Neither of them glanced my way, or I daresay they’d have had as big a shock. In a moment they were gone, heading downtown in the late-afternoon traffic. I registered almost in retrospect the fact that they had both been wearing evening dress, which at this hour suggested they were headed for some gala performance at Lincoln Center or somewhere similar. That meant it would be a late night, so there was little point in my hanging around.
That was when I had the idea of sending a letter—to “myself’ at his address. I looked at my watch. There was still time. I found a copy shop close by and quickly mocked up a sheet of plain paper with the detective agency’s address. Then I did the same with an envelope. It took only a few moments to type and print the letter, then I caught the last post. It would be there in the morning.
There was one last thing I had to do that day, which was call my friend Skeeter up in Oregon. I made the call collect from a pay phone: Skeeter could afford it, with his ranch and the horses he’d bought after getting lucky that last time he and I did business. Skeeter owed me too much to refuse me the favor I was going to ask him. Also I knew too much about him, including where the bodies were buried—literally. I told him I was in Manhattan and needed—urgently—to get out. I had no money, people were looking for me, so I needed him to arrange a pick-up. He didn’t hesitate, just asked when and where. I said the following day, somewhere in Manhattan. I didn’t know exactly when or where, but I’d check back with him once he’d gotten everything set up and we’d do the details.
After that I had a drink in a bar and counted my dwindling reserve of dollars. There was just enough for a room in the cheapest hotel I could find. It was an uncomfortable and noisy night, as a result of which I was up early and on my way to George’s apartment at about the time I expected the post to be delivered. It suddenly started to rain hard. I took cover under a bus shelter across from the building’s entrance, and to my surprise after a couple of minutes saw George emerge with an umbrella, solicitously shepherding his wife into a waiting cab. When he went back in I saw him pick up his mail from one of the locked brass boxes on the back wall of the lobby. I decided to give him a while.
The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. I started walking on the glistening wet sidewalk, intending to circle a couple of blocks before giving him a call. I tried to imagine him opening the letter and almost certainly rereading it several times in disbelief. Then he would try to phone the agency, but I knew no one was there over the weekend. Nadia Shelley had offered to give me an emergency number when I’d asked about this, but I’d said it wasn’t necessary. The fact that she had offered it meant almost certainly that George didn’t have it, which was useful to know.
After fifteen minutes I was ready to give him a call. I’d noticed a pay phone near the bus shelter where I’d hidden from the rain earlier. I imagined he’d be able to see it from his balcony, which meant I could get him to look down and I would wave to him—a suitably unthreatening way, I thought, to break the ice.
When I got there, naturally enough, the pay phone was busy. So I waited. But suddenly, in the background, I saw George crossing toward the park. He was walking with his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in his pockets, the classic body language of tension and frustration.
I couldn’t resist a faint smile of amusement as I set off after him. Twenty minutes later we were talking.
Chapter 15
What did I want from him when we first looked at each other? I don’t think I really knew. Whatever I could get, I suppose. A sympathetic ear, certainly, for the story I would tell him, and a little money to get me through the immediate future. I had only a few hours before I had to call Skeeter again. His team was probably in place by now, and I was certainly going to need money.
I was glad when he suggested we go back to his apartment to talk. I’d had more than enough of looking nervously over my shoulder, hoping he didn’t notice. We spent the afternoon like a pair of teenagers hashing over their lives, comparing every little like and dislike, talking about our parents, figuring out their motives, and tracing the events that had, as it seemed to us, brought us to that point. At the end of it all we dreamed up this childish prank of switching roles and playing a joke on George’s agent, Lou Bennett. I swear I hadn’t planned it all. It was only as the day wore on and things started falling into place that I conceived of doing what I did. As I said, it’s all about making the most of your chances.
After we’d tried on each other’s clothes and were pretty sure that nobody would be able to tell which of us was which, I asked George if I could use his phone. He handed me a mobile, then went off to the kitchen for something, leaving me alone to talk in private. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d overheard what I had to say; it was innocuous enough. I simply called Skeeter and asked him if everything was in place. He confirmed that it was. I told him I would call him back in the next hour.
Dusk fell, and it was time for my rendezvous with Lou. I was anxious to get going, which made me careless. I should have been the one, not George, to point out that I needed some way of identifying Lou. It was a clumsy mistake on my part, which, to a smarter man than George, might have suggested that I had no intention of keeping that appointment with his agent. Luckily, the moment passed without causing a problem.
We took the elevator to the garage and left the building as we had entered it, seeing no one. We walked a block or so, then I hailed a cab. As it drove off, I turned to grin back at George through the rear window, giving a little wave and a gesture of reassurance that everything was going to go just fine.
