The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  Christine Manon’s main occupation was watching Jane. Each morning she watched her go through her Tai Chi exercises, stretching and contorting but never stopping, always in motion at the same slow, constant pace so she moved from one position to another and each pose was already changing into something else. Then Chris waited while Jane went outside to run. Sometimes an hour later she would catch a glimpse of Jane coming up the walk, taking long, fast strides with her head up and her neck straight, landing each step on the ball of her foot. Jane’s movements seemed always to be the kind that should require her muscles to be tight and straining, but they weren’t. The word that came to Christine’s mind was “coiled.” She was preparing herself for something.

  It was three days before Christine worked up her nerve enough to say, “I want you to teach me how to fight.”

  Jane looked at her skeptically, then said, “You needn’t expect to see them again.”

  “I can’t be sure.”

  “You’re going to be invisible, and they’re not going to strain much to find somebody who can’t come up with five thousand a month. They have richer clients, who are running from worse trouble. And if they were to come, you don’t fight. You run.”

  “But what if they do come, and I can’t run? Please. I know I’m not very promising, but I know that you can help me.”

  Reluctantly, Jane had walked to the kitchen, taken out a big pot and set it on the stove, then put a long-handled ladle beside it. “Make some sauce, make some stew, the kind that simmers for twelve hours. Keep something going whenever you’re feeling that way.”

  “You mean if I eat something I’ll feel better and stop imagining things?”

  “No. It’s boiling water, only thicker. If somebody comes in, he’ll smell it, but he won’t be afraid of it. The smell makes him think nothing’s wrong. If you need to hurt him, you throw a ladleful in his face, dump the rest on him, and run. Don’t stop to look back. He’ll probably have third-degree burns, but he’ll also be very angry.”

  Christine picked up a long butcher knife from the counter and looked at it.

  Jane shook her head. “That’s not your first choice. A knife is good only if he never sees it. The boning knife is a better size and shape. Using one takes a strong stomach, and you can’t do it from a distance.”

  “Why a distance?”

  Jane took the knife out of Chris’s hand and led her to the kitchen table, then sat across from her. “This isn’t going to sound good to you, but here it is. You are a woman. No matter what lessons you take, or how hard you work at it, you are not going to meet one of these men in an even hand-to-hand fight and not get killed.”

  “Then what about all those self-defense classes and things? Karate and all that.”

  Jane shook her head sympathetically. “There are people who make a good living by teaching scared women a few quick moves that might buy them ten seconds to get away. Good for them. But they also manage to imply to a lot of gullible ladies that lesson number six hundred and forty-seven will make them formidable enough to overpower a serious attacker. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Why not?”

  Jane seemed to contemplate her for a minute. “What’s the simplest way to put this? Athletic-equipment companies have been studying this stuff like crazy for years, trying to design gear especially for women. It’s a gold mine, so they’re working hard. One result I saw was a baseball glove they had developed just for women. It had to be smaller, but also compensate for the fact that the average American woman has fifty-five percent less strength in her hand than the average man.”

  “You’re telling me I should give up? It’s completely hopeless?”

  Jane shook her head. “No. I’m telling you that pretending a woman is a man with long hair will get you killed.”

  “What won’t get me killed?”

  “Recognizing what you can do, and practicing.”

  “Practicing what?”

  “A man has more upper body strength than you can ever have, so you never compete with it. Practice staying out of his reach. A woman is more flexible. We can bend and stretch more, kick higher. If you work hard at a few moves, you can become very fast. But above all, you fight dirty.”

  “I’m willing to do that, but what do I do?”

  “Think about it clearly. If he hits you once, the fight is over. So you always hit first. Each movement of your body must be a surprise, and it must be capable of disabling him—if possible, permanently. You want to put out an eye, dislocate a kneecap, crush a trachea. Always use a weapon if you can. Never let him suspect that you intend to fight until after you’ve done the worst you can to him—not the worst you think is necessary: the very worst.” Jane paused. “That’s most of it.”

  “I don’t want most of it. What’s the rest?”

  Jane shrugged. “That comes with time. It’s mostly learning how a man fights with a woman. If you watch boxing on TV you’ll see men dancing and circling, bobbing and weaving, keeping their guard up. That’s what they do if they think the other person is their equal. They know you’re not, so they’re very sloppy. Usually they don’t even try to hit you—just grab you and you’ll give up. That gives you one enormous chance. Use it wisely, because there won’t be another.”

  For three days Christine practiced in the middle of the living room. Jane told her, “Learn just one sequence of moves: six punches delivered just as fast as your arms can move—left-right-left-right-left-right to his nose, eyes, throat—then the side kick to the knee, pivot, and run. Always the same.”

  Christine was insulted. “Always the same? I mean, it seems too simple.”

  “If you were going to do it twice, it would be. But you’re not. You only have to surprise him once. You practice it until your body simply does it without bringing your mind into it. He has to make decisions, you’re already in motion.”

