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.
7
THE CLEAVER
John Glass woke early out of a riot of vivid and disorderly dreams, all detailed recollection of which drained from his mind the moment he opened his eyes. He lay in the half dark feeling paralyzed by dread. What was the matter, what terrible thing was amiss? Then he remembered the murder of Dylan Riley, the black weight of which lay over him like a shroud. How was it he could have been so calm yesterday, so detached, when he heard of the young man’s killing and Captain Ambrose summoned him to Police Headquarters? He marveled, not for the first time, at how the self insulates and protects itself against life’s shocks. He closed his eyes again, tight, and burrowed down into the warmth of the bedclothes and his own familiar fetor. He knew that things would seem different when the sun came up and the ordinary business of the day began. For now, though, he could have done with someone else’s warmth beside him, another’s body to cling on to for solace. But Louise had long ago, and without fuss, banished him from the master bedroom into the box room at the end of the corridor beyond the library. The arrangement suited him; mostly he preferred to sleep alone, if sleep was all that was going to happen, and it was some time since anything else had happened in bed between him and Louise.
He tried to fall back to sleep but could not. His mind was racing. It felt as if he were not so much thinking as being thought. Memories, nameless forebodings, speculations and conjectures, all were jumbled together in the ashen afterglow of the dreams he had forgotten. He turned on his back and lay gazing up at the shadowed ceiling. As so often late at night or in the early-morning hours he asked himself if he had made a mistake in moving from Ireland to America-no, not if he had made a mistake, but how great were the proportions of the mistake he had made. Not that he and Louise had been so very much happier living in Ireland, in Louise’s father’s gloomy gray-stone mansion at Mount Ardagh, and not that they had seen so very much of each other, for that matter. They had both spent the greater part of their time traveling, he on assignments abroad and Louise promoting charities across five continents. He knew he should not but in his heart he despised his wife’s career, so-called, as an ambassador of good works.
Maybe they should have had children.
He shifted, groaning angrily. The pillow was too hot, and his pajama top was damp with sweat and held him fast like a straitjacket. He could hear Clara in the kitchen, getting her mistress’s day started-Louise was an early riser. It made him uneasy, having a live-in servant. His father had died young and his widowed mother had kept house for a rich Dublin lawyer so that her only son could have an education. Coarse, he thought again, coarse as cabbage. He sighed. It was time to get up.
Dylan Riley’s murder was not reported in the Times, or at any rate he could find no mention of it. Louise would not have the Post or the Daily News in the house, so he had to go out and buy them. He took them into his workroom-where he never did any work-and sat on the silk-covered chaise longue that Louise had bought for him as a house-warming gift when they had moved in here six months ago. The Post had a couple of paragraphs on the killing, but the News ran a bigger story, on page five: Computer Wiz’s Mystery Slaying. There was nothing in either report that was new. Captain Ambrose of the NYPD was quoted as saying that he and his team were following a number of definite leads. There was a photograph of Riley’s girlfriend, one Terri Taylor, leaving the premises on Vandam in the company of a policewoman. She wore jeans and had long black hair; she had turned her face away from the cameras.