The Face-Changers

11

Jane drove west on Route 224 into the dark, flat Ohio countryside. For ten minutes she watched the pattern of glowing headlights behind her. Then, at the beginning of a long, straight stretch where she was sure she could see a mile or two ahead, she turned off the road and stopped until the line of cars had passed. She waited to be sure that none of the cars stopped farther down the road, watched her rearview mirror until there were no headlights, then accelerated onto the highway again. She was satisfied that she had not been followed.

“Are you up to talking?” she asked.

“I should be,” said Dahlman. “I don’t think I’ve slept this much since I was a child.”

“I need to know exactly how you got into this mess.”

“Why?”

Jane raised an eyebrow. This man had apparently spent a lifetime collecting and refining ways of being irritating. But she said patiently, “I think it will help. It might tell me all of the people who are searching for you, and that’s useful, because they all search in different ways, look in different places, ask different people. If I don’t know these things, I could take you right into someone’s path.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “That isn’t how this happened.”

“I know.”

He didn’t seem to be willing to accept even that. “How do you know? Presumably most people who kill someone say they didn’t either.”

“They would also be willing to use a gun to defend themselves from someone who is chasing them. In fact, most people would. But not you.”

“Oh. I suppose so.” He seemed to respond to logic, and that made Jane feel more hopeful. “It’s a very long story.”

“I expect it will be a very long night.”

Jane turned to look at him, and saw that his eyes were focused on a point in the distance. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts, and that was something Jane did not want him to do. She didn’t want an account full of neat, clean summaries and judicious, erroneous conclusions. “Who do the police think you killed?”

“Her name was Sarah Hoffman. She was a friend and partner of mine for about ten years. She assisted me in surgery frequently. She was a fine plastic surgeon with her own practice, but at the time we started working together I was better known, and was being brought some cases that other people weren’t.”

“What sorts of cases?”

“Reconstructive surgery, mostly—usually people who had been terribly burned or injured. I was developing experimental methods for transplantation of tissue, and some post-op procedures that had brought promising results. It had struck me some time ago that these were the areas where the new developments could be made. We have thousands of surgeons who are now probably about as good at cutting as a human being will ever be. We have methods of magnification and nonintrusive monitoring and micro-instruments and lasers that make use of that dexterity in very sophisticated ways. But maybe seventy percent of the battle with restorative and plastic surgery involves allowing the body’s tissue to grow and letting it make up for what we can’t do with a blade—as well as repairing what the blade has done. Surgeons are the star quarterbacks of medicine: everything has been done to protect our part of the process and maximize its effectiveness. But at a certain level you do one after another. It feels like being a quarterback who throws a pass and is taken out of the game and put into another one before he even sees whether it’s been caught.”

“This isn’t what you taught at the university, is it?” she asked.

“I was a general surgeon,” said Dahlman. “For most of my working life, I probably performed more thoracic operations than anything else. The instruction I gave was almost entirely practical—in an operating room, teaching people who already were surgeons. I spent less time on post-operative work than most surgeons in private practice.”

“What happened?”

Dahlman seemed mystified by his memories, like a man leafing through photographs who kept finding ones he had forgotten and lingering over them. As his eyes stared ahead of the two funnel-shaped beams of the headlights, his face moved, taking on a look of happiness, then sadness, then puzzlement. “I had good hands. By the age of forty I was one of the eight or ten most accomplished traditional surgeons in the country. I had been practicing at the University Medical Center since residency, and was already the Goldsden-Meara Distinguished Professor of Medicine. I was so busy performing surgeries and teaching young doctors like Carey McKinnon that I paid little attention to anything else. At sixty I was forced to do some thinking.”

“Forced by what?”

“My wife died suddenly. An embolism. She was fine in the morning, and when I came home in the evening she was dead.”

“Did you have children?”

“Two,” he said. “My boy, David, was born the year we graduated from college. He was thirty-eight when his mother died, and living in California. My daughter, Terry, was thirty-six, married, and living in Paris. They both came home for the funeral, said the correct things to each other and to me, and went back to what they had been doing. When they were gone, I sat and thought, and looked around me. The kids were grown up and self-supporting in every sense of the word. They seemed to like me, but whatever emotional needs they ever had must have occurred during an earlier period, and my wife handled them while I was too busy to notice. So I was left with a lifetime appointment to an endowed chair, a series of vested pensions, paid-up life-insurance policies, and various savings accounts and investments that my prudent wife had accumulated for a rainy day she never lived to see. I found myself absolutely alone, with no real responsibilities, but no real connections either, and certainly no needs. That was a surprise. There were others.”

