The Lemur

by Benjamin Black

  “I believe,” Glass said, “that the Trust does good work.”

  “Oh, yes,” David said, heaving a histrionic sigh. “That’s what makes it so boring.”

  Glass heard himself breathing, as he always did when he was angry. He threw away his cigarette and turned aside, muttering something, and walked into the house, and up to his bedroom, and shut the door behind him and sat on the side of the bed and picked up the telephone and dialed, and after a moment said: “Captain Ambrose, is he there? I’d like to speak to him. Glass, tell him. John Glass.”

  14

  THE LOVE NEST

  W hen Glass arrived at his office next morning there was message waiting on the answering machine. It was from Terri Taylor, to say good-bye. Her father had come in from Des Moines and she was flying back with him-“going home to Insurance Land,” as she said, with one of her snuffly, apologetic little laughs. The machine made her voice sound hollow and distant, as if she were speaking already from way out on those far plains. He found, to his surprise, that he was touched she should have thought to call him, but then he reflected that perhaps she had no one else in New York to say good-bye to.

  He sat down at his desk. He had expected there would be a message from Alison O’Keeffe. He thought of calling her, and even picked up the phone, but set it back again, slowly, in its notch. And immediately the thing rang.

  “Wilson Cleaver here. How you doing, brother?” Cleaver sounded chirpy and amused, as usual, enjoying immensely his ongoing private joke at the world’s expense. “What’s the news, Sherlock? You catch the dastardly culprit yet who gave our nosey friend one in the eye?”

  “No. But I think I know who it was.”

  That brought a silence on the line. Cleaver breathed for a while, thinking, and then said: “You care to say a name?” More silence. “No, I guess not.”

  “I want to talk to you. About Charles Varriker.”

  “Heh heh. Now where’d I hear that name before?”

  They met at an Irish bar on Broadway. The bar was Cleaver’s suggestion, another detail added to the big joke’s already crowded scenario. Muldoon’s was a great dim barn of a place, with tricolors on the walls and shamrocks everywhere, and framed parchments with droll Irish verses graven in curlicued script, and a muscular bar girl in an outfit of black felt and bits of white lace that might have been worn by a Welsh milkmaid in a time of myth. Cleaver today wore jeans and a leather jacket and scuffed sneakers, an outfit in which he looked almost ordinary. He ordered a pint of Guinness, and Glass asked for a Jameson, despite the early hour. “Varriker,” he said. “What do you know about him?”

  Cleaver did his eye-widening act. “Man, you the one with all the knowledge-you tell me.”

  “When we had that drink, at the Tavern on the Green, you knew a lot of things about him. You even knew what day of the week he died on. What got you so interested in him that you made it your business to find out all that?”

  Cleaver showed his dusty-pink palms. “I told you, I was reading up on Big Bill Mulholland. A lot of facts fell out. You know how it is.”

  “Useless facts, or otherwise?”

  Cleaver dipped a prehensile upper lip into the creamy froth of his Guinness and sucked up a wedge of the shiny, ebony-colored stout. “Jesus,” he said, grimacing, “how do you guys drink this stuff?”

  Glass indicated his shot glass. “I don’t.”

  “You don’t drink Guinness? What kind of an Irishman are you, brother? You ain’t even got red hair.”

  The brawny barmaid hovered near them, eavesdropping on their talk while pretending to be polishing the countertop.

  “Listen,” Glass said, “I think Varriker is the key to everything.”

  Cleaver gave him an exaggerated stare, still playing at being Mister Bones. There were tiny red striations all over the slightly yellowish whites of his eyes. “‘Everything’ being Dylan Riley getting whacked? How come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Cleaver took this in, sucking his teeth at one side and slowly nodding.

  “What do you know about Varriker’s death?” Glass asked. “Where was he when he died?”

  “Place up near Harlem. Had a room in an apartment house there, pretty run-down. Sounded like a love nest, to my suspicious way of thinking. Left no note, nothing. And all the time that first-class ticket to gay Paree was waiting for him at an Amex office over there on Lexington. Course, people do the darnedest things on the spur of the moment, even down to shooting their brains out.”

