The Forgers (11 page)

I looked down, up, and he was gone. Realizing Meghan must be wondering where I was—though she was altogether aware that I tended to wander off and lose myself at these fairs—I made my way down the crowded corridor toward where Slader had stood, looking for him in the milling throng and, seeing him nowhere, returned to the photography booth. Not finding my wife there, I panicked. Had Slader doubled back to speak with her directly while I stood mesmerized in an aisle nearer the exit? As a child I got lost only once, having wandered away from my mother in a department store, and the same wretched feelings of terror and abandonment that seized me then did so now. In a sweat, I now found myself searching out two people, one loved, the other hated. Five relentless minutes passed as I made my way around the fair in a sweat, bumping into people and muttering apologies like some fool, not knowing what I would do if I encountered Slader and Meghan together.

“There you are,” Meghan said, her hand laid on my shoulder from behind. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine, no worries,” I managed.

“You sure? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“Well, neither a ghost nor any books I can't live without,” I said, skating past her comment as best I could. “What about you, anything you can't live without?”

“Other than yourself, nothing,” she said.

With that we left the Armory. No further sighting of my accuser, my extortionist. As we strolled back downtown along stately Park Avenue and scruffy lower Broadway, the faltering promise of freedom, if only I could square things away with Slader, seemed at once near and far. I knew that, just as one cannot force a flower to blossom by pulling on its petals, I had to be patient, bide my time, and hold out hope that my fragile dream would come to pass.

K
ENMARE IT WAS.
The village where we got engaged, the magical locus where we felt the happiest. We let a small cottage, not far from the lodge where we had stayed, on a vigorous creek punctuated by muscular bantam waterfalls and populated by salmon and trout that flashed in the morning light when they leapt. Although English was spoken here in the southern part of the country, as in most every part of Ireland except for little pockets known as Gaeltacht areas, we studied Gaelic together, a language that more than rivaled German for its crazy polysyllabics and unpronounceable pile-ups of consonants, and made day trips to Dingle to converse with locals. We made a few friends, not many, but all of them good-hearted folk who had grown up in County Kerry and wisely never left. We hiked MacGillycuddy's Reeks; we loved taking the ferry out to the Skellig isles where monks once lived in utter austerity, cut off from the outside world like the pillar saints of old, atop their barren rocks hundreds of feet above the gnawing ocean. Our days were filled with simple tasks—sweeping the kitchen, shopping at the market for dinner, reading and writing, breathing, being.

One midsummer day we shared a paper bag lunch of black bread, olives, and local cheeses at one of our favorite places in all of Kenmare, an impressive neolithic stone circle known as the Shrubberies, a few minutes'
walk from the center of town. Despite being near the somewhat busy Cromwell's Bridge and a stone's throw from the village's main streets, this ancient circle—egg-
shaped, actually—of fifteen boulders, a baker's dozen of them upright, centered by an impressive boulder burial, was utterly quiet. Birdsong, occasional respectful visitors speaking in low tones, the distant, whisper-soft white noise of unseen traffic, these were all that disturbed the otherwise sanctum-sanctorum hush of the place. In our self-taught crash course to learn as much about our adopted home as we could, Meghan and I discovered that the Irish name for Kenmare was An Neidín, which meant “the Little Nest.” Perfect, we thought, even before we came upon the Shrubberies which, to us, was a nest within a nest.

Sitting alone on one of the sun-warmed boulders that had been placed there thousands of years before, feeling a little sacrilegious given it was a burial site, we said nothing for a time. It was curious, our silence in this silent place, as Meghan and I were usually involved in a constantly streaming dialogue. Without either of us saying as much, we each knew what the other was thinking. Maybe we had managed to break the bonds that held us back in the States, break away from our different orphan stories to forge a new life together. Sure, Meghan had lost her parents in a single tragic event while mine had died separately, one slowly eaten alive by cancer, the other felled by a heart attack. And whereas I never had a sibling to turn to, hers—one whose very lifeblood derived from her, it seemed—was gone. We were both alone and anything but alone. I looked at her, then glanced away toward the enclosure of pristine fir trees, thinking, Yes, we'll make this work, a pair of orphans together forging a new life.

