The Identity Man (11 page)

"Go, go," said the foreigner. "Is not so bad. Look."

Shannon took a deep breath and lifted the mirror.

His first sensation at what he saw in the glass was terror, a quick, lancing jag of nauseating fear. Where had he gone? Who was that there? Who was he? But the moment passed. He was still himself. The features were changed, reshaped, but they were still his features somehow. He could still make himself out in the eyes and in remaining traces of the face he'd known. And he was still himself inside.

His terror abated. He was relieved. It was not so bad. It was good, in fact. No one else, not even people who knew him well, would ever recognize him. But he felt the same. He was who he was.

"You are Henry Conor now," the foreigner said.

"Henry Conor," Shannon murmured, gazing at his reflection. He let the name play in his mind. He didn't like it much. It sounded to him like the name of some pencil-head in a suit, a lawyer or something like that. "Why can't I pick my own name?"

"Because I make papers," the foreigner said. "This is name I put."

Shannon shrugged. A name was a name.

He went on looking. He felt better and better about the face looking back at him. Whatever else it was, it was no way the distorted monster face he'd seen reflected in the TV. The beard made him look like kind of a wild man, but he could shave that off soon enough. Underneath, it was all right.

"You do good work," he said.

The foreigner straightened from the briefcase he had opened on the bedroom chair. He handed Shannon a couple of manila folders. "Here are papers. License, passport, Social Security. Also tax returns for five years. Work history, references boss can call so he knows you are good worker." He handed him the folders.

"Nice. This is a whole big operation."

"You will have tools to work with and number to call where you can get job."

Shannon opened a folder. Saw the driver's license in there. Saw the address under the photograph.

"That's a long way away."

"This is good, yes? Far from where you were."

"Yeah, I guess that is good. I never been out there. Where'd you get the picture of me?"

"Computer morph. It's what I work from when I do face. You will shave to look like picture."

"Right. I'll look good without the beard. Should be able to get laid now and then anyway."

"That's why I leave same testicles," the foreigner said.

Shannon tossed the folders aside onto the bed. He searched the foreigner's droll and disdainful expression. "So all this is 'cause I saved that girl? I mean, this whole setup—this is all Whittaker paying me back for my good deed?"

The foreigner didn't answer. He just stood looking at him—looking at him, Shannon thought, as if he were a monkey in a cage or a child being observed on one of those hidden nursery cameras, a child playing dress-up alone in his room who didn't know the camera was there. The foreigner stood and watched him, in other words, as if he were some kind of lesser creature who didn't know he was being watched and whose antics amused him.

"What?" Shannon said. "What're you looking at?"

The foreigner merely went on watching him in that way another few seconds. Then finally he said, "Shave face. Get ready."

Shannon got ready. He shaved. He studied his new look in the mirror until it grew familiar. Then the foreigner came back for the last time.

"Here," he said. He put out one of his knobbly hands. He was holding a couple of capsules.

"No, I'm good," Shannon said. "I don't need them anymore."

"Take. Or I put needle in neck again." Shannon scraped the pills up off the foreigner's palm. "They will make you sleep. When you wake up, you have new life, like princess in fairy tale." He handed Shannon the juice bottle with the straw.

Shannon swallowed the pills, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Where'll you be?" he asked. It wasn't that he'd miss the foreigner exactly, but he was curious. He'd gotten used to the old guy, the only person he'd seen in ... well, he didn't know how long.

"Lie down or you will fall on new face."

Shannon lay back on the bed, looking up at the foreigner, at his disreputable old-world countenance with the hair sprouting in all the wrong places.

"You just go off to another job or what?" he asked him.

"I disappear like smoke," the foreigner said. "Close eyes."

"Identity mang has no identity, huh," said Shannon sleepily. He was already going under, starting to blink heavily. He fought it for another second or two. Now that the time had finally come, he was nervous about all this, his new life and so on. It'd been boring in here, in the white room, but it had felt safe anyway. Without newspapers or the TV news, the cops and Benny Torrance and the Hernandez killings had all seemed very far away. He'd forgotten what it was like to be out there in the world, on the run with the law after you.

Anxious or not, he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. He let them fall shut slowly. He lay still, countering his nervousness with images of the house from that last movie, the house in the small town with the lights on in the windows and Mom and Dad inside...

He gave a long nostalgic sigh. He missed those old days.

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.

"A man who is full of sin is full of shame!" she cried out, shaking her Bible at him.

He looked down again and Peter Patterson's corpse was no longer visible because, Ramsey suddenly realized, the water had turned to blood.

The dream haunted Ramsey as he tied his tie that morning standing before the bedroom mirror. He had woken from the nightmare with his heart racing and the image of his long-dead mother walking toward him through the storm made his heart race again as it came back to him.

A man who is full of sin is full of shame!

Where had he heard that phrase before? Somewhere. He tucked the tip of the port-red tie down into the Windsor. It looked good against the dark blue shirt. It would add to his air of authority and dignity. That would help at his meeting this morning with Augie Lancaster. He had always suspected that Augie was a little intimidated by him, overawed by his aura of street wisdom and self-control.

As he pulled the knot tight, he remembered: Skyles. That's where the phrase in his dream had come from. The Reverend Jesse Skyles.
What brought him to mind?
he wondered.

