Vanishing Act jw-1 Read online

  The letter came on the seventh day. Jane began to clean the house.

  16

  It was morning, and they sat at the kitchen table trying to keep their eyes from settling on the two suitcases Jane had bought in Brantford.

  Felker broke the silence. "Should we leave some money to pay for all the food and stuff?"

  "No," she said. "There are rules about hospitality. Some time I’ll give Mattie a present."

  "Like you did Wendell?"

  "Yes."

  "I know this is kind of an odd question, but what would happen if we just stayed here? Didn’t go on to another place?"

  "Eventually something would happen. You’d get sick and have to go to a hospital, or maybe the government agent here would notice you and start making quiet inquiries, or you’d get a speeding ticket." She smiled sadly. "We’ve got to get you settled."

  There was a knock on the door. Jane went to open it, and she saw Carlton the Mohawk on the porch. Felker stood up and took their bags out to the truck. They drove to Mattie’s farmhouse, and Jane ran inside.

  Mattie was at her stove, and a soap opera was on the television set. "Hi, Janie," she said. "Leaving us so soon?"

  "Yes."

  Mattie came up and gave her a big hug. Jane could smell chicken feathers and flour and fresh air somehow caught in the big, soft apron during the early morning chores. When she held Jane out at arm’s length to look at her, she said, "You’ve been crying."

  "Don’t be silly."

  "Yes, you have. Not just now, maybe, but at night in the dark." She nodded at the door. "Did he see you cry?"

  Jane shook her head.

  "Smart girl," she said. "Keep it that way. Men don’t like problems they can’t solve. It just makes them mad."

  Jane gave Mattie a kiss on the cheek, handed her Jimmy’s keys, and said, "See you, Mattie."

  Carlton drove them north through Galt and picked up the 401 above it, then rode into Toronto on a stream of thick, fast-moving traffic. As soon as he had made the turn into the airport loop, Carlton said, "What parking lot should I go to?"

  "None of them," said Jane. "Drop us off in front of Air Canada." When he pulled up to the curb, Jane said, "Be good."

  "We’ll miss you," said Carlton.

  As Jane and Felker approached the terminal doors, Jane spoke under her breath. "I’ll do this."

  She paid for the tickets with a credit card that said Janet Foley and specified that the other ticket was for Daniel Foley. She checked their two suitcases and then gave Felker his ticket as they walked across the lobby.

  "Take this," she said. "The gate is 42 and the flight leaves in forty minutes. Go into a men’s room and lock yourself in a cubicle until then. I’ll see you on board."

  "Is that necessary?"

  "Do it," she said. "This is the last place where a sensible person would look for you. Once we’re out of here, they’ve lost you forever."

  He stepped into the first men’s room they came to, and Jane walked on as though she had nothing to do with him. And so I don’t, she thought. She bought a magazine in the gift shop and went to Gate 42. The magazine was just the right size to hold in front of her while she watched for the wrong sort of men to show up at the gate.

  There were a couple of Canadian naval officers traveling in uniform. No matter how resourceful the ones chasing Felker were, they couldn’t have anticipated far enough in advance for the uniforms. There were eight Pakistanis, three African-Americans, nine Chinese. The men she had seen that night had been light-skinned. The most suspicious people were a young couple who appeared to stare around them a lot, but then she saw that they were staring because their two children were being allowed to play on the seats a couple of rows away, supposedly by themselves. Two men appeared who were distinct possibilities, but then they sat down and she saw that one of them had a pair of leather-soled shoes with an imprint on the sole that said Eaton’s. An American trying to look like a Canadian might buy something Canadian to wear, but not shoes. She calmed down. As a bonus, she noticed that on page 127 of the magazine there was a camel coat that an actual living woman might like to wear. She folded the comer of the page and went on with her vigil.

