The Dead Man's Brother

by Zelazny, Roger

  "He is so good a friend that he would do this thing if you ask him?"

  "Hell, no. But you are no longer important to him. It’s those records that he wants. And since I’m the only person who knows where they are I am certain that we can reach an understanding."

  He lay there a while, apparently thinking it over, then said, "I don’t know how to thank you."

  I hauled out my filthy wallet and fetched forth a soiled card.

  "Here," I said. "Keep me in mind when there’s some native artwork that needs marketing."

  He accepted it and nodded. He smiled.

  "Requiescat in pace," I said. "Mors janua vitae."

  *

  Later, I was to see small, cryptic reports in the back pages of the Times concerning Bassenrut, minor governmental shakeups and a continuing crackdown on revolutionaries. The usual stuff. Maria had seen me off at the airport, and she had brought Vera along. Vera had given me a figa—a thumb-through-fist good luck charm—which I had dropped into my pocket, and Maria had given me a lukewarm goodbye kiss which I could not gracefully decline.

  She was remaining, of course, to do some sort of work with the tribes of the Matto Grasso. They both saw me off again, several hours later, after my plane blew three tires on its left side, flopped about a bit and had its fuel catch fire. I do not know whether it was the figa or Berwick’s good luck hypothesis catching up with me, but there were two deaths and I was the only passenger who was not injured in some way. My second departure worked all right, though it is an awkward thing to say goodbye twice in the same morning.

  The rest of the journey was without significant outward scent. I spent a lot of time alternating between thinking about what life with Maria would have been like and thinking about an autoból match we had seen in Rio the day before leaving for the airport. There is a growing enthusiasm for autoból these days, a sport which started out modestly enough as an outgrowth of the traffic situation. A wide, blocked-off street serves as a playing field where two teams, consisting of five drivers and their autos, play soccer with a tough, four-foot diameter ball. Usually, old junkers are employed, and demolished, in the game. The one we saw, however, involved late-model cars and drew an enormous crowd. As I watched them tear into one another, gradually transforming their sleek, colorful lines of power into the uncertain outlines of premature decrepitude and collapse, I thought about Maria—who, along with Vera, stood at my side then, cheering wildly at the mayhem—and I felt an uncomfortable sympathy for the ball, which, like myself, had initially occupied a classical, middle-of-the-road position. Yes, the gaping pit was closed and I realized that someone like Claude, who might, in his way, be an incipient saint and possessed of spiritual stamina, would be the better mate for a minor Fury. It was not without a certain regret, though, that I sniffed the last of the brimstone along with the exhaust fumes. But I had a philosophical bent of mind with which to console myself and a handy metaphor to objectify the moral. I also ate, drank and slept on the flight home.

  Walt had taken things graciously enough, after discovering that appeals to my patriotism and my cupidity were equally fruitless, and that there really was only one thing that I would settle for.

  "All right, you son of a bitch," he had said, lighting a cigar.

  "All right, you son of a bitch," he had repeated, waving it in my direction like a branding iron. "Now Emil is dead, too. A pox on both of them! I’ll even mail you a copy of the death certificate. I suppose you want to approve my report before I submit it, too?"

  "That won’t be necessary," I said. "Having read your articles over the years, I am certain that you will be able to obscure the issue sufficiently without much extra effort."

  "All right, you son of a bitch," he had said. "Now take me to those papers."

  I had led him off into the jungle then, toward the hills, to the place where the large boulder faces the tree that reminded me of a hunchback with a cane.

  We had shaken hands on the deal, and later in Rio he had taken me to dinner at an excellent place of his own choosing, to show me that there were no hard feelings. Mine vanished as I ate of the magnificent spread he had ordered, even up to and including the resentment that had remained over his talking Maria into carrying the transmitter—not unlike the one Morales had tried to get me to swallow—which had allowed him to follow the entire parade with his superior force; as well as any remaining feelings over his having had my every move watched, from the time he located us after our release up until the rendezvous. He had not tried to make me party to his plan because he had guessed—correctly—that I would have refused. He was able to get to Maria because of her feeling that I was doing nothing to further her objective, with a promise that this would help. Yes, he had known all about Claude and Maria. He kept tabs on everybody connected with the Sign of the Fish. Would he keep his promise to me? I thought that he might, because even if he did not, there would be little reason to resurrect Claude Bretagne to help remedy the situation in Brazil. In fact, such an action could even produce an impediment. Better to let Rover keep snoring.

  Upon my return, Bill Mailer welcomed me. He had let himself into the Taurus after my departure and remained there, "to keep a finger in the hole" as he put it, during my absence. Because of this, the place was in even better shape than I had left it. He had done some painting, washed the windows and shampooed the carpeting. On learning that I was off the hook with the law, he embraced me with tears in his eyes, then dashed off, rounded up people and reestablished his commune in the rear rooms. I gave a party that night to celebrate my return, and the smell of incense and innocence is with me once again, as well as music, laughter and things that go bump in the night.

