Time Thieves

type.”
        
        “Should he see someone?” Della asked. They all knew she meant a psychiatrist.
        
        Billings sipped his coffee. “Perhaps. But I'd wait a few weeks first, see what happens. It may very well all come back, bit by bit. Most amnesia victims eventually recall the things that happened in their blank period.”
        
        “If I don't?” Pete asked.
        
        “If you can't recall a single* thing in two weeks, you may be subconsciously repressing the memories. Then, a psychiatrist would be a good idea.”
        
        “Until then?” Della asked.
        
        “I'm going to give you some sleeping pills, Pete. In case you have insomnia, which is often an aftereffect of this thing, they'll help you get the rest I'm also prescribing. Don't go back to the office for a week. Go out to dinner, see a good movie or two, try to loosen up as much as you can.”
        
        “That's all?” Pete asked. Since Della's siege in the hospital, he had acquired an unnatural dread of having to go there himself.
        
        “Well,” Billings said, rising as he finished his coffee, agile for his years, “maybe you could add one thing to that list.”
        
        “What?” Della asked.
        
        He set his cup on an endtable and grinned. “Make some rousingly active love before you go out to dinner tonight.” He chuckled at their embarrassment.
        
        “Dirtier and dirtier,” Della said.
        
        “And old and older,” Billings ammended. “With the age comes the degeneracy, you know.”
        
        He took a packet of sleeping tablets out of his satchel and wrote directions for their use. He gave Pete a thorough examination but found nothing wrong outside of the bruises on his shoulders-which were Della's doing. After a final cup of coffee, he repeated his suggestions-love and dinner at a good restaurant-and kissed her on the cheek and left.
        
        They took both of his suggestions. The first was far more satisfactory than the second. Indeed, the dinner seemed a bad idea once they were in the restaurant and had steak and potatoes before them.
        
        “You're nervous,” Della observed. “If you're worried about meeting someone you know, just tell them what happened. Amnesia isn't something to be ashamed of.”
        
        “That's not what's bothering me.”
        
        “What, then?”
        
        “See that man two tables over: pale, shock of black hair, long nose?”
        
        Della turned and looked unobtrusively at the man. He was tall and lean. His hands were long and slim and handled the utensils with a swift grace not unlike the manner in which a magician dealt with the tools of his trade. He was neither handsome nor ugly, but bland. His features seemed a bit too rounded for a man so thin, but they aroused no uneasiness in her.
        
        “What about him?” she asked.
        
        “I've seen him before.”
        
        She looked again. “Not me. You sure?”
        
        “Positive.”
        
        “Well, through the agency, then. You meet too many people to remember who they-”
        
        “Not him. I never met him through the agency.”
        
        “Forget him,” she said. She tried to sound light, but there was something in her husband's preoccupation with the stranger-coming on the heels of his amnesia-that alarmed her. Each of them cared for the other far more than they were able to admit aloud. She did not want to lose him, even for twelve days, ever again.
        
        But he could not avoid glancing at the stranger from time to time. The man left shortly before they were finished with their dessert and coffee. Only a minute or two after his departure, Pete said, “I have it.”
        
        “Have what?”
        
        “Where I've seen him before.”
        
        “And?”
        
        “Sometimes during the last two weeks, during my amnesia.” He laid his napkin down and got to his feet. “I'll be back in a minute.”
        
        He hurried across the room, through the wide archway and into the cashier's foyer.
        
        Della put down the chunk of steak on her fork and picked up her goblet of wine. She had only sipped a third of it all through the meal; now, she finished it off in three long swallows.
        
        He returned.
        
        “Something?”