The Lemur

by Benjamin Black

  “Do you know my father?” Sinclair asked. “ Mister Sinclair, the pride of Wall Street?” He seemed to find all titles irresistibly funny.

  “I’ve met him,” Glass said warily. “I wouldn’t say I know him.”

  The young man turned his face aside and looked down into the courtyard where the birds had intensified their ransacking of the birches and the dogwood trees, as if they were trying to shake something out of them. He must have been reading Glass’s thoughts, for now he said: “He used to beat my mother.” Glass stared. “Didn’t she tell you? Oh, not badly. Just a slap or a punch, now and then. I think he was hotheaded”-he turned back-“like you. I tried to intervene, once. I was only a kid. I bit his hand and he tried to throw me out the window. We were in the Waldorf=Astoria, on the eighteenth floor. He would have done it, too, only the window didn’t open. It was the day after Clinton was elected the first time, so I suppose he was feeling sore.” He smiled. “He’s not a Democrat, as you probably know.”

  Glass cleared his throat and stood up, the metal legs of his chair scraping on the balcony’s concrete floor. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I have work waiting.”

  Sinclair was looking up at him, with his insinuating smile, his head on one side. “Of course,” he said softly. “Of course you do.”

  Glass had stepped through the French windows into the drawing room when Sinclair called after him: “Oh, Da -ad?”

  “Yes?”

  “Here.” He held out his hand. “You forgot your lighter.”

  It was rush hour, and Glass had trouble finding a taxi. The streets were electric with spring’s sudden overnight arrival, and the trees crowding at the edge of the Park looked as if they were preparing to surge over the railings and set off on a march for the East River. Louise had stopped Glass at the elevator to say that she and David and her father were going out to Bridgehampton, and asked if he wanted to come with them. He said perhaps he would, but later; he did not know if he could face being stranded on Long Island and subject to his father-in-law’s steely geniality and his stepson’s smiling contempt.

  In the lobby of Mulholland Tower he was about to show his pass to the electronic eye at the turnstile when Harry on the security desk spoke his name and waved him over. “You got a caller, Mr. Glass.” Harry pointed. “She been waiting an hour.” She was sitting on a bench under the brass wall plaque with its portrait in relief of Big Bill Mulholland’s handsome profile. She looked familiar yet Glass could not say for the moment who she was. She seemed tiny and lost in that great echoing marble space. She wore a crooked skirt and a short, flowered blouse, and a man’s rat-colored raincoat three or four sizes too big for her. He walked across to her, and she stood up hurriedly, fumbling her hands out of the pockets of the raincoat. Her midriff was bare, and she had a metal stud in her navel. “I’m Terri,” she said. “Terri Taylor.”

  “Ah, yes,” Glass said, remembering-the Lemur’s girlfriend. “Terri with an i.”

  She gave a forlorn, small smile, gnawing her lip at one side. She had freckles and prominent front teeth, and her long straight hair was dyed black, badly. They stood a moment contemplating each other, both equally at a loss. He asked if she would like to come up to his office, but she shook her head quickly. Maybe they would go out and get a cup of coffee, then? “Let’s just walk,” she said. They went into the street. He was about to put a hand under her elbow but thought better of it. She gave a snuffly laugh. “I seem to have done nothing else but walk, since…” She let her voice trail off.

  Playful gusts of wind swooped along the street. A DHL delivery man, talking rapidly to himself, wheeled a loaded pallet into an open doorway. A dreadlocked derelict in a St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt was arguing with a fat policeman. Beside a storm drain three ragged sparrows were fighting over a lump of bagel as big as themselves. Glass smiled to himself. New York.

  “How are you managing?” he asked. He was wondering why she had come to him, what she might want. “It must be tough.”

  “Oh, I’m all right, I guess,” she said. She had wrapped the raincoat tight around herself; it must have been Riley’s. She was pigeon-toed, and her legs were bare, and mottled a little, from the cold. “Dylan and I hadn’t been together long. Just since Christmas. We met on Christmas Eve, at a party at Wino’s.” She looked up at him sideways. “You know it, Wino’s? Cool place.” She nodded, swallowing hard. “Dylan liked it there.” Now she sniffed. He hoped she was not going to cry.

