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.
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.