The Face Thief (2 page)

She posed a challenge—an interesting one in a season of contracting sales and rote presentations. But he was up to the challenge. And he was curious, as well. What was she finally after? He would find out soon enough, he thought, paying his bill and getting back into his car.

Chapter Three

T
hree months later, in a small town in Northern California, a man named John Potash lurched awake with a convulsion as large as a sneeze, and shot out of a dream of careening forward motion and billowing fire back into his body. When he opened his eyes, the quiet of the room underlined his sensational mental violence. A leading edge of sun illuminated the thick carpet underfoot, touched the swirling colors of paintings hung on the wall, and lay most spectacularly of all on his wife, who was sprawled naked and asleep on the sheet next to him, her spine describing a long, lovely curve that seemed itself to symbolize the essence of trust.

He shut his eyes. From behind his lids he could feel the pinkish pressure of the sun, shining through his capillaries. It was the sun that was the problem. It was the blameless stupid illumination of the sun.

If not for the sun, and the languor it brought with it, he would almost certainly have let the phone ring through to voice mail when it buzzed alertly on the desk of his small rented office that day a few weeks ago. Instead, as a recent arrival in California, he’d shrugged off his (urban, Manhattan) suspicions on the spot, and stabbed “call” with his finger.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Potash?” A woman’s voice, warm with a tone of rising complicity, was on the other end.

“Yes?”

“This is Janelle Styles of Greenleaf Financial. I hope you don’t mind me calling you like this.”

“Well, that depends,” he said, hedging his voice in a way that could make his utterance either funny or sincere.

If not for the sun, he thought, getting quietly out of bed so as not to disturb his still-sleeping wife, he wouldn’t have continued to banter with the woman, who seemed at every step of the conversation somehow a step ahead of his response. He entered the small frosted glass shower cubicle and turned the taps to cold, shivering under the freezing spray while the tape of the conversation, as it had every hour on the hour for several days, continued playing in his head with crisp, punitive fidelity.

“What it is, Mr. Potash,” the woman was saying in memory, “is that Mr. Martin at the New York office personally forwarded me your name as someone who’d been an early investor in our Dyna-venture Fund and had already exited with an attractive return. I’m calling about a new, highly collateralized opportunity we feel
very
strongly about, and that we’re offering exclusively to our best investors.”

“Is that so?” he remembered saying, noncommittal.

“Yes. Now, normally, this type of investment wouldn’t be available to someone like yourself, but Mr. Martin asked that you be allowed to participate alongside some very high net worth individuals and institutional investors because of how appreciative we are of the confidence you’ve shown in us in the past.”

Potash squeezed the fragrant juice of shampoo onto his head and recalled that at this moment in the conversation there’d been a pause while he’d pondered her offer. He had first been introduced to Greenleaf Financial through two of the members of his home poker game in New York, each of whom had invested with positive results. Emboldened by their stories of excellent yields on wind farms and Mexican algae plantations, he was enticed to experimentally invest five thousand dollars. When his 11 percent returns were promptly deposited in his account, he doubled the amount. His next investment raised the bar still higher, to fifty thousand, with the same results. Greenleaf was not a hedge fund, nor an extravagant risk-taking operation based on funny-number math or cooked books. It was a consortium of forward-seeking investment advisers and analysts from elite business schools who roamed the world seeking the latest cutting-edge sustainable products. Predatory, cash-rich, not averse to opportunistic bottom-feeding, Greenleaf was masterful at saving companies teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, often snatching up extraordinary assets for ten cents on the dollar or less.

“Tell me more,” he’d said to the woman.

Potash now leaned forward and turned the shower hot, then hotter still. It was as if he wanted to scald away the recollections, expunge the fluent bit of salesmanship that came next. Was he aware, he remembered her asking, of the new smartphone that boasted a bioplastic casing derived entirely from cornstarch, along with low-impact packaging and PVC-free electronics? Or how about hydrotreated renewable jet fuel to answer the need of an American aviation industry that was “sick of being the unwanted relative at the national petrochemical buffet”? If that wasn’t enough, she added with a feathery, cascading downward chuckle, there were proton-exchange membranes in fuel cells, zinc-air batteries, and by the way, had he heard about the new Japanese experiment in organically growing a birch tree that was already treated, insect resistant and ready to be used as lumber?

Potash, at forty-two, had spent the majority of his adult life as the vice principal of a small alternative high school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His expertise was administrative; his gift was inspirational. Slim, affable, his face filled with the sympathetic curves of a born listener, he’d become the go-to guy for giving convincing speeches at fund-raising dinners, and could be counted on to provide a consoling shoulder for teachers caught in the hot cross fire between eruptive adolescence and shrinking state budgets. But as of eleven months ago, all that had changed.

