The Face-Changers

1

Janet McAffee stepped out of the Baltimore Medical Center and winced as the icy air coming off the Inner Harbor lacerated her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes began to water as she lowered her head and searched for the taxi cab. At one time she would have called the sensation pain, but that was before she had learned what pain was. The chemical peel had only left her skin feeling tender and exposed, the way a sore tooth would feel if she drank iced tea.

The part of the makeover that had taken her by surprise was the liposuction. That had been the only part of the process that she had been secretly looking forward to, because it seemed like cheating away all the days she had convinced herself she was too busy to exercise and too hungry to turn down dessert. But the liposuction had cost her a week of hot, fiery misery before she had felt like moving again. Because they had sucked most of the fat from the places that a person rested on, stillness had not offered much relief. The doctors never told you that. Instead they drew lines on a photograph of your face to show you how clever the cut-and-stitch surgery was going to be. The mild discomfort from that was already half-forgotten and the scars were almost invisible.

She spotted the taxi cab parked beside the curb just outside the parking barrier, where the driver had stopped so he wouldn’t have to pull a ticket from the machine to come into the lot. She resolved to be more specific next time she ordered a cab. She squared her shoulders and prepared to step away from the shelter of the big medical building into the wind. She felt a hand touch her elbow and shrank from it, tightening her muscles to clamp her arm to her side.

Janet whirled. A tall, thin woman with long black hair was standing beside her, looking into her eyes. The woman seemed to note her startled reaction, but it seemed neither to surprise nor particularly worry her. She said quietly, “Go back into the building and wait for me just inside the door.”

“But that’s my cab. I was just on my way—”

The woman interrupted. “Didn’t they tell you I would come for you? It’s time.” Her eyes betrayed a small glint of amusement as she watched Janet’s face.

Janet sensed a sudden weakness in her arms and legs. They felt heavy, but somehow empty, as though there were no bones. “All right,” she said.

She stepped back in and watched through the glass door as the new woman walked up to the driver, said something to him, gave him some money, and stepped back to watch him wheel out and drive away. She turned and walked across the driveway and through the door, then kept going past Janet without looking at her. After five paces, she stopped, turned, and said, “This is it. If you’re coming, come now.”

Janet nodded and took a step. She could not help wondering if this single step was one of those enormous ones, like a step off the railing of a ship, but then she reminded herself that this wasn’t like that at all. She had taken that step months ago, on the night when she had decided to make the telephone call. She had been busy preparing for this day for a long time—first quietly moving out of the condominium into the small apartment where everything was unlisted and nobody but the police knew she lived there, then enduring the makeover. This was only the next step, not the first.

She followed the tall, dark woman down the hallway and out the front door, then to a small green car that looked a lot like the one that Janet had owned until—No, she didn’t want to follow her memory backward. This was a new beginning.

Janet got into the passenger seat and closed the door just as it began to move. The woman accelerated away from the curb and into traffic, then moved quickly into the next lane, then turned, turned again, and headed east. She was not exactly a reckless driver, but she was aggressive and sure, and those were qualities that made Janet uneasy.

Janet said, “I didn’t think you would come for me here.”

“That’s why I did,” said the dark woman. Then she seemed to change, as though she had thought about it and decided that there was no practical reason not to be friendly. “Everyone who has been wondering if you might try to disappear assumes that you’ll do it in certain ways. What they’re waiting for is to see you some night slinking out of your condo carrying a suitcase. Nobody disappears from a doctor’s office.” She glanced at Janet. “How did it go, by the way?”

Janet shrugged. “He says I’m doing great. I’m not supposed to see him again for six months.”

“He did a wonderful job on you. Big improvement.”

“Thank you,” she said mechanically. It was a shock that this woman, who seemed so strange, would say something as normal and human as an empty compliment. “How do you know? We’ve never met before.”

“I’ve seen a lot of pictures of you.” She made another turn. “What have other people said? Has anyone who knew you before the surgery seen you since?”

