The Ross Forgery Read online

Townsend flipped the pages of the book, looking at the photographs. Tommy Wise, the fat-cheeked little Britisher with his conventional tastes, natty little moustache, and cold, cold eyes. Ambition and social climber written all over his face. Sycophant, nipping around the fringes of the London literary crowd, starting the Browning Club and the Rossetti Club and the Swinburne Club for personal gain.

  The first forgery a small, “newly discovered” first edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, bearing the false place and date, Reading, 1847. A forged first edition, actually printed in 1889 by a London printer under the direction of Thomas Wise.

  Skillful little forgeries that gave him the money he needed to build the magnificent Ashley Library, known the world over. Magnificent, but flawed (as the owner himself was) by the little peccadillos, the little frauds.

  A simple little game, really. Pick any major poem and “discover” a heretofore unknown first edition, predating the real first edition by a few years.

  “I know you,” said Townsend to the picture of Wise in his academic cap and gown, holding his honorary degree. “I know you for a thief and a fraud.”

  Wise, in his academic cap and gown, tittered triumphantly from the photograph. For the major part of his life, he’d had the literary world at his feet. And, amassing a fraudulent fortune, had lived the life of a very rich man. Wise tittered and didn’t think about the last years of bitterness, condemnation, ruined reputation, and loneliness.

  3

  “We want to sell everything as quickly as possible. Convert everything to cash.” Mrs. Conde stuck her face out emphatically at the lawyer as her husband silently watched. “Everything. Right now.”

  The lawyer, Mr. Birdwhistle, drummed his fingernail on the desk thoughtfully. “Yes. I understand.”

  “I’m not sure you do, Mr. Birdwhistle. I’ve observed your work for Miss Dodgson over a period of seventeen years. And I can tell you, you don’t understand what speed is. Now, this is the cleanest will you’ve handled in a long time, I’m sure. Miss Dodgson had no surviving relatives, neither here nor in England. Mr. Conde and myself are the only heirs in her will, a will, I might point out, you yourself drew. Everything is in perfect order, and the will should be through like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  “Now, Mrs. Conde. Let’s be plain with each other. Your observation of my service to Miss Dodgson is not a fair measure of this firm’s legal services. We do move with the utmost celerity when conditions require. Miss Dodgson’s affairs just were not urgent matters, and haste was not a requisite. However, to show you that I understand your desire to wind up this matter and move to Florida, I have already arranged to have Skelly Auctioneers visit the premises today. They’ll give you—for a modest fee—a complete valuation on everything outright, or sell it at auction as your agent—for a fee, of course.”

  “Today?”

  “Today.”

  Mrs. Conde nodded with reluctant agreeableness.

  4

  Blackstone’s messenger wandered vaguely down the lane toward Ross’s type shop. He was eating a bag of chocolate kisses, dropping the paper foil as he went, masticating slowly, clutching the parcel to his body with his withered left arm and staring at things as he went, slack-jawed.

  Ross watched him come, watched him struggle with the shop door. Finally, the boy put the cellophane bag of candy into a pocket and turned the knob.

  “Blackstone’s Advertising Agency,” he bellowed. “Anything to go back?” Soft air flowed in with him, smelling of spring.

  Helen Ross crossed the room quickly and received the package. “No,” she said softly. “Nothing going back today, Albert.”

  The boy looked around at the ceiling as though something pained him, something he couldn’t remember, something he could never remember. His eyes found Kitty Fitzgerald, and his chocolate-stained mouth hung habitually open as he stared at her.

  Ross watched the blasted eyes examine the girl’s long red hair and her face. They rested on the faint pattern of freckles on her cheek and arms, on every item of clothing, and on her wristwatch, then wandered back to the ceiling.

  “OK,” said the boy slowly, and turning, staring sidelong again at Kitty Fitzgerald, he left, wandering with his candy bag.

  “Love, love, love,” said Kitty Fitzgerald, rising. She smirked at Ross, then watched as Helen Ross opened the thick brown envelope. Strips of masking tape peeled away, and Mrs. Ross pulled out a sheaf of papers.

  Ross walked over to the counter table and watched.

  “Lists of dealer names,” said Helen Ross. “Hundreds of them. For eighteen regional farm newspapers.”