He’d met a woman at a New York party and fallen deliriously, sexually, in love. In the process, he’d left a childless marriage filled with frictionless boredom and leaped across the country to be with his new love in a single life-altering jump. Anabella was a forty-year-old woman with two teenage sons who worked as a research scientist in a field—fragrance chemistry—about which Potash was utterly ignorant. He wasn’t used to having children in his life; he wasn’t used to being in the dark about what his wife did; and he wasn’t used to waking each morning alongside someone for whom—differently from his ex-wife, a Realtor—money wasn’t the first order of the day. Anabella, who’d grown up in a small town in Minnesota, was lean, spiritually athirst, energetic and unassumingly pretty. Plus, she loved sex. After an amicable divorce from his wife, they married immediately. To the marriage Potash brought a sizable nest egg, some of it his elderly parents’, entrusted to him for investment purposes, and some of it his own.

“Can I send you some literature in the mail?” he remembered Janelle Styles asking him after she’d finished her pitch.

“Of course,” he’d said, and hesitated a moment before obligingly giving her his mailing address. An envelope was couriered over the very next day, and he made a point of studying the prospectuses, investment strategy and projected return schedules carefully. Years immersed in school budget battles had given him an eye for reading contracts, and he knew his way around a spreadsheet. On the surface anyway, it all checked out perfectly.

Several days later, following up, she called. Cautious by nature, but drawn to the possibility of blessing his new marriage with a whopping annuity while he spent several months shopping around for a new job, Potash agreed to meet for lunch. He arrived on time at the restaurant and paused a moment on the threshold of the entrance. A pretty woman of about thirty, dressed in a black pencil skirt, high heels and a fitted top, stood up from a nearby booth and gave him a brilliant smile.

Potash smiled back, involuntarily, and in response, her own smile deepened on the spot. In some very subtle way, she gave the impression that she’d already calculated for the small, ongoing shock wave that her presence caused among men. Was this simple sophistication, or something else? Her hand was extended toward his in greeting, and her wide, extravagantly lashed green eyes fixed on his and then blinked in a quick triplet.

“Hi, John,” she said.

“Janelle, a pleasure.” He grasped her hand in his while her other hand fashioned a kind of loose, weaving gesture in the air and came to rest against his shoulder. It lay there for a second while they spoke, light but persistent. He noticed it.

The maître d’ took them as if by design to a booth in a darker, quieter part of the restaurant, well away from other diners.

“Have you been here before?” she asked as they sat down.

“Never, actually.”

“Oh, good. I find it’s the perfect place to meet someone, because it gives that sense of being just a little bit out of the world, and thereby a little bit intimate, unto itself.”

“Nice.”

She gave him a heatless smile, and he now understood where that plush telephone vibrato of hers came from: her entire body, somehow, was a sounding board for her voice.

“Drink?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” he said, “although maybe . . .”

“I know, at lunch, right?” She laughed, familiarly, with square, even teeth bleached almost too white but not quite. “But a spritzer tends to go down easy and still leaves you refreshed.”

“Touché,” he said gallantly. “A spritzer then!”

When the man left, nearly simultaneously, they both opened their menus.

“So,” she said, “how long have you been living in sunshine central?”

“About ten months.”

“A newbie! Would it be too forward of me to ask what brought you out here?”

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, I fell in love.”

“Really?” She looked up at him, openmouthed. “Does that still happen? Oh, God,” she touched her breast, “I’m sorry if I sound cynical!”

“Not at all,” said Potash, smiling. “But what can I say? I’m very happy. And I find that Northern California agrees with me. For a former New Yorker, it’s kind of like Disneyland.”

“You answered my next question, but I had a feeling.”

“What about?”

“That you were from the Northeast.”

“Why? Do I give off a big-city vibe?”

“Yes, but I mean that only in the best noncynical way.”

She laughed again, in a way that suggested an expansion of some kind, a reminder of the warm-blooded physicality behind her clothes. Potash leaned forward confidentially. “To tell you the truth, I’m still adjusting to being cheerful all the time. It’s a new sensation.”

“Bottle and sell it, if you can.”

The waiter passed again with their drinks and took their orders. She raised her glass, looked at him sportively over its edges, and winked.

“To a successful partnership and a greener earth.”

“Amen to that.”

They clinked glasses and drank.

