"Slowly, I'm afraid," Gla.s.s said, in a neutral tone.

Mulholland seemed unsurprised, and unperturbed. "Well," he said, "I didn't expect you to hurry. Just keep in mind, though, I'm not immortal, no matter what some people might say."

"I'm gathering things," Gla.s.s said, lifting his hands and molding an invisible globe between them. "There's a lot of material."

Mulholland was nodding again, the smile forgotten on his tanned hawk's face. He was thinking of something else, Gla.s.s could see it, the tiny polished wheels turning, the levers engaging.

Louise came and sat on the arm of the sofa beside her husband and even laid a hand weightlessly on his shoulder. "He's in the office every day, nine to five," she said, laughing lightly, and a touch unsteadily. Always in her father's presence her voice had an uncertain wobble that she tried to suppress, and that still sparked Gla.s.s's waning protective instincts. He put a hand over her hand that was resting on his shoulder. Mulholland looked at them and a hard, sardonic light came into his face. "How is the office?" he asked. "You settled in? Got everything you need?" He took a sip of brandy, swallowed, sniffed. "I wouldn't want to think of you uncomfortable, down there."

"Up there," Louise said. "John is scared of the height." Gla.s.s swiveled his head to look up at her, but she only smiled at him and made a mischievous face.

"That so?" Mulholland said, without interest. "Guess I don't blame you, these days. We didn't know we were building so many standing affronts to the world." He looked into his gla.s.s again. "We didn't know a lot of things. After '89 we thought we were in for a spell of peace, unaware of what was slouching toward us out of the festering deserts of Arabia. Now we know."

Gla.s.s always marveled at the complacency with which his father-in-law delivered these solemn addresses; he wondered if it was all a tease, a toying with the tolerance of those around him, a test to see if there was a limit to what he would be let get away with. Perhaps this was how all the rich and powerful amused themselves, talking ba.n.a.lities in the sure knowledge of being listened to.

"It's fine," Gla.s.s said. "There isn't much I need, just s.p.a.ce, and quiet."

Mulholland gave him a quick glance, and seemed to suppress a grin. "Good, good," he said. He held out his empty gla.s.s to his daughter. "Lou, my dear, you think I could get maybe another tincture of this very special old pale?" She took the goblet from him and walked away soundlessly down the shadowed room, and opened a door and closed it softly behind her; she would be gone for some time, Gla.s.s knew; she was adept at reading her father's signals. The old man sat forward in the armchair and set his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands in front of his chin. He wore a dark gray Savile Row suit and a handmade silk shirt and John Lobb brogues. Gla.s.s fancied he could smell his cologne, a rich, woody fragrance. "This fellow Cleaver," Big Bill said, "you know who I mean? One of life's mosquitoes. He's been buzzing around me for years now. I don't like him. I don't like his tactics. Guy like him, he thinks I'm the enemy because I'm rich. He forgets, this country is founded on money. I've done more for his people, the Mulholland Trust has done more, than all the Mellons and the Bill Gateses put together." He chafed his clasped hands, making the knuckles creak. He did not look at Gla.s.s when he asked: "And who is this Riley fellow?"

Gla.s.s made no movement. "A researcher," he said.

The old man glanced sidelong from under his eyebrows. "You hired him?"

"I spoke to him," Gla.s.s said.

"And?"

"And then he got shot."

"I hope you're not going to tell me that the one thing followed from the other?" Mulholland suddenly grinned, showing a hundred thousand dollars' worth of clean, white, even teeth. "Say you're not going to tell me that, son."

"I'm not going to tell you that."

The lamplight formed still pools around their feet, while above them the dimness hung in billows like the roof of a tent.

