The Longest Second

by Bill S. Ballinger

  It explained several points, however... why I should have a semiprivate room, why a specialist such as Doctor Stone agreed to do an emergency operation. Charity cases, especially police charity cases, don’t receive that kind of treatment.

  So I had a thousand dollars. Santini watched my face, attempting to read my expression. He read nothing which was exactly what I had to conceal.

  Santini removed the unlit cigarette from his mouth, twisted the loose end of it together neatly so it had a small paper nipple, and replaced it in his mouth thoughtfully. “Well,” he observed to no one in particular, “it’s not often some guy is found in the street with his throat cut. Particularly if he is only wearing a pair of shoes and is otherwise as naked as the day he was born.” Suddenly he stared at me. His eyes were very hard and very brown, set close together. They gave the impression of intense emotion... curiosity, ruthlessness, and carefully repressed bitterness.

  I stared back at him. I sensed his animosity which I could not understand. The detective represented a threat, a danger to me, and yet I did not know why this might be so. I couldn’t see where my personal problem should make such a difference to him. After all I was the one who had been wounded; possibly I had even done it myself, and if I had, I couldn’t see where it was any of his business. Finally he stared away from me and his eyes riveted on Minor. “You often find guys with their throats slit and a grand in their shoe, Doc?” Minor regarded Santini with a fleeting expression of dislike. “Not often,” he told the detective.

  Santini shrugged. “ ‘Not often,’ the doc says. Me? I’ve never seen it even once before.” He turned his attention back to me. “The shoes don’t tell us much. We’ve tried to trace them ... nice expensive shoes, better than a cop wears. But not handmade. No, not handmade. Too many of ’em sold each year.”

  “What about fingerprints?” asked Minor. “And that old scar on his back?”

  “Ah, yes, fingerprints and that old scar,” replied Santini pretending to a sudden recollection, “well, I’ll tell you. We checked with our own files and we don’t have them. Then we checked with the FBI and they don’t have them. Now we’re checking with the Army, Navy, Air Force, and all the ships at sea. Maybe they got ’em, but we’ll just have to wait a little while to find out.” He turned his face to me and his eyes were hot on my face. “I think you’re bluffing,” he said softly, “and I don’t think you’ve lost your memory. I got to take the doc’s word that you can’t talk, but I won’t take it that you can’t remember. You’re covering up something.”

  “I don’t think so,” Doctor Minor corrected him. “It’s very difficult to fake amnesia successfully.”

  “It is?” asked Santini sarcastically. “If you can’t say anything, it’s hard?” He shoved his hands in his pockets wearily. “Oh, hell! If a guy wants to knock himself off, I say okay. Let him do it just so long as he don’t mess anybody else up. But if he doesn’t pull it off, then I got to take time to run it down. Or take it the other way, somebody else gives him the knife and he knows it, why not say so? There’s enough other things for me to do.”

  I could see Santini’s point. It didn’t necessarily interest me, and there was no way to discuss it with him.

  “The woman, of course, says she never saw you before,” Santini continued thoughtfully.

  Woman? What woman? I wondered whom he meant? The detective again was watching me closely. I set my lips and noiselessly mouthed the word “who?”

  “Who?” repeated Santini. “You mean the woman?”

  Yes.

  “The one who found you?”

  Yes.

  “Well,” said Santini, “there’s this woman by the name of Hill, Bianca Hill. Does her name mean anything to you?”

  No.

  “Nice, decent woman as far as we know. She found you bleeding all over her doorstep. She called the cops, then sat down and held her thumbs at your throat until the ambulance arrived.”

  First, I thought, it was Doctor Stone who sewed up the wound and saved my life... for a cut of the thousand dollars, no doubt. Then, a woman named Hill sat on her doorstep and held my throat in her hands to prevent me from bleeding to death. Why?

  Santini finally lit his cigarette. “I’m going now,” he said. “I’ll see you again. You won’t be going anywhere for a while.”

