The Face-Changers

32

Jane found her seat in the airplane, sat down, and felt a cold, empty sensation in her chest. She was about to go west again, away from Carey instead of toward him. She had spent most of the summer trying to find people who had done terrible things and left Richard Dahlman to take the blame. But Richard Dahlman was in a pleasant retirement home in Carlsbad, and the one who was surrounded by policemen, watched, and suspected was Carey. It couldn’t go on much longer. Something Jane tried had to work.

She slowly forced herself to stop thinking about Carey and tried to think instead about what she had to do to set him free. But every time she tried to plan what she would do when she arrived in Santa Barbara, she began to lose her resolve. It was impossible to think about Santa Barbara without bringing back a horrible memory.

Harry the gambler had been so hot that she had not wanted to know where his final hiding place would be. She had been afraid that she would be caught and that whatever they did to her would make her reveal it.

She had taken Harry to Lewis Feng’s shop in Vancouver, where she could buy him a whole prefabricated identity, not just a few good papers like the ones she could have bought from Sid Freeman. Lewis Feng had not dealt in new names. Lewis’s specialty had been creating unoccupied spaces in the universe, then holding them until the right customers arrived with the right sums of money. The driver’s license, the credit cards, the Social Security card, the car registration, even the apartment had been obtained in advance and kept current, waiting for the right purchaser. Most of Lewis’s customers had been rich ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia who foresaw that some day they might want the chance to slip into the United States. But Lewis had kept a number of surnames that weren’t necessarily Chinese. So Harry had filled the space of Harry Shaw, and Jane had left him in Vancouver.

Harry had made no mistakes. He might have lasted forever if Jane had not met another runner who had convinced her that he, too, deserved the very best kind of identity, one with an impeccable provenance and enough age. Jane had taken John Felker across the country into Canada and left him at Lewis Feng’s shop. The next time she had seen Lewis Feng she was staring at a picture of him in a newspaper above an article that called him “the victim.” The next time she had seen Harry she had been looking down at him from the rim of an open grave. And the next time she had seen John Felker, he had been busy cycling the bolt of a rifle for his second shot at her.

Lewis Feng had placed Harry in a small apartment on a quiet street on the outskirts of a medium-sized community at the edge of the country. Harry had been killed in Santa Barbara. Jane reminded herself that it was a coincidence. Harry had been put there because it was a place where a lot of middle-aged people could be seen doing nothing. It was a place where Harry would not be able to play the horses in person. If he wanted to organize a game of cards, he couldn’t be stopped, but in Santa Barbara he probably would not find himself sitting across the table from other pros, who would know who he was and what his location would be worth to them.

The face-changers must have picked Santa Barbara for similar reasons. It was still a place where a stranger could appear to be minding his business without having a business that was evident. There were a couple of colleges, lots of tourists, lots of conventions, lots of retirees from someplace else. It was a place where you could give a runner a history and assume it wouldn’t be deeply scrutinized.

Jane got off the plane in Sacramento, then took the whole day driving south down the long highway through central California, and arrived in late afternoon. Santa Barbara still looked pretty and peaceful to her, wedged in the pocket between tall mountains and the ocean.

When she parked on Anacapa Street and walked to State Street, she could see that the pedestrian traffic was thicker and faster and busier than the last time. Visitors were the city’s main industry, and it looked to her as though business was expanding. The parts of lower State Street that used to cater to fishermen and divers and surfers had been replaced by a mall that might have been moved in one piece from Beverly Hills. Jane had stayed alive by reading changing configurations of people, and this change was one that added to her safety. It was not hard for a strange woman to stay invisible on a street crowded with strangers.

Jane waited until night to drive to Padre Street and find the address Christine had given her. It was a small white house with a low porch and a tiny patch of green grass between that and the sidewalk. The front windows were blocked by opaque white horizontal blinds, but she could see tiny slices of light behind them.

Jane drove past the house once each hour. The lights were still on at midnight, but were off when she came by at one. At two she made a list of the cars parked on the street nearby, because they probably belonged to people who lived on the block in houses that, like C. Langer’s, had no garage. One of them was probably C. Langer’s.

At three she parked her car around the corner and walked to the house for a closer look. The night was warm, and the smell of jasmine was overpowering. She left the deserted street and walked quietly beside C. Langer’s house. The windows were the sliding kind with wooden sashes and a latch between the upper pane and the lower. They were all closed and the latches locked, but there were no signs of an alarm system. Jane studied the lock on the kitchen door and the placement of shrubs between the windows and the street, then walked the fences along the sides and back. By the time she returned to her car she was confident that if she needed to, she could get in without making much noise or being visible from the street.

