The Lemur

by Benjamin Black

  He was sitting in an armchair in the drawing room, holding aloft a clear crystal goblet with half an inch of brandy in it, gazing into the liquor’s amber depths with one eye narrowed and showing off his raptor’s profile. In his late seventies, he was still impossibly handsome, with the head of an athlete of ancient Greece under a great upright plume of undyed dark hair. It was only when he turned that he showed the flaw in his good looks: his eyes, uncannily like those of his grandson, were set much too close together. They gave him, those eyes, the look of being always meanly at work on some extended, crafty, and malign calculation. “Ah, John,” he said expansively, “here you are, at last.” Without rising from the chair he offered Glass a slender, sun-browned, manicured hand. The little finger sported a ruby signet ring; on his other hand, the one holding the brandy glass, he wore a narrow gold wedding band. “We wondered where you’d got to.”

  Glass shook the firm, dry hand briefly and then went and sat down on the white sofa, facing his father-in-law. He could sense Louise, a hovering presence, somewhere behind him in the dim lamplight. He wondered for a moment if she might be signaling soundlessly to her father. Mulholland regarded him with what seemed a deep affection, smiling and twinkling in that way he had, nodding a little, like a leader on a balcony bestowing a general vague approval upon the gathered masses of his subjects. “Working late, I hope?” he said. “Delving into my racy past? How is the book coming?”

  “Slowly, I’m afraid,” Glass said, in a neutral tone.

  Mulholland seemed unsurprised, and unperturbed. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t expect you to hurry. Just keep in mind, though, I’m not immortal, no matter what some people might say.”

  “I’m gathering things,” Glass said, lifting his hands and molding an invisible globe between them. “There’s a lot of material.”

  Mulholland was nodding again, the smile forgotten on his tanned hawk’s face. He was thinking of something else, Glass could see it, the tiny polished wheels turning, the levers engaging.

  Louise came and sat on the arm of the sofa beside her husband and even laid a hand weightlessly on his shoulder. “He’s in the office every day, nine to five,” she said, laughing lightly, and a touch unsteadily. Always in her father’s presence her voice had an uncertain wobble that she tried to suppress, and that still sparked Glass’s waning protective instincts. He put a hand over her hand that was resting on his shoulder. Mulholland looked at them and a hard, sardonic light came into his face. “How is the office?” he asked. “You settled in? Got everything you need?” He took a sip of brandy, swallowed, sniffed. “I wouldn’t want to think of you uncomfortable, down there.”

  “ Up there,” Louise said. “John is scared of the height.” Glass swiveled his head to look up at her, but she only smiled at him and made a mischievous face.

  “That so?” Mulholland said, without interest. “Guess I don’t blame you, these days. We didn’t know we were building so many standing affronts to the world.” He looked into his glass again. “We didn’t know a lot of things. After ’89 we thought we were in for a spell of peace, unaware of what was slouching toward us out of the festering deserts of Arabia. Now we know.”

  Glass always marveled at the complacency with which his father-in-law delivered these solemn addresses; he wondered if it was all a tease, a toying with the tolerance of those around him, a test to see if there was a limit to what he would be let get away with. Perhaps this was how all the rich and powerful amused themselves, talking banalities in the sure knowledge of being listened to.

  “It’s fine,” Glass said. “There isn’t much I need, just space, and quiet.”

  Mulholland gave him a quick glance, and seemed to suppress a grin. “Good, good,” he said. He held out his empty glass to his daughter. “Lou, my dear, you think I could get maybe another tincture of this very special old pale?” She took the goblet from him and walked away soundlessly down the shadowed room, and opened a door and closed it softly behind her; she would be gone for some time, Glass knew; she was adept at reading her father’s signals. The old man sat forward in the armchair and set his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands in front of his chin. He wore a dark gray Savile Row suit and a handmade silk shirt and John Lobb brogues. Glass fancied he could smell his cologne, a rich, woody fragrance. “This fellow Cleaver,” Big Bill said, “you know who I mean? One of life’s mosquitoes. He’s been buzzing around me for years now. I don’t like him. I don’t like his tactics. Guy like him, he thinks I’m the enemy because I’m rich. He forgets, this country is founded on money. I’ve done more for his people, the Mulholland Trust has done more, than all the Mellons and the Bill Gateses put together.” He chafed his clasped hands, making the knuckles creak. He did not look at Glass when he asked: “And who is this Riley fellow?”

