The Face Thief (4 page)
Authors: Eli Gottlieb
T
he days had a swimming, circular rhythm to them. The sun came up. The nurses bustled around the room. An open calm space expanded around her, and she lay partly in that space and partly in the silence she felt inside herself. Then the sun burned out and evening came on, crawling up the sides of the room like ink filling a jar, and the process was repeated.
The doctor smelled of peppermint. He shined a light in her eyes and spoke in a prying, anxious voice about her progress. Nicer by far was Dan France, who came by regularly, and who often, as now, was waiting on her, smiling pleasantly as if a second had gone by, when she opened her eyes.
“And so?” he said.
“And so?” she repeated, slowly.
“You were in the middle of telling me everything,” he said, and then looked at her as if he knew something, and gave her a long, liquid wink.
Irresistibly, her eyes slid lower. When they closed, she again found herself looking directly into the bright, fresh faces of the eighth-grade boys in her middle-school class. They bulged and dwindled hilariously in their bodies, and if she let them kiss her, they made gulping sounds like toilets. But one grade higher was a teacher named Mr. Wilkington, who gazed at her with a strange calm doglike intent that made her feel he was trying to touch her heart through her clothes. She liked that. He had a beard like a wild animal and was terribly thin. He had wanted to be a poet once, he told her in an afterschool conference, and when she told him that she loved poetry, particularly the Lake Poets, and that she loved many things to do with certain parts of England in the nineteenth century, he was so surprised that for a full long moment the normally chatty Mr. Wilkington couldn’t speak.
Not long after, a book appeared in her library cubbyhole. It was a collection of poetry by a man named Thomas Hardy. It was very beautiful and very sad. Thomas Hardy’s wife had died and he missed her terribly.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
In her diary she wrote, “I’ve met the most unusual man. He’s funny and cool and he always looks to one side in conversation with you like he’s hoping an invisible person sitting next to him will know the exact right thing to say and he can then say that thing. I think I’m going to seduce him.”
They began meeting after school. They would sometimes take walks along the nearby drainage canal. He was directing her along the list of his favorite books and they would discuss her reading. She’d never heard anyone talk like him. For her father, words were a series of cold, functional links in a chain, but Mr. Wilkington with his voice like a sad woodwind spoke in looping long expeditions of thought. Ideas moved him. He was terribly excited. Then he was misty-eyed with longing. Then he was battered by insights that he nearly choked on trying to explain. The letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne were “what doom tasted like on the tongue.” Shelley had “a heart like autumn.” Poetry “should be taken in small doses every day, like vitamins.”
Then one day the gentle Mr. Wilkington sat her down on a bench and said, “I love your company, Margot. In fact I love it so much that I realize that I can’t do this with you any longer. It’s not right that a teacher take walks with a girl student, especially one of whom he’s as terribly fond as I am of you. I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to break this off, sparrow. Okay?”
That night, with tears rolling down her cheeks, she wrote, “This is what it feels like to be heartbroken. It’s like being stuffed with ice except the ice burns. It’s like being the last person alive on the planet and only seeing dead people everywhere you look. I solemnly swear I’ll never ever let it happen again as long as I live!”
Later that same year, her mother came down with a disease whose ugly name sounded in her head like leg braces and rattling metal. This was multiple sclerosis. And though the reasons for the illness were “unknown,” her mother withdrew to her bed and began spending most of each day prone while wearing a faint funny smile on her new face like she alone knew what was the matter and wasn’t telling.
Her father began arriving home from work with red blotches on his cheeks and then steering his long body unsteadily to his study, where he fell asleep in his sea-green Barcalounger chair and slept right through dinner and sometimes the next breakfast too. His voice turned slack. More than once he parked the car at a diagonal on the front lawn. Sloppy stains appeared on his clothes from meals falling from his hands. The town was small. Children in school made ugly faces at her. They pointed at her the stinking finger of accusation, the finger of ridicule:
Your father is a drunk!
