“He wasn’t slumped over anything,” Glass said.
“-with half his brains splattered across the screen, which in the circumstances is surely symbolic of something. As usual, New York’s Finest are scratching their heads for a who and a why. Riley’s girlfriend Terri -with an i-Taylor told police that yadda yadda yadda. The Cleaver is reliably informed-i.e. the cops told us-that Riley’s last phone call was to internationally renowned bleeding-heart journo Mr. John Glass, who, as unhappy chance would have it, is at present working on a biography-nay, the biography-of his daddy-in-law, electronics mogul and former Company spook Mr. William ‘Big Bill’ Mulholland. The Cleaver asks: have we stumbled into a wilderness of mirrors here? ” She turned from the screen. Glass was standing by the bed, buttoning his shirt. She crossed to her side of the bed and took a printed silk wrap from the closet and put it on, all the while studying Glass out of a narrowed eye. “What did Cleaver say when you met him?”
He stooped to put on his trousers, lifting a shoulder defensively against her. “Nothing much. He was just fishing for information, looking for a story.”
“And did he know about”-she made a sardonic grimace-“us?”
“Probably. He called you because he thought your number was mine-he got it from Riley, whose filing system seems to have left a lot to be desired.”
“Then Riley did know about us.”
“Obviously.”
She made a brief laughing sound. “You think there’s anything obvious about any of this?”
He sighed. He felt weary. He wished he had never heard the name Dylan Riley, and silently cursed his contacts who had recommended him. He began to light another cigarette, but Alison said: “Would you mind not? The place reeks already.” She never smoked in the studio.
He fitted the cigarette back into the pack, deliberately, resentfully. “Let’s go out and eat,” he said.
“It’s early.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Don’t snap.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
This was how it was between them now, so often, the sudden lunge and whip of irritation, followed by a fuming silence. He took a long breath. “Where do you want to go?”
“Where do we ever go?” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “You find a table, I’ll get dressed and follow you.”
He turned. “Alison.”
She looked at him. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
She would not look at him. Something like embarrassment, like shame, almost, sat heavily in the space that separated them.
“This fellow getting killed,” she said, “do you think it had something to do with your father-in-law?”
“I don’t know.” He needed that cigarette. “I hope not.”
“Have you talked to… have you talked to Louise about it?”
“Not really. Louise doesn’t take much interest in things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like people that she doesn’t know getting murdered. Her range of concerns is limited. Her stocks portfolio. Getting a really good table at Masa. The quality of the top snow at Klosters this year.” He could not stop. “The Mulholland Trust. Her son’s future. Me getting my comeuppance.”
She tightened her lips. “Go and find us a table,” she said.
They ate at the little French place round the corner where they went most evenings when they were together, which were not many, and were becoming fewer. He did not know why Alison put up with him-he would not have put up with himself. She was lonely, he supposed, as he was, two exiles from a tiny place stranded here amid all this enormity. The image he entertained of America was that of a buffalo standing foursquare with its great head lifted in the direction of old Europe, and him a microbe perched precariously on the tip of the creature’s mighty muzzle. Perhaps he should go home, to Ireland; perhaps they should both go home; together, even; perhaps.
After dinner they strolled over to Washington Square. The rain had stopped and there was a fresh, clean fragrance on the night. Glass recalled their meeting here that winter noon before Christmas when they had walked in the glassy air round and round this bare rectangle, under the spectral trees. The time that had elapsed since then seemed far more than a mere four months. “It was at the Washington Square Bookstore here, in 1920,” he said, “that the head of the Society for the Prevention of Vice, chap called Sumner, I believe, bought a copy of the Little Review with the Gerty MacDowell episode from Ulysses in it, and lodged a complaint with the police that led to the trial of the book for obscenity. I bet you didn’t know that.”
“You’re a mine of information,” Alison said drily.
The air had softened with the coming of darkness. Glass loved this city at night, the flash and gleam of it, the heavy hum of life going on everywhere, driven, undaunted.
“What will you do,” Alison said, “if you find this killing really is somehow connected with Mulholland?”
“I’m not going to find any such thing,” he said, in almost a snarl, surprised at his own anger. He took a measured breath. “I told you, there must be dozens of people who would have been glad to see the last of Dylan Riley. Why do you automatically think my father-in-law must be involved?”
“Why are you being so defensive?”
He sighed. “I’m not defensive. I’m just tired of being crossexamined.”
“You came to me in a panic after Riley phoned you. Have you forgotten? You were terrified he might have found out about you and me. What else were you frightened of, but that he would tell Big Bill Mulholland you were two-timing his daughter?” She linked her arm in his, not out of affection, but sidling close like an assassin, he thought suddenly, positioning herself to drive the dagger all the deeper. “You’ve always been afraid of him,” she said, “of what he could do to you-of what he could take away from you.”
He stopped, and made her stop with him. The square of sky above them had a sickly orange cast. He was breathing heavily, a man at bay. “What do you mean, what he could take away from me?”
She did not reply at once, but stood regarding him with a halfsmile, regretfully sardonic, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “Look at you,” she said. “Look what you’ve become-what they’ve made of you.”
She detached her arm from his then, sadly but firmly relinquishing him, and turned and walked back in the direction of Bleecker Street. He watched her go. Police sirens, two or three of them together, were whooping somewhere close by. He knew he should follow her, the sirens behind him seemed a frantic urging, yet he could not make himself take the first step. She seemed, like so much else, to be receding from him down a long slope that steepened steadily into darkness.
10
BIG BILL
Glass stepped out of the elevator into the apartment and his wife came from the shadows quickly, as if to forestall him, and asked in a low voice, sounding tense and cross, where he had been until this hour. The question was rhetorical; she knew where he had been, more or less. She took his arm, much as Alison O’Keeffe had taken it an hour ago, with urgent and unfond intent. “Billuns is here, and he wants to talk to you. He’s mad about something, I can tell.” Glass said nothing. He might have guessed his father-in-law had arrived. Something happened to an atmosphere when Big Bill Mulholland stepped into it. They walked forward, Louise’s high heels making a sharp rapid noise on the parquet that sounded as if she were clicking her tongue. The light in the apartment was muted, no overhead bulbs burning and all the lamps shedding their subdued radiance downward, as if in deference to the great man’s presence.
He was sitting in an armchair in the drawing room, holding aloft a clear crystal goblet with half an inch of brandy in it, gazing into the liquor’s amber depths with one eye narrowed and showing off his raptor’s profile. In his late seventies, he was still impossibly handsome, with the head of an athlete of ancient Greece under a great upright plume of undyed dark hair. It was only when he turned that he showed the flaw in his good looks: his eyes, uncannily like those of his grandson, were set much too close together. They gave him, those eyes, the look of being always meanly at work on some extended, crafty, and malign calculation. “Ah, John,” he said expansively, “here you are, at last.” Without rising from the chair he offered Glass a slender, sun-browned, manicured hand. The little finger sported a ruby signet ring; on his other hand, the one holding the brandy glass, he wore a narrow gold wedding band. “We wondered where you’d got to.”