“What others?”

“I suddenly realized, as though I were waking up, that I was sixty. What it meant was that the best work I would do with my hands either had been done, or shortly would be. I had to decide what to do next—how to use the next ten or fifteen years. I could spend the time training young surgeons, or use my name and reputation for medical causes—gradually do less medicine and more lobbying and fund-raising—or I could try to do some clinical research to solve the problems I’d noticed during the years of nonstop surgery.”

“I take it you chose research.”

“I found I didn’t need to choose. As it turned out, my name and a letter from me did more for medical causes than my presence. My personality seems to irritate people. So I let the institutions write the letters and signed them for a couple of hours each week. My best teaching was done in the operating room, so it took no exclusive time at all. I spent my afternoons taking on the work I was telling you about.”

“Where did Sarah Hoffman fit into it?”

“I selected her as my teacher. She taught me to perform plastic and reconstructive surgery, like an apprentice. When I was ready, I began to move ahead, and she followed. I learned from her that the surgery itself is more art than science—like being a sculptor. I became good at it, and my broader background in surgery gave me a wider range of techniques, familiarity with more of the situations that can come up, and so on. My credentials gave the universities and big drug companies an interest in keeping me abreast of the enormous amount of research they had been doing on various kinds of induced healing, artificial tissue, and so on. We both made great progress, became extremely productive. We published a number of articles, helped lots of patients.”

“Carey seems to think there’s more to the research than you’re saying.”

Dahlman smiled. “Carey.… He would see what it was instantly, and want it to happen right then, even if the others couldn’t imagine it. He was that kind of medical student—always asking why we can’t do better, asking for a finer instrument. He was right, of course. We were trying to reach the point where we could reliably induce rapid cell replication—persuade the body to do what it does anyway, but much, much faster and more completely.”

“Did you succeed?”

“We had some success, but nothing as dramatic yet as what we’re hoping—what I’m hoping for, and what Carey envisions. We understand a bit about the hormone that makes a human baby grow quickly during its first year of life. We know a bit about rapid cell replication in malignancies. There’s already work being done on giving the body more of what it needs—exposing it to hyperbaric oxygen to stimulate healing, and so on. But ultimately, what we’re talking about is speeding up time within the human body: an increased flow of blood to the wound, increased supply of oxygen and nutrients in the blood, a tremendously increased metabolic rate.”

“How close were you to doing it?”

“We were just beginning. We weren’t simply doing theoretical research. We were physicians trying to help the human beings who came to us, and that meant that most of our time with each patient went to applying the proven methods we had. When something was both promising and safe, we would get a patient’s permission to try it.”

“So what went wrong?”

“We took on a case of a sort that we seldom did—purely cosmetic. It was a man who simply wanted to improve his appearance. He came through Sarah’s office, and she did all of the interviewing and so on at the beginning. The paperwork was handled by her nurse, Carol. Sarah used to take her own photographs, so that was done there too. Normally, whatever we had done together was paid for by the patient’s insurance. Since this was purely elective surgery, it would be paid for by the patient. Normal procedure is to alert the insurance company anyway, in case there are complications. Records were created. That’s an important fact. Then Sarah brought him to me.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did she bring him to you instead of doing it herself?”

“We usually worked together on particularly difficult cases. This one wasn’t difficult, medically. But it was a patient who had certain requests, and one of them was my involvement.”

“You just said you were concentrating on using your last years as a working surgeon efficiently. Surely there must have been somebody—some kid with a birth defect or something—that fit better. Or was using a healthy patient better for the research?”

Dahlman waved the question away. “I don’t know that it makes any difference. Our motives aren’t really the issue.”

He was hiding something. “So tell me anyway.”

“It was a combination of things. One was that Sarah had already made up her mind when she brought him to me. She was my partner. I owed her a lot. What was called for was a safe, familiar sequence of procedures. The difference between performing them on a patient who had no physical limitations and a patient who had suffered disfigurement was really only a question of the quality of results. And it would demonstrate the applicability of the methods we had learned in our reconstructive work to another whole category of—”

“He offered you a lot of money.”