  The airline functionaries arrived at the gate a few minutes before time, set up shop at the desk, and began to make announcements into the microphone, first in English, then in French. After the second one, Felker drifted in. She put down her magazine and scanned the faces. The only ones who stared at him and pretended not to were two teenaged girls by the window who had some sort of hormonal interest in men who looked like him but probably still had an inaccurate idea of why this should be so. There was something to be said for locking them up in convent schools until they knew how to conjugate lots of foreign verbs, she thought.

  The next announcement came, and she felt reassured. "Now boarding." She waited until he was in line so she could watch his back, but she still saw nobody who had any interest in him.

  She sidestepped along the aisle inside the plane, past people stowing things in the overhead compartments and taking off coats, and sat down beside him. When the plane had bumped along up the runway and taken off, he leaned close to her and said, "They have very clean restrooms in Canada."

  "Lucky you," she said.

  "Why Vancouver?"

  "For the next few hours, we eat, sleep, watch a movie, read magazines, whatever. We don’t talk."

  "Not even about Vancouver?"

  "No."

  "Come on. Is there somebody on the plane who doesn’t know where it’s going?"

  She smiled. "Please. Just do what I ask. It’ll be better."

  "Will you make it up to me?"

  "No."

  "How about a neutral topic? Is that where Harry is?"

  "Harry’s not a neutral topic."

  Over the Great Plains she fell asleep. She slept without moving, simply fell into the darkness and stayed there until people started ignoring the pilot’s recitation of the rules about not standing up until the plane had stopped at the terminal.

  Jane opened her eyes to see Felker watching her.

  In the terminal, she hurried him to the baggage area without speaking. She was still watchful, but things had changed. She was no longer expecting to see the four men. Whatever had been chasing Felker hadn’t gotten big enough yet to send hundreds of watchers to all of the major airports on the continent, but soon it might. She just hoped that his boss hadn’t gotten tired of calling his answering machine by now. When he did, Felker could be on the list of people that the F.B.I., Interpol, and lots of local police would be watching for. Accountants who embezzled money from clients traveled.

  When they made it out of the baggage area, she took a deep breath. It was late afternoon here, and the air was damp and fresh and cool. The airport was on an island, clutched between the two arms of the Fraser River, with the Strait of Georgia to the west. The first taxi in line pulled to the curb and the driver got out while the trunk popped open.

  "Going to town?" he asked. He was short and blond and red-faced.

  "Yes," said Jane. "The Westin Hotel."

  The man snatched up the bags and set them in the trunk while Jane and Felker climbed inside. The cab pulled into traffic and took the route north on Granville Street. Jane stared out the window at the city. She liked being in a car, away from the lighted glass enclosure of the terminal.

  When the taxi stopped at the hotel, she handed the driver one of the Canadian twenties she had picked up in Brantford. They let the bellman scoop up their bags and lead them to the front desk.

  "Dr. and Mrs. Wheaton," said Jane, obliterating Janet and Daniel Foley. Everything was little jumps to make breaks in the trail. Never use the same name on the airline ticket and the hotel register. Never miss a chance to mislead.

  "Yes," said the desk clerk, plucking a white card out of a box behind the desk with her long, manicured fingers. "We have your reservation right here."

  Felker signed the card, and the desk clerk hande
d the keys to the bellman, who pushed a tall cart ahead of them with their bags on it, using it like a moving barricade to shield them all the way to the elevator. He opened the door for them and bustled around, switching lights on and off just long enough for Jane to slip Felker some money and for Felker to pass it to the bellman.

  Everything was quick, smooth, and private. That was another part of the method. You used the facilities that had been invented to insulate the people who had a little money from the rough edges and annoyances. The Dr. Wheatons of the world didn’t have to wait for buses or stand in lines. They stepped out of one enclosure into another. For them waiting was irritating. For the John Felkers of the world it was dangerous.

  Felker flopped backward onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. "Now I can ask, can’t I?"

  "Ask what?" Jane crawled onto the bed next to him.

  "Why Vancouver?"

  "We’re here because this is where a man named Lewis Feng is. He’s the best."

