The Face-Changers

23

Jane arrived in Minneapolis and registered at the Copley Hotel because it was too big and ornate and comfortable for a woman who didn’t want to be noticed, then bought the best street map the gift shop had and went out to find an apartment and do some shopping. She had very specific requirements for the apartment, so she wasted very little time.

Sid Freeman had always been proud of his little stronghold, even in the days when he was calling himself Harlan J. Hall or Mrs. Dilys Mankewitz and he had not yet reinforced it with steel and stone. But even in those days, Jane had been alert to its vulnerability. Sid required that every visitor approach the house from the same direction and move along the rise above the lake shore so that his lookout—usually Quinn, when he was around—could study the visitor through a rifle scope. Sid and his sniper had an elevated, unobstructed view of the path all the way from the other end of the lake to his door. What Sid had not provided was a way of keeping a third party from seeing the path too.

Jane visited an apartment in a big house two blocks west of Sid’s. It was slightly higher on the hill than Sid’s house, and obscured by the leaves of two long rows of tall oak trees along the old, quiet streets.

The apartment was on two levels, with a kitchen and small living room on the second floor and a staircase that led to a bedroom at the peak of the house. It had once been the attic, so it had a low sloping ceiling and was hot, but the landlord had installed an air-conditioning unit in the front window. It had a separate entrance down an enclosed staircase to the driveway. Jane walked back to the front window and studied the view of the lake over the air conditioner, then took out a pen to sign the lease.

Jane left her apartment and went out to buy all of her furnishings at once. At a sporting goods store in a mall she found a sixty-power spotting scope on a tripod. At another sporting goods store she bought a nightscope with infrared enhancement. She had known Sid for years, and if those were what he used, they were what was necessary. The electronics were slightly more chancy, because she wasn’t yet sure how much of what she bought would work at this distance. She knew that the only way to solve it was to buy everything that might work: two video cameras, a directional microphone, a tape recorder, a scanner that the salesman slyly assured her would pick up conversations on cell phones. Then she went to a giant appliance discount store and bought an air-conditioning unit exactly like the one in the front window of her apartment.

Jane set up her gear in the late afternoon. She knew that night was the time for watching the path, because Sid dealt with people who tried to stay indoors in the daytime. She took the motor and refrigeration coils out of her new air conditioner so it was nothing but a metal box with louvers, and used it to replace the original one. She put the video cameras inside it, plugged them in to run on AC power, and aimed them between louvers at a spot on the path through the park that was open and close enough so that with the zoom lens set properly she could get a clear picture of anyone visiting Sid Freeman’s house. Then she placed the spotting scope and the night-vision scope in the air conditioner beside the cameras.

The directional microphone took a bit more thought. It had a dish-shaped receiver that was too big to escape notice in a window, and putting it behind a pane of glass or a set of blinds would muffle sounds. It occurred to her that the proper way to use it was to make it look like a TV satellite dish and place it on the roof.

Jane spent fifteen minutes trying to decide whether the roof was merely her best hope or her only hope, because best hope was not good enough for Jane Whitefield. Her parents had brought her up without concealing that the world was a place composed of materials that were much harder and more enduring than human flesh and bone. Nothing she had seen since then had caused her to forget it.

Her father had been an ironworker, one of hundreds of Iroquois men who had traveled the country in little crews, working on big construction projects for much of each year. There was a myth in the society at large that the Iroquois men were simply lucky that they had inherited some odd blank on their chromosomes in the spot where other people carried the gene for their fear of heights. They walked the high girders that formed the skeletons of skyscrapers, and clung to the cables that spanned bridges, and made good money. But one of those men had been Henry Whitefield, and he had told his daughter the truth.

There was no such thing as a genetic immunity to fear. Three hundred feet looked the same through his brown eyes as it did through the blue eyes Jane had inherited from her mother. Things of the mind were controlled by the will, not by chemical codes. A man who needed to feed his family simply taught himself to weigh the risk against the benefit without adding in the fear. It was probably two years later that the cable holding the steel I-beam that suspended Henry Whitefield so high above the river snapped.