Janet shook her head. “I’m a little low on the invitation list lately, and I didn’t go out at all while my face still made people stare. The doctors and nurses are the only ones. And cab drivers.”

The woman swung into a covered parking ramp, went up two levels, then stopped in an empty space and turned off the engine.

“Why are we stopping?”

“I need to give you some things.” She reached into her purse and produced a ticket in an airline envelope. “Your flight leaves in two hours.”

“Where am I going?” She pulled aside the corner of the envelope and read the ticket. “Chicago?”

“You’ll be there for a while, but it’s just a stop on the way. It will keep you out of sight until your plastic surgery is completely healed. You should show up at your final destination looking like a finished product—face, body, hair, wardrobe, credentials.”

She handed Janet a small wallet that was stiff with cards. “Here’s your ID.”

Janet looked at the MasterCard on top. “Mary Anders. Is that going to be my name?”

“Just for this trip. You’ll need to flash identification to get on the plane. If something goes wrong or you’re stalled, you can’t even get a room without a credit card. Use those.”

Janet looked at the driver’s license. The picture was the one she’d taken in a photo booth a week ago, but it had been touched up. It looked to her as though someone had scanned it into a computer and adjusted the color and texture to hide the surgery. She gazed at the picture. It was a young, pretty woman, but it was still her face. Maybe she would look like that after everything healed, and it made her hopeful again. She put the wallet in her purse with the ticket.

“Now let’s have yours.”

“Mine? What?”

“Your license, credit cards, and so on. Whatever you have with Janet McAffee written on it has to go.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. It had not occurred to her that she would have to lose things that took so little space. But of course she did. The dark woman watched impatiently while she took out her wallet, removed her driver’s license, stared at it for a second as though she were saying good-bye to it, and set it down on the seat beside her.

“You’d better give me the whole thing. There’s nothing in there that you’re going to need.”

“But what about later?”

The dark woman looked at her sympathetically and patted her arm. “I wish we had more time together right now, before you get on that plane, so I could help you through the hard parts. I really do. This has all been done before, and there’s a right way. We don’t know how long it’s going to take for things in Baltimore to improve. It might be that those men will get caught trying to put a bomb in your condo tonight, or try to hire an outside killer who is really an undercover cop. Stranger things have happened. But you have to be prepared to wait a long time, and that means doing everything as though it were for keeps. It’s not that much harder.” She took the wallet and put it into her own purse. “Now for your traveling money. They told you to get a safe-deposit box nobody knows about, right?”

“It’s not in there. I was afraid you’d come for me when the banks were closed. It’s in a long-term storage place. The closest cross streets are Light and Fayette.”

The woman looked at her with curiosity. “You mean by the courthouse, and all that?”

“That’s right,” Janet said apologetically. “I thought with all those policemen coming and going, it would be safer. It’s so much cash …”

The dark woman didn’t verify or contradict her theory. She seemed to be thinking hard. “Okay. Give me all your keys—condo, apartment, everything. I’ll get rid of everything that might cause trouble later.”

Janet handed over her keys, and the woman looked at them, then asked, “What about the safe-deposit box? Is the key in the apartment?”

“No, I have it with me.”

“Then give it to me. I’ll put your old ID in there with the rest of your papers.”

“But I only have one key.”

The woman smiled, but it was the kind of smile that told Janet she should have known better than to bring up something as foolish as that. “People lose them all the time. When this is over, you go to the bank. You tell them you lost it. They drill the lock.” She held out her hand.

Janet handed over the key.

The dark woman seemed to hear something. Her eyes rose to settle on the rearview mirror. Then she turned in the seat and stared out the back window for a moment. Her smile was gone, and she looked intense, agitated. “We’d better get moving.”

Janet tried to keep herself from looking in the direction the woman had been staring, but she couldn’t help herself. “Did you see something?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m not in the business of hanging around to verify hunches. I just get people out.” She started the car.

A black car had been prowling up the ramp on the far side of the garage. As soon as the noise of the green car’s starter echoed in the concrete enclosure, the black car accelerated. It swung around the first aisle, where there were a dozen empty spaces, past several more aisles, and began to make the turn up this aisle.

