The Identity Man

by Andrew Klavan

  And because he knew, Super-P's you-and-me-brother strategy was getting to him more than he let on. In fact, his own mental image of that bygone picture on the preacher's wall was getting to him, too. Crouching over the banger in the shed, he could almost feel that snake of sin writhing and twisting and spitting sourly in his belly. And because it really did remind him of Super-P, it was almost as if it was Super-P himself writhing inside him. Not that Ramsey's sin was this gangster's beatdown. That was nothing. That was street business. That just had to be. No. His sin was Peter Patterson, killing Peter Patterson. Even now, weeks after the storm, the memory of the bookkeeper's pitying eyes stared up at him from the memory of the flame-streaked black water, the dead man's face liquid and wavering.

  "You loose this cracker on me?" Super-Pred whined. "You think he your beast, but he own you same as slavery. You and me both."

  Lieutenant Ramsey gave a single silent laugh but the laugh was a fake, too. This punk didn't know how close he was, how close to getting Ramsey's goat, setting him off. The lieutenant went on smiling but he wanted to shut this punk up with a bullet. Shut him up with a bullet and then do Gutterson, too—do him slow—kneecap, then belly, and finally no-longer-smirking-but-pleading-sweating-cowardly face. Kill them both as if they were the snake inside him.

  "You're gonna tell me the shooter's name, little man," he said. "That's a fact." He spoke with his lifelong tone of quiet self-control and moral dignity, his fake tone now that he had Peter Patterson's pitying stare and his own writhing shame inside him. "Detective Gutterson has all day to deal with this. But me, I've got better things to do."

  He stood up, making as if to leave.

  That did the trick. Panic went flaring through the beaten boy. A day alone with Detective Gutterson would be a day without sunshine for damn sure.

  "No, wait! Now hold on! Hold on, daddy."

  Ramsey waited. Looked down with his demeanor of lofty dignity at the punk on the floor.

  Super-P's body sagged there, the twisting, snakelike tension dying in him. He was finished. He just needed a moment to swallow his shame now, swallow his self-disgust at breaking down, at showing his ass and giving over. There was always that moment at the end before they gave over.

  He gave over. "Fatboy," he said.

  Ramsey sighed. Fatboy. Figured. Sixteen-year-old lardbutt bully-bait trying to make his bones by unloading on the police. He could be tried as an adult for this, do twenty years, two decades grabbing his ankles, asshole spiked on jail yard meat. It was a world without justice.

  "Don't feel so bad," he told Super-P. "You're ashamed 'cause we see your ass? You're ashamed 'cause it turns out you're no tough guy like the rapper on your shirt or your big brother in prison? Turns out you're just another scared, fatherless punk doesn't know how to be a man and you're ashamed? Well, guess what. Rapper on your shirt? Your big brother in prison? They're scared, fatherless punks, too. Show their ass for a dollar and a kick in the shin. It's just who you all are, boy. You just gotta swallow it. Swallow it like a whore swallows cum." He spat in the bloodstained dirt. He sighed again. Fatboy. Then, to the ape Gutterson he said, "Come on."

  He gestured the big thug toward the shed door and began to head that way himself. Gutterson paused to snort his disdain over the broken child in the dirt. Then he followed.

  But Super-Pred wasn't done. Or that is, he was done, but he needed to pretend there was still some man in him.

  "You think you're better than me?" he called up from the floor, called at their backs. "You no better than me, daddy. You just the same."

  Ramsey felt Gutterson glance at him as they walked away together. Ramsey only just bothered to roll his eyes to show how little he cared. But he did care, the snake writhing in him.

  "What are you but a g with a badge?" ragged Super-Pred from the floor, trying to salvage some self-respect. "Why shouldn't Fat-boy fight his turf? You just another crew out here, my man. You think we don't know? What about Peter Patterson? Whole street knows about him."

  Ramsey stopped in his tracks. Gutterson didn't catch it. The big thug kept going, reached the shed door, had his hand on it. Only then did he look behind to see Ramsey frozen.

  Ramsey turned slowly back toward Super-P. "What do you think you know?" he said quietly. Demeanor of lofty moral dignity. His mother's son.