  Glass was looking into his whiskey. “Do you know how he was shot?” he asked.

  Cleaver said nothing.

  “Through the eye, with a Beretta. Just like Dylan Riley. Now that , my friend, that is a coincidence.” He left his untouched drink on the bar and stood. “And if it’s not,” he asked, “then what is it?”

  Cleaver followed him into the street. They stood together for a moment, unsure how to part. The day glared unreally, in a parody of April weather, the sunlight glancing in spikes off car roofs and shopwindows. A fat mauve cloud with an edge of burning magnesium was elbowing its way up the narrow strip of sky above Fifth Avenue.

  “You know,” Cleaver said, “that blackmail stuff with Riley. It wasn’t real. He didn’t care about money. It was you he cared about, what he thought you were doing to yourself.”

  Glass said nothing. He knew it was true, so what was there to say?

  Cleaver smiled. “You look to me,” he said, “like a man about to cause an awful lot of trouble.” He had at last let drop the black-and-white-minstrel act. “Do I need to urge you to take it easy, to watch your back?”

  Glass was squinting up at the advancing rain cloud. “I want you to do something for me,” he said.

  “Anything for a comrade.”

  “If nothing comes of this-if I get nowhere-if I’m stopped, and you hear no more of all this, don’t let it go. Keep digging, and publish what you turn up. Don’t worry about Mulholland or what he can do. Just keep on.”

  Cleaver was half smiling, with eyebrows lifted and his head held on one side. “That’s what we do, my friend,” he said. “We keep on.” He offered a hand. “Good luck.”

  When, half an hour later, Glass got to the apartment overlooking the Park there were shadows standing like transparent pillars in the high rooms. The cloud over the city had released its rain and moved on, and the sun was in the streets again, but indoors a wistful dimness persisted, vague as memory. Glass moved through a silence that seemed to cling like gauze. “All hands,” he murmured, his usual greeting, but with no one to hear.

  In the library he found his father-in-law sitting in the middle of the white sofa, straight-backed as always, with head erect, in the pose of a tribal elder, his big liver-spotted hands set on his knees and his feet in their handmade brogues planted side by side on the polished parquet. Glass wished that he could just turn now and walk away, away to a time before the Lemur had come to his office, before Captain Ambrose had called him, before he had met Cleaver, before anyone had died.

  The old man started, and looked at him, keeping his head set forward and only swiveling his eyes sideways. “What do you want?” he asked.

  Glass sat down opposite him on a delicate Regency chair with a striped silk seat and curved legs ending in lion’s claws. “I want,” he said, “to know the truth about Charles Varriker.”

  The old man gave a phlegmy laugh. “It’s my life story you’re supposed to be writing, not Charlie Varriker’s.”

  “You hated him. Why?”

  He shrugged. “What if I did? He was good, but just too damned good. That was supposed to be my thing, I was the one who was virtuous despite all the odds. But Charlie was better. Charlie was truly a virtuous man. It was unnatural. And it grated on me.”

  “And therefore he had to die.”

  Big Bill had stopped listening, and was looking about distractedly. “You think you could fix me a drink?” he asked. “I really need a drink.”

  Faintl
y, from the hallway, Glass heard the whirr of the elevator as it came to life; someone had called it. He went into the dining room and poured a shot of Bushmills whiskey over a glass of ice and brought it back to the library and handed it to his father-in-law. The old man held the glass in both hands and drank greedily, the ice cubes knocking, then leaned back against the sofa wiping at his lips with his fingertips. “What did you say about Charlie’s death?” he asked. “All I know is it was a crime and a sin, and I don’t forgive him for it.”

  “Did you kill him?” Glass asked.

  For a moment it seemed that Big Bill had not heard. Then he turned his weary eyes again and looked at his son-in-law for a long moment, expressionless. “What are you talking about, you stupid son of a bitch?” he said at last, softly. “Kill him? Why would I kill him?”

