“But…” Shannon stopped. “How? Why?”
“Schneider makes terrific IDs,” Cooper said, shifting the heavy duffel bag from one shoulder to the other. “He specializes in abnorms who want to live as normals. High risk, but big money. Those who can’t pay work it off.”
“Making cheap clothes.”
“Making cheap copies of expensive clothes.” Cooper nodded to a woman three desks down. Hair the color of cigarette smoke was pinned in a rough knot at the back of her head. She wore odd glasses, like two jeweler’s loupes mounted in granny frames. As they watched, she slid a shirt from a basket on her left side, laid it across her table, kept one hand moving to dip into a cardboard box for an embroidered logo half an inch across, which she placed precisely and then affixed with swift, measured stitches before sliding the shirt into a basket on her right side and reaching back to take another from the basket on her left. The whole process took maybe twenty seconds.
“Is that the Lucy Veronica logo?”
“Beats me.” He started moving again, and she followed.
“So how long does it take to pay for a new identity?”
“A couple of years. They need regular jobs to make a living. They’re nurses and plumbers and chefs.” He paused at the end of a row, looked both ways, moved on. “It’s only after they finish that they come here, work six or eight hours off their debt.”
“You’re saying they’re slaves.”
“More like indentured servants, but you’ve got the idea.” He glanced down the aisle and saw Schneider talking to a dark-skinned guy twice his weight. “This way.” No one paid them any attention. Part of the ethos of the place; no one here wanted to be acknowledged. After all, that’s what they’re working toward. Brilliants going blind over menial labor, stitching knockoff clothing so they can earn the right to masquerade as normal.
Max Schneider was a scarecrow, six and a half feet tall and cadaverously thin. His watch was expensive but his teeth were a wreck. Cooper figured that for a choice, believed the forger found an advantage in the discomfort it caused other people. Or maybe he just didn’t give a damn.
The worker he was talking to was big, fat layered over muscles. His skin was Caribbean black, but Cooper read the tension in him as crackling waves of sickly yellow. “But it’s not my fault.”
“You introduced the guy,” Schneider said. “He was your friend.”
“No, I told you, just a guy I met. I told you that when I brought him here, I said I didn’t know him, you asked if I was vouching for him, I said no.”
Schneider waved his hand in front of his nose like he was clearing away a smell. “And now he gets in a bar fight, gets arrested? What if he talks about me?”
“I didn’t vouch for him.”
“I should just cut you loose. End our arrangement.”
“But I’ve only got three weeks left.”
“No,” the forger said. “You’ve got six months left.”
It took a moment to hit, then the man’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared, his pulse jumped quicker in his carotid. “We had a deal.”
Schneider shrugged. If he was cowed by the size or fury of his employee, he didn’t show it. To Cooper, he looked like a man completely in charge, a man who could take or leave the world. “Six months.” He turned and started away.
“I didn’t vouch for him,” the man repeated.
The forger spun back. “Say that again.”
“What?”
“Say that again. Say it.” Schneider smiled with stained teeth.
For a moment Cooper could see the guy was thinking about it, that he was thinking about saying it and then grabbing Schneider by the neck and squeezing, crushing his strong fingers together. He saw the weight of a thousand injustices bearing down on the abnorm, and the urge to throw them all off at once, to surrender to the momentary pleasure of pretending there was no future.