  That afternoon, shortly after lunch, the hospital discharged Merkle. Before he left, he wrote out his home phone and address, and told me to be sure to call him sometime. It was quiet in the room after he had gone, and I didn’t miss him. I lay in my bed, motionless, and permitted my mind to wander. There were many things I could remember, things which were in my mind, but which I couldn’t connect up with anything. For instance, I knew I was in New York; I knew Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building, Times Square, although I couldn’t recall if I lived in New York or how I knew these other locations.

  This chain of thought eventually led me to wondering about my name again. ... Bing Crosby, Pablo Picasso, Charles Lindbergh, Colonel Horstman. Snap! Again my mind snapped shut. Slowly, very slowly, I went back over the names. ... Crosby, an entertainer; Picasso, painter; Lindbergh, public figure; Horstman—? Who was Horstman? The name Colonel Horstman was familiar to me, as familiar as the others, but I couldn’t identify him. Who was Colonel Horstman? I worked with the idea, approaching it both directly and indirectly, but I could carry the thought no further. I only knew that the name of Horstman was one I had known very well; but who he was I didn’t know. It almost seemed as if he existed in another dimension, separated by time, space, memory ... and contact. Contact, in the sense of communication; that he could be reached only by another type of thinking, another mind, or another language.

  The hospital didn’t place a patient in my room immediately. That night I began to dream again. It was the old familiar dark room with the spot of light in the comer. I stood within the room waiting for someone to appear in the light. Cold sweat beaded my forehead while I waited. In my dream I waited all night ... all night for someone, or something, to appear. Whoever, whatever it was, didn’t show up. But when I awakened in the morning, I knew that sometime it would appear.

  4

  WITH the cars, the lights, and the activity, the street had come alive ... at two in the morning. The uniformed police kept the curious at a careful distance. Gorman, from the Medical Examiner’s office, was inspecting the body carefully but without changing its position. Gorman’s activities had been shielded from the eyes of the curious crowd by a portable canvas screen.

  A few feet from Gorman, Burrows and Jensen waited patiently for the doctor to conclude his preliminary examination. Final and complete posting could take place only at the laboratory.

  Burrows said, “It doesn’t look like a sex job, even if the body has been stripped.”

  “All except for the shoes,” said Jensen. “Why take the trouble to remove the clothes and leave the shoes and socks?” From behind them, in the house, a high, piercing wail screamed through the night. Burrows shivered at the sound. “Jesus,” he said, “that gets me.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Jensen, “that’s the dame who found him. Gorman gave her a hypo, but it hasn’t taken effect yet.”

  “We’ll have to talk to her in the morning,” Burrows replied.

  “Sure. If we’re lucky. By that time her own doctor will probably put us off for a week.”

  The wail trailed away lonesomely into the night.

  Burrows picked up their conversation. “You think the shoes mean something? A symbol of some kind?”

  “It could be. Remember the guy ... what’s the name ... Clinton, who strangled three dames and always insisted on using a pair of smoke-gray nylon stockings?”

  Burrows said slowly, “It could be that sort of thing but maybe it might be done to conceal the identity.” He turned partly away, and cupping his hands lit a match. The flame burned yellow against the fullness of his face, etching and molding his features with shadows.

  “It’s pretty hard to c
onceal an identity these days,” Jensen said in part agreement, “but it isn’t impossible. Or possibly the idea is not to conceal who it is, but just to gain a little time by slowing up the identification.”

  Burrows dragged on the cigarette, the tip glowing red. “Or, I suppose, there’s even another way to look at it. Maybe, being stripped is supposed to make for a quick identification, to mean something to somebody.” He shrugged, half-humorously. “That’s pretty damned farfetched, though.”

  Jensen neither agreed nor disagreed. He stepped around the screen and watched Gorman for an instant, then returned to join Burrows. “How’s the doc getting along?” Burrows asked.

  “He’s still at it,” Jensen replied.

  5

  SANT1NI followed Doctor Minor into the room. “There’s something about a hospital that always gets me,” the detective said. “It isn’t the smell, it’s the feeling. You know, everybody waiting for something to happen. Waiting to get well, or go ahead and die.”

  “You get used to it,” replied Minor. He looked at me, winked slowly, and turned back to Santini. “Take it easy with him again today,” the doctor told him.

