The Identity Man (12 page)

"Let me ask you a question." Skyles shot the words at his congregation, undeterred by their intimidated silence, hopping back and forth, back and forth behind the folding table. "Who is it who does you like this? Who gives you money but takes your self-reliance? Who gives you jobs but robs you of your desire for excellence? Who takes care of your babies for you but steals your morality and your dignity? Let me ask you this question so you understand: Who gives you the things of the body and lures you away from the things of the spirit?"

"The devil!" an older woman shouted from the folding chairs—the spirit had caught her and she couldn't help herself. Half a dozen worried sidelong glances went toward Lieutenant Ramsey. The woman realized what she'd done and half glanced at him, too. But then she must've figured it was too late. She settled back into her folding chair with a defiant sniff and an I-don't-care wiggle of her bottom.

And Jesse Skyles's spirit fed off hers. "The devil!" he answered back, riding a fine, high wave of indignation. "It's the devil who gives you the things of the world and lures you away from the soul things, the real things. It's guilty white folks trying to buy their way out of history. It's Augie Lancaster making his money and his power off their shame. And it's the devil himself. And if you ask me, they all three's the same!"

Lieutenant Ramsey shrugged into his blue blazer now and examined himself one last moment in the mirror. He had the effect he wanted: distinguished and commanding. He looked into his own eyes.

The nightmare was still in his mind and the memory of Skyles was in his mind, too, and out of the interplay between them, a truth came to him.

Down deep, way down deep, he had agreed with Reverend Skyles that day. He understood that now, only now. He had been angry at Skyles for defying him and for saying what he said, but down deep he had agreed. How could it have been otherwise? What Skyles was telling the people was no different from what Ramsey's mother had told him, what his mother had pounded into him as she sculpted his heart with that hammering Bible. Self-reliance, morality, dignity, self-control. Don't be looking to anyone else to take care of you. Pull yourself up and walk like a man.

That day at that makeshift church—that day marked the first inkling Ramsey had in his heart that the logic of his life had been skewed and twisted, even corrupted and spoiled by Augie—by Augie and his promises and his high rhetoric and his flash. It was the first time he was forced to brush away the suspicion that there was no excuse for this man, that his ends did
not
justify his means, that he was in fact empty and disreputable in every particular, and had led Ramsey astray step by self-justifying step. That's why Ramsey had come to feel that Augie was right about Skyles, that Skyles was dangerous. Because down deep he realized that Skyles could overturn everything, the whole city. Because down deep, he realized that Skyles was speaking the unholy truth of his own mistakes.

That's why he had agreed to help Augie destroy him.

He turned from the mirror and left the bedroom. He went into the living room and stood beside the small round dining table near the kitchenette. He lifted his coffee mug from the table and brought it to his lips for a last sip, even though he knew the coffee had grown cold and bitter. He looked over the mug's rim at the apartment. Hard to believe he'd been living here almost a year now. Hard to believe it was a year since his wife had asked him to go. The apartment was small and drab, furnished as impersonally as a hotel room. Even looking straight at it, he barely saw it anymore.

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

So it was, no question. His mama never lied.

He paused before he took another sip of the coffee. All his life, he reflected, he had kept control over his emotions. It was no different now. His shame was just one more emotion he had to control, bad dreams and all.

He set the mug down and left for his meeting with Augie.

He was asked to wait in the Media Room. The Media Room, they called it now. That was new. It was the Conference Room last time he was here. But today it was, "Of course, Lieutenant, go right in and have a seat in the Media Room," from the white boy at the front desk. The white boy was new also, one of the volunteers who'd come in from the coast after the flood.

The flood had changed a lot of things around here.

The Media Room was a long chamber paneled in dark wood with one wall of windows overlooking the city park. The glass table was still here from its more modest Conference Room days. And there were still those fancy overpriced chairs around it, the ones with the aerated backs: your tax dollars at work. Now, though, your tax dollars were working overtime, because there were also three, count them three, flat-screen TVs on the wall opposite the windows. TV on the left showed local channel eight; TV on the right showed local channel five; and TV in the middle showed CNN in a little square surrounded by a lot of other little squares showing other news channels. And what do you know? Right this minute, as if it were planned, as if it were timed for Ramsey's edification, all three stations, eight, five, and CNN, were featuring none other than the increasingly famous Augie Lancaster. Augie had made a speech last night before the Council on Justice. It had been touted in the media as his debut on the national political scene. So there he was at the lectern, gazing like a visionary into the distance or at least into the TelePrompTer. The audio on the TVs was off, thank God, but the TV on channel eight was running captions, the white words on the black background appearing under Augie's image, line by line: "We can't have faith until we have hope and we can't have hope until we learn to dream again as a nation..."

