Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

"Law Enforcement Liaison." The words dripped like venom from Ramsey's lips. "Well, Miss…"

"Mortimer-Rimsky."

"Miss Mortimer-Rimsky…"

"Charlotte, please."

"I'd love to get to know you at some point, but I'm afraid this isn't the time. My business with Augie is urgent and requires his immediate personal attention." It was the best he could do. And what good was it really? Everyone involved in this transaction-he and this woman and Augie as well-they all knew that he was being stripped right here and now of every vestige of prestige and even masculinity. There was no pretending it was otherwise. And yet pretense was the only fig leaf he had to cover the place where his balls used to be.

The woman, for her part, did her best to look pained and sincere. Ramsey thought she must've taught herself that expression before breaking up with her high school boyfriend. A pretty little kiss-off.

"I don't know what to tell you. It's just not going to be possible today. I did manage to get you this, though."

She had a blue file folder in her left hand. She gave it to him and then stepped aside toward the windows. She gazed down discreetly at the park below, giving him a moment to open the blue folder.

There was a single photograph inside. Printed out from a computer onto ordinary paper. Dark, blurry. An enlargement of a picture taken with somebody's cell phone, Ramsey guessed. He recognized the house in the background. It was the house on the dead-end lane, the green shingled house where he and Gutterson had found the graffito.

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson!

"Where did you get this?" he said.

"Some of my city contacts. They're telling me this is the man who wrote that graffito. He's been spreading similar rumors on the street."

He looked at her, at her tailored back, as she faced the window. He let the silence of his doubt play over her, weigh on her. They both knew she didn't have any goddamned city contacts. Only Augie himself could've thrown his net wide enough to haul in something as random as this. She was protecting Augie. She'd been in town for ten minutes and she had the gall to stand between him-between him-and Augie Lancaster.

She kept her eyes on the window, on the scene outside, but he could see by her uncomfortable posture that she felt his accusation. She felt compelled to explain. "The thing is, Augie is at a transitional moment," she said finally, with a defensive glance back at him. "I don't have to tell you that. It's a key moment, maybe the key moment in his trajectory."

"His trajectory," Lieutenant Ramsey said with an aspect of stone.

She faced him. He wanted to rip that porcelain mask of earnestness right off her. "Yes. I mean… look… It's a transformational moment in the whole country. We all know that. It's a time of real hope and… and change."

So he had fucked her. Well, good for him. That was fast work. He must've explained all this to her in the afterglow. We can't have hope until we have dreams and we can't have dreams until you suck my black dick…

"Augie has a real chance to become one of the new transformational figures. Isn't that what we've all been working for? To get beyond race? To bring some of the same progressive policies to the federal level that Augie's implemented here at the municipal level?"

Even in his rage and shame, Ramsey nearly laughed out loud. Had Miss Dreams ever gone ten steps beyond this pristine government complex? Had she ever set her baby blues on exactly what Augie's progressive policies had accomplished at the municipal level? The city is in fucking ruins, you dumb bitch!

"Look, we all know," this girl-who was too young to know much of anything-went on desperately. "We all know that in the rough and tumble of city politics… associations are made… things get done by the people around you… Augie would never turn his back on his friends, believe me. It's just that… with this degree of scrutiny on the national level, he has to take appearances into account in a new way. For a period of time, I mean."

He stared at her. He couldn't help himself. For a moment, he was simply dazed, astonished at the wonderful perfection and complexity of Augie's treachery, as if it were some kind of magnificent crystal suddenly revealing its infinite network of facets to the light. Then, as his astonishment receded, anger rushed back into its place with a new force. Ramsey had seen this kind of fury in the faces of men twisted up like pretzels on cell floors, the froth of seizure on their lips, words of such filth and savage desire spewing from them it was enough to make you believe in hell and the devil. He had seen it, but he had never felt that sort of titanic rage himself until this minute. He wanted to shove this girl, this created suburban thing, against the wall, wanted to seize a handful of her throat and a fistful of her breast and ram himself up inside her like he was planting a flag on the moon. He wanted to cram his face a whisker's breadth from her terrified eyes and tell her everything, everything that was going to happen to her next. Come a day, he wanted to spit into her porcelain face through his gritted teeth, come a day, you will stand before judgment, so help me, before a judge, in fact, or a Senate committee or God his own fat, happy self, and Augie will do as much to you as he has done to me here now. "I never knew her," he'll say. "I never knew what she was up to. We had a fling. She took it too seriously. She was overzealous on my behalf. That wasn't what I meant at all." Then oh then, so help me, so help me, you will strip off that sexless suit of yours, you will ditch your degree in environmental horseshit and scurry to put on some tears and lace blouses and any other waif-like wile of femininity that might just charm your sweet white ass out of prison or your sorry soul out of the flames of hell. And even if you do escape, that's your life ever after, cooz. That's the definition of your future life: a bewildered slag announcing your redemption-through-rehab to some bored reporter from www.excelebrityfelons.com, a ragged exile from your daydreamed self, a half-damned half-spirit in a perdition of philosophical somersaults and rationalizations and glasses of wine-anything-any trick you know to stave off the hour when you make a priest of your mirror and confess to yourself what you did here today.

He wanted to tell her that, throttling her, clutching her, pumping into her until he finished to the pounding rhythm of the final syllables and ejaculated acid in her, burning right through her womb to poison her bleeding heart…

But instead, expressionless, he nodded once, the image of dignity, of authority and calm. He looked away from her studied earnestness, down again at the blue folder open in his hands, at the picture in the folder. His eyes went from the green-shingled house to the line of cars parked at the curb outside. His eyes went to the figure behind the wheel of one of those cars, a man in shadow with his features obscured by the glare of the streetlight on the windshield, the same streetlight that illuminated the right half of the car's license plate. Just enough of the license plate so that Ramsey would be able to track the man down.

This was all Augie would give him, the last thing he would give him-and he would never admit that he had given him even this. This picture. This figure. This man who had written the graffito in the green-shingled house-or who had made the remark to the gang-bangers there that caused the graffito to be written-who somehow-somehow-knew:

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson!

The image of dignity, of authority and calm, Ramsey lifted his eyes. He looked away from the doomed white girl, done with her. He gazed thoughtfully instead at the televisions on the wall. Augie on all three screens. Standing behind the lectern, before the new post-racial world. Gazing visionary into the TelePrompTer.