Booking In Read online

  “Is Hickey the guy that got in the fight with the other famous writer?” Maury said. “They duked it out in a ring, had the gloves on, a referee, the whole nine yards. That guy?”

  “You’re more or less correct,” Fletcher said.

  “Hickey drilled the other guy, what was his name, Miller?”

  “Mailer,” Fletcher said. “Norman Mailer.”

  “For a guy who doesn’t subscribe to The New York Review of Books,” I said to Maury, “you’re not bad on literary history.”

  “I try to keep up,” Maury said. He winked at me.

  Our food and wine arrived, and between sips and mouthfuls, Fletcher spent the next twenty minutes setting the scene and describing the aftermath of the big fistic showdown between Walter Hickey and Norman Mailer. It had taken place in the summer of 1969 at a party thrown by The Paris Review. The setting was an abandoned church on Welfare Island in the East River just off Manhattan, and the guest list included everyone who counted on the eastern seaboard’s literary scene. At the time, Mailer had long since established his worldwide reputation as a novelist and journalist, while Hickey, already as well known as Canadian novelists got in their own country in those days, was just at the beginning of making an international success. The two guys got into an argument over their respective talents, and that led to the boxing match in a ring that happened to have been set up in the gym downstairs in the former church. Everybody from the party, many of them fellow authors of high status, crowded into the gym for the big bout.

  “I’m right about Hickey cleaning Mailer’s clock?” Maury said, interrupting Fletcher’s flow.

  “That was in dispute by Mailer and his clique,” Fletcher said. “But your version is generally accepted.”

  “Tell us this, Fletcher,” I said. “Can we assume the Hickey papers that were swiped last night mostly deal with the fight?”

  “Virtually all the papers are letters, and virtually their only subject is the boxing match. Mailer wrote exhaustively to Hickey; Hickey answered in like fashion. Each insisted he’d outfought the other. People from The Paris Review wrote letters in favour of one side or the other. George Plimpton, William Styron, Irwin Shaw. The controversy went on for three years, people writing back and forth, the whole crowd of novelists getting into the argument, and Hickey saved every scrap of paper. Some people say it was Hickey’s wife who did the saving. Either way, the collection was absolutely complete.”

  The three of us had finished eating. Each dish had come with a pile of frites that were the best I’d tasted this side of Paris. I made a mental note to tell Annie about the place. She was mad for great frites.

  Fletcher went on, “Hickey is, of course, dead now. Practically everybody who was present at the fight is dead. But Hickey’s daughter kept the correspondence that her father passed down to her. She’s Acey, the daughter, and she’s the one who retained me to find a buyer for the papers.”

  “What kind of name is Acey?” Maury asked.

  “Her full name is Anita Carmen, but she goes by Acey. Running the first letters of the two names together, if you follow. Rather a lower-class naming device, I would say. Common.”

  “Her parents pinned it on her?” Maury said.

  “Let’s not waste time on irrelevancies,” Fletcher said. “The point is I take my instructions from Acey, and in order for me to carry out her wishes, the papers have been in my safe for the past six months.”

  “Until last night,” I said.

  “Alas, yes.”

  “They’re worth how much?” I asked. “The Hickey letters?”

  “One million dollars is a low assessment. Two million is probably closer to the true price.”

  “No bull?” Maury said. “Almost makes me wish I were still in the burglary game.”

  The waiter asked if we wanted coffee. Fletcher waved him off. He told Maury and me we’d all have coffee at a place he knew in the market. He was talking about Kensington Market, the historic old neighbourhood south of College.

  “And you’ll tell us about the second set of papers that have gone missing?” I said to Fletcher

  “Crang,” Fletcher said in his self-satisfied mode, “you’re going to find the story of these other papers hitting awfully close to home.”

  Fletcher paused, still looking at me with his malicious little smile.

  “Your home,” he said.

  Chapter Six

  The three of us were sitting at an outdoor wooden table on Nassau Street in the thick of Kensington Market’s commerce. Maury and I had cappuccinos in front of us. Fletcher went for a double espresso. Around us the sidewalks were teeming with beautiful young women in skimpy shorts or colourful summer dresses that didn’t reach midthigh.

  “You ever seen so many first-class dames in your life?” Maury said to me.

  “Only when I’m alone in a room with Annie.”

  “And the clothes these girls got on, I can hardly believe it’s legal.”

  “There was a time in this part of town,” I said, “everybody female dressed long and black.”

  In the early twentieth century, modest rents for humble dwellings made Kensington Market the first choice in address for ethnic groups newly arrived in Toronto. It was the Jewish quarter first, where immigrants beating it out of Russia and Eastern Europe established their homes, shops, and businesses. Then, as the Jewish families grew flush and pushed north to roomier neighbourhoods, the market turned more heavily East Asian. Now, the area had morphed into a shopping centre for young people from all over the city hot after bargains in clothes, food, and electronics. Graffiti artists had gone nuts on the outdoor walls of commercial buildings, and the whiff of marijuana drifted on the breeze. To young Toronto, Kensington Market was the hip hangout of the moment.

