Page 92

92

When he was on East Houston Street, he called Tatyana, wondering if she was out taking pictures. She picked up on the second ring. “Hi,” she said.

“Anything going on?” he asked.

“Going on?” she said lightly. “What do you mean?”

“Are you at home?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Are you there alone or . . . ?”

“Just me and little Pushok,” she said. “Why?”

“We’ll talk when I get back from work,” he said.

“But . . . Zhenya Frost called me to ask where you were. He said you didn’t come in.”

“I had some errands to run,” he said. “I’m on my way back into the office now.”

He was lying to her.

But at least he had a plan.

*

The idea had come to him a few weeks before, on one of his visits to his uncle’s long-term care facility in New Rochelle.

The head nurse there was named Sheila Drake. She was a large woman with a great mane of auburn hair, in her thirties. Sheila was loquacious and not very discreet. She loved to talk about the son of a celebrity who was being taken care of here. She also often mentioned the young man who had been in a coma for nearly five years. She seemed to think that the more exotic her patients, the more qualified the nursing home.

“The young guy in a coma—what happened to him?” Paul asked.

“He was in a cycling accident and landed on his head.”

“Five years ago?”

She nodded. “Hasn’t spoken since. Hasn’t opened his eyes. It’s tragic. He’s spent the end of his twenties in a coma. In a vegetative state.”

Paul shook his head. “What a nightmare.”

Even as he was speaking to his uncle, he was thinking about the young man in the coma. Does someone in a coma have dreams? Do they have nightmares? What did it mean, really, to be in a vegetative state? Did you not have thoughts?

He stopped for a moment outside the coma guy’s room, next to Uncle Thomas’s, and suddenly realized what he might be able to do.

*

Paul had noticed that the files on the patients were kept in black horizontal file cabinets against the wall behind the nurses’ station. He’d also noticed that Nurse Sheila took her lunch break at 1:30 every afternoon.

On what would turn out to be his final visit to Uncle Thomas, he showed up at 1:30 and found the nurses’ station unattended. The other two nurses were on their rounds. Looking from side to side, making sure no employee was in sight, he slipped behind the counter, found the right drawer, and pulled it open. Quickly, he found the folder tab labeled “ANDERSON, Grant.”

Inside, he found what he needed right away: the man’s Social Security number and most recent home address. He snapped a picture with his phone and then closed the drawer and was out of there before anyone appeared.

Grant Anderson was three years younger than him, which was close enough in age. That meant that Paul could borrow Grant’s identity. After all, Grant wasn’t using it. Taking—stealing—someone’s identity turned out to be the easiest way to start a new life in the twenty-first century.

He rented a mailbox at a UPS Store on East Fifty-First Street. Using Grant Anderson’s Social Security number and this new address, he was able to get a new Social Security card and a birth certificate, both sent to his UPS mailbox. It took about three weeks.

When the time was right, and if necessary, he was ready to become Grant Anderson.