Somebody was talking to me. I came back across the years from the dry, sunny, southwestern country of my boyhood to the sterile northwestern hospital room with rain on the window.
“What did you say, Doctor?” I asked.
“Are you all right, Mr. Madden?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
It was a time to be very careful. I now knew for certain that I was a man who’d constructed a false identity for himself and worn it for at least six months—and had then, somehow, wound up in the ocean with a cracked head. The two circumstances might have no connection, but I couldn’t count on that. It was no time to be passing out personal information to anybody, beyond what was absolutely necessary to keep them happy and unsuspicious.
“I guess I was thirteen or fourteen at the time,” I said. “Later, I recall getting kicked out of college due to some kind of fight I got into with a bunch of upperclassmen who were trying to push me around.” I grinned. “I must have been a feisty young fellow. I finished up at another school. Then my parents both died within the same year. I got a job with a camera on a newspaper in the state capital, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Later I worked for some other New Mexico newspapers. I did say all this took place in New Mexico, didn’t I? After that—”
I stopped abruptly. It had been coming with a rush, but suddenly there wasn’t any more.
“Go on.”
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s all she wrote, at least for now. It ends with that last newspaper job—the last I remember, anyway. That was in Albuquerque. I don’t remember leaving, and there’s nothing after that.”
“I see,” he said. He frowned thoughtfully, watching me, for a second or two. Abruptly, he got up and walked to the window and spoke looking out at the rainy view. “Mr. Madden.”
“Yes.”
“I’m inclined to turn you loose. Physically, Dr. DeLong tells me you’re coming along very well. Mentally, I feel you can’t be helped much more here. There’s no skull fracture. The concussion seems to have produced no impairment of function. The danger of hematoma—blood clots—is past. As far as your memory is concerned, I think you can deal with the problem yourself. If it comes back, fine. If not, as I told you earlier, it’s something most patients adjust to quite easily, although their friends and families tend to take it more seriously.” After a little pause, he swung around at the window to face me once more. “However, if you think you’re up to handling it, I’d prefer to send you off with all the information we can give you.”
“What information?” I asked. “Don’t tease me, Doctor.”
He said carefully, “We’re in possession of some rather puzzling data—rather disturbing, I might add.”
I realized, from the way he was studying me, that for all his psychiatric training he wasn’t any more sure than anybody else that I wasn’t kidding him about my loss of memory. He was looking for a guilt-reaction that would tell him I already knew what he was going to say.
I grinned. “Well, if I go into shock, this is a good place for it, isn’t it?”
He smiled thinly. “Very well, Mr. Madden. You might, in your idle moments, try to recall how you acquired three submachinegun bullets in your right shoulder and arm not too terribly long ago, say within the past two years.”
I won’t say I hadn’t noticed the scars, or the faint residual stiffness in the mornings, but I hadn’t given them any thought. Perhaps I’d deliberately avoided thinking about them. I could see why Dr. Lilienthal found the human mind a fascinating subject.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Fairly sure,” Lilienthal said. “Dr. DeLong has had considerable experience in military situations. He says he would wager a tidy sum on their being projectiles from a machine pistol, although two achieved total penetration and the third has been removed. Probably 9mm. They could have come from a 9mm handgun, but something about the grouping seems to indicate a fully automatic weapon to Dr. DeLong. Not a rifle. Three bullets from a highpowered rifle in that large a caliber would pretty well have torn your arm off.”
I said, “According to my fiancee, I’m supposed to have spent some time in Vietnam with my cameras.”
“Of course, Mr. Madden.”
I looked at him sharply. “You have a very unconvincing way of agreeing with a guy, Doc.”
Lilienthal said dryly, “You’re a very unconvincing guy, Mr. Madden.”
“Spell it out, please.”
He came back to his chair, swung it around so he could straddle it, and faced me over the back of it. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Do you really feel that you are a gentle photographer chap currently specializing in beautiful pictures of little birds and animals?”
I grinned. “At the moment, I’m gentle as a lamb, but the answer to your question is that I’m not sure how I feel. Not yet. Go on.”
“The fact is that you have altogether too many marks of violence on your body for a peaceloving cameraman, or even a news photographer with a penchant for trouble. The shoulder wounds are the most recent but there are others. And the most interesting thing about them is that some have been carefully erased, as well as could be managed with plastic surgery, as if somebody’d been interested in making sure you wouldn’t cause too much comment with your shirt off.”
“So that’s it!” I couldn’t help laughing. “I thought those investigators from your MOT eyed me very suspiciously, not to mention that closemouthed gent from the RCMP. I suppose this was called to their attention.”
Lilienthal looked slightly embarrassed. “As a matter of fact, it was. A doctor has a duty to his patient, but he also has a duty to society. There was no way for us to be certain that the identification found on you wasn’t forged or stolen.”
“So somebody decided they’d dredged up a professional syndicate hitman, or maybe a soldier of fortune, disabled while engaged in a nefarious operation of some kind, is that it?” I laughed again. “How did you get around the fact that I’d been positively identified by Kitty Davidson… Oh, of course, she was my gun moll helping to preserve my cover. Cover? That’s the word, isn’t it, Doctor?”
Lilienthal smiled. “Well, some fairly melodramatic theories were considered, I’ll admit, although the RCMP quickly determined that Miss Davidson was precisely who and what she claimed to be. Your history was a little harder to obtain, since you are not a Canadian citizen.”
“And?”
“Your fingerprints were finally identified in Washington.”
I said, “The suspense is awful. I can hardly stand it, Dr. Lilienthal.”
He said, “Your fingerprints were positively identified as belonging to Paul Horace Madden, a reputable photographer with no recorded involvement with the law.”
I drew a long breath, not all for display. “Well, if they’d found anything else, that Mountie would be parked outside the door, wouldn’t he? What about my fascinating scars?”
“You were severely wounded in Vietnam. It was some time after that—after convalescence—that you began concentrating on peaceful wildlife photography.”
There was a little silence. I frowned. “So it’s all explained very plausibly, but you’re not satisfied. What bugs you, Doctor?”
“Bugs?” It was his turn to frown; then he laughed. “Oh, yes, of course. Bugs!” He became sober and intent once more. “I’ve done my duty to society, Mr. Madden. Now my duty is to you, my patient. My professional advice is: don’t waste time and effort trying to remember something that never happened, regardless of the official records.”
I said slowly, “Something like being wounded in Vietnam while heroically snapping pictures under fire?”
“Exactly. Your various scars were caused by different weapons, and incurred at different times, not in a single traumatic wartime experience. Dr. DeLong tried to point this out to the authorities, but you know how they are when they already have a simple solution to a problem. They refuse to let it be complicated by contradictory information.” Lilienthal rose, and spoke curtly: “As far as I’m concerned, you’re well enough to be released from this hospital. Goodbye, Mr. Madden.”
“Doctor,” I said, “you’re mad about something. What is it?”
He hesitated, and said, “I think you know.”
“Sure,” I said. “You think I’m a phony but you’re not quite sure. Right?”
He didn’t speak for a moment. At last he nodded. “As you say, I’m not sure.”
I said, “For what it’s worth, you have my word that, no matter what kind of a phony I may turn out to be, my amnesia is perfectly genuine.”
He hesitated once more. “Good luck, Mr. Madden,” he said again, but his voice was friendlier than it had been.