Dahlman slumped in his seat. “Yes.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

“I thought you were set for life, and didn’t need money.”

Dahlman squinted, as though he were still trying to fathom what had been in his own mind, and having little success. Jane could tell that this part of the story was an irritant. “I didn’t need money. Sarah was younger—I believe thirty-eight or thirty-nine. I could work for free; she couldn’t. We had always assumed that she would naturally, gradually take over more of our joint work until I retired. The clinic and our research would revert to her. But at this stage the research was enormously expensive, and even the surgeries we did increased the deficit—sometimes because we took on the very sort of patient you mentioned. We had to give some thought to how Sarah would manage to continue the work without me. Two hundred thousand wasn’t much, but it would help.”

“You didn’t like the decision, did you?”

“No. I didn’t. But I couldn’t deny the problem. We discussed it in very specific, practical terms that day. The question was, would we interrupt our real work to do forty tummy tucks and nose bobs, or do one complete, ambitious makeover for a rich patient who would serve as a demonstration for others?”

Jane said, “Tell me about the patient.”

Dahlman said, “I never knew much about him. Sarah told me he wanted not only to have the best medical services available but to be of help. The fee was his idea, and we were to consider the excess a contribution. He had signed a standard agreement to let us publish whatever we learned in the course of his treatment.”

Jane tested a suspicion. “Including pictures?”

“Including pictures. Of course.”

Jane had guessed wrong, but she sensed that she shouldn’t let Dahlman gloss over the patient. “Where did the money come from? What made him rich?”

“Sarah mentioned that he was the heir to the Hardiston fortune.”

“Was his name Hardiston?”

“Yes. James Hardiston.”

Jane still couldn’t be positive: there probably were some living Hardistons. There was no way for her to verify her suspicion while she was driving along a deserted road in the middle of the night, but this was the first part of the story that seemed to sink when she put weight on it. Hardiston was a word that everybody knew: Bulova, Piaget, Timex, Cartier, Rolex, Omega, Hardiston. One of them was printed on your watch, and ten times a day, when you looked to see what time it was, you couldn’t help reading it. Hardiston was undoubtedly the best of the bunch, because nobody could be named Timex, and half the school classrooms in the country had those big Hardiston clocks over the blackboard. Kids sat at their desks watching it out of the corners of their eyes. At three o’clock the red second hand reached the twelve, the minute hand clicked backward a half-step, then forward to the next minute, and the dismissal bell went off.

It was a con game as old as the Industrial Revolution. You just took some brand name that had started out as a surname and told the mark you were the great-grandson. If you could convince somebody your name was Pillsbury or Hilton or Doubleday or Kellogg or Hardiston, they thought they’d already done all the checking they needed to, and they started to get light-headed from the smell of money. “And you—or Sarah—thought the two hundred thousand might be only the beginning.”

“Well, it had occurred to us.”

“How did he know about you?”

“That was one of the things that impressed me. His forms said he had been referred to us by a doctor in Maryland. The doctor was real, and highly respected.”

“Did you call him?”

“There was no reason to. He had simply told Mr. Hardiston that we would be the best specialists in the country for his needs. What was there to ask him—whether he meant it? Afterward I learned that he had given Hardiston copies of some of our articles from medical journals.”

Jane’s jaw muscles worked, keeping her mouth closed so she wouldn’t succumb to the temptation to point out that this, too, was a confidence maneuver: the con man arrives with a fistful of recommendations and credentials, but they’re all about the mark, not about him. “So you took him on.”

“Yes. We performed five procedures over a period of about eight months.”

“What exactly was wrong with him?”

“Nothing, really. He was healthy and had regular features. But the net effect of his face was not what he wanted, and I couldn’t blame him: he had clearly never been considered attractive when he was young, and now his expression seemed forbidding, unlikable. And he was about fifty and looked older: lots of damage.”

“What kind of damage—scars?”

“Nothing like that. His nose had been broken at some point—a souvenir of some adolescent football game—but the damage I meant was wear and tear. Some I would attribute to the sun, some to tobacco and alcohol and possibly other drugs, and the rest to age. He had some unflattering wrinkles that went with the sun damage—scowling and squinting.”

“None of that sounds like anything he couldn’t have had fixed on a slow afternoon the next time he was in Beverly Hills. What did you do?”

