by Howard Engel
PENGUIN CANADA
MEMORY BOOK
HOWARD ENGEL is the creator of the enduring and beloved detective Benny Cooperman, who, through his appearance in twelve best-selling novels, has become an internationally recognized fictional sleuth. Two of Engel’s novels have been adapted for TV movies, and his books have been translated into several languages. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2005 Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award, the 1990 Harbourfront Festival Prize for Canadian Literature and an Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction. Howard Engel lives in Toronto.
Also in the Benny Cooperman series
The Suicide Murders
Murder on Location
Murder Sees the Light
The Ransom Game
A City Called July
A Victim Must Be Found
Dead and Buried
There Was An Old Woman
Getting Away with Murder
The Cooperman Variations
East of Suez
Also by Howard Engel
Murder in Montparnasse
Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell
HOWARD ENGEL
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
With an Afterword
by Oliver Sacks, MD
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2005, 2006
Published in this edition, 2008
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Howard Engel, 2005
Afterword copyright © Oliver Sacks, 2005
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Simcoe College is a fictionalized college at the University of Toronto.
Manufactured in Canada.
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-316752-5
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca
Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474
This work is for
Cathy Nelson
Memory
Book
THE DREAM
The train was putting on speed. The wheels chattered, the pitch became higher. My fellow passengers didn’t notice. Anna Abraham, sitting beside me, continued to read her book. Through the window and ahead of me, the tracks maintained a steady, level cut across the landscape. I could see a curve to the left, a tight curve. We were going into it too fast! The wheels were screaming. Nightmare sounds of metal on metal. The coaches were bending away from the tracks. Wheels were coming off the steel. I could feel the danger in my spine. We were going to turn over. Centrifugal or centripetal forces. I couldn’t remember which. Maybe both.
The train lurched. Brakes screeched. Then an uncanny silence, like the silence of falling. I couldn’t see Anna anywhere. We were turning over! Briefcases and luggage tumbled over me. I thought of the pictures in Alice in Wonderland. Coffee cups and playing cards flew around me and overhead. Paper money and change were momentarily suspended in mid-air as the bottom of the coach became the top. Newspapers and glossy magazines obscured the inverted landscape outside the window. A suitcase with metal-reinforced corners came floating toward me through the confusion of flying objects. I tried to avoid it, not too difficult a task since everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. But the heavy suitcase clipped me above my left eye, into blackness, and I went down in a tempest of flying objects.
ONE
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a private investigator who acts on his own behalf is an idiot who has a fool for a client. However true this may be, a circumstance occurred a year ago that may go a mile or two toward rehabilitating the fool. It all began when I opened my eyes on strange surroundings: white walls and suspended curtains. A face near mine spoke.
“What?” I yelled.
“I said, ‘Do you know where you are?’” She was looking down at me, her face rather closer to mine than needed for normal conversation. And who was she, anyway?
“Do you know who I am?” Her hair smelled clean. Her face was close again. It came and went, like it was swinging on a string, or seen through a playful zoom lens. A horizontal yo-yo. It came closest when she talked, as though I might not understand her at a greater distance.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “But it seems like a good place to start. Who are you? You look familiar somehow.”
I put that last part in to be polite. Part of it was nervousness. It’s hard talking to strangers from a horizontal position. I was caught in an unfamiliar corner. This woman might be the key to something important.
“I’m Carol McKay, rhymes with ‘day.’ I’m a nurse here at the hospital. Do you remember that you are in the hospital?”
“I was on a train before. There was an accident. A train wreck.”
“You weren’t on a train, Mr. Cooperman.”
“Not a train?”
“Not a car either.”
“Then why am I lying down? What sort of accident was it? Was I hit by a bus? A truck? What day is it?”
“You have no broken bones, Mr. Cooperman. You haven’t had a stroke or heart attack. And this is Friday, the twentieth.”
“The twentieth! I’ve been here for most of the month.” I don’t know where I got the notion that whatever put me in the hospital must have happened at the beginning of the month. It was just tidier for nasty things to happen at the beginning of the month. I was trying to be tidy. Confusion was the enemy. The nurse’s brown eyes were fixed on me. I wet my lips and cleared my throat. “I haven’t been in hospital since I had my tonsils out when I was a kid. The twentieth! April’s nearly over!” I only had the vaguest notion of time. I don’t know why I picked April. Maybe I was trying
to show that I was still on top of things.
