The Lemur (15 page)

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Authors: Benjamin Black

Tags: #Family Life, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective

BOOK: The Lemur
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“Well well,” David Sinclair said into the silence of his grandfather’s departure, “and then there were three!”
Louise, as if coming suddenly out of a trance, put a hand to her forehead and shut her eyes briefly. “This is,” she said, “this is …” and could not finish. She opened her eyes and looked at her husband. “Why are you
doing
this? You don’t
need
to, you don’t need to … to …”
“
Need?
” Glass said. “Where does
need
come into it?”
“He doesn’t understand,” David said to his mother, as if to soothe her. “He’s just an old broken-down reporter who’s missed the story entirely.” He smiled again at Glass. “Haven’t you? Because you see,
Dad
, it’s
Murder on the Orient Express
. We
all
did it, all of us—including you.”
 
ALL IN THE FAMILY
 
T
hroughout his life, so it seemed, John Glass had been running to women for solace. People had remarked when he was young on his closeness to his mother—one of his aunts used to say, with a sour little sniff, that he was more like her boyfriend than her son. Louise, too, he had looked to for reassurance and protection. He suspected it was mainly this that he had married her for, to be his shield against the world’s buffetings. And she, what had she hoped for from him?
When he stopped on Bleecker Street and pressed the doorbell the intercom did its rattle and squawk and then Alison O’Keeffe answered. He spoke his name. “How did I know it would be you?” she said, with rueful weariness. “How did I know that?”
Huddled in the doorway, misting the metal grille with his breath, Glass was reminded of sweaty sessions in the confession box, long ago. He said: “I need to talk to you.”
Another pause. “Well, you’d better come up, then.”
When he stepped out of the elevator she was waiting in the doorway in her painter’s dark blue smock. She led him upstairs to the little cold apartment, where she sat down in an armchair and lit a Gauloise. She blew an angry-seeming trumpet of smoke at the ceiling. “Well?” she said. “What is it you need to talk about so urgently?”
The sun of late afternoon shone in the mansard window above them, setting a beam of pale gold light to stand at a slant behind her chair. He lit one of his Marlboros.
“Do you know anything about quantum physics?” he asked. She said nothing. “Neither do I, or not much, anyway. But there’s an experiment scientists do, when they fire an atomic particle at a surface with two narrow slits in it, and wait for what will happen on the other side. What happens is that an interference pattern forms, as if the particle was not a particle but a wave. In other words, the single particle seems to go through both slits at the same time, and”—he laughed—“interfere with itself!” Alison watched him impassively. Billows of pale blue smoke from their cigarettes rolled and tumbled together in the sunlight behind her. “That’s strange enough,” he said, “but what’s stranger still is that the particle only behaves like that, like a wave,
when it’s not being observed.
When you’re looking at the particle it stays a particle, and when you’re not looking it becomes a wave.”
She waited. He drew on his cigarette, glancing vaguely here and there about the room and frowning. She asked: “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how hard it is to know anything for certain. I thought I knew who killed Dylan Riley, but I didn’t.”
A lengthy silence passed, then Alison gave a sort of laugh. “And
I
thought you had come here to talk about us.” She turned her eyes aside angrily. “So tell me,” she said, “who
did
kill him?”
“It doesn’t matter. I was wrong.” He looked around for a place to stub out his cigarette. “I should go.”
“Yes,” she said, her face still turned away from him. “You should.”
He walked the streets for a long time, as the day died and the million lights of Manhattan began to come on. He had never felt such a stranger to the city. He ducked into a dive on Broadway and drank whiskey, slumped at the bar in the amber and pink gloom surrounded by indistinct figures like himself, whose faces would materialize for a moment when they leaned down into the harsh white glare coming up from the strip-lighting under the rim of the bar to take a sip from their glasses and then retire back into the shadows. After the third shot he dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and hustled himself out into the night again.
