separating the map from its binding. Bland targeted the libraries of out-of-the-way universities, including the University of Delaware, the University of Florida, and the University of Rochester. Most of his thefts were of fairly common maps by Ortelius, Hondius, and Mercator, and more recent nineteenth-century American maps—the kind that might sell for at most a few thousand apiece.
He got away with the racket for nearly two years, until the day in December 1995 he decided to steal from the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. That day, a bored librarian began watching one of the patrons, a fortyish man with light-brown hair and a slight mustache, when she thought she saw him tear a page out of one of the books he was examining. She called security, who followed him out the door and apprehended him in the doorway of a nearby museum.
Along the way, Bland threw a red spiral-bound notebook into the bushes; when the guards retrieved it, they found two maps from a 1763 book about the French and Indian War folded into its pages. Together they were probably worth around $2,000. Rather than press charges, the library let him off with a payment of $700 in cash for the damage. It was only after they let him go, however, that they noticed that the notebook contained page after page of the names of antique maps along with the libraries where they could be found.
As magazine writer Miles Harvey chronicled in the book The Island of Lost Maps, that was just the beginning of a case that eventually included seventeen university libraries around the country and two in Canada. Authorities caught up with Bland again a few months later, when a campus cop at the University of Virginia began investigating the theft of several maps, including those of Herman Moll and Andrew Ellicott. After getting an address for Bland from a local Howard Johnson where he’d stayed, police tracked him to his home in Florida, where he turned himself in. Eventually, he led the FBI to a storage locker in Boca Raton filled with 150 rare maps. Over the next few months, he’d help them recover about a hundred more. All told, the FBI figured their value at around a half million dollars.
Librarians around the country were outraged. “I feel like I was a real victim, like it was a personal assault,” one told Harvey. “If Bland gets in front of my car, I’ll run over him—but in a nice way,” said another. “Oh, and then I’ll back over him again.” Only four of the affected institutions pressed charges, however. In the end, Bland served just seventeen months in prison and was required to pay $100,000 in restitution. The reason more libraries declined to press charges was simple: embarrassment. By coming forward, they were essentially admitting to the public—and to potential donors—that they couldn’t protect their collections. As the FBI began to return maps to libraries, some of them refused to even admit that items had been taken. Some seventy of the maps were never claimed.
In his book, Harvey described Bland as a cipher who had gotten away with his crimes by avoiding notice. “Bland was less of a con man than an un man . . . lulling people into b
elieving he was simply not worth much thought one way or another.” Even the dealers who bought from him found him unremarkable: “Mr. Bland was bland,” one said. “He looked bland, he sounded bland, he acted bland. There was no personality: nothing there.”
The scope of his crimes put the map community on notice—warning that they would have to be more wary about whom they bought from. But Bland was hardly the first person to ever steal a map.
—
MAP THEFT HAS always been a shadowy twin to the map trade. As John Smith knew when he named New England, and the French and English learned when they played out their coming war on paper, mapping an area is tantamount to possessing it. From cartography’s earliest days, maps were closely guarded secrets. The Roman emperor Augustus locked his maps in the most protected chambers of his palace. A Carthaginian general purportedly ran his ship aground and drowned his crew to keep sea charts from falling into Roman hands.
During the Age of Exploration, the kings of Portugal decreed that copying that country’s charts would be punishable by death. That didn’t stop Alberto Cantino, an ersatz horse trader in the secret employ of an Italian duke, from smuggling one out of Lisbon in 1502. The Cantino chart, beautifully illustrated on vellum, is now the oldest surviving Portuguese sea chart. Among other features, it shows a colossal new southern continent in the Western Hemisphere that had recently been “discovered” by Amerigo Vespucci. The map eventually came into the hands of German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, who used it in part to create his famous 1507 map naming America.
Theft continued to be important to the history of mapmaking for centuries. When the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the dominant trading power with the East, they did so with the help of the Dutch East India Company’s “Secret Atlas”—a volume containing 180 maps showing the quickest passage to the East. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the French and English Crowns handsomely rewarded privateers for capturing maps held by Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish sea captains. One of the reasons few Spanish charts remain today is that ships’ captains frequently weighted them with lead and threw them overboard when captured, lest they fall into enemy hands.
The Map Thief Page 13
