“Prowlers? No. Just a minute ago a man did come into the block from Third, but Sun let out such a horrible growl that he went away. We’ll be fined if he barks and growls at people like that.”
“I’ll pay his fine. Do you realize that even if somebody shot at you, they couldn’t get away afterwards? He’d get them and tear them to bits.”
“I suppose he would. No, Sun, you know you’re not allowed near the tree. Let’s go in.” As Gamadge unlocked the door, she added: “I suppose I’m not to ask where you’ve been.”
Gamadge turned to her and laughed: “You and Sun saved my life and reason. I’d as soon keep the Marines out of it!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Expert
J. HALL, DEALER IN RARE BOOKS, had practically retired; but he maintained the two rooms, on the second floor of a converted private house in the Forties, which he used as an office and stockroom. The room in the rear had a fireplace; and here he sat, looking over old catalogues and making notes for the book he was going to write some day, while the world rumbled beyond his philosophy. He watched the change of seasons as it manifested itself through the sycamore tree in his back yard.
To-day, at mid-morning, he looked up testily when Albert, his clerk, opened the sliding doors, and peered through.
“It’s Mr. Gamadge, sir.”
“Oh. Well. Send him in. How are you?” asked Hall, as Gamadge appeared. “Come in and sit down. How’s your wife?”
“Splendid.” Gamadge sank into the leather chair opposite his host. “Hope you’ll be coming up to dinner soon.”
“Glad to. Now that’s a woman.”
“She loves your stories. By the way, I’ve come to hear one.”
“Of course you have. You never do come unless you want something. What is it this time?”
“I want to know about literary forgers in Paris in the twenties. Wasn’t there a regular ring?”
J. Hall looked up at him sharply. “Now how did you hear about that? It wasn’t broadcast.”
“Some people showed me a description of what purported to be a newly discovered manuscript. It was perfectly done, must have been done by an expert in such things.”
“Well, what of it?” asked Hall.
“I got an idea that it was done in Paris in the twenties. One of the crowd must have been a scholar. One or more of them found old stuff to imitate—in libraries or old country houses in England. Then there were the artists who actually did the work. There must have been a lot of research done.” Gamadge sat back and put his fingertips together. “This is between us; there was a little man named Wakes.”
Hall said after a moment: “If we’re going to mention names, there was a woman named Mrs. Wakes, and a man named Brandon. He was the scholar involved.”
“I imagined so.”
“Truth is,” said Hall, his eyes on the distant branches of the sycamore, “except for poor Brandon no names got out past a few people that didn’t want publicity. Brandon killed himself, and the thing was allowed to drop. Wakes died—of fright, I suppose. His widow came back to America and disappeared. You understand, the few people in the know made it plain that if there wasn’t a complete scattering and cessation, they’d bring charges; but nobody wants to bring charges if they can help it, because—we—” Hall smiled. “They may have bought stuff themselves.”
“Good as that, was it?”
“Couldn’t be better. In those days people weren’t alerted as they’ve been since the thirties, you know—to paper and so on; but I understand that Wakes managed to get some paper, flyleaves and endpapers and so on. Ever read his books? And would you believe it?”
“I suppose he’d lost his money?”
“If he ever had much. These old families—half the time you don’t really know.”
“Does evidence exist against these people?”
“Only some of the stuff they put out. Mrs. Wakes, clever woman, helped with the literary end of it. I don’t know who half the others were, nobody does now. Probably never did. Poor Brandon, he was the goat. He’d taken to drugs, and he needed the money. Drugs made him careless, and they found faked manuscripts in his room after his death, and his notes and so on. So the police had it all, and he had to get the publicity. But he was only the adviser. Too bad.”
“He’d be able to describe a lost book of Chaucer?”
“Oh, child’s play for Brandon. But that would be a little too much for the most credulous amateur collector to swallow, I should say.”
“The notion is fantastic, is it—finding one of the lost books now?”
