The Face Thief (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-Five

D
riving his mom’s snorting, ancient car, he’d pulled up to the house—an indistinguishable pair of brick shoulders in an endless serried row of same—checked the address and then cut the engine. It was still dark out in Queens, though a violet glow was beginning in the east. Desperation made him calm, even if he wasn’t in the least certain what he was going to do.

Potash had brought with him a small pair of field glasses, which dated from the period when his mother and father used to attend opera and ballet at Lincoln Center. He rolled down the windows. The night fragrance of sleeping trees poured into the car. The neighborhood was giving faint signs of awakening, with the squares of windows lighting up, and the occasional soft clacking of cutlery and dishes. Potash, underslept and overwhelmed, remembered well the deliciousness of lying as a child beneath the scratchy blanket at just this time of morning, with the day not yet hardened into the errands of the adult world and all of life still waiting in the soft, poured forms of the dawn.

But that was a thousand years ago. And that golden-limbed child had grown into a heavyhearted adult with a defect of mind that had let him be defrauded of that which was rightfully his. “Fighting for my frickin’ life,” he whispered to himself, unsheathing the field glasses from their case, “is what I’m doing.” A big pane of light popped on in the house directly across the street. He had no need of field glasses to clearly discern a stocky figure in a T-shirt and jeans moving about a living room, setting things on a small table. The figure opened the fridge and stood a moment in the fall of yellow light, arm braced against the appliance, before withdrawing some items for breakfast. Even crooks have to eat. But was this in fact the crook, Potash wondered, or the cop that Berke had spoken of, or someone else?

After a moment, the man went away. Another small window lit up, and a couple of minutes later, the man returned, and continued to move around the room, making small adjustments and setting things out on the table. Potash watched, and as the rising sun began draining the undersea gloom from the scene, a woman walked slowly into the living room from stage left. She and the man chatted. Potash, now drawn entirely into the moment, slowly put the field glasses to his eyes. Across the sixty or so feet that separated him from her he discerned the telltale profile he’d never forget: proud nose, sensual lips, and hair that, though lightened and cropped, did not distract him from the truth: it was her.

Half unconsciously, he grunted as the impact of seeing Janelle hit him with a physical force. If he could have, he would have reached long arms across the street and throttled the neck she was now showing off as she smiled, swiveled her head and made morning conversation with her friend. He watched as she made those same winsome moves of the head with which she’d once lulled him into a defenseless trance, coquettishly dipping her face so that she could then look up at you from beneath the brake of the lashes, pursing her lips, dimpling her cheeks, flashing her green eyes and keeping herself, like a moving target, always fractionally ahead of where your gaze might light.

Then the man was leaning down to her, and as he kissed her a strange, mixed shock went through him—a feeling, oddly enough, of her humanity. But he would not allow it, and he closed his heart violently against the perception, muttering under his breath, “Motherfucker, I’m gonna get you.”

By now, as the light of the street continued to lift, he felt exposed, sitting in the car with the small binoculars to his eyes, and so he quickly put them back in their case. Slumping downward, he began reading the paper in an attempt to render himself as inconspicuous as possible.

This was not the kind of neighborhood where people evidently worried about being spied upon. It was an area dense with families, and as if at a signal, within the next twenty minutes, doors began opening up all over and children spilled down the stairs and stoops, en route to school. Potash wasn’t so far removed from his previous life to be unaffected by the spectacle of this orderly adherence to the dream of an education. Always, it was the disadvantaged, the marginal, the outcasts, who threw themselves at the opportunity. Chinese, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Kazakhstanis—over the years, how many times had he seen the arc of acculturation through the agency of a good public school turn a mumbling, socially awkward parent into a smooth exemplar of the American dream in a single generation? Rejects there were aplenty, but Potash, despite the mounting evidence of their gross inefficiency, was still proud of American schools.

But even as he let himself be buoyed a moment by these thoughts, he was recalled to the truth of his mission by the sight of the door of the house directly across the street opening and the man leaving.