“We decreased the prominence of the brow and cheekbones and smoothed the skin with endoscopic surgery, performed rhinoplasty to make the nose thinner and slightly shorter, made the chin thinner and tapered it. In the process we did some traditional cut-and-tuck work here and there to remove wrinkles and sags, made the lips slightly fuller, and performed blepharoplasty on the eyes. We used a carbon dioxide laser to remove small wrinkles and uneven pigmentation. It wasn’t the surgical procedures that interested him, it was the work we had done on induced healing and tissue regeneration. And it worked. When he left he looked like a different person—but that different person is a man about thirty years old.”

“Did you do anything to his body?”

“Liposuction to relieve him of a middle-aged slackening around the middle.”

“It sounds pretty good. I hope you’re still around when I need a little help.”

Dahlman’s head turned toward her abruptly, and the stare was almost hatred. “He destroyed us.”

“Did he?” Jane said evenly. “Tell me how.” His pause gave her time to amend it. “Tell me how you found out, step by step.”

Dahlman’s anger seemed to slowly change to something like amazement. “It was strange, like being eaten alive, bit by bit. There were five of us involved in his treatment: Sarah Hoffman; her nurse, Carol Flanders; me, of course; the anesthesiologist, Dr. Koh Wung; and his assistant, Celia Rodriguez. The first thing that happened was that Carol Flanders quit.”

“Why?”

“She got an offer from a hospital in her hometown in Colorado. She had elderly parents there, and the job was, by any objective assessment, better than the one she had. We all advised her to take it. Working in a small clinical research facility like ours was rewarding, but it was also exhausting. We couldn’t pay her the way a major hospital could, and there was no better job we could promote her to. So we wished her well, and had a little party for her on her last day.”

“What then?”

“Nothing, for about a month. Then Dr. Wung left for a university hospital post in Boston and took his assistant with him. The final thing was that Sarah Hoffman was murdered.”

He was skipping over parts of the story that Jane suspected must be huge. She would have to bring him back to them, but for now she needed to keep him talking. “How was she murdered?”

“At first it looked like a burglary. She was in her office, apparently late at night. Nobody knows why. She seldom did that. It’s possible that she was trying to catch up on some paperwork because she hadn’t yet replaced Carol Flanders. Or maybe someone called her and asked to meet her there. She was shot several times, but nobody heard it. The office was torn up terribly—not as though someone was looking for something valuable to steal, but as though they wanted to destroy all of it—file drawers dumped in the middle of the floor and set on fire.”

“Did the police call you in to look at it?”

“No. The police came to me about a day later, because they wanted some idea of who might have done it, and why. By then they had decided it wasn’t a burglary. That night I called Carol Flanders in Colorado to break the news to her gently. I got no answer at the number she had given us. I tried to reach her through her parents. They told me she had been killed in a car accident a couple of weeks before. She had been driving to Colorado to start her new job, and had never made it.”

“Did it occur to you to call Wung?”

“Of course. His new university gave me a runaround. He didn’t have an office listing, because he was to start in the fall, and the fall directory hadn’t been printed yet. The personnel office in Boston at least knew who he was, but not where. I finally went to our university and talked to four people before I could get them to see that this was an emergency and to give me the emergency numbers he had put on his old personnel forms. The numbers were for relatives in Korea. I called his brother, and got another terrible shock. Koh was dead. I asked how, and all he would tell me was that he had gone on a vacation and died. His English was only slightly better than my Korean, and I don’t speak Korean. He did understand when I gave him my name and phone number, because an hour later his sister called. She was screaming at me. All I could sort out at first was that Koh had committed suicide. Somehow they got the impression that he had been fired from the University of Chicago, and the job in Boston was a step down. Since he had been working with me, I must have gotten him fired, and the shame made him kill himself. I couldn’t get the details—how they knew it was suicide, how it had happened—and asking again just infuriated her. I gave up.”

“What did you do then?”

“I realized that the most urgent thing was trying to warn Celia Rodriguez. I called the university in Boston again. It was the same story as Koh—she wasn’t supposed to start work until the fall, so they had no idea where she was, or even if she had arrived in Boston yet. I called Boston information, I even called Koh’s sister again to see if they had found her number in Koh’s effects. Nobody there had ever heard of Celia Rodriguez.”

