“Where do I live? What do
I do?”
“You rent an apartment.
It’s in a large building, but not a building that’s fancy
enough so they do any checking before you move in. I’ve already
found one and rented it for you. I used an identity that’s old
enough to stand up if it needs to. Nothing else is in your name. I’m
your girlfriend. If anybody ever asks about me, we broke up and I
moved out.”
“What do I drive?”
“For now, nothing. I’ll
have to get you out quick, so I have no time to do it for you. Here’s
a short lesson. Leasing a car triggers an all-out credit search.
Buying a new car on time does the same. But it’s going to be
tricky for you to write a check for the full price tomorrow or the
next day, because it’s what the people who have studied you
think you’ll do. So don’t. What you want is to find a
used car for sale by the owner: it’s the only market where
paying in cash is necessary, and it will keep you off a car company’s
customer list. Have a mechanic check it out. For most people that’s
just to see if it’s any good. For you, it’s also because
he’ll warn you if it’s stolen. Register it and insure it
under your new name. Car registrations are public records, and
insurance companies sell lists of customers. There’s no way to
avoid that. Just don’t do it right away.”
“How long should I wait?”
“If you do it tomorrow,
you’ll be on a short list. The longer you wait, the longer the
list.”
“What else?”
“Don’t do anything
that brings you to the attention of the police, of course. If you see
a fire or an accident or a politician, walk the other way. There
could be news cameras. Don’t vote, file any legal papers, serve
on a jury, buy land, buy a gun, or get married, because those create
public records.”
He had heard the list, and none
of those things had been anything he would have done anyway. At any
rate, Pete Hatcher would not have done them. He looked at his face in
the speckled mirror. The part of this that was beginning to weigh on
him was that he had not had enough time to get used to the idea
before he had done it. One day he had been Pete Hatcher, walking
through the cavernous casino in his tailored summer-weight suit, and
a few hours later he had been sitting here in this small, dark
apartment in Denver.
She had asked him where he
wanted to live, where he could live without being recognized. He had
not been able to think of a place. She had rattled off a list of
cities and when she had said Denver, he had said yes, just because it
was a city where he had never lived, never been for more than an hour
or two to change planes, and now even that was safe because it wasn’t
even the same airport. She had said Denver was okay, because it was
only eight hundred miles from Las Vegas, and a person running for his
life didn’t usually stop that soon.
There were lots of things she
had not told him, because there had been no time. She had not told
him that David Keller would one day sit in this room and look at
himself and find that he had not the slightest vision of a future –
not just what to do, or what to expect, but what to want, who to be.
And she had not told him that David Keller would be afraid.
It was late. Through the open
kitchen window he could hear faint traces of the music from the bar
floating up through the still, late-summer air, and cars hissing past
it on Colfax. He closed the window and locked it, sat on the single
bed in the small bedroom where he slept. He should have felt safe.
She had chosen a fourth-floor apartment so he didn’t need to
worry about somebody climbing in the windows. It wasn’t even in
a male name, so it would be hard to trace him here. Pete Hatcher had
left Las Vegas with over six hundred thousand dollars. He could live
like this for ten or fifteen years without poking his head above the
surface.
He took his shirt off and lay in
the tiny, dark room, on the surface of the bed. He had found David
Keller was not comfortable taking all his clothes off in a bed. There
was something especially frightening about having them come for him
while he was naked, so now he always kept his pants on and his shoes.
He had forgotten something. He got up, walked into the kitchen,
opened the drawer, and took out the butcher knife. He wrapped the
blade in a dish towel and set it beside his left hand in the bed, so
they wouldn’t see it behind his thigh, and he wouldn’t
roll over on it. He rested his hand on the handle and lay back in the
darkness, feeling the drops of sweat forming on his forehead in the
airless room.
As he waited for sleep he
thought of the woman in the supermarket. He wished, more fervently
now than ever, that he could have responded to her differently when
she had spoken. She had been in the market on a Sunday afternoon with
nothing much to do, and she had liked him. She had not wanted to put
him in danger. She had wanted somebody to play with – to ride
bikes, like kids. He had thrown away her telephone number, but maybe
he could still find her. He could buy a bicycle, go to one of the
places she had mentioned, and just happen to meet her.
No, it was impossible. She would
talk, and he would have to talk too – pay out to her an endless
series of lies, like beads on a string. There was something too quick
about her for that. She would remember what he said, see that bead
sixty-seven wasn’t the same as bead nineteen. Or she would tell
people about him, even make him meet them, and then he would have two
or three strings of lies going at once, then more. They would all get
farther and farther out of control until he got himself tangled in
lies. She would never be in this bed with him, lying with her soft
chestnut hair on his chest. Not her, not anyone. The difference
between being alive and being dead had all but vanished.
He awoke to the glare of the sun
hitting the window above his head and throwing a square patch on the
wall. He closed his eyes again and lay perfectly still. If they had
come into the apartment while he was asleep, they would have gone
straight to the bigger bedroom, and their muffled creaking and
rustling would be what had awakened him. He listened for a long time,
as he did every morning, at length satisfied himself that no sound
had caused him to wake, and sat up. He sensed a change. The world was
different this morning.
He went into the big bedroom,
laid out some of his favorite clothes – the plain blue oxford
shirt, the blue jeans between new and broken in – and stepped
into the shower. This was the best part of the day. It always seemed
to him that in the morning the universe was starting out clean and
fresh. Anything could happen.
It wasn’t until he was
dressed and eating his breakfast under the open kitchen window that
he recognized what was different. It was David Keller. He was through
holding his breath.
