The Forgers (25 page)

C
HRISTMASTIME IS UPON US AGAIN
,
the holly-jolly season that New York excels at celebrating. A fresh snow muffles the city sounds, reminding me of
a delightful moment in my childhood when my father pulled me along in a sled down the middle of our unplowed, snowbound street. Adorable Nicole is five now, my life's joy and, along with Meghan, my reason to keep on breathing. After the break-in and attack that left me maimed for life, our homey cottage in Kenmare mutated into walls, floors, and windows we no longer recognized. Even the baby's room, so lovingly decorated, was sullied. My security system, obviously a wasted effort to deflect the inevitable, was a bad joke in retrospect. And any sweet luster Eccles's Vandercook once held was now tarnished. After my release from the hospital, Meghan and I realized we could no more live in a crime scene in Kenmare than we could have in Montauk. So it was we returned to the States, where I would continue my rehabilitation, and where, in February as it happened, Meghan gave birth to a healthy girl. We rented a walk-up apartment in the old familiar neighborhood near Tompkins Square, a few short blocks from Meghan's old shop. Our baby daughter was doted on to the exclusion of almost everything else. It was fortunate we still had quite a bit of savings left to support our outsider lifestyle, nor did it hurt that Atticus sent along a sizable cashier's check without an accompanying note but clearly meant to satisfy any debts, real or imaginary, and lock us into a mutually beneficial silence.

Several weeks after we had settled into our new place and after the baby was tucked in and had fallen into her enviably rapt sleep, Meghan and I made love, silently but powerfully, the kind of intercourse that borders on religious communion. After her shuddering orgasm, she whispered to me she loved me and drifted immediately off to sleep. Me, I lay there, my heart slowing, my half-handed arm draped over my wife, hoping to join my family in dreamland. But insomnia got me by the throat, and once more I was captive to my night thoughts. Adam's name had come up during dinner out of the blue, Meghan ruing the fact he had the sweetest niece in the world and what a crime it was that he never got to be her uncle. Just a mention in passing, not a long melancholy dialogue, but emerald-green arsenic to me nonetheless. It was surely that allusion that conjured him up, dead Adam's beggarly ghost, as I turned away from Meghan and looked without focus into our darkened room. Over the years, I had rehearsed what went on the night he was murdered and had grown sick of thinking about it. Were I going to wend my way through it, frame by frame, once again, then this had to be the last time, I told myself. The last time, I demanded of myself.

What had I done? By now the reality—that suspect word again—of the incident was so lodged in the receding past that I misdoubted my version of what happened and can no longer be sure whether or not my imagination has embellished things, erased this or that, revised, emended, amended, and so forth.

Without much aforethought but driven by an ire I cannot fully understand, I recall getting my car out of the garage, a cheap monthly outdoor spot on the West Side with chain-link fences topped by razor wire, telling the indifferent attendant I would bring it back in a few days, needed to get some repairs done. This was not anything unusual. My car, a boxy old Volvo that looked like a Matchbox toy some fond child had pummeled with great enthusiasm into the playground gravel, was dated enough to be very used but not enough to be fancy vintage. Vaguely silver, an inheritance from my father that I didn't drive much but couldn't bring myself to sell, the car needed servicing, and servicing it got at a repair shop out in Sunset Park. I chose the place because it was cash only, under the table, or under the chassis as it were. Had the brakes and transmission checked, too. All was well, but even so I tipped the man who ran the shop, as obviously corrupt a human being as one might ever want to meet, five hundred dollars cash on top of what I owed him for the servicing, asking if he would mind if I left the car for a couple of days at his place.

“Between garages and I don't want to leave it on the street,” I explained, a nervous tremor audible behind my obvious falsehood.

He glanced over at the Volvo then turned slowly back to meet my eyes, shrugging as if to say, Who you kidding, man, nobody would want to steal that beater.

“I'll have it out of here in a few days, promise.”

After a pause, he asked, “Need to keep it out of sight? That's another five.”

“Out of sight would be good. But I may need to use it once while it's here, so I've got to have access.”

We discussed details briefly, and our handshake, solemn if idiotic, creditable if corrupt, sealed a pact that meant nothing happened here because, in fact, nothing had. I can still picture his ruddy pockmarked cheeks and handsome sloe expressive eyes. Were he married, which I'm sure he was, he was as unfaithful a husband as ever lowered his trousers.

