But why would God do this? To test me? Like some character in the Old Testament? To that extent, God’s motives were indistinguishable
from those that Dave had claimed for himself: that he wanted to find out how his programmed creation (me) would play the hand
I’d been, however unjustly, dealt. That’s what he’d said: “I want to know what you’ll do now.”
The questions were infinite and unanswerable. The more I thought about them, the more I began to spin in dizzying circles.
Eventually I found myself thinking about something I’d written only that morning. At least it seemed to me that it had been
that morning. According to the calendar I must have written it eighteen months ago. All the same, when I went into my study
I found the notebook where I remembered leaving it. I opened it at the last page that bore my handwriting, and read:
Or is all this speculation simply missing the point? Is something quite different going on?
Is it all about something else?
I took a long bath and stared at the ceiling. Sara would be back soon. What would I say? What would I do? I felt myself suffused
with a strange lightness of being. I checked and rechecked aspects of my mind—memories, senses, sensibilities—like a crash
survivor realizing he’s come through alive but needing to be reassured that his body is still in one piece and his limbs in
working order. So far as I could see, I was still functioning more or less as usual.
By the time she let herself into the apartment I was stretched out on the bed in my robe. I pretended not to hear her when
she called out to see if I was home because I didn’t know what to say. I had a moment of panic. This was the confrontation
I had been dreading, yet at the same time was impatient for.
“George? Are you all right?”
She was standing in the door. I turned to look at her and said, “Fine.”
“I called, you didn’t answer.”
“I took a bath, fell asleep. I was thinking.”
She came over and bent down to kiss me on the forehead. “If we’re going to Rob and Charles’s party,” she said, “you need to
get ready. Me too.”
“Yeah, right.”
I rolled off the bed looking at my watch, grateful for the chance to escape into my dressing room. The moment she had mentioned
it I had known that we had to be at Rob and Charles’s loft by seven. What I didn’t know was how I knew. I hadn’t known the
last time I remembered leaving the apartment. How could I have? It was eighteen months ago.
Then again, if time and space did not exist…
That was the thought I had to hold on to, my lifeline to sanity. Because if time and space
did
exist, I was almost certainly both insane and a murderer.
F
or a moment in the elevator, when she asked me again if something was wrong, I hovered on the brink of coming out with the
whole story. But I realized, faced with the prospect of putting it into words, how impossible that was. I made some anodyne
reply, but was convinced from then on that she suspected something was seriously wrong. More than once during the evening
I caught her watching me oddly when she thought I wasn’t looking. As a result I found myself watching her more closely than
usual, and probably feeding her suspicions even further. We were getting caught up in a vicious circle. I had to find a way
out.
The next day was a Sunday. It was a relief to me that Sara would be spending most of it at the gallery, where they were still
preparing for their opening the following Tuesday. I decided to make some kind of inventory of what I knew and what I needed
to find out about my situation. Most of all I still needed to find some evidence of Larry Hart’s existence. I thought that
perhaps I might return the following morning to the agency I had originally hired to track down Jeffrey Hart and Lauren Paige.
According to Larry, who had intercepted their report to me, they had come across records that proved his existence—though
of course I only had Larry’s word for that.
But did I dare go back to that office where Nadia Shelley used to work? Could I risk opening up that can of worms by probing
into one of the last cases she was involved with? Even if Larry Hart
had
existed, the fact was that she had always known him as George Daly. To all intents and purposes it was George Daly who had
murdered her and framed Steve Coleman. On balance, I decided, it would be wise to stay away from anything that might connect
me with that crime.
I remembered that after coming across all that stuff in my father’s trunk I’d gone to a specialist movie store to see what
I could find on Jeffrey Hart and Lauren Paige. There wasn’t much, but the guy there had searched the Web and given me a printout
of their shabby careers. I had no idea what I’d done with those details; if Larry had come across them among my things he
would undoubtedly have destroyed them when he destroyed all the other evidence of his existence. But he couldn’t, I supposed,
have wiped the Web—although, of course, the computer could. All the same, I decided to see what I could find.
