The Lemur Page 2

  “How is the work?” his wife asked, her eyes on the menu. “Have you made a start yet?” The rain-light from the window gave her the look of an early Florentine madonna as she sat there with her long, angular, pale face inclined, and the menu she was holding might have been a psalter.

  “No,” he said, “I haven’t made a start. I mean, I haven’t started writing. There are things I have to do first.”

  “Research, you mean?”

  He looked at her sharply. But there was no way she could know about Dylan Riley; he had told no one about the Lemur. She was still reading the menu, bringing to it the rapt, radiant attention that she brought to everything she did, even, he ruefully recalled, lovemaking. “Yes, research,” he mumbled, “that kind of thing.”

  The waiter came and Glass ordered linguine with clams and Louise asked for a plain green salad. It was all she ever ate at lunchtime. Why, then, Glass wondered, did she spend so long poring over the menu? Having taken their order, the waiter pointed his pencil inquiringly at the empty third place, but Louise shook her head. “David might look in,” she told Glass. “I said we’d eat and he could join us for coffee.”

  Glass made no comment. David Sinclair was Louise’s son by her first marriage, to a Wall Street lawyer who seemed to have passed through her life leaving hardly a trace, except, of course, the young man who now occupied the center of her world. Glass looked round for the waiter and the wine list; if his stepson was joining them he would need more than a glass of Prosecco.

  Their food arrived and they ate in silence for a time. The small rain wept against the windowpane and the cars and taxis going past shimmered and slid as in a wet mirage. Glass was wondering why he felt the need to be so secretive about Dylan Riley. Bill Mulholland’s life was emblematic of the last two-thirds of the chaotic, violent, and dizzyingly innovative century that had ended not so long ago. No one would expect a biographer to do unaided the extensive research that would be required for the writing of the life of such a man-no one except that man himself. Bill Mulholland was the original rugged individualist and required those around him to be made of the same stern stuff. What sort of sissy writer would hire someone else to do the donkeywork? He had offered the commission, along with a million-dollar fee, to his son-in-law because, as he had said, he trusted him; trusted him, that is, as Glass well understood, to leave certain overly heavy stones unturned. It was Glass himself-not his father-in-law, as he had told Dylan Riley-who wanted all the facts, even, or especially, the inconvenient ones. Glass believed Aristotle was right: he that holds a secret holds power.

  He took a drink of wine and studied his wife. She was attending to her plate of greens with the long-necked, finical concentration of a heron at the water’s edge. She had urged him strongly to accept her father’s offer. “You used to like nothing better than a challenge,” she had said, “and writing my father’s life will be nothing if not that.” He had noted then, too, the tense employed. Used to. “And a million dollars,” she had added, with a lopsided, ironical smile, “is a million dollars.”

  It was not the money that had made him take on the job. What, then? He supposed Louise was right. What greater challenge could there be than to write the official biography of his own father-in-law, one of the fiercest and most controversial of that last cohort of Cold Warriors who had, so they believed, brought the Evil Empire to the dust?

  “You know you’ll have to give the manuscript to the boys at Langley for their okay,” his father-in-law had told him, with that famous twinkle. “There are some things that can never get told.” And Glass, remembering that remark, thought again now of Nixon, poor old Tricky Dick, sweating under the arc lamps, in another age.

  David Sinclair arrived. He was tall and sleekly slim, like his mother, but black-haired and swarthy where she was russet and pearl-Rubin Sinclair, his father, was a hirsute and barely civilized redneck from Kentucky. David was handsome, in a dandyish sort of way, but his slightly protruding eyes were set unfortunately close together-whenever Glass contemplated his stepson he recalled Truman Capote saying of Marlene Dietrich that if her eyes had been a fraction nearer to each other she would have been a chicken. Waspish, wicked Truman. Glass had tried to interview him once, over a hopelessly bibulous lunch at the Four Seasons in the middle of which the sozzled novelist had laid his cheek on the tablecloth and gone noisily to sleep. Glass at the time was young enough not to be embarrassed, and contentedly finished his broiled squab and the remains of a bottle of Mouton Rothschild, calm in the knowledge that the lavish treat was being paid for by the Sunday Times of London.

  “Hello,” David Sinclair said to Glass, sliding sinuously into his seat and unfolding a napkin across his lap. His attitude always toward his stepfather was one of amused skepticism. “How is the great world?”

  Glass smiled thinly. “It wasn’t so great,” he said, “the last time I looked.”

  David ordered peppermint tea. He was dressed in a dark wool suit and a white silk shirt and silk tie. His watch was a Patek Philippe, one of the more discreet models. His mother pampered him; he was her only weakness.

  “David has some news for you,” she said now. “Haven’t you, darling?”

  The young man raised his eyebrows and briefly closed his eyes, his version of a shrug. “I thought you would have told him yourself by now, you’re so excited about it,” he said.

  Louise turned to her husband. “David is joining the foundation.”

  He looked at her blankly. “The foundation?”

  “For goodness’ sake, John! The Mulholland Trust. In fact, he’s going to be the new director.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that all you can say- oh?”

  “I thought you were the director.”

  “I was. It was becoming too much for me, I told you that. From now on I’ll take a back seat.”

  “Isn’t he”-Glass took a small pleasure in speaking pointedly of his stepson as if he were not there-“isn’t he a little young, to take on so great a responsibility?”

  David laughed shortly, for some reason of his own, and sipped his tea.

  “I’ll still be there, to help him, at first,” Louise said, sharply. She always resented being required to explain herself. “Besides, there’s the staff. They’re all experienced people.”