The Reverend Jesse Skyles was the most dangerous man in the city. That's what Augie Lancaster had called him anyway, though in Ramsey's opinion, Augie's hatred for the reverend had sometimes shaded over into personal obsession. Every time word got out that Skyles was setting up another of his makeshift churches, Augie would have Ramsey assign precious police resources to find it. He would send building inspectors and fire inspectors to shut it down, or bangers—and off-duty cops pretending to be bangers—to bust it up. At one point, he was threatening to raid the next place right during the service. He had some fantasy about SWAT storming in, rousting suspicious characters, dragging the minister himself away in handcuffs on some trumped-up charge. Ramsey had had a job of it making him see reason.
These are good folks gathering,
Ramsey said,
your folks, home folks who love them some God.
You couldn't go in there like it was Baghdad. It would only turn people against you, and give Skyles credibility, too. It might even alert some news media—the national news media, who weren't in Augie's pocket back then.
Let me go over there,
Ramsey said.
Let me go over and have a look.
Augie liked that idea. He got the picture of it. Ramsey's very presence during the service—the presence of a respected lawman who had risen up from these very streets—would send a chill of suspicion and danger through the congregation. They would ask themselves:
What's the lieutenant doing here? Is the reverend up to something wrong? What's the lieutenant going to think if he sees me here? Maybe I should stay home next time, stay away from this, I don't need the trouble.
It might even intimidate Skyles himself.

That Sunday, the reverend held his service in a storefront in the Five Corners. He and his deacons must've thrown the place together Saturday night. Nothing but metal folding chairs for pews and a card table for an altar. No light in the cramped room but the morning sun through the big window and a couple of desk lamps set on top of stools, their extension cords running to the outlets next door. They'd put out the come-to-meeting at the last possible minute, with phone calls and runners to keep it within the congregation. It was the only way they could outsmart Augie's inspectors and the bangers and the off-duty cops.

But Ramsey found them. Of course. Ramsey pushed gigantically through the door just as the sermon was beginning. He stood in the back of the room large as life and watched with his grim, threatening dignity hanging over the church like a vulture. The worshippers felt him there from the outset. They shifted uncomfortably in their folding chairs. They cast sidelong glances at him.

But not Skyles. Skyles had the spirit in him that morning. It was as if he had swallowed a Roman candle: he was jumping around and there were sparks flying out of him every which way. No lawman—and no man's law—were going to hold him back.

"The white man in America is full of sin and a man who is full of sin is full of shame. He's full of the shame of racism, the shame of slavery and Jim Crow. And he'll do anything to make that shame go away. He'll give you money—welfare money for doing nothing. He'll give you government jobs you didn't earn and don't deserve. He'll say: 'You wanna take drugs? You wanna get your girlfriend pregnant? You want to live without morality? Why, that's okay, little black man, you go right on ahead. I give you abortions to kill those babies. I give the mother money so you don't have to marry her. I give you some
pro-grams
for those drugs.
Pro-grams,
that'll set you right up. Just don't be calling me racist. I'll give you anything you want, just set me free of my shame.'"

In appearance, Skyles was a prim little man. Old—Lieutenant Ramsey noticed with some bitterness—old enough to remember segregation and the rest. Wore a three-piece suit. Had a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses. When he was standing still, he had the punctilious, slightly sour aspect of a man who sold ladies' underwear and found it rather distasteful—though in fact he ran a Donut Land franchise over on Pearl Street. But when the spirit was in him like this, he never did stand still. He jumped and strutted like a chicken on fire. Back and forth behind the folding table with the flames and sparks shooting out of him and the words bubbling out of his mouth in a high frantic rasp.

"You say to me, 'No, no, no—no, no, no, Reverend Skyles, we don't take nothing from the white man. We got the black man in power now. We got Augie Lancaster in power.
He
give us that money.
He
give us them abortions. He give us some
pro-grams!
We do love us some
pro-grams,
Reverend Skyles, they set us right up.' But I tell you truly. I tell you: Augie Lancaster
is
the white man. Augie Lancaster has made himself the tool of the white man's shame. He understands the agony of their sin. He goes right to Washington, he says, 'If you don't want me to call you racist, you better give me some of that money you take from people who
earn
their livings. You don't want that shame, you gotta give me some more jobs, some more
pro-grams.'
That's how he buys his homes and his boats and his mistresses. That's how he buys his friends—by giving them those jobs. And that's how he buys you, too. That's right. He buys you, too, just like the rest. And yes, I see his police thug standing in the back there—" he shouted suddenly. He didn't even deign to glance at the imposing Ramsey. He just shouted: "You don't need to be stealing looks back there at him, you keep your eyes on the truth! You keep your eyes on the Word!"

That got some
amens
going for a moment, little eruptions of them here and there. Annoyed, Lieutenant Ramsey let his eyes move sternly over the heads of the parishioners.
I'm seeing you,
he was telling them.
I'm seeing your faces.
The people cast their sidelong glances at him. Fear and anxiety tightened their lips. The
amens
petered out and died.

But Jesse Skyles went on, unstoppable. He had the spirit in him.

"Now the white man has enslaved you again, but it's worse this time, because this time you're his accomplice. Augie Lancaster is an accomplice, and you're an accomplice in your own slavery. You looking to massa to help you instead of helping yourself. You're taking his money and giving up your self-reliance. You take his abortions and give up your responsibilities. You take his
pro-grams
and give up your morality. You getting fat on the milk of his sin, on the honey of his shame. You get all that sweetness by blaming the white man, so you don't need to take no responsibility for yourself."

Ramsey continued to stand there, lithic and imposing, his hands folded in front of him, his roving stare picking off
amens
like they were ducks at a shooting gallery. He was aware of the anger burbling volcanically in the core of that tightly controlled self of his. He was beginning to see Augie's point about this loudmouth. What did he have to be saying
this
kind of thing for? Didn't these people have troubles enough? They needed those jobs and pro-grams Augie got for them. What else did they have? And who else would give them? So why make them feel bad about it? Why make them look bad to themselves—or to the white man if he was listening? And why make Augie look bad? Ramsey was beginning to understand why Augie was so intent on bringing Skyles down.