The Book of Air and Shadows

treasure. He went into a lot of detail, which I will not repeat here, but it was highly convincing, and amazingly intricate. The forger’s agent within the camp of the mark-for this too was vital, and it had better be a bird, a little crumpet never hurts if the mark gets iffy-this girl would contrive to deliver the Shakespeare manuscript into the hands of the mark. Who would then sell it to the real mark, the moron with the money. Because, needless to say, you could only pull off something like this with illiterates. You couldn’t
actually
forge a Shakespeare play-the merest junior don would catch you out-so you had to find someone with more gelt than sense, d’you see, and then there had to be a secret transfer, the manuscript for cash, and goodbye. The final act was the girl swiping the cash from the original patsy-a trivial operation-and there you have it.
    And we did have it, on my little machine. Paul had been insistent about that, even going so far as insuring that the batteries were freshly bought ones. After Pascoe wound down, Paul said, “Well, let’s see what you can do,” and brought from his briefcase some folio sheets of what appeared to be old paper, a small glass bottle of sepia-colored ink, and three goose quills. Pascoe’s face lit when he saw them, as a mom’s might at the sight of her baby, and he quickly rose, took the material, and sat at his little desk. He examined the paper carefully, holding it to the light of his desk lamp, and made sounds of appreciation. Then he opened the ink bottle, smelled it, tasted it, rubbed a drop between his thumb and forefinger.
    “Marvelous stuff,” he said at last. “The paper is genuine seventeenth century and the ink’s tallow soot and oxgall. I assume the ink’s extracted from old documents?”
    “Of course,” said Paul.
    “Brilliant! Wherever did you get it?”
    “The Vatican Library,” said Paul. “A deaccession.”
    Pascoe grinned. “Well, that’s one word for it,” he said, and without further speech set about trimming the goose quills, using an X-Acto knife Paul provided. While he was doing that, Paul brought out what I recognized as a page photocopied from our Bracegirdle ms. Pascoe readied his quill and, after testing it on some scrap paper, set to work. We sat. Paul took out his breviary and mumbled. It was like an afternoon at a Benedictine scriptorium, without the bells.
    “There!” said Pascoe, handing over the page. “What d’you think of that?”
    We looked. He had copied the first ten lines of the Bracegirdle ms. three times in all, the first one rather crude, the second one much better, and the third indistinguishable, to my eye at least, from Bracegirdle’s own hand.
    It seemed to satisfy Paul as well, because he began to put all the things we had brought, including the forgery practice page, back into his portfolio. Pascoe watched the paper and ink vanish with an expression of longing.
    I waited until we were back in the Merc before I spoke. “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”
    “It’s a forgery. I told you before, the whole thing is an elaborate scam.”
    “So it seems. What was that at the beginning about a payment?”
    “Pascoe has a boyfriend and wants to keep him provided for. That’s why he did the forgery and that’s why he spoke to us. I arranged for the boyfriend to receive a nice check.”
    “You’re abetting unnatural acts?”
    “Not at all. Mr. Pascoe is safe in prison and incapable of doing any but solitary unnatural acts. He shows a laudable concern that his honey not be forced to go out on the streets as a rent boy, and wishes to support him. I believe it’s simple charity to help him out.”
    “You really are a perfect hypocrite, aren’t you?”
    Paul laughed. “Far, far from perfect, Jake. The interesting thing is that this young fellow our Pascoe is supporting in luxury is the same one whose testimony landed him in jail after that
Hamlet
thing.”
    “And how did you figure all this out?”
    “Oh, I have contacts. The Society of Jesus is a worldwide organization. I had someone go talk with Pascoe and out came the story, perfect confidentiality of course, and I approached Pascoe by phone before we left.”
    “So what do we do now?”
    “The same thing we would have done if the thing were genuine,” said Paul. “Go through all the hoops, get the fake play, and deliver it to the bad guys. That gets you and yours off the hook.”
    “And what
about
the bad guys?