Hall got out a large silk handkerchief in rich colours and rubbed his nose with it. He put it away, and asked: “Somebody trying to sell you one?”
“Not in the sense you mean. I was shown a description. The manuscript—fifteenth-century copy—is now said to be lost again, for good.”
Hall said: “Let’s be conservative; let’s say that the big jump in values came in the last fifty years; also the big drive for manuscripts, and the intensive research. Have you any idea how many dealers, scholars, paid research experts, thesis writers and collectors have been raking over the middens in the British Isles and Europe during this last half century? Have you any idea how many of them would be Chaucerians? Do you suppose much stuff has escaped them, or that they haven’t heard of the stuff that may exist but is inaccessible?”
“I didn’t think myself that there was any chance of such a find.”
“Finds occur. I’d say the odds against this one were astronomical. I don’t know why Brandon or any other forger considered putting such a thing on the market.”
“I had a kind of theory that it may have been an abandoned project.”
Hall wrinkled up his face and thought this over.
“It might have tempted Brandon,” continued Gamadge. “The big money in it if he could put it over. If he knew where to get the right materials, paper and vellum, and could employ an expert in fifteenth-century script; it might tempt him. Such an invention would be great fun—I’m sure somebody got a lot of fun out of doing that description.”
Hall said: “But why were you supposed to swallow the description, and the story about the manuscript?”
“Well, the people who showed the description to me may not have realized how fabulous such a find as The Book of the Lion would be.”
“I’m no Chaucerian; was that one of them?”
“Yes. All correct. I think these people may have got hold of the description somehow, at some time, probably in Paris—”
“Clever of the gang, to operate in Paris with British material.”
“Very. These people I’m speaking of might have got hold of the description and Brandon’s notes on it—probable market value of the fake, proper way to introduce it, plausible story of the way it was found. He might even have advised his employers to put the end page in the middle, so that it could seem to have been innocently acquired at a sale.”
Hall was staring. After a pause he said: “You must meet some queer characters.”
“I do. These people who tried to sell me the idea may have been on the distributing end of the game, but experts in any other way. They’d think, if they found Brandon’s notes, that he must have known what he was about and that the discovery was credible.” Gamadge, watching the smoke of his cigarette rise, smiled a little. “A bookstore, now—shouldn’t you say that would be a good distributing centre? A bookstore in Paris. Literary characters dropping in, high thinking and small profits for enthusiasts. And then there’d be the travelling American, business man with hobbies, sociable bachelor with money in his pockets, all sympathy and comprehension. He’d distribute pretty well, too. Some such character gave me the line on the Chaucer discovery.”
Hall’s only comment was a kind of snort.
“Don’t you think their minds might have worked in the way I suggest?” asked Gamadge. “The man called me a graphologist; that isn’t what he meant, but at least it shows that he wouldn’t make fine di
stinctions in other ways. Don’t you agree with me?”
“I don’t profess to follow the mental processes of such pests,” said Hall with some irritation. “They drive us all crazy. I’ve no doubt that plenty of Brandon’s middle-English masterpieces are still kicking around in dealers’ safe deposit boxes, questionable for ever. Luckily Brandon didn’t do much with the moderns, but others did. Those damn’ Byron and Shelley letters! What a profession. The unfortunate Wakes woman, she had a good start as a writer. Now, if she’s still alive, she’s probably still wondering if the bolt will fall—ruin and disgrace. If Wakes hadn’t died he’d have ended in jail, not a doubt of it.”
“Mrs. Wakes died yesterday.”
Hall peered at Gamadge. “Is that why you’re here?”
“I’m here because I’m interested in that description of the Chaucer manuscript.” Gamadge rose and walked over to a bookshelf.
Hall craned over the side of his armchair. “Albert! Albert! My morning paper.” He resumed his sunken posture, watching Gamadge as he passed along inspecting books. “All this was twenty years ago,” he said. “Everybody’s dead.”
“Yes. Did you ever hear of Paul Bradlock in that connection?” Gamadge pulled out a volume, examined it, put it back.
