Synopsis/Details
A plumber walks into a jewelry store in San Diego, sets a duffel on the glass, and tells the owner exactly which cases hold real stones and which hold paste. He gives him ninety seconds. He tells him to breathe out, not in. He has never shot anybody and would like to keep the streak. He leaves, walks past the plumbing van he arrived in without a glance, and in a bus station restroom he peels his face off at the sink. Underneath is GERARD LUCOMAN, thirty-two, narrow and tired and utterly forgettable — a man whose real face is somehow less convincing than the ones he builds. In a twenty-two-dollar motel room he files an index card into a shoebox with fifty-one others and sets the plumber's face into the ninth slot of a foam-lined case, pressing the eyelids flat with his thumb. Across the mirror, a map of California: sixty pins. Fifty-nine are pins. The last one, in Los Angeles, is a red thumbtack with a circle drawn around it so many times the paper has worn through. In Sacramento, DETECTIVE MARISOL AVILA briefs a task force that has stopped listening. Forty men on the wall — bald, fat, mustached, scrubs, UPS, a wine-stain birthmark — and her sergeant calls it a crew with good discipline. Avila has run crews. Crews leak. Five years, forty scores, and not one human being has ever called to trade something. She doesn't have a better theory. She has a problem with his. In a dead daughter's bedroom in Los Gatos, HAL BREWSTER, seventy-something and forty years in retail jewelry, types the statewide bulletin nobody pays him for. He notices what no cop noticed: real robbers say the ring, the big one. This one says case three. That's what an employee says — or a man who stood in the store on a Tuesday with no intention of buying anything and counted the cases left to right. Gerard's only tether is ODESSA CLAY, seventy-eight, arthritic, a retired creature-effects artist working out of a Burbank garage lined with a hundred life casts. She taught him to build a face when he came to her at fifteen with his father in the ground, and she never asked what for. She suspects. Suspecting is free. The machine holds until Modesto. A mother and a seven-year-old boy are in the store when Gerard walks in. A clerk goes for the panic strip, Gerard's gun comes level with his chest, and the boy says: Mister? Your face is wrong. Gerard lowers the weapon, leaves ninety seconds early with a third of what he came for, and is sick on a motel bathroom floor tearing the old man off his jaw in strips. The walls close from three directions. Avila's analyst points her at medical-grade silicone — it doesn't keep, so he has to buy it forever — and the trail runs to Odessa's garage, where the old woman lies to a detective for the first time in her life and gives herself away with a single pronoun. An unrelated sheriff's raid takes down Gerard's fence, who remembers a fat man in bowling shirts who never sweats, in a hundred and four degrees, not once in five years. And Avila, working the Union Station concourse with a photograph of a duffel bag instead of a face, walks within four feet of Gerard on a bench, gets six steps past, and turns around to a folded newspaper squared to the edge and a seat that isn't cold yet. Broke, fenceless, and rushing, Gerard does a sloppy score in San Bernardino — the first mask that doesn't hold, the first camera he didn't map — and the still that goes up on Avila's wall finally shows the seam at the jaw. Meanwhile Odessa forces the confrontation he's been avoiding: there are forty three stores, he's at forty two, and the forty third is Zelnick. And then what? He has no answer. He never made a card for after. At ZELNICK BROTHERS, eighty years of jewelry district marble, floor manager MIRIAM ORTEGA has been pinning Hal's bulletins to a corkboard for a year and has worked out that it's always a Thursday. She and SAM DELUCA — a security guard on a stool who was a deputy for eighteen months until he stood in a doorway for eight seconds — agree on a code phrase. If she doesn't like someone, she'll ask whether they still have the Bergman piece. She doesn't want an answer. She wants the man behind the mask. Gerard walks in on a Thursday wearing the best face he has ever made: mid-forties, a jeweler's face, kind around the mouth. His father's. He asks for case four. Miriam counts the horseshoe, one two three four, and understands that nobody counts them left to right. She asks Sam about the Bergman piece. And when Gerard asks for Arthur Zelnick and gives the name Manny Lucoman — nobody knows it, that's sort of the entire thing — the old man comes to the mezzanine glass, squints down at a stranger in his store, and doesn't know him. Would not know the real face either. Never knew Manny Lucoman had a son. Gerard steps out from behind the counter — the first unnecessary step in five years — and Sam swings. Sam, kneeling on him, grabs a fistful of hair to hold his head still, and the face comes off in his hand. Avila comes through the door with her weapon up into a tableau she will never stop seeing: a manager kneeling, a guard sitting on the marble holding a human face, and a thin exhausted young man crying on the floor in a spill of other people's diamonds, who looks like nobody. Who looks like anybody. He pleads guilty to all forty-three counts before his public defender can stop him. The only thing he asks for — trading the entire case, forty three jewelry store exhibits, every card and date and fence, with no motion to suppress — is that nobody puts Odessa in a car. Avila asks him why he carried a loaded gun forty-three times and never fired it. Gerard replies, because if I'd carried it empty, it would have been a costume. Gerard sentenced to Thirty years in prison. In the gallery, Odessa lifts one ruined hand. In the hallway afterward she puts her palm flat against his cheek — his own cheek — and says there, that's the one, and tells him she's putting him on the visiting list and bringing the bad coffee he likes. In a prison washroom, at a sheet of scratched steel bolted where a mirror should be, Gerard raises one hand to his hairline and runs his fingers down along his jaw, feeling for a seam that is not there and will not be there for thirty years.
