Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

The thought brought Ramsey back to himself, back to his own predicament-left behind here as he was on the history-flooded earth as Augie levitated into the television ether where the young folks danced and sang his praises and the reporters-who-were-not-reporters-anymore appended choral hallelujahs to his name. The thought brought Ramsey back to the blue folder. It was all about the blue folder now.

To anyone with eyes to see with, to anyone with a mind accustomed to the way things worked in this good old city, in this good old world, the blue folder was nothing less than an order to kill a man. It had come to Ramsey through Charlotte Mortimer-Rimsky, but it was really an expression of Augie Lancaster's will. And now Ramsey had given the blue folder to Gutterson and the folder had become an expression of Ramsey's will. And if ever the deed itself should come back to haunt him, Ramsey would say, "No, no, that wasn't what I meant. It was just a blue folder. I don't know what he was thinking."

Because Ramsey had watched Augie Lancaster on TV. He had seen him floating free of the city and he had learned his lesson. He had learned how to give an order to do murder without uttering an incriminating word. He had learned how to turn the current of his conscience against the directions of his upbringing, against the fact of his own actions and the tug of responsibility. He, too, had learned how to float free.

He sat stirring an extra half spoon of sugar into his coffee cup and gazed mildly out the window at the passing scene. ON SATURDAY, after all those days of spring sunshine, it finally rained. That was the day Shannon finished the angel.

He went to the Applebees' house and carried the sculpture into the house's small garage. He worked on it in there, putting on the finishing touches. When he was done, he and old man Applebee set the altarpiece back on the mantel in the dining room. Teresa and the boy came home from the grocery store and they all four admired it.

Teresa made pork chops and mashed potatoes, and they all had dinner together in the dining room by candlelight. There was an atmosphere of celebration in the house as Applebee and Teresa took turns admiring different aspects of the wooden angel Shannon had made, the angel of Joy and Sorrow. Applebee even raised a glass of wine and toasted it. When dinner was over, he went to it and studied it up close.

"You're an artist, Henry," he said to Shannon.

Shannon laughed that off. He was no artist.

"No, I'm serious. You could make a living at it. I mean, this…" He shook his head. "It really is remarkable."

Shannon felt good. He was aware of how good he felt. He didn't have that feeling he sometimes got as if his skin were crawling. He just felt good. This was the life, he thought: sitting here with these people as if he were part of the family and holding his love for Teresa half-secret in his heart and having the angel he'd made sitting on the mantel there. Somewhere inside, he knew it all had to come apart at some point, because he knew he was a fraud. The angel looked at him from its perch as if it knew he was a fraud, too, a crappy little thief with a face job and false papers. But he, Shannon, put that out of his mind for now, because this was what he'd always wanted, wanted without knowing it, this was the life, the new life the identity man had promised him: here it finally was.

"Well, we ought to do something," he said. "Go out and celebrate sometime or something." He spoke out of his general pleasure with things, but the idea in his mind was that he would take Teresa out somewhere sometime and they would be alone together.

But the kid, Michael, piped up, "We could go to the fair. There's a fair. Junie went to it, Junie at school. We could go."

And Teresa looked at Shannon expectantly.

So what the hell, the next day, Sunday, when Teresa and the boy came home from church, Shannon took them to the fair.

It was really just a carny on the edge of the city. The usual rides and booth games trucked over from the last town before being trucked over to the next. The kid thought it was magical, though, and that was fun even for Shannon. Michael's usual solemn demeanor fell away. He kept running off to one thing and then another, shouting, "Can we go on this? Can we do this?" The Ferris wheel, the bouncy castle, the whirligig. "Can we do this? Can we do this?" Shannon bought him cotton candy and taught him how to throw one of the lightweight baseballs at the booths. After spending about a million dollars on balls, the kid actually knocked over one of the targets and won a stuffed frog worth maybe a buck-fifty. That practically rocketed him into the stratosphere: "Look, Mama, I won, I won!" He held the frog in a death grip the rest of the day.

Shannon could tell it made Teresa happy to see the boy so excited. Whenever Shannon turned to her, she lit up and gave him a big smile. It really got to him. The smile was about the kid, sure, and he was glad to see that, but it got to him and it made him wonder if they could send the kid off somewhere for a while so he could kiss her. After the way she'd looked at him in the backyard, he was pretty sure she wanted him to.

It was a bright, warm afternoon. Saturday's rainstorm had left the air feeling fresh and clean. The weather brought the people out and as the day wore into blue evening, the fair grew crowded. Shannon and Teresa and the kid had to push their way through the mob and wait on line for the rides, but the kid didn't seem to mind.

He went on the carousel. He wanted Shannon to come along, but Shannon wanted a chance to be alone with Teresa. Maybe the kid understood that, because he tugged at Shannon for only a few seconds, then went off on the ride by himself.

The carousel was small, with colored light bulbs flashing and a calliope playing fairy-tale music. The kid went around on his painted horse every few seconds, waving to them so that they had to wave back. There was no time to go after the kiss. But Shannon and Teresa were standing next to each other behind a low metal barrier and she had one hand on the top of the barrier, leaving the other free for waving at the kid. After about the fifty-seventh time the kid went by, Shannon figured why not and reached out and put his hand over Teresa's hand where it sat on the barrier. He heard Teresa take a deep breath, and then she wrapped her hand around his. Shannon remembered the first time a girl had let him slide his fingers down her pants, when he was thirteen, the first time he had actually felt the magical damp portal into her flesh. It had set off a pretty substantial explosion in him, an expanding fireball filling him with flame. But this was on another order of magnitude, this was nuclear, and it was just her hand in his. Her hand in his and the carousel bringing the kid around and the cheap carny colored lights and the calliope music, that's all. But he really was crazy about her, he really was. He'd never felt anything like it. He turned to look at her, and she looked at him and smiled again, and that was pretty nuclear, too.

Then a movement caught his eye and his glance shifted, and he saw the man who had been following him all this time.

It was that same guy, the same damned guy with the shaved head and the watchful eyes and the cheap suit. It was a different cheap suit this time, but the exact same motherfucker otherwise, large as life, Shannon was sure of it. In that first moment, when Shannon first shifted his gaze from Teresa's smile and saw the bastard through the crowd, the guy was just standing there, just staring his way.

There could be no doubt about it anymore: the guy was watching him.

He was over by the wheel-of-fortune booth. The big wheel was turning and its colored lights blinking behind him. The flashing colors played on him and the fair lights washed over him so Shannon could see him clearly even in the twilight. The bald-headed goon saw Shannon look at him. Caught off-guard, he started. The next moment, he hurried away, losing himself in the crowd.