Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

"I love this!" Sharpstein said once to a crow-faced woman in a tan pants suit. "My client is telling the truth and you're trying to plea bargain him into lying. It's beautiful!"

"No one wants anyone to lie," said the crow-faced woman grimly. But she had that is-my-fly-unzipped look in her eyes. It was very entertaining.

Then there was a startling moment.

Shannon was alone, except for the lawman who, he knew, was sitting in a chair outside the door of the white room. Shannon was watching an old black-and-white movie on the TV Sharpstein had gotten him. The movie was about a British pilot during World War II. The pilot was shot down by the Nazis, and he went diving down to earth in his plane to crash and die. But his plane went into the fog and in the fog Death couldn't find him, so even though the plane crashed, the pilot didn't die. It was a fantasy movie.

So, anyway, the pilot went off to a hospital and he met this girl and he fell in love with her. But then, Death finally caught up with him and wanted to take him away. But the pilot said, well, hold on a second, that's not right, you made a mistake and now I'm in love and it's not fair to kill me because it's all your fault I'm in this situation to begin with.

Shannon was doing sit-ups during the movie, but when it got to this part, he stopped and just sat up and watched. Because wasn't this exactly what had happened to him? Through no fault of his own, he had been given a life he wasn't supposed to have and he had fallen in love, and then they had come to take him away and it wasn't fair.

In the movie then, the pilot had to go up to heaven for a big trial that was judged by all the good people who had died, like Abraham Lincoln and so on. They argued back and forth over whether the pilot should die or be allowed to live and have his love. Shannon thought this was like what was happening now, outside in the world, between the TV people and the radio people. They were arguing back and forth and in the end they would decide what happened to him.

In the end of the movie, the judges decided that if the pilot could prove the girl really loved him, he could live again. So the pilot went back to earth and he collected a tear the girl had cried because she thought he was going to die, and he brought the tear back to heaven as proof of her love. Shannon gaped at the TV screen, because he saw it was just like the face of the angel, wasn't it? The girl's tear in the movie was just like the face he had carved when he had fallen in love with Teresa. He couldn't put it into words exactly why it was the same, but he knew it was the same. And suddenly he understood why he wasn't afraid of prison anymore or even of death row. He understood why his skin didn't crawl when he was just sitting around like this. He couldn't put any of it into words, but he understood that somehow he had won some kind of big victory, that even though good things had never happened to him and he had never had a chance in life and even though they were going to put him in prison or even send him to death row, he had somehow won anyway, like some kind of sports hero in the impossible last minutes of a game, and now his skin did not crawl and he was not afraid and whatever happened, he would be all right and his life was good. His life was good.

The final credits of the movie rolled and Shannon put his face in his hands. He was fi lled with a gigantic feeling of sweetness that he couldn't describe even to himself. He had no words for any of it, and he just sat there with his face in his hands.

It ended suddenly. Things were just going along, and then it was over.

Sharpstein came. He said, "We're done." Then two large men came into the white room. They pulled Shannon's arms behind his back and put handcuffs on him.

"What's happening?" Shannon said to Sharpstein.

"Augie Lancaster's been indicted. Foster's guys on the inside worked the pyramid. They've got testimony all the way up. Lancaster's done. Foster's been reinstated. It's over. The good guys won."

The two big men were pulling Shannon roughly toward the door. Sharpstein followed him to the threshold.

"Where are they taking me?" Shannon said.

"They don't need you anymore," Sharpstein told him. But that was all he could get out before the door shut in his face, and the two men hustled the handcuffed Shannon down the hall.

It was a blazingly bright morning. The air was warm and lazy, but there was a bracing hint of autumn, too, and Shannon smelled grass. The two large men hurried him over a scraggly field to a dark limousine parked on a dirt road. Shannon lifted his eyes, yearning to see the world. He had a glimpse of a vast plain running to a broad open sky. Then one of the large men opened the back door of the limousine and the other lowered Shannon inside.

It all happened very fast. Before Shannon fully understood what was going on, one of the large men reached behind him and unlocked the handcuffs. Then the man pulled out of the limousine and shut the door.

The limousine seemed very dark after the bright day. Dazed, Shannon tried to see the driver, but he was an obscure figure behind a divider of tinted glass. The car started moving.

"We meet again, eh?" said a voice from beside him.

Shannon turned and, son of a bitch, there was the identity man, the foreign guy who had given him his new face. Shannon gave a startled laugh. The disreputable old buzzard cut an elfin figure sitting there in his tweed jacket with his spotty hands and his slicked-back red-silver hair and his unkempt eyebrows. And that gleam of disdainful foreign humor in his eyes.

"Hey!" Shannon said. "What are you doing here?"

"You are not happy to see me?" said the foreigner. Cheppy, he said. You are not cheppy to see me, with the ch being the sound you make when you're about to spit.

"That depends," said Shannon. He didn't know what to think about any of this. "Last time I saw you, you stuck a needle in my neck and cut my face up."

That made the foreigner chuckle. "I remember. Good times, yes?"

"You gonna do that again?"

"Only if it amuses you. For my part, it is not necessary."

"Yeah, then I'll pass, thanks."

Shannon felt the car begin to speed up. He turned to look out the window. They were on a freeway now, racing past long fields of sparse grass. It was the first moment since Sharpstein had barged in on him that he had had a chance to think. Now, he began to put things together. What Sharpstein had said: "They don't need you anymore." The fact they had taken the cuffs off him. The identity man. There was a slow dawn of hope and amazement inside him.

He turned back to the foreigner quickly.

"We're not going to prison? No prison?"

The foreigner had turned to look out his window, too. He answered without turning back, casually, as if the whole business meant nothing to him. "No prison, Shannon. You are to go free."

Shannon was surprised at how powerfully this hit him. He had not been afraid of going to prison. He was resigned to it. He had not even been afraid to die, if it came to that. But when he heard it would be this way instead… When he heard: You are to go free… Well, there was a great surge of pleasure and celebration inside him, champagne corks and fireworks all around.

"No kidding," he said. Then the interior party sort of rose up and overwhelmed him. He put his hand over his eyes. "No kidding. Free."

The foreigner glanced at him and shrugged. "Look at you. Great powers are going back and forth in world, winning and losing. You are nothing in it. Just cork on sea."

Shannon took a breath to settle himself. "I don't care about them. The great powers. I just want my life, that's all."

"So. You have life. Lots of life, all the life you want. No one cares damn about you. They are just as happy for you to go away."