But now?
I did not see how this venture I had my eye on could go wrong. Whichever way you looked at it, it was a cinch, a cert, a shoo-in.
What actually went wrong was something I could not have foreseen even as the remotest of downside possibilities. A guy in
a key position had a heart attack at the wrong time, unraveling the whole operation.
When that happened, the guy with the heart attack wasn’t the only dead man. The next one was me—or would have been.
Thank you, George, for being there to take care of that problem.
My stroke of genius, if that doesn’t sound too immodest, came next. Since George was carrying my wallet, I was carrying his.
That had been something I’d made sure of as part of our costume change. I opened it and found a couple of hundred dollars.
Desperate though my need for cash was just then, I knew I had to give it away. There would, after all, be plenty more where
that came from. I stopped the cab, got out, and within a few blocks had pressed notes into the grubby hand of every addict
and panhandler I could find.
The next thing I did was lose the credit cards. First of all I cracked and tore them into the smallest fragments I could,
then dropped them down a grating into the sewers of the city.
That done, I began looking for the proper setting in which to stage the next part of my little drama. Within a few minutes
I had found an alley running all along the back of several shops and restaurants. It was dark and narrow and exactly what
I needed. Frankly, it wasn’t the kind of place through which a timorous soul like George would have chosen to take a shortcut,
but when it later became known that he’d been hurrying to keep an appointment with his agent, for which he was obviously late,
his uncharacteristic boldness would make sense.
I slipped into the shadows, carefully picking my way past garbage pails and bulging black plastic bags. When I was certain
that I was unobserved, I threw away George’s wallet, which would later be found minus cash and credit cards.
The next part was the hardest. The first thing I had to do was make a mess of my clothes, tearing and dirtying them up to
look like I’d been in a fight, rolling on the ground getting kicked and beaten. The next thing—and this was the bit that I
say with no false modesty took the balls—was kneeling and smashing my head on the stones until I was streaming blood and,
frankly, suffering a good deal of pain. Once I’d taken as much as I could without risking a real concussion and marginal brain
damage, I began crawling slowly and painfully toward the light at the far end of the alley.
True to form, the good citizens of New York stepped around and over me without a second glance for several minutes, assuming
I was just another drunk and best ignored. I don’t know which self-appointed Samaritan first noticed that my clothes were
too good for a bum, and that the injuries to my head needed attention. By the time the cops and ambulance arrived I was, to
be honest, only half-conscious. I was lifted onto a stretcher and rushed with siren blaring through the city. After that I
remember being wheeled beneath a long, long ceiling with strip lighting and heating pipes that seemed to wiggle as they flashed
by. I was taken into what I supposed must be an emergency treatment room, where I was injected, stitched up, and finally put
to bed. After that, I enjoyed the finest sleep of my life.
When I awoke, bright morning sunlight filled the ward I was in. There must have been twenty or thirty beds, all occupied.
I found I was bandaged and hooked up to some kind of IV drip. At least I was relieved to discover that the battering I’d given
myself hadn’t landed me in intensive care.
A nurse entered. She was very young and had a sweet, rather hesitant smile.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. “You should have quite a headache.”
“Yes, I do,” I said, sounding feebler than I actually felt, “a bad one.”
“We’ll give you something in a while. The doctor wants to see you first.”
I looked about me as though only just becoming aware of my surroundings, and called to mind a scene that my old man had played
in a corny fifties movie called
Spring in Piccadilly
. But I’d liked this scene when I saw it on TV one time.
“Where am I?” I said, just the way he had. “What happened? What am I doing here?”
“You’re in the city hospital,” she said. “The police said you were attacked and robbed. The first thing we need to know is
your name.”
That was perfect. Almost exactly like the movie. I let a few seconds elapse, maintaining the expression of someone about to
answer willingly, then replacing it with one of growing alarm as I realized the truth of my predicament.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember.”
