The Identity Man (13 page)

He wanted to tell her that, throttling her, clutching her, pumping into her until he finished to the pounding rhythm of the final syllables and ejaculated acid in her, burning right through her womb to poison her bleeding heart...

But instead, expressionless, he nodded once, the image of dignity, of authority and calm. He looked away from her studied earnestness, down again at the blue folder open in his hands, at the picture in the folder. His eyes went from the green-shingled house to the line of cars parked at the curb outside. His eyes went to the figure behind the wheel of one of those cars, a man in shadow with his features obscured by the glare of the streetlight on the windshield, the same streetlight that illuminated the right half of the car's license plate. Just enough of the license plate so that Ramsey would be able to track the man down.

This was all Augie would give him, the last thing he would give him—and he would never admit that he had given him even this. This picture. This figure. This man who had written the graffito in the green-shingled house—or who had made the remark to the gang-bangers there that caused the graffito to be written—who somehow—somehow—knew:

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson!

The image of dignity, of authority and calm, Ramsey lifted his eyes. He looked away from the doomed white girl, done with her. He gazed thoughtfully instead at the televisions on the wall. Augie on all three screens. Standing behind the lectern, before the new post-racial world. Gazing visionary into the TelePrompTer.

We can't have Me until we have Me and we can't have Me until we learn to have Me-Me-Me as a nation.

Augie sailing off into the new age—and here was Ramsey left behind in the Media Room with this picture, this picture somehow magically in his hands. That was the way of these things, wasn't it? Someone had to stay behind. Someone had to clean up the mess. Someone had to find the man in the picture, had to find out what he knew and how he knew it.

And someone, in the end, was going to have to kill him.

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.

Stretching, craning his neck, he took in his surroundings. A small studio apartment. Gray walls with a couple of pictures hung on them. Nice wooden floors with a braid rug by the bed. A dresser, a desk, a chair, a mirror on the back of the closet door. He could see himself in the mirror, sitting there with his jockey shorts and his brand-new face on. Look at that: a brand-new face. This time, the sight of it struck him as wonderful. He broke out in a big silly grin. It was just like the foreigner said. He was new mang.

Excited, he got up to explore. He looked out the windows first. There were only two of them, both on the same wall. Not much of a view. Two brownstones across the street. The entrance to a wide alley next to a small grocery. Just the same, after all that time locked up in the white room, he was eager to get out there. Was he ever! Out in the open air again! He couldn't wait.

He checked the front door. Yup, it opened. He was free. A new mang and a free mang, too.

Humming to himself, he wandered around the apartment some more. The fridge in the kitchenette was stocked with food. The dresser was stocked with clothes. The foreigner's folders were on the desk, the ones with all his new identity papers in them—Henry Conor's papers. There was a computer there, too. When he pressed the keyboard, the machine whirred and the monitor lit up, showing classified ads. Carpenters wanted all over the place. Next to the computer: a receipt for the first two months' rent on the apartment. Plus car keys with a Honda logo. Plus a wallet with three hundred-dollar bills in it. Nice.

Maybe the best thing, though, was what he found in the closet. A big red bag with hammers and wrenches in the outside pouches. He unzipped it. He cursed under his breath with wonder.

Tools. A beautiful set of brand-spanking-new Milwaukees, bright silver and red. A framing nailer, a roofing nailer, a Skilsaw, a chop saw, cordless hammers, screwdrivers—must've been three thousand bucks' worth of stuff. It made his heart beat harder. He loved good tools.

Crouched over the bag, he looked around him, nodding to himself. He thought of the foreigner. He felt gratitude to the old dude. Even some affection for him.

New mang. New life. Like princess in fairy tale.

