Memory (Hard Case Crime)

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Good boy. Now, so far as I know, there won’t be anyone else there you know, but if there is just fake it. You are an actor, after all, isn’t that right?”

  “Right,” he said, more forcefully than he’d intended. But this was confirmation of his reason for existence, his reason for struggling against the dullness of his days and the sluggishness of his memory and the pessimism of the doctor. His irritation with her was forgotten; she was his agent, and he was an actor. The fact of that relationship was enough to bolster him.

  “Give me a call when it’s finished, sweetie,” she said. “Let me know how it works out. And don’t forget about tonight. Be there about eight.”

  “All right, I will.”

  He hung up, suddenly remembering his agreement to go see her this evening, and a pall was cast on his pleasure. He’d been nervous before Helen’s call, and then for a minute he had been calm and relaxed, almost like a professional, and now he was nervous again. Not because of the job this time, but because of the evening that was supposed to follow it.

  All right, never mind that for now. One thing at a time. Take care of the job, and then see what could be done to get through this evening.

  It was time to leave. He got an extra suit out of the closet and folded it carefully into his canvas bag; they’d said they wanted him to bring two suits, and he was wearing the other. He put on his overcoat, checked his pockets to be sure he had everything he needed, read the notes on the wall to be sure he wasn’t forgetting anything else he was supposed to do today, and at last he was ready to leave. He hefted his canvas bag, grinned uneasily around the apartment—he felt uncomfortable these days if he had to go out before the place was cleaned from one end to the other—and finally he did leave, locking the door behind him.

  He had a subway map, and he’d bought maps and street guides to Manhattan and Brooklyn and the Bronx, and last night he’d mapped out his route to the studio; it was with him now, folded and in his pocket, carefully drawn on a sheet of writing paper. He took it from his pocket as he walked toward the subway, refreshing his memory, and then stuffed it back again.

  It was a clear day, the first in nearly a week. The sun was very high and very pale, and the sky was such a pale blue as to be almost white, but at least there were no low-hanging greasy-looking clouds, and the dank cold of the last few days had been replaced by a drier breeze whistling down from the north. It was an invigorating day, and he took that to be a good sign.

  The trip was no trouble at all. He had only the one subway transfer to make, at Columbus Circle, where he picked up the train to the Bronx. It was only a three block walk from the subway station in the Bronx to the studio, and he got there ten minutes early.

  The building was an old neighborhood motion picture theater, converted to television work. Boards had been put over the faces of the old marquee, and painted white, and given the legend in black: fine arts studios. The building was of old brick, very grimy and ancient looking, and the row of doors leading to the lobby were gray with grime and dust.

  Cole pushed through one of the doors and crossed the small lobby to another row of doors, these of wood. He went through, and found himself in a large echoing room. The movie theater seats had been removed, and so had the railing behind the last row. Movie theater floors slant downward toward the rear wall, where the screen is located, but here both slant and screen had been removed. The floor had been filled in and straightened to the level of the lobby all the way to the rear wall, and now consisted of wooden planking which rang with a somewhat hollow sound whenever people walked on it. Pipes traversed the ceiling, in a complex kind of tic-tac-toe board, with heavy spotlights suspended from them and cables wound snakelike around them. In the far right corner squatted a bulky bank of electronic equipment. Flimsy looking sets and odd pieces of furniture made little island groupings here and there around the floor, and Cole counted four television cameras standing around waiting, untended now. A group of people were clustered around a large table to the left, which was covered by a sloppy mass of papers and cardboard coffee containers and wadded napkins. Not knowing what else to do, Cole started toward them, and suddenly one of the people there spied him and came walking rapidly toward him, arms outstretched, shouting out, “Comrade!”

  It was a short man. He had a receding hairline, and a round face, and hornrim glasses, and he was smiling. He came hurrying forward, and grasped Cole’s right hand in both of his and pumped it effusively, saying, “Good to see you again, comrade, good to see you again.”

