“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 say 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 of outstanding-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?”