  It was several months later that I received an approval shipment of native artwork, mostly carved wood, from a new outfit in Brazil. Much of it was quite good. I put it on display and it has been doing well enough. However, there was one particularly ugly specimen: a hollow-bellied individual with prominent genitalia, an awful expression on his face and a small dog biting his left leg. This, I purchased myself and sent to my brother and sister-in-law for an anniversary present, to let them know my peeves were cooling. I hope it is a fertility deity. Serve them right.

  The stuff set me to thinking, though. Prematurely. For it is not yet time to think along those lines. But during that brief cloudburst, my mind rushed along the curb toward the inevitable. I relived that journey once more, to jail, Virginia, Rome, Brazil and home again, seeing all the bodies, violence and bad business it had contained, along with a few cherishable moments that had somehow slipped in, and I recalled what Maria had told me on that final day—probably because she felt she owed me the explanation, possibly because she had to tell someone and Claude was the one person she could not.

  She and Carl Bernini had hit upon a rather naïve scheme to reverse their fortunes. In earlier days, before his brain had become tinctured in alcohol, I do not believe he would have gone along with it. But he was apparently getting desperate. You have to be, to consider blackmailing an organization with a built-in defense against just such a thing. He and Maria faked their quarrel and breakup to defend against any suspicion of collusion on their part. She even took up with the first presentable man available—who just happened to be Claude—to let it be known that Carl was definitely a thing of the past, never guessing how she would come to feel about this strange man. Then Carl, after lying low for several months, communicated with her a final time. During some of his more lucid moments, he had been having second thoughts on the matter. He decided that for safety’s sake and for added brainpower, he wanted a third party in on the thing—a lucky, successful criminal type, whom he had worked with before and thought he could trust—namely, me. So he made his way to New York to look me up. Later, when I telephoned her in Rome, she thought that it meant I had agreed and that we were both back in town. She was torn at that time between her original notion of blackmailing the Sign of the Fish because of its smuggling activities and her concern over her
new love, then in Lisbon. I resolved everything a few sentences later, however, by telling her that Carl was dead. Freed of her commitment to Carl, she went immediately to Lisbon, only to discover that Claude was apparently dead, too. She returned home and got drunk, burning with remorse and anger.

  That was her story, and the only additional information I was able to obtain concerning my former partner.

  But, as in all matters of import, speculation is born at the point where the facts cease.

  I see only two alternatives. The first possibility is that the Fish people got wind of the plan. Perhaps Carl’s tongue loosened when he drank. They let him get as far as my place and killed him on the premises—or else took him there and did it—leaving him as an object lesson to me, in case there had been any prior communication on the subject and I should consider trying it alone. This thought did tend to make me somewhat leery of my Piscean competitors, so much so that I never did attempt to contact any of the artists on the list Bruno had given me. But perhaps I wrong them. For there is another, even more unsavory possibility that comes to mind.

  If he had wanted me, just me—because Maria knew me and trusted me, and through her I could reach Claude, and through Claude reach into that tangled mess in Brazil, whether in the manner in which things actually worked out or in accordance with some other plan that folded—would Collins have possessed the willingness to sacrifice a friendless, down and out, alcoholic criminal who was possibly even in this country illegally, and do this thing in a fashion calculated both to incriminate me and to arouse my curiosity, so that he could not only dragoon me into running his errand but have me at least partly desirous of seeing it carried to a successful conclusion? I wondered.

  The anonymous telephone call to the police, poking a hole in my story and strengthening the circumstantial case against me, was a thing that troubled me all along. And then there was the matter of the alleged fingerprints on the weapon.

  But I do not really care which guess is the correct one, whether he seized an opportunity or created it. Collins had used me with, if anything, greater callousness than Morales had, and he made the same mistake that Morales did. He assumed that once it was all over, if I lived, I would shift my mental gears and learn to live with what had occurred, I would accept it because there was nothing that I could do about it. In this, he would be correct, if I were to play by his rules. Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves.

  It is not yet time to think about it, for I still have a long, innocuous while in which to fade from memory into oblivion, but that shipment of wood, shaped into life by the loving hands of the pathetically stepped-upon tribesmen whose brothers Morales shot down as one beheads a daisy with a stick, reminded me of another, silent promise that I made, contingent upon my surviving a final encounter with that man, and it sent me off upon this reverie. That is all.

  Collins, master of small destinies, maker of decisions that can kill, maim, half a world or half a block away, sometimes to a good end, sometimes uselessly, we are related, we are brothers, you and I. For beyond victory, a loss, a stalemate, we both understand the fourth way in which a game of chess can be concluded. We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent.

