Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

That day at that makeshift church-that day marked the first inkling Ramsey had in his heart that the logic of his life had been skewed and twisted, even corrupted and spoiled by Augie-by Augie and his promises and his high rhetoric and his flash. It was the first time he was forced to brush away the suspicion that there was no excuse for this man, that his ends did not justify his means, that he was in fact empty and disreputable in every particular, and had led Ramsey astray step by self-justifying step. That's why Ramsey had come to feel that Augie was right about Skyles, that Skyles was dangerous. Because down deep he realized that Skyles could overturn everything, the whole city. Because down deep, he realized that Skyles was speaking the unholy truth of his own mistakes.

That's why he had agreed to help Augie destroy him.

He turned from the mirror and left the bedroom. He went into the living room and stood beside the small round dining table near the kitchenette. He lifted his coffee mug from the table and brought it to his lips for a last sip, even though he knew the coffee had grown cold and bitter. He looked over the mug's rim at the apartment. Hard to believe he'd been living here almost a year now. Hard to believe it was a year since his wife had asked him to go. The apartment was small and drab, furnished as impersonally as a hotel room. Even looking straight at it, he barely saw it anymore.

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

So it was, no question. His mama never lied.

He paused before he took another sip of the coffee. All his life, he reflected, he had kept control over his emotions. It was no different now. His shame was just one more emotion he had to control, bad dreams and all.

He set the mug down and left for his meeting with Augie.

He was asked to wait in the Media Room. The Media Room, they called it now. That was new. It was the Conference Room last time he was here. But today it was, "Of course, Lieutenant, go right in and have a seat in the Media Room," from the white boy at the front desk. The white boy was new also, one of the volunteers who'd come in from the coast after the flood.

The flood had changed a lot of things around here.

The Media Room was a long chamber paneled in dark wood with one wall of windows overlooking the city park. The glass table was still here from its more modest Conference Room days. And there were still those fancy overpriced chairs around it, the ones with the aerated backs: your tax dollars at work. Now, though, your tax dollars were working overtime, because there were also three, count them three, flat-screen TVs on the wall opposite the windows. TV on the left showed local channel eight; TV on the right showed local channel five; and TV in the middle showed CNN in a little square surrounded by a lot of other little squares showing other news channels. And what do you know? Right this minute, as if it were planned, as if it were timed for Ramsey's edification, all three stations, eight, five, and CNN, were featuring none other than the increasingly famous Augie Lancaster. Augie had made a speech last night before the Council on Justice. It had been touted in the media as his debut on the national political scene. So there he was at the lectern, gazing like a visionary into the distance or at least into the TelePrompTer. The audio on the TVs was off, thank God, but the TV on channel eight was running captions, the white words on the black background appearing under Augie's image, line by line: "We can't have faith until we have hope and we can't have hope until we learn to dream again as a nation…"

Nigger, what you on about? Ramsey thought, and the hint of a shadow of a whisper of a smile played at the corner of his lips.

Shaking his head, he turned his back on the TVs and faced the window. He gazed out at the park three stories below. From here, the city looked whole and brilliant. This little corner of the city anyway, the square of government buildings surrounding the sculpted lawn. Men and women walked busily to and fro on gracefully curving asphalt paths. They wore colorful spring shirts and blouses, solid reds and oranges and yellows. The tulips were red and orange and yellow in their beds. Above it all, the dome of city hall presided stately and golden against the blue sky. City of Hope. City of Justice. From here, the little square looked like Augie Lancaster's rhetoric made real.

Watching the people below, it occurred to Ramsey that it was a beautiful, warm spring day out there. It occurred to him that he had taken no joy in it, that he'd barely noticed it as he walked from his car to the building. It occurred to him that all his joy in life, in fact, was gone.

Just then, the door opened behind him.

Ramsey turned and saw a young woman come in. It was a terrible and wholly unexpected moment. As soon as he saw her, he felt a kind of spiritual vertigo, as if a trapdoor had opened inside him, the Inner Man falling through. Nothing in his expression changed, of course. His aura of authority and dignity glowed as brightly around him as ever-brighter because of the extra effort required to keep it there, a hollow persona willed into place around a now empty core. But just that one look at the woman and he understood everything that was about to happen.

He'd never seen her before, but he knew her all right. Graduate from some hall of intellectual mirrors. Bard, Sarah Lawrence, Earlham, one of those. Just out of grad school or law school or still in or about to go. Studying something about the environment probably. Advanced Self-Righteous Hysteria 101. With her porcelain skin and the golden blond hair and that body they seem to issue these women along with their degrees nowadays: the taut, slender body with just enough Girl in it to get them what they wanted but not enough so they could be blamed. She had been in her dorm room when she'd first seen Augie on TV. Or maybe in her bedroom at her parents' house or in the apartment they'd bought her. After hours of wallowing in teary-eyed indignation, staring at images of helpless brown victims, listening to grim-faced newscasters calling it "the worst flood since Noah," hearing wise men, movie stars, and pop singers tell her that the gibbering black punks who'd set their own city on fire were nothing but symptoms of the white man's uncaring: she was primed for Augie, and then along he came.

We can't have dreams until we have faith and we can't have faith until we learn to hope again as a nation.

Wasn't it just so true?

So here she was, wearing her white sin like a mink, proud of her shame and searching for her virtue, hoping to receive her virtue like the holy host from Augie's victim-colored hands. Ramsey wondered if Augie had fucked her yet. Maybe not. But he would, he assured himself angrily, and in every possible sense of the word.

"Lieutenant Ramsey?" she said-warm, respectful, solicitous, arrogant, superior, agonizingly self-aware, and wholly self-ignorant at the same time. "I'm Charlotte Mortimer-Rimsky." Of course she was. She extended her slender porcelain hand, a startling flash out of the take-me-seriously black sleeve of her sexless suit.

Ramsey stood dizzy with humiliation. This-this uncooked slice of poon, this blond creation of her own dreamy delusions- this was what Augie sent to him? To him? It took all his discipline not to leave her hand hanging there, not to cry out "Where's Augie? I had an appointment with Augie!" like a cheated child.

But he did it. He fought down every coarse insult that leapt into his head and shook her hand politely.

"Nice to meet you," he said, just as his mother had taught him.

"Augie sends his apologies. He's been called to a meeting with Senator Lundquist and he just couldn't get out of it. But I'm his new law enforcement liaison, so he thought this might be a good opportunity for us to get to know one another."