Shoot It Again, Sam Page 5

  Murder the bastard!

  Neither of us had spoken a word since I had turned up the Judas card. But the room was alive with the clinking fall of the thirty pieces of silver. It was as if this modern Saviour had known that all conversation, all reason, all bargaining, would have been lost on me. He was right, of course. I didn't know what I was doing.

  The insane clocks ticked on.

  The President edged toward the open mouth of the foyer and the dim safety of the elevator. I blocked him quickly, reducing the size of the space he had to work in. It was a tense minute and both of us seemed to know, target and assassin, that the moment of truth was staring us both in the face.

  The scene held.

  Him backing away.

  Me coming on.

  Both of us watching each other's tiniest move, barest reflex. Like two dogs circling a bone. The bone in this case was the elevator.

  And then suddenly, he relaxed. His face lit up briefly and an expression of utter weariness and sadness illumined his handsome head. I barely saw his mouth move but I heard his voice. A low, authoritative spate of words which had all the patience and wisdom of the world in its tones: "Don't shoot, Tommy. He doesn't know what he's doing . . ."

  Too late, I tried to turn, trick or not.

  I was the animal. Without reason, only the instinct of survival of the fittest and the bald, bold conditioning of the wolf.

  Tommy, wherever he had come from and whatever had brought him back, hit me.

  I don't know what with but it didn't matter.

  I went down, with a head exploding rockets and hand grenades blasting, the Situation Room tilting at a forty-five degree angle, the tall figure of the President wavering ghostlike and eerily in the crimson and purple of my nightmare.

  Beyond the President's executive desk, the picture window showed a Washington all on fire. In flame, with pinwheeling comets and detonating star shells lighting up the Treasury Building, the Senate Office Building and the Capitol Dome. The Dome collapsed, splitting open and emptying blood and decaying bones down over its crumbling sides. As if someone had lifted the lid off to show the corruption and polluted insides to a watching world.

  It didn't matter anymore, though.

  Nothing did.

  "Brave soldiers . . . can it be that your nerves

  are tightening . . . ?"

  Eduoardo Cianelli as

  The Guru in Gunga Din. (1939)

  BRAIN

  □ "Where am I?"

  It's classic, it's corny, it's Clicheville but it is always exactly what you say when you wake up somewhere other than where you have been, following a blackout of time, consciousness and memory. I didn't say the words aloud but they were there all the same. My lips must have formed the question because I didn't hear myself. I only saw the setting around me. And it made me very frightened. It was alien, weird and senseless. Completely senseless. My last vivid image had been the sight of the corpse of Dan Davis, dead movie great, rising like a specter from the Maple hardwood coffin in the baggage car of The City of San Francisco. That image was a terrifying set-piece in my mind. Along with the spectacle of Goolsby, the round jolly little man in a train conductor's uniform, with his mouth, face and eyes frozen in a mask of shock.

  After that, Nothing.

  Blank.

  Zero.

  Blackout.

  A shutout.

  A row of goose eggs, all circular and empty.

  And mocking. Every single one of them. A real Schneider.

  There was no coffin, no train, no Dan Davis back from the dead, no Goolsby, no clickety-clack-clack-clack, no whistles and tracks in the night. And no assignment, no telegram, no man known as troubleshooter, secret agent and private investigator.

  Now, was me. Eyes open, looking around and seeing a glass cage of some kind. A shining, crystal thing through which the sun seemed to blaze, dancing off the flesh of my face, warming it, pleasuring it, maybe sun-tanning it. I didn't know. I didn't know anything.

  I unfuzzed very, very slowly. Maybe I had opened my eyes before, maybe I had tried to come out of this before and this might be only the very next time I was trying. I didn't know that, either.

  All I knew was that it was an effort. My eyelids had iron anchors on them, weighing them down. I struggled to lift the anchors off. It made me perspire freely. The glass world around me shimmered, wavered and gleamed like a thousand swords flashing in a sunlight. I gave up trying to open my eyes. The sun felt good, though. My body warmed all over. I could feel blood stirring somewhere in the mass of reflexes and nerves and muscles that connected with my eyesight.