Jane saw it immediately. If Carol’s accident and Koh’s suicide and Sarah’s murder had taken place in Chicago, the police would have jumped on them and initiated a search for Celia Rodriguez. But in Boston, nobody knew the connection, or that anything else had happened. She knew nobody there, so there was nobody to report her missing. Some murders got reported nationally, but not the suicides or car accidents of people who weren’t famous. “Were you afraid?”

“I was angry. I went to the police and told them what I knew—that within a period of about forty days, all four of my colleagues had met deaths that were, at the very least, suspicious. At first I thought they weren’t taking me seriously. Then, a couple of days later, two policemen came to my house.”

“To arrest you?” There was no question that he had been arrested at some point, but she knew she should verify each bit of the story that she could hold on to as a fact, and the order of events made a difference.

“No. They were from a special squad that protects people. They told me they believed I was in danger. We talked for some time.”

“Did you talk about who the criminal might be?”

“Yes. After some discussion, they agreed with me that Mr. Hardiston probably wasn’t Mr. Hardiston. He was someone who wanted to change his looks to escape prosecution for some crime. They were desperate for the photographs—any copies I had of the ones Sarah took. But I never had any, and now I’m sure they were all destroyed, along with the medical records, in the fire in Sarah’s office. The policemen tried to get me to describe the man. I’ve described him for you, as he looked before the surgeries and after. Could you find him?”

“I could find about a hundred of each in the next town.”

“Exactly. They called the station and explained the situation to some superior, then came back to say that they had a plan.”

“I’ll bet.”

“What?”

“What was their plan?”

“Since there was no way to identify the man, the safest way was to take me to a quiet place and hide me. I was to tell no one where I was going. I would have to live incognito for a time, and when the man surfaced I would have to reappear to identify him and testify in court. It would take lots of arranging, but if they didn’t do it this way, they would risk losing me too. I was the only living person who could point out the man.”

“You agreed to this?”

“I felt it made no sense not to cooperate. They took me to a farmhouse that night, over three hundred miles from Chicago. I was allowed to pack only those items that nobody would know were missing—some clothes, a few items of little value. Then we left.”

“Where was it—the farm?”

“About ten miles outside a little town near Carbondale, called Hurst. I was there for three days.”

“Then what?”

“It was strange—like a dream. They were very considerate. They even had a newspaper delivered each morning. One morning I got up and walked down the long dirt road from the house to the mailbox on the highway to pick up my paper. On the bottom corner of the front page was a story that said the police wanted me for questioning.”

“How did you feel?”

“A bit disappointed, for one thing. The police had given me to understand that they were going to make my house look lived in, and if the killer made an attempt to break in, they would scoop him up. For some reason the deception hadn’t worked, and they had given up hope of that. Otherwise, the police would never have revealed to reporters that I was gone. I also had some trivial concern about how the story in the paper would look to other people. It sounded almost as though I were a suspect.”

“I take it the policemen had a key to your house?”

“Well, yes. As I said, they wanted to make it look as though I were still living there.”

“When did your small worry turn into a big worry?”

“Three more days passed. The policemen were to deliver more groceries once a week. I wondered when they would come. The next day I stayed indoors all day waiting. Finally, I left a note on the table and went for a walk. When I returned, there were police cars parked in front of the farmhouse—not plain ones like the ones they had used before, but real ones, black and white, with lights on the roofs. I was excited. I knew that they would never show themselves like that unless the waiting was over, and they had found the killer. They had: it was me.”

“Tell me about the arrest.”

“I ran up, they threw me on the ground on my face, handcuffed my hands behind my back, pushed me into the back seat of one of the cars, and set off for Chicago. I told the policemen everything. I asked them to call the Special Protection Squad and verify my story. They just listened, but they called nobody.”

Jane frowned. “What made them come after you?”

Dahlman threw up his hands. “I just told you that—”

“No,” she said. “Forget the hiding part. I haven’t heard anything yet that sounds like grounds for charging you with murder.”

“They said they had wanted to ask more questions, couldn’t find me at work, couldn’t reach me by phone, and became concerned. They got a warrant and broke into my house. They showed me pictures they took. I recognized the place, but it had been altered. My wife’s walk-in closet had been transformed into a kind of madman’s shrine. There were pictures of Sarah pasted to the walls—dozens of them, with steak knives stuck in some, and holes or burn marks in others. And strange scrawls about killing her. One said her time was coming, and others had captions like ‘Thief’ or ‘Betrayer’ on them.”