Jane had been eleven that summer, and she had been three thousand miles away from that river in Washington, but she had seen him falling, over and over in her dreams. Sometimes she would be up there with him, not standing on anything as he was, but disembodied, watching him in his red flannel shirt and blue jeans, looking so small up there surrounded by sky. And then the cable snapped and he was lost, his arms flailing and his legs kicking for second after second, all the way down. But sometimes she would be inside him when it happened, and that was worse. She would be looking down all the way at the dark water and the big rocks along the edge, watching for a long time as they rushed up toward the eyes she was looking through.

Jane hated heights. The roof of this house was steep. It was a three-story house at the street, but on the lower side of the hill where the directional microphone needed to be placed, the ground sloped away, so it was four stories high. The risk was not inviting. All she could do to mitigate it was to prepare herself. The next morning she went out to a sporting goods store and bought a baseball and a pair of leather gloves. Then she stopped at a military surplus store and picked out a hundred-yard spool of olive-drab seven-strand para cord. She wasn’t sure whether that meant it was used in parachutes, but the label guaranteed that the minimum tensile strength was five hundred and fifty pounds.

That afternoon she unrolled some of the cord from the spool and set to work on it. Every two feet she tied a strong knot that held a loop a foot in diameter. After thirty feet, she decided she had tied enough loops. She unrolled another hundred feet of cord, then cut it. Next she sliced open the laces of the baseball in two spots, worked the end of the cord through one hole and out the other, and tied it securely. She opened the side window of her bedroom. Below her she could see the top branches of a big sycamore, and she half-formed the notion that if she fell she could clutch at it to slow her fall, but then dismissed the idea. She wasn’t going to fall.

That evening, when she heard her landlords’ car start, she hurried to the window. She watched the wife get into the passenger seat, then saw the headlights go on. The car backed out of the driveway, then drove off down the hill toward the main thoroughfares, where the restaurants and movie theaters were. It was time.

Jane opened the window at the side of the house. She leaned out, held onto the frame with her left hand, lowered the baseball about ten feet, and began to swing it back and forth in an arc. It gained momentum, swinging faster and faster, higher and higher. Finally, as it reached the bottom of its arc and began to climb, she changed its direction slightly so it came up, high over her head above the overhanging eaves of the house. She let go, heard the hard ball hit the roof, bounce once, and then roll down the other side of the peak.

She paid out more para cord until the line went slack, then quickly went down the stairs and outside to the driveway. The ball was lying on the pavement with the cord hanging down to it from the roof. Jane pulled the cord slowly and patiently, dragging more and more of it out her upstairs window and over the roof. When it stopped, she climbed upstairs and found that one of the knots she had tied to make loops had snagged on the rain gutter. She searched the back yard until she found a rusty rake, went up to her room and used it to push the loop up over the gutter onto the roof, then pushed the next few up after it. Next she returned to the driveway and pulled the para cord tight again. She wound the para cord three times around the trunk of the tree beside the driveway, tied it securely, and hurried back to her room.

When she had the directional microphone and its electrical cord strapped to her back with a belt, she pulled on her gloves, gingerly put one leg out the window, and looked down to place her foot in the nearest loop of cord. She felt her lungs huff, as though a pair of hands had clapped together against her ribs to squeeze her breath away. She raised her eyes a little, grasped the cord, and swung out above the ground.

She climbed slowly, using each loop as a foothold, then reaching to grasp the next one to pull herself up until she was just below the gutter. Then she reached over it and felt for the next loop. When she found it, she pulled herself over the gutter onto the roof. She held on to the rope as she crawled up the steep incline to the chimney. She freed herself of the directional microphone, set it where the chimney would hide it from the street and the slope would hide it from Sid Freeman’s house, then aimed it at the spot where she had parked her car on the night when she had brought Dahlman here.