Nigger, what you on about?
Ramsey thought, and the hint of a shadow of a whisper of a smile played at the corner of his lips.

Shaking his head, he turned his back on the TVs and faced the window. He gazed out at the park three stories below. From here, the city looked whole and brilliant. This little corner of the city anyway, the square of government buildings surrounding the sculpted lawn. Men and women walked busily to and fro on gracefully curving asphalt paths. They wore colorful spring shirts and blouses, solid reds and oranges and yellows. The tulips were red and orange and yellow in their beds. Above it all, the dome of city hall presided stately and golden against the blue sky.
City of Hope. City of Justice.
From here, the little square looked like Augie Lancaster's rhetoric made real.

Watching the people below, it occurred to Ramsey that it was a beautiful, warm spring day out there. It occurred to him that he had taken no joy in it, that he'd barely noticed it as he walked from his car to the building. It occurred to him that all his joy in life, in fact, was gone.

Just then, the door opened behind him.

Ramsey turned and saw a young woman come in. It was a terrible and wholly unexpected moment. As soon as he saw her, he felt a kind of spiritual vertigo, as if a trapdoor had opened inside him, the Inner Man falling through. Nothing in his expression changed, of course. His aura of authority and dignity glowed as brightly around him as ever—brighter because of the extra effort required to keep it there, a hollow persona willed into place around a now empty core. But just that one look at the woman and he understood everything that was about to happen.

He'd never seen her before, but he knew her all right. Graduate from some hall of intellectual mirrors. Bard, Sarah Lawrence, Earlham, one of those. Just out of grad school or law school or still in or about to go. Studying something about the environment probably. Advanced Self-Righteous Hysteria 101. With her porcelain skin and the golden blond hair and that body they seem to issue these women along with their degrees nowadays: the taut, slender body with just enough Girl in it to get them what they wanted but not enough so they could be blamed. She had been in her dorm room when she'd first seen Augie on TV. Or maybe in her bedroom at her parents' house or in the apartment they'd bought her. After hours of wallowing in teary-eyed indignation, staring at images of helpless brown victims, listening to grim-faced newscasters calling it "the worst flood since Noah," hearing wise men, movie stars, and pop singers tell her that the gibbering black punks who'd set their own city on fire were nothing but symptoms of the white man's uncaring: she was primed for Augie, and then along he came.

We can't have dreams until we have faith and we can't have faith until we learn to hope again as a nation.

Wasn't it just so true?

So here she was, wearing her white sin like a mink, proud of her shame and searching for her virtue, hoping to receive her virtue like the holy host from Augie's victim-colored hands. Ramsey wondered if Augie had fucked her yet. Maybe not. But he would, he assured himself angrily, and in every possible sense of the word.

"Lieutenant Ramsey?" she said—warm, respectful, solicitous, arrogant, superior, agonizingly self-aware, and wholly self-ignorant at the same time. "I'm Charlotte Mortimer-Rimsky." Of course she was. She extended her slender porcelain hand, a startling flash out of the take-me-seriously black sleeve of her sexless suit.

Ramsey stood dizzy with humiliation. This—this uncooked slice of poon, this blond creation of her own dreamy delusions—
this
was what Augie sent to him? To
him?
It took all his discipline not to leave her hand hanging there, not to cry out "Where's Augie? I had an appointment with Augie!" like a cheated child.

But he did it. He fought down every coarse insult that leapt into his head and shook her hand politely.

"Nice to meet you," he said, just as his mother had taught him.

"Augie sends his apologies. He's been called to a meeting with Senator Lundquist and he just couldn't get out of it. But I'm his new law enforcement liaison, so he thought this might be a good opportunity for us to get to know one another."

"Law Enforcement Liaison." The words dripped like venom from Ramsey's lips. "Well, Miss..."

"Mortimer-Rimsky."

"Miss Mortimer-Rimsky..."

"Charlotte, please."

"I'd love to get to know you at some point, but I'm afraid this isn't the time. My business with Augie is urgent and requires his immediate personal attention." It was the best he could do. And what good was it really? Everyone involved in this transaction—he and this woman and Augie as well—they all knew that he was being stripped right here and now of every vestige of prestige and even masculinity. There was no pretending it was otherwise. And yet pretense was the only fig leaf he had to cover the place where his balls used to be.