"See, I've got to know," Mulholland said. "I've got to know if you're in trouble, because, frankly, if you're in trouble then most likely so am I, and so is my family, and I don't like that. I don't like trouble. You understand?" He rose from the chair, without, Gla.s.s noted, the slightest effort, and walked to the fireplace and stood there with his hands in his pockets. "Let me tell you a story," he said, "a tale from the bad old days, when I was in the Company." He laughed shortly, and had to cough a little. He had an eerie aspect, standing there with the top half of him in gloom above the lamplight, a truncated man. "There was a friend of mine-personal friend, as well as professional-who managed to get himself on the wrong side of J. Edgar Hoover. Now that, as I'm sure you know, was not a good place to be, J. Edgar being-well, J. Edgar. I'm talking about the sixties, after Kennedy's time. Doesn't matter what it was that my friend-let's call him Mac-doesn't matter what Mac had done to displease that fat old f.a.g. Matter of fact, I thought it was pretty stupid of him, in the circ.u.mstances. Hoover was the kingpin then, and the FBI was una.s.sailable." The lamplight was picking out high points in the shadows, the shine on a clock face, a gleam of polished wood, a spark from Big Bill's ruby ring. "Anyway," he said, "Hoover was real mad at my friend Mac, and decided to bring him down. Now, Mac was pretty high up, you know, at Langley, but that wasn't going to stop J. Edgar. What he did was he organized a sting operation, though that wasn't what we called it in those days." He paused, musing. "Matter of fact, I can't remember what we called it. Memory's going. Anyway. The trap was that Mac was to be at a certain place at a certain time to take delivery of papers, doc.u.ments, you know, that were supposed to have come from the Russian emba.s.sy in Washington. In fact, what was in the package, though Mac didn't know it, was not papers at all but a big stash of money-serious, serious money-and when it was in Mac's hands J. Edgar's people were supposed to jump out of the bushes and nab him for a corrupt agent taking money from a foreign power, the foreign power, and our number one enemy. Anyway, someone in Hoover's office, who liked Mac and didn't like his boss, tipped him off, and Mac just didn't show up at the appointed rendezvous. Okay? So next day Mac, who was pretty sore, as you can imagine, he went down to the Mayflower Hotel where Hoover ate his lunch every day with his constant companion Clyde Tolson. The maitre d' stopped Mac at the desk, worried, I guess, by the wild look in his eye, and when Mac told him he wanted to see Hoover-"J. Edna," as he called him-the maitre d' said he had a standing instruction that Mr. Hoover was never to be interrupted while he was eating his cottage cheese and drinking his gla.s.s of milk. You tell that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Mac said, that unless he gets his fat a.s.s out here this minute I'm going to announce to this restaurant that the boss of the FBI is a skirt-wearing f.a.g. So Hoover comes bustling out, and Mac accuses him of trying to entrap him. Hoover of course denies all knowledge of the sting, and promises he'll set up an investigation right away to find out who was responsible, says he won't rest until he has identified the miscreant, et cetera, et cetera. So. Week later, Mac and his wife are flying down to Mexico in Mac's private Cessna, just the two of them, with Mac piloting. Half an hour out from Houston, out over the Gulf, kaboom. Bomb under the pilot's seat. Wreckage strewn over half a square mile of water. Mac's body was found, the wife's never. At the funeral, Hoover was seen to wipe away a tear." He gave another quick laugh. "No half measures for our John Edgar."

Gla.s.s was fingering the pack of Marlboros in his coat pocket. He heard the door at the end of the room opening softly, and a moment later Louise appeared, carrying a tray with three gla.s.ses. Gla.s.s wondered if she had been listening outside the door. At times it seemed to him he did not know his wife at all, that she was a stranger who had entered his life sidewise somehow and stayed on. "Sorry it took so long," she said. "John, I brought you a Jameson." She leaned down to each of the men in turn and they took their gla.s.ses, then she put the tray on a low table and brought her own drink-Canada Dry with a sliver of lime-and sat beside her husband on the sofa, crossing her legs and smoothing the hem of her dress on her knee.

"We've been talking about J. Edgar Hoover and his wicked ways," her father told her.

"Oh, yes?" she said. Gla.s.s could feel her not looking at him. He sipped his whiskey.

"Your father was telling me," he said, "how Hoover arranged the a.s.sa.s.sination of a CIA man and his wife."

"Who says it was Hoover?" Big Bill said, with a show of innocent surprise. "I told you, he wept at the funeral." He swirled the brandy in its goblet, smiling again with his teeth.

Louise was still smoothing the stuff of her dress with her fingertips. "Billuns is wondering," she said, not looking up, "what it was exactly you said to that man Riley."

The atmosphere in the room had tightened suddenly. From the library they heard the silvery chiming of the Louis Quinze clock that Mulholland had given them for a wedding present.

"I don't remember telling him anything," Gla.s.s said. "We spoke on the phone, he came to the office, I said what I was writing, what I needed-"

"What you needed?" Mulholland said. He looked suddenly all the more like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed, motionless. "See, that's what I don't understand, John. Why you needed to bring in someone else. I gave you this commission because you're family. I told you that at the time, I said, John, I want someone I can trust, and I know I can trust you. Surely you knew that meant you, and not some computer nerd along with you?" He turned to his daughter. "Am I making sense, Lou? Am I being unreasonable?" Louise said nothing, and Mulholland answered for her. "No, I don't think I'm being unreasonable. I don't think I'm being unreasonable at all."

