“Charlie Varriker,” Big Bill said, in a tone at once morose and defensive, “was one of the finest men it’s been my privilege to know. He was great because he was good.” He looked up at Glass, and there was a fierce light in his face now. “You know what I mean by that? You got any conception of what I mean by that? Goodness is not a quality that’s much valued, nowadays. It’s become kind of old-fashioned. Charlie was like that, Charlie was old-fashioned. He believed in honor, decency, loyalty to his friends. Just as I was about to be flayed alive he saved my financial skin, and asked no thanks for it. That was Charlie. He was good, and he was great, and I loved him.” He stood up, wincing at some twinge, some inner pinch, and looked out across the garden with eyes from which the light had gone, and that seemed glazed over and opaque now, like windowpanes on which frost has begun to form. “Yes,” he said, “I loved him.”
He turned and walked into the house, following the way his daughter had gone. Glass, still leaning on the wooden rail, smoked the rest of his cigarette, then flicked the butt out onto the grass. The faintest of sounds had started up, and now when he looked out into the air he saw that a fine rain had begun to fall.
Louise and he ate dinner alone, waited on with catlike attentiveness by the unspeaking Manuela. They were in the Indian Room. There were Edward Curtis originals on the walls, and Hopi pots stood in rows on custom-built shelving. The rain whispered on the leaded window beside them, and a greenish light suffused this front half of the room. Louise’s father was resting, she said. “I wish you hadn’t mentioned Charles Varriker. It upsets him to have to recall all that.”
“Yes, that was apparent.”
She was cutting a steamed asparagus spear into four equal lengths. “What did he say about him-about Charlie?”
“That he loved him.”
She gave an odd little laugh. “Loved him?” she said. “He hated him. And feels guilty, of course.”
“who?”
“Why what?”
“Why did he hate him, and why does he feel guilty about him?”
She paused, with knife and fork lifted, and looked at him. “I suppose you think,” she said, “in your usual nasty-minded journalist’s way, that Billuns has something to feel guilty for.”
“I wish to God you wouldn’t call your father by that ridiculous name.”
She narrowed her eyes in gathering anger but he went quickly on: “You said he feels guilty. Why, if he’s not guilty in some way?”
“You’re Irish,” she said. “Are you telling me it’s not possible for people to feel guilt even when they’re entirely blameless?”
“No one is ever entirely blameless.”
“Oh, don’t give me that!” she said, her contempt as quick as a slap across the face. “You can do better than that.”
“Then tell me why he feels guilty. There must be a reason.”
“He feels guilty because he hated Charlie Varriker, and loved him, and because Charlie saved Mulholland Cable from disaster, and because Charlie killed himself. Don’t you know anything about human beings?”
They sat for a long moment with gazes locked, and then went back to their plates. The day was ending and the green of twilight was intensifying. Manuela came and lit the two tall candles that stood at either end of the table, and went away again.
“Tell me what happened,” Glass said to his wife. “Tell me what happened between Varriker and your father.”
“Nothing happened. They were partners, or at least Charlie thought they were-my father is not the type to be a partner, as I’m sure you’re aware. He ran Mulholland Cable like a department of the CIA, on a”-she smiled thinly-“on a need-to-know basis. Which meant no one knew anything beyond their own little area, except Billuns, who knew everything. That was the trouble, that secretiveness, that… arrogance. My father treated men as agents, soldiers, fighters-killers, I suppose-but business isn’t warfare, or espionage, either, whatever people say. When things started to go wrong he didn’t know how to make them right. That was why he brought in Charlie Varriker. Because Charlie was charm-oh, pure charm. And Charlie fixed the business, mended it. And then…” She stopped, and looked out at the rain and the gathering dusk.
“And then,” Glass said, “he killed himself.”
“Yes,” his father-in-law said from the doorway, where he had entered unnoticed by either of them. “That’s what he did.” He came forward into the candlelight and the greenish glow from the window. His face was drawn and gray. “The goddamned fool took my Beretta and shot himself”-he lifted a finger and pointed-“right here, through the eye.”