Sure enough, I found that between 1953 and 1967 they had played together in a handful of small British pictures called
Spring in Piccadilly, Whistling Through, Girl Scout Patrol
, and
There’s a Spy in My Soup
. In 1973 Jeffrey alone played in
The Silver Spoon
. There was no mention of their son, Larry, in fact no reference of any kind to their private life.
I racked my brains to think of some other avenue of inquiry I might explore. The only thing that came to mind was that secret
trip back to New York—to murder Nadia—that Larry had made on his own passport while he was staying in London as George Daly.
Sara and I had a friend with a travel company who made all the arrangements for her business trips as well as private travel
for both of us. I was pretty sure that Larry would have used him to book his flight to London in my name, so I called him
at home to see if he recalled doing so. I made some excuse about needing to check dates because of a book I was writing. He
remembered perfectly well making my reservations for the flight as well as my hotel in London. (It’s amazing how any question,
no matter how absurd, intrusive, or even offensive, becomes acceptable when you explain that you’re writing a book.) Using
the same excuse, I then said I had a favor to ask him.
“I’m trying to trace the movements of a man called Hart, Larry Hart,” I said. “Full name Laurence Jeffrey Hart. He might have
made a round-trip between London and New York during the period I was in London. He also might have made a New York-London-New
York trip a few weeks later. I’ve called a couple of airlines but they won’t come up with the information without asking a
lot of questions that I don’t want to go into. Can you help?”
He said he’d get into it, sounding as though he quite relished the challenge of showing off his expertise.
“Who is this man?” he asked. “Who is Larry Hart?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ I said.
I had a subscription to a couple of news services on the Web. It occurred to me that although I knew all about Steve’s trial,
I had neither seen anything of it firsthand nor had I watched the daily TV or press reports. At least, that was how it seemed
to me. Of course if Larry Hart and I were one, then I must have read them in the persona of my murderous alter ego and forgotten.
Either way, it would be interesting to read or reread them now.
Within a few minutes I was scrolling through the reports and accompanying photographs. There was nothing new, no revelations
that I hadn’t been prepared for—until I came across one passage that shot through my brain like a bolt of lightning. Fibers
of the pantyhose that had been used to strangle Nadia Shelley had been found on the fender of Steve’s car. They matched exactly
the traces of fibers found on her body, and they also carried traces of blood that had been matched to hers. This was a key
part of the forensic evidence that had helped convict Steve.
But the pantyhose themselves had never been found. The presumption was that Steve had gotten rid of them somewhere, most likely
destroyed them.
I, however, knew differently. I knew they had never been found because Larry had hung on to them in case he needed them later
to incriminate Steve yet further. I knew this because I had been told it by Dave.
What I did not know, however, was what Larry had done with them. He must have hidden them somewhere, but where? And were they
still where he had hidden them, or had he eventually destroyed them?
Why did I not know that?
If I were Larry, if Larry was my own insane and self-exculpatory invention, then I knew somewhere in my subconscious exactly
what had happened to those pantyhose, but I was concealing that knowledge from myself.
If, on the other hand, they were hidden in some place I could not possibly have known about or had access to, then I, George
Daly, could not be Larry Hart. Which meant that the whole mad metaphor of Dave and our computer universe was not a metaphor
at all. It was the plain unvarnished and outrageous truth, which I had stumbled on by probing too earnestly into the mysteries
of synchronicity.
But how to prove it either way? Still that warning note of Dave’s lingered at the back of my mind—the notion that the computer
always strove to iron out contradictions and rationalize inconsistencies. Even if a “loop” of the kind he had described had
arisen, it had by now been closed. The glitch had been resolved with Larry’s “death” and things had reverted to their previous
state. The past had been revised. Larry had never existed; only his crimes remained.
And they didn’t commit themselves—did they?
Whichever way I looked at it, fate seemed determined not to let me off the hook. Guilt was closing in around me like a fog.
But I refused to be overwhelmed by it without a fight. If there was any way out of this impossible situation, I determined
I would find it.
