SURPRISE!
We chose “The Donor” to lead off this anthology because it is the very essence of the McGuffin, with an understated symmetry and a whiplash ending which leaves the reader breathless as a roller-coaster ride. Great McGuffins demand great artistry, a quality not always in evidence in the paperback original novels which are Mr. Marlowe’s chosen arena. But the growing talent he displayed in 1962 with the unforgettable The Name of the Game is Death was confirmed in 1970, when his Operation Flashpoint was awarded the Edgar. Today his Earl Drake series enjoys booming sales and reprinting in over a dozen foreign countries. So any would-be or want-to-be writers reading these words take heart: Dan Marlowe is an ex-professional gambler who didn’t write a word for money until he was pushing fifty! - J.G.
I went to reform school when I was twelve, prison when I was eighteen, and I’ve spent most of my life in one penitentiary or another. I’ve stolen cars, cashed bad checks, burglarized stores, and committed armed robberies. During any given ten-year period, I was seldom outside the walls of an institution for more than a few months at a time.
Then I took a trip west to change my luck. It changed it for the worse. I took another fall, and then in prison one day I was standing alongside another con when he was knifed in the back. I was tried for his murder. It didn’t matter that for once I was innocent; the judge pronounced the mandatory death sentence. I couldn’t help thinking that it seemed to be what I had unconsciously been preparing myself for all my life.
So, at forty-eight, with the handwriting on the wall, I made up my mind to leave life with more style than I’d lived it. When the automatic appeal had been denied, I told my court-appointed lawyer I wouldn’t need him anymore. I settled down to the death row routine of tearing pages from a calendar and waiting for the big day.
I thought the warden would be happy to have a prisoner who wasn’t always bugging him for some privilege, but he wasn’t. For some reason my attitude seemed to concern him.
“It’s not natural for a man in your position to show so little concern,” said Warden Raymond.
“How would you know what’s natural, warden?” I asked. “You’re young. All you know about prison you got out of books. You’ve only had your appointment for about a year. You’ve got a lot to learn.”
He shook his head. He looked like a tired David Niven except that his hair was reddish-brown. He had dark circles under his eyes most of the time. There was a prison joke about the dark circles. Warden Raymond had a young wife. I’d never seen her, but the men who had said she had an unconsciously sexual appeal.
The chaplain came to see me a few times, but I always ran him off. “It’s got to be better the second time around, Pilot,” I told him. The men called him the Sky Pilot. He couldn’t cope with my theories on reincarnation, but he didn’t stop coming.
My only other visitor was Warden Raymond. He would have himself admitted by the ever-present guard, and I’d set down the book I’d been reading. The warden made more frequent trips from his office to my cell as the big day grew closer. Each time I saw him he looked worse. It was going to be the first execution for each of us, but to look at him you’d think he was the one who was going to ride the lightning.
“You know that the-uh-execution is only a short time away,” he said to me one day.
“I know.”
“Have you decided upon which-uh-which method you want us to use?”
I stared at him. “Which method? I don’t get it.”
“There are two approved methods of execution in this state, hanging and the firing squad.” I must have looked blank. “I thought you knew.”
I tried to sound flippant. “Is that what happens when there’s no more cheap power? I thought it would be electrocution.”
“You have a choice, as I indicated,” he answered. He didn’t sound happy even telling me about it.
“It’s not going to be hanging, warden,” I said positively. “Have the firing squad oil up the rifles.”
The warden spoke urgently. “Doesn’t this bother you at all? Don’t you feel-uh-odd, having to choose the way you’re going to die?”
“Why, no. If I’ve got to go, and I don’t seem to have much say about that, what’s so hard about selecting the method?”
He grimaced and left the cell.
During the next couple of weeks I ate well and got plenty of rest. I gained five pounds and the warden lost ten. He obviously spent more time thinking about my execution than I did. The man had too much empathy for his own good. He even tried to get the governor to commute my sentence to life imprisonment. He came to my cell almost in tears when he failed. He was really getting on my nerves a little bit, although it’s difficult to dislike a man because he doesn’t want to kill you.
