Memory (Hard Case Crime)

by Donald E. Westlake

  He smiled with pleasure at that, like an invalid who’s been promised an outing. He reset his alarm clock for twelve-thirty, so he wouldn’t forget to leave the apartment on time, and then returned to the normal routine, washing and dressing and feeding himself and then cleaning the apartment.

  Reveries filled his mind as he worked around the apartment. In fantasy, his memory had already returned, and he had been reunited with his real self. That self, of course, was only magnificent. Graceful, polished, witty, self-confident, surrounded by friends, fulfilling the promise of his early years by going on to the heights as an actor. Smiling, mumbling snatches of dialogue to himself, he scrubbed the windows and the toilet and the tub.

  The alarm clanged out when he was deep in fantasy, shocking him. For just a second he was completely disoriented, thinking, It was only a dream! I never lost my memory at all! A great happiness flooded through him. Fantasy and reality ran together like the view through a rain-wet window, and then the world righted itself again, and he remembered the note about the Unemployment Insurance office.

  He changed his clothes, putting on his gray suit and a dark figured tie, taking time to polish his shoes. It was a good thing he’d remembered about the unemployment insurance; he had less than forty dollars left, and had to pay seventy-five dollars rent on Wednesday.

  It was a heavy overcast day outside, the sky low with dirty clouds. Cole hunched inside his topcoat and hurried along the narrow sidewalks to the subway entrance. His pockets were full of notes, telling him the address he was to go to, and how to get there, and what line to stand on.

  The Unemployment Insurance office, when he got to it, was crowded and damp. Long lines stretched back along a cigarette butt-strewn floor from the high counter. Cole found his line, and waited in silence, self-contained, paying no attention to the people standing around him, aware only vaguely of their similarity to the men he’d worked with in that town.

  In twenty-five minutes, he reached the head of the line, and handed his booklet to the woman behind the counter. She was about forty, with dry and kinky black hair and a blotchy face. She had shaved off her eyebrows and drawn two thin arched black lines on her forehead to take their place. She stamped his booklet, and asked him questions while she filled out a square yellow form. Her voice was flat and metallic.

  “Were you employed at all last week?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Did you seek employment?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you available for employment?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He answered her metallic questions, and then she slapped his booklet back on the counter: “That’s all.”

  He looked at the booklet, and at her face. “What about the money?”

  “What? Next, please.”

  “The money, I’m supposed to get money.”

  “They mail it to you. Next, please.”

  “Wait a second, wait a second.”

  A stocky man in a mackinaw was trying to push past him, but Cole clung to the counter, trying to catch the woman’s eyes. She refused to look at him, but he spoke to her anyway. “When will I get it? Tomorrow?”

  Then she did look at him, grimacing in irritation. “What’s the matter with you? Do you mind telling me? You’re holding up the line.”

  “I just want to know when I’ll get my money.”

  “Next week. Now, step aside.”

  “Next week?”

  “You don’t get paid for the first week, that’s waiting period. Next week you’ll get your full four days’ credit.”

  “But I’ve got to pay rent.”

  The stocky man said, “Sing us your troubles some other time, pal, I forgot my violin.”

  “I’ve got to pay my rent,” Cole insisted.

  “Not my problem, pal,” said the stocky man. “My problem, now, my problem is you’re holding up the line.”

  The woman said, “Next, please,” and reached her hand way over the counter to take the stocky man’s booklet. Cole looked at the two of them, the stocky man and the woman, and as far as either of them knew he wasn’t there anymore. The woman was asking her metallic questions again, and the stocky man was giving his metallic answers. Neither was looking at the other.

  Cole took a step back, feeling frightened, and backed into the people standing on the next line. “Excuse me. I’m sorry, excuse me.” Clutching his booklet, he turned away, hurrying down the gauntlet between the lines, bumping into people who didn’t even bother to turn around and look after him. He rushed out to the street, and turned the wrong way, gong down the block away from the subway. When he realized his mistake, he was embarrassed to let everyone know about it by turning around and retracing his steps—besides, he didn’t want to have to go past the Unemployment Insurance office again, where the stocky man might just be coming out—so instead he walked all the way around the block, and then to the subway.

