Authors: Eli Gottlieb
The Face Thief (14 page)
“N
ew York, Chicago, and points north of Los Angeles.”
“All of them?”
“Within a three-month span, John-O.”
“Yeah, the wacky PI already gave me the big-picture read on her shenanigans. But how did you find out, Cas?”
They were seated at one of the dark-wood restaurants near Cas’s office. Cas always dined in dark-wood restaurants.
“Ah, that’s the mystery, isn’t it?” he said. “Let me put it this way. Your girl is a hard worker. She dropped anchor in each of those places and I’m sure some now shirtless and probably pantsless bonehead can testify to that fact. No offense by the way. As for me, well, I called in a favor or two from some friends in law enforcement who were able to tap the resources of something called the BSA or Bank Securities Act. Even before the Patriot Act, you see, Big Brother was hard at work giving the American citizens a collective prostate massage in their checking accounts and surveilling the living shit out of them. Plus, I’m owed favors.
That’s
how I knew.”
They had roomed together in freshman year of college, and the two of them—a reserved, somewhat bookish kid from an Old Left middle-class family and the showboating scion of dynastic American wealth—had bonded over a shared joy in corrosive social irony and begun a conversation that, in a very real way, had never stopped since. Shared college histories, they’d discovered, trumped even the bitterest ideological divides.
Potash was shaking his head. “There goes that word again,” he said.
“Prostate?”
“No, ‘favor.’ I mean, who doesn’t owe you a favor? Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to Tony Soprano.”
“You flatter me, my friend.”
Potash looked at him as Cas dipped a piece of rosemary-studded focaccia in olive oil and asked, “And how’s that bridge loan holding up, amigo?”
“Badly, thanks.”
Tall, conventionally handsome, with a foxy crest of hair and skin boasting the ruddy glow of spa attentions, Cas said, “Foo!”
He whipped out his phone and punched a number. “Debby? Please disburse another 20k to my old footloose friend John Potash, would you? Same routing info as before. Yes, that’s right.” He looked at Potash a second. “No, it’s better than that. Yes, he’s still married. I’ll tell you later.”
He put the phone away.
“Thanks,” said Potash, “a lot.”
“Waiter!” Cas barked.
“Yes?” A gleaming young man approached at a race-walk from out of Potash’s sight.
“We’re celebrating my friend’s discovery of the romance of poverty, and in that spirit, I was thinking a Super Tuscan, perhaps a nice Sassicaia to accompany our lunch.”
“That sounds expensive,” said Potash as the waiter withdrew, nodding.
“It is.”
“I’m glad my fiscal ruin is an opportunity for you to let go.”
“Bro, you’re not offended, are you?” Cas looked at him with his sharp green eyes atilt. “Hey, I know you’re suffering. But this is all in service of you getting your money back, remember? In the meantime, you’re letting the witch win if you’re having a bad time.”
The waiter reappeared and harassed them with perfunctory sommelier courtesies that had to be acknowledged, rolling the bottle in front of them like an ancient artisan at a lathe, and making faces of the utmost concern as he decanted a few drops of it into a balloon glass for Cas’s pleasure.
“Perfect,” Cas said, with a small wave. As the wine pattered into their glasses, he went on, “Not that I mean to minimize what you’re going through, Johnny. But you gotta allow me to have some fun while I run after you, cleaning up. You hungry?”
Potash lowered his eyes to the menu, but the fancy script looked like snarled string. He had no appetite in the least. “Not especially,” he said.
“I’ll order for you. Now tell me about your mom.”
“It’s like I already explained. Apparently a clot or fleck of arterial gunk can plug up a little vein in the brain for a few minutes, but then float away. Sort of like leaves over a storm sewer. It’s scary while it’s happening, but no damage—at least we think.”
“Your mom was always tough as nails,” said Cas, raising his wineglass. “Remember that visit sophomore year?” Potash raised his own for their second toast.
“Do I have to?” he asked.
His mother had shown up, taken opportunistic part in a parade against a nearby nuclear power plant, and in an ensuing scuffle with police had been photographed with a fifty-eight-year-old breast hanging out. The image had gone the pre-Internet equivalent of viral.
“May they only embarrass their sons to death once in a life,” said Cas, and they both snickered as they drank.
“Speaking of near death,” said Potash, putting his glass down, “the girl, the crook, Janelle or whatever her name is, apparently suffered a brain injury from an attack or something—they don’t exactly know what. She’s in rehab now but heading home soon. The noose is closing around her and an indictment is on the verge of being handed down. Meanwhile nutty Wilbraham the PI told me I should have a cop accompany me to intercept her somewhere and threaten prosecution as a way to maybe squeeze some money out of her. A Hail Mary, really, but what choice do I have? He even has the cop picked out. A moonlighting pal of his. I’m expecting his call later today.”
