Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

He found Joe Whaley in his trailer. He stood around and waited for Joe to get off the phone. Joe hung up and tilted back in his swivel chair behind the mess of papers on his gray metal desk. He put his hands behind his head and lifted his chin as if to ask what was up.

"Listen," said Shannon. "That thing Saturday."

Whaley looked around as if he thought someone might overhear them, even though there was no one else in the trailer.

"Listen, thanks a lot, Joe, but I don't think I want to do that," Shannon told him.

"What do you mean?" said Joe Whaley.

"I mean… I don't want to do that. I don't think I'll do that."

"We talked about it," said Joe Whaley. "You said you were interested."

"Well, I thought about it. I don't want to do it."

"Man, that's not right. I was counting on you. You said you were interested."

"I didn't say I'd do it," said Shannon, though he knew he'd said as much.

"Well, man, that's not right. That's not the way it works. I mean, when you say something, you gotta walk the talk."

Shannon didn't answer. He felt a powerful impulse to just give in, just go along. It would be so much easier than starting trouble. But he didn't want to.

After the silence went on a few seconds, Joe Whaley said, "You know, this is a big development here. There's a lot of work around and for a long time. Handsome Harry listens to me about who to hire."

So that was the way it was. If he didn't do the job for Whaley, Whaley would screw up his work life. It was always something like this, Shannon thought, pissed off. People were always tangling you up in things. He didn't have enough money to leave town and he knew he could get blackballed pretty easily in a city like this. He hesitated. But still, something inside was telling him, Don't do this job. Once you do this job you'll be tangled up forever. Identity like stain.

"You gonna get me fired, Joe?" he said. He gave Joe Whaley a hard look. If Joe was going to do this to him, let him say it to his face. "I don't do this job, you gonna blackball me?"

Joe looked back. Then, after a moment, he backed down. He averted his eyes. "Ah. You're a good carpenter," he muttered. Then, more forcefully, he said, "But don't come crawling back to me when you need extra money. Know what I'm saying? I gotta be able to count on people. You're out now, you're out for good."

"I got you. I won't come back. Sorry, Joe." He felt the need to make an excuse. "It's a personal thing," he said. "I got-personal things going on."

Joe Whaley waved him off, disgusted. Shannon left the trailer sheepishly. Part of him was sorry to let Joe down, but was he ever relieved to be out of that situation! He hadn't realized how tied up in knots he was about it until now.

On Saturday, he drove to the address Frederick Applebee had given him and he couldn't believe what he saw. Amazed, he sat in his car, parked at the curb, looking out at the place through the window. He thought: What are the chances of that?

It was the white house-the white clapboard house with black shutters on H Street-the same house where he'd seen the woman crying in the window. FREDERICK APPLEBEE MET HIM at the door, holding the barred door of the security cage open. As Shannon stepped inside and followed the old man through the house, he looked around him. Since he knew this was where the crying woman lived, he was looking for signs of her and for clues about what she was like.

The house, he found, was kind of old-fashioned. Shabby and musty but very… respectable was the word that came to his mind. Respectable and homey. It made him think back to the hero's house in the black-and-white movie about the angel. The furniture was worn, but very proper-looking: straight-backed chairs and a tidy little sofa-and one big old armchair next to a table stacked with books. There were white napkins on the lamp stands in the living room, and a fireplace with framed snapshots on the mantel. As he tromped behind Applebee in his jeans and sweatshirt, the whole place seemed to watch him with disapproval like some old gray-haired lady looking over the tops of her spectacles.

It was the old man's house, Shannon concluded, not the young woman's. It had been decorated by the old man's wife a long time ago. For some reason, he got the feeling the wife was dead now. He found she had no presence in the place except for lingering traces from the past. At one point, he spotted some ladies' magazines in a basket in the corner, but they were the sort of magazines a younger woman would read-the crying woman maybe, not the old man's wife.

"We were lucky in the flood," Applebee told him as they walked through. "This area was hit hard, but we're on slightly higher ground."

"How come your angels got broken then?"

"The reredos? It was in the cellar. When my wife was alive, she always said it made the house look too much like a church, so she put it down there. I'd completely forgotten about it until I came back after the evacuation and went downstairs to check the damage."

Applebee led him to the broken altarpiece. It was on a mantel in the dining room now. Shannon ran his tape measure over it so he could get the wood he needed. Applebee watched him, standing nearby with his hands in his pockets. After a while, a little boy wandered in and stood next to him. Applebee put his hand on the boy's shoulder.

"Mr. Conor, this is my grandson, Michael."

"Hey, how you doing, little man?" Shannon said over his shoulder. The kid was a solemn little fellow for-what?-a six- or seven-year-old. He was skinny and small with short hair and big sad eyes. Shannon worked it out in his mind: if this was Applebee's grandson, then that meant the woman crying in the window was probably his daughter, not his chippy girlfriend or second wife or whatever. What about the boy's father then? That was the question that came into Shannon's mind. Was the boy's father still around?

Shannon went on measuring the broken places on the altarpiece, but he asked the boy over his shoulder, "You live here?" Trying to find out what was what.

The boy was too shy to answer, but Applebee said, "Michael and his mom are staying with me for a while."

Michael and his mom-so the father was out of the picture for now anyway.

Then the boy suddenly spoke up. "My daddy died in the war."

Well, that answered that. "Oh, hey, that's sad," Shannon said. "I'm sorry, little man."

"In Iraq. He was a very brave soldier," said Frederick Applebee-speaking for the boy's sake, Shannon guessed. "He died saving the lives of two other people. Didn't he, son?"

The boy nodded solemnly. Shannon felt a pang of jealousy. He didn't know why. What was it to him if the woman in the window had a hero husband? The guy was dead for one thing, so he was no competition. And what difference did it make if he was competition? Shannon didn't even know this woman.

He thought about it later after he left the house. He thought about her, about the woman he'd seen crying in the window. It wasn't that he'd fallen in love with her at first sight or anything. She'd just made an impression on him, that's all. He didn't know what it was about her exactly. The image of her standing there crying just stuck in his mind.

He had to drive a long way to find a specialty wood store. The nearest one was set up in an old barn about fifty miles outside of town. After a couple of minutes looking around the place, he picked out a piece for the angel's wing, but the match for the head was much harder to find. He wasn't expecting to get anything perfect, just a good match for color and grain. But then he stumbled on a real piece of luck. In a dusty corner behind a repro pine table that was on display, he found a beautiful block of red oak that seemed tailor-made for the job. When he picked it up and turned it over in his hands, he got a real rush of pleasure. He could practically see the angel's face hidden inside it, waiting to be brought out.