Roger Zelazny: Nine Princes In Amber

I stared out the window, watching the dead leaves fall.

When I hit the Big City, the first thing I did was to get a shave and haircut in the nearest clip joint, and the second was to change my shirt and undershirt in the men’s room, because I can’t stand hair down my back. The .32 automatic, belonging to the nameless individual at Greenwood, was in my right-hand jacket pocket. I suppose that if Greenwood or my sister wanted me picked up in a hurry, a Sullivan violation would come in handy. But I decided to hang onto it. They’d have to find me first, and I wanted a reason. I ate a quick lunch, rode subways and buses for an hour, then got a cab to take me out to the Westchester address of Evelyn, my nominal sister and hopeful jogger of memories.

Before I arrived, I’d already decided on the tack I’d take.

So, when the door to the huge old place opened in response to my knock, after about a thirty-second wait, I knew what I was going to say. I had thought about it as I’d walked up the long, winding, white gravel driveway, between the dark oaks and the bright maples, leaves crunching beneath my feet, and the wind cold on my fresh-scraped neck within the raised collar of my jacket. The smell of my hair tonic mingled with a musty odor from the ropes of ivy that crowded all over the walls of that old, brick place. There was no sense of familiarity. I didn’t think I had ever been here before.

I had knocked, and there had come an echo.

Then I’d jammed my hands into my pockets and waited.

When the door opened, I had smiled and nodded toward the mole-flecked maid with a swarthy complexion and a Puerto Rican accent.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’d like to see Mrs. Evelyn Flaumel, please.”

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Her brother Carl.”

“Oh come in please,” she told me.

I entered a hallway, the floor a mosaic of tiny salmon and turquoise tiles, the wall mahogany, a trough of big-leafed green things occupying a room divider to my left. From overhead, a cube of glass and enamel threw down a yellow light.

The gal departed, and I sought around me for something familiar.

Nothing.

So I waited.

Presently, the maid returned, smiled, nodded, and said, “Please follow me. She will see you in the library.”

I followed, up three stairs and down a corridor past two closed doors, The third one to my left was open, and the maid indicated I should enter it. I did so, then paused on the threshold.

Like all libraries, it was full of books. It also held three paintings, two indicating quiet landscapes and one a peaceful seascape. The floor was heavily carpeted in green. There was a big globe beside the big desk with Africa facing me and a wall-to-wall window behind it, eight stepladders of glass. But none of these was the reason I’d paused.

The woman behind the desk wore a wide-collared, V-necked dress of blue-green, had long hair and low bangs, all of a cross between sunset clouds and the outer edge of a candle flame in an otherwise dark room, and natural, I somehow knew, and her eyes behind glasses I didn’t think she needed were as blue as Lake Erie at three o’clock on a cloudless summer afternoon; and the color of her compressed smile matched her hair. But none of these was the reason I’d paused.

I knew her, from somewhere, though I couldn’t say where.

I advanced, holding my own smile.

“Hello,” I said.

“Sit down,” said she, “please,” indicating a high-backed, big-armed chair that bulged and was orange, of the kind just tilted at the angle in which I loved to loaf.

I did so, and she studied me.

“Glad to see you’re up and around again.”

“Me, too. How’ve you been?”

“Fine, thank you. I must say I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I know,” I fibbed, “but here I am, to thank you for your sisterly kindness and care.” I let a slight note of irony sound within the sentence just to observe her response.

At that point an enormous dog entered the room — an Irish wolfhound — and it curled up in front of the desk. Another followed and circled the globe twice before lying down.

“Well,” said she, returning the irony, “it was the least I could do for you. You should drive more carefully.”

“In the future,” I said, “I’ll take greater precautions, I promise.” I didn’t now what sort of game I was playing, but since she didn’t know that I didn’t know, I’d decided to take her for all the information I could. “I figured you would be curious as to the shape I was in, so I came to let you see.”

“I was, am,” she replied. “Have you eaten?”

“A light lunch, several hours ago.” I said.

So she rang up the maid and ordered food. Then “I thought you might take it upon yourself to leave Greenwood,” she said, “when you were able, I didn’t think it would be so soon, though, and I didn’t think you’d come here.”

“I know,” I said, “that’s why I did.”

She offered me a cigarette and I took it, lit hers, lit mine.

“You always were unpredictable,” she finally told me. “While this has helped you often in the past, however, I wouldn’t count on it now.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The stakes are far too high for a bluff, and I think that’s what you’re trying, walking in here like this. I’ve always admired your courage, Corwin, but don’t be a fool. You know the score.”

Corwin? File it away, under “Corey.”

“Maybe I don’t,” I said. “I’ve been asleep for a while, remember?”

“You mean you haven’t been in touch?”

“Haven’t had a chance, since I woke up.”

She leaned her head to one side and narrowed her wonderful eyes.

“Rash,” she said, “but possible. Just possible. You might mean it. You might. I’ll pretend that you do, for now. In that case, you may have done a smart safe thing. Let me think about it.”

I drew on my cigarette, hoping she’d say something more. But she didn’t, so I decided to seize what seemed the advantage I’d obtained in this game I didn’t understand with players I didn’t know for stakes I had no inkling of.

“The fact that I’m here indicates something,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied, “I know. But you’re smart, so it could indicate more than one thing. We’ll wait and see.”

Wait for what? See what? Thing?

Steaks then arrived and a pitcher of beer, so I was temporarily freed from the necessity of making cryptic and general statements for her to ponder as subtle or cagey. Mine was a good steak, pink inside and full of juice, and I tore at the fresh tough-crested bread with my teeth and gulped the beer with a great hunger and a thirst. She laughed as she watched me, while cutting off tiny pieces of her own.

“I love the gusto with which you assail life, Corwin. It’s one of the reasons I’d hate to see you part company with it.”

“Me, too,” I muttered.

And while I ate, I pondered her. I saw her in a low-cut gown, green as the green of the sea, with full skirts. There was music, dancing, voices behind us. I wore black and silver and … The vision faded. But it was a true piece of my memory, I knew; and inwardly I cursed that I lacked it in its entirety. What had she been saying, in her green, to me in my black and silver, that night, behind the music, the dancing and the voices?

I poured us more beer from the pitcher and decided to test the vision.

“I remember one night,” I said, “when you were all in green and I in my colors. How lovely things seemed — and the music…”

Her face grew slightly wistful, the cheeks smoothing.

“Yes,” she said. “Were not those the days? … You really have not been in touch?”

“Word of honor,” I said, for whatever that was worth.