When he got out of the elevator at his floor in Mulholland Tower he would not let himself look out of the big window at the end of the corridor, but inside his office, with its wall of glass, there was no avoiding the vertiginous city out there bristling on its stilts, sleekly bejeweled in the shining darkness. There was no avoiding Louise, either, sitting silently in the steel and leather chair where Dylan Riley had slouched that first day, when all that was to happen had not happened yet, and the world was different. She had not switched on a light, and in the gloaming she might have been a statue fashioned from steel, sharp featured, burnished, unmoving.
“The night man on the desk let me in,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
He was smoking a cigarette—he had lit it in the elevator, defying the smoke alarm, which anyway had failed to go off—and now he groped on the desk for an ashtray that was not there. He had to search for the switch of the desk lamp, too. It cast a cone of light downward, its penumbra illuminating the side of Louise’s face, an ear, an eye, a corner of her mouth.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“Oh, not long.” They were like two travelers stranded in a waiting room, at night, far from home. “I guessed this is where you’d be.”
She still wore her little green coat and ridiculous hat. Her hands were in her lap. She gazed straight before her. Glass walked to the window and looked out into those dark canyons that at night were less alarming than by day, inexplicably. “I don’t know what to say to you, Louise,” he said.
He heard her stirring behind him, shifting in the chair, repositioning herself. “You mustn’t believe …” she began, and stopped. “You mustn’t believe the things you think you know. Really, you’ve mistaken it all.” She turned to look at him where he stood with his back to her, and the chair made its little protesting squeak. “Please,” she said, “come and sit down.”
Distantly from the streets below he heard the wailing and yapping of a police siren, and squinting down he saw it, not the car but only the pulsing blue light speeding along Forty-fourth Street. He turned and walked to the desk and sat, hunching his shoulders and leaning forward on his elbows. He had been tipping the ash of his cigarette into his palm, and now, impatient suddenly, he dropped it onto the floor beside his chair. Louise continued to sit sideways-on to him, showing him her sculpted, lamp-lit profile. He thought of Alison O’Keeffe sitting like this earlier: two women, their faces set against him.
“I have things to tell you,” Louise said, “things I should have told you long ago.” She looked down. “I don’t know where to begin. Charlie—Charlie Varriker …” She stopped.
“You were in love with him,” Glass said, “weren’t you?”
She nodded, pressing her lips together and closing her eyes. “Yes.” She spoke so softly it seemed a kind of distressful sighing. “He was—oh, I can’t tell you what he was. I mean I can’t explain it. He was … everything.” She looked down again; she was pulling spasmodically at one of her fingers, as if trying to pull off it a ring that was not there. “I was young, of course—my God, what was I? Twenty-two? And Charlie was—oh, he was just so beautiful. It’s not a thing men are supposed to possess, that kind of beauty, but he had it. It wasn’t so much a matter of looks, you know, but something that came out from inside, that just—that just
shone out
. And he was funny. It’s a cliché, I know, that women will love a man who can make them laugh. But laughter with Charlie was something—something
blessèd.
That will amuse you, I know. I can hear how ridiculous it sounds. But that’s what it was, blessed.
You know, Lou
, he used to say,
not once anywhere in the Gospels does Jesus laugh, or even smile
.
Who could believe in a God that doesn’t laugh?
” Glass took another cigarette. “He rented a room for us, in one of those little streets around Morningside Park. What a neighborhood! We were lucky we weren’t murdered for our shoes. It’s strange, but somehow the squalor made what we had seem all the more tender, all the more pure. Does that make sense? And then”—she was suddenly in a rush, the words tumbling out—“and then there was the baby, I didn’t know what to do, I was too young, and Charlie, of course, Charlie was helpless, so happy and loving and yet helpless, helpless. Rubin had been hanging around—Rubin Sinclair, I mean, Daddy Warbucks, as Charlie used to call him—and Billuns, of course, was insisting I must marry him, I think he saw it as something like a Medici marriage, the melding of two great families blah blah blah. I said to Charlie,
It’s the obvious way out, I’ll marry Rubin and after a little while you and I can be together again, we can even have the baby for ourselves.