“I’ll have the salmon tartare,” said Cas to the mysteriously reappeared waiter. “And my friend will have the spaghetti Bolognese.”
“I will?”
“They make it wonderfully here, with a sauce of pork and beef that stews all morning. And you need something to stick on those skinny ribs of yours. But more important than your health is my next question.”
“Which is?”
“Can I go with you instead?”
“Of who?”
“The cop.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I kind of need to.”
“What do you mean, you need to?”
“Let me put it this way; I’m an asset, I’m your benefactor and I
want
to.”
“How are you an asset?”
“Because I’m a star negotiator, John. I can do hard. I can do soft and teary. I can flow between the cracks. Besides,” he said, leaning forward, “I could use a break.”
“My heart bleeds for you. Putting the Gulfstream up for hock, are you?”
“Go ahead, laugh. But I’m serious.”
“Cas, you’d be an impediment, God bless you, and besides, who the hell knows what types this chick is tangled up with? I mean, this could rapidly become something that isn’t safe.”
“Like the safari moment where the animals turn and rush the Land Rover? But that’s exactly what I want!”
“You nut,” said Potash affectionately, trying not to calculate exactly how much of his fresh twenty thousand would be instantly disbursed among ticking, overdue bills. Under reasonable circumstances, forty-five thousand dollars would be a sure buy-in to any adventure short of a moon shot. But now?
“Okay, you can participate in the stakeout with me, how about that? But the deal is I’ve got Berke on standby, and the moment we see the girl, we call him and he swoops in and deals directly, got it?”
“You, sir,” said Cas, “are the straw that stirs the drink. And you won’t regret it.”
“I already do,” said Potash, knocking back a glass of wine as tailored as a good suit, and winking at his old friend.
“C
areful, please.” Dan France touched her at the elbow and on the back as he walked her out the front door and toward the waiting car. She was wearing a lightweight dress, and she could feel the heat of his hands on her body. It was dusk, late summer. From every direction, the city appeared to fall toward her from incalculable heights. She paused on the sidewalk and turned one last time to behold the rehab facility. From inside, it had seemed to her an endless maze of linking hallways as big as the world, but now it looked simply like another Manhattan building turning a blind, boring eye to the street.
Then she was inside the car and sitting down amid the chrome bezels of the dashboard, dark-wood accents, and shiny surfaces holding a variety of subdued and blinking lights. Something pinged like a heart monitor.
“Nice car,” she said.
“The Range Rover,” he said, and
his face held a rare light as he got in with a rustle of clothes, “is a thing of beauty.”
The seat smelled of fresh leather. It smelled like affluence. She breathed it in, deeply. Dan France had already loaded up her few belongings in the back and they took off, driving slowly.
Over the previous days, her memory had crawled steadily forward, reclaiming past events. The process wasn’t perfect. There was an indistinct stretch of time after Clive Pemberthy, in particular. She lived with someone for a while. A young someone. He had a nice house. Then one day there were shouts and cries. Somebody poured a drink over her head. She was kicked out, summarily. Not long after, she had sex with the married publisher of
Cachet
and was eventually given a small settlement and fired. But against this story line an idea was forming. She remembered that it was an important idea, having something to do with her long-standing belief that she would join the wealthy ranks of her friends not by eating shit for a living, but as the result of an inspired leap, an act of levitation.
“You excited?” Dan France now asked.
“What about?”
He looked at her and shook his head in mock disgust. “About going home, of course.”
“Yes, I am, I think.”
“You think? How about simply yes, for once? How about some simple good old-fashioned enthusiasm, huh?”
Instead of answering, she glanced out the window. Lights were coming on in the wall of high-rises running alongside the car, a million individuals flicking switches to turn dusk into day. In the somber stacked boxes of their apartments, people were getting ready to eat dinner and then fall asleep, dreaming dreams of spiraling flight, threat and sex, before putting on their professional clothes the next morning and riding down in elevators while giving no sign at all of having recently crossed vast, flaming landscapes at the speed of thought.
The real reason we have faces,
she thought,
is to hold back what we’re thinking from the world.
Dan France was now making a kind of mumbling conversation that sounded like someone sharpening a dull knife on a wheel. She turned and looked directly at the squarish block of his head. She would use him as a perfect screen. And against this screen she would project the image of herself sitting alone in her apartment on that fateful day, recently fired from her job, her settlement already mostly spent on back rent and a fresh crop of new bills piling up. She’d been flipping idly through
The
New Yorker,
she remembered, when a small ad caught her eye.
“Face and Body Reading for Financial Advantage,” read the ad. It gave some particulars as to a seminar being held, along with a website, and a location, in a hotel about forty minutes north of Manhattan.
