The Ross Forgery Read online

  He saw a forefinger wave in the audience. “Good. I have a bid of ten dollars. Will anyone say twenty? Twenty dollars? No one? I’m sure these pamphlets are worth at least ten dollars each to collectors around the country, wouldn’t you say? You wouldn’t say. Hmmm.” The auctioneer stuck his lower lip out, and several in the audience tittered. “Going for ten dollars, then. Going. Going. Last chance to say twenty.” He paused. “Gone. For ten dollars, to the gentleman in the gray jacket. Thank you very much.”

  Michael Townsend walked up to the recorder seated by the podium, as the auctioneer began to scold the audience again. He got them laughing and advised them to consult the listing for the next lot item.

  “Michael Townsend,” said Townsend to the recorder. He held forth a ten-dollar bill, plus some silver. And received the receipt.

  He showed the receipt to the uniformed custodian and was allowed to lift the cardboard carton off the table and leave with it.

  Outside, Townsend struggled with the box and looked for a cab. Now he knew how much fifty thousand dollars weighed.

  19

  Ross came running.

  He came up the subway stairs and jogged eagerly along the sidewalk. He stopped at the intersection, shouldered his way through the pedestrians at the corner, and dashed across the street between cars. Urgently, he grabbed a doorknob and pulled. He scowled at the people along the bar, seeking.

  As Townsend stood up, Ross saw him and grabbed him. “Hey, if this is a false alarm—”

  “Easy, Edgar. Easy. No false alarm.”

  “Well, give, give, quick!”

  “Calm down. Calm down. I’ve got it all right here in this envelope. Keep your voice down.” He pulled Ross by the lapel of his jacket to a booth. “Sit down.”

  Ross, eagerly obedient, sat down and watched Townsend sit down. Ross had a stubble of beard. His tie was undone and his collar open. Both eyes were badly bloodshot.

  “How was the wet, wet grass all the way to hell and gone up in Bronx Park?”

  Ross waved a hand at him. “Never mind about my hangover. What have you got?”

  Townsend pulled out a pamphlet. “Fifty grand is what I’ve got.” He served the pamphlet to Ross, lifted it with two hands across the booth table, and deftly, with the enhancing hands of a skilled jewelry salesman, laid the piece before Ross.

  Ross looked at it, then at Townsend. His bald head glistened damply with perspiration. “What the hell’s that?”

  “There’s your Wise forgery.”

  “That? Honest to God? You mean that’s it? I can just take it and deliver it to what’s-’s-face?”

  “Not quite. Did you read the cover?”

  Puzzled, Ross scanned it, frowning. “Whatever the hell that means. Dodgson. Hmmm.”

  “See the publication date?”

  “Yeah, 1884.”

  “OK. There’s your paper.”

  “Where?” Ross sat with his hands in his lap, staring dully down at the pamphlet. “You can’t bleach that type off there. It’ll ruin the paper.”

  “Look at page 3.

  Ross opened the cover and looked at page 3. “Is this 3?”

  “Counting the cover as page 1 and the inside cover as page 2, that’s page 3. What do you see?”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing on it.”

  “Turn over to the other side—page 4.”

  “It’s blank.”

  “OK. Try page 29 and 30.”

  Ross, scowling irritably, furiously humoring a child, pawed the back pages, located 29 and 30. “Blank. Blank!”

  “Blank, blank,” said Townsend, patiently. “There’s your paper.”

  Ross scowled doubtfully at him. Then comprehension lit his face. He opened the pamphlet and traced the bound sheets. “Three and 4 and 29 and 30 are all the same piece of paper. Blank on all four faces!”

  He stood up and grabbed Townsend by both ears and kissed him on the cheek. He sat down, smiling. Then abruptly sat up. “Hey—how many sheets—”

  “Eighty.”

  “Eighty! You got eighty of these? Where?”

  “An auction. What difference does it make?”

  “I need a drink.” Ross lurched out of the booth and across to the bar. He returned with two glasses of whiskey. “Here, Townsend. Long may you wave, you old bastard. The next problem is typefaces, and that’s my department.”

