Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  "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."

  14

  Jane woke up in the dark room. She felt agitated, troubled. There was a throbbing of drums far off, and then the voices of the people singing the Ga-dashote. The chorus of voices in the first column of dancers was singing, "Ga no oh he yo," and the other column of dancers
would answer, "Wa ha ah he yo."

  "Are you awake?" Felker was in the room.

  "Yes," she said. She pulled the covers up to her neck and sat up. "What is it?"

  "I was going to ask you the same thing."

  She laughed. "I’m sorry. You startled me. Are you dressed?"

  "Sure. As soon as I heard the war drums, I figured I’d better."

  "Give me a minute."

  She watched his shadow slip out and the door close. Then she got out of bed, turned on the light, and searched her bag for clean clothes while she tried to bring her mind back up from the panicky feeling she had gotten in the deep, restless sleep. She caught sight of herself in the mirror on Jimmy’s dresser when she stepped into her jeans. She looked frightened.

  She walked out into the living room, brushing her hair. "Mattie will be here in a few minutes to find out why we’re not at the dance."

  "Shouldn’t we wait for her?"

  "No. If we don’t go now, we’re being rude." They walked out into the field and headed for a long, low building a distance off. There were lights, cars, and the sound of the drums and voices. "It’s not a war dance, by the way. It’s called the Trotting Dance. It’s the first dance you do in a big celebration."

  "What are we celebrating?"

  "Thanks to the Maple."

  "You mean the tree?"

  "It’s the first big party of the year, because the first good thing in the spring is that the maple sap starts running. Then there’s the Green Corn Festival, Strawberry Festival, Harvest, New Year’s. You know, the usual."

  "New Year’s I know about. What do they do on New Year’s?"

  "They used to strangle a white dog and hang it on a pole."

  "The usual."

  "And then they’d have the guessing of dreams."

  "That sounds like fun. Did you just have a dream?"

  "Yes."

  "Can I guess it?"

  "No."

  As they walked through the cool night air toward the low building, the music seemed to grow louder. The doors, one on each end of the building, kept opening to let more people inside, and each time a light would shine out into the darkness and the sound of the singing would rise. The beat of the drums and the squash-shell rattles were amplified by the thumping of hundreds of feet.