Twice Shy Read online

  As ready, I supposed, as I would ever be.

  “Just walk around in front of him. Say something. Anything you like. Stay there until we tell you it’s enough.”

  I swallowed. I had never wanted to do anything less in all my life. I could see them all waiting, polite, determined, businesslike—and too damned understanding. Even Jonathan, I noticed, was looking at me with a sort of pity.

  Intolerable.

  I walked slowly around the machines and the chair and stopped in front of Angelo, and looked at him.

  He was naked to the waist. On his head, below a cap of fawn crepe bandage, there was a band of silvery metal like a crown. His skin everywhere gleamed with grease and to his face, his neck, his chest, arms and abdomen were fastened an army of electrodes. No one, I imagined, could have been more comprehensively wired; no flicker of change could have gone unmonitored.

  He seemed as well-fleshed and as healthy as ever, despite his earlier two weeks in a coma. The muscles looked as strong, the trunk as tanklike, the mouth as firm. The hard man. The frightener. The despiser of mugs. Apart from his headdress and the wires, he looked just the same. I breathed a shade deeply and looked straight into his black eyes, and it was there that one saw the difference. There was nothing in the eyes, nothing at all. It was extraordinary, like seeing a stranger in a long-known face. The house was the same . . . but the monster slept.

  It was five weeks, all but a day, since we had last faced each other; since we had brought each other near death, one way or another. Even though I had been prepared, seeing him again affected me powerfully. I could feel my heart thudding: could actually hear it in the expectant room.

  “Angelo,” I said. My tongue felt sticky in my dry mouth. “Angelo, you shot me.”

  In Angelo, nothing happened.

  He was looking at me in complete calm. When I took a pace to one side, his eyes followed. When I stepped back he still watched.

  “I am . . . William Derry,” I said. “I gave you . . . Liam O’Rorke’s betting system.” I said the words slowly, clearly, deliberately, trying to control my own uneven breath.

  From Angelo there was no reaction at all.

  “If you hadn’t shot me . . . you’d have been free now—and rich.”

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  I found Jonathan standing beside me, and after a pause Angelo’s gaze wandered from me to him.

  “Hello, Angelo,” Jonathan said. “I’m Jonathan, do you remember? William told you I was dead. It wasn’t true.”

  Angelo said nothing.

  “Do you remember?” Jonathan said. “I tricked you sideways.”

  Silence. A dull absence of all we had endured for so long. No fury. No sneers, no threats, no towering hurricane of hate.

  Silence, it seemed to me, was all that was appropriate. Jonathan and I stood there together in front of the shell of our enemy and there was nothing in the world left to say.

  “Thank you,” Tom Course said, coming around the chair to join us. “That should do it.”

  Angelo looked at him.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Dr. Course. We talked earlier, while we were fixing the electrodes.”

  Angelo made no comment but instead looked directly at me.

  “You were talking,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “William Derry.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “No.”

  His voice was as deep and as gritty as ever, the only remnant, it seemed, of the old foe.

  Dr. Course said heartily, “We’ll take all those wires off you now. I expect you’ll be glad to get rid of them.”

  “Who did you say you are?” Angelo said, frowning slightly.

  “Dr. Course.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. I’m here to take the wires off.”

  “Can I have tea?” Angelo said.

  Dr. Course left the taking off of the wires to his woman colleague and led us around to look at the results on the machines. The observer, I noticed, was also consulting them acutely, but Course paid him scant attention.

  “There we are,” he said, holding out a yard-long strip of paper. “Not a flicker. We had him stabilized for an hour before his visitors came. Breathing, pulse rate, everything rock steady. Quiet in here, you see. No interruptions, no intrusions, no noise. That mark, that’s the point at which he saw you”—he nodded at me—“and as you can see, nothing altered. This is the skin temperature chart. Always rises if someone’s lying. And here”—he moved across to a different machine—“heart rate unchanged. And here”—to another—“brain activity, very faint alteration. He couldn’t have seen you, his hated victim, suddenly and unexpectedly standing in front of him, and yet show no strong body or brain changes, not if he’d known you. Absolutely impossible.”

  I thought of my own unrecorded but pretty extreme responses, and knew that it was true.

  “Is this state permanent?” Jonathan asked.

  Tom Course gave him a swift look. “I think so. It’s my opinion, yes. See, they dug pieces of skull out of his brain tissue. Brilliant repair job on the bone structure, have to hand it to them. But there you are, you can see, no memory. Many functions unimpaired. Eat, talk, walk, he can do all that. He’s continent. He’ll live to be old. But he can’t remember anything for longer than about fifteen minutes, sometimes not even that. He lives in the absolute present. Loss of capacity for memory is not all that rare, you know, after severe brain damage. But with this one, there were doubts. Not my doubts, official doubts. They said he was faking, that he knew he’d go to a hospital, not a prison, if he could persuade everyone he’d lost his memory.”

  Tom Course waved a hand around the machines. “He couldn’t have faked today’s results. Conclusive. Settle the arguments once and for all. Which is why we’re all here, of course. Why they gave us this facility.”

  His woman colleague had taken the silver band off Angelo’s forehead and the straps off his wrists, and was wiping the grease from his skin with pieces of cotton wool.

  “Who are you?” he said to her, and she answered, “Just a friend.”

  “Where will he go?” I said.

  Tom Course shrugged. “Not my decision. But I’d be careful. I’m not a civil servant. My advice, I don’t suppose, will be taken.” His remark was clearly aimed at the observer, who remained obstinately impassive.

  I said slowly, “Could he still be violent?”

  Tom Course gave me a swift sideways glance. “Can’t tell. He might be. Yes, he might be. He looks harmless. He’ll never hate anyone, he can’t remember anyone long enough. But the sudden impulse . . .” He shrugged again. “Let’s say I wouldn’t turn my back on him if we were alone.”

  “Not ever?”

  “How old is he? Forty?” He pursed his mouth. “Not for another ten years. Twenty perhaps. You can’t tell.”

  “Lightning?” I said.

  “Just like that.”

  The woman finished wiping the grease and was holding out a gray shirt for Angelo to put on.

  “Have we had tea?” he said.

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “You’ll have tea soon.”

  I said to Tom Course, “His father was outside. Did Angelo see him?”

  Course nodded. “No reaction. Nothing on the machines. Conclusive tests, the whole lot of them.” He looked slyly at the observer. “They can stop all the arguing.”

  Angelo stood up out of the chair, stretching upright, seeming strong with physical life but fumbling with the buttons on his shirt, moving without total coordination, looking around vaguely as if not quite sure what he should be doing next.

  His wandering gaze came to rest on Jonathan and me.

  “Hello,” he said.

  The doors from the outer room opened wide and two white-coated male nurses and a uniformed policeman came through them.

  “Is he ready?” the policeman said.

  “All yours.
”

  “Let’s be off, then.”

  He fastened a handcuff around Angelo’s left wrist and attached him to one of the nurses.

  Angelo didn’t seem to mind. He looked at me uninterestedly for the last time with the black holes where the eyes should have been and walked as requested to the door.

  Diminished, defused . . . perhaps even docile.

  “Where’s my tea?” he said.

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