That night I had a quiet dinner with Meghan. Again, for reasons that elude me, assuming there was anything akin to reason involved in the first place, ours was a memorably lovely meal. We splurged on a bottle of excellent Merlot, shared a T-bone steak with creamed spinach and potatoes au gratin. Back at her place—this was when we used to alternate apartments more often than we did after Adam died—we made love and slept together like two kittens might sleep, ridiculously warm and familiar. In the morning, I was up first and brewed our coffee. Meghan sleepy, Meghan with her red hair and pale full lips, coming from dreamland to life, from slumber to sentience, was a beautiful sight to see. I have no words for the wave of devotion, of affection and adoration, I felt when watching her wake up.

Our talk that morning was no different from any other morning.

“What are you up to today?” I asked.

“Workaday workday,” she answered. “Nothing special. You?”

“Same by me,” I lied.

“See you later?” she asked.

“You bet,” I said. “Go out or cook here or what do you want to do?”

“Let's cook in, your place. But just to remind you, I have to appraise a collection downtown so I can't stay over.”

I frowned, then said, “So you'd said. Not a problem.”

We had, and I would contend still have, a solid and simple relationship. The problem was her brother. Her first-class freeloader, second-rate forger brother—not even worthy of the word “forger” since I now comprehended he was a dilettante scribbler at best and mostly a mere fence, a marionette who danced to Henry Slader's pulled strings—who was doing everything to undermine our relationship.

How did I know this? Letters to her, simply. Adam Diehl, for all his innumerable faults, was a pen-and-paper letter writer, which I admired. And Meghan, no doubt trusting that her boyfriend wouldn't read private correspondence, was never one to hide them from prying eyes, my eyes. This would have been a few weeks before my car needed its spurious repairs.

Maggie, thanks for the five hundred to get the gas and electric co & another creditor off my back. You're the best sister ever. Hope your shop is doing great. In a rush here but can I ask you a question? I don't have the guts to ask you in person, especially because I know how much you like him, but do you totally trust this guy you're dating? You sure he's on the up and up? I'm trying to look out for you, okay. Bunch of people respect and admire him, but a friend of mine thinks otherwise. I don't know. Just wondering. Love, Adam

That friend was Henry Slader, as far as I am concerned, my reputation being what it otherwise was at the time. Not a single rare book dealer ever suspected me, or if they did, they sold what I had sold them knowing I guaranteed my materials and accepted returns for a full refund, no questions asked. The book trade was, as with any other business, one in which reputation meant everything. World affairs have always been implemented on similar lines. A diplomatic handshake might mean averting a war.

No, I never liked this Adam. But now he was in danger, not to mince words. He not only threatened me with losing the sole woman aside from my mother who loved me and whom I loved, too, my darling Meghan. What was more, this hapless remora with his suspect signatures and idiotic letters that brought the cops to my door, or so I believed, threatened my first love and livelihood, my forgery. Hate was not strong enough a word to characterize how I felt. Disgust, loathing, contempt, just hand me a thesaurus and watch me fill pages with vile synonyms to describe Adam Diehl, doomed neophyte. And he had no idea of the animus I felt toward him.

On the fatal night, as the dime detective novel phrase has it, after Meghan left my apartment around ten to head back to hers, I dressed, telephoned her as usual to make sure she got home safely, and left. Making sure none of my neighbors were out and about in the hall—I would have abandoned my project had I run into anyone I knew—I grabbed the subway out to Sunset Park. Feigning exhaustion, I dropped my head forward, chin on chest, to partly obscure fellow passengers' view of my face. Watchman's cap and hands stuffed inside my coat pockets helped further to camouflage me, not that anybody was looking. My repair shop man was good to his word, a key to the garage hidden where he said it would be. The neighborhood was dead and I slipped into the night, certain of not being seen.

