simon/munshin -&- autolycus (tocatchathief) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2011-01-26 16:27:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | mark yoo |
Who: Mark Yoo
What: You never forget your first forgery.
When: Wednesday Night
Where: Mark's Spare Room/Darkroom
It was the middle of the night by now. For hours Mark had been bent over various machines, trays of chemicals, and pages of notes. Ever since he'd gotten home from work. When he'd first moved in, he'd boarded over the window and covered the edges with black tape to keep out any light. In his neighborhood that probably made it look like he was starting a drug lab or something, but it served it's purpose. A heavy black drape hung over the door for a similar reason and a dim red light hung overhead, making everything in the room look alien and unreal. The strange makeshift darkroom was his favorite place to be.
Mark tried to stay out of trouble, he really did. He did an alright job of it too. Most of the time. That hadn't stopped him from accumulating some debts though, with the sort of guys you didn't want to be in debt to. He didn't have a lot of options. He couldn't ask his family for money. The original loan had been to help with his mother's medical bills to begin with. He couldn't ask Emalee for the money. She was good for it, but he just... couldn't. She'd already thought he was scamming her, or after her for her inheritance. He wouldn't even let her pay for dinner when they went out, he wasn't about to take money from her.
He had some skills though. Skills that could make some very good money.
It's for a good cause, the voice in his head supplied. Mark had to agree. Not getting his kneecaps broken was a very good cause.
He was no painter, but Neal was a master forger, and Mark had no small amount of skill in a darkroom. There were lots of different kinds of masterpieces.
One of the original signed prints of Ansel Adams' Moonrise had recently sold at auction for more than six hundred grand. That was a later re-interpretation though, from it's first formal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. It had been published a year before that by U.S. Camera and the original submitted print had been lost for decades. Imagine what that would be worth to the right buyer.
He'd made a negative from a museum poster. He'd tracked down vintage chemicals and paper. Now it was just a matter of details. All of the details, exactly right. The photo hung from two vintage clips, drying after it's final chemical bath. He wasn't done though. This was just the start of the process.