He found the car after an hour
of looking in the newspapers. He knew he couldn’t buy something
like a Mercedes. Even an Audi or a Saab was pushing his luck. It
should be dull and American and cheap. The sliver of an ad said, “96
SL2,4 door, air cond. automatic, PS. $12,000 OBO.” He called
the number and he could hear a baby crying in the background. The
woman said, “You should probably come after dinner, when my
husband is home. I can’t answer any questions about it. I don’t
know a thing about cars.”
He made his voice sound worried
and disappointed. “Oh. That’s too bad. I just got to
town, so I’ve got nothing to drive, and I start work in a
couple of days…” A little of Pete Hatcher seemed to come
back to him. He could sense there was something bothering her. “Oh,
I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. Your husband’s not
home so you don’t want some stranger showing up. And of course,
I don’t want to buy a used car in the dark. So I guess I’m
out of luck…. Hey, I have an idea. Is the car on the street?”
“No, but I could move it.”
“Great. I’ll just
come by and take a look at it. If it’s not what I want, I won’t
bother you.”
“I guess that would be all
right.”
He took a cab to the house and
stood beside the gray car for a time, peeked at the underside, cupped
his hands to lean against the window to peer at the number on the
odometer, wrote down the license number and serial number, examined
the tires. He was running out of things to do when the door of the
old duplex opened and a young woman came out on the porch carrying a
one-year-old girl on her hip. She had a corkscrew strand of blond
hair that kept coming down across her left eye. She had been watching
him, as he had hoped, and decided he didn’t look like a
psychotic.
She said, “You the one who
called about the car?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m
sorry to come at such an inconvenient time.” He smiled at the
little girl. “Hi, cutie.”
“That’s okay,”
said the woman.
“Well, I’m
interested.” He looked back at the car. “Is there
anything I need to know about the car? Any accidents?”
“No. My husband’s
dad bought it, drove it for a year, and died. He seemed to like it,
and he took care of it. I’m not going to be working again for a
while, so we’d just be paying insurance on it for nothing.”
“I understand,” said
Keller.
“Would you like to drive
it?”
Keller said apologetically, “If
it’s all right.”
“I called my husband and
he said it was okay.” As she held out a set of keys, Keller
sensed that she wasn’t telling the truth.
He took the keys and said, “I’ll
be right back.” Keller drove the car around the block and
pulled up in front of the house. This wasn’t exactly the way
Jane had said to do it. It seemed better. The woman had seen him for
a few minutes, could suspect him of nothing, and seemed too busy and
housebound to talk to anybody about him. He got out of the car and
walked to the porch. She came out and he held up the keys. “I’d
like to buy it.”
She brightened. “Well,
wonderful.” After a second she added, “My husband will be
happy. It kind of reminds him of his dad.”
“Do you know what time
he’ll be home? I’d like to get this done today.” He
showed her the envelope. “I brought the money.”
“In cash?”
“I didn’t want to
have to wait for a check to clear. I’m not exactly an old
customer of the local banks.”
“We don’t need to
wait for him. Come on in.”
Keller followed her into the
house. She opened a drawer of the buffet, where she kept the dishes,
and pulled out the pink slip. Keller handed her the envelope and
watched her count the hundred-dollar bills. When she had finished,
she leaned over the coffee table and signed the pink slip and handed
it to him.
Keller glanced at the slip. It
had been signed by Ronald Sedgely with the new owner as Maura
Sedgely, and now she had signed it. The car was hers? There was no
husband coming home tonight. Either Ronald Sedgely was her father,
and she wasn’t married, or she had gotten the car in a divorce
from Ronald Sedgely. The discovery made him feel elated, filled with
confidence.
He wasn’t the only one.
Everybody was lying. Everybody was hiding some vulnerability. Opening
your face and telling people the truth about yourself wasn’t
normal. She was normal. She was a single mother trying to deal with a
man who called on the telephone and might try to cheat her on a car
deal, or might even be a maniac who would rape and kill her in front
of her baby. Pretending there was some guy who had to approve the
deal and knew all about cars, and just might pop in to protect her,
that was the sensible thing to do. She was perfectly normal. He was
normal.
Keller drove the car to the
D.M.V. to register it, drove to an insurance office he had picked out
in the telephone book to insure it, and found that neither was as
difficult to do as he had feared. They wanted to know the answers to
questions he had prepared for a month ago. Jane had assured him that
his driver’s license was genuine. It must have been true,
because everybody’s computer loved David Keller. He had no
outstanding warrants, no problems of any kind, and not even any
disturbing blank spaces. He had gotten a new license a year ago,
after driving in New Jersey for twelve years.
As David Keller drove around
town, he couldn’t help feeling grateful that human beings were
so simpleminded. All he had needed to do to break free of the
depression that had been paralyzing him was to get out and drive
around in a car on a summer day with his window rolled down. It was
such a small improvement that it made him laugh.
It made him even happier when he
looked at it in reverse. He had bought the right kind of car in the
way Jane had said was the safest. He had bought it from the ideal
seller, a woman who didn’t even know his name. Maybe he had
done it a little early for Jane’s taste, but she had not known
how invisible he had been for three months. He had made no mistakes
at all. And the car made him feel safer.
He would park it somewhere away
from his apartment. If they found the apartment, he could sneak down
the fire escape, get in his car, and go. If they found the car, he
would see them watching it before he went near it. He would hide some
emergency supplies inside the car – money, maybe ten grand in a
clever place. And what else would he need if they found him?
The clerk in the gun shop was a
woman. She was short and gray-haired and probably had been pretty
once, but her face looked as though she had spent some time squinting
into the sun. When she walked around the counter and he saw that she
was wearing a pistol in a holster on her hip, he thought at first
that it was some kind of illusion. Then he noticed that everybody in
the store was wearing one, even the stock boy with the broom.
She let him stare down through
the glass case for a few minutes, then came up and stood beside him.
“Anything I can show you?”