Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  “I went to the woman leaning against the bomb; I was thinking I had to get her away from the bomb. … When I got to her, when I took her arm, I realized that I could see her brain. … She was moaning in a kind of singsong voice, staring straight ahead, her face covered with mud and blood, her dress torn, it was a pretty summer dress but it was stiff and sticky with blood from her own wounds and from clutching the severed leg, and she’d lost her shoes and she kept reaching out and touching the leg beside her as if she were afraid it might walk away. … I believed she would certainly die from the head wounds, I nearly left her to go in search of someone I could actually help … but do you know what saved her, Mr. Cassidy? I’ll tell you. Even as she was—and I’m sure my description fails to convey the condition she was in—but even so horribly brutalized, I could see how beautiful she was. … Odd, that she should be saved because her beauty was still visible and drew me to her. … People are not born equal, you see, and the will to survive was still alive within her inextinguishable beauty. Well, I helped her to her feet, I couldn’t take my eyes away from the broken skull, that bit of living matter beneath the white and bloody shell of bone. …

  “I got her to a hospital, she didn’t need one of those doctors who was drowning in a sea of victims because she had one of her own, me, I was her personal doctor and that saved her. I knew some people at the hospital and with the help of a dear friend of mine, another brain surgeon who had his hands full, but with his help I operated on her and we did what we could. … We reconstructed her skull. … Her recovery was a perilous business, she didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t speak for months, in the end she was capable of speaking but was clearly choosing not to, I’m quite sure of that, but she slept an enormous amount, almost comatose, and then miraculously she seemed to be curing herself from within, locked inside her womb of silence.

  “Eventually I thought she was well enough to take her to my clinic and there she began to flourish. By September of 1942 she had begun to speak—now, I wonder, how can I make you see this? See what I felt when at last she spoke? I’d grown so accustomed to her silence, but I had been speaking normally to her right along, treating her as if she were normal because I knew by her physical responses that she could hear, that she was waiting until the time was right, she would nod and smile at one of my stuffy little jokes … She read, mostly the classics, she would never read the newspapers, nothing about the war. … Then one day I brought her a cup of tea, she was sitting at a table on the balcony outside her bedroom, looking out across the valley—she was living in her own room in my home by then—and she glanced up at me shyly and smiled very gently and said, ‘Danke, Herr Dr. Moller.’ I cried, Mr. Cassidy, I was smiling at her, but the tears were streaming down my cheeks, and she took my hand in hers and squeezed it. … She was coming back to the real world. It was unfortunate, of course, that the real world was blowing to pieces but, then, what would life be without irony?” He frowned at the crack of thunder, louder, nearer the house. Lightning tracked across the purple sky. “What would a German be these days without a sense of tragedy? And irony?”

  “Not only Germans,” Cassidy said.

  It was at Dr. Moller’s mountain home that Manfred Moller met Karin, there that they slowly—during his intermittent appearances—fell in love. They were married at the Catholic church in the village at a time when the groom was serving as SS liaison for Göring and knew that nothing could turn the tide of the war. Within a month of the marriage, in May of 1944, the Allies had invaded Fortress Europa, creating a second front in the West. By then no sane man in Germany was thinking about anything but the best possible terms of surrender. When the following winter the German army had made the final violent breakout in the Ardennes, Manfred had come home to spend Christmas with his wife and brother. Then he’d gone back to Berlin to lay the plans for and subsequently undertake the desperate final mission for Göring. They had never seen him again.

  And then one day Sam MacMurdo had turned up looking for a line on Manfred and, as Rolf Moller said, “Here we are. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to comprehend all that has happened since Colonel MacMurdo entered our lives. … Imagine what it’s been like for Karin who remembers only fragments of her past, who doesn’t know she was married before. … I don’t know how I could have handled that utter void were it my own life—it seems impossible!” He clicked the cigarette holder and the butt dropped like a forlorn refugee into the ashtray. He took a white handkerchief from his sleeve—another Englishism—and polished his glasses. There were deep red indentations on the sides of his nose. “None of us knew who she was until MacMurdo recognized her. … It’s all come in a rush, don’t you see?”

