don’t want to talk to you about Charlie Varriker,” she said.
“Then I’ll ask your father.” He waited, and she said nothing. “There’s something not right here, Lou. And it’s to do with Varriker, I’m sure of it. I don’t know how, but I’m sure.”
“Since when,” she flashed at him, “did you start to care again about things not being right?” She continued glaring for a moment, then turned aside with her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. “Charlie was a good man,” she said. “He didn’t deserve to die. That wasn’t right.”
“Dylan Riley didn’t deserve to die, either.”
“Oh, yes?” she said, and gave him a sardonic look. “And you’re going to avenge his death, are you?”
“I want to know for certain who killed him. Maybe I’ve decided to be a journalist again, as you say I should.” He waited, then said: “What happened, with Charlie Varriker? Tell me, Lou.”
The old sailor, squatting on his heels, was fashioning an elaborate knot in the boat’s painter. He had lit a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, from where a line of smoke ran straight up into his left eye. He knew, Glass saw, that Louise was watching him; male vanity never ages.
The girl brought their coffee.
“Charlie was Billuns’s best recruit,” Louise said.
“At the CIA?”
She ignored the question as too obvious to require an answer. “Billuns was so proud of him. God knows the things he had got him to do-there had been some ‘op,’ as they used to say, in Vietnam that Charlie would never talk about, that had been a great success, just before the Tet Offensive. They used to get drunk together and make toasts to Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. They were like schoolboys, or like a schoolboy and his teacher.” She stopped.
“And?”
Louise sipped her coffee and grimaced. “It’s hot,” she said, “be careful.” The old sailor had gone. A family of five fatties waddled past, making the wharf groan under them. The three roly-poly children wore identical, brand- new Sag Harbor T-shirts. One of them, a girl, had an exquisitely pretty face encased in a football of fat. Louise resumed her cheerless sprawl, shoving her hands into the sleeves of her sweater. “And nothing,” she said. “Billuns brought in Charlie to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong at Mulholland Cable, and he did, he fixed it. He could fix anything, with that way of his. And then he killed himself.” She was looking out at the drab green hills across the bay, her eyes narrowed again and her mouth making tiny movements behind tightened lips as if she were biting on something small and hard between her teeth.
“How well did you know him?” Glass asked.
“Who-Charlie? He was Billuns’s employee, then his partner, then he was dead. People came and went like that, in our life, in those days. It was a hectic time. Things changed from one day to the next. Someone was there and then gone. That was the kind of world it was.”
“And you hated it.” Only when he had said it did it strike him as surely true.
“What was there to hate?” she said, on a suddenly weary note. “It was my life. It was what I knew. There was no changing that.”
“You mean,” he said, “there was no escaping it?”
She smiled, for what seemed to him the first time in a long time. “ You were supposed to be my escape,” she said.
“What about Mr. Sinclair?”
“Oh, he was just”-she waved a hand, again in seeming weariness-“he was just someone along the way.”
“Along the way to me?”
“Just-along the way.”
The sun’s faint warmth was lifting a tarry smell from the wooden tabletop between them.
“I’m sorry,” Glass said, not knowing exactly what it was he was sorry for.
To his surprise, she reached out and touched the back of his hand with her fingertips. “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m not. Not really.” Then she pushed her coffee cup aside and stood up, pulling the heavy cape close about her. “Brr,” she said, “I’m cold. Let’s go-Mass will be over by now.”
When they got back to the church Big Bill and his grandson were already in the car. Sitting upright there, the top half of Big Bill looked like a ruined monument to some immemorial chieftain, his eagle’s profile and dark crest of hair suggesting a warrior race, long extinct. “I told you you had upset him,” Louise murmured.
David Sinclair saw them and waved. “We had a wonderful sermon, very edifying,” he said. “Mammon and the media and the craze for celebrity. How modern the priesthood has become all of a sudden. Not so long ago it was hellfire and the hope of salvation. What happened to good old-timey religion, that’s what I want to know.”
His grandfather sat motionless, seeming not to hear him. When he blinked, his eyelids fell like miniature canvas flaps. They drove back up to the house in silence except for Sinclair’s happy humming. As they traveled inland the salt-sea smell gave way to scents of grass and pine. In the backseat Glass tried to catch his wife’s eye but she looked out steadily at the road, her hair shaking in the wind.
Manuela had set out drinks in the drawing room, lemonade, her specialty, and herb tea for Big Bill and Louise, and Glass’s habitual gin and ice and lemon and tonic water. But Glass did not feel like drinking, and walked out to the verandah and smoked a cigarette instead. The birds, quieter now, browsed among the trees, whistling and chattering. Presently David Sinclair came out, carrying a tall tumbler of lemonade. Glass ignored him, hoping he would go away, but the young man instead sat down on one of the swings and began happily rocking himself forward and back, his feet lifted free of the floor. “They’re planning a pow-wow on my future,” he said. “Mother and Billuns, that is. I’m supposed to join them, but really, I can’t face it.” He smiled, compressing his lips, which were so pink they might have been painted. “You don’t believe in all this for one little moment, do you?-I mean me as pontiff of the one, holy, and apostolic Mulholland Trust.”
“I believe,” Glass said, “that the Trust does good work.”
“Oh, yes,” David said, heaving a histrionic sigh. “That’s what makes it so boring.”
Glass heard himself breathing, as he always did when he was angry. He threw away his cigarette and turned aside, muttering something, and walked into the house, and up to his bedroom, and shut the door behind him and sat on the side of the bed and picked up the telephone and dialed, and after a moment said: “Captain Ambrose, is he there? I’d like to speak to him. Glass, tell him. John Glass.”
14
THE LOVE NEST
W hen Glass arrived at his office next morning there was message waiting on the answering machine. It was from Terri Taylor, to say good-bye. Her father had come in from Des Moines and she was flying back with him-“going home to Insurance Land,” as she said, with one of her snuffly, apologetic little laughs. The machine made her voice sound hollow and distant, as if she were speaking already from way out on those far plains. He found, to his surprise, that he was touched she should have thought to call him, but then he reflected that perhaps she had no one else in New York to say good-bye to.
He sat down at his desk. He had expected there would be a message from Alison O’Keeffe. He thought of calling her, and even picked up the phone, but set it back again, slowly, in its notch. And immediately the thing rang.
“Wilson Cleaver here. How you doing, brother?” Cleaver sounded chirpy and amused, as usual, enjoying immensely his ongoing private joke at the world’s expense. “What’s the news, Sherlock? You catch the dastardly culprit yet who gave our nosey friend one in the eye?”
“No. But I think I know who it was.”
That brought a silence on the line. Cleaver breathed for a while, thinking, and then said: “You care to say a name?” More silence. “No, I guess not.”
“I want to talk to you. About Charles Varriker.”
“Heh heh. Now where’d I hear that name before?”