  Riding downtown, he began to worry, as his self-consciousness wore off. He hadn’t worried very much about money before this, expecting that he’d have just enough to survive on if he was careful, and for the moment he couldn’t want or expect any more than that, but now, with money he’d counted on suddenly and inexplicably being withheld, money began all at once to loom in importance.

  He would have to get a job now. Yes, any kind of a job, maybe with a moving company or in a factory somewhere, any kind of job at all. The idea appealed to him in a guilty way; it would give him something more or less meaningful to do, it would fill his days without the makework of constantly cleaning the apartment. But at the same time he was afraid; it would be like a confession of defeat. As long as he was still struggling to find his old self, he didn’t dare expose himself to anything that would have been foreign to the old Paul Cole, had no right to fill himself with useless confusing new memories that could only hamper his regaining the old.

  But what else was there to do? He had to pay his rent, had to buy food, had to stay alive until the Unemployment Insurance money started to come in.

  He couldn’t make up his mind. He almost missed his subway stop, but jumped to the platform just as the doors were closing, and walked home through the gray air. He went into the apartment and looked at his watch, and it was twenty minutes to three.

  Pawn the watch. Yes. He looked at it again, remembering the existence of pawn shops, the idea of selling property to get cash. Of course, pawn the watch.

  And anything else? He looked around the living room, and saw again the painting on the wall over the sofa. Could that be valuable? It was an original, not a print, done, he remembered vaguely, by a friend of his. No, he couldn’t expect to get anything for that. Besides, he wouldn’t even know how to go about selling it.

  The books, what about the books? He couldn’t read them now, so they were useless to him. He supposed he already had read most of them or all of them in the past, so once his memory returned he still wouldn’t need them, because he would then remember their contents.

  He went to the bedroom and got the telephone book and looked up used book stores. Yes, there they were, and most of the addresses were on Fourth Avenue, all clustered together. He called one of them at random, and the man said yes, they did buy used books, and his store was located between 10th and 11th Streets. The other bookstores in the phone book had addresses similar to that one, so they would all be close together. He could even shop around and get the best price.

  He was pleased now, and excited. He was doing for himself, working his own way out of a dilemma. He hurried back to the living room and got two large paper grocery bags he’d been saving for rubbish, and sat on the floor in front of the bookcase to select his books.

  Not the paperbacks, he couldn’t expect more than what—half-price?—about ten or fifteen cents each for those. But the hardcovers, particularly the thick ones. No, all of them, all of them, he could carry them all. And if he could get, say, a dollar apiece for them—why not? most of them had cost three or four dollars
new—then that would be... He counted the hardcover books, and he had twenty-seven of them. Twenty-seven dollars. All right, it would help, it would certainly help.

  He loaded them into the bags, and there was a little room left over in one of the bags, so he stuffed some of the higher-priced paperbacks to fill it out. These paperbacks were marked at ninety-five cents or a dollar forty-five, prices like that; surely he could get a quarter each for them. Six in the bag, six more in his coat and trouser pockets. Another three dollars, plus twenty-seven dollars; thirty dollars. And if he could get another twenty-five for his watch, wouldn’t that be enough? Fifty-five dollars. Plus forty he already had. He could pay his rent and have twenty dollars left over to live on till the Unemployment Insurance money came.

  He picked up the two bags, and found them surprisingly heavy. Books weigh a lot; he was surprised. They hadn’t seemed to weigh much when he’d handled them one at a time.

  He left the apartment and went downstairs and out again to the gray air. He started walking east, over to Eighth Street. The bags of books got heavier and heavier, and before he was halfway down Eighth Street to Fifth Avenue he had to stop and rest, setting the bags on an automobile fender. The exertion was making him sweat, and the perspiration on his forehead was cold as ice in the cold air. He wiped it off, and wiped it off, but more kept coming out; and he was panting, dragging cold air into his lungs too fast and too frequently, so that his throat ached.