For a while now Gla.s.s had felt the room forming an angle behind him, the corner into which he was being backed. "I'm sorry," he said. "It would have been no great thing, to hire a researcher. It's normal. Historians do it all the time."

Mulholland opened his little dark eyes as wide as they would go. "But you're not a historian, John," he said, as if explaining something to a child.

"I'm not a biographer, either."

His father-in-law went on gazing at him almost mournfully for a moment, then set down his brandy gla.s.s and slapped his palms on his knees and stood up and walked to the fireplace again. "My problem now, you see, John, is how to handle this. We have here what we used to call a fail-int, that is, a failure of intelligence. I don't know what you told Riley, and I don't know what Riley told this Cleaver guy. When you have a fail-int, you've got to do some creative thinking. That's something you could help me with. Because I have to decide how to deal with Mr. Wilson Cleaver and his innuendos."

A voice spoke from the depths of the room: "What about special rendition?" They turned and peered, all three, and David Sinclair came strolling out of the shadows, tossing something small and shiny from one palm to the other. He was smiling. "Surely you could arrange a little thing like that, Granddad."

11.

TERRI WITH AN I.

In the morning Gla.s.s was sitting after breakfast on the little wrought-iron balcony outside the drawing room, savoring in solitude a third cigarette and a fourth cup of coffee, when his stepson reappeared. Gla.s.s had to struggle not to show his annoyance. Usually he was the only one who used the balcony, sharing it with rust and spiderwebs and a few moldering remnants of last autumn's leaves. Below him was a courtyard-a courtyard, in Manhattan!-and a little garden with ailanthus and silver birch and dogwood, and other green and brown things he did not know the names of. On certain days in all seasons a very old man in a leather ap.r.o.n was to be seen down there, sc.r.a.ping at the gravel with a rake, slow and careful as a j.a.panese monk. Today the sun was shining weakly, like an invalid venturing out after a long, bedridden winter, but spring had arrived at last, and now and then a silken shimmery something would come sprinting through the trees, silvering the new buds and shivering the windowpanes of the apartments opposite and then going suddenly still, like children stopping in the middle of a chasing game. The square of sky above the courtyard was a pale and grainy blue.

Gla.s.s thought of Dylan Riley with his eye shot through; there would be no more spring mornings for him.

"So this is where you hide yourself," David Sinclair said.

Although he had his own duplex over by Columbus Circle the young man often spent the night at what he insisted on referring to as his mother's apartment, no doubt imagining that he was thereby neatly excising Gla.s.s from the domestic circle. He stood in the open French windows now, smiling down on his stepfather with that particular mixture of mockery and self-satisfaction that never failed to set Gla.s.s's teeth on edge and that was so hard to challenge or deflect. This morning he was dressed in cream slacks and a cream silk shirt and two-tone brown-and-cream shoes with perforated toecaps. A cricket sweater with a pale blue stripe along the neck was draped over his shoulders. He was on his way to a squash game. With his slicked-down hair and those protuberant, little black eyes he bore a strong resemblance to a cartoon Cole Porter.

"Good morning," Gla.s.s said coldly.

Sinclair laughed, and stepped onto the balcony and edged around the little metal table and sat down on a wrought-iron chair. He crossed one knee on the other and laced his fingers together in his lap and happily contemplated his stepfather, who was still rumpled from sleep, and also a little hungover from the four or five whiskeys he had drunk sitting alone on the sofa last night after the rest of the household had gone to bed.

"You've certainly upset, Granddad," the young man said lightly. "What were you thinking of?"

Below, a flock of lacquered, dark brown birds came swooping down from somewhere and settled vexatiously among the ailanthus boughs, windmilling their wings and making a raucous, clockwork chattering.

Gla.s.s lit another cigarette and put the pack and his lighter on the table before him. "Have you started your new job yet?" he asked, watching the busy birds.

David Sinclair reached out and took Gla.s.s's lighter from the table and sat back and began to lob it from hand to hand, as he had done the night before with whatever it was he had been carrying then. "Not yet. Mother isn't quite as ready to relinquish the reins as she likes to pretend. You know how she is." He smiled, arching an eyebrow; his tone and look suggested he did not for a moment believe his stepfather knew how his mother "was" about the presidency of the Mulholland Trust, or about anything much else, for that matter.

"It's a large thing she's doing for you," Gla.s.s said heavily. "I hope you realize that. I hope you acknowledge it, too, now and then."

The young man's smile broadened in delight; he loved to irritate his stepfather. He played on Gla.s.s's sensibilities with virtuosic skill, tinkling all the right keys and pressing the pedals at just the right intervals.