“Bradlock? Bradlock? What do you mean? His signed letters or his manuscripts aren’t worth enough to interest a forger, and never were…” Hall struggled to a more upright position in his chair. “You mean he was a member of the ring? I never heard so.” He sank back again. “Wouldn’t particularly surprise me. I don’t know what his morals were like when he was young, but by the time he was killed he’d sunk low. Shoddy tricks—borrowing from people who couldn’t afford to lose their money, cadging from strangers.” Hall looked amused. “Did he blackmail his old friends and get his head beaten in for his pains?”
Albert came in with morning papers, and Hall snatched them. Gamadge thanked him for information received, and went away in a hurry. He was not anxious to be there when Hall discovered his close involvement with Mrs. Wakes’s death; he wouldn’t get away for an hour, and it was getting on for lunch time.
Riding up town, he reflected that blackmail was perhaps the only way in which anybody could have profited by Mrs. Wakes; but what could Mrs. Wakes have possessed of value to a blackmailer? She was none—whatever she had, she never used it. And if Bradlock could use it, he himself was not implicated.
She had taken to brandy “a couple of years ago”; the inference was, about the time of Bradlock’s death. Because she had been forced out of fear for her own safety to do something that made it hard for her to sleep of nights? And had Bradlock’s death released the information she had given him to other, even more sinister, keeping?
At his own corner Gamadge bought a newspaper. He had already seen one, and this edition gave no further news. It said that Isabel Wakes, writing and living under the pen name of Imogen Weekes, had died of an overdose of morphia. Despondent (this favourite newspaper word had been furnished by the superintendent of her building), she had taken her own life. Mr. Henry Gamadge, writer and document expert, had been calling on her earlier that afternoon, gathering material for an article on her late husband Jeremy, and on other personalities in Paris in the 1920’s. Reminiscence had probably been too much for her. Mr. Gamadge, returning by appointment at six o’clock, had found her dead.
There was further information about her career as a pulp ghost writer, and a general implication that she had had a long and bitter struggle, and had concealed it successfully from all but her agent and one or two others, business contacts. There was comment on her first book, written so long before, which had had good reviews; and on the fact that Jeremy Wakes had lost his money. That was about all.
It was enough. Gamadge tried to visualize the expressions of Iverson and Mrs. Paul Bradlock as they absorbed these paragraphs with their morning coffee.
He found Malcolm in the library, getting the news from Clara and fuming with impatience. Gamadge said he had nothing to add at present, and that he wanted his lunch.
“Nothing to add! Nothing to add!” Malcolm sat down reluctantly with the two others at the round table in the library window; a tall and wide French window, through which Gamadge had a better view of his ailanthus than Hall had of his sycamore. “I don’t know why you’re alive and capable of adding anything, even if you wanted to. You oughtn’t to go out of the house until these people are bound over to keep the peace, or whatever it is.”
“Nonsense.” Gamadge had begun on his celery. “You think so? You think I couldn’t kill you any time, anywhere, and have it filed as accident?”
Clara looked up and asked, startled: “Could you, Dave?”
“Of course I could. And they’re professionals.”
“Nonsense,” repeated Gamadge. “They can’t do that now. You forget—they’ve read the papers. Even Durfee would tie it up now.”
“And you’ve gone and asked the accomplice to come and be your assistant. You seem to have made up your mind that the girl isn’t in it.”
“Bless her little innocent heart, no.”
“You sound pretty ghastly sentimental about her.” Malcolm looked at him disgustedly. “What’s she like?”
“Well, she’s skinny. Her elbow went into me like a spike every time she nudged me at the movies.”
“I don’t think,” remarked Clara, who was quietly engaged on her bouillon, “that I’d better do that to him. I don’t think he’d care for it from me.”
“You’re not skinny enough,” said Malcolm.
