I let him go on for a while, but I was stupefied. I was investigating a suspected forgery, and the man at its center was asking me to “make a lot of stuff up” for a new project in which he’d be my eager accomplice. The proposal was so tone-deaf that I wondered whether he was clueless, incorrigible or up to something I couldn’t yet discern. I reminded him that I was a journalist, not a novelist. I wrote fact, not fiction. Nor could I relinquish research to or accept services from the subject of a story.