"But tell me about this Riley business," Sinclair said. "A murder, no less, and practically in the family! Do the police know who did it, or why?"

"I don't know what the police know. They don't tell me."

Sinclair was regarding him with malicious glee. "Are you a suspect?"

"Why would I be?"

"Oh, I don't know. While he was poking around in Billuns's murky world this Riley might have found out something about you, that you would rather he hadn't. Hmm?"

Gla.s.s gazed at him, and drew on his cigarette and turned away and blew a stream of smoke out over the metal balcony rail with a show of indifference. Once, when he and Louise were not long married, he had hit his stepson. He could not now remember the exact circ.u.mstances. He had said something to the boy, reproved him in some way, and David had sworn at him, and before he could stop himself he had struck the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d openhanded across the jaw. It had not been a serious blow, but David had never forgiven him for it-understandably, Gla.s.s had to admit. He would have liked to hit him again now, not in pa.s.sion, not in anger, even, but judiciously, flicking out a fist and catching him a quick jab under the eye, or at the side of that fine-boned nose that was so like his mother's, to knock it out of alignment.

"Do you know my father?" Sinclair asked. "Mister Sinclair, the pride of Wall Street?" He seemed to find all t.i.tles irresistibly funny.

"I've met him," Gla.s.s said warily. "I wouldn't say I know him."

The young man turned his face aside and looked down into the courtyard where the birds had intensified their ransacking of the birches and the dogwood trees, as if they were trying to shake something out of them. He must have been reading Gla.s.s's thoughts, for now he said: "He used to beat my mother." Gla.s.s stared. "Didn't she tell you? Oh, not badly. Just a slap or a punch, now and then. I think he was hotheaded"-he turned back-"like you. I tried to intervene, once. I was only a kid. I bit his hand and he tried to throw me out the window. We were in the Waldorf=Astoria, on the eighteenth floor. He would have done it, too, only the window didn't open. It was the day after Clinton was elected the first time, so I suppose he was feeling sore." He smiled. "He's not a Democrat, as you probably know."

Gla.s.s cleared his throat and stood up, the metal legs of his chair sc.r.a.ping on the balcony's concrete floor. "I've got to go," he said. "I have work waiting."

Sinclair was looking up at him, with his insinuating smile, his head on one side. "Of course," he said softly. "Of course you do."

Gla.s.s had stepped through the French windows into the drawing room when Sinclair called after him: "Oh, Da-ad?"

"Yes?"

"Here." He held out his hand. "You forgot your lighter."

It was rush hour, and Gla.s.s had trouble finding a taxi. The streets were electric with spring's sudden overnight arrival, and the trees crowding at the edge of the Park looked as if they were preparing to surge over the railings and set off on a march for the East River. Louise had stopped Gla.s.s at the elevator to say that she and David and her father were going out to Bridgehampton, and asked if he wanted to come with them. He said perhaps he would, but later; he did not know if he could face being stranded on Long Island and subject to his father-in-law's steely geniality and his stepson's smiling contempt.

In the lobby of Mulholland Tower he was about to show his pa.s.s to the electronic eye at the turnstile when Harry on the security desk spoke his name and waved him over. "You got a caller, Mr. Gla.s.s." Harry pointed. "She been waiting an hour." She was sitting on a bench under the bra.s.s wall plaque with its portrait in relief of Big Bill Mulholland's handsome profile. She looked familiar yet Gla.s.s could not say for the moment who she was. She seemed tiny and lost in that great echoing marble s.p.a.ce. She wore a crooked skirt and a short, flowered blouse, and a man's rat-colored raincoat three or four sizes too big for her. He walked across to her, and she stood up hurriedly, fumbling her hands out of the pockets of the raincoat. Her midriff was bare, and she had a metal stud in her navel. "I'm Terri," she said. "Terri Taylor."

"Ah, yes," Gla.s.s said, remembering-the Lemur's girlfriend. "Terri with an i."

She gave a forlorn, small smile, gnawing her lip at one side. She had freckles and prominent front teeth, and her long straight hair was dyed black, badly. They stood a moment contemplating each other, both equally at a loss. He asked if she would like to come up to his office, but she shook her head quickly. Maybe they would go out and get a cup of coffee, then? "Let's just walk," she said. They went into the street. He was about to put a hand under her elbow but thought better of it. She gave a snuffly laugh. "I seem to have done nothing else but walk, since ..." She let her voice trail off.

Playful gusts of wind swooped along the street. A DHL delivery man, talking rapidly to himself, wheeled a loaded pallet into an open doorway. A dreadlocked derelict in a St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt was arguing with a fat policeman. Beside a storm drain three ragged sparrows were fighting over a lump of bagel as big as themselves. Gla.s.s smiled to himself. New York.