  Kitty Fitzgerald closed her eyes slowly then opened them. “Set in two-point flyspeck. Right?”

  “‘Six-point,’” said Helen Ross, reading the instructions. “‘Set solid. Flush left. Ragged right. Bodoni Book. Names of states boldface, all caps. Cities, boldface, caps and lowercase.’”

  “How much of it is there?”

  “We can stop”—Helen Ross looked at her husband—“when we get to five thousand dollars.” Kitty Fitzgerald got out the job ledger and began to log the job in.

  “Client: Monarch Farm Tires,” she said, writing. “Agency: Blackstone’s.”

  Helen Ross reached over and pulled open the shop door. The soft air flowed in.

  Ross went over to his phototype font file to pull out three sets of Bodoni Book, six point.

  God, deliver me. One Hundred Grand, deliver me. Townsend, deliver me. Where the hell was Townsend?

  5

  Into the ramshackle, winter-weary, salt-stained city, a southeast breeze carried the smell of earth and springtime.

  Michael Townsend smelled it. Felt it. And the need to be off once again was compelling. He smelled an English lane in springtime, felt the throb of London streets under the soles of his shoes. The cities of London—bombed-out London, Victorian London, Dickens’s London, Samuel Johnson’s London, Pope’s, Fielding’s, Swift’s. Restoration London, the return of the Royalists on blooded horses, bringing back the pomp and circumstance of the French court. Layer by layer, like a peeled onion.

  Townsend strode across the quadrangle of Saint David’s School, inhaling that disturbing air, and walked through the passageway to the street.

  Chub. On the exterior walls of the old school buildings, written with an aerosol spray can of red paint. Chub. Chambers Street Crusaders. Power to the People. Rich Ofays. Mindless graffiti, like mental vomit.

  He heard a ship’s horn call from its West Side berth, and he ached to run home and pack. A day to run away and join the circus.

  He hefted the briefcase crammed with school papers. “My Dog Spot.” And walked toward the subway. He passed a band of boys from the junior class. Blue blazers, striped red ties, and dirty fingernails.

  For my next trick, I will now, before your wondering eyes, create a flawless forgery. A perfect fake. A fake of a fake.

  The papers, the ink, the typography, the hybrid font, the binding—all of these things, lazies and ge’muns, are going to be absolutely fraudulent. The result of a policy of willful deceit. Yet no one, not even the most case-hardened collection of celebrated literary specialists—with all their spectographic tests, mercury vapor lamps, their comparative typography analyses, their forensic chemistry—no one, I say, will be able to demonstrate unequivocally that this is a fraud.

  Sure.

  Townsend descended the subway steps as stale winter air rushed from the tunnel. Subway coming. He stepped down two steps at a time out of the spring air and into sempiternal darkness. Follow the mole road home.

  6

  The brindle tom, Henry Fielding, slept on his back on the windowsill between the windowpane and the tank of tropical fish.

  From the doorway, it appeared to Townsend that the cat was sound asleep inside the fish tank. Majestic and bearded angelfish promenaded sinuously in and out of the shadows of Sagittarius grass, while streams of aerated bubbles rose from the gravel.


  Henry Fielding stretched his neck and yawned, revealing the scars of neck and jowl. He conned Townsend with one drugged eye and recomposed himself in the warm sunlight to nap again, waiting for dusk and the ineluctable drop from the window ledge into the evening’s adventures.

  Townsend slouched into his desk chair, still wrapped in his topcoat. A wad of school compositions peeked out from the briefcase. “My Dog Spot.” He glanced at the telephone.

  It would be fascinating to try. But impossible. No one can fake eighty-year-old paper.

  He groped a hand into his inside coat pocket and extracted a folded sheet of yellow foolscap. Three words were written on it: The Victimless Crime.

  He recited it to himself again. We make a fake for a man who commissions it and pays us for making it. He knows it’s a fake. He uses it to taunt a book collector whom he hates. Collector is tormented greatly by his own greed for the newly discovered item. The crime has no victim. The greedy collector is harmed only by his own avarice.

  Ah, but then. People die. The fake gets into the market, ultimately, and comes to grace a celebrated library or a private collection. But who cares? It’s not fake literature. The cribbed words will be real enough, authentic enough, no matter what author they copy. It’s fake printing. And there’s no harm to anyone—except possibly Thomas Wise, whose reputation will be only a little more blackened.