  “Have you got people here?” he asked. “Family?”

  “No. I’m from Des Moines. Des Moines, Iowa?” She laughed. “Insurance capital of the world. You should see it, the buildings, every one of them owned by an insurance company. Jeez.”

  They sidestepped a jumbo dog turd-must have been a Great Dane, at least, Glass estimated-and arrived at Madison Avenue. He had never got used to the surprise of turning off tranquil little side streets onto these great boulevards surging with mad-eyed shoppers and herds of taxis and bawling police cars.

  “He liked you, you know,” Terri Taylor said. “Dylan, I mean-he liked you.”

  “Did he?” Glass said, trying not to sound incredulous.

  “He said you were one of his heroes. He had cuttings of things you wrote, a whole file of them. He was just thrilled you had asked him to work for you-he was like a kid. John Glass, he kept saying, just imagine it, John Glass!”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” Was he? He was not sure. “I’m flattered.”

  “That’s how he was. He was an enthusiast, Mr. Glass. A real enthusiast. ”

  Glass was recalling the Lemur sprawled in the leather chair in his office that day up there on the thirty-ninth floor, smirking, and working his jaws on an imaginary wad of gum and clawing at the fork of his drooping jeans; women see their men as other men never see them.

  “Have you any idea who… who might have…?”

  She shook her head vehemently, pressing her lips so tightly together they went white. “It’s crazy,” she said. “Just crazy. Who would have wanted to do such a terrible thing? He didn’t harm anybody. He was just a big kid, playing his computer games, surfing the Web and gathering things.” She laughed. “You know, my granddad still has the baseball cards he collected when he was a school kid? He has them all there, in a shoe box, under his bed, shows them to anyone who’ll listen to him. Baseball cards! I threw my Barbies in the trash can when I was ten.”

  Glass hesitated. “Any idea,” he ventured, the pavement turning to eggshells under his feet, “any idea what sort of things Dylan gathered about me?”

  They had come to the corner of Forty-fifth. A squat little woman in an outsized fur coat leading a dachshund on a jeweled leash walked forward against a red light and a taxi screeched to a halt and the driver, another Rastafarian-dreadlocks again-lifted his hands from the wheel and threw back his head and laughed furiously, his teeth gleaming. Terri Taylor smiled, watching the scene. “What?” she said, turning to Glass. The light turned to WALK, and they walked.

  “Only he phoned me, you see,” Glass said. “Apparently he had stumbled on something, I don’t know what it was, though he seemed to think it was… significant.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “That’s the point-I don’t know.”

  She pondered. They were passing by a bookshop, and a man inside turned to the young woman who was with him and pointed at Glass and said something to her, and the young woman gazed out at Glass with blank interest. There were still people who remembered him, from the days, so far off now, when he had been briefly, mildly, famous.

  “I thought,” Terri Taylor said, “you hired him to do research on your father-in-law, not on you?” She was puzzled; she did not know what he was asking her.

  “Yes, I did,” Glass said. “Or I sort of did-there was no formal arrangement in place.”

  “Well, he was working on Mr. Mulholland, I know that, he told me so.”

  “And what did he say?”

  She laughed mournfully.
“He didn’t say. He was kind of secretive, you know? Although-” She paused, and her steps slowed, and she gazed down at her turned-in feet in their scuffed and patchy black velvet pumps. “He did mention a name.”

  Glass waited a beat. “Yes?” he said, keeping his voice under control.

  “It was someone Mr. Mulholland had worked with. What was it? Oo.” She scrunched up her face, trying to remember. “Something like ‘varicose,’ like in varicose veins?”

  “Varriker,” Glass said. “Charles Varriker.”

  “That’s it. Varriker. Funny name. Do you know him?”

  “No,” Glass said. “He’s dead. He died a long time ago.”

