They ate Chilean sea bass and green salad, and Glass ordered a bottle of Tocai from Friuli, even though Alison had said she wanted to work in the afternoon and would drink only water. He downed the first glass of wine in two long draughts and poured another before the bossy waiter had time to wrest the bottle out of his hand. Alison, watching him, frowned. “Why are you so edgy?” she asked. “You’ll be drunk in a minute, and I’ll have to carry you home to your wife.”
She was right: the wine had gone straight to his head already. As he looked at her, seated there before him with the crowded room at her back, she appeared to shine, in her blue blouse, a living, bloodwarm creature. It seemed to him he had never noticed her ears before, these intricate, whorled, funny and lovable things attached at either side of her dear face. He wanted to reach across the table and touch her. He wanted to hold her head, that frail and delicate egg, between his palms and kiss her and tell her he loved her. Tears were welling in his eyes and the back of his throat was swollen. He felt ridiculous and happy. He was alive, and here, with his girl, in the midst of the cheerful clamor of midday, and it was spring, and he would live forever.
“By the way,” she said, “do you know someone called Cleaver?”
He blinked. “What? No. Who?”
She gave him a frowning smile that made her nose wrinkle at the bridge. “Cleaver,” she said. “Wilson Cleaver.” She shook her head. “What a name.”
He was having some difficulty with his breathing. “Who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“He’s a journalist, I think. A reporter. He telephoned me yesterday, just after you did. He wanted to talk to you. I thought it was odd.”
He stared at her. The tipsy euphoria of a minute ago had evaporated entirely. “How did he get your number?”
“I think he knows that fellow you were talking about yesterday. What’s his name? Someone Dylan? No-Dylan someone.”
“Riley.”
“That’s it. Dylan Riley. What was it you called him?”
“The Lemur.”
8
THE SHEEPFOLD
They had arranged to meet by the Boathouse in the Park. On the telephone Glass had listened intently to Wilson Cleaver’s voice but had not learned a great deal from it. Black, he thought, from the jivey bounce in the tone and the way he dealt with certain sibilants. Self-confident, too, with an overlay of easy, almost languid, amusement. If he had been a friend of Dylan Riley’s he certainly did not seem to be in mourning. “Good of you to call, Mr. Glass,” he had said, with a lordly, laughing air. “I know your stuff, of course. Been a fan of yours for years.” There had been no mention of Riley or his death. All very businesslike. The Boathouse, noon. “See you there, Mr. Glass. Look forward to it.”
At twelve on the stroke he came striding along by the water, smiling and with a hand thrust out while he was still five yards off. “Mr. Glass, I presume?” he said. “Cleaver. Howdy do?” He was a young man, thin and tall with a sharp face and a big, exaggerated smile. His hair was cut close and he sported a sort of beard that was just two narrow black lines running down past his ears and along the jawline to meet underneath the notched chin. He wore a striped seersucker jacket tightly buttoned and a blue bow tie with red polka dots. Glass noticed his shoes, impossibly long and narrow patent-leather sheaths, the laces knotted into stiff and perfectly formed figure eights. There was something about him of the professional performer, but one from another age, a sixties stand-up comedian, maybe, or even one of those old-time zootsuited jazzmen with a horn in one hand and a reefer in the other. He was all movement, flexing his knees and shooting his cuffs and tugging at his tie, as if he were controlled by an internal clockwork mechanism, oiled and intricate. Having shaken hands with Glass he smoothed the wings of his sleek pencil moustache rapidly downward with the tips of a thumb and forefinger. “Let’s walk,” he said.
The day had a bluey-green tinge and the coming of spring was everywhere in evidence. The trees quivered and there were fresh gusts of wind among the budding boughs, and the lake water shone like a knife blade. Glass loved this park, so grand, so generous, and so unexpected. Today, as always, there were joggers everywhere, and young mothers airing their children, or perhaps they were not mothers but minders, and the usual complement of crazy people and shuffling down-and-outs.
“How that book of yours coming along?” Cleaver asked.
“What book?”
Cleaver had a high-pitched, hiccuppy laugh. “Oo, you so coy!” he crowed.
“How do you know me?” Glass asked coldly. “How did you come to have Alison O’Keeffe’s number?”
“I thought it was your number, man. Old Dylan, he liked to think he was real organized but he sure could get his data mixed up.”
“You knew him, then, Dylan Riley?”
“Yeah, I knew him, the poor cracker.”
“What do you do, Mr. Cleaver?”
“I do what you do, Mr. Glass.”
“You’re a journalist?”
“Paid up and bona fidee.”
Glass had understood from the start that the Dixie slang and the cornpone accent were put on. Cleaver was making fun of him.
“You know Riley is dead.”
Cleaver made a gun of a thumb and forefinger and pointed it at his eye. “No great surprise, and he can’t claim he wasn’t warned. Riley, I’d say to him, you not careful, you going to get yourself whacked someday, boy. But would he listen? No sir.”
They came in sight of the Bethesda Fountain with its gilded angel striding aloft. Two little boys were wrestling by the parapet of the fountain, each trying to topple the other into the water, while a bored young woman with an Eastern European pallor looked on listlessly.
“See, what it is,” Cleaver said, as if continuing a topic already opened, “I wrote some things about your Mr. Mulholland for Slash- ” He broke off. “You know that magazine, man, that Slash? No? It’s good. Small, sure, but it’s sharp, like you might guess from the name. Anyways, I got leaned on pretty hard for those things I wrote. Yeah, pretty hard.”
A large dark bird flew down swiftly from the trees on their right and skimmed the footpath with wings outspread.
“What do you mean, leaned on?” Glass asked.
“Oh, you know. Silence all of a sudden from certain quarters that used to be real noisy. Commissions canceled with no reason given. Phone calls at four in the morning with nobody saying anything, only breathing real heavy. You get my drift?”
“And you think Mr. Mulholland was behind these things?”
“It’s a fair bet, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t.”
Cleaver found this funny and did his hee-haw laugh. “Fact,” he said, “I was planning to write a book about him. Ain’t that a coincidence, you and me both on the same track? ’Cept my book would have been different from yours, I’m guessing.”
“You were going to write a biography of Mr. Mulholland?”
“Not exactly. More a expose, you might say. I been real interested in him for a long time. And in Charles Varriker, his guy that died all those years ago. Dylan Riley, he was helping me. I hired him, like you did.” So, Glass thought, that’s how Riley happened to have all those facts at his fingertips about Big Bill. “Yeah, he was in on it with me for a while, until I gave it up, under all that pressure from persons unknown. And now he’s dead. There’s another coincidence.”
They came to the Bow Bridge and set off across it, toward the Ramble.
“What’s your interest in Charles Varriker?” Glass asked.
“Well, he’s the main man in the story of Big Bill’s financial recovery way back then in the bad old eighties, ain’t he? He was the one Big Bill brought in to save Mulholland Cable when Mr. Bankruptcy began to beckon. Now Varriker, what I know of him, wasn’t the kind of man who’d let himself get so low there wasn’t nothing for it but to eat a gun.”