  “I don’t know. Because you hated him.”

  “He killed himself, for Christ’s sake. He shot himself through the Goddamned eye, with my gun-I told you.”

  “Yes, I know you did. But that’s how Dylan Riley was shot, too. With a Beretta. Through the eye.”

  “What?” The old man was shaking his head. “I don’t understand-what do you mean?”

  The lift was whirring again, and there was the faint clatter of it rising. Glass had been wondering where Clara the maid could be-perhaps this was she, coming back from the store.

  “Dylan Riley,” Glass said, “the researcher I hired to work for me. He was shot in just the same way that Varriker was, through the eye, with a Beretta. I think you did it. I think you shot Varriker, and Riley found out somehow, and then you had to shoot him, too. Or maybe you had it done-maybe you called in a favor from your old friends in the Company. Is that what happened?”

  When Louise and her son came into the room Glass experienced a moment of incongruous pure flashback to his boyhood, when he and his own mother on some unremembered afternoon must have entered a room somewhere in just this way, carrying packages and talking together and bringing with them the cool air of outdoors, with all its spring fragrances of trees in leaf and rained-on pavements, the delicate, drenched, petrol-blue air of April. He closed his eyes for a second. Why should he not just shut up now, claw back what had already been said-Big Bill seemed lost in bewilderment-and let the whole thing go, forget what he thought he knew, leave the dead to their own devices. If he kept on he would destroy the world that he and Louise had worked so long and hard to hold intact, to smash the elaborate jewel box that both contained and supplied adornment for his life. Was that what he really wanted?

  Big Bill stood up lumberingly, half the whiskey in his glass splashing on the carpet. “Lou,” he said, in a loud, whining voice, as if she were much farther away from him than she was, “you know what this guy is accusing me of?” He turned his furious, narrow glare on his son-in-law. “You tell her!”

  Louise had stopped motionless in the middle of the floor. She was wearing a little green coat tightly belted at the waist and her spunsugar Philip Treacy hat. Her face had gone as pale as paper. She looked quickly from her father to Glass and back again, scanning, assessing, calculating. David Sinclair, resembling today a sleek young priest, in a black silk suit and white polo-neck, took the shopping packages from her hands and set them with his own on a low table by the fireplace and turned back, smiling eagerly, avid for whatever might be coming next.

  “Dylan Riley telephoned me on the day he was murdered,” Glass said, looking at none of them but conscious of their eyes on him. He could hear himself breathing, hisss- hiss, hisss -hiss. “He phoned twice, in fact. Only one of those calls reached me, in the office. The second time he called, he called here.” It was what he had remembered Captain Ambrose saying, that Riley’s phone had logged two telephone calls to him; what Ambrose had omitted to say, until Glass phoned him yesterday from Bridgehampton, was that the two calls had been made to different numbers, one at the office in Mulholland Tower, and the other here at the apartment. “What I’m wondering is, who took the second call?”

  Mulholland lumbered a step forward until he was looming over his son-in-law. The knuckles of his hand that held the whiskey glass were white under the suntan. He swayed a little. “What are you trying to do here?” he asked, almost plaintively. “What kind of mischief are you trying to make?”

  Glass lit a cigarette with a hand that shook.

  “He’s saying,” David Sinclair said, still smiling, his eyes aglitter, “that a person in this room shot Dylan Riley-only he has the wrong person.”

  “David!” Louise cried, and it was as if something had propelled itself out of her, a tangible fragment of woe, and then, “ Da vid,” she said again, softly. “Stop, please stop.”

  Her son ignored her. He looked at Glass and his smile became almost tender. “But it’s true, isn’t it, Monsieur Poirot?” He stood with his hands lightly in the pockets of his jacket, his thumbs hooked on the outside, in the pose of an English royal. A knotted nerve was twitching at one side of his mouth. Big Bill gave a sort of groan, twisting up his lips as if at some awful taste, and set the tumbler down with a thud on the little table where the parcels were stacked. “This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t understand this.” He turned abruptly and shambled off, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. Louise spoke his name but he waved a hand behind him, shooing away her appeal in angry dismissiveness, and went on. At the door he paused for a moment, still with his back turned to the room, his head lowered, then softly he opened the door and went out and as softly shut it behind him again.