And what happened next, thought Potash, finishing his long shower at last and stepping out into the chill, dry air before vigorously wiping himself down with a fresh towel, was what he would have to live with for the rest of his life. Because after three rounds of spritzers, and a stream of dazzling conversation about algae fuel, biomass and ethanol, he agreed to meet her and her “partners” at the nearby home offices of their firm, to discuss the possibility of “bringing him more seriously on board.”

Potash finished toweling off and then dressed, slipped on his Merrells and tiptoed out of the bedroom. The tape in his head had stopped playing for him long enough to again appreciate the nest of creaturely amenities in which he found himself. Love had brought him to this home, whose continued existence—as he walked down the main staircase and into the sun-flooded living room through air faintly scented with bougainvillea and piñon pine—depended on his now doing the exact right thing. He went into the kitchen, opened the heavy vault of the fridge door, and drank a glass of orange juice, fast, standing up. Then he strolled out the front door and swung into his SUV. His appointment with Agent Hiram Bortz of the FBI was in two hours and the office was nearly a hundred miles away. Traffic would be ramping up soon and he was hoping, for once, to beat the morning rush.

Chapter Four

T
he doctor stood before her, as tall as a tower, dressed all in white and leaning close. Bending forward, he scraped his nails along the soles of her feet.

“Tell me,” he said, “do you often lose your balance and fall down a ballroom length of marble stairs?”

There was a silence.

“And do you have any idea how lucky you are?”

She didn’t know how lucky she was. She was in the hospital. What could that possibly have to do with luck? She wanted to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. The words were still hanging a distance off. The doctor was looking at her with his peculiar smile-frown.

“In addition to everything else,” he said, “the blunt force trauma to the skull produced a subdural hematoma that came very, very close to shutting you down. I wouldn’t say you’re a miracle, young lady, but you’re one whole heck of a medical outlier.”

The doctor then leaned close enough so that she could feel the soft, buttery lapping of his breath.

“Lucky life,” he whispered.

She shut her eyes, and when she next opened them a man in a blue suit was standing there smiling. His hair had a wet, seal-like glisten to it, and a box of beautiful air seemed to stand out around the bones of his face.

“You’re up,” he said in a soft small voice entirely unlike the big man he was. “Mind if I sit?”

“No,” she said carefully.

With a hissing sound, he sat on a chair by her bed. She tried not to stare too hard at this person, who was telling her he was a police detective named Dan France and giving her a card embossed with a tiny gold shield while smiling at her with his face of an intelligent, well-fed animal. Soon after, he was leaning forward and touching the tips of his fingers together between his legs and drawing a breath. Clearly he was about to tell her something important. But all she heard as he began to speak was how his voice had the exact pitch of the outboard motor on a boat her family had once owned called
Nutmeg,
which thrummed as it somehow said the human words:
slidepath, likelihood, propulsive, motive.

After that, time passed or maybe it just stood still while her mind contracted into a shape that snapped like a whip as it shot her all the way around space and suddenly back into herself, dazed, looking up into the man’s handsome face.

“You fell asleep for a second,” Mr. Dan France said.

“Oh.”

“It’s common with your condition.”

“Is it?”

“I was talking about what you could remember of the seconds that preceded your, uh, fall.”

“Okay.”

“I’m looking forward to talking to you again, Margot.”

She wanted to say the right thing, but now too many words came forward, confusing her; they hung sparkling in the space before the eyes of her mind while making a tiny clattering sound, like the applause of dimes, before shooting away in every direction. She followed them as far as she could before she fell asleep.

When she next opened her eyes—a day later? A week?—Dan France was again, incredibly, standing at the foot of her bed. He was blinking lashes as long as a cartoon animal and slowly opening and closing his mouth.

But before Dan France there had been the mirror. She remembered that now. She remembered that a helpful nurse had held it up to her. In the mirror her face was a broken, perfectly round object, like a dropped clock.

“Good morning,” he was saying.

“Good morning?”

“I was in the area and thought I’d stop in,” he said.

“You . . .”

“How you feeling?”

Her voice when she now spoke buzzed softly in the cavity of her head.

“I’m not sure.”

“Tired, sad, happy, any of those ring a bell?”

There was a very long pause while she flung the lariat of her mind at some floating words, yanked them in.

“A joke?”

He laughed out loud. It was pleasant laughter, friendly laughter. It meant no harm. Maybe he was one of those boring harmless handsome men.

“Mind if I sit down for a moment?”

The lariat expanded into space, snickered back:

“Suit yourself.”

