The Identity Man

by Andrew Klavan

  And even Skyles—even the reverend had to wonder sometimes, too. At that moment, the critical moment, when the girl deftly slipped the strap of her dress down her shoulder—deftly hiked her hem—and slipped her naked breast against his upraised hand and pressed her shaved and shockingly naked slit against his knee, hadn't he hesitated for just a second before he started back and pulled away? It sure looked like that on the security camera footage—it sure looked like he hesitated a long, long second—a clear, open-and-shut case of Lust in the Heart. That was enough to quiet any questions about the girl and her intentions, especially from reporters whose priest-fucks-kid narrative fell out of them like dog slobber at a dinner bell. And that was enough, in turn, to make Skyles half believe he half belonged in prison. Wracked with guilt, he could only blither weakly in his own defense while Augie Lancaster's judge and jury members worked their will—his will—Augie Lancaster's ever-unspoken will.

  So there it was. The perfect case in point. The reverend wasn't sure if he was guilty. The girl wasn't sure if she was lying. Ramsey wasn't sure whose idea the whole thing was. No wonder Augie Lancaster floated free of history, like a soap bubble carried away on a rising atmosphere of abstract desire...

  An image that made one corner of Ramsey's mouth lift slightly beneath his moustache...

  Just then—in keeping with this theme—into the coffee shop came the animal Gutterson. Tromping thump-footed like a troll guarding a castle gate. Wearing a jacket of white linen that looked like it hadn't been ironed since last spring.

  He got his coffee at the counter and sank into his chair across the small round table from the lieutenant. He let out a heavy sigh as he sat and said, "Another day, another dollar." Full of earthy wisdom was the detective.

  Ramsey didn't even bother to speak. He simply pushed the blue folder across the table at him.

  Gutterson sighed again and cleared his throat. He opened the folder with one hand while he raised his coffee cup to his lips with the other.

  It was the same blue folder that had been given to Ramsey by Charlotte Mortimer-Rimsky. It held the same blurry photograph of the man in the car outside the graffito house. But now it also held printouts from Ramsey's long, discreet, difficult, and only partially successful investigation.

  Gutterson scanned the printouts, staring dead-eyed and working his lips like some knucklehead reading porn.

  "Mysterious," he rumbled after a while.

  "I need to know what he knows."

  "That could get messy." Unconcerned, Gutterson flipped the blue folder shut. He sipped his coffee, looking over the rim at Ramsey.

  It was the crucial moment, but it all seemed more or less inevitable. Gutterson's stupidity was of a wholly moral nature. He was smart enough otherwise. He had survived on this city's police force a long time. He was plenty smart enough to divine his superior's will.

  "Well, we can't have a mess," Ramsey said.

  "No, we cannot. No, we cannot," said Gutterson with some unfathomable combination of bloodlust and world hatred. He swept up the blue folder with one paw. "I keep this?"

  Ramsey gestured as if to say Be my guest.

  Then, when Gutterson was gone, the lieutenant sat alone through a half-price refill, looking out the window at the pleasant view of a Westside shopping mall. He daydreamed vaguely about what he'd do when all this was over. How he'd become the law officer he'd started out to be, the neighborhood model of success, self-control, and integrity, his mother's son. He saw himself rescuing fatherless children from their gangster mentors ... or something. Whatever. He knew full well that it would never happen. He knew full well that "all this" is never over. "All this" is just the world and you make your choices and you pay your way. He was just soothing his conscience, that's all. That was part of his discipline, too, now: quieting the voice of his upbringing, breaking free of his mother's outmoded philosophical apron strings, willing away his shame.

  Because that was the real secret of the whole business, wasn't it? That was the great thing Augie Lancaster knew and that Ramsey, meditating on Augie's success, had now discovered: conscience was history. Conscience was the weight of history, the only power it had over you. And it, too—conscience, too—was nothing more than a current of mass opinion that could be turned this way or that by a strong man's will.

