Authors: Donald Hamilton
“Tell me again.”
“Well, all right, although it seems a little…” She checked herself, and drew a long breath, and recited: “I work for the Malaspina Lumber Company, in their Vancouver office. I’m a public relations girl, I guess you’d say. You were doing an article on the lumber industry and I was assigned to help you. For instance, I arranged for a company helicopter to take you where you wanted to go back in the bush. Things like that.”
“But it wasn’t a helicopter I used this last time out.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “That was a float plane, a DeHavilland Beaver, I believe, that you’d hired down by the waterfront. It’s a safe guess; everybody flies them. The outfit is called North-Air. The pilot’s name was Walters, Herbert Walters. You’d flown with him before. I was in the East, visiting our Toronto office. I didn’t even know you’d been through Vancouver until I got back and found a message saying that you’d called and would call again on your way south… Only you didn’t. The next thing I knew, you’d been picked up way up there by Queen Charlotte Islands.”
“And you don’t have any idea what I was working on?”
She shook her head. “Nobody does, darling. You didn’t mention it to anybody at North-Air, apparently, unless you told Walters after you were airborne. All they know is that you wanted to be taken to a small lake you’d visited before, pretty well inland. They have no idea how you came to be floating around in the ocean over a hundred miles to the north and west.”
I grimaced. “I’m afraid the investigators from that Ministry, whatever it was—”
“The Ministry of Transport, or MOT as we call it. They look into all aircraft accidents.”
“Sure. The Ministry of Transport. Well, somehow I got the impression they weren’t exactly happy with me; and neither was that plainclothes guy from your Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the darkfaced character who stood back while they questioned me and tried to look like part of the furniture. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell they suspected me of. Am I supposed to have murdered the pilot, wrecked the plane, hit myself over the head, and taken a swim in the fog, all just for fun?”
Kitty laughed. “Oh, I don’t think they have any immediate plans for throwing you into prison. It’s just that, well, amnesia is a rather odd—” She stopped, abashed.
“Yeah, odd,” I said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… Anyway, we don’t seem to be gaining on it, as you Yankees say.”
I patted her on the knee. “Don’t give up yet. Let’s hear about the interesting stuff, like how I managed to acquire a Canadian fiancee, living way down there in the U.S. of A.”
She smiled. “After our business dealings, you seemed to find your way across the border fairly frequently, Mr. Madden. Of course, you’d been doing quite a bit of work up here already, before we met, and it’s only a hundred and twenty miles, freeway all the way.”
“Still, it’s a drive,” I said. “I must have been hard up for girls.”
She glanced at me quickly, then she laughed. Her laughter stopped. We regarded each other for a moment. She leaned over to be kissed. It turned out to be a fairly complicated osculation, since we’d started from positions not ideal for the purpose. Sitting in the bed, I had to kind of haul her into place across my lap, and make a number of preliminary adjustments, before we could make satisfactory contact. Once I found them, her lips were soft and eager. The chaste resolutions I’d announced earlier didn’t last very long; but those damned pink slacks proved to be seriously obstructive. For the moment, at least, I had to confine myself to investigating the warm girl contours through the thin gabardiny cloth…
“Paul, no!”
I sighed, surrendered the zipper tab I’d discovered, and let her go. Anyway, it was nice to know that, memory or no; the proper stimuli still produced, the proper reactions, if you want to call them proper. Kitty sat up and pushed the long, straight, brown hair back from her small face. Her cheeks were flushed and she looked very pretty indeed—well, if you like phonies.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I said stiffly. “I thought I heard somebody talking big stuff about getting into beds and raping people and stuff, but I must have been mistaken. My most humble apologies, ma’am. I surely didn’t mean to get familiar, ma’am.”
She said irritably, not looking at me, “Oh, don’t be stupid! I just… You’re not all
that
well yet; and anyway, the door isn’t locked and the nurse is apt to stick her head in any minute.”
“Oh, dearie me,” I said sourly, “does anybody get to be a nurse without discovering that people kiss people?”
“Well, I just don’t like to get all mussed and excited when… when it isn’t really
practical
, darling.”
“Sure.”