  After a few minutes, he gathered up the bags again and started forward. He reached Fifth Avenue, crossed it, and walked another block to University Place before he had to stop again and rest. Then there was a long long block from University Place to Broadway, and he rested again. The next block was short, and then he was at Fourth Avenue. He turned left, and walked uptown, and two blocks up he came to the first of the bookstores.

  There was a cluttered desk just inside the door, and behind it sat an elderly man in ragged clothes. Cole stood in front of him, holding the two bags in his arms, and said, “I want to sell some books.”

  The elderly man grunted, and then just sat there.

  Cole didn’t know what to do. His arms ached from elbow to shoulder; all he wanted was to put the bags down somewhere. He said, “You buy books, don’t you?”

  “Let’s see ’em.”

  “Where do I put them down?”

  “Floor.”

  Cole went around to the side of the desk, where the elderly man would be able to see the books, and went through contortions trying to get the bags down onto the floor. He finally did it by going down on one knee, and two paperbacks slid out of the top of one of the bags.

  The elderly man said, “All paperbound in that one?”

  “No, mostly hardcover. I’ve got some more...” He pulled the extra paperbacks out of his pockets, put them on the floor, and started unloading the bags, stacking the books up on the floor.

  The elderly man watched, and when Cole was done, he said, “Ten dollars.”

  “Ten? Is that all?”

  “You got nothing there. Plays? They’re a dead item, nobody wants last year’s plays.”

  “They ought to be worth more than that.”

  The elderly man shrugged. “Try around,” he said. “Try next door. Two or three more up the next block. You won’t get a better price.”

  Cole knelt on the floor and looked at the stacks of books and the empty bags. To load the books into the bags again, to somehow pick them up from the floor, to go through the same motions again in another store, and then another store... “All right,” he said. “Ten dollars.”

  The elderly man opened the center drawer of his desk. It was full of crumpled bills. He found a ten and handed it to Cole, who stood up and carefully put the bill away in his wallet. There was nothing to say, and the elderly man wasn’t looking at him anymore, so he went back outside, and turned downtown again. Walking away from the store, he began to regret having sold the books. His old self had valued them, had kept them after reading, had constructed a bookcase to store them in. And to only get ten dollars for them, that was terrible. But he couldn’t have carried them anymore, that was the main reason he’d sold them.

  He’d meant to pawn his watch, too; now it was more necessary than ever. He walked slowly westward, looking for a pawnshop, but that was no way to go about it. There might not be any in this neighborhood at all. He went into a bar and asked the bartender, who told him there was a pawnshop on University Place, and gave him directions to get there.

  It was three blocks. The store was on a corner, with heavy mesh screening over its windows, and a ragtag jumble of goods on display. Inside there was a low-ceilinged crowded darkness, with narrow aisles between dusty display cases. The store was very hot, but somehow damp.

  Cole had expected an old man, like the man in the bookstore, but the man who came expectantly toward him was young, no more than thirty, wearing a business suit. He could have looked like any sort of clerical worker, except for his glasses; the frames were orange, and the lenses as thick and distorted as soda bottle bottoms. He came forward with a small smile playing about the edges of his lips, and as he moved his hands washed each other.

  “Yes? Buy or sell? Buy or sell?”

  “I want to pawn my watch.”

  “Your watch.” He still smiled, but he seemed disappointed. “Well,” he said, like a sigh. “Let’s have a look at it.”

  Cole took it off and showed it to him. The man took it, fingered it, listened to it tick, looked at the back of it for inscriptions, tugged at the expansion band a bit, and said, “Five dollars.”

  “Oh, no. I need more than that, no, never mind.”

  Cole had reached out to take the watch, but the man ignored his hand, and kept the watch himself, touching it all over with his fingers. “You want to pawn? Not sell? Pawn? Five dollars. What if you never come back, never claim the merchandise? What then, eh? Come here.”

