Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  She grabbed her favorite face-wash without opening her eyes and pumped a generous dollop onto her palm. If anyone was going to save Tilanna, then it would be Tilanna herself.

  And there she went, buying into her brother’s word-association game. Without realizing it, Luke was helping Ben craft an allegory to what was happening around them. The man he called the Martian, aka the man in the too-big coat, was embodied in the despicable Kanyri, who were cutthroats and sadists, one and all. Everything was joined together, even if Luke didn’t understand the joining himself. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised Mira if the real name of the man in the too-big coat turned out to be an anagram of Kanyri. It might have seemed preposterous, but in a world where a dyslexic nonreader could recite the passionate prose of a man who was reportedly impervious to bullets … well, damn near anything was possible.

  A thought occurred to her, promising enlightenment, but it slipped away before revealing itself.

  She lifted her head and looked at herself in the mirror, trying to tease the fragment closer. Her face was covered in creamy oatmeal-colored cleanser, only her eyes and nostrils visible. She was thinking about word association, but why did that matter? Why did it feel so significant?

  Without bothering to rinse her face, she tugged open the bathroom door and asked, “What were those numbers again?”

  Luke didn’t even look up, just kept reading Ben’s latest pages, his lips moving expertly as he sailed across the words. Ben glanced down at his hand. He’d written the numbers there as soon as Gabe had given his report in the car outside the prison grounds. “One, three, five, four, one. Why?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s like the tip-of-the-tongue thing, you know?”

  “Usually happens to me with crossword puzzles. You think you have it figured out?”

  “Not quite. But let me think about it and maybe I’ll—”

  Gabe let himself into the room, interrupting her. Mira was surprised by how glad she was to see him.

  “I am officially unemployed,” he announced. “My supervisor kindly told the university that I was no longer needed on the project.”

  Luke was the first to respond. “Are they going to dee-port you?”

  “Not yet, but…” His eyes settled on Mira, and whatever he was saying trailed away. He looked at her in a way that made her wonder if she was living the real-life version of one of those dreams in which you forget to put your pants on before venturing to a crowded shopping mall, and everybody stares. Then she realized he was enraptured by her milky mask.

  “What’s the big deal?” she asked him. “Never see a woman exfoliate before?”

  Very slowly, Gabe tilted his head to the side, like an animal in response to a strange sound.

  “Gabe, you’re freaking me out here.”

  “Sorry, it’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  “I can … sort of see you.”

  She had no idea what he meant. Was she missing something? Why was he looking at her like that? “You have some kind of issue with pore-refining facial toner?”

  He smiled weirdly. “No, it’s just”—he shrugged—“it happens every now and then. It works with circus clowns, with all their makeup. And mimes. I can almost see them, too.”

  “Mimes? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Forget I said anything.” Red circles appeared on his cheeks. “I’m gonna go hit the soda machine outside.”

  And he was gone.

  Bewildered, Mira looked at Luke and Ben.

  “I don’t get it,” Luke admitted.

  “Nor do I,” Ben said.

  Mira returned to the bathroom and closed the door. Tilanna might be a rugged heroine who fought Martian outlaws with her dead lover’s guns, but her life was no stranger than Mira’s. In fact, with every passing hour, Mira figured she had Tilanna beat.

  She turned on the water and rinsed her face, thinking about Gabe.

  * * *

  At least he was no longer a suspect.

  Gabe considered that a feeble consolation. With the rifleman’s appearance at the bookstore, he’d confirmed his existence in front of enough witnesses that the police no longer wondered if Gabe was making it all up; the boy was not crying wolf. But with every yin of good news came the yang of the bad. During his meeting with the State Department’s attorney, they’d spoken to Rubat on a conference call that had ended with the paranoid observatory chief publicly firing his protégé. The project was already under too much scrutiny for economic reasons, and Rubat claimed he couldn’t risk putting it in further jeopardy.

  The soda machine spat out something that made sense: a Pepsi. At least there was one recognizable element in his life these days. Did he have enough cash for a plane ticket home? The lawyer from the embassy had made it clear that they wanted him gone as soon as the cops said he could leave.

  He was cracking the top on the pop can when a gray sedan rolled to a stop at the curb. As a transit bus rumbled through the intersection and a low-riding pickup gunned its engine across the street, the driver’s window scrolled down, revealing a mystery behind the wheel.

  Gabe stopped with the can in front of his lips. He threw a glance at the motel door. Fifteen meters. Could he make it?

  “Get in, Señor Traylin.”

  “Fontecilla?”

  “I realize I am forgettable,” Fontecilla said, “but by now I think you would know me.”

  “I’m not so good with faces.” He got into the car and waited. He concentrated on his soda.

  “And I am no Sherlock Holmes,” Fontecilla said, looking at him.

  “Your point?”

  “Despite my shortcomings, I believe there is … something not right with you, if you will pardon the observation.” He took his foot off the brake and drove.

