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Authors: Eli Gottlieb

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Chapter Five

A
s promised, Margot booked a private lesson through his website, and on the morning of that lesson, Lawrence found himself in an unnaturally good mood. Having had breakfast with his wife, Glynis, he returned to his study to attend to some paperwork and was ready to leave the house by 10:30
A.M.

“All dolled up today?” Glynis said to him as he passed her in the kitchen, where she was misting the orchids with a long-necked brass spray can. He was nattily attired in lightweight summer slacks, a white dress shirt and loafers. She was wearing Crocs, cargo shorts and a shapeless linen top. Having just recently finished gardening, she had her sun hat drawn low on her head.

“I’ve got a private.”

“Really? You look like you’ve got a screen test.”

Small, clean puffs of mist came between his glance and her face at that moment, and on either side of them, they laughed.

Darling,
he thought to himself. But he did not say it. Instead, continuing to walk away, Lawrence shot a furtive look at his wife as she stood in a pose as familiar to him as the smell of his own body: watchful, with down-lowered eyes and the strong planes of the cheekbones catching the light. Over the many years of their marriage, he had found a peace in discarding his own perceptions of her aging and then, when he could no longer ignore them, embracing them as proofs testifying to the unshakable eternity of their bond:
we’re going out of this life together
. At fifty-three, despite the Jazzercise classes and the daily time spent bowing and twisting with the Wii in front of the television, she was beginning to expand everywhere at once, like a reverse invasion. Yet on certain days, at certain moments, the right play of light and shadow could still counterfeit a perfect image of the fresh, apple-shaped face he’d first fallen in love with. These instants of silent time travel he found intensely moving. It was unfair that men as they grew older drew into a configuration called “dignified,” while women, despite the pots and paints of their cosmetics, stood nakedly exposed to the depredations of age. Small brown spots high on her temples had recently appeared, as if Death, daubing with a brush, was getting in its first licks.

“I’m off,” he said, hefting his shoulder bag.

She raised her eyes to him and sent a few more tentative puffs of vapor into the long-stemmed, swaying clump of flowers.

“Good-bye, honey,” she said.

He raised his hand to blow her a kiss, unconsciously brushing with the pads of his fingers the colorless stitch of a scar. It was the signature of that moment, at the age of twenty-five, when Lawrence had been in a bar and gotten into a fight. Back then he’d had a bit of a hair-trigger temper, and the years spent in high school and then college lacrosse had endowed him with physical strength allied to an innate aggressivity. A couple of strong drinks in him and he’d be halfway spoiling for a showdown. On this particular night, some stray drunken comment by a passerby about the girl he was with ignited him; a shouted exchange led to him receiving a slap, and not long after, Lawrence was swinging his fists in wide, swift arcs from his hips.

He’d fought before, without incident. But this time, after the man sucker-punched him so hard in the face as to have perforated his upper lip with a tooth, he swung back blindly, on instinct, connecting satisfyingly with the man’s jaw and sending him reeling backward. The man tripped and slammed the back of his head full force against the fieldstone edge of the bar before hitting the floor and losing consciousness. When not long after he went into a long series of open-eyed violent convulsions, it was clear he’d had more than the wind knocked out of him.

The young man, a promising grad student in a local business school, had sustained damage to the occipital lobe of the brain and would thereafter suffer permanently from visual field cuts and movement agnosia. Lawrence became very familiar with these terms because they were employed with punitive precision at the civil trial by lawyers hired by the boy’s family. Wheelchair bound, speaking softly, the boy made a terrific witness. Lawrence avoided jail time and bankruptcy only because friends of his who had been there that night came forward at the trial to bolster his claim of self-defense.

But alone, in that period, he grew sick with remorse. He was unable to reconcile this magnesium-flash of violence with his self-image as someone versed in the arts of reconciliation and gifted with a second sight into the occult essence of the world. Long after he’d abandoned the volatility of his twenties, the bar fight continued to live on inside him as a pressurized cell of memory, warping the flow of experience around it in such a way as to sway him from a long-considered career in law enforcement and drawing him eventually into the windless harbor of a field—psychology—where the violence was only verbal. A brief clinical practice and a short teaching career prepared him for what would be his adult mission: writing bestselling books on the secrets of face and body reading, and conducting what would eventually become large, lucrative seminars on the same subject.

Having kissed his wife good-bye, Lawrence now drove to the motel that housed the small conference room he rented for his occasional privates. A half hour later he was setting up the dry-erase board on its easel, and breaking out his notes, when he heard a disturbance at the door and saw her there. Dressed in tight black pants, a designer white T-shirt and sneakers, she looked somewhat like a mature college student, even though he’d guess her age somewhere in her late twenties.

