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and her eyes smiled, curving upward almost into an Oriental cast. “Mr. Pacific,” she said, “that’s a lovely name. I’m glad you came to see me; I’ve wondered about you. Once I called the hospital, and they told me you were doing fine.”
    Nodding, I tasted the brandy. Her hands caught my eye. They were red, with bums over them. They were not pretty and I turned my eyes away.
    “Tell me,” she asked, “do you live in New York?”
    I shook my head, then wrote out the fact that I had lost my memory completely. I had only my name, no family, no address.
    She rose quickly from the table to refill her coffee cup. Then she asked slowly, “You have no place to go? None at all?”
    No. I shook my head.
    “Do you have any money?”
    Reaching in my pocket, I removed the sixty-three dollars and placed it on the table. She understood, and I replaced the money in my pocket. Her eyes searched my face quietly, while she drank her coffee. Finally she said, “How perfectly awful! Is there anything at all you can do to earn a living? I mean ... do you remember any skill ... or job?”
    I wrote “nothing.”
    “Is there a chance that you will get better ... remember someday?”
    “Possibly.”
    The sudden whiteness of her smile animated her face, and her words began to tumble out eagerly. “I have an idea,” she explained. “Perhaps it’s a crazy one, and wouldn’t work out very long. But I think it’s terrible ... impossible ... for you to just wander out into the city! Not remembering anything, not having any help! What do you think?”
    I didn’t think. I shrugged, but it didn’t lessen her enthusiasm.
    “Everyone would say I’m foolish,” she continued, “not knowing you, or anything. However, I believe a person should help others, don’t you? Help each other ... mutually, that is. For a long time I’ve needed help here. Look! Look at these.” She held out her two hands—red and disfigured. “I haven’t been able to afford to pay enough to hire someone to help me.” She hesitated for a moment, then continued more slowly, her voice a little embarrassed, “Perhaps you’d like to work for me?”
    I scribbled, “Doing what?”
    She laughed. “Oh, I make jewelry; silver, handmade jewelry. That would make me a silversmith, wouldn’t it? At least partly a silversmith, because I work in copper too. I have my workroom here in the house—down in the basement I sell everything I make through just two or three shops uptown on Fifth Avenue. My big problem is that I can’t turn out many things because it takes so long.” She laughed. “Consequently, I don’t have much money.”
    My note to her explained I knew nothing about silver-working.
    “Don’t worry,” she reassured me, “you can take care of the silver furnace, do the firing, the smelting, the pouring. I need help.” She added, looking at her scars, “That’s how I keep burning my hands all the time.”
    I nodded, but I couldn’t understand why a woman wanted to be a silversmith anyway.

6
    THE lights bounced off the canvas screen, painting it a delicate silver in the blue-black night But behind the screen, Gorman had tentatively completed his indelicate examination. He nodded, and two attendants walked leisurely away to the police ambulance to find the six-foot-long, covered, canvas box to remove the corpse. In the meantime, Jensen and Burrows joined the medical examiner. “What do you think?” asked Burrows.
    “It’s damned near impossible to make out very much under these circumstances,” Gorman replied. “I’ll know a lot more after I get through in the lab.”
    “Tell us what you can,” Jensen urged.
    “Well,” said Gorman, slipping into his jacket, “he was in good physical condition. He might have been anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five years old. The features are so covered with blood, you can’t tell; but the post on a few organs can narrow that down. He’s six feet tall or slightly better, and probably weighs