What ever happened to the word “forge” that it had acquired such an ugly meaning, I wondered, my thoughts straying. Here was a term that indicated slow and steady progress, a forging ahead against odds. A forge was a hearth, a furnace in whose fiery heat the blacksmith pounded metal into the useful shapes of horseshoes, andirons, tools with which to build. Way back in the fourteenth century, at a time when different people gathered at this stone circle, to forge meant to create, to make and shape, like a Joycean smithy of the soul. When did the virtue go out of this beautiful old word? When did it evolve into a derogatory that meant to defraud, to counterfeit, to falsify? And yet who was I to think such thoughts in this place as old as Stonehenge, older than the dirty definition of forgery, I who embodied the definition of the evil side of this otherwise noble word?

As I had no answer to this last question, it was one I recognized I needed to let go of that day and hope it never returned.

Yes, Slader did contact me again. This time his letter stipulated a place and time for us to meet. I suppose that given we had encountered and recognized one another at the fair, the ice was broken, as it were, and getting together to cut our deal was somehow less an onerous, appalling task. Prior to our meeting, I got it in my head to make one last beautiful forgery before depositing what was left of my pens, my inks, and other paraphernalia in the garbage. I bested Slader's Baskerville archive, writing it out verbatim, not unlike Pierre Menard with his
Don Quixote
in Borges's story, correcting any and all minute flaws in the calligraphy, getting Doyle's sometimes idiosyncratic hand just right. During our minute-long exchange in a Greek coffee shop not far from Washington Square—the James allusion couched in the rendezvous spot Slader named was not lost on me—I gave him back his “original” knowing that a newer original now existed, far closer to what the master would have scribed, had he ever done so in the first place.

“We're done?” I asked him.

I noticed he seemed far more nervous than I felt.

“Because we had better be done,” I ventured, trying to set on my face a steely look of both resolve and threat. I didn't envy him his messy life, a life entangled in profit and deceit, secrecy and inevitable ruin. Myself, I was finished with all that, or so I hoped with an almost religious fervency, a fervency that quite nearly equaled the passion that used to be reserved for the intimate acts of forgery in which I used to luxuriate.

“Done,” he said and, without counting the money or peering inside the manila envelope that housed his Baskerville forgery, left. Out of nowhere, one of my favorite lines in all of Conan Doyle's Holmes adventures came to mind as I watched him disappear out the door, a line in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” in which Holmes introduces himself to the hapless, rat-faced larcenist at the center of that mystery. This man—a white-cheeked, would-be jewel thief named James Ryder—responds to Holmes's statement, “I think that I could be of assistance to you,” by demanding, “You? Who are you? How could you know anything of the matter?” Holmes tells the naif his name and then defines his entire purpose in life, his philosophy and fundamental creed. “It is my business,” he says, “to know what other people don't know.” Words to live by, I thought when I first read that sentence in my very early teens. Words to live by.

Meghan sold a large percentage of her bookshop to a collective of her employees with very generous terms for payment. Indeed, we dispossessed ourselves of almost everything aside from clothing, a few favorite books, various childhood souvenirs. My car went to a junkyard where the scrappers gave me a hundred dollars, which happened to be more than the thing was worth on the market. As a personal gesture to Atticus Moore, one meant silently to atone for having sold him those forgeries, I consigned most of what was left of my permanent collection, telling him to send me whatever he thought was fair for what he realized in sales whenever it was convenient, and no rush about it. No, this didn't erase my treachery but it somehow drew off, at least to my mind, a little of its poison. These monies plus the proceeds from the Montauk sale gave us a comfortable cushion and the freedom to start over as we saw fit.

Meghan and I drove one day to our favorite restaurant in Kinsale, a seafood joint called Fishy Fishy, where just-caught hake and haddock were served in the cool blue shade of awnings outdoors. We were trading the small talk of contented married folks against the background of seagulls screeching and chattering over the bay when she said something that caught me off guard.