What a dream. What a fool. Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. He couldn’t bear to think of me with Rubin, he said, it would kill him, he would die—”
“Why didn’t you marry him?” Glass asked.
She made an impatient gesture. “Don’t be absurd. Billuns would have destroyed us. He hated Charlie for saving his millions. What do you think he would have felt if he had married his daughter?” She was silent for a moment, picking intently at a loose thread in the seam of her coat. “I bought him a ticket to Paris. Charlie loved Paris, he always said it was his spiritual home.
Go there
, I told him,
go to Paris
,
and when you come back it will be done. That way it won’t hurt so much.
But he didn’t go. He couldn’t live without me, he said. He was the last of the romantics. He took Billuns’s gun and locked himself in the room on Morningside Avenue and shot himself.” She paused; she was breathing rapidly, in shallow beats, still fingering that thread. A helicopter was hovering somewhere nearby, its blades dully beating at the air. “I found him,” Louise said. “I put him on the bed, I don’t know how, he was a big man. Somehow I had to do it, it was important, I don’t know why. I sat with him through the entire afternoon. I’ve never known such silence. And a week later I married Rubin Sinclair.” She lifted a hand and laid it over her eyes, as if to shade them against a glare falling from above. “When David was born, I think Rubin knew. He never said anything, but I think he knew. He wasn’t a fool. And he was good to me, in his way. He didn’t denounce me, didn’t demand that Billuns horsewhip me. He plodded on, until everything just quietly fell apart. And then I met you.”
“Did your father find out?” Glass said. “About David, I mean, whose son he was?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably. He knew everything about everything, why not this, too?”
“And you’re sure that Varriker killed himself?”
She did not look at him. “I have to be,” she said, in almost a whisper, “haven’t I? Anything else is unthinkable.” Now she lifted her eyes and met his questioning stare. “I know what my father is, but I must believe he isn’t that wicked.” They sat for a long moment looking at each other. Then she leaned back in the chair and sighed. “I thought it was all over and done with, until that young man phoned the apartment that day.”
“It was you he spoke to?”
“Of course—who else?”
“How did
he
know about Varriker and the rest of it?”
“He wouldn’t say. There were people I confided in at the time, friends, so-called. I suppose he tracked them down. I don’t know. I had to do something, of course. If he had gone to Billuns it would have been the end of everything, the Trust, David’s future, everything. I told him I would come and see him. I took the gun. I—”
“Stop,” Glass said. “Tell me the truth.”
“I
am.
I
am
telling you the truth—” She put a hand quickly into the pocket of her green coat and brought out something compact and darkly agleam and set it down on the desk before him. He could read the manufacturer’s name clearly on the short, fluted barrel. “There,” she said. “There, if you don’t believe me!”
He picked up the Beretta and hefted it in his hand. “Where did you get this?” She said nothing. The helicopter was gone, and in its wake the silence in the room had become hollow. He set the gun down between them again. “How did he know?” he asked.
“Who? What?”
“David. How did he know about Riley? Was he there when Riley phoned you?” He made a fist and crashed it down on the desk, making the pistol jump. “
Was he
!” Something came into her face then that he had never seen before: it was the look, dismayed, helpless, lost, that she would have when she was old. She stared at the weapon on the desk and nodded listlessly. She said something, but so quietly he could not hear and had to ask her to say it again. She cleared her throat. “He was right,” she said. “We all did it, me, you, all of us. What does it matter who pulled the trigger?”
“It matters, Lou,” he said. “Tell me.”
She buried her hands in the pockets of her coat and drew in her shoulders, folding herself into herself, as if she were suddenly cold. “Yes,” she said, “David was there when Dylan Riley called. He saw how I looked when I heard what Riley had to say. He made me tell him. He said he would go and talk to Riley, that he would reason with him, offer him money, if necessary. I didn’t know”—she reached out a hand as if to touch him but faltered and braced her fingers instead on the side of the desk—“I didn’t know what he would do. He’s so damaged, John. Rubin treated him dreadfully, and then you rejected him—yes, you did, don’t deny it! You could have tried. You could have been a father to him.”

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