  “Amnesia is a kind of conjuror’s trick,” Dr. Rolf Moller observed. “Something is made to disappear. Amnesia is a very deep mystery.”

  Lew Cassidy sat in one of the matching leather chairs, rubbing his eyes, willing his brain to keep track of everything he’d heard during the long afternoon. The rain had become a steady, determined downpour. It rattled in the eaves and lead gutters and downspouts.

  “Some of us pretend to know more about it than we actually do. I’ve been fascinated by the whole study of mnemonics, but in the course of a doctor’s practice true cases of amnesia are very rare. Short-term shell shock, yes, in a century that has become one long charnel house—but this kind of amnesia, no, very rare. I’ve studied it with Archibald in London, with Wolff in Geneva, with Kruger in Leipzig, and I can assure you that the mystery is only beginning to render its answers. Of course, the more difficult the mystery is to solve, the more interesting it becomes. … The Enigma Syndrome, as old Kruger liked to call it. Amnesia stems from many different causes, but the only ones that concern us in this instance are actual injury to the brain, a physical cause—and shock of a psychological nature. There are as well different types of amnesia, primarily anterograde, which refers to the events following the trauma being lost in the mind of the patient—clearly not what we’re dealing with here, and retrograde amnesia, in which events that occurred before and during the trauma are lost.” He coughed again and cast an accusing glance at the cigarette, which was the ninth he’d lit since they’d begun talking. “In Karin’s case, her entire history before the bombing of Cologne is gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Utterly gone.”

  Cassidy said: “Was it the injury or …”

  Moller shrugged, pursing his lips. He passed a small hand over his thinning light brown hair. He had bags under his eyes, dark pouches of worry partially hidden by his spectacles. It occurred to Cassidy that Moller was exhausted, worn down by the advent of MacMurdo. “I wish I could give you an answer, but whether it is traceable to the brain injury or to the shock”—he shrugged, a small, helpless gesture—“we cannot be absolutely sure. But we do know that what she has lost are the personal memories—that is, her identity, her personal history, by which I mean, as our friend MacMurdo would say, ‘She doesn’t know her ass from her teakettle, pard.’ We’ve told her who her father was, some things of that nature, but she has no recollection whatsoever. She has, for example, no memory of having skated in the Olympic Games, nor of living in the United States, nor of making movies, nor of having married you. That which is less personal—how to drive a car, how to speak English, how to cook certain favorite dishes, indeed even how to ice skate—all that is intact.

  “As a brain surgeon, I can understand that there may be a physical cause. Her brain sustained terrible trauma, but it is not easily measurable. There is also the possibility, which I see while wearing my psychiatrist’s cap—which I hasten to add is much like a dunce cap, tall and pointed”—he permitted himself a small smile at his joke—“there is the possibility of psychoneurotic amnesia, retrograde, which causes a person to escape or deny those memories that are too painful to bear and remain sane. We would say that those memories are repressed, that is to say they are repressed or forgotten intentionally. … We call that motivated forgetting. In Karin’s case, the bombing of Cologne w
ould have desperately needed forgetting.”

  Cassidy said: “You mean if she remembers the bombing she’ll remember just how godawful it was … but she might also remember the rest of her previous life, good and bad? Is that it, more or less?”

  “More or less.”

  “Do you think her memory is gone for good?”

  “Ah, there is no way to know. Sometimes the amnesia lasts for weeks, sometimes for years, sometimes forever. Karin has developed a whole new life, a whole new pattern of life. This condition is called a fugue state. Oddly enough, when the individual recovers the lost memory of the pretrauma past, the events of the new life—of the fugue state—are almost always forgotten.”

  “My God,” Cassidy sighed. “Isn’t there anything you can do to push her? Can’t you drag that memory back to the surface?”

