The Lemur Part 3

Gla.s.s went up in the little elevator. It was a venerable and somewhat rackety contraption, and he was never comfortable in it, feeling constricted and vaguely at peril. He refused to let himself make of this a metaphor for his life in general. He was a free man, no matter how narrow his circ.u.mstances might have become recently. Yes, free.

The elevator opened directly onto a private hallway leading into the apartment. The first time he had entered here he had been more impressed, cowed, even, than he would have cared to admit. Now he called out "All hands!" as he always did; he could not remember the origin of this manner of announcing his homecoming. From far inside the apartment he heard Louise's muted answering call. He found her in the library, seated at her desk, an eighteenth-century escritoire, with a little pile of cards and envelopes, and her fountain pen. She was wearing the gray silk kimono that some j.a.panese bigwig had presented to her when she visited Kyoto as a UN Special Amba.s.sador for Culture. She gave her husband a glancing, absentminded smile. "There you are," she said, and went back to her cards.

He stood behind her. He caught her sharp perfume. What was the word? Civet. The same perfume smells differently on every woman. Or so he had been told. He felt curiously unfocused, adrift, somehow. He supposed it was the aftermath of his meeting with Captain Ambrose, and all the adrenaline he had used up. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Invitations for Tuesday."

"Tuesday?"

"The party for Antonini."

"Oh. The painter."

"Yes," she said, imitating his flat tone. "The painter."

"I think he has a soft spot for you."

She did not turn, or lift her head. "Do you?"

"Or a hard spot, more likely."

"Don't be coa.r.s.e."

"That's me, coa.r.s.e as cabbage."

He admired the way she wrote, in firm, swift strokes, so confidently. He had not used a fountain pen since he was in primary school.

Why did she not ask about the call from Captain Ambrose? Could she have forgotten?

He moved away and sat down on the low white sofa, where he was surrounded on three sides by bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. It struck him that he had not lifted a volume from those shelves since ... since he could not remember when. They stood there, the books, sorted, ranked, a battalion of rebukes. He had not done that book of his own that he had always planned to do. The unwritten book: another cliche.

"By the way," Louise said, and still did not turn, "did you speak to that policeman?"

"Yes."

"What was it about? Was someone murdered?"

"Yes."

Now she did turn, setting an elbow on the back of her chair and looking at him with a faint, questioning smile. "Someone we know?" she said lightly.

He put his head back on the cushions and considered first one corner of the ceiling, then another. "No."

When he failed to continue she waggled her head in a parody of regal impatience and said, "Weh-ell?" in her Queen Victoria voice. He lowered his gaze and fixed it on her. Her eyes shone, and her glossed lips caught points of light from the chandelier above his head and glittered. Why was she excited? It must be, he thought, the prospect of the smoldering Antonini. He went back to gazing at the ceiling.

"A young man called Dylan Riley," he said. "Computer wizard. Would-be spy." And? Go on, say it. "Researcher."

"And the police were calling you why?"

"He had phoned me, this Riley."

"He had phoned you."

"Yes. This morning. And in the afternoon he was killed. Murdered. Shot through the eye."

"My G.o.d." She sounded more indignant than shocked. "But why was he phoning you, this person-what did you say his name was?"

"Riley. Dylan Riley. Doesn't sound like a real name, does it, when you say it out loud?"

He picked up a copy of The New Yorker from the low table in front of him. Sempe. The Park, spring leaves, a tiny dog.

"Are you," Louise said, "going to tell me what this is about, or not?"

"It's not about anything. I contacted this Riley because I thought he might do some research for the book. He called me back. Mine happened to be the last number on his cell phone. Hence the call from the police." She still sat turned toward him from the waist, her arm still resting on the back of the chair, the fountain pen in her fingers. "The nib will dry up," he said. "I remember that, how the nib would dry up and then you had to wash it out with water and fill it in the inkwell again."

"The inkwell?" she said. "You sound like someone out of d.i.c.kens."

"I am someone out of d.i.c.kens. That's why you married me. Bill Sikes, c'est moi."

Clara the maid came in to announce dinner. She was a diminutive person. Her color, deep black with purplish shadings, fascinated Gla.s.s; every time he saw her he wanted to touch her, just to know the feel of that satiny skin. In her little white uniform and white rubbersoled shoes that Louise made her wear she had the look of a hospital nurse. When she was gone, Louise whispered: "You must remember to compliment her. She's made a souffle. It's a big moment." Louise had been teaching Clara how to cook, with considerable success, which was fortunate for Clara, since otherwise she would have gone by now-Louise did not entertain failure.

