Booking In Page 14

  “Thorne-Wainwright created this poster or whatever one should call it?” I asked. “Though I guess ‘create’ is hardly the right word.”

  “Chris made no secret that his hand wrote this,” Doris said. “As I remember, he liked to call it and the rest of these things his ‘treatments.’”

  “Donne was, what, seventeenth century?” I asked.

  “He wrote this in 1624,” Doris said.

  “When you first opened the case just now, I couldn’t begin to identify the century the writing is supposed to impersonate, but I guess that’s not the real issue anyway.”

  “No, none of Chris’s so-called treatments are intended to be impersonations of anything or forgeries, not by any means,” Doris said. “I’ll just show you the others.”

  The next poem, which had been given similar treatment, was William Blake’s one about the tiger burning bright, and the third was an excerpt from John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  “Blake was 1794,” Doris said. “Milton was much earlier, 1667.”

  “What about Thorne-Wainwright’s writing styles on each of these three?” I said. “The physical ways the letters are made — what period are they true to? If any?”

  “I wondered that very thing when I found these treatments among Chris’s donations all those years ago,” Doris said. “So I made a small effort at comparing his writing on the documents with real samples of handwriting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

  “That was typical Doris,” Kate said to me. “Going way beyond the call of duty.”

  “And you concluded what?” I said to Doris.

  “Chris’s writing was a hodgepodge,” Doris said. “It was very clever, mind you. It includes a faithful recreation of some seventeenth-century-style writing and some eighteenth. But very inconsistent and totally mixed up.”

  “You mean the bit of Paradise Lost in the Milton documents includes lines both in a mid-seventeenth-century style and in a style from the next century? Something like that?”

  Doris nodded. “It was as if he just wanted the poems to look ancient, and it didn’t really matter whether the ancientness, as it were, was faithful to the right period for the author or not.”

  I looked at the three large manuscripts a little longer, wondering whether I could think of a reason for their existence. What purpose did this Thorne-Wainwright guy intend them for? I hadn’t a clue. So I asked Doris if she knew the answer to my question.

  “To make money for himself,” she answered.

  “From whom?” I said.

  “Customers at his bookstore.”

  “They’d have to be saps if they thought they were getting the real deal.”

  “Not at all,” Doris said. “You see, Chris wasn’t trying to peddle to anyone what you just referred to as the ‘real deal.’ The customers he attracted with these manuscripts just had a naïve sense of taste.”

  “That’s all it took?”

  “Chris impressed on these customers that these were important poems, if they didn’t already know, and it would be a matter of prestige if they decorated their libraries at home with framed versions of them written in a variation of ancient script.”

  “I think I get it,” I said. “Fraud wasn’t a factor. It didn’t enter in any way into the transaction.”

  “Chris is an honest man, I’m sure of it.”

  “He was playing more on the vanity of the people who bought these things.”

  “They were the kind of customers who ordered books from Chris measured by the yard,” Doris said.

  “The customers wanted the books strictly for display?”

  “Not for reading.”

  “And,” I said, “the framed poems in ye olde manuscripts were more or less part of the package.”

  “Exactly,” Doris said. “Chris told me he had a period when he turned a very good dollar selling these things. He did Wordsworth and Keats and Byron and some other poets of the same renown.”

  “If he was turning a profit, why did he quit with the treatments?”

  “The transcribing simply got so tedious.”

  “I can understand.”

  “Also, he told me he lost interest in dealing with the fools and dolts who bought the darned things.”

  Doris and I, and Kate too, spent a few more minutes considering the outsized printings of the poems and contemplating the foolishness of mortal man. And maybe mortal woman as well.

  “All of which,” Kate said, levelling a look at me that was accompanied by a sly smile, “would seem to bring us to our mutual acquaintance, Fletcher Marshall, and the Reading Sonnets.”

  “You and Doris have been talking this over?”

  “Indeed we have.”

  “You both think Fletcher inveigled Thorne-Wainwright into cooking up a forged copy of the Reading Sonnets to sell to Meg Grantham?”

  “I don’t agree that Chris was a knowing party to a fraud,” Doris said. “But I don’t deny he probably did the work on the forgery.”

  “Putting things in the blunt language that you just did, Mr. Crang,” Kate said, “it’s a situation that needs to be addressed.”

  “Fletcher’s story to me,” I said, “was that Meg retained him to verify the document she had already acquired. That puts Fletcher at a remove in his version of events. If we believe him, the implication is that somebody else, not him, found and produced the copy of what was alleged to be an original copy of the Reading Sonnets. Presumably this somebody else would be Thorne-Wainwright.”

  “Well, excuse me,” Doris said, “but as I keep saying, I can’t see Chris in that role. He is many things, but a charlatan is not one of them. He might have been prevailed upon to do a fake copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese just as he did John Milton’s Paradise Lost, but I reject the notion completely that he would be in on some kind of dishonesty with respect to Meg Grantham.”

  “Mr. Crang,” Kate said, “I think the onus is on you to take the next step.”

  “I agree,” Doris said.

