Authors: Eli Gottlieb
The Face Thief (16 page)
B
erke called while Potash was making his mother’s lunch. She’d returned from the hospital like an African queen on a barge, bearing a new, slow deliberateness that only underlined her essential pugnacity. He had helped her into the house, aiding her in the endless procession up the front stoop, and then held her hand while she sat down in sections, like a dynamited building collapsing, on the living room couch. He’d then gone to prepare her lunch and was shaking a canister of raisins into a bowl when his phone rang.
“Ed Berke” came the voice, without preamble, fatigued and full of authoritative police gravel. Potash felt a pang. Instead of calling him as arranged upon first spotting the girl, he’d instead pursued her with Cas, and by the time he did call, he had lost her entirely. Not that this lessened the exorbitant fee Berke charged him for being on standby.
“Bad news, Mr. Pootush,” said the cop. “Since we last talked I reviewed the case and I’m not gonna take it. There’s departmental heat like a blowtorch around this lady, and maybe even another officer involved, and that makes it a no-go. My advice? Cut your losses and forget it. That’s all there is to it from where I’m standing. I’m sorry if this puts you out, but good luck. What I’m gonna do, since you’re a good guy who got clipped pretty badly is, I’m gonna tell you something I’m not supposed to. You didn’t hear it from me, but the address you can find her at is 5775 Ocean Boulevard, in Queens. But I wouldn’t go there if I was you.”
And Potash, who for the rest of his days would remember that he was staring at a watery bowl of raisin-dotted yogurt when blindsided by the news, said only the word “Okay!” but softly, and after muttering something in closing, hung up. He wrote down the address, and then, unable to process fully what had happened, decided to revisit it later, from the far side of pretending nothing was amiss, and so continued methodically for another two minutes to prepare his mother’s lunch. But he was no longer entirely in his body. In fact, he wasn’t even
near
his body. From halfway across the room, he watched himself leaving the kitchen and then bending down to the large, recumbent person who seemed to smile and then frown without context, while he said, “Here ya are, Mom.”
He watched the person say, “Thank you,” but somewhat automatically, and then reach a veined hand toward the television remote control. A moment later, with surprising fluidity of motion, he watched the person stab a spoon into the mixture he’d prepared while with the other hand clicking rapidly through the channels till stopping at the image of a political discussion show involving middle-aged men sneering at each other in stage makeup. “Ah, but it’s good to be home!” she cried.
“I’ll bet,” he said, entirely without conviction.
He left his mother to her meal and over the next minute wandered aimlessly through the house till he fetched up in his bedroom. Standing there in a light trance before the familiar slants of light and shade, and the furniture and knickknacks unchanged for twenty-five years, he felt as if his childhood had already outlived him somehow, and through the agency of these books, toys, deflated footballs and folded baseball mitts was now signaling backward in time from the future with the message: We tried, John. We gave it our best shot.
And we lost.
Frowning, Potash sat heavily down on the small bed, while a faint odor of something sprang up into the air about him, a shower of ancient scent, expressed into the atmosphere from the mattress after a twenty-year dormancy. For more than a year, he’d been living in a bright, supershiny soap bubble of certainty about his prospects, flush with happiness, deeply in love, and moving, as he believed, from strength to strength. All that had been brought to a swift end by him allowing money, that magic water, to run through his hands till there was no more.
Potash took those same hands and covered his eyes with them, shutting out the world. Was it the narcotic influence of love itself that had made him this dumb? Or had he somehow been defanged by sunshine, New Age babble and ocean views? Where had his street smarts gone, anyway? And where the protective belt of thick, tough cynicism on which he’d always prided himself?
There was only one thing to do. He passed the rest of the day on a version of automatic pilot, keeping up appearances with his mother and making her her dinner. Having arranged for a home health aide to come calling the next morning, he took a sleeping pill to knock off early, and seven hours later, while it was still dark, he awoke and slipped out of the house and into the garage, where he started his mother’s car and headed, alone, for Queens.
T
hey’d finished their dinner in a riot of innuendo, having quickly polished off the second bottle of wine. It came back to him so easily, this warm, aerial art of flirtation. Always, it was the woman petitioning him from afar. Always, it was her signaling with her eyes and breasts and the cant of her pelvis that she was open, interested. Invariably, with a certain staged reluctance, it was him admitting to being swayed. To being slowly convinced, and drawn into the physical particulars while appearing elsewhere engaged. The lounging, roundabout trip to bed was his specialty. And women, after all, had this way. As for Margot, he was merely softening her up while waiting for the moment to strike as hard as he knew how.