  Christine practiced in the living room while Jane watched. It reminded Christine of a dance rehearsal, with the choreographer studying everything she did. A few times Jane jumped up and corrected her. “Not just arms,” she said. “Your arms aren’t enough. Up on the balls of your feet, and explode off your back foot. Your whole body has to deliver it, and it has to be a poke, like a piston, not a swing.” Jane did it all with such speed and force that Christine felt a little frightened of her. She tried to imitate the moves precisely. Jane watched with tentative approval, then said, “See his face in front of you. Faster. Harder. Body, not arms.”

  During these days in Cleveland Jane tried tracing the license number of the car that had brought Christine to Sid Freeman’s. She claimed her car had been dented in a parking lot and a witness had left a note with that number on it. The Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles gave her the name of the company that the car had been rented from. Jane decided not to call the company: knowing the false name the man had used to rent it would get her nowhere.

  Jane called the Los Angeles county clerk’s office to find the owner of the apartment complex at 19942 Troost Avenue in North Hollywood. In exchange for four calls and a fee, Jane learned that the owner was a corporate entity called 19942 Troost Management and its address was the bank that held its checking account.

  On the fourth day, Christine walked quietly to the doorway of the bedroom and stopped. Jane was facing away from her, throwing clothes into a suitcase. After a second or two, when Christine was sure she had not shifted her weight or even breathed, Jane said, “I’ll be back in two days.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To meet someone.”

  After Jane was gone, Christine sat in the middle of the living room and stared out the window at the upper branches of a tree slowly swaying against the cloudy sky beyond it. She thought about Jane on an airplane. Pretty soon the silver airplane would rise up to pierce those clouds like a little needle. Christine was already alone.

  The silence of the apartment was suddenly palpable, and it forced her to think. She kept coming back to a nagging worry that was al
most like guilt. She had let Jane save her life, then spent all of this time with her. Had she remembered to tell her everything? Probably it wasn’t worth anything to Jane, she assured herself. And Jane wasn’t the problem. Christine was the one who had to be afraid. She had only a few secrets left.

  30

  Something just below Violet Peterson’s chest was clutched again by the throbbing of the drums, quickened and carried along with their rhythm. The wild, falsetto voices of the singers rose and fell and made her throat contract with theirs as she waited in the crowd. This was the part of the doings that she had found she loved the most. It brought back the amazement that she had felt as a small child, when the sound of the drums had held her in some space between physical and emotional, and the wailing male voices that were clearer and a pitch higher than the voices of normal life had seemed to come from somebody far older and more important than her uncles and cousins.

  Violet glanced at her watch. It was seven o’clock, and the Entry was beginning. She saw the four men of the honor guard moving up into the big circle. The first of them carried an American flag; the next, a blue one with pictures on it she couldn’t make out that she supposed must be the flag of Oklahoma. Then there were two men carrying feathered staffs. They all wore Cherokee gear—beaded buckskin shirts, tall horsehair roaches on their heads with feathers jutting out at angles. She recognized some of the medals pinned to their shirts: two—no, three—purple hearts, a silver star. The one with the American flag had a few she had not seen before.

  She had gotten used to the way powwows went. It seemed unsurprising that the honor guard was always made up of combat veterans, because that was the way people had done things in the Old Time. Next came the traditional male dancers, mostly older men who wore not replicas of costumes but the family heirlooms of twenty or thirty nations. Tonight, in this group, there were plains shirts made of deer that had probably died before Custer, embroidered with trade beads and porcupine quills, and bear-claw necklaces and eagle-feather war bonnets. Then came the grass dancers with long fringe, then the fancy dancers, wearing iridescent colors that didn’t exist a hundred years ago and bells and turkey-feather bustles and hoops and war paint.

  Next came the traditional women dancers, then women in jingle dresses with cones made of the shiny metal tops of chewing tobacco cans, clacking together as the women danced. Then there were the women fancy dancers, with dresses embroidered and beaded and even sequinned so they reminded Violet of hummingbirds. Nearly all of the fancy dancers wore a single feather in their hair, something that in the Old Time would have been about the same as wearing your husband’s breechcloth. The shawls were breathtaking, worn over the shoulders and held out in the dance like the wings of birds.

  Violet looked around her at the crowd. Before she had hit South Dakota she had never seen anyone wearing a cowboy hat except on television. There were lots of people here tonight with them, and she was starting to get used to them.

  Even two of the F.B.I. stalkers had worn them tonight. The man with the little mustache and the blond woman posing as a couple were wearing black ones with fancy decorations on the crowns. She supposed that the black ones must be evening attire, because the sun during this afternoon’s doings would have baked their brains. She took another look at the woman. She had a cute shape—probably from all the exercise they got running and jumping and aiming guns at decent people—but she had made a mistake with those blue jeans. They were way too tight. Violet almost felt sorry for her, because she just didn’t know any better than that.

  She turned away from them and checked on the man with the glasses. He seemed to be fascinated, watching the dancers come in. No, she remembered. He was watching her. No matter where his eyes were when she looked at him, that was what they were all here for, and they were distressingly good at it.