She rose and looked down at herself and made a face at her slightly disintegrated appearance. She tugged the dislodged zipper back into place, pulled up her pants, tucked her shirt in, and smoothed down her sweater.
“I… I’ll come back again tomorrow,” she said, and fled, snatching up her coat on the way out.
Frowning, I watched the door close automatically behind her. I was feeling rather frustrated, but also a bit ashamed of myself for deliberately pushing her clear to the point of protest. A gentleman would have controlled his base impulses as soon as he sensed that the lady disapproved; but I wasn’t a gentleman, I was a guy with a bandaged head and no memory trying to find out a few things about myself and other people. Now I was feeling puzzled and baffled and disturbed by what I’d learned.
My pretty fiancee had led everybody to believe that we’d anticipated our forthcoming marriage on numerous occasions. She’d been quite brazen about it—or modern, if you prefer. Yet the simple fact seemed to be that we didn’t even know each other well enough to kiss each other without a lot of preliminary fumbling. My memory might be faulty, but I had a distinct impression that people who’d been lovers for months, as we were supposed to have been, could generally manage to find their way into a clinch more expertly than that.
The telephone rang. It startled me; then I decided it had to be Kitty calling to straighten things out between us. I sighed and picked up the instrument.
A man’s voice spoke in my ear: “Helm?”
The voice meant nothing to me, and neither did the name. “What’s a Helm?” I asked.
“You are,” said the voice, and the phone went dead.
I replaced the instrument slowly. Then I sat there for a while, trying to put my small, safe, comfortable world back together. It had been a peaceful hospital existence with nothing to worry about except getting well. Okay, so I had a spot of amnesia; I could live with it. Sooner or later the past would return. Even if it didn’t, well, nobody dies from loss of memory. What I’d misplaced probably wasn’t priceless judging by what had emerged to date: some free-lance photography in the far-off boonies, a bit of non-combatant war experience—well, maybe my history was a little more colorful than some, but it still wasn’t anything I couldn’t afford to forget.
What had mattered was that I was alive, I was being well looked after, I had a lovely fiancee willing to share my problems, and I had a home and business waiting for me down in the U.S. Some officials had asked me some searching questions, to be sure, but that had been just part of the normal post-airplane-crash routine. I was a fairly ordinary guy named Madden who’d had a narrow escape from death and whose job was simply to regain his strength and pick up his life where he’d left it.
That was the way it had been. Now it was gone, wiped out by a kiss and a phone call. My lovely fiancee was a sweet little fraud. My name wasn’t Madden…
I drew a long breath and told myself to relax. Maybe I was taking the whole thing too seriously. I was, after all, not exactly a picture of perfect health at the moment—either physical or mental health. I could be building a couple of minor incidents into a major crisis simply because my recent harrowing experiences had left me vulnerable. Maybe Kitty Davidson was, as she’d claimed, just a fastidious young lady who couldn’t bring herself to risk the embarrassment of being caught wrestling happily and sexily with a man, even a man she was going to marry, on a rumpled hospital bed behind an unlocked door. Maybe. And maybe the phone call had been a hoax or a joke perpetrated by a crank or a prankster—but up here in remote Prince Rupert, B.C., who’d bother?
Instinct warned me that it was serious and that I’d damned well better take it seriously. I might be reading too much into Kitty’s reaction, but nobody would call up a hospital patient with a grave psychological problem and toss a strange name at him just for fun. Helm. It still didn’t mean anything to me. The steering control of a boat. An old-time military skull-protection device. A patronym of Nordic or German origin.
Helm. If I was Helm, as the voice had indicated, who was Madden, if there was a Madden?
But there had to be a Madden. With the probable death of the pilot to investigate, with the sole survivor of the crash claiming ignorance on the grounds of amnesia—amnesia, for God’s sake, the refuge of every impulse murderer whose mind suddenly went blank, your Honor, totally blank—the Canadian authorities would inevitably have checked me out at least as far back as the house at 2707 Brightwood Way, Bellevue, Washington. I’d be very much surprised if they hadn’t checked a lot farther. There simply had to be a Madden living at that address who took pictures for a living and had a convincing background, or the questioning to which I’d been subjected would have been a lot longer and tougher.