  It’s less a crime than bank robbery. Or product adulteration. Yes. But a crime, nonetheless. Boy Scout.

  If not you, Townsend, then someone else.

  The hell with it. The idea’s harebrained. The odds for bringing it off are in the realm of infinity. And if they were exposed, his career in the world of literary scholarship would be destroyed irredeemably. So, no. Not now. Not ever. No.

  He crossed the room to the doorway, feeling enormously relieved.

  He would not do it.

  7

  Ross studied the long fall of Kitty Fitzgerald’s hair. Under sunlight, an extraordinary fall of flame in the subdued setting of a type shop.

  Then he realized that Kitty Fitzgerald was staring at something. His eyes looked through the shop window.

  Townsend. He was walking down the cobbled lane, long, swinging strides, purposefully. Ross felt his stomach go cold. Now he’d know. Yes or no. They were in or out. He dreaded no. To have come this far, to have overcome so much, to be so close, so very, very close, about to nibble the cheese, when —zonk. No. Never, It couldn’t be.

  He watched the long-legged gait of Michael Townsend coming closer. Yes or no? For God’s sake, man. Does he walk yes or does he walk no? Name of God. Run!

  He sat in his chair, waiting and watching. And realizing that Kitty Fitzgerald was watching, watching every step.

  Townsend reached the front of the building, passed along the shop windows, and reached the door. Ross slowly rose to his feet as the door swung open.

  Townsend entered and shut the door. He stood hesitantly for a moment, gazing from Helen Ross to Kitty Fitzgerald. Then he saw Ross. The two men looked silently at each other.

  Ross waited, rigid, where he stood. Then he began to make impatient, beckoning motions with both hands. “Well, in the name of God, don’t take root there! Yes or no!”

  “Well,” Townsend took a breath. “I’d be willing …”

  “You will?” Ross slammed his palms together. “Smartest move you ever made. Start packing. You’ll be in London in a week!”

  Townsend stood mutely in the middle of Ross’s shop, sensing the eyes of both women on him. He was stunned by the misunderstanding. He was trying to say no and Ross was hearing yes. Ross’s enthusiastic voice was ringing unheard words into his ears.

  Townsend sighed finally and cleared his voice. “Ross! Ross! Ah, slow down. Listen, don’t start counting the money yet.” “What? What do you mean?”

  “Well, we have one impossible problem.”

  “What! What are you telling me?”

  “The paper.”

  “Yeah. So what? We’ll bake some in an oven to age it.”

  “Not this paper, you won’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Esparto grass.”

  “Huh?”

  “Ee ess pee ay ar tee oh. Es-par-to. Esparto grass.”

  8

  Kitty Fitzgerald watched the swinging gait of Michael Townsend carry down the lane. She wiggled her eyebrows at Helen Ross. “Bit of all right, wot, ducks?”

  Ross, lost in thought, looked at her and snorted. “What role do you give him? Conquering hero? Torn shirt and dried sweat? Pot ’n’ poetry?”

  “Oh, no,” said Kitty Fitzgerald. “The best, the most irresistible role to a woman.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Little boy lost.”

  9

  It was late in the day when the two men from Skelly’s Auctioneers entered the attic.

  Mr. Poad, the senior appraiser, smiled at the light switch, a twist-button type on a ceramic dome. “Rarely see electrical fixtures like that any more. I’ll bet you—ah, I was right. Clear glass bulbs with a point and filament. See?”

  Mr. Dexter saw. Wordlessly, he followed Mr. Poad up the gritty attic steps.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Poad. “That’s the mirror that goes with the bureau in the main bedroom. Perfect condition. The mirror must have been resilvered not too many years ago. That’ll fetch a nice penny. Hmmm.” He turned slowly, surveying all the mute items that filled the attic—hatboxes and trunks, clothes bags and furniture. He walked slowly to the front of the attic and opened a window, wrinkling his nose against the mustiness. “My grandparents lived in a great, old Victorian house like this. And when we were children, we often played in the attic. I can still hear the rain on the slate roof, still smell the old clothes that we found in the trunks. Gates-ajar collars and derby hats—oh, we had lots of laughs up there in front of the old mirrors, I can tell you. Now, there’s an old-timer. That trunk is at least 100 years old. English make, I’m sure. Quite valuable.” He crouched down and read the name, gilt-lettered on the transom below the lock:

  REVEREND OSWALD LEX DODGSON, D.D.