Jane began the slow descent from the peak of the house, paying out the electrical wire as she went. When she reached the place where the para cord bent and went over the gutter, she felt the worst of the fear. She clung to the para cord and let her legs go out while she lowered herself with her hands, then bent at the hip and felt with her toes for the next loop.

When she found it, she felt a relief so strong that her breath came from her throat in raspy whispers. It took a short time to climb down to the level of her window. When she reached it and pulled herself across the sill she lay on the floor, trembling for a moment. The arches of her feet hurt from unconsciously trying to bend them to cling to the loops of the cord like hands.

When she stood up, she felt energized. She had not fallen. Now she had to clean up. She ran downstairs to cut the cord free of the tree and pick up the baseball. She returned to the room and pulled the cord back over the house into her window. Then she went back to watching the path along the lake.

It was early the next morning before she adjusted all of her equipment for the last time. The microphone and one video camera were trained on the most likely spot for a car to park along the lake. That was the only place where the face-changers would say anything to their rabbits. After that, until the rabbit returned, he was on his own. The second video camera was aimed at the approach to Sid’s house. At this range the built-in microphone might even pick up a bit of what the lens saw. Then Jane lay on the bed and closed her eyes.

By watching all night and working all morning, she had reset her internal clock to become nocturnal. When she closed her eyes she had to endure three very clear and convincing versions of herself losing her footing on the high, steep roof, then sliding down the rough shingles, scrabbling with her fingers so the nails broke, then being launched over the edge, where she made one desperate grab for the gutter. Each time, that only got her turned around, so that she plummeted toward the ground headfirst like a diver, the wind blowing her hair and the ground coming toward her so fast it seemed to swell to fill her field of vision like an image in a zoom lens. Then her heart would stop for an instant, and she would be awake again. While she waited to see it for the fourth time, she fell into a deep sleep.

She awoke at sunset and went to check her equipment. She played each of the tapes on fast forward, but none of them had picked up anything but a woman walking a dog by the lake, at least a hundred cars passing on the road above it, and four little boys who had come to give bread to the ducks.

She had dinner and rewound all of her tapes. When it was dark she put the earphones on and listened to the microphone and watched the lake with her night-vision scope. Late in the morning she turned on her recorders and video cameras and went to sleep.

Jane watched the path this way, night after night. She ate simple meals that didn’t require her to be away from the window. She performed extended versions of the Tai Chi movements to keep her muscles loose and her joints flexible. She left the house only during daylight, when visitors were least likely to come along the path, and when she returned she checked the tapes her recorders had made. She resisted the growing temptation to turn her attention toward Sid Freeman’s house, because she knew there was no more to be learned there. All she could do was make Sid’s protégés think his house was her target and kill her.

She kept her suitcase open, and the only clothes that were out of it were the ones she was wearing at the moment. She had a second, larger suitcase that she would use to carry the cameras and recorders and earphones. The directional microphone could stay on the roof if it didn’t come down the first time she tugged the power cord. One thing she knew for certain was that she was not going up on that roof after it.

Each evening after dinner she cleaned the apartment completely before she sat down to watch the path. If she had to leave quickly, there would be two or three door knobs to wipe off, and the place would yield no prints. She even composed a note and typed it on a typewriter on display at an office equipment store. It said, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, I’m afraid I’ve been called away urgently. My mother back in Florida has had a stroke, and I need to be there to care for her immediately. Thank you so much for your kindness. I’m enclosing next month’s rent to cover the inconvenience while you find a new tenant. Regretfully, Tamara Davis.” She had put the paper into the typewriter and taken it out with a tissue in her hand, then slid it into an envelope the same way so it would carry no prints.

With that, she decided she was ready. In the Old Time, a lone Seneca might have come to this very place to watch the lake. In the wars of the forests, all attacks were surprise attacks, and the best strategy was to become indistinguishable from the forest, to wait and listen and watch. Enemies needed to be studied until their strengths and vulnerabilities were known and the time was perfect. Relations with distant tribes of the west were fluid and shifting, so they were studied for signs of impending trouble.

