We nodded and he opened the door to the inner room parsimoniously and eeled himself through the gap, closing it behind him. The man behind the desk went on looking bored and offered no comment of any sort, and presently his colleague slid back through the same sized opening and said they were ready for us inside and would we please go in.
The inner room was lit brightly and entirely by electricity and contained four people and a great deal of electrical equipment with multitudinous dials and sprouting wires. I saw Jonathan give them a swift sweep of the eyes and supposed he could identify the lot, and he said afterwards that they had all seemed to be standard machines for measuring body changes – cardiograph, encephalograph, gauges for temperature, respiration and skin moisture – and there had been at least two of each.
One of the four people wore an identifying white coat and introduced himself quietly as Tom Course, doctor. A woman in similar white moved among the machines, checking their faces. A third person, a man, seemed to be there specifically as an observer, since that was what he did, without speaking, during the next strange ten minutes.
The fourth person, sitting in a sort of dentist's chair with his back towards us, was Angelo.
We could see only the top of his bandaged head, but also his arms, which were strapped by the wrists to the arms of the chair.
There was no sign of any plaster on the arm I'd broken: mended no doubt. His arms were bare and covered sparsely with dark hairs, the hands lying loose, without tension. From every part of his body it seemed that wires led backwards to the machines, which were all ranked behind him. In front of him there was nothing but a stretch of empty brightly lit room.
Dr Course, young, wiry, bolstered by certainties, gave me an enquiring glance and said in the same quiet manner, 'Are you ready?'
As ready, I supposed, as I ever would be.
'Just walk round in front of him. Say something. Anything you like. Stay there until we tell you it's enough.'
I swallowed. I had never wanted to do anything less in all my life. I could see them all waiting, polite, determined, businesslike… and too damned understanding. Even Jonathan, I noticed, was looking at me with a sort of pity.
Intolerable.
I walked slowly round the machines and the chair and stopped in front of Angelo, and looked at him.
He was naked to the waist. On his head, below a cap of fawn crepe bandage, there was a band of silvery metal like a crown. His skin everywhere gleamed with grease and to his face, his neck, his chest, arms and abdomen were fastened an army of electrodes. No one, I imagined, could have been more comprehensively wired; no flicker of change could have gone unmonitored.
He seemed as well-fleshed and as healthy as ever, despite his earlier two weeks in a coma. The muscles looked as strong, the trunk as tank-like, the mouth as firm. The hard man. The frightener. The despiser of mugs. Apart from his headdress and the wires he looked just the same. I breathed a shade deeply and looked straight into his black eyes, and it was there that one saw the difference. There was nothing in the eyes, nothing at all. It was extraordinary, like seeing a stranger in a long-known face. The house was the same… but the monster slept.
It was five weeks all but a day since we had last faced each other; since we had brought each other near to death, one way or another. Even though I had been prepared, seeing him again affected me powerfully. I could feel my heart thudding: could actually hear it in the expectant room.
'Angelo,' I said. My tongue felt sticky in my dry mouth. 'Angelo, you shot me.'
In Angelo, nothing happened.
He was looking at me in complete calm. When I took a pace to one side, his eyes followed. When I stepped back he still watched.
'I am… William Derry,' I said. 'I gave you… Liam O'Rorke's betting system.' I said the words slowly, clearly, deliberately, trying to control my own uneven breath.
From Angelo there was no reaction at all.
'If you hadn't shot me… you'd have been free now… and rich.'
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I found Jonathan standing beside me and after a pause Angelo's gaze wandered from me to him.
'Hullo, Angelo,' Jonathan said. 'I'm Jonathan, do you remember? William told you I was dead. It wasn't true.'
Angelo said nothing.
'Do you remember?' Jonathan said. 'I tricked you sideways.'
Silence. A dull absence of all we had endured for so long. No fury. No sneers, no threats, no towering hurricane of hate.
Silence, it seemed to me, was all that was appropriate. Jonathan and I stood there together in front of the shell of our enemy and there was nothing in the world left to say.
'Thank you,' Tom Course said, coming round the chair to join us. 'That should do it.'
Angelo looked at him.
'Who are you?' he said.
'Dr Course. We talked earlier, while we were fixing the electrodes.'
Angelo made no comment but instead looked directly at me.
'You were talking,' he said. 'Who are you?'
'William Derry.'
'I don't know you.'
'No.'
His voice was as deep and as gritty as ever, the only remnant, it seemed, of the old foe.
Dr Course said heartily, 'We'll take all those wires off you now. I expect you'll be glad to get rid of them.'
'Who did you say you are?' Angelo said, frowning slightly.
'Dr Course.'
'Who?'
'Never mind. I'm here to take the wires off.'
'Can I have tea?' Angelo said.
Dr Course left the taking-off of the wires to his woman colleague and led us round to look at the results on the machines. The observer, I noticed, was also consulting them acutely, but Course paid him scant attention.
'There we are,' he said, holding out a yard long strip of paper. 'Not a flicker. We had him stabilised for an hour before his visitors carne. Breathing, pulse rate, everything rock steady. Quiet in here, you see. No interruptions, no intrusions, no noise. That mark, that's the point at which he saw you,' he nodded at me, 'and as you can see, nothing altered. This is the skin temperature chart. Always rises if someone's lying. And here…' he moved across to a different machine. 'Heart rate unchanged. And here…' to another. 'Brain activity, very faint alteration. He couldn't have seen you, his hated victim, suddenly and unexpectedly standing in front of him, and yet show no strong body or brain changes, not if he'd known you. Absolutely impossible.'
I thought of my own unrecorded but pretty extreme responses, and knew that it was true.
'Is this state permanent?' Jonathan asked.
Tom Course gave him a swift look.'I think so. It's my opinion, yes. See, they dug pieces of skull out of his brain tissue. Brilliant repair job on the bone structure, have to hand it to them. But there you are, you can see, no memory. Many functions unimpaired. Eat, talk, walk, he can do all that. He's continent. He'll live to be old. But he can't remember anything for longer than about fifteen minutes, sometimes not even that. He lives in the absolute present. Loss of capacity for memory is not all that rare, you know, after severe brain damage. But with this one, there were doubts. Not my doubts, official doubts. They said he was faking, that he knew he'd go to a hospital, not a prison, if he could persuade everyone he'd lost his memory.'
Tom Course waved a hand around the machines. 'He couldn't have faked today's results. Conclusive. Settle the arguments once and for all. Which is why we're all here, of course. Why they gave us this facility.'
His woman colleague had taken the silver band off Angelo's forehead and the straps off his wrists, and was wiping the grease from his skin with pieces of cotton wool.
'Who are you?' he said to her, and she answered, 'Just a friend.'
'Where will he go?' I said.
Tom Course shrugged. 'Not my decision. But I'd be careful. I'm not a civil servant. My advice, I don't suppose, will be taken.' His remark was clearly aimed at the observer, who remained obstinately impassive.
I said slowly, 'Could he still be violent?'