“And if it’s a forgery?” I asked, hoping my frustration that all of this was unfolding in front of Maisie wasn’t overly obvious to her. Despite the girl’s bravado, she was fragile and hurt.
“You’ve heard me say how the untutored eye is the forger’s best friend? My eye is anything but untutored. Without getting into a more scientific analysis of the book, and despite the fact that, as I said, it shouldn’t logically be right, every instinct in me suggests it could be genuine. The paper tone, its texture and weight and, what, frailty. This uneven darkness of the ink. The variety of vintage stains, tide lines along the bottom edges, and other flaws. And if that’s the case, this is trouble because it’s here now with no reasonable explanation as to why I possess it. The only provenance is a forged letter in Poe’s hand. There’s a reason Slader gave it to Maisie along a dark road where no one was watching,” he said, then asked Maisie, “Do you remember if he was wearing gloves?”
“Honestly, I couldn’t—”
“I’m lost,” I interrupted. “Why don’t we call the police, if you think it’s stolen?”
Any mention of the police made my husband recoil. After his encounter with the law back when I first knew him, he steered clear whenever possible, even though I knew he hadn’t relapsed into forging since. He’d confessed, done his penance, reinvented himself. Even as I understood his reluctance, I began to compass the vague outlines of Henry Slader’s trap here. Was Tamerlane, to use a childhood phrase for a sophisticated ploy, a hot potato?
“Rather than the cops, I think it’s the convict I need to consult with. Shall we go clear the table and wash dishes?”
“Let’s do,” I said, stifling my irritation.
“Speaking of which, did you move Ripley’s bowls, Maze?” he asked.
Maisie said she hadn’t.
“Would you mind keeping an eye out for them? And for Ripley too? They’ve both gone missing, it seems,” he said, and as he spoke I noticed that the perplexed and perplexing look on his face was one I hadn’t seen since the bad old days when Slader first surfaced in our lives, and when poor Adam, mysteriously friends with Slader, had been slain. Days which, other than unclouded memories of my brother, I’d just as soon consign to oblivion. After all, as I was reminded in the woods last night, not only did his murder remain unsolved, but any leads that might once have existed had now gone as cold as the headstone in the Montauk cemetery where he was buried.
If Henry Slader had lost some years out of his life while in prison, it appeared he hadn’t lost his edge as a world-class forger and despicable yegg. Here he was again, as welcome as some sarcoma, as malignancy itself. I had been so keen on forgetting my encounters with the man, wiping him from memory, that I could scarcely picture him in my mind. But when I walked into the low-ceilinged, dark-wood-paneled tavern of the Beekman Arms, that handsome white-clapboard colonial behemoth at the center of Rhinebeck village, the oldest continuously operating inn in America and a place where George Washington and many other dignitaries had slept, I recognized him at once.
Pale as cod, head not shaven but shorn tight, angular in every way, spare but still strong, wearing a black sweater and jeans, he rose with a disconcerting grin to shake my hand, as if we were long-lost friends. Could he possibly have forgotten? Not about our hating each other, but about what he’d done to me years ago. When I placed my warm talon, my fleshy pincers of a right hand, in his and gently pressed, he winced. Almost imperceptibly, but unmistakably, winced.
We sat at a table that paralleled the venerable old bar, me on a Windsor-style bench that ran along the wall, Slader with his back to the daytime regulars drinking their beer. Before he could say a word of the speech he’d no doubt rehearsed, I asked, “So you’ve taken to assaulting girls now? In the guise of a ghost, to boot.”
“Nothing of the kind. I just gave her the package, asked her to give it to you.”
“She came home all scraped up, scared out of her wits, and you’re saying you didn’t push her over?”
Slader shrugged. “Didn’t think she’d frighten so easily—”
“Your entire intention was to terrify her, you disingenuous bastard. Now you’re going to insult her on top of that?”
“Please. To answer your question, no, I never laid a finger on the girl. If she claimed otherwise, you might want to talk with her about the perils of lying. It’s something you know a little about.”
There was no point, I realized, in pursuing it further, and I certainly hadn’t come here to rehash ancient history. I would always loathe Slader, and he, me.
“That was quite some calling card you left,” I said.
A waitress came by the table and asked what we’d like to drink. I ordered a Jameson. “Seltzer on the rocks with lime,” Slader told her, then confided after she’d left, “Abstinence is one of the many bad habits I learned in lockup.”
“No doubt. But the Poe. It’s a blue-ribbon fake, I must say. Did you do it?”
Slader laughed, looked away with a cough, then back. I’d forgotten how dark his eyes were, ebony in this dimly lit bar. “You’re the one who’s apparently graduated to letterpress printing. Me, I’m just a hopeless, out-of-date calligrapher. A cursive dinosaur.”
“I wouldn’t call letterpress any less out-of-date than calligraphy. So if you didn’t forge it, who did? And why put it in my hands? I don’t want to have anything to do with the thing.”
Slader thanked the server, crushed his lime into the sparkling water. “That ‘thing’ is worth north of a million, you know. On the right day, in the right auction room, I could see it going for two.”
“Why not three?” I asked with a smirk.
“You’re right. Why not three? Let the hammer drop where it may.”
“Please.”
“You think I exaggerate? There are a lot of well-heeled collectors out there who want this book, the Holy Grail of American letters. Not to mention libraries. Three would shatter all records, but it doesn’t seem out of the question. All it takes is two determined bidders of means who are willing to chase one of the greatest rarities of them all.”
Were it genuine, Slader wasn’t altogether mistaken. For a copy in original wrappers, sky would be the limit in the rooms. I had done research before heading over and learned there are no known copies of Tamerlane inscribed by its author. The slim volume emerged into an indifferent world where it not only received no reviews but where, when its young author published his second book, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, in 1829—a book that did gain Poe some attention, mixed reviews being better than none—some people even dismissed his claim that there had ever been an earlier edition of Tamerlane. What insult upon injury, for the public to ignore a poet’s first book, then deny it ever existed to begin with. If that weren’t enough, Poe himself seems not to have kept a copy. And as for Al Aaraaf, there appeared to be only around twenty survivors of the original edition of that book as well. Early Poe is a landscape of almost freakish rareness.