  Gabe had no rebuttal. Explaining his prosopagnosia wouldn’t bring them any closer to locating the rifleman. Even if Fontecilla eventually accepted the story, he would likely only do as others had done; when they learned of Gabe’s condition, they became unnaturally polite, as if he were some poor victim in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  “Seat belt, please.”

  Gabe did as he was instructed.

  “At first I thought you must be on the lam,” Fontecilla said.

  “On the what?”

  “Is not that the correct expression? Like they say in the detective novels?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “I contacted the U.S. authorities, and they have nothing to report about you, nothing whatsoever.”

  Nothing whatsoever. Story of my life.

  “So this morning, when the four of you left your rooms, I followed you.”

  Gabe turned away and stared out the window at the passing storefronts. He found no refuge there. Amateur that he was, he’d permitted himself to be tailed all the way to the penitentiary.

  “Do you really think my officers would have let you leave their protection without my permission? I followed you to the prison. After you left, I went in and flashed my badge. That’s also something they say in the American detective novels, yes? I don’t think I have ever said that until today. Either way, I found what I needed. The question is”—he signaled left and turned that way—“whether or not you found what you needed.”

  Gabe had no recourse but to confess what he knew, at least most of it. “The boy in your morgue or wherever he is, Nicky Lepin, he’s the grandson of Micha Lepin.”

  “I realize this now. I also realize that you took it upon yourself to pretend to be a policeman, which is very flattering but not very wise.”

  Gabe saw no way out of it. Fontecilla had cut off his escape routes. “I didn’t pretend to be anything. I never told anyone I was a cop. I just didn’t know what else to do. I had to talk to him.”

  “I gave you my card. You could have called.”

  “I had to find out on my own.”

  “Why?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You are probably righ
t. I am not as empathic as the heroes of the detective stories. That is the proper word, isn’t it? Empathic?” He guided the car from the main thoroughfare and onto a cobbled lane that ran between a color guard of Chilean firetrees. “I trust you learned things of great significance from Señor Lepin?”

  “Only that somebody’s after him.”

  “After him?”

  “Paybacks, you know. Vengeance. For what, I don’t know. But he’s got an enemy. The remains of the woman you found under Mentiras … that was his daughter.”

  Fontecilla only nodded. Maybe he already knew the woman’s identity or maybe he didn’t. Everyone had a poker face as far as Gabe was concerned.

  When a full minute passed and Fontecilla remained quiet, Gabe blundered ahead, further damning himself for obstruction of justice or withholding information or some other unintentional yet fully punishable crime. “I know you’re going to ask me why I didn’t let you in on any of this, and I don’t really have a good reason other than I didn’t want to get pushed onto the periphery. I wanted to see it through to the end. For whatever that’s worth.”

  Fontecilla slowed the car. “I met the assistant warden. He was kind enough to permit me to listen to the recording of your conversation with Lepin. Perhaps you did not know that everything is recorded in those situations, in the event that such information is needed later.”

  Gabe sighed. There was an old joke in his profession. Astronomers do it with long tubes. This was only slightly less juvenile in its humor than Astronomers do it with Uranus. Gabe figured he’d screwed himself with about the longest tube around.

  “You are quite the persistent investigator,” Fontecilla said, without a trace of the sarcasm he was surely implying.

  “The whole thing just … got out of control.”

  “Perhaps. But I must admit, though the recording I heard was enlightening, it really offered no further lead on the case.”

  One, three, five, four, one, Gabe thought. How’s that for a lead?

  “I am hoping you could be persuaded to let the police be privy to your plan, so that we might lend a hand as needed.” He stopped the car and finally looked over. “Get out.”

  Only now did Gabe take account of his surroundings. Granite slabs lay on the ground. Headstones rose like obelisks from the grass, engraved with the names of the dead.

  “A cemetery?”

  “Follow me.” Fontecilla struck off across the grass.

  Gabe trailed him through the maze of markers, many of them more than a century old. Catholic iconography abounded, the crucifixes and cherubs recognizable even to a backsliding Protestant like Gabe. A replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà cast an indigo shadow across the grounds, its depth surpassed only by the shadow of Mary’s grief as she held her martyred son.

  Fontecilla clasped his trilby in his hands as he stopped before a single marker made of rough-hewn marble.

  Gabe read the name inscribed there—Beatriz Guajardo—but didn’t recognize it. “Who was she?”

  “Mother of three, former college athlete, law school graduate, practicing defense attorney.”

  “And?”

  “They found her two years ago with her feet cut off, crawling along the road near the community’s water-treatment facility. When they put her in the ambulance, she was … out of her head. What is the term? Delirious. She died en route.”

  Gabe’s imagination, always rampant, served up every painful frame of that film, a woman he’d never met dragging herself forward, centimeters at a time. “Did he do it? The rifleman?”

  “The case was never solved. Not a single viable clue. Even after seeing Nicky Lepin’s body, I did not make the connection until this morning when I realized who you were visiting at the prison.”

  “Was Beatriz related to Micha Lepin?”

