The Deadly Percheron Read online

  Then I felt Sonia’s hand on my shoulder, and I heard Sonia’s calm voice in my ear. “Let go of him, John. You’re killing him. It is not his fault, John. He had nothing to do with it. Let go of him.”

  I let go of him. He lay there gasping on the floor, trying to speak. When he managed to get the words out they came in painful phrases and his voice was a thickened whisper. I could see the imprint of my fingers on the flesh of his throat. I could still feel his skin writhing under my fingers. “I saw your back …it looked…familiar. I tried to catch up with you. But you ran away. You r an… ran into… the car. Then I saw your face. I knew it was you…although you looked…terribly different.”

  Later, I apologized. He was still afraid of me and he could not get out of my place fast enough. I made him give me his address, which he did reluctantly – writing it down on a scrap of paper Sonia found. I could not think straight. I was still unreasonably angry at him. All I could see was that bright scar dividing my face. That scar should not have been there. Felix went away rubbing his throat.

  I did not lose his address.

  SEVEN

  The Dilemma

  “What was all that about?”

  Sonia was standing with her back to the door. Felix had just left. I had sat down again on the bed. My head was aching and I did not feel well.

  “I pretended that I did not know who I was to confuse him,” I said. “I thought I might learn something about…about my past.”

  Sonia stuck her hands deep into her trousers’ pockets. “Tell me the truth, John. Have you killed someone?”

  Her question surprised me. My heart jumped beneath my ribs. Then I remembered that she knew nothing about the death of Frances Raye except what she had gathered from my conversation with Felix.

  “No,” I said. “I am not a murderer. Although it looks like I was meant to be a victim.” I began at the beginning and told her the whole story of Jacob and his “little men,” the phone call in the middle of night, the impostor I found at Centre Street, my accident in the subway and my awakening, late in May, in the psychopathic ward of the hospital. I described how I had lied my way out of the hospital and my shock at finding that I had a horrible disfigurement.

  “But why did you continue to call yourself John Brown?” she asked. “Why didn’t you go at once to the police and try to locate your wife instead of – ” She did not complete her sentence. Her face was expressionless, but from the way she blinked her eyes I could see that she was fighting back tears.

  “How could I go back to Sara looking like…like this?” I asked. “I did not look this way before, you know?” I stroked my face with my hand. “I cannot bear to look at it myself. How could I go back to her?”

  “I never see it anymore!” Sonia said with quiet emotion. “It makes no difference to me!”

  “But, don’t you see, I could not bear it to make a difference with… with Sara?”

  Sonia did not answer. She turned her head away and would not look at me. I felt miserable.

  We talked that night, Sonia and I. We had much to say to each other. I told her all I could remember about my past: my childhood in Indianapolis, my father’s death, the years at medical school in Cincinnati and the post-graduate work in psychopathology in Zürich, the hard years of the early ’thirties, my mother’s death, my marriage and my slowly rising fortunes until I could call myself a success at thirty-six. I tried to explain why I had felt apathetic when I left the hospital, why I had continued to lead the life of John Brown instead of trying to recover the career of Dr George Matthews. “A psychiatrist should look distinguished,” I said, “not like a clown.” I tried to make her see why I had been unwilling to attempt to recall the happenings of my blank period – the seven months between the 12th of October, 1943 and the last part of May in 1944. But as I talked I found myself losing the very apathy I was defending, and beginning to be angry instead. Who had done this to me? What had happened and why had it happened? This left me worse off than before. As long as I allowed myself to forget the blank spots, to ignore them and live only in the present, I had no immediate problems. But now I was regaining my sense of identity, and I realized what an impossible situation I was in. I had two complete personalities, John Brown’s and George Matthews’. I was Dr George Matthews to myself, but I was John Brown to Sonia and all my friends in Coney Island. When I looked into a mirror, I saw a horrible face that matched the life of John Brown, not Dr George Matthews. But it had been Matthews’ face before it had been Brown’s.

  Sonia told me all she knew about me. There was nothing new in this. After the first shock of realization that I had a wife as well as a double personality, she adopted a sympathetic attitude to my problem. I knew that she had been hurt by the way I had acted, and I guessed that she was also afraid for my sanity – especially after I attacked Felix. But she was also in love with me.

  It was Sonia who suggested the theory which I later came to think of as my “working hypothesis.” She reminded me that I had suffered at least two accidents, one in October, 1943 and another that night. Amnesia, a mental disorder that caused me to forget my past, had certainly resulted from one – if only for a short time. When I had awakened that night after being struck by the automobile, I had forgotten the scar on my face and – for an instant – I had confused the recent past with the less-recent past. If this was true, was it not likely that I had also lost my memory regarding my past life at the time of the accident in the subway? During the seven months between my fall in the IRT station and my awakening in the hospital, I had called myself John Brown, had worked and received a Social Security Card.

  “Or someone – the same person who pushed me into the train in the subway, perhaps – gave me that card,” I proposed.

  “Then you think someone tried to kill you, too,” Sonia said.

