Memory (Hard Case Crime)

by Donald E. Westlake

  This morning, badly hung over, he had sunk without reluctance, almost with relief, back into the routine, just as though he had never tried to fight his way out of it.

  But the outside world was insistent, ringing and ringing at his mind, until finally he had to answer, and to hear Helen Arndt’s voice in his ear.

  She was noncommittal, impersonal: “I wondered why you didn’t show up last night, but now I know. Herbie Lang just called.”

  “Oh.”

  “You weren’t ready, were you?”

  “I thought I was. I guess I made a mistake.”

  “I guess you did. Don’t get me wrong, sweetie, but this isn’t something you can just play around with, this isn’t make-believe. Herbie Lang is a very nasty little man when he wants to be. He’s perfectly capable of taking it out on my other clients.”

  “I’m sorry. I tried to do it, I really did.”

  “I’m sure of that, honey, but look at the position you’ve put me in. I mean, after all.”

  A sudden agitation shook him, and he shouted, “Your position? What about my position? Why is it always everybody else’s position, your position and Rita’s position and Kirk’s position and everybody’s position, why isn’t it my position sometimes?”

  “Now, don’t get huffy, baby.”

  “Don’t call me baby, don’t call me honey or sweetie or any of that, don’t do it anymore.”

  “Now, slow down there, my friend.”

  He shook his head desperately and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I’m just all loused up.”

  “I’d say so.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Honey, have you thought about seeing a psychiatrist? I mean, I don’t want to tell you your business, but from what Herbie says of the way you carried on yesterday...” She let the sentence drift off.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t need a psychiatrist. I don’t need...I don’t want all this. I don’t know what I want.”

  “You know I’m in your corner, honey, but there are limits. Before I try to find anything else for you, I want to be sure you’re all right. I’ll want to see you in something first. Do you understand me, dear?”

  “Yes, you’re right. I shouldn’t have tried it before I got my memory back, that was all.”

  “You let me know when you’re ready, dear. Let me know when you’re in a production somewhere.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  “Good luck to you,” she said briskly, and broke the connection.

  He hung up, and went back to work on the windows, and he didn’t understand the implications of what Helen had said to him until hours later, until he was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a TV dinner and drinking instant coffee, with night outside the gleaming windows, and then all at once it occurred to him what she had really been saying.

  She had dropped him. She was no longer his agent. “Let me know when you’re in a production somewhere,” she had said, and what did that mean? It meant that his next job he would have to get himself, on his own, without an agent.

  He remembered this much from the dim past: The first necessary goal of the young actor is to be accepted by an agent. No matter how hard the struggle after that, it is nothing in comparison to the struggle preceding it. The unagented actor gets no television, no movies, no Broadway, and damn little off-Broadway. The unagented actor will take any part in any medium for any pay or no pay at all, if only an agent or two will be in the audience.

  It was all going, all crumbling away like an island being swallowed by the sea, eroding like river banks in the spring floods. Rita, avoiding him. Nick, impatient with him. Kirk, irritated by him. Helen, through with him. His vocation, impossible for him to handle. On his desk, propped up against the wall, was the notice from the Screen Actors’ Guild demanding an amount of money he couldn’t possibly pay.

  The next day, Wednesday, a similar demand for back dues came from Actors’ Equity. That was the same day his paid-up time with the answering service was done, and he didn’t renew.

  What was left? Of everything that Paul Cole had ever done or ever been in this towering city, what was now left? The apartment. Only the apartment, now antiseptically clean in a way that the old Paul Cole wouldn’t recognize, and littered with notes and reminders that the old Paul Cole wouldn’t need.

  He stayed in. No one phoned, no one knocked at his door. He didn’t bother to wear a shirt, or shoes. He shaved, but only from habit. From Monday to Friday he stayed in the apartment, making his narrow little round by day, trampled by the monsters of his dreams by night. Edna. The square of shiny metal. “Have you ever seen this before?” “Help! Paul, help me!”

  Edna. The afternoon in the doctor’s office came into his mind unbidden, time after time. Of course he wished that Edna were with him now, why not? What did that prove? She would console him and comfort him, she would be someone he could talk with and be with without the self-consciousness and without the danger of destroying yet another part of the past. It would be pleasant to have Edna here with him now, but it would be unfair to her. Once his memory came back, she would be out of place here, she would be as unhappy here then as he was now.

  And it would come back, it would.

  But he couldn’t make himself believe in the scaffoldings of confidence he was trying to erect. An oceanic lethargy weighted his limbs and dragged at his mind; he shuffled through the days, worried and distraught and weary, unable to push himself into any concentration, any thought or any action.

  Early Friday afternoon, he came to himself with a start, realizing that he had spent the entire day so far in a blank. Not once all day had he had any thought beyond the motions of eating and washing and housecleaning. Not once had he thought of any person, not once had he thought about what had happened to him or what he could do in the future. He had been mindless today, the routine taking on its own reason. Early in the afternoon he came to himself and realized: I’d forgotten who I was!

