They rolled me to the hospital’s front door in a wheelchair. After that I was on my own—well, except for Kitty, who seemed to be indulging a highly developed Florence Nightingale complex. She helped me solicitously to the waiting taxi, which took us to the airport by way of a small car ferry. Apparently there’s no real estate level enough for a landing strip on that rugged mainland; the Prince Rupert Airport is therefore located on an island across the harbor.
The plane was a goodsized jet, wide open inside and crammed full of tourist-class-sized seats from bow to stern: a giant, airborne commuter bus. We took off on schedule and headed south. There were snowy mountains off to the left of our course. There was a dense, damp-looking wilderness below. Off to the right, the west, was a misty maze of islands and waterways that reminded me of Scandinavia or pictures of Scandinavia, I wasn’t quite sure which. I only knew that I associated that kind of rocky, piny archipelago with a different part of the world; but of course you can see practically anything on color TV these days.
I reminded myself that I must have flown over just such country as this—maybe even this particular landscape—within the past few weeks with a guy named Herb Walters, but I still couldn’t bring back a thing from that illfated plane ride. As the big jet rumbled southwards, I was aware of an odd and not entirely unpleasant sense of expectation. It wasn’t, I realized, that I thought the rest of my memory would return like a sudden gift from heaven the instant I walked through the door of my own house in Bellevue, Wash. It was, instead, that I had a pretty strong hunch it wouldn’t. I’d got back all I was going to for the time being. I was going to have to figure things out for myself. To hell with the recalcitrant mental machinery; I’d spent enough time waiting for it to get into a cooperative mood. It was a challenge, let’s say. A good man ought to be able to get by in the present without a lot of help from the past. If a newborn baby could do it, dammit, I could.
“Do we have to change for Seattle?” I asked. “Or does this plane go right through?”
“Who’s going to Seattle?” Kitty asked. She reached out and squeezed my hand. Apparently I’d been forgiven for my amorous crudities of yesterday. “I’m taking you home with me,” she said, smiling.
I said, “That’s called kidnaping, ma’am. A capital offense, I do believe.”
“You don’t really mind, do you, darling? After all, it isn’t as if you hadn’t stayed in my apartment before; and you need somebody to look after you for a few days, at least.”
“Sure,” I said. “How’s your cooking? I seem to forget.”
“Don’t worry so much about your memory,” she said. “You’re going to be just fine.”
I wasn’t worrying about my memory, but I was wondering a bit about the girl beside me. She still didn’t quite add up to her own billing as a bright PR girl and a complaisant mistress, even a mistress with matrimonial ambitions.
Well, she wasn’t the only one who didn’t quite make sense. The Chinese kid who’d visited me—I reminded myself that Kitty had never bothered to mention her name to me—hadn’t been exactly a little jewel of relaxed and logical behavior, either. My impression was that the Chinese could hold grudges as well as anybody or even a little better; yet my cruelly jilted oriental sweetheart had made a special trip five hundred miles north into the Canadian bush just to relieve my poor sick mind of worry, she’d said.
It was mean of me to doubt her, of course, but my poor sick mind couldn’t help considering the possibility that, in spite of her pretty pretense of ignorance, she’d heard that I’d lost my memory and come flying up to get some notion of what I actually remembered and what I didn’t. This brought up the question of why my recollections, or lack of them, should be of concern to her. Well, she worked for the outfit that had employed the pilot who’d taken me on that last flight. She even admitted to being emotionally involved with the guy. When you buckled down to think about it hard, you arrived at the interesting fact that there was absolutely no proof that Walters was dead. The only guy who was known to have got hurt on that airborne safari was me. Looking at it from this angle, which no one else seemed to be doing, I could see a lot of fascinating possibilities, mostly threatening to my welfare.
I told myself to go back to the start and try to unravel it from there. The start was now—it had to be—the simple and amazing fact, just handed me by Dr. Lilienthal, that my fingerprints had been sent to Washington, D.C., and had been officially identified as those of P. Madden. Yet one of the few things about myself I knew for sure was that I’d been born M. Helm.
I considered the possibility that, at some time in the part of the past that was still missing to me, the true Mr. Helm had switched identities for some reason, probably nefarious. He’d managed the changeover so well that no government files carried anything but the new information on the false Mr. Madden…
No. It wasn’t possible, I told myself. It couldn’t have been done, not by a lone man covering his own tracks. I’d been a newspaper photographer for several years; I’d driven a car; I’d paid income tax. There would be—there had to be—all kinds of records extant concerning Matthew Helm, boy cameraman. I couldn’t actually recall fingerprints being taken, but somewhere along the line I was sure that, in the line of my newspaper business, I’d have needed a government clearance or permit or pass, since New Mexico, I recalled, has always been full of federal installations. My prints would have gone into storage with the rest of my data. There was also a strong possibility of real military service of some kind, although I couldn’t remember any. It was simply not possible that my whirls and loops and ridges were not associated, in the official master memory banks, with the name Helm. Yet, when asked, the computer had belched out Madden, complete with non-combatant war wounds.