Each night she sat at her window gazing at the familiar picture she could see through her night-vision scope. By now the bright green image had become flat like a painting—an unchanging arrangement of shapes that her mind simply verified each time she leaned to the eyepiece.

But the green painting had small living elements. Owls nested high in the canopy of leaves at the top of the stand of old maples across the lake to her left, where there were no houses. Every few nights she would see one glide out of the high place, suddenly swoop into the brush, and rise clutching a small shape that must have been a mouse, then flap its wings to return to the confusion of dark leaves. The ducks that swam on the surface of the lake in daylight were gone by the time she took her post each night, but she had studied the tapes to see them return to their nesting places in the reeds to the right of the owl trees. To the far right, near the road that ringed the lake, she had found squirrels. To amuse herself she had switched on the infrared scope to pick up their body heat as they slept in their ramshackle piles of dead leaves in the high overarching limbs of the sycamores.

The only human shapes that moved across the green painting regularly were two people she called Woman with Dog and the Sad Man. Woman with Dog seemed to work late five nights a week. Jane saw her car appear on the hill at around midnight and pull into the driveway of a big house up one of the side streets across the lake. The light would go on only in an upper window, so Jane was sure the woman lived in a converted upstairs apartment like hers. Then the woman would reappear in a sweat suit with a retriever on a leash, and go for a long walk in the park. The Sad Man usually appeared some time later. He seemed to come from a distance. He walked steadily, but not quickly. He slouched forward and looked down at the ground, as though he were wondering whether this was the night to burrow into it.

The other visitors were ephemeral. One night, after Jane had watched a middle-aged man selling crystal methamphetamine to a college-age boy, a man and a woman pulled to the curb near the spot where Jane’s directional microphone was trained. Jane’s spine straightened, she turned on her cameras, and recorded the sounds her microphone picked up. The scene began as she expected. The man was alert and watchful, looking around him for other people, then moved the car with its lights out so that it was precisely in the ideal parking spot, shielded by bushes, barely visible from any side but Jane’s.

Jane put on the earphones, and the man said, “This isn’t a good idea. I don’t want to do this. Please.” That didn’t sound right. The woman’s voice said, “What are you afraid of?” Then she suggested, “The police?” and the man said, “Well, that’s not unreasonable, is it?” Jane increased the magnification of the zoom lens of the video camera aimed at the car, turned up the volume of the microphone, and began to prepare. She had her suitcase closed, her keys and purse on the bed, and was on her way to the window with the big empty suitcase to begin collecting her electronic equipment, when the sounds began to change. She stopped and listened. They were having sex.

Jane had started to turn off her electronic equipment, then stopped. It wasn’t out of the question for one of them to be a face-changer and have that kind of relationship with a runner. This wasn’t the time for it, but since it wasn’t beyond the realm of human behavior, she couldn’t dismiss these two people just yet. She waited, keys in hand.

Finally, the man said, “Next Friday?” and the woman answered, “I’m sorry, but it’s my anniversary, and it’s very important to me. How about Saturday?”

Jane thought about that a few times afterward, but never was confident that she understood. Each of the false alarms during those few weeks made her faster and more efficient, but each one made her more impatient. She seemed to have done to herself what she had done to Carey. She had left him in a kind of paralysis, where he could do nothing but stay where he was and allow every tiny movement he made to be watched. Now she was trapped too, sitting in a room watching a static landscape, waiting to detect some minuscule change.

One night another man and woman arrived and stopped in the same parking place. They behaved so much like the other couple that she was almost sure it was just more sex. The woman said, “Are you sure no one will see?” and the man was the one who said, “Don’t worry.” But then he said, “Just walk straight ahead along that ridge. Then go up to the big brown house, stand on the porch, and knock. By the time you get there they’ll be waiting.”