An Army truck with ridiculously huge wheels, like those of a giant earth-mover, was rolling through a field of -tulips. The girl with the red hair was sitting on the hood, wearing an officer's cap and with her skirt hitched high, revealing long legs. The rear portion of the truck was a striped tent with tasseled ropes and pennants, like something from a carnival. A siren on the roof of the cab was blaring. . . .
The image dissolved, and the blaring became a car's horn outside in the street. Jarrow awoke sluggishly. His head ached, and there was a dry, acrid taste in his mouth. He opened his eyes, and then closed them again as the light coming through the cheap floral drapes turned the aching in his head into pain. He wished all the torments of the damned upon whoever was sounding the horn.
At last, mercifully, it stopped, and a void of quiet -descended outside, only to be filled a moment later by the sound of two voices yelling an exchange of obscenities. It took Jarrow a few seconds to reassemble the fragmented recollection of where he was. For a while he just lay there, swallowing and working his mouth in an effort to wash away the sour taste, and trying to reconstruct his plan for the day. The air in the room felt chilly on his face. He remembered that there had been a sign on the desk downstairs yesterday, warning hotel residents to expect power cuts that morning.
He rose, rinsed his face in the sink by the bed, and checked himself in the mirror. By now his appearance was a source of total mystery to him. It looked familiar, yet what he saw clashed with everything he remembered about himself. Chris had mentioned last night that he needed a shave, and by now his chin was black with stubble. But he recalled being light-bearded—it had taken him a long time to grow his mustache. Now he didn't even have a mustache. Everything was crazy. And what had come over him that enabled him to demolish a couple of punk muggers as if they were pastry puffs?
The cut under his chin and the mark below his ear were doing fine, but still needed to be kept covered. Chris had been right about the shirt too, he saw when he held it up: the collar was grubby from a day's travel. He should have thought to buy a few more when he was in Kmart. So, some shirts, Band-Aids, a razor, toothbrush, and some toilet gear were first on his list, and then to get himself cleaned up. After that, breakfast. And over breakfast, he could think about how he was going to approach Larry.
His first call when he returned to the hotel was to the Hennepin County coroner's office. A clerk there confirmed that Richard Jarrow, then residing at 703 Orchard Lea Court, Brooklyn Center, had died from a thrombosis of the brain on May 5. The body was cremated on May 8. Identification was made by the deceased's sister, Beatrice Ishen, from Duluth, who had taken care of the arrangements. Jarrow was referred to her for any further information. For a reverse-charge fee, the clerk faxed the details through to the hotel's receiver downstairs. Jarrow brought the copy up to his room and sat contemplating it for a long time with a curious mixture of emotions. He had read many literary allusions to people signing or reading their own death warrants. But never their own death certificate.
He thought of calling Betty—just to see if even his own sister didn't recognize him, he tried to tell himself, but he was just looking for somebody close to talk to, even for a few minutes. He already knew what the outcome would be. It would serve no purpose. He tucked the paper away in a pocket of the travel bag that he had bought to hold the things he was beginning to accumulate. Then he turned to the pad from the room in Atlanta, in which he had noted Larry's number.
Larry's girlfriend, Hilda, answered, but of course she didn't recognize Jarrow. He had moved the viewphone so that the window would be behind him, hiding the fact that he was calling from a hotel room.
"Hello, I'm trying to contact a Larry Banks. Do I have the right number?"
"Yes, you do. Who is it?"
"My name's Maurice Gordon. I'm an insurance investigator."
"I'll fetch him."
"Thanks."
That way Jarrow wouldn't be caught if Larry asked to see some ID. He was lucky that Larry wasn't at work, he reflected while he waited. That was something he should have thought of last night.
Larry appeared, rubbing his eyes and yawning, looking as if he had just gotten up, still much the same, yellow hair tumbling to his collar.
"Hello?"
"Mr. Banks?"
"Yes."
"I hope I'm not calling at an awkward time. My name's Gordon. I'm an insurance investigator. I'd like to talk to you, if I may, when you've got a few minutes."
"I don't need any insurance."
"No, you've got me wrong. I'm not selling. I said I was an investigator."
"I've heard it before."
"Believe me, Mr. Banks."
"Which company are you with?"
"No company. I'm an independent consultant."
"What's this about?"
"I believe you were a colleague of Richard Jarrow's, who died last May."
"Dick Jarrow? . . . Well, yes, that's right."
"We have reason to believe that the circumstances of his death might be part of a more widespread pattern that could affect insurance settlements. I'm helping some people who are putting some statistics together, and we'd like to know a little more about events just before he had his stroke. Somebody suggested I should talk to you."