  “Do I assume correctly that you ladies have been thinking for a while about putting this idea to me?” I said. “You’ve been laying a plan?”

  “Darn tootin’,” Doris said.

  “You want me to speak to one of two people,” I said. “Either Mr. Thorne-Wainwright or Ms. Grantham.”

  “We had only got as far as deciding to suggest you call on Chris,” Doris said.

  “But now that you mention it,” Kate said, “approaching Meg Grantham would really put the cap on your investigation. Surely she knows who brought the sonnets to her for purchase.”

  “Surely,” I said.

  “But I’m guessing you’d much prefer to handle Mr. Thorne-Wainwright initially.”

  “Good guess,” I said. “Does the Fisher know where I can find him?”

  “Not all that far from here,” Doris said.

  “You’re speaking of his home?”

  Doris was rummaging in the pockets of her light summer cardigan.

  “He has rented the same two-storey apartment in a house in Chinatown for decades,” she said. “Or so he says.”

  Doris found what she was looking for in her pockets. It was a piece of folded paper. She handed it to me across Kate’s desk.

  “You’ll find Chris strikes a distinctive figure,” Doris said. “Especially in his neighbourhood.”

  “How so?” I said.

  “He looks like Santa Claus, only larger,”

  I opened the piece of paper. The address was on Sullivan, a street I knew.

  “Will I need an introduction from you?” I asked Doris.

  “Just keep in mind, Chris is wholly unpredictable,” she said without really answering my question. “That’s all you’ll need to get you through your time with him.”

  “Unpredictable?�
�� I said. “That’s a quality I don’t mind in a person.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Before I headed for Sullivan Street, I detoured home, going straight to the bureau drawer where I had placed the envelope with the phony Reading Sonnets in it. I spread out a half dozen sheets from the envelope on the bedroom floor and took two photographs of each, storing them in my iPhone. Then I locked the poems back in the bureau drawer. This was Crang in action, the electronically dynamic investigator.

  Sullivan was an east-west street a couple of blocks north of Queen. It ran from Spadina on the west to Beverley Street on the east. This geographical arrangement positioned Sullivan at the hub of Chinatown at the Spadina end and on Chinatown’s fringes at the Beverley terminus. The street’s population ran heavily to citizens of Chinese descent but included plenty of white Anglo-Saxons, a group of which Chris Thorne-Wainwright must have been a long-standing member.

  The house where Doris said he rented space was a brick three-storey with a battered look. The front yard was without flowers or foliage and not much grass, and the only object on the small stone porch was a honey pail filled with sand. Somebody had butted dozens of unfiltered cigarettes into the sand. Beside the knob on the front door, there were two buzzers. No resident’s name accompanied either buzzer. I pressed both three times, and after four or five minutes, a man arrived at the door, appearing to have come from the lower apartment. The man wasn’t happy.

  “What?” he barked at me.

  Doris Draper had been half right in her description of Thorne-Wainwright. The man standing in front of me had as many whiskers and as much head hair as Santa, and it might have been white if he’d cleaned himself up a little. But his beard was streaked with nicotine stains that gave it a consistent yellowish shade. He may once have been as heavy as Santa, but the clothes he wore drooped and sagged on his bones. The clothes themselves could have stood a dry cleaning too. Thorne-Wainwright looked to be in his unhealthy late seventies.

  “My name is Crang,” I said. “Doris Draper suggested I call on you.”

  Thorne-Draper’s mouth hung a little. He was taking his time about organizing a response.

  “I was hoping Doris’s name would get me through your door,” I said.

  “Doris is a good girl,” Thorne-Wainwright said. His firm voice seemed one part of his body that was surviving the aging process.

  “She speaks well of you,” I said.

  Thorne-Wainwright stepped back from the door, turned, and without speaking, walked back down a short, darkened hall and through an open interior door. I followed, shutting both the front door and the interior door behind me. Inside the second door, the hall continued into a large living room and an even larger dining room. The hall was stacked from floor to ceiling with books. No shelves held the books, and only the walls appeared to keep them in place. The same arrangement of stacked books continued in the living and dining rooms. A pair of single windows in each room brought a little light to the scene. Thorne-Wainwright, not much on host duties, sat in an easy chair within range of the front windows. He nodded at a similar chair opposite his. I took the nod as a sign I should sit. I sat. A small cloud of dust rose around me from the chair’s cushion.

  “What were you seeing Doris about?” Thorne-Wainwright asked. “Anything that involves me selling you a book?”

  “All of these books I see in the stacks are for sale?”

  “They’re what’s left over from my store,” he said. “More in the basement. You’ll get a bargain on anything you’re looking for.”

  “You specialize in any particular areas?”

  “I’ve kept a little of most categories,” Thorne-Wainwright said. “Tell me what you’re interested in.”

  “Biographies of jazz musicians.”

  “I’ve got a jazz section down the basement. A lot of biographies in there. Be more specific. Give me a name.”

  “A biography of Bill Evans written by an English concert pianist named Peter Pettinger — now deceased, as is Evans.”

