The Signature

The firm kept Lantz in a windowless interior room he had decorated with tide tables and the certificates of experts he had unseated, and he was, at fifty-eight, a man entirely without vanity about his gift, which he described as the ability to notice that two chickens have the same eyebrows.

Dov Lantz had come to documents the way some men come to the sea, early and by accident and never really leaving. His father had run a stamp shop on Pine Street, and the boy had spent his adolescence among permis and forgeries, learning that the difference between a treasure and a fraud was usually a single perf, and that the men who paid for both were paying for the same thing, which was the belief that a piece of paper could hold a person. He had taken a law degree because his mother wanted it and a seat in the firm's document room because nobody else wanted it, and in thirty years he had testified in two hundred forgery trials, unseated four experts whose names were better known than his, and developed, as his sole professional eccentricity, the habit of keeping on his wall the framed signature of every man he had ever helped convict, arranged by date, like a hunter's birds. He now had the Voss deed and the Wick note in two upright stands on his bench, and Marsh standing behind him with his hat still on.

"Take your time," Marsh said.

"I will take exactly as much as it deserves, which is none. Look." Lantz moved a magnifier on its arm. "The terminal e in Ezra. Your client writes a terminal e with a counter-clockwise burial, he digs the tail into the baseline and leaves it there. The Wick note does the identical burial. The k in Wick is made in two strokes instead of one, against every hand-lettering convention in this state, and so is your client's k in the deed of 2019. The backward kick at the signature end, the pen lift, the ink pooling on the downstroke. Two documents, Mr. Marsh. One hand. I have been doing this for thirty years and I have sent men to prison on less, and I would testify to this pair in front of the Pope."

"Then testify to it to no one," Marsh said. "Not yet."

"Not yet." Lantz turned around on his stool and looked at the lawyer with the frank interest of a man who has watched a hundred clients arrive at this exact spot. "You are going to sit on the fact that your client forged a letter from his own shadow, and you are going to sit on it because the alternative is that your client wrote it and did not forge it, and both of those facts are impossible, and one of them is true."

"I am going to sit on it because it is not mine to move," Marsh said. "It is his. And I am going to make him give it to me."

He left the firm at once and drove through the rain to Pioneer Square, to the handsome green door beside the padlocked freight door, and he used the brass knocker for the first time in four years, and the door was opened, after a long interval, by Walt Ostrow, the caretaker, a heavy, reliable, expressionless man who had run the annex for a decade and had never been heard to offer a sentence he could not also have filed.

"Mr. Ostrow. Is the doctor receiving?"

"He is not receiving, Mr. Marsh." For the first time in ten years the flat face carried something on it, and the thing was fear. "He is not receiving anybody. He has not left this building in eight days."

"Eight days."

"He takes his meals in the laboratory. The grocery slips come to me and I leave them at the door and he signs for them through the slot. I hear him moving at night. I do not hear him moving in the day." Ostrow looked over his own shoulder into the hall, and lowered his voice into a place it had clearly never been. "And Mr. Marsh. He has given me instructions about a voice. If I ever hear a voice in this building that is not his, I am to telephone you at any hour. He made me repeat the instruction twice. He has never in ten years told me anything twice."

"Then I will tell you something once," Marsh said. "If you hear that voice, do not telephone anyone in this city but me."

The annex conversation had one more piece, and Ostrow delivered it at the door, with the lamp already lowered, in the voice of a man paying out the last of his store. Marsh had asked, on his way out, the one question left in the building: what did the slot sound like. And Ostrow, who had been waiting for someone to ask him that for eight days, told him. In the good weeks, the doctor's weeks, the slot sounded like a man at a desk: the chair, the pages, the pen, the tap of the vial rack being squared away. In the bad weeks, and the weeks had been bad for a month, the slot sounded like pacing, and the pacing had a gait that Ostrow had tried not to recognize and had recognized anyway, because he had watched the doctor walk for nineteen years and the doctor did not walk like that, had never walked like that, the doctor's walk was a professor's walk, unhurried, load-bearing, and the pacing behind the door was quick and light and stopped at nothing, least of all at the door itself, where it would stand, he said, and he could hear it standing, the way you can hear a person standing close to the other side of a wall, not moving, not breathing audibly, just present, with the whole door between you, and twice, Ostrow said, twice, at three in the morning, something had touched the slot flap from the inside, once, lightly, the way a child touches the door of a room where the company is, and both times he had sat up the rest of the night with the hall light on and the telephone in his lap, and both times, when morning came, there had been a note under the slot in the doctor's own hand, thanking him for his service, and asking him not to listen.

He drove home through the rain with the wipers counting like a metronome and the note from Lantz, unsigned, in his breast pocket, and he thought about handwriting all the way. A signature is the cheapest thing a man owns, he thought. It is on the checks and the wills and the birthday cards. It is how we prove to strangers that we are ourselves. And now a man's own name was the one thing in the world his own hand could not safely write, because his own hand had learned to write a stranger's, and the stranger had beaten a senator's head in with a birthday present, and somewhere south of the rain, in a red-brick annex with a padlocked door, the one hand that owned both names had not come out for eight days.

He parked under his own awning and sat with the engine off and admitted it to himself at last, in the professional, unlovely, load-bearing language of his profession: his client was sheltering a murderer, and the murderer had not been seen since the murder, and the letter that exonerated the murderer was in the murderer's own handwriting, which was also the client's, and there were exactly two readings of that fact, and both of them ended with the sound of a padlock snapping in a dead lane.

The call he made after the annex, when the rain had followed him all the way home, was to Detective Reyes, and it lasted ninety seconds, and it was the call of a man setting a tripwire for his own client.

"The restitution account," Marsh said. "The black card. I want to know the date of the last authorized movement of money."

Four hours after the green door had shut him out, in the dead hours of the same night, a letter was in the mail slot of Marsh's own house, hand delivered, in an envelope with no stamp. It was from Walt Ostrow, and it was five words long, quoting its instruction verbatim the way Ostrow quoted anything from behind that door, and Marsh read it standing in his own doorway with the rain coming down behind him.

He said: bring the lawyer now.