Benjamin Black - The Lemur

“The night man on the desk let me in,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

He was smoking a cigarette-he had lit it in the elevator, defying the smoke alarm, which anyway had failed to go off-and now he groped on the desk for an ashtray that was not there. He had to search for the switch of the desk lamp, too. It cast a cone of light downward, its penumbra illuminating the side of Louise’s face, an ear, an eye, a corner of her mouth.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

“Oh, not long.” They were like two travelers stranded in a waiting room, at night, far from home. “I guessed this is where you’d be.”

She still wore her little green coat and ridiculous hat. Her hands were in her lap. She gazed straight before her. Glass walked to the window and looked out into those dark canyons that at night were less alarming than by day, inexplicably. “I don’t know what to say to you, Louise,” he said.

He heard her stirring behind him, shifting in the chair, repositioning herself. “You mustn’t believe…” she began, and stopped. “You mustn’t believe the things you think you know. Really, you’ve mistaken it all.” She turned to look at him where he stood with his back to her, and the chair made its little protesting squeak. “Please,” she said, “come and sit down.”

Distantly from the streets below he heard the wailing and yapping of a police siren, and squinting down he saw it, not the car but only the pulsing blue light speeding along Forty-fourth Street. He turned and walked to the desk and sat, hunching his shoulders and leaning forward on his elbows. He had been tipping the ash of his cigarette into his palm, and now, impatient suddenly, he dropped it onto the floor beside his chair. Louise continued to sit sideways-on to him, showing him her sculpted, lamp-lit profile. He thought of Alison O’Keeffe sitting like this earlier: two women, their faces set against him.

“I have things to tell you,” Louise said, “things I should have told you long ago.” She looked down. “I don’t know where to begin. Charlie-Charlie Varriker…” She stopped.

“You were in love with him,” Glass said, “weren’t you?”

She nodded, pressing her lips together and closing her eyes. “Yes.” She spoke so softly it seemed a kind of distressful sighing. “He was-oh, I can’t tell you what he was. I mean I can’t explain it. He was… everything.” She looked down again; she was pulling spasmodically at one of her fingers, as if trying to pull off it a ring that was not there. “I was young, of course-my God, what was I? Twenty-two? And Charlie was-oh, he was just so beautiful. It’s not a thing men are supposed to possess, that kind of beauty, but he had it. It wasn’t so much a matter of looks, you know, but something that came out from inside, that just-that just shone out. And he was funny. It’s a cliche, I know, that women will love a man who can make them laugh. But laughter with Charlie was something-something blessed. That will amuse you, I know. I can hear how ridiculous it sounds. But that’s what it was, blessed. You know, Lou, he used to say, not once anywhere in the Gospels does Jesus laugh, or even smile. Who could believe in a God that doesn’t laugh? ” Glass took another cigarette. “He rented a room for us, in one of those little streets around Morningside Park. What a neighborhood! We were lucky we weren’t murdered for our shoes. It’s strange, but somehow the squalor made what we had seem all the more tender, all the more pure. Does that make sense? And then”-she was suddenly in a rush, the words tumbling out-“and then there was the baby, I didn’t know what to do, I was too young, and Charlie, of course, Charlie was helpless, so happy and loving and yet helpless, helpless. Rubin had been hanging around-Rubin Sinclair, I mean, Daddy Warbucks, as Charlie used to call him-and Billuns, of course, was insisting I must marry him, I think he saw it as something like a Medici marriage, the melding of two great families blah blah blah. I said to Charlie, It’s the obvious way out, I’ll marry Rubin and after a little while you and I can be together again, we can even have the baby for ourselves. What a dream. What a fool. Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. He couldn’t bear to think of me with Rubin, he said, it would kill him, he would die-”

“Why didn’t you marry him?” Glass asked.

She made an impatient gesture. “Don’t be absurd. Billuns would have destroyed us. He hated Charlie for saving his millions. What do you think he would have felt if he had married his daughter?” She was silent for a moment, picking intently at a loose thread in the seam of her coat. “I bought him a ticket to Paris. Charlie loved Paris, he always said it was his spiritual home. Go there, I told him, go to Paris, and when you come back it will be done. That way it won’t hurt so much. But he didn’t go. He couldn’t live without me, he said. He was the last of the romantics. He took Billuns’s gun and locked himself in the room on Morningside Avenue and shot himself.” She paused; she was breathing rapidly, in shallow beats, still fingering that thread. A helicopter was hovering somewhere nearby, its blades dully beating at the air. “I found him,” Louise said. “I put him on the bed, I don’t know how, he was a big man. Somehow I had to do it, it was important, I don’t know why. I sat with him through the entire afternoon. I’ve never known such silence. And a week later I married Rubin Sinclair.” She lifted a hand and laid it over her eyes, as if to shade them against a glare falling from above. “When David was born, I think Rubin knew. He never said anything, but I think he knew. He wasn’t a fool. And he was good to me, in his way. He didn’t denounce me, didn’t demand that Billuns horsewhip me. He plodded on, until everything just quietly fell apart. And then I met you.”

“Did your father find out?” Glass said. “About David, I mean, whose son he was?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably. He knew everything about everything, why not this, too?”

“And you’re sure that Varriker killed himself?”

She did not look at him. “I have to be,” she said, in almost a whisper, “haven’t I? Anything else is unthinkable.” Now she lifted her eyes and met his questioning stare. “I know what my father is, but I must believe he isn’t that wicked.” They sat for a long moment looking at each other. Then she leaned back in the chair and sighed. “I thought it was all over and done with, until that young man phoned the apartment that day.”

“It was you he spoke to?”

“Of course-who else?”

“How did he know about Varriker and the rest of it?”

“He wouldn’t say. There were people I confided in at the time, friends, so-called. I suppose he tracked them down. I don’t know. I had to do something, of course. If he had gone to Billuns it would have been the end of everything, the Trust, David’s future, everything. I told him I would come and see him. I took the gun. I-”

“Stop,” Glass said. “Tell me the truth.”

“I am. I am telling you the truth-” She put a hand quickly into the pocket of her green coat and brought out something compact and darkly agleam and set it down on the desk before him. He could read the manufacturer’s name clearly on the short, fluted barrel. “There,” she said. “There, if you don’t believe me!”

He picked up the Beretta and hefted it in his hand. “Where did you get this?” She said nothing. The helicopter was gone, and in its wake the silence in the room had become hollow. He set the gun down between them again. “How did he know?” he asked.

“Who? What?”

“David. How did he know about Riley? Was he there when Riley phoned you?” He made a fist and crashed it down on the desk, making the pistol jump. “ Was he!” Something came into her face then that he had never seen before: it was the look, dismayed, helpless, lost, that she would have when she was old. She stared at the weapon on the desk and nodded listlessly. She said something, but so quietly he could not hear and had to ask her to say it again. She cleared her throat. “He was right,” she said. “We all did it, me, you, all of us. What does it matter who pulled the trigger?”