“I have a question I've been wanting to ask for the longest time.” She spoke in a tone of voice that was perfectly even, betraying not an iota of accusation or even particular concern.

“What's that, darling woman.”

“It's a stupid question and you'll probably laugh at me—”

“Nothing you say is stupid,” I assured her, taking a sip from my pint of Beamish.

“You never visited my brother out in Montauk before we were together, did you?”

“No, like I've always said, we really only knew each other at fairs and in the occasional bookshop.”

“And you and I never went out there once we started seeing each other.”

Where was she going with this, I wondered, and waited, shaking my head.

“So how was it you knew the way to the bungalow that first morning when you drove us out there? No map and no directions from me?”

Taken aback, I couldn't afford to pause a moment longer than I did before saying, “But you're wrong. You're not remembering right. You did give directions.”

Her turn to hesitate. “You're sure about that?”

Encouraged by her uncertainty, I insisted it was impossible I could ever have found my way to his oceanside door on my own. Persuaded, she tucked her hair behind her ear and offered me one of her smiles so richly touched by love that I felt there were few men alive more fortunate than I.

J
UST AS A STORM
can abruptly replace a sunny Kenmare day with gale-driven rain that renders umbrellas useless and gives Ireland its reputation for capricious rotten weather, my feelings of peace were punctuated by moments of sudden dread. Now and again, an out-of-the-blue fear of the mailman reminded me of the bad old days. If I caught a stranger on the street eyeing me with what I considered unseemly curiosity, a bolt of familiar panic would seize my viscera and make my hands go icy cold. Even when I heard the rare burst of local police car sirens, however different they sounded from the wailing music of their counterparts in the States, a sour taste rose into my mouth, the acid taste of guilt I suppose one might say.

And yet most of the time I found relief in forgetfulness about my past. An ocean did, after all, separate me from my former life. Whatever bad things I had or hadn't done were behind me now, so I reassured myself. At night, in our warm bed, while listening to Meghan softly breathing in her sleep and watching the constellations wheel with magisterial slowness and godly indifference across the black sky outside our window, I reasoned there was no further need to worry about anything. A year and a half had clocked by since Adam's death, and the murder case was as cold as the black interstices between the stars above. Atticus Moore, true to his word, sent along the occasional check for my share in the books I had consigned him, always with a brief and upbeat note that never once suggested he'd run into any problems with the works I had forged. Slader had, it seemed, disappeared back into the rotten woodwork from whence he came.

Taking advantage of Meghan's birthright, we had filed our papers and were able to take part-time jobs, as much to get ourselves more involved in our adopted community as to earn any wage. Meghan clerked in the local bookstore, well stocked with Irish history and literature, maps, and, yes, art- and cookbooks. Myself, I found work in a stationer's that had a nifty letterpress printing shop in the back, complete with a Vandercook proof press I was eager to learn to operate. Each of us was in our element. With this litany of reassurances, I would shut my eyes and drift into a dreamless sleep. Looking back on this calm period in my life, I wonder if dreams during sleep were unnecessary. I was already living a dream every waking hour, despite the occasional dark cloud of fear that came over me, the understandable fear this all might be somehow taken away.

News that would forever change my life, news that was every bit as unexpected as receiving a Henry James letter in the mail or a policeman's knock on the door but that carried none of their calamitous misfortune, came on a nondescript Sunday morning several months into our Kenmare sojourn.

Meghan and I, inveterate early risers, always slept in late on Sundays. We tried never to make plans that would involve anything other than a nice, lazy start to the day. Scrambled eggs and blanched cherry tomatoes, rashers, some black and white puddings, fresh coffee, the newspaper—this was our idea of perfection. So I was taken aback when I awoke on the second Sunday in August to find that my wife had gone downstairs and started what was to be a surprise breakfast. Wasn't my birthday. Wasn't any day I could remember as being special. Drawn by the smell of ground espresso beans, I put on my robe and went down to join her.