"How are you managing?" he asked. He was wondering why she had come to him, what she might want. "It must be tough."

"Oh, I'm all right, I guess," she said. She had wrapped the raincoat tight around herself; it must have been Riley's. She was pigeon-toed, and her legs were bare, and mottled a little, from the cold. "Dylan and I hadn't been together long. Just since Christmas. We met on Christmas Eve, at a party at Wino's." She looked up at him sideways. "You know it, Wino's? Cool place." She nodded, swallowing hard. "Dylan liked it there." Now she sniffed. He hoped she was not going to cry.

"Have you got people here?" he asked. "Family?"

"No. I'm from Des Moines. Des Moines, Iowa?" She laughed. "Insurance capital of the world. You should see it, the buildings, every one of them owned by an insurance company. Jeez."

They sidestepped a jumbo dog t.u.r.d-must have been a Great Dane, at least, Gla.s.s estimated-and arrived at Madison Avenue. He had never got used to the surprise of turning off tranquil little side streets onto these great boulevards surging with mad-eyed shoppers and herds of taxis and bawling police cars.

"He liked you, you know," Terri Taylor said. "Dylan, I mean-he liked you."

"Did he?" Gla.s.s said, trying not to sound incredulous.

"He said you were one of his heroes. He had cuttings of things you wrote, a whole file of them. He was just thrilled you had asked him to work for you-he was like a kid. John Gla.s.s, he kept saying, just imagine it, John Gla.s.s!"

"I'm glad to hear that." Was he? He was not sure. "I'm flattered."

"That's how he was. He was an enthusiast, Mr. Gla.s.s. A real enthusiast."

Gla.s.s was recalling the Lemur sprawled in the leather chair in his office that day up there on the thirty-ninth floor, smirking, and working his jaws on an imaginary wad of gum and clawing at the fork of his drooping jeans; women see their men as other men never see them.

"Have you any idea who ... who might have ... ?"

She shook her head vehemently, pressing her lips so tightly together they went white. "It's crazy," she said. "Just crazy. Who would have wanted to do such a terrible thing? He didn't harm anybody. He was just a big kid, playing his computer games, surfing the Web and gathering things." She laughed. "You know, my granddad still has the baseball cards he collected when he was a school kid? He has them all there, in a shoe box, under his bed, shows them to anyone who'll listen to him. Baseball cards! I threw my Barbies in the trash can when I was ten."

Gla.s.s hesitated. "Any idea," he ventured, the pavement turning to eggsh.e.l.ls under his feet, "any idea what sort of things Dylan gathered about me?"

They had come to the corner of Forty-fifth. A squat little woman in an outsized fur coat leading a dachshund on a jeweled leash walked forward against a red light and a taxi screeched to a halt and the driver, another Rastafarian-dreadlocks again-lifted his hands from the wheel and threw back his head and laughed furiously, his teeth gleaming. Terri Taylor smiled, watching the scene. "What?" she said, turning to Gla.s.s. The light turned to WALK, and they walked.

"Only he phoned me, you see," Gla.s.s said. "Apparently he had stumbled on something, I don't know what it was, though he seemed to think it was ... significant."

"What sort of thing?"

"That's the point-I don't know."

She pondered. They were pa.s.sing by a bookshop, and a man inside turned to the young woman who was with him and pointed at Gla.s.s and said something to her, and the young woman gazed out at Gla.s.s with blank interest. There were still people who remembered him, from the days, so far off now, when he had been briefly, mildly, famous.

"I thought," Terri Taylor said, "you hired him to do research on your father-in-law, not on you?" She was puzzled; she did not know what he was asking her.

"Yes, I did," Gla.s.s said. "Or I sort of did-there was no formal arrangement in place."

"Well, he was working on Mr. Mulholland, I know that, he told me so."

"And what did he say?"

She laughed mournfully. "He didn't say. He was kind of secretive, you know? Although-" She paused, and her steps slowed, and she gazed down at her turned-in feet in their scuffed and patchy black velvet pumps. "He did mention a name."

Gla.s.s waited a beat. "Yes?" he said, keeping his voice under control.

"It was someone Mr. Mulholland had worked with. What was it? Oo." She scrunched up her face, trying to remember. "Something like 'varicose,' like in varicose veins?"

"Varriker," Gla.s.s said. "Charles Varriker."

"That's it. Varriker. Funny name. Do you know him?"

"No," Gla.s.s said. "He's dead. He died a long time ago."