In the service of this eventuality, he ordered brandies after dinner. Brandies were a man’s drink, a burning distillate made to be absorbed into yardages of sinew and fat. To his disappointment, however, she demurred, merely taking a sip and putting it down. He threw his down the hatch and ordered another. Not long after, by common consent, they left the table and proceeded out to the lobby. Slumped giggling together, they rode the elevator to the top floor because she wanted “some air.”
Then they were spilling out of the elevator and onto the carpet, whose mix of turning circles and barred slashes gave him the feeling of a recurrent mood disorder.
“This is . . . bad,” he said gnomically, and they exploded in laughter.
“What you haven’t learned sufficiently, dear Lawrence,” she cried, “is that bad is the new good!”
The upper floors of the hotel, which dated from Victorian times, were rarely used, and to conserve electricity, were lit only sparsely. Her face, as it drew near his, was greenish gray, a bit feral, somewhat indistinct. But then again, the frames of everything were shuddering and twisting and wreathing in the dimness. Perhaps he’d drunk more than he’d thought.
“To the roof!” she cried.
“Wonderful idea,” he said, thinking that if nothing else, the cool air of evening might bring him around a bit, and would also give him fresh opportunities of some sort
. I must
, he thought,
get her into open ground
—though what he would do with her there remained still unclear.
In one corner of the hallway a long staircase drew upward to the roof. Once, according to local legend, a ballroom had been fitted to the rooftop garden, and this staircase, with its sweeping, double-width proportions and enormous vertical rise, now had the air of a defunct colossus; a massive output of travertine and marble leading to a small, latched fire door at the top.
“Wow,” he said as they glimpsed it.
Then they were sweeping forward, arms around each other, and in a single rush, flowing up the stairs. Very clearly, he could feel her body through the press of her ribs against his. Obviously, he reasoned to himself, the moment was drawing near. He couldn’t feel his legs, especially. It was a marvel to him that she was able still even to stand.
They made it to the top. He was getting ready to press the metal bar to allow them access to the roof when her hand on his forearm stopped him in mid-gesture. Her eyes, which had been somewhat slack, drew suddenly to a sharp focus.
“We’ve come to that part of the night,” she said, “where I get to ask you something.”
He looked down modestly at the ground. Over the years this particular bridge had been crossed by women with florid declarations, with whispered confessions and, several times, with coldly clinical requests for sex. Who was he to deny them? Life was hard and people required comforting. He made a pushing movement of his teeth into his lips that signaled his patient willingness to entertain all inquiries.
“Are you happy with your annuities?”
Lawrence laughed out loud. So she was going to make a joke of it? Fantastic! He turned to her with a smile.
“You’re funny,” he said, again touching the wall slightly to keep himself upright. But she was merely eyeing him with the same flat, neutral stare.
“You’ve had two books each on the
New York Times
bestseller lists for nineteen weeks,” she said calmly, “and you bought your house in 1984 for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I’m betting you’ve got a tidy pile stashed away, Lawrence. Are you really satisfied with a future of safe, minimal returns?”
His hand was on the bar to open the door to the roof, but he never pushed it. Through the fog of his inebriation, a worrisome signal reached him.
“How,” he began, “do you know about—”
“Your books?” she said crisply. “It’s my business to.”
“Now, wait,” he began, “just a—”
“Lawrence,” she cut him off impatiently. “Waking up old money is what I do. And research is a part of that. The question is, Can I wake up yours?”
For a moment, the erotic subtext of her words reassured him. But her bright, composed face in front of him read as anything but lubricious. He again grew confused.
“Think how great it would feel,” she was saying, “to have your money making you a fortune instead of being parked on life support in the annuity nursing home.”
He touched his mouth experimentally. His entire face had a poured-in feeling. “But why,” he asked, “now?”
“If not now, when?” she said sensibly. “Why are you giggling?”
Why was he giggling indeed? He’d begun giggling because he was getting really drunk, firstly. But mainly he was giggling because for all this time he’d been under the illusion that her interest in him was erotic while it had been strictly, boringly, plainly commercial. She was after his money! Was this possible? Could he even remember the last time something like this had happened to him?
