Authors: Thomas Perry
“I’ll do my best,” said Jane.
“We know you will,” said Ellen. “Alma said you looked thin. Are you getting enough
to eat?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ve just been getting a lot of exercise.”
“To be honest, she said you looked like a stray cat. Go have lunch. And call me again
when you can.”
“I will.”
Jane heard Ellen Dickerson hang up. She put the receiver back on the hook and walked
over to sit on the steps in front of the museum with Jimmy.
“You look as though you got bad news. Is your husband mad?”
“Yes. He knows this has to be done, but he’s not clear on why I should be the one
to do it, and he worries.” She knew she had made things sound better than they were.
“So what’s wrong?”
“There are men getting themselves arrested and put into the Erie County jail system,
so they’ll be there when you arrive.”
“Are you sure?”
“The story came from some Haudenosaunee boys who were in jail. Rumors go around in
jails quickly because people don’t have much to do, and gossip gives them relief from
thinking about their own problems. It’s always hard to tell what’s true—the place
is full of liars—but I think we should give people time to check this one out. If
it were true, who would these men be—friends or relatives of Nick Bauermeister?”
“I don’t know anything about him, so I don’t have a theory. He was just a nasty drunk,
a bully that I ran into one night.” Jimmy sat for a moment, looking out toward the
city. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“Just stick with me for a while, until it’s safe to go back. I’ll keep you out of
sight until they give us the word.”
Jimmy leaned forward and turned to look into her face. “Janie, last night I asked
you a question, and you brushed me off. You know you can trust me. Whatever you tell
me, I’ll never tell anybody else.”
Jane looked down at her feet for a few seconds, then sighed. “I’m an old friend of
yours, somebody you played with as a kid. And how many of us are there? Maybe ten
thousand Senecas, in five reservations in New York and Ontario, or near them, and
maybe a couple thousand left in Oklahoma and Ohio and Missouri. We’re about the size
of one small town. You and I are probably related to each other in a hundred ways
by now. You can trust me too.”
“I’m not questioning that you care about what happens to me. You’ve already done more
for me than I’ve ever done for anybody. But if you’ll be open with me, it will help.
What’s going on? I got in trouble and ran, and within two days the clan mothers went
straight to you. Last night three men clubbed me to the ground, and you nearly killed
them, but there isn’t a mark on you. Now you tell me how it feels to be in jail, and
say you’ll make me invisible for a while. So who are you?”
She put her hands between her knees, and shrugged. “Right now I’m exactly what I seem
to be—Mrs. Carey McKinnon, the wife of a Buffalo surgeon, who lives a quiet life in
a nice old house in Amherst. But for a long time, maybe fifteen years, I was a guide.”
“What kind of guide?”
“People came to me who had pretty much used up their lives. They had good reason to
believe that they were going to be murdered, and had no way out. I took them to other
places where nobody knew them, made them into new people, and taught them how to be
those new people.”
He stared at her in shock for a few seconds. Finally he said, “How did you get involved
in that?”
“I didn’t exactly get involved. When somebody is in danger and you know how to help
him, you do, that’s all. When I was in college I spent three summers working for a
skip tracer, so I learned how to find people. Then one night I was at a party and
learned a friend of mine was in trouble. When I thought about it, I realized that
I didn’t just know how to find people. I knew how to lose people too. So I helped
him disappear that night. But a number of our friends were at the party too, and knew
what I’d done. A year later, one of them knew somebody else who needed that kind of
help, and brought her to me. Then there were others, and the ones I helped told others.
Pretty soon it was strangers. Over the next fifteen years I invented a lot of people.”
“You were in jail. So I guess you got caught.”
She shook her head. “No. Not for that reason, and not under my name. I just got myself
sent to jail a couple of times because there were women in there that I had to get
to.”
“How did you learn to fight like that?”
“It’s not about fighting. It’s about running. If I’m cornered I fight dirty. Strike
first without warning, use any weapon I have, hurt them as badly as I can, and then
run.”
“There’s more to it than that. You have some kind of training.”
“Years ago, there was a man I had to keep hidden for a very long time—more than eight
months. Every day I taught him and tested him, making him learn to be a new person
and forget the old person’s tastes, habits, and attitudes. You can only do that for
seven or eight hours a day. In return, he spent another seven or eight hours a day
teaching me what he knew—aikido. Over the years, I learned more, and I practice. And
I stay in the best physical condition I can: I do tai chi to maintain my flexibility,
balance, and tone, and I run every day.” She paused, and thought about the long months
of recovery after she was captured. “Unless I’m really sick, and can’t get out of
bed.”