I
had read up on the subject and knew that psychological trauma was the whiplash of neurology: It was practically impossible,
in the absence of actual brain damage, either to prove or disprove the psychological effects of injuries to the head.
Once or twice I detected a hint of suspicion behind some of the questions asked by my doctors as the days went by. “Well,
it is rather unusual, Mr. Daly, for memory loss to persist so long after such relatively superficial injuries, but I’m sure
we shall see an improvement soon.”
As for “superficial,” let
him
try doing what I had. Certainly for most people the stitches and bruising were enough. Nobody questioned my sporadic attacks
of amnesia.
In fact there was an improvement in my condition: The more I learned of George’s life, the more my memory “returned.” But
all gaps and even outright blunders could still be covered by a sudden relapse. I developed a technique of using it almost
as a stutter, as though not my tongue became tied but my brain, and I found myself suddenly on the brink of a gaping hole
in my train of thought. More often than not I could use it as a prompt for somebody to fill in whatever was missing.
One of the first things I had to master when I was allowed home after two days was George’s handwriting. I checked through
his papers, in particular his notebooks, which were all handwritten. Amazingly, the difference between his script and my own
was virtually nil. But then, I reflected, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that identical twins should have similar styles.
At least it was one less thing to worry about.
The trickiest part of the whole deception, I had anticipated, would be the marriage. I had mapped out a strategy to tease
out of his wife, Sara, the habits, preferences, and protocols of their most intimate life together, especially their sexual
relationship.
But this marriage, I quickly discovered, was not all it seemed to the outside world.
I raised no objection when I found, on my return from the hospital after the weekend, that Sara had moved me into one of the
guest rooms. As I was still convalescing, I chose to see it as considerate on her part. But after a couple of days, as my
strength returned and I suggested a return to the marital bed, I sensed an evasiveness. When eventually I got right to the
point and tried to make love to her, she became upset.
“No, George,” she said, “please don’t. Please.”
“What’s wrong?”
She looked at me with a pained expression. “How can you ask that?”
“I can ask it,” I said, letting her see that I was starting to get annoyed, “because I would like an answer.”
“George, we discussed it all. We agreed.”
“When?”
“Last week, before I left for Philadelphia.”
I must have looked blank. I had my amnesia as an excuse, of course, but her reply had still caught me off guard.
“Are you telling me,” she asked, reading my expression, “that you really don’t remember?”
“Yes. I mean no, I don’t remember.”
She turned away and cupped her hands over her face. After a while she said, very quietly, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make
any difference.”
“Perhaps I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Yes, of course, you’re right. I’m sorry.” She turned to look at me again, almost pleadingly this time. “But not now. Please,
George, just not now.”
There was a kind of exhaustion in her face, as though the prospect of talking yet again about whatever problems—sexual or
otherwise—afflicted her and George’s marriage had completely drained her of all energy.
I reflected for a moment, and realized this was something I could make play in my favor. Allowing this distance, whatever
its cause, to remain between us meant one less chance of making a bad mistake. Of course, there was always the possibility
that she would get over whatever was bothering her in the next day or two and “come around,” which meant I must keep my amnesia
symptoms ticking over to cover whatever holes still remained. But by then I should have a far better sense of the overall
landscape of George’s life than I had at that moment. So I shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever you want. We’ll talk when you’re ready.”
Meeting George’s friends and social acquaintances was easier than I’d anticipated. There was widespread sympathy for me as
the victim of a brutal attack. My wallet had been found, as I hoped it would be, minus cash and credit cards, painting the
picture exactly as I’d wanted it.
Fitting into the role that people expected of me socially was helped by the fact that they largely defined it for me through
their own attitudes and manners. It was easy to see that dear old George had not been a dominant personality. Mostly all I
had to do was coast along and smile from time to time.
Sara and I attended a couple of social occasions that week. There were always photographers around and I began to worry about
the risk of getting my picture in the social columns, which hardly seemed like a smart move for a man who was trying to disappear.