  “Mr. Cassidy, think of what you’re saying—you’re suggesting a very dangerous game. What if she is dragged back, against her subconscious will, from the snug harbor of a place we call Forgetting. Suppose we force her all the way back to the here-and-now and she remembers what she’s been trying to escape. Who’s to say she won’t crack at the remembered horror? Who’s to say she won’t simply go mad? Who’s to say she won’t escape the next time by killing herself? Would that be preferable, Mr. Cassidy? Did she survive the fiery hell of Cologne in 1942 only to kill herself in a world at peace in 1945? No, I think not. Better to just let nature work … let time have the chance to heal the scars. If she comes back under her own power it will be because somewhere deep within her wounded, battered psyche she has decided to return. …

  “And then she will be Karin Cassidy again. Only then, I’m afraid …”

  Cassidy and MacMurdo were standing under the roof of the portico at the side of the house. The rain was beating down and bouncing off the driveway. It was dark and the lamps on the columns glowed through the murk. You could see your breath in the cold. Fall had arrived. They were waiting for Clyde, one of MacMurdo’s aides, to bring the Ford around. When it had looked like it was about to rain, sure enough, Clyde had gone out and pulled the rag top into place.

  “Well, you’ve got the whole story now, Lew. The girl’s had a tough time. Like lots of other folks.” MacMurdo shrugged his massive shoulders. “Now about the job I’ve got for you, whattaya say?”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Your country will owe you one, Lew.”

  “That’s very reassuring, Colonel.”

  “Call me Sam, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Well, you’re a determined guy, Sam. I’ll ask some questions, talk to some people—”

  “That’s right, pard. Gossip of the Rialto, as the Bard or somebody once said. You can get a line on the Nazi symps in New York. Let ’em know you’ve heard about the priceless minotaur, how it’s been smuggled out of Germany and how it just may be on the market—hell, you know what to do.” He took his pipe from his pocket and tapped the bowl on his heel.

  “I’ve got an idea or two.”

  “Then there’s the Maine situation. A plane goes down in Maine, somebody must have seen it or heard it. It’s only been six months. And, look, we know these things cost money. Cost of doing business, you might say. You’ll find a satchel in your car. Twenty grand.”

  “Come on, Colonel. That’s way too much. Sounds like a bribe out of taxpayers’ money—”

  “Believe me, it’s on the up and up. An operation like this, for the good of the state, has to be funded. What you do with the money is your affair. It’s out of my hands. You may have to hire operatives, charter planes, pay some people off—look, you know what you’re doing, pard.” He began to fill the pipe. He’d never get it lit in the cold wind.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Cassidy said, “but I wonder about you, Colonel. What do you want out of this? What do you really want?”

  “No mystery about that.” He stopped fiddling with the pouch and pipe and stared at Cassidy. “I want Manfred Moller and the Nazis he’s working with and for—I want ’em all in the hoosegow, pard, or at the end of a rope, where they damn well belong.”

  “That’s all just fine,” Cassidy said as Clyde pulled the rain-shiny Ford under the roof, the wipers sliding back and forth across the glass. The rain stopped bouncing off the white top as the car eased into shelter. “But has anybody told Karin? You may have noticed that what you want is decidedly not what she wants. She wants her husband, her other husband, back. You have a problem there—”

  “Not me.” MacMurdo shrugged. “She may have a problem a ways down the road, but that’s life. Look, in the first place, she’s got no complaints comin’ so far as I can see. She was crawling around the gutters of Cologne with her brains runnin’ out—hell, the way I look at it, she’s way ahead of the game. And in the second place, Manfred Moller is an SS bastard who simply galls my ass, pardonnez-moi. I want him, pard. And in the third place, if we take Manfred out of the picture that reduces by exactly half the number of available husbands for the lady. Puts you in the catbird seat, Lew. Think about it.”