In the dining room the lamps burned low, and there were candles on the table, their flames reflected in countless gleaming spots among the silver and the crystal. It occurred to Gla.s.s that what he had admitted a moment ago was true, that he was coa.r.s.e, compared to all this that Louise had set in place, the elegant table, the soft lights, the fine wines and delicate food, the expensively simple furniture, the Balthus drawing and the Giacometti figurine, the leather-bound books, the white-clad maid, the Glenn Gould tape softly playing in the background-all the rich, muted, exquisitely tasteful life that she had a.s.sembled for them. Yes, he fitted ill, here; he had tried, but he fitted ill. He wondered why she had tolerated him for so long, and why she went on tolerating him. Was it simply fear of another divorce and her father's rage? No doubt it was. He was perfectly capable, was Big Bill, of cutting off her inheritance. So much would go, for her and for David Sinclair, if those millions went-not just the house in the Hamptons, the rooftop suite at the Georges V in Paris, the account at Asprey's in London, but most important, control of the Mulholland Trust. That was what Louise prized most; that was the future.

Clara's spinach souffle was excellent, and Gla.s.s remembered to compliment her on it, and she fled back to her kitchen in confusion. Louise had put down her fork and was gazing at him. "You can be so sweet, sometimes," she said.

"Only sometimes?"

"Yes. Only sometimes. But I'm grateful."

"Don't mention it."

Still she watched him, at once frowning and smiling. "You have been up to something," she said, "haven't you. I can see it in your eye."

"What sort of something?"

Her face, candlelit, was reflected in the window by which she sat. Outside in the darkness the crowns of the ma.s.sed trees in the Park gave off an eerie, silverish glow. "I don't know," she said. "Something to do with that young man who was murdered?"

"What?" Gla.s.s said, "Do you think I shot him?"

"Of course not. Why would you?"

A sudden, constrained silence fell then, as if both had taken fright at something vaguely seen ahead. They ate. Gla.s.s poured the wine. At length he said: "I don't know that I can write this book."

She kept her eyes on her plate. "Oh? Why not?"

"Well, for a start I suddenly remembered that I am a journalist, or used to be, and not a biographer."

"Journalists write biographies."

"Not of their fathers-in-law, they don't."

"Billuns gave his word he wouldn't interfere."

Billuns was Big Bill's pet name in the family; it made Gla.s.s's skin crawl, especially when his wife used it. He drank his wine and looked out over the treetops. How still it was, the April night.

"Why do you think he asked me to write it? I mean, why me."

"He told you himself: he trusts you."

"Does that mean more, I wonder, than that he thinks he has a hold over me, through you?"

"Thinks?" She smiled, pursing her lips. "Doesn't he have a hold over you, through me?"

He looked at her levelly in the candlelight. He did not understand why she was behaving so tenderly toward him tonight. There was a languorous, almost feline air about her. He was reminded of how, on their honeymoon, which seemed so long ago now, she would sit opposite him at a balcony table in the Eden Roc at Cap d'Antibes after a morning of lovemaking and smile at him in that same caressing, mischievous fashion, and kick off her sandals under the table and wrap her cool bare feet around his ankles. What days those had been, what nights. At moments such as this one now, here in the stealthy candlelight, the sadness he felt at the lapsing of his love for her became a desolation. He cleared his throat. "Tell me," he said, "about Charles Varriker."

Something flickered in her eyes, a far-off lightning flash. "Charles?" she said. "Why?"

"I don't know. He's a figure in the landscape-your father's landscape."

Her mood had altered now: she seemed impatient, angry, almost. "He's been dead for twenty years, more."

"How well did you know him? Was he a figure in your landscape?"

She put down her fork again and lowered her head and turned it a little to one side; it was a thing she did when she was thinking, or upset. "Is this how it's going to be if you write this book?" she asked, in an odd, low voice with a shake in it. "Will there be dinnertable interrogations? Will I be required nightly to pick over the past for you? A pity your researcher got shot, he would have spared me a lot of work." She rose abruptly, not looking at him. Her napkin had fallen to the floor and she found herself treading on it. "d.a.m.n!" she said, in that same, angry undertone, and kicked the napkin off into the shadows, and strode away, the skirts of the kimono ruffling about her. Gla.s.s thought to call after her but did not. The silence seemed to vibrate faintly, as in the aftermath of something having shattered.

What had Dylan Riley discovered, and why had he been shot? And how were the two things connected, as Gla.s.s was now convinced they were? He looked again to the window, but this time saw only his own face reflected there.

