Read The Lemur Online

Authors: Benjamin Black

Tags: #Family Life, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

The Lemur (2 page)

BOOK: The Lemur
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“I’ve got to get my head around this, get organized, decide priorities. Then we’ll talk again.” By now Glass had the door open. The much used air in the corridor smelled faintly of burnt rubber. “I’ve got to get my head around
you,
too,” Riley said, with a suddenly bitter laugh. “I used to read you, you know, in the
Guardian
, in
Rolling Stone, the New York Review.
And now you’re writing Big Bill Mulholland’s life story.” He inflated his cheeks and released the air in them with a tiny, plosive sound. “Wow,” he said, and turned away.
Glass shut the door and walked back to his desk, and when he reached it, as if at a signal, the telephone rang. “This is Security, Mr. Glass. Your wife is here.”
For a moment Glass said nothing. He touched the chair Dylan Riley had sat in, and again it made its tiny protest:
eek, eek.
The young man had left a definite odor on the air, a grayish, rank spoor.
A lemur! That was the creature Dylan Riley resembled. Yes, of course. A lemur.
“Tell her to come up,” John Glass said.
 
LOUISE
 
Louise
Glass was forty-eight and looked thirty. She was tall and slim and a redhead, though these days most of the red came out of a bottle. Her skin was pale to the point of translucency, and her sharp-featured face was lovely from some angles and fascinatingly harsh from others. She was, Glass acknowledged to himself, for the umpteenth time, a magnificent woman, and he no longer loved her. It was strange. One day, around the time he had given up being a journalist, all that he had felt for her, all that helpless, half-tormented passion, had dropped to degree zero. It was as if the flesh-and-blood woman had, like an enchanted princess in a fairy tale, been turned to stone in his arms. There she was, as she had always been, a smooth, svelte, burnished beauty, at the mere sight of whom in former days something in him would cry out piteously, in a kind of happy languish, but whose presence now provoked in him only a faint, fading melancholy.
Today she wore a dark green suit and a Philip Treacy hat that was a minuscule square of black velvet topped with a few wisps of what might be spun sugar.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look ghastly.”
“It’s this place.”
She looked about the office, frowning. It was she who had suggested he borrow the room—her father owned the building. “What’s wrong with it?”
He did not want to admit his fright at being almost forty floors above street level. “It’s too impersonal. I don’t know if I can write here.”
“You could work at the apartment.”
“You know I can’t write at home.”
She settled on him her gray-green gaze. “
Is
it home?” The silence that followed this was a chasm into which they both cast a glance and then stepped quickly back.
“You could go out to Silver Barn.” Silver Barn was their—her—house on Long Island. “The study is all set up. It’s quiet, no one to disturb you.” He pulled a face. “Well then,” she said, with a tightening of the lips, “if you can’t work, you can take me to lunch.”
They walked east along Forty-fourth Street and Glass at last got to smoke a cigarette. The fine rain drifted down absentmindedly, like ectoplasm. The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking. Sometimes when he had a cigarette going he would forget and reach for the pack and start to light another. Maybe that was the thing to do, smoke six at a time, three in the gaps between the fingers of each hand, achieve a Gatling-gun effect.
Mario’s was crowded, as usual these days. The red-check tablecloths and rickety bentwood chairs proclaimed a peasant plainness that was contradicted by the breathtaking prices on the menu. The Glasses had been coming here since the early days of the establishment, long before they had moved permanently to New York, when Mario himself was still in charge and the place really was plain. They had nicknamed it the Bleeding Horse, for reasons no longer remembered. Now Louise gave up her dripping umbrella to a waiter and they were shown to their usual table in a corner by the window, set, Glass noted, for three. Flutes of Prosecco were brought at once. “I wish,” Louise murmured, “I had the courage to tell them what a common drink I think this is.”
Glass said nothing. He liked Prosecco. He liked the gesture, too, the drinks coming uncalled-for and set down before them with an actorly flourish. It made him feel an old New York hand; he could almost see the caption, “Glass in the Bleeding Horse, one of his favorite Manhattan eateries.” He often thought of his life in journalese, it was an old habit. He wondered if Louise considered him common, too, like the wine.
