David Liss - A Spectacle Of Corruption

“You are too good.”

“But for now, sir, there is the matter of my own girl.”

We arrived in his shop, where Elias was seated at a table, drinking a glass of wine and chatting about the opera with Swan’s pretty fifteen-year-old daughter, a girl of dark hair and dark eyes and a face as round and red as an apple.

“Such a marvelous spectacle,” he was saying. “The Italian singers warbling, the momentous stage, the marvelous costumes. Oh, you must see it some day.”

“I’m sure she will,” I told him, “and I would hate for you to ruin the surprise of it, so you’ll tell her no more of operas, Elias.”

He flashed me a pout, but he took my meaning well enough and I knew he would not make himself difficult. “Good, then.” He rubbed his hands together. “We are all here, and we may begin.”

Swan sent away the daughter and closed the door. “You need only direct me, and I will do as you say.” He began picking with distaste at my footman’s livery with his long, unusually narrow fingers.

“Here is what we want,” Elias began. He rose to his feet and started to pace about the room. “Having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that Mr. Weaver must take on the persona of a man of means, one recently returned to this island from the West Indies, where he owns a plantation. His father, let us say, was always active in politics, and now that he is come to his homeland, of which he knows nearly nothing, he has decided he too would like to become a political creature.”

I nodded my approbation. “It seems a fair disguise,” I said, thinking that this persona’s newness to the isle would conceal my own awkwardness in society. “As to the clothes?”

Elias clapped his hands together. “That’s the thing, Weaver. Our worthy Mr. Swan must manage it very carefully. If you do this right, Swan, I can promise you my own business in future.”

“I can think of no greater incentive to give the man,” I observed, “than the business of a gentleman who never pays his bills.”

Elias pursed his lips but otherwise ignored me. “If Weaver is not to be recognized, there must be as little about him as we can manage that draws attention to his identity. His clothes, then, must be fashionable and bespeak his supposed station, but they must not make themselves conspicuous in any way. I want that when a man looks at Weaver, he merely thinks he has seen that kind a hundred times before and looks no further. Do you understand my meaning, Swan?”

“Perfectly, sir. I am your man.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” Elias exclaimed. “We can use the very principles of a performing trickster to hide Mr. Weaver in plain sight. Why, I believe anyone might look upon him who had seen him countless times before, and not know him for who he is. And as for the rest of the world, which seeks him out from a description of his general personage- why, these strangers will never look at him twice.”

Swan nodded. “You are right in that, sir. Very right, for in my trade I have long come to know that when we meet each other, we see the clothes and the wig and the grooming, and we form our opinions with only a glance or two at the face. But as to choosing the clothes to do what we wish, that shall not be easy. Or, rather, it shall not be easy to hit it just on target. We must be most cautious, I think.”

And here they entered into a conversation I could hardly even begin to understand. They spoke of fabrics and cuts and weaves and buttons. Swan pulled out samples of cloth, which Elias waved away with contempt until he found what he liked. He examined threads and lace and buckles; he dug through buckets of buttons. Elias proved himself as much an expert on these matters as Swan, and they spoke in their particular argot for near an hour before the course of my wardrobe was determined. Would a coat of silk or wool be more fitting? A dye of blue or black? Blue, of course, but how deep a shade? Velvet, but not this velvet! Of course, they could not use this velvet (which looked to me indistinguishable from the one they could use quite happily). And as for the embroidery- well, that would have to be just so. I believe Elias took as much pleasure from ordering my new clothes as he did his own.

“Now, regarding your wigs,” Elias announced, when he had ordered clothing to their mutual liking. “That is another matter requiring particular attention.”

“My wife’s brother is a peruke maker, sir,” Swan said. “He can do the business.”

“Can he be trusted?”

“Entire, sir. He can be trusted entire, but there is no need for him to be trusted at all. He need not know who Mr. Weaver is or that there is aught unusual about him.”

“I fear he must, for we need wigs with a singular design- that of concealing Mr. Weaver’s own hair.”

“Would it not be easier for me simply to shave my head?” I asked. Though no Samson, I admit to an attachment to my locks, which I thought rather manly. However, I was more attached to my life, and I saw no reason to burden myself with the hangman’s noose if I could squeak by with the barber’s shears.

“That cannot be,” Elias said, “for you are to make appearances still as Benjamin Weaver, and if you show yourself with a wig or a shaved head, the world will know that you are otherwise disguising yourself, and those who seek you out will look for a man in a wig. Far better for you to be blatant in your exposure so that no one even thinks to peek under the hat of a West Indian planter.”

I accepted his point, and we agreed that there was no choice but to put our faith in Swan’s brother-in-law.

Mr. Swan began to take my measurements while Elias continued to chat about how I would carry out his plan. “You will need to choose a name, of course. You want something Christian sounding, but not too Christian.”

“Michael?” I suggested, thinking of the English version of my uncle’s name.

“Too Hebrew,” Elias said, waving his hand. “There’s a Michael in your Jewish scriptures.”

“How about Jesus,” I suggested. “That should be sufficiently un-Hebrew.”

“I thought perhaps Matthew. Matthew Evans. There is a name neither unusual nor common. Just the very thing we need.”

I had no objections, so at that moment my identity as Matthew Evans pushed its way into the world through the womb of Elias’s mind. Not a particularly pleasant way to be born, but the alternatives were surely worse.

Swan informed me that it would be some days before my first suit was ready, but he was able, while I waited, to provide me with a plain and unpretentious costume of the kind I normally wore (he was working on such a one for another customer and merely altered it to fit my frame). I could now safely dispose of my footman disguise, but in doing so I also ran the risk of being recognized, for in these clothes I looked far more like myself than I would have preferred.

The tailor then took us to his brother-in-law’s shop, where I ordered two fashionable wigs. The peruke maker offered to trim my hair somewhat to make the fit easier, but not so much that a casual observer might notice my hair had been altered. This fellow, too, said that he would work night and day to make certain my wares were ready as quickly as possible. Matthew Evans would have to wait only a little while before making his first appearance in the world.

In the meantime I had to procure for myself a place to stay, for I thought it best not to linger at a single inn or another for more than a day or two. I therefore found new lodgings, and though the innkeeper appeared suspicious of my lack of belongings, I bespoke a fiction of relocation and lost baggage that he found satisfying enough once I promised to pay for my stay each night in advance and for my meals as I ate them.