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.”
Glass shook the firm, dry hand briefly and then went and sat down on the white sofa, facing his father-in-law. He could sense Louise, a hovering presence, somewhere behind him in the dim lamplight. He wondered for a moment if she might be signaling soundlessly to her father. Mulholland regarded him with what seemed a deep affection, smiling and twinkling in that way he had, nodding a little, like a leader on a balcony bestowing a general vague approval upon the gathered masses of his subjects. “Working late, I hope?” he said. “Delving into my racy past? How is the book coming?”
“Slowly, I’m afraid,” Glass said, in a neutral tone.
Mulholland seemed unsurprised, and unperturbed. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t expect you to hurry. Just keep in mind, though, I’m not immortal, no matter what some people might say.”
“I’m gathering things,” Glass said, lifting his hands and molding an invisible globe between them. “There’s a lot of material.”
Mulholland was nodding again, the smile forgotten on his tanned hawk’s face. He was thinking of something else, Glass could see it, the tiny polished wheels turning, the levers engaging.
Louise came and sat on the arm of the sofa beside her husband and even laid a hand weightlessly on his shoulder. “He’s in the office every day, nine to five,” she said, laughing lightly, and a touch unsteadily. Always in her father’s presence her voice had an uncertain wobble that she tried to suppress, and that still sparked Glass’s waning protective instincts. He put a hand over her hand that was resting on his shoulder. Mulholland looked at them and a hard, sardonic light came into his face. “How is the office?” he asked. “You settled in? Got everything you need?” He took a sip of brandy, swallowed, sniffed. “I wouldn’t want to think of you uncomfortable, down there.”
“ Up there,” Louise said. “John is scared of the height.” Glass swiveled his head to look up at her, but she only smiled at him and made a mischievous face.
“That so?” Mulholland said, without interest. “Guess I don’t blame you, these days. We didn’t know we were building so many standing affronts to the world.” He looked into his glass again. “We didn’t know a lot of things. After ’89 we thought we were in for a spell of peace, unaware of what was slouching toward us out of the festering deserts of Arabia. Now we know.”
Glass always marveled at the complacency with which his father-in-law delivered these solemn addresses; he wondered if it was all a tease, a toying with the tolerance of those around him, a test to see if there was a limit to what he would be let get away with. Perhaps this was how all the rich and powerful amused themselves, talking banalities in the sure knowledge of being listened to.
“It’s fine,” Glass said. “There isn’t much I need, just space, and quiet.”
Mulholland gave him a quick glance, and seemed to suppress a grin. “Good, good,” he said. He held out his empty glass to his daughter. “Lou, my dear, you think I could get maybe another tincture of this very special old pale?” She took the goblet from him and walked away soundlessly down the shadowed room, and opened a door and closed it softly behind her; she would be gone for some time, Glass knew; she was adept at reading her father’s signals. The old man sat forward in the armchair and set his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands in front of his chin. He wore a dark gray Savile Row suit and a handmade silk shirt and John Lobb brogues. Glass fancied he could smell his cologne, a rich, woody fragrance. “This fellow Cleaver,” Big Bill said, “you know who I mean? One of life’s mosquitoes. He’s been buzzing around me for years now. I don’t like him. I don’t like his tactics. Guy like him, he thinks I’m the enemy because I’m rich. He forgets, this country is founded on money. I’ve done more for his people, the Mulholland Trust has done more, than all the Mellons and the Bill Gateses put together.” He chafed his clasped hands, making the knuckles creak. He did not look at Glass when he asked: “And who is this Riley fellow?”
Glass made no movement. “A researcher,” he said.
The old man glanced sidelong from under his eyebrows. “You hired him?”
“I spoke to him,” Glass said.
“And?”
“And then he got shot.”
“I hope you’re not going to tell me that the one thing followed from the other?” Mulholland suddenly grinned, showing a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of clean, white, even teeth. “Say you’re not going to tell me that, son.”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
