Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

A few years earlier, it was all over the media and in the press. An antiquarian dealer claimed that he had discovered multiple volumes of Hitler’s handwritten diaries, all of which were scrupulously maintained, a veritable storehouse of the dictator’s most intimate thoughts during the war. It was a treasure trove, except for one little thing: The entire collection was a modern forgery.

“So a copy would be useless for purposes of publication?”

“In point of fact,” he says. “But political wacko though he may have been, Terry was nobody’s fool, especially when it came to money. He may have been an avowed socialist at heart, but when it came to book sales, he was a capitalist through and through. What he said was that he knew where the original letter was. What’s more, he knew someone who could get it for him.”

“Did he say who?”

Bonguard shakes his head. “I asked him, but he wasn’t talking.”

“Do you have any idea who it might be?”

“Only guesses.”

“Would you like to share them?”

Bonguard gives me a face, a little shrug of the shoulder. Now that he knows neither I nor the cops have the letter, he is becoming more reticent. I move on.

“Scarborough makes no reference to the letter in Perpetual Slaves?” Both Harry and I have scoured Scarborough’s book from cover to cover and found no reference to any secret letter.

“No. It was a conscious decision not to include it in this book,” says Bonguard. What is more interesting here is what Bonguard doesn’t say. He doesn’t tell me what he told the cops, that the so-called J letter was the impetus, the driving force that caused Scarborough to write Perpetual Slaves in the first place. Why? For the moment I leave it alone. I don’t ask him.

“Could it be that whoever had the original of the letter didn’t want to release it to him?” I ask.

“Could be,” says Bonguard. “Or it could be, knowing Terry, that he wanted to fan the flames of discontent with Perpetual Slaves and throw more fuel onto the fire later with the letter. That would be his style. And the letter wasn’t necessary to the sales of Perpetual Slaves. He had roused the masses with the revelation that the language of slavery remained in the Constitution. For Terry that was the first blow. I got the sense the letter was the clincher. According to Terry, the letter would have blown the top off of things.”

“Do you know who wrote the letter, the original author?”

“Not with certainty. As I say, I never saw it.”

“Do you know when it was supposed to have been written?”

“Terry never said, though he referred to it cryptically on a few occasions.”

“Cryptically?”

“Alphabetically,” says Bonguard. “He called it the ‘J letter.’”

“J?”

“You can form your own conclusions. If you work from a list of the politically prominent at the time that the framers crafted the Constitution, your list becomes very short fairly quickly.”

“Jefferson?” I ask.

“Or John Jay. There are a couple of others. But Jefferson would get my vote,” says Bonguard. “At the time the Constitution was being written, Jefferson was in Paris serving as American ambassador. This would account for the fact that he would be compelled to reduce any thoughts to writing. We know there was considerable correspondence between Jefferson and others back in the States at the time. We also know his position on slavery, at least his public position. He is on record as favoring abolition. Yet at the time he was one of the biggest slave owners in Virginia. You might call him ambivalent on the subject, since his words and his actions were a bit at odds. He vowed to free his slaves during his lifetime but never did. Economics, it seems, always got in the way.”

“My American history is a little rusty,” I tell him.

“He’s right, Dad,” Sarah chimes in.

“I’m not a history buff either,” says Bonguard. “But when you have a client bringing in the kind of money Terry was and he mentions a letter as a basis for another book, you tend to do a little research.”

“Any idea as to who this letter was directed to?” I ask.

“Your guess would be as good as mine. Terry never said.”

“Do you have any idea as to the monetary value of this letter?” I ask.

“Umm…” He looks at me with a dull gaze as if suddenly I’ve jumped the tracks on him. He thinks for a moment. “Assuming it’s authentic, that it’s never seen the light of day, publicly at least, I have to assume that it would be worth a good deal to collectors.”

“And how do we define ‘a good deal’ in the literary antiquities market?” I ask.

Bonguard smiles at me. “I’m certainly no expert on the value of historic correspondence. But assuming all your assumptions are correct, it would go at auction, one of a kind. And if it’s as explosive as Terry suggested, my guess is it would be worth multiple millions, perhaps. I don’t know. Given a good airing with a bestselling book as Terry was intending, that would drive the price very high.”

“So that would make whoever possessed this letter quite wealthy,” I say.

“Umm…” He sips his coffee, studying me over the brim of the cup. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “People have killed for less. Except for one thing. If Terry was to be believed, he only had a copy of the letter. That in itself was worthless unless it could be authenticated.”

“Maybe the killer didn’t know that,” I say.

He mulls this for a moment. “That’s possible. If you can sell it to a jury.” He smiles again.

“You have no idea how Mr. Scarborough may have gotten his copy of the letter?”

He looks at his watch. “Your dozen questions are about up,” he says. “I have a meeting in a couple of minutes. I don’t know how he got his copy of the letter. He didn’t tell me.”

“Do you have any guesses?”

“It’s only conjecture,” he says. “And don’t say that it came from here, but Terry had a girlfriend. An on-again, off-again thing. I believe it was off when he was killed, since they hadn’t seen each other in a while. The woman’s name is Trisha Scott. She’s a high-powered lawyer with one of the big firms in D.C. Terry met her when she was clerking for the Supreme Court. She was just out of law school, quite a bit younger than he was. If I had to guess as to a source for the letter, I would start there.”

“Why is that?”

“Because this whole thing, the idea of writing Perpetual Slaves, seems to have had its genesis about the time that Terry picked up with Scott. That and other things,” he says.

“What other things?”

“His interest in Arthur Ginnis, the justice that Scott clerked for. Do you know him?”

“I know of him, naturally. Never met him. Supreme Court justices and lowly trial lawyers live and operate in different legal universes,” I tell him.

“Well, Ginnis isn’t exactly the sort that I would expect to take up with Terry. I know Ginnis only slightly. I’ve met him twice. No”-he thinks for a moment-“actually, it was three times. Anyway, I was introduced to him by his wife, Margaret. She’s a lovely woman. For a while she was a client. I met her in New York at a political function. She was publishing a fascinating cookbook. The woman has a positive flair for finding an unusual niche and marketing it. The Favored Dishes of the High Court-that was the name of her book. She did a sequel and went historical on the next one, Meals from Marshall to Warren. That one didn’t do as well.

“She actually got Justice Scalia to pose for the cover on the first one, smiling with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. Do you know Scalia?”

I shake my head again.

“Actually, I don’t know him either, only by reputation. But I’m told that even if you don’t agree with him politically-And I don’t,” he says. “I’m hoping for better things following the election. Still there’s one thing that everyone agrees on. Scalia, like his politics or not, is the wit on the Court. Man has an incredible sense of humor. And sharp as a knife, if you know what I mean. Margaret’s book wasn’t The South Beach Diet, but in its market it did very well.”