  I went back to sleep. Painlessly, easily.

  It was like drifting off the end of the world, and falling into a bottomless pit. Swirling and rolling clouds, every color of the rainbow, billowed up to meet my falling body. I was weightless and airborne, falling freely. There was no fear or alarm in me. The bed of colored clouds below seemed friendly and where they were just for the sole purpose of protecting me from hurting myself.

  I sailed down in a glide worthy of a peregrine falcon.

  Falcon. Bird . . . "By gad, you are a character, Sir . . . "

  Something tried to break through the rising, billowing mass below. A shaft of light revolved from a tiny, coruscating circle into a shaft of illumination, piercing upwards toward me.

  Before it could reach me, I was asleep again.

  When I awoke again, everything was utterly normal.

  I found myself sitting in a wheelchair of sorts, faced away from the glass enclosure this time. It was no trick at all now to identify my surroundings. I was in a solarium of some kind. A small, economy-sized one. I had it all to myself. With one comfortable bed, a chair and a parquet floor, of all things. The glass windows looked out on a wilderness of forest and trees and sky. I couldn't see any horizon at all. I felt fine though confused. I was feeling no pain and except for the fact that I was wearing a cocoa-colored bathrobe with my feet encased in hospital slippers and that I had no idea of where I was or how I came to be there, I was in another vacuum of I-didn't-give-a-damn. I would never know exactly, no matter how well it was finally explained to me, of the deadly, dangerous trip my mind and my sanity had gone on. That was something so dark that not even centuries of civilization and sophistication would ever rationalize it for me. Hamlet's Heaven and Hell would always perplex this Horatio.

  There were no sounds beyond my glass room. Not a peep of a bird from that wilderness of forest, nor so much as a footfall beyond the walls of the room. Where there had to be corridors, hallways. Where there had to be something. I didn't panic, though. I didn't worry. It was as if I was incapable of caring. Of feeling fear. Or anything but a dullish, quiescent sense of timelessness and confusion.

  It didn't seem to bother me anymore about the train, the coffin, Dan Davis or jolly, terrified little Goolsby.

  Finally, when the outside world did enter my private one, I took it as casually as one takes the arrival of the landlord on the day when the rent is due. A perfectly natural version of cause-and-effect. It was nothing to get upset about. I was obviously in a rest home or hospital of some kind, wasn't I? Where else would you expect to find a doctor? Or an attendant? Or an angel of mercy?

  The door clicked open and he came in.

  I was sitting in the wheelchair facing the door, with the sunny glass windows behind me. Even though I had discovered that my ankles and wrists were bound to the chair by tight, leather straps with huge brass buckles, I hadn't raised an eyebrow.

  It all seemed perfectly normal. Natural.

  The doctor was a tall young guy with a neat Van Dyke beard and moustache. He oozed efficiency and the curt, get-right-down-to-cases manner some professional men acquire at a very early age. This one had to be still on the sunny side of thirty. He had a picturesque birthmark on his left cheek that lent his face an air of mystery and intrigue. I didn't want to imagine things so I stopped looking at his birthmark and watched his hands. They were tucked int
o the side pockets of a very white short coat. The Kildare coat, all medical personnel wear. But there was nothing else about him to suggest medicine. No stethoscope, no clip pad, no ballpen, no hospital trappings.

  He put his back against the door, took his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms. He smiled across the room at me and the Van Dyke beard twitched. He was a very handsome guy, the kind that must make impressionable young nurses and hypochondriac old ladies flip with fresh passion. And wild ideas.

  "How are you feeling?"

  I found my voice. It didn't seem to me strained or husky. About par for the course. As much as I could remember, that is.

  "I'll live. Where am I?"

  "Camp David. No reason for you not to know, Mr. Spade."

  Something stirred again in my brain.

