Coincidence by David Ambrose Page A

agencies. At any rate, it had suited
     both couples to make this private arrangement between themselves. My mother would have her twins and give up one of them at
     birth to the Harts. They then, by whatever means (the details were unimportant, perhaps we would uncover them later), had
     somehow gotten their adopted baby into Britain and registered him—Larry—as their own by birth.
    Larry leaned back in the armchair he’d settled into and looked at the ceiling before letting the air out of his lungs with
     a whooshing sound. Then he looked at me and shook his head in wonderment.
    “Who in the hell would believe this if we told them?” he asked.
    “Pretty much everybody when I get this book written,” I said. “We’ll go on talk shows and do press interviews together—if
     you’re agreeable, that is.”
    “No problem.”
    “There’s a certain amount that’s been written about synchronicity already, and some amazing coincidences recorded, but I’ve
     never come across anything as extraordinary as this.”
    His face cracked into a grin. “Tell you what,” he said, “why don’t we have a little fun with this while we can—you know, before
     everybody knows about it. It could make a whole extra chapter for the book.”
    “Like what?” I asked him. “What d’you have in mind?”
    He shrugged. “I dunno. That stuff that twins do when they’re kids, I suppose. You know, swap roles, fool people into thinking
     that I’m you and you’re me. The kind of stuff we’d have been doing if we
had
been kids together.”
    For some reason I felt oddly dubious about this. Not just that I felt it was treating too frivolously something of potential
     importance: more a feeling that with all the other problems on my plate at that moment I wasn’t really up to goofing around
     like some teenager. He must have read the reaction in my face, because he immediately tried to reassure me.
    “Nothing serious. Just, you know, when your wife gets home, for example, you could be sitting right where you are now, and
     after a couple of minutes I could walk out of the bathroom. I don’t know her, but I bet she’s got a sense of humor. Can you
     imagine her reaction?”
    He laughed at the thought of it, as though seeing the scene clearly in his head.
    “I don’t want to involve my wife in this,” I said quickly, and in a tone that wiped the smile from his face and left him once
     again anxiously reassuring me.
    “You’re right. That’s kind of a dirty trick. Lousy idea. But there must be something we can do just to prove that we really
     are as identical as we think we are. I mean, if you called up a friend of yours to come over for a drink, then I opened the
     door pretending to be you, wouldn’t that be great to see how long it took him to figure out something was wrong?”
    I remained noncommittal, though I could see his point. The idea had some appeal. He was right; it would make an amusing little
     episode for the book. Suddenly I thought of the perfect candidate to play the trick on: my agent, Lou Bennett. Lou hadn’t
     been sure that he could sell my publishers on the idea of a book about synchronicity, but with this whole story attached,
     the discovery of my long-lost twin, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we found ourselves in a bidding war.
    Larry loved the idea of Lou. “It’s perfect,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
    I called Lou at home. He had a house on the East Side in the seventies. It was already after four in the afternoon, and he
     said he had a couple of things to do and didn’t have time to come over. However, he was dining at Smith & Wollensky’s down
     on Third at eight o’clock and would be happy to meet somewhere for a drink around six-thirty or seven. We settled on a bar
     we both knew.
    “It’s about the book,” I said, while Larry made signs at me not to say too much. “Kind of a discovery I’ve made that I think
     you’re going to really like. I’ll tell you about it when we