  She moved back from the dancers and began to circulate in the crowds. She paused at a few of the booths. At some they sold turquoise and silver jewelry from Arizona, reddish gold from the Black Hills, some beaded moccasins that were sort of like the ones she had at home, some tall ones like boots that the Apaches made. There were Navajo blankets and rugs, a lot of baskets, Hopi pottery. She stopped and bought some fry bread with powdered sugar and a Coke. She could get used to this stuff, she decided, but it had to be loaded with calories.

  Behind her she could hear the blaring amplified voice of the master of ceremonies making the opening speech, then some words that must be a prayer in his own language. Then the drums began again, and the grass dancers were out in the circle. They wore costumes with two-foot fringe swinging from their arms and backs and around their legs as they whirled and dipped and spun, doing the Kiowa dance that was supposed to stomp down the tall grass so the night’s festivities could begin. The stomping down wasn’t literal. She had seen an Ottawa on a tractor-sized lawn mower cutting the grass on the day she had arrived. It was a preparation in the Indian sense, the way Seneca negotiators used to tell the whites they would uproot brambles and cut down tall trees to clear a path to the spot where negotiations would take place. It just meant they would make things right.

  The grass dancers were spinning and stomping wildly now, working up a sweat. People around Violet were nodding their heads in time with the drums and smiling to themselves. It was a nice feeling, being out here in this rolling country with strange bright-red dirt and fragrant grass, all being Indians together.

  Violet was a bit of a conservative in her own ways, and had always favored the old Seneca songs and dances and customs. She understood the words and had the feeling that they were about her and her family and their relationship with the universe. But the powwow circuit was about just being Indian. It was probably something like the great councils had been, when dozens of nations who had little in common, speaking unrelated languages and wearing all of these different costumes, had traveled thousands of miles to come together in the same circle for a time.

  If it hadn’t been for the F.B.I. agents following her around like circling vultures, she might have enjoyed it even more. Maybe when it was all over and she had time by herself in the old house at Tonawanda, when new sights weren’t being flashed in front of her eyes every few seconds, she would formulate the spectacle into some general impression that would fit into her head all at once.

  She had been gazing around her at the groups of dancers and celebrants as she walked, but now she found herself in the middle of a dozen costumed dancers she had seen in the entry of the traditional women. A voice beside her ear said, “Vi.”

  Violet turned. In front of her stood a Seneca woman got up to look the way women had not looked since the 1790s. On her cheeks were painted two vermilion circles from the eyes to the chin, and four broad red lines made by a horizontal swipe of the fingers crossed her forehead. The part in her hair was bright yellow. Handsome Lake had dissuaded women from painting themselves in this fashion because it was calculated to attract the gazes of men they weren’t entitled to entice. The woman wore the old-style beaded moccasins, leggings, skirt, and overdress, and around her shoulders was a dark blue shawl embroidered with daisies and apple blossoms. But still, she was Jane Whitefield.

  She spoke in Seneca. “I see three people keeping watch over you. Are there others?”

  Violet forced her eyes toward the circle as though she were watching the dancers and answered in Seneca. “The woman with yellow hair, her husband, and the one with glasses.”

  “Have they spoken to you yet?”

  “Oh yes,” said Violet. “They raided my hotel room in Eagle Butte.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jane. “Were you afraid?”

  “Of course,” she admitted. Then she quickly added, “But I’m fine.”

  “What did they do?”

  Violet risked looking into Jane’s eyes for a second. “Nothing. But they were prepared to shoot you when they came in. They were all ready, you know.”

  “I thought they might be,” said Jane. Violet saw a flash of white teeth smiling
in the red paint. “It’s a good thing it was only you.”

  “It’s not a good joke, Jane.”

  Jane shrugged. “It’s the only joke we have. Tell me about Carey.”

  “He’s exactly as you left him,” said Violet. “He’s so worried about you he looks like something hurts.”

  Jane said, “I came to tell you to go home, Vi. Tell Carey where we were when you saw me.” Jane’s body seemed to pick up the beat of the drums. She began to dance a little, moving slowly away into the crowd.

  “Wait,” said Violet. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and slipped a small piece of white paper into Jane’s palm. “One of the agents gave me that. It’s his name and the number you call to get connected directly to him. He said it was in case I change my mind. Keep it in case you change yours.”

  Jane closed her fingers around it without glancing at it. She said, “Please, Vi. Don’t worry about me.” Jane looked over her shoulder at the crowds of people of both sexes and all ages, wearing every kind of gear and ornament that had ever been seen on the continent, almost all of them with hair that gleamed black in the floodlights above the field. “They can’t even see me.”

  Jane walked out past the man in the glasses, nearly brushing his shoulder as she went, then slipped between the man and the woman in cowboy hats. They looked at her, but they saw only a flash of bright paint and the clothes of a woman who might have lived long ago.

  31

  When Jane returned to Cleveland she seemed different to Christine. She spent the first day in the little apartment staring at the wall. On the second, she went out for the whole day. She came back with shopping bags full of new clothes, some hair dye, and a shoulder bag full of hundred-dollar bills. She sat Christine in the living room beside the telephone.