There was only one conclusion possible. I hadn’t been a lone man covering my own tracks. Somebody in Washington with a lot of clout must have had the official electronic brains carefully reprogrammed to say Madden when somebody pushed the Helm button.
Okay. It was clearing up a little. That would be the same somebody, presumably, who’d set me up in Seattle with appropriate business cards, and cameras and darkroom to match, utilizing my genuine photographic experience to bolster a phony identity. Well, nobody’d go to all that trouble to create a dedicated nature photographer called Madden if there wasn’t some kind of an important undercover job for him to do, but what job? I grimaced. There was no way of getting at that, for the moment. Or was there?
I frowned. It was a very odd thing when you came to think of it. I’d been comfortably settled in my quiet hospital room resigned to spending at least another week under medical observation—and suddenly the phone had started ringing with mysterious calls, mysterious visitors had come sneaking through the door, and the doctors who’d been coyly parrying my questions about when they planned to let me go had suddenly fallen all over themselves to get rid of me.
What else had happened? Nothing much. Somebody had just gone and blown up a ferry, that was all…
Kitty put her hand on my knee. “You’re not supposed to make faces like that,” she said. “You know the doctors told you not to try too hard to remember… What were you trying to remember?”
I said, “Something you’ve been keeping from me. Sally Wong. She came to see me yesterday.”
Kitty took her hand away. “Oh, the little Chinese girl.”
“Yeah,” I said, “the little Chinese girl I seem to have ditched to get engaged to you. You might have told me. I had to ask her who she was. She wasn’t at all sure I wasn’t playing some kind of a nasty joke on her. You can hardly blame her.”
Kitty laughed, unembarrassed. “Well, what was I supposed to say, that you’d been doing your best for interracial relations when we met, but then you couldn’t resist my enchanting personality and magnetic physical attraction… I can’t tell you everything, darling. Some things you’re just going to have to discover for yourself.” She leaned forward a bit so she could see past me, out the plane window. “Look, we’re almost there.”
Vancouver was a spectacular city surrounding a big harbor and backed by tall white mountains. Actually, the metropolis below seemed to be half water; long fingers ran inland from the open straits over which we flew. The names Burrard Inlet, False Creek, and Fraser River came to me without my being able to recall how or when I’d learned them. The airport was located out on the flat delta of the Fraser, quite a distance south of town. Since we had no luggage to retrieve from the baggage-handling area—I had only the clothes Kitty had brought me plus a small flight bag with my toothbrush and pajamas; and she carried a single case small enough to fit under the airplane seat—we were soon riding away in a taxi.
“The Vancouver Hotel, please,” Kitty said to the driver as she settled herself beside me with her big leather purse in her lap. She glanced at me and explained: “We have to pick up my car. I just hated to leave the poor little thing standing at the airport all that time, so I parked it in the hotel garage and took the regular limousine out.”
The streets were wet with recent rain, but the sun was shining for a change. It was a fairly long drive involving some big bridges. The clear, bright day made all my elaborate logic seem very shaky, for some reason. After all I was just a guy with a sore head who’d lost a sizeable hunk of his past. Why try to kid myself I could figure it out? The idea that my situation could be in some way related to that bomb on the ferry I’d only read about, well, how farfetched could you get? And that powerful mystery-man I’d dreamed up who’d carefully covered my tracks in Washington…
Kitty reached out and covered my hand with hers. “You’re doing it again,” she scolded me. “Stop it! Just forget about remembering, dear, and tell me about dinner. I can thaw some nice salmon for you, and I’ve still got a bottle of that funny Australian wine you liked, but if you’re too tired for a real meal just tell me and I’ll think of something simple and easy.”
“No, that sounds great.” I was looking out the cab window as we drove. “You know, it all looks familiar, somehow. The Vancouver Hotel? That’s the big, old-fashioned one in the middle of town—Burrard and Georgia Streets, right? The funny thing is, I can see it but I can’t see myself seeing it, if you know what I mean. It’s just as if I’d read about it in a guidebook.”
“Down, Rover, down!” she said, laughing. “Now, for dessert there’s French vanilla ice cream with my special homemade sauce to get the last taste of that hospital food out of your mouth. Also, I think, just a touch of that Mexican liqueur you brought me last summer. Kahlua?”
I knew that Kahlua was kind of brownish and tasted like sticky-sweet alcoholic coffee; but of course I couldn’t recall bringing it to her. Obviously, however, I’d made quite a production of playing the ardent swain. Yet if I was a man on a secret mission operating under a carefully constructed alias, as everything indicated, it seemed unlikely that my amours, oriental or occidental, would be totally unrelated to my assignment, whatever it was. Nobody’d go to all that trouble to establish an agent in the rainy Northwest just so he could exercise his virility on a pair of irrelevant females…
Kitty said, “Darling, when we get to the hotel, please do exactly as I tell you. Please?”
There was something odd and strained about her voice. I glanced at her quickly. She’d taken a small, nickel-plated, automatic pistol from her purse and she was pointing it straight at me.