“Well,” he said, “I really appreciate your interest in my fiscal, uh, well-being, but the fact is I’m set up fine. I’ve got state municip . . . ”—he struggled with the words—“municipals that net me four percent.”
She drew away from him a moment. “I can get you eleven,” she said, “even in a down market.”
The Chaplin still wobblingly in place, he looked at her while trying to arrange his thoughts. He had agreed to this meeting in the hopes of rooting this dangerous person forever out of his life. Delusionally, as it turns out, he had taken her self-interest in his money to be erotic interest in his person. And yet even as recently as an hour or so ago at the restaurant, she’d been filled to the brim with flirtatious badinage and showing him her body, wrinkling her nose, and sending him warmly inviting waves. Slowly, with drunken care, swaying at the top of the stairs, he drew an erratically straight line between these two points: drunk and flirty before, sober and professional now. There was currently about her no entrée that would have allowed him a devastating conversational blow, knocking her forever out of contention. He was without the necessary erotic traction.
“Bioprocessing,” he heard her say. He was nearly disbelieving. He looked as if through a long, bending telescope at the close-up of her mouth. The puffy wing-like sections of her lips were moving in rhythmic unison. These lips were animated by the power of her breath. He was now drunk enough to be seeing things in the knobs and sticks fashion of alcoholic reduction. Everything was suddenly clear. She had beaten him at his own game, outflanked his ability to read the subtler human signs in the service of a deeper truth. Though he’d known she was a player and a phony, he’d underestimated her brilliance at both.
“Depreciation,” he heard her say. She would never stop talking. She was young, strong, as smart as he was, and she had her whole life ahead of her. Plus, she was beautiful. There was really nothing else to be done. He was still nodding in apparent agreement with her conversation as he reached forward, expressionless, and pushed.
A
fter locking her in for the night, Dan France returned early the next morning, while it was still dark out. She was already up. The high-toned lecturing began with watery coffee not long after and continued, to her dismay, for an hour straight. The lecture was delivered in the little kitchen, accompanied by the hectic sound track of kids heading toward school on the street outside the windows.
Righteous and scolding, it had about it the unvarying grate of a chain saw. Over the course of their friendship she’d gone from being a victim to a perp, for all intents and purposes. Yes, they were closing in on the person they believed had assaulted her, but that didn’t change what she herself had done to at least a half-dozen people, according to their records. And she was too talented to do this. And good, too. Deeply, humanly good, in the heart, where it counted.
Did she know that the FBI had partnered with not only one but
several
U.S. district attorneys, and that an indictment for wire fraud was about to be handed down? She did Shock at him, seasoned with a touch of openmouthed Horror. Did she know, he went on, nodding sympathetically at her evident distress, that sentencing guidelines in a case like this, even with no priors, called for a substantial time away? Now, he couldn’t promise, but by pulling some strings with a friendly prosecutor, and factoring in her full cooperation, he could probably get her off with a probationary arrangement, or minimum (he stressed that word) jail time.
The great, round shapes of happy animation blew up all over his face again as he began urging her to agree that it was a blessing she’d been caught, because from here on everything would be different.
“Caught?” she said, quietly.
But either he didn’t hear her or he simply missed her intended irony by a mile, because now, his voice beginning to fill with the wind of his convictions, he began to explain that, if she were in agreement, he would take her on as one of his most important projects in life. And he loved projects. He loved rebuilding things that were skewed or mismated or crooked in their parts. Making stuff whole was what he did. He ministered to it from his “heart,” which he allowed her to imagine as a righteous machine whose powerful pistoning single-handedly upheld the fallen of the planet. He was a “throwback” of a sort, and descended from a “long, interminable line of do-gooders.” She was a “hard nut to crack,” but he believed in her because he’d gotten to know her and know her story. Smiling at her now, he spread his arms wide in the manner of a preacher exhorting his flock.
“Understood?” he said.
“I think,” she said, “this is the part where I get to say thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. Stirred, breathing heavily, he went on, “As I said, I know someone whose nature is kind, even if she grew up wrong and got some switches flicked by her parents that shouldn’t have been. And what I said to you in the car about you having just another hard-luck childhood? I lied.”
She looked at him.
“It wasn’t just another,” he said. “It was special. It was yours.”
“To my knowledge,” she said, “my parents didn’t flick a single switch.”
“Very funny. You know what I mean,” he said, and then sitting down next to her, he bent close, blew a moist, minty fog of breath in her face and kissed her on the lips.