  ’’The best what?"

  "He’s the one I sent your pictures to."

  "What’s he doing here?"

  She sat up and looked down at him. ’’The people who need the best American passports and licenses and things aren’t in the United States. They’re on the outside looking in."

  "Who are they?"

  "Right now what’s driving this market is China," she said. ’’There are a lot of rich people in Hong Kong who don’t think it’s going to be a great place to be rich when the British lease runs out. Some are setting up to move to other places, maybe sending a couple of members of the family to establish residency, set up bank accounts, that sort of thing."

  "So why do they need fake papers? A person with serious money can still buy a congressman and get real papers."

  "Some of the richest probably do. A billionaire doesn’t have any trouble getting in anywhere, but then there’s family, retainers, friends, and if you’ve lived through, say, sixty years of Chinese history, you get used to the idea that governments change their minds fast. So a lot of them are hedging their bets, setting up a second place they can run to if the door closes, a second identity if the first one doesn’t hold up. The same thing is happening in Taiwan and Singapore. A lot of people who have made a lot of money in the past twenty years don’t want to bet their lives that China is always going to leave them alone, either."

  "So all of a sudden Vancouver is the best place to get forged American papers?"

  She shook her head. "God, no. Just one of the places. There’s Miami, where you have refugees, drug runners, and prospective revolutionaries, or ones who already tried and blew it. L.A. is the big money-laundering center now, and that means bagmen have to bring it in, and others have to get enough I.D. to do a lot of banking and buying. And New York, just because it’s New York and it’s still the best place to buy anything you want."

  "That’s where we were heading, wasn’t it? New York."

  "Yes. That was before." She didn’t say before what.

  "Why didn’t we just fly there?"

  "This is safer for you."

  "Why?"

  "Because Lew Feng has a very specialized clientele. A lot of them may be gangsters, but if they are, they’re from Shanghai or someplace, not St. Louis. That means they aren’t interested in you and they don’t know anybody else who is. In New York I can’t guarantee that."

  "All right," said Felker. "What do we do now?"

  "I go out and make some more arrangements, buy you some clothes. You’re going to stay here, out of sight."

  "How long?"

  "We meet Lew Feng tomorrow night."

  17

  It was a small shop on a quiet block, the third in a row of seven narrow painted fronts, each with a single door and a small display case full of expensive knitted clothes, ivory carvings, furs, or leather. The sign over the door said WESTMINSTER STATIONERS. When Jane pushed the door open, a small bell attached to a spring on top tinkled for a few, seconds, then rang again when Felker closed it. On all of the shelves were neat displays of boxed stationery, open stocks of vellum and linen, hand-pressed paper of silk threads and cotton, and colored inks and pens for calligraphers, artists, and architects.

  Jane stood still in the middle of the room in front of the video camera so she could be recognized on the monitor, and in a moment Lewis Feng appeared. He was about six feet tall and very slim, dressed in a dark suit and a shirt so white and starched that it seemed to belong on the shelves with the paper. "Hello, Jane," he said.

  "Hi, Lew," she answered.

  "Come in." The way he said it told Felker that this was only an anteroom.

  He led them into an office that looked like a doctor’s consulting room. He went behind his desk while Jane and Felker waited, then opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a key. He used it to open another door, which led into a large workshop with dozens of pieces of equipment, a few of which Felker recognized. There were a light table, an enlarger, engraving machines, even an old-fashioned printing press. Felker understood. A stationer could have an incredible collection of printing equipment and special papers without anybody giving it a thought. Lew Feng noticed that Felker was looking around, and said, "The foundation of our relationship is our mutual lack of curiosity."

  "Of course," said Felker. He glanced at Jane with a wince.

  Feng went to a shelf where there were ream-size packages of paper with the wrappers still on them. He lifted one off the pile, tore it open on a workbench, pulled a piece of paper out, and set it in front of Felker.

