Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  "This is John Felker," said Jane. "Mattie Wilson." Then she added a few Seneca words that seemed to be part of the same topic. When the older woman happily answered her, Felker listened. There were no enunciated b’s, m’s, or p’s.

  They entered the house and found themselves in a big farm kitchen. Jane sat down at the table without being asked, at least in English, so Felker did the same. He looked at her for clues, but all he got was a smile.

  Mattie Wilson laid out cornbread, honey, and blueberries and poured strong coffee, but she didn’t sit down with them. Instead she hovered, adding dishes of food as they talked. "Jimmy’s off on a job in Brooklyn," she said. "You two should be reasonably comfortable over there."

  Jane added commentary. "Jimmy is an ironworker. He and his brothers, George and Henry. They travel a lot."

  "When they’re working," said Mrs. Wilson cheerfully. "The rest of the time they eat and lie around like a pack of dogs."

  Felker laughed. "I think I hear my mother talking. It makes me homesick."

  This seemed to put Mrs. Wilson in an even better mood. "Well, if you’re no better than the rest of the men, I ought to write your mother a letter. Because I know you won’t."

  "No," he said. "I don’t think I want you two getting together. I’m no match for her as it is." He tasted the food again. "Just send her the recipe for this cornbread."

  Jane watched him in nervous tension. Whenever he spoke he seemed to be teetering on a high place, but each time he went to the edge, he came back with more of Mattie Wilson’s affection.

  When she was satisfied that they had eaten enough, Mattie went to a drawer under the counter, found a keychain, and gave it to Jane. "You’d better get settled over there," she said. "Will you be around for o-ta-denone-ne-o-na-wa-ta?"

  Jane said, "Maybe," then got up and kissed Mattie Wilson. Felker said, "Thank you, Mrs. Wilson. If I had known how wonderful it is here, I wouldn’t have waited for Jane to bring me. I’d have come alone."

  As they left, Mattie said to Jane in Seneca, "Keep one hand on that one. He’s beautiful, but he didn’t learn that much about women from his mother."

  They walked among the dried husks in the cornfield, then between the trees of the orchard. "What did she say?" he asked.

  Jane smiled. "She said you had a blueberry caught in your teeth."

  He swept his tongue around in his mouth. "I do not."

  She shrugged. "My Seneca must be getting rusty."

  They made their way to a second farmhouse, this one a little better kept up but smaller. Jane walked up onto the front porch, opened the door with the key, and entered. Inside, the house looked like the home of a bachelor, but one who hadn’t been here in some time.

  "Is this Jimmy’s farm?"

  "Well, title is complicated here," she said. "It’s Jimmy’s house, but it really belongs to his mother because she’s the senior woman of his clan. They don’t divide land like, ’Here’s the boundary; let’s put a fence on it.’ They use what they need until they don’t need it. Jimmy doesn’t have a wife. When he does, he might live here, or he might go live in a house that belongs to her."

  "That doesn’t sound too complicated."

  "It isn’t," she said. "But sometime in the twenties the Canadian government decided that all Canadian Indians had to be patrilineal. So legal ownership could be in the name of some man who isn’t even related to Jimmy. It doesn’t matter. Right now it’s ours. I’m going to take a bath and go to sleep in it."

  "I was hoping you’d say that," said Felker. "Is there a couch or something ..."

  ’’There are two bedrooms. Pick one."

  He hesitated. "Jane ... before I go to sleep I should say this. You saved my life maybe three times last night. I want to thank—"

  "Save it," she interrupted. "We can talk later."

  Jane soaked in Jimmy’s bathtub for a long time, letting the warm water soothe the muscles in her back and arms and legs. On the wall above her, presumably for Jimmy’s contemplation, was a large poster of a blond woman who for some reason had taken off all of her clothes and sat straddling a big black motorcycle. Jane viewed her critically. She wasn’t really that attractive. It was only a matter of attitude.

  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?"