Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

One day, he parked across the street from a hobbled brownstone. He watched from his car as three ambulance guys rolled a body out of the ground floor on a stretcher. The corpse was enormous, impossibly bloated. It must've been lost in the flooded basement all this time.

A clutch of onlookers shook their heads and covered their noses. A bunch of homeless guys laughed about it, drunk on their bagged bottles. Even where he was sitting, Shannon caught the stench of the waterlogged dead.

Man, what a town. What a town this was.

Patrolmen were standing guard over the scene, their eyes shifting and their hands on their holstered guns. They were the first cops Shannon had seen since he'd gotten here. Their nearness startled him.

One cop's roving gaze came toward him. Shannon seized up inside, afraid of being spotted and caught. He almost hit the gas and sped away. Then he realized: he didn't have to. He didn't have to worry anymore. He had his brand-new face on. He sat there boldly. The cop's gaze never hesitated. It just passed over him and moved on.

Shannon smiled to himself as he watched the bloated corpse shoved into the back of the ambulance. He felt again the power of his anonymity, the possibility of a fresh start.

As he drove away, he thought to himself: New mang. Don't blow it.

The next day, he was still thinking along the same lines. He was walking on a narrow street. Ruined brick apartment buildings slanted and loured on either side of him. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder. He saw this guy stepping out of a pale green Ford, a Crown Victoria with a white scrape on the side. He was a small guy, hungry-thin or maybe drug-thin. He was dressed in a cheap black suit, white shirt, narrow tie. He had a shaved head. He had smart, searching, dangerous eyes. They looked in Shannon's direction-then quickly looked away.

About half an hour later, Shannon caught a glimpse of him again, the same guy, on a corner several blocks to the north. It made him nervous. Was this fucktard following him?

He ducked into a restaurant to see what would happen. He watched through the front window as the guy wandered off.

Then, since he was here, he decided to get something to eat. It was a nice place, a family place with lopsided wooden floors and wooden plank walls painted cheerful red. It was called Betsy's. Betsy served the food. She was a warm, friendly lady in her sixties with a small face, sad-eyed but also cheerful. When she brought him his waffles and chicken, he realized how hungry he was and tore into them. Betsy stood over him, nodding with approval. "There's a man who can eat," she announced to the other people in the restaurant. The other people nodded, too. Some of the little children covered their mouths and giggled.

Betsy and her restaurant and the friendly people here made him feel better about things, less depressed. As he ate his waffles, he started to think that maybe this wasn't such a bad town to be in after all. He thought of the bag of tools in his closet and he remembered what the foreigner had said to him: We put you in place where there is many buildings, much work. There'd be many buildings and much work here, all right. He could make good money if he put his mind to it.

He started to see the logic of the thing. Maybe the old foreign buzzard wasn't such an idiot after all.

Later that afternoon, he sought out a neighborhood where there was some construction going on. Crews were clearing away the wreckage of several houses. Other crews nearby were laying fresh foundations. There was even a wooden frame or two beginning to rise against the sky. He began to imagine himself working here. He would be part of a big project: building the city back up again. He could go to Betsy's for lunch on Sundays and eat waffles and chicken and tell her about his week. Tomorrow, he decided, he'd start calling the numbers in the help-wanted ads on the computer.

Evening was coming as he made his way back to his brownstone. He didn't know the streets and got a little lost. Just as the sun was going down and the color draining out of the sky, he came upon a sight he would never forget.

There was a house on a street called H Street. A beautiful old clapboard house, all white, two stories plus an attic under a pitched roof. Behind its security bars, it had mullioned windows flanked by black shutters, white drapes visible on the inside. There was a white picket fence enclosing the front yard.

All around the house, there were empty lots, expanses of rubble and wreckage, overgrown with weeds. It was as if the flood and fire had destroyed everything near the white house, and yet passed over the house itself, leaving it unharmed.

It was a striking contrast: the house untouched in the midst of the ruins. Shannon stopped to look. That's when he noticed the woman in one of the upstairs windows. The light was on up there. The window was a rectangle of yellow glowing against the dusk. It was too high to reach from the ground so there were no security bars blocking the view. He could see the woman clearly. She was standing just by the drapes, gazing out through the glass into the distance. She was crying-crying terribly. He could see her whole body shaking with the force of her grief. Now and then, she pressed her hand to her mouth as if she didn't want anyone to hear her sobs.

The crying woman was in her twenties. She was pretty and slender. Shannon stood gazing at her, entranced by the depth of her suffering and by the secret intimacy of watching her unawares.

After a while, he realized he'd been staring at her for long seconds. He became afraid she would look down and see him spying on her sorrow. He forced himself to turn away.

As he did, he caught a glimpse of movement. He had a sense that something-someone-had just darted off into the shadows. He scanned the empty lots on every side of him. At first, he saw nothing, no one.

Then a flash of red caught his attention. He turned and saw the red brake lights of a car. The car was just turning the corner, heading off down a side street. It had its headlights off and its body was sunk in twilight. But as it drove away, it passed under a streetlamp. Shannon saw the car was green. Maybe a Ford. Maybe-he wasn't sure-a Crown Victoria…

He remembered the man he had seen earlier in the day: the small, drug-thin man with the shaved head and the cheap suit and the smart, searching, dangerous eyes. NOW IT WAS a few weeks later. Shannon was working as a carpenter. He'd been taken on by a contractor named Harry Hand. "Handsome Harry" everyone called him, which was a joke because he was a little fat guy with a puckered face. He looked like a munchkin gorilla.

Handsome Harry had some kind of city connections. That was probably how he landed his job, overseeing a rebuilding development in the northeastern section. He was always slipping envelopes to guys in suits. Cops and inspectors, Shannon figured. That was the way the city worked. Shannon himself had to pay a "threeper"-a 3 percent kickback to stay on the job. But he was pulling down thirty-three an hour and the good working weather was holding day after day, so he had no complaints on the money front.

In fact, for a while, he had no complaints at all. There he'd be of a fine spring morning, up astride the second-floor joists in the cool and faintly liquid breezes, lost in the rhythm of air-nailing fire blocks between the vertical studs, lost in a sweet dream. He'd look up, look around, and what would he see? The other frames of other houses nearby him, the fresh brown of new wood rising from the colorless rubble and mud. It was as if he was part of something big, a big project to rebuild the broken city. It gave him a good feeling. It was just as he'd imagined it would be.

Sometimes little boys liked to come and watch the construction. They probably should've been in school, but they hung around the site watching the work. There was this one cute little guy who would hang around Shannon in particular. When Shannon was perched on a cinderblock eating his lunch, the boy would stand over him, asking all kinds of questions about his tools and about how you build things. Some of the other boys would hang around behind this one boy too sometimes, listening in.