Mindkiller

by Spider Robinson

  The readout he got in response to his query elated him. A male Caucasian of Norman’s approximate age and size had died within the confines of the hospital during the previous forty-eight hours. More important, the late Aloysius Butt had been a pauper with no known relatives, was awaiting burial by the province. Since the demographics of Halifax bulged markedly in Norman’s age bracket, this could not be considered an incredible stroke of fortune, but Norman definitely took it for a good omen. Aloysius Butt was the one lucky break Norman required for the plan he was forming. Had Aloysius not had the grace to die so timely, Norman would have had to postpone his campaign until a suitable candidate presented himself, and Norman could not bear the thought of enforced inactivity at this point. He did not want too much time for reflection, for doubt and worry. Fortunately fate had given him the one factor that his wits could not provide, just when he needed it. It was railroading time!

  Now for traveling cash. Back out to another pay phone.

  “This is me, no need for names.”

  “Not if you say so,” the other said agreeably. “To what do I—”

  “I am prepared to sell you, under certain conditions, my entire collection. You know what they’re worth, can you get that much cash by tonight?”

  “What conditions?”

  “You tell nobody where they came from. I don’t mean just Revenue Canada Taxation or your mistress, I mean nobody. You get them in different jackets—same goods, in Angel sleeves, but the jackets’ll be from junk, I keep the original jackets. And it has to go down tonight, at 3:00 A.M.”

  “Without the jackets, the resale value depreciates. There would have to be a small dis—”

  “No it doesn’t and no there won’t. You have no intention of selling them. Book value, take it or leave it.”

  “I don’t know if I can get that much cash by tonight. Can I give you a check for the last five thousand or so? You know I am good for it.”

  “My friend, this is a one-time-only offer, and nothing in it is negotiable. The Swede wouldn’t treat these as well as you would, he wouldn’t appreciate them—but I know he’ll have the cash at home.”

  The barest hesitation. “Come up the back way and knock two paradiddles. Thank you for thinking of me.”

  Details filled the rest of the afternoon. Norman picked out two complete sets of clothing, put on the first and folded the second into a compact package. He carefully filled a backpack, his two prime considerations being that the backpack should sustain him for an indeterminate time on the road, and that no one subsequently searching his apartment should be able to deduce that such a backpack had been filled. He did not, for instance, pack his salt shaker, but poured half its contents into an old perfume vial of Lois’s. Any essential of which he could not leave behind a convincing amount in its original container he abandoned, to be replaced out of his operating capital on the road. When he was done with his preparations he examined his entire apartment in detail—and shook his head. I am, he thought, an unreasonably neat man. The apartment was, as always, so neat and organized as to give the impression that its owner was away on vacation—which was exactly wrong. He un-neated it a little, gave it a spurious kind of lived-in look. He went so far as to cook himself a dinner—an undistinguished one, when what he wanted was a grand Last Feast, a farewell to his gourmet’s kitchen—and leave the dishes in the sink.

  He spent the next six hours in his armchair with headphones on, saying goodbye to his music. At midnight he shut off the system and transferred a carton full of extremely rare jazz records, many of them deathgifts from his mother, into the jackets of cheap ordinary records, and vice versa. He put the disguised rare records into another carton, then selected eight more mundane records from his shelves and put them, in their original jackets, into the carton full of rare records. In three unobserved trips, he brought both cartons, his backpack, and his spare set of clothing down to the lobby, stashing them in the dark community room.

  One A.M. Lois should have just returned home from work by now.

  He flinched at the cold as he left his building. He hurried across the street, noting that the window he wanted was lighted. He used a key he had possessed for some time, but never before used, to let himself into the ancient three-story apartment building. The hall heaters were not working, and more than half the lightbulbs were dead. There were no security cameras to record comings and goings. Norman climbed to the top floor, located a door. He had a key for this door too, but did not wish to use it; he knocked.