My father is an important lawyer who works for the attorney general of Massachusetts said the cold, calm voice in her head. But she never said it aloud; she never defended him. She continued implacably to get straight As at school. She practiced the violin every night for hours. She watched her mother exhausting herself by flinging herself like a wave against the large rocklike silence of her father, and it didn’t matter. “I will be married,” she wrote in her diary. “I have to be married. Nothing can stop me from being married,” she wrote.
A
fter three classroom lessons, Lawrence convened their fourth meeting in the street. He called it his “live laboratory.” He chose a small inclined street he’d used before for drills of this kind, which had an outdoor café at its uppermost point. Arriving first, he seated himself at a table and ordered a coffee.
The plan was for Margot to station herself about a hundred yards down the hill and ask directions of ten passersby while charting as many facial tells as possible during the conversations. While pretending to take down the information being offered her, she would in reality note these facial tells on a small pad. Lawrence would form his own conclusions about the same people as they strolled past his table a couple of minutes later and they would then compare notes.
He had brought the daily paper and was scanning the headlines when he heard her swift stride.
“Good morning,” she said, coming up to his table.
He looked up, smiling. Because it was warm out she was wearing shorts, a halter top and platform espadrilles. Her brunette hair was pulled back in a chignon and her makeup was skewed to a summer palette. It had not escaped his notice that she was an expert in the shape-shifting use of cosmetics and clothes. When they first met, she’d had the wholesome balanced face of a young soccer mom. Subsequent meetings had revealed her equally at home dressed with an aggressive downtown, even punkish edge. Today she was fully inhabiting the role of artsy coed. And the striking green eyes were as mascaraed as ever. He told himself that the warm burst of feeling he was entertaining just then was simply the hunger of a childless father for a daughter in life.
“Morning, Margot,” he said, “and don’t you look perfect for the job today.”
“I thought I’d work my blend-in look,” she said. “And you look well.”
Lawrence had a large, calm, open face of the kind that people regularly referred to as “wholesome,” with square teeth, wide brown eyes, a domed forehead and the gray quills of hair usually brushed straight back while still wet. His mouth, however, was small and firm.
“Thank you, and your blend-in look is working,” he said. “You’re so good you’re almost invisible.”
She frowned a second.
“Just kidding,” he said quickly, and then, confused at the sudden, open hanging feeling in the air, he went on with a quickening professional tone, “Um, I usually send students to that spot down there.”
She turned and squinted into the sun, down the hill, while he found himself studying her lean jawline.
“Remember,” he said slowly, “that it’s important to distract these people and send their minds elsewhere as a way to get a deeper, better look. And here’s a little bit of neurolinguistic programming for background. Most people in the world are right-handed. When right-handers are creating an image in their minds, their eyes generally look up to the right, okay?”
“Sure,” she said, a little noncommittally.
“But if they’re recalling something they’ve heard, like an old song, they look to the left and tilt their head as if listening. If they are remembering a feeling, like say a physical sensation or an emotion, they look down and to the right. People talking silently to themselves also look down to the left. It’s like a compass rose of a sort. And why is this important?”
She’d begun smiling, as she always did when she received new information. “I’m sure you’re gonna tell me,” she said.
“It’s important because if we know whether someone typically thinks in pictures, or words or feelings, then we’re that much closer to their decision points, and that much better at making predictive guesses about their next move. The smallest advantage is better than none at all.”
“I love it,” she said. She was making her tiny upper body swerves again.
“Good,” he replied. The warm feeling in his chest was deepening. “I’m giving you thirty minutes, Margot. You bring the steno pad?”
She pulled it from her pocket.
“Check,” she said.
“Well, then, go for it.”
“Wish me luck.”
“As my Italian grandfather used to say, ‘
In boca al lupo.
’ ”
“Which means?” She was already half turned around and facing down the hill.
