Benjamin Black - The Lemur

“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.”

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.