“Well, hi!” she said loudly.

“Margot, welcome.”

Holding out his large hand, he shook her dainty fingers while feeling himself internally contracting at the same time. She made him naturally watchful.

“Please sit down,” he said, with a little bow.

“Thank you.”

She slid her laptop onto the table, took out a notebook, and, as well, he was gratified to see, a copy of
The Physique of Finance
.

“I’ve now read you twice,” she said, smiling, “with a pencil!”

“Always nice to hear.” He laced his hands together and smiled. He was seated about four feet away from her.

“Have a pleasant drive here?” he asked.

“Not bad, considering the traffic at this time of the day can stop you in your tracks,” she said.

“Don’t I know it.”

Unbeknownst to her, he was studying her intensely. The small bumps and thinness of her shell-like ears; the precise curl and fold of her lip; the way in which the hair of the brows was distributed in two circumflex hoops above her bright green eyes—he felt his own eyes drop infinitesimally and then flutter, tabulating his perceptions, storing them away.

“Well,” he said, nodding, “shall we begin?”

“Please,” she said, nodding, as she opened her laptop and set her notebook out in front of her. Though her hand had felt fragile in his, he noted that she actually had fine, strong hands, indicating a person gifted in doing and achieving in the world. Her nails were ridgeless and attested to a diet rich in vitamin B and iron, but the moons, he noticed, were invisible: pituitary problems?

“Any thought where you’d like to begin?” he asked. “What needs strengthening and work?”

“Thanks for asking,” she said. “I think that what I need most to work on is how best to make a good first impression. I mean, once the ice is broken, I’m usually pretty good, but sometimes I just freeze up while still on the approach ramp. Does this make sense?”

“Absolutely.” He’d been nodding as he listened, and then he stopped. “The Golden Gate,” he said simply.

“Pardon?”

“The Golden Gate.” He stood up and wrote the words on the dry-erase board, and then turned to her. “It’s the key ten-second interval when you meet someone for the first time and they form their lasting first impression of you. That gate is crossed by trust, blocked by fear, and negotiated, as is often the case,” he looked over the tops of his glasses at her—“by desire.”

She was staring back at him, slightly openmouthed, while her hands, as if seemingly independent organisms, produced a high, fast cricketing from the keyboard.

“Cool,” she said.

“To unlock that gate,” he said, “we each of us lead with our attributes. Some are visual, some are emotional and intellectual, and some, if we believe our brothers on the esoteric side of the aisle, are subtler than that.”

“Subtler?” Her fingers were poised motionless over the keys.

“Let me ask you a few questions,” he said. “Did you know that retailers sell more in blue environments than in red ones?”

Her fingers jerked into motion again.

“Or that shoppers consistently purchase more expensive merchandise when classical music is played in the background?”

He could see her face relaxing. “Did you know that haircuts, for at least a week, have a direct effect on endorphin production?”

“No,” she said, “I didn’t.”

“Or that the voices of people with what is called ‘greater bilateral body symmetry,’ which is fancy talk for a good body, are rated as sounding more attractive than those with less symmetrical bodies? Their voices, mind you—”

“I think I see where you might be—”

“Going with this?” He smiled. “My point,” he said, “is that things aren’t necessarily what they appear at first, especially in our line of work. We deal with the liminal, Margot, with the partial, the hidden. To the experienced reader, faces and bodies are like a kabbalistic text in which every word stands for something other than what it seems.”

“Kabbalistic? I like the way you think,” she said.

“Excellent,” he said, and beamed. He was feeling sharp and he was feeling expansive. He turned a forty-five-degree angle, splayed his hand at the juncture of his lumbar and midback regions, and rotated farther, sending out a fusillade of dry cracks.

“I have a little handout,” he said, centering himself, “just for you.”

But she didn’t respond to that. She was still studying him a second. “It looks like you could use an adjustment on your back,” she said, and seemed about to say something else. But before she could, Lawrence cut in smoothly, “Couldn’t we all.”

Out of a loose-leaf notebook he took a small paper-clipped bundle of papers with the handwritten title:
First Impact.

“Now let’s dig in,” he said.

Chapter Six

P
otash almost beat rush hour, en route to the FBI offices. But as he drew near to San Francisco, the traffic thickened, and then slowed to a crawl, and the anxiety this brought on naturally tipped him into retrospective mode. From there, it was but a quick, associative leap to regret. His regret at the moment was vast, foundational. Where to begin? He could start with the fact that, after his lunch meeting with Janelle Styles, he was in a very good mood, expansive, sanguine, and more in love with the new woman of his life than ever.