  It is early, though the hour is late, and you still have time for some hunting—of men, secrets, power—living, in your genteel way, per Aristotle’s dictum, feeling that the best place, really, for violence, is offstage where you cannot see it.

  Rest. Rest a while now. I am. You might as well.

  THE END

  THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER

  An Afterword by Trent Zelazny

  I’m pleased to have the chance to acknowledge both my father and my admiration for his work. Though known for his tales of fantasy and science fiction, Roger Zelazny’s interests ran amuck throughout all worlds, both real and imagined. He was a voracious reader, on average reading about eight or nine books at a time, some fiction, some not. Many of my childhood recollections involve hobbies of his such as lock picking, collecting knives and decks of playing cards, and (my personal favorite) having one of his children time how long it took for him to escape from a straitjacket (his best time was about three minutes). It was a surprise when Kirby McCauley, his agent, called to say he had discovered this manuscript.

  A surprise, but in no way a shock.

  Dean Koontz said of my father, "Roger Zelazny is a science fiction writer, but he clearly could have written anything he chose to write." Mr. Koontz is dead on with this. My father once told me that his true passion was poetry followed next by science fiction. He also told me to read at least a little in every genre and on as many subjects as possible, as you never know what’s waiting for you on the next page.

  To quote Shunryu Suzuki: "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few." The truly great writers know this. They sift through their mental garbage, overwhelmed by all the possibilities that are no longer possible, until they come upon one of those rare few. They consider the possibility, analyze it. A plot, a character, a paragraph, or even a sentence with vague familiarity is, as a general rule, expunged. They draw upon everything, yet do their best to mimic none. The great writers find a style or genre—or lack of—which best suits their needs for telling the stories they have inside them.

  But Roger Zelazny could no more stick exclusively to science fiction than James Cagney could stick to gangster films. Nobody can stick to one kind of thing 24 hours a day, no matter how much they love it. Cagney will always be remembered best for The Public Enemy and White Heat, but thinking a little further, we will then remember Yankee Doodle Dandy.

  To my knowledge, nobody knows exactly when this book was written. The earliest and probably most accurate estimate is around 1970 or 1971, still a handful of years before I entered the world. Some think it was his attempt to break into the mainstream. Maybe partially true, but I don’t believe this was his priority. I believe that an idea came to him, and though it fell into a different genre from his norm, he acted on it nonetheless.

  Great writers will never hold back due to genre. They will tell the story they want—or must—in spite of the limiting labels designed by publishers. They don’t think of themselves as science fiction writers or mystery writers or western writers. They think of themselves simply as writers, period.

  And so, rather than writing about gods, people who become gods, struggles between worlds of magic and technology or sentient space-exploration robots, this time my father wrote an international intrigue thriller. If the aforementioned date is correct, it speaks to the fact that my father was indeed interested in crime and mystery fiction at the time. Also around the time he penned Today We Choose Faces, a story about a mobster who wakes up from a cryogenic sleep for one last job, and the three novelettes that constitute My Name is Legion, about a nameless man who destroys his personal data before it’s entered into a global computer network and becomes a multiple-identity private investigator; so it’s clear that mysteries and crime were running through his head. Whether it troubled him that The Dead Man’s Brother was leaving out the science fiction aspect or not, I don’t know.

  A part of me is tempted to go more deeply into the storyline of the book you’re currently holding, but there doesn’t seem much point in that, as you’ve either just read it or are about to (I also tend to shy away from academic approaches). I will say that The Dead Man’s Brother, despite being over 35 years old, holds its own in the sophisticated contemporary world of mystery. It’s a smart book, entertaining as hell, very well thought out, and, of course, well written.

  I hope you are half as fond of it as I am. I�
��m thrilled that Hard Case Crime is the publisher bringing it to you. They are the perfect folks for this one, and I know my father would be very pleased. Somewhere, I imagine he’s smiling a bit, hands clasped behind his head, saying something to the effect of, "Thanks."

  As I said earlier, a part of me was surprised when told about the manuscript, but in no way was I shocked. Now, I won’t even be surprised if another turns up down the road. Thrilled beyond imagining, yes, but not surprised, as writers usually have material that has never been published, or has been lost in the mists of time.

  The man clearly could have written anything he chose to write. He will likely always be remembered best for Lord of Light and The Chronicles of Amber, but thinking a little further, we will then remember The Dead Man’s Brother, and what a wonderful tale it is.

  Roger Zelazny (May 13, 1937 – June 14, 1995) was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction, best known for his Chronicles of Amber series. He won the Nebula award three times (out of 14 nominations) and the Hugo award six times (also out of 14 nominations), including two Hugos for novels: the serialized novel ...And Call Me Conrad (subsequently published under the title This Immortal) and then the novel Lord of Light (1967).