"Do you really think I would have forgotten if he had?"

He looked into his drink. "You mightn't want to tell me about it. I mean"-hastily-"you might have wanted to spare me."

"Spare you?" She laughed incredulously. "Well, he didn't. And I wouldn't. Want to spare you, that is." She drank the last of her drink. The beef-faced broker was eyeing her speculatively. "And now," she said, "I'm going back to work."

He took a taxi uptown, gazing out unseeingly at the damp blocks as they fleeted past. He was hungry, for in the bar he had taken nothing but two martinis, the famous New York liquid lunch. He thought of stopping off at the Bleeding Horse but decided he could not face the crowds and the venal leer of the maitre d'.

Although he would never have admitted it, Gla.s.s was afraid of his father-in-law. His fear was of the low-key, fuzzy, four-o'clock-in-the-morning variety, always there, like the dread of death, a pilot light glowing steadily inside him. Big Bill had notoriously strong opinions on the sanct.i.ty of the marriage vow. He had managed to have his own first, brief, starry union annulled by the Vatican on technical grounds, while his second wife, the hard-riding Miz Claire, had come a conveniently fatal cropper; and although Nancy Harrison had left him twenty years ago, he still considered himself married to her. What would Big Bill do if he heard of his son-in-law's latest peccadillo? There had been sc.r.a.pes in the past that Gla.s.s had managed to smooth over, with his wife's tight-lipped acquiescence, but Alison O'Keeffe, he was somehow certain, would be a different matter. What was to be done?

When he got out of the lift on the thirty-ninth floor he could hear the telephone ringing in his office. He fumbled the key into the door and scrambled to the desk and seized the receiver-what is it, he wondered, that is so irresistibly imperative about a ringing telephone?

"For G.o.d's sake," Louise said, "where have you been?" He mumbled something about lunch, and immediately, like retribution, an acid after-waft of gin burned his throat. "Someone has been phoning for you-he called twice, at least."

"Who?"

"A Captain Ambrose." Gla.s.s frowned in bafflement toward the transparent office wall and the deep canyons beyond. Why would someone in the army be calling him? Then he realized: it must be a policeman. Dear Christ.

"What did he want?"

"It seems someone has been killed."

Far uptown a speck-sized helicopter was hovering like a mosquito above a building site on the roof of a skysc.r.a.per, with a cable or something dangling from it, taut and straight, like a proboscis.

"Killed?" he said faintly.

"Yes. Murdered. What on earth have you been up to?"

5.

SWEET GUYS.

The police station, if that was what to call it-headquarters? precinct house?-looked just as it would have in the movies. John Gla.s.s was led through a big, low-ceilinged, noisy room lined with desks and cramped cubicles, where many shirtsleeved people, some in uniform and some not, walked determinedly about, carrying doc.u.ments and paper coffee cups and shouting at each other. Gla.s.s idly entertained the fancy that, if it were viewed from above, all this apparently random toing and froing would resolve into a series of patterns, forming and re-forming, as in a Busby Berkeley musical. Everyone seemed to be either bored or in a temper. The women, washed-out blondes, mostly, were heavy eyed and slow-moving, as if they had not slept last night, which perhaps they had not, since to Gla.s.s it appeared that every other working woman in New York City was a single mother, either divorced or abandoned. The big room had a somehow familiar aspect, which was more than just the memory of countless crime films, and after a minute or two it came to him: it looked exactly like a newspaper office.

Captain Ambrose had the face of an El Greco martyr, with deep brown, suffering eyes and a nose like a finely honed stone ax head. He was tall and cadaverous, and his light-olive skin was smooth and seemingly hairless. Gla.s.s thought he might be an Indian, Navajo, maybe, or Hopi. His accent was pure New York, though, broadvoweled and nasal. He wore a dark brown suit the same shade as his eyes, a white shirt and nondescript tie, and big black leather shoes with quarter-inch rims. There was nothing in the room that did not need to be there. The desk at which he sat showed him to be a fanatical tidier, with doc.u.ments all sorted and squared, pens ranked by size and color, and every pencil freshly sharpened. On the wall were two framed photographs, of the president, and the late Pope John Paul II.

"Take a seat, Mr. Gla.s.s," the policeman said. "Thanks for coming in."

A heavy-haunched woman with black roots showing in her b.u.t.terblond hair entered without knocking and laid a sheaf of papers on the desk. "Think us two thirsty fellows could get a cup of coffee, Rhoda?" Captain Ambrose asked.

The woman glared at him. "Machine is busted," she said. "Walensky punched it again." She went out, and the gla.s.s panel in the door rattled behind her.

"How did you get my number?" Gla.s.s asked.