  He still had the watch, so Cole had no choice; he followed him deeper into the store, to a far wall, where the man waved his arms and said, “See?”

  Nails studded a large green rectangle of wall, and watches hung from all the nails, two or three watches per nail. Many of them had expansion bands, catching what little light there was, reflecting it back in muted glitters.

  The man said, “What do I need with another watch? You pawn it, you don’t claim it, what then? If you wanted to sell, now, that would be a different story.”

  Cole didn’t understand what he meant, but he said, “What would you give me if I sold it?”

  “Well, now.” He went through the same inspection all over again, Cole’s watch turning and turning in his fingers. His head was cocked to one side, and behind the thick lenses his eyes were slowly and steadily blinking. He said, “Mmm. Twelve-fifty. Yes.”

  “All right,” Cole nodded. “All right, I’ll sell it, then.”

  “That’s a different story.” The man whisked his arm out, and Cole’s watch was hung on one of the nails, where it swayed a bit, and then stopped.

  Cole followed him again, around the end of a display case to a narrow crowded counter. The man had papers to fill out, had to have Cole’s name and address, and then he gave Cole a crisp new ten dollar bill, two crisp new singles, and a shiny half dollar. “A pleasure to do business with you. Anything you want, buy or sell, always be happy to deal with you.”

  Going out, Cole passed the wall of watches. He stopped and studied them a minute, but he couldn’t find his own; there were too many of them there, all crowded in together.

  He saw the man peering at him, white circles of light on his lenses, so he gave up looking for the watch, and left the shop. He walked homeward, adding up numbers in his head; forty dollars, and ten dollars, and twelve dollars and fifty cents. But the numbers didn’t yet add up to seventy-five, so he would have to find something else to sell. In different places, though. He didn’t want to meet either of these people again.

  He went back to the apartment, and felt such relief
at being safely indoors again that he decided not to try to sell anything else until tomorrow. It was nearly four o’clock anyway; if he went back out, he’d be caught in the rush hour.

  Something looked funny, looked wrong. He frowned at the living room a minute, and then realized what it was: the bookcase. It was only a little more than half full now, and it had been almost completely full before. His world was such a narrow one now, so ritualized and so dependent on physical symbols of the past, that this dislocation bothered him all out of proportion to its actual effect on the appearance of the room. After he hung up his coat, he knelt in front of the bookcase and switched the books around, moving handfuls of them this way and that, trying to give it more of the proper appearance. He could get it to seem more full, but still it wasn’t right; there had been hardcover books on the lower right before, and now there were paperbacks there. But there was nothing he could do about that.

  Having rearranged the books and put a record on, it seemed natural to continue around the room, straightening up, cleaning. His routine had been disrupted today, by the trip to the Unemployment Insurance office and the time spent selling the books and watch, so the apartment wasn’t even half cleaned yet. Soon he was back in the normal pattern again, scrubbing and dusting, whispering dialogue to himself.

  21

  On New Year’s Eve, he went to Fred Crawford’s party. Nick came by for him around eight o’clock, and had to remind him he’d been invited. Fred Crawford lived in Brooklyn, so they rode the subway endlessly southward from the Village. Because of the noise of the subway, they couldn’t talk together during the trip, and Cole sat silent and apprehensive, wondering if going to this party was a mistake.

  Today had been strange from the beginning. It had started, while he was still eating breakfast, with another call from Helen Arndt. This time she didn’t ask him to come to her apartment for dinner; instead, she wanted to know why he hadn’t yet got in touch with the doctor she’d recommended. He said that he’d forgotten about it, he’d lost the doctor’s name and phone number, he was sorry, and she gave him the name and address and phone number again. He promised to call the doctor at once, and make an appointment, without intending to at all. What did he need from a doctor? More, what could a doctor do for him? He needed time, that was all, time and to be surrounded by the familiar. But he couldn’t explain that to Helen Arndt.