you will know, one child only, a daughter, Louise, by the second Mrs. Mulholland. Miz Claire, as this grand lady was called, died in a hunting accident-balking horse, broken neck-in April 1961, on the eve, as bloody-minded Fate would have it, of the invasion of the Playa Giron, otherwise known as the Bay of Pigs, a venture in which Big Bill was sunk up to his neck. The grieving widower returned from the shores of Florida to find the Eliots already moving his things, including his two-year-old daughter, out of the grand old family mansion in Back Bay.”
He turned and walked back and slumped down in the chair and again turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Next thing,” he said, “Big Bill was married a third time, to Nancy Harrison, writer, journalist, and Martha Gellhorn-look- alike, and living with her on a fine estate in County Somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, not an Oscar statuette’s throw from the home of his old friend and drinking buddy John Huston. Grand days, by all accounts, but bound to end, like all such. Blond Nancy couldn’t take the endless rain and the low-browed natives and packed up her Remington and hightailed it for sunnier climes-Ibiza, Clifford Irving, Orson Welles, all that.” He stopped, and lowered his glossy gaze from the ceiling and fixed on Glass. “You want more, I got more. And I haven’t even looked into the crystal ball of my laptop yet.”
“What did you do,” Glass said, “rehearse this stuff before you came up here?”
A sharp something came into the young man’s look, a resentful edge. “I have a photographic memory.”
“Useful, in your trade,” Glass said.
“Yeah.”
He was, Glass saw, sulking. His professional honor had been questioned. It was good to know where he was vulnerable.
Glass rose, a finger braced against the desktop for balance, and launched himself cautiously out into the room. At each step that he took he felt he was about to fall over, and had the impression that he was yawing sideways irresistibly in the direction of the glass wall and the gulp-inducing nothingness beyond. Would he ever become accustomed to this cloud-capped tower?
“I can see,” he said, “I’ve picked the right person. Because what I want is detail-the kind of thing I’m not going to have the time to find for myself, or the inclination, frankly.”
“No,” Riley said from the leather depths of his chair, still sounding surly, “detail was never your strong point, was it?”
What struck Glass was not so much the implied insult as the tense in which it was couched. Was this how everyone would see it, that by agreeing to write his father-in-law’s biography he had renounced his calling as a journalist? If so, they would be wrong, though once again it was a matter of tense. For he had already given up journalism, before ever Big Bill had approached him with an offer it would have been foolish to refuse. His reports on Northern Ireland during the Troubles, on the massacre in Tiananmen Square, on the Rwandan genocide, on the Intifada, on that bloody Saturday afternoon in Srebrenica, not so much reports as extended and passionately fashioned jeremiads-there would be no more of them. Something had ceased in him, a light had been extinguished, he did not know why. It was simply that: he had burned out. An old story. He was a walking cliche. “I want you to write this thing, son,” Big Bill had said to him, laying a hand on his shoulder, “not only because I trust you, but because others do, too. I don’t want a hagiography-I don’t merit one, I’m no saint. What I want is the truth.” And Glass had thought: Ah, the truth.
“It’s not going to be easy for you,” he said now to the young man lounging in the shell-shaped chair.
“How’s that?”
“I don’t want Mr. Mulholland to come to hear of you and what you’re doing. You understand?”
He turned-too quickly, making his head spin-and gave Dylan Riley what he hoped was a hard look. But Riley was gazing at the ceiling again, gnawing on the nail of his left little finger, and might not have been listening.
“That’s my job,” Riley said, “to be discreet. Anyway, you’d be surprised how much information-detail, as you say-is on record, if you know where to look for it.”
Glass suddenly wanted to be rid of the fellow. “Have you a standard contract?” he asked brusquely.
“A contract? I don’t do contracts.” Riley smiled slyly. “I trust you.”
“Oh, yes? I didn’t think you’d trust anyone, given the nature of your work.”
Riley stood up from the chair and adjusted the crotch of his sagging jeans with scooping gestures of both hands. He really was an unappetizing person. “‘The nature of my work’?” he said. “I’m a researcher, Mr. Glass. That’s all.”
“Yes, but you find things out, and surely sometimes the things you find out are not to the taste of your employers, never mind the people they are having researched.”
Riley gave him a long, piercing look, putting his head on one side and narrowing his eyes. “You said Big Bill has no guilty secrets.”
“I said I expect none.”
“I’m here to tell you, everybody has secrets, mostly guilty ones.”
Glass turned toward the door, drawing the young man with him. “You’ll get to work straightaway,” he said, a statement not a question. “When can I expect to hear from you?”
“I’ve got to get my head around this, get organized, decide priorities. Then we’ll talk again.” By now Glass had the door open. The much used air in the corridor smelled faintly of burnt rubber. “I’ve got to get my head around you, too,” Riley said, with a suddenly bitter laugh. “I used to read you, you know, in the Guardian, in Rolling Stone, the New York Review. And now you’re writing Big Bill Mulholland’s life story.” He inflated his cheeks and released the air in them with a tiny, plosive sound. “Wow,” he said, and turned away.
Glass shut the door and walked back to his desk, and when he reached it, as if at a signal, the telephone rang. “This is Security, Mr. Glass. Your wife is here.”
For a moment Glass said nothing. He touched the chair Dylan Riley had sat in, and again it made its tiny protest: eek, eek. The young man had left a definite odor on the air, a grayish, rank spoor.
A lemur! That was the creature Dylan Riley resembled. Yes, of course. A lemur.
“Tell her to come up,” John Glass said.
2
LOUISE
Louise Glass was forty-eight and looked thirty. She was tall and slim and a redhead, though these days most of the red came out of a bottle. Her skin was pale to the point of translucency, and her sharp-featured face was lovely from some angles and fascinatingly harsh from others. She was, Glass acknowledged to himself, for the umpteenth time, a magnificent woman, and he no longer loved her. It was strange. One day, around the time he had given up being a journalist, all that he had felt for her, all that helpless, half-tormented passion, had dropped to degree zero. It was as if the flesh-and-blood woman had, like an enchanted princess in a fairy tale, been turned to stone in his arms. There she was, as she had always been, a smooth, svelte, burnished beauty, at the mere sight of whom in former days something in him would cry out piteously, in a kind of happy languish, but whose presence now provoked in him only a faint, fading melancholy.
Today she wore a dark green suit and a Philip Treacy hat that was a minuscule square of black velvet topped with a few wisps of what might be spun sugar.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look ghastly.”
“It’s this place.”
She looked about the office, frowning. It was she who had suggested he borrow the room-her father owned the building. “What’s wrong with it?”
He did not want to admit his fright at being almost forty floors above street level. “It’s too impersonal. I don’t know if I can write here.”
“You could work at the apartment.”
“You know I can’t write at home.”
She settled on him her gray-green gaze. “ Is it home?” The silence that followed this was a chasm into which they both cast a glance and then stepped quickly back.
“You could go out to Silver Barn.” Silver Barn was their-her-house on Long Island. “The study is all set up. It’s
