The Face-Changers (32 page)

There was bright morning sunlight glinting off the chrome and mirrors of the cars ahead when Jane opened her eyes and sat up.

“You’re awake,” the woman announced.

“How’s it going?” asked Jane.

“It’s about fifty miles to Sioux Falls. If I don’t see a ladies’

room in a couple of minutes, I’m going to die.” Jane leaned closer to look at the fuel gauge. “Pull off at the next exit. We’ll get some gas and use the rest room. We’ll find a place to eat breakfast.”

“There’s nothing around here but these tiny little towns.”

“Good,” said Jane. “Everything we want will be close together.”

They pulled onto a two-lane highway that had obviously been superseded by the interstate. A hundred yards farther on, they found a little business district dominated by a single blinking stoplight hanging across the intersection. Jane got out to fill the gas tank while the woman disappeared into the ladies’ room. Then they parked across the street in front of a diner that called itself a “family restaurant.” As they ate in the little diner, Jane reflected on what she had just learned. The woman had never spent time in small towns. She didn’t know how they worked, or even what was in them. People in small towns needed all of the services that people in big cities needed – a store or two, a gas station, some kind of restaurant.

Jane studied her as the local people talked in cheerful tones at the counter. Sometimes they included someone who came in the door, or others who were at tables. The woman ate with her eyes down in a kind of embarrassment at the discovery mat people in the diner talked to each other from table to table.

When a girl of about twenty got up and walked around, then picked up a newspaper that had been left at an empty table and scanned the headlines before she went off to work, it seemed to strike her as tragic – as though the girl had been scavenging scraps from a plate.

There was no question that she had lived her whole life in big cities. People who had not come in the door together must be strangers, and strangers should avoid and ignore each other.

Making eye contact was not only a breach of propriety, it was dangerous. Raising your voice across a room to talk to a stranger was something city people did when they had gone crazy enough to stop keeping themselves clean. Jane decided to get her outside before she got too uncomfortable. She paid the bill in cash and left an unmemorable tip.

When they were in the car again, she told the woman, “If you want to sleep, it’s your turn.” Jane was reasonably confident that the sun would keep her from getting much rest.

“Not yet. I guess I shouldn’t have had coffee.” Jane drove back out onto the highway. She said nothing as she drove, until she could feel that the silence was making the woman as uncomfortable as the talk in the diner had. That was another sign of a person who had always lived in cities. If you weren’t a stranger, you had to fill up all the time with talk.

“Are we going to drive all the way to Los Angeles?” the woman asked.

“I think so,” said Jane. She had known the woman had planned to fly to Los Angeles, but she had not known whether she had been intending to fly on to some other destination. L.

A. must be where she was going to live. “The safest way to lose yourself is in a car. It’s anonymous.” She looked ahead at the road. “When they call me in, it means they think it’s time to take precautions.”

“Do you have a gun?”

Jane looked at her in surprise. “I have several.”

“I mean now.”

Jane said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t conceive of a way that having two pounds of metal strapped to me would help me accomplish what I’m trying to do now. It doesn’t make me drive faster or keep your face from being recognized.”

“It would be safer.”

Jane sighed. “I’m sorry, but I was called into this at the last minute to pluck you out of an airport. I don’t know anything about you except the name they gave you, and nothing about the kind of trouble you were in. Do people shoot at you?”

“Oh,” said the woman. She looked disappointed. “That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Why you let me drive. That’s what got me here. I caused a terrible accident.”

Jane nodded sagely, as though that made sense: hit and run? “How did that happen?”

“It was so stupid. I can remember the whole thing exactly, every detail – what I was feeling and thinking.” Jane shrugged. “So tell me. It’s a long way to California.”

“Well, I lived in Baltimore and worked in Washington. I had only been in my job for about four months.”

“Wait,” said Jane. “Back up. Why did you live so far away?”

“That was another mistake. It’s as though every decision I ever made was leading up to this. My first job out of college was in Baltimore.”

“Doing what?”

“I was an investment specialist for a mutual fund.”

“And when you got another job you didn’t want to move.”

