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Authors: Eli Gottlieb

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Chapter
Forty

T
he cab deposited her at Kennedy airport.
Somewhere, people alerted to her absence were probably already hunting
through her clothes, searching her documents and accounts in an effort to
box her in, track her down. She ignored that and got slowly out of the car,
giving Jai Dev a tip that left him muttering with disbelieving joy. Then she
steadied herself on the handle of her rolling bag, proceeded through the
sliding glass doors into the terminal and froze, unable to walk any
farther.

The main concourse gave the
impression of shooting away from her in every direction. People were surging
forward with blind directional intensity, deafened by the yelling faces of
clocks and titanically amplified voices and bells ringing without obvious
purpose and the space itself, which seemed to roar continuously. Through
this space poured faces, an endless sea of features rushing by at eye
level.

In the quiet weeks of hospital
and rehab, she had been pampered. The faces she’d seen there were usually
curled subtly in concern for her: the underthrust lower lip, the slight
downturn of the eyes. But here she saw her fellow citizens of the world
streaming by her plain, and the truth shocked. These faces were ugly,
stranded by inner lives grown old too quickly or too slowly; pasty with
ill-health, or drawn back in a snarl of appetite on the bones and left to
harden there. To these add the many round, soft faces of the American
Midwest, fattened on grains and beef, along with crooking lean country faces
of inbred cleverness, and young girls dimpling and quick across the eyes and
cheeks. The elderly, covered with a dust of age, carried pleated expressions
around like disused table linen or drapes. And everywhere, she thought, was
the question, What final truth do I represent? What vision, what original
mystery do I uphold? Eyes filled with gel to refract light; teeth in the
mouths to grind animals and plants to nutritious paste, and brains to pity
the disappearing planet: she looked at the huge, stutter-step pour of
humanity with confusion, and slumped against the metal edge of a newsstand,
waiting till the dizziness, the strange negative rapture, had
passed.

When she felt able to, she
pushed away from the newsstand, walked slowly to the United counter, bought
a ticket, and headed for the gate. Security made her laugh, it seemed so
mechanical and stupid compared to the subtler onboard weapon of human
insight. Having passed through the metal detector, she gathered her
belongings, but instead of replacing her cell phone, placed it in her outer
pocket and entered the nearby bathroom.

In the neutral fluorescent
light, she found a stall and sat clothed on the toilet. The face of the cell
phone when she withdrew it from her pocket looked to her like a woman with
her mouth open, screaming. She wouldn’t miss it where she was going, she
thought, pulling the battery out, and then flushing it piece by piece down
the toilet. And she wouldn’t make the mistake of being geo-tracked and
traced.

Life was an endless process of
shedding skins, and she was the cobra that suns itself on a rock.

Back at her gate, after a wait
of another hour or so, they began to board the plane. Dimly she was aware of
hunger. Vaguely she was conscious of those odd pinging and bridling sick
feelings along her skin that had been coming and going all day. But she
ignored them, and concentrated on heading down a boarding ramp ribbed like a
gullet. It wasn’t till she was about to enter the plane that she realized
how thready, loose, dirty everything was around her. The white of the plane
was streaked with rivulets of gray grime. The big door had tiny coronas of
rust around the bolts. In her mind, preparing for this moment over the
previous day, she’d imagined the jet as an immaculate capsule traveling
through heavenly regions of space before setting down in a new destination,
but all it was, she now saw, was a kind of tired old bus.

She boarded, stowed
her bag, took her window seat, placed her hands between her knees, and
pressed hard, trying to make the nausea go away. A few minutes later, the
aisle seat was taken by a man. Out of the sides of her eyes, she watched him
sit down, retrieve the inflight magazine and begin paging through it. She
shut her eyes and then opened them slowly, preparing herself.

“Excuse me,” she said, and when he turned to her
she beheld an attractive fortysomething face, filled with easy symmetries.

“Do you know how long the flight is supposed to
be?”

“Nine hours,” he said, and while he smiled she
found her eyes ticking over him in that swift, inventorying way that had once
been second nature: the suit jacket, beautifully cut; the hair, with the suave
joinery of something expensive; the shirt, tieless and open on a chest filled
with matted hair. Businessman. Possibly Jewish. Sexual and no ring.