  Glass made no movement. “A researcher,” he said.

  The old man glanced sidelong from under his eyebrows. “You hired him?”

  “I spoke to him,” Glass said.

  “And?”

  “And then he got shot.”

  “I hope you’re not going to tell me that the one thing followed from the other?” Mulholland suddenly grinned, showing a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of clean, white, even teeth. “Say you’re not going to tell me that, son.”

  “I’m not going to tell you that.”

  The lamplight formed still pools around their feet, while above them the dimness hung in billows like the roof of a tent.

  “See, I’ve got to know,” Mulholland said. “I’ve got to know if you’re in trouble, because, frankly, if you’re in trouble then most likely so am I, and so is my family, and I don’t like that. I don’t like trouble. You understand?” He rose from the chair, without, Glass noted, the slightest effort, and walked to the fireplace and stood there with his hands in his pockets. “Let me tell you a story,” he said, “a tale from the bad old days, when I was in the Company.” He laughed shortly, and had to cough a little. He had an eerie aspect, standing there with the top half of him in gloom above the lamplight, a truncated man. “There was a friend of mine-personal friend, as well as professional-who managed to get himself on the wrong side of J. Edgar Hoover. Now that, as I’m sure you know, was not a good place to be, J. Edgar being-well, J. Edgar. I’m talking about the sixties, after Kennedy’s time. Doesn’t matter what it was that my friend-let’s call him Mac-doesn’t matter what Mac had done to displease that fat old fag. Matter of fact, I thought it was pretty stupid of him, in the circumstances. Hoover was the kingpin then, and the FBI was unassailable.” The lamplight was picking out high points in the shadows, the shine on a clock face, a gleam of polished wood, a spark from Big Bill’s ruby ring. “Anyway,” he said, “Hoover was real mad at my friend Mac, and decided to bring him down. Now, Mac was pretty high up, you know, at Langley, but that wasn’t going to stop J. Edgar. What he did was he organized a sting operation, though that wasn’t what we called it in those days.” He paused, musing. “Matter of fact, I can’t remember what we called it. Memory’s going. Anyway. The trap was that Mac was to be at a certain place at a certain time to take delivery of papers, documents, you know, that were supposed to have come from the Russian embassy in Washington. In fact, what was in the package, though Mac didn’t know it, was not papers at all but a big stash of money-serious, serious money-and when it was in Mac’s hands J. Edgar’s people were supposed to jump out of the bushes and nab him for a corrupt agent taking money from a foreign power, the foreign power, and our number one enemy. Anyway, someone in Hoover’s office, who liked Mac and didn’t like his boss, tipped him off, and Mac just didn’t show up at the appointed rendezvous. Okay? So next day Mac, who was pretty sore, as you can imagine, he went down to the Mayflower Hotel where Hoover ate his lunch every day with his constant companion Clyde Tolson. The maitre d’ stopped Mac at the desk, worried, I guess, by the wild look in his eye, and when Mac told him he wanted to see Hoover-“J. Edna,” as he called him-the maitre d’ said he had a standing instruction
that Mr. Hoover was never to be interrupted while he was eating his cottage cheese and drinking his glass of milk. You tell that bastard, Mac said, that unless he gets his fat ass out here this minute I’m going to announce to this restaurant that the boss of the FBI is a skirt-wearing fag. So Hoover comes bustling out, and Mac accuses him of trying to entrap him. Hoover of course denies all knowledge of the sting, and promises he’ll set up an investigation right away to find out who was responsible, says he won’t rest until he has identified the miscreant, et cetera, et cetera. So. Week later, Mac and his wife are flying down to Mexico in Mac’s private Cessna, just the two of them, with Mac piloting. Half an hour out from Houston, out over the Gulf, kaboom. Bomb under the pilot’s seat. Wreckage strewn over half a square mile of water. Mac’s body was found, the wife’s never. At the funeral, Hoover was seen to wipe away a tear.” He gave another quick laugh. “No half measures for our John Edgar.”

