Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Without warning, Molly erupted in anger. She had been sitting next to me in silence, contemplatively I thought, no doubt in an advanced state of shock. But as it turned out, she had been smoldering, seething.

“How... could... you do this to me? How could you put me through this?”

“Snoops—” her father began.

“God damm it! Have you any idea —”

“Molly!” he shouted hoarsely. “Hold on! I didn’t have a choice, don’t you see that?” He drew in his lanky legs until he was sitting upright, then hunched forward toward his daughter, his eyes beseeching, glistening.

“When they killed my dear Sheila, my love — yes, Molly, we were lovers, but I’m sure you knew that — I realized it was only a matter of hours before they got to me. I knew I had to hide.”

“From the Wise Men,” I said. “From Truslow and Toby—”

“And half a dozen others. And their security forces, which aren’t exactly small-time.”

I said: “This all concerns what’s happening in Germany, isn’t that right?”

“It’s complicated, Ben. I don’t really have—”

“I knew you were alive,” Molly interrupted. “I’ve known it since Paris.”

There was something steely in her tone, a quiet assurance, and I turned to look at her.

“It was his letter,” she continued, looking at me. “He mentioned an emergency appendectomy that forced him to spend an entire summer with us here, at Lac Tremblant.”

“And?” I prompted her.

“And — it sounds trivial now, but I didn’t remember seeing an appendix scar. The face was pretty much destroyed, but the body wasn’t, and I guess I would have remembered, would have registered it on some subconscious level. I mean, it might have been there, but I wasn’t certain. You understand? And you remember I tried to get the autopsy a while back, but it was sealed? Order of the Fairfax County district attorney. So I pulled some strings.”

“Which is why you wanted the fax machine in Paris,” I said. At the time, she had told me only that she had a thought about her father’s murder, an idea, a way to prove something.

She nodded “Every pathologist — at least, every pathologist I know — keeps a copy of his work in his own locked drawers. You do that in case you ever run into trouble later on, so you can turn to your notes and all that. So I’m not without resources. I called a friend at Mass. General, a pathologist, who called a colleague at Sibley in Washington, where the autopsy was done. Routine inquiry, right? Bureaucratic? It’s incredibly easy to circumvent security channels in a hospital if you know where to pull the strings.”

“And?” I prompted her again.

“I had the autopsy report faxed to me. And sure enough, it listed the presence of an appendix. And at that point I knew that wherever Dad was, it wasn’t beneath that gravestone in Columbia County in upstate New York.” She turned back to her father. “So whose body was it?”

“No one who’ll be missed,” he replied. “I’m not without my own resources.” Then he added, quietly: “It’s a lousy business.”

“My God,” Molly said under her breath, her head bowed.

“Not quite as evil as you must be thinking,” he said. “A fairly thorough sweep of John Does — unidentified cadavers in hospital morgues — netted us someone of approximately the right build, age, and — toughest of all — good health. Most homeless people are afflicted with a dozen different ailments.”

Molly nodded, smiled fiercely. Bitterly, she said: “And what’s one less vagrant?”

“The face wasn’t important,” I said, “since it was to be mostly destroyed in the crash anyway, right?”

“Right,” Sinclair replied. “Actually, it was destroyed before the crash, if you must know. The restorative artists at the mortuary, who had no idea they weren’t laboring away on the real Harrison Sinclair, were given my photograph to work from. Whether there’s to be a public viewing or not, they generally like to make the body as presentable as possible.”

“The tattoo on the shoulder,” I said. “The mole on the chin—”

“Easily done.”

Molly had been silently observing this matter-of-fact exchange between her father and her husband, and at this point she began to speak again, her voice tinged with bitterness. “Ah, yes. The body was in terrible shape after the car crash. Plus which some decompositional bloating had set in.”

She nodded, flashed a broad smile that was not pleasant. Her eyes shone with ferocity. “It looked like Dad, sure, but how closely did either of us look, really? How closely could we bear to look at such a time, under such circumstances?” She was staring at me, but at the same time she wasn’t seeing me; she was looking through me. There was something awful in her tone now: a monotone with underpinnings of steel, anger, sarcasm. “They bring you into the morgue, they slide open a drawer and unzip the body bag. You see a face, partially destroyed in an explosion, but you see enough of it to say, yeah, sure, that’s my own father, that’s his nose as far as I can tell, as far as I want to look, that’s part of his mouth , for Christ’s sake! You say to yourself, I’m seeing my own flesh and blood, the man who helped bring me into the world, the guy who gave me piggyback rides, and I never want to remember that I ever saw him this way, but they want me to look, so I’ll give a perfunctory look, there , now take it away!”

Her father had put one hand up to his craggy face. His eyes were sad. He waited, didn’t speak.

I watched my dear Molly, saw she couldn’t go on. She was right, of course. It wasn’t terribly difficult, I knew, using face masks and what is called the “restorative art,” to make a cadaver resemble that of another.

“Brilliant,” I said, genuinely impressed, if still thoroughly befuddled.

“Don’t credit me,” Sinclair said. “The idea came from our old enemies in Moscow. You remember that bizarre case they lecture on during training at the Farm, Ben? About the time in the mid-sixties when the Russians had an open-coffin funeral in Moscow of a high-ranking Red Army intelligence officer?”

I nodded.

But he continued, addressing his daughter. “We sent our spooks ostensibly to pay their respects, but actually to see who turned up at the funeral, take clandestine snapshots, and so on. Apparently this Red Army officer had been a significant American asset for a dozen years.

“And then, eight years later, it turned out that the guy was still alive. The whole thing had been an elaborate Soviet counterintelligence operation, in effect, a sting. Complicated stuff. Evidently they’d made a life mask from the double agent — whom they’d turned into a triple in the meantime — and somehow put it on a corpse they happened to have handy. In those days, the good old Brezhnev years, the top brass thought nothing of having a guy shot if they needed to, so maybe they sent out an order for the body of a guy who looked like the mole, I don’t know.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler,” I asked, “to just say you were so badly burned in the crash that nothing was left to identify?”

“Simpler,” Sinclair said, “but in the end riskier. An unidentifiable body raises all manner of suspicions.”

“And the photograph?” Molly asked. “Of you with — your throat slit?”

“These days,” Sinclair said wearily, “even that’s not impossible. A contact who was once affiliated with the Media Lab at MIT—”

“Sure,” I said. “Digital retouching of photographs.”

He nodded; Molly looked puzzled.

I explained: “You remember a couple of years ago when National Geographic ran a photograph on its cover, where they moved the Giza pyramid over a bit so it would fit?”