More mundanely, he remembered (while sitting in the crawling car and glancing occasionally out the side window to where people frolicked in the surf and early morning sun worshippers, already on the beach, lay foreshortened like inkblots on the sand) that he phoned some friends back in New York and asked them to dig into the specific sustainable investment areas Greenleaf Financial was proposing. The word that came back was that several of these areas were, in fact, on the techno-cultural cusp and currently attracting a lot of heat among sustainably oriented forward-thinking investors. Greenleaf’s deal flow might not be quite on par with blue-chip venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins or Benchmark, but it was close. Bolstered by the flood of positive information, he was encouraged to set up a meeting with the Greenleaf staff.

Would he ever forget Janelle’s face that day? Would he ever not remember exactly how she looked as she came out of an inner door to the waiting room with her arms open wide and her head lying slightly to one side while crying, “John, so excited to see you!” Now slumped in the stopped car and muttering to himself, Potash turned on the radio to the calming New Age “space music” station he and Anabella so loved, which was heavy on ouds and lutes. As he did so, he remembered her pulling him into a frontal full-contact hug that went on so long a strange, mixed heat blossomed upward from his thorax. When the hug stopped, Janelle, looking carefully into his eyes, drew her mouth into a smile.

“Well, how simply great to see you again,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, feeling the sudden need to scratch his forehead energetically, “you too.”

“And welcome to Greenleaf,” she went on.

“Glad to be here.”

She did a quarter turn with her arms in the air like a ballerina, drawing his attention irresistibly to how her body funneled downward from her breasts to her waist, and asked, “Would you like a coffee?”

“At this time of day? I’d—I’d be dancing all night.”

“Ha, right you are! Well, then,” she turned back to face him directly. “To business, yes?”

“Absolutely.”

“Right this way. Frank and Nick are already here.”

He was then escorted down a small windowless hallway, headed toward a conference room. A man stood up from a conference table as he entered the room and bid him a crisp “Hello, sir!” This was Frank Mayfair. Shaggily gray-haired and bearded and somewhere in his midfifties, Frank wore a blue double-breasted blazer with double rows of brass sleeve buttons and was clearly, self-consciously of the school of “salty old dog.”

“Glad you could make it to our port of call,” he said with astonishing adherence to type, putting out his hand to shake with a small tinkle of bracelets. Was that an odd musk Potash was smelling, or aftershave covering up the metabolized funk of alcohol? Meanwhile, behind him, Nick Lattanzio was standing up. Unsmiling and small, Nick had dark hair combed straight back and seemed possessed by a variety of subtle nervous tremors.

“Hi,” Nick said simply, extending a slightly damp palm.

“As you know,” Janelle interrupted before he could get much of a bead on Nick, “we have much to get to today, so let’s begin, shall we?” Once they were seated, she leaned forward and cleared her throat. “I’m very excited to bring John on board. Not only does he have a genuine desire to be involved in sustainable venture investment, he also happens to be a good guy. And by the way,” she stage-whispered, “he’s a New Yorker in exile.”

Potash allowed himself a smile.

“Frank,” she said, “why don’t you begin our presentation.”

“Aye-aye,” said Frank, shooting him a wink and clearing his throat.

After a moment, seeming to think better of it, he got to his feet, and Potash was surprised to see, below the immaculate blue blazer, a pair of somewhat ratty jeans.

“In our world of modern conveniences,” he began, “it’s easy to forget the one deep truth about life, which is that we live within nature’s boundaries. John, natural resources are the assets on our planetary balance sheet, and oil and natural gas, to take two examples out of about ten thousand, are being drawn down daily. Imagine,” Frank beetled his brows as if in indignation “a company that systematically depleted its own assets without any plan to replenish them. Can you imagine the hell
those
people would catch at the shareholders’ meeting? Well, those people are us, John, and the shareholders’ meeting is the national election, and guess what? Nothing changes, no matter who’s in office. But we at Greenleaf Financial believe different. We believe in plain talking and bottom lines. For us, profit isn’t necessarily the enemy of sane environmental policy. It’s an enabler!”

Potash nodded grudgingly. He wasn’t about to be bowled over by simple volume, or the usual arpeggios of sustainability and planetary threat. And Frank, nearly as if he understood that, immediately switched gears, and began talking with technical precision about the exact composition of the fund of which Potash would be a part. As he spoke, Nick, like a chorus, would interrupt regularly to speak in a slightly monotone voice about returns and accelerated depreciation schedules. In this way, with one of the pitchers happy and expansive, and the other dourly literal, they moved forward for nearly an hour. When it was over, the meeting was sealed with a valedictory round of happy handshakes, after which Janelle walked Potash out to his car. She seemed to bounce slightly as she strode. Potash, who was carrying under his arm a laminated plastic folder blazoned with the vaguely planetary logo of the company and stuffed with letterhead bearing a variety of financial breakdowns, felt his head buzzing from the hour-long pitch and his own proximity to all that luscious, ecologically sound, socially boastable revenue.