  Glass was fingering the pack of Marlboros in his coat pocket. He heard the door at the end of the room opening softly, and a moment later Louise appeared, carrying a tray with three glasses. Glass wondered if she had been listening outside the door. At times it seemed to him he did not know his wife at all, that she was a stranger who had entered his life sidewise somehow and stayed on. “Sorry it took so long,” she said. “John, I brought you a Jameson.” She leaned down to each of the men in turn and they took their glasses, then she put the tray on a low table and brought her own drink-Canada Dry with a sliver of lime-and sat beside her husband on the sofa, crossing her legs and smoothing the hem of her dress on her knee.

  “We’ve been talking about J. Edgar Hoover and his wicked ways,” her father told her.

  “Oh, yes?” she said. Glass could feel her not looking at him. He sipped his whiskey.

  “Your father was telling me,” he said, “how Hoover arranged the assassination of a CIA man and his wife.”

  “Who says it was Hoover?” Big Bill said, with a show of innocent surprise. “I told you, he wept at the funeral.” He swirled the brandy in its goblet, smiling again with his teeth.

  Louise was still smoothing the stuff of her dress with her fingertips. “Billuns is wondering,” she said, not looking up, “what it was exactly you said to that man Riley.”

  The atmosphere in the room had tightened suddenly. From the library they heard the silvery chiming of the Louis Quinze clock that Mulholland had given them for a wedding present.

  “I don’t remember telling him anything,” Glass said. “We spoke on the phone, he came to the office, I said what I was writing, what I needed-”

  “What you needed?” Mulholland said. He looked suddenly all the more like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed, motionless. “See, that’s what I don’t understand, John. Why you needed to bring in someone else. I gave you this commission because you’re family. I told you that at the time, I said, John, I want someone I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Surely you knew that meant you, and not some computer nerd along with you?” He turned to his daughter. “Am I making sense, Lou? Am I being unreasonable?” Louise said nothing, and Mulholland answered for her. “No, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable at all.”

  For a while now Glass had felt the room forming an angle behind him, the corner into which he was being backed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It would have been no great thing, to hire a researcher. It’s normal. Historians do it all the time.”

  Mulholland opened his little dark eyes as wide as they would go. “But you’re not a historian, John,” he said, as if explaining something to a child.

  “I’m not a biographer, either.”

  His father-in-law went on gazing at him almost mournfully for a moment, then set down his brandy glass and slapped his palms on his knees and stood up and walked to the fireplace again. “My problem now, you see, John, is how to handle this. We have here what we used to call a fail-int, that is, a failure of intelligence. I don’t know what you told Riley, and I don’t know what Riley told this Cleaver guy. When you have a fail-int, you’ve got to do some creative thinking. That’s something you could help me with. Because I have to decide how to deal with Mr. Wilson Cleaver and his innuendos.”

  A voice spoke from the depths of the room: “What about special rendition?” They turned and peered, all three, and David Sinclair came strolling out of the shadows, tossing something small and shiny from one palm to the other. He was smiling. “Surely you could arrange a little thing like that, Granddad.”

  11

  TERRI WITH AN I

  I n the morning Glass was sitting after breakfast on the little wrought-iron balcony outside the drawing room, savoring in solitude a third cigarette and a fourth cup of coffee, when his stepson reappeared. Glass had to struggle not to show his annoyance. Usually he was the only one who used the balcony, sharing it with rust and spiderwebs and a few moldering remnants of last autumn’s leaves. Below him was a courtyard-a courtyard, in Manhattan!-and a little garden with ailanthus and silver birch and dogwood, and other green and brown things he did not know the names of. On certain days in all seasons a very old man in a leather apron was to be seen down there, scraping at the gravel with a rake, slow and careful as a Japanese monk. Today the sun was shining weakly, like an invalid venturing out after a long, bedridden winter, but spring had arrived at last, and now and then a silken shimmery something would come sprinting through the trees, silvering the new buds and shivering the windowpanes of the apartments opposite and then going suddenly still, like children stopping in the middle of a chasing game. The square of sky above the courtyard was a pale and grainy blue.