“April is over, Mr. Cooperman. So is May. This is June. The twentieth.” She glanced at the chart on the outside of her notebook. “You have been here for six weeks and you were at Mount Sinai for two weeks before that. You may not remember me, Mr. Cooperman, but you’ve seen me before. In fact, we’ve had this same conversation before. But I’m not surprised you don’t remember it. The brain has its own way of healing. We may have to go over it again tomorrow. It’s all part of what we expect.”
My being here had something to do with a train. Had I been on a trip? I couldn’t remember. I’d forgotten the nurse’s name, too. The pieces of the puzzle were slipping through my fingers.
Maybe I’d been drunk? No, I hadn’t been drinking; it goes against my character, such as it is. This was getting more and more ridiculous. And why hadn’t the news of all this brought me to my feet? When was the last time two weeks—no, two months—had vanished into limbo? Why wasn’t I jumping up and down about it? And here I was, taking it in as though she’d been telling me what the menu was for lunch.
“I think I was in a train wreck.”
“No, Mr. Cooperman. No trains, cars, or buses.”
I attempted to return her cool, even look, while trying to swallow at the same time. “Did I have a stroke or something? A heart attack? My father had a heart attack a few years ago. I know that my diet has not been the healthiest. Too many restaurant meals.”
“Mr. Cooperman …”
“… I’ve tried to introduce more vegetables, less fat and …”
“Mr. Cooperman, you came to us from Brain Injuries at Mount Sinai Hospital. You had a trauma to your head.”
Automatically, my hands explored the area on the upper left-hand side of my head, where it still felt tender. “How did I get this? Was I in an accident? Was I hit? Did I fall?”
“The injury is consistent with your having suffered a blow to your cranium.”
“‘Consistent with.’ You sound like a lawyer.”
“Looks like a blow to me. But I’m not a brain specialist; I’ve only been a nurse on this floor for twenty-two years. Nobody has suggested in my hearing that you did that falling. Looks to me as if you were hit from behind on the left-hand side.” Somehow, I wasn’t taking most of this in. It was as if she was telling me about somebody I hadn’t met yet. I tried another tack.
“Do my mother and father know I’m here?”
“They’ve been in to see you almost every other day. They’re staying with your brother. He’s looked in on you, too, from time to time.”
“Sam drove in from Toronto? Seventy-five miles? I’ll bet!”
“But you’re in Toronto. It’s your parents who’ve had the long drive.”
“Sorry. I’m still a bit thick in the head. Let’s do the basics. I’ll begin with the usual first question: Where am I?”
“Good beginning. This is the Rose of Sharon Rehabilitation Hospital on University Avenue in Toronto. This is the fifth floor and I’m Carol McKay, rhymes with ‘day.’ Next question?”
“How long have I been here?” I’d lost her name again. She consulted her clipboard.
“You were admitted to the hospital on April 11 and came to this ward two weeks later, the twenty-third of April.”
“Will I ever walk again?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your legs, Mr. Cooperman. Don’t you remember going to the bathroom?” As she said it, I seemed to remember the bathroom on the other side of the curtain. The curtain hung from tracks surrounding my bed. It seemed to me that I had dreamed of these tracks in the ceiling, but that memory was too scrambled to sort out. What’s-her-name was looking at me.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“What the hell is ‘all right’ in these circumstances? Will you tell me what’s going on? Why can’t I remember yesterday? What’s wrong with me? What have I got to look forward to? Am I finished? That’s the question, damn it.”
“You don’t want to raise your voice, Mr. Cooperman. I can hear you. Don’t get yourself excited. You are improving every day. Yesterday we didn’t get nearly this far before you dozed off. Are you feeling tired now?”
“I want to know what’s up first. How long will I be here?”
“That depends on your progress. Head injuries are slow healing; slower than fractures, slower than sprains, slower than most surgery. You’re going to have to learn patience. You’re on the fifth floor. Everybody on five has had a stroke or brain injury. We’ll see to it that you work with people who can help you get over the injury and others who will help you adjust.”
“Damn it, I don’t want to adjust! I have to be able to work. People depend on me. There are bills that need paying and things that can’t be put off.”
“I hear that all the time, Mr. Cooperman, but patients learn that with a little time most things can be accomplished. Rome wasn’t built overnight. We have to learn to walk before we learn to run. Just try to remain calm.”
