Broker smiled. “May I use your phone?”
“You may not. Now, if you’re through, I have a patient coming in a few minutes.”
Broker wheeled through the storm, looking for the nearest phone booth. Mental note. End his rustic Luddite phase. Buy a cell phone.
The first booth he found was glyphed with gang symbols.
When he got to it, he found the receiver cord cut. Turning, he noticed the grayish brown Ford Ranger pickup, black tinted windows, parked across the street, trailing a plume of exhaust. Did he see it in front of Dr. Nelson’s home?
Broker had to drive a block over, to Grand Avenue, to find a phone outside a 7-Eleven. As he dropped in a quarter, he saw the butternut-colored truck drive by and turn the next corner.
Madge in Grand Marais accepted charges. “Jeff’s got my house key in his office. Have whoever is patrolling north of town stop by my place. There’s a crumpled copy of a phone bill pinned to my bulletin board in the kitchen over the phone. Can’t miss it. Has strawberry jam on it. Have them call me at my motel. I’ll be there for the rest of the day.”
Madge had the motel number. He thanked her and hung up. Then he called J.T. Merryweather. Two minutes later, he stepped from the booth and made the truck, idling half a block down the street, reflecting the confetti swirl of the stormy sky in its opaque windshield.
47
Who was he? Was he Danny yet?
He was in the program, they said; but for a week his jubilee was put on hold. The Marshals Service was skeleton-staffed for Christmas and New Year’s. He had once written a story on Tibetan Buddhists that required some research into the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Tibetans believed that souls lan-guished in a void known as the Bardo zone between incarn-ations. The description fit his current status, somewhere after Tom and before Danny, spending Christmas sequestered in a room in a Ramada Inn, in a bombed-out blue-collar neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
His window overlooked the empty parking lot of a defunct beer factory, the dingy, red brick housing of the departed workforce and the dreary Lake Michigan sky.
His guards changed daily, sometimes twice a day. He started demanding that they show their ID. The phone connected to room service but not to the outside.
“It’s the holidays,” a marshal explained. To compensate, they plied him with all the food and drink he desired. And VCR videos.
On Christmas day, he ordered a porterhouse steak, a fifth of Chivas Regal, and chose three movies. The films were calculated to indulge his current predicament- stories about Witness Protection, or about people who changed their identity.
Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger was a hoot-WITSEC on steroids for the popular culture, which was to say, teen-agers. Tom laughed, drank, turned down the volume on all the gunfire and explosions.
The second movie was appropriate. The Passenger with Jack Nicholson was somber and European. Nicholson played a reporter who escaped his life of quiet desperation by im-pulsively switching identities with a dead gunrunner. But Jack got in over his head and wound up murdered. Bummer, because old Jack hadn’t thought it through, like he-Tom, almost Danny-had. Which figured, Jack’s character was a TV reporter, therefore light in the ass. But the chick, Maria Schneider-the one Brando stuck the butter to, in Last Tango in Paris-looked great in a cotton dress against the background of the African desert.
Lascivious on Scotch, he saved the best for last. One of his all-time favorite movies: Apartment Zero. Another foreign film, natch-had to be, it had character development. This time the protagonist, a mild Buenos Aires landlord, Colin Firth, rented a room to a psychopathic killer-mercenary.
Drawn in by the killer’s dark charm, Firth finally overcame his wimp personality by murdering the psycho and absorbing his scary persona.
That was more like it.
Tipsy, he hit rewind and played the last scene over. Colin Firth, transformed, walked out of the art film cinema he owned, which was showing a James Dean retrospect-ive-James Dean see, a subtle cue there in the background, brooding from the movie posters. Now Firth had exchanged his conservative suit for a leather jacket. Smoked a cigarette.
New hair. Rugged, ballsy, a killer who got away with it. And, yeah-cultivating the look of James Dean.
You know, Tom thought. If you took away the glasses…
He stood, weaving slightly in front of the mirror over the dresser. Took off his glasses, experimented with combing his hair straight back, no part. Danny Storey could look like James Dean. Get contacts, some muscles. Put a dab of gel in his hair.
He poured another drink, rewound the movie, and watched it again.
The holidays ended and Tom checked out of the Bardo Motel. Another blacked-out van was waiting. This one opened in front of the Northwest baggage handlers at the curb of the Milwaukee airport. Two new marshals, in the young, taut, military mold, met him. They introduced themselves as Dennis and Larry. Their job was to escort him to “orientation.”
Dennis and Larry were correct but uncommunicative traveling companions. They said about five words apiece all the way to Richmond, Virginia.
Another hearse was waiting in short-term parking. Tom guessed that his destination was Washington, D.C. In keeping with WITSEC’s clandestine nature, the marshals never flew point to point, they always traveled at a remove.
Tom spent three hours in comfortable isolation. They stopped once at a Holiday station on an interstate exit, to use the bathroom. The marshals parked the van literally three feet from the bathroom door. Tom was out and back in, not seeing more than a slice of bare trees. Cloudy sky. The air was cold, wet, damp. But still some trace of green lingered to the exhausted grass. No snow.
The ride ended in another parking garage. Tom went up another elevator and was admitted to another quiet floor of an office building with unmarked doors and thick carpets.
His escorts unlocked a door and told him to go in and wait. Tom carried his bag into an efficiency apartment appointed with clean, plain furnishings. A sliding door led to a small balcony that faced brick walls on three sides. He heard voices, Spanish vowels slid off Asian tones. Cooking smells hung on the stale enclosed air. People were living all around him. A child yelled, then another.
He was in a warehouse of protected witnesses and their families.
There was a knock on the door. Tom opened it and faced a tall slender prematurely gray man in dark slacks and a light blue button-down shirt. No tie, black loafers. He looked less military than the escorts. He looked tired.
“Tom, my name is John, and I’ll be handling your processing.” He pointed to the telephone next to the bed. “That’s an internal line that rings in my office.”
“So we’re self-contained?” asked Tom.
“Completely. You won’t even see other people going through the process.”
“How long will it take?” asked Tom.
“Not that long for you. In fact, very fast.” John handed Tom a manila folder containing a menu and schedule of daily activities. Most of the regular schedule had been Magic-Markered out on his copy.
“All the testing except routine physical and dental has been waived. And your file is green lighted-which means you’re being processed quicker than anyone I can remember.”
John rubbed his eyes. “Actually, while you were in transit, we came up with a workable plan to reestablish you. Basically, we’re waiting on minimal redocumentation.”
Tom grimaced. “I’ve read about people going years before they get new Social Security cards and birth certificates.”
John wrinkled his nose. “They didn’t deliver Tony Sporta.”
“So how long?”
“Just weeks. Less.”