Benjamin Black - The Lemur

The laptop computer that Mulholland’s people had supplied him with, sleek, gleaming, gunmetal gray, sat before him on the desk, daring him to open it. So far he had passed up the dare. He was a long way from being ready to start writing-oh, a long, long way, weeks, at least, maybe months. He spent the empty hours of his working days browsing through histories of the OSS and the CIA and the FBI, the DST and the DGSE and the SDECE, the NKVD and the KGB and the GRU-the Soviets were whimsically prone to change the names of their security agencies-and, of course, M15 and M16, the difference between which he could never keep clear in his mind. Stumbling about in this bristling thicket of acronyms he felt like the dull but honest hero of a cautionary folktale, who must make his way through a maze of magical signs and indecipherable portents to the lair of the great wizard.

And there was something of the magus about Big Bill Mulholland. He had been, or claimed to have been, that rarest of birds among a teeming aviary of rareties: an agent with a conscience. There were people in what Glass the cliche hater told himself he must remember not to call the highest echelons of the West’s intelligence services who swore by Big Bill’s probity; there were also those who swore at it. Allen Dulles himself, when he was director of the CIA, had once been heard referring to Big Bill, in an uncharacteristic lapse from his usual urbanity, as “that goddamned sanctimonious son of a bitch.” For William Mulholland, whose second name was, with awful aptness, Pius, was seized of the lifelong conviction that even, or perhaps especially, the intelligence services had a duty to be as frank and open with the public as the dictates of security would allow. “Otherwise,” as he so simply put it, “why call ourselves a democracy?” And this doctrine, Glass often reminded himself, had been laid down in the 1950s, and the early 1950s, at that, when Joe McCarthy and his crew were still cocks of the anti-Red walk. Big Bill attributed his compulsive honesty to the influence of his beloved mother, Margaret Mary Mulholland, of blessed memory. She would probably, would Margaret Mary, require an entire chapter of her son’s biography, John Glass had glumly to acknowledge. He would earn that million bucks.

When the telephone rang it made him jump. He secretly hated telephones, for they frightened him. It was, he noted by the baleful clock that glowered at him from the wall opposite his desk, ten forty-seven A.M. The day was bright but windy, and since his arrival he had been trying not to notice the way the entire building quivered almost voluptuously under the strokings of the stronger gusts.

“Hi here,” the voice said, and although Glass had been waiting all week for this call, for a moment he did not recognize the voice. There was a soft laugh on the line. “Riley here. Your hired bloodhound, don’t you know.” It occurred to Glass that perhaps the fellow was not parodying his accent after all, and that the plummy tone he liked to put on was meant to make him sound like Sherlock Holmes, or Lord Peter Wimsey.

“I wondered where you’d got to,” Glass said.

“Well, I got to all sorts of places, virtually and otherwise. And turned up all sorts of things.”

Glass had an image of some gawky bird under a bush probing and pecking among a mulch of dead leaves. “Oh?” he said.

“ Owh, ”Riley echoed, and this time there was no doubt that he was mimicking Glass’s way of speaking. “ Owh, is right.” There was a silence. Glass did not know what to say, what prompt to supply. A faint, a very faint, niggle of unease had set itself up in the region of his diaphragm. “Listen,” Riley said, and Glass had a distinct impression of the young man leisurely stretching back in a chair and clawing absently at the roomy crotch of his jeans, “for a start I know what Big Bill is paying you to write up his colorful life story.”

Glass heard himself swallow. He had thought that he and his wife and his father-in-law were the only ones who knew that figure. How could the Lemur have found it out? Big Bill would surely be the last one to blab that kind of thing. Had Louise been talking? Not like her, either. “I’m sure,” Glass said measuredly, “you’ll have got hold of a wildly exaggerated sum.”

The Lemur did not bother insisting. “We didn’t discuss my fee,” he said.

“I asked if you had a standard contract-remember?”

“The point is, this is turning out not to be a standard job.”

Glass waited, but the young man was in no hurry; it was apparent even down the phone line that he was once again enjoying himself. “Come on,” Glass said, trying to sound unconcerned, “tell me what it is you’ve stumbled on.”

The Lemur did his breathy little laugh. “The way I see it, we’re partners in this project-thrown together by chance and the word of whoever it was recommended me to you, but partners all the same. Yes?”

“No. I hired you. I am your employer. You are my employee.”

“-and given that we find ourselves together in this deal, I think it only fair that I should be an equal partner.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning half a million dollars. Fifty percent of your fee for writing this hard-hitting and entirely unbiased book. Share and share alike-right, John?”

Glass’s upper lip was misted with sweat. His mind went temporarily numb. “Tell me,” he said, and it sounded in his ears like a croak, “tell me what you’ve found out.”

Again along the wires there was that sense of luxurious stretching, of pleasurable scratching. “No,” Dylan Riley said, “not yet.”

“Why?”

There was a pause for thought, then: “I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of an occupational thing. I learn a secret, I want to hold on to it for a while, roll it around, you know, like good wine on the palate. Does that make sense, old boy?”

A flash of light from outside, extraordinarily bright, burst on Glass’s retinas, making him turn his face aside. Had someone in one of the surrounding towers managed to open a window? He peered, but could see no movement out there, no lifted arm or angled pane. He floundered, trying to think what to say next. How had this thing gone wrong, so quickly, so comprehensively? One minute his problem was how to get rid of a cigarette end, the next he was in a sweat while the pinhead he had been foolish enough to hire was trying to blackmail him for half a million dollars. Where was the link, the swaying rope bridge, between that then and this now? He put a hand to his forehead; he could hear himself breathing against the mouthpiece of the phone, hisss -hiss, hisss -hiss.

“Look, Riley-” he began, but was not allowed to go on, which was just as well since he did not know what he was going to say.

“No, you look,” the Lemur said, in a new, harsh, and suddenly unadolescent-sounding voice. “You used to be the real thing, Glass. A lot of us believed in you, followed your example. Now look at you.” He gave a snort of disgust. “Well, sell out to your father-in-law the spook if you like. Tell the world what a sterling guy he is, the unacknowledged Cold War conscience of the West, the man who urged negotiations with Castro and a safe passage for Allende to Russia-as if he’d have wanted to go, the poor schmuck. Go ahead, write his testament, and peddle your soul for a mess of dollars. But I know something that will tear you people apart, and I think you should pay me, I think you will pay me, to keep it all in the family.” Glass tried to speak but again was silenced. “And want me to tell you something else? I think you know what I know. I think you know very well what I’m talking about, the one thing big enough to screw up the cozy little civilized arrangement you all have going between you. Am I right?”