  Cloud shadows rippled across the barroom floor and the late afternoon westering sun flooded the barroom.

  The long rain had ended.

  FIVE

  1

  Ross sensed that his speech had grown fuzzy.

  “Clay was the printer,” he repeated. Fuzzy, but his mind was clear, and he felt great. Eighty Dodgson pamphlets, each with a blank sheet of authentic paper. He stuffed some more pretzels into his mouth. “Go on. Clay.”

  “R. Clay and Taylor,” said Townsend. “London printer. Clay did all of Thomas Wise’s printing.”

  Ross slopped some more beer from the pitcher into his glass. “OK. Get on with it.”

  “Clay used two basic typefaces to do Wise’s first editions. He used a face called Long Primer that was based on Caslon’s Roman. And he used another called Pica. Actually, there were a lot of variations on these two. Clay used both a Long Primer and a Long Primer Old Style, and he used a Pica and a Small Pica and Small Pica Old Style, and so forth. For a lot of technical reasons, we’re going to have to use the Long Primer. Clay called it Long Primer Number Three. But the typefounder he bought it from—P. M. Shanks, of Red Lyon Square—Shanks called it Long Primer Number Twenty.”

  Ross nodded and washed the pretzels down with a mouthful of beer. “Shanks. Long Primer Number Twenty. Go on.”

  “Now comes the problem. Around 1880, Robert Clay himself decided that the Shanks typeface had an irritating problem —the lowercase f and j were constantly breaking right where they loop.”

  Ross nodded. “That’s called the kern. Phototypography cured that forever.”

  “Clay was tired of his kerns breaking off in the printing. The broken letters looked terrible—”

  “So Clay had Shanks design a new f and j to go with the existing typeface.”

  “Yeah,” said Townsend. “So you knew?”

  “I know typographic history,” said Ross, speaking very slowly, very distinctly. “Clay started a whole new trend in typography. Every typefounder in the world introduced kernless type after that.”

  Townsend nodded. “Yeah. And that was the second thing that tripped up Thomas Wise. The first kernless fonts for books didn’t come out until around 1883. Clay had his early —sometime after 1880. And we know he got rid of the whole font in 1893.”

  Ross nodded. “So we have to find a typeface from an English typefoundry that was punched over ninety years ago.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ross noisily ate a palmful of pretzel sticks and wiped his hand on his pants. “Jesus. You know—” He rinsed his mouth with beer and tried to stop the slack-jawed speech. “—you know what makes this such a problem? You wanna know, Townsend? When the typesetting machines came in—the linotype, the Ludlow, and all the others—when they came in, printers everywhere threw out their hand-set types. They flooded the market with them. And most of them just got melted down, and the typecases were used for firewood. I’ll lay you eight to five that Clay got rid of his in 1893 because he went into machine-set type. Most of those hand-set fonts are gone forever.”

  He stood up and looked about him. “Be ri’ back, Mickey-cakes.” He was unsteady on his feet, and he walked very carefully between the packed tables. He realized that the babble was tremendous. Waiters and waitresses in straw skimmers moved deftly with pitchers of beer.

  2

  Arthur Tank sat at the end of the long, old-fashioned bar near the door, with the coat racks just behind him. He was reading his next lesson and periodically raising his eyes to watch Ross and Townsend.

  His principal attention was directed at the singleton who sat about midway at the b
ar. A chunky cat with some big rings on his thick fingers and black muttonchop sideburns. He had squinty little black eyes and a craggy, overhanging forehead. His shoulders seemed ready to burst through the seams of his suit jacket.

  Tank watched Ross stand up and meander toward the men’s room. The chunky cat with the muttonchops stood up and casually sauntered toward the men’s room, too.

  With equal casualness, Tank seized his opportunity. He stood up and stepped over to the coat racks. He located Townsend’s briefcase and pulled it down. Glancing into the main room, Tank watched Townsend talking to the waitress. Tank put the briefcase on a bar stool and opened it.

