“They weren't selling anything? You're sure, right? They asked for me by name, not 'Mr. Halter' or 'the man of the house' or anything like that?”
In one swift sure movement she snaked away from him, sliding over the arm of the couch and spinning to her feet like an acrobat. Her eyes lashed at him. She clenched her fists at her sides. “What do you tell me-for months, what do you tell me? You want me to be Mrs. Halter. Mrs. Halter! And who am I to be now? Mrs. Nobody? Yes?”
He took a step toward her and she backed up against the double doors that gave onto the deck. “Shut it,” he said. “Just shut it. We leave in the morning, first thing. So get this shit”-and here he snatched an armful of clothes from the couch-“in your fucking suitcase and get your fucking suitcase in the fucking car, you hear me?”
“Oh, I hear you,” and she was rubbing her arm now, ““Mister” Martin. If that is even your name. Is that your name? Huh, “Bridger?” Is that your name?”
He had no time for this. “A man and a woman,” two nouns that beat in his head with the force of revelation. They knew what he looked like, knew where he lived. They could be out there now, watching him. He looked past her, through the windows and out beyond the deck where the colors were neutering down toward night and the water had blackened along the gray fading shore. Something released in him then-“he had no time”-just as Madison appeared in the doorway calling “Ma-ma” in a piteous attenuated voice and both of them turned to her. “It's all right,” he heard himself say. “I got the food. It's right here. Right here in the hallway.”
They were sitting at the kitchen table, an interval of peace, lingering, the candles lit, wine poured, the chopsticks at their lips, and Madison, revitalized, telling them the plot of a movie she'd seen about a dog and a cat on a cross-country trek, when the doorbell rang. If he'd allowed his internal motor to idle over dinner-and he didn't care how crazy things got, dinner was sacrosanct, because if you didn't sit down over dinner you weren't even civilized-now it revved suddenly, so suddenly he didn't even know how he'd got through the double doors and out onto the deck, ready to drop down a story into the flower bed below. “I'm not here,” he called to Natalia, slipping a leg over the rail, “you never even heard of me.” And he eased himself down till he was dangling by his arms, then dropped to the ground.
It took all of sixty seconds, legs and arms pumping, and he was around front, letting the fronds and tendrils of the vegetation conceal him. There were two figures on the doorstep-a man and a woman-and Natalia was just opening the door. The man-he was in his twenties, soft-looking, with spiked hair, a two-tone jacket and the oversized black jeans the street punks and club aficionados affected-was the one who spoke up, because the woman (and here it hit him: “Dana Halter,” she was “Dana Halter,” in the flesh) just stood there as if she'd been molded out of wax. And she “was” something to look at. She had Natalia's hair, thick and dark, though it twisted out and away from her scalp and hung loose over the collar of her tan jacket and she was taller, slumping her shoulders awkwardly because this was no fun for her. Somebody had assumed her identity, fucked with her life, and she was slumping her shoulders because she was embarrassed by the whole thing. But not so embarrassed she was about to just give it up and let the credit card companies and the insurance people sort it out. That gave him pause. Who was she? Why was she doing this to him? Was it payback, was that what she wanted? And the guy, Bridger-what was it to him?
“You again?” Natalia's tone was peevish, hard. “I told you. I already told you.”
“Frank Calabrese,” the man said. “Is Frank here?”
“Who?”
He repeated himself. His voice took on a pleading quality. “Look, we've been victims of a crime-or she has.” He pointed to the woman. “My fiancée. She-somebody stole her identity. We're looking for Dana Halter. Or Frank Calabrese. You sure he's not here? Frank?”
From where he was hiding, crouched in the bushes, and he would not go down on one knee and stain a good pair of Hugo Boss twill trousers for nothing, he made sure to take a clean mental snapshot of these two, because they were going to pay for this-he was going to make them pay, both of them-and that was a promise.
The light in the entryway shone weakly, casting a jaundiced glow over the little gathering on the doorstep. Natalia's face hardened. She looked ready to do battle, and that was a good sign-she was on his side, at least, and he felt in that moment that she was going to stay there, no matter what he wound up telling her. “Listen,” she said, her voice gone higher now, pinched and querulous, “there is nobody of this name, no Da-na, no Frank, nobody. This is not the correct house, understand?” A car pulled into the lot-the cream-colored Lexus that belonged to the Atkinsons, in one-eleven-and for a moment he felt his pulse leap as the headlights swept the bushes and then died. “If you come here to this house again,” Natalia was saying, her face a sallow over-laid mask in the rinse of yellow light, “to, to “discommode” me and my daughter, I will call the policeman.”
“Yeah, you do that,” the guy snarled, trying to tough it out, but this was the same voice that had come at him over the phone and it had nothing behind it, nothing at all, and the door slammed and the night went quiet but for the solitary receding footsteps of Rick Atkinson on the gravel walk.
And then the strangest thing: the two figures stayed there on the doorstep a long moment, conferring, but without saying a word. Their hands-they were working their hands like ghostly shrouded puppets, and it took him a moment to understand. They were deaf. Or she was deaf. She was the one who hadn't spoken and so here she was juggling her hands as if she were molding something out of the air and passing it to him and then he juggled it and passed it back. It was so unexpected, so private and intimate, that Peck lost all consciousness of the moment. He felt like a voyeur-he “was” a voyeur-and his rage at what had just taken place cooked down into a sort of wonder as he watched them walk down the steps and up the path to the parking area. He was going to leave it at that-they were going, that was enough, and by morning he'd be gone too and all this would be behind him-but he recovered his wits in time to slip out of the shadows and follow them. Just to see what they would do next.
Somehow they'd traced him to the condo, but what did that mean? He wasn't Dana Halter anymore, he wasn't Frank Calabrese. “Frank Calabrese”-that gave him a chill. How in Christ's name did they get hold of that? But still, even if they called the cops and the cops came-a remote possibility-nothing would happen, or at least not immediately. Where was the proof? He'd deny everything, act bewildered. And then, if he had to, incensed. The cops could see just by looking at him, by the way he was dressed, by the way he held his ground at the door of his three-quarters-of-a-million-dollar luxury condo, that they were out of their league. These two must have known that. But then what were they doing-playing amateur detective? Looking to run him down, confront him, settle this outside the law? For all he knew they could have a gun. Anybody could have a gun, the rangiest no-chin kid on the street, the old lady pushing a shopping cart, housewives, mothers-guns were the currency of society, and he, personally, wanted nothing to do with them, especially not on the receiving end.
The shadows played to him. He stayed out of sight, following the scrape of their shoes on the gravel path, watching their silhouettes bob against the hard fixed umbrella of light opening out of the pole at the far end of the lot. He saw them juggle their hands again when they reached their car-a black Jetta, California plates-and then they were speaking aloud, but he couldn't make out what they were saying, her voice blurred and thumping at the syllables as if she had a blanket over her head, his voice blending with hers in a way that made them both indistinct. After a while, they climbed into the car and the doors slammed with two soft detonations, one on the tail of the other.