“When they showed you this stuff, did you have a lawyer present?”

“I had a lawyer. He had settled my wife’s estate, and made out our wills before that. He called a criminal lawyer for me who was supposed to be terrific. I’m sure the man was competent, but …” Dahlman’s voice trailed off.

“But he didn’t believe you.”

“He asked me questions like ‘Do you know what day it is?’ ‘What year?’ and then he said, ‘I’m here to help you, but the best help I can give you is to advise you not to hide anything.’ ”

“Did he listen to your whole story?”

“He’d already heard it when I met him. The police had apparently been recording it when I told them the first time.”

“No wonder he didn’t believe you.”

“I know. The idea that the police department had conspired to frame me for a murder seemed to be too much of a leap for his plodding intellect.”

Jane sighed wearily. She had been dreading this moment. “There’s a lot to be said for a plodding intellect.”

Dahlman was offended. “What, exactly, do you mean?”

“Well,” said Jane. “For starters, those two men who came to talk to you and then hid you weren’t policemen.”

“How could you possibly know?” He was furious.

Jane ignored his anger. “There are a lot of little things. One is that no city police department has anything called a ‘Special Protection Squad.’ Los Angeles and Chicago have both asked for money to begin protecting witnesses in gang-related trials, but so far, neither has gotten it. If the police want a witness protected, they don’t hide him on some farm alone. They protect him—put a cop with him, or keep him in custody. A criminal lawyer knows these things. And if policemen think you’re being watched and stalked by experts, they don’t use your phone to call their office and discuss their whole plan. These weren’t policemen.”

“Oh,” said Dahlman. Then he added, unnecessarily, “They were very convincing.”

“The real ones were the ones you saw when you went to the police station. How did you get away from them?”

Dahlman shook his head. “That was the one service my attorney provided for me.”

Jane frowned. “After all that creepy stuff in the house and the sudden disappearance to the farm, he got you out on bail?”

“No. The lawyer had them put me in a psychiatric lockup ward in the hospital for observation. I had worked in that hospital, and suddenly there I was—just like any other mental patient. The transformation was quite a feeling: a loss of identity, really. I was just another anonymous patient in institutional pajamas. Who I had been a week before meant nothing to them. I was there for observation, but I was given large doses of a powerful tranquilizer that would have made observing me a waste of time.”

“Would have?”

“I pretended to take the pills, but hoarded them for four days. I didn’t really have a plan yet, but I knew that if I took those pills, I never would have one. Then one day, an orderly turned up whom I’d known for some time. He used to work the surgical floors, but had transferred to the psychiatric wing because it paid better. We talked. He knew I wasn’t crazy, and that I certainly hadn’t killed my partner. He agreed to help me if I could keep him from looking guilty. So, we put the tranquilizer into his bottle of Snapple. I took his identification, keys, and clothes, then put him in a place they called the Quiet Room to sleep it off. I used his keys to get out of the ward, and used the money in his wallet to get on the bus to Buffalo to find you.”

“This is something I’ve been waiting to hear. How did you know about me?”

He shook his head slowly. “It was an odd circumstance. It was less than a year ago. I was at a conference in Road Town on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s.” He stared at her. “That’s something you must know all about. If you have a conference of surgeons, it has to be in some holiday period when very little surgery gets done. If it’s in the winter, it will draw better attendance if it’s held in a warm place. In fact, Carey might have been there.”

“Last year?” Jane shook her head. “Nope.” Since they had been married, Carey had gone to very few of these doctors’ conventions, and she was glad. She would have missed him, and she didn’t like to go with him. She had spent too much of her life in airports and hotels already, and whenever she was in another, she felt a quiet uneasiness that one of the people who had a reason to look for her would turn up.

“I seldom go either. I went because I was reading a paper on a few of the post-operative techniques we had developed. That part seemed to go well. Then it was New Year’s Eve, and I was scheduled to leave for home the next morning. I had developed a friendly relationship with a waitress.”