“In the mouth of the wolf.”
Lightly, nearly over her shoulder, she flung the words, “And would the wolf be you?” After which, she sauntered down the hill.
Lawrence raised his paper halfway up as a screen, and over it he watched her take up her position. Within minutes, an old man wandered by and she convinced him to stop for what seemed like an extended time. A minute later she was nodding gravely to a librarian-looking lady of late middle age and then a teenage boy. He watched how she carefully arranged her body in such a way as to invite or remain neutral, depending on the situation. She did this by sucking in her breasts or throwing them into relief and by tilting her hips in such a way as to either “shine” or “cover” her pelvis while moving her hands distractingly. Two male college students stopped to talk and he laughed with silent appreciation as he watched her draw them toward her so that by the end of the conversation they were both raked forward on their toes.
Lawrence ordered a second coffee and by the time it arrived, these same people were approaching his table and his eager eyes. Would they have the indented temples of the obsessive-compulsive? The cleft chin of the attention seeker? Would they sport the short eyebrows of the friendless or the downturned nose of the shrewd? Differently from the fallen world of speech, the body never lied. Were they sporting the high blink rate of liars? Or, if they were a couple, was one of them practicing “ventral denial”—that is, rotating the sensitive front part of their body significantly away from their partner?
Together, they worked the passersby on the street for about a half hour. It was a sunny warm morning, and the coffee tasted good in his mouth, and the peacefulness of the situation, along with his own pleasure in exercising his craft, relaxed and soothed him. But before he could comment on it to himself, she strode swiftly back up the hill and beat him to the punch.
“Can I tell you something?” she said as she sat down next to him and he felt that energetic wave of hers wash over him.
“Yes,” he said.
“I felt fantastic out there.”
“I could tell.”
“No, I mean it was like this work, the way it looks inside people, it just gives you this incredible confidence that you can just do whatever you want with someone.” She shrugged, as if she were giving too much away. “I guess,” she said in a deliberately calmer voice, “I always wanted a little extra protection in life.”
“Nothing wrong with that.” He was feeling indulgent. “So,” he said, “let’s see what you got?”
“Okay,” she said, and gave him her pad. He was impressed by the congruence between their outlooks. With allowances made for her relative greenness and lack of vocabulary, her intuitive reading of people’s appetites and inclinations was nearly spot-on.
“Impressive,” he said, smiling.
“Now,” she said, lowering her eyes, “you’re embarrassing me.”
“No, I’m serious.” He suddenly wanted her to understand just how good she was; it was important to him. “I’ve been at this a long time and you’re not typical. In fact, you’re not not typical by a long shot, which is a funny-sounding thing to say, but you get the idea.”
“Consider it gotten, and thank you. I think I always wanted a teacher who I felt was on my level, and I think it’s happened to me maybe once before in my life.” She paused, looking into his eyes. “Don’t take this in the wrong way, but can I do something for you?”
“You already are,” he said gallantly. “It makes all the difference in the world to be ‘gotten’ by someone other than a middle-aged woman in a bad pantsuit who’s convinced her hubby is, uh, carrying on”—he pronounced the words carefully—“with his secretary.”
“Lawrence—” She did one of those microtonality things again, almost imperceptibly lowering her voice.
“Yes?” he asked.
She placed the tips of her fingers together beneath her chin. She was “steepling.” He couldn’t believe it! Evidently, she’d forgotten she was making the most superauthoritative and confident tell of them all. Again, he was recalled to the fact that she was a player, possibly a user. He studied her a moment, but without result. What did she want?
“Dinner?” she said. “With me?”
P
otash waited a long, long time for the FBI agent, aimlessly leafing through magazines while rehearsing in his head the particulars of the last few weeks and days. He did this in tribute to his long-standing belief that recollection was a useful response to crisis, and in his conviction that making a story out of it somehow absolved him from the thought he’d been played for an utter moron.