He stepped out of the brownstone. He stood at the top of the stoop. It felt like the times he'd gotten out of prison—that same dizzying sense of open space. Your soul shrank when you were inside for too long. It shriveled to the size of the cell you were stuck in. When you finally came out, there was all that wide world whirling around without you in it. It was unnerving. You were afraid that if you let yourself go, if you let your soul expand again, there might not be enough of you to fill all that emptiness. You might drift away like some kind of mist and finally evaporate and be gone forever. Some guys never did dare to do it. They lived the rest of their lives all shrunken up inside as if the cell walls were still around them. Shannon had seen it happen. If they put you in prison long enough, you were in prison forever, even after they let you go.

But that was the whole point here, wasn't it? He wasn't going back to prison. Not at all, not ever. He had a new face, a new identity. New mang, free mang.

He went down the stairs like a top-hatted dancer. Down the street like the mayor. Taking in the sights. Excited. Growing bigger inside with every breath. He passed a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. He passed two men and a woman flirting on a brownstone stoop. He passed two older women in skirt suits. They smiled at him as they went by. They had Bibles in their hands. They were coming home from church. He could hear the bells ringing. It was Sunday morning. Nice day, blue sky, temperature spring-cool with an undercurrent of the coming summer heat.

He went on down the block of brownstones. Past cars parked under green sycamores. That reminded him ... He reached into his pocket. He pressed the button on the key to his Honda. A horn honked nearby. Sure enough, there it was: a blue Civic, his own car. About a year old, clean. In pretty good shape, it looked like. He'd have to give it a spin later. But not now. Now he was walking, like a top-hatted dancer, right out in the open, like anyone, like the mayor.

Then he reached the corner and turned and stopped short.

Suddenly, he was staring at a scene of devastation. It stretched into the distance, as far as he could see. In the foreground: brownstones gutted by fire, their windows broken, their brick charred. Beyond those, there were stucco apartment buildings, stricken and slumped like stroke victims. Beyond those, there were piles of churned mud and litter where lawns had been in front of piles of debris that had been houses. In the distance, he could see emergency trailers standing by empty lots, the garbage in the lots making a weird, rocky landscape of appliances and rubble, metal and stone. And all this led at last to the skyline, broken and jagged against the horizon. Light shining through the scorched framework of ruined towers. The city's signature spire snapped off as by a giant's hand. Shannon was never one to watch the news or read the papers much or to fiddle around much online. He'd heard about the floods here and the riots and the fire—you couldn't help but hear. He just hadn't thought about it much. He hadn't thought it could be this bad.

Standing there, staring, stunned, at the extent of the destruction, he tried to maintain his exuberant mood. He tried to tell himself it wasn't so bad. Hell, he could always leave if he wanted to. He was a free man, that was the whole point, that was the really important thing.

But it was no good. He'd had such high hopes there for a minute, but now his heart was sinking. He felt sick with disappointment, with bitterness even, even with anger.

All the places the identity man could've left him, and he left him here, in the ruin of the world.

He spent the next few days exploring the city, sometimes on foot, sometimes in his car. He drove slowly past toppled trees that blocked the sidewalks, past mountains of stinking garbage, past houses washed right off their foundations and abandoned in house-shaped jumbles by the curb. The sights depressed him. He cursed the identity man. He wished he had enough money to start over somewhere else.

He walked through neighborhoods overrun with gangsters, prowling young thugs with their eyes all over everything, their hands itching to strike out and make some kind of grab, probably any kind. Watching them, he could feel their antsy energy inside himself, that old agitation. He caught himself following their glances, casing their lawless neighborhoods for jobs. If only he had enough money...

Identity like stain,
he thought. He shook off the antsy feeling. No, no, no, no. Not here, not this time. New life. New mang.

The gangsters stared at him balefully and he stared back. They knew a hard guy when they saw one—new face or no new face—and they left him alone.

He walked on, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, depressed.

***

One day, he parked across the street from a hobbled brownstone. He watched from his car as three ambulance guys rolled a body out of the ground floor on a stretcher. The corpse was enormous, impossibly bloated. It must've been lost in the flooded basement all this time.

A clutch of onlookers shook their heads and covered their noses. A bunch of homeless guys laughed about it, drunk on their bagged bottles. Even where he was sitting, Shannon caught the stench of the waterlogged dead.