I remembered the blocky, dark gent in plainclothes from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He’d been doing a lot of heavy thinking behind his deadpan expression. Even with Kitty making a positive identification, he would have found any obvious discrepancies in my record if there had been some to find. So Madden must exist—or must he? After all, I’d been told that he’d only made his appearance in the Seattle area some six months ago.
Was there, perhaps, just a guy named Helm who’d rented a house, set up a darkroom, and handed out business cards with a name that wasn’t his? If so, why? And if so, why was Miss Catherine Davidson supporting the masquerade with outrageous hints about our beautiful sex life together, when she was actually, it seemed, a fairly inhibited kid who recoiled in near panic from a man’s hand on her fanny, not to mention on the zipper tab of her stylish slacks?
Helm, I thought. A mysterious character named Helm, pretending to be a free-lance photographer named Madden. A detective tracking down a criminal or a criminal organization? A spy or counterspy? A robber or con man setting up a big caper? In any case, it seemed that this nebulous, weirdo had taken a hired plane north into the Canadian bush and wound up floating in the ocean a long way from his supposed destination minus his aircraft, his pilot, and his memory. An attractive female had then appeared, very conveniently, to claim this masquerader as her lover and intended husband, and confirm his false identity… Nuts! It was TV stuff, I told myself irritably. I was building a melodramatic soap opera out of a word spoken on the phone and the fact that a nice girl had behaved in a sensible and ladylike manner instead of succumbing wantonly to my crude advances.
My head had begun to ache. I reached for the newspaper on the bed and forced myself to shove the wild speculations out of my mind. The attending psychiatrist had said I shouldn’t allow myself to get disturbed or excited, ha! I told myself that the news, as funneled through the Vancouver press, deserved my most careful attention. Reading resolutely, I learned that people were passing, or hoping to pass, or hoping to keep from passing, laws against cigarettes, dogs, guns, old age, and automobile accidents, to mention only a few of the subjects being considered for legislative remedies. The French-speaking citizens of Canada were demanding their linguistic rights, whatever those might be. The commercial fishermen were demanding protection against the depredations of foreign fishermen. The Canadian political parties were still calling each other names. So much for the overall picture.
On the local level, the recent heavy rains—I was glad to see somebody around the place admitting it had actually been raining kind of hard—had flooded certain roads in the Vancouver area and washed out most of a small town over on Vancouver Island. Don’t get confused: that Captain Vancouver covered a lot of territory. The city of Vancouver is one thing: a metropolis of close to half a million inhabitants situated on the mainland. Vancouver Island is something else again: a rugged, offshore piece of real estate almost three hundred miles long. The capital of the province, Victoria, is out on this island. The two cities are connected by a system of ferries, one of which had just been bombed, providing the big news of the day:
FERRY EXPLOSION KILLS THREE
Reformo Leader Among Victims of Terrorist Bomb
Grateful for something interesting enough to take my mind off my own troubles, I read the story carefully. Apparently, the explosives had been left in an old Ford van on the car deck, and timed to go off just as the ferry, having made its fifty-mile crossing of the Strait of Georgia, was docking at Tsawwassen—don’t ask me how to pronounce it—at the mainland end of the run. Fortunately, in loading, the van had got parked at the end of the vessel instead of in the more crowded and vulnerable middle. Fortunately, also, there had been some fog to delay the crossing; the explosion had therefore occurred while most passengers were still on the upper decks, instead of as they were returning to their cars, near the bomb, in preparation for landing. Even so, a dozen people had been injured and three of these had died, including a well-known Canadian politician of whom I’d never heard, who’d stayed in his car to work on a campaign speech to be delivered in Vancouver. His name had been Andrew McNair, and he’d been the head of the Reform Movement, whatever that might be, known in Canadian political shorthand as Reformo.
Quick work by the ferry’s crew had contained the fires that had been started on the car deck. The captain had managed to dock the damaged vessel and disembark the passengers in orderly fashion. However, the continuing threat of fire, and the possibility of exploding gas tanks, had made it imperative to get everyone ashore immediately, without waiting for the police. In the confusion some people had got away from the landing area before it could be blocked off—among them, apparently, whoever had driven the van aboard, presumably in a car driven by confederates.