Then I took out his mobile phone, which I’d brought with me, and called Skeeter again. I told him that in fifteen minutes’ time I would be walking along Central Park South. I described the clothes—my clothes—that George would be wearing, though this was probably unnecessary: They would have spotted him anyway once they’d been told where to look. The important thing was that he was carrying my wallet with my credit cards and driver’s license. He would not lightly talk himself out of that. He would do his best, of course, but without success. The killers themselves, the men who actually did the job and who I’d seen outside the bank the day before, spoke very little English.
But they were professionals, skilled and ruthless. They would pick him off the street without a scuffle. No one would notice a thing as he was bundled into the back of the waiting car. I didn’t know where they would take him, but everything would have been planned in advance. They would put a bullet in his head—that much was tradition. Then the body would be disposed of with equal permanence. They would use a lime pit, or possibly a deep hole in the foundations of some construction site, into which he would be thrown, after which rubble and concrete would be added.
That this would happen I knew with certainty. I knew it because I knew that Skeeter had betrayed me. I had suspected for some time that I could no longer trust him, and seeing those men yesterday had confirmed it. I knew that anything I told him would be relayed directly to the people who wanted me dead. He thought I had played into his hands, whereas in reality he had played into mine. I owed this reversal of fortune to pure chance. I had been in deep, deep trouble, and only the accident—coincidence, if you prefer—of meeting George had saved my life. That was extraordinary, I grant you. Quite extraordinary.
A month earlier, such a coincidence would have been amusing at best, perhaps simply irritating, and certainly irrelevant. But it has always amazed me how quickly things can change. A month earlier I’d been on top of the world. I was taking risks, but then I always had, and so far I’d always gotten away with them. Perhaps I’d started taking my luck too much for granted. Was that my fatal mistake?
I’d used the music business as my cover for many years. When I felt myself burning out on the creative side, which had happened after a very short time, I started arranging introductions, for a fee, between people in the business and others who could provide certain services and substances much in demand in the music world. This had led t
o an increasing involvement in the financial side of things, until a federal money-laundering inquiry had curtailed my activities. Charges had been dropped owing to lack of evidence, more particularly lack of witnesses owing to a couple of unfortunate accidents.
It had been a setback nonetheless. The people I worked for had stood by me, but chiefly out of self-interest. Now I was a liability, and found myself being rapidly sidelined. I decided to take one last shot at a big payday while I still had the chance. I could have done it a hundred times in the past, but never had. I’d imagined doing it and knew how it would work, but it was just a mental exercise, neither a plan nor an intention.
But now?
I did not see how this venture I had my eye on could go wrong. Whichever way you looked at it, it was a cinch, a cert, a shoo-in.
What actually went wrong was something I could not have foreseen even as the remotest of downside possibilities. A guy in a key position had a heart attack at the wrong time, unraveling the whole operation.
When that happened, the guy with the heart attack wasn’t the only dead man. The next one was me—or would have been.
Thank you, George, for being there to take care of that problem.
My stroke of genius, if that doesn’t sound too immodest, came next. Since George was carrying my wallet, I was carrying his. That had been something I’d made sure of as part of our costume change. I opened it and found a couple of hundred dollars. Desperate though my need for cash was just then, I knew I had to give it away. There would, after all, be plenty more where that came from. I stopped the cab, got out, and within a few blocks had pressed notes into the grubby hand of every addict and panhandler I could find.
The next thing I did was lose the credit cards. First of all I cracked and tore them into the smallest fragments I could, then dropped them down a grating into the sewers of the city.
That done, I began looking for the proper setting in which to stage the next part of my little drama. Within a few minutes I had found an alley running all along the back of several shops and restaurants. It was dark and narrow and exactly what I needed. Frankly, it wasn’t the kind of place through which a timorous soul like George would have chosen to take a shortcut, but when it later became known that he’d been hurrying to keep an appointment with his agent, for which he was obviously late, his uncharacteristic boldness would make sense.
I slipped into the shadows, carefully picking my way past garbage pails and bulging black plastic bags. When I was certain that I was unobserved, I threw away George’s wallet, which would later be found minus cash and credit cards.
The next part was the hardest. The first thing I had to do was make a mess of my clothes, tearing and dirtying them up to look like I’d been in a fight, rolling on the ground getting kicked and beaten. The next thing—and this was the bit that I say with no false modesty took the balls—was kneeling and smashing my head on the stones until I was streaming blood and, frankly, suffering a good deal of pain. Once I’d taken as much as I could without risking a real concussion and marginal brain damage, I began crawling slowly and painfully toward the light at the far end of the alley.
True to form, the good citizens of New York stepped around and over me without a second glance for several minutes, assuming I was just another drunk and best ignored. I don’t know which self-appointed Samaritan first noticed that my clothes were too good for a bum, and that the injuries to my head needed attention. By the time the cops and ambulance arrived I was, to be honest, only half-conscious. I was lifted onto a stretcher and rushed with siren blaring through the city. After that I remember being wheeled beneath a long, long ceiling with strip lighting and heating pipes that seemed to wiggle as they flashed by. I was taken into what I supposed must be an emergency treatment room, where I was injected, stitched up, and finally put to bed. After that, I enjoyed the finest sleep of my life.
