Benjamin Black - The Lemur

“It says here,” Big Bill said, laying a hand on the folded newspaper beside him on the seat, “that Ulster is the next place to watch. Huge economic potential just waiting for the right boost to get it going.” He leaned down and twisted his head to read from the page. “ The Protestant Pound is set to give the Euro a run for its money. I like that-the Protestant Pound!”

“Chasing Catholic credit,” Glass said.

Big Bill gave a small nod and a restrained, tolerant smile. “First they’ll have to break with the Brits,” he said.

Louise, sitting with her glass at the other end of the swing, laughed lightly. “That’s been tried, surely?”

Her father shook his head. “British tax law strangles enterprise. That’s what you people in the Republic”-he was addressing Glass-“that’s what you understood, the need to slash corporation taxes. Now I remember…”

Glass sipped his drink and gazed up at the dense wall of budding trees at the end of the lawn. A thing like a tumbril was making its lumbering way slowly through his head: he could almost feel the wheels creaking. Above all states of mind, boredom was the one he went most in fear of. His father-in-law was recounting the oft-told tale of how, twenty-five years before, he had called a secret meeting of Northern Ireland’s leaders on the Isle of Man for the purpose of knocking their heads together and making them see sense about the future of their most misfortunate statelet. Now Glass interrupted him. “Did Charles Varriker accompany you on that historic occasion?”

It was Louise and not her father who registered the sharpest surprise. She stared at her husband and for a second it seemed her lower lip trembled. “Why, John,” she murmured, as if he had shouted out an obscenity. Her father looked from Glass to her and back again, fumblingly, like a thrown rider struggling to climb back on his horse. His eyes were suddenly baffled and old. “Charlie?” he said. “No, no, Charlie was dead by then. Why are you asking about him?” He turned to his daughter again, querulously. “Why is he asking about Charlie?”

Louise had regained her equilibrium. She ignored her father’s question, and set her lemonade glass firmly on the table and rose. “I must talk to Manuela about dinner,” she said, and walked away into the house, slowly, deliberately, holding her back very straight, as if to prevent herself from breaking into a run.

Left alone, the two men were silent for a time. Big Bill looked this way and that at the floor around his feet, as though vaguely in search of something he had dropped. Glass lit a cigarette from the stub of the one he had just finished smoking down to the filter. He felt almost queasy, out here over these deeps and headed into darkness, knowing only how little he knew.

“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.”

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.