Vanishing Act

13

She woke up slowly, fighting off consciousness for a long time as she lay in the bed with the sun beginning to shine into the room. She had held herself in the dream, had explored it and found that it wasn’t the kind of dream with boundaries but the kind that opened out before her in every direction she looked. She finally had relinquished it, like a swimmer giving in to the need to rise to the surface for air. When she opened her eyes she felt an instant when she couldn’t remember where she was, and it was like coming up and gulping for air too soon and breathing water. She felt a sensation like drowning must be, a desperate reflex to get up and out of it.

She sat up and looked around her at Jimmy’s room to make the dream go away. Then she listened for Felker. He was moving around in the living room. That was probably all it had been: She had heard him, and her mind had acted to absorb the noise into her dream so that it could get the sleep it needed. She stood up and went to the dresser to get her leather bag, and took it into the bathroom with her.

When she was dressed in clean blue jeans and a sweatshirt, she came out and bypassed the living room to get to the kitchen. When he came in to join her, she was making coffee. She didn’t look at him as she said, "Sorry I slept so late."

"That’s okay," he said. "I just got up myself." She turned around and saw him run his hand over the thick whiskers that had grown in on his jaw. "Do you think I should grow a mustache?"

"A mustache is not a great disguise for you."

"What’s a great disguise?"

"Great? Great is like you take female hormones for a year, get a sex-change operation that’s so good that your reclusive billionaire husband never suspects that you weren’t always a woman, and neither do any of his army of security people."

"I’d better settle for good. What’s good?"

"I haven’t decided yet." She frowned. "You’re a big, muscular, hairy ex-cop. You add a mustache, it just makes you look more like what you were anyway. You’ll need something that makes you look like a different kind of person who just happens to look like you."

"This is starting to sound like Zen."

"It’s not, but it is an attitude. What we’ve got to do is think about you." She stared at him for a moment. "You know who looks most like cops?"

"Who?"

"Criminals. They walk the same and they have the same facial expressions. Criminals just have worse tattoos and better haircuts."

"Passing for a criminal doesn’t sound like a step up."

’’That was just an example," she said. "You could pass for an old soldier. Were you ever in the military?"

"Yeah. Army. I hated it."

"But you know the names of things and where the bases are and all that. If you just don’t try to pass for a soldier in an army camp, you’re okay."

"I also don’t get paid. Say I’m a retired master sergeant. How does that help?"

"It gives people a box to put you in, so they don’t have to spend any energy thinking about you. We do all the thinking ourselves now."

"But what’s the smartest thing to be?"

"Just start thinking about who you really are. I mean, what would you have done if circumstances and accidents hadn’t pushed you into all this? We can make up other circumstances to account for anything. It just has to be something you can keep being for a long, long time."

"How long? Forever?"

"Say, twenty years. I imagine you’ve noticed, but it’s amazing how few people who carry guns for a living last that long."

"I noticed," he said. Then he added, "But there’s an endless supply."

"But the replacements won’t care about you, because John Felker is dead too and you’re somebody else." She watched him for a moment. "So what do you want to be when you grow up?"

"I don’t know."

"Then keep thinking about it."

They spent the day in the kitchen, sometimes sitting across the table from each other, sometimes up and walking around the room, now and then stopping to eat something, wash dishes, or make more coffee, but always talking.

"A lot of it is premeditation," Jane said. "You think ahead so that what you do doesn’t cause somebody to ask questions you can’t answer yourself."

"Like what?"

"Apply for a job where you need a security clearance or where they give employees lie-detector tests."

’’That one I know. The first question they ask is your name, so they’ll know what it looks like when you’re not lying. What else?"

"You don’t buy a house until you can survive a credit check. You rent. You think before you do anything."

"So I live like a rat in a hole forever."

"No, just the opposite. You look for ways to be average. You don’t get a job as a dishwasher, for instance. It’s perfectly honorable, but it’s what people do who are convicts or something. It makes you as vulnerable as they are. You pick the best career you can handle. If you need references or papers, you call the number I’m going to give you. They’ll come."

