Thriller (41 page)

Brandt don’t look much alike, one is stoop-shouldered with

slightly buck teeth and a facile grin, the other stands ramrod

straight and strides down the street with confidence and a certain joie de vivre. Gait is more important than the face in these

matters. Faces tend to blur in people’s memories, but the manner in which someone walks remains.

He stares at himself and feels as if he is looking at a painting

or a mannequin. He is Harold Moss and Max Brandt, their skins

are wrapped around him, in him, through him, helping to obliterate whatever was there before he had conjured them up. His

facade, his exoskeleton, his armor is complete. He is no one,

nothing, less—far less—than a cipher. No one glancing at him

on the street could possibly guess that he is a clandestine agent—

save for the enemy against whom he has labored tirelessly and

assiduously for thirteen years, and possibly longer, the enemy

who is no longer fooled by his periodic shedding of one persona

for another, expert though it is, the enemy who is now curled

on his doorstep, having finally run him to ground.

He returns to the rumpled bed, flicking off more water bugs.

They like to gather in the warm indentations his body makes,

no doubt feeding on the microscopic flaking of skin he leaves

behind in sleep, like fevered nightmares sloughed off by the unconscious mind. He moves the bugs out of necessity only; really

he has no innate quarrel with them the way most people do. Live

and let live is his motto.

His harsh laugh sends them scattering to the four shadowed

corners of the room. Some disappear behind the closed wooden

jalousie that covers the window. They have all too quickly come

to know him, and they have no desire to be eaten alive. Flopping down on the thin mattress in a star position, he gazes up at

the constellations of cracks in the plaster ceiling that at one time

long ago must have been painted blue. They seem to change position every time he takes this survey, but he knows this cannot

be true.

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I know, I know…
A singsong lullaby to himself.
What do I

know?
Something, anything, who can say with the fissures appearing inside his head?

It never fails, the color blue makes him think of Lily. The azure

sky under which they picnicked when they were dating, the

aquamarine-and-white surf through which he swam, following

her out to the deep water. There were bluebirds in the old

sycamore that dominated the front yard of their house in Maryland, and there was a time, early on in their marriage, when Lily

cultivated bluebells in her spare moments. She liked to wear blue,

as well—powder-blue sleeveless blouses in summer, navy cardigans in autumn, cobalt parkas in winter, denim work shirts in

the spring, with the sleeves half-rolled revealing, after snows and

cruel biting winds, the beautiful bare flesh of her forearms.

Lily with her hard, lean body and bright cornflower-blue eyes.

She rode horses like a man but made love like a woman. In the

privacy of their bedroom, she was soft, her voice gooey enough

to get him to do anything gladly. He was the only one to see this

side of her—not even their son, Christopher, had an inkling. He

was acutely, almost painfully aware of the nature of her gift to

him, but then his love for her ran so deep and strong that the

first moment he had seen her take the stage for an audition at

college he had been struck by a bolt of physical pain that had

nearly felled him.

He was in the theater arts program then, learning the ins and

outs of makeup design. Within a week, he would be painting her

face for the stage, making her look older so that she could better fit the role she had won at the audition. She was a fine actress, even then, raw and untrained, for she had been born with

the mind and the heart to recite lines as if they were her own

thoughts and feelings.

He loved his work. The characters he created were for him

more real than the actors themselves, whom he found vain and

boring. When he was required to simulate blood or wounds he

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found novel ways of execution, for he dreamed of the violence

that had caused these traumas, lived it, imagined it in such vivid

detail that he never failed to win accolades from the faculty directors who over the four years came and went like clockwork.

Applying makeup to Lily was akin to making love to her. He

felt strongly that he was transforming her not only outside but

inside as well. She was, through him, becoming another person,

an unknown quantity. At those times he felt a peculiar form of

intimacy that was transcendent. He felt as if he was killing her,

only to have her splendidly resurrected when she made her appearance on stage.

At first, she hadn’t seemed interested in him, or at least she

had contrived to remain aloof. That was her reputation, he had

learned. More than one of his friends and acquaintances had

counseled him to steer clear of her. Perversely, their warnings had

only served to make him want her more. Desire was like a floodtide inside him, threatening to sweep him away.

“You want me, you may think you want me,” she had said to

him in those early days, “but I know what you want.”

She had startled him, but like everything she said or did, hidden inside the shock of her words was the truth: she had been

interested enough in him to do the research. She did not strike

him as the kind of person to waste her time on things that didn’t

matter to her. He was right. Six months after graduation they

were engaged.

By that time, he had switched from makeup to set design,

wanting to re-create reality in the largest sense possible. He had

become bored by the tiny tasks involved in remaking faces. He

required a bigger canvas for his imagination. In his widely hailed

designs could be detected not only symbols from the playwrights’

work, but for every major character. It was as if he had imagined

each character, carefully hiding the most potent part of him

somewhere in plain sight.

A year after that, they had a June wedding. It was beautiful—

or, rather, Lily was beautiful in her shimmering satin gown with

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ephemeral tulle sleeves. There was, however, a flaw that marred

the perfection. During the reception, he had gone to relieve himself and, upon returning, had seen Lily in close conversation with

his cousin, Will. What enraged him beyond all reason was Will’s

hand rested on Lily’s bare forearm. The white tulle of her sleeve

had been drawn back like the intimate curtain in a boudoir, revealing that which should not be caressed by any outsider. It was

unthinkable.