  The thought brought Ramsey back to himself, back to his own predicament—left behind here as he was on the history-flooded earth as Augie levitated into the television ether where the young folks danced and sang his praises and the reporters-who-were-not-reporters-anymore appended choral hallelujahs to his name. The thought brought Ramsey back to the blue folder. It was all about the blue folder now.

  To anyone with eyes to see with, to anyone with a mind accustomed to the way things worked in this good old city, in this good old world, the blue folder was nothing less than an order to kill a man. It had come to Ramsey through Charlotte Mortimer-Rimsky, but it was really an expression of Augie Lancaster's will. And now Ramsey had given the blue folder to Gutterson and the folder had become an expression of Ramsey's will. And if ever the deed itself should come back to haunt him, Ramsey would say, "No, no, that wasn't what I meant. It was just a blue folder. I don't know what he was thinking."

  Because Ramsey had watched Augie Lancaster on TV. He had seen him floating free of the city and he had learned his lesson. He had learned how to give an order to do murder without uttering an incriminating word. He had learned how to turn the current of his conscience against the directions of his upbringing, against the fact of his own actions and the tug of responsibility. He, too, had learned how to float free.

  He sat stirring an extra half spoon of sugar into his coffee cup and gazed mildly out the window at the passing scene.

  ON SATURDAY, after all those days of spring sunshine, it finally rained. That was the day Shannon finished the angel.

  He went to the Applebees' house and carried the sculpture into the house's small garage. He worked on it in there, putting on the finishing touches. When he was done, he and old man Applebee set the altarpiece back on the mantel in the dining room. Teresa and the boy came home from the grocery store and they all four admired it.

  Teresa made pork chops and mashed potatoes, and they all had dinner together in the dining room by candlelight. There was an atmosphere of celebration in the house as Applebee and Teresa took turns admiring different aspects of the wooden angel Shannon had made, the angel of Joy and Sorrow. Applebee even raised a glass of wine and toasted it. When dinner was over, he went to it and studied it up close.

  "You're an artist, Henry," he said to Shannon.

  Shannon laughed that off. He was no artist.

  "No, I'm serious. You could make a living at it. I mean, this..." He shook his head. "It really is remarkable."

  Shannon felt good. He was aware of how good he felt. He didn't have that feeling he sometimes got as if his skin were crawling. He just felt good. This was the life, he thought: sitting here with these people as if he were part of the family and holding his love for Teresa half-secret in his heart and having the angel he'd made sitting on the mantel there. Somewhere inside, he knew it all had to come apart at some point, because he knew he was a fraud. The angel looked at him from its perch as if it knew he was a fraud, too, a crappy little thief with a face job and false papers. But he, Shannon, put that out of his mind for now, because this was what he'd always wanted, wanted without knowing it, this was the life, the new life the identity man had promised him: here it finally was.

  "Well, we ought to do something," he said. "Go out and celebrate sometime or something." He spoke out of his general pleasure with things, but the idea in his mind was that he would take Teresa out somewhere sometime and they would be alone together.

  But the kid, Michael, piped up, "We could go to the fair. There's a fair. Junie went to it, Junie at school. We could go."

  And Teresa looked at Shannon expectantly.

  So what the hell, the next day, Sunday, when Teresa and th
e boy came home from church, Shannon took them to the fair.

  It was really just a carny on the edge of the city. The usual rides and booth games trucked over from the last town before being trucked over to the next. The kid thought it was magical, though, and that was fun even for Shannon. Michael's usual solemn demeanor fell away. He kept running off to one thing and then another, shouting, "Can we go on this? Can we do this?" The Ferris wheel, the bouncy castle, the whirligig. "Can we do this? Can we do this?" Shannon bought him cotton candy and taught him how to throw one of the lightweight baseballs at the booths. After spending about a million dollars on balls, the kid actually knocked over one of the targets and won a stuffed frog worth maybe a buck-fifty. That practically rocketed him into the stratosphere: "Look, Mama, I won, I won!" He held the frog in a death grip the rest of the day.

