Authors: Donald Hamilton
There was a description of the damage, as far as it had been determined at press time. The idea that the bomb could have been planted by enemies of McNair, apparently a somewhat controversial figure, was rejected on the grounds that the police had discovered in one of the restrooms, aerosol-sprayed on the wall of a booth, a known terrorist symbol, the letters PPP. The newspaper didn’t mention whether the plumbing facilities involved were designed for masculine or feminine patronage. It did state, however, that the same initials had been found in a restroom after the San Francisco bus station blast last year that had taken seven lives. What they stood for was still not known, or if it was, nobody was saying. The reporter finished his piece with a summary of all recent bombings of presumably terrorist origin: the La Guardia airport explosion, the Toronto railroad bang, and several others. He didn’t say that the unknown PPP organization was responsible for all of them, but he didn’t say it wasn’t…
Somebody knocked on the door of my room. Nurses and other hospital functionaries either don’t knock at all or knock and walk right in. I waited, but nobody appeared. The knock came again. I drew a long breath. It was probably either the Mounties or the Ministry of Transport. I wondered a bit uneasily what the hell they wanted now.
“Come in,” I called, and the door opened.
The girl who entered looked much too small to be a Mountie, and she didn’t resemble any investigator I’d encountered to date. I told myself I’d never seen her before in my life.
“Hello, Paul,” she said.
Obviously I’d told myself wrong.
She came forward rather hesitantly. She was small and slender, with heavy black hair cut short about her face, which was delicately pretty in an Oriental way. You had to hand it to Mr. Madden I reflected. Whether or not he really existed, he certainly knew how to pick them, even if his tastes did run to girls so slim they hardly cast shadows. Or maybe the choices had been Helm’s, whoever he might be.
The girl was wearing a very neat, very tailored, very occidental tweed suit with a skirt, not pants. The rare, precious sight of a pair of nice girl-legs in nylons was almost too much for me to bear in my weakened condition. She wore little plastic boots to protect her high-heeled shoes from the rain, and carried a big purse and a red raincoat.
It was time for me to say something. “Hi,” I said.
She stopped by the bed and looked at the paper I still held. “Isn’t it terrible?” she said. “That ferry, I mean. I read about it on the plane coming up from Vancouver; one of the boys had a delivery to make near here.”
“Terrible,” I agreed.
My visitor looked down at me for a moment. “I don’t mean to intrude, Paul,” she said. “You once made your feelings about clinging females quite clear, and I’m most certainly not trying to… Well, never mind that. But I just couldn’t bear to think you might be lying up here wondering if I… if we… if anybody at North-Air was blaming you for what happened to Herb.” She stopped. I didn’t say anything. She went on quickly, speaking with just the slightest hint of a Chinese accent, “We don’t, of course. To blame you for hiring him to fly would be ridiculous; flying was his business. In fact, it was very nice, very fair of you to continue to come to us when you needed a plane in spite of… in spite of everything. It certainly wasn’t your fault that it turned out this way. After all, you don’t know anything about flying; and whatever happened I’m sure you couldn’t possibly have prevented… They say you don’t really remember what happened. That’s often the case in a bad crash, I understand. I just didn’t like to think you might be, well, delaying your recovery by brooding about it. Even if we’re no longer… even if we’re not on very good terms, Paul, the least I can do is to be fair, too.”
“Sure,” I said. “Fair.”
She studied me for a moment longer. “Well, that’s all I came to say, I’d better get back to the plane before they fly off and leave me,” she went on. “I… I miss Herb very much, of course, but I’m glad you came out of it all right, I really am. I hope you get well soon.” She started to turn away.
“Wait,” I said.
She paused and glanced back over her shoulder in a reluctant way. “Please. Everything we had to say to each other, we said several months ago. I was just doing my duty as a Girl Scout. Don’t make me regret—”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She stood perfectly still for a long time. In the silence, I could hear the inevitable rain beating against the window, and the sound of somebody rolling some kind of a cart down the hospital corridor outside. Slowly, she turned to face me again.
“Are you serious?” she asked.
I said, “They told me that I’m Paul Madden, and that I’m engaged to be married to a wonderful girl named Catherine Davidson. They didn’t tell me anything about you.”