Jane considered saying nothing. She had almost asked whether Sarah had gone to the Virgin Islands with him, but had decided to wait. At some point she was going to have to ask exactly what their relationship had been, but not yet. She decided to prod him a little. She raised an eyebrow. “A waitress?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped. “The week in that hotel was frustrating. Most guests dealt with the manager and got nothing they asked for. I now believe he was the evil wayward son of some aristocratic family. Or they spoke with the concierge, who seemed to be there because she looked good behind the desk, but was utterly brainless. But this waitress would listen and get what was wanted. So I overtipped her and treated her with courtesy. That is all.”

“She told you about me?”

“No. She knocked on my door at three A.M. and said there was a medical emergency. The hotel was full of surgeons, but in her eyes they had all disqualified themselves. Some had been drinking. I didn’t drink. Some had come with wives and children, and I had come alone. Some had simply never noticed her, or had not struck her as approachable. So I was the one. She took me to a house. It was enormous, a villa of the sort you might expect to see on the Mediterranean, but wouldn’t. The owner was ill, and apparently there was some problem about finding a surgeon who would admit him to the local hospital on New Year’s Eve. Maybe it was true, and maybe it was just an excuse for drafting me. But I could tell the man had a hot appendix. We moved him to the hospital, I operated, and he was fine. It’s a simple procedure. Medical students do it all the time. But he was grateful. He wanted to reward me. I refused. It’s one thing to perform emergency surgery in a foreign country, but another to take pay for it. But he didn’t mean money.

“He was positive that I had come to Tortola with a suitcase full of cash to hide in a bank down there. I said it was a medical conference, and he said that the reason they held conferences during the holidays was because the customs force was thinner and lazier then, and that’s when American doctors and lawyers and politicians came to make deposits. I couldn’t convince him. He just kept looking at me with a patronizing, knowing smile. The man was clearly a criminal, and the idea that someone else could be honest seemed never to have occurred to him. Finally he wrote down your name and address and handed it to me. He said that since I was evading taxes, I might one day find myself in trouble. I said I wasn’t. He said there were a million reasons why one day a person—any person—might need to disappear. I was to memorize your address and destroy the paper, and when my time came I should go there and ask for you. I destroyed the paper, of course, but the words he had written never seem to have left my mind. It was such an odd evening, and I’d never met anyone like him before.”

“When the Buffalo police spotted you, you were on your way to my house?”

“Yes. I got as far as the bus station in downtown Buffalo. I was going out to find a cab, but I guess I looked suspicious, so two policemen approached me and asked to see identification. I ran a few steps, they called for me to stop, and that brought me to my senses. When I reached into my coat to produce my stolen wallet, they thought I had a gun. That was something George Hawkes hadn’t told me about.”

If he was still calling himself George Hawkes, Jane thought, then his luck was holding. When she had met him he had made his living as a travel agent for money, taking it on trips from a jewelry wholesale operation in California through Panama to banks in the Netherlands Antilles to front corporations in Europe, and then back. One afternoon seven or eight years ago, he had been raided in Los Angeles by policemen who thought he was a drug dealer. But he had managed to see the signs just in time: the van that had been parked down the street, which occasionally wobbled a little, as though a person were moving around inside, and then the large, plain cars arriving from different directions all at once.

He had slipped out through the crowded produce market next door, carrying a great deal of money with him. Walking out ahead of the raid instead of getting caught in it did not, however, have the desired effect. His clients, who were innocent of drug dealing but deeply involved in the business of making unauthorized copies of feature films and selling them in foreign markets, had interpreted the facts in their own way. They felt he had absconded with their money. He had come to Jane.

After Jane had hidden him, she had gotten in touch with his former clients. She had then dictated a treaty. The former Harvey Fisk would take his usual commission and return their money via the usual channels, which would then close forever. He would not engage in any illegal activity again. They need not worry that at some time in the future he would get caught and be tempted to trade information about them for a light sentence. In return, they would never search for him, bother him, or speak of him to a third party. Any infraction of the treaty by either party would result in Jane, the referee, giving sufficient information to the authorities to put the infringing party away.

Jane gave in to her curiosity. “How is he?”

“Oh, fine,” said Dahlman. “Excellent health for fifty-six. Good physical conditioning, muscle tone apparently from tennis and swimming. The appendix doesn’t really mean a thing.” He noticed her expression. “You didn’t mean that, did you?”

“No.”

“He lives like a king. And you know what? It didn’t seem like anything then, but now it seems like everything. He isn’t afraid.”