Larry looked dubious. "I don't know much about that. I wasn't anyone particularly special, if you know what I mean. We worked in the same place, but I wouldn't say I knew any more about him than what anyone else there could tell you."
"I understand. But all the same, if you wouldn't mind, I do have some questions that I'd be interested in your answers to. Would you have a few minutes sometime -today?"
"Can't we do it right now?"
"It's not quite that simple. And I don't think the subject is really suitable to discuss over the phone. I'd rather it were face-to-face."
Larry sighed, making it obvious that in his view it was already a waste of time. "Okay. But I'm going out about lunchtime and I don't know when I'll be back. Can you get here by then?"
"Sure."
"You know where to find us?"
"I can get it off the map."
"Look out for a gate with a big sign that says Farnstead. We're along the street practically opposite that."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Banks. I'll be there before lunch."
But how? Jarrow wondered after he had cleared down. An insurance investigator would look odd showing up on a bus. He shook his head and tutted at himself. His mind seemed to be functioning more coherently at last, but too slow. He paced across the room and stared down from the window at the traffic on the street.
Then he remembered the credit cards in Gordon's wallet. The obvious thing was to rent a car. True, the cards might have been reported as lost and invalidated . . . but there was only one way he was going to find out. If they were good, however, it would be an invaluable way of stretching out the remainder of the cash.
He sat down at the table by the window, took the cards from the wallet, and stared at them. The thought of illegality made him nervous, causing a queasy feeling in his stomach. But God, how often did anyone find themself in this kind of predicament? Surely no court on Earth would convict him in circumstances like these.
He selected the MasterCard and set it before him. Then he drew across the notepad again and turned it to a fresh sheet. He poised his pen over it and looked at the signature on the card again. In the stories he'd read about crooks and forgers, you were supposed to do it in one confident movement, the same way as the original had been written, without hesitating or breaking the rhythm. So telling himself, he lowered the point of the pen and wrote smoothly and deliberately: Maurice J. Gordon. And to his amazement, the match was perfect.
He held the pad and the card side by side and examined them in the light from the window. There was no doubt about it: he himself must have signed the card. So was he really Gordon after all, and not Jarrow? Of course he was, a panicky voice told him from somewhere inside. Wasn't the picture in Gordon's passport enough? He compared the top sheets of the pad—the mysterious message and phone numbers that he'd found when he awoke in Atlanta, the page he'd written yesterday with Larry's number, and his shopping list from first thing that morning. The writing on all of them was identical.
And then all of his doubts came flooding back. Who did he think he was, trying to act like some kind of police detective or private investigator? He needed help, not trivia answers from seven months ago. He threw the pad onto the bed and emitted a strangled sound, at the same time a moan of frustration and a despairing sob. Why him? Why couldn't he just be Richard Jarrow again and pick up the threads of his own life?
Because he wasn't. He was somebody else. . . . No, even that wasn't right. He was Jarrow and somebody else, two people mixed up together. So why not simply present himself to the authorities and say so? That was what they were there for, wasn't it, to look after citizens? They had people who would know what to do.
But as he thought it through further, more doubts -assailed him. What would the likely reaction of the authorities be? As far as they were concerned, he would be Gordon—never mind how he felt about it inside. And from the little he knew of Gordon—the guns, the hotel-room woman, and the cash, the fleeting sample he'd seen last night of the kinds of things Gordon was capable of—their response might not be too friendly. They might even -receive his story as an attempt on Gordon's part to concoct an excuse, an alibi . . . for what? God alone knew what he might have been involved in.
It was no good, he concluded. Until he knew more about who this other self of his was and what kind of business he was in, he could be walking into anything.
He waited ten minutes to calm himself down. Then, putting on his scarf and coat, he went down to the desk to find out about the nearest car rental office.
Jarrow sat on the couch by the window, his notebook opened on his knee. To look the part more, he had bought himself a stiff-backed one, legal size, and a plastic cover with pockets for pens and papers. Larry was sprawled in the easy chair by the woodstove, wearing old jeans and a sweater with frayed cuffs, and looking as if he had gone down a peg since Jarrow last saw him. The place was much the same as when Jarrow was here before—roomy but cluttered, a comfortably anarchic collection of scatter rugs and wood furnishings, lots of books and gadgets, shelves littered with domestic odd-ments and offbeat souvenirs. Hilda had let Jarrow in, said hello, then gone off discreetly to busy herself elsewhere.