The dark woman backed out of the parking space quickly, stopped with a jerk, threw the car into forward gear, and shot ahead. Janet tried to interpret what she had seen in a dozen sensible ways, but she could not. The black car could only have been trying to make it up the aisle before the green car backed out so it could stop behind it to block it in.

Janet turned in her seat to stare out the rear window. She could make out that the black car had silhouettes of two heads, but the upper part of the windshield was tinted, and she could not have seen the two faces in the dim light of the parking structure anyway. She had time to see it go past the parking space they had just vacated before the dark woman spun around the first turn of the ramp and descended so she couldn’t see anything.

“I think they’re coming,” she said.

The dark woman didn’t look surprised. “Are they the ones we have to worry about, or could they just be police?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen them. They would just call me on the phone.”

The woman’s eyes kept flicking upward to the rearview mirror, then settling on the ramp ahead so she wouldn’t hit anything. “I guess we’d better assume they are, since they don’t seem to own a siren. I’ll have to lose them while you go get your traveling money. It’s Light and Fayette?”

“Yes.”

“All right. We’ve got about an hour and forty minutes left, so this will be tight Here’s what we do. I can get us into the neighborhood in the next five minutes. I’ll let you off somewhere nearby, and keep going. You go into the storage place and pick up your money, then meet me wherever I let you off.”

“Okay.”

“Then get ready.”

Janet watched the rear window while the dark woman took several quick turns, sped down a narrow street lined with row houses, cut across a parking lot, then emerged on Light Street and drove past the intersection at Fayette. Finally, she turned in at the Harbour Court Hotel. There was a brick portal like the mouth of a cavern, then a circular patio with a fountain in the middle to keep cars moving around it in a circle to the lobby entrance.

The dark woman said, “Go through the hotel and out the other side. This is where I’ll be. Don’t look for the car, look for me. Now, move.”

Janet slipped out of the car, the doorman dodged in front of her to open the door, and then she was in. She heard the sound of a car scraping its undercarriage, then turned her head to see that the black car had turned into the driveway too quickly just as the dark woman was accelerating to bring the green car around the fountain and out to the street. The two men inside seemed too intent on following the little green car to glance in the direction of the hotel entrance. They just leaned their bodies inward against the centrifugal force as they made the circuit, then bounced out again.

Janet hurried across the lobby, then out the other door, and nearly ran up the street toward Fayette. She stepped into the storage building’s entry, rang the doorbell on the counter, and spent a few seconds catching her breath. It took three more rings to bring the clerk, who opened the cage and led her up to her storage cubicle. She was worried already. She had not exactly told the truth when she had allowed the dark woman to think the money was where it could be picked up quickly.

When she had locked the door behind her, she went to the big box where the winter coats were hanging in a row covered with dry cleaner’s bags, and slipped her leather carry-on bag from between two of them. Then she began retrieving letter-size envelopes, each with ten thousand dollars sealed inside it, and placing them in her bag.

She took four from inside a pair of high leather boots she had not worn in years, two from coats that had inner pockets, three from the inside of Aunt Rosalie’s giant casserole dish that had come to her because it didn’t fit in any relative’s cupboard, and had not fit in Janet’s either. There was one envelope inside the little door in the back of the big wind-up clock that chimed every hour loudly enough to wake anyone trying to sleep in any dwelling smaller than an English manor house. Two were rolled inside the stemmed glasses and covered with tissue paper, and one slipped between the crystal decanters. She had once thought them pretty, but now anything associated with drinking made her depressed. It took a moment to push the bad painting of a sailing ship out of its thick frame and remove the false backing, then almost as long to collect the loose hundred-dollar bills she had packed there into their envelope.