It took the best man and three of the ushers to wrench him

off his cousin, whose face was by then a bloody pulp. Will

couldn’t even stand on his own, a fact that created a fierce elation in him as he was bound backward across the dance floor.

The band had been playing “We Are Family,” and now they

resumed, the first several bars as shaky as Will.

He stands spread-legged in front of the laboring air conditioner, which he is quite certain has had no Freon in it for years.

At least the air, hot as it is, is moving. Lurid neon colors seep

through the blades of the jalousie despite his best efforts to

smother the outside world. There is a pool in the concrete courtyard below, or at any rate he thinks there is, remembering a blueblack oval he passed upon his arrival several days—or is it

weeks?—ago. He could, he thinks, go down to the courtyard and

fling his sweating body into the water. But perhaps that, too, is

lukewarm like the water out of the faucet and he would sweat

all the more with his exertions. In any case, he knows he will

not take the chance. He is in his bunker now, the final resting

place from which he has challenged his enemies to take him

feetfirst.

Christopher was born six months after the wedding, but he

wasn’t a preemie. No, his birth was dead on time. He was a handsome child, with none of the gnomelike qualities many newborns

exhibit. He had hair as blond as his mother’s and her pink appleblossom cheeks, but he had his father’s musculature and sturdy

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build and, over the years, would grow into a larger, handsomer

version of the man who had made him.

That is how he has always thought of himself in relation to

his son, as if Lily was a mere receptacle for his seed, as if her genes

had played no role in Christopher’s physical or emotional

makeup. Jesus, he hopes that is so.

And yet… He thinks of the day when Christopher found one

of his early stage sets—a marvelous one-eighth size of colored

cardboard, bits of wood and metal he’d done for the last act of

Death of a Salesman
. Christopher was—let’s see—ten or eleven.

The boy had plucked his old dog-eared copy off the shelf in his

den-studio and had called his parents in to witness his performance. He’d played the part of Biff and he wasn’t half-bad. Lily

had encouraged him, of course, and for a while he’d taken acting lessons just as she had. But even then Christopher thought

for himself. The chaos of acting, the publicness of performance

proved too stressful. It was computers that fascinated him; he

loved their precision and logic. For his first real project, he created software to change stage sets so that his father could fashion ever more intricate and complicated interiors and exteriors,

cleverly mimicking reality in ways never before possible.

It was little wonder that this project—an artistic triumph,

though with limited commercial value—led to a closeness with

his son he could never have imagined. It was also the reason, he

was convinced, that Christopher confided in him, rather than in

the male companions his own age.

“They don’t understand me, they don’t have a clue as to who

I am,” Christopher told him one day.

And on others, during long walks, he confessed to his father

his various love affairs. “They’re all doomed, from the start,” he

said, “because even when I’m with them I can see how it’s going

to end, and this throws me into an agony of despair.”

“Then, why don’t you stop?” he had said.

“Because I can’t,” Christopher replied. “The first blush is transporting, there’s no other feeling like it in the world.”

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He had been startled to discover that Christopher kept tokens

of all his affairs—locks of hair, a few beads, an anklet, even the

crushed butt of a cigarette on which was imprinted in pink the

lips of his former beloved. He accepted this fetishism because he

understood it, deeply and completely, but of course he never

told Lily.

And then there was the time when he’d found Christopher

standing at the open window of his room. It was in the dead of

night, when the world was quiet and far away.

“What are you doing?” he asked his son.

“I’m imagining what it would be like to jump.”

“Jump?” he had said, not quite understanding yet.

“Killing myself, Dad.”

He had come to stand by his son’s side. “Why would you want

to do that?”

“Why do you think?”

Once again, he wasn’t alarmed; once again, he understood. He

also felt out of sync with the world, estranged and a stranger,

sometimes even to himself.

He’d put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder and felt as if it

were his own shoulder. “Don’t concern yourself, son. Everything

changes.”

“But it won’t get better.”

“That, no one can say.”

Christopher had nodded and, closing the window, had said,

“Thanks, Dad. Thanks for not lying to me.”

For all its impotence, the air conditioner roars like the jet engines of the plane that brought him here. With the hot stream

lifting the hairs on his forearms and chest, he looks down at his

bare feet and thinks of death. There is nothing else left to think

about, and now he wonders whether there ever was.

When had it become apparent that there was something wrong

with Lily? Even though he has racked his brains for months, he

hasn’t been able to quite pinpoint the moment. Perhaps there was

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no one moment, perhaps, as in all other things in life his wife’s

demise was a death by ten thousand cuts. Because, until the very

end, she had been the consummate actress. He was uniquely

qualified to see her ruse—he who was closest to her, who should

not have been able to be objective because she was his wife and

his beloved. But she was to him a great, intricate clock, whose

every tick, every tock he knew inside and out.

What eventually caught his attention were the tiniest details,

so minute that not even Christopher had been aware of them.

Only he, who was obsessed by her, who fetishized her—only he

knew. But, really, he didn’t know—not at first, anyway. But slowly

the tendrils of suspicion took hold of him and would not let him

go. So he began to pay special attention.

He recalls the time he went into her closet. He always went

into her closet to search on his hands and knees for bits of her—

a stray nail clipping or a strand of pubic hair. Eyelashes he loved