  “Well well,” David Sinclair said into the silence of his grandfather’s departure, “and then there were three!”

  Louise, as if coming suddenly out of a trance, put a hand to her forehead and shut her eyes briefly. “This is,” she said, “this is…” and could not finish. She opened her eyes and looked at her husband. “Why are you doing this? You don’t need to, you don’t need to… to…”

  “ Need? ” Glass said. “Where does need come into it?”

  “He doesn’t understand,” David said to his mother, as if to soothe her. “He’s just an old broken-down reporter who’s missed the story entirely.” He smiled again at Glass. “Haven’t you? Because you see, Dad, it’s Murder on the Orient Express. We all did it, all of us-including you.”

  15

  ALL IN THE FAMILY

  T hroughout his life, so it seemed, John Glass had been running to women for solace. People had remarked when he was young on his closeness to his mother-one of his aunts used to say, with a sour little sniff, that he was more like her boyfriend than her son. Louise, too, he had looked to for reassurance and protection. He suspected it was mainly this that he had married her for, to be his shield against the world’s buffetings. And she, what had she hoped for from him?

  When he stopped on Bleecker Street and pressed the doorbell the intercom did its rattle and squawk and then Alison O’Keeffe answered. He spoke his name. “How did I know it would be you?” she said, with rueful weariness. “How did I know that?”

  Huddled in the doorway, misting the metal grille with his breath, Glass was reminded of sweaty sessions in the confession box, long ago. He said: “I need to talk to you.”

  Another pause. “Well, you’d better come up, then.”

  When he stepped out of the elevator she was waiting in the doorway in her painter’s dark blue smock. She led him upstairs to the little cold apartment, where she sat down in an armchair and lit a Gauloise. She blew an angry-seeming trumpet of smoke at the ceiling. “Well?” she said. “What is it you need to talk about so urgently?”

  The sun of late afternoon shone in the mansard window above them, setting a beam of pale gold light to stand at a slant behind her chair. He lit one of his Marlboros.

  “Do you know anything about quantum physics?” he asked. She said nothing. “Neither do I, or not much, anyway. But there’s an experiment scientists do, when they fire an atomic particle at a surface with two narrow slits in it, and wait for what will happen on th
e other side. What happens is that an interference pattern forms, as if the particle was not a particle but a wave. In other words, the single particle seems to go through both slits at the same time, and”-he laughed-“interfere with itself!” Alison watched him impassively. Billows of pale blue smoke from their cigarettes rolled and tumbled together in the sunlight behind her. “That’s strange enough,” he said, “but what’s stranger still is that the particle only behaves like that, like a wave, when it’s not being observed. When you’re looking at the particle it stays a particle, and when you’re not looking it becomes a wave.”

  She waited. He drew on his cigarette, glancing vaguely here and there about the room and frowning. She asked: “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about how hard it is to know anything for certain. I thought I knew who killed Dylan Riley, but I didn’t.”

  A lengthy silence passed, then Alison gave a sort of laugh. “And I thought you had come here to talk about us.” She turned her eyes aside angrily. “So tell me,” she said, “who did kill him?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I was wrong.” He looked around for a place to stub out his cigarette. “I should go.”

  “Yes,” she said, her face still turned away from him. “You should.”

  He walked the streets for a long time, as the day died and the million lights of Manhattan began to come on. He had never felt such a stranger to the city. He ducked into a dive on Broadway and drank whiskey, slumped at the bar in the amber and pink gloom surrounded by indistinct figures like himself, whose faces would materialize for a moment when they leaned down into the harsh white glare coming up from the strip-lighting under the rim of the bar to take a sip from their glasses and then retire back into the shadows. After the third shot he dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and hustled himself out into the night again.