  12

  THE PROTESTANT POUND

  T here was nothing more Terri Taylor could give John Glass, beyond the name of Charles Varriker, which kept cropping up with interesting regularity. Glass still did not know why Terri had come to him. Perhaps for her he was one of Dylan Riley’s touchstones, all of which she had to visit in turn before she could be free to go home to Des Moines. “New York is not my place,” she had said, and then smiled ruefully, “not that I really think Des Moines is, either.” She seemed less grief stricken at the death of Dylan Riley than just weary. She was young, and death was too much for her: too bizarre, too baffling, too unreal. He imagined her in ten years’ time, married to an insurance executive and living with him and the kids in a frame house in a suburb on the edge of a city where the cornfields began, mile upon mile of them, stretching away in shining, windpolished waves to the flat horizon.

  You were one of his heroes, she had said to him of Riley. And someone had shot Riley through the eye.

  In the afternoon he walked over to Lexington Avenue and Fiftieth to catch the Hampton Jitney. It was one of the not inconsiderable advantages of being married to money that he did not need to pack when he traveled out to the house on Long Island, since everything he might need was already in place for him there, down to toothbrush and pajamas.

  He hated this journey. It was long and tedious and noisy, and he would arrive reeking of exhaust fumes and in a temper. When he had first heard of the Hampton Jitney he had pictured something out of a Frank Capra madcap comedy, a battered old bus with a bulbous front and cardboard suitcases on the roof, and a Marilyn look-alike sitting up front adjusting her lipstick and trying not to snag her stockings on a broken seat spring. The reality was, inevitably, otherwise. He had expected sea views, at least, given the narrowness of the island, but there was only the flat, featureless road with filling stations and pizza places and the odd undistinguished hamlet. He supposed Bridgehampton itself was handsome, in a faux-Founding Fathers sort of way, and Silver Barn was certainly a fine house, set atop a low, wooded hill with a view down over pitch pine and scrub oak to an ever shining line of distant sea. Big Bill had built the house for his third and, according to him, present wife, the globetrotting journalist Nancy Harrison, who had probably spent altogether no more than a few weeks in the place. In the old days Glass had sometimes come across Nancy, in this or that remote corner of the world where they were both covering some small war or non-man-made calamity, and they would have a drink together and laugh about Big Bill and his ways. The shell of the house had originally been an Amish barn that Big Bill had found somewhere in Pennsylvania and bought and had disassembled and carted up plank by plank to Long Island, where it was rebuilt with many additions and refinements. The wood of the walls was the color of ash and polished like the handle of a spade.

  Louise came out to meet him as he was alighting from the taxi at the Colonial-style front door. She was wearing what he thought of as her Jean Seberg outfit: black pedal-pushers, black-and-white-striped matelot top, a short red silk scarf knotted at her throat. Her hair was tied back and she wore no makeup. He did not think he had ever seen his wife inappropriately attired. He could imagine her on the deck of the Titanic in green Wellies and a Burberry mac and head scarf. Well, he had loved her once, and her elegance and self-possession were not the least of the things he had loved her for.

  She laid her fingertips on his shoulders and kissed him with feathery lightness on the cheek. “How was the trip?”

  “Hideous, as usual.”

  “Billuns came out by chopper, you could have come with him.”

  “For God’s sake, Louise. ‘The chopper!”

  She stood back and regarded him with tight-lipped reproach, like a mother gazing upon an unbiddable, scallywag son. “We can’t all have the luxury of being unconventional,” she said. “We’re not all”-he could see her trying to stop herself and failing-“ace reporters.”

  “Oh, Lou, Lou,” he said wearily, “let’s not start.”

  The spring that had taken over the city seemed not to have reached this far east yet, and the sky was an unblemished milk-gray dome, and he could smell rain coming. “We were about to have a drink,” Louise said. “I imagine you could do with one?” Glass followed her inside. Although the house was supposed to be theirs now, his and Louise’s-her father had made it over to her, for tax reasons, mainly-Glass always felt a visitor here. Yet he could not but be fond of the place, in a distant sort of way. The tranquil atmosphere that reigned within its warmly burnished walls was a legacy of the simple-living people who had hewn and planed these timbers a hundred years ago or more.