When I awoke, bright morning sunlight filled the ward I was in. There must have been twenty or thirty beds, all occupied. I found I was bandaged and hooked up to some kind of IV drip. At least I was relieved to discover that the battering I’d given myself hadn’t landed me in intensive care.
A nurse entered. She was very young and had a sweet, rather hesitant smile.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. “You should have quite a headache.”
“Yes, I do,” I said, sounding feebler than I actually felt, “a bad one.”
“We’ll give you something in a while. The doctor wants to see you first.”
I looked about me as though only just becoming aware of my surroundings, and called to mind a scene that my old man had played in a corny fifties movie called Spring in Piccadilly. But I’d liked this scene when I saw it on TV one time.
“Where am I?” I said, just the way he had. “What happened? What am I doing here?”
“You’re in the city hospital,” she said. “The police said you were attacked and robbed. The first thing we need to know is your name.”
That was perfect. Almost exactly like the movie. I let a few seconds elapse, maintaining the expression of someone about to answer willingly, then replacing it with one of growing alarm as I realized the truth of my predicament.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember.”
Chapter 16
I had read up on the subject and knew that psychological trauma was the whiplash of neurology: It was practically impossible, in the absence of actual brain damage, either to prove or disprove the psychological effects of injuries to the head.
Once or twice I detected a hint of suspicion behind some of the questions asked by my doctors as the days went by. “Well, it is rather unusual, Mr. Daly, for memory loss to persist so long after such relatively superficial injuries, but I’m sure we shall see an improvement soon.”
As for “superficial,” let him try doing what I had. Certainly for most people the stitches and bruising were enough. Nobody questioned my sporadic attacks of amnesia.
In fact there was an improvement in my condition: The more I learned of George’s life, the more my memory “returned.” But all gaps and even outright blunders could still be covered by a sudden relapse. I developed a technique of using it almost as a stutter, as though not my tongue became tied but my brain, and I found myself suddenly on the brink of a gaping hole in my train of thought. More often than not I could use it as a prompt for somebody to fill in whatever was missing.
One of the first things I had to master when I was allowed home after two days was George’s handwriting. I checked through his papers, in particular his notebooks, which were all handwritten. Amazingly, the difference between his script and my own was virtually nil. But then, I reflected, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that identical twins should have similar styles. At least it was one less thing to worry about.
The trickiest part of the whole deception, I had anticipated, would be the marriage. I had mapped out a strategy to tease out of his wife, Sara, the habits, preferences, and protocols of their most intimate life together, especially their sexual relationship.
But this marriage, I quickly discovered, was not all it seemed to the outside world.
I raised no objection when I found, on my return from the hospital after the weekend, that Sara had moved me into one of the guest rooms. As I was still convalescing, I chose to see it as considerate on her part. But after a couple of days, as my strength returned and I suggested a return to the marital bed, I sensed an evasiveness. When eventually I got right to the point and tried to make love to her, she became upset.
“No, George,” she said, “please don’t. Please.”
“What’s wrong?”
She looked at me with a pained expression. “How can you ask that?”
“I can ask it,” I said, letting her see that I was starting to get annoyed, “because I would like an answer.”
“George, we discussed it all. We agreed.”
“When?”
“Last week, before I left for Philadelphia.”
“Are you telling me,” she asked, reading my expression, “that you really don’t remember?”
“Yes. I mean no, I don’t remember.”
She turned away and cupped her hands over her face. After a while she said, very quietly, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Perhaps I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Yes, of course, you’re right. I’m sorry.” She turned to look at me again, almost pleadingly this time. “But not now. Please, George, just not now.”
There was a kind of exhaustion in her face, as though the prospect of talking yet again about whatever problems—sexual or otherwise—afflicted her and George’s marriage had completely drained her of all energy.
I reflected for a moment, and realized this was something I could make play in my favor. Allowing this distance, whatever its cause, to remain between us meant one less chance of making a bad mistake. Of course, there was always the possibility that she would get over whatever was bothering her in the next day or two and “come around,” which meant I must keep my amnesia symptoms ticking over to cover whatever holes still remained. But by then I should have a far better sense of the overall landscape of George’s life than I had at that moment. So I shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever you want. We’ll talk when you’re ready.”
Meeting George’s friends and social acquaintances was easier than I’d anticipated. There was widespread sympathy for me as the victim of a brutal attack. My wallet had been found, as I hoped it would be, minus cash and credit cards, painting the picture exactly as I’d wanted it.
Fitting into the role that people expected of me socially was helped by the fact that they largely defined it for me through their own attitudes and manners. It was easy to see that dear old George had not been a dominant personality. Mostly all I had to do was coast along and smile from time to time.
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