Every hour was a dream when I drove out. Every minute was like an unconsciousness so blank and empty of imagery and visual content and of sound too, though there must have been screaming, no not screaming, not a sound at all but an audible whump when I hit him from behind with a hard object, a rolling pin that sufficed to stun him as he sat at his desk unaware an intruder had entered the cottage. I wanted to extract one hand but didn't know which was his writing hand, and so I used his cleaver—Meghan's and his parents had outfitted their kitchen beautifully, being amateur chefs themselves, inspiring my girlfriend to collect and disseminate cookbooks—to take away both. As a longtime student of criminal behavior from the mysteries my father owned by the hundreds, I was of course wearing gloves and disposable shoe covers, and went about my business swiftly and as silently as possible, leaving the cottage under dark of night. Pure dumb luck that a light snowfall had just started coming down after I got to my car, with bloodied gloves and bloodier hands in the thick plastic bag I'd brought for the purpose. I arrived back well before daybreak, having replaced the car at the repair shop and returned home, showered and waited for the phone call from Meghan. As for the hands, they were easy enough to dismember, joint by joint, bone by bone, and wrap individually in tissue before flushing each piece down the toilet.

That Diehl had managed to fashion makeshift bandages from dish towels, I suppose by using his teeth and stumps, so he didn't bleed to death, was unnerving if impressive. Even if he had lived, though, he wouldn't have been able reliably to accuse me of the attack since he never set eyes on me. For all intents and purposes, I was never there. By moving wildly about, as I picture it, in a state of semiconscious panic fueled by the adrenaline of a man fighting death, stumbling through the disarray of books on the floor, knocking furniture over before passing out again, he managed to confuse a crime scene that the authorities would, as fortune darkly shined, themselves further deface, further botch.

The phone soon rang. Bereft, she was in Tompkins Square, schoolchildren shouting with glee in the background. My first words to her, after hearing what had happened, were, “Where is he now?” knowing full well that I stood at the beginning of a journey in which the less I knew about Adam Diehl, the more I learned to push him out of my consciousness, the better off I would be. Meghan's dying brother was anathema to me. Having stood between me and what I most cherished, he brought on his own little apocalypse, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent his pitiful outcome.

That was in the dead middle of winter whereas today we find ourselves at the solstice, with a gentle snowfall starting up in the bluish late-afternoon light. As I sit here alone at the kitchen table in our East Village apartment while Meghan and Nicole are up at Rockefeller Center visiting the big Christmas tree on display there and watching the ice skaters do their scratch spins and figure eights, out of the blue I remember that night when I couldn't sleep, and when I recapitulated Diehl's final days and hours as best I could, with recollections as aligned with the truth as a forger's faulty memory allowed. I am relieved I kept my promise to myself not to ponder those dark times any further. While I know that the refusal to think about a wicked act does not absolve one, it does carry the benefit of release, of liberation, and for that I am grateful.

When Meghan and Nicole get home, which ought to be pretty soon, I plan on getting our girl warmed up with some hot cocoa before leading one of our regular father-daughter calligraphy lessons, much the same as her namesake grandmother used to do with me. A shame she will never meet her grandmother, study the crafting of letters and flow of words with her, who was a far superior teacher than I will ever be. Even more's the pity, since young Nicole is—and I posit this not as a dad but an objective expert—bursting with talent. She has a natural aptitude, an unpolished genius, if you will, with pen and paper. I remember my mother being awed by the concentric circles I drew when I was Nicole's age or even a bit older, but they couldn't have been as perfectly drawn as my daughter's. And she makes them over and over as if it were as simple as breathing in and breathing out. For her sixteenth birthday, I plan on giving her the Arthur Conan Doyle pen that I myself inherited, passing it along to a third generation in our family, a talisman for her to preserve just as her father has and his father did before him.

As for what she will do one day with her calligraphic skills, I cannot say. Perhaps she will become a painter or a set designer, or maybe she'll end up doing something altogether different. Even if the dreams she pursues when she grows up have nothing to do with the act and art of writing, someone, possibly a future best friend or lover or even spouse, will notice the grace of her script on a restaurant bill or mundane shopping list, and comment, “Hey, Nicole, you have the most beautiful handwriting I've ever seen.” And just maybe, if my wrathful shadows don't catch up with me and devour the one who got away, she will say with conspicuous pride, “My father taught me when I was young.” She will think of me then, a man who now must forever be quietly glancing over his shoulder, with unreserved love in her heart.