“Wow,” she said.

“Longer than you expected?”

“Much.”

“Better settle in.”

“Definitely.”

With a roar, the plane ran headlong down the runway
and flung itself into the air. She continued to watch him paging through a
magazine with the light, lifted concentration of a man waiting for the
opportunity to speak. Already a mile below, and shooting away beneath the tail,
the earth with its crazy schemes, its dupes, its dead parents, and its long,
bloody histories of right and wrong, was dwindling away to nothingness, a
memory, a wisp, a forgotten breath.

“We’re expecting turbulence,” the man said, a
finger hovering over a page.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“The captain, chatting with an attendant.”

A calm, measured-sounding, mid-Atlantic voice, with
the slightly adenoidal twinge of motherlove often found in firstborn sons.

“Yikes,” she said.

“I know.” He grinned.

They each returned to their magazines. The plane
climbed and climbed. It reached upward like someone trying to win a prize. When
they finally rose through the last levels of cloud and into the permanent,
brilliant high-altitude sun, arriving from millions of miles away to make her
comfortable this very minute, she put away the magazine. He was watching her out
of the corner of his eyes, she understood. His face had the large overlip of
someone in love with stimulation and the expansive nostrils of a person born
generous. She yawned, covering her mouth.

She owed men everything and nothing. Lawrence
Billings was probably about to get arrested at any minute and feeling sick to
his soul. Her father was rotting to a kind of shredded tobacco underground. Mr.
Wilkington the English teacher was long dead with all his tuneful poetry gone
with him, and Clive Pemberthy was no doubt sleeping off his latest conquest en
route to an early heart attack. In memory, they continued trooping across her
vision, a solemn procession of boys and then men, each of them taking his turn
and passionately pleading his case. Many of them were married. These were
invariably the most winsome in their appeal. Though he’d stopped reading, the
man next to her was continuing to stare frozenly at the page.

She settled back into her seat, steepled her
fingers together, rested her chin on them, and turned on him a tidy little
smile. Irresistibly, his face slid sideways before his eyes flared and settled
on hers. Men spoke a stench. She sniffed delicately.

“So,” she said.

Acknowledgments

To my agent, Betsy Lerner, who was midwife, sharpshooter, all-weather genius, and steadfast friend on this book; to Enrico Perotti, Stephen O’Shea, Carlo Pizzati, Bruce Ettinger, Peter Cole, Mark Kamine, great readers all; to Susan Aposhyan, Martin Earl, Brian Kitely, Kip Hunter, Nevine Michaan, Tracey Alexander, Susan Bell, Don Berger, and Lars Skogen for varying forms of hospitality and wisdom; to the fabulous Dana Prescott of Civitella Ranieri; to Kirk Ruth, Ed Hernstadt, and Carrie Cohen of the U.S. District Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, for technical support; to the crack crew of wizards at William Morrow, Henry Ferris, Tavia Kowalchuk, and Andy Dodds; to my beautiful pair of stepsons, Noah and Eli, and finally to the woman whose radiance, forbearance and abiding love lit every step of the way of this book and of the life that went into it, Judy Godec—thank you from the heart.

About the Author

ELI GOTTLIEB’s
New York Times
Notable Book,
The Boy Who Went Away
, won the Rome Prize and the 1998 McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors. His second novel,
Now You See Him
, has been translated into eleven languages. He lives in New York City.

www.eligottlieb.com

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www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by Eli Gottlieb

Now You See Him

The Boy Who Went Away

Credits

Cover design by Mary Schuck

Cover photograph © by Katya Evdokimova/Millennium Images, UK

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE FACE THIEF
. Copyright © 2012 by Eli Gottlieb. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gottlieb, Eli.

The face thief / Eli Gottlieb. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-173505-9

1. Femmes fatales—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction.

3. Deception—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3557.O8313F33 2012

813’.54—dc22

2011025474

12 13 14 15 16
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

EPub Edition JANUARY 2011 ISBN: 9780062100856

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BOOK: The Face Thief
3.61Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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