It wasn’t a bad spot to place a runner. It was quiet and private without looking as though anyone had gone to any effort to make it so. It had three good ways out—two that would put C. Langer on another street in ten seconds. That was the way to keep a runner alive: keep her out of sight, and give her an escape route she could use if something went wrong.

Jane stopped herself. She had unconsciously slipped into the assumption that C. Langer was a woman, just because Chris was a woman, maybe because the house looked like a woman’s. But Sid Freeman had told her that most of the clients he’d seen had been men. C. Langer was probably a man. It was also possible that this runner wouldn’t be some stockbroker who had driven drunk, or a banker who had been unable to keep customers’ accounts from merging with his own. There was no guarantee that the face-changers wouldn’t take on a runner who was dangerous. If they were in it for the money, a client was anybody who had the fee.

Jane stayed down the street in her car until it was nearly light. When she saw movement behind the blinds just before six, she pulled away from the curb and drove around the corner. She didn’t want to try for a first look at C. Langer at a moment when she was the only person on the street, and C. Langer could see as well as she could. She drove down to the beach to find a hotel where the dining room opened for breakfast early.

Jane spent two days learning about C. Langer’s car. By a process of elimination she learned it was a red Mazda Miata. It struck Jane as an impossible choice. Sporty little cars attracted attention, even if they weren’t expensive. Convertible tops were easy for a thief to slash open to get the radio, and a runner had to be careful to stay off police blotters. It was possible that C. Langer had a second car hidden somewhere and that this was a decoy, the one he or she wanted watchers to get used to seeing.

Jane was curious enough to try to find it. California law required drivers to carry proof of insurance, and C. Langer would be careful not to break any laws. Jane waited until after the street was dark and empty, then cut a slit in the convertible top that was just big enough to let her reach inside and open the door. She found the insurance card under the visor on the driver’s side, wrote down the company and policy number, and went home.

The next day she called the company and gave the woman who answered the policy number. She said she was a loan officer and C. Langer had used the car as collateral on a loan. Was the insurance on it current and valid? Liability, collision, and so on? Payments made on time? Cost of policy? Were there other vehicles on the policy? There was also a new Ford Escort, and the woman gave her the license number.

It took Jane another day to find the Escort. There were few places in Santa Barbara that would do for a runner’s car. It had to be accessible at any hour, it had to be close to where he or she lived, and it had to be unobtrusive. Jane found it in a carport behind an apartment building two blocks away.

It wasn’t until she had been studying the house and the cars for three days that she saw C. Langer come out the front door, walk down the steps, and get into the Miata. C. Langer was a man in his early thirties. He wore a crisply pressed pair of khaki pants, Top-Sider shoes, and a short-sleeved polo shirt. He had the sort of sunglasses that Jane had always favored for her runners, with big photosensitive lenses that kept a bit of tint in dim light and became practically opaque in the sun. He looked lean and walked with more energy than he needed to expend, and his skin showed that he spent quite a bit of time in the sun. Even in the short walk to the car he was watchful. His head was high and his eyes were in motion, scanning the middle distance from left to right as though he had been taught to take in the sights one sector at a time to avoid missing anything. Jane stepped on the accelerator of her car so she would be beyond the corner before he could get around to looking at her.

She drove to the supermarket and bought a cookie sheet, then bought a pair of tin snips at a hardware store nearby, and went to a big drugstore on State Street for a box of thin, disposable latex gloves, a small flashlight, and a roll of adhesive tape. She cut a thin strip from the middle of the cookie sheet, wrapped one end of it with adhesive tape to make a handle, and she was ready.

Jane had predicted that the bathroom window and the kitchen windows would be the least troublesome, and she had been right. The bathroom window had no screen, so she could simply insert the thin strip of metal upward between the wooden frames of the two panes of glass. When it was in, she pushed forward to bend it slightly so it slipped behind the latch. She had made it long enough so she was able to use it as a lever to pry the latch around and unlock the window.

The architect had probably assured somebody that the window was too narrow for a man, but it was wide enough for Jane to slither halfway in. It wasn’t until she reached her hips that she had to turn onto her side, put her right hand on the sink, and pull her legs in.

She closed the window behind her before she went out into the living room. She paused at the doorway. This wasn’t the way runners’ abodes usually looked. They almost always took furnished lodgings first, and kept them until they grew more confident. Even then, they tended to own things that they wouldn’t mind walking away from.

C. Langer had an antique sideboard. He had a dining room table inlaid with squares of bird’s-eye maple. He had a television set with a screen so big that it had gone beyond being obtrusive to just being a black wall. And C. Langer had a grand piano covered with framed photographs.

She moved closer. There was a picture of a man who looked as though he might be related to C. Langer standing on the deck of a sailboat. There was another of two children on a ski slope with a blond woman who looked like a model. The pictures were impressive. They looked old. She wondered whether Sid had made this man a few relatives. Of course, there were no pictures of C. Langer himself. A runner had to be able to walk away without leaving a fresh portrait of himself in the middle of the living room.