“Wow,” Janelle said, touching him on the forearm as they walked, her green eyes sparkling. “I mean, John.” She laughed. “You’re good!”

“Am I?”

She held her finger on his forearm, her voice firm: “Yes, you are. You ask questions, you make inquiries, you’re really engaged, and you know what you’re talking about. Impressive, my friend.”

“Well, thank you,” said Potash, who enjoyed the compliment, even as he gave his own performance a B, nothing more. Yes, he had requested breakdowns of some of the projected claims, and yes, he knew that among the financial instruments the fund would be involved in was something called a reverse shell merger, which was how a promising young business, by attaching itself to a publicly traded but essentially dead company, could float a stock offering without having to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley and all the legal and accounting expense of a traditional IPO. But there was also a whole blizzard of terms that were beyond him—though he’d dutifully filled up his yellow pad with notes.

“There’s a lot to digest. But rest assured,” he said, beaming at her, “digest it I will.”

“Of course you will.” Her beautiful head, exactly three feet from his, swam along next to him with the unwavering horizontal smoothness of a Steadicam. “Remember, John, that for us, every client relationship is a partnership. And we personally invest in every one of our offerings, which allows us to align our interests perfectly with yours. I was pleased with the results from the Dyna-venture Fund, which I chalk up as a solid double. But this time, my friend, we’re going for a home run.”

They passed through the swinging glass doors and into the parking lot. “I’m impressed,” Potash admitted. “And that Frank,” he said, “is some character.”

She stopped a moment on the asphalt and put her hand on her breast, forcing Potash to convert his next forward step to a kind of pirouette as he swiveled back around to face her.

“Francis Mayfair is one of the best, the cleanest, and by the way the most profitable Wall Street brains in the business.”

“Is he? Funny that I never—”

“He belongs,” she went on, holding his eye, “to the generation of the Milkens and Buffetts and Kravises and has their same brainpower. But rather than mindlessly pursuing money for just money’s sake, he’s found that ethics and mission are entirely compatible with outsize profits. The man shines a light, even if he likes staying under the radar. But you should see his spread in Costa Rica!”

“Does he sail his own boat there?”

She laughed. “You mean the beard? He does seem a bit ‘nautical’ and yachty, doesn’t he. You’re funny.”

They began walking again and soon drew up to his car.

“To get serious a second, John,” she said, “the ball’s now in your court. Go home, talk to your friends, your brokers, complete your due diligence and then get back to us when you’ve come to a point of resolution. As we made clear, we’re not looking for a hands-off, passive investor who remembers us only when we wire his quarterlies into his account. We prefer actively engaged strategic partners that we can leverage for domain knowledge. And as a perk for privileged fund participants, by the way”—she leaned forward confidentially—“you’ll have access to our London office, which is, well,
lovely
.”

She put a special, curling emphasis on the last word.

“Swinging Londontown, eh?” He felt suddenly giddy as he opened the car door, and in a single smooth motion lowered the window while taking his seat. “I’m there!”

“Good,” she leaned forward into the open window while bringing the cleft between her exposed breasts, like the notched sight of a rifle, directly into his line of vision. “Bye-bye, John.”

“Bye for now, Janelle.”

She turned and sauntered back to the building and, grinning to himself, Potash put the key in the ignition, bursting with his secret: that he was about to make him and his wife pots and pots of money, and thereby add yet another link to the golden chain of circumstance that had begun assembling itself from the moment he’d left New York to start a beautiful, sustainable, humanly rich new life in California.

A
horn blared behind him and he raised his eyes from his sad daydream to see—finally!—a lane of space opening ahead of him. Traffic, ever mysterious, had unknotted for reasons known only to itself, and he accelerated toward the FBI office. After making good progress for about twenty minutes, he turned off the interstate and was soon following the curving road along the route he’d MapQuested. He parked, hustled out of the SUV and took the stairs two at a time. Finding the proper door, he entered and gave his name to the receptionist. The room was furnished in the typical pastel governmental palette of advanced desertification, and some worn magazines were piled on a table. Potash picked one up, and unseeing, began paging through it. They were superbusy that morning, the receptionist had explained, and he’d have to wait.

BOOK: The Face Thief
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