Sliver Of Truth

I glanced at each picture and saw nothing unusual. I shrugged at him and shook my head. He kept his eyes on me, nodded again toward the photos. “Look closely.”

I looked again. Still nothing.

“Why don’t you just cut the crap,” I suggested, “and tell me what you see.”

He took a black Sharpie from his lapel pocket and circled the figure of a man behind us at the Botanic Garden. He was more like the specter of a man, tall and thin. His face was paper white, little more than a ghostly blur. He wore a long black coat, a dark hat. He leaned on a cane. He seemed to be looking in my direction.

Agent Grace circled another figure behind us in Central Park. Same coat, same cane; this time the man in the picture wore sunglasses. The figure in the photograph was so far away it could have been anyone.

He took the Sharpie again and marked another man in the doorway of Notre-Dame. This time he was caught in profile, more clearly, closer. Something about the shape of his brow, the ridge of his nose caused me to lean in. Something about the slope of his shoulder made my heart flutter.

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“What?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. Those eyes of his were weird, at once sleepy and searing.

“I see what you’re trying to do,” I said.

“What?” he repeated, leaning back. I expected to see smug satisfaction on his face but I didn’t.

“It’s impossible.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

I looked again. They say it’s a person’s carriage that allows you to recognize him across the room or across the street. But I think it’s a person’s aura, the energy that radiates from within. The man in the photograph was greatly dissimilar in physical appearance, perhaps as much as a hundred pounds thinner than the man I remembered. He looked twenty years older. He seemed a damaged, hollowed-out person lacking any of the radiant warmth I’d basked in most of my life. But still there was something familiar about this man. If I had not personally seen his dead body moments before cremation, had I not with my own hands scattered his ashes from the Brooklyn Bridge, you might have been able to convince me that I was looking at the man I’d once known as my uncle Max, who was my biological father. But the fact was I had done all those things. And dead was dead.

“I’ll admit there’s a resemblance,” I said finally, after a brief but intense staring contest.

“We think there’s more than a resemblance.”

I sighed here and leaned back in my chair. “Okay, say you’re right. That would mean that you think Max staged his own death for whatever reason. Why would anyone go to all that trouble just to risk being discovered a couple of years later?”

Agent Grace regarded me for a minute.

“Do you know the number one reason why people in the witness protection program get found by their enemies and wind up dead?”

“Why?” I asked, though I could probably guess.

“Love.”

“Love,” I repeated. That wouldn’t have been my guess.

“They can’t stay away. They can’t help but make that call or show up incognito at a wedding or a funeral.”

I didn’t say anything, and Agent Grace went on. “I’ve seen his apartment. It’s practically a shrine to you. Max Smiley did some terrible things in his life, hurt a lot of people. But if he loved anyone, it was you.”

His words put a crush on my heart and I found I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“I don’t get it. Were you following me? How did you know about these photos? Do you have some kind of relationship with my photo lab?”

He didn’t answer me and I hadn’t really expected him to. I took a last glance at the pictures. That man could have been anyone; could even have been three different men, I decided.

“I don’t know who this is,” I told him. “If it is who you want it to be, then it’s news to me. If you want to talk more, it’ll have to be in the presence of my attorney.”

I clamped my mouth shut then. I knew he could make life hard for me. Since the Patriot Act, federal authorities have more latitude than ever. If they wanted to, they could hold me indefinitely without counsel if they claimed it had something to do with national security. (Which in my case would have been a stretch. But I promise you, stranger things have happened.) I think, though, Agent Grace sensed the truth: I had no idea who the man in those photos might be.

He looked at me hard with those eyes of his. I found myself inspecting the cut of his suit. Not cheap, exactly, but not Armani, either. I saw he had a bit of a five o’clock shadow coming in on his jaw. I noticed that the knuckles on his right hand were broken, not bleeding but raw. He rose suddenly, gave me a look he might have meant to be intimidating, and left without another word.

Shortly afterward, his partner came and told me he’d escort me from the building. He slid the photos on the table into the envelope Agent Grace had left behind. He handed them to me with a cordial smile. “Thank you and come again,” I expected him to say.

“Agent Grace wants you to have these…to look over more carefully.”