  The boy gangster knew he'd gone too far, tried to backtrack. "I don't know nothing." Ramsey took a single step toward him. That was all it needed. Mr. Super-Pred started babbling, "I'm just rapping. Just a tag, man. Give a brother some slack. Trying to get your goat, that's all. Just a tag I saw."

  "A tag? Where?" said Ramsey in the same quiet tone. "You saw it where?"

  "A house. Old house we hang in sometimes."

  Ramsey nodded slowly. With that lifelong demeanor. With the snake writhing in his belly. Peter Patterson's pitying stare through the wavering water.

  "Tell me the address," he said.

  There was a magazine between the two front seats of the unmarked Charger. Standing in the hollow armrest between where Gutterson sat behind the wheel and where Ramsey sat on the passenger side. It was a national newsweekly. A leading national newsweekly with a picture of Augie Lancaster on the cover. Lancaster was striking a heroic pose. Fists on his hips, eyes on the horizon. They'd photographed him from below so he looked like a moral giant.

  Fighting to Save His City.

  That was the headline. That was actually the headline.

  If stupidity were a communicable disease, Ramsey thought, journalists would have to be herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle.

  He looked out his window. It was late afternoon on a dull gray day. No beam of sun—no shock of blue or any color—appeared to mitigate the bleakness of the scene. There was devastation on every side and an inhuman stillness, a heavy hollowness in the atmosphere—or maybe that was Ramsey himself, an emanation of his own interior state. In any case, brownstones stood gutted, their black windows like skull-eyes gazing back at him. Houses lay crippled and broken, sunk in mud that used to be lawns. Shops—he could see through the shattered storefronts—had been scoured of all their goods and were empty and abandoned, the walls stained brown up to the waterlines near their ceilings. There were words scrawled and painted on doorways and walls, words that had been scrawled and painted there to alert rescuers at the height of the flood. They came to Ramsey like disembodied voices, whispering out of the wreckage: Help us. Four trapped inside. One dead here. Save us. Help us.

  The whole area stank. Stagnant water and sewage. It made you flinch at first, but then it made you sad. It was such a mortal sort of odor, the stench of an abandoned corpse. It made you sad and then, after a while, you got used to it and just couldn't smell it at all anymore.

  Fighting to Save His City.

  Ramsey's eyes went over the scene, flicking instinctively to whatever was alive. A woman wearing a gym suit and carrying a shopping bag, young but bent over as if the earth itself were on her back. Two old men sitting in chairs against a wall, staring at the wrecked world like a movie. An angry mother yanking at her toddler's arm. And here and there, again and again, the slouching, shift-eyed, yellow-eyed young coyote-men prowling the afternoon, casing locations, casing prey, meeting on corners to clasp each other's hands in an expert and near-invisible exchange of cash and contraband.

  Fighting to Save His City.

  Had it ever been true? Ramsey wondered bitterly. Even at the beginning when Ramsey had first followed him, even loved him, even then had Augie Lancaster ever fought to save this city? Had he ever even meant to? Well ... in daydreams maybe. Daydreams like we all have of ceaseless cheering, of an endless parade, of himself, Augie, slowly passing in his top-down limousine, the hands of the poor upraised in gratitude at the spangly gold showering from his beneficent fingertips. Maybe he really hadn't known—maybe he really hadn't understood that even the dream of doing good can be the hunger for power in disguise. Maybe he hadn't recognized the strangely red-visaged angel who
had whispered to him he could be king of saints only to slowly tutor him to be king of kings—king of the city kings with his vacation homes and his cars and his boat, and the vacation homes and cars and boats of his cronies...

  Fighting to Save His City.