“Right,” said the woman. “But there’s more to it than that. I worked for this mutual fund in Baltimore. I did fine for four years. I worked hard, made solid investments. One day I put a big bet on Wonderfair Drugs. I had researched it. The price-earnings ratio was great, they were positioned in good areas, they had a big enough market share, they had spectacular young management.”

Jane noted that the woman was one of the ones Sid Freeman had described. Jane could tell she was bright, ambitious, and probably very professional: Sid must have hated her.

“One thing that attracted me to Wonderfair was that the biggest shareholders were two British companies that I knew about – very conservative, very solid, very smart. One was a marine insurance company, the other an oil and chemical company. Together they controlled about forty percent. If they wanted a piece of Wonderfair, so did I.”

“Sounds reasonable,” said Jane. She knew she was about to hear why it wasn’t.

“One night – it was day there – a tanker sank in the Indian Ocean. The oil company was on the hook for a billion dollars’

worth of oil and a billion-dollar ship. The insurance company had to cover both. But there were other problems. The ship was grossly off course in clear weather, so it looked like a sure bet for lawsuits, enormous fines, and maybe having their other ships temporarily barred from some of the European ports where they delivered. They had big contracts with other companies and a couple of governments to deliver specific amounts on specific dates. That turned small trouble into big trouble. They knew instantly that they weren’t going to be able to perform. They didn’t have the reserves. It’s still not clear to me how much of this loss was going to get covered by the insurance company, but it doesn’t matter, because they acted together.”

“Who acted together?”

“The second the market opened, both companies dumped Wonderfair. It was nearly ten o’clock before we knew where the shares had to be coming from. At about four the news about the ship came out, and I began to piece it together. They were converting to cash. The excuse was that they had to hedge against their losses. What they were really doing was jumping on the opportunity to increase equity.”

“I’m afraid I don’t get it.”

“That’s not a surprise,” she said. “I didn’t either. The oil company was a terrific business. The marine insurance company was a terrific business. But the minute the word got out, their stock was going to drop. The way these things work, the stock nosedives on the headline. Then, after a few days, people realize that the disaster is not going to be that big a deal, and it goes halfway up again. Three weeks after that, it’s business as usual. They knew their own stock was going way down. So when it did, they bought back all they could get their hands on. The money they used was the money from their stock in Wonderfair Drugs.”

“What happened to them?”

“Not only did they pick up a huge block of their own stock at a disaster sale, but all the buying was enough to start the move back upward in the price. They were rich, and they got richer.”

“No,” said Jane. “I meant Wonderfair Drugs.”

“Their stock tanked. The company lost a quarter of its value in an hour, fifty percent in a day. For a while people thought that if the smart money was leaving, so should they.

After a month or two, people realized nothing was wrong.

Wonderfair became an ideal takeover target, so they got gobbled up by a competitor that was actually a weaker company. But that was later. I lost my job that day.”

“Just like that? One catastrophe?”

“It’s a tough business. The timing was bad for me, because they happened to be looking for somebody to fire.” Jane said, “What did you do then?”

“Looked for a job, of course. It took ten months. I got really good at telling that story. Every time I had an interview, the person would say, ‘Why did you leave the Gray Fund?’ so I would tell it. Then I would say, ‘You know, I learned a lot from that series of transactions.’”

“Was it true?”

She laughed. “No.” Then she said, “Or maybe it was. I learned that just about anything can happen. Which is good, because it has.”

“I take it that the place where you found a job after ten months was Washington.”

“Yes,” she said. “I didn’t dare move until I was sure it would last. It was a good job, doing essentially the kind of investment analysis I was trained for. But I had trouble getting to know people, trouble feeling secure, trouble getting myself to concentrate. Maybe it was my fault. I guess I was still trying to get over my last experience, maybe holding something back because I had committed myself completely the last time and gotten burned. But the people at the investment bank didn’t exactly extend a warm welcome, and everything was sort of…

tentative. At first, anyway.”

“But things changed?”

