David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

The next morning, Bern was shaken awake by Susana, who was leaning over him, a towel wrapped around her, another draped over her wet head.

“Wake up,” she said.

When he opened his eyes, she resumed fluffing the towel through her hair. It took him a second to remember where he was, and then he rolled over and raised himself on one elbow.

“Listen,” she said, “we’ve got to go somewhere. You need to get up.”

He wasn’t sure about the tone of her voice, and for a second it seemed urgent. His heart lurched. But then she bent over and let her hair fall over her head as she continued to dry it, and it seemed he’d misread her. She wasn’t frantic. Bern could smell the shampoo. She straightened up quickly, flinging her hair back.

“I’ve made some coffee in the kitchen,” she said. “While you’re showering, I’m going to run a quick errand. I’ll be back in less than an hour, and I’ll bring some pastries with me. You grab a bite and then we’ll go.”

“Go where?”

“I’ll explain it to you on the way.”

“So who was that on the phone last night?” he asked.

“I’m not sure.” She picked up a comb from the foot of the bed and started combing her damp hair, tilting her head to the side.

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to go out,” he said, “until you’ve had time to bring me up to speed.”

“Did you read last night?”

“Yeah, until late.”

“Then I guess you’re picking up speed.”

She turned around and headed for the bathroom. “I’ll be out of there in five minutes.”

Bern got out of bed and slipped on his pants. There was a chest of drawers near Jude’s closet, and he looked inside. Underwear, T-shirts, socks. This was going to be strange.

He looked around the room. On one side of the door that led out to the studio was a wardrobe, which he hadn’t even noticed before. He heard the hair dryer going in the bathroom, so he went to the wardrobe and opened it. Susana’s clothes. Or some woman’s clothes at least. He lifted one of the blouses and smelled it. Susana’s perfume. A smaller chest on the other side contained her lingerie.

He went back to the closet and stared at the clothes. Would he find things in the pockets, an old theater ticket, a receipt for some small purchase? The hair dryer stopped. He didn’t want Susana to find him staring blankly into Jude’s closet, so he went back to the door that led to the studio and looked out. It felt familiar. Being there one night couldn’t have done it. There was more to it than that.

“Okay,” she said, coming out of the bathroom, “it’s all yours.”

Her thick hair was fluffy from drying, and she was rubbing lotion on her arms. Bern guessed she would now go around to her side of the bed, the side near the window, and sit on the edge of the bed and rub lotion on her legs.

She went past him and around the end of the bed. She sat down and began putting lotion on her legs, leaning over, her bare back to him.

It was just that easy. He could fall back into the routine in less than a day. The thought of it left a hollow place in his stomach. He headed for the shower and closed the bathroom door behind him.

He stood at the sink a long time, the towel wrapped around his waist, his hair still wet, looking at the shelves in the medicine cabinet. He looked at the tube of toothpaste, neatly rolled from the bottom. A tin of bandages. Over-the-counter antihistamines. Razor heads. Antiseptic throat spray. Advil. Midol. A packet of emery boards. Dental floss. Deodorant.

He closed the door. The jar of shaving cream was on the marble countertop. Bern used shaving cream, too. Most people didn’t, but millions did, he guessed. There was no need to believe there was any special significance in that. He opened it and caught the scent of almonds. His own cream was almond-scented, too. But then, he figured, millions of men must use that also.

Looking into the jar, he saw where Jude had run his fingers through the cream and scooped it out. Good God. Slowly, he put his own fingers into the same grooves of the cream and carefully pulled them through the same shallow flutes created by Jude’s fingers. He looked at the cream on his fingers and then looked into the jar. The striations of Jude’s fingertips were gone. Paul had taken the first steps of replacing him. He began to lather his face.

The next forty minutes or so were a nearly hallucinatory experience as he slowly crawled into the minutiae of his brother’s life. He deliberately did not replace the razor head, wanting a tactile intimacy with Jude, though he didn’t stop to reason why. After shaving, he used Jude’s lotion on his face, then put Jude’s talcum under his arms.

In the bedroom, he opened the chest of drawers and took out a pair of Jude’s shorts and put them on. He put on a T-shirt. As if in a trance, he went to the closet and chose a pair of trousers, selected a belt from a rack of them on the closet door, picked out a freshly laundered shirt. The shoes. Jesus Christ, he had forgotten about the shoes. He chose a pair, then got a pair of socks and put them on. Everything fit. Everything suited him.

He looked at himself in the full-length mirror on Susana’s wardrobe, and it was only at that moment that it hit him how important it was for him to become Jude as deeply and as completely as humanly possible. None of this was going to work, not even for a moment, if he didn’t.

It was something that should have hit him like a lightning bolt from the very instant that it was proposed to him by Mondragon back in Houston, but it hadn’t. He thought he had understood, but he hadn’t. Not really. Not until this intimate intercourse with the details of Jude’s small moments, not until he saw himself in Jude’s clothes and slept in the same bed with the same woman that Jude must have slept with, not until this very moment in front of Jude’s mirror, looking into Jude’s face, did the full impact of the reality of his situation actually hit him. His life depended upon the resurrection of the face in the mirror. If he wanted to live, Jude had to be reborn, whole and believable.

He was standing at the studio windows when he heard the front door open and close. A few minutes later, Susana’s quick footsteps crossed the living room and stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

“Jude,” she yelled.

Caught off guard, he felt a wash of panic, and then he immediately caught himself.

“Yeah,” he called back.

“I’m bringing up the pastries. You want some coffee?”

“I just got a fresh cup,” he said, and heard her start up the stairs.

He turned away from the windows and was halfway across the studio when she came around the top of the landing and saw him. Her quick pace halted abruptly, as if someone had yelled at her, and then she came toward him slowly. She was holding the white sack of pastries, and the look on her face was a conflation of surprise and an effort to conceal it. Her eyes were all over him, absorbing the sight of him.

When she got to him, she reached up without hesitation and put her hand softly along the side of his face, looking at him as if she were remembering him, not seeing him, and then she dropped her hand and put it flat against his chest, feeling him breathe.

Suddenly, she took her hand away and went around him and put the pastries on the coffee table in front of the sofa a few feet away.

“We need to get moving,” she said, her back to him as she shrugged off her shoulder bag and began looking into it for something. “You’d better grab a bite. It’s going to take us about an hour to get there.”

They descended to the street and stepped out into the quiet morning on Avenida Mexico. Bern could hear the roar of the city only a few blocks away in any direction, but the park was an island of tranquility, the loudest distraction coming from the songs of birds in the high canopies of the trees.