She said without expression, “That’s hardly surprising, if your fiancee was doing the telling.” When I didn’t speak, the Chinese girl went on, “I heard from the MOT inspectors that you couldn’t remember much about the crash, but they didn’t say… I didn’t dream…”
When she stopped without finishing the sentence, I said deliberately, “As you’ll notice, I remember my English real good. I even recall some Spanish words, and there are a couple of other languages with which I seem to be slightly acquainted. I remember what happens when you add, or multiply, two and two. I can tell you about the American Revolution and the Civil War—otherwise known as the War Between the States—and a couple of World Wars and some unpleasantness in Korea. I even seem to know, in a general way, that there was a more recent conflict in Vietnam, but although I’m supposed to have attended the party with a camera, I remember nothing about that. I can tell you a bit about what New York looks like, or Seattle, or Vancouver, B.C., but I just don’t see myself in those pictures either, if you know what I mean. I don’t know when I was there if I was there, or what I did there, or whom I met there. Okay?”
She said softly, “You might have stopped me before I made a goddamned little fool of myself!”
It seemed, somehow, like a shocking thing for a Chinese girl to say, but I couldn’t have told you exactly why.
“I had to let you talk,” I said. “I’m sorry, but you might have said something that would trigger total recall.”
“Did I?”
I shook my head. “No recall at all. Back to Square One.” After a moment, I went on slowly: “I can use all the information I can get. It doesn’t have to make me out a nice guy.”
She frowned, staring at me hard, trying to decide whether or not I was kidding her. Well, that was something I was getting hardened to. Amnesia seemed to bring out the cynic in a lot of people.
“All right,” she breathed at last. “Maybe it’s a game, but all right, Paul, I’ll play it with you.” She paused to organize things in her mind, and began to speak in clipped, businesslike sentences. “My name is Sally Wong. I work for North-Air. I’m the girl behind the counter in the ticket office. We met about six months ago, right after you’d moved to Seattle, I believe. You’d driven up here to take some pictures at a local bird sanctuary. Afterwards you hired a plane from us to take you to a lake up north where you camped for several days photographing some rare ducks or something. We picked you up on schedule. You seemed to like your pilot, Herb Walters. After that, you did all your flying with us. At the time, Herb and I… well, he was in love with me and I couldn’t make up my mind. Then you and I began to…” She stopped, and made a small, helpless gesture. “You can fill in the blanks for yourself, can’t you? It was… very nice for a while. Finally you met another girl on a job you were doing for a magazine. Maybe I’d started taking things a bit too seriously for you. Anyway, it was not a very good scene as the kids say nowadays. Luckily for me, there was big, strong, loyal Herb waiting patiently for me to come to my silly senses…” She shrugged her small shoulders inside the neat tweed jacket. “That’s it, Mr. Amnesia. I hope it helps. We Wongs are known for our fine humanitarian impulses.”
She turned sharply and hurried to the door.
“Miss Wong.” Since I didn’t remember her at all, I didn’t feel entitled to call her Sally, no matter how well we’d known each other once.
“Yes?” she said, pausing with her hand on the knob.
“Thanks.”
She threw a quick look my way. I was disturbed to see that her eyes were wet. She opened the door and was gone. After a while I got out of bed. My legs were still moderately feeble, but they didn’t collapse under my weight; after all, I’d been making the brave journey to the john for several days. I stood in front of the dresser and took stock, seeing a tall, skinny character in wrinkled pajamas with a neat white bandage on his head. The guy, Madden or Helm or whoever the hell he might be didn’t look like much of a lady-killer, but I guess you never can tell.
That night I dreamed about my boyhood. Awakening in the dark, with the hospital silent around me, I realized it hadn’t been a dream at all. At least I didn’t think it had, although the images started receding and disintegrating when I tried to call them back and study them for details. Still trying, I went back to sleep.
Before visiting hours the following morning we went through the usual hospital routine. The physical doctor, an older man named DeLong, took off the head bandage and replaced it with a slightly oversized bandaid. He told me all vital signs were positive and as far as he was concerned I was just loafing around taking up valuable space needed by sick people. Then the mental doctor had his turn. He was a young, intense, somber specimen with a big aquiline nose in a thin, dark face; the introspective kind of mind specialist who’d probably got interested in the way other people’s minds worked while worrying about the workings of his own. His name was Dr. Lilienthal. We hadn’t got chummy enough to proceed beyond that.