7.

THE CLEAVER.

John Gla.s.s woke early out of a riot of vivid and disorderly dreams, all detailed recollection of which drained from his mind the moment he opened his eyes. He lay in the half dark feeling paralyzed by dread. What was the matter, what terrible thing was amiss? Then he remembered the murder of Dylan Riley, the black weight of which lay over him like a shroud. How was it he could have been so calm yesterday, so detached, when he heard of the young man's killing and Captain Ambrose summoned him to Police Headquarters? He marveled, not for the first time, at how the self insulates and protects itself against life's shocks. He closed his eyes again, tight, and burrowed down into the warmth of the bedclothes and his own familiar fetor. He knew that things would seem different when the sun came up and the ordinary business of the day began. For now, though, he could have done with someone else's warmth beside him, another's body to cling on to for solace. But Louise had long ago, and without fuss, banished him from the master bedroom into the box room at the end of the corridor beyond the library. The arrangement suited him; mostly he preferred to sleep alone, if sleep was all that was going to happen, and it was some time since anything else had happened in bed between him and Louise.

He tried to fall back to sleep but could not. His mind was racing. It felt as if he were not so much thinking as being thought. Memories, nameless forebodings, speculations and conjectures, all were jumbled together in the ashen afterglow of the dreams he had forgotten. He turned on his back and lay gazing up at the shadowed ceiling. As so often late at night or in the early-morning hours he asked himself if he had made a mistake in moving from Ireland to America-no, not if he had made a mistake, but how great were the proportions of the mistake he had made. Not that he and Louise had been so very much happier living in Ireland, in Louise's father's gloomy gray-stone mansion at Mount Ardagh, and not that they had seen so very much of each other, for that matter. They had both spent the greater part of their time traveling, he on a.s.signments abroad and Louise promoting charities across five continents. He knew he should not but in his heart he despised his wife's career, so-called, as an amba.s.sador of good works.

Maybe they should have had children.

He shifted, groaning angrily. The pillow was too hot, and his pajama top was damp with sweat and held him fast like a straitjacket. He could hear Clara in the kitchen, getting her mistress's day started-Louise was an early riser. It made him uneasy, having a live-in servant. His father had died young and his widowed mother had kept house for a rich Dublin lawyer so that her only son could have an education. Coa.r.s.e, he thought again, coa.r.s.e as cabbage. He sighed. It was time to get up.

Dylan Riley's murder was not reported in the Times, or at any rate he could find no mention of it. Louise would not have the Post or the Daily News in the house, so he had to go out and buy them. He took them into his workroom-where he never did any work-and sat on the silk-covered chaise longue that Louise had bought for him as a house-warming gift when they had moved in here six months ago. The Post had a couple of paragraphs on the killing, but the News ran a bigger story, on page five: Computer Wiz's Mystery Slaying. There was nothing in either report that was new. Captain Ambrose of the NYPD was quoted as saying that he and his team were following a number of definite leads. There was a photograph of Riley's girlfriend, one Terri Taylor, leaving the premises on Vandam in the company of a policewoman. She wore jeans and had long black hair; she had turned her face away from the cameras.

He switched on the miniature television set that squatted on a corner of his desk. There was an item on Fox 5 News, just a plain reporting of the facts. New York 1 had sent a camera and a reporter, and there was footage of Terri Taylor briefly on the pavement outside the warehouse. She was a pale, waiflike creature with a little pointed face and haunted eyes. She did not seem entirely heartbroken; rather, her look was one of bafflement and dismay, as if she were wondering dazedly how she had come to be involved in this mess. The camera team had managed to corner Captain Ambrose. On screen he looked even more like a tormented saint, in his brown suit and his big black brogues. He talked here also of "definite leads," and then walked away quickly from the camera at his Indian-scout lope. Common to all the reports of the murder was an underlying note of-not indifference, exactly, but of halfheartedness, and faint impatience, as if everybody felt that time was being wasted here, while matters of far greater import were calling out urgently for attention elsewhere. What this meant, Gla.s.s knew, was that no one expected the murder to be solved. Dylan Riley had been a loner, according to the Daily News, so there would be no one to press the police for action. Even Terri Taylor, it was obvious, was leaving the scene as fast as her skinny legs would take her.