Jimmy said, “The clan mothers knew about all this?”
“I have no idea how they found out—who would have told them, or how long ago it was.
They knew about me in the way they know other secrets. They keep things to themselves
until they decide it’s time not to.”
Jimmy was silent, looking down at the white pavement in front of the steps.
Jane said, “What I’ve told you would get some very nice people, including me, into
terrible trouble—jail for a few of them, death for nearly all of the others—if the
wrong person found out and made the right connections. These are people who had someone
really scary after them at the beginning. They’re okay now, but that kind of trouble
doesn’t ever really go away. It just waits. I’m trusting you with our secret because
your knowing will make it easier for me to help you.”
“I’ll never tell anybody,” he said. “I promise.”
“Then you can be one of my runners.”
“Runners?”
“My clients. What I do is help people stay alive. I don’t help them get revenge, or
bring them justice, or something. I teach them to run and hide. Are you interested
in that?”
“I’ve tried fighting, and that hasn’t worked out too well.”
“Then we’d better get started.”
8
J
ane bought a
Cleveland
Plain Dealer
at a vending machine and then walked with Jimmy to a coffee shop a couple of blocks
up from the lake. She scanned a page of ads. “Here,” she said. “Here’s the kind of
thing we want. ‘Suites by the day, week, or month. One or two bedroom, kitchen-slash-sitting
room.’” She circled the ad with her pencil, then three others. “Any of these in this
column would work. Apartments can require a background investigation, deposits, and
sometimes references. Hotels only require a credit card that isn’t rejected when they
test run it for a hundred bucks to be sure it’s valid. And once you’re there, everybody’s
a stranger.” She turned a page, then another.
“That’s not enough?”
“We’ll also need a car.” She started circling ads again. “It has to be used, for sale
by owner. A person sells his car because he wants to get more than he can get on a
trade-in. He knows he might get a bad check, so what he really wants is cash, and
that’s good for us.” She crossed off a few ads. “No antiques, no convertibles, no
conversation pieces. When you’re doing this, look for low-end models from good manufacturers.
You want the car that nobody remembers, the kind you’d find easy to lose in a parking
lot. You’re not going to try to drive it for a hundred thousand miles. It just has
to run okay, and have some working life left.”
“What about leasing a car, or renting one?”
“Neither option is good for you right now. Rentals are fine if you have a credit card
in another name, need a car for a day or two, and can return it to the same place—or
get someone else to. It’s expensive after a few days, and the company can locate the
car if they feel the need. A lease is a bank loan, and it triggers a credit check.”
“What else do we need?”
“The rest are incidentals. If we get a place to stay and a car, everything else is
easy.”
They caught a cab at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and took it to the most promising
of the extended-stay hotels. Jane rented a two-bedroom suite and came outside to
bring Jimmy in. He walked around in the suite, looked in the bedrooms, and examined
the main room, which was a living room with a one-wall kitchen consisting of a counter,
sink, refrigerator, and stove. “How did you rent it?”
“A credit card.”
“Whose?”
“Mine.” She held it up so he could read it.
“Who’s Diane Kazanian?”
“She’s me. Years ago two women I had helped decided to send me a present. They worked
in the county clerk’s office in Cook County, Illinois. They added fifty birth certificates
to the files there, and sent fifty certified copies to me. They were for men, women,
and children, aged from about five years to seventy. One of them said Diane Kazanian
and was about my age. I used the birth certificate to apply for a driver’s license,
took the tests, and got one. Then I used the license and the birth certificate as
ID to start a small bank account. I bought some magazine subscriptions with checks,
sent away for some things from big stores and paid for them, and then started getting
offers for credit cards. I bought things with the cards, and paid the bills. The address
is a mailbox rental in Chicago, which I pay to forward everything to another one
nearer to home that’s in the name of a corporation I formed. After a few years, Diane
had a good credit record, a passport, a library card, and a few other things.”
“Have you done that a lot?”
“Enough. For about ten years, I’d receive a batch of birth certificates every year.
Most of them I’ve never used. But I keep growing identities, and use them in rotation
so they all stay fresh.”
“I can’t believe you do this stuff,” said Jimmy. “Where did you even learn how?”