Hadn’t she, she told herself, sitting back in her kitchen chair, already had a distinguished career of both reading and composing faces? After all, she’d faked Correct Schoolgirl. She’d faked Broody College Coed. She’d faked Perky Bright Journalist Ingénue. And, repeatedly, she’d faked Orgasmically Responsive Twentysomething. In all these roles, a quietly despairing voice had whispered to her that her charge in life was to keep up this particular appearance against all odds, because were she to waver even a little, it would mean to End Up Like Your Mother, looted by life, her husband and herself, in that order.
“What the hell is this?” Dan France said suddenly, looking into his rearview mirror.
“What?”
“A car, Margot.”
“So—?”
“—That I’ve been seeing in our rearview mirror basically ever since we left. I just made some evasive maneuvers and he’s still there.”
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
Before she could say anything in response, he floored the gas, a whomping mammal sound of blocked power arose from the engine, and the car shot forward down the road so fast that her head slammed back into the headrest.
“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted, as he wheeled the car in a violent spin that caused her now-gonging head to slew sharply around on her neck.
But he said nothing as they shot down a side street, roared into the air off a speed bump and then jounced heavily back onto the earth. Expertly he spun the large car yet again, pivoting seemingly on a single fixed point as the landscape wheeled screeching past the window, before the tires bit and they flew down a narrow, garbage-filled alley while scattering a spray of wooden boxes as they went. A few seconds later, with a sudden pitching forward, they slammed to a stop near the loading dock of a grimed warehouse. Dust, catching up to them, continued rushing past the car a moment.
She was hyperventilating. She was nearly in tears. But Dan France was the opposite of ruffled. He turned to her and said calmly, “I think it’s time for a chat.”
“You’re insane!” she shouted, massaging her aching temples.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Uh, it’s called ‘getting away.’ ”
“From who?”
“I was about to ask you that.”
“What are you talking about, Dan?” She felt as if a burning iron bar had been jammed laterally through her ears.
“I was going to have this conversation with you a little bit at a time once you got settled, but I think the time is now. You wanna level with me?”
“What?”
“Do you really think that I don’t know what you’re about, Margot?”
She looked at him in sincere confusion a second and then drew herself up.
“Take me back to the rehab facility, now!”
“Here’s what I think,” he said. “I think you’ve been involved in the game for a long, long time. I think you took me to be another mark, a rube who you could roll, but that you were too weak this time, too needy, and so the mask kinda slipped from the face. Am I right?”
She thought:
should I do Indignant? But she felt too light-headed.
“I’ll take your silence as a yes,” he said. “And I won’t be insulted by the fact that you treated me like I was an okey-doke who didn’t know what time it was. You’ve probably always had one mental setting till now, and that setting was fraud. But here’s what you don’t know. I saw the other side of you, my friend. While you were lying there out cold in your hospital bed, I was digging all the way back to your poor crippled mother and the drunken fool who called himself your dad. Well, boo hoo on you, because we’ve all got a dozen cheap tearjerkers inside us and that’s no excuse.”
His face suddenly softened. “You’re just lucky you’re so goddamned cute.”
She couldn’t speak.
“And that I see the other person in you who you’ve probably hated your whole life long: the simple, fundamentally nice girl. Oh, and you’re not going home either, by the way, if that’s your idea.”
“Why not?” she said, finally finding the words.
“Because whoever’s tailing us knows where you live.”
“But who would do that in the first place?” she asked.
They were pulling back onto a boulevard. “Gimme a break,” he said, hitting the turn signal. “The list is probably as long as my arm.” Up ahead she saw a sign for
QUEENSBORO BRIDGE
. She felt like throwing up.
“Queens?” she said.
He laughed, shortly. “That’s right, Princess. You’ve probably never been there in your life, have you? I’m taking you to a safe house we sometimes use for people we feel are under threat. You now qualify, I’m afraid. You’ll stay there for a day or two while we figure out what to do next with you.”
“A day or two?” she cried.
“Try to control your joy.” He turned to look at her, not unkindly. “You’ll have the guest bedroom all to yourself.”
The expansion joints of the roadbed of the bridge were now rattling the car like so many taps on an inflamed nerve in the back of her head. She shut her eyes, and burrowed away from the horrid Dan France, and did her best to rejoin the recollection that was already in progress. If she looked hard enough, she could again see herself glancing at the Face Reading website, intrigued, and then booking a reservation. She could see herself entering the hall of the hotel in which the seminar was held. And she could see the man, the middle-aged facilitator of the weekend, calling for volunteers while she slowly, somewhat shyly raised her hand.
Margot opened her eyes and looked away from her own memories toward the mysterious dark borough of Queens. They had exited the bridge and were waiting at a red light. Dan France had fallen silent.
“I know,” she said, “that you now think you know me. But you have no idea.”
The light changed to green.
He laughed, but gently. “There you’re wrong,” he said, putting it in gear and driving away.