  He had to break out of this. He’d been as purposeless as an animal, he’d die this way. He’d even forgotten to go to the unemployment insurance office. There’d be a check in the mail today, for last week, but none next Friday. No money, no agent, no friends, no past, no future, no hope.

  How small the apartment was! The gray walls leaned inward ever so slightly, and the windows looked out at brick walls which themselves were edging slowly closer and closer. The ceiling was low, really, very very low, and dark with dirt. The notes tacked to the walls fluttered as he moved by them, making a small rustling sound, the only sound in the apartment; he played the records no more.

  Out, he had to get out of here! Away...

  He fled the apartment, and downstairs in the mailbox was the check from the unemployment insurance people, as he’d expected. He went out, shivering in the cold air, and hurried through the streets to the bank, getting there just before closing and cashing the check, keeping all thirty-eight dollars, putting none in the checking account.

  From the time he left the apartment till the time he walked out of the bank with the cash in his pocket, he had been moving at last with a purpose, no matter how slight or unimportant that purpose was. But at least he’d had a reason to do something. The purpose had been to cash the check; now it was cashed.

  He wandered. He was afraid to go back to the apartment, actually afraid, as though within the apartment lurked some miasma, some green gas that would fill him and enfold him and reduce him to pulp. The coffee shops and bars and theaters where his former friends were to be found were mostly eastward from where he was, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, so he wandered westward instead. He roamed up and down and around the narrow streets, the twisted Bagdad of streets south and west of Sheridan Square. He crossed Hudson Street into the West Village, where he hadn’t gone before, and strolled this way and that, stopping in an Italian grocery to buy a fresh pack of cigarettes, and then going on.

  In the next block on his right, there was a dirty red brick building with gara
ge doors across the front and a big green sign with white lettering above the doors. It looked vaguely familiar, the first even remotely familiar sight he’d seen in half an hour or more.

  He stepped out to the curb so he could read the sign better, and squinted up at it in the failing light of late afternoon: CASALE BROS. MOVING & TRUCKING.

  Why was that familiar? Then he remembered; he’d seen that name on a form somewhere. On his tax forms? Maybe, he wasn’t sure. On some form somewhere, more than likely the tax forms.

  He must have worked there, in the old days, between acting jobs.

  All at once he laughed aloud. Between acting jobs! By God, if he was ever between acting jobs in his life it was now! He was between acting jobs like nobody’s business!

  Why not? Get him out of the apartment, get him doing some sensible physical labor for a little decent money, and it wouldn’t even be a break with the past, because he’d worked here in the past! Here was one part of his past he could touch all he wanted, and it would never crumble in his hands!

  He hurried down to the far end of the building, past the shut green garage doors, to the smaller door, the entrance to the office. He went in, and it was a small crowded room with girlie calendars all over the walls and a rolltop desk littered with pink and yellow sheets of onionskin paper. A short stocky man with thick black hair—black hair growing out of his ears, out of his nostrils, on the backs of his hands, a prickly stubble of black beard darkening his jaw—was sitting at the desk in his shirt sleeves, one pencil in his hand and another stuck behind his ear. He looked up when Cole came in and said, “Yeah?”

  “My name’s Cole. Paul Cole. I worked for you part-time a couple of years ago. I was wondering if you could use me again.”

  The stocky man squinted at him, and drummed his pencil point on some papers. Then he said, “Cole? An actor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I didn’t recognize you. You look different.”

  “I guess I am different.” Cole grinned, trying to make a joke of it.

  The stocky man nodded. “I remember you,” he said. “Sure, I can use you. When do you want to start?”

  “Any time.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “All right, fine.”

  “Nine A.M., check?”

  “Check,” said Cole.

  He left there, walking purposefully once again, headed back to the apartment. The apartment had no fears for him now, it couldn’t trap him. He had things to do. The apartment could only trap those who were meaningless and purposeless, those who had nothing to do, no reason for existing.

  As soon as he got home, he went to work. First, he made a tour of the walls, ripping down all the notes that no longer had any purpose, notes about Nick and Rita and Helen and the job he’d failed on Monday, and when he was done the walls were almost bare again. Then he made up some new notes. One, on his pillow, reminded him to set the alarm for eight o’clock before going to bed. A second, over the desk, reminded him that he had a job with the moving company. A third, for his pocket, gave the name and address of the moving company, which he found on an old W-2 form.

  He’d been right in telling the doctor he’d like to work in that tannery again. Physical labor, filling the day and using the body and easing the mind, was the best prescription in the world for while he awaited the return of his memory.

  When he was done with the rearrangements in the apartment, he felt a restlessness, a new energy. He went out again, and walked a while, and at one intersection he saw a block away to his right the lights of a movie marquee. He walked down that way, and the theater was showing a double feature, two Technicolor musical comedies. He bought a ticket and went in.

  He sat through until the last showing was finished, at five minutes before midnight. He enjoyed it all, the singing and the laughing, the bright music and the bright colors, and the sense of freedom. He wasn’t forcing himself to do what he could not do, or scuttle around after this former friends, or listen to music he didn’t like, or go to movies he couldn’t understand. It was as though he’d been a prisoner within the old Paul Cole and now he was no longer a prisoner.