“How
is
the work?” his wife asked, her eyes on the menu. “Have you made a start yet?” The rain-light from the window gave her the look of an early Florentine madonna as she sat there with her long, angular, pale face inclined, and the menu she was holding might have been a psalter.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t made a start. I mean, I haven’t started writing. There are things I have to do first.”
“Research, you mean?”
He looked at her sharply. But there was no way she could know about Dylan Riley; he had told no one about the Lemur. She was still reading the menu, bringing to it the rapt, radiant attention that she brought to everything she did, even, he ruefully recalled, lovemaking. “Yes, research,” he mumbled, “that kind of thing.”
The waiter came and Glass ordered linguine with clams and Louise asked for a plain green salad. It was all she ever ate at lunchtime. Why, then, Glass wondered, did she spend so long poring over the menu? Having taken their order, the waiter pointed his pencil inquiringly at the empty third place, but Louise shook her head. “David might look in,” she told Glass. “I said we’d eat and he could join us for coffee.”
Glass made no comment. David Sinclair was Louise’s son by her first marriage, to a Wall Street lawyer who seemed to have passed through her life leaving hardly a trace, except, of course, the young man who now occupied the center of her world. Glass looked round for the waiter and the wine list; if his stepson was joining them he would need more than a glass of Prosecco.
Their food arrived and they ate in silence for a time. The small rain wept against the windowpane and the cars and taxis going past shimmered and slid as in a wet mirage. Glass was wondering why he felt the need to be so secretive about Dylan Riley. Bill Mulholland’s life was emblematic of the last two-thirds of the chaotic, violent, and dizzyingly innovative century that had ended not so long ago. No one would expect a biographer to do unaided the extensive research that would be required for the writing of the life of such a man—no one except that man himself. Bill Mulholland was the original rugged individualist and required those around him to be made of the same stern stuff. What sort of sissy writer would hire someone else to do the donkeywork? He had offered the commission, along with a million-dollar fee, to his son-in-law because, as he had said, he trusted him; trusted him, that is, as Glass well understood, to leave certain overly heavy stones unturned. It was Glass himself—not his father-in-law, as he had told Dylan Riley—who wanted all the facts, even, or especially, the inconvenient ones. Glass believed Aristotle was right: he that holds a secret holds power.
He took a drink of wine and studied his wife. She was attending to her plate of greens with the long-necked, finical concentration of a heron at the water’s edge. She had urged him strongly to accept her father’s offer. “You used to like nothing better than a challenge,” she had said, “and writing my father’s life will be nothing if not that.” He had noted then, too, the tense employed.
Used to.
“And a million dollars,” she had added, with a lopsided, ironical smile, “is a million dollars.”
It was not the money that had made him take on the job. What, then? He supposed Louise was right. What greater challenge could there be than to write the official biography of his own father-in-law, one of the fiercest and most controversial of that last cohort of Cold Warriors who had, so they believed, brought the Evil Empire to the dust?
“You know you’ll have to give the manuscript to the boys at Langley for their okay,” his father-in-law had told him, with that famous twinkle. “There are some things that can never get told.” And Glass, remembering that remark, thought again now of Nixon, poor old Tricky Dick, sweating under the arc lamps, in another age.
David Sinclair arrived. He was tall and sleekly slim, like his mother, but black-haired and swarthy where she was russet and pearl—Rubin Sinclair, his father, was a hirsute and barely civilized redneck from Kentucky. David was handsome, in a dandyish sort of way, but his slightly protruding eyes were set unfortunately close together—whenever Glass contemplated his stepson he recalled Truman Capote saying of Marlene Dietrich that if her eyes had been a fraction nearer to each other she would have been a chicken. Waspish, wicked Truman. Glass had tried to interview him once, over a hopelessly bibulous lunch at the Four Seasons in the middle of which the sozzled novelist had laid his cheek on the tablecloth and gone noisily to sleep. Glass at the time was young enough not to be embarrassed, and contentedly finished his broiled squab and the remains of a bottle of Mouton Rothschild, calm in the knowledge that the lavish treat was being paid for by the
