The Face-Changers

13

Jane guided the car up the quiet street above the little lake and stopped. The moment that the breeze through the open windows died, she could feel the weight of the humidity settle on her and make her arms heavy. She turned around to face Dahlman on the back seat. “Time to get up.” She leaned closer to the steering column, pulled the two wires apart, and the engine was silent.

Dahlman slowly unbent himself, sat up, and looked around him. “Where are we?”

“Minneapolis. You slept most of the day. The sun will be down in a few minutes. How do you feel?”

“I’m a little stiff, but I don’t feel as though the wound is inflamed, and that could be a wonderful sign.”

He had not used a word like “wonderful” before, thought Jane. Maybe all it meant was that he really was getting better, but maybe it meant that last night’s discussion about justice had made him decide to stop telling her the truth. “We’ve got to go for a walk now.”

Dahlman ran his hands through his hair, made an attempt to straighten his clothes, then got out of the car. Jane locked the doors, then set off along the crest of the grassy slope above the lake. There were mallards bobbing on the darkening water, then lifting their heads to the sky to clap their bills in a shivering, jittery little movement to sift bits of food.

A car glided past on the road around the lake, and Dahlman moved a little lower down the slope, but Jane didn’t join him. She stopped walking. “Don’t hide yourself,” said Jane. “The way is along the ridge.”

“But it’s the same direction.”

“No. Come back up.” She waited while he joined her. “I’ll explain this as well as I can. There’s a house a little higher up the hill at the end of the lake. There’s a man in that house I want to see. In order to get into that house, you have to go a certain way. It shows another man that we’re okay. This one is a very unpredictable, suspicious man—the sort of person who hits back first—and he’s studying us through a spotting scope.”

“A spotting scope?”

“You’ll probably see it. It’s a sixty-power telescope on a tripod at an upper window. In the day it is, anyway. When the sun goes down, they switch to a nightscope with infrared to pick up your body heat. You have to walk along the crest so they have time to get a good look at who you are and what you’re carrying, and who else is nearby who might be following you.”

“What happens if you’re the wrong person?”

Jane shrugged. “It depends. If you’re just enjoying the scenery, nothing. When I was here before they always had cars waiting with the keys in them, and beside the spotting scope there was another tripod with a Heckler & Koch G7 rifle on it. They have lots of options.”

“Exactly who is this man we’re going to see?”

“Just a man who knows how to get things accomplished.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It doesn’t matter.”

Dahlman let his frustration show. “That’s not a possible statement of fact. You can’t not know exactly. Either you know or you don’t. You can’t know a name approximately.”

Jane frowned, and there was an edge in her voice. “I need to say a few things, so listen carefully. As long as I could, I’ve kept you in the part of the world that you’re familiar with. People aren’t entirely rational in that world, but they behave as though they were, and they make sure that their actions have to do with attaining reasonable goals—that is, things that they’re allowed to want. Their way of getting them is by a logical series of causes and effects: you work, you get paid. You’re patient, you get rewarded. You’re pleasant, people like you. I kept you in that world for several reasons. You’re a success in that world, so you know how it works and can move around in it without raising eyebrows. Something as simple as speaking grammatical English and holding a fork correctly makes you almost invisible. You also feel comfortable there, and that makes you look innocent. But the main reason I kept you in that world is that it’s safer.”

“Safer than what?” Dahlman’s voice was skeptical.

“Safer than where we’re going now.”

“And where is that? What do you mean by other parts of the world? Are we leaving the country?”

Jane looked at him, and there was a touch of regret in her eyes. “I’m trying to prepare you for a shock. I hope it’s not a big one, but it might be. The people we’re going to see are not like you, not like Carey. I’d like to say they’re not like me, either, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been here.” As soon as Jane said it she realized she had identified the hurt that had been constricting her chest. She was back in this life. It was as though she had happily fallen asleep in the old house beside Carey, and awakened with a start along this path by the lake. The place where she walked now wasn’t a point in space; it was a point in time, in the past. Falling back into this place was not like being abducted. It was like being unmasked.

“You mean they’re not honest.”

“Categories like honest and dishonest don’t apply to them any more than they do to your cat. These people have certain principles and habits and inclinations, but you don’t have time to learn them all. Be alert. Be observant, and listen to every word that’s said in your presence, but believe nothing unless I say it. Don’t ask questions or express an opinion. You’re a passenger.”

