The Hoax Read online

  “Because you’re getting hooked on the idea,” Dick said, grinning. “Admit it, for Christ’s sake.”

  “In theory,” I admitted. “This is all theoretical.”

  But our theorizing became more intense and intricate that afternoon in the studio, when we came to discuss the problem of what to do with the theoretical money. We had already, in buccaneer fashion, brazenly assumed that I could convince McGraw-Hill I was meeting Howard Hughes, get a contract from them and an advance payment to do the research. Why? Well, why not? The world was mad, wasn’t it? Didn’t every sane man know that? Where the plan came a cropper was in the realization that Hughes himself would have to be paid for his cooperation in the project. A check would at some point have to be drawn payable to Howard Hughes. But who would cash it?

  “Only Hughes,” I said, “and there’s the rub, amigo. The authenticity goes out the window if a check can’t pass through one of his bank accounts.”

  We hammered away at the problem while Dick paced back and forth in front of the heater and finally reached a solution. We would have to do what every other person with illegal or “funny” money did; we would look toward Switzerland, with its hitherto unbroken code of bank secrecy. “I don’t see any other way to go,” I said. “We’ve got to have an account in the name of Howard Robard Hughes, and we damn sure can’t have it in the States where anyone can just pick up a phone and find out who opened it. I think Edith’s got an extra passport somewhere in the house — some mixup with the Swiss Consulate in Barcelona a few years ago — and I’ll see if I can change it around.”

  “Who’ll use it? Never mind — don’t answer that. I know who.” Dick shoved a pile of books and newspapers to one side and sat down heavily on the bed.

  I laughed. “Have some passport photos made. Grow a mustache and powder your temples. Rent a wheelchair.”

  “It won’t work. I mean, look at me …” Dick’s down-sweeping glance took in all six-foot-two-and-a-half inches and two hundred eighty pounds of him. “I’m too easy to remember, mustache or no mustache. And who’ll push the wheelchair? You? How about …” He mentioned several mutual friends on Ibiza and quickly vetoed them. “No, we’ve got to keep this in the family. Do you think Edith …? No, that wouldn’t work, either. It has to be a man.”

  I walked to the window, leaned my forehead against the icy glass, and thought for a moment. “You’re wrong,” I said slowly. “It wouldn’t have to be a man — not if the bank signature is H. R. Hughes instead of Howard R. Hughes …”

  It was as if we were still playing the writer’s game — constructing an outline for an absurd thriller with characters but no coherent plot. I turned. “But first, let’s see if I can find the passport. If Edith sent it back, it’s goodbye Charlie. I’m not about to go buying passports on the black market, if there is such a thing as a black market.”

  “You’ve got scruples?”

  “Well, I hope so,” I said, “somewhere. But I’ve also got sense. And goddammit, don’t rush me into this!”

  We spent the next few hours going over the same ground, from time to time pinpointing a new angle or analyzing a new problem. We were like miners sifting the same earth time and again to look for nuggets. At five-thirty I drove Dick to the airport.

  Arriving home, I climbed the outside staircase to Edith’s studio and asked her about the passport. She was on her knees, just finishing a canvas that lay on the floor, dabbing a streak of color here and there, then crawling back with her head cocked to one side to examine the effect.

  “I don’t remember where I put it,” she said. “Look in the old suitcase in Nedsky’s room. Maybe it’s …” She didn’t finish the sentence, but inched purposefully forward and slashed a streak of bright green across the center of the canvas, giving a little grunt of satisfaction.

  The passport wasn’t in the old suitcase. Neither was it in the desk, nor in the bottom of the grandfather clock, where we sometimes hid money and jewelry. I finally found it in our bedroom, under a pile of art supplies I had brought back from New York after my father’s death. The extra Swiss passport was the result of a curious mix-up that had taken place in 1968, and at first neither of us could remember the precise details that accounted for its existence. “Try,” I said to Edith. “It’s important.”

