Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

Ramsey turned slowly back toward Super-P. "What do you think you know?" he said quietly. Demeanor of lofty moral dignity. His mother's son.

The boy gangster knew he'd gone too far, tried to backtrack. "I don't know nothing." Ramsey took a single step toward him. That was all it needed. Mr. Super-Pred started babbling, "I'm just rapping. Just a tag, man. Give a brother some slack. Trying to get your goat, that's all. Just a tag I saw."

"A tag? Where?" said Ramsey in the same quiet tone. "You saw it where?"

"A house. Old house we hang in sometimes."

Ramsey nodded slowly. With that lifelong demeanor. With the snake writhing in his belly. Peter Patterson's pitying stare through the wavering water.

"Tell me the address," he said.

There was a magazine between the two front seats of the unmarked Charger. Standing in the hollow armrest between where Gutterson sat behind the wheel and where Ramsey sat on the passenger side. It was a national newsweekly. A leading national newsweekly with a picture of Augie Lancaster on the cover. Lancaster was striking a heroic pose. Fists on his hips, eyes on the horizon. They'd photographed him from below so he looked like a moral giant.

Fighting to Save His City.

That was the headline. That was actually the headline.

If stupidity were a communicable disease, Ramsey thought, journalists would have to be herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle.

He looked out his window. It was late afternoon on a dull gray day. No beam of sun-no shock of blue or any color-appeared to mitigate the bleakness of the scene. There was devastation on every side and an inhuman stillness, a heavy hollowness in the atmosphere-or maybe that was Ramsey himself, an emanation of his own interior state. In any case, brownstones stood gutted, their black windows like skull-eyes gazing back at him. Houses lay crippled and broken, sunk in mud that used to be lawns. Shops-he could see through the shattered storefronts-had been scoured of all their goods and were empty and abandoned, the walls stained brown up to the waterlines near their ceilings. There were words scrawled and painted on doorways and walls, words that had been scrawled and painted there to alert rescuers at the height of the flood. They came to Ramsey like disembodied voices, whispering out of the wreckage: Help us. Four trapped inside. One dead here. Save us. Help us.

The whole area stank. Stagnant water and sewage. It made you flinch at first, but then it made you sad. It was such a mortal sort of odor, the stench of an abandoned corpse. It made you sad and then, after a while, you got used to it and just couldn't smell it at all anymore.

Fighting to Save His City.

Ramsey's eyes went over the scene, flicking instinctively to whatever was alive. A woman wearing a gym suit and carrying a shopping bag, young but bent over as if the earth itself were on her back. Two old men sitting in chairs against a wall, staring at the wrecked world like a movie. An angry mother yanking at her toddler's arm. And here and there, again and again, the slouching, shift-eyed, yellow-eyed young coyote-men prowling the afternoon, casing locations, casing prey, meeting on corners to clasp each other's hands in an expert and near-invisible exchange of cash and contraband.

Fighting to Save His City.

Had it ever been true? Ramsey wondered bitterly. Even at the beginning when Ramsey had first followed him, even loved him, even then had Augie Lancaster ever fought to save this city? Had he ever even meant to? Well… in daydreams maybe. Daydreams like we all have of ceaseless cheering, of an endless parade, of himself, Augie, slowly passing in his top-down limousine, the hands of the poor upraised in gratitude at the spangly gold showering from his beneficent fingertips. Maybe he really hadn't known-maybe he really hadn't understood that even the dream of doing good can be the hunger for power in disguise. Maybe he hadn't recognized the strangely red-visaged angel who had whispered to him he could be king of saints only to slowly tutor him to be king of kings-king of the city kings with his vacation homes and his cars and his boat, and the vacation homes and cars and boats of his cronies…

Fighting to Save His City.

All those times he had called these people his brothers. All those times he had told them that the white man was their enemy, that only he could save them as he saved them-look!-in his dreams. All those beautiful speeches- City of Hope, City of Justice -spurring them on to this protest or that, to boycott a Jew store owner who had shot a neighborhood thief, or to picket a radio station where some DJ had made some racial crack, or to protest a white jury's verdict that had sent some black mad-dog to prison. All those times he had inspired them to bare their chests and display the scars of injustice, mobilizing them as an army of victims to blackmail another dollar out of the citadels of white guilt and fear. It was all good-all good for the king of the city kings, but for the brothers? Useless, meaningless diversions while their fatherless children prowled the streets in drooling coyote crews and their fatherless mothers smoked bone for crack cocaine which their fatherless fathers sold to them in the broken buildings that all the spangly gold from his fingertips somehow never did rebuild.

Fighting to Save His City.

Sure. Because the journalists had their daydreams, too, the guilty white journalists made gullible by their desperate yearning for virtue. The same strangely red-visaged angel whispered in their ears, too: Well done, thou good and faithful servants, here are your Pulitzer Prizes and your I-Love-a-Nigger Decoder Rings for, lo, you have lifted a dusky-colored saint into the slowly passing top-down limousine of his parade where the spangly gold may fall upon the brown-skinned masses, transforming their infirmities and all your sins into an ever-to-be-remembered goodness.

Herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle, Ramsey thought. The stupidest pack of fools on earth.

Except maybe for him. Except maybe for Lieutenant Brick Ramsey himself, who had also followed Augie, who had even loved him and also believed.

Gutterson swung the wheel and turned the Charger off the boulevard.

They came onto a short lane. The houses here stood ghostly, lopsided and broken. You could see through the staring windows that they were empty, their interiors ravaged. You could see over-turned furniture in there and piles of debris and brown stains rising to the high waterlines on the wall.

The lane dead-ended at an empty lot, a dirt-brown expanse where plastic bags and papers tumbled over concrete shards and discarded mattresses and discarded refrigerators and ovens and scrap. It made a mournful backdrop.

"This is the one," Gutterson said.

It was the fourth house down on the left, about halfway to the dead end. It was made of large wooden shingles painted pale green. Ramsey could already feel its haunted emptiness as the Charger pulled to the curb in front of it.

"This is where they hang?" said Gutterson. "Look at it. Bunch of animals."

Ramsey choked down his hatred for the man and with it any answer he might've made.

The two of them got out of the car. They started across the front yard-the ruin of the front yard. The lawn was dead and littered with rubbish: cans and bags and pieces of lumber and rebar. They stepped through it gingerly, the debris crunching and clanging and crackling under their shoes. Gutterson's hand hovered over his nine, in case anyone was in the house and up to mischief. Ramsey's hands were at his sides. He was certain there was no one in there.

They reached the front door and stood one on either side of it. A breeze off the river brought a fresh stink to them. Ramsey's nostrils stung with it and with the first hint of the smell within. Gutterson glanced at Ramsey. Ramsey nodded. Gutterson reached out and banged on the door with his fist.