Sunday Times
of London.
“Hello,” David Sinclair said to Glass, sliding sinuously into his seat and unfolding a napkin across his lap. His attitude always toward his stepfather was one of amused skepticism. “How is the great world?”
Glass smiled thinly. “It wasn’t so great,” he said, “the last time I looked.”
David ordered peppermint tea. He was dressed in a dark wool suit and a white silk shirt and silk tie. His watch was a Patek Philippe, one of the more discreet models. His mother pampered him; he was her only weakness.
“David has some news for you,” she said now. “Haven’t you, darling?”
The young man raised his eyebrows and briefly closed his eyes, his version of a shrug. “I thought you would have told him yourself by now, you’re so excited about it,” he said.
Louise turned to her husband. “David is joining the foundation.”
He looked at her blankly. “The foundation?”
“For goodness’ sake, John! The Mulholland Trust. In fact, he’s going to be the new director.”
“Oh.”
“Is that all you can say—
oh
?”
“I thought
you
were the director.”
“I was. It was becoming too much for me, I told you that. From now on I’ll take a back seat.”
“Isn’t he”—Glass took a small pleasure in speaking pointedly of his stepson as if he were not there—“isn’t he a little young, to take on so great a responsibility?”
David laughed shortly, for some reason of his own, and sipped his tea.
“I’ll still be there, to help him, at first,” Louise said, sharply. She always resented being required to explain herself. “Besides, there’s the staff. They’re all experienced people.”
Glass contemplated the young man sitting with his back to the window and smirking. “Well,” he said, lifting his wineglass, “congratulations, young man.” He tended not to address his stepson by name, if he could help it.
“Thanks,
Dad
,” David said, with high sarcasm, and lifted his teacup to return the toast.
Suddenly Glass remembered the first time he and Louise had met, one April afternoon at John Huston’s mansion near Loughrea in the wet and stormy west of Ireland. He had been a precocious nineteen, and had come to interview the film director for the
Irish Times.
Bill Mulholland and his daughter were there. They had ridden over from the mansion down the valley that Mulholland had recently purchased, and Louise wore stained jodhpurs and a green silk scarf knotted at her throat. She was barely seventeen. Her skin was flushed pink from the ride, and there was a sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her perfect nose, and Glass could hardly speak from the effort of trying not to stare at her. Huston, the old satyr, saw at a glance what was going on in the young man’s breast, and grinned his orangutan’s grin and handed him a dry martini and said: “Here, son, have a bracer.”
David Sinclair had finished his tea and now he rose, shooting his cuffs. He had to be somewhere, he said smoothly, giving the impression that it was somewhere much too important for its name to be spoken aloud in public. Glass saw how pleased with himself he was. Director of the Mulholland Trust at the age of—what was he?—twenty-three? Young enough, Glass thought with satisfaction, to make a serious mess of it. His mother, of course, would shield him from the worst of his mistakes, but Big Bill, the founder of the Trust, was not as fond of his grandson as Louise would wish him to be, and Big Bill was not a great forgiver.
When the young man had gone Louise signaled for the check and turned to her husband and said: “I wonder if you realize how clearly you betray your jealousy.”
Glass stared. “Who am I jealous of?”
She handed her platinum credit card to the waiter, who went away and came back in a moment with the receipt. She signed her fine, firm signature and he gave her the copy and departed. Glass watched as she folded the receipt carefully four times lengthwise and then slipped the spill she had made into her purse. That was Louise’s way: fold and file, fold and file. “I’m surprised Amex haven’t done a card specially for you,” Glass said mildly. “In Kryptonite, perhaps.” She ignored this; his barbed jokes she always ignored. She looked down at the tablecloth, fingering the weave of it. “The Trust does valuable work, you know,” she said, “more than valuable, not least in helping to resolve that late, nasty little conflict in your native land.”
He marvelled always at the way she spoke, in molded sentences, with such preciseness, making such nice discriminations; her three years of study in England, a postgraduate course among the Oxford logical positivists, had honed her diction to a gleaming keenness.
“I know,” he said, trying not to sound petulant, “I know what the Trust does.”
BOOK: The Lemur
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