  "Camp—?" I stared up at him. "The place where presidents fling off the cares of office and relax? That Camp David?"

  He seemed very pleased that I knew that much.

  "Very good, Mr. Spade. You're coming along fine—"

  I shook my head. "Yeah? Then why are you calling me Mister Spade? I may be a private detective for a living but that's kind of corny humor, Handsome."

  He came forward, slowly, unlocking his arms. He approached within a few feet of the chair. His smile was still on, but somehow tighter, more guarded. He had deep brown eyes and they measured me at close range.

  "I'm sorry," he said, evenly, easily. "It says Samuel Spade on your entrance card. Naturally, I assumed—"

  "You assumed wrong," I grated. "I'm Noon. Ed Noon. And the only resemblance between me and Bogart is that we both smoked too much. Look here, Doc. Be a good guy and tell me what the hell I'm doing here anyway? I feel fine—no joke—but if this is the Man's idea, I need a diagram. I've lost a day or two somewhere but I can get it all back if I talk to him—"

  "That's not possible. Not just this minute, Mr. Spade."

  "Will you stop calling me that? I'm Noon. N-o-o-n. Even spelled backwards it's the same. Cut it out, Doc."

  He nodded, and suddenly reached down. His left hand fiddled with my wrist. I looked up at him. I knew he was taking my temperature but it all seemed suddenly very silly.

  "Doc—" I began, fuming a little.

  "Dayton," he said, still measuring my pulse, his eyes intent on my face, as if he was examining my eyes. "Fred Dayton."

  "Pleased to meet you." I must have been more sour than five lemons. I could see the chuckle between the Van Dyke and the moustache. "Come on. Give. How did I get here? What's supposed to be wrong with me?"

  "Later." He let go of my wrist and tucked his hands back in the side pockets. "You're still running a temperature. One hundred and two and a half."

  "You're screwy. I feel fine."

  I really did except for the mental cobwebs.

  "Just the same. It's too early for any more tests."

  "Tests? Listen, what the hell is this?"

  He ignored that and went to the door. His tall figure and great head were somehow important to me all of a sudden. I didn't want him to leave. I was like those young nurses and nice old ladies. Demanding his bedside manner. If I could have stood to one side and watched myself and listened to myself, I would have laughed out loud. Good and loud.

  "Please, Dr. Dayton. Don't go. Stay and talk to me. Tell me what's going on, will you, for Christ's sakes— Dr. Dayton!"

  The door had closed and I began to scream.

  Suddenly, I did care very much. Suddenly, I was afraid. The billowing clouds were rolling over me again. Only this time they weren't friendly. They were dark, tinted blood-red and they were rolling into me, piling up, accompanied this time by a hooting, shrill, piercing blast of sound. A train whistle in the night—I tore and kicked and pulled at the leather straps of the chair. I could hear my screams and yells thundering off the glass walls of the room. I sounded as nutty as a fruit cake.

  I might have kept that up forever but the door opened very very quickly and two men ran in, dressed in white uniforms. One of them had a hypodermic needle ready. It went deep into my left arm even as I tried to struggle against the iron hands of the other man pinning me down to the chair. Then both men left, as silently as they came, and I was closing my eyes again and it couldn't have been more than ten seconds after they left. Ten seconds and I stopped screaming and stopped struggling and stopped caring again.

  I ran out again, dropping down to meet the clouds coming on to hold me in their white, billowing masses.

  I took that train that goes nowhere.

  Again.

  The one that keeps on moving, and never stops, because it has no destination at all.

  The last train to nothingness.

  ". . . what did you think? Did you think that in

  your friend Jekyll you saw a bit of me, Hyde?"