And what
was
the story?
Irritably, he put down the magazine, shutting his eyes. The memory was like a bad smell he couldn’t stop smelling. It began in the days after his meeting with Janelle Styles, when he spent many hours on due diligence. The portfolio companies taking part in the offering all had websites that, given the secretive nature of their work, were password protected. Greenleaf had thoughtfully furnished him with these passwords, and he passed several afternoons browsing their “news” sections, which boasted flattering profiles in journals he’d never heard of and reams of jargon-heavy “white papers” published for industry consumption. Having signed a nondisclosure agreement in advance, he savored the sense of elation involved in peering into the inner workings of what he believed, in a very real sense, to be the future. He also cold-called at least two of the experts whose names Greenleaf had provided him and had affable entry-level chats about sustainable energy that quickly spiraled into arcane theoretical regions he couldn’t follow.
In all this, Potash was waiting patiently for the arrival of what he privately called his “vector.” His vector was his private tipping point, that confluence of hard data, intuition and good vibes that had green-lit all the most important transitional moments of his life. After four days of research and a couple dozen phone calls, the vector arrived suddenly one afternoon. It was accompanied, as was so often the case, by the sense of an abrupt sharpening of vision, of superfine clarity allied to a feeling of specific sanction.
This
was what he was supposed to do, and right this very second. Dimming the lights in his rented office, he turned down the ambient “space music,” called his personal banker and instructed him to wire-transfer six hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the Greenleaf EcoTech High Yield Fund.
The resultant euphoria was intense, unnaturally sweet and dramatically short-lived. The very next day, he sat waiting patiently with his wife at a high-end local restaurant to which he’d invited Janelle for a celebratory dinner. His wife, who had never met Janelle and was still in the dark about his investment, had wondered out loud at the expense of the place, but, in a magnanimous mood, he’d ordered drinks for them both followed by a costly bottle of white wine. The EcoTech Fund was going to be a bouquet he laid at Anabella’s feet, and extravagance was the order of the evening.
An hour later, he was slightly drunk and growing annoyed. Janelle hadn’t arrived, and he couldn’t very well phone in front of his wife and upset the elaborately choreographed surprise. Potash took the endless box staircase downstairs to the bathroom, irritated at first. But the irritation soon began to shade into something else as he stood in the low-lit space methodically dialing both Janelle’s home and cell numbers and finding them ringing through to voice mail. He tried the numbers of another Greenleaf contact and had the same thing happen. Openly alarmed, he dug through his wallet to find yet another. He dialed those two numbers as well, and then two others. As each of them rang through to the exact same recorded message, he found himself effortlessly ascending a rising arc of panic. Three minutes after having entered the bathroom, Potash put the phone back in his pocket and stared at his face in the mirror. Without warning, a white flare of light went off in his head while a ring of cold sweat burst onto the crown of his skull and he bent double over the sink as a vast, inexorable pressure seemed to press him downward toward the floor. He hung on to the edge of the sink, swaying on his feet, and when he finally returned to himself, his heart beating hard, he slowly stood up before leaning down again and running cold water on his face for a full sixty seconds.
Upstairs, Potash did his level best to rejoin a conversation his tipsy wife had begun about making synthetic sandalwood, but he himself was no longer drunk in the least. The flare of anxiety had burned it right out of his system. He found himself staring fixedly at the front door of the restaurant for several minutes as if by sheer force of will he could make Janelle materialize out of the night air and run up to his table crying, “My God, John, there was a car crash on the highway and I’d left my cell phone at home!”
When he finally returned his attention to the table, his wife, as if it were the punch line of a long anecdote, was just saying the word
polymerize.
He smiled at her, stood back up and rushed again to the bathroom, where this time he dialed 911. The desk sergeant on call seemed bored by his story and kicked him upstairs along the chain of command to the fraud unit, giving him the number and telling him to call the next day.