“Yeah, and walk directly to the nearest exit. We who are about to die salute you. Beautiful! This sounds like lifeboat drill on the Titanic!”
“It’s early days, Mr. Cooperman. Don’t rush yourself into having a stroke. You may never again have such a good excuse for taking it easy. Are you getting tired?”
“No, damn it! I told you, I just want to know what’s going on. You can’t put me off with a bunch of platitudes. I know that day by day in every way I’m getting better and better. So, let’s wave Pollyanna off into the sunset and get back to reality. Have there been any policemen looking for me?” How did I know the cops were involved? The nurse hadn’t said anything. The idea came from me. Where did I get it?
Her eyebrows shot up. Good! At last I’d asked a question that made her expression change.
She took a moment to calm her features, then became the inquiring machine again. “The police have only asked if they will be able to speak to you when you feel better. The police are not after you, Mr. Cooperman. There’s no guard at the door. They simply want to talk to you.”
“Sure.”
“Can you remember how you acquired this injury, Mr. Cooperman?”
“A train fell on me. It turned over.”
“You’ve said that before. Anything else?”
“I can’t remember. If you know something, please tell me.”
“You’ve had a serious blow to the back of your head. Can you remember anything about the time before the insult to your brain?”
“Insult? What happened was more than unpleasant words.”
“It’s our way of describing a serious brain injury, Mr. Cooperman. It has nothing to do with bad manners,” she said. “Now, can you think back to when you were little. Where was home?”
“Right here. The banks of the Eleven Mile Creek. My father runs a store.”
“Good! Except that this is Toronto, not Grantham. What else can you remember?”
I turned my eyes back inside my head, figuratively speaking. I looked for anything that came to mind: images of children playing with alleys and marbles on the hard-packed earth of the schoolyard; the same children sliding down an icy slope behind Edith Cavell School; the principal, Mr. Martin, whistling the end of recess through two fingers placed between his teeth.
“Public school’s intact. I can remember the schoolyard and my grade six teacher.”
“That’s more than I can do. What about high school?”
I thought of the bus ride with wool-clad kids my own age. I could see the monumental façade of the collegiate, girls going up and down the stairs, carrying books before them, hugged to their young bosoms. I could see faces of my fellow students, lined up for an annual photograph, the teachers looking grave in serried ranks.
“Let’s see. Mr. Kramer (we called him Otto), Miss Smith, Mr. Ogilvy, Mr. James Palmer, Mr. Price, Mr. C. Evan Macdonald, Miss Smith …”
“You said Miss Smith already.”
“She was worth two mentions. They said she was
a former cheerleader from the University of Toronto. That’s what we wanted to believe, anyway.” I recalled how we boys sighed for Miss Smith’s history classes.
“What can you remember about last fall or this past winter? Were you working hard after the snow cleared? I’m sorry, Mr. Cooperman, I’m a bit vague about what it is you do for a living. Are you a debt collector of some kind?”
“Sometimes it amounts to that. I’m a private investigator.”
“Oh, like Sam Spade and Lew Archer?”
“Yeah, but without Bogart. I don’t think he could have stomached the tedium.”
“Can you remember any of your recent cases?”
I lay in silence thinking about this for some time before I could answer. “When I get close to the present, my memory is not as certain. Things, images, are more like Jell-O that hasn’t set properly yet. I can picture my office and my apartment, but I can’t quite remember where they are or how I get from the one to the other.”
“Keep thinking about your work,” she said.
I thought, trying to clear away the fog. All I could find were fragments, shards, confetti, like the pieces of a smashed dish. Echoes of voices in a great hall. Maybe a museum. Nothing that made sense. Then there was the recurring image of falling about in my tumbling railway car. Sometimes I could hear names from my past, forgotten names that I tried to place, to find a context for, to put a date on, to measure against some other familiar monument in my life. Doug Slack, Garth Dittrick, Billy Challace. Most of them I hadn’t thought about in years. Kids from my kindergarten class, clients from my first cases, girls I’d dated only once, characters in novels and movies. The nurse was still waiting for an answer. I tried to remember the question.
“There were a couple of new cases.” I was really rolling back the clouds now. I tried to picture the view from behind my desk. “I think there was a skipper, and …” My mind wouldn’t give up anything more. I tried harder until my head began to hurt. “Nurse, I know that loss of memory is called amnesia. It’s a very popular device in old movies like Lost Horizon …”