The policeman reached for the papers Rhoda had brought and held them upright and tapped them on the desk to align their edges. "It was in the call log on Riley's cell phone," he said. "When did you speak to him?"

"This morning. At ten forty-seven."

The captain lifted an eyebrow.

"I happened to be looking at the clock."

"Ah. Right. That every witness should be so accurate."

Witness. The word sent something like a small electric charge along Gla.s.s's spine. It seemed to him that everything in the headachey, noise-a.s.saulted, vertiginous six months he had lived in New York had been leading to just this moment, when he would be sitting here in this policeman's office, dry mouthed and faintly nauseous, with a tingle in his backbone and his veins fizzing. What was happening was at once ordinary and outlandish, inevitable and contingent, as in a dream. "What happened?" he asked. "I mean, how did you ... ?"

The captain was leaning forward at the desk with his long, narrow dark hands clasped before him, which intensified the sainted look. "His girlfriend called us. She'd been out of town, came back and found the body, still warm." Gla.s.s had not reckoned on Dylan Riley having a girlfriend. What kind of girl could she possibly be? The captain went on: "We're not getting much out of her at the moment, naturally. She didn't do it. We checked: she was in a Boeing somewhere over Pennsylvania when it happened. She says stuff was taken, two, maybe three computers."

"Then there must have been more than one person."

"Oh?"

"To be able to carry so much."

A faintly pitying light came into the policeman's eye. "Computers are compact and light these days, Mr. Gla.s.s. That's why they're called laptops." He uncoiled himself from his chair, pushing down on the desk with the steepled fingers of one hand. He really was a very tall man. "Listen, I've got to get that cup of coffee. You want to come? There's a place across the street."

They moved in chill sunlight through the late-afternoon crowds. The captain loped along at a forward stoop, his arms slightly bowed and his head turned a little to the side, like an Indian scout, one of his ancestors, perhaps, leaning down intently to listen for the sound of the cavalry's distant hoofbeats. They were in the coffee shop before Gla.s.s thought of lighting up. A cigarette would have calmed him, but not much.

The place was crowded and while they were waiting for a table the policeman, jingling coins in a pocket of his trousers, talked in relaxed tones about the circ.u.mstances of Dylan Riley's death. Other customers, also waiting, stood within earshot, but paid no heed; apparently murder was a conversational commonplace, in the environs of Police Headquarters. "A very smooth job," the captain said. "Small-caliber bullet through the left eye. A Beretta, we think, maybe. Then the place was neatened up, with the victim on his bed and all, ready for the meat wagon. He was shot at his desk, though."

"How do you know that?"

Again the captain flashed that mild, pitying look. "Stains on the chair," he said. "Like the medical textbooks tell us: no death without defecation."

A gum-chewing waitress in a gingham ap.r.o.n showed them to a table in a corner; the tabletop was sticky to the touch. Gla.s.s really, really wanted a cigarette.

"You're Irish, right?" the captain said. "How long you been here?"

"Since November."

The ginghamed waitress brought their coffee.

"You planning on staying?"

"It seems so. My wife is American." The policeman nodded, and Gla.s.s saw that he knew a great deal more about him than the fact of his American wife. "My father-in-law has commissioned me to write his biography." It sounded entirely implausible. "That's William Mulholland."

Captain Ambrose nodded again, watching his hand as it spooned sugar into his cup. Gla.s.s felt he was back in a dream, trying to exonerate himself for some nameless thing he had not done, desperately offering up sc.r.a.ps of evidence to an omniscient but preoccupied and wholly unimpressible interrogator.

"I went to the Jesuits," the policeman said. Gla.s.s stared, helplessly, imagining himself a goldfish in a clouded bowl. What new tack was this? "Saint Peter's, in Jersey City. You know Jersey City? No, I guess not. You educated by the priests?"

"Mine was a diocesan college, in Ireland. Also called Saint Peter's, as it happens. Since in disgrace."

"Pedophiles? Right. We had them, too. No one cared, in those days. And we never talked, I mean us kids-who would have listened?" He shook his head sadly. "Tough times."

"And not so long ago, either."

"That's right." He stirred his coffee slowly, slowly. Gla.s.s was trying to think which character in Alice in Wonderland the captain reminded him of. Was there a sloth? Or maybe the Caterpillar? And then at last the question came: "Tell me, Mr. Gla.s.s, what was the connection with Dylan Riley?"

Gla.s.s heard himself swallow. "The connection?"

"Yeah, his connection with you, yours with him." He was still frowning into his cup, as if an answer might at any moment present itself there, etched in the froth. "Why was he phoning you?"

"As I said, I'm writing a biography of Mr. Mulholland."

