Benjamin Black - The Lemur

“I swear,” Glass said, more a gasp than a croak this time, “I swear I have no idea what you can have found out.”

“Right.” Now he was nodding that long narrow head of his. Glass could see it clearly in his mind, the lips pursing up, the little blond goatee wobbling, those starting eyes furiously agleam. “Right. The next call you get about this won’t be from me.”

The line went dead.

That day thirty years before, when Glass and Louise had first met at John Huston’s house, St. Clerans, in Connemara, the director had taken him for a walk after lunch. By then Big Bill and his daughter had left-the Atlantic wind was still in her hair, Glass caught the coolness of it when she passed him by going out-and Glass, too, was anxious to be on his way, for he had a deadline to meet. But Huston had insisted on them taking what he called “a tramp” together. He went away and came back half an hour later-Glass had filled the time listening back over the material he had taped-wearing tweed plus fours and a tweed jacket with a half-belt at the back, and plaid wool socks and walking boots and a floppy peaked cap reminiscent of a cowpat. He looked as if he had been dressed by a drunk in the costume department for a leading role in Brigadoon. He caught Glass’s incredulous glance and smiled broadly, showing off his big yellow tombstone teeth, and said: “What do you think, would I pass for a native?” Glass did not know if he should laugh.

They had walked along a boreen and down into the valley. Sunlight and shadow swept the dark green hillsides, and the birds were whistling madly in the thorn trees, and there was the sound of unseen waters rushing under the heather, and the gorse blossom was already aflame. Huston had lately finished filming The Man Who Would Be King and was in a reflective mood. “Who’d have thought,” he said, “a Missouri boy would end up here, owning a chunk of the most beautiful country God ever made? I love this place. I’ve been an Irish citizen since ’64. I want my bones to rest here, when the time comes.” They arrived at a wooden gate and Huston stopped and leaned an elbow on the top bar and turned to Glass and said: “I’ve been watching you, son. You get so busy asking questions you forget other people can see you. You’re ambitious. I approve of that. You’re a little bit ruthless, and I approve of that, too. Only the ruthless succeed. But there’s something about you that kind of troubles me-I mean, that would worry me, if you were really my son. I’d be kind of scared thinking of you out there in the big, wide world. Maybe it’s that you expect too much of people.” He unlatched the gate and they walked on along a path into a dense stand of tall pines, where the light turned brownish blue and the air was colder somehow than it had been when they were in the open. Huston put an arm round Glass’s shoulders and gave him an avuncular squeeze. “Knew a fellow once,” he said, “a mobster, one of Meyer Lansky’s numbers men. He was a funny guy, I mean witty, you know? I’ve always remembered something he said to me once. ‘If you don’t know who the patsy in the room is, it’s you.’” Huston gave an emphysemic laugh, the phlegm twanging deep in his chest. “That was Joey Cohen’s gift of wisdom to me-‘If you don’t know who the patsy is, it’s you.’” The director’s big, shapely hand closed on Glass’s shoulder again. “You should remember it, too, son. Joey knew what he was talking about.”

Now, in his office teetering high above Forty-fourth Street, Glass held the phone in a hand that refused to stay steady and tapped out a number. A bright New York voice answered, doing its singsong yes-how-may-I-help-you?

“Alison O’Keeffe,” Glass said. “Is she there? Tell her it’s John-she’ll know.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk and listened to the hollow nothingness on the line. Can there be, he was thinking, any more costly hostage to fortune than a mistress?

Glass had first met Alison O’Keeffe the previous winter outside a bar in the Village. It was, she was, every middleaged male smoker’s fantasy made flesh. There he stood, huddled in the doorway sucking on a cigarette as flurries of snow played round his ankles, when she came out, scowled at the bruisecolored sky and lit up a Gauloise-a Gauloise, for God’s sake! He assumed from this that she was French, but the longer he looked at her-and he looked at her for so long and with such intensity that he was surprised she did not call a cop-the more convinced he became, on no basis other than tribal instinct, that she must be Irish. She was of middle height, slender, very dark of hair and very pale of skin. The word he could not help applying to her features was chiseled, though they were far from hard-creamy marble, lovingly shaped. Her eyes were an extraordinary shade of deep azure which, as he would come to know, grew even deeper at moments of passion. She smoked now in that faintly impatient, faintly resentful way that women did when they were forced outdoors like this, one arm held stiffly upright, an elbow cupped firmly in a palm, her fingers twiddling the cigarette as if it were a piece of chalk with which she was dashing out a complex formula on an invisible blackboard. She wore a high-necked black sweater and black leather trousers; the trousers he considered a mistake, but one that, on balance, he could forgive.

Afterward he would insist that he was in love with her before they had exchanged their first words.

She paid him no heed, and seemed not to have noticed him there, though they were the only two pariahs in the smokers’ vestibule at that five o’clock hour of the darkling December evening. He had come to the bar to meet the editor of a new, radical journal who wanted him to contribute a piece on the Northern Irish peace agreement for the first issue. The editor was a muscular, fresh-faced, tirelessly smiling young man recently out of Yale, and after two minutes of his pitch Glass knew he was not going to write for him. That kind of sincerity, though he supposed he, too, must have been filled with it, and filled to the brim, back at the dawn of history, now only wearied him. So he would not have been eager to go back into the bar even if this palely lovely girl had not been outside with him, which she most certainly, most excitingly, was. Well, not with him, perhaps, but there, which for the moment was enough. He wondered how he might go about securing her attention. It was odd how perilous it could be in this city to offer a friendly remark to a stranger. Once he had commented on the weather to a girl in a lift, and she had shrunk back from him into a corner and informed him in a tense, low voice that she had a Mace spray in her purse. This one irritably smoking beside him now, in her shiny rawhide pants, looked as if she would be not so antagonistic, though her self-containedness was certainly daunting. But it was Christmas, the time of year most fraught, for him, with erotic possibilities, and he had a panicky sense that at the very next moment this particular possibility was going to stub out her cigarette and thrust herself back into the crowded bar, and that he would never see her again, and so, at last, he spoke.

“I’ve made a bet with myself,” he said.

The young woman looked at him, and seemed not impressed by what she saw. “Pardon me?”

“I’m wagering you’re Irish.” He smiled; it felt, from his side of it, like a leer.

She narrowed her eyes and set her jaw at an angle, weighing him up. “How did you know?” she said.

He was so taken aback at being right that he felt winded for a moment. He laughed breathily. “I don’t know. Are you Irish Irish, or did your granny come from Ireland?”

She was still watching him measuringly. “I’m Irish Irish,” she said. “And as it happens, my grandmother came from New York.” Then she did stub out her cigarette, and pushed open the door of the bar behind her and, throwing him a cold, quick smile, was gone.