The warden showed up in front of my cell with a stranger when the execution was a week away. His usual uneasiness seemed to have been replaced by embarrassment. “This is Dr. Sansom,” he said to me. “He’d like to talk to you.”
I looked Dr. Sansom over. He had to have some kind of clout. Not every doctor makes it onto death row. The guard came over and unlocked the cell door, but only the doctor came inside.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Warden Raymond said quickly, and hurried away.
“Come to see if I’m healthy enough to kill, Doc?” I asked as he sat down. His mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t. He was young, but he had the coldest-looking eyes I’d ever seen on a human being.
“You don’t want to mind him,” I went on, nodding in the direction of the warden’s departure. “He’s taking all this pretty hard.”
“And you’re not?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s what they told me, and that’s why I’m here.” He crossed his legs leisurely. “I’m chief of neurosurgery at Mercy Hospital in town. I want you to donate your body to science. Specifically, I want you to donate it to me.”
There was certainly nothing bashful about the doctor. Just like that, he wanted my body. “How come, Doc?”
“You’ve read about the organ transplants performed recently—kidneys, livers, hearts?”
“I can read the big print in the newspapers.”
Irony was wasted on him. He was all business. “Techniques have been developed that would have seemed miraculous a short time ago. You might be able to save several lives.”
“Several?” I had a mental picture of myself being cut and dealt like a deck of cards. I wanted to discourage him. “Look, I’m not a kid any longer. I’m pushing fifty. I always thought you people wanted young meat. Besides, when the bullets get through with me, my ticker won’t be any good to me or to anyone else.”
But Dr. Sansom had an answer for everything. “The prison physician tells me you’re in remarkable condition for a man your age. He attributes this to your being sheltered so often and so long from the vices prevalent outside prison. I’m sure your organs are just what I want. As for the wasteful method of execution you’ve chosen, though, I wish you’d reconsider.”
“Not a chance, Doc.”
“Well, what about your body?”
I still didn’t care for the idea of being used for spare parts, but with the new image I’d been building for myself it proved hard to be ungracious. “I’m not about to change my mind about the firing squad,” I told him, “but you’re welcome to what’s left.”
“I’ll make do with that,” he said, and rose to his feet. He pulled a large envelope from his inside breast pocket and handed me a crackling legal paper to sign. He was taking no chances on my changing my mind. I signed the paper, and Dr. Sansom departed.
After that I was glad the execution date was so near. It had been difficult enough on some days to seem unconcerned, and the doctor had added a mental burden. When I had thought of myself as dead, I had always pictured myself sleeping peacefully with my hands folded across my chest. Now I didn’t care to dwell upon the final scene.
On the morning of the execution, though, Warden Raymond was still far more disturbed about it than I was. He looked as though he’d been up all night, and his whiskey breath made no secret about how he’d spent his time. I followed him out into the prison yard with the chaplain by my side. The prison guards I’d come to know waved or nodded as I passed. A few murmured reassurances. The ones who weren’t following on my heels, that is, to make sure I didn’t change my mind about going peaceably.
The prison yard was cool. The first rays of the sun were striking the wall. A heavy wooden chair with leather straps attached to it sat facing a small wood-and-canvas structure fifty yards away. I knew the firing squad was already inside the structure, concealed from view by the canvas awning. When the time came, the awning would be raised, and—BOOM!
A large, white tractor-trailer was parked twenty yards to the left of the chair. Dr. Sansom stood beside it with a number of other men. They were all wearing light-green hospital gowns. The only sound in the prison yard was the hum of a diesel generator mounted on top of the trailer. I figured out finally that it was needed to keep my organs from spoiling during the run into town.
I went directly to the chair and sat down. I could hear the collective sigh of relief from the guards, happy that they didn’t have to wrestle me into it. The warden read a paper—mumbled would be more accurate—to the official observers, and then a pair of guards fastened my arms and legs with the leather straps. The prison physician pinned a target to the front of my shirt, and then a hood was dropped over my head.
In the dead silence that followed nothing happened for a few seconds. I was trying to think of something clever to say when I felt as though I’d been struck in the chest by a sledgehammer.