  I thought about the wink. I didn’t like the idea that Minor believed he was conferring any favors on me.

  Santini said, “I’ll take it easy, but before you go, Doc, give me a little run down on how his throat is.”

  Minor automatically reached for my wrist. Momentarily he seemed to sink within himself; whether he was counting my pulse or considering Santini’s question, I couldn’t decide. Then Minor dropped my hand, straightened his white jacket, and began to explain slowly. “The carotid arteries are on each side of the throat—on the far sides, that is—and are crossed by the jugular veins. The recurrent laryngeal nerve, one on both sides of the larynx, controls the vocal cords to the larynx. The larynx, as you probably know, is the voice box. Located below the larynx is the trachea ... the windpipe.”

  Santini was following the doctor’s description carefully. He nodded his understanding. Minor continued, “The patient, here, received the main force of the blow across the trachea, nearly severing it, although it was still possible for him to receive some air through his wound. He could not have continued indefinitely to breathe in such a manner, but he would not asphyxiate immediately. The force of the blow deteriorated at the sides of his neck, but not without severing one laryngeal nerve completely and badly damaging the other. His immediate danger was from loss of blood resulting from the wounds in the carotid arteries. Local application of aid where he was found prevented his bleeding to death quickly, and when he arrived at the hospital immediate surgery was indicated and completed.”

  “In other words,” said Santini, “if the blow had cut him just a little deeper, he’d have died right away. As it is, he can’t talk. Will he ever be able to?”

  “Sometimes,” Minor replied, “patients can recover the use, or partial use, of damaged vocal cords, and through practice learn the use of other muscles for compensation. But it is never what may be termed normal speech.”

  Santini began twisting the loose end of a cigarette, then put it in his mouth. “Maybe yes, maybe no, huh?” he remarked. Shrugging, he pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and glanced at it carefully. It seemed to me that he was pretending, and that whatever was written on the slip, he already knew very well. However, he continued to look at it, his brows wrinkled as he concentrated, and finally he said to me, almost indifferently, “Well, we know who you are.”

  I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t. It was Minor who asked, “Who?”

  Santini went through the motions of reading from his report: “Name, Vic Pacific ... Victor, no-middle-name, Pacific. Age, thirty-six. Home, New York City, which is a lie.” Santini looked at me for a contradiction. I didn’t give it to him.

  The doctor asked, “Where did you get the information?”

  “The Army had his prints on file,” Santini replied. “Funny thing though, the ID was slow coming through and it was a little jumbled. We can’t find an address for him or, for that matter, much of anything else about him.”

  At the back of my mind, an alarm went off signaling danger, but I didn’t know why.

  “What information did the Army have?” Minor inquired. “Pacific claimed he was an orphan. The address he gave I checked on and find it is still occupied by some gas pipes off East River Drive.”

  “Was he in the war?”

  “Sure. World War II. Good record. Tanks ... Six hundred and fourth. In Africa. Master sergeant. Wounded, that’s where the scar in the back comes from. Hospitalized over there; discharged here.” Santini deliberately folded his paper and returned it to his pocket. “No relatives,” he continued, “and he wasn’t married. No police record either. After his discharge he drew his terminal pay and disappeared. Never applied for veteran benefits, medical attention, or anything else. He isn’t heard of again, until more than twelve years later with his throat cut.” He looked at me. It was a hard unpleasant look. “What the hell you been doing all this time?” I held up the palm of my hand. I didn’t know.

  Santini asked the doctor when I would be able to leave the hospital, and Minor told him, “As soon as he’s able to eat comfortably. Probably in a week or so. He’s out of danger now, and is recovering his strength rapidly. His biggest problem is being able to eat and drink without pain. He’ll come around.”

  Miss Pierson came into the room with another jar of glucose. She began to roll up my sleeve. Santini left, although Minor remained by the foot of my bed. He nodded in the direction Santini had gone. “Did Santini say anything which meant something to you?” he asked.

  No.

  “Perhaps it’ll begin to come back to you slowly,” the doctor continued. “Don’t try to work at it too hard, or force yourself too fast. I think you’ll find that little pieces of your past, here and there, will gradually return. One moment a certain key memory will return and everything else will fall into place.” He turned and left.

