12.

THE PROTESTANT POUND.

There was nothing more Terri Taylor could give John Gla.s.s, beyond the name of Charles Varriker, which kept cropping up with interesting regularity. Gla.s.s still did not know why Terri had come to him. Perhaps for her he was one of Dylan Riley's touchstones, all of which she had to visit in turn before she could be free to go home to Des Moines. "New York is not my place," she had said, and then smiled ruefully, "not that I really think Des Moines is, either." She seemed less grief stricken at the death of Dylan Riley than just weary. She was young, and death was too much for her: too bizarre, too baffling, too unreal. He imagined her in ten years' time, married to an insurance executive and living with him and the kids in a frame house in a suburb on the edge of a city where the cornfields began, mile upon mile of them, stretching away in shining, windpolished waves to the flat horizon.

You were one of his heroes, she had said to him of Riley. And someone had shot Riley through the eye.

In the afternoon he walked over to Lexington Avenue and Fiftieth to catch the Hampton Jitney. It was one of the not inconsiderable advantages of being married to money that he did not need to pack when he traveled out to the house on Long Island, since everything he might need was already in place for him there, down to toothbrush and pajamas.

He hated this journey. It was long and tedious and noisy, and he would arrive reeking of exhaust fumes and in a temper. When he had first heard of the Hampton Jitney he had pictured something out of a Frank Capra madcap comedy, a battered old bus with a bulbous front and cardboard suitcases on the roof, and a Marilyn look-alike sitting up front adjusting her lipstick and trying not to snag her stockings on a broken seat spring. The reality was, inevitably, otherwise. He had expected sea views, at least, given the narrowness of the island, but there was only the flat, featureless road with filling stations and pizza places and the odd undistinguished hamlet. He supposed Bridgehampton itself was handsome, in a faux-Founding Fathers sort of way, and Silver Barn was certainly a fine house, set atop a low, wooded hill with a view down over pitch pine and scrub oak to an ever shining line of distant sea. Big Bill had built the house for his third and, according to him, present wife, the globetrotting journalist Nancy Harrison, who had probably spent altogether no more than a few weeks in the place. In the old days Gla.s.s had sometimes come across Nancy, in this or that remote corner of the world where they were both covering some small war or non-man-made calamity, and they would have a drink together and laugh about Big Bill and his ways. The sh.e.l.l of the house had originally been an Amish barn that Big Bill had found somewhere in Pennsylvania and bought and had disa.s.sembled and carted up plank by plank to Long Island, where it was rebuilt with many additions and refinements. The wood of the walls was the color of ash and polished like the handle of a spade.

Louise came out to meet him as he was alighting from the taxi at the Colonial-style front door. She was wearing what he thought of as her Jean Seberg outfit: black pedal-pushers, black-and-white-striped matelot top, a short red silk scarf knotted at her throat. Her hair was tied back and she wore no makeup. He did not think he had ever seen his wife inappropriately attired. He could imagine her on the deck of the t.i.tanic in green Wellies and a Burberry mac and head scarf. Well, he had loved her once, and her elegance and self-possession were not the least of the things he had loved her for.

She laid her fingertips on his shoulders and kissed him with feathery lightness on the cheek. "How was the trip?"

"Hideous, as usual."

"Billuns came out by chopper, you could have come with him."

"For G.o.d's sake, Louise. 'The chopper!"

She stood back and regarded him with tight-lipped reproach, like a mother gazing upon an unbiddable, scallywag son. "We can't all have the luxury of being unconventional," she said. "We're not all"-he could see her trying to stop herself and failing-"ace reporters."

"Oh, Lou, Lou," he said wearily, "let's not start."

The spring that had taken over the city seemed not to have reached this far east yet, and the sky was an unblemished milk-gray dome, and he could smell rain coming. "We were about to have a drink," Louise said. "I imagine you could do with one?" Gla.s.s followed her inside. Although the house was supposed to be theirs now, his and Louise's-her father had made it over to her, for tax reasons, mainly-Gla.s.s always felt a visitor here. Yet he could not but be fond of the place, in a distant sort of way. The tranquil atmosphere that reigned within its warmly burnished walls was a legacy of the simple-living people who had hewn and planed these timbers a hundred years ago or more.

They walked through to the wooden verandah at the back, where there were a couple of porch swings with wheat-colored cushions and a long, low table, much scarred and stamped with the marks of the many dewed-over gla.s.ses that had been set down on it through the years, another form of age rings. Big Bill was there, reclining on one of the swings with his feet on the table and his ankles crossed, reading The Wall Street Journal. It always fascinated Gla.s.s that rich men actually read the Journal; what could it possibly tell them that they did not know already, and in far more intricate and dirty detail? The old man wore chinos and a pale pink cashmere sweater, and loafers without socks. Even his ankles were tanned. "John!" he said, and folded the newspaper. "How was the journey?"

"He hates the Jitney," Louise said.

"Too bad. Did you take the new one, with those roomy leather seats?"

"I hate that even more than the old one," Gla.s.s said.

His father-in-law laughed. "You're like all us Irish," he said. "You love to suffer."