  He lifted a wad of papers held by a thick rubber band. Classroom compositions. He put them on the bar next to his pitcher of beer. He pulled out a book. Baroque Architecture and the Eighteenth Century Novel. Another book. Bookpapers and Their Manufacture During the Interregnum. A Study in Improvising. He put them on the bar next to the wad of compositions. In an inside pocket, his groping hand found a cellophane sleeve containing a brochure, and he pulled it out.

  His stolid, unblinking eyes followed the words of the title across the page, line by line. Then he sat down at the bar and took out a pocket pad and stub of a pencil. He copied the title: The True and Right Method of 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 Churches of England.

  The copying occupied a few minutes of laborious writing. Then Tank put the cellophane envelope back into the briefcase, returned the two books and the classroom compositions, snapped the clasp and put the case back on top of the coat rack. He sat down at the bar again and resumed reading Section 4: The Legal Aspects of Eavesdropping and Wiretapping.

  The banjo players were climbing back on the bandstand.

  Arthur Tank hated banjos.

  3

  The walls in the men’s room were covered with locker room words, graffiti, and telephone numbers.

  Water. Ross braced himself against the urinal and decided he’d drink more water and clear his head. Funny, he was drunk, but his head was clear. Then he decided he wasn’t drunk. He was still poisoned from last night’s hangover, and he was exhausted. Bed. He’d go to bed.

  “What time is it?” he asked a man who was washing his hands.

  “Midnight. Just after midnight.”

  Through the walls of the lavatory, he heard the banjos start up again. “Limehouse Blues.”

  He pushed through the door and found his way back to the table. He stood uncertainly on his feet, feeling tired, watching Townsend pay the girl in the skimmer. Ross leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  “Thank you, Curlylocks,” she said.

  4

  Tank canted his porkpie hat down over his eyes as Ross and Townsend straggled to the front door. Ross’s eyes were blasted with drink, and he walked with rigid attention to keep his balance. They struggled into their topcoats and left, Townsend carrying his briefcase firmly by its handle.

  Once the door shut on them, the muttonchopper stepped back from the bar and walked purposefully toward the door. He glanced once at Tank.

  The din from the banjos and the hand-clapping was deafening. Tank poured more beer from the pitcher. His ears hurt. He drained half the glass and buttoned his topcoat. He fitted his course lesson into a slash pocket.

  He thought about that pamphlet with the long title that seemed to make Ross and his buddy so happy. Two dumdums. Anyway, Ross was safe. He wasn’t going to go anywhere except to bed. Ross was a laughing drunk this night.

  Happy men never run away.

  5

  Ross woke up at 3 A.M.

  He lay in his bed and listened to the night noises: the clock ticking in the living room; the cracking of the stairs; the stirring night wind, pawing the edges of the window curtains. At his side, his wife breathed peacefully.

  The fear was a cold spot in his gut. And there was a beer headache gripping his temples.

  One hundred thousand, riding on an extinct typeface. Long Primer Number Twenty. Oh, the odds, the odds on finding it. He did a mental rundown on the typographers and dealers in old type fonts. That was what woke him up. Type-stands up to the sky, each packed with typecases—wooden, thirty-two and a half inches wide, fourteen and a half inches deep, and an inch and a third high. He recited the information like a catechism. Upper case of type, ninety-eight compartments for caps and small caps. Lower case, fifty-three compartments.

  He could peg type from a typecase onto his composing stick in his sleep. The fastest stick in Brooklyn at one time, faster even than his father. Two generations, side by side, pegging type for the old Brooklyn Eagle. Right hand like a barnyard chicken, pecking bits of metal and dabbing them onto the metal stick. Smell the printer’s ink. Smell it? And the typewash. An ocean of typewash. He could smell it at will for the rest of his life.

  Pegging type. Always when the night fears came, he could lie there and peg type, believing that if he set it fast enough, he could solve all problems—with type.

  And what had gone wrong? Next to his father all day, reading type books all night and designing his own. No beard. No razor. No wife. Just type. Invincible—type designs never seen before. What went wrong? Where did he go off? His life had become a bunch of pied type in a composing room hell-box.