  Spencer Tracy in the title role of

  Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. (1941)

  TRANSCRIPT

  □ Later, much later, when I finally started to be put together again, they let me read some of the transcripts they made of the grueling sessions. They had put me through all the hoops and paces of their business; pumping me full of long-named drugs at regular intervals, drying me out in sauna bathrooms, asking me a thousand questions, running me through free association word games and the like—all with the express purpose of reorienting the disoriented man. It must have been a long, slow, teeth-pulling process. Dr. Dayton's matinee idol kisser popped up very frequently through all of this schedule but there were other faces, too. Faces I didn't know and would never remember. But it all came down to the same thing: make this man well. Drive the cobwebs out of his mind and soul. Brainwash him—in reverse.

  Gradually, very slowly, very painfully, I came up from darkness. Up from the dim, shadowy woods where trains and coffins and dead movie stars went bump in the night. I remembered only very hazily the face of Dr. Hilton telling me all about his passion for Gary Cooper's Morocco, I saw through a bedroom darkly the erotic movements and lineaments of my bogus Brigid O'Shaughnessy. I did remember the pale greens of the Washington Monument after the rain. I saw, as if in a dream, the tall, ridiculous figure of a basketball-player high, one-eared Chinaman named Charles Too. I saw him go down on the grass under a hail of pistol fire coming from the guns of Secret Service men. I had absolutely no memory of my murderous attack on the Man. My conscious mind rejected that all the way. It was unthinkable, but there it was. I didn't want to remember trying to kill the President. Not even all their miracle drugs and skillful questions and clever tests could make me do that. I had blotted it from my mind, entirely.

  But I had to take their word for it.

  And even if I didn't, it was all there in some of those amazing transcripts of recorded conversations between a drugged me and an interrogating them.

  It didn't make nice reading, either.

  It could send a man up the wall if he hadn't been there already.

  Weird words all:

  ". . . now we'll have that word game again. All right? Say the first thing that comes into your mind."

  "All right."

  "White."

  "Black."

  "Movies."

  "Hollywood."

  "Pencil."

  "Eraser."

  "Death."

  "Black."

  "Black?"

  "Melissa."

  I frowned at the typed lines in the transcript. Damn clever bastards. Black had brought me right back to thinking of Mel. More than a secretary Melissa Mercer. A black and beautiful woman.

  But the transcript was just warming up, obviously.

  "That's pretty good. Now, let's switch around a little. I'm going to ask you some direct questions. Please answer as best you know how. Or the best way you can remember."

  "Okay."

  "What's your name?"

  "Ed Noon."

  "What is your occupation?"

  "Private investigator."

  "Who's Sam Spade?"

  "Private eye in a famous bo
ok The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart played him in the movies . . ."

  "Does the name Brigid O'Shaughnessy mean anything to you?"

  "Yes. She was the girl in the book. The murderer of Spade's partner . . ."

  "Who's Dan Davis?"

  "A movie star. I saw all his pictures—"

  "Please. Just answer the questions. Don't elaborate on your responses unless I ask you to."

  "All right."

  "What does The City of San Francisco mean to you?"

  "That's the train. Crack streamliner. I took it once—"

  "Please, Ed. Try to hold back."

  "Oh, all right."

  "Chinaman—why are you smiling, Ed?"

  "Just remembered. One called Charles Too. He had only one ear. The right one, I think. Maybe the left. . . ."

  Reading my answers to those questions made me wince. It sounded so pathetic. So small-boy. I sounded like a parrot answering by rote. But this was somewhere in the beginning of the cure, obviously. Later on, the transcripts became a bit more lucid,

  And the questions got heavier.

  ". . . now, why did you try to kill the president of your country?"

  "What are you saying?"

  "You heard me—why did you try to kill the president of your country?"

  "That's a goddamn lie! I never would do a thing like that!"

  "Wouldn't you?"

  "No!"

  "Ed, you remember wearing a pair of black-and-white Oxfords and a plum-colored tropical worsted suit and a Panama hat sometime?"

  "Yeah, I think I have an outfit like that—"

  "You do. You wore those clothes the day two Secret Service agents took you in to see the President at the White House. In what they call the Situation Room. Does that ring a bell?"

  "Sure. I know the Situation Room. And I did see the Chief. But—"