I told him I was feeling better, which was true. I told him I’d had a midnight dream about the past. I refrained from mentioning the mysterious telephone call. After all, he was a doctor, not a detective.
“Yes, I do think we’re making progress,” he said when I’d finished. “However, you’ve been through a rotten experience and your mind is apparently still trying to protect you from it. Like many self-appointed protectors, the mind sometimes over-reacts.” He hesitated. “If you feel up to it, Mr. Madden, I’d like for us to do a bit of probing. We’ve been more or less letting things progress at their own pace while you regained your strength, but now that Dr. DeLong has pronounced you reasonably fit, let’s see if we can’t expedite matters a bit. Tell me about this boyhood incident you recalled in your dreams. What was it concerned with?”
“Hunting,” I said. “Dove hunting. With my father.”
He looked a little shocked. “
Dove
hunting?”
I grinned. “Cut it out, Doc. Don’t give this ex-farmboy that tired old bird-of-peace routine.” Things did seem to be coming back; up to that moment I hadn’t been aware I’d ever lived on a farm—actually, I had a vague feeling we’d called it a ranch. I went on: “That’s the greatest little game bird on this continent, and where’s your bedside manner? If I’d said I was a homosexual psychopath with sado-masochistic tendencies, you’d merely have nodded wisely; but when I mention shooting perfectly legal game in season you act like I’d cut my mother’s throat with a dull knife.”
He considered resenting it; then he laughed instead. “Touché, Mr. Madden. Perhaps I’m just a naive city boy at heart. Go on, tell me about your dove hunting.”
“In my dream, if that’s what it was, we had a dog with us,” I said slowly. I closed my eyes and I saw it clearly once again, and felt the sunshine and tasted the desert dust. “A big German Shorthaired Pointer named Buck. That was back when the GSP wasn’t as popular in the U.S. as it is now. Old Buck had been imported straight from Europe by a wealthy rancher, a friend of Dad’s, who’d then had a heart attack. He’d given Buck to Dad so a good dog wouldn’t be, well, wasted on somebody who couldn’t hunt him right.” I opened my eyes. “Sorry, I’m rambling.”
“That’s fine. Just keep on rambling.”
I said, “You don’t use a pointing dog to find doves, of course, not like when you’re hunting pheasants or quail… You’re sure you want all this? I seem to have to work around it a bit before I can get a grip on it.”
“Go on.”
“With doves,” I said, “you just scout around until you find a place they’re using, a field or spring or gravel pit, and you hide in the bushes and take them as they fly by. We worked Buck as a retriever on doves, to locate and bring in the birds that fell. They’re hard little devils to find in any kind of cover without a dog, and Dad was very particular about shooting game and letting it go to waste. That evening, I remember, we were late getting home because we’d spent half an hour stomping through some tall weeds locating my last bird. Buck had been retrieving for Dad and hadn’t seen it drop, but he finally found it. If we hadn’t, we’d still be out there looking for that dove, I guess. Dad wasn’t about to have a good day ruined by a lost bird.”
I stopped. I could now see us clearly, getting out of the old pickup in front of the house, letting Buck jump out of the rear on command, and gathering up the guns and hunting vests and shooting stools. It was a long reach for me into the pickup since I hadn’t got my height yet. Dad had gone ahead to open the gate. He was waiting while I got a good grip on all my gear so I could follow.
He was speaking: “That was a fine shoot, Matthew, but we must rest that field tomorrow or we will burn it out; the doves will become frightened and stop using it.” He didn’t have a Scandinavian accent as much as a Scandinavian way of speaking. He went on: “Now you go feed the dog while I start plucking the birds…”
I had a sharp picture in my mind of him standing there in his beatup Stetson and worn ranch clothes with the old Model 12 Winchester that had a slip-on rubber recoil pad to lengthen the stock to fit him, since he was a tall, long-armed man. He’d never, that I remembered, got around to having a longer stock made although he was always talking about it. I could see the little swinging gate and the rural-type mailbox on a post. The lettering on the box was easy to read:
Rt. 4
,
Box 75, Karl M. Helm.