  Glass thought of Dylan Riley with his eye shot through; there would be no more spring mornings for him.

  “So this is where you hide yourself,” David Sinclair said.

  Although he had his own duplex over by Columbus Circle the young man often spent the night at what he insisted on referring to as his mother’s apartment, no doubt imagining that he was thereby neatly excising Glass from the domestic circle. He stood in the open French windows now, smiling down on his stepfather with that particular mixture of mockery and self-satisfaction that never failed to set Glass’s teeth on edge and that was so hard to challenge or deflect. This morning he was dressed in cream slacks and a cream silk shirt and two-tone brown-and-cream shoes with perforated toecaps. A cricket sweater with a pale blue stripe along the neck was draped over his shoulders. He was on his way to a squash game. With his slicked-down hair and those protuberant, little black eyes he bore a strong resemblance to a cartoon Cole Porter.

  “Good morning,” Glass said coldly.

  Sinclair laughed, and stepped onto the balcony and edged around the little metal table and sat down on a wrought-iron chair. He crossed one knee on the other and laced his fingers together in his lap and happily contemplated his stepfather, who was still rumpled from sleep, and also a little hungover from the four or five whiskeys he had drunk sitting alone on the sofa last night after the rest of the household had gone to bed.

  “You’ve certainly upset, Granddad,” the young man said lightly. “What were you thinking of?”

  Below, a flock of lacquered, dark brown birds came swooping down from somewhere and settled vexatiously among the ailanthus boughs, windmilling their wings and making a raucous, clockwork chattering.

  Glass lit another cigarette and put the pack and his lighter on the table before him. “Have you started your new job yet?” he asked, watching the busy birds.

  David Sinclair reached out and took Glass’s lighter from the table and sat back and began to lob it from hand to hand, as he had done the night before with whatever it was he had been carrying then. “Not yet. Mother isn’t quite as ready to relinquish the reins as she likes to pretend. You know how she is.” He smiled, arching an eyebrow; his tone and look suggested he did not for a moment believe his stepfather knew how his mother “was” about the presidency of the Mulholland Trust, or about anything much else, for that matter.
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  “It’s a large thing she’s doing for you,” Glass said heavily. “I hope you realize that. I hope you acknowledge it, too, now and then.”

  The young man’s smile broadened in delight; he loved to irritate his stepfather. He played on Glass’s sensibilities with virtuosic skill, tinkling all the right keys and pressing the pedals at just the right intervals.

  “But tell me about this Riley business,” Sinclair said. “A murder, no less, and practically in the family! Do the police know who did it, or why?”

  “I don’t know what the police know. They don’t tell me.”

  Sinclair was regarding him with malicious glee. “Are you a suspect?”

  “Why would I be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. While he was poking around in Billuns’s murky world this Riley might have found out something about you, that you would rather he hadn’t. Hmm?”

  Glass gazed at him, and drew on his cigarette and turned away and blew a stream of smoke out over the metal balcony rail with a show of indifference. Once, when he and Louise were not long married, he had hit his stepson. He could not now remember the exact circumstances. He had said something to the boy, reproved him in some way, and David had sworn at him, and before he could stop himself he had struck the little bastard openhanded across the jaw. It had not been a serious blow, but David had never forgiven him for it-understandably, Glass had to admit. He would have liked to hit him again now, not in passion, not in anger, even, but judiciously, flicking out a fist and catching him a quick jab under the eye, or at the side of that fine-boned nose that was so like his mother’s, to knock it out of alignment.