  “I remember now,” she said, after a while. “It was really very simple. My first Swiss passport was with the name Edith Rosenkranz. Then when I got divorced I got me a passport in my own name, Edith Sommer. Then I married you and got me a passport in your name, Edith Irving. But in the other passport I had that American visa, what was good for all my life. Then my father got sick in Gmünd that year. And I had given before that to the Americans my other passport, my new passport, so I could get the same visa. So I had to rush to Germany, you remember, because my father was sick? And I had no passport, what meant I couldn’t go. You called the American Consulate and they said they had mailed it to me, but I didn’t yet get it. So I flew to Barcelona and told this story to the Swiss Consulate, and they gave me another passport to go to Gmünd. I don’t think they understood the whole business but they were very nice to me. When I got back, the other passport had arrived from the Americans. I forgot to mail it back. You see? It’s simple.”

  “I take your word for it,” I said.

  Nedsky and Barney barged into the living room for their evening romp in the toybox. It was not the moment to broach the subject to Edith, so I waited an hour until Rafaela had come clucking to gather them up and take them away to her part of the house for supper. Then I explained the problem to Edith: how, if we embarked on this Hughes caper, we would need someone to open a bank account in Switzerland under the name of H. R. Hughes. “The important word is if.”

  “Darling,” she said, “I know you too well. There’s no if any more. I hear you and Dick from the corner of my ear. I hear you all excited, like I’ve never heard you before. I know you’re going to do it.”

  “Well,” I admitted, “we may see how far we can go with it. Anyway, if we do it, how would you like to change the color of your hair, and change your name to Helga Renate Hughes, expatriate Swiss businesswoman who conducts her financial affairs only with her initials?”

  I explained what I had in mind. The passport would never be used for crossing borders, because that struck me as an out-and-out crime. To open a Swiss bank account with it, however, seemed to me — in probability — an everyday, mundane matter. It was something I had read, I remembered, in a book called The Swiss Banks. McGraw-Hill had published it.

  “I wear a wig?” Edith said playfully.

  “Sure. And dark glasses and lipstick.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I think about that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Because there’s a certain amount of risk. I’m not sure what, but there’s bound to be something.”

  Edith became serious. “I’ll think.”

  Two days later I asked Edith, “Have you thought about doing it?”

  “Okay. I wear the lipstick, but not too much of it.”

  “I thought you might not do it. I wasn’t sure it was fair to ask.”

  “I help you, I don’t let you down. I go to Zurich, what I love, where there is a wonderful street to shop. If you do this thing,” she added laughing. Because she laughed, I know that she wanted to say something more, but couldn’t. Was it: “And would your Nina do that?”

  I worked for the next week on the final drafting of the letters and the doctoring of Edith’s Swiss passport. Now and then I would have a fit of literary conscience and haul the unfinished novel out of the file cabinet to plow ahead a page or two; but inevitably I was drawn back to the letters and the passport. The challenge of the job fascinated me. If I succeeded, we could go ahead with the project in April or May, when the novel hopefully would be finished. If I failed, that would end it. Whatever the outcome, the compulsion was too powerful to allow for postponement.

  We spent a quiet New Year’s Eve at home with a few friends and some tim
e during the next week drove up to the studio together. “Bring your black wig and a lipstick,” I instructed Edith. I carried my camera and a pair of ping-pong balls.

  “What are they for?”

  “To stuff in your cheeks.”

  “What you think I am, a squirrel?”

  We arrived at the moment of truth, on the balcony of my studio under a gray but glaring sky, and the disguise didn’t work. The wig was fine — it was a shaggy, curly, cheap affair that Edith had bought a year or two ago in Palma. The lipstick changed Edith’s appearance, too. But the ping-pong balls in her cheeks made her look as if she had a particularly virulent case of mumps, or something worse. She muttered a strangled protest.

  “All right. Take them out. Puff out your cheeks a little bit.”