Dahlman gave a little chuckle. “You’re treating me as though I were a child. Speak when spoken to, and don’t be afraid.”

“Oh, no,” said Jane. “That isn’t what I meant at all. Be afraid. Just don’t show it.”

Dahlman walked along in silence for a time, then said, “Is that why you won’t tell me his name? Are you afraid to?”

“No. One of the things he sells is forged identification. It’s the reason I know him. But he’s like a tattoo artist.”

“A tattoo artist?”

“Every tattoo artist gets tired of waiting for the right customer to come in the door and ask for the right picture, so they all end up working on themselves. Some of the old pros are covered, from their toes to their collarbones. The man we’re going to see doesn’t concede that he should be permanently limited to one name, and he doesn’t have to be, so he isn’t. He uses an identity until he’s tired of it, and then picks a new one. I know what he was calling himself last time. He was Paul Carbin. But it’s been three or four years. He’s probably been several people since then.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

Jane walked a few more paces. “Until now, the police have probably been operating on the theory that you were still in Buffalo, or near it. The night we left, I had enough of everything on hand—money, forged IDs, clothes—to keep us out of trouble for a while if we got out and kept going. We were spotted last night at a gas station on an interstate in the Midwest, and that means we change our strategy. We’ve got to dig in somewhere, get an identity that’s tailor-made for you, and then prepare to wait.”

Jane led Dahlman to the end of the lake, then up the hill on the sidewalk to a Victorian three-story house with a stone-and-masonry facing that had originally been the foundation and at some point had been raised to the height of a man. She climbed the steps to the wide wooden porch and stopped to beckon to Dahlman. Dahlman hesitated, then climbed the steps, stood beside her, and looked around him.

There was a security screen door with steel mesh and bars set in so that it was much stronger than it looked from a distance. Behind that was a steel fire door with wooden panels glued on to fit the decor. For the first time, Dahlman noticed that the shutters on the lower windows were closed.

The fire door swung open and a thin young man whose pale skin didn’t look entirely clean to Dahlman stared out with a bored, sullen expression. After a moment he muttered, “He said you could come in if you want to.”

“We want to,” said Jane.

The young man slipped the bolt on the screen and Jane stepped inside, then held it for Dahlman. “Come in,” she said. “If I let it close, it’ll lock.”

Dahlman stepped in behind her. The room had once been a spacious foyer. There was a straight staircase leading upward to a second-floor landing, but the railing up there seemed wrong. It was out of proportion, the spokes too short and the base too high. Then Dahlman saw a pair of eyes peering down at him between the spokes. A girl about the same age as the boy at the door sat up, and brought with her a small, square-looking piece of black metal that Dahlman didn’t recognize as an automatic weapon until she turned it away from him and he could see the short barrel in profile. She stood and sauntered off to dissolve into the shadows of the upstairs hallway.

“Well, what do you think of her?” The voice came from somewhere to the left of them, a loud baritone.

Dahlman turned his head to see that Jane was already staring in that direction, into a room beside her that looked almost as it should have. It was the library of the old house, and it was still lined with ornate oak shelves that held rows of leather-bound volumes. There was a tall, bearded, broad-shouldered man with a fat belly that showed a little between his T-shirt and his jeans sitting in a wing chair in the dimly lighted room.

Jane shrugged and walked to the entrance. “She’s way too young to be sincere. She’ll take your money and cut your throat.”

The big man laughed and shook his head. “I was referring to the backup for the door. That’s an innovation since you were here. See, they get past the door—”

“How?” she interrupted. “It would take a half hour with a battering ram.”

“But if they did—say by guile and artifice—then Cindy opens up from the balcony with the Ingram. She’s behind a layer of steel and bricks, and they’re standing down here blinking.” Dahlman saw the man’s eyes settle on him thoughtfully. He didn’t look pleased.

“What’s your name these days?” Jane seemed to be trying to break his train of thought.

“Sid Freeman.”

“Pleased to meet you, as usual,” said Jane.

Sid Freeman’s face was set and expressionless. “Who’s he?”

