“I think,” he said, “I’ve got myself into a spot of bother.”
She laughed. “Again?”
He took another go of his drink. He was trying to recall the exact moment when it had occurred to him that it would be a good idea to hire a researcher to help him in writing the Life of William Pius Mulholland. It had seemed such a simple, such an innocent, thing to do. “Did anyone phone you?” he asked.
“Did anyone phone me?” She pretended to ponder. “My mother rang the other day, to ask me how I am and if I’ve dumped you yet, which she is forever urging me to do. That dealer on Seventy-fourth Street called, but he’s less interested in putting my pictures into his gallery than in getting into bed with me. And I spoke to the plumber about that leak in the-”
“I mean,” Glass said, “anyone you didn’t know. Anyone asking questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Well, about us.”
“Us?” She gave another, louder, laugh. “Who in this town knows about us?”
Her beauty assailed him afresh each time they met, yet it dismayed him, too. How would he bear it if he were to lose her? And lose her he would, of course, sooner or later. He found it hard to believe that he had got her in the first place. He had followed her into the bar that snowy December day and after a search had found her drinking Christmas tequilas with a couple of her girlfriends-tough broads, and how they had glared at him!-and spun her a transparently fake line about wanting to interview her for a piece he was supposed to be writing on the new Irish in Manhattan. She had gazed up at him in the solemn-faced way of someone trying not to laugh, and taken his card and braced it between a finger and thumb as if she were considering flipping it across the bar. Instead she had kept it and, to his surprise, telephoned him next morning and arranged a meeting in Washington Square at noon. She was, as he had guessed, a Dubliner, like him. Her father was dead, her mother worried about her endlessly, her brother was a banker and a bastard, she had been in New York a year, she lived in a freezing apartment above the Bleecker Street studio that her rich father had left her in his will-oh, and she had recently broken up with her boyfriend, a Romanian plasterer without a green card whose main interest in her, she had discovered, was the fact that she possessed an American passport thanks to her Brooklynborn dad.
All this she had told him as they walked around the bare little park in the frost-smoke of the winter day. When he made to tell her something about himself she had said: “Oh, I know who you are. I’ve been reading you for years.” He suspected that he had blushed.
Now, four months later, their affair had drifted into the doldrums, he could not quite say why. He loved her, in his way, and believed that she loved him, in her way, yet somehow they could not get a strong enough grip on each other, there was something that kept eluding them. Perhaps in their way was a way that was not direct enough, and that was why they seemed to keep swerving around each other. Then there was the fact that she resented the secrecy Glass had imposed on their liaison-that was the word he had once used to describe what they had going between them, and she had never forgotten or forgiven it-for he dreaded what would happen if his wife, or, worse, his father-in-law, should hear of the affair. Not that it was the first time he had been unfaithful to Louise, nor was Louise herself a model of fidelity. The Glasses had an unspoken arrangement, eminently civilized, and Glass wanted to keep it that way. There were certain rules to be observed, the first of which was the rule of absolute discretion. Louise did not wish to know of his affairs, and emphatically not one that involved what seemed to be, all doubts and reservations aside, love, the actually existing thing itself.
“Go on,” Alison said now, getting ready to laugh again, “you may as well tell me what’s up.” His supposed haplessness in the face of the world’s difficulties was one of the things she claimed to love him for. This puzzled him and, although he would never say so, annoyed him, too, a little, for he had always thought of himself as quite a competent fellow, indeed, more than competent. Now, when he had finished telling her about Dylan Riley-telling her some of it, anyway-she did laugh, shaking her head. “Why do you call him the Lemur?” she asked. “And by the way, a lemur is not a rodent.”
“How do you know?”
“I was a keen zoologist when I was at school. The name comes from the Latin word lemures, meaning ghosts, specters.”
“Anyway, he’s that type, tall, gangly, with a long neck and shiny black eyes like my dear stepson’s.”
“You forget,” Alison said drily, “that I’ve not had the opportunity to know what your dear stepson’s eyes, or any other parts of him, look like.”
Glass did not respond to this; in what circumstances could she possibly imagine him introducing her to David Sinclair? Standing next to them at the bar were a couple of caricature Wall Street brokers, loudly discussing hedge funds. One of them wore red suspenders-did brokers really wear red suspenders anymore?-and had a big, square head like a side of beef.
“Anyway,” Glass said, “I think the Lemur has found out about us. You’re sure he didn’t call?”
“Do you really think I would have forgotten if he had?”
He looked into his drink. “You mightn’t want to tell me about it. I mean”-hastily-“you might have wanted to spare me.”
“Spare you?” She laughed incredulously. “Well, he didn’t. And I wouldn’t. Want to spare you, that is.” She drank the last of her drink. The beef-faced broker was eyeing her speculatively. “And now,” she said, “I’m going back to work.”
He took a taxi uptown, gazing out unseeingly at the damp blocks as they fleeted past. He was hungry, for in the bar he had taken nothing but two martinis, the famous New York liquid lunch. He thought of stopping off at the Bleeding Horse but decided he could not face the crowds and the venal leer of the maitre d’.
Although he would never have admitted it, Glass was afraid of his father-in-law. His fear was of the low-key, fuzzy, four-o‘clock-in-the-morning variety, always there, like the dread of death, a pilot light glowing steadily inside him. Big Bill had notoriously strong opinions on the sanctity of the marriage vow. He had managed to have his own first, brief, starry union annulled by the Vatican on technical grounds, while his second wife, the hard-riding Miz Claire, had come a conveniently fatal cropper; and although Nancy Harrison had left him twenty years ago, he still considered himself married to her. What would Big Bill do if he heard of his son-in-law’s latest peccadillo? There had been scrapes in the past that Glass had managed to smooth over, with his wife’s tight-lipped acquiescence, but Alison O’Keeffe, he was somehow certain, would be a different matter. What was to be done?
When he got out of the lift on the thirty-ninth floor he could hear the telephone ringing in his office. He fumbled the key into the door and scrambled to the desk and seized the receiver-what is it, he wondered, that is so irresistibly imperative about a ringing telephone?
“For God’s sake,” Louise said, “where have you been?” He mumbled something about lunch, and immediately, like retribution, an acid after-waft of gin burned his throat. “Someone has been phoning for you-he called twice, at least.”
“Who?”
“A Captain Ambrose.” Glass frowned in bafflement toward the transparent office wall and the deep canyons beyond. Why would someone in the army be calling him? Then he realized: it must be a policeman. Dear Christ.
“What did he want?”
“It seems someone has been killed.”
Far uptown a speck-sized helicopter was hovering like a mosquito above a building site on the roof of a skyscraper, with a cable or something dangling from it, taut and straight, like a proboscis.