  We were having coffee which she prepared on the hot plate in my closet. As she said this, I suddenly realized the full extent of the injustice that had been done to me. For a long time I had been unwilling to face the fact that all these things had not just happened, but that someone had done them to me for a reason. Here I was, living in a dingy room on a counterman’s wages, alienated from my wife, and I had not even made a protest!

  I wanted to jump to my feet, to scream and rage. I did not do it – I have always had fairly good control over my emotions – but I could feel the anger welling up in me. Why should anyone do these things to me? “Why should I be deprived of my profession, my home, everything of value to me including my life?” I asked Sonia.

  “I don’t know John – George, I mean. I think that something like that may have happened though. Tell me, when they gave you back your clothes at the hospital, didn’t they give you your wallet? And if they did, didn’t it contain some identification that would have told you who you had been?”

  “Only the Social Security Card with John Brown’s name on it,” I said.

  “But on that day last year when you had the accident in the subway, didn’t you have that kind of identification on you then?”

  “At that time I was carrying my membership cards in several medical and psychiatric associations, my bankbook and both my business and home addresses,” I said.

  “Yet you didn’t have any of these when you entered the hospital, apparently. Doesn’t this point to a plot against you?”

  It certainly did.

  Sonia was excited. She leaned across the table and pressed my hand. “Do you know what I think, George? I think that on that last day you must have stumbled upon some fact that was dangerous to some person or group of persons. A fact that he, or they, could not dare let you remember!”

  This was what had been in the back of my mind all night, but which I had not been able to put into words.

  “Why didn’t they kill me then?” I asked.

  Sonia shook her head. “I think they tried-and failed. I think they might try again.”

  I had nothing to say to this. It was just a supposition, of course, but an un
pleasantly logical one.

  “George – who is Jacob Blunt?”

  “Why, I’ve told you,” I said. “He was my patient. He said that ‘little men’ hired him to do crazy things. He wanted me to help him find out if these ‘little men’ were real.”

  Sonia walked to the window. The sun was rising over the rooftops – the structure of one of the rides a few blocks away was clearly visible. We had talked all night.

  “George, didn’t Felix say that Jacob Blunt hired him to say certain things to you?”

  “That was what he said.”

  “George, don’t you think you had better find Jacob Blunt?” There was no doubt that Sonia was right. Unless I wished to give up the fight altogether, I must find Jacob Blunt. For it was inconceivable that I could return to Sara, as I was, without some explanation of how I got this way – what had happened to me and why, who had done it. But did I want to continue the fight? And, above all else, did I want to go back to Sara and resume being Dr George Matthews?

  One way I looked at it, my decision had already been made. Felix had forced it by revealing to Sonia my true identity. To the one person most important to John Brown, John Brown no longer existed. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to keep up my deception from day to day when I knew that Sonia also, was aware of what I was doing. Despite myself, I was – again – Dr George Matthews.

  But what about returning to Sara? I was thinking about the way I looked, the absurd, grotesque face I saw when I gazed into a glass. How had I managed to face people without feeling self-conscious? I realized that a major part of my composure during the short time I had worked at the All-Brite came from my rejection of the personality, and standards, of Dr George Matthews. George Matthews had looked a certain way – he had to or he was not George Matthews – but John Brown belonged to the vicious caricature of a face that he glimpsed in mirrors. If I went back to my old way of life, I had to overcome this feeling of wearing a disguise, of appearing to myself as another character. Of course I could persuade myself that my face looked much more vile to me than it possibly could to another. All my past training in mental hygiene supported this self-advice, but I could not believe in it. All I could see when I thought of going back was that lewd smear of outraged flesh… and it disgusted me. I wanted to cover my face with my hands.

  I suppose the reason I decided, finally, to go back – to find Jacob Blunt – to discover what was behind everything that had happened to me (as well as what it was that had happened), was that I desired revenge. This emotion, which soon dominated me and drove me on like a cruel spur in my side, was in itself paradoxical. For I had always held that revenge was a motive alien to modern, civilized man, a primitive drive, a bloodlust that human nature had sloughed off. But the man who had cultivated this opinion – the George Matthews of a short year ago – was a different man from the George Matthews I had become; nor could the man who accepted the name today ever wholly return to the man of yesterday who had never known another.

  Aware of this, I set out to recapture the past.

  Sonia had to go to work and I was left alone. I decided not to go back to the cafeteria. There was no reason why I should work there –I had money in the bank and a home in New Jersey. Of course, I might not be able to get the money out of the bank without a bankbook, without identification, without resembling the man who had deposited it. And I did not want to return to New Jersey because Sara might not be there – and also because Sara might well be there.

  Yet, despite my torturing ambivalence, I wanted badly to see Sara. What had happened to her in the past year? Had I forgotten her, too, when I fell in the subway? The only way to discover the answers to these questions was to go and find out. I put on my hat and coat and walked over to the elevated station. Since it was early in the morning, the huge, two-leveled structure was cavernously empty; it dwarfed me as the enormity of my task dwarfed my spirit. I tried to whistle, but the tones froze in my throat. I let three trains pass before I stepped onto one.

