The Lemur

6
ALL HANDS!

John Glass disliked the sprawling apartment where he and his wife lived, more or less. More or less, in that Louise lived there, while he merely joined her in the evenings, stayed overnight, and left in the mornings. That, at least, was how he thought of it. To an observer-and the wealthy and fashionable Mrs. Glass was always under scrutiny-the Glasses would have seemed a typical Upper East Side couple. Louise made sure that it should stay that way. She was careful to preserve appearances not least for fear of her father and what he would do if she allowed a scandal to develop. William Mulholland’s bitter disapproval of divorce was well known, and he had been heard to accuse his daughter, no more than half jokingly, of being a bigamist. Big Bill had not much liked Rubin Sinclair, Louise’s first husband, but, as she later told Glass one Champagnelit night when they were first together, he had liked it even less when she announced, no doubt with a quaver of terror in her voice, that the marriage had gone hopelessly awry and that she was filing for divorce. Her father had not argued with her, Louise said, in some wonderment, had not shouted or threatened. The mildness of his response had been more frightening to her than any show of rage. “You took a vow, Lou,” he had said gravely. “You took a vow, and now you’re breaking it.”

After the divorce came through Louise had fled with her ten-year-old son to Ireland, to her father’s big old Georgian house in Connemara, to tend her soul’s wounds and figure out how to rebuild her life. In Ireland she had met John Glass-for the first time, as she had thought, for she had forgotten that long-ago windblown afternoon at the nearby Huston place-and something about him, a detached, dreamy something, had seemed the perfect balm for her bruised spirit. John Glass was everything that Rubin Sinclair was not. Or so she had thought. For his part, John Glass was certain, despite all he knew of Fate and her caprices, that the fact of this exquisite creature’s having drifted a second time into his orbit was a circumstance to be seized upon without delay. He proposed on the date that, three months previously, her divorce came through. “Oh, God,” Louise said, a laughing wail, “what will my father say!”

Once again Big Bill’s response had been unexpectedly mild. He liked, it seemed, John Glass. He still had friends in the surveillance world and had got them to look into his past-“Don’t mind it, son, it’s an old habit”-and was satisfied with what was turned up. Glass had never been married, and therefore not divorced, he was admired in his profession, seemed honest, and was probably not a fortune hunter. “Just one thing,” Big Bill had said to his daughter and her prospective husband, with a smile that seemed only mildly pained, “wait to marry until you’re at least a year divorced, Lou, to save what shreds of respectability our poor old family has left.” And Louise had kissed him. Kissing was not a thing they often did, Big Bill and his daughter.

John Glass was remembering that kiss when he entered the lobby of the apartment building after his interview with Captain Ambrose. He could not recall what thoughts had gone through his head as he watched that unwonted moment of intimacy and accord between father and daughter, and this troubled him. But perhaps he had not been thinking anything. His memories of those days were all hazed over happily, as if he were looking back through a pane of glass that had been breathed on by someone who was laughing.

Lincoln, the doorman, tipped his cap and remarked on the weather. “Be getting warmer soon, Mr. Glass, and then we be wishing for the cool days again.” There was a touch of the poet to old Lincoln.

Glass went up in the little elevator. It was a venerable and somewhat rackety contraption, and he was never comfortable in it, feeling constricted and vaguely at peril. He refused to let himself make of this a metaphor for his life in general. He was a free man, no matter how narrow his circumstances might have become recently. Yes, free.

The elevator opened directly onto a private hallway leading into the apartment. The first time he had entered here he had been more impressed, cowed, even, than he would have cared to admit. Now he called out “All hands!” as he always did; he could not remember the origin of this manner of announcing his homecoming. From far inside the apartment he heard Louise’s muted answering call. He found her in the library, seated at her desk, an eighteenth-century escritoire, with a little pile of cards and envelopes, and her fountain pen. She was wearing the gray silk kimono that some Japanese bigwig had presented to her when she visited Kyoto as a UN Special Ambassador for Culture. She gave her husband a glancing, absentminded smile. “There you are,” she said, and went back to her cards.