"You have people writing fake references?"

"Let’s just say there are people who do it. Or fill out ten years of fake tax returns on the right obsolete forms. Whatever it takes."

"I’ve seen some forged papers in my time, but none of them were quite right."

"If you knew they were forged, then they weren’t. It’s like anything else you can buy."

"You make it sound like an industry."

"It is," she said. "I didn’t invent it; I just found it. You’re used to picking up some career criminal and seeing his papers have somebody else’s name. It’s much bigger than that."

"What do you mean?"

"Nobody has any idea how many people are living this way. There are divorced parents who take their own kids and run off, millions of illegal aliens, women hiding from some lunatic who’s stalking them, people who made a bad start and don’t have the right degree or the right discharge or good enough grades. Ones who just got fed up and wanted out. All of these people need the same things. Most of them come on paper or can be gotten by using paper. When there’s a market, somebody will get into the business. It’s a lot easier to counterfeit a driver’s license than a twenty-dollar bill, and you can get more than twenty dollars for it."

"But won’t these people know who I am and where I am?"

"That’s a problem I solve. I don’t help people who are running away from debts or paternity suits or something. I don’t use shops that laminate I.D.’s so teenagers can buy a drink. I use the very best."

"But they’re still criminals."

"So are we. The paper is the easy part. What we’ve got to work on is you."

By the time they quit, it was after midnight. The next morning when Jane came into the kitchen, he was smiling. "I think I figured it out."

"What did you figure out?" she asked. She was glad to see that he had made the coffee. She had been dreaming again, and it had left her feeling confused and irritable. The dreams were caused by anxiety, she knew, and the constant talk and concentration on every aspect of his past and future to the exclusion of everything else in the world, like air and sunshine. She poured a cup and turned to face him.

"The reason I decided to be an accountant was that I liked math. I was good at it, and accounting sounded like a sensible thing to do with as little math as I knew. But what I really would have liked to be was a teacher."

She looked at him judiciously. The most common reason police officers gave for getting into it was that they wanted to help people. When they found themselves dragging their hundredth bloody suspect into the emergency room, some of them decided that wasn’t the way. "It’s kind of a lousy time in history to become a teacher. Real ones are getting laid off all over the place. Of course, math teachers are always hard to come by."

"I thought about it a lot last night. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life just hiding. If I live to be ninety, what do I say to myself—that I lived to be ninety?"

"Keep talking," she said. "I’m just thinking about it."

"It’s average, right? A nice job, but not high-profile. The outsiders you meet are mostly parents." He looked at her hopefully for a moment.

"Maybe," she said. "What sort of education do you have?"

"That’s a problem. I dropped out of college in my freshman year. The draft board was after me, so I figured I’d get the army out of the way. Then, after I quit the force, I got a B.S. in accounting at night."

Jane paced back and forth for a few minutes. "The more I think about it, the better I like it." She stopped and studied him. "You’re sure about this?"

"Yes."

"All right, then. You’re going to need to spend some more time in a college. That’s fine, because colleges are a great place to get lost if you know what you’re doing. You’re too old to be anything else but a guy who’s starting a second career, so we need an excuse."

"How about the truth? I was a cop who wanted to be a teacher."

"No. In that environment, the cop part would make people curious. You have to throw away something or be one of a kind. Losing your B.S. in accounting would cost you years. You were something else, and you were laid off. What kind of job could you have done with your credentials that wouldn’t bring you into contact with companies like Smithson-Brownlow?"

"A lot of things. All big corporations have accounting departments. Aerospace?"

"No, not a big company. There are too many ways to approach a big company and ask about you. We need a small company, so if somebody wants to get in touch with them, there’s only one number to call."

"Uhhh ... stores, banks, insurance agencies ..."

"Banks. You worked for a small bank and it went out of business. It’s boring and there’s nothing you have to explain. It happens all the time. You apply to get into a teacher-credential program. You have an accounting degree—not the real one, of course—and you want to major in math."

