The first copy of Tamerlane to surface in an institution, I found out, wasn’t until 1876, in London’s British Museum, of all places, where it had been purchased in 1860 along with a batch of other American volumes. It now resides in the British Library. Eight American libraries possess copies—the Lilly in Indiana, the Ransom Center in Austin, the Huntington and Clark in San Marino and Los Angeles, the Free Library in Philadelphia, the Regenstein at the University of Chicago. Manhattan being Manhattan, the Berg Collection at New York Public has two, one with its cover intact, the other with no cover at all. Two copies are in private hands. And, to round out the census, the copy that had been housed in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia—it bore a romantic inscription, now faded to near invisibility, from one Phatimer Kinsell “to his sweetheart” Mary Reed—went missing in 1974, and remains lost to this day. Totus est.
“Is it the one lifted from Virginia?” I asked, emerging from my stream of thought.
“That’s a reasonable speculation, but no. Under infrared light there’s no sign of the inscription that’s unique to the Alderman copy. According to rumor, that was an inside job and whoever ripped it off, or paid for it to be lifted, doesn’t dare bring it to market. Either way, not the same animal.”
Before I’d left the house, Meghan was still upset about my meeting with this man who had attacked me. “It’s deranged, your willingness to talk with him. You know what happens to the moth drawn to flame,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”
However much I disliked Slader, however much I distrusted and resented him, I couldn’t help but admire the knowledge he possessed. He could fairly be accused of many ills and iniquities, but ignorance wasn’t one of them. Besides, if there was any chance the Tamerlane was real, it was imperative I get it out of our house. I even considered bringing it with me to give it back, but that same possibility, ironically, in fact precluded my doing so. Black tulips don’t belong in bars. Part of me also believed, perhaps wrongly, that by keeping it in my safe for the short term, I might have more leverage in my discussion with Slader.
“Is it one of the two copies held privately? Stolen, in other words?”
Slader stared at the lime wedge in his drink, shaking his head.
“It’s the thirteenth copy,” he said, raising his eyes as he clasped his hands on the small table. His gesture and the cryptic look on his face conveyed a curious blend of self-assurance and, what, gravity, anxiety. In my few but unforgettable encounters with Henry Slader I had never seen anything on his face other than arrogance in its many forms. On the other hand, in times past we had never discussed such a legendary rarity.
“Well,” I muttered, taking a drink of my whiskey. “If so, it’s an historic find, one of the first magnitude, front-page newspaper material, but—”
“True enough,” he interjected. “The last copy discovered was sold at Sotheby’s thirty years back, and the eleventh copy came to public light a little over thirty years before that, in 1954, if I’m not mistaken.”
“All very correct and interesting,” I said, quite sincerely. Then, just as sincerely, I told him, “I still don’t want to have anything to do with it, or you.”
Undaunted, his full confidence returning, he said, “With me, I understand. But unless you destroy it, which I doubt you’ll want to do, or turn it in to the police, which I equally don’t see you doing, as I’m positive it would raise more questions than you’d be able to answer, I don’t think you have much choice.”
“You’re wrong,” I countered, and signaled the server for another round.
“By the way, did your lovely wife tell you about her little visitation the other night? Your adopted daughter isn’t the only one who saw a ghost. She’s just the one who screamed.”
“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“After all these years of wedded bliss, I would have thought you didn’t keep secrets from each other,” he sneered, leaning forward. “Well, of course, there’s always that one.”
My patience with Slader was running thin. Yet I had to admit that, while I was sitting alone with Tamerlane most of the previous day, in the wake of its tumultuous entry into my life, an old forbidden passion had been reawakened. I’d reread the accompanying letter that was so exquisitely, if perfidiously, rendered in Poe’s distinctive script, and felt grudging admiration. Like shoplifters and adulterers and drug addicts, forgers do experience a contact high that rivals religious rapture, though they often come to regret their fleeting, immoral gratification. While I loathed the rotten part of my heart that was drawn to forgery, it would be a falsehood to claim it wasn’t alluring.
For one as emotionally tortured as Poe, his penmanship was, particularly after he had graduated from his teens, quite methodical and legible. His words were spaced evenly, his baseline was often as straight as the raven flies, his letters angled to the right with ascenders pointed like a row of robust cypress trees bent a bit by the wind. If, as Poe himself believed, handwriting is a window into one’s soul—“that a strong analogy does generally exist between every man’s chirography and character will be denied by none but the unreflecting,” he wrote—then the author knew his mind, based on the surviving evidence, given how infrequently he struck out words. Yes, sometimes whole passages were excised by his drawing neat vertical lines, angled a bit like a tepee with no top. But Poe was no James Joyce, who crossed out and rewrote most every phrase he set to paper, then crossed out the rewrites too. Edgar’s handwriting suggested to me that his ideas came to him in strong steady waves. And this remained true, although his hand did evolve and change from the earliest to the middle and late phases of his writing life. His signature varied as well during different eras, from self-consciously stylized to childlike; rounded to angular; sometimes elaborately underscored, other times naked of ornament. He was something of a chirographic chimera.
“I’ll be sure to ask her,” I said finally. “But don’t give yourself too much credit. Chances are, whatever you’re talking about, she forgot.”
“Doubtful, very,” Slader whispered, with a cocksure smirk that made him seem a bit of an idiot, even though I knew he was anything but.
At that moment, as I looked this man in the eye, I was reminded of Hanlon’s razor, a philosophical notion that states one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. It occurred to me just then that, conversely, one ought never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by malice. But for the Poe at home in my fireproof safe, I would have terminated our tête-à-tête right there and then. As things stood, I made my decision, and framed it in questions.
“Where did you get it?”
“You sure you want to know? It might implicate you.”