Десмонд Бэгли - Landslide

‘You’re no dope,’ he announced, waving a sheaf of papers. ‘You scored a hundred and thirty-three on the Wechsler-Bellevue — you have intelligence, so use it.’

My body was dreadfully scarred, especially on the chest. My hands were unnaturally pink with new skin and when I touched my face I could feel crinkled scar tissue. And that led to something else. One day Matthews came to see me with Susskind in attendance. ‘We’ve got something to talk about, Bob,’ he said.

Susskind chuckled and jerked his head at Matthews. ‘A serious guy, this — very portentous.’

‘It is serious,’ said Matthews. ‘Bob, there’s a decision you have to make. I’ve done all I can do for you in this hospital. Your eyes are as good as new but the rest of you is a bit battered and that’s something I can’t improve on. I’m no genius — I’m just an ordinary hospital surgeon specializing in skin.’ He paused and I could see he was selecting his words. ‘Have you ever wondered why you’ve never seen a mirror?’

I shook my head, and Susskind chipped in, ‘Our Robert Boyd Grant is a very undemanding guy. Would you like to see yourself, Bob?’

I put my fingers to my cheeks and felt the roughness. ‘I don’t know that I would,’ I said, and found myself shaking.

‘You’d better,’ Susskind advised. ‘It’ll be brutal, but it’ll help you make up your mind in the next big decision.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

Susskind snapped his fingers and the nurse left the room to return almost immediately with a large mirror which she laid face down on the table. Then she went out again and closed the door behind her. I looked at the mirror but made no attempt to pick it up. ‘Go ahead,’ said Susskind, so I picked it up reluctantly and turned it over.

‘My God!’ I said, and quickly closed my eyes, feeling the sour taste of vomit in my throat. After a while I looked again. It was a monstrously ugly face, pink and seamed with white lines in arbitrary places. It looked like a child’s first clumsy attempt to depict the human face in wax. There was no character there, no imprint of dawning maturity as there should have been in someone of my age — there was just a blankness.

Matthews said quietly, ‘That’s why you have a private room here.’

I began to laugh. ‘It’s funny; it’s really damn’ funny. Not only have I lost myself, but I’ve lost my face.’

Susskind put his hand on my arm. ‘A face is just a face. No man can choose his own face — it’s something that’s given to him. Just listen to Dr Matthews for a minute.’

Matthews said, ‘I’m no plastic surgeon.’ He gestured at the mirror which I still held. ‘You can see that. You weren’t in any shape for the extensive surgery you needed when you came in here — you’d have died if we had tried to pull any tricks like that. But now you’re in good enough shape for the next step — if you want to take it.’

‘And that is?’

‘More surgery — by a good man in Montreal. The top man in the field in Canada, and maybe in the Western Hemisphere. You can have a face again, and new hands, too.’

‘More surgery!’ I didn’t like that; I’d had enough of it.

‘You have a few days to make up your mind,’ said Matthews.

‘Do you mind, Matt?’ said Susskind. ‘I’ll take over from here.’

‘Of course,’ said Matthews. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be seeing you, Bob.’

He left the room, closing the door gently. Susskind lit a cigarette and threw the pack on the table. He said quietly, ‘You’d better do it, bud. You can’t walk round with a face like that — not unless you intend taking up a career in the horror movies.’

‘Right!’ I said tightly. I knew it was something that had to be done. I swung on Susskind. ‘Now tell me something — who is paying for all this? Who is paying for this private room? Who is paying for the best plastic surgeon in Canada?’

Susskind clicked his tongue. ‘That’s a mystery. Someone loves you for sure. Every month an envelope comes addressed to Dr Matthews. It contains a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and one of these.’ He fished in his pocket and threw a scrap of paper across the table.

I smoothed it out. There was but one line of typescript on it: FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT.

I looked at him suspiciously. ‘You’re not doing this, are you?’

‘Good Christ!’ he said. ‘Show me a hospital headshrinker who can afford to give away twelve thousand bucks a year. I couldn’t afford to give you twelve thousand cents.’ He grinned. ‘But thanks for the compliment.’

I pushed the paper with my finger. ‘Perhaps this is a clue to who I am.’

‘No, it’s not,’ said Susskind flatly. He looked unhappy. ‘Maybe you’ve noticed I’ve not told you much about yourself. I did promise to dig into your background.’

‘I was going to ask you about that.’

‘I did some digging,’ he said. ‘And what I’ve been debating is not what I should tell you, but if I should tell you at all. You know, Bob, people get my profession all wrong. In a case like yours they think I should help you to get back your memory come hell or high water. I take a different view. I’m like the psychiatrist who said that his job was to help men of genius keep their neuroses. I’m not interested in keeping a man normal — I want to keep him happy. It’s a symptom of the sick world we live in that the two terms are not synonymous.’

‘And where do I come in on this?’

He said solemnly, ‘My advice to you is to let it go. Don’t dig into your past. Make a new life for yourself and forget everything that happened before you came here. I’m not going to help you recover your memory.’

I stared at him. ‘Susskind, you can’t say that and expect me just to leave it there.’

‘Won’t you take my word for it?’ he asked gently.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Would you if you were in my place?’

‘I guess not,’ he said, and sighed. ‘I suppose I’ll be bending a few professional ethics, but here goes. I’m going to make it short and sharp. Now, take a hold of yourself, listen to me and shut up until I’ve finished.’

He took a deep breath. ‘Your father deserted your mother soon after you were born, and no one knows if he’s alive or dead. Your mother died when you were ten and, from what I can gather, she was no great loss. She was, to put it frankly, nothing but a cheap chippy and, incidentally, she wasn’t married to your father. That left you an orphan and you went into an institution. It seems you were a young hellion and quite uncontrollable so you soon achieved the official status of delinquent. Had enough?’

‘Go on,’ I whispered.

‘You started your police record by the theft of a car, so you wound up in reform school for that episode. It seems it wasn’t a good reform school; all you learned there was how to make crime pay. You ran away and for six months you existed by petty crime until you were caught. Fortunately you weren’t sent back to the same reform school and you found a warden who knew how to handle you and you began to straighten out. On leaving reform school you were put in a hostel under the care of a probation officer and you did pretty well at high school. Your good intelligence earned you good marks so you went to college. Right then it looked as though you were all right.’

Susskind’s voice took on a savage edge. ‘But you slipped. You couldn’t seem to do anything the straight way. The cops pulled you in for smoking marijuana — another bad mark on the police blotter. Then there was an episode when a girl died in the hands of a quack abortionist — a name was named but nothing could be proved, so maybe we ought to leave that one off the tab. Want any more?’