The lamplight formed still pools around their feet, while above them the dimness hung in billows like the roof of a tent.
“See, I’ve got to know,” Mulholland said. “I’ve got to know if you’re in trouble, because, frankly, if you’re in trouble then most likely so am I, and so is my family, and I don’t like that. I don’t like trouble. You understand?” He rose from the chair, without, Glass noted, the slightest effort, and walked to the fireplace and stood there with his hands in his pockets. “Let me tell you a story,” he said, “a tale from the bad old days, when I was in the Company.” He laughed shortly, and had to cough a little. He had an eerie aspect, standing there with the top half of him in gloom above the lamplight, a truncated man. “There was a friend of mine-personal friend, as well as professional- who managed to get himself on the wrong side of J. Edgar Hoover. Now that, as I’m sure you know, was not a good place to be, J. Edgar being-well, J. Edgar. I’m talking about the sixties, after Kennedy’s time. Doesn’t matter what it was that my friend-let’s call him Mac-doesn’t matter what Mac had done to displease that fat old fag. Matter of fact, I thought it was pretty stupid of him, in the circumstances. Hoover was the kingpin then, and the FBI was unassailable.” The lamplight was picking out high points in the shadows, the shine on a clock face, a gleam of polished wood, a spark from Big Bill’s ruby ring. “Anyway,” he said, “Hoover was real mad at my friend Mac, and decided to bring him down. Now, Mac was pretty high up, you know, at Langley, but that wasn’t going to stop J. Edgar. What he did was he organized a sting operation, though that wasn’t what we called it in those days.” He paused, musing. “Matter of fact, I can’t remember what we called it. Memory’s going. Anyway. The trap was that Mac was to be at a certain place at a certain time to take delivery of papers, documents, you know, that were supposed to have come from the Russian embassy in Washington. In fact, what was in the package, though Mac didn’t know it, was not papers at all but a big stash of money-serious, serious money-and when it was in Mac’s hands J. Edgar’s people were supposed to jump out of the bushes and nab him for a corrupt agent taking money from a foreign power, the foreign power, and our number one enemy. Anyway, someone in Hoover’s office, who liked Mac and didn’t like his boss, tipped him off, and Mac just didn’t show up at the appointed rendezvous. Okay? So next day Mac, who was pretty sore, as you can imagine, he went down to the Mayflower Hotel where Hoover ate his lunch every day with his constant companion Clyde Tolson. The maitre d’ stopped Mac at the desk, worried, I guess, by the wild look in his eye, and when Mac told him he wanted to see Hoover-“J. Edna,” as he called him-the maitre d’ said he had a standing instruction that Mr. Hoover was never to be interrupted while he was eating his cottage cheese and drinking his glass of milk. You tell that bastard, Mac said, that unless he gets his fat ass out here this minute I’m going to announce to this restaurant that the boss of the FBI is a skirt-wearing fag. So Hoover comes bustling out, and Mac accuses him of trying to entrap him. Hoover of course denies all knowledge of the sting, and promises he’ll set up an investigation right away to find out who was responsible, says he won’t rest until he has identified the miscreant, et cetera, et cetera. So. Week later, Mac and his wife are flying down to Mexico in Mac’s private Cessna, just the two of them, with Mac piloting. Half an hour out from Houston, out over the Gulf, kaboom. Bomb under the pilot’s seat. Wreckage strewn over half a square mile of water. Mac’s body was found, the wife’s never. At the funeral, Hoover was seen to wipe away a tear.” He gave another quick laugh. “No half measures for our John Edgar.”
Glass was fingering the pack of Marlboros in his coat pocket. He heard the door at the end of the room opening softly, and a moment later Louise appeared, carrying a tray with three glasses. Glass wondered if she had been listening outside the door. At times it seemed to him he did not know his wife at all, that she was a stranger who had entered his life sidewise somehow and stayed on. “Sorry it took so long,” she said. “John, I brought you a Jameson.” She leaned down to each of the men in turn and they took their glasses, then she put the tray on a low table and brought her own drink-Canada Dry with a sliver of lime-and sat beside her husband on the sofa, crossing her legs and smoothing the hem of her dress on her knee.
