The Identity Man

by Andrew Klavan

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Front

  PART I

  A PAGE OF A NEWSPAPER lay sodden on the sidewalk. minister jailed in sex scandal, the headline read. Peter Patterson made out the words before the gusting wind caught the paper up and carried it, wet and heavy as it was, tumbling away through the mist of slashing rain. Patterson watched the paper gray and dim and vanish in the darkness. He kept walking, the wind and water whipping at his face.

  A THOUSAND MILES away, a week or so later, as evening came, Shannon was working with wood. We'll call him Shannon anyway. He'd had a couple of other names in his life and he'll have one more before this story is finished, but he was Shannon now and it'll do. He was running a draw knife over a block of white ash. White ash was a hard wood to shape and it rotted fast, but he liked the color of it. This block in particular had caught his eye in the art supply store. He could see a woman in it, a woman's face. She was not young but not old either. She was very gentle and sweet, feminine and yearning. It was only the face but he could picture all of her. He could see her standing in the doorway of a house at the edge of a field of grain. She was looking into the distance, watching for her man, hoping he would come back to her.

  IT WAS A LONG WAY back to his place on foot. Up hills, down empty streets, the night full of sirens. By the time Shannon pushed through the door of his apartment, he was breathless and sweating. He was scared, too. It wasn't hard for him to figure out what was going to happen next.

  FOR THREE DAYS he lived in a graveyard. It was on a cliff top overlooking the sea. There were acres and acres of gently rolling lawn. There were paved walkways winding through the grass. There were stones and steles, crosses, and the occasional statue rising white on the green hills amid shrubs and eucalyptus and palm trees. Shannon knew one of the groundskeepers here, a sad-eyed, egg-shaped dude named Hector Medeiros. They had done a few jobs together. Hector helped him hide out.

  PART II

  THE GANGSTER WAS fifteen years old. He called himself Super-Pred—he actually called himself that. He had his own following among the scattered crews warring over the city's Northern District, or what was left of the Northern District after the looting and the fire and the flood. He had a rep for the unimaginably sudden and grotesque: frothing fits of rage that left his enemies de-boweled or otherwise damaged irrevocably. There was, for instance, one thirteen-year-old in his posse nicknamed Eyeball because Super-Pred had torn one of his eyeballs out in a property dispute over some twelve-year-old cooch—who, by the way, had been missing ever since.

  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.

  PART III

  RAMSEY DREAMED he was standing on the flooded street again with the city burning all around him. The water had risen to his thighs and Peter Patterson's body was sunk in it, staring up at him through the rain-rattled surface. Then the water began to thicken and grow opaque. The bookkeeper's corpse grew dimmer. Only his stare remained bright. Ramsey heard a voice. He turned and saw his mother, long dead, walking toward him from a block or two away. She was dressed in her print dress for Sunday meeting, holding a black umbrella over her head. She was pushing steadily between the flaming buildings, through the driving rain.

  SHANNON OPENED HIS EYES. At first, he was startled to find himself somewhere new, somewhere other than the white room. He lay still on the strange bed, wary. Then he remembered. He sat up, dragging his hand down his cheek, trying to swipe away the tranquilizer haze.

  NOW IT WAS a few weeks later. Shannon was working as a carpenter. He'd been taken on by a contractor named Harry Hand. "Handsome Harry" everyone called him, which was a joke because he was a little fat guy with a puckered face. He looked like a munchkin gorilla.

  FREDERICK APPLEBEE MET HIM at the door, holding the barred door of the security cage open. As Shannon stepped inside and followed the old man through the house, he looked around him. Since he knew this was where the crying woman lived, he was looking for signs of her and for clues about what she was like.

  SHANNON FELL IN LOVE with her—with Teresa. It was something entirely new.

  NOW HE SET TO WORK in earnest. He carved the angel's features quickly, half-afraid he would lose the image of the face in his mind, but also knowing somehow that he wouldn't lose it because the image in his mind was also, weirdly enough, the very face that was buried in the wood, imperishably there.

  PART IV

  LIEUTENANT RAMSEY SAT in the coffee shop, waiting for Gutterson. His oval face with its thin moustache was deadpan in its imperturbable dignity. His thoughts were likewise cool, as cool as his expression. His anguish was no longer operational.

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

  HE PARKED THE Civic down the street from his brownstone. He shut the car off and sat in it a while, just sort of weighing the car keys in his hand and staring through the windshield.