  I clicked a dozen pictures with my Nikkonnat and had them developed the next day at one of the local pharmacies. They made Edith look like a woman in her forties. Using ink eradicator, I wiped out the name, birthdate, and color of hair from the passport, then lettered in the new details with a black felt-tip pen. Changing the number was even easier, except that it had to be done on all thirty-two pages of the passport. Among my father’s art supplies that I had brought back to Ibiza were several sheets of letters and numbers which could be transferred to another surface simply by rubbing them on with a rounded point. It was no trick to turn sixes and threes into eights, and fives into sixes; it was only tedious to do it thirty-two times. The old photograph, of course, bore the impressed seal of the Swiss Consulate. I puzzled over that for a while and then worked out a simple method for duplicating it. I placed the black-wigged photograph of Helga Renate Hughes over the blonde one of Edith and rubbed it hard with a gum eraser. In a few minutes the faint impression of the seal appeared on the second photograph. Trimming the enlargement down to the right size, I pasted it into the passport.

  Only two details remained: the purple-inked seal of the Swiss Consulate, and the signature. I must have been either tired or over-confident when I tackled those jobs. When I had finished eliminating Barcelona — intending to substitute Amsterdam or Stockholm — the outline was still there and the seal looked mangled. The razor blade had dangerously thinned the paper; if I was to print the name of another city it would be bound to blur. I took a purple felt-tip pen and re-inked the word Barcelona. It blurred.

  The signature was even more difficult. Edith had written her name in a full, flowing script and the eradicator had bleached the fine watermarked design of the paper so that the name Edith Irving was still visible. Caution gave way to annoyance, and annoyance to an irrational boldness. Following the written outlines of the signature, I took a thick blue felt pen and scribbled a huge Helga R. Hughes. You could still see the white outlines. I threw the passport into a drawer, slammed it shut, and tried to forget it.

  The half-pad of lined yellow legal paper arrived three days later, airmail express, from Dick in Palma. I picked it up with the rest of my mail at the bank then drove up to the studio at Los Molinos. Most of that morning I spent fiddling with a scene in my new novel that needed some strong rewriting, but my eye kept wandering to the pad of yellow paper tossed carelessly on a canvas chair. I rummaged through a trunk wedged behind the bed and found what I was looking for: an old Esterbrook fountain pen and a bottle of Parker Quink. The black ink was crusted with age, but an inch of usable fluid remained at the top of the bottle. I cleaned the pen under the cold-water tap in the kitchen. Howard Hughes was the kind of man, I reckoned, who would use an old-fashioned fountain pen. More to the point, I hadn’t used one in ten years. Any letters I had handwritten to McGraw-Hill were with a felt-tipped throwaway pen.

  Talk is cheap, I realized. How do you forge a letter? A signature was one thing, and with enough practice I assumed it could be done; but a letter was a formidable problem. That tiny inset from Newsweek, with the last paragraph of Hughes’s letter to Chester Davis and Bill Gay, was all that I had. No forger in his right mind would use it as a model. I would certainly need a magnifying glass. I spent an hour searching for it, ransacking drawers and file cabinets, and wound up in a sweat amid indescribable clutter. I went back to work on the novel and bogged down after fifteen minutes, and at five o’clock I drove home.

  Edith was the orderly one. I lived in a chaotic jumble of unanswered letters, shirts and sweaters slung on the backs of chairs, bills and receipts piled on top of the bed in my studio, dozens of folders into which I slung papers with bold annotations: TO BE FILED. But the files were for the most part nonexistent.

  “Where is that goddam magnifying glass I brought back from New York?” I demanded.

  “There where you put it,” she said, unperturbed.

  I was in the studio at ten o’clock the next morning. The telephone rang immediately. I knew who it was and I said, without preamble: “Yes, I got the paper. But I can’t do the letters.”

  “What do you mean? You said you could do the letters.”

  “Well, I was wrong. Listen, Dick, it’s not so easy. I don’t have a magnifying glass.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” he yelled. “You were the one who said they wouldn’t have a letter to compare it to, and now you’re getting finicky. You’re giving up before you’ve even begun. So go to work. Practice!”