  They walked through to the wooden verandah at the back, where there were a couple of porch swings with wheat-colored cushions and a long, low table, much scarred and stamped with the marks of the many dewed-over glasses that had been set down on it through the years, another form of age rings. Big Bill was there, reclining on one of the swings with his feet on the table and his ankles crossed, reading The Wall Street Journal. It always fascinated Glass that rich men actually read the Journal; what could it possibly tell them that they did not know already, and in far more intricate and dirty detail? The old man wore chinos and a pale pink cashmere sweater, and loafers without socks. Even his ankles were tanned. “John!” he said, and folded the newspaper. “How was the journey?”

  “He hates the Jitney,” Louise said.

  “Too bad. Did you take the new one, with those roomy leather seats?”

  “I hate that even more than the old one,” Glass said.

  His father-in-law laughed. “You’re like all us Irish,” he said. “You love to suffer.”

  Manuela, the Filipina maid, appeared with a jug of fresh lemonade and three tall glasses. She set the tray on the table and stood back, smoothing her hands down her apron and smiling at the floor. It was a standing joke in the family that Manuela was hopelessly and incurably infatuated with John Glass, who always confused her in his mind with Clara, Louise’s maid in Manhattan. He asked her now to bring him a gin and tonic and she nodded mutely and fled. Louise poured lemonade for herself and her father. Glass went and leaned against the wooden rail of the verandah and lit a cigarette. Below him the smooth lawn stretched away to a high bank of oaks that marked the boundary of the garden. From beyond and above the trees came the sounds of mingled talk and spurts of laughter and even, faintly, the tinkling of glasses; Winner the book agent owned the next house up the hill; Winner was famous for his parties. Manuela came back with Glass’s drink and scampered off again.

  “It says here,” Big Bill said, laying a hand on the folded newspaper beside him on the seat, “that Ulster is the next place to watch. Huge economic potential just waiting for the right boost to get it going.” He leaned down and twisted his head to read from the page. “ The Protestant Pound is set to give the Euro a run for its money. I like that-the Protestant Pound!”

  “Chasing Catholic credit,” Glass said.

  Big Bill gave a small nod and a restrained, tolerant smile. “First they’ll have to break with the Brits,” he said.

  Louise, sitting with her glass at the other end of the swing, laughed lightly. “That’s been tried, surely?”

  Her father shook his head. “British tax law strangles enterprise. That’s what you people in the Republic”-he wa
s addressing Glass-“that’s what you understood, the need to slash corporation taxes. Now I remember…”

  Glass sipped his drink and gazed up at the dense wall of budding trees at the end of the lawn. A thing like a tumbril was making its lumbering way slowly through his head: he could almost feel the wheels creaking. Above all states of mind, boredom was the one he went most in fear of. His father-in-law was recounting the oft-told tale of how, twenty-five years before, he had called a secret meeting of Northern Ireland’s leaders on the Isle of Man for the purpose of knocking their heads together and making them see sense about the future of their most misfortunate statelet. Now Glass interrupted him. “Did Charles Varriker accompany you on that historic occasion?”

  It was Louise and not her father who registered the sharpest surprise. She stared at her husband and for a second it seemed her lower lip trembled. “Why, John,” she murmured, as if he had shouted out an obscenity. Her father looked from Glass to her and back again, fumblingly, like a thrown rider struggling to climb back on his horse. His eyes were suddenly baffled and old. “Charlie?” he said. “No, no, Charlie was dead by then. Why are you asking about him?” He turned to his daughter again, querulously. “Why is he asking about Charlie?”

  Louise had regained her equilibrium. She ignored her father’s question, and set her lemonade glass firmly on the table and rose. “I must talk to Manuela about dinner,” she said, and walked away into the house, slowly, deliberately, holding her back very straight, as if to prevent herself from breaking into a run.

  Left alone, the two men were silent for a time. Big Bill looked this way and that at the floor around his feet, as though vaguely in search of something he had dropped. Glass lit a cigarette from the stub of the one he had just finished smoking down to the filter. He felt almost queasy, out here over these deeps and headed into darkness, knowing only how little he knew.