It was not an especially interesting kiss; it reminded her of the bashful quick kisses of high school boys that faded off the face like breath off a mirror. But as he drew away afterward, and looked at her shining-eyed and with a crooked little smile of triumph, it occurred to her she was seeing him in what was quite possibly one of the happiest moments of his life.
“I’ve wanted to do that,” he said, “for a while now.”
“Did you?” she said, and in the moment of silence that followed she realized the previous sounds of children en route to school had vanished, swallowed up by subways and buses. Everybody had somewhere to get to in the world; half of life was getting to that place as quickly as possible. Where did she have to get to? Dan France had now begun talking rapidly, as men sometimes did after first kisses. He was composing that familiar aroused-guy music of peppy, upward-breaking turns of phrase and little puppyish exclamations that concealed the bolting blood flow in his pants. Yes, men spoke a stench, but she hadn’t smelled that particular sweet rotting top note of sex for a while now.
“How true, Dan.” She cut in at an appropriate moment and gave him an effortless, medium-strength smile that allowed her to feel the air on her teeth. “And the reason for that is because we do basically the same thing, in a way. I’m just the photographic negative of the positive which is you.”
“Exactly right,” he said. “And by the way, is this what I have to look forward to in the future?”
“What’s that?”
“You always staying a step ahead of me in conversation?”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not in the least,” he said.
“Good, because the answer is yes.”
He laughed his panting laugh.
“You know what I wish about now?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“That I didn’t have to go to work.”
“Well, then, call in sick,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t.
“I can’t.”
She mimed unhappiness, sticking out her lips.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s the last thing I want, either. But duty calls. And hey, I actually love my job. Are you laughing at me? It can happen to you, too.”
“I’m not sure I ever really truly loved a job in my life,” she said.
“Well, that’s about to change,” he said.
She looked at him carefully. “Yes,” she said, and then, “How long will you be gone?”
“Till early afternoon, though if I can, I’ll try to swing by before then. Can you deal with some time alone?”
“I’ll manage.”
“Remember, the drill is: no sudden movements if possible, lots of time lying down, and can you also call me regularly to check in? I could pop back in to say hi in as soon as two hours.”
“Two hours,” she said, her mind widening outward in a geographical sweep over the surrounding area.
“Yes, and Margot,” he said, “I’m hoping and believing this is the start of something, but I’m not an idiot. Just like last night, the doors will be locked from the outside. I want you staying put.”
A two-hour radius from Queens included at least four airports and twenty-five million people.
“Right,” she said.
Another silence while he stared at her. She watched with relief as, having kept his head classically “turtled” in the protective lowering of the chin as a hedge against doubt, he now raised it up, exposing his neck. Just perceptibly there, she thought she saw his pulse beating.
“Chocolate bars in the right crisper drawer,” he said, and winked. “Enjoy the house.” And with that, leaning close, he brushed her lips with his again, but briefly this time, and then stood up and walked to the front door from where he turned, gave her an airy little wave that she pretended to catch openhanded and stuff in her pocket, and then pivoted away.
The door sighed shut behind him. Letting out the bottom half of a breath she’d been holding, she sat in perfect silence for a few minutes on the kitchen chair, as if waiting to see if this odd little house would do something, surprise her in some way. Then she got up, took a very hot shower, and slowly went through the drawers of the desk. In one of them she found a small metal box. This she battered slowly with a hammer she found in a utility drawer, smashing at it until it broke. In it were several candid outdoor photos of Dan France with a pretty woman, and as she hoped, a set of house keys. With these in hand, she dressed slowly, packed her bag and entered the small guest bathroom. She had already noted that unlike the other bathroom and the windows of the house, which were protected with frames of decorative wrought-iron bars, this small frosted window giving onto an alley was painted shut but otherwise unprotected. Retrieving a large screwdriver from the utility drawer, she slowly hammered the blade into the soft wood around the edges of the window until she was able to lever it open. Then, after lacing sneakers onto her feet, she gently leveraged herself off the toilet bowl tank and slithered through the enclosure. A soft, somewhat awkward landing on the cindery dirt, and she was standing up and dusting off her skirt and swapping the sneakers out for heels. She opened the back door with the key, retrieved her rolling bag, and as quickly as she was able, walked out of the shadowy little backyard and, unlatching the front gate, into the brilliant room of daylight waiting on the other side.
