“Merle, do you think I'm so damn stupid I'd waste a lot of time digging up investors before I was even sure there was something to put the money into? I haven't talked to anybody about this except you, and I guess I won't be now either. Who do you think he could have been? What did he want?”
I shook my head, but I was remembering those words in Thari.
Why not?
“He also asked me whether I'd ever heard you refer to a place called Amber.”
He was looking in the rearview mirror when I said it, and he jerked the wheel to catch a sudden curve. “Amber? You're kidding.”
“No.”
“Strange. It has to be a coincidence—”
“What?”
“I did hear a reference to a kind of dreamland place called Amber, last week. But I never mentioned it to anybody. It was just drunken babbling.”
“Who? Who said it?”
“A painter I know. A real nut, but a very talented guy. Name's Melman. I like his work a lot, and I've bought several of his paintings. I'd stopped by to see whether he had anything new this last time I was in town. He didn't, but I stayed pretty late at his place anyway, talking and drinking and smoking some stuff he had. He got pretty high after a while and he started talking about magic. Not card tricks, I mean. Ritual stuff, you know?”
“Yes.”
“Well, after a time he started doing some of it. If it weren't that I was kind of stoned myself I'd swear that it worked-that he levitated, summoned sheets of fire, conjured and banished a number of monsters. There had to've been acid in something he gave me. But damn! It sure seemed real.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway,” he went on, “he mentioned a sort of archetypal city. I couldn't tell whether it sounded more like Sodom and Gomorrah or Camelot-all the adjectives he used. He called the place Amber, and said that it was run by a half mad family, with the city itself peopled by their bastards and folks whose ancestors they'd brought in from other places ages ago. Shadows of the family and the city supposedly figure in most major legends and such whatever that means. I could never be sure whether he was talking in metaphor, which he did a lot, or just what the hell he meant. But that's where I heard the place mentioned.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Melman is dead. His place burned down a few days ago.”
“No, I didn't know.” He glanced into the mirror again. “Did you know him?”
“I met him-after you left this last time. Kinsky told me Julia'd been seeing him, and I looked the guy up to see what he could tell me about her. You see-well, Julia's dead.”
“How'd it happen? I just saw her last week.”
“In a very bizarre fashion. She was killed by a strange animal:”
“Lord!” He braked suddenly and pulled off the road onto a wide shoulder to the left. It looked upon a steep, tree-filled drop. Above the trees I could see the tiny lights of the city across a great distance.
He killed the engine and the headlights . He took a Durham's bag from his pocket and began rolling a cigarette. I caught him glancing upward and ahead.
“You've been checking that mirror a lot.”
“Yes,” he replied. “I was just about sure a car had been following us all the way from the parking lot down at the Hilton. It was a few turns behind us for the longest while. Now it seems to have disappeared.”
He lit his cigarette and opened the door. “Let's get some air.”
I followed him and we stood for a few moments staring out across the big spaces, the moonlight strong enough to cast the shadows of some trees near to us. He threw down the cigarette and stamped on it.
“Shit!” he said. “'This is getting too involved! I knew Julia was seeing Melman, okay? I went to see her the night after I'd seen him, okay? I even delivered a small parcel he' d asked me to take her, okay?”
“Cards,” I said. He nodded.
I withdrew them from my pocket and held them toward him. He barely glanced at them there in the dim light, but he nodded again.
“Those cards,” he said. Then: “You still liked her, didn't you?”
“Yes, I guess I did.”
“Oh, hell,” he sighed. “All right. There are some things I'm going to have to tell you, old buddy. Not all of them nice. Give me just a minute to sort it all out. You've just given me one big problem-or I've given it to myself, because I've just decided something.”
He kicked a patch of gravel and the stones rattled down the hillside.
“Okay,” he said. “First, give me those cards.”
“. Why?”
“I'm going to tear them into confetti.”
“The hell you are. Why?”
“They're dangerous.”
“I already know that. I'll hang onto them.”
“You don't understand.”
“So explain.”
“It's not that easy. I have to decide what to tell you and what not to.”
“Why not just tell me everything?”
“I can't. Believe me—”
I hit the ground as soon as I heard the first shot, which ricocheted off a boulder to our right. Luke didn't. He began running in a zigzag pattern toward a cluster of trees off to our left, from which two more shots were fired. He had something in his hand and he raised it.
Luke fired three times. Our assailant got off one more round. After Luke's second shot I heard someone gasp. I was on my feet by then and running toward him, a rock in my hand. After his third shot I heard a body fall.
I reached him just as he was turning the body over, in time to see what seemed a faint cloud of blue or gray mist emerge from the man's mouth past his chipped tooth and drift away.
“What the hell was that?” Luke asked as it blew away.
“You saw it, too? I don't know.”
He looked down at the limp form with the dark spot growing larger on its shirtfront, a 38' revolver still clutched in the right hand.
“I didn't know you carried a gun,” I said.
“When you're on the road as much as I am, you go heeled,” he answered. “I pick up a new one in each city I hit and sell it when I leave. Airline security. Guess I won't be selling this one. I never saw this guy, Merle. You?”