  Shannon could tell it made Teresa happy to see the boy so excited. Whenever Shannon turned to her, she lit up and gave him a big smile. It really got to him. The smile was about the kid, sure, and he was glad to see that, but it got to him and it made him wonder if they could send the kid off somewhere for a while so he could kiss her. After the way she'd looked at him in the backyard, he was pretty sure she wanted him to.

  It was a bright, warm afternoon. Saturday's rainstorm had left the air feeling fresh and clean. The weather brought the people out and as the day wore into blue evening, the fair grew crowded. Shannon and Teresa and the kid had to push their way through the mob and wait on line for the rides, but the kid didn't seem to mind.

  He went on the carousel. He wanted Shannon to come along, but Shannon wanted a chance to be alone with Teresa. Maybe the kid understood that, because he tugged at Shannon for only a few seconds, then went off on the ride by himself.

  The carousel was small, with colored light bulbs flashing and a calliope playing fairy-tale music. The kid went around on his painted horse every few seconds, waving to them so that they had to wave back. There was no time to go after the kiss. But Shannon and Teresa were standing next to each other behind a low metal barrier and she had one hand on the top of the barrier, leaving the other free for waving at the kid. After about the fifty-seventh time the kid went by, Shannon figured why not and reached out and put his hand over Teresa's hand where it sat on the barrier. He heard Teresa take a deep breath, and then she wrapped her hand around his. Shannon remembered the first time a girl had let him slide his fingers down her pants, when he was thirteen, the first time he had actually felt the magical damp portal into her flesh. It had set off a pretty substantial explosion in him, an expanding fireball filling him with flame. But this was on another order of magnitude, this was nuclear, and it was just her hand in his. Her hand in his and the carousel bringing the kid around and the cheap carny colored lights and the calliope music, that's all. But he really was crazy about her, he really was. He'd never felt anything like it. He turned to look at her, and she looked at him and smiled again, and that was pretty nuclear, too.

  Then a movement caught his eye and his glance shifted, and he saw the man who had been following him all this time.

  It was that same guy, the same damned guy with the shaved head and the watchful eyes and the cheap suit. It was a different cheap suit this time, but the exact same motherfucker otherwise, large as life, Shannon was sure of it. In that first moment, when Shannon first shifted his gaze from Teresa's smile and saw the bastard through the crowd, the guy was just standing there, just staring his way.

  There could be no doubt about it anymore: the guy was watching him.

  He was over by the wheel-of-fortune booth. The big wheel was turning and its colored lights blinking behind him. The flashing colors played on him and the fair lights washed over him so Shannon could see him clearly even in the twilight. The bald-headed goon saw Shannon look at him. Caught off-guard, he started. The next moment, he hurried away, losing himself in the crowd.

  Shannon felt sick inside. Who was this guy? A cop? He had to be. What else? Deep down, Shannon had known all along that something like this would happen, that someone would find him. But why did it have to be now, so soon? Why couldn't it be in a few months or a year or a couple of years when he'd had a chance to live out his new life, when he'd had a chance to be with Teresa?

  The sickness turned to anger in him. He let go of Teresa's hand and said, "I'll be right back, okay?"

  "What's wrong?" she said.

  "Nothing. I'll be right back."

  He left her and plunged into the crowd, going after this guy, this bastard, meaning to run him to ground.

  The next minute everything was racing past him and everything was racing inside him, too. The glittering lights of the turning carousel and the muscular rise and fall of the Ferris wheel and the strangely deadpan faces of parents and their children raced past on both sides of him, and his chaotic angry thoughts raced inside him, disconnected. He didn't know exactly what he was planning to do. But something. He wasn't going to just stand around and let this bastard follow him and torment him from a distance. If the guy was a cop, well, let him show his hand. Or if he wasn't a cop. Maybe he was something else, like a blackmailer or something—or an agent of Benny Torrance, out for revenge. Whatever. Never mind. If he had some proof of who Shannon was, let him bring it out. If he wanted to make a play, let him make it. Christ, couldn't Shannon have ten seconds to hold his girl's hand at the fair like anybody would? Was that too goddamn much to ask from the universe?