Gla.s.s went into the kitchen to get himself a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, but Clara was there and of course insisted on doing it for him. He stood leaning against the refrigerator pretending to read the sports pages of the Daily News. Louise had already breakfasted and left-she had a meeting at the United Nations with someone from UNESCO. Gla.s.s wondered idly if his wife ever met anyone who was not someone. Covertly he watched Clara as she bustled about the windowless room. He knew almost nothing about her life. Her people were from the Caribbean-Puerto Rico, was it, or the Dominican Republic? He could not remember. She had a boyfriend, according to Louise, but so far there had been no sightings of the ghostly lover. What did she do in the evenings, he wondered, in her room off the kitchen? Watched television, he supposed. Did she read, and if so, what? He could not imagine. It struck him that for a journalist he felt very little curiosity about people, how they thought, what they felt. Dylan Riley, for instance: what did he know of him, except that he resembled a lemur and did not wash often enough? Maybe that was why he had given up journalism, he thought, because fundamentally he had scant concern for human beings. It was events that interested him, things happening, not those involved.

Clara handed him his coffee. "Real strong, Mr. Gla.s.s, like you like it." She smiled, flashing her shiny white teeth. The toast had the texture of scorched plaster of paris.

The day outside was fresh and bl.u.s.tery, and there was a lemony cast to the sunlight. He took a taxi to Forty-fourth Street to check his mail. As usual, there was none. He sat with his feet on his desk and his hands behind his head and studied the sky, or what he could spy of it, between the jumbled buildings. He believed he could see the wind, faint striations like scour marks etched on the clear blue. He wished he could feel something solid and real about Dylan Riley's murder-anger, indignation, an itch of curiosity, even. Yet all he could think was that Riley was dead and what did it matter who had killed him?

Then he remembered something, and he shifted his feet from the desk and reached for the telephone, fishing Captain Ambrose's card out of his wallet.

When he said his name the policeman betrayed no surprise. Was he looking out at the same sky, that streaked azure?

"Who else did Dylan Riley call?" Gla.s.s asked. "Before he called me, I mean."

There was a breathy sound on the line that might have been a low laugh. "Called lots of people," the policeman said. "You thinking of anyone in particular?"

"I mean, did you trace all the numbers on his phone? Did you identify them all?"

"Sure, we traced them. His girlfriend, his dental hygienist, his mother in Orange County down in Florida. And you."

"No one else in my family? Not my father-in-law?"

"Mr. Mulholland? No. You think he might have called him about this research you wanted him to do?"

"I expressly told him not to."

"You said Mr. Mulholland didn't know you were bringing in someone to check out his history."

Gla.s.s closed his eyelids briefly and pressed an index finger to his forehead. "I told you, I hadn't decided finally whether to hire Riley or not."

"Right. So you did, I remember." There was a silence; it hummed in Gla.s.s's ear. The policeman said: "You were the one he called-twice. That's why I asked you to come in. You were the only one we couldn't account for, the only one who wasn't his girlfriend or his dentist or his mother." Another pause. "You got something you want to tell me, Mr. Gla.s.s? About Mr. Mulholland, maybe?"

"No," Gla.s.s said, and expelled a breath. "I was just curious."

"And worried?"

"Worried?"

"That Riley might have let your father-in-law know you had hired-were thinking of hiring-a snoop."

"No," Gla.s.s said, making his voice go dull. "I wasn't worried." He could sense the captain thinking, turning over the possibilities. "Mr. Mulholland and I have an understanding. He trusts me."

Again there was that snuffle of suppressed amus.e.m.e.nt. "But you hadn't told him about Dylan Riley."

"I would have," Gla.s.s said, still in that dulled, dogged tone.

"Sure, Mr. Gla.s.s. Sure you would."

When he had put down the receiver he sat for a long time drumming his fingers on the desk and gazing unseeing before him, trying to think. His mind was still fogged with the after-traces of last night's unremembered dreams. He picked up the phone again and called Alison O'Keeffe and asked if she would have an early lunch with him. She said she was in the middle of work but he pressed her and in the end she gave in, as he had known she would. He telephoned for a table at Pisces, a little fish place down at Union Square that had been a favorite haunt of theirs in the early days of their affair. Like Mario's, it was becoming depressingly fashionable, and Gla.s.s worried that someday Louise would come in with one of her someones in tow and find him and Alison all snug and cozy at their accustomed corner table. That would be awkward.

He had not spoken to Alison since yesterday. He did not like to think of her being involved, however peripherally, in the business of Dylan Riley's death, and was sorry he had mentioned Riley to her in the first place. He still could not think how Riley might have found out about him and Alison; he supposed he was naive for having imagined that New York was big and impersonal enough to allow him to carry on a love affair without anyone knowing.