The Forgers by Bradford Morrow Read Free Book Online Page B

marvel what a crummy world it is we sometimes inhabit.
    M Y DOWNFALL CAME on an otherwise classically beautiful autumn day. I was in my apartment making coffee after sleeping in. Meghan and I had been out the night before on one of our subway excursions to an outer borough neighborhood for some lamb curry she’d read was the best in the city, and I had gotten home late after dropping her off at her place. The knocks at my door came in three insistent bursts, like nothing any of my neighbors would ever make. I hitched my bathrobe tight, finger-combed my hair, and walked to answer, my stomach churning. The letters promised this moment, and I sensed it was now upon me. Two men stood there, one of medium height and artificially tanned, the other stocky and short with pockmarks on his cheeks, each displaying a badge and looking past me into the room. I had seen such things in movies but it was surreal, to say the least, for it to transpire before my very eyes, and not in some darkened theater but my own home.
    There is no need to describe in detail what happened next, given it was all more or less as one might expect. A typical investigation had gone on for several months, one in which I was drawn into selling a couple of overpriced forgeries to a couple of second-tier dealers I would never speak to again, nor they to me. One of the books was a relatively inconsequential Robert Frost, but the other, a signed copy of Dubliners dated 1914, the year of publication—my rendering of James Joyce’s signature running upward from left to right as was his sometime habit—was a different story. Big money, that one, well into five figures. Some overpriced, overrated autograph experts were brought in to verify what the police wanted to hear, and thus was I stung.
    The only freakish part about the arrest was that the officers, who came in and sat with me to talk a little before making their collar, provided me with a copy of a confession to my crimes written out in my own hand —yes, I do have my own personal handwriting, and much as we are let down when an impersonator speaks in his regular voice, my penmanship left a few things to be desired. They didn’t seem to like it when, seeing words I hadn’t written right there in my own hand, I let out with a loud, thunderstruck laugh. Of course, I thought. Whoever had been sending me the menacing letters in James’s hand could not resist a pièce de résistance, an inside joke only he and I would truly appreciate. Even as I spent the night downtown sitting on the hard concrete bench of a holding cell with twenty other miscreants until being released on my own recognizance the next morning, I vacillated between hating the bastard who did this to me and admiring his sense of humor. The counterfeit of my handwriting wasn’t perfect, which led me to infer that my accuser worked up his facsimile from fragments he hadn’t spent much time studying or else wasn’t all that accomplished. Still, the resemblance was close enough that it would have taken someone with my skill to recognize it as a forgery, and on this neither the police nor courts would ever accept my considered testimony—if it ever came to that, which it didn’t.
    Too, I began racking my brain, going through the many hundreds of deals I had been involved in over the years, trying to figure out who was behind my sudden shift of fortune. I should add that Adam Diehl, right or wrong, was on my short list. He for one would have had access to my handwriting if he’d secretly read my letters to Meghan, of which there were quite a number, as we shamelessly adored penning each other private love notes, especially in our earliest months of dating. Stealing glances at our romantic exchanges wouldn’t have been hard for Adam to do, since whenever he visited town he stayed at her place while she moved over to mine. On the other hand, because I was an avowed Luddite who stubbornly refused to