"Everything I do creates obstacles. A fake degree, fake jobs..."

"I told you to forget about the paper. That’s the easy part."

They spent the day talking about his new career and developing memories for him to take with him into it. The next morning, when he got up and came into the kitchen, she was there waiting. "You’re up early," he said.

"We have a lot of work to do." She had torn herself out of the dream this time and found it was five o’clock. She had decided it was better not to go back to sleep because the dream was waiting in the back of her mind.

She went to the counter and picked up a 35 millimeter camera. "I dug up Jimmy’s camera. We’re going to take your picture. That wall over there with the reflected light on it looks the best. We’ll do the first few standing up."

He slowly walked to the wall. "Why?"

"Driver’s license, et cetera." She aimed at him and said, "Smile," then lowered the camera. "That’s a smile?"

"I don’t know a whole lot about this, at least from the fugitive’s point of view," he said. "But doesn’t it strike you as a little dangerous to have pictures of me floating around?"

"Trust me," said Jane. "The people who will see the prints would die if any pictures got into the wrong hands."

"They would, eh?" He looked at her skeptically, his eyes half closed. She clicked the camera. "You took one already?"

"That was your driver’s license. Everybody looks that way on their driver’s license—like they just ate a worm."

He smiled and the camera clicked again. "Hey," he said. "What was that?"

"I don’t know. Maybe the bank’s Christmas party."

"I wasn’t ready."

"Then they’ll paste you in with your arm around the boss’s wife, like you got caught." When he didn’t smile, she said, "Stop worrying. They only need a couple of prints. You and I can burn the rest of them together."

"The negatives?"

"Those too. Now go find a nice shirt and tie in Jimmy’s closet and put your coat on over it."

When she had taken all thirty-six exposures, Jane said, "I’ll be back in a couple of hours with the prints. If anybody comes to the door, let him in and be nice."

She removed the roll of film, put on a jacket that belonged to Jimmy, and walked outside. He looked out the window and watched her making her way across the cornfield to Mattie’s house.

She returned before the two hours were up. She had a blue envelope with the negatives and glossy prints inside. Felker spread them out on the table and looked at them one by one.

"Thirty-three," he said.

"I mailed three of them to the specialist. Next time you see them, they’ll be glued to some official paper."

"Why three?"

"Have you ever seen anybody with the same picture on everything?"

He gathered the photographs and put the envelope into his pocket. "What now?"

"Now we wait, and we work to get you ready."

That day they walked along the banks of the Grand River and up country roads past small farms and through woods. Always they talked.

"It’s time to use our imaginations," she said. "Think like a cop. The person you’re looking for is you. The fugitive has a false name and false papers, and he’s starting a new life. Where do you start?"

"Put out a circular with everything we know about him: his description, picture, habits."

"Very good," said Jane. "Who does it go to?"

"Everybody."

"Bad answer, but at least you’re thinking like a cop again. It goes to police stations. That’s not everybody. Nobody ever sees these things except other policemen. What’s the moral of the story?"

"Stay away from cops?"

"Right. There are ways to do that. The obvious one is to watch out how you drive. You’re never again going to be in enough of a hurry to speed or double-park. But you don’t go where trouble is, either."

"That much I know," he said.

"What do you do if you’re walking down the street and a man tries to pick a fight with you?"

"Walk away."

"What if he doesn’t let you walk away?"

"Call for help?"

"Think harder. This shouldn’t be news to you," she said. "You obviously haven’t called for help much. Nobody jumps in, but sometimes they call the police. The safest thing for you to do is put him down fast, immobilize him, then get out. The people who couldn’t pull themselves together enough to stop him won’t be any better at stopping you."

"I guess that’s true."

"Suppose you come home from work and find out you have a burglary?"

"That one I’ve thought about. I don’t call the cops. The fingerprint people will take prints from all the surfaces, and they’ll need to take mine to be sure which ones belong to the burglars."

