flawed world, who struggled against all odds, and who in the end were forced by terrible circumstance to make an agonizing compromise that left slavery alive and crawling on American soil at its birth, may in fact be a myth.”
30
Because of the riots, Quinn has had to move the jury across town to a hotel where they deliberate in a conference room for two days while the police battle with rioters in the streets downtown.
Three days later they finally return to the courthouse where burned-out vehicles along Broadway are still smoldering. And they continue to deliberate.
It was that morning that Harry came into my office and reminded me that in our rush to the island, our search for Ginnis, and the forty-eight-hour forensic mayhem after the delivery of the Jefferson Letter, we had forgotten to follow up on one item. He had it in his hand.
It was a copy of the Post-it note on the inside of the jewel-case cover holding the DVD found by Jennifer in the police evidence locker, now nearly two months ago, the one with Ginnis’s name on it.
But it was the other name on the slip that Harry was talking about, the name Edgar Zobel. He hands me a stapled stack of pages, maybe twenty in all.
Edgar Zobel, a French emigre to the United States, came to Virginia with his parents as a young boy. Zobel had always had an interest in writing, not so much with an eye toward content as style. In his youth he had mastered the art of calligraphy. He actually held two U.S. copyrights for scripts that were later developed into type fonts first used on old Selectric typewriters and later incorporated in digitized type fonts for computers, but that would be later in life.
Growing up in Virginia, he was immersed in the Colonial history of the area. Museums in and around Washington often exhibited the private and public letters of historic figures. As a child Zobel marveled at the different colors of ink and the elegant flourishes of script, on paper yellowed by age, the edges of which were often frayed. He practiced the fine styles of penmanship employed by those composing letters that now rested under glass in the display cases of museums. By the time he was fifteen, he possessed his own collection of these in replica form. Several of them were mounted, framed, and hung on the walls of his room.
In an age before computers, when other kids were out playing baseball or swimming, Edgar was busy indulging his fetish, replicating more items for his collection of historic documents. He became adroit in the use of sealing wax and collected old metal stamps created to impress an image in the hot wax that sealed folded letters in the time before envelopes were invented.
By the time he was thirty, Zobel could copy the elegant freestyle script of more than eighteen of the early U.S. presidents so closely that even experienced handwriting experts would have difficulty identifying the replica from the real. Without a thorough analysis of the paper and ink, it would have been impossible to tell.
It was about that time that Zobel was approached by two men who owned a small shop in the historic district of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The shop dealt in antiquities, mostly Civil War memorabilia with an occasional item dating back to the Revolution. The men wanted Zobel to craft some elegant replicas of historic correspondence that they could sell to customers who either couldn’t afford to or didn’t want to pay the high prices of historic originals. To make a few bucks, Zobel was happy to do it.
The copied documents always carried a printed disclaimer, “Hand-Reproduced Replica,” on the back. Almost all of Zobel’s early copies were of well-known historic letters or documents, but they were different from the usual lithograph copy you might find in typical curio shops, much more authentic to the eye in terms of paper texture and ink. They had a kind of three-dimensional quality, including the folds in the paper and its frayed edges, that made them look astonishingly real. Each document was scripted on unique paper. For Colonial documents Zobel would use custom-made paper, large sheets similar to those used in the Colonial period, which were then either cut or torn into quarters to make traditional “quartos,” the quarter pages often used for writing. Sometimes he would employ a smaller “folio” size.
In time the owners of the shop where Zobel’s work was displayed came to realize that collectors of rare documents were traveling long distances, some from as far away as New York, Boston, and Chicago, to buy up everything that Zobel created, as fast as he could produce it. When the shop raised its prices for Zobel’s works, while the profits rose, the result was the same. Their inventory of his work was gone almost before it could be hung. Tony decorating salons in Georgetown and Manhattan began to call, asking if they could commission specific items. If the shop could have cloned Zobel, they would have made a fortune.
The problem was, there was a built-in economic ceiling for his work. The moment the prices started approaching the cost of an original, demand disappeared. It didn’t take long before it dawned on them that if people with money in New York and Boston were decorating the walls of their studies and libraries with Zobel’s elegant copies, how much more would they pay if they thought the article was real?
They didn’t have to argue long to convince Zobel. He had been working up calluses on his fingers, was running out of turkey quills, and had less than twelve hundred dollars to show for eighteen documents, all of which were sold nearly before they were written. Zobel was having visions of dying like van Gogh, broke, only to have collectors trading his works for millions years later, as pieces of art.
The first item they crafted was an original letter from Washington to one of his aides, an obscure two paragraphs about military stores for his troops. For provenance the shop owners claimed that the item was found pasted to the back of a drawer in an eighteenth-century dining set that came into their shop. The piece sold at auction in New York for eighteen thousand dollars. They did it again, a different letter, a different author, and this time they used a party not connected with the shop who said she found the item behind an old photo, a family heirloom. They netted twenty-three thousand dollars at auction.
Now they were in business. They kept the documents sufficiently obscure, with only one notable signature, so the price would stay in the realm of reason and the buyer would not be induced to have experts examine the paper and ink. In fourteen months they’d sold seventeen pieces, netting nearly half a million dollars. It was that last piece, the seventeenth item that brought the roof down. It seems they’d gone to the well once too often. One of the auction houses in New York got suspicious. Unless someone had found a chest of forgotten letters, a mother lode of historic grocery lists penned by the pantheon of American founders, there were simply too many new finds coming from one region all at one time. A quick check of the ink and paper and it didn’t take long for the FBI to trace everything back to the little shop in Fredericksburg.
It is from the statement of facts in the circuit court’s opinion that Harry gleaned all these details of Zobel’s early life.
Edgar Zobel did six and a half years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for interstate fraud, wire and mail fraud, and lost his house, paying a fine of a quarter of a million dollars. He sat in prison while his lawyers filed an appeal that was ultimately denied by the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia, an opinion written by the Honorable John R. Logan, circuit judge. It took Harry a few minutes longer to find the names of the other two judges on the three-judge panel: the Honorable Rufus James and Arthur J. Ginnis, both concurring. That was twenty-six years ago.
Immediately I called Quinn and told him. I gave him the citation so he could find the case.
He told me that it was interesting, he would look at it, but that it was outside the record of the trial and could not be given to the jury.
I told him I knew that, but that it was the first solid piece of evidence we had that the Jefferson Letter, more than likely, was a fraud.
It took Herman a little longer than Harry-and some shoe leather-to discover that Zobel was still alive and to find him. In nearly a quarter of a century, he hadn’t ventured far. Zobel was living in a small house that unless you looked closely you might swear was a barn, along a dried-up creek among scrub oaks twelve miles outside