Then I reminded myself that as far as the people who had wanted me dead were concerned, I
had
disappeared. In the unlikely event of their picking up some glossy publication and seeing a photograph of the Manhattan socialite
and art dealer Sara Daly with her writer husband, George, all they would see was a coincidental resemblance to the man they
had murdered. The most cursory of checks would establish that George Daly had been George Daly all his life. I felt so confident
of this that, even if I’d had to face people who claimed that I was Larry Hart, I knew I could have pulled off the bluff.
After all, everybody knows that coincidences happen. And many people believe that everybody has a double somewhere in the
world.
As soon as I felt I could do so without arousing suspicion, I began casually taking stock of “my” overall financial situation.
I was canny enough about money to be able to piece together the details I found among George’s personal papers, of which there
were relatively few. His earnings from writing, I discovered, were far from enough to live on in the style he had enjoyed.
He had some investments, a few government bonds and some gilt-edged stock—but not amounting to anything substantial.
I saw that a modest sum was paid each month into a personal account from a source that took me a couple of days to track down.
It turned out to be a trust fund set up by his evidently very wealthy wife. The income was apparently enough to provide for
George’s modest needs—but not by a long way for mine.
Worse, I came across a copy of a prenuptial agreement drawn up by her lawyers. It appeared that George had committed himself,
in the event of divorce—“for whatever reason,” I noted—to making no claims either on her inherited wealth or on the thriving
gallery she had created. Should we divorce “for whatever reason,” my settlement was prearranged at a level that might conceivably
have kept George from starvation for the rest of his life, but would have barely covered my expenses for a year.
I couldn’t make out whether George’s willingness to accept a marriage on such terms was proof of a man so besotted by love
that he was blind to any shred of self-interest, or so defeated by life as to be grateful for whatever crumb of security his
rich wife might throw him.
The last will and testament, however, turned out to be another matter. I found copies of both his and hers at the back of
his filing cabinet. George’s was a straightforward affair mentioning two nieces, none of whom were going to get rich on the
worldly goods he had to bestow—unless, I discovered, looking at Sara’s will, she died first. The picture here was very different
from the one enshrined in that wretched prenuptial agreement. In the event of her death, I inherited the apartment in Manhattan,
though not the estate in the Berkshires, which I had yet to see and which was entailed to her family. However, I received
everything else that was not specifically willed elsewhere. I went down the list of bequests, which were substantial, but
I calculated that I stood to inherit an investment portfolio worth many millions of dollars.
What I needed to know now was whether this was the current will, or whether it had been superseded by a more recent version.
A couple of codicils in it concerning one of her cousins’ children and someone who worked in the gallery were dated only six
months earlier, so there was every reason to believe that this was still the one in force.
It gave me food for thought.
I got a call from George’s agent, Lou, and he took me to lunch at some dreary place in Little Italy. I had to ask him to remind
me of the address owing to my temporary amnesia. I caught him looking at me oddly once or twice in the course of lunch, but
then his glance went to the still-visible scars on my head, where the stitches had just been removed. He found my state of
mind curious, I concluded, but understandable.
“What about the book?” he said. “When d’you think you’ll finish?”
George had told me, of course, about his “synchronicity” project, and before meeting with Lou I had glanced through his notes
in longhand and on his computer. They struck me as nothing but a collection of loose ends and half-baked theories that I had
no idea what to do with. Besides, I’d seen how little money his books earned. I’d even gone into a couple of shops and tried
to buy one; they’d never heard of him. I suspected that George’s life as a writer was on the same level as his role as a husband-cum-household
pet. Lou, and behind him the publisher whom I never even bothered to meet and who showed absolutely no interest in meeting
me, were quite obviously carrying him. I could only believe that their reasons for this were the financial and social clout
of George’s—and now my—wife, Sara. The only question that left me with was: What the hell was she doing with a man like George?