“Some of it came from that first summer job skip tracing. I studied the methods that
you can use to follow trails of people who don’t want to be found. If you’re the one
who’s running, you have to understand the risk that each thing you do carries with
it.”
“But aren’t you ever afraid the banks will figure out there’s something wrong with
this new customer and call the police?”
“Banks have the biggest apparatus for detecting fraud, but they’re only interested
in protecting their profits, not enforcing laws. What they want is for you to deposit
money so they can use it, and borrow money, so they can charge you interest. They
sincerely don’t care if you’re an ax murderer. If you are, they don’t want to know
about it, and make an effort not to find out. Go online sometime and look at the list
of banks with branches in the Cayman Islands. There has never been a reason for any
foreigner to put money in the Cayman Islands except to hide it from their home governments.
But every single major bank in the US or Europe that you can name has branches there.
If your bank isn’t on the list, then it’s an error in the list. They’re not there
for the convenience of vacationers withdrawing a little cash for a dinner on the beach.
It’s big-time tax evasion, money laundering, profits from drugs, extortion, embezzling,
kidnapping. Give banks a way to mind their own business, and they will.”
Jimmy said, “Okay, so if I don’t have to worry about banks, who do I have to worry
about?”
“Remember that guy who was chasing us on foot?”
“How could I forget him? Sergeant Isaac Lloyd, New York State police.”
“That’s who you worry about—a dedicated police officer who has reason to believe you’ve
committed a serious crime. This one went after us alone and on foot because he realized
that was the way we were traveling, so it was probably the only way to follow us.
He’s trouble. Anybody like him is trouble.”
“Let’s hope there aren’t any others.”
“Let’s do everything the right way, so he has no trail to follow.”
She stood up and walked across the room to pick up her backpack. “Right now I’m going
to get cleaned up and then leave you alone to do the same while I go out for a while.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find us a car. It’s just like renting this suite. You stay invisible.” Jane disappeared
into the bathroom and in a moment he heard the water running in the shower.
Twenty minutes later, Jane emerged from the bathroom wearing fresh, clean clothes—a
black blouse, a pair of gray pants, and flat shoes—and carrying a small black purse.
Her hair was shiny and clean, and she wore makeup. Jimmy looked up from the television
set. “You still clean up nice.”
“Thank you,” she said. “When I go out the door, lock it. If there’s a knock, don’t
open it. It’ll probably be housekeeping, and all they can want is to turn down the
sheets. We can do that ourselves. Just stay where you are, be nice and quiet, and
don’t talk to anyone. And this may take a while. I have the other key, so don’t worry
about letting me in.” She picked up the newspaper classified ads, took the single
page of used car ads out, folded it, and put it in her purse.
“Okay. Good luck.”
She went downstairs and through the lobby. It was still midafternoon, so she used
a pay phone to call three of the numbers in the car ads to make appointments to see
the cars. As she stepped out of the hotel she looked to her left
and saw that there were three cabs waiting down the drive for passengers, so she raised
her hand and one pulled to the curb to pick her up. She gave the driver the address
of the
first and most likely car for sale, and sat quietly while he drove there.
When she arrived in her cab, she paid the driver and said thanks. She watched him
drive off, and then she went to the door of the house and rang the bell.
The door opened and a young, trim black woman wearing the pants and blouse from a
business suit and an apron stood in the doorway. When she saw Jane she took off the
apron, tossed it onto the table by the door, and came out. “I’ll bet you’re Diane
Kazanian.”
“Yes,” said Jane. They shook hands.
“I’m Tyler Winters.”
“I hope I’m not interrupting dinner.”
“No,” she said. “I just got home from work a little while ago, and I thought I’d get
it into the oven before my husband comes home. I’m free for a while. Ready to see
the car?” She reached onto the table and pressed a remote control unit, so the garage
door rolled upward.
“Sure,” said Jane. As they walked to the garage she said, “Is the car yours?”
“Not exactly,” Tyler Winters said. “It’s my mom’s. I’m just selling it for her.”
Jane smiled. “I thought not. You seem more like the BMW type.”
The woman laughed. “You got me. I have a Three Series, but I’ve been driving mom’s
car for a few days so I could leave it in the company lot with a sign on it. How do
you do that—guess the car?”
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “It’s just a knack I guess.”