Man, what a town. What a town this was.

Patrolmen were standing guard over the scene, their eyes shifting and their hands on their holstered guns. They were the first cops Shannon had seen since he'd gotten here. Their nearness startled him.

One cop's roving gaze came toward him. Shannon seized up inside, afraid of being spotted and caught. He almost hit the gas and sped away. Then he realized: he didn't have to. He didn't have to worry anymore. He had his brand-new face on. He sat there boldly. The cop's gaze never hesitated. It just passed over him and moved on.

Shannon smiled to himself as he watched the bloated corpse shoved into the back of the ambulance. He felt again the power of his anonymity, the possibility of a fresh start.

As he drove away, he thought to himself:
New mang. Don't blow it.

The next day, he was still thinking along the same lines. He was walking on a narrow street. Ruined brick apartment buildings slanted and loured on either side of him. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder. He saw this guy stepping out of a pale green Ford, a Crown Victoria with a white scrape on the side. He was a small guy, hungry-thin or maybe drug-thin. He was dressed in a cheap black suit, white shirt, narrow tie. He had a shaved head. He had smart, searching, dangerous eyes. They looked in Shannon's direction—then quickly looked away.

About half an hour later, Shannon caught a glimpse of him again, the same guy, on a corner several blocks to the north. It made him nervous. Was this fucktard following him?

He ducked into a restaurant to see what would happen. He watched through the front window as the guy wandered off.

Then, since he was here, he decided to get something to eat. It was a nice place, a family place with lopsided wooden floors and wooden plank walls painted cheerful red. It was called Betsy's. Betsy served the food. She was a warm, friendly lady in her sixties with a small face, sad-eyed but also cheerful. When she brought him his waffles and chicken, he realized how hungry he was and tore into them. Betsy stood over him, nodding with approval. "There's a man who can eat," she announced to the other people in the restaurant. The other people nodded, too. Some of the little children covered their mouths and giggled.

Betsy and her restaurant and the friendly people here made him feel better about things, less depressed. As he ate his waffles, he started to think that maybe this wasn't such a bad town to be in after all. He thought of the bag of tools in his closet and he remembered what the foreigner had said to him:
We put you in place where there is many buildings, much work.
There'd be many buildings and much work here, all right. He could make good money if he put his mind to it.

He started to see the logic of the thing. Maybe the old foreign buzzard wasn't such an idiot after all.

Later that afternoon, he sought out a neighborhood where there was some construction going on. Crews were clearing away the wreckage of several houses. Other crews nearby were laying fresh foundations. There was even a wooden frame or two beginning to rise against the sky. He began to imagine himself working here. He would be part of a big project: building the city back up again. He could go to Betsy's for lunch on Sundays and eat waffles and chicken and tell her about his week. Tomorrow, he decided, he'd start calling the numbers in the help-wanted ads on the computer.

Evening was coming as he made his way back to his brownstone. He didn't know the streets and got a little lost. Just as the sun was going down and the color draining out of the sky, he came upon a sight he would never forget.

There was a house on a street called H Street. A beautiful old clapboard house, all white, two stories plus an attic under a pitched roof. Behind its security bars, it had mullioned windows flanked by black shutters, white drapes visible on the inside. There was a white picket fence enclosing the front yard.

All around the house, there were empty lots, expanses of rubble and wreckage, overgrown with weeds. It was as if the flood and fire had destroyed everything near the white house, and yet passed over the house itself, leaving it unharmed.

It was a striking contrast: the house untouched in the midst of the ruins. Shannon stopped to look. That's when he noticed the woman in one of the upstairs windows. The light was on up there. The window was a rectangle of yellow glowing against the dusk. It was too high to reach from the ground so there were no security bars blocking the view. He could see the woman clearly. She was standing just by the drapes, gazing out through the glass into the distance. She was crying—crying terribly. He could see her whole body shaking with the force of her grief. Now and then, she pressed her hand to her mouth as if she didn't want anyone to hear her sobs.