"Very good. But what if you’re home when it happens? You’re asleep in bed and you hear them breaking in?"

"Same thing. Let them take what they want and go."

She shook her head. "No, I’m afraid that’s the exception. There are very few burglars who don’t case a place to see who lives there before they decide. There are almost none who can’t tell if somebody’s home before they break in. So what you’ll have is an intruder who knows who you are and that you haven’t gone out."

"You mean—"

"I’m afraid so. It would probably mean that it’s not a burglar at all. One of the people who is after you has found you. The only thing you can do is get out."

"But if I could subdue him somehow, I might be able to find out—"

"Find out what? Who he is? I can answer that now. He’s one of the hundreds of guys in jail who heard you were worth money, and he’s the one who guessed right."

"What if there is no way out?"

"You’ll have to decide for yourself," she said. "Nobody can tell anybody else what the circumstances are when they’re justified in pulling the trigger. You’re not a cop anymore, so there aren’t any rules. Just make sure you do whatever thinking you have to do in advance."

"Okay, what if I did it?"

"Even if you have the best case of self-defense in history, they’ll still find out who you are. You do whatever you can to hide the body and bail out. Come back to me and we try again."

Each day they walked the same route through the country, taking the roads that ran along the fields and away from the houses. Two days later Jane asked, "Remember the circular that John Felker the policeman was going to put out to catch John Felker the embezzler?"

"Sure," he said.

"What else was on it?"

"Age, height, weight—"

"Can’t help you much there, but there are ways of thinking about it that are useful. What you have to think about isn’t the way you look but what photographs of you exist. Only one in a thousand of the people who will be looking for you have seen you in person. The last picture the police have would be at least five years old, right?"

"Right."

"If there are any more recent ones—say your sister has some—try to get rid of them. Call her and tell her to burn them. Your ex-wife—"

"No problem there. If she has them, they’d be ten years old."

"Good. Then, when you work on your appearance, think of the photographs as though you were John Felker the cop. The best things to do are simple. You’re tall, so you drive a small car. It has an unconscious effect. People just think: small. Wear a hat or sunglasses—anything that would keep John Felker the cop from making the connection at a glance. Unless you’re in some other trouble, a glance is all the time they’ll have. What else is on the circular?"

"Distinguishing marks or scars."

"Do you have any?"

"No." He smiled. "Should I get some?"

"Hardly. What else?"

"Distinctive personal habits."

"Okay," she said. "Go beyond the stuff that’s on the circular because the cops aren’t the only ones who will be looking. You don’t seem to smoke. Do you drink?"

"Not heavily. I’ve been known to have one or two."

"One or two what?"

"Beers. Once in a while some scotch and water."

"Where? Bars?"

"No. We used to spend too much time going out on calls to bars to want to go back after a shift. There were a couple of places in St. Louis that a lot of cops went to—not many civilians, so some cops felt relaxed, but I didn’t. It was the same faces I’d seen at work."

"Good. Stay out of bars. Things happen—fights inside and robberies in the parking lots. If you were in the habit, that’s one of the first places they’d look. Besides, the strangest people get sanctimonious. When some guy goes out to get ripped, he doesn’t want to rub elbows with his kids’ math teacher. What about the rest of your social life?"

"What do you mean?"

She walked along for a step or two. "If you’re uncomfortable about this, we’ll close the topic. Just think about what I’m saying. You’ve been divorced for about ten years. You don’t have any girlfriends at the moment. Are you gay?"

"No," he said.

"Are you celibate?’’

He chuckled. "Not for long, and never by choice."

She seemed to choose her words carefully now. "Okay, I don’t need to know anything about this. If you have some ... attitude about sex that’s unusual, just take it into consideration in the future."

He looked at her closely. "Unusual?"

She walked along for a few steps in silence, and then said, "What I mean is predictable."

"There’s nobody in my past that I can’t resist getting in touch with."