  Cassidy was thinking about it as he got into the car and saw the leather briefcase on the passenger seat. Twenty thousand dollars. If he told Terry Leary about that much untraceable money floating around, Terry would want to split it, forget declaring it as income, and maybe that was the thing to do. But it ought to go into the Dependable Detective account. Cassidy wasn’t sure but Terry would be. Terry knew how to deal with moral dilemmas. He laughed at them.

  But he was thinking about Karin again by the time he had the car in gear and had slowly pulled away into the rain. Did he want to be the only available husband for Karin? Did he want this woman, the strange and distant creature Karin had become? It was a question that made him forget the twenty grand.

  He was passing the front of the immense stone house when he slowed to a stop and dropped the briefcase over the back of the seat. The rain drummed steadily on the fabric top. He looked up at the house.

  She was standing motionless, staring out the window at him. A chandelier shone brightly through the rain.

  Slowly she lifted her hand like a little girl and waved at him. MacMurdo was right. It was just like a movie.

  He felt as if his heart would break.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “IN CASH?” TERRY LEARY WHISTLED softly, under his breath. “Twenty grand in cash in a briefcase? This is like it was back in the old days, right?” He grinned raffishly at Lew Cassidy, then turned to the thickset man on his left. “Like that time at the Shore in Jersey with Rocco’s boys? Bless me, those were the days. And old Markie washing up on the beach roped to that sailor boy, a crab crawling out of his mouth … and Lew wound up with all the money that time, too. …” Terry Leary shook his head at the wonder of it all, his eyes glittering, as if to say How did any of us get out of it alive? “This MacMurdo,” Terry said, swirling the ice in his Rob Roy, listening to it clink, “I like the man’s style. Unorthodox, you might say. This money—it’s a lot like a bribe.” He chuckled with pleasure.

  “Well, you sure as hell know a bribe when you see one,” the third man said, just loudly enough to be heard. He had a habit of always speaking just loudly enough to be heard. A waiter came to the table, leaned over, and the man said just loudly enough to be heard: “Dickens martini, Charlie.”

  “Of course, the usual. And you, Mr. Cassidy?”

  “Rob Roy’ll be fine, Charlie.”

  Charlie went away and Cassidy remembered the first time he’d heard the other man order a Dickens martini. That had been a new one on Cassidy and he’d asked for an explanation. “No olive or twist,” the man had said.

  They were sitting at Leary’s regular table, where Max Bauman had once sat most nights, well off to one side at the edge of the dance floor, near the exit to the hallway that led back to the dressing rooms or in the other direction to the office where Max had held court for years, running the club and his whole ugly empire. Now it was Leary’s office because, as MacMurdo had already know
n, after Leary had killed Max the gangster’s will had left Heliotrope to him. It was, indeed, a funny old world. Cassidy was reflecting on just how funny it all was when Terry handed him an eight-inch Havana. Cassidy savored its aroma, rolling it beneath his nose. Charlie came back with two drinks on a tray, set them down, and struck a wooden match for Cassidy’s cigar, letting all the sulfur burn away first. It was funny about the cigars, too. Max Bauman had bequeathed his entire stash, which had been kept in the humidor room at Dunhill, to Terry Leary, whom he had, in his own way, before the brain tumor had ravaged him and turned him into a killing machine, loved like the son he’d lost in the South Pacific. Cassidy drew on the cigar until it was going nicely, then nodded to Charlie, who disappeared again.

  The dance floor was filling up and when Cassidy glanced up at the bandstand he saw the afterimage that always lingered there for him. The blond girl with the English accent singing “The White Cliffs of Dover” and “Where or When.” Cindy Squires. She was always there in his mind and he could hear her voice and he never spent any time at all in Heliotrope without remembering the night he’d met her, Max’s new singing discovery, his songbird. Cassidy had come out of the men’s room and had heard some jerk making a pass at her in the dressing room and he’d gone in and taken care of this clown and he’d met Cindy Squires. But that was another story, a long time ago, and there was no point in dwelling on it anymore.