  He reached the wheel-of-fortune booth, where the guy had been. He was breathless, tense and sweating, the wheel's colored lights flashing in his eyes and the barker calling to place your bets, take your chances. Jostled by some dick-swinging trucker who was swaggering past, Shannon turned unsteadily, scanning the people moving along the line of game booths toward an octopus ride—eight seats spinning round and round and up and down on the end of mechanical arms.

  He saw—he thought he saw—the back of that bald head in the crowd by the octopus. He went after it, turning his body and using his hands to work his way past the people jammed up in front of him.

  He reached the octopus, the seats going up and down above him, the calliope music playing loudly in his ears. But the bald guy was already gone, lost in the crowd...

  No, wait, there he was. At the carnival's exit. Walking fast into the parking lot, walking toward that car of his, that same pale green Crown Victoria with the scrape on the side. Shannon saw its red taillights blink once as the guy pressed the button on his key to unlock it. No chance to catch up to him now, no chance to stop him.

  Shannon stood helplessly, jostled by the crowd. He watched helplessly as the guy pulled the car door open and lowered himself inside.

  A moment later, the Ford was pulling away.

  When Shannon got back to the carousel, the boy, Michael, was leaning against his mother's jeans and sobbing. He was clutching her leg with one hand and clutching his stuffed frog to his runny nose with the other.

  "He thought you left," Teresa told Shannon. She didn't sound angry or anything, but she gave him a look of deep meaning, and Shannon understood that this was some kind of big deal because of the kid's father being dead and all. He felt bad about it. He had to force his thoughts back from his run across the carnival, back from that bastard making his getaway in the Ford. He had to force his attention back to the boy—who really did look pretty pitiful clutching his buck-fifty stuffed frog like that.

  Shannon knelt in front of him, put his hand on the kid's shoulder. "Hey, hey, hey," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

  But the minute he said it, he felt something dark open inside him. Because it was a lie, wasn't it? He was a fraud—a fugitive fraud with a murder rap hanging over his head. And with this bald guy after him, this new life of his was sure to fall apart at some point. And then he would be going somewhere, maybe forever.

  The little boy snuffled against his mother's leg, looking at him through his tears, waiting to be told that everything was okay. That's when it hit Shannon full force: if his n
ew life did fall apart—or, all right, when it fell apart—it wouldn't just fall apart for him now but for this boy, too, maybe for Teresa, too, if she gave a damn, but for this boy more than anyone.

  Kneeling there with his hand on the poor kid's shoulder, Shannon lifted his eyes. He saw Teresa looking down at him, and he understood that she was thinking pretty much the same thing.

  By the time he took them home to the old rectory, it was late, dark. Teresa sent the boy inside to his grandfather and stood alone with Shannon at the front door.

  "Thank you, Henry. That was a nice day," she said.

  He could see clearly enough what she was going to say next, and he was desperate to stop her. So he stepped close and took her face in one hand and kissed her. It was no good. It was all wrong, because of the desperation and because he was just doing it to shut her up. Still, she let him do it, and for a few moments he had the drunken sense of what it might've been like, the feel of her mouth giving way and her hair tangling in his fingers and the sweetness of the thing starting up between them, not just the kiss, but the whole thing.

  She must've felt some of it, too, because, at first, her hand lifted as if she wanted to take hold of him. But she didn't. It was all wrong, and she didn't touch him. After a while, her hand sank down again. Shannon broke the kiss off and stepped away.

  "Oh ... Listen, Henry..." she began—because he hadn't stopped her from saying what she was going to say, he'd just delayed it.

  "I know, I know," he said. "Look..."

  "No, I just have to be sure, you know? It's different when you have a kid. I can't pretend I'm just some girl again and he isn't there."

  "No, no, you're his mother, I understand that."

  "I can't have people come and then leave. Guys, I mean. I can't just start up with them and let him care about them and then have them leave. I can't let him go through something like that again."