The New York Times-20080127-The Lemur- Chapter 3- The Bite- -Series-

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The Lemur: Chapter 3: The Bite; [Series]

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The Lemur: Chapter 3: The Bite

Last week: John Glass did not tell his wife, Louise, that he hired a researcher to help him investigate her father for the biography he was writing.

John Glass spent the week in his office, trying his best to get used to it, to the plate glass and the steel, to the deadened air, to, above all, the heady elevation. He tried to keep office hours, breezing in at 9 but slouching out again morosely five or six hours later. One day, when it occurred to him that there was no one to challenge him, he smoked a cigarette, leaning back luxuriously in his chair with his feet on the desk and his ankles crossed. No forbidden cigarette ever, including the ones he used to pilfer from his father's coat pocket when he was a 10-year-old, had tasted so sweet, so dangerous, so sexy.

Presently, however, he saw the problems he had given himself. How was he to get rid of the smell of smoke, since the windows up here were sealed tight? The telltale stink would probably cling on for weeks in this endlessly recycled air. And in the more immediate term, what was he to do with the ash or -- damn! -- with the stub? In the end he fashioned a makeshift ashtray from the foil of a Hershey-bar wrapper that someone left in the wastepaper basket, feeling as proudly resourceful and inventive as Robinson Crusoe. When he was finished he folded the wrapper as neatly as Louise would have done and put it in his pocket -- surprising how much heat was left in the stubbed-out butt -- and crept with a felon's circumspection to the men's room and locked himself in a stall and emptied the contents of the foil into the lavatory bowl. But of course the filter tip was too buoyant to go down -- even some of the ash stayed on the surface of the water -- and in the end, after repeated, vain flushings, he had to fish the soggy thing out and wrap it in a wad of toilet tissue and carry it back to the office and throw it in the waste bin, where, he gloomily supposed, some cleaner or busybody janitor would nose it out and denounce him.

What about real addicts, he wondered, poor wretches hooked on heroin or crack cocaine -- or that new stuff, something meth -- were their lives a series of grimly comic frustrations and inept subterfuges? He supposed they must be, though he supposed too that junkies would not see the funny side of things. Not that he was laughing, exactly.

The laptop computer that Mulholland's people supplied him with, sleek, gleaming, gunmetal gray, sat before him on the desk, daring him to open it. So far he had passed up the dare. He was a long way from being ready to start writing -- oh, a long, long way, weeks, at least, maybe months. He spent the empty hours of his working days browsing through histories of the O.S.S. and the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., the D.S.T. and the D.G.S.E. and the S.D.E.C.E., the N.K.V.D. and the K.G.B. and the G.R.U. -- the Soviets were whimsically prone to change the names of their security agencies -- and, of course, MI5 and MI6, the difference between which he could never keep clear in his mind. Stumbling about in this bristling thicket of abbreviations, he felt like the dull but honest hero of a cautionary folktale, who must make his way through a maze of magical signs and indecipherable portents to the lair of the great wizard.

And there was something of the Magus about Big Bill Mulholland. He had been, or claimed to have been, that rarest of birds among a teeming aviary of rarities: an agent with a conscience. There were people in what Glass the cliche hater told himself he must remember not to call the highest echelons of the West's intelligence services who swore by Big Bill's probity; there were also those who swore at it. Allen Dulles himself, when he was director of the C.I.A., had once been heard referring to Big Bill, in an uncharacteristic lapse from his usual urbanity, as that sanctimonious son of a bitch. For William Mulholland, whose middle name was, with awful aptness, Pius, was seized of the lifelong conviction that even, or perhaps especially, the intelligence services had a duty to be as frank and open with the public as the dictates of security would allow. Otherwise, as he so simply put it, why call ourselves a democracy? And this doctrine, Glass often reminded himself, was laid down in the 1950s, and the early 1950s at that, when Joe McCarthy and his crew were still cocks of the anti-Red walk. Big Bill attributed his compulsive honesty to the influence of his beloved mother, Margaret Mary Mulholland, of blessed memory. She would probably, would Margaret Mary, require an entire chapter of her son's biography, John Glass had to glumly acknowledge. He would earn that million bucks.

When the telephone rang it made him jump. He secretly hated telephones, for they frightened him. It was, he noted by the baleful clock that glowered at him from the wall opposite his desk, 10:47 a.m. The day was bright but windy, and since his arrival he had been trying not to notice the way the entire building quivered almost voluptuously under the strokings of the stronger gusts.

Hi, there, the voice said, and although Glass had been waiting all week for this call, for a moment he did not recognize the voice. There was a snicker on the line. Riley here. Your hired bloodhound, don't you know. It occurred to Glass that perhaps the fellow was not parodying his accent after all, and that the plummy tone he liked to put on was meant to make him sound like Sherlock Holmes, or Lord Peter Wimsey.

I wondered where you'd got to, Glass said.

Well, I got to all sorts of places, virtually and otherwise. And turned up all sorts of things.

Glass had an image of some gawky bird under a bush probing and pecking among a mulch of dead leaves. Oh? he said.

Owh, Riley echoed, and this time there was no doubt that he was mimicking Glass's way of speaking. Owh, is right. There was a silence. Glass did not know what to say, what prompt to supply. A faint, very faint niggle of unease had set itself up in the region of his diaphragm. Listen, Riley said, and Glass had a distinct impression of the young man leisurely stretching back in a chair and clawing absently at the roomy crotch of his 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 onto 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 dumb fool. 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 startling eyes furiously agleam. Right. The next call you get about this won't be from me.

The line went dead.

That day 30 years ago when Glass and Louise first met at John Huston's house, St. Clerans, in Connemara, the director took 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 eager to be on his way, for he had a deadline to meet. But Huston insisted on them taking what he called a tramp together. He went away and came back half an hour later -- Glass 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 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 was when they were in the open. Huston put an arm around 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 44th 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?

Next week: We meet the other woman in John Glass's life.

[Illustration]DRAWINGS: Last week: John Glass did not tell his wife, Louise, that he hired a researcher to help him investigate her father for the biography he was writing. (DRAWINGS BY IAN DINGMAN)
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