Benjamin Black - The Lemur

“Like what?”

“Like people that she doesn’t know getting murdered. Her range of concerns is limited. Her stocks portfolio. Getting a really good table at Masa. The quality of the top snow at Klosters this year.” He could not stop. “The Mulholland Trust. Her son’s future. Me getting my comeuppance.”

She tightened her lips. “Go and find us a table,” she said.

They ate at the little French place round the corner where they went most evenings when they were together, which were not many, and were becoming fewer. He did not know why Alison put up with him-he would not have put up with himself. She was lonely, he supposed, as he was, two exiles from a tiny place stranded here amid all this enormity. The image he entertained of America was that of a buffalo standing foursquare with its great head lifted in the direction of old Europe, and him a microbe perched precariously on the tip of the creature’s mighty muzzle. Perhaps he should go home, to Ireland; perhaps they should both go home; together, even; perhaps.

After dinner they strolled over to Washington Square. The rain had stopped and there was a fresh, clean fragrance on the night. Glass recalled their meeting here that winter noon before Christmas when they had walked in the glassy air round and round this bare rectangle, under the spectral trees. The time that had elapsed since then seemed far more than a mere four months. “It was at the Washington Square Bookstore here, in 1920,” he said, “that the head of the Society for the Prevention of Vice, chap called Sumner, I believe, bought a copy of the Little Review with the Gerty MacDowell episode from Ulysses in it, and lodged a complaint with the police that led to the trial of the book for obscenity. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“You’re a mine of information,” Alison said drily.

The air had softened with the coming of darkness. Glass loved this city at night, the flash and gleam of it, the heavy hum of life going on everywhere, driven, undaunted.

“What will you do,” Alison said, “if you find this killing really is somehow connected with Mulholland?”

“I’m not going to find any such thing,” he said, in almost a snarl, surprised at his own anger. He took a measured breath. “I told you, there must be dozens of people who would have been glad to see the last of Dylan Riley. Why do you automatically think my father-in-law must be involved?”

“Why are you being so defensive?”

He sighed. “I’m not defensive. I’m just tired of being crossexamined.”

“You came to me in a panic after Riley phoned you. Have you forgotten? You were terrified he might have found out about you and me. What else were you frightened of, but that he would tell Big Bill Mulholland you were two-timing his daughter?” She linked her arm in his, not out of affection, but sidling close like an assassin, he thought suddenly, positioning herself to drive the dagger all the deeper. “You’ve always been afraid of him,” she said, “of what he could do to you-of what he could take away from you.”

He stopped, and made her stop with him. The square of sky above them had a sickly orange cast. He was breathing heavily, a man at bay. “What do you mean, what he could take away from me?”

She did not reply at once, but stood regarding him with a halfsmile, regretfully sardonic, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “Look at you,” she said. “Look what you’ve become-what they’ve made of you.”

She detached her arm from his then, sadly but firmly relinquishing him, and turned and walked back in the direction of Bleecker Street. He watched her go. Police sirens, two or three of them together, were whooping somewhere close by. He knew he should follow her, the sirens behind him seemed a frantic urging, yet he could not make himself take the first step. She seemed, like so much else, to be receding from him down a long slope that steepened steadily into darkness.

Glass stepped out of the elevator into the apartment and his wife came from the shadows quickly, as if to forestall him, and asked in a low voice, sounding tense and cross, where he had been until this hour. The question was rhetorical; she knew where he had been, more or less. She took his arm, much as Alison O’Keeffe had taken it an hour ago, with urgent and unfond intent. “Billuns is here, and he wants to talk to you. He’s mad about something, I can tell.” Glass said nothing. He might have guessed his father-in-law had arrived. Something happened to an atmosphere when Big Bill Mulholland stepped into it. They walked forward, Louise’s high heels making a sharp rapid noise on the parquet that sounded as if she were clicking her tongue. The light in the apartment was muted, no overhead bulbs burning and all the lamps shedding their subdued radiance downward, as if in deference to the great man’s presence.

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.