He studied him closely a second. A thick, bullish neck sat atop an upper body expanded, probably, through weight lifting or contact sports. A cop haircut, boxed on the sides and long in front, crowned an undistinguished snub-nosed face. He wore a suit jacket, casually draped, and chinos finishing in cowboy boots. He didn’t exactly hulk as he walked, but balletic he was not, swinging heavily into his car—the Range Rover, Potash noted—and starting it up.

He cut his eyes to the house. The woman was not visible. The Range Rover was pulling out and leaving the neighborhood. With a sudden rush of nerves, now that the moment was nearly upon him, he pondered his options. They were the following: call Berke, even though Berke had washed his hands of him. Call Cas, and wait for him to arrive in an explosion of ridiculousness and over-the-top verbiage; simply call the police and thereby have her questioned (but if the man who had just left was the police, then where would that leave him, Potash?); or do what he was deciding to do, which was to sit still and wait. He’d come this far, after all.

Several minutes went by in a state of furious confusion as he stared unseeing at the page of his newspaper, trying to figure out his next move. Eventually he decided that he’d simply take a walk around the block, clear his head and contemplate the possibilities; and he had actually placed his hand on the handle of the door, psyching himself up to leave the safety of the car, when his vision was arrested by something off to one side. It was her, the girl, opening the small gate of the house’s fence and stepping with a certain tentative daintiness onto the driveway, a rolling cart behind her. Smoothly, without wasting any movement, he continued opening the car door, and then stood up and began walking toward her.

As he moved forward, he felt himself oddly tall, tippy on his feet. He noted that she was smiling absently, her eyes blinking rapidly, as if troubled by the morning sun. He walked directly toward her and planted himself in her path.

“Uh, yes?” she said, “Can I—?”

“Janelle, or whatever your name is, it’s me,” he said, unsmiling. “John Potash.”

She continued to stare at him directly, silent.

“You really thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?”

She began beetling her brow.

“Do we know each other?” she said finally.

He gave a kind of sob of a laugh.

“Do we?” she repeated. “I’m thinking, based on your response, that maybe we do, in which case excuse me. Who do you think I am?”

Faintly, he was aware of the neighborhood all around him. Thronging with children fifteen minutes ago, it was now eerily silent. All the parents who had recently bid good-bye to their kids were now cleaning up, reading the papers, yet he knew it would take but a single scream to flood the street with concerned citizens.

“We can do this one of two ways,” he said quietly. “Either you can restore the entirety of the money you embezzled from me, or you can go to jail.”

“Embezzled? Jail?” Her brow beetled further. He was amazed to be this touchably close to the person who he had sought in dreams and fevered imaginings for ten whole days. A wavering white bracket seemed to be bristling in the air around him; he remembered, just in time, to breathe.

“Yes,” he said, “jail time. That’s what they give you when you steal, and when you steal a lot, as you did from me, and it was probably a hell of a lot more than that because who knows who else you stole from—” And here he stopped and looked at her in dawning disbelief. Because this somewhat pale, diminished version of the woman who’d ruined his life was now raising a sheaf of hair and showing him a terrible series of barred dots, a small ladder of bluish lines running in sequence on a shaved expanse of her skull while saying, quietly, “You can say whatever you want about me, but I’m recovering from a bad thing. I had a fall of some kind down the stairs, they tell me, and lost my memory.” She shrugged her shoulders, emptily. “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she said. “It sounds awful.”

The openness of his own throat and neck suddenly made him feel vulnerable. Was she somehow on the verge of wriggling away
again
? He pitched his voice as low as possible.

“I want you,” he said, “to take me to whoever is responsible for you.”

“I’m not sure who that is at the moment,” she said calmly, and shrugged her shoulders again. “I just got out of rehab and if you wanna know the truth, I was taking a walk around the block.”

“With a rolling bag?”

“To do a little shopping.”

She looked at him, and for the first time he saw a faint flicker of something like recognition, a briefest of ripples in the smooth, calm shining of her green eyes.