“I was just getting to that,” Jane said cheerfully. “He’s my runner. His name is Richard Dahlman.”

Sid Freeman stared at Dahlman for seven or eight seconds, then turned to glower at Jane. She avoided his gaze and looked around her as she said, “I don’t see any of the old faces.”

Sid Freeman snorted. “Death, plague, and conflagration on many fronts. Quinn got into the habit of wearing a Rolex and driving to unsavory parts of Chicago in a major piece of automotive extravagance. He made a stop one night while he was on the way to deliver a very big payoff, and the combination was too much for some people to resist.”

“Sorry.” Jane used the moment to inwardly celebrate the absence of Quinn. Sid was unbalanced, but Quinn had been frightening. She had once stood beside him at the window when he had the rifle pressed to his shoulder, watching an unidentified man strolling along the path by the lake. He had been gripped by a tense, aching longing to squeeze the trigger just to see the man’s body jerk and the blood flow. Jane had stared into the spotting scope and said the man’s earphone was a hearing aid, and his glasses were too thick to let him qualify as a cop. Quinn had kept the rifle to his cheek and his finger tapping eagerly on the trigger guard until Sid had taken a turn at the telescope and told Quinn not to fire.

Sid shrugged. “It’s probably better that he’s gone. He would have fallen eventually to a dirty needle or unpremeditated sex; he never considered an evening complete without both.” He looked sadder as he said, “The lovely and talented Christie got caught in a sudden reverse of the natural order. She was killed by a New York cab driver. Actually, he wasn’t a real cab driver—just stole it and spent the evening cruising hotels looking for a rich mark, when Christie was there making a delivery for me. But it makes a better story that way: CABBIES FIGHT BACK!” He laughed at the thought.

His laugh induced a sensation in Jane that wasn’t exactly revulsion. It was the absence of pleasant surprise—what she might have felt if she had looked into an empty barrel and verified that it was still empty. Christie had been Sid’s—what was the term? “Girlfriend” sounded like something playful and innocent, and their closeness had always seemed to be a fetid amalgam of eroticism and conspiracy. Christie had always been putting her lips close to his ear and whispering secrets that had to do with money. But Jane had been sure that whatever minuscule level of affection Sid was capable of, it had been reserved for Christie.

Jane said, “I assume we don’t have to worry about anybody who’s in the house right now?”

Sid Freeman shook his head so that his shaggy hair whipped against his forehead. He pushed it back. “Worry about the kids?” He gave an amused snort. “They’re my greatest possession. They’ve eased the way out of my midlife tragedy and into my reclining years. I picked the first pair up to help me do some hunting—you know, to put Christie and Quinn to rest. They turned out to be ferocious—no hesitation, unencumbered by thoughts, either first or second. And they’re sleek and beautiful to watch, like tigers. So I kept them and got some more. Four so far. I’m hoping they’ll breed. But you don’t want to climb in the cage with them, if you know what I mean: Sid Freeman doesn’t indulge in the marital arts except with blue-haired ladies of his own generation. For you, of course, I’m willing to accept false ID.”

Jane gave a little smile and shook her head slowly from side to side. “Not if you were driving the last bus out of hell and I was made of ice cream.”

Sid Freeman shrugged. “Which, incidentally, is not an inaccurate description of your present predicament.”

“That’s how I know,” said Jane. “I asked myself what I’d do for you if you got me out of this, and the answer already came back: ‘Not a thing.’ ”

“You’re not a spontaneous person,” he chuckled. “But you wouldn’t be here if something weren’t making your little heart go pitty-pat. What is it?”

“Top of the list is that I had to hot-wire a car in an airport lot in Akron, Ohio. It’s on the street with two suitcases on the back seat.”

“J.C. saw it when you got out of it. Old Chevy?”

“That’s the one,” said Jane.

Sid Freeman stood up and walked across the foyer into the kitchen. Dahlman could hear him muttering, and then two or three pairs of feet walking across the floor and a door closing. When he returned, he said, “They’ll dissolve it for you and bring in the bags.” He stared at Jane in a leisurely way. “Is that it?”

Jane nodded at Dahlman. “I take it you know about him.”