  “Gentlemen,” Fletch said, “let me tell you about my other client whose papers have gone missing.”

  “You’ve got our full attention, Fletcher,” I said, though Maury, still tracking the girls, seemed less than deeply engaged in our conversation.

  “The client,” Fletcher said, pausing for emphasis and wearing a sneaky smile, “is someone you’ve no doubt socialized with, Crang. I’m referring to none other than Meg Grantham.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Your loss.” Fletcher switched to his haughty persona.

  “Let’s keep on track here,” I said. “Just how and why did Meg Grantham’s papers find their way into your safe?”

  “Meg,” he began, “is interested in assembling collections in different categories. Paintings. Music scores. Ceramic pieces. One prize example she’s done very well with is her collection of Canadian painters who showed at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto in the 1950s and ’60s.”

  “Do all her collections have Canadian content?” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” Fletcher said, shaking his head. “In the case of the papers in my safe, the collectible falls into the category of a forged rare book, and it’s English.”

  “What you’re talking about now isn’t an authentic rare book, but a phony version of the rare book?”

  “Correct.”

  “I’m trying to figure out the value in the forgery,” I said. “Does it become so famous for its own illegality that it takes on some worth all by itself?”

  “That’s roughly what happens, and Meg’s banking on it continuing to happen,” Fletcher said. “Actually, it’s also a fun thing for her. She thinks it’s amusing to have a printed work that owes its renown to a criminal act.”

  “How about some names, Fletcher? Whose work got forged? Who did the forging? Otherwise my grip’s hanging loose on what you’re talking about.”

  “Thomas Wise and Harry Buxton Forman,” Fletcher said. “We’ll start with them.”

  I reached into my pocket for the iPhone and tapped in the two names.

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p; “These guys were the forgers or the victims?” I asked.

  “The scoundrels,” Fletcher said. “Two English book dealers of the Victorian years who had what they considered an ingenious idea. Everything they did was based on the fact that the first edition of a famous author’s first book brings the highest price when it eventually comes up at auction. So what Wise and Forman did was introduce to the book trade an edition of a work that they claimed had been published before what had been, until then, the accepted first edition. Is that clear?”

  “Wise and Forman peddled a forged version that was a kind of pre-first first?”

  “You could say so.”

  “Who was the author these two guys picked for their scam?”

  “They eventually forged the work of many writers, but they began with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The first version of her Sonnets from the Portuguese was published legitimately in 1850, and this was the poem, a very long poem indeed, that Wise and Forman got started with.”

  “Ah-ha,” I said. “Every kid at my high school learned something from Sonnets from the Portuguese. There are forty-three sonnets, right?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “It’s the last one of the forty-four every school child learned.”

  “Second last. And every kid at your high school probably remembered only the first two lines.”

  “‘How do I love thee?’” I recited. “‘Let me count the ways….’”

  My recital ran out of inspiration in a hurry.

  “Ah-ha yourself, Crang,” Fletcher said, looking even more superior than usual. “That’s as far as you can go?”

  I thought about punching Fletcher in the schnozz but settled for allowing him to get on with his tale of forgery among the Victorians.

  “Wise and Forman — this was in 1894, many years after the first publication of Sonnets from the Portuguese — they printed a dozen copies of their booklet,” Fletcher said. “They used paper and type that looked authentically like something from much earlier. And they were careful about inventing a story to account for the poem’s re-emergence all those decades after it had been printed in, as they claimed, 1847, three years before the true first edition. It was a quite sophisticated apparatus Wise and Forman rigged, and it convinced all the scholars of the day.”

  “Elizabeth Barrett Browning wasn’t around to object?”

  Fletcher nodded. “She had died. So had everybody else who could have blown the whistle on the whole idea of an edition earlier than the real first edition.”

  “Who eventually spotted the Wise and Forman version for a fake?” I said, entering notes into my iPhone. “And when?”

  “A pair of young English booksellers named Carter and Pollard in 1934. These two had real science on their side. They worked typographical analysis of the typeface on the pages, chemical an­a­ly­sis of the paper, all of the science that proved the faked version of the poetry dated from much later than 1847.”

  “Am I assuming correctly that Wise and Forman were no longer on the scene?”

  “Forman had died years earlier, but Wise had the bad luck to keep on living for a few years after Carter and Pollard pulled the rug on him. The old fellow denied the forgeries to the end, even though it was shown that he and Forman had done the same thing with works by Tennyson, Rossetti, and scads of others.”

  “But the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem was the best known of their fakes?”

  “The reason possibly being that it was the one for which they first got caught.”

  I glanced at Maury, who was back to checking out the girls in the passing parade.

  “Maybe you should cool it with the ogling,” I said to him. “Or I might rat you out to Sal.”

  “Just comparison-sampling,” Maury said. “None of the dames on the street out here can match Sal’s all-round pulchritude. That’s my conclusion.”

  I turned back to Fletcher, who wore a frown of impatience.

