He lived in Bangkok for a year. He reburied the coffin in the yard behind the shack he rented, working furiously all through his first night with a black-market entrenching tool stolen from the US Army. He could manage an entrenching tool. It was designed to
be used one-handed, while the other hand held a rifle.
Once his money was safe again, he went looking for doctors. There was a large supply in Bangkok. Gin-soaked remnants of Empire, fired from every other job they ever had, but reasonably competent on the days they were sober. There wasn’t much they could do with his face. A surgeon rebuilt his eyelid so that it would almost close, and that was it. But they were thorough with his arm. They opened the wound again and filed the bones round and smooth. They stitched the muscle down and folded the skin over tight and sealed it all back up. The told him to let it heal for a month, and then they sent him to a man who built false limbs.
The man offered him a choice of styles. They all involved the same corset to be worn around the bicep, the same straps, the same cup moulded to the exact contours of his stump. But there were different appendages. There was a wooden hand, carved with great skill and painted by his daughter. There was a three-pronged thing like some kind of a gardening tool. But he chose the simple hook. It appealed to him, though he couldn’t explain why. The man forged it from stainless steel and polished it for a week. He welded it to a funnel-shaped steel sheet and built the sheet into the heavy leather cup. He carved a wooden replica of the stump and beat the leather into shape over it, and then he soaked it in resins to make it stiff. He sewed the corset and attached the straps and buckles. He fitted it carefully and charged five hundred American dollars for it.
He lived out the year in Bangkok. At first the hook chafed and was clumsy and uncontrollable. But he got better with it. With practice, he got along. By the time
he dug up the coffin again and booked passage to San Francisco on a tramp steamer, he had forgotten all about ever having two hands. It was his face that continued to bother him.
He landed in California and retrieved the coffin from the cargo sheds and used a small portion of its contents to buy a used station wagon. A trio of frightened longshoremen loaded the coffin inside and he drove it cross-country all the way to New York City, and he was still there twenty-nine years later, with the Bangkok craftsman’s handiwork lying on the floor beside his bed, where it had lain every night for the last eleven thousand nights.
He rolled over on to his, front and reached down with his left hand and picked it up. Sat up in bed and laid it across his knees and reached out to take the baby’s sock from his nightstand. Ten past six in the morning. Another day of his life.
William Curry woke up at six-fifteen. It was an old habit from working the day shift on the detective squads. He had inherited the lease on his grandmother’s apartment two floors above Beekman Street. It wasn’t a great apartment, but it was cheap, and it was convenient for most of the precinct houses below Canal. So he had moved in after his divorce and stayed there after his retirement. His police pension covered the rent and the utilities and the lease on his one-room office on Fletcher. So the income from his fledgling private bureau had to cover his food and his alimony. And then, when he got established and built it up bigger, it was supposed to make him rich.
Six-fifteen in the morning, the apartment was cool. It was shaded from the early sun by taller buildings
near by. He put his feet on the linoleum and stood up and stretched. Went to the kitchen corner and set the coffee going. Headed to the bathroom and washed up. It was a routine that had always gotten him to work by seven o’clock, and he stuck to it.