Immediately after that I heard the roar of the rifles. The echo rebounded from the stone walls. Blood gushed into my throat, and I remember thinking that Dr. Sansom wouldn’t be able to use my lungs, either.
Then I couldn’t think anything…
I could see light and movement when I opened my eyes, but I had difficulty in focusing upon it. I felt weaker than I had ever felt in my life.
“Call Dr. Sansom in here at once!” a female voice said urgently.
“He’s regained consciousness again, and this time he seems rational!” There was a flurry of activity around me. Shadowy figures gradually became more distinct. Then I was looking up at Dr. Sansom. There was a flicker of something other than the usual impassivity in his cold-eyed stare. Excitement? The situation became clear to me at once. Dr. Sansom had taken me from the firing squad chair and given me a new heart. I raised a trembling hand as I tried to complain to him, but all I could utter was gibberish.
Then I saw freckles on the back of my hand.
My hand?
I’d never had a freckle in my life!
I sank back upon the pillow, exhausted. Dr. Sansom. that diabolical surgical magician, hadn’t given me a new heart. He had implanted my brain in someone else’s head. I wondered where the rest of me was. God only knew into how many parts I’d been divided.
“Don’t try to talk yet, Tom,” Dr. Sansom said soothingly. “You’ve been in a coma for a long time. Relax and get your bearings.” I became conscious of bandages on my face. “You’re making a fine recovery. We’ll have you up and moving around in a few days now. When we remove the bandages, you’ll look almost the same as you did before you tried to mix drinking and driving and went through the window of your car. Most of the scars will be hidden by your hair.”
Not so much as by the flicker of an eyelash did he indicate—and no one could know more surely—that I wasn’t “Tom.”
I hadn’t noticed previously, but there were tubes connected to my other arm and my side. Dr. Sansom directed the nurses as they disconnected them, and my own life cycle took over the function of keeping me breathing. My own? I closed my eyes and stopped thinking about it. They took away all the machinery that had kept me alive while I was in the coma.
Tom’s wife was allowed to visit me for five minutes a day. She was a tall, buxom girl with an anxious expression that in ensuing days changed to one of hope. She sat and held my hand and stared at my bandaged face with tear-stained eyes. “I thought I’d lost you,” she said repeatedly.
Another complication, I thought wearily.
But life takes over. I worked at gaining control of my new body in the days that followed. Speech was the most difficult. At first I had to concentrate hard to form each word, but soon I was speaking simple sentences. Dr. Sansom permitted me to get out of bed and move carefully around the hospital room. He watched me with a gleam in his eye. I found that it was like trying to drive a car after a long prison stretch. I had to develop judgment and a new depth perception.
I gained strength every day. That was when I first became aware that my new body was a young body. I felt better than I had for years. I felt a chill, though, when Dr. Sansom said something one day about getting me back on the job. Surely he realized there was no job to which I could return? I was still a middle-aged convict who’d spent more than thirty years behind bars. I had no skills, no training, no education that hadn’t come from reading two or three books a week no matter what prison I happened to be calling home. The only thing prison had prepared me for was more prison.
The more I saw of Tom’s wife the more I wished I could really be him, but there was no possible way. I didn’t know what Tom’s job had been, but whether it was lawyer, engineer, architect, or street cleaner, I didn’t try to fool myself into thinking I could step into it as easily as I had taken over his body.
Then Dr. Sansom appeared in my room one day with an armful of clothing. “Get dressed,” he said. “We’re going to take a ride to your office.” I tried to protest, but he ignored me. “It will be just a short visit. When we get back, we’ll take your bandages off.”
One of the nurses drove the car. I sat in the middle with Dr. Sansom beside me. I stared at the dashboard, trying to keep the blur of rapidly passing scenery from confusing me further. Then the car stopped, and I looked up. I drew a long, unbelieving breath.
They helped me out of the car. The concrete walk was lined with people. Smiling people. All the way to my office I accepted greetings from uniformed guards, many of whom I knew well. Very well.
“Welcome back, Warden Raymond,” they said.