T
hat evening, Sunday, I joined Sara at the gallery around eight and we went out to eat with a couple of the people she worked
with. When we got home she was tired and went straight to bed. I was lucky that she was so preoccupied over those few days;
it kept questions and awkward conversations to a minimum, and left me with time to figure out where I went from there.
I slept barely at all that night and spent hours pacing the apartment, trying without success to distract myself by reading.
I climbed back in bed alongside Sara and managed an hour or so of shallow sleep before her alarm went off at 7:30. After that
I slept fitfully a while longer, but was up and having breakfast by nine. Shortly afterward my phone rang. It was my friend
in the travel business with the information I’d asked him for.
“A passenger named L. J. Hart made two round-trips within the periods you mentioned,” he said, and gave me the details—exactly
as I had expected, and feared, I would hear them. I thanked him and promised him I’d give him the full story in time, if there
ever was a full story—which of course, so far as he and perhaps everybody but myself was concerned, there never would be.
What I knew now was that a man calling himself Larry Hart had actually taken those flights, which coincided (coincidence again,
but of a more sinister kind than had begun this story) with Nadia Shelley’s and Clifford Edge’s murders.
But if I had been that man and blocked out the memory, where in God’s name had I gotten the extra passport, the one in the
name of Larry Hart? I had no idea how to go about obtaining such a thing. True, I’d read
Day of the Jackal
years ago and vaguely remembered how you could look around a graveyard, find the name of someone who’d been born about the
same time as yourself, then apply for a copy of his birth certificate and use it to get a passport in his name. So had I found
Larry Hart’s grave? But how? Where? It didn’t hang together.
Or maybe it did, but I just didn’t want to see it. Maybe I was more determined to prove that Larry Hart had existed than to
uncover and face up to the truth that he never had.
Or maybe I was still just going around in circles, asking all the wrong questions.
Maybe, as I had written once, it was all about something else.
But what?
That night I knew again I wouldn’t sleep, and told Sara I would use a guest room so as not to disturb her with my restlessness
the night before her opening. She asked me if I was sure I was all right and suggested I see our doctor for a checkup. I assured
her it was nothing more than a little temporary insomnia, but I’d get a checkup anyway.
Around one, desperate for release from the agony of self-questioning and endless speculation, I took a sleeping pill. It was
something I so rarely did that I fell asleep within half an hour. That was the first time I had the dream.
I knew it was a dream, yet it had such an extraordinary clarity that I had no doubt I would remember it when I awoke; indeed,
I was convinced it was important that I should, though I had no idea why.
In the dream I was riding in the back of a New York cab, heading somewhere downtown, when I observed one of those odd little
coincidences that happen all the time but are usually meaningless. I, however, knew by now—even in the dream—that coincidences
were never meaningless. What happened was that just as the taxi meter registered a tariff of four dollars forty-four cents
(4.44) a digital clock on the dash registered a time of 4:44.
Aside from the coincidence, I knew at once that something was wrong. It was broad daylight. Manhattan was bustling with shoppers
and visitors and people hurrying between appointments.
“Your clock’s wrong,” I said to the driver. “Shouldn’t it read sixteen forty-four?”
He shook his head briefly. “No,” he said in a guttural Slavic accent, “that’s how it works.”
At that moment I noticed a woman on the crowded sidewalk. She was tall and beautiful in a top model sort of way—poised, cool,
impeccably elegant. The dress she wore was as striking as she was herself. It was high-collared, tight-waisted, and long-sleeved,
patterned in broad stripes of black and white that seemed to coil around her body like a giant snake. She wore a wide-brimmed
hat, also in black and white but with a single dash of red—a flower of some kind. The skirt was long but slashed up one side
to the hip, revealing legs of utter perfection moving with a hypnotic and gazellelike grace. She was an image of such unlikely
theatricality on that dusty and mundane sidewalk that I was amazed she wasn’t the center of general and excited interest.
Yet no one paid her the slightest attention. She moved through them like a star through a milling crowd of extras, all of
whom had been instructed not on any account to acknowledge her presence.