  “I wonder … He tried the hasp and found it firm. “Hramm.” He looked at Mr. Dexter, who was sorting keys and tags on his large clipboard.

  “Try this one,” said Mr. Dexter. “And this—and here’s a third.”

  The second one worked, and the old hasp folded heavily down.

  Mr. Poad lifted back the trunk lid. “Manuscripts?” he asked. “Hmm. They’ll have to have a literary man for this. Looks like a collection of old pamphlets.” He selected a copy and held it up, peering through his bifocals.

  The True and Right Method for Countering the Deleterious Effects of that Insidious, Blasphemous Work, “The Origin of Species,” by Charles Darwin. Being a Learned Discourse on Measures for Healing the Divisions that Exist Among the Protestant Clergy of England.

  By Reverend Oswald Lex Dodgson, D.D.

  Cambridge

  “Hmmm. A relative of Miss Dodgson’s—father, perhaps.” He glanced at the bottom of the cover.

  Commemorative Edition of Dr. Dodgson’s Celebrated Sermon that Raised Over One Hundred Thousand Pounds Toward the Establishment of a New Divinity School.

  PEPPERCORN PRESS

  BRISTOL, ENGLAND, 1884

  He looked up at Mr. Dexter. “First edition, you think? Trunk is filled with copies of the pamphlet. If these are valuable collector’s items, you can imagine what a trunkful of them thrown on the market will do to the price.” He shrugged. “Well, I can tell you one thing. This trunk will create some heavy bidding.” He ran his hand over the exterior. “Beautiful.”

  FOUR

  1

  A coin of light the size of a quarter. Under the microscope, the specimen was a blur, and Townsend turned the knurled adjustment gear carefully until a sharp image appeared—like a bundle of sticks.

  “That’s a sample of paper from the New York Times,” said Townsend. “A paper expert can tell you whether
that’s pine, spruce, or whatnot. Here’s a piece of magazine stock—seventy pound, with a machine finish. See?” He put another glass slide under the microscope. “Very different. And this is a cover stock with an enamel finish. A chemical test can tell you exactly what the finish coat is made up of. In fact, with many of these papers, an expert can identify the company that made it and even the very plant it was made in.”

  Ross listened to Townsend’s voice as his eye studied each specimen under the microscope. His heart was sinking.

  Townsend next handed him a book. “I’m going to have to explain some historical facts about paper to you, Ross. This is C. Ainsworth Mitchell’s textbook on paper, Documents and Their Scientific Examination. It was published in 1922, and it’s still a basic text on paper. Now, see these photographs? They’re samples of paper made from various materials. See here? This is a piece of paper made from cotton rags. Up until 1860, all paper was made from rags, but the volume of printing was soaring and the supply of rags remained steady. The English were running out of rags. No rags, no paper. So the English papermakers began using straw. See? This is straw. You can see the difference from rags, right? Then the paper-makers tumbled to esparto grass—it was better and cheaper, and it could be processed faster.

  “Almost identical to straw. This is esparto grass. But esparto grass has these microscopic hairs that grow on the inner side of the leaf. See, they look like a bunch of commas. Straw doesn’t have them. Now, one more piece to the puzzle.”

  “OK, OK,” said Ross, lifting his eye. “That’s enough.”

  “I’m telling you exactly how Pollard and Carter nailed Thomas Wise,” said Townsend. “Better hear me out. After 1860, there were new paper-processing methods being developed. The sulphite process, the sulphate process, the alkalis, and so forth.

  “That fake 1847 edition of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets was printed on esparto grass paper. Couldn’t have been printed in 1847—didn’t exist then. It also had traces of sulphite chemical processing in it, and that didn’t come about until the late 1880’s. Pollard and Carter had uncovered a fake. OK. Let me give you the recipe for paper we need. It has to be typical of the paper used by Wise’s printer around 1890. Ready? Made from esparto grass in combination with sulphite chemical wood made from a European tree—Swedish, or something.”