I nodded.,
“That's Dan Martinez, the man I was telling you about.”
“Oh, boy,” he said. “Another damn complication. Maybe I should just join a Zen monastery someplace and persuade myself it doesn't matter. I—”
Suddenly, he raised his left fingertips to his forehead. “Oh-oh,” he said then. “Merle, the keys are in the ignition. Get in the car and drive back to the hotel right away. Leave me here. Hurry!”
“What's going on? What—”
He raised his weapon, a snub-nosed automatic, and pointed it at me.
“Now! Shut up and go!” “But—”
He lowered the muzzle and put a bullet into the ground between my feet. Then he aimed it squarely at my abdomen. “Merlin, son of Corwin,” he said through clenched teeth,
“if you don't start running right now you're a dead man!” I followed his advice, raising a shower of gravel and laying some streaks of rubber coming out of the U-turn I spun the wagon through. I roared down the hill and skidded around the curve to my right. I braked for the next one to my left. Then I slowed.
I pulled off to the left, at the foot of a bluff, near some shrubbery. I killed the engine and the lights and put on the parking brake. I opened the door quietly and did not close it fully after I'd slipped out. Sounds carry too well in places like this.
I started back, keeping to the darker, righthand side of the road. It was very quiet. I rounded the first turn and headed for the next one. Something flew from one tree—to another. An owl, I think. I moved more slowly than I wanted to, for the sake of silence, as I neared the second turning.
I made my way around that final corner on all fours, taking advantage of the cover provided by rocks and foliage. I halted then and studied the area we had occupied. Nothing in sight. I
advanced slowly, cautiously, ready to freeze, drop, dive, or spring up into a run as the situation required.
Nothing stirred, save branches in the wind. No one in sight.
I rose into a crouch and continued, still more slowly; still hugging the cover.
Not there. He had taken off for somewhere. I moved nearer, halted again and listened for at least a minute. No sounds betrayed any moving presences.
I crossed to the place where Martinez had fallen. The body was gone. I paced about the area but could locate nothing to give me any sort of clue as to what might have occurred following my departure. I could think of no reason for calling out, so I didn't.
I walked back to the car without misadventure, got in and headed for town. I couldn't even speculate as to what the hell was going on.
I left the wagon in the hotel lot, near to the spot where it had been parked earlier. Then I went inside, walked to Luke's room, and knocked on the door. I didn't really expect a response; but it seemed the proper thing to do preparatory to breaking and entering.
I was careful to snap only the lock, leaving the door and the fame intact, because Mr. Brazda had seemed a nice guy. It took a little longer, but there was no one in sight. I reached in and turned on the light, did a quick survey, then slipped inside quickly. I stood listening for a few minutes but heard no sounds of activity from the hall.
Tight ship. Suitcase on luggage rack, empty. Clothing hung in closet-nothing in the pockets except for two matchbooks, and a pen and pencil. A few other garments and some undergarments in a drawer, nothing with them. Toiletries in shaving kit or neatly arrayed on countertop. Nothing peculiar there. A copy of B . H. Liddell Hart's Strategy lay upon the bedside table, a bookmark about threequarters of the way into it.
His fatigues had been thrown onto a chair, his dusty boots stood next to it, socks beside them. Nothing inside the boots but a pair of blousing bands. I checked the shirt pockets, which at first seemed empty, but my fingertips then discovered a number of small white paper pellets in one of them. Puzzled, I unfolded a few. Bizarre secret messages? No... No sense getting completely paranoid, when a few brown flecks on a paper answered the question. Tobacco. They were pieces of cigarette paper: Obviously he stripped his butts when he was hiking in the wilderness. I recalled a few past hikes with him. He hadn't always been that neat.
I went through the trousers. There was a damp bandana in one hid pocket and a comb in the other. Nothing in the right front pocket, a single round of ammo in the left. On an impulse, I pocketed the shell, then went on to look beneath the mattress and behind the drawers. I even looked in the toilet's flush box. Nothing. Nothing to explain his strange behavior.
Leaving the car keys on the bedside table I departed and returned to my own room. I did not care that he'd know I'd broken in. In fact, I rather liked the idea. It irritated me that he'd poked around in my Ghostwheel papers. Besides,
he owed me a damned good explanation for -his behavior v on the mountain.
I undressed, showered, got into bed, and doused my light. I'd have left him a note, too, except that I don't like—to create evidence and I had a strong feeling that he wouldn't be coming back.
CHAPTER 6
He was a short, heavy-set man with a somewhat florid complexion, his dark hair streaked with white and perhaps a bit thin on top. I sat in the study of his semirural home in upstate New York, sipping a beer and telling him my troubles. It was a breezy, star-dotted night beyond the window and he was a good listener.
“You say that Luke didn't show up the following day,” he said. “Did he send a message?”
“ No.”
“What exactly did you do that day?”