  He was starving when he left the theater, so he stopped at a Riker’s for hamburgers and coffee, and then he went home and set the alarm for eight in the morning, and went to bed. He fell asleep relaxed and happy, sure there would be no bad dreams tonight, but they assaulted him just the same, gnawing and clawing at him, sticking razors into his brain, and he awoke twice during the night in shaking terror, sweat-soaked, both times with the conviction that something critical had been told him which he had not understood.

  And Edna.

  And the square of shiny metal.

  30

  When he awoke he knew at once that it was Sunday and that he wouldn’t be working today, and he thought, I’m taking Edna to the movies. Then he remembered where he was, and that yesterday he had worked not at the tannery but on the moving van, and he got mad at himself for the stupid thought, and got angrily out of bed.

  He’d made it to his new job yesterday morning exactly on time. The boss had assigned him to a big rattling truck with a red cab and a black body. The driver’s name was Marty, and the other helper’s name was Jack; they were both professional movers, doing this full time and not waiting for any other career to suddenly flower in some other corner of their lives.

  It had been fun working on the truck. That was the only word for it, fun. Their first job, they’d driven over to Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, to one of the apartment hotels over there, and unloaded four rooms of furniture from a seventh floor suite, taking everything down the big square open-sided slow-moving freight elevator at the back, and out the rear door to where the truck was double parked on 12th Street. The party was two elderly ladies and two small brown dogs with silky hair in their eyes. The furniture was all bent and twisted, gnarled and gleaming antiques padded with green felt. The two ladies twittered like birds, afraid everything was going to be broken; they stood around in the way, each of them holding a little dog to her breast. But they got everything out okay, and loaded onto the truck, and the two ladies went off in a cab, and the truck snorted through traffic uptown to West 73rd Street, Marty driving hard and screaming out the window all the time, Jack telling dirty jokes or how he’d screwed companies out of money in the past.

  After that first job, they did a short haul, taking three rooms of furniture from East Seventh Street near Third Avenue over to Minetta Lane. The party that time was a young couple with a baby; the wife reminded Cole a little of Edna, but somewhat prettier.

  They ate lunch at a White Rose on Fourth Avenue, and then they spent the afternoon in Brooklyn, moving a bachelor from Manhattan Beach to Bay Ridge. He had thousands of books and phonograph records all packed away in grocery cartons, and he kept making jokes about girls and offering cans of beer.

  After work, Cole went with Marty and Jack to a bar on West 14th Street, over near Ninth Avenue. As far as he could tell, he’d never been there before; it didn’t look like the kind of place the old Paul Cole would have gone to. Nor his friends, either. There was a shuffleboard in the back of the place, and the three of them played for beers until three o’clock, when the place closed. Then he’d gone home and to bed and to sleep. The dreams had come—the dreams were always there waiting for him—but they hadn’t been as vicious as usual.

  Now it was Sunday, nearly noon, and he’d spoiled things by starting the day with a stupidity. Forgetting where he was, thinking he was back in that town, feeling pleased at being back in that town, pleased at the notion of going to the movies with Edna. How perverse his mind was! The one time in all his life he didn’t give a damn about, and that was the only part of his past his mind remembered. Not that it remembered much—the name of the town was gone, and the name of the tannery, and the names of his coworkers—but the little it did remember seemed to cling and cling. Only two items, all in all; Edna’s first name and what she looked like, and Malloy, the name of the fa
mily he’d lived with there. Why he should remember those two things he didn’t know, but there they were, always intruding, interrupting his thoughts. Especially Edna.

  The apartment was getting a little messy, but he didn’t care. That part was finished, he had a better way to use his energy. He ate his breakfast now, and left the dishes unwashed in the sink, and then went back to the bedroom to get dressed. This afternoon he’d go to a movie, and tonight he’d go to the bar on 14th Street, see if Marty or Jack was around.

  He’d just finished dressing when the knock sounded at the door. He went out to the living room, frowning, wondering who it could be, and when he opened the door Benny pushed his way in, looking belligerent and determined, saying, “Okay, man, enough is enough.”

  Cole remembered him, remembered his name and vaguely remembered the scene here the first night he’d come home, but he had no idea what Benny was talking about. He said, “What is this? What do you want?”

  “You know what I want. Cough it up.”

  “Cough what up? Benny, I’m not ki—”

  Benny made an angry gesture, saying, “Don’t try that memory crap on me, man, I’ve had it up to here. Just pay me the twenty-five bucks you owe me and we’ll forget about it.”

  Cole shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said. “You loaned me—”

  “I told you, don’t pull that crap!”

  “What crap? What’s the matter with you?”

  “You know who I am, don’t try to kid me.”

  “Sure. You’re Benny. You were staying here while I was gone.”

  “Beautiful. What an actor. I woulda brung an Oscar, but it slipped my mind. Pay me.”

  “Listen, I’m not acting. For God’s sake, do you think I want—”

  “I don’t care what you want, man. What I want, I want that twenty-five bucks.”

  “If I owe you twen—”

  “If?” Benny stared around the room as though looking for a weapon. His hands were clenched into fists, help up close to his chest, shaking.