  “Mister Lang,” said Cole. He said it as a statement, as a greeting, but he meant it as a question.

  Apparently the answer was yes. Lang pumped his hand a few seconds longer, and then released it and grabbed his elbow instead, saying, “Get right on into makeup, comrade, today’s the day we beat every speed record, depend on it. We’re liable to use you before lunch, what do you think of that?”

  Lang was propelling him toward a door to the left; the room it led to must be next to the lobby. Cole went along willingly, carrying his canvas bag, and Lang said, “It’s good to see you again, comrade, it really is. It’s been too long.” He winked, and smiled broadly, and patted Cole cheerfully on the back, and left him at the doorway, calling, “See you later, comrade.”

  Cole went on into the room, and at first glance it looked like a barber shop, full of barber chairs. But they weren’t exactly barber chairs, and the man in the white jacket who began at once to order him around wasn’t exactly a barber. He was a short and narrow-faced man, with moles on his forehead and thick dry-looking black hair. He bundled Cole out of his overcoat and suitcoat and tie and shirt, told him to sit down in one of the chairs, and said, “Right. Who are you?”

  “Paul Cole.”

  “Paul Cole?” The man seemed baffled. “What the hell—? No, no, I mean in the goddamn show! How do I make you up if I don’t know who you are in the show? What’s the matter with you, you never done this before?”

  “I didn’t know what you meant. Nobody told me who I am in the show.”

  “Well, shit. That’s what I say, shit. How they expect me to get anything done around this goddamn place? Shit in a bucket, that’s what I say. Don’t you move, you. You stay right there in that chair.”

  “All right.”

  The makeup man hurried out of the room, and Cole heard a sudden spate of shouting echo around the big room outside, and then the makeup man came bustling back in, looking indignant and harried. “You’re Condemned Man,” he said brusquely, and turned to the counter where the makeup was.

  Condemned Man? Cole started half out of his chair, looking around wildly, as though someone were playing some sort of joke on him in very bad taste. Condemned Man? Was Robin Kirk out there? Was this some sort of joke they were pulling on him, Helen Arndt and Robin Kirk in on it together? Condemned Man!

  The makeup man turned back, his hands full of tubes of makeup. He stared at Cole, still half out of the chair, and said, “Where you think you’re going? You think I got all day? You think you’re the only one I got to do?”

  Cole stared at him. “Is this a joke?”

  “What? What the hell you talking about?”

  Cole was trembling now, but not from nervousness; he was trembling with anger. His hands gripped the arms of the chair, squeezing tight so the knuckles stood out white and knobby. He said, “You better tell me. Is this Robin Kirk?”

  “What are you, a nut? Is that what you are, you’re a nut?”

  The makeup man wasn’t part of any joke; that much came through clearly to Cole, and he subsided, sitting back down in the chair. “I don’t know,” he said, feeling as though he ought to try to explain. “It’s some kind of coincidence or something.”

  “Don’t tell me your troubles, you, I got troubles of my own. No talking now, I got to do your face.”

  Cole leaned his head back on the rest, and the makeup man went to work on him. The creams he smeared on Cole’s face were cooling, helping to relax him fu
rther. But still, it was unnerving. Condemned Man! Sitting there, thinking of it, the coincidental connection with that improvisation of Robin Kirk’s, he began to feel more and more apprehensive. He hadn’t been able to do that improvisation, that bit of make believe about a condemned man in Robin Kirk’s loft, but he’d ignored the implications of that failure. Was it all gone, whatever talent or ability he had had? Then what would happen this morning, when it came his turn to step in front of the television camera?

  No, this was going to be different. That improvisation had been nonsensical, a piece of fantasy without beginning or end, without rhyme or reason. It had meant nothing, and it had proved nothing. This was different, this was work. There was an actual play, a complete and total play, not some excerpt wrested foolishly out to be performed for no reason, not some spur-of-the-moment invention without depth or purpose. And besides, what had stopped him in the improvisation? Lines, that was all. He hadn’t had anything to say, there were no lines prepared. But here, today, he would have his line. One line to speak, and that was all, and it was already written down for him, with its proper place in the sequence of a planned and purposeful play. There was no reason why he couldn’t do it, no reason at all.