He stood behind her. He caught her sharp perfume. What was the word? Civet. The same perfume smells differently on every woman. Or so he had been told. He felt curiously unfocused, adrift, somehow. He supposed it was the aftermath of his meeting with Captain Ambrose, and all the adrenaline he had used up. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Invitations for Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?”

“The party for Antonini.”

“Oh. The painter.”

“Yes,” she said, imitating his flat tone. “The painter.”

“I think he has a soft spot for you.”

She did not turn, or lift her head. “Do you?”

“Or a hard spot, more likely.”

“Don’t be coarse.”

“That’s me, coarse as cabbage.”

He admired the way she wrote, in firm, swift strokes, so confidently. He had not used a fountain pen since he was in primary school.

Why did she not ask about the call from Captain Ambrose? Could she have forgotten?

He moved away and sat down on the low white sofa, where he was surrounded on three sides by bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. It struck him that he had not lifted a volume from those shelves since… since he could not remember when. They stood there, the books, sorted, ranked, a battalion of rebukes. He had not done that book of his own that he had always planned to do. The unwritten book: another cliche.

“By the way,” Louise said, and still did not turn, “did you speak to that policeman?”

“Yes.”

“What was it about? Was someone murdered?”

“Yes.”

Now she did turn, setting an elbow on the back of her chair and looking at him with a faint, questioning smile. “Someone we know?” she said lightly.

He put his head back on the cushions and considered first one corner of the ceiling, then another. “No.”

When he failed to continue she waggled her head in a parody of regal impatience and said, “Weh-ell?” in her Queen Victoria voice. He lowered his gaze and fixed it on her. Her eyes shone, and her glossed lips caught points of light from the chandelier above his head and glittered. Why was she excited? It must be, he thought, the prospect of the smoldering Antonini. He went back to gazing at the ceiling.

“A young man called Dylan Riley,” he said. “Computer wizard. Would-be spy.” And? Go on, say it. “Researcher.”

“And the police were calling you why?”

“He had phoned me, this Riley.”

“He had phoned you.”

“Yes. This morning. And in the afternoon he was killed. Murdered. Shot through the eye.”

“My God.” She sounded more indignant than shocked. “But why was he phoning you, this person-what did you say his name was?”

“Riley. Dylan Riley. Doesn’t sound like a real name, does it, when you say it out loud?”

He picked up a copy of The New Yorker from the low table in front of him. Sempe. The Park, spring leaves, a tiny dog.

“Are you,” Louise said, “going to tell me what this is about, or not?”

“It’s not about anything. I contacted this Riley because I thought he might do some research for the book. He called me back. Mine happened to be the last number on his cell phone. Hence the call from the police.” She still sat turned toward him from the waist, her arm still resting on the back of the chair, the fountain pen in her fingers. “The nib will dry up,” he said. “I remember that, how the nib would dry up and then you had to wash it out with water and fill it in the inkwell again.”

“The inkwell?” she said. “You sound like someone out of Dickens.”

“I am someone out of Dickens. That’s why you married me. Bill Sikes, c’est moi. ”

Clara the maid came in to announce dinner. She was a diminutive person. Her color, deep black with purplish shadings, fascinated Glass; every time he saw her he wanted to touch her, just to know the feel of that satiny skin. In her little white uniform and white rubbersoled shoes that Louise made her wear she had the look of a hospital nurse. When she was gone, Louise whispered: “You must remember to compliment her. She’s made a souffle. It’s a big moment.” Louise had been teaching Clara how to cook, with considerable success, which was fortunate for Clara, since otherwise she would have gone by now-Louise did not entertain failure.