  All those times he had called these people his brothers. All those times he had told them that the white man was their enemy, that only he could save them as he saved them—look!—in his dreams. All those beautiful speeches— City of Hope, City of Justice —spurring them on to this protest or that, to boycott a Jew store owner who had shot a neighborhood thief, or to picket a radio station where some DJ had made some racial crack, or to protest a white jury's verdict that had sent some black mad-dog to prison. All those times he had inspired them to bare their chests and display the scars of injustice, mobilizing them as an army of victims to blackmail another dollar out of the citadels of white guilt and fear. It was all good—all good for the king of the city kings, but for the brothers? Useless, meaningless diversions while their fatherless children prowled the streets in drooling coyote crews and their fatherless mothers smoked bone for crack cocaine which their fatherless fathers sold to them in the broken buildings that all the spangly gold from his fingertips somehow never did rebuild.

  Fighting to Save His City.

  Sure. Because the journalists had their daydreams, too, the guilty white journalists made gullible by their desperate yearning for virtue. The same strangely red-visaged angel whispered in their ears, too: Well done, thou good and faithful servants, here are your Pulitzer Prizes and your I-Love-a-Nigger Decoder Rings for, lo, you have lifted a dusky-colored saint into the slowly passing top-down limousine of his parade where the spangly gold may fall upon the brown-skinned masses, transforming their infirmities and all your sins into an ever-to-be-remembered goodness.

  Herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle, Ramsey thought. The stupidest pack of fools on earth.

  Except maybe for him. Except maybe for Lieutenant Brick Ramsey himself, who had also followed Augie, who had even loved him and also believed.

  Gutterson swung the wheel and turned the Charger off the boulevard.

  They came onto a short lane. The houses here stood ghostly, lopsided and broken. You could see through the staring windows that they were empty, their interiors ravaged. You could see over-turned furniture in there and piles of debris and brown stains rising to the high waterlines on the wall.

  The lane dead-ended at an empty lot, a dirt-brown expanse where plastic bags and papers tumbled over concrete shards and discarded mattresses and discarded refrigerators and ovens and scrap. It made a mournful backdrop.

  "This is the one," Gutterson said.

  It was the fourth house down on the left, about halfway to the dead end. It was made of large wooden shingles painted pale green. Ramsey could already feel its haunted emptiness as the Charger pulled to the curb in front of it.

  "This is where they hang?" said Gutterson. "Look at it. Bunch of animals."

  Ramsey choked down his hatred for the man and with it any answer he might've made.

  The two of them got out of the car. They started across the front yard—the ruin of the front yard. The lawn was dead and littered with rubbish: cans and bags and pieces of lumber and rebar. They stepped through it gingerly, the debris crunching and clanging and crackling under their shoes. Gutterson's hand hovered over his nine, in case anyone was in the house and up to mischief. Ramsey's hands were at his sides. He was certain there was no one in there.

  They reached the front door and stood one on either side of it. A breeze off the river brought a fresh stink to them. Ramsey's nostrils stung with it and with the first hint of the smell within. Gutterson glanced at Ramsey. Ramsey nodded. Gutterson reached out and banged on the door with his fist.

  "Police!" he started to say. But with a soft, damp sound, the flood-rotten wood of the doorframe splintered. The door swung in and the word died half spoken.

  Another glance at Ramsey. Another nod. Gutterson drew his gun and charged the place. Ramsey more or less strolled in after him.

  "Oh...!" Gutterson strangled on a curse. The stench inside was hellish. He clapped a hand over his nose and mouth. "Fucking animals," he said through his fingers. "It's like living nose-deep in shit."

  He went off to search the place, moving tensely behind his gun.

  Ramsey, meanwhile, put his hands in his pants pockets and ambled into the living room. The smell was even worse in here. He tried breathing through his mouth but the air tasted bad, too. It was an awful brew: sewage, garbage, rotten food, maybe some dead things, drowned rats in the walls or a cat somewhere, and just the all-around putrescence of water damage. The whole place must've been under the flood at some point. The sofa had been soaked to a hulking mush. It looked as if it had melted and then resolidified. Chairs and tables were all overturned, broken and only half recognizable, what was left of them flung randomly about like body parts in a minefield. The walls were crumbling, broken through in places to the beams and insulation. The ceiling was mildewed and sagging as if it were about to come crashing down.

  "Clear!" Gutterson announced, coming in behind him.

  Ramsey had already found what he was looking for, was already standing in front of one moldy wall. Gutterson moved up beside him and the two cops stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at it.

