Robert Silverberg: The Dead Man's Eyes

“Marianne?” he said.

She turned her head slightly and stared at him without any show of recognition.

“I do look different, yes,” he said, smiling.“I’m sorry, but I don’t—”

A slender, agile-looking man five or six years younger than she, wearing sunglasses, appeared from somewhere as though conjured out of the floor. Smoothly he interpolated himself between Frazier and Marianne. A lover? A bodyguard? Simply part of her entourage? Pleasantly but forcefully he presented himself to Frazier as though saying, Let’s not have any trouble now, shall we?

“Listen to my voice,” Frazier said. “You haven’t forgotten my voice. Only the face is different.”

Sunglasses came a little closer. Looked a little less pleasant.

Marianne stared.

“You haven’t forgotten, have you, Marianne?” Frazier said.

Sunglasses began to look definitely menacing.

“Wait a minute,” Marianne said, as he glided into a nose-to-nose with Frazier. “Step back, Aurelio.” She peered through the shadows. “Loren?” she said.

Frazier nodded. He went toward her. At a gesture from Marianne, Sunglasses faded away like a genie going back into the bottle. Frazier felt strangely calm now. He could see Marianne’s upper lip trembling, her nostrils flickering a little. “I thought I never wanted to see you again,” he said. “But I was wrong about that. The moment I saw you and knew it was really you, I realized that I had never stopped thinking about you, never stopped wanting you. Wanting to put it all back together.”

Her eyes widened. “And you think you can?”

“Maybe.”

“What a damned fool you are,” she said, gently, almost lovingly, after a long moment.

“I know. I really messed myself up, doing what I did.”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “You messed us both up with that. Not to mention him, the poor bastard. But that can’t be undone, can it? If you only knew how often I prayed to have it not have happened.” She shook her head. “It was nothing, what he and I were doing. Nothing. Just a silly fling, for Christ’s sake. How could you possibly have cared so much?”

“What?”

“To kill a man, for something like that? To wreck three lives in half a second? For that ?”

“What?” he said again. “What are you telling me?”

Sunglasses suddenly was in the picture again. “We’re going to miss the car to the airport, Marianne.”

“Yes. Yes. All right, let’s go.”

Frazier watched, numb, immobile. Sunglasses beckoned and a swarm of porters materialized to carry the luggage outside. As she reached the vast doorway Marianne turned abruptly and looked back, and in the dimness of the great lobby her eyes suddenly seemed to shift in color, to take on the same strange topaz glint that he had imagined he had seen in Hurwitt’s. Then she swung around and was gone.

An hour later he went down to the Consulate to turn himself in. They had a little trouble locating him in the list of wanted fugitives, but he told them to keep looking, going back a few years, and finally they came upon his entry. He was allowed half a day to clear up his business affairs, but he said he had none to clear up, so they set about the procedure of arranging his passage to the States, while he watched like a tourist who is trying to replace a lost passport.

Coming home was like returning to a foreign country that he had visited a long time before. Everything was familiar, but in an unfamiliar way. There were endless hearings, conferences, psychological examinations. His lawyers were excessively polite, as if they feared that one wrong word would cause him to detonate, but behind their silkiness he saw the contempt that the orderly have for the self-destructive. Still, they did their job well. Eventually he drew a suspended sentence and two years of rehabilitation, after which, they told him, he’d need to move to some other city, find some appropriate line of work, and establish a stable new existence for himself. The rehabilitation people would help him. There would be a probation period of five years when he’d have to report for progress conferences every week.

At the very end one of the rehab officers came to him and told him that his lawyers had filed a petition asking the court to let him have his original face back. That startled him. For a moment Frazier felt like a fugitive again, wearily stumbling from airport to airport, from hotel to hotel.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all. The man who had that face, he’s somebody else. I think I’m better off keeping this one. What do you say?”

“I think so too,” said the rehab man.