jeans, “for a start I know what Big Bill is paying you to write up his colorful life story.”
Glass heard himself swallow. He had thought that he and his wife and his father-in-law were the only ones who knew that figure. How could the Lemur have found it out? Big Bill would surely be the last one to blab that kind of thing. Had Louise been talking? Not like her, either. “I’m sure,” Glass said measuredly, “you’ll have got hold of a wildly exaggerated sum.”
The Lemur did not bother insisting. “We didn’t discuss my fee,” he said.
“I asked if you had a standard contract-remember?”
“The point is, this is turning out not to be a standard job.”
Glass waited, but the young man was in no hurry; it was apparent even down the phone line that he was once again enjoying himself. “Come on,” Glass said, trying to sound unconcerned, “tell me what it is you’ve stumbled on.”
The Lemur did his breathy little laugh. “The way I see it, we’re partners in this project-thrown together by chance and the word of whoever it was recommended me to you, but partners all the same. Yes?”
“No. I hired you. I am your employer. You are my employee.”
“-and given that we find ourselves together in this deal, I think it only fair that I should be an equal partner.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning half a million dollars. Fifty percent of your fee for writing this hard-hitting and entirely unbiased book. Share and share alike-right, John?”
Glass’s upper lip was misted with sweat. His mind went temporarily numb. “Tell me,” he said, and it sounded in his ears like a croak, “tell me what you’ve found out.”
Again along the wires there was that sense of luxurious stretching, of pleasurable scratching. “No,” Dylan Riley said, “not yet.”
“Why?”
There was a pause for thought, then: “I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of an occupational thing. I learn a secret, I want to hold on to it for a while, roll it around, you know, like good wine on the palate. Does that make sense, old boy?”
A flash of light from outside, extraordinarily bright, burst on Glass’s retinas, making him turn his face aside. Had someone in one of the surrounding towers managed to open a window? He peered, but could see no movement out there, no lifted arm or angled pane. He floundered, trying to think what to say next. How had this thing gone wrong, so quickly, so comprehensively? One minute his problem was how to get rid of a cigarette end, the next he was in a sweat while the pinhead he had been foolish enough to hire was trying to blackmail him for half a million dollars. Where was the link, the swaying rope bridge, between that then and this now? He put a hand to his forehead; he could hear himself breathing against the mouthpiece of the phone, hisss -hiss, hisss -hiss.
“Look, Riley-” he began, but was not allowed to go on, which was just as well since he did not know what he was going to say.
“No, you look,” the Lemur said, in a new, harsh, and suddenly unadolescent-sounding voice. “You used to be the real thing, Glass. A lot of us believed in you, followed your example. Now look at you.” He gave a snort of disgust. “Well, sell out to your father-in-law the spook if you like. Tell the world what a sterling guy he is, the unacknowledged Cold War conscience of the West, the man who urged negotiations with Castro and a safe passage for Allende to Russia-as if he’d have wanted to go, the poor schmuck. Go ahead, write his testament, and peddle your soul for a mess of dollars. But I know something that will tear you people apart, and I think you should pay me, I think you will pay me, to keep it all in the family.” Glass tried to speak but again was silenced. “And want me to tell you something else? I think you know what I know. I think you know very well what I’m talking about, the one thing big enough to screw up the cozy little civilized arrangement you all have going between you. Am I right?”
“I swear,” Glass said, more a gasp than a croak this time, “I swear I have no idea what you can have found out.”
“Right.” Now he was nodding that long narrow head of his. Glass could see it clearly in his mind, the lips pursing up, the little blond goatee wobbling, those starting eyes furiously agleam. “Right. The next call you get about this won’t be from me.”
The line went dead.
That day thirty years before, when Glass and Louise had first met at John Huston’s house, St. Clerans, in Connemara, the director had taken him for a walk after lunch. By then Big Bill and his daughter had left-the Atlantic wind was still in her hair, Glass caught the coolness of it when she passed him by going out-and Glass, too, was anxious to be on his way, for he had a deadline to meet. But Huston had insisted on them taking what he called “a tramp” together. He went away and came back half an hour later-Glass had filled the time listening back over the material he had taped-wearing tweed plus fours and a tweed jacket with a half-belt at the back, and plaid wool socks and walking boots and a floppy peaked cap reminiscent of a cowpat. He looked as if he had been dressed by a drunk in the costume department for a leading role in Brigadoon. He caught Glass’s incredulous glance and smiled broadly, showing off his big yellow tombstone teeth, and said: “What do you think, would I pass for a native?” Glass did not know if he should laugh.
They had walked along a boreen and down into the valley. Sunlight and shadow swept the dark green hillsides, and the birds were whistling madly in the thorn trees, and there was the sound of unseen waters rushing under the heather, and the gorse blossom was already aflame. Huston had lately finished filming The Man Who Would Be King and was in a reflective mood. “Who’d have thought,” he said, “a Missouri boy would end up here, owning a chunk of the most beautiful country God ever made? I love this place. I’ve been an Irish citizen since ’64. I want my bones to rest here, when the time comes.” They arrived at a wooden gate and Huston stopped and leaned an elbow on the top bar and turned to Glass and said: “I’ve been watching you, son. You get so busy asking questions you forget other people can see you. You’re ambitious. I approve of that. You’re a little bit ruthless, and I approve of that, too. Only the ruthless succeed. But there’s something about you that kind of troubles me-I mean, that would worry me, if you were really my son. I’d be kind of scared thinking of you out there in the big, wide world. Maybe it’s that you expect too much of people.” He unlatched the gate and they walked on along a path into a dense stand of tall pines, where the light turned brownish blue and the air was colder somehow than it had been when they were in the open. Huston put an arm round Glass’s shoulders and gave him an avuncular squeeze. “Knew a fellow once,” he said, “a mobster, one of Meyer Lansky’s numbers men. He was a funny guy, I mean witty, you know? I’ve always remembered something he said to me once. ‘If you don’t know who the patsy in the room is, it’s you.’” Huston gave an emphysemic laugh, the phlegm twanging deep in his chest. “That was Joey Cohen’s gift of wisdom to me-‘If you don’t know who the patsy is, it’s you.’” The director’s big, shapely hand closed on Glass’s shoulder again. “You should remember it, too, son. Joey knew what he was talking about.”
Now, in his office teetering high above Forty-fourth Street, Glass held the phone in a hand that refused to stay steady and tapped out a number. A bright New York voice answered, doing its singsong yes-how-may-I-help- you?
“Alison O’Keeffe,” Glass said. “Is she there? Tell her it’s John-she’ll know.”
He drummed his fingers on the desk and listened to the hollow nothingness on the line. Can there be, he was thinking, any more costly hostage to fortune than a mistress?
4
ALISON
Glass had first met Alison O’Keeffe the previous winter outside a bar in the Village. It was, she was, every middleaged male smoker’s fantasy made flesh. There he stood, huddled in the doorway sucking on a cigarette as flurries of snow played round his ankles, when she came out, scowled at the bruisecolored sky and lit up a Gauloise-a Gauloise, for God’s sake! He assumed from this that she was French, but the longer he looked at her-and he looked at her for so long and with such intensity that he was surprised she did not call a cop-the more convinced he became, on no basis other than tribal instinct, that she must be Irish. She was of middle height, slender, very dark of hair and very pale of skin. The word he could not help applying to her features was chiseled, though they