There were two envelopes taped inside the carved Tibetan mask. She had been told that what the mask was vomiting through its fanged maw was supposed to be good luck, but she had never been able to feel comfortable about a culture so alien that it imagined good luck looked like that. She figured faith always worked that way—believing something frightening and unappetizing would be just the thing to make you happy. She supposed that attitude was why she had never married. Suddenly she wished she had a girlfriend with her so she could have said that aloud, but she was alone. At the moment, that woman waiting in the car was as close as she could come to a friend, and Janet somehow knew that the dark woman wouldn’t have laughed.

She found one envelope behind her graduation picture, one in the battery compartment of a bulky old-fashioned portable radio that held four batteries, and three more tucked in with the receipts she kept with her old tax returns. That made twenty-one: two hundred and ten thousand. Oh, and five thousand in her purse. She had gotten into the habit of carrying that with her in case the very worst happened and she didn’t even have time to come here.

Janet took a last look at the old things she had stored in the cubicle. She had judged all of them ineligible for space in her condo, but she had never been able to rid herself of any of them. She knew that as soon as the lease on the cubicle ran out, they would end up in a Dumpster. She felt a tearing sensation at the thought, paused for a moment, then retaped one envelope on the back of her graduation picture, under the frame cover.

She went out to the counter, where the clerk was waiting. “Is there any way I can pay in advance for the next five years?”

“Five?”

She had said it without thinking it through, and tried to concoct a reason why he shouldn’t think she was doing something crazy or illegal. “Yes. I figure with inflation, I’ll save money over the long run.”

He shrugged, and she could tell she had been wrong about him. If forced to think about it, he would probably have said that she was stupid, but he cared so little about her that he didn’t bother. He reached under the counter and produced a blank rental agreement like the one she had signed four years ago. “Sign it, and I’ll figure the charge.”

He punched a calculator on the counter and did some elaborate mathematical operation while Janet’s brain silently screamed, “Just move the decimal point to the right! Four eighty a year. Forty-eight hundred, divided by two, is twenty-four hundred.”

He said, “That will be … forty a month … times twelve months … times five.” Janet waited while he gave her a chance to prepare for the shock. “Two thousand four hundred.”

She had been counting out hundred-dollar bills while he’d completed his computations. “Here.” She handed him the money and waited while he wrote up a receipt.

As she left the building, she felt a little better, a little smarter. Two hundred thousand was enough running-around money, and this way, when she came back to Baltimore, she would at least have something—a little cash, a few objects that belonged only to her. She had even avoided writing a check, which would eventually be mailed to her condo and tell someone she had a rented storage space.

She glanced at her watch. It had taken her twenty-three minutes. She had used too much time. The dark woman had probably thought she would walk in, grab the bag, and run.

Janet hurried up the street toward the hotel, hating herself once again. She had worked hard for that money, invested it prudently each week for years, then carefully, over the past few months, had converted it to cash in five-thousand-dollar increments. She had hidden the cash in the way she had invested it: a little here, a little there. If the worst had happened, and someone had broken into her little storage area, she had hoped he might find one envelope and run away, assuming he had found everything. She had not considered that her chance of safety might be slipping away in the time it took her to gather it all.

The cold, steady breeze from the harbor punished her tender face as she hurried toward the hotel, but Janet felt that she deserved it. She had been too slow-witted to explain in advance to the woman who was helping her that the money would take time. That was unforgivable. Had she even made sure the woman knew that what those men had threatened to do to her wasn’t just beating her up or something? Yes. She had told the person on the telephone all about it. The one on the telephone had been a woman too, or she might not have been able to say some of the words. The dark woman might even have been the one on the telephone.

Janet hurried through the hotel entrance, then walked as casually as she could across the marble floor of the lobby. She had been in the habit of wearing business clothes to the plastic surgeon’s office. She had wanted to make the people there think she was a busy professional person, because being busy and prosperous seemed the same as being respectable. But now the disguise that had given her courage was making things worse. The high heels had always been just fine for getting out of a taxi cab and walking fifty feet to the waiting room, but now they were hurting her feet and making noises on the marble floor like a horse clopping down a cobblestone road. And the new sensitivity of the skin around her middle since the liposuction and tucks made her underclothes feel as though she were harnessed up to pull a carriage.