“Sure,” he said. “They said he took a hot one from a constable somewhere.” He suddenly poked his finger toward Dahlman. Although Dahlman was five feet away, the surprise made him involuntarily tighten his pectoral muscles and cringe to protect the wound, then wince at the pain it caused. “Right there.”

Jane said, “He’s been sewn up, he’s got antibiotics, but he’s going to need to stay in one place for a while and rest. While he’s healing, I go out and prepare a place for him to be somebody else, do the necessary shopping, and come back.”

“Big shopping?”

“I’ll be gone one week, two at the outside. We both stay two more weeks after that. During that time you help me cook up a first-rate identity: family pictures, school records, work history, credit record, driver’s license, the works. And I want a second identity that’s almost as good, in case he’s spotted using the first one. I could do it alone, but each step takes time and I don’t want to use time that way right now. When we leave, it’s in a good car with a clean title.”

Dahlman watched as Sid Freeman’s face took on a new expression. Dahlman could tell it was only an approximation of a face Freeman had once seen that had carried concern and regret, which he had found intriguing. “Ah, Janie,” he moaned. “Where have you been? You’re such a prize.”

“I quit doing this about a year ago, on the stupid assumption I could have a life,” said Jane. “Anything on that list you can’t handle?”

“Let’s see,” said Freeman. He squinted down at his fingers as though he were counting them, then waved the whole hand. “All of it.”

“Why not?”

“Janie, Janie, Janie,” he said softly. “You disappear without a footprint—which, after all, is what anybody with a brain always thought you would do—but then you come scratch at my door, wet-puppy style, and talk as though you’re still a fixture of the landscape. You nodded off, times changed, annelids turned.”

“Annelids look pretty much the same on both sides,” she said, unperturbed. “Now, human beings—”

“Sid’s not human,” Sid interrupted. “He’s humanoid: two arms, two legs, wears corrective lenses, takes money.”

“Oh, money,” said Jane. “If we’re just haggling about price, let’s hear numbers.”

“Sid doesn’t haggle,” he said. “Janie, I love you more than I hope for tomorrow’s dessert. But I can’t do business with you this time. I just let you in because you remind me of my mom.”

“So your kids aren’t chopping the Chevy for me?”

“They like the activity, so I threw that in as part of my lapse into sentiment. On the house. Besides, I can’t leave a thing like that on my doorstep and expect to do business. But Sid can’t fill your shopping list of goods and services.”

“Why can’t he? Did Sid get too rich in the last couple of years?”

He scowled. “Let’s explore your problem.”

“That’s better. How much will it take?”

“You have this baggage with you, this multiple-homicide suspect, escaped from custody in two states. You know more about the rest of this game than anybody alive. You tell me who’s hunting, what they’ll use, and where the game ends.”

Jane glanced at Dahlman, then answered. “If he were on his own, it would be over already, but he’s not.”

Sid Freeman shook his head. “I mean starting from now. Anybody making odds will say it ends by some TV zombie recognizing him and calling the police. The boys in blue don’t need to go it alone, because the F.B.I. has already invited them to call in. So they do, and pretty soon there’s a battalion. Are they then going to say, ‘Come out with your hands up’ loud enough for him to hear and reload? No. They’re going to batter down walls and make everybody for miles around gulp tear gas. You and Foxy Grandpa will have many more holes than you started with.”

“Will you miss me?”

“Will I have time? The next day, the F.B.I. demonstrates its zero tolerance of the brand-new Fleeing Felon Problem it just discovered by tracking down whoever gave you the papers, the car, the clothes, and whatever else they found near your bodies. They won’t get me, of course, but they’ll need somebody. They could scare clients, choke off a couple of my sources and suppliers. Very inconvenient. And for what?”

“What has it ever been for, Sid? Money.”

He stared at her body from the feet up to the neck. “If you were carrying that kind of money among your various curves I’d see it, and you wouldn’t leave it in a hot car, so it’s on a pay-later basis, right?”

“I could get more during my shopping spree.”

“I don’t want to be depressing, but this time wanting to come back does not mean I’ll hear your footsteps on my front porch. When your suitcases get here, I’ll drop you someplace. Final word.”

“You know who framed him,” Jane said.

Sid’s face froze in its mask of annoyance. It stayed that way for a few seconds. His mouth opened once to say something, then closed again. Finally the mask vanished and was replaced by another, softer one. “You drop off the radar screen for a couple of years. Do you think you invented the disappearing business, so you can take it with you when you go?”