Jarrow began. "Just to make sure we've got it right, you are Lawrence T. Banks, of this address?"
"Right."
Jarrow glanced at his pad again. "And you teach at Linden Junior High School?"
Larry snorted. "Well, you're some investigator. No, that's way out-of-date. I haven't worked there since June." -Although Jarrow was used to Larry's cynicism, there was a bitterness in his tone that was new.
"When did you quit?"
"I didn't quit. I was asked to leave. They don't want teachers who show kids how to think anymore. They want rat trainers to condition them to run mazes. It's called eliciting desirable behavior."
"I see. . . . So what do you do now?"
"Look, are we talking about me or Dick Jarrow?"
"I'm sorry." Jarrow peered down at his pad and gave the mood a moment to lighten.
"Let's see now, Jarrow died on May fifth."
"Did he? Okay, if you say so."
"As far as you recall, was he acting normally in the time leading up to that?"
Larry frowned and stared at the floor. "It's been a while now . . . but from what I can remember there was nothing especially strange. Like I tried to tell you on the phone, I wasn't especially a close kind of friend of his, you know."
"Was it sudden—did it come as a surprise to people? Or was it on the cards? Had he been hospitalized or taken away someplace before May fifth, for example?"
"Don't your records tell you that?"
"Er, there are some conflicting accounts that I'm trying to resolve."
"Accounts?" Larry's face wrinkled. "What do you need to go by accounts for? You've only got to look at admission records to see if he was hospitalized. What is this?"
"I'm just trying to reconstruct as much as I can of what Jarrow did in the month before his death, from independent sources. I've a note here that says that on April third you drove him to a doctor's off Groveland Avenue that he'd been attending, a Dr. Valdheim?"
"I dropped him off there a number of times—we used to ride-share into work. Was one of them April third? Okay."
"It was a Thursday."
"I'll take your word for it."
"Did he show up again at the school later that day, as he was supposed to?"
Larry tossed up his hands helplessly. "Look, I can't even remember which time that was. How do I know what he did later?"
Jarrow realized that the questions were becoming implau-sible, but he had to have answers. "Was April third the last time you took him to Valdheim's?"
"I just said, I don't know!"
"When was the last time you saw Jarrow?"
"Well, that's a bit easier. It was the day he fell over. He'd driven me to the school that morning."
For a moment Jarrow just stared. Obviously that was what he should have asked in the first place. That meant, then, that he'd been around and functioning normally, as Jarrow, for something like three weeks after that visit to Valdheim's. "So where did the stroke take place?" he asked unthinkingly. "Are you saying he died at work, at the school?"
"Are you saying you don't know?" Larry ceased trying to disguise the suspicion that had been building up inside. "Look, who are you? This insurance line smelled from the minute you walked in."
Jarrow spread his hands candidly. "Okay, I'm not in insurance. I—"
Larry stood up abruptly, his face paling with anger, and strode across the room. "Your people cost me my job and a lot of friends. So what have they sent you snooping around here for? If there's such a thing as rights left in this country, what I do now is my business. Here's the door. On your way, mister. Tell 'em to waste their tax rake-offs on something else."
Jarrow stood up too, not wanting to let it go at this but flustered, and raised his arm in a way that was supposed to calm things. "Look, I didn't know how else to get to you, because this situation is crazy. This is going to be hard to accept, I know, but the fact is, I'm Dick Jarrow! Something that I don't understand has happened to me. That visit to Valdheim on April third is the last thing I -remember. . . ."
Larry was staring at him in the way he might at a bomb likely to go off any second. "What kind of shit is this?"
Jarrow was desperate. The words babbled in an uncontrollable flow. "You drove me to Valdheim's that day. We were stopped at a traffic check on ninety-four. You talked about an engineer you knew, who said the pollution thing was misrepresented. You remember? How else would I know?"
"You know too damn much about me. That's all I'm hearing."
"You wanted a book that I'd borrowed from the library. You were going to pick it up that afternoon. . . ."
Larry leaned out through the door that he had been holding open and yelled toward the kitchen. "Hilda, call the cops. This guy's a nut."
"No! Don't do that. I just need five minutes to talk. Really, Larry, I am Dick. I woke up yesterday in Atlanta and—"
"Hilda! Do it now!"
Hilda's voice came distantly through the doorway. "Okay, I've got emergency on the line now. . . . Hello, yes. Send someone quick. We've got some kind of lunatic in the house here."
Jarrow panicked. "Okay, okay. I'm not here to make any trouble. I'll leave now. Just take it easy."
And he fled.