“Well, you don’t strike me as the type for a six-year-old Chevy Malibu either.”
“Normally I wouldn’t seek it out,” said Jane. “But right now for work I need a small,
reliable car that doesn’t catch the eye. I don’t want the car somebody would pick
out in a parking lot to rob. I’m in pharmaceutical sales, and it’s much safer not
to drive
that
car.”
“Then I think you’ve come to the right place.” She led Jane to the garage. The Chevy
Malibu was a nondescript gray with cloth seats and the standard interior, but it was
clean and shiny, without any nicks or dents, and the tires looked nearly new. Jane
leaned close to the window. The interior was spotless. She said, “What’s the mileage?”
Tyler handed her the key. “You have to turn it on to read it.”
Jane sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key, then said, “One hundred and two
thousand, two oh three.”
“Would you like to drive it?”
“Love to.”
Jane waited for her to get into the passenger seat, and then tested the headlights
while it was still in the garage and she could see the two bright spots on the garage
wall, backed out, and drove it up the street. “Your mother took great care of it.”
“Yes,” said Tyler. “My husband helped her, but she’s always been careful with things.
This is just like the car I learned to drive on, and she kept that one for twelve
years. We couldn’t talk her into letting us buy her a new one until I volunteered
to sell the old one for her.”
“She drives a hard bargain,” said Jane.
“She sure does. But she’s getting old, and I’d just feel better if she had something
new instead of waiting for some part to go.”
“Your ad said four thousand.”
“I’m willing to bargain a little, but that’s what my husband thinks is fair.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Really?”
“I like it,” said Jane. “And I think your husband is probably right about the price.
Now what? Should we go see your mother to have her sign it over?”
Tyler said, “Uh, this is kind of awkward, but—”
“You want cash?”
“I’m sorry,” Tyler said. “But we don’t know you, and—”
“I brought cash. I assumed nobody wants to take a personal check from somebody who
just arrived in town and answered an ad.”
“Great,” said Tyler. “My mother has already signed the pink slip, and a bill of sale.
I just have to fill in the amount and hand it over. You can take the car right away.”
Ten minutes later, Jane had a car with the appropriate papers, traceable with great
difficulty to a woman named Kazanian, whose last address was in Illinois, but who
had no physical residence on earth. Jane drove her car out onto the street again,
and made a few stops at stores. By the time she returned to the hotel she was very
pleased with her purchases.
When she opened the door of the hotel suite, Jimmy stood and went outside to help
her bring in four grocery bags and a few bags from clothing stores. They loaded the
food into the refrigerator, and then opened the clothing bags.
Jimmy looked at the clothes she had bought him. He held up a sport jacket, and then
looked at a pair of shoes, a pair of dress slacks, and a pile of shirts in their packages.
“Thanks so much. These are really nice, but you know, I don’t usually wear stuff like
this.”
“I can’t think of a better reason to start,” Jane said. “So now you do.”
“Why?”
“For a lot of reasons,” she said. “One I just told you. The people who are searching
for you are looking for a guy who wears T-shirts in the summer, sweat shirts and puffy
jackets in the winter, hoodies in the spring and fall. He goes to places where that’s
what everybody is wearing.”
“I guess that makes sense, sort of.”
“Yes. So now you stay out of those places. You’re a guy who goes to a job every day
and comes home to his wife and kids in the evening. Maybe you’re a lawyer or businessman.
You’re local. That’s important. And when you travel, you dress the way that kind of
guy dresses for travel. Think polo shirts, light sport jackets, khaki pants, walking
shoes.”
“I don’t know if I can carry that off.”
“You’ll learn.”
“Aren’t these clothes kind of expensive?”
“Not as much as you’d expect, but they do look that way. What that accomplishes is
that people who see you will make a series of assumptions, based on very little evidence.
They’ll think you’re financially solvent. You probably don’t steal hubcaps off cars
for a living. You’re probably not physically dangerous. You’re not crazy in any way
that matters to anybody. The police, who are the ones we’re concerned about right
now, are not looking for a man dressed like you. Most of the time they’re only looking
at people dressed the way you used to. And in these clothes you’ll be easily accepted
into the kinds of places where the police aren’t looking anyway.”
“A safe car, a safe place to sleep, clothes that will help us hide. That’s a lot to
accomplish in one shopping trip. Thank you.”
“You’re forgetting the food,” she said. “I did that too. Let’s make some dinner.”