The Forgers by Bradford Morrow Read Free Book Online

but if I suspected Adam, the way he acted toward me—polite if awkward, restrained yet sometimes willing to share anecdotes about rare book acquisitions or the gossip that circulates through the arteries and veins of the antiquarian trade like lifeblood—gave me pause, a pause I wished into being for Meghan’s sake.
    Instinctually, I knew Adam regretted our introduction at the Armory show when she tagged along with him and we were crowded together in a booth, making it hard for him not to offer the gesture without appearing thoroughly rude. She and I spoke with easy camaraderie from our first warm handshake. Seeing as Meghan lived downtown, not all that far from me, we decided to go out for a drink, talk books. She showed interest in my collection, and I wanted to visit her shop. Ours was an instant attraction. Love at first sight, if such a thing existed. Despite the unvarnished chill that emanated from her wary brother in even those initial minutes of my acquaintance with his sister—he stood there like the proverbial third wheel, a flat tire of a man—Meghan and I felt we had known each other our entire lives, an impression we confessed on that first drink date several days later. As we grew closer over the weeks and months, Adam and I, never close, withdrew into a polite remoteness. Sure, I recognized that I cut into the time his sister might otherwise have spent with him, in person or on the phone—he seemed far more needy and attached than she, to such an extent that I began to find it pathological—but what could I do? For my part, I think I tried to reach out, at least enough for appearance’s sake. But the one time we set up a date to finally have lunch together—I agreed to do this for Meghan’s sake, and given I never once traveled out to the tip of Long Island to visit his place, a Manhattan lunch was the least I could do—he himself canceled at the last minute because of some plumbing emergency that had come up in Montauk. He had to get straight out there to attend to it, some Niagara of a dripping faucet, and we never rescheduled.
    As for these noxious letters, though, I had to question what possible motive he would have to threaten his sister’s beau, his sister whom he clearly adored and whose happiness was paramount to him. Even if he and I were never warm toward one another, would he have been incensed enough to give in to such impulses?
    Looking back, I should probably have saved them, these missives. But what good would it have done? They served to incriminate only me, not the sender. If I hadn’t been guilty of pretty much every last thing they accused me of doing, I might have had some recourse. But stew as I might in my personal toxic juices of rage and dread, there was no clear response, so I systematically tore them up and threw them away, flushing them in bits and pieces down the toilet. A frustrating business, as vintage bond, unlike toilet paper, prefers to remain afloat rather than sink. Much like guilt itself, I suppose.
    In the midst of this concern, I focused on Meghan and my then-current Conan Doyle projects, including nice inscriptions I’d made in a cache of early books bought in England years ago that were ready to re-engage the world with fresh histories. These afforded me the happiness necessary to get through days spent both figuratively and literally looking over my shoulder. Meg and I loved going out to inexpensive restaurants she’d read about, testing various cuisines, sampling the vast variety of foodie culture that only New York and its boroughs can offer—Russian in Brighton Beach, Jamaican in Canarsie, Polish in Greenpoint, Bengali in Kensington. She ran her bookshop by day, which gave me plenty of time to go about my own literary labors in a basement room I rented pseudonymously, not far from my apartment, paying the landlord in cash every month with a dull regularity meant never to raise an eyebrow.
    For all my