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said. “We’re gonna go indoors and you’re either gonna phone your bank and tell them we’re coming by to pick up an awfully big cashier’s check, or wire transfer the money back into mine through the computer, and once I see that it’s back in my account, I won’t press felony charges, and that’s it. Felony charges,” he repeated.

But despite everything, he heard the reasonableness of his reconciliator’s tone, leaving his mouth eager to find common ground, and pitching his voice deliberately lower, he repeated, “Do you hear me?”

She was looking past him and smiling. Potash irritably swiveled his head. A neighbor, walking his dog, was waving at her cheerfully.

“Either I get satisfaction,” he said in the same voice, “or this whole neighborhood is going to know the truth about you in about thirty seconds.”

“Mr.?” she said.

“John Potash.”

“Yes. Clearly, you’re very upset. Something bad was done to you. Of that I have no doubt. But really”—and here she shook her head and made a face as if appealing to some invisible witness—“what do you want me to do?”

“Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said, “of my money, and my elderly mother’s money and my wife’s money.”

She put her hand on her breast. He recognized the gesture.

“That’s horrible!”

“Thanks for the sympathy. You’ve got five minutes.”

“Mr. Potash,” she said in that same somewhat slowed-down version of the voice he once knew; the same timbre, but ghosted now in the apparent aftermath of that surgery whose blue lines crisscrossed her skull, “you seem like a nice person. I’d like to try to help you. But . . .”

Now, more than ever, he wished for Berke. Berke would have known exactly what to do. But the vast universe of police procedure with its certainties and end-stopped threats floated, maddeningly, just a few feet out of reach.

“I am not leaving,” he said, “until I get satisfaction.” He raised his cell phone. “And I’m perfectly happy to call the local police department and explain to them that a known criminal happens to living at 5775 Ocean Boulevard and see how they feel about that.”

She was nodding her head, the gesture located somewhere between sympathy and pity.

“If I were in your shoes,” she said, “I’m sure I’d do the exact same thing.”

She stopped nodding her head and looked him directly in the eyes. He felt a peculiar current of energy tingling down the backs of his legs. Without being exactly aware of what he was doing, he dwelled on the pleasure it would give him to smash her skull.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “Why don’t I take you back inside the house, and if you can show me this terrible thing that happened to your accounts on the computer, maybe I can try to help or call someone who can?”

“We’ll go into the house,” said Potash, masterfully dissimulating the surge of violence, “and we’ll look up our accounts on the computer, mine and yours, and then you’ll pay me back, and if it’s not all the money, to the very last dime, I’ll call the cops.”

“Mr. Potash—John, these threats of yours, they don’t do anything to me, don’t you see? Now be reasonable and follow me inside, please.”

He said nothing, but kept close behind her as she backtracked toward the house. Despite the tension of the moment, he couldn’t help but note that her face seemed shrunken and gray and that she walked more haltingly than he remembered, with less of that smooth, butt-driven saunter that advertised “sexual power here.” Something bad, it was clear, had happened to her. Possibly some other aggrieved party had gotten to her first. But he wouldn’t dwell on it. He was here on a one-pointed mission of his own.

She turned around and touched him on the sleeve and he yanked his arm back as if snakebit. She recoiled a moment in surprise.

“I only wanted to tell you that for security, we keep the front door locked so I’m going to go around back to let myself in. Would you like to accompany me?”

He wouldn’t dignify her question with a response, but stayed right behind her as they crossed the yard, she opened the gate and they proceeded through to the small somewhat sunless backyard and up a flight of three brick steps.

“This is a little odd,” she said, putting a key in the lock and squinting while doing so with the evident effort of coordination, “that I’m letting a man I don’t know into the house. But hey”—she shrugged her shoulders again—“you have a trustworthy face.” She smiled at him for the first time. “I used to be a connoisseur of faces.”

But Potash refused, again, to acknowledge the comment and merely made a directional nod to push her attention back to the lock. She turned the key and he followed her inside the house.