  I got off at Wall Street and walked past Trinity Church and down Cortlandt Street to the Hudson Tubes. In Jersey I took a bus to my neighborhood. When I left the bus I took all the shortcuts to our street, foolishly proud that I still remembered them. But when I stood in front of my house, I did not recognize it. I knew the block and the number, yet I walked past it three times before I found it. In the beginning I could not tell what was wrong–it just did not look like my house. Then I saw that it had been painted and that some of the shrubbery had been uprooted and that there was a child’s tricycle on the front porch. Sara and I had no children.

  I walked slowly up the steps and pushed the doorbell tentatively. Heavy steps resounded through the house. The door opened upon a large woman in an old silk dress. She had a stocking cap over her hair and a dark mole on one check. She stared at me aggressively.

  “We don’t need anything,” she said.

  “I’m not selling anything.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I’d like to speak to Mrs George Matthews.”

  “There’s no one here by that name.”

  “She used to live here I know.” I wanted to say more. I wanted to say: I own this house. Mrs Matthews is my wife! I must see her! But the words clogged my throat.

  “The house was empty when we came.” The woman had begun to shut the door. “We rented it last year. We don’t know anything about the people who lived here before.”

  “Who do you rent it from?” I all but shouted. I had to find out more. I could not stop now!

  “The realty company rents it to us. They’re still trying to sell. That’s their sign out there.” She pointed to a large sign stuck into the lawn. Then she shut the door in my face.

  I walked down the steps to the street and turned around to look back at the sign. A few minutes before I had stood on the same spot and looked in the same direction, but I had not seen the sign then because I did not want to see it. How many other obvious facts had I overlooked in a similar fashion? And why did I not want to see certain things?

  I looked at that sign for a long time. Then I took a piece of paper and a pencil out of my pocket and wrote down the name and address of the real estate agency: Blankenship & Co., 125 West 42nd Street, New York City.

  Then I walked back to the bus stop to wait for the bus back to town.

  I did not learn much at Blankenship & Co. I talked to a young man with a bland manner and eyes the color of fish scales. He said, “We contracted to manage Mrs Matthews’ property in November of last year. We are to rent to responsible people until the opportunity presents itself to sell at a reasonable figure. The present tenants have been there since June. Are you interested in purchasing the property?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m a friend of the family who has lost touch with Mrs Matthews. I thought you might help me reach her again. Perhaps, if you told me where you send the rent money…?”

  When I asked this question, his fish scale eyes slid over me appraisingly. I could see he suspected my intentions. But he answered my question. “We deposit the rent to Mrs. Matthews’ account in her New York bank.”

  Her New York bank? Then Sara had left the city?

  “Could you tell me where Mrs. Matthews lives now?”

  The young man stood up. “I’m sorry, but we are instructed not to divulge Mrs Matthews’ whereabouts to anyone.”

  “Can’t you even tell me the name of her bank?”

  His mouth had compressed itself into the thinnest of lines. “I’m sorry, but that is confidential, too.”

  I took my hat and left. On the street I wondered if I would have met with more success had I told him who I was instead of saying I was “a friend of the family.” But I could not have proven that I was Dr George Matthews. I could only prove I was John Brown.

  I took a local at Times Square to Canal Street and Police Headquarters. I had decided that it was time I had a talk with Lieutenant Anderson.

  The policeman at the switchboard a
sked me: “Why do you want to see the Lieutenant?”

  “I think I have some information about the murder of Frances Raye,” I said.

  He hesitated. I could see him thinking, could tell the exact moment when he recalled the case. He did something to the switchboard, said something into the receiver strapped to his head, then looked up at me.

  “Go in the second door to your right. The Lieutenant will see you shortly.”

  I walked down the same corridor as I had that morning in October, 1943, but went this time to a different room. That meant the Lieutenant was not seeing me in his office. I wondered why.

  I opened the frosted glass door and stepped into a brightly lighted cubicle. It contained the usual desk, three chairs, a framed map of the five boroughs of New York. I sat down on one of the stiff-backed chairs, struck a match to a cigarette and waited.

  I was very nervous. Would I be able to convince the Lieutenant that I was George Matthews? We had been old friends, but would he be able to recognize me despite my disfigurement? Felix had been able to, but he had seen my back first – or so he said. It was possible that Anderson would not know me at first, and that I would have to prove my identity to him. Would he give me the information I wanted – where Sara and Jacob were – or would I have to try other means? I could advertise in newspapers. I could hire a private detective and get in touch with Sara’s relatives. But I might never see my wife again. And finding Jacob promised to be even more difficult.

  I do not know how long it was before Anderson came into the room. He walked over and sat down behind the desk, folded his hands on the blotter and regarded me intently. His face blanched. Then he said, “My God! It is you, isn’t it, George?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t look quite the same, Andy.” I did not mean to speak so familiarly – while I had been waiting I had remembered the coldness of his manner at our last meeting. But I was encouraged by his easy friendliness this time. For a few moments I relaxed into the belief that everything was going to be all right.