The woman, for her part, did her best to look pained and sincere. Ramsey thought she must've taught herself that expression before breaking up with her high school boyfriend. A pretty little kiss-off.

"I don't know what to tell you. It's just not going to be possible today. I did manage to get you this, though."

She had a blue file folder in her left hand. She gave it to him and then stepped aside toward the windows. She gazed down discreetly at the park below, giving him a moment to open the blue folder.

There was a single photograph inside. Printed out from a computer onto ordinary paper. Dark, blurry. An enlargement of a picture taken with somebody's cell phone, Ramsey guessed. He recognized the house in the background. It was the house on the dead-end lane, the green shingled house where he and Gutterson had found the graffito.

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson!

"Where did you get this?" he said.

"Some of my city contacts. They're telling me this is the man who wrote that graffito. He's been spreading similar rumors on the street."

He looked at her, at her tailored back, as she faced the window. He let the silence of his doubt play over her, weigh on her. They both knew she didn't have any goddamned city contacts. Only Augie himself could've thrown his net wide enough to haul in something as random as this. She was protecting Augie. She'd been in town for ten minutes and she had the gall to stand between him—between
him
—and Augie Lancaster.

She kept her eyes on the window, on the scene outside, but he could see by her uncomfortable posture that she felt his accusation. She felt compelled to explain. "The thing is, Augie is at a transitional moment," she said finally, with a defensive glance back at him. "I don't have to tell you that. It's a key moment, maybe
the
key moment in his trajectory."

"His trajectory," Lieutenant Ramsey said with an aspect of stone.

She faced him. He wanted to rip that porcelain mask of earnestness right off her. "Yes. I mean ... look ... It's a transformational moment in the whole country. We all know that. It's a time of real hope and ... and change."

So he
had
fucked her. Well, good for him. That was fast work. He must've explained all this to her in the afterglow.
We can't have hope until we have dreams and we can't have dreams until you suck my black dick...

"Augie has a real chance to become one of the new transformational figures. Isn't that what we've all been working for? To get beyond race? To bring some of the same progressive policies to the federal level that Augie's implemented here at the municipal level?"

Even in his rage and shame, Ramsey nearly laughed out loud. Had Miss Dreams ever gone ten steps beyond this pristine government complex? Had she ever set her baby blues on exactly what Augie's progressive policies had accomplished at the municipal level?
The city is in fucking ruins, you dumb bitch!

"Look, we all know," this girl—who was too young to know much of anything—went on desperately. "We all know that in the rough and tumble of city politics ... associations are made ... things get done by the people around you ... Augie would never turn his back on his friends, believe me. It's just that ... with this degree of scrutiny on the national level, he has to take appearances into account in a new way. For a period of time, I mean."

He stared at her. He couldn't help himself. For a moment, he was simply dazed, astonished at the wonderful perfection and complexity of Augie's treachery, as if it were some kind of magnificent crystal suddenly revealing its infinite network of facets to the light. Then, as his astonishment receded, anger rushed back into its place with a new force. Ramsey had seen this kind of fury in the faces of men twisted up like pretzels on cell floors, the froth of seizure on their lips, words of such filth and savage desire spewing from them it was enough to make you believe in hell and the devil. He had seen it, but he had never felt that sort of titanic rage himself until this minute. He wanted to shove this girl, this created suburban thing, against the wall, wanted to seize a handful of her throat and a fistful of her breast and ram himself up inside her like he was planting a flag on the moon. He wanted to cram his face a whisker's breadth from her terrified eyes and tell her everything, everything that was going to happen to her next.
Come a day,
he wanted to spit into her porcelain face through his gritted teeth,
come a day, you will stand before judgment, so help me, before a judge, in fact, or a Senate committee or God his own fat, happy self, and Augie will do as much to you as he has done to me here now. "I never knew her," he'll say. "I never knew what she was up to. We had a fling. She took it too seriously. She was overzealous on my behalf. That wasn't what I meant at all." Then oh then, so help me, so help me, you will strip off that sexless suit of yours, you will ditch your degree in environmental horseshit and scurry to put on some tears and lace blouses and any other waif-like wile of femininity that might just charm your sweet white ass out of prison or your sorry soul out of the flames of hell. And even if you do escape, that's your life ever after, cooz. That's the definition of your future life: a bewildered slag announcing your redemption-through-rehab to some bored reporter from
www.excelebrityfelons.com
, a ragged exile from your daydreamed self, a half-damned half-spirit in a perdition of philosophical somersaults and rationalizations and glasses of wine—anything—any trick you know to stave off the hour when you make a priest of your mirror and confess to yourself what you did here today.