After a sleepless night, Potash phoned his old friend Casper Macaleer the first thing next morning. Cas was an ex–college roommate now wired heart and soul into the Street who, upon hearing him out at length, asked two questions: “John, why didn’t you come to me before you made a move of this size?” And: “Did you ever think about why Greenleaf Financial just happens to have a small satellite office in your little pissant town when they only have two or three in the whole country and five in the world?”
Shouting something not entirely coherent in response, Potash hung up, jumped in his SUV and, driving maniacally, arrived ten minutes later at the local offices of Greenleaf Financial. He whipped through the front doors and was halfway across the lobby when he jerked suddenly to a stop like someone whose hips had locked tight.
He’d never talked to the New York office
. Slowly, he took his left foot where it was lingering still planted behind him and drew it even with his right. He’d never talked to New York even once. He turned slowly in the space of the lobby, marveling. He’d always believed himself a far-seeing man, but he’d been as blind as a baby, as helpless as a newborn.
He’d just wired the vast majority of his savings into thin air and he’d never talked to New York.
A kind of foul mist clouding his eyes, he got on the nearby elevator. It rose slowly upward, the ping sounded, the door slid open and with a gut-shot heavy feeling he walked down the hallway of suites till he found the door that had formerly led to Greenleaf. Though it still bore the vaguely planetary logo, it was locked tight.
“Lemme guess,” said a passing secretary, staring at Potash with a slightly pitying air. “Another person for Greenleaf, right? They’re gone, and fast, too.”
The girl was continuing to talk to him, but he was barely hearing her. She was saying dully human things like,
They seemed like nice people, but this moving van pulled up, and the next thing I knew the office was locked and they were out of here lickety-split. People were coming by all day yesterday and looking about as unhappy as a person can
.
With a peculiar copper taste in his mouth, he took the elevator back down and walked back through the lobby. He felt like a stick figure in an illustration manual. Slumping nearly in tears on a bench in front of the building, he again dialed Cas, who picked up on the first ring.
“Oh,” said Potash softly into the phone, “my God.”
“John,” shouted Casper, “what happened?”
“I feel like I’m dying, Cas.”
There was a silence on the other end, and then Casper, in a low voice, said, “Oh, shit.”
“Just like you said, it was a front,” Potash croaked. “A front, totally. And so fucking slick and well done that I never thought to talk to New York.” Suddenly he felt tears, but they were tears of disappointment at his own stupidity. “I mean,” he repeated in a lowered voice, “I never talked to New York, Cas.” And then, again, and as if it was the bitterest, saddest admission of defeat, “Not once.”
“John,” said Cas, simply.
“And now,” Potash said, wanting suddenly to tear at his head, stab or gouge himself, “now I don’t know what.”
“Well, there’s procedures,” said Casper. “I mean, there are resources.”
Potash, breathing heavily, said only, “I’m drowning, Cas.”
“John, you’ve gotta be strong here and think clearly and, I know it’s next to impossible, but you’ve also gotta not get emotional.”
Potash let out a sharp, unfiltered shout.
“Like that,” said Casper.
“Excuse me, Mr. Potash?”
He opened his eyes, and for a split second, in the perfect hush before sense returned, dwelled happily in the hope that all this had happened to someone else.
“Yes?” he asked groggily.
“Agent Bortz will see you now.”
And then he remembered.
“Thank you.”
Getting to his feet, Potash followed the receptionist down a long back hallway, where he was ushered into the appropriate office. As he stood a moment on the threshold, his initial impression of the individual who held the last, best hope for his fiscal future was that, in contradistinction to his cow-calling name, Agent Hiram Bortz was a strikingly handsome man.
“Mr. Potash,” he said by way of introduction, greeting him across a large, meticulously clean desk, “come in. It seems you fell in with some bad folks.”
“You might say,” said Potash, walking forward and sitting down while attempting a medium smile of his own.
