The Longest Second (2 page)

“It was in the morning,” the nurse corrected him, “about two o’clock in the morning.”

“When they wheeled him in here, he was whiter than the sheet wrapped around him.” Merkle paused, then added slyly, “ ’Course, that’s not saying much, considering the laundry they got here.”

Miss Pierson refused to be offended. “Perhaps you’d prefer to do your own laundry, Mr. Merkle.”

Merkle shook his head. “Nope,” he laughed. “But as far as he was concerned I sure figured he was a goner.”

The nurse reached up to turn the small valve in the bottle, and the glucose began to run through the tube. She looked at me and said, “It was very fortunate for you that Doctor Stone was still in the operating room when you arrived.” I asked her a question with my eyes, and she read it correctly. “Doctor Stone,” she told me seriously, “is one of the finest throat surgeons in New York City. He’d just finished an emergency, a private case of his own, when you arrived. He agreed to do what he could.” She checked the glucose to see that it flowed properly, then continued, “You can be thankful that Doctor Stone was here. Just sheer chance that he was too.”

This was the first that I had heard of Doctor Stone. This man, a stranger, had saved my life; I didn’t know whether to thank him or not. Perhaps I had a good reason for wanting to die, and didn’t know it. Doctor Stone might have done me no favor after all.

Merkle, during his stay in the hospital, had picked up a number of medical terms which he enjoyed using whenever possible. He asked the nurse, “Was he in bad shock?”

Miss Pierson glanced at him. “Certainly he was in shock. The injury was bad enough, but the shock was worse.”

“For a couple, three days,” Merkle recalled, “everybody was running in and out of here with plasma and blood...”

The nurse didn’t reply. She walked out of the room.

“… and giving transfusions,” Merkle concluded to no one in particular.

I could think clearly now, although I had no memory extending beyond the four walls of the hospital room. Three days of shock when I had first been received; another three days of sedation and drugs; then today. Seven days... one week. For all practical purposes that was my complete life. Before that I hadn’t existed. I was one week old now. My mind returned to the day before: my name? What was my name? I tried to recall what I had been thinking when I thought of the Duke of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway, Adlai Stevenson, but my thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of Doctor Minor.

Minor seriously studied my chart. Nodding gravely, he looked at me. “How are you feeling today? Good?” I signaled, yes. “I see you’re enjoying a good lunch,” he said, watching the glucose, and making an ancient hospital joke.

Merkle called from across the room. “Yeah, just chock full of goodness and real flavor!”

“Certainly,” agreed the doctor, “it’s glucier glucose.” The doctor was satisfied with his display of wit. I didn’t mind. I didn’t care, as a matter of fact. Minor and Merkle, both, were trying to be friendly. Whether they were friendly didn’t make any difference. If they wanted to make the effort, it was all right; frankly, I would have preferred they kept quiet.

Miss Pierson looked through the doorway and Minor signaled to her. She disappeared and in a few minutes a short, dark man walked in. He was wide in the shoulders, carried a slight paunch, and had a still, watchful face. He glanced at Minor inquiringly. “Okay, Doc?” he asked.

“I guess so,” replied Minor, “but as I’ve told you, he can’t speak. Don’t try to force him or you’ll have to leave.”

The dark man nodded and turned his gaze on me. He regarded me impassively, standing a slight distance from the bed. For a moment he searched his pockets, and then removed a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth, although he didn’t light it. Finally, he said, “My name is Santini. I’m a detective from the Eighth precinct. I got to ask you a few questions. The doc says you can signal me answers ... yes and no. Okay with me. Now, for the first question: do you know who you are?”

No.

“You don’t remember anything?”

No.

“You don’t remember who did it to you?”

No.

“You don’t remember if you did it to yourself?”

No.

“You don’t remember where you got that thousand bucks?” No. I didn’t know that I had possessed a thousand dollars.

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.

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 conceal 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.

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.”