"A biography. Right."

"And Dylan Riley, he's-he was-a researcher. I had hired him-was thinking of hiring him-to work with me, on the book."

"Right," the policeman said again. "I figured that must be it."

After that there was a lengthy pause.

In his lifetime John Gla.s.s had known many occasions of fear. Once, on a plane flying into Lebanon under Israeli rocket fire, he had very nearly shat himself. It had been a humbling moment, never to be forgotten, or forgiven. What he felt now was not fear, exactly. His mouth was still dry, but he had a sensation deep in his gut that was as much excitement as anxiety. He was, in a strange way, he realized, thrilled: thrilled to be mixed up in a murder, thrilled to be here being questioned by this peculiar lawman, thrilled that, somehow, after all these months, he could be said to have really arrived at last in New York, this place that was so vividly, so violently, so murderously alive. He recalled a phrase from Emerson about death, and our thinking of it: There at least is reality that will not dodge us.

He drank the bitter black coffee. "Where did he live," he asked, "Dylan Riley?"

"SoHo, near the river. He had a warehouse on Vandam, filled with all this surveillance stuff. Remember Gene Hackman in The Conversation? I suspect our boy was a keen moviegoer."

"They say he was very good at what he did."

"That right? Who's they?"

Gla.s.s retracted instantly, like a touched snail. "Some people I know-journalists. That's how I got his name."

The captain had taken out a gunmetal cigarette lighter and was turning it idly in his fingers. A fellow smoker! Gla.s.s experienced a rush of brotherly warmth for this long, emaciated, saintly-seeming figure. Ambrose saw him looking hungrily at the lighter and grinned. "Gave them up six months ago-about the time you moved here to our fair and wondrous city." He shifted sideways on his chair to allow his long legs more s.p.a.ce. The espresso machine behind the bar began to hiss like an industrial boiler and he had to raise his voice to be heard. "My problem is, Mr. Gla.s.s, somebody shot this Dylan Riley, which means somebody had a reason to shoot him, and I don't know what that reason might be. He was a researcher, you say, but from the look of the inside of that warehouse of his he was a lot more than that, or aspired to be." He picked up his empty cup and peered into it regretfully, as if there would never be another drink of coffee to be had. His eyes were hooded. "Secrets, Mr. Gla.s.s," he said. "Dangerous things."

Another silence followed. The policeman kept his eyes downcast and seemed to be pondering the woes of the world.

"I don't think," Gla.s.s said, measuring his words, "that I can help you, Captain. I didn't know Dylan Riley, not in any real sense."

Those olive-dark lids shot up and the eyes fixed him, wet-brown and shining. "But you met him." It was not a question.

"Yes, I-he-that is, he came to my office, to discuss the possibility of his working with me on the book. Nothing was agreed."

The policeman was still watching him. "What kind of research would you have wanted him to do, if 'something' had been 'agreed'?"

Gla.s.s's nerves were thrumming for the want of a cigarette. "Just ... general. Dates, places, people Mr. Mulholland met, where, when. That kind of thing."

The captain flipped open the lid of the lighter but did not ignite the flame. Gla.s.s caught a faint whiff of gas from the pinp.r.i.c.k nozzle, or imagined that he did, and his craving nerves stretched another notch.

"Mr. Mulholland," the captain said, "is a pretty interesting man. That's to say, he's led a pretty interesting life. Must be some things in his past you won't be able to write about."

"There are things in all our pasts that wouldn't bear the light of day."

The policeman gave a low, deprecating laugh. "But that's not the same thing, is it. What I mean is, Mr. Mulholland is likely to have secrets that wouldn't be allowed to see the light of day. Given his line of work before he set up Mulholland Cable."

"Then I'm wasting my time."

That seemed to require no comment, and again a silence fell between the two men, uneasy, and faintly rancorous. Gla.s.s was calculating the number of lies he had told the policeman so far today. Or not lies, perhaps, in the strict sense, the sense the Jesuits of Saint Peter's in Jersey City would have insisted on, but shifted emphases, strategic withholdings. What was the phrase? Sins of omission? That was it. Yet it was no task of his to incriminate himself. He paused on that thought. Incriminate himself in what? He had not shot Dylan Riley. All he was doing was trying to cover up the possibility, the distinct possibility, that what the Lemur had unearthed was the fact of Gla.s.s's affair with Alison O'Keeffe, and that he had been out to blackmail Gla.s.s by threatening to reveal the affair to his wife and her father. What man, what husband, no matter how far estranged from his wife, would not want to suppress such a revelation and preserve the arrangement that had been suiting everyone for so long? And then, deny the thought though he might, there was that million dollars ...