  Lois answered the door. She started with surprise when she recognized him. “Why, Norman!” she said in a voice that seemed a bit too loud. “What brings you here?” She made no move to step aside and let him in.

  “I’ve got to talk to you, Lois. Business, very urgent.”

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow? I just got in from work and—”

  “Sorry. It can’t wait.”

  She hesitated.

  “Come on, it’s cold out here. It won’t take a second.”

  Still she hesitated.

  “I always let you in.”

  She let him in. A woman, also in nurse’s uniform, was seated in Lois’s living room; as he saw her, her hands were just coming down from the top button of her smock. Pillows were spread on the floor before her, and he noted that the stockings below her uniform were distinctly non-regulation. He turned back to Lois and, now that the light was better, observed a lipstick smear on the side of her throat. So Lois was trying to change her luck, and was embarrassed about it. Wonderful! She would be flustered, anxious to get rid of him, and the presence of her lover would allow him to be as vague as possible.

  “Leslie, this is Norman, my ex. Norman, this is Leslie; she and I have to prepare a report together by tomorrow. What can I do for you?”

  “Those records you borrowed. King Pleasure, Ray Charles Trio, Lord Buckley, the Lennon outtakes. I need them all back, right away.”

  Lois bit her lip. “Uh…I haven’t had a chance to tape them yet.”

  “It’s been over a year.”

  “Well…can I borrow them back and tape them later?”

  Lie. “Sure.”

  If she had been alone she would have argued. “Well…wait here, I’ll get them.”

  She left the room. Norman smiled sweetly at the other nurse, and sat down across from her. “Hello, Leslie. Or should I call you Lez?” He was ashamed at once of the cheap shot, but it could not be recalled.

  Leslie started to speak, then changed her mind and stood up. “Excuse me,” she said coldly, the only words she had spoken since he arrived. She left, following Lois, and shortly he heard the buzz of low conversation in the adjoining room. Lois came back alone with eight records, each jacket sprayed with preservative plastic.

  “Here. Take them and go.”

  Now for the dirtiest trick. Well, it couldn’t be helped. “Lois—let me borrow your car for tonight.”

  “I need it tomorrow.”

  “No problem. I’ll leave it under the building, keys in the usual spot. But I’ve got to do a lot of traveling tonight, and a taxi just won’t make it.”

  She frowned.

  “Lois, this cancels us, okay? I’ll never ask you for another favor. Please.”

  Again she hesitated. Then: “Norman…promise that it won’t be the last favor you ever ask me, and you’ve got a deal.”

  That one hurt; it was an effort not to wince. “Okay,” he lied at last.

  She handed over her key ring, and unexpectedly she kissed him—a long, smoldering kiss that was painfully evocative. For the thousandth time in his life, Norman wished there were some truly effective way of erasing memories. The worst of it was having to cooperate in the kiss, to put a false promise into it. “I’ll be here alone tomorrow night,” Lois murmured as the kiss ended. “Come tell me about your night’s travels.” Norman was silent, regretting. She searched for words that would bind him to her, and what she came up with was, “I miss your prick.” The regret faded; he prom
ised and made for the door.

  Still he paused on the threshold. “Lois…thanks.”

  “No problem, Norman, really.”

  “No, I mean…thanks for the good times, all right?”

  He turned and fled down the hallway, annoyed with himself for yielding to melodrama. That had sounded too much like an exit line for a suicide.

  In case she was watching, he took the car for a several-block drive before doubling back to their street, where he parked in front of his own building. Loading the car with records, backpack, and clothing took no appreciable time and, as far as he could tell, went unobserved. Once inside the car again, he switched jackets between the eight records Lois had returned and the eight mundanes he had fetched. The mundane records, now in jackets claiming that they were rares, he put in the trunk of the car.