“A few months later, when I was just about over my jitters, I made a big score. I picked a winner. It came just as completely out of nowhere as the one that got me fired. I saw a pair of companies in one business. They both made a component for compact ultrasound imaging systems. They sold to military suppliers, companies that made medical equipment – just about anything where you need to see through something solid. One company held the patent, and one licensed it. I was assuming I’d invest with the company that invented it and held the patent. But when I went to talk to their management, I sensed problems. The CEO was the inventor, and all his company did was make that one component. He was an egotist, and he seemed to be enjoying his wealth just a little too much: his clothes, his car, his office, his plane. The other company was dependent on the ultrasound business, but you could tell they wouldn’t always be. They were hungry and serious, developing products of their own. So I gambled on them. A month later, the news comes out that the inventor has been bleeding his own company. It’s insolvent.

Presto. Suddenly there’s one company making the component.

The stock I bought tripled.”

“So you were a hero.”

“I was a hero,” she repeated. “And I no more deserved it this time than I had deserved to be fired the last time.” She smiled. “People at the bank suddenly noticed me. I think that they had been trying to keep from being friends because they knew they might have to fire me, and it would be painful. But now I was in the club. No, that’s not right. I was being invited into it. The one who did the inviting was my boss.”

“Who was she?”

“Not a she. A he. That was part of the problem. He was a single man about five years older than I was. He was nice-looking, and he was just about the only one who had ever talked to me before any of this.”

“You had a crush on him.”

She nodded. “A big one. He asked me to dinner at the Hay-Adams Hotel for a Friday-night celebration of my victory.

That was Tuesday. I got all agitated thinking about it, bought a dress, took it back, bought another one. Some of the time I was nervous because I was so happy, and some of the time I was nervous because I was dreading some sexual-harassment thing: I mean, there are nice restaurants that aren’t in hotels. I would think, ‘Well, okay. Suppose he does try to talk me into something? If it’s got nothing to do with my job, then he’s just a single guy talking to a single girl.’ Then I’d think, ‘But how can it not have to do with my job? He’s my boss.’ You get the picture. By the time we left for the restaurant, I was thoroughly confused. I was listening to every word as though I were a prosecutor.”

“Did he say anything you objected to?”

“No,” she said with a sad little laugh. “I think that he actually had something in mind. But he sensed that I was bracing for it, so he didn’t. If only he had, and I had said yes, I wouldn’t be here. I’d still be me, only I’d actually have a life.”

“I’m not sure I get it. That caused the accident?”

“We had dinner at this beautiful, romantic restaurant. I was so uncomfortable and crazy by then that I gulped down a martini before we got to the table and half a bottle of wine with dinner. That wasn’t a problem for him, but I was tipsy. I was also beginning to feel desperate and weepy, because even though I’d had more to drink than I was used to, everything was clear. I liked him a lot, and I’d had a great chance alone with him, and blown it completely. I tried to prolong the dinner to start all over again and pull it out. All I could think of was after-dinner brandy. Things just got worse. I was dumb and tongue-tied, and by then he was tired of thinking of bright, cheerful things to say. He took me back to the office, where my car was parked, waited until I was inside with the doors locked and the engine running, and left.” Jane felt sorry for her, partly because she wasn’t blaming it on somebody else, and partly because she had been foolish as the manipulators and opportunists never were. “What did you do?”

“I cried. Then I opened the windows wide and started to drive. I missed my turn for the 295 parkway. I made a U-turn and came back looking for the sign for the entrance, didn’t see the light change, and crashed into another car.” She was wide-eyed, then jumped when she said it, as though she were feeling the shock again in her body. “It was so loud. On TV there’s a kind of crunch sound, but it’s really a bang. After that there was glass breaking and tires squealing sideways on the pavement. It was awful. I was hurt and bleeding and drunk. I was outside of the car, but I didn’t remember standing up and opening the door and all that. The windshield of the other car was gone and the man was lying on the street. He wasn’t dead, but he looked horrible. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I ran to a phone booth and dialed 911. When they answered I didn’t know the name of the cross street. I had to run a block back down there and look. But when I got there, the police car was there already. Suddenly I’m blowing into a tube, then I’m in handcuffs, and then I’m in jail.”