The personnel file said that I had been a good athlete at school. I still felt strong and solid. But totally “average.” I could fade into a crowd and become invisible quite easily.
Who am I?I could not escape the feeling that I had been put here, placed into this life, only three years ago by some power or agency that had wiped clean all memory of my earlier life.
I realized that I had to find out who, or what, had put me here. And Aretha was the key to my past; she knew, and she wanted me to know. My heart was pounding now, my breath fast, almost panting. I was feeling some emotion now, and for several minutes I reveled in it. But then, with a deliberate effort I lowered the adrenaline level in my blood, slowed my heartbeat and breathing rate.
Somehow I knew that the grenade had been meant for me. Not Aretha or anyone else. Me. Someone had tried to kill me. With the total certainty of truly in-built instinct, I realized that to try to discover my origins would mean mortal danger for me. Death. But I could not turn back. I had to know. And I realized that whoever I was, whatever my past had been, it must have involved not only Aretha but those two men as well — the angel and the dark spirit. One of them, perhaps both of them, had tried to kill me.
CHAPTER 3
The morning after the restaurant bombing I strode into my office exactly at nine, a bit later than usual for me. I had to brush aside questions from my secretary and several co-workers who had either seen the story on the evening TV news or were brandishing morning newspapers with a front-page photograph of me standing amid the injured and the dead.
I slid behind my desk and told my computer to phone St. Mercy’s Hospital. The hospital’s answering computer told me, in the warm tones of a trained human actress, that visiting hours were from two to four p.m.and six to eight in the evening. Ms. Promachos was listed in good condition. She could not come to the phone; the doctor was examining her at the moment.
I left a message saying that I would be there at two. Then I did a day’s work, and more, that morning. For some foolish reason I felt wonderful. It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes or a window had suddenly opened to reveal a lovely landscape to me. Yes, I was aware that my memory was virtually a blank, that I did not know who I was or why I was here. I realized that my life was probably in the gravest sort of danger. But even that knowledge was wonderfully exhilarating. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been an emotionless automaton; I hadn’t even guessed that most of my memory had been erased. I was merely going through the motions of being alive. I breathed, but I didn’t feel. Now it was like coming up to the beautifully sunlit surface of the sea after spending much too long in the murky darkness of the depths.
I worked right through the nominal lunch hour; I was much too excited to eat. Like a teen-ager running eagerly to his first date, I left the office just beforetwo o’clockand hailed a taxi down on the crowded, rushing avenue and fidgeted impatiently as the cab wormed its way through the afternoon traffic to St. Mercy’s Hospital.
“Ms. Promachos,” said the nurse behind the desk at the entrance to Aretha’s ward, “checked out about half an hour ago.”
I felt stunned. As if someone had clubbed me between the eyes. “Checked out…?”
“Yes. Are you Mr. O’Ryan?”
I nodded mutely.
“She left a message for you.” The nurse handed me a folded scrap of paper. My name was penciled on it, in what looked like swift, rushing strokes. She had misspelled O’Ryan. I opened the tablet sheet and read: No time. The dark one … Then, in an almost undecipherable scribble, Underground.
I crumpled the sheet in my hand.
“When did you say she left?”
The nurse was an experienced old bird. The look in her narrow eyes told me that she did not want to get involved in a lover’s triangle.
“When?” I repeated.
She glanced at the digital clock on the panel in front of her seat. “Twenty-eight minutes ago, to be exact.”
“Who was with her?”
“I didn’t get his name. She signed herself out.”
“What did he look like?”
She hesitated. I could see a struggle going on inside her head. Then: “A big man. Not quite as tall as you, but… big. Y’know? Wide as a bus. Like a Mafia hit man, only worse. He looked… threatening. Scared you just to see him.”
“Dark complexion, black hair, bushy brows.”
“That’s him.” She nodded. “Only… Ms. Promachos didn’t seem to be afraid of him. I was, but she didn’t look scared at all. Acted like she knew him, like he was a member of her family.”
“Some family.”
The nurse had no idea where they had gone. It was against hospital rules for her to give me Aretha’s home address, but she did it anyway, with only the slightest urging from me. The dark one had truly frightened her.
I took another taxi to the address the nurse had given me, far downtown, near the Brooklyn Bridge. The driver, a Latino from Central America, was quickly lost in the maze of Lower East Sidestreets. I paid him off and walked several blocks, searching for Aretha’s apartment.
There was no such address. The information was fake. I stopped on a street corner, beginning to feel conspicuous in my business suit where everyone else was wearing jeans, fatigues, tee shirts, even shawls that had once been tablecloths. I wasn’t afraid of being mugged; I suppose I should have been, but I wasn’t. I was concentrating too hard on trying to figure out why Aretha had given the hospital a phony address. I was certain that the nurse had told me the truth; it was Aretha herself who had falsified her address.
Underground. What did she mean by that? Underground. I looked at the time. She had left the hospital nearly an hour ago. In an hour they could have gone anywhere in this vast, teeming city.
“Hey, that’s a nice watch you got, man.”
I felt the prick of a knifepoint against my back as the foul breath of the man who held it warmed my neck.
“I really like that watch, man,” he said, low, trying to sound menacing.
I was in no mood to be mugged on a busy street corner in broad daylight. This fool was standing close behind me, pressing his knife into the small of my back, trying to rip me off without letting anyone walking past know what was happening.
“Just gimme the watch, shitface, and keep your mouth shut.”
I lifted my hands as if to slip the watch off my wrist, then whirled and gave him an elbow in the abdomen and a backhand chop across the bridge of his nose. The knife clattered to the pavement. The blow to his middle had cut off his wind so he couldn’t even yelp. He sank to his feet, nose broken, blood gushing over his ragged clothes and spattering the cement. I grabbed a handful of his filthy hair and jerked his head back. His face was covered with blood.
“Get out of here before I lose my temper,” I told him. With my left foot I kicked his knife into the gutter.
Gagging, wide-eyed with pain and shock, he staggered to his feet and limped away. A few passersby glanced at me, but no one said a word or lifted a hand to intervene. The city at its finest.
Underground. I heard a subway train rumble beneath my feet, its wheels screeching on the iron rails. Underground is a British word for subway. There was a subway station just outside the hospital’s main entrance. Looking across the street from where I was standing, I saw the entrance to another station. I dashed across the street, leaving a chorus of bleating horns and cursing drivers behind me, and raced down the steps. In the grimy, urine-stinking underground station, I went from one map of the subway system to another until I found one that was readable beneath the spraycan graffiti. Sure enough, a red line connected the station at the hospital with this station downtown.