They met at an Irish bar on Broadway. The bar was Cleaver’s suggestion, another detail added to the big joke’s already crowded scenario. Muldoon’s was a great dim barn of a place, with tricolors on the walls and shamrocks everywhere, and framed parchments with droll Irish verses graven in curlicued script, and a muscular bar girl in an outfit of black felt and bits of white lace that might have been worn by a Welsh milkmaid in a time of myth. Cleaver today wore jeans and a leather jacket and scuffed sneakers, an outfit in which he looked almost ordinary. He ordered a pint of Guinness, and Glass asked for a Jameson, despite the early hour. “Varriker,” he said. “What do you know about him?”
Cleaver did his eye-widening act. “Man, you the one with all the knowledge-you tell me.”
“When we had that drink, at the Tavern on the Green, you knew a lot of things about him. You even knew what day of the week he died on. What got you so interested in him that you made it your business to find out all that?”
Cleaver showed his dusty-pink palms. “I told you, I was reading up on Big Bill Mulholland. A lot of facts fell out. You know how it is.”
“Useless facts, or otherwise?”
Cleaver dipped a prehensile upper lip into the creamy froth of his Guinness and sucked up a wedge of the shiny, ebony-colored stout. “Jesus,” he said, grimacing, “how do you guys drink this stuff?”
Glass indicated his shot glass. “I don’t.”
“You don’t drink Guinness? What kind of an Irishman are you, brother? You ain’t even got red hair.”
The brawny barmaid hovered near them, eavesdropping on their talk while pretending to be polishing the countertop.
“Listen,” Glass said, “I think Varriker is the key to everything.”
Cleaver gave him an exaggerated stare, still playing at being Mister Bones. There were tiny red striations all over the slightly yellowish whites of his eyes. “‘Everything’ being Dylan Riley getting whacked? How come?”
“I don’t know.”
Cleaver took this in, sucking his teeth at one side and slowly nodding.
“What do you know about Varriker’s death?” Glass asked. “Where was he when he died?”
“Place up near Harlem. Had a room in an apartment house there, pretty run-down. Sounded like a love nest, to my suspicious way of thinking. Left no note, nothing. And all the time that first-class ticket to gay Paree was waiting for him at an Amex office over there on Lexington. Course, people do the darnedest things on the spur of the moment, even down to shooting their brains out.”
Glass was looking into his whiskey. “Do you know how he was shot?” he asked.
Cleaver said nothing.
“Through the eye, with a Beretta. Just like Dylan Riley. Now that , my friend, that is a coincidence.” He left his untouched drink on the bar and stood. “And if it’s not,” he asked, “then what is it?”
Cleaver followed him into the street. They stood together for a moment, unsure how to part. The day glared unreally, in a parody of April weather, the sunlight glancing in spikes off car roofs and shopwindows. A fat mauve cloud with an edge of burning magnesium was elbowing its way up the narrow strip of sky above Fifth Avenue.
“You know,” Cleaver said, “that blackmail stuff with Riley. It wasn’t real. He didn’t care about money. It was you he cared about, what he thought you were doing to yourself.”
Glass said nothing. He knew it was true, so what was there to say?
Cleaver smiled. “You look to me,” he said, “like a man about to cause an awful lot of trouble.” He had at last let drop the black-and-white-minstrel act. “Do I need to urge you to take it easy, to watch your back?”
Glass was squinting up at the advancing rain cloud. “I want you to do something for me,” he said.
“Anything for a comrade.”
“If nothing comes of this-if I get nowhere-if I’m stopped, and you hear no more of all this, don’t let it go. Keep digging, and publish what you turn up. Don’t worry about Mulholland or what he can do. Just keep on.”
Cleaver was half smiling, with eyebrows lifted and his head held on one side. “That’s what we do, my friend,” he said. “We keep on.” He offered a hand. “Good luck.”
When, half an hour later, Glass got to the apartment overlooking the Park there were shadows standing like transparent pillars in the high rooms. The cloud over the city had released its rain and moved on, and the sun was in the streets again, but indoors a wistful dimness persisted, vague as memory. Glass moved through a silence that seemed to cling like gauze. “All hands,” he murmured, his usual greeting, but with no one to hear.
In the library he found his father-in-law sitting in the middle of the white sofa, straight-backed as always, with head erect, in the pose of a tribal elder, his big liver-spotted hands set on his knees and his feet in their handmade brogues planted side by side on the polished parquet. Glass wished that he could just turn now and walk away, away to a time before the Lemur had come to his office, before Captain Ambrose had called him, before he had met Cleaver, before anyone had died.
The old man started, and looked at him, keeping his head set forward and only swiveling his eyes sideways. “What do you want?” he asked.
Glass sat down opposite him on a delicate Regency chair with a striped silk seat and curved legs ending in lion’s claws. “I want,” he said, “to know the truth about Charles Varriker.”
The old man gave a phlegmy laugh. “It’s my life story you’re supposed to be writing, not Charlie Varriker’s.”
“You hated him. Why?”
He shrugged. “What if I did? He was good, but just too damned good. That was supposed to be my thing, I was the one who was virtuous despite all the odds. But Charlie was better. Charlie was truly a virtuous man. It was unnatural. And it grated on me.”
“And therefore he had to die.”
Big Bill had stopped listening, and was looking about distractedly. “You think you could fix me a drink?” he asked. “I really need a drink.”
Faintly, from the hallway, Glass heard the whirr of the elevator as it came to life; someone had called it. He went into the dining room and poured a shot of Bushmills whiskey over a glass of ice and brought it back to the library and handed it to his father-in-law. The old man held the glass in both hands and drank greedily, the ice cubes knocking, then leaned back against the sofa wiping at his lips with his fingertips. “What did you say about Charlie’s death?” he asked. “All I know is it was a crime and a sin, and I don’t forgive him for it.”
“Did you kill him?” Glass asked.
For a moment it seemed that Big Bill had not heard. Then he turned his weary eyes again and looked at his son-in-law for a long moment, expressionless. “What are you talking about, you stupid son of a bitch?” he said at last, softly. “Kill him? Why would I kill him?”
“I don’t know. Because you hated him.”
“He killed himself, for Christ’s sake. He shot himself through the Goddamned eye, with my gun-I told you.”
“Yes, I know you did. But that’s how Dylan Riley was shot, too. With a Beretta. Through the eye.”
“What?” The old man was shaking his head. “I don’t understand-what do you mean?”
The lift was whirring again, and there was the faint clatter of it rising. Glass had been wondering where Clara the maid could be-perhaps this was she, coming back from the store.
“Dylan Riley,” Glass said, “the researcher I hired to work for me. He was shot in just the same way that Varriker was, through the eye, with a Beretta. I think you did it. I think you shot Varriker, and Riley found out somehow, and then you had to shoot him, too. Or maybe you had it done-maybe you called in a favor from your old friends in the Company. Is that what happened?”
When Louise and her son came into the room Glass experienced a moment of incongruous pure flashback to his boyhood, when he and his own mother on some unremembered afternoon must have entered a room somewhere in just this way, carrying packages and talking together and bringing with them the cool air of outdoors, with all its spring fragrances of trees in leaf and rained-on pavements, the delicate, drenched, petrol-blue air of April. He closed his eyes for a second. Why should he not just shut up now, claw back what had already been said- Big Bill seemed lost in bewilderment-and let the whole thing go, forget what he thought he knew, leave the dead to their own devices. If he kept on he would destroy the world that he and Louise had worked so long and hard to hold intact, to smash the elaborate jewel box that both contained and supplied adornment for his life. Was that what he really wanted?