  “That one was published by an American university press,” Thorne-Wainwright said. “An Ivy League school, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Princeton.”

  “Hard to get that book. But from the sound of things, I’m guessing you already own one.”

  “I do.”

  “You know what they say about a good book, which I’m told the Pettinger is: a man can always use a backup copy.”

  “You’ve got one?”

  “Down in the basement.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Thorne-Wainwright twitched in his chair. I couldn’t tell whether it came out of the satisfaction of making a sale or out of an urge to light up a cigarette. From halfway across the room, I could smell the scent of stale tobacco smoke rolling off his clothes, but it was clear he never lit a cigarette in his rooms. That would be guaranteed to send his livelihood up in flames.

  “You didn’t come from Doris to me just to buy a second copy of a book you already have in your house,” Thorne-Wainwright said. “What do you really want?”

  “Doris showed me the versions of No Man Is an Island and Paradise Lost and some other poems you wrote in ancient script.”

  “That’s twenty-five years ago,” Thorne-Wainwright said. “Even further back. And they were all frivolous then and still are now.”

  “And were originally made for a clientele of chumps.”

  Thorne-Wainwright nodded and might even have smiled. “‘Chumps’! That’s got those people dead right.”

  “But I understand from Doris the money wasn’t bad.”

  “I needed cash to stay in business.”

  “And you did a good job on the script you wrote the poems in. Looked serious, almost like the real thing.”

  “Not bad if you didn’t study the writing too closely.”

  I reached into my pocket for my iPhone, clicked up the photos I’d taken of the phony Reading Sonnets, and handed the iPhone to Thorne-Wainwright.

  He needed no time at all to realize what he was looking at. He raised his head and gave me a long stare.

  “What did you say your name was?” he said.

  “Crang.”

  “Well, Mr. Crang, you a cop?”

  I shook my head. “A lawyer,” I said. “I’m representing your old sparring partner, Fletcher Marshall.”

  “Why’s he need a lawyer?”

  “Somebody swiped the copy of the Reading Sonnets you’re looking at in those digital photographs.”

  “If he needed another of those ridiculous thing, why didn’t he just pay me to write it?”

  “You admit this is your work?”

  “Of course it’s mine.”

  “Even the part in the forty-third sonnet that you filled in with a BIC Cristal?”

  “Jesus mackerel, you noticed that?” Thorne-Wainwright looked genuinely chagrined. “I must really be losing my touch if some lawyer caught me on a thing like that.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, an ink expert was the guy who spotted it.”

  “First a lawyer, now an ink expert. How come people like you are sticking their noses in a two-bit job like this one I did for Fletcher?”

  “Two-bit?”

  “He paid me three hundred dollars to write the imitation and promised to double the three when the deal he was working on finished up.”

  “Six hundred bucks maximum.”

  “I can’t afford to turn down that kind of money. It’s the only reason bloody Fletcher came to me. The man knows I’ve had no respect for him going back a lot of years. But he knew I’d jump to do such an easy job.”

  “You make it sound like an innocent venture.”

  “That’s because it was innocent at my end.”

  “Then why did you ask if I was a cop?”

  “Come on, Mr. Crang. Don’t
take me for a doddering idiot, even if I look like one. You come in here with digital pictures and a bunch of questions that mean trouble for somebody. Who else would I take you for except a policeman?”

  “A real cop might reason it out that you and Fletcher were working a scam with the copy you did of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

  “No scam on my part,” Thorne-Wainwright said. “I got a history behind me of writing old poetry in ancient script. People have used the things for décor. The piece I did for Fletcher was just another piece to make somebody’s library look fancy.”

  “That’s the line Fletcher fed you?”

  “He didn’t feed me any line. He waved the prospect of six hundred dollars in front of me. That clinched the deal as far as I was concerned.”

  “You asked no questions?”

  “I asked if he could boost the price.”

  “What did he answer?”

  “He said he’d think about it.”

  “You didn’t raise the possibility of the scam element?”

  Thorne-Wainwright gave a bark of a laugh. “Now, Mr. Crang,” he said, “why would I go looking for trouble?”

  “Sensible point,” I said.

  I got out of the easy chair, a light cloud of dust rising with me.

  “We’re finished?” Thorne-Wainwright said.

  “I’m happy with your take on events.”

  “That’s nice,” Thorne-Wainwright said from his chair. “But what about the book?”

  “Book?”

  “The Peter Pettinger biography of Bill Evans.”

  “It’s in reasonable condition?”

  “Looks like nobody’s even turned through the pages,” Thorne-Wainwright said. “I’ll let you have it for seventy-five dollars.”

  “You got a sale,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Acey Hickey said she’d meet me for coffee, but not at her place, wherever that was, or even close to her place. She’d come to my neighbourhood. I suggested a small coffee shop called Volta Espresso on Bathurst on the opposite side from the subway station and up a block and a half. I didn’t know how the owner defined Volta, but if it had anything to do with power, then the strength of the coffee lived up to the shop’s name. Acey said Volta Espresso sounded fine for her, though her voice coming over the phone had a frosty ring.