Author(s): Tony Tetro, Giampiero Ambrosi

Crime and Justice

I was lying on the couch falling asleep when I heard a rustling at the front door and someone saying, "Tony? Tony? You there?" I said, "Yeah," and the next thing I knew twenty-five cops burst into my condo. The first thing one of them said was, "A man just gave you eight thousand dollars in cash. I'm going to need that back right now." It was true, so I handed the money over immediately. The cops began demolishing my place, slicing up the wallpaper, pulling up the carpets, emptying all the drawers. The whole time I sat there on my couch sweating bullets, staring up at my secret room, which was reflected in the mirror on the mantelpiece. The room was in an odd-shaped space behind the upstairs bathroom. If you pressed # on the cordless phone, a full-length mirror would pop open and reveal my secret stash of special papers, pigments, collector stamps, light tables, vintage typewriters, certificates of authenticity, notebooks with signatures-everything a professional art forger might need.... If they had found my secret room, I would have been buried for real. Book jacket.