Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

"Go, go," said the foreigner. "Is not so bad. Look."

Shannon took a deep breath and lifted the mirror.

His first sensation at what he saw in the glass was terror, a quick, lancing jag of nauseating fear. Where had he gone? Who was that there? Who was he? But the moment passed. He was still himself. The features were changed, reshaped, but they were still his features somehow. He could still make himself out in the eyes and in remaining traces of the face he'd known. And he was still himself inside.

His terror abated. He was relieved. It was not so bad. It was good, in fact. No one else, not even people who knew him well, would ever recognize him. But he felt the same. He was who he was.

"You are Henry Conor now," the foreigner said.

"Henry Conor," Shannon murmured, gazing at his reflection. He let the name play in his mind. He didn't like it much. It sounded to him like the name of some pencil-head in a suit, a lawyer or something like that. "Why can't I pick my own name?"

"Because I make papers," the foreigner said. "This is name I put."

Shannon shrugged. A name was a name.

He went on looking. He felt better and better about the face looking back at him. Whatever else it was, it was no way the distorted monster face he'd seen reflected in the TV. The beard made him look like kind of a wild man, but he could shave that off soon enough. Underneath, it was all right.

"You do good work," he said.

The foreigner straightened from the briefcase he had opened on the bedroom chair. He handed Shannon a couple of manila folders. "Here are papers. License, passport, Social Security. Also tax returns for five years. Work history, references boss can call so he knows you are good worker." He handed him the folders.

"Nice. This is a whole big operation."

"You will have tools to work with and number to call where you can get job."

Shannon opened a folder. Saw the driver's license in there. Saw the address under the photograph.

"That's a long way away."

"This is good, yes? Far from where you were."

"Yeah, I guess that is good. I never been out there. Where'd you get the picture of me?"

"Computer morph. It's what I work from when I do face. You will shave to look like picture."

"Right. I'll look good without the beard. Should be able to get laid now and then anyway."

"That's why I leave same testicles," the foreigner said.

Shannon tossed the folders aside onto the bed. He searched the foreigner's droll and disdainful expression. "So all this is 'cause I saved that girl? I mean, this whole setup-this is all Whittaker paying me back for my good deed?"

The foreigner didn't answer. He just stood looking at him-looking at him, Shannon thought, as if he were a monkey in a cage or a child being observed on one of those hidden nursery cameras, a child playing dress-up alone in his room who didn't know the camera was there. The foreigner stood and watched him, in other words, as if he were some kind of lesser creature who didn't know he was being watched and whose antics amused him.

"What?" Shannon said. "What're you looking at?"

The foreigner merely went on watching him in that way another few seconds. Then finally he said, "Shave face. Get ready."

Shannon got ready. He shaved. He studied his new look in the mirror until it grew familiar. Then the foreigner came back for the last time.

"Here," he said. He put out one of his knobbly hands. He was holding a couple of capsules.

"No, I'm good," Shannon said. "I don't need them anymore."

"Take. Or I put needle in neck again." Shannon scraped the pills up off the foreigner's palm. "They will make you sleep. When you wake up, you have new life, like princess in fairy tale." He handed Shannon the juice bottle with the straw.

Shannon swallowed the pills, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Where'll you be?" he asked. It wasn't that he'd miss the foreigner exactly, but he was curious. He'd gotten used to the old guy, the only person he'd seen in… well, he didn't know how long.

"Lie down or you will fall on new face."

Shannon lay back on the bed, looking up at the foreigner, at his disreputable old-world countenance with the hair sprouting in all the wrong places.

"You just go off to another job or what?" he asked him.

"I disappear like smoke," the foreigner said. "Close eyes."

"Identity mang has no identity, huh," said Shannon sleepily. He was already going under, starting to blink heavily. He fought it for another second or two. Now that the time had finally come, he was nervous about all this, his new life and so on. It'd been boring in here, in the white room, but it had felt safe anyway. Without newspapers or the TV news, the cops and Benny Torrance and the Hernandez killings had all seemed very far away. He'd forgotten what it was like to be out there in the world, on the run with the law after you.

Anxious or not, he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. He let them fall shut slowly. He lay still, countering his nervousness with images of the house from that last movie, the house in the small town with the lights on in the windows and Mom and Dad inside…

He gave a long nostalgic sigh. He missed those old days.

RAMSEY DREAMED he was standing on the flooded street again with the city burning all around him. The water had risen to his thighs and Peter Patterson's body was sunk in it, staring up at him through the rain-rattled surface. Then the water began to thicken and grow opaque. The bookkeeper's corpse grew dimmer. Only his stare remained bright. Ramsey heard a voice. He turned and saw his mother, long dead, walking toward him from a block or two away. She was dressed in her print dress for Sunday meeting, holding a black umbrella over her head. She was pushing steadily between the flaming buildings, through the driving rain.

"A man who is full of sin is full of shame!" she cried out, shaking her Bible at him.

He looked down again and Peter Patterson's corpse was no longer visible because, Ramsey suddenly realized, the water had turned to blood.

The dream haunted Ramsey as he tied his tie that morning standing before the bedroom mirror. He had woken from the nightmare with his heart racing and the image of his long-dead mother walking toward him through the storm made his heart race again as it came back to him.

A man who is full of sin is full of shame!

Where had he heard that phrase before? Somewhere. He tucked the tip of the port-red tie down into the Windsor. It looked good against the dark blue shirt. It would add to his air of authority and dignity. That would help at his meeting this morning with Augie Lancaster. He had always suspected that Augie was a little intimidated by him, overawed by his aura of street wisdom and self-control.

As he pulled the knot tight, he remembered: Skyles. That's where the phrase in his dream had come from. The Reverend Jesse Skyles. What brought him to mind? he wondered.

The Reverend Jesse Skyles was the most dangerous man in the city. That's what Augie Lancaster had called him anyway, though in Ramsey's opinion, Augie's hatred for the reverend had sometimes shaded over into personal obsession. Every time word got out that Skyles was setting up another of his makeshift churches, Augie would have Ramsey assign precious police resources to find it. He would send building inspectors and fire inspectors to shut it down, or bangers-and off-duty cops pretending to be bangers-to bust it up. At one point, he was threatening to raid the next place right during the service. He had some fantasy about SWAT storming in, rousting suspicious characters, dragging the minister himself away in handcuffs on some trumped-up charge. Ramsey had had a job of it making him see reason. These are good folks gathering, Ramsey said, your folks, home folks who love them some God. You couldn't go in there like it was Baghdad. It would only turn people against you, and give Skyles credibility, too. It might even alert some news media-the national news media, who weren't in Augie's pocket back then. Let me go over there, Ramsey said. Let me go over and have a look. Augie liked that idea. He got the picture of it. Ramsey's very presence during the service-the presence of a respected lawman who had risen up from these very streets-would send a chill of suspicion and danger through the congregation. They would ask themselves: What's the lieutenant doing here? Is the reverend up to something wrong? What's the lieutenant going to think if he sees me here? Maybe I should stay home next time, stay away from this, I don't need the trouble. It might even intimidate Skyles himself.