She stared at him intently. She tried to remind herself that her instinctive feeling of dread didn’t matter for the moment. He knew something. “Who is it?”

But Sid shrugged. “There are some people, and they’re doing pretty much what you always did, only they’re not going about it in this eccentric and self-indulgent way.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re in a business, and they act like it. They charge what they can get, and they don’t turn somebody away because he offends their nostrils. They give him what he can pay for. This, as you know, is a theory of business I subscribe to. On occasion they’ve sent to me for specific items of merchandise.”

“Sent to you?”

“Yeah. They send the runner to pick up things, but don’t come with him. There will be this typed list of stuff, practically pinned to his shirt, and he’ll have the money in cash. I’m talking about runners who know zero. If I let them out the wrong door, they wouldn’t be able to find their way back to the car.”

“Like who?”

Sid threw up his hands. “Do I suddenly know names? Some up-and-comers from business school who looked at me like I wanted a handout for wiping their windshield.”

“Any women? Kids?”

“No kids so far. A couple were women, but the kind that when they say ‘the market’ they don’t mean a place you buy groceries. They’re just men with suits that cost more and don’t come with pants.”

“And not one of them ever made a mistake and said who sent them?”

“Never.”

“Did you ask?”

“Be assured,” said Sid Freeman. “They always say it was a friend of theirs. But these are not people who would know enough not to say. Someone told them.”

“What did they buy?”

“Not much overlap. What some of them wanted might get them a job as night watchman in a junkyard. One of the women got the full glamour makeover—birth, Social Security, credit, diplomas, transcripts, job references, old tax returns, doctored photographs of her standing in front of the Denver capitol building hugging one of my guys who was cleaned up to look like a boyfriend, passport, shot record.”

“You came up with all that, and she said nothing? It must have taken a month.”

“You have to understand that this is a very unpleasant young woman who came to Sid’s door with a suitcase full of money. No incentive to establish a social relationship, and Sid doesn’t haggle.”

“Didn’t the proportions strike you as wrong?”

“They did seem a bit off,” said Sid. “But I kept an eye on the television and checked a lot of newspapers and magazines. There was nobody who looked like her, no disappearances of famous people, or of anybody about the same time who rated a line of print.”

Jane’s eyes rested on Dahlman, but he sensed that she was listening to something. “Your boys are back.”

Sid looked away from her. “See how reliable? The future is in good hands.”

Jane was still staring at Dahlman. “What about him?”

Sid looked at Dahlman too. “What about him?”

“How did you know he wasn’t some madman who really had killed his friends and run off? If you got the story from television, what was there that told you?”

Sid stared at her uncomfortably. “I think it was his cunning plan to go live in a farmhouse. Was he going to stay there forever? Who would buy that as a plan? I mean, not counting the police.”

Jane shook her head. “The world is a wondrous place, Sid. Naive credulity is rampant. What did they buy from you? The photographs they left in his house?”

“Just the gun. That’s how I remembered the name. It was a tricky business, because it had to come from a legitimate dealer that never saw the buyer, but be registered in the name Dr. Richard Dahlman.”

“Registered?” said Jane. “Then it was a suicide gun?”

“That’s what I think now, after all the dust that got kicked up. I think the idea was to shoot them both and put the gun in his hand. Maybe they figured it was safer to just kill her: no matter how hard the police look at a murder it’s still a murder, but a murder-suicide doesn’t always include a real suicide. If the suicide doesn’t hold up, they start looking for somebody else.” He frowned at Dahlman. “They obviously put too much confidence in police marksmanship.”

Jane said, “Are you going to help us, or not?”

“I still like money,” he said. “But something in my mind keeps telling me, ‘Janie and these faceless guys are about to bump into each other. Who’s coming home to dinner?’ Your suitcases are waiting.”

Jane walked to the door, picked up Dahlman’s suitcase and reached for hers, then saw the keys beside the handle. She could see that the papers beneath them were a car registration and a pink slip with no names on them. She straightened and turned toward Sid Freeman.

“Just fresh horses, that’s all,” he said. “It’s the quickest way to get him out of my place of business.”