  IT WAS A LONG time before the full extent of the catastrophe occurred to him. Oh, he knew it was a disaster right away, but it was a long time before he could take it all in. With the adrenaline still pumping through him and the cop just lying there dead on the floor, he couldn't think clearly. But he had to think. He had to figure out what to do.

  PART V

  AT HIS FIRST sight of the dead Gutterson, Lieutenant Ramsey had an uncomfortable premonition of nemesis: a sense some evil fate was working against him. He pushed the idea aside as self-defeating superstition. He looked down at Gutterson and thought: Just good old-fashioned, all-too-human incompetence, that's all.

  IN THE DAYLIGHT, Shannon sat cross-legged on the empty floor and tried to think the situation through. It wasn't easy. His mind was clearer now, but the situation—that was a mess. Here he was in a new town with a new face, all his records wiped out, even his DNA records changed. But from the very start, some bald guy had been following him everywhere. Then, on the night he finally chased the bald guy away, up showed some cop and tried to cut his ear off. What the hell? How did that make sense? Shannon had known a cop or two who would cut your ear off if it served their purposes. He'd even known a couple of cops who would cut your ear off for a laugh. But it was not the usual coplike thing. He did not imagine your average, honest carpenter citizen would get house calls from cops who wanted to cut his ear off. So someone, in other words, knew who he really was or thought he was someone else they knew. Or something.

  LIEUTENANT RAMSEY WENT to see the old man first. The meeting did not go well. The very sight of the white shingled house standing whole and alone amid the rubble all around it renewed that oppressive superstitious sense of destiny or karma or something at work—that sense that had been haunting the periphery of his awareness ever since he saw Gutterson dead on the floor, the great, staring, stupid lump of him with his brainless head caved in. That whiff of nemesis then—the whiff of dead Gutterson's shit and also of nemesis—of evil fate working against him—an invisible will opposing his invisible will—had been just that, just a whiff, a faint sensation, but it grew now when he saw the white house standing there as if magically unharmed. And when the old man opened the door to his knock, it grew even stronger.

  "ALL RIGHT," said Shannon. "Tell me."

  LIEUTENANT BRICK RAMSEY waited, too, suffered tortures that long day, too, tortures of indecision and of what he disdained to name as fear. But he was afraid—there was no other word for it. It had been building in him since that morning.

  PART VI

  NIGHT FELL. Far away, beneath a chandelier flashing rainbows over a fine ballroom in the nation's capital, Augie Lancaster was bestowing the high, ringing ideals of his oratory on the upturned faces of worshipful celebrities. But here, in the alleys of the city he'd created and left behind, there were
a thousand little crucifixions. Girls who still had secret dreams of romantic dances were on their knees in the dust taking a mouthful of dick for a handful of dollars. Boys in the animal rage of manhood-without-nobility were strutting the little distance between their hard-ons and the grave. Gunfire was everywhere. A teenager was gurneyed into an ER with a slug in his chest. He'd leave in a wheelchair: dead-eyed, drooling. Wailing drifted through every half-opened window. A little girl slapped her baby because it wouldn't stop crying long enough for her to hit her methamphetamine pipe in peace. Tsk, tsk, tsk, said the old men shaking their heads. Old, dried-up, moralizing men locked behind the barred doors of their houses to keep them from souring the juicy life of the street; chewed-up old men spat into the gutter of the juicy street life. And the women? So mean. Thirty-year-old grandmothers: nasty, bullying.

  SHANNON DROVE ON through the dark streets. The old man sat beside him. Teresa sat in back, cradling her son in her arms.

  IT WAS A LONG NIGHT—a long, long night. The waiting was bad. The waiting is always the worst part, Shannon thought. He lay on the cot where the slick agent had read the girly magazine. He lay with his eyes open, staring up at the pipes zig-zagging through the shadows on the loft ceiling. He thought that this was what it must feel like to be on death row. The weird combination of suspense—as if you didn't know what was going to happen—and the sickness of inevitability. Shannon figured you felt the suspense because even though you did know what would happen, you couldn't help hoping you'd be saved from it somehow. Where there's life, there's hope—that's what makes the whole business so terrifying.

  THE BUSINESS DISTRICT had been hit hard on the night of the disaster. Water had damaged luxurious lobbies and atria. Rioters had smashed massive storefront windows. Mobs had marauded through skyscrapers, ransacking offices at random. There had been fires everywhere.

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