“I remember I was having a glass of beer, sitting in a corner near the fireplace. It was around midnight. Jonas Brady was trying to get me to go with him to a girl’s house. A ‘complaisant Swiss,’ he said, ‘amply upholstered,’ who’d seen me around and told Jonas—it was probably a lie!—that ‘she thought it would be fun to sleep with a Negro.’ A real typical gesture: Jonas was a guy who was filled with Sartre and Celine, and Huysmans; tiny perversions were all that interested him any more. He existed on Pernod, which he got by playing ragtime tunes on Jackie’s piano. Open-toe, broken-toenail set. You know? He liked me for only one reason: he didn’t dare not to. Lot of people that way, afraid to dislike any one Negro because then they’d be accused of prejudice. It’s prejudice-in-reverse, you might call it. Anyway, there was Jonas, babbling away, and me pretending to listen, when this dark-haired kid walked up and asked to bum a cigarette.

“Jonas introduced me and said for the guy to join us. He did, and for a while I was afraid that he was just another carbon copy of Jonas. ‘Reprieve Carriers’ we called them. But I was wrong. Adam Cramer turned out to be very bright and very friendly, and he was the only one who managed to persuade me that my color didn’t signify.

“He was taking a criminal medicine course at the time, but he knew philosophy, and we used to walk outside of the town, across the fields, freezing our asses and arguing, I don’t know, Kant, or whoever. He became my only friend in Zurich, and later, when we returned to America to finish up at the University here, we stayed friends.

“I was still groping, still not quite sure; and upset at finding nothing solid to hang onto. I went along with Adam conversationally, but inside it was different. Maybe it was with him too.

“We made quite a pair. But while I was looking for a meaning to life, he was working on finding the way to—well, it’s hard to put. With Adam, you see, this was a personal thing. He didn’t care why other people were around; he wanted to know why he was around. But that was okay. One, I figured, would answer the other.

“It’s for certain that he was looking, though. Every bit as hard as I was.”

Preston Haller shifted his position on the bench and drank the rest of his beer.

“What about Blake?” Driscoll said. “I hear there’s a connection.”