13
SOME LIKE IT HOT
B y morning the rain had cleared, and the vast blue sky was so pale it was almost white. John Glass sat on the pitch pine verandah with his coffee and his cigarettes and watched the sunlight stealthily leaching the night’s shadows out of the trees. He had slept badly and woken at dawn. He had sat first in the big central living room and tried to read, but the silent house with other people asleep in it made him uneasy and so he had come out here. The salt air was cold still. Birds swooped down swiftly to the lawn in pursuit of the early worm and then flew up again.
He was wondering at what time Captain Ambrose started work. He needed to talk to the policeman; there were questions he needed to ask him. He had been wrong about Dylan Riley, all wrong. He had a sense of smoldering anger that at any moment might flare into flame.
Later, he was eating a silent breakfast with Louise in the big sunfilled kitchen when David Sinclair arrived from the city. His mother rose from the table and kissed him, and then held him for a moment at arm’s length, scanning his face and touching him lightly here and there with her fingertips, as if to check him for damage. She worried about the places David frequented, the Chelsea clubs and dives where he spent most his nights. “I know so little of what he does,” she would say. “He won’t tell me anything.” Glass had no comment to make; this was territory he did not venture into willingly.
“ Uh- oh,” David said now, lifting his head and pretending to sniff the air. “This at mosphere that I’m getting. Have you two been having a long day’s journey into night? I can almost hear the foghorns.” He was wearing a blazer with brass buttons and a crest on the pocket, and white duck trousers and an open-necked white shirt and a Liberty cravat. All he lacked was a yachting cap. The young man had as many personalities as he had outfits. And he had seen too many movies. Today he was Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, camp lisp and all. When his mother asked how he had managed to arrive so early he said he had driven up, setting out at six while the dawn was still an hour off. “They say the city never sleeps,” he said, “but it does, it does. There wasn’t a soul about, not even a bag lady.” He turned suddenly to Glass. “Anybody else get shot since I saw you last?”
Big Bill appeared then, unshaven, in a terrycloth robe and purple velvet slippers. He looked greatly unwell. The tanned skin of his cheeks still had a grayish tinge, and the stubble on his chin glittered like spilled grains of salt. After her father had gone to bed the night before, Louise had berated her husband yet again for bringing up the painful subject of Charles Varriker and his suicide. “Don’t you think he deserves a bit of peace,” she had said, “after all these years?” Peace, Glass thought, did not come into it; peace was not the point.
“Good morning, Granddad,” David Sinclair said, with exaggerated deference.
Big Bill gave him a sliding glance from under his eyebrows and muttered something and sat down at the table. Glass wondered how Louise had persuaded her father to let her hand over the directorship of the Mulholland Trust to a young man who was the old man’s opposite in every way imaginable. Would he understand it, he wondered, if he had a daughter who herself had a son? The subtleties of familial loves and loyalties baffled him; his own father had died too young.
Big Bill drank the coffee that Louise had poured for him and crumbled a piece of bread in his fingers but did not eat it. Glass noticed the tremor in his h
and. He had aged overnight. “Need someone to drive me down to St. Andrew’s,” he said. St. Andrew’s in Sag Harbor was where he heard Mass on Sundays when he was at Silver Barn.
“You can do that, can’t you, darling?” Louise said to her son.
“But of course,” David said, with fake eagerness, and turned to his grandfather. “I’ll come to Mass, too. Simply can’t resist those gorgeous vestments.”
He winked at Glass. Big Bill said nothing.
In the end all four of them climbed into David Sinclair’s vintage open-top gold Mercedes, the old man in the passenger seat and Glass and Louise crowded together in the back. As they drew away from the house and set off down the hill Glass realized he had forgotten to call Captain Ambrose. Was he afraid of what the policeman might have to tell him? And would it be any more than he suspected, any more than he dreaded? Without wanting to, he knew now, he was sure of it, who had shot Dylan Riley. Or who had arranged for him to be shot.
