Robert Silverberg: The Dead Man's Eyes

“And they grab me the moment I collect the letter,” Frazier said. “How stupid do you think I am? You could set up forty intermediaries and I’d still have to create a trail leading to myself if I want to get the letter. Besides, I’m not in South America any more. That was months ago.”

“It was only for the sake of the dis—” the lawyer said, but Frazier was gone already.

He decided to change his face and settle down somewhere. The lawyer was right: all this compulsive traveling was wearing him down. But by staying in one place longer than a week or two he was multiplying the chances of being detected, so long as he went on looking like himself. He had always wanted a longer nose anyway, and not quite so obtrusive a chin, and thicker eyebrows. He fancied that he looked too Slavic, though he had no Eastern European ancestry at all. All one long rainy evening at the mellow old Addis Ababa Hilton he sketched a face for himself that he thought looked properly Swiss: rugged, passionate, with the right mix of French elegance, German stolidity, Italian passion. Then he went downstairs and showed the printout to the bartender, a supple little Portuguese.

“Where would you say this man comes from?” Frazier asked.

“Lisbon,” the bartender replied at once. “That long jaw, those lips—unmistakably Lisbon, though perhaps his grandmother on his mother’s side is of the Algarve. A man of considerable distinction, I would say. But I do not know him, Senhor Schmidt. He is no one I know. You would like your dry martini, as usual?”

“Make it a double,” Frazier said.

He had the work done in Vienna. Everyone agreed that the best people for that sort of surgery were in Geneva, but Switzerland was the one country in the world he dared not enter, so he used his Zurich banking connections to get him the name of the second-best people, who were said to be almost as good, remarkably good, he was told. That seemed high praise indeed, Frazier thought, considering it was a Swiss talking about Austrians. The head surgeon at the Vienna clinic, though, turned out to be Swiss himself, which provided Frazier with a moment of complete terror, pretending as he was to be a native of Zurich. But the surgeon had been at his trade long enough to know that a man who wants his perfectly good face transformed into something entirely different does not wish to talk about his personal affairs. He was a big, cheerful extravert named Randegger with a distinct limp. Skiing accident, the surgeon explained. Surely getting your leg fixed must be easier than getting your face changed, Frazier thought, but he decided that Randegger was simply waiting for the off season to undergo repair. “This will be no problem at all,” Randegger told him, studying Frazier’s printout. “I have just a few small suggestions.” He went deftly to work with a light-pen, broadening the cheekbones, moving the ears downward and forward. Frazier shrugged. Whatever you want, Dr. Randegger, he thought. Whatever you want. I’m putty in your hands.

It took six weeks from first cut to final healing. The results seemed fine to him—suave, convincing, an authoritative face—though at the beginning he was afraid it would all come apart if he smiled, and it was hard to get used to looking in a mirror and seeing someone else. He stayed at the clinic the whole six weeks. One of the nurses wore the Marianne face, but the body was all wrong, wide hips, startling steatopygous rump, short muscular legs. Near the end of his stay she lured him into bed. He was sure he’d be impotent with her, but he was wrong. There was only one really bad moment, when she reared above him and he couldn’t see her body at all, only her beautiful, passionate, familiar face.

Even now, he couldn’t stop running. Belgrade, Sydney, Rabat, Barcelona, Milan: they went by in a blur of identical airports, interchangeable hotels, baffling shifts of climate. Almost everywhere he went he saw Mariannes, and sometimes was puzzled that they never recognized him, until he remembered that he had altered his face: why should they know him now, even after the seven years of their marriage? As he traveled he began to see another ubiquitous face, dark and Latin and pixyish, and realized that Marianne’s vogue must be beginning to wane. He hoped that some of the Mariannes would soon be converting themselves to this newer look. He had never really felt at ease with all these simulacra of his wife, whom he still loved beyond all measure.

That love, though, had become inextricably mixed with anger. He could not even now stop thinking about her incomprehensible, infuriating violation of the sanctity of their covenant. It had been the best of marriages, amiable, passionate, close, a true union on every level. He had never even thought of wanting another woman. She was everything he wanted; and he had every reason to think that his feelings were reciprocated. That was the worst of it, not the furtive little couplings she and Hurwitt must have enjoyed, but the deeper treason, the betrayal of their seeming harmony, her seemingly whimsical destruction of the hermetic seal that enclosed their perfect world.

He had overreacted, he knew. He wished he could call back the one absurd impulsive act that had thrust him from his smooth and agreeable existence into this frantic wearisome fugitive life. And he felt sorry for Hurwitt, who probably had been caught up in emotions beyond his depth, swept away by the astonishment of finding himself in Marianne’s arms. How could he have stopped to worry, at such a time, about what he might be doing to someone else’s marriage? How ridiculous it had been to kill him! And to stare right into Hurwitt’s eyes, incontrovertibly incriminating himself, while he did! If he needed any proof of his temporary insanity, the utter foolishness of the murder would supply it.

But there was no calling any of it back. Hurwitt was dead; he had lived on the run for—what, two years, three?—and Marianne was altogether lost to him. So much destruction achieved in a single crazy moment. He wondered what he would do if he ever saw Marianne again. Nothing violent, no, certainly not. He had a sudden image of himself in tears, hugging her knees, begging her forgiveness. For what? For killing her lover? For bringing all sorts of nasty mess and the wrong kind of publicity into her life? For disrupting the easy rhythms of their happy marriage? No, he thought, astonished, aghast. What do I have to be forgiven for? From her, nothing. She’s the one who should go down on her knees before me. I wasn’t the one who was fooling around. And then he thought, No, no, we must forgive each other. And after that he thought, Best of all, I must take care never to have anything to do with her for the rest of my life. And that thought cut through him like a blade, like Dr. Randegger’s fiery scalpel.

Six months later he was walking through the cavernous, ornate lobby of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo when he saw a Marianne standing in front of a huge stack of suitcases against a marble pillar no more than twenty feet from him. He was inured to Mariannes by this time and at first the sight of her had no impact; but then he noticed the familiar monogram on the luggage, and recognized the intricate little bows of red plush cord with which the baggage tags were tied on, and he realized that this was the true Marianne at last. Nor was this any hallucination like the Connaught one. She was visibly older, with a vertical line in her left cheek that he had never seen before. Her hair was a darker shade and somehow more ordinary in its cut, and she was dressed simply, no radiance at all. Even so, people were staring at her and whispering. Frazier swayed, gripped a nearby pillar with his suddenly clammy hand, fought back the impulse to run. He took a deep breath and went toward her, walking slowly, impressively, his carefully cultivated distinguished-looking-Swiss-businessman walk.