  Glass contemplated the young man sitting with his back to the window and smirking. “Well,” he said, lifting his wineglass, “congratulations, young man.” He tended not to address his stepson by name, if he could help it.

  “Thanks, Dad,” David said, with high sarcasm, and lifted his teacup to return the toast.

  Suddenly Glass remembered the first time he and Louise had met, one April afternoon at John Huston’s mansion near Loughrea in the wet and stormy west of Ireland. He had been a precocious nineteen, and had come to interview the film director for the Irish Times. Bill Mulholland and his daughter were there. They had ridden over from the mansion down the valley that Mulholland had recently purchased, and Louise wore stained jodhpurs and a green silk scarf knotted at her throat. She was barely seventeen. Her skin was flushed pink from the ride, and there was a sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her perfect nose, and Glass could hardly speak from the effort of trying not to stare at her. Huston, the old satyr, saw at a glance what was going on in the young man’s breast, and grinned his orangutan’s grin and handed him a dry martini and said: “Here, son, have a bracer.”

  David Sinclair had finished his tea and now he rose, shooting his cuffs. He had to be somewhere, he said smoothly, giving the impression that it was somewhere much too important for its name to be spoken aloud in public. Glass saw how pleased with himself he was. Director of the Mulholland Trust at the age of-what was he?-twenty-three? Young enough, Glass thought with satisfaction, to make a serious mess of it. His mother, of course, would shield him from the worst of his mistakes, but Big Bill, the founder of the Trust, was not as fond of his grandson as Louise would wish him to be, and Big Bill was not a great forgiver.
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  When the young man had gone Louise signaled for the check and turned to her husband and said: “I wonder if you realize how clearly you betray your jealousy.”

  Glass stared. “Who am I jealous of?”

  She handed her platinum credit card to the waiter, who went away and came back in a moment with the receipt. She signed her fine, firm signature and he gave her the copy and departed. Glass watched as she folded the receipt carefully four times lengthwise and then slipped the spill she had made into her purse. That was Louise’s way: fold and file, fold and file. “I’m surprised Amex haven’t done a card specially for you,” Glass said mildly. “In Kryptonite, perhaps.” She ignored this; his barbed jokes she always ignored. She looked down at the tablecloth, fingering the weave of it. “The Trust does valuable work, you know,” she said, “more than valuable, not least in helping to resolve that late, nasty little conflict in your native land.”

  He marvelled always at the way she spoke, in molded sentences, with such preciseness, making such nice discriminations; her three years of study in England, a postgraduate course among the Oxford logical positivists, had honed her diction to a gleaming keenness.

  “I know,” he said, trying not to sound petulant, “I know what the Trust does.”

  She brushed his protest aside. “You, of course, are too cynical and, yes, too jealous, to acknowledge the importance of what we do. Frankly, I don’t care. I long ago stopped caring what you think or don’t think. But I won’t have you trying to infect my son with your bitterness. Your failures are not his fault-they’re no one’s fault but your own. So keep your sarcasm to yourself.” She lifted her eyes from the tablecloth and looked at him. Her gaze was as blank as the face of her son’s expensive watch, with a myriad unseen, infinitely intricate movements going on behind it. “Do you understand?”

  “I’m going out to smoke a cigarette,” he said.

  The rain had stopped and the street was steaming under watery sunlight. He walked back to the office, the chill of early spring striking at him through the light stuff of his jacket. He was thinking of Dylan Riley, picturing him in some Village loft hunched over his machines, the screens throwing their nocturnal radiance onto his face and printing their images on the shiny dark ovals of his eyes. It was to be a week before Glass would hear from him again, and then he would learn how sharp and penetrating was the Lemur’s bite.

  3

  THE BITE

  Glass had spent the week in his office, trying his best to get used to it, to the plate glass and the steel, to the deadened air, to, above all, the heady elevation. He tried to keep office hours, breezing in at nine but slouching out again morosely five or six hours later. One day, when it occurred to him that there was no one to challenge him, he smoked a cigarette, leaning back luxuriously on his chair with his feet on the desk and his ankles crossed. No forbidden cigarette ever, including the ones he used to pilfer from his father’s coat pocket when he was a ten-year-old, had tasted so sweet, so dangerous, so sexy.

  Presently, however, he saw the problems he had given himself. How was he to get rid of the smell of smoke, since the windows up here were sealed tight? The telltale stink would probably cling on for weeks in this endlessly recycled air. And in the more immediate term, what was he to do with the ash or-Jesus!-with the stub? In the end he fashioned a makeshift ashtray from the foil of a Hershey bar wrapper that someone had left in the wastepaper basket, feeling as proudly resourceful and inventive as Robinson Crusoe. When he was finished he folded the wrapper as neatly as Louise would have done and put it in his pocket-surprising how much heat had been left in the stubbed-out butt-and crept with a felon’s circumspection to the men’s room and locked himself in a stall and emptied the contents of the foil into the lavatory bowl. But of course the filter tip was too buoyant to go down-even some of the ash stayed on the surface of the water-and in the end, after repeated, vain, flushings, he had to fish the soggy thing out and wrap it in a wad of toilet tissue and carry it back to the office and throw it in the waste bin where, he gloomily supposed, some cleaner or busybody janitor would nose it out and denounce him.

  What about real addicts, he wondered, poor wretches hooked on heroin or crack cocaine-or that new stuff, something meth-were their lives a series of grimly comic frustrations and inept subterfuges? He supposed they must be, though he supposed, too, that junkies would not see the funny side of things. Not that he was laughing, exactly.

  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 cr
otch 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.”