Janet kept her eyes ahead of her on the big glass doors across the lobby. A sliver of green made her hold her breath and stare, but when she saw it again, it was only the doorman in his green generalissimo’s uniform lurking outside the door. There didn’t seem to be a green car out there. Janet veered to the left a little so she could see the spot to the right of the door that was the logical place for the green car to be waiting, but she couldn’t achieve enough of an angle.

She quickened her pace, goading herself with the foolishness of taking the time to pay advance rent on her storage space. Her sudden reluctance to part with a pile of gewgaws too old and tasteless to keep in her home was going to get the dark woman killed, and then Janet. They both could have been out of Baltimore by now if she had only kept walking past that counter.

She reached the door and looked out, but the green car wasn’t in the courtyard. As she craned her neck to look toward the street beyond the portal, she felt the presence of someone behind her. She stepped aside to let them out the door.

The voice was almost in her ear. “Stay out of the doorway.”

It was the woman. She took Janet’s arm and led her toward the steps leading up to the restaurants on the second floor. “What happened?” Janet whispered.

“They were nastier about letting me lose them a second time.” She changed her direction slightly, and they skirted the stairway, went out the door, and emerged on Light Street. “The car is down here.” She brought Janet down Pratt Street, then turned into a parking area for the Convention Center. The car was parked between two big vans.

Janet came closer. The rear window had a small, round puncture, a milky circle of pulverized safety glass, and around it, a radiating spiderweb of cracks. She knew instantly that it was a bullet hole, and she noticed that it was not on the left side, behind the driver’s seat. It was on the right, where they must have thought she was crouching. The dark woman acknowledged her thought.

“Don’t worry about that. Just get in. We’re taking too much time.”

Janet obeyed, wondering how anyone could not worry about that. She listened for some kind of assurance that what had caused the bullet hole was over, but none came. The car began to move away from the Inner Harbor, and she looked through the side and rear windows for the black car. What met her eyes were last glimpses of familiar sights—the National Aquarium, then the World Trade Center, and lots of other buildings that she had never been inside, but that she somehow felt she knew because she had driven past them so many times.

In minutes they were on the 295 expressway, then the 195, and every sign announced the approach of Baltimore/Washington Airport. But the dark woman pulled off the expressway and glided onto Dorsey Road, then stopped at a hotel near the southern edge of the airport.

“We’ll have to take a few quick precautions,” the dark woman said. “Come in.”

She hurried into the nearest wing of the hotel with Janet struggling to keep up, and moved down the carpeted hallway, then into a room. She hurried to the closet. “They’ve seen you, and they’d be fools not to have figured out you might be heading for the airport.”

“What can we do?”

“Get rid of everything they’ve seen, and show up a different way.” She laid some jeans and a sweater on the bed, then tossed a pair of thick-soled running sneakers on the floor. “Put these on.”

Janet put on the jeans and sweater, then sat on the bed to tie the sneakers, and the dark woman knelt on the bed behind her to braid her hair in a way she never wore it. “There’s an airport shuttle that stops at all the hotels along here. Maybe we can catch it. They’ll be expecting to see the car.”

The woman took a small suitcase out of the closet and opened it. She put Janet’s bag of money and her business suit and blouse into it. “Check the suitcase at the curb. You can’t carry a bag of money on a plane and not have them run it through the X-ray machine, and maybe look inside. After you get to Chicago, throw the clothes away. Once they’ve seen an outfit, it’s dangerous.”

Janet tried to look in the mirror over the bureau, but the woman took her arm and pulled her to the door. “It’ll have to do.”

As they walked down the hallway toward the reception area, Janet thought about her appearance. She had not been allowed to see whether it was attractive, but it certainly was better. The clothes had a different look, but also a different feel. The running shoes made her a couple of inches shorter, and they made her walk differently, too. The woman seemed to know dozens of little tricks and shifts and be able to put them into play so quickly that the effect was not a collection of small details, but a transformation.