At the church it was apparent that Big Bill expected them to accompany him inside, but Glass said he would take a walk down by the water, and insisted that Louise should come with him. The old man grunted and turned abruptly and set off across the street to the church. David looked at his mother and smiled inquiringly. “Go on,” she said, “go with him. He’ll be pleased.”
There were not many people at the harbor, the season proper not having begun yet. They walked out onto the Long Wharf. The water swayed and wallowed, sluggish as oil in the calm of morning. Across the bay the low hills on Shelter Island, where the last of winter seemed to linger still, were a surly olive green. The sharp air, reeking of iodine and salt, stung their nostrils.
“Tell me about Charles Varriker,” Glass said.
Louise was wearing knee-high black leather boots and a tweed cape over a heavy Aran sweater. She walked with her arms tightly folded against the chill of morning. She was pale, and her eyes had a faintly haunted look. He suspected she, too, had passed a sleepless night. He wondered what she was thinking now; he always wondered what she was thinking.
“Tell you what?” she said. “What can I tell you, that I haven’t already?”
“Why did he kill himself?”
“Why does anybody? No one ever knows.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“Of course not.” She stopped, and turned to him. “Why are you so interested in this?”
“Dylan Riley found out something, something I thought at first had to do with me but now I think had to do with Varriker. And before you ask, I don’t know what it was.”
They walked on.
“I wish,” Louise said, “that you’d start being a journalist again. You need something to occupy you.”
“That’s what the priests used to tell us-an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Good title for a book, don’t you think? The Devil ’ s Workshop. Maybe that’s what I’ll call Big Bill’s biography.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I thought it was.”
“You love to needle me, don’t you? It’s a kind of hobby for you.”
A little white sailing boat with sails furled and its outboard going came weaving through the throngs of millionaires’ yachts, cleaving a clean furrow in the water that, close in here, had a milky shine like the inner lining of an oyster shell. A whiskery fellow in a sailor’s cap and faded blue sailcloth trousers rolled to the knee stood in the prow with one bare foot planted on the topmost strake. It amused Glass that everyone here dressed the part, like hopeful extras waiting for the camera crew to arrive.
They came to a little restaurant adorned with knotted ropes and red-and-white lifebuoys and festoons of fishing net. They took an outside table from where they could watch the Old Man of the Sea tying up his boat to a post of rough-hewn timber. A buxom girl with a big toothy smile came and took their order. Louise sat low in her chair with her hands clasped under her cape and her booted legs thrust out before her, crossed at the ankles. “I don’t want to talk to you about Charlie Varriker,” she said.
“Then I’ll ask your father.” He waited, and she said nothing. “There’s something not right here, Lou. And it’s to do with Varriker, I’m sure of it. I don’t know how, but I’m sure.”
“Since when,” she flashed at him, “did you start to care again about things not being right?” She continued glaring for a moment, then turned aside with her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. “Charlie was a good man,” she said. “He didn’t deserve to die. That wasn’t right.”
“Dylan Riley didn’t deserve to die, either.”
“Oh, yes?” she said, and gave him a sardonic look. “And you’re going to avenge his death, are you?”
“I want to know for certain who killed him. Maybe I’ve decided to be a journalist again, as you say I should.” He waited, then said: “What happened, with Charlie Varriker? Tell me, Lou.”
The old sailor, squatting on his heels, was fashioning an elaborate knot in the boat’s painter. He had lit a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, from where a line of smoke ran straight up into his left eye. He knew, Glass saw, that Louise was watching him; male vanity never ages.
The girl brought their coffee.
“Charlie was Billuns’s best recruit,” Louise said.
“At the CIA?”