  The wall was spray-painted and chalked from top to bottom, covered in tags, scrawled all over with ornate and sweeping gang handles and gang signs. Black skulls, green waves, gray thorns, red fire. Nicknames formed by tortuous swirls of color. Ramsey's eyes went over them. He knew the merciless thugs who made these marks and he despised them. He had always known them, always despised them. They were what his mother had hammered at him not to be. What the marines had sweated out of him. He had thought he'd lost his last sentimental traces of pity for them during his patrolmen years, seeing the creatures they were, cleaning their victims' entrails off the macadam. But it was strange. Looking at these marks today, he felt some distant stirring of ... compassion ... something. The flamelike rise of their embroidery seemed to him like supplicating hands raised to the sky, the masculine energy of their creation sounded in his mind like the soul-cries of fatherless young men, a great inarticulate bubble of boy-prayer desperately bursting under an empty heaven and then desperately gone.

  "Like pissing on a tree," said Gutterson. "Animals."

  Ramsey, with his air of quiet moral dignity and the writhing sourness inside him, didn't answer. Reluctantly, already knowing what he'd find, he shifted his gaze to the wall's low corner on his right hand, to the words stroked there in dripping blood-red letters.

  "What the fuck?" Gutterson muttered.

  The dripping blood-red letters said,

  Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson!

  SHANNON KNEW TIME was passing but he didn't know how much. Days? Weeks? He had no way of telling. He would float upward toward the surface of consciousness but never quite break through. He would see the world above as if through water, a liquid blur of life just beyond him.

  The foreigner was up there sometimes. The crazy old bastard who'd injected him. Shannon remembered. The mall parking lot. The watching eyeglasses. The back seat of the car...

  The foreigner would give him drinks through a straw. He would talk sometimes, though the words also came to Shannon as if through water and he could never recall from time to time what the foreigner said. He would try to answer. He would struggle to break through the surface, to come awake fully. But the drugs—it must've been drugs—would suck him back under. Light narrowing to a pinpoint, depths closing over him. He would hear the foreigner's voice like a fading echo: "Sleep."

  And he would sleep.

  Now he awoke. It was different this time. He felt it right away. His mind was clearer. He was aware of the room around him, of the bed underneath him. He had a new sense of his own material presence.

  He was in pain—he was aware of that now, too. His face was stiff, aching
, throbbing. The pain pulsed from the center of his head to radiate through his entire body. His left arm stung like hornets had been at it.

  He began to lift a hand to his face.

  "Don't touch yet," the foreigner said.

  Shannon stared at the hand groggily. He let it sink down again to the sheets. Slowly, he turned toward the voice.

  The foreigner was standing beside his bed. He was wearing a doctor's get-up, a white coat, a stethoscope around his neck. He was adjusting a blinking machine that stood on the top shelf of a green cart. Shannon noticed now that his bed had a rail like a hospital bed and that the mattress was partly raised like a hospital mattress so he could sit up. The machines the foreigner was tinkering with looked like hospital-style machines, too. There was an IV bag with its tube stuck in Shannon's arm. Another tube ran out from under the blankets—a catheter. It was all hospital stuff.

  But Shannon sensed that this was no hospital. A dim fire of panic sprang up in him, a dim fire of fear he understood was there but could hardly feel. He looked around the room. No windows. No pictures. Nothing. Just blank, white walls. No furniture but the bed and one chair. Where the hell was he?

  At that point, Shannon's eyes started to sink shut. He started to slump on the upraised mattress.

  "Sit. Sit up, stay up," the foreigner said briskly, coming to the bedside, pushing at his shoulder. "You have to keep elevated for swelling."

  Shannon shook his head, stretched his eyes, trying to stay awake. "Where am I? What'd you do to me?"

  "I cut off your legs and replace them with grinning doll heads."

  "What?"

  "Ta, ta, ta. Don't be fool. I joke with you. I give you new face, like I tell you. So the police, they won't know you. Is good, yes?"

  "My face? You changed my face?" Shannon started to lift his hand to it again.

  "Don't touch. Here. Drink."