The Lemur (4 page)
Authors: Benjamin Black
Tags: #Family Life, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective
“Alison O’Keeffe,” Glass said. “Is she there? Tell her it’s John—she’ll know.”
He drummed his fingers on the desk and listened to the hollow nothingness on the line. Can there be, he was thinking, any more costly hostage to fortune than a mistress?
ALISON
Glass
had first met Alison O’Keeffe the previous winter outside a bar in the Village. It was,
she
was, every middleaged male smoker’s fantasy made flesh. There he stood, huddled in the doorway sucking on a cigarette as flurries of snow played round his ankles, when she came out, scowled at the bruisecolored sky and lit up a Gauloise—a Gauloise, for God’s sake! He assumed from this that she was French, but the longer he looked at her—and he looked at her for so long and with such intensity that he was surprised she did not call a cop—the more convinced he became, on no basis other than tribal instinct, that she must be Irish. She was of middle height, slender, very dark of hair and very pale of skin. The word he could not help applying to her features was
chiseled,
though they were far from hard—creamy marble, lovingly shaped. Her eyes were an extraordinary shade of deep azure which, as he would come to know, grew even deeper at moments of passion. She smoked now in that faintly impatient, faintly resentful way that women did when they were forced outdoors like this, one arm held stiffly upright, an elbow cupped firmly in a palm, her fingers twiddling the cigarette as if it were a piece of chalk with which she was dashing out a complex formula on an invisible blackboard. She wore a high-necked black sweater and black leather trousers; the trousers he considered a mistake, but one that, on balance, he could forgive.
had first met Alison O’Keeffe the previous winter outside a bar in the Village. It was,
she
was, every middleaged male smoker’s fantasy made flesh. There he stood, huddled in the doorway sucking on a cigarette as flurries of snow played round his ankles, when she came out, scowled at the bruisecolored sky and lit up a Gauloise—a Gauloise, for God’s sake! He assumed from this that she was French, but the longer he looked at her—and he looked at her for so long and with such intensity that he was surprised she did not call a cop—the more convinced he became, on no basis other than tribal instinct, that she must be Irish. She was of middle height, slender, very dark of hair and very pale of skin. The word he could not help applying to her features was
chiseled,
though they were far from hard—creamy marble, lovingly shaped. Her eyes were an extraordinary shade of deep azure which, as he would come to know, grew even deeper at moments of passion. She smoked now in that faintly impatient, faintly resentful way that women did when they were forced outdoors like this, one arm held stiffly upright, an elbow cupped firmly in a palm, her fingers twiddling the cigarette as if it were a piece of chalk with which she was dashing out a complex formula on an invisible blackboard. She wore a high-necked black sweater and black leather trousers; the trousers he considered a mistake, but one that, on balance, he could forgive.
Afterward he would insist that he was in love with her before they had exchanged their first words.
She paid him no heed, and seemed not to have noticed him there, though they were the only two pariahs in the smokers’ vestibule at that five o’clock hour of the darkling December evening. He had come to the bar to meet the editor of a new, radical journal who wanted him to contribute a piece on the Northern Irish peace agreement for the first issue. The editor was a muscular, fresh-faced, tirelessly smiling young man recently out of Yale, and after two minutes of his pitch Glass knew he was not going to write for him. That kind of sincerity, though he supposed he, too, must have been filled with it, and filled to the brim, back at the dawn of history, now only wearied him. So he would not have been eager to go back into the bar even if this palely lovely girl had not been outside with him, which she most certainly, most excitingly, was. Well, not with him, perhaps, but there, which for the moment was enough. He wondered how he might go about securing her attention. It was odd how perilous it could be in this city to offer a friendly remark to a stranger. Once he had commented on the weather to a girl in a lift, and she had shrunk back from him into a corner and informed him in a tense, low voice that she had a Mace spray in her purse. This one irritably smoking beside him now, in her shiny rawhide pants, looked as if she would be not so antagonistic, though her self-containedness was certainly daunting. But it was Christmas, the time of year most fraught, for him, with erotic possibilities, and he had a panicky sense that at the very next moment this particular possibility was going to stub out her cigarette and thrust herself back into the crowded bar, and that he would never see her again, and so, at last, he spoke.
“I’ve made a bet with myself,” he said.
The young woman looked at him, and seemed not impressed by what she saw. “Pardon me?”
“I’m wagering you’re Irish.” He smiled; it felt, from his side of it, like a leer.
She narrowed her eyes and set her jaw at an angle, weighing him up. “How did you know?” she said.
He was so taken aback at being right that he felt winded for a moment. He laughed breathily. “I don’t know. Are you Irish Irish, or did your granny come from Ireland?”
She was still watching him measuringly. “I’m Irish Irish,” she said. “And as it happens, my grandmother came from New York.” Then she did stub out her cigarette, and pushed open the door of the bar behind her and, throwing him a cold, quick smile, was gone.
Now, in damp April, he was making his way into another bar, again in the Village, with something of the same sense of alarmed anticipation—though for different reasons—that he had felt when he had followed her into the dive on Houston Street that snowy afternoon in Christmas week, determined she would not disappear out of his life. She was standing at the bar, leaning on an elbow, holding a tall glass of something crimson. “What’s up?” she said. “You’re green around the gills.” She was a painter, and she wore a painter’s smock, but although she had been working and had come straight round from her studio on Bleecker Street there was not a spot of spilled paint to be seen anywhere on her person; she was not that kind of painter. She also wore leggings with black and gray horizontal stripes that made him think, incongruously, of Siena Cathedral.
He ordered a dry martini, and Alison arched an eyebrow. “A bit early, isn’t it?” she said. “What’s the matter, has your father-in-law cut you out of his will?”
Glass’s connection with the Mulhollands was for Alison an unfailing invitation for raillery and comic elaboration. She was a humorous girl, with a wayward appreciation of life’s more ridiculous arrangements. What she thought of his marriage to Louise he did not know, for she never said, which was fine by him. She painted big, bold abstracts in bright acrylics, which he did not consider very good. Alison knew what he thought of her work, and did not mind; she was that kind of painter.
He asked her what she was drinking, looking dubiously at the gory stuff in her glass, and she said it was a Virgin Mary. He sipped at his martini. She was waiting for him to tell her what it was that had made him speak to her so urgently, and so cryptically, on the telephone. Patience was one of her more notable qualities, patience, and a peculiar, and sometimes, so he found, unsettling way of becoming suddenly, eerily still, as if she were waiting calmly for something to take place that she had already foreseen.
“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—”
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
?”
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.
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.”
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 maître 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.
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