She ignored the question as too obvious to require an answer. “Billuns was so proud of him. God knows the things he had got him to do-there had been some ‘op,’ as they used to say, in Vietnam that Charlie would never talk about, that had been a great success, just before the Tet Offensive. They used to get drunk together and make toasts to Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. They were like schoolboys, or like a schoolboy and his teacher.” She stopped.
“And?”
Louise sipped her coffee and grimaced. “It’s hot,” she said, “be careful.” The old sailor had gone. A family of five fatties waddled past, making the wharf groan under them. The three roly-poly children wore identical, brand-new Sag Harbor T-shirts. One of them, a girl, had an exquisitely pretty face encased in a football of fat. Louise resumed her cheerless sprawl, shoving her hands into the sleeves of her sweater. “And nothing,” she said. “Billuns brought in Charlie to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong at Mulholland Cable, and he did, he fixed it. He could fix anything, with that way of his. And then he killed himself.” She was looking out at the drab green hills across the bay, her eyes narrowed again and her mouth making tiny movements behind tightened lips as if she were biting on something small and hard between her teeth.
“How well did you know him?” Glass asked.
“Who-Charlie? He was Billuns’s employee, then his partner, then he was dead. People came and went like that, in our life, in those days. It was a hectic time. Things changed from one day to the next. Someone was there and then gone. That was the kind of world it was.”
“And you hated it.” Only when he had said it did it strike him as surely true.
“What was there to hate?” she said, on a suddenly weary note. “It was my life. It was what I knew. There was no changing that.”
“You mean,” he said, “there was no escaping it?”
She smiled, for what seemed to him the first time in a long time. “ You were supposed to be my escape,” she said.
“What about Mr. Sinclair?”
“Oh, he was just”-she waved a hand, again in seeming weariness-“he was just someone along the way.”
“Along the way to me?”
“Just-along the way.”
The sun’s faint warmth was lifting a tarry smell from the wooden tabletop between them.
“I’m sorry,” Glass said, not knowing exactly what it was he was sorry for.
To his surprise, she reached out and touched the back of his hand with her fingertips. “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m not. Not really.” Then she pushed her coffee cup aside and stood up, pulling the heavy cape close about her. “Brr,” she said, “I’m cold. Let’s go-Mass will be over by now.”
&n
bsp; When they got back to the church Big Bill and his grandson were already in the car. Sitting upright there, the top half of Big Bill looked like a ruined monument to some immemorial chieftain, his eagle’s profile and dark crest of hair suggesting a warrior race, long extinct. “I told you you had upset him,” Louise murmured.
David Sinclair saw them and waved. “We had a wonderful sermon, very edifying,” he said. “Mammon and the media and the craze for celebrity. How modern the priesthood has become all of a sudden. Not so long ago it was hellfire and the hope of salvation. What happened to good old-timey religion, that’s what I want to know.”
His grandfather sat motionless, seeming not to hear him. When he blinked, his eyelids fell like miniature canvas flaps. They drove back up to the house in silence except for Sinclair’s happy humming. As they traveled inland the salt-sea smell gave way to scents of grass and pine. In the backseat Glass tried to catch his wife’s eye but she looked out steadily at the road, her hair shaking in the wind.
Manuela had set out drinks in the drawing room, lemonade, her specialty, and herb tea for Big Bill and Louise, and Glass’s habitual gin and ice and lemon and tonic water. But Glass did not feel like drinking, and walked out to the verandah and smoked a cigarette instead. The birds, quieter now, browsed among the trees, whistling and chattering. Presently David Sinclair came out, carrying a tall tumbler of lemonade. Glass ignored him, hoping he would go away, but the young man instead sat down on one of the swings and began happily rocking himself forward and back, his feet lifted free of the floor. “They’re planning a pow-wow on my future,” he said. “Mother and Billuns, that is. I’m supposed to join them, but really, I can’t face it.” He smiled, compressing his lips, which were so pink they might have been painted. “You don’t believe in all this for one little moment, do you?-I mean me as pontiff of the one, holy, and apostolic Mulholland Trust.”
The Lemur Page 10