  At least I had a few things to work on. A few more things each day. Minor, however, didn’t permit me to leave the hospital in a week. It was two weeks. During those two weeks I attempted desperately to recall the trouble I’d been in. Sometimes I could almost remember, it seemed, the night it happened. Mixed up in my memory was a dark room, a spot of light, and faces. Two faces in particular seemed to be present although I couldn’t see them plainly, and other faces, a number of them, in the background, But then, at this point, I’d think, am I really remembering this, or is it only part of my nightmare which I now take for reality? My mind would veer off at a tangent and I’d say to myself, “No!” What really happened was in a car. I can just about recall the car racing and twisting through the street and... ! Unfortunately, however, there was no reality to it and immediately I’d begin to think of something else—an alleyway, a short flight of metal stairs, a roaring elevated highway or bridge, a darkened office building. It made little difference what I recalled because there were no details connected with my unstable memories and, although for just a moment I might feel that I really was about to remember something important, my intelligence would contradict me. These memories were merely memories which anyone might have. They might be from my past somewhere, but they didn’t mean anything.

  I felt that I couldn’t trust anything I tried to remember. What Santini told me about being an orphan, for example. For some deep, basic reason, some instinct, told me it wasn’t true. Obviously, I had also been lying about my address; it’s impossible to live in a gas pipe. Why did I lie? I didn’t know. I had to live somewhere. Where had I been living? Some forgotten touch of reason told me that recently I’d been living in New York. But where, and under what name, I didn’t know either.

  At night though it was even worse because when I was only half asleep it was difficult, impossible, to differentiate between insignificant events, casual facts, wild fancies, and dreams. How could I sort out what I might have read somewhere at some time; what someone might hav
e described to me; what was my own personal history, or someone else’s? I might have lived many places on the earth, or never stepped out of New York City. All the information in the world might belong to me, yet I didn’t know what information was my own.

  I tried to compile lists of names in my mind. I studied faces and photographs in the newspapers and magazines. I belabored my mind, searching and probing to remember one solid, specific detail. All that I could discover, seemingly, was that beyond the day I awakened in the hospital I had no past. My name was Victor Pacific; I was thirty-six years old, had been in World War II, claimed I was an orphan, and lived in a gas pipe.

  The day I was released from the hospital, Doctor Minor and Miss Pierson saw me off. It was in the early afternoon, after lunch, and by this time I was eating farina, soup, soft puddings, and milk. The hospital had furnished me with a suit of used clothes and bought me some linen. In my pocket sixty-three dollars remained ... all that was left of the thousand which had been found on me. The surgeon and hospital had taken the rest. Minor shook hands with me. “If you don’t feel right, come back to see me,” he said. I nodded, and he hurried away.

  Miss Pierson asked, “Where are you going?”

  I shook my head. I had no idea.

  She walked beside me to the main entrance and then said good-by. Outside, looking up to the sky, I saw the heavy, semi-smoky haze which seems to hang over the afternoon skies of Manhattan. It doesn’t look like rain; it only appears that the air is heavy enough to shred with your fingers. I felt that I knew it well. Walking down the steps of the main entrance and reaching the sidewalk, I paused; attempting to decide what to do. It was obvious that I must find a place to stay for the night. Although I had no luggage, I did have sufficient money to pay for a room so there seemed no cause to be concerned. Cutting across the diagonally running street, on which the hospital was located, I reached Sixth Avenue. Turning south, I began to stroll slowly.

  Passing a cigar store, I paused and stared at it wondering if I enjoyed smoking. I couldn’t remember and it had never occurred to me before. In the hospital I hadn’t missed tobacco. Walking into the tiny shop, I was assailed by the old familiar odor of tobacco, and pointing to a pack of cigarettes I purchased it. I lit one and permitted the smoke to trickle down my throat. It didn’t cause me to cough, although I received no pleasure from it, and once again there was a fleeting illusion of a moment when something similar had given me enjoyment. I decided that once I had smoked, but had since forgotten the sensation. Stuffing the pack into my pocket, I threw away the cigarette and continued down the street.