  And as for the coincidence, what of it? Condemned men weren’t exactly rare in fiction; they were stock enough for Robin Kirk to have thought of one. So the coincidence didn’t mean a thing. It was a coincidence, and nothing more.

  The makeup man was finishing his face as two more men came into the room. He looked at them and said, “One minute. Be with you in one minute, don’t go nowhere.” And then, under his breath, “So I got to work alone? When that son of a bitch gets here, I swear to Christ—” He stepped back, studied Cole critically, and finally nodded. “All right,” he said. “You’re done. They want your hands done, come back. If they don’t say nothing, you don’t say nothing.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  But the makeup man was already snapping at one of the others to come sit in the chair.

  Cole put his shirt and suitcoat on and went outside and headed toward the group of people still clustered around the big table, and once again Herbie Lang came scurrying toward him, beaming, arms outstretched, shouting, “Comrade! You look perfect! Absolutely beautiful! Come along, come along.” He grabbed Cole’s elbow again, and guided him over to the table and to a woman in a beige tweed suit. “Karen. Karen. One second.”

  She turned around, glancing with irritation at Lang and noncommittally at Cole. “Who’s this?”

  “Condemned Man. All right? Beautiful makeup job?”

  “Gray suit,” she said. “I don’t like the gray suit, that light a gray. Condemned Man, it ought to be darker, more somber.” She turned her head. “Harvey?”

  A gaunt tall man came over, carrying a cardboard coffee container. “Something wrong?” He said it in a long-suffering way, as though he’d always known something would go wrong now, at this exact moment in time.

  She gestured loosely at Cole. “Condemned Man,” she said. “The gray suit. Is it too light or is it too light?”

  The gaunt man studied Cole and nodded. “Too light,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” said the woman. To Cole she said, “Did you bring another suit?”

  “Yes, it’s in my—”

  “What color?”

  “Darker than this.”

  “Go try it on.”

  Lang had his elbow again. “Come along, comrade,” he said gaily. “I’ll show you the dressing room. Where’s your suit?”

  “In my bag, in the makeup room there.”

  “Oh. I’d better not go in there, Ralphy’s peeohed at me. You see the stairs over there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Up them, and first door to your right. Got it?”

  Cole nodded.

  “Good, kimosabe.” Lang patted him on the back again, and hurried off.

  When Cole went into the makeup room the makeup man spun around to glare at him, saying, “The hands? Is that it, the goddamn hands?”

  Everyone was nervous, the makeup man and Lang and the woman and the gaunt man, all of them, exuding nervousness from every pore. Cole’s own equilibrium was held only tenuously, and all this nervousness around him was having a bad effect on him. He pointed at his canvas bag, unable to say anything, and his hand was shaking.

  “Shit,” said the makeup man, and went back to work.

  Cole picked up his bag and carried it upstairs and through the first door on the right. This was a barren room, with pale green walls. A row of wall lockers was stretched across the opposite wall, with a wooden bench in front of them. A middle-aged man was getting laboriously into some sort of police uniform. He nodded to Cole, but didn’t say anything, so Cole only nodded back.

  Cole changed quickly, and put his first suit in the canvas bag. Then he looked around, wondering where to leave the bag, and the middle-aged man said, “Just stick it in one of the lockers. Nobody’ll take it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Cole went back downstairs, and this time it was the woman who caught him first. She stopped him and stood peering at him a minute, and then nodded emphatically. “Much better,” she said. “Much much better. Come along, we need Harvey’s okay.”

  He went with her to find the gaunt man, who was now standing broodingly in an office set in the middle of the room, gazing unhappily at the desk. The woman attracted his attention and asked him if Cole’s new suit weren’t much better, and he said deliberately that it was. The woman was pleased, and told Cole, “All right then, you find yourself a seat over there and we’ll call you when we’re ready. Be careful you don’t smudge your makeup now, we’ll be ready to use you very soon.”