“She has nice bright eyes,” continued Gamadge, “not very large. Her hair—well, she does the best she can with it, but you can’t do much at home, nowadays. She catches cold easily, poor little thing. The tip of her nose is always red; she tried to make powder stick on it last night, but…”
Malcolm was now laughing to such an extent that he couldn’t swallow.
“And she loves to ride in taxis,” said Gamadge, “and I wish her taste in sandwiches was better. Still, they’re cheap.”
Clara said calmly: “Henry loves her because she’s a victim and doesn’t resent it.”
“Doesn’t know it,” Gamadge corrected her. “There’s nothing more beautiful than a martyr who isn’t aware of the fact.” He picked up Clara’s hand and held it against his cheek. As he laid it down again, she said: “I can’t imagine what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean.” Gamadge was laughing too.
“So now the accomplice is Welsh,” said Malcolm, restored to the use of his voice, “and he’s a mental case, and you’re giving him the run of the laboratory. What kind of situation does that remind you of, Clara?”
“Frankenstein. Is he a mental case, Henry?”
“Not being a psychiatrist, I don’t know what he is. There are other people in the world besides Welsh who might have been involved at the Bradlock studio, and might have watched me come, and gone and changed that brandy flask.”
“It’s Welsh,” insisted Malcolm. “He’ll blow you all up. That’s the accident I was talking about. No, seriously, Gamadge, you might spare your family these risks. This fellow is devoted to Mrs. Paul Bradlock. You don’t suppose that story you told him about the annuity on the hundred thousand dollars is going to prejudice him all in a minute? He’s asked her about it, and she’s explained everything. And as you say, they’ve read the papers.”
Old Theodore came to the door of the library. He said: “Mist’ Gamadge, young man downstairs say he came about a job. Mist’ Gamadge, we has a veteran.”
They had a veteran, a war-worn mechanic’s mate, who in spite of his battered condition seemed to run the whole house, inside and out, with little assistance from Theodore. Gamadge said: “Ask him to wait a few minutes in the office. Or has he had his lunch?”
“I’ll ask him.”
“See if he minds having it in the kitchen with Youmans. If he does, bring a tray for him up here. Just explain that he’ll get it quicker and hotter that way.
Tell him it’s not a precedent.”
“I can explain in a satisfactory manner, Mist’ Gamadge.”
“I know you can.”
Theodore left the room. Three faces, void of expression, turned back to their contemplation of food. There was a heavy silence.
Theodore returned. “He only wanted coffee, he and Youmans they’s talking boats together.”
“When he’s had his coffee, bring him up here.”
The Gamadges and Malcolm were finishing their own coffee when Theodore ushered Welsh into the library. He stood, looking huge in his clean slacks, glancing not at the people in the room, but about him; at the polychrome ceiling, the old Turkey rug, the globes, the books, the portrait over the mantel. Then he turned his eyes on the group in the window. Gamadge and Malcolm rose.
“Glad you came, Mr. Welsh. Clara, Mr. Welsh; this is Mrs. Gamadge, and Mr. Malcolm.”
Welsh nodded twice.
“Came to look the job over, did you?”
“That feller off the P.T. boat, he showed me the laboratory.”
“We might go down.”
Welsh said: “Vera—Mrs. Bradlock thought it would be a good idea for me to come.”
“I’m glad she approves. But you can’t manage three jobs, you know. That’s impossible.”
“I’m leaving. Going room-hunting this evening.” He glanced about him again. “Sally Orme is coming in later—like you said.”
“That’s nice,” said Clara. “Won’t you have a cigarette?”
“I have mine, Ma’am.”
“You go on down,” said Gamadge. “Be with you as soon as I’ve finished this. Know the elevator?”
“Pretty cute.” Welsh slowly smiled. He nodded again, turned, and went out. When they heard the elevator, Clara said: “That boy is lost.”
“Getting his bearings.”
With no further words, Gamadge went down.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Appointments
WELSH STOOD in the door of the laboratory, cats weaving in and out around his feet. He said: “I’ve decided to take the job.”
The Book of the Lion Page 12