She sighed in frustration. "Good. But there are other possibilities. Since you’re single and you haven’t been celibate, presumably there are a number of women around who could tell somebody things about you. Since we don’t know who is trying to get you, it’s not out of the question that a woman is involved. Women can sometimes get other women to discuss things that they wouldn’t tell a man."

"I don’t think there’s anything they could say."

It came too quickly, so she realized she was going to have to be more specific. She looked ahead and made her voice sound impersonal and cheerful and clinical. "There are also things that can be unintentionally revealing. If your wife and all your girlfriends looked alike, you might want to widen your horizons a little. If you got into the habit of knowing all the prettiest prostitutes, as some cops do, that might be a good thing to change. If you can find the prostitutes in a new town, so can they, and they’ll pay them just for talking. If you subscribed to a pornographic magazine for people who have some ... special interest, it would be smart not to get another subscription in your new name. They make money by selling their mailing lists. That goes for other interests too, from coin collecting to motorcycles." She stopped abruptly. She knew where that had come from—Jimmy’s stupid poster.

Jane walked along in silence for a long time. Finally, she glanced up at him and saw he was staring at her and grinning. He shrugged. "No hits so far. But go on. I like hearing women talk about sex."

"Forget it," she said. "Do you have any chronic physical conditions that would mean you have to see a specialist or take medicine?"

"Is this the same topic or a new one?"

"New one. And I’m trying to help you stay alive, so I’d appreciate it if you’d try too."

He was serious again. "No medical problems."

"All right," she said. "Let’s go into buying habits. Go through your wardrobe in your mind. Picture your closet. Look at the ties, suits, jackets, shoes, and shirts. Men your size sometimes buy particular brands or even through mail order, to get a better fit. Even though you’re gone, the catalogs and things will keep coming to your house. Your clothes are still there, and people will study them. Even if you’re smart enough to buy the same kinds of clothes with different labels, the ones in the closet will give them a very accurate picture of how you’ll look."

"Now you’ve got me," he said. "I’m one of those guys who found a few things he liked and stuck with them."

"Change," she said. "Don’t buy anything you would have bought a month ago. It shouldn’t be too hard. You’re going from being an accountant to being a student."

"I hope I am, anyway," he said.

"You are," she said. "Be absolutely certain of that. You’re only going to be running until we get you settled. Just keep that in mind. This is hard, but it’s going to end."

When they walked back to the house on the fourth day, they didn’t stop. Now there was a frantic quality to their conversations, as though Jane were trying to tell him everything she knew at once. While she made dinner, she had him pretend he was talking to his academic adviser at a college, telling her why he wanted to be a teacher, how he discovered he was interested in working with young people. Now and then she would ask him questions.

"Give me a list of the mathematics courses you had in your first degree program."

"Math 101-102, Math 363 and 4 ..."

"Time out. Say, ’advanced calculus,’ or ’probability theory.’ Don’t give them numbers, because the fake transcript might not have the same ones. The transcript will have to carry the same numbers as the catalog for the college you supposedly attended. Anytime somebody is writing down your answers, you have to think ahead."

They went on into the night, making pots of coffee and sitting in the kitchen, again, staring at each other across Jimmy’s table.

"What are you going to do with your money?"

"Bury it, I guess. I can’t put it in a bank. There’s a reporting requirement for cash deposits over ten thousand dollars."

"How much did you take?"

"Three hundred and fifty thousand."

"There are ways to hide it," Jane said. "You open seven or eight checking accounts in different banks: two in the town where you live, and the rest in other places."

"In my own name?"

"Yes. You put a few thousand dollars in each one— say, eight thousand. Make sure they don’t pay any interest, because that gets reported to the IRS."

"Then what?"

"Then you get one of the local banks to think you’re a businessman who leaves cash receipts in the night-deposit box, a few hundred dollars a night, to feed that checking account. You use that one to pay the others now and then."

"What does that accomplish?"