“We’ve been talking about J. Edgar Hoover and his wicked ways,” her father told her.
“Oh, yes?” she said. Glass could feel her not looking at him. He sipped his whiskey.
“Your father was telling me,” he said, “how Hoover arranged the assassination of a CIA man and his wife.”
“Who says it was Hoover?” Big Bill said, with a show of innocent surprise. “I told you, he wept at the funeral.” He swirled the brandy in its goblet, smiling again with his teeth.
Louise was still smoothing the stuff of her dress with her fingertips. “Billuns is wondering,” she said, not looking up, “what it was exactly you said to that man Riley.”
The atmosphere in the room had tightened suddenly. From the library they heard the silvery chiming of the Louis Quinze clock that Mulholland had given them for a wedding present.
“I don’t remember telling him anything,” Glass said. “We spoke on the phone, he came to the office, I said what I was writing, what I needed-”
“What you needed?” Mulholland said. He looked suddenly all the more like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed, motionless. “See, that’s what I don’t understand, John. Why you needed to bring in someone else. I gave you this commission because you’re family. I told you that at the time, I said, John, I want someone I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Surely you knew that meant you, and not some computer nerd along with you?” He turned to his daughter. “Am I making sense, Lou? Am I being unreasonable?” Louise said nothing, and Mulholland answered for her. “No, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable at all.”
For a while now Glass had felt the room forming an angle behind him, the corner into which he was being backed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It would have been no great thing, to hire a researcher. It’s normal. Historians do it all the time.”
Mulholland opened his little dark eyes as wide as they would go. “But you’re not a historian, John,” he said, as if explaining something to a child.
“I’m not a biographer, either.”
His father-in-law went on gazing at him almost mournfully for a moment, then set down his brandy glass and slapped his palms on his knees and stood up and walked to the fireplace again. “My problem now, you see, John, is how to handle this. We have here what we used to call a fail-int, that is, a failure of intelligence. I don’t know what you told Riley, and I don’t know what Riley told this Cleaver guy. When you have a fail-int, you’ve got to do some creative thinking. That’s something you could help me with. Because I have to decide how to deal with Mr. Wilson Cleaver and his innuendos.”
A voice spoke from the depths of the room: “What about special rendition?” They turned and peered, all three, and David Sinclair came strolling out of the shadows, tossing something small and shiny from one palm to the other. He was smiling. “Surely you could arrange a little thing like that, Granddad.”
11
TERRI WITH AN I
I n the morning Glass was sitting after breakfast on the little wrought-iron balcony outside the drawing room, savoring in solitude a third cigarette and a fourth cup of coffee, when his stepson reappeared. Glass had to struggle not to show his annoyance. Usually he was the only one who used the balcony, sharing it with rust and spiderwebs and a few moldering remnants of last autumn’s leaves. Below him was a courtyard-a courtyard, in Manhattan!-and a little garden with ailanthus and silver birch and dogwood, and other green and brown things he did not know the names of. On certain days in all seasons a very old man in a leather apron was to be seen down there, scraping at the gravel with a rake, slow and careful as a Japanese monk. Today the sun was shining weakly, like an invalid venturing out after a long, bedridden winter, but spring had arrived at last, and now and then a silken shimmery something would come sprinting through the trees, silvering the new buds and shivering the windowpanes of the apartments opposite and then going suddenly still, like children stopping in the middle of a chasing game. The square of sky above the courtyard was a pale and grainy blue.
Glass thought of Dylan Riley with his eye shot through; there would be no more spring mornings for him.
“So this is where you hide yourself,” David Sinclair said.
Although he had his own duplex over by Columbus Circle the young man often spent the night at what he insisted on referring to as his mother’s apartment, no doubt imagining that he was thereby neatly excising Glass