In the dining room the lamps burned low, and there were candles on the table, their flames reflected in countless gleaming spots among the silver and the crystal. It occurred to Glass that what he had admitted a moment ago was true, that he was coarse, compared to all this that Louise had set in place, the elegant table, the soft lights, the fine wines and delicate food, the expensively simple furniture, the Balthus drawing and the Giacometti figurine, the leather-bound books, the white-clad maid, the Glenn Gould tape softly playing in the background-all the rich, muted, exquisitely tasteful life that she had assembled for them. Yes, he fitted ill, here; he had tried, but he fitted ill. He wondered why she had tolerated him for so long, and why she went on tolerating him. Was it simply fear of another divorce and her father’s rage? No doubt it was. He was perfectly capable, was Big Bill, of cutting off her inheritance. So much would go, for her and for David Sinclair, if those millions went-not just the house in the Hamptons, the rooftop suite at the Georges V in Paris, the account at Asprey’s in London, but most important, control of the Mulholland Trust. That was what Louise prized most; that was the future.

Clara’s spinach souffle was excellent, and Glass remembered to compliment her on it, and she fled back to her kitchen in confusion. Louise had put down her fork and was gazing at him. “You can be so sweet, sometimes,” she said.

“Only sometimes?”

“Yes. Only sometimes. But I’m grateful.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Still she watched him, at once frowning and smiling. “You have been up to something,” she said, “haven’t you. I can see it in your eye.”

“What sort of something?”

Her face, candlelit, was reflected in the window by which she sat. Outside in the darkness the crowns of the massed trees in the Park gave off an eerie, silverish glow. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something to do with that young man who was murdered?”

“What?” Glass said, “Do you think I shot him?”

“Of course not. Why would you?”

A sudden, constrained silence fell then, as if both had taken fright at something vaguely seen ahead. They ate. Glass poured the wine. At length he said: “I don’t know that I can write this book.”

She kept her eyes on her plate. “Oh? Why not?”

“Well, for a start I suddenly remembered that I am a journalist, or used to be, and not a biographer.”

“Journalists write biographies.”

“Not of their fathers-in-law, they don’t.”

“Billuns gave his word he wouldn’t interfere.”

Billuns was Big Bill’s pet name in the family; it made Glass’s skin crawl, especially when his wife used it. He drank his wine and looked out over the treetops. How still it was, the April night.

“Why do you think he asked me to write it? I mean, why me.”

“He told you himself: he trusts you.”

“Does that mean more, I wonder, than that he thinks he has a hold over me, through you?”

“Thinks?” She smiled, pursing her lips. “Doesn’t he have a hold over you, through me?”

He looked at her levelly in the candlelight. He did not understand why she was behaving so tenderly toward him tonight. There was a languorous, almost feline air about her. He was reminded of how, on their honeymoon, which seemed so long ago now, she would sit opposite him at a balcony table in the Eden Roc at Cap d’Antibes after a morning of lovemaking and smile at him in that same caressing, mischievous fashion, and kick off her sandals under the table and wrap her cool bare feet around his ankles. What days those had been, what nights. At moments such as this one now, here in the stealthy candlelight, the sadness he felt at the lapsing of his love for her became a desolation. He cleared his throat. “Tell me,” he said, “about Charles Varriker.”

Something flickered in her eyes, a far-off lightning flash. “Charles?” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know. He’s a figure in the landscape-your father’s landscape.”

Her mood had altered now: she seemed impatient, angry, almost. “He’s been dead for twenty years, more.”

“How well did you know him? Was he a figure in your landscape?”

She put down her fork again and lowered her head and turned it a little to one side; it was a thing she did when she was thinking, or upset. “Is this how it’s going to be if you write this book?” she asked, in an odd, low voice with a shake in it. “Will there be dinnertable interrogations? Will I be required nightly to pick over the past for you? A pity your researcher got shot, he would have spared me a lot of work.” She rose abruptly, not looking at him. Her napkin had fallen to the floor and she found herself treading on it. “Damn!” she said, in that same, angry undertone, and kicked the napkin off into the shadows, and strode away, the skirts of the kimono ruffling about her. Glass thought to call after her but did not. The silence seemed to vibrate faintly, as in the aftermath of something having shattered.

What had Dylan Riley discovered, and why had he been shot? And how were the two things connected, as Glass was now convinced they were? He looked again to the window, but this time saw only his own face reflected there.