"I read that thing you wrote," the captain said, "that thing in one of the magazines, about the Menendez brothers." Gla.s.s stared, and the captain rolled his scarecrow's shoulders in a parody of prideful shyness. "Shucks, yeah, I read, don't even move my lips." He stirred his coffee again. "It was a good piece. Lyle and Erik. Sweet guys. You meet them?"

"I did."

"And?"

"Sweet guys."

The captain chuckled, and pushed aside his cup and stood up. Together they went toward the door. Gla.s.s brought out his wallet but the policeman lifted a hand. "We don't pay here," he said with stony emphasis. "Graft. Don't you know about New York cops?" Then he grinned. "Joke. I keep a tab open."

In the street Gla.s.s paused to light a cigarette, and the captain stood with his hands in his pockets and watched him, shaking his head. "You should quit," he said. "Believe me, it makes a difference. Even in the sack-you got more breath."

They waited at the lights and then crossed.

"Mr. Mulholland know about you and Dylan Riley?" the policeman asked.

"There wasn't much to know."

They were at the door of the station. Gla.s.s was unsure if he was free to go; maybe the real questioning had not started yet. He had so far only met the good cop, surely the bad one would be along any minute. The captain stopped, and turned to him. "You know you were the last person Dylan Riley called? That makes you the last one to talk to him alive."

"You mean, the second-last."

Captain Ambrose grinned again. "Yeah. Right."

6.

ALL HANDS!.

John Gla.s.s disliked the sprawling apartment where he and his wife lived, more or less. More or less, in that Louise lived there, while he merely joined her in the evenings, stayed overnight, and left in the mornings. That, at least, was how he thought of it. To an observer-and the wealthy and fashionable Mrs. Gla.s.s was always under scrutiny-the Gla.s.ses would have seemed a typical Upper East Side couple. Louise made sure that it should stay that way. She was careful to preserve appearances not least for fear of her father and what he would do if she allowed a scandal to develop. William Mulholland's bitter disapproval of divorce was well known, and he had been heard to accuse his daughter, no more than half jokingly, of being a bigamist. Big Bill had not much liked Rubin Sinclair, Louise's first husband, but, as she later told Gla.s.s one Champagnelit night when they were first together, he had liked it even less when she announced, no doubt with a quaver of terror in her voice, that the marriage had gone hopelessly awry and that she was filing for divorce. Her father had not argued with her, Louise said, in some wonderment, had not shouted or threatened. The mildness of his response had been more frightening to her than any show of rage. "You took a vow, Lou," he had said gravely. "You took a vow, and now you're breaking it."

After the divorce came through Louise had fled with her ten-year-old son to Ireland, to her father's big old Georgian house in Connemara, to tend her soul's wounds and figure out how to rebuild her life. In Ireland she had met John Gla.s.s-for the first time, as she had thought, for she had forgotten that long-ago windblown afternoon at the nearby Huston place-and something about him, a detached, dreamy something, had seemed the perfect balm for her bruised spirit. John Gla.s.s was everything that Rubin Sinclair was not. Or so she had thought. For his part, John Gla.s.s was certain, despite all he knew of Fate and her caprices, that the fact of this exquisite creature's having drifted a second time into his...o...b..t was a circ.u.mstance to be seized upon without delay. He proposed on the date that, three months previously, her divorce came through. "Oh, G.o.d," Louise said, a laughing wail, "what will my father say!"

Once again Big Bill's response had been unexpectedly mild. He liked, it seemed, John Gla.s.s. He still had friends in the surveillance world and had got them to look into his past-"Don't mind it, son, it's an old habit"-and was satisfied with what was turned up. Gla.s.s had never been married, and therefore not divorced, he was admired in his profession, seemed honest, and was probably not a fortune hunter. "Just one thing," Big Bill had said to his daughter and her prospective husband, with a smile that seemed only mildly pained, "wait to marry until you're at least a year divorced, Lou, to save what shreds of respectability our poor old family has left." And Louise had kissed him. Kissing was not a thing they often did, Big Bill and his daughter.

John Gla.s.s was remembering that kiss when he entered the lobby of the apartment building after his interview with Captain Ambrose. He could not recall what thoughts had gone through his head as he watched that unwonted moment of intimacy and accord between father and daughter, and this troubled him. But perhaps he had not been thinking anything. His memories of those days were all hazed over happily, as if he were looking back through a pane of gla.s.s that had been breathed on by someone who was laughing.

Lincoln, the doorman, tipped his cap and remarked on the weather. "Be getting warmer soon, Mr. Gla.s.s, and then we be wishing for the cool days again." There was a touch of the poet to old Lincoln.