  "Here is your birth certificate. The form is genuine. The signature is forged, but the county clerk in question is both real and dead." He paused while Felker glanced at it, then reached into the package again. "Driver’s license. This is genuine. The written examination and driving test were taken, and the license issued. The only thing on it that we’ve added is your photograph. The military discharge papers and the old tax returns are convincing but false. You can use them with anyone but the government. The Social Security card is genuine, but its value is limited. The only way to get one was to have an eighteen-year-old with a second birth certificate in your name apply for it. So you can safely use it and pay taxes into the account, but I’m afraid you would have to wait forty-seven years to collect the benefits."

  "I’ll just have to save my money," Felker said.

  Lewis Feng betrayed no amusement. "I know this doesn’t seem like a big penalty compared to your present problems, but you need to know. If you misuse these documents, you could be ... embarrassed."

  "I understand," he said; "Please, go on."

  "This diploma is a Bachelor of Science from Devonshire-Greenleigh College, a reputable small college in Pennsylvania that ran short of money about eight years ago and closed. We maintain the fiction that there is still a registrar’s office that employers can write to for a transcript, funded by the alumni, so if you need academic records, just write to the address on the envelope."

  Felker picked up the diploma and read, "John David Young."

  Lew Feng said, "Many of our clients are Orientals, so we use Oriental names that don’t attract attention in North America: Young, Lee, Shaw, and so on. Jane specified the first name John, and we had a John Young."

  "Had one?"

  "We had been building one. Jane asked for the deepest kind of cover, and that takes time. The credit cards are real. The car was bought from a dealer in John Young’s name—"

  "Car? I have a car?"

  "It’s the safest way to cross the border."

  Felker looked at Jane, then at Feng. "What is all this going to cost?"

  "We were paid in advance," said Lewis Feng.

  "We’ll talk about it," said Jane.

  Lewis Feng went on. "This is the key to your apartment in Medford, Oregon. It was rented for you by a legitimate apartment-finding service, so nobody is going to be expecting you to look like the person who put down the deposit."

  "This is all safe?" asked Felker.


  "Nobody knows anything except members of my family, and I protect them by making sure they never see the customer or know anything more than a long list of new names we make up. I have to keep some record of the information that we’ve generated so that when you need additional documents, we won’t create inconsistencies. But it’s well hidden and it’s never cross-referenced to your original identity, which I don’t know. As I said, our mutual lack of curiosity is the foundation of our relationship."

  He handed Felker a crisp manila envelope for his papers and keys and held out his hand. Felker shook it numbly. "Good luck in your new life, Mr. Young."

  "Thank you."

  They walked out of the shop in silence, then down the street for two blocks. "This is your car," said Jane. It was a gray Honda Accord, with Oregon license plates, parked by the curb. He stopped to look, but Jane pulled him along. "Leave it. I don’t want them to see it at the hotel."

  He stopped again. "Where did the money come from?"

  "People give me presents. I gave you one."

  "I have my present. I’d be dead if you hadn’t—"

  "Hold on to your cash. You’ll need it until you’re settled."

  She flagged down a taxi, and they got into it. They didn’t speak all the way back to the hotel. When it pulled up in front of the entrance to let them off, she said, "Wait for me." Felker pulled her aside. "What’s going on?"

  "You’re alive," she said. "You’re a new man, with a suitcase full of cash and a new car and a new apartment. You have a fresh start. See if you can do something with it."

  "Let’s talk about this inside."

  Jane shook her head. "I’ve already checked us out of the hotel. The doorman has our bags, and my plane leaves in two hours."

  "You mean it’s over?"

  "This is over. The old John is missing, presumed dead."

  "You know what I mean."

  "Maybe sometime you can get in touch with me, if you live. If I live, I might meet you someplace." She looked up into his eyes, then threw her arms around his neck and hugged him hard. She whispered, "Happy birthday, John Young." Then she walked to the doorman’s cubicle, handed him a receipt and a Canadian bill, and took her suitcase.