  Cole went over where she’d pointed, to the side wall, where he found some folding chairs set up against the wall. The middle-aged man was there, in his police uniform, and another man in a police uniform, and two others in business suits. Cole sat down near them, but not with them, and waited. To his right, the other four men chatted together; out on the floor, men in shirt sleeves wrestled the television cameras around and shouted to one another and pointed up at the ceiling and spoke into headsets and hurried this way and that. Other men, in work shirts, carried pieces of furniture around, or stood in small groups talking together and smoking cigarettes.

  The waiting began to bother him after a while. He’d gotten over his first shock at hearing the part he was supposed to play, and he had stopped being bothered as much by the nervous motion going on all around, but as the time went by the very fact of waiting began to prey on him. There was hustle and bustle everywhere, and the woman had told him they would be ready to use him very soon, so he was expecting to be called any second, but the time went by and went by and went by, and nothing happened.

  From his position here, on the side wall, he could see the control room, a concrete block affair built up on the balcony, with broad soundproof windows overlooking the whole work area. Through the windows he could get dim glimpses of men in white shirts, their heads bobbing back and forth; they were in semi-darkness up there, with faint red and green lights playing on them, reminding him of aquariums.

  An hour went by, and a second hour, and no one had come near him, and then all of a sudden Herbie Lang came trotting over, smiling as broadly as ever. Lang spoke to them as a group, to Cole and the other four men, saying, “Well, comrades, it won’t be long now. We’ve had our little problems, you know how it is, but we’re all squared away now and we’ll be ready to use you right after lunch. Take a lunch break now, be back at one-thirty. Check? Check.” He hurried away again.

  The other men got to their feet, grumbling together, and started off in a body toward the doors. Cole trailed after them, not knowing what else to do, but then he realized they weren’t paying any attention to him and didn’t consider him a part of their group, and he hung back, embarrassed at having tried to attach himself to them like a fifth wheel. He moved w
ith deliberate slowness, letting them get farther and farther ahead, so that they’d already gone out the street door when he pushed through one of the doors into the lobby. They went off to the right; when he reached the street, he turned left.

  He had to go all the way back to the subway entrance before he found a luncheonette, and then he stood for a second on the sidewalk, gazing at the concrete steps down to the subway, feeling in himself a desire to keep on going, to go down those steps and into a subway car and ride all the way back home. Everything was depressing him today, everything. The name of the character he was to play, and the tension crackling around the big shots in the studio, and his complete isolation from the other actors with minor roles, all of it surrounding him with premonitions of danger and trouble, of the presence of threats to himself that he could neither anticipate nor understand.

  He told himself angrily that it was just the cycle affecting him, just one of his normal depressions coming over him, and what a hell of a time it had picked to come back. This was the most important event since his accident; the day on which he was starting again to live his old life. What he had been doing so far was not living his old life, it was living a kind of interregnum in the area of his old life, and that wasn’t the same thing at all. Today was a new beginning, the first real step in the return to normalcy; he couldn’t let any depression or any gloomy premonitions ruin this for him.

  He went into the luncheonette and sat down at the counter. There were middle-aged women, shoppers surrounded by brown paper bags, eating lunch in two of the booths, and a few men in work clothing were sitting at the counter. A youngster in his late teens, pale and thin, came over to serve him, and Cole asked for hamburger and coffee. The counterman looked at him somewhat oddly, but didn’t say anything. He went away and put the hamburger on, and Cole watched him, wondering why he’d been given such a funny look. But there wasn’t any explanation.

  He got his food and started to eat, and after he took his first sip of coffee he saw a dark red smear on the cup, the kind women leave with their lipstick. He stared at it, and suddenly remembered the makeup. He was in full makeup; his whole face covered with an orange-like grease, black and white and gray lines streaked this way and that across his forehead and cheeks, dark red on his lips.