"It lets you start an investment account with one broker or mutual fund for each checking account except the one you’re feeding. You set up automatic monthly withdrawals—a couple hundred a month. You can add a little cash once in a while, but most of the money comes in checks from your local bank. When you get behind, buy travelers’ checks with cash and use them to make deposits in the checking accounts."

"Does that keep me from getting noticed?"

"If you pay taxes on the bogus business and on the investments, it does. You keep the cash deposits small but steady, so nobody thinks you’re doing anything illegal. To the extent that you can, you live off the cash. That also gives you change, so it’s not all hundreds or round-number deposits. When you need to write a check for something like tuition, do it from the second local account. After a few years, you end up with about two thirds of your cash in seven or eight good investments you’ve built gradually. You stop the automatic withdrawals, close all the checking accounts except two—one local and one somewhere else, so you can still pass a little money from one hand to the other when you need to. By that time your teacher’s salary will have kicked in, and you can live like everybody else."

"That leaves me with a third of the cash, less whatever it costs to live until I get a job. What’s that for?"

"That’s in case you make a mistake," she said. "That gets you out."

"How did you learn all this?"

She shrugged. "It’s what I do."

"Why do you do it?"

"Because I need to do something that makes sense."

"You know a lot about colleges, so you must have gone to one. What were you studying to be?"

"Nothing, really," she said. "To tell you the truth, I spent most of my time in the library. One of the great ironies of being an Indian in the twentieth century is that you have to do a lot of reading. I had a vague idea I might go to law school, but I got distracted before I made a decision."

"What distracted you?"

"I was a sophomore when somebody I knew got into trouble. He was a little older. During the war, he had been drafted and ducked out. He hadn’t even changed his name, just stopped answering their letters and went to a different college. He wasn’t exactly a problem for the government. He just didn’t want to kill anybody, but his local board decided he wasn’t a conscientious objector. They probably knew where he was all the time, but they were too busy to go pick him up. After the war ended, they found the time."

"How did you know him?"

"We took a class together. Sometimes we’d have coffee after a seminar. It wasn’t much of a relationship. But one night he came to me in the dorm and told me the F.B.I. had come to his apartment looking for him while he was out. While he was talking, I could tell he had decided that if he had to go to jail, he would kill himself. He was saying goodbye. Not to me—we weren’t even involved, really, but I was the only girl he could talk to right then, that night, and so he was saying goodbye to all women through me—the ones he had known but didn’t anymore, and the ones he would have known if he had lived."

"Did you talk him out of it?"

"No," she said. "I wanted to, but all of a sudden I realized I wasn’t listening to his words. I was looking at him and thinking how easy it would be to make him disappear."

"As a sophomore? You must have been—what— nineteen?"

"I had worked two summers as a skip-tracer for a bill-collection agency in Buffalo, so I had a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn’t. I also got a feeling for how the dogs hunt. They’re not all the same, and they don’t look equally hard for everybody who’s on the run. A young guy who’s a student and isn’t dangerous, sometimes they figure he’ll just turn up sooner or later. He’ll pay taxes or apply for a marriage license or a loan or something. Sometimes I think they got a special kick out of arresting draft-dodgers twenty years later, so it would get into the papers to remind people that they never stop looking."

"So you made him disappear?"

"Yes. Then a few people found out about it—friends of his, friends of mine."

"And they told other people?"

"Not right away. But people grow up and the years go by, and just about everybody meets someone at some point who needs that kind of help."

He nodded. "So they made you do it again."

"No," she said. "It wasn’t them, it was me. When I realized I could do it, there was a temptation to do it again. I was the one who decided."

When the sun started to fill the room they turned the lights off and made breakfast. As they washed and dried the dishes at Jimmy’s sink, Felker said, "What’s next?"

Jane pulled the plug in the sink and let the water go out. "We need to sleep." She had kept it up for almost twenty-four hours now. She wasn’t sure she had burned the dream out of her mind, but she knew she hadn’t been doing him any good for the past hour or two. "If you wake up before I do, spend the time thinking about the future. Try to pick out things you’re not sure about. Forget the past. There’s nothing deader than that."