She shrugged her shoulders to accompany what she’d said. But that was a mistake; a stabbing pain shot through her arm.

“Whoa,” he said. “Take it easy.”

Words were coming back to her, and with them a certain familiar pressure, light, sour, warm: words.

“One day at a time,” he said.

“Right,” she said, because it was what you said, and because he was continuing to smile, was the pretty animal-like Dan France, and because she liked the feeling of receiving that smile across the air of the room, like something tossed lightly and lovingly.

“You’re funny,” he said.

“I am?”

“Yes, you make all these expressions, like you’re thinking terribly and deeply about everything you say, and then maybe a single word pops out. Oh, wait, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that!”

She was crying. There had been no intervening moment; the water had simply appeared in her eyes and begun falling down her face. She’d been thinking about the mirror again. He jumped to his feet and raised his arms in the air like someone surrendering at gunpoint.

“Not what I wanted!” He dropped his arms. “Here, please. I’m so sorry.”

His handkerchief was out and coming toward her. Cloudlike, it was scented with something that was maybe lavender.

“Anything you need,” Dan France was saying with his police voice as she buried her face in the scented cloud. “Anything I can do, you just let me know, okay?”

She was nodding. He was seating himself again at the foot of her bed. He was opening his mouth and she was looking into that mouth. It occurred to her how nice it’d be to go to sleep in that mouth, with her feet hanging out.

That special old warm feeling was coming back to her; that feeling of being in a body again. Below the broken face were her arms and legs. Without warning she dropped off to sleep and began falling slowly through a deep, dimensional mist a little bit like the seaside fogs of childhood into which she remembered inserting whole parts of herself disappearingly: toes, knees, thighs vanishing as if into milk.

When she dropped out of that cloud, landing gently on her feet and looking around, she was twelve years old. She was in a store that extended in every direction as far as the eye could see. Gingerly she moved forward down aisles that seemed piled high as if with all the goods of the world. She raised an arm and looked carefully, once, around the store. Her hair was perfectly combed and brushed. Her pinafore was fresh from the dryer. Her Buster Browns were polished to a T. She smiled politely. And then she stole something.

Lying in her hospital bed, her eyes swimming in smooth figure eights beneath her lids, she smiled.

She’d begun by stealing small stuff mainly: costume jewelry; cassette tapes. The desire to do so was like a small, kindly tug on the sleeve. It pulled her to the nearby malls, where she would walk in her quiet observant way through the lighted barns of the stores. She’d nod calmly at the passersby. She’d enter the stores. And she’d steal from them.

At home she spent her spare time reading of women trapped in remote country settings and dying for love. She read
Northanger Abbey.
She read
Jane Eyre.
She wrote in her diary in a flowing hand using a fountain pen that she felt somehow linked her up to the history of suffering women in the nineteenth century. From the local Safeway she filched tea bags, croissants, and puff pastries. At the Stop and Shop she lifted small bottles of perfume.

Evenings, she watched her father’s face carefully at the dinner table to see if he knew. He knew everything. His head was a repository of all the knowledge in the world. And she loved to watch his mouth as he spoke. The power came from there. As did the lack of doubt in everything he said. This was an amazing thing. How could you live without doubt? Life was so filled with it.

But from her father instead there came this absolute sureness and unswerving speed. Everything he did was fast. He ate his food fast and with swift square motions. In his car, down Route 6, he moved quickly. And once the car came to a stop with a quick screech and the door whipped open, then out he came, charging into the very next thing and tilted forward with velocity. In his study, in the living room of the house, her father moved with his loping stride. He steered his tall frame past the room where she crouched practicing her violin. He was en route to the bottle of whiskey in his study. Meanwhile the tempo of her Czerny exercises increased. Harsh squawks and rubbing whistles awoke from the instrument. It occurred to her, lying asleep in her hospital bed, that as a child she called to her father with her instrument as a bird calls to another, and that the finger exercises on her violin that she remembered unhappily filling the house with their cawing music were in fact the passionate cries of her loneliness.

She was lonely, in the little house on the edge of the earth. The continent finished there, in that plunge into the bean-green water near Cape Cod. You could stand on that small chilly bit of sand feeling the grains between your toes and you could stare to where the earth curved, and launch your gaze into outer space.

She opened her eyes in her hospital bed. Dan France was long gone and the room was dark. Things hissed and twittered in the night, and in the hallway outside her door, every few minutes she heard the faint sucking sound of the ripple-soled shoes of the nurses. She lay there for a long time, unmoving. If she shut her eyes, she knew, it would start all over again.