She moved into the kitchen and opened the cupboards. C. Langer’s kitchen didn’t look as though he did much cooking, so she began with the one beside the stove where the pots and pans were. It took her only a moment to find the pistol. She pulled it out of the pot gingerly because she could tell by the weight that it had a loaded magazine. She held it up. It was a Glock 19 nine millimeter. She put it back and looked in the refrigerator.

There was a milk carton that was too far back, and didn’t slosh when she lifted it. Inside were a driver’s license and credit cards in the name Frederick Henry Waldman, and underneath them were about fifty hundred-dollar bills in a plastic bag. The Waldman cards had no scratches from being swiped through magnetic readers, so they had to be a second set of forgeries he kept in case somebody saw through C. Langer. The milk carton was his escape kit.

Jane moved into the bedroom. Maybe the face-changers had taught him so well that Jane would not find what she was looking for. Maybe they had searched his belongings, cut the tags out of his clothes, removed anything that related to his old life, packed the boxes in Chicago themselves, and sent them on only when they were sure they were clean. But she had met few runners who had willingly taken that last step. Usually they tried to keep something—an old driver’s license, a birth certificate, some piece of paper—that would let them go back if some miracle happened and home suddenly became a safe place.

Jane took the top drawer out of the nightstand, held it up, and looked to see if anything was taped under it. As she moved to put it back, she saw the second pistol in the bottom drawer. This one was a Walther P99. She slid the drawer in over it. This was a man who didn’t waste money on cheap, unreliable firearms. She slid the drawer out and felt under it and behind it, but there was nothing taped there either.

Jane moved to the dresser and began removing the drawers, beginning at the top. It wasn’t until she tried the bottom drawer that she found the wooden box. She opened it and looked at each item carefully. There were two watches—a Patek Philippe and a Cartier, but neither had anything engraved on it. There were a couple of tie tacks and some cuff links. Then she picked up the ring, almost unbelieving. It was a Yale class ring that said 1965 on it. C. Langer wasn’t nearly old enough to have graduated in 1965. Was his father young enough to have? Just barely, if he had married young.

She tried to see it as a prop. Maybe he had bought it in a pawnshop to help with C. Langer’s identity. But if he’d done that, he must have expected to alter the year somehow. She looked at the side and made out the initials B.R.V. He would have to do something about those, too. But there was something bigger than that wrong with the idea. If a runner wanted to hide and develop a safe identity, pretending to be a Yale alumnus was a rotten idea, and wearing a Yale ring was a worse idea. If a college was necessary, it should be something like the University of California, which had nine campuses, each as big as Yale, and must be so familiar to people around here that nobody would think about it. Apparently the face-changers hadn’t bothered to teach this runner the first rule: don’t answer any questions until somebody asks.

Jane looked around the room to be sure that she was leaving it undisturbed, then picked up the pistol in the nightstand and went to the living room to wait.

Just as she sat down she heard the Miata drive up and stop in front of the house. She heard the car door slam, and suddenly the sights she had seen began to come together into a suspicion. The Yale ring, the money he had spent on the furniture and the guns and the two cars, the photographs that looked a little bit like him were all wrong. Everything in this house was wrong. C. Langer wasn’t an ordinary runner.

Jane stood up and moved silently into the bedroom, replaced the gun, slipped into the bathroom, and opened the window. She heard the key in the front-door lock as she was slithering out the narrow opening, then heard the door swing open. Jane lowered herself to the ground and slid the window closed, then crouched beneath it. She heard his footsteps approach. She heard him urinate, then flush the toilet. She knew he was directly above her, his face inches from the window as he washed his hands at the sink.

After what seemed like a long time, she heard his footsteps receding. Jane found a spot for her home-made latch opener behind a low bush near the window and left it there, then slipped along the back fence and across two yards to her car.

The next morning Jane waited until C. Langer had gotten into the Miata and driven off before she climbed in the bathroom window with her video camera. She turned it on as soon as the window was closed, then walked through the rooms, one by one. She made images of the furniture, recorded the serial numbers of the two guns, made close-ups of the photographs on the piano, the jewelry, the class ring, then laid out the Frederick Waldman identification cards and recorded close-up shots of those too. Before she left, she made sure that nothing was out of place. Then she closed and latched the bathroom window from the inside and left by the front door. When C. Langer came home, he would put his key into the dead bolt and turn it. Unless he was very astute, he would not be sure that the key moved too easily for the dead bolt to have been locked.

As soon as Jane was outside, she felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to escape from this place. She wanted to get into the car and drive as fast as she could, away from Santa Barbara. She promised herself that she would do it, but not yet. There was still one thing she didn’t have on tape.