  “She was his lawyer many years ago. Though he was suspected of being responsible for the deaths of at least thirty-five people, the prosecution had solid evidence of only two. Only two, from all of those years and all of that suffering. During the proceedings, Señora Guajardo was almost able to counter the forensic facts with various tactics. She fought to keep Lepin a free man, but she failed. She argued that his trial was not fair, that the people were being vindictive and taking out their hatred of Pinochet’s government on a man who was merely following orders. The appeal was denied.”

  “At least she helped him avoid the death penalty.”

  “No, Señor Traylin, we do not execute people in this country. We are not barbarians. What kind of point does it make to murder someone for murdering? No, we locked Lepin away for eternity.”

  “Okay, so America is a social backwater where we still permit state-sponsored killing. Whatever. But apparently your kind of justice wasn’t enough, huh? The rifleman cut off her feet because she helped Lepin.”

  “He may have considered her an accomplice, yes.”

  “And he’s been out there free for two years?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe if you guys had just shoved Lepin in the gas chamber then, a lot of innocent people would still be alive, because that sick-o wouldn’t have had reason to chop them up.”

  “As I told you before, I have no powers of fortune-telling. My grandmother was the clairvoyant. I can use only the gifts that God in His wisdom has given me.” He knelt at the grave and trailed his fingertips through the grass. “If you are holding something back, Gabriel, then I will do what I can to convince you to tell me, even if it means arresting you. What this man is doing … it ends now.”

  Gabe admired the detective’s resolve, but he wondered at his own reluctance to divulge the numbers Lepin had given him. Why was he so intent on making this his personal crusade? What debt did he owe the dead?

  “I’m waiting. But I will not wait forever.”

  The hell with it. “One, three, five, four, one. That’s it. All I have. Hopefully you’ll be able to make more sense of it than I can.”

  Fontecilla finally looked up, his face meaningless. “Explain.”

  “Can’t. He gave me those numbers. That’s it. He left it up to me to figure them out.”

  “That is all he said to you?”

  “He didn’t say it, but yeah, that’s it.”

  “It could mean anything.”

  Gabe had already given the numbers so much thought that they’d ceased to make sense. Their riddle remained impenetrable.

  Fontecilla stood up, his knees popping softly. “I will see what the department can make of it. We are not an affluent organization, but we have a few resources that might help. Computers these days, you know…”

  Gabe followed him back to the car. “Does this mean I’m not under arrest?”

  “On what grounds? I have no probable cause.” He put on his hat. “Besides, if you were in jail, how could I follow you when you inevitably disregard my warnings and set off after this man yourself?”

  Gabe didn’t bother looking at him to see if the wily cop was being facetious. It wouldn’t have done any good.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The dust storm collapsed.

  Tilanna lifted her head as the red cloud fell in on itself. Its infrastructure of wind suddenly stripped away, the cloud gave up its rage, settling in soft russet layers on the building Tilanna and Vanchette were about to infiltrate.

  She wiped the powder from her faceshield.

  Vanchette’s voice, as hard as old oak, issued from the speaker near her ear. “Are you well?”

  She wanted to tell him that she hadn’t been well since Dycar, damn him, had abandoned her. “When have you ever known me not to be well?”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “What do you say we blow this Kanyri shithole to Andromeda?”

  “I say lead the way…”

  “Do we have to say ‘shithole’?” Luke asked.

  Ben raised his eyebrows. “Well, I reckon not. If they buy the movie rights, they can make it PG-13, but I guess we can lighten things up a bit. What word did you have in mind?�
�

  “Dump.”

  “Dump?”

  “Yep.” He looked down at the notebook and read. “‘What do you say we blow this Kanyri dump to Andromeda?’” He looked up, frowning. “What’s Andromeda?”

  “A galaxy two and a half million light-years from here. Our next-door neighbor. It’s got about one trillion stars in it, which is a shitload, unless you prefer dumpload.”

  “Nah, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I agree.” Ben glanced across the room to where Gabe sat, poring through regional magazines, newspapers, and phone books. “Yo, astronomer. That’s correct, isn’t it? A trillion?”

  “Give or take a few million.” He ran both hands through his hair. “I’m starting to think this is pointless.”

  Ben wanted to say that pointless was okay. He knew the benefit of a good bout of pointlessness. It gave you time to live in your skin a while, get to know yourself, not get tangled up in the melee of smash-and-grab humanity. The trick was not letting your sabbatical of pointless living turn into a permanent vacation. He might have related his feelings on this and other, even more esoteric matters, but then he noticed Mira.

  She sat in one of the motel’s spiritless chairs, a map of Calama spread out on her lap. For the last half hour she’d been studying the damn thing for anything similar to 13541. But now she was looking at Gabe, though the dummy apparently didn’t feel the substance of her stare. Fool. He was too caught up in the hunt to realize when an attractive woman was staring at him.

  “What about word association?” she asked.

  Gabe closed the telephone directory. “What about it?”

  “It’s something I thought of earlier. What’s the first thing that comes to mind if I say those numbers to you?”

  “A zip code.”

  “Okay, well, we’ve already established that zip codes aren’t the right angle.” She turned to Ben. “What about you? One, three, five, four, one.”