  Walter, the collector who appreciated jazz rarities, had been able to acquire the cash Norman demanded. As Norman had expected, Walter accepted the jacket swapping and other skullduggery as a scheme to defraud Revenue Canada, and was quite happy to collaborate, as Walter’s own tax position was chronically less than optimal. He actually drooled as he rummaged through the carton, establishing the identity and condition of each disc. His pudgy hands trembled as he gave Norman the suitcase full of used bills in low denominations—but only because the hands yearned to return to the records. Norman did not bother to open the case and count the money. He forestalled the attempts at conversation that Walter was really too excited to make, and left as soon as he decently could.

  It was approaching four in the morning when he reached the hospital. His effortless success there had very little to do with luck. He knew the hospital layout intimately, knew where to park and where the few graveyard-shift personnel could be expected to be cooping and where spare uniforms could be had. And of course he had Lois’s key ring. The late Aloysius Butt never had a chance. His absence, in fact, went unnoticed for several days, and when discovered was attributed to the notoriously twisted sense of humor of interns, so obviously was it an inside job.

  By the time the sun was rising, Norman had succeeded in hitching the first in a series of rides, and was well content. He wanted to go west, and so he had hitched his first ride east. His hair was parted on the opposite side, and his hairline had receded a full inch. He wore entirely bogus eyeglasses that Lois had once given him as a birthday joke to make him look more “professorial.” Cheek inserts subtly changed the shape of his face. His dress did not match his station in life, but looked at home on him. He was unshaven, and could not possibly have been mistaken for a dapper academic. He had a suitcase full of untraceable cash.

  Behind him in Halifax, the local newspaper, famed for many years as not only the worst daily newspaper in Canada, but very likely the worst newspaper possible, was preparing to misinform its readers on at least one count for which, for a change, it could not reasonably be blamed. A story and photos on pages one and three alleged that a local English professor named Norman Kent had crashed his wife’s car into an oil-storage tank at the foot of the hill by the waterfront, totally destroying the tank, the car, himself, and an extremely valuable rare-record collection whose ruins were discovered in the wreckage.

  Norman was ready to hunt him some Jacques.

  8

  1999 There was one timeless frozen instant in which I could close my eyes and murmur, “Oh, shit.”

  Then Karen and I were both in motion. We got the unconscious woman to a couch. We laid her out gently. Karen loosened her uniform collar. It has been my experience that fainters usually revive at this point, but she showed no signs of recovery at all. Her color remained pale. The pulse in her throat fluttered. Her breathing was shallow.

  “Jesus, Joe,” Karen said. “Jesus.” Her eyes were wide.

  There was too much in my head. I was dangerously close to fainting myself, and dared not. “You sure can pick ’em.” I turned slowly round, looked at the room and everything in it. “Oh, my, yes.”

  “Joe, she’s—”

  “—big trouble, right. No telling how big.” I went to the table and sat down. “Not until she wakes up—and before then we have to decide which way to jump.”

  “I—what do you mean?”

  I wanted to bark, kept my voice low with an effort. “We are engaged in a criminal conspiracy to wreck a billion-dollar industry. We require darkness and quiet. This client of yours has taken me for someone she knew and believed dead—someone who obviously meant a great deal to her.”

  “Her ex-husband, Norman. She talked about him a lot.”

  “Oh, fine. So as soon as she wakes up she is going to turn on all the searchlights and sound all the alarms. ‘Oh, you’re not my dead husband, Norman? Who are you, then? Can you prove it? What a terrific coincidence this is—I must get to know you better, there must be dozens of little nuances of irony here. I can’t wait to tell all the girls down at the hospital.’” I frowned. “We need this like an extra bowel. You know what—”

  “Joe!”

  I trailed off.

  “How do you know you’re not Norman?”

  My face must have turned bright red. I could feel my nostrils flair as I sucked in enough breath for a bellow. My teeth ached. It took all the strength I possessed to keep my vocal cords out of circuit while I exhaled. A shout might wake the sleeping nurse.

  I gazed at her across the room.

  Her uniform cap was askew. Her blonde hair was mussed. Now that she was unconscious, her face looked petulant. I scrutinized the face very carefully, and then the generous body. I was prepared to swear that I had never seen her before in my life.