The dark woman left her and went to the front desk. She spoke to the clerk, then looked up over the clerk’s head at the clock on the wall, and returned to Janet. “The shuttle bus is already due, so it should be here in the next minute or two.”

Janet said, “Are you coming with me?”

“No. The way to get past them is to lose everything they’ve seen—the car, the clothes, the hair, and me. They’ll be watching for two women, and once you’re in the building, there’s nothing I can do for you that the airport police can’t.”

“But the airport police don’t know I’m in danger.”

“Once you’ve checked your suitcase, go straight through the metal detectors. After that, whatever those men have in mind, at least it can’t involve guns or knives. Then duck into a ladies’ room and stay there until you hear the speaker announce that your flight is boarding. Walk directly to the gate and get on.”

Janet stared out at the driveway, watching for the shuttle bus, but that made each moment tick by and upset her. “I know this is none of my business, so you don’t have to answer.”

“If I can’t, I won’t.”

“What will you do next? If you’re in a hotel, you don’t live around here. Do you just get on a plane too?”

“The job’s not over yet.” The woman shrugged. “In a minute I’ll get back in the car and drive toward Baltimore. If they’re driving south toward the airport and see me coming in the northbound lane, there’s no way they can get to me, but they’ll think about it.”

“What will they think?”

“Either we didn’t go to the airport, and you’re still with me, or you’re already in the air. They’ll realize that either way, I’m the one to follow, so they’ll try, and fail.”

Janet saw the shuttle van pull up and stop at the curb. As the driver jumped out, she could see three or four people already inside. He ran to the door and said, “Airport?”

“Yes,” said the dark woman.

The driver snatched the suitcase and hurried to the van. Janet hugged the dark woman and whispered, “Thanks.”

“Go,” said the dark woman.

As Janet sat in the van beside a pair of elderly ladies, she could see the dark woman walking quickly toward the small green car to draw the killers away from her path.

As soon as the shuttle bus had safely made the turn onto the airport drive, the green car pulled away from the hotel. It moved along Dorsey Street for a half mile, then turned into the driveway of the Holiday Inn. The dark woman drove up to the front entrance, and two large men in their thirties got in.

The green car pulled away. As it passed under the Baltimore/Washington Parkway, the dark woman reached into her purse and produced a little Colt SF-VI revolver. She turned to the muscular man with blond hair sitting in the front seat beside her. “Get rid of this,” she said.

He took the pistol and put it into his coat pocket. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the bullet hole in the rear window. “What was that for, anyway?”

“To give her nightmares.” She looked in the rearview mirror and saw the top of the dark, curly head of the second man, who was bent forward as he ran his hand along the back of his companion’s bucket seat. “Don’t bother looking for a bullet in here,” she said. “I packed the inside of the window with a couple of phone books before I did it”

She passed a sign that said “Patapsco Valley State Park,” then pulled over at a wooded picnic area, and all three got out of the car. The woman opened the trunk, took out the tire iron, and leaned over the right side of the car. She swung the tire iron against the rear window three times, pounding the glass around the bullet hole into the back seat. She looked at the bigger hole, nodded to herself, and tossed the tire iron back into the trunk. “I saw a body shop down the road from your hotel the other day. Get the window replaced before you leave for home. And don’t forget to tell them you’re paying cash, so they don’t waste a day writing up an inflated estimate for the insurance company.”

The shorter man with curly hair said, “Are you going to fly back?”

“I’m going to keep her apartment occupied for a while,” she said. “It’ll take about a month to get a loan against her condo. Once the check clears, and I’ve cleaned her safe-deposit box and maxed out her credit cards, I’ll turn up.”

The blond man grinned, then sat on top of the nearest picnic table and lit a cigarette. “I’ve got to say, you kept us hopping. We actually lost track of you a couple of times.”

She nodded. “Did you ever see Jane when she was getting somebody out?”

“See her? I thought somebody made her up. You mean there’s a real Jane?”

The dark woman walked back toward the car. “Probably not,” she muttered. “There used to be.” She got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Come on. If we trade cars now, you may be able to get this one fixed today and leave.”