  “Okay, Knute Rockne. I’ll get back to you tomorrow. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

  I got out the yellow paper, pen, ink, and Newsweek. The reproduced paragraph read:

  As I have said, this matter has caused me the very gravest concern, and is damaging my company and all the loyal men and women associated with me in the very deepest and far-reaching way.

  My sincere regards,

  Howard R. Hughes

  I went over it carefully, analyzing the lower-case letters first and then the capital letters. Fortunately the paragraph contained specimens of all but six lower-case letters: b, j, k, q, x, and z. It would be hard to write a letter without a b, but Hughes seemed to base his handwriting on the standard form of penmanship taught when I was in grammar school, so I could keep the b’s to the minimum, fake them, and hope for the best. To my horror, however, I realized immediately that the sample I had to work from gave me only five capital letters: A, I, M, H, and R. The major problem, therefore, was to create a correspondence using only those capital letters. I mulled that for a few minutes and then hit on the simplest solution. Hughes would be the supreme egotist. He would begin every possible sentence in his letters to me with the pronouns I and My.

  I quit work only when it was long past dark. The next day I shoved the novel aside and drafted the three Hughes letters on my typewriter. I made a few changes to eliminate all unnecessary capital letters with which I was unfamiliar, then called Dick in Palma. I read the letters aloud.

  “Not bad,” he said. “But a little stiff.”

  “Howard’s not a writer,” I pointed out. “That’s why he needs me to do his biography.”

  “And how’s the work coming?”

  I knew what he meant by “the work” and I said: “Onward and upward with the arts. I’ll show it to you next week.”

  Dick visited Ibiza later in January, just after I had mailed the promised teaser to Beverly Loo, and again near the end of the month. Between visits we spoke almost daily on the telephone. I read him the revised text of the letters from Howard and he suggested several additional changes. I still had more work to do on the passport signature. “Take your time,” he cautioned me. “Whatever you do, don’t fuck it up.”

  It was finished when he arrived at the end of January. First I showed him where I had changed the numbers; then the photograph. He grunted approval, and I unveiled my final effort.

  “How do you like the signature?”

  There was a gasp of outrage; I didn’t turn to look at him. “You must be kidding! Is that what it took you three days to do? Christ! It looks like it was made by a six-year-old kid with a felt-tipped laundry marker. Shell never be able to cross the border with that. They’ll pick her up in
a minute.”

  “She’s not going to cross the border with it,” I snapped back. “She’ll use her own passport to get into Switzerland, and just show this one at the bank. If we go through with this crazy caper,” I added, as usual.

  “And you think they’ll let her open an account? You’re out of your mind. Look here …” his thick forefinger jabbed at the “Helga.” “You can see where it’s been eradicated. There’s ‘Edith’ coming through, like a fucking palimpsest.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ve talked to a few people who have bank accounts in Switzerland. They don’t give a damn about those I.D. papers. If the money’s real, that’s all they care about.”

  Dick looked dubious. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “So do I,” I said fervently.

  “So let’s get to the next move. You call McGraw-Hill, right?”

  I looked at the telephone. Once I placed that call, we would be on our way. There would be room to maneuver and opportunity to turn back, but the direction would be set. We would be committed, willy-nilly, for better or for worse.

  “You sure you want me to do this?” I asked.

  He pondered for a long while and then said: “No, I’m not at all sure. Are you?”

  “Neither am I.”

  Dick laughed. “But you’re going to do it anyway.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, and I laughed, too. “What the hell. You only live once.” I thought it over. “It’s just a telephone call. It doesn’t really commit me. Right?”

  “Right.”

  I picked up the telephone and placed a person-to-person call to Beverly Loo in New York. Two cigarettes later, the operator informed me that Beverly was out of the office. I hung up.

  “The McGraw-Hill Building’s been blown up by the Weathermen. No survivors.”

  “Try Random House,” Dick said doggedly.

  “I don’t know anyone there. I’ll call back in an hour. Bev’s not in. Do me a favor — go back to the house and tell Edith I’ll be a little late. Let me do this alone. You make me nervous, and I’m nervous enough already.”