  Which meant nothing.

  Or did it? It depended on which theory of amnesia you bought. Amnesia the way it is in the movies, or amnesia the way you think it really must be, or amnesia the way it really is.

  Movie amnesia: if this blonde fem really was my wife once, I would unquestionably have remembered her at once, regaining my memory on the spot. Love is stronger than brain damage. Hate, too—since she was alleged to be an ex-wife.

  Amnesia as one imagines it: no such pat, instant abreaction—but at least some few small bells should ring. A spouse becomes familiar on so many levels that you almost relate to them from your spinal column—the way a pianist will remember his way around his instrument, regardless of whether or not he can recall his name at the moment. This woman was a stranger. In odd hours I have tried to guess what kind of woman I would want, if I wanted women. As far as I could tell, this ex-wife was not even my type.

  Amnesia as documented: in 1924, baker Benjamin Levy disappeared from his home in Brooklyn. Two years later a Catholic street sweeper named Frank Lloyd flatly refused to believe he had ever been a Jew, a baker, or named Levy—even when they proved it to him with fingerprints and handwriting analysis. He was quite suspicious, and only when other relatives were able to pick him out of a crowd did he decide there might be something to it. Reluctantly he moved back in with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn. He had to get to know them all over again, and to his dying day he claimed he had no recollection of his early life as Levy.

  The mind is stranger than it can imagine.

  I had myself back in control now. I looked up, saw Karen staring at me.

  “What if I am?” I asked her calmly.

  She started to explode.

  I overrode her. “We are stalking some very dangerous game, and we are committed now. Maybe they know someone is angling for them, maybe they don’t. We could be on borrowed time right now. Suppose this woman does hold the key to the missing half of my brain—is now the time to get into it? Either way it blows my cover, jerks me off the rails.” I grimaced. “In fact, there’s a mighty funny smell to the way she popped up just at this time in our lives. A nurse could be involved in wireheading…”

  “But if she was sent here she wouldn’t have fainted—and that faint is genuine.”

  “True…”

  “You don’t recognize her at all?”

  I sh
ook my head. “Proves nothing, though.”

  “Jesus Christ, Joe, aren’t you curious?”

  “Not half as much as I am scared. I want to defuse this one, fast. If there’s anything to it, I can always come back to it when the job’s done.”

  “You could die! You could die never knowing!”

  “So what?” I snarled. “Maybe she was the whole world to me once—but right now she’s a live grenade on my sofa. Let’s try and get the pin back in.” I got up from my chair. I took the headset off the phone and laid it down on the end table. I punched my New York number and put my portable terminal next to the headset. I told the computer to record audio from this location at maximum gain. I told it to transmit a constant dial tone to the phone’s earpiece and filter it from both the recording and the extension phone in my bedroom here in Nova Scotia. I gave the computer a one-syllable audio-disconnect cue, which could wipe the whole circuit and all records save for the recording in its own impregnable memory. Then I switched off the terminal and put it away. The phone now looked and sounded as if it had been left off the hook for privacy, rather than for the opposite.

  “I’m going into my room, so the shock of seeing me when she comes to doesn’t start a loop. And so I can eavesdrop on the extension. When she comes around, convince her she made a mistake—and pump her for everything you can get on this Norman.”

  “She’ll want to see you.”

  “And I won’t want to upset her. But when she really insists, I’ll have to come out and persuade her I’m not Norman. Which is why you have to get every drop of information you can first, so I can do a convincing job. Keep her talking.”

  “How do you keep someone talking?”

  “Be fascinated. You can’t fake it. Find her every vagrant thought interesting. Make small involuntary sounds of wonder and sympathy. Nod slightly from time to time. This fem could get us both killed, honey; be fascinated.”

  Karen took a deep breath. “I guess you’re right. We play it your way.” She shook her head slightly. “But I just don’t know…”