Bortz, who was in his midthirties, had cropped dark hair, sharp blue eyes and the manner of someone studying you for the fault line in your outlook.
He dropped his eyes to the folder in front of him and squinted for a second. “I won’t gild the lily here.”
He raised the freezing blue eyes.
“I received your intake complaint a few days ago and have done a little investigation. In the process, I’ve contacted the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District, and will be pitching the case to them as a wire fraud later today. If they agree, the two of us would take it up together. Bear in mind that we’re looking at a minimum six months before anything happens. Also, let’s face it, Mr. Potash, these people are obviously professionals. This wasn’t a simple penny-stock scam or a pump and dump, but rather a coordinated and extremely professional effort to wipe you and a group of other, uh, investors out.”
Potash, with a lump in his throat, nodded.
“And you should also remember that recovery rates of assets through court actions in cases of large-level fraud of this sort are pretty low.”
“Mr. Bortz?”
“Sir?”
“I’ve been kind of destroyed here. There’s gotta be
some
legal recourse.”
“Well,” Bortz looked at him with an ironic twinkle, “there is a tax break called a Section 165, which will allow you to deduct your loss, but I suspect that’s not what you’re talking about.”
But Potash, deep in his misery, said only, “I keep wondering what I did wrong, why they zeroed in on me.”
“That’s not really my department,” said Bortz, “but let me turn it around for you and ask: Can you think of any obvious way in which you might have made yourself publicly vulnerable—showing off at parties, talking about your nest egg?”
“No, that’s not my way.”
“Okay. Were there any public announcements regarding your arrival here, anything that might have indicated to a watchful eye that you’d come to invest money in the area?”
“That’s the thing. No. I mean, there might have been a small notice somewhere in some educational journal, but my moving here was in no way a public event.”
“I see. Well, let me ask you this. Have you been married recently?”
Potash was surprised.
“Married? Well, yes. But what does that . . .”
Bortz leaned his head forward as if to allow Potash to come to his own conclusions. When he didn’t, he went on to say, very calmly, “Did you take out an announcement?”
From the center out, Potash felt a slow, burning crumpling feeling.
“Yes,” he said.
“Maybe mentioning your relocation to an affluent neighborhood?”
Unable to speak, he simply nodded.
“Real estate transactions,” said Bortz, “are public domain.”
Ruefully, he recalled Anabella’s girlish joy in the wedding announcement, and his own somewhat reluctant participation in something that, in the broadest terms, simply embarrassed him a little. But she’d been having so much fun that he’d gone along with her. As he’d done in so many recent things, overriding his own suspicions in the belief this woman had something to teach him about human nature that his more calculating, cynical self had never before permitted itself, he’d said sure. The fruits of that compliance, a four-color image of the two of them comfortably composed under a grape arbor in Napa, beaming out at the camera with their announcement bannered below, had appeared in the
San Francisco Examiner.
Staring at his shoes, he said softly, “I think I see what you’re getting at.”
“Indeed,” said Bortz, and allowed a pause for the truth to sink in. “As to what you can do now, well, that’s entirely up to you. We will, if the case goes forward, move considerable resources into it, rest assured, and do our best to apprehend these people. I can understand that the time frame may not work for you, but that’s about all I can tell you.”
Potash at this point actually put his face in his hands. When he took them away, the FBI agent was looking at him with a not unkindly expression. He seemed to be thinking.
“Here’s what I can’t do,” Bortz said in a softer voice. “I can’t tell you to try to get to her, personally. I can’t tell you to hire a PI skilled in such things and try to track her down and confront her with arrest, and maybe attempt to bargain a partial return of the monies in exchange for not pressing charges. I can’t tell you I know a person who’s been effective at that from time to time, and most of all what I can’t do is provide you his name.”
Continuing to hold his eye, Bortz slid a card across the table.
“What I
can
tell you,” he said, “is that whichever way you go, you’re going to have a tough time of it.”