“I checked his room in the morning. It was just as I'd left it. I went by the desk. Nothing, like I said. Then I had breakfast and I checked again. Nothing again. So I took a long walk around the town. Got back a little after noon, had lunch, and tried the room again. It was the same. I borrowed the car keys then and drove back up to the place we'd been the night before. No sign of anything unusual there, looking at it in the light of day. I even climbed down the slope and hunted around. No body, no clues. I drove back, replaced the keys, hung around the hotel till dinner time, ate, then called you. After you told me to come on up, I made a reservation and went to bed early. Caught the Shuttlejack this morning and flew here from Albuquerque.”
“And you checked again this morning?”
“Yeah. Nothing new.”
He shook his head and relit his pipe.
His name was Bill Rosh, and he had been my father's friend as well as his attorney, back when he'd lived in this area. He was possibly the only man on Earth Dad had trusted, and I trusted him, too. I'd visited him a number of times during my eight years-most recently, unhappily, a year and a half earlier, at the time of his wife, Alice's, funeral. I had told him my father's story, as I had heard it from his own lips, outside the Courts of Chaos, because I'd gotten the impression that he had wanted Bill to know what had been going on, felt he' d owed him some sort of explanation for all the help he'd given him. And Bill actually seemed to understand and believe it. But then, he'd known Dad a lot better than I did.
“I've remarked before on the resemblance you bear your father.”
I nodded.
“It goes beyond the physical,” he continued. “For a while there he had a habit of showing up like a downed fighter pilot behind enemy lines. I'll never forget the night he arrived on horseback with a sword at his side and had me trace a missing compost heap for him.” He chuckled. “Now you come along with a story that makes me believe Pandora's box has been opened again. Why couldn't you just want a divorce like any sensible young man? Or a will written or a trust set up? A partnership agreement? Something like that? No, this sounds more like one of Carl's problems. Even the other stuff I've done for Amber seems pretty sedate by comparison.”
“Other stuff ? You mean the Concord-the time Random sent Fiona with a copy of the Patternfall Treaty with Swayvil, King of Chaos, for her to translate and you to look at for loopholes?”
“That, yes,” he said, “though I wound up studying your language myself before I was done. Then Flora wanted her library recovered-no easy job-and then an old flame traced-whether for reunion or revenge I never learned. Paid me in gold, though. Bought the place in Palm Beach with it. Then-Oh, hell. For a while there, I thought of adding `Counsel to the Court of Amber' to my business card. But that sort of work was understandable. I do similar things on a mundane level all the time. Yours, though, has that black magic and sudden-death quality to it that seemed to follow your father about. It scares the hell out of me, and I wouldn't even know how to go about advising you on it.”
“Well, the black magic and sudden-death parts are my area, I guess,” I observed. “In fact, they may color my thinking too much. You're bound to look at things a lot differently than I do. A blind spot by definition is something you're not aware of. What might -I be missing?”
He took a sip of his beer, lit his pipe again.
“Okay,” he said. “Your friend Luke-where's he from?”
“Somewhere in the Midwest, I believe he said: Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio-one of those places.”
“Mm-hm. What line of work is his old man in?”
“He never mentioned it.”
“Does he have any brothers or sisters?”
“I don't know. He never said.”
“Doesn't that strike you as somewhat odd-that he never mentioned his family or talked about his home town in the whole eight years you've known him?”
“No. After all, I never talked about mine either.”
“It's not natural, Merle. You grew up in a strange place that you couldn't talk about. You had every reason to change the subject, avoid the issues. He obviously did, too. And then, back when you came you weren't even certain how most people here behaved. But didn't you ever wonder about Luke?”
“Of course. But he respected my reticence. I could do no less for him. You might sa
y that we had a sort of tacit agreement that such things were off limits.”
“How'd you meet him?”
“We were freshmen together, had a lot of the same classes.”
“And you were both strangers in town, no other friends. You hit it off from the beginning...”
“No. We barely talked to each other. I thought he was an arrogant bastard who felt he was ten times better than anybody he'd ever met. I didn't like him, and he didn't like me much either.”
“Why not?”
“He felt the same way about me.”
“So it was only gradually that you came to realize you were both wrong?”
“No. We were both right. We got to know each other by trying to show each other up. if I'd do something kind ofoutstanding-he'd try to top it. And vice versa. We got so we'd go out for the same sport, try to date the same girls, try to beat each other's grades.”
“And... ?”
“Somewhere along the line I guess we started to respect each other. When we both made the Olympic finals something broke. We started slapping each other on the back and laughing, and we went out and had dinner and sat up all night talking and he said he didn't give a shit about the Olympics and I said I didn't either. He said he'd just wanted to show me he was a better man and now he didn't care anymore. He'd decided we were both good enough, and he'd just as soon let the matter stand at that—I felt exactly the same way and told him so. That was when we got to be friends.”
“I can understand that,” Bill said. “It's a specialized sort of friendship. You're friends in certain places.”
I laughed and took a drink.
“Isn't everyone?”
“At first, yes. Sometimes always. Nothing wrong with that. It's just that yours seems a much more highly specialized friendship than most.”
I nodded slowly. “Maybe so.”
“So it still doesn't make sense. Two guys as close as you got to be-with no pasts to show to each other.”
“I guess you're right. What does it mean?”
“You're not a normal human being.”
The Great Book of Amber Page 94