  “So Meg has an authentic Wise and Forman forgery of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Portuguese Sonnets in her collection?”

  “The forgery’s referred to in the trade as the Reading Sonnets because Reading was the town in England where they were supposedly printed.”

  “And Meg’s the owner of an original Reading Sonnets?”

  “Allegedly.”

  “Allegedly?”

  “Just so.”

  “Allegedly, it’s an authentic forgery by the two frauds, but just maybe somebody else did a later forgery and peddled it as an original Wise and Forman con job?”

  “The second alternative is a concern in the case of Meg’s document,” Fletcher said. “That’s why I’m investigating the authenticity of her Reading Sonnets.”

  “And what’s your conclusion?”

  “I haven’t had the time to form an opinion one way or another,” Fletcher said. “Meg put the matter in my hands less than a week ago.”

  “What was her motivation in the first place? How did she come to even consider that her forgery might have actually been faked at a later time?”

  Fletcher had a sip of his espresso, taking time to think about his answer. “Strictly a matter of caution, I would say. Meg didn’t make herself a wealthy businesswoman by tossing her money around without doing her homework first. She’s taking the same approach to her various collections. She’s new to all the different fields, the Canadian paintings, the ceramics, the music pieces, so she’s been turning to experts in each of the fields to back up her own instincts, as it were. It happens that I’m the documents expert.”

  “What about whoever she bought the alleged Reading Sonnets from? Didn’t he certify them as authentic or whatever the vendor does in this case?”

  Fletcher answered in a hurry, as if he didn’t want to waste time getting his wrap-up of the subject on the record.

  “That end of the purchase is of no concern of yours, Crang,” he said.

  “I assume you know who the vendor is.”

  “And I’ve already told you that dealing with anything relative to the vendor is not part of your mandate.” Fletcher’s voice was raised and declarative. “Just drop the subject and do what I’m asking you to do. My own task is to verify the documents’ authenticity.”

  “That’ll be done once you get the documents back in your hands.”

  “Which is where you come in.”

  “And my colleague.”

  “When Mr. Samuels is not otherwise engaged in watching beautiful young girls.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Maury said. “I got it all locked in my head what those two guys pulled off, Wise and the other one.”

  “You can take it that Maury and I have signed on,” I said to Fletcher. “Where we start, now that’s all about emphasis.”

  “You’ll have to explain what you mean.”

  “Whoever broke into your safe,” I said, “wasn’t likely interested in hauling off both of the two sets of papers. The possibly forged rare work of a century and a half ago is entirely different in style and everything else from the letters about the fight between two contemporary novelists. They’re not going to attract the same heist man. This guy, whoever he might be, was after one of the two collections, probably on order from a customer, but he took the other collection as well just because it was there.”

  “And you’re wondering which of the two stolen collections to emphasize when you go looking for them?”

  “The Hickey makes the more logical choice for whoever broke into the safe. It’s worth more on the market than Meg’s forged poems, right?”

  “Undoubtedly there’s a wider and larger market for the Hickey letters,” Fletcher said sharply. “But apart from that, I can add something to the matter of motivation for the theft.”

  “You’ve got more reason to finger the Hickey collection as the burglar’s target?”

  “I me
ntioned earlier that Walter Hickey’s heir is his daughter,” Fletcher said.

  “Acey,” Maury said.

  “Anita Carmen,” I said.

  “Acey is in her forties,” Fletch said. “A self-deluded piece of work. A second-rate novelist who can’t understand why her books don’t win the prizes she thinks they deserve. Or even get the sales.”

  “How many novels has she written?”

  “Four, I believe. The first two were published by a small house on the west coast, the second two she self-published. I imagine her basement has stacks of books she can’t sell.”

  “But she perseveres?”

  “As I say, the woman’s delusional.”

  “Summing up, you don’t much care for Acey,” I said. “And I bet she makes dealing with her hard going.”

  “That’s more or less correct.”

  “So she’s a pain in the neck. Is that a reason all by itself for us to get extra snoopy with her?”

  Fletcher raised his right hand, sticking out his forefinger in the posture of a schoolteacher impressing a lesson on his students. “Not so long ago,” he said, “Acey took out an insurance policy on the Hickey collection naming her as the beneficiary.”

  “For how much?” I said.

  “Two million.”

  “The top end of what you think they might be worth on the market.”

  “Need I say more?” Fletcher said, nodding as if he wanted me to finish the line of supposition for him.

  “And you think Acey could have arranged for the theft of her father’s collection of letters in order to hit the insurance company for a possible two-million-buck payout?”

  “Is there any doubt?”

  “So, Fletcher, my man,” I said, “you’re pushing hard for Maury and me to concentrate first on tracing the Hickey collection?”

  “Because it’s logical.”

  “But I’ve found it’s always a good idea to keep the options open.”

  “Honestly, Crang, what in the world are the so-called options in this case?”

  “Meg Grantham’s forged poems,” I said, “even if they aren’t as valuable.”