  A new ball game, a new slate, a fresh start. Still invincible. One hundred thousand and freedom if only he could find it—that face. Long Primer Number Twenty. The odds, the odds. A hand-set typeface nearly a hundred years old, made in a foundry far, far away in England. Was there a typecase lying in a typographic graveyard in some loft in Brooklyn or Manhattan?

  Not likely.

  One hundred thousand dollars. Gone, gone, gone. And Edgar Ross in chains, pegging type for classified ads for the rest of his natural life.

  Away. Away. Run away with the murmuring wind.

  He watched the curtains flutter.

  6

  Seven Seas Typographers was the place to begin. Just off the Flatbush Avenue extension, by the Brooklyn Bridge: Fonts in All Languages—Typesetting and Antique Fonts Bought and Sold.

  Metal type-stands. Aisles upon aisles. Stepladders and gooseneck lamps. Ross read the type names on the case drawers like tombstones. Old friends, old memories—Dom, Caslon, Bodoni Book. Variations on familiar themes by the famous typefoundries: Baskerville, Garamond, even a Bembo. Times Roman and Centaur—bedamned, if it isn’t Gill Sans.

  Like silenced voices. Newspaper fonts that had clamored war, politics, kits for sale, obituaries. Silent now, muted; in drawers, in darkness, year after year; waiting to come out and shout and sing and dance again.

  He read names of owners on the case faces. J. E. Davies, Singapore. Manila Times. Stuttgart. Memphis. Atlanta Constitution. Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

  Many would never shout and sing or dance again.

  There were cases of Russian alphabets, Greek, Sanskrit.

  Now, they clamored at him with his beer headache. English fonts, Dutch fonts, German, Italian, French.

  He prowled Seven Seas all morning, concealing from the clerks the name of the type he wanted. Finally he found the English typefaces himself. A very small collection. No Shanks.

  7

  He bused to Long Island City after lunch, and did Clauson’s Antique Fonts in an hour. Clauson’s catered to advertising agencies. Most of his faces were brand-new castings of old faces, done to meet the fad and the fashionable. Ross wandered back to Manhattan, automatically eliminating the smallest typographers from his list. He quit late in the afternoon.

  There was only one place it could be—where he should have started in the first place. Tomorrow morning.

  Lanski’s.

  8

  In the morning, the wind had backed around to the northwest again and sheeted up the sky with unbroken, flat, gray clouds. A penetrating, damp cold crept back into the city.

>   Spring was never to come. Never.

  And there in the parking lot in Bayonne, near the U.S. Navy drydock, overlooking the flat, battleship gray of New York Harbor and the flat gray of the New York skyline, its towering buildings like exotic chess pieces, Ross sat in his car, buttoning his overcoat and praying.

  Through the windshield, he read the sign over the enormous warehouse: LANSKI USED PRINTING EQUIPMENT.

  A snapping breeze followed him across the parking lot, carrying the smells of acetylene, brackish port water, and creosote. A bass ship’s horn shook the air.

  The biggest type dealer of them all. It’s either here or nowhere.

  Arty, the legendary human encyclopedia on typefaces, leaned his arm on the old counter and listened with bowed head, like a priest in a confessional. He nodded.

  “You got an art press in your cellar, right? I know, I know. Now give me an idea of what kind of a face. I have a Dutch face from the Enschede Foundry in Haarlem, Holland. Lutetia, it’s called. Upper and lower case, all twelve point. Beeeeuuutiful. I got a real collector’s item. Medieval. Cast by Goudy himself in his shop at Marlboro. The matrices were destroyed by fire. I just got in some Times Roman from an Italian foundry. Got it both roman and italic. You can use that for anything. Very versatile. Look, you could get lost out there.” He paused for breath and looked at Ross.

  “I got thousands of cases of type out there. I got the same typeface by different foundries. I got stands that go from here to the ceiling. So I’ll tell you what.” He turned and pointed at a library card file. “Why’n’t you start right here with my card file? I got all the cases out there broken down by families. It’s a rotten system—I set it up eighteen years ago when I first set up this type department for old man Lanski—and it’s not up-to-date. In fact, if I had time, I’d do the whole damned thing over again in a different system. Anyway. See? Look. Come here.”