Manuela, the Filipina maid, appeared with a jug of fresh lemonade and three tall gla.s.ses. She set the tray on the table and stood back, smoothing her hands down her ap.r.o.n and smiling at the floor. It was a standing joke in the family that Manuela was hopelessly and incurably infatuated with John Gla.s.s, who always confused her in his mind with Clara, Louise's maid in Manhattan. He asked her now to bring him a gin and tonic and she nodded mutely and fled. Louise poured lemonade for herself and her father. Gla.s.s went and leaned against the wooden rail of the verandah and lit a cigarette. Below him the smooth lawn stretched away to a high bank of oaks that marked the boundary of the garden. From beyond and above the trees came the sounds of mingled talk and spurts of laughter and even, faintly, the tinkling of gla.s.ses; Winner the book agent owned the next house up the hill; Winner was famous for his parties. Manuela came back with Gla.s.s's drink and scampered off again.

"It says here," Big Bill said, laying a hand on the folded newspaper beside him on the seat, "that Ulster is the next place to watch. Huge economic potential just waiting for the right boost to get it going." He leaned down and twisted his head to read from the page. "The Protestant Pound is set to give the Euro a run for its money. I like that-the Protestant Pound!"

"Chasing Catholic credit," Gla.s.s said.

Big Bill gave a small nod and a restrained, tolerant smile. "First they'll have to break with the Brits," he said.

Louise, sitting with her gla.s.s at the other end of the swing, laughed lightly. "That's been tried, surely?"

Her father shook his head. "British tax law strangles enterprise. That's what you people in the Republic"-he was addressing Gla.s.s-"that's what you understood, the need to slash corporation taxes. Now I remember ..."

Gla.s.s sipped his drink and gazed up at the dense wall of budding trees at the end of the lawn. A thing like a tumbril was making its lumbering way slowly through his head: he could almost feel the wheels creaking. Above all states of mind, boredom was the one he went most in fear of. His father-in-law was recounting the oft-told tale of how, twenty-five years before, he had called a secret meeting of Northern Ireland's leaders on the Isle of Man for the purpose of knocking their heads together and making them see sense about the future of their most misfortunate statelet. Now Gla.s.s interrupted him. "Did Charles Varriker accompany you on that historic occasion?"

It was Louise and not her father who registered the sharpest surprise. She stared at her husband and for a second it seemed her lower lip trembled. "Why, John," she murmured, as if he had shouted out an obscenity. Her father looked from Gla.s.s to her and back again, fumblingly, like a thrown rider struggling to climb back on his horse. His eyes were suddenly baffled and old. "Charlie?" he said. "No, no, Charlie was dead by then. Why are you asking about him?" He turned to his daughter again, querulously. "Why is he asking about Charlie?"

Louise had regained her equilibrium. She ignored her father's question, and set her lemonade gla.s.s firmly on the table and rose. "I must talk to Manuela about dinner," she said, and walked away into the house, slowly, deliberately, holding her back very straight, as if to prevent herself from breaking into a run.

Left alone, the two men were silent for a time. Big Bill looked this way and that at the floor around his feet, as though vaguely in search of something he had dropped. Gla.s.s lit a cigarette from the stub of the one he had just finished smoking down to the filter. He felt almost queasy, out here over these deeps and headed into darkness, knowing only how little he knew.

"Charlie Varriker," Big Bill said, in a tone at once morose and defensive, "was one of the finest men it's been my privilege to know. He was great because he was good." He looked up at Gla.s.s, and there was a fierce light in his face now. "You know what I mean by that? You got any conception of what I mean by that? Goodness is not a quality that's much valued, nowadays. It's become kind of old-fashioned. Charlie was like that, Charlie was old-fashioned. He believed in honor, decency, loyalty to his friends. Just as I was about to be flayed alive he saved my financial skin, and asked no thanks for it. That was Charlie. He was good, and he was great, and I loved him." He stood up, wincing at some twinge, some inner pinch, and looked out across the garden with eyes from which the light had gone, and that seemed glazed over and opaque now, like windowpanes on which frost has begun to form. "Yes," he said, "I loved him."

He turned and walked into the house, following the way his daughter had gone. Gla.s.s, still leaning on the wooden rail, smoked the rest of his cigarette, then flicked the b.u.t.t out onto the gra.s.s. The faintest of sounds had started up, and now when he looked out into the air he saw that a fine rain had begun to fall.

Louise and he ate dinner alone, waited on with catlike attentiveness by the unspeaking Manuela. They were in the Indian Room. There were Edward Curtis originals on the walls, and Hopi pots stood in rows on custom-built shelving. The rain whispered on the leaded window beside them, and a greenish light suffused this front half of the room. Louise's father was resting, she said. "I wish you hadn't mentioned Charles Varriker. It upsets him to have to recall all that."

"Yes, that was apparent."

She was cutting a steamed asparagus spear into four equal lengths. "What did he say about him-about Charlie?"

"That he loved him."

She gave an odd little laugh. "Loved him?" she said. "He hated him. And feels guilty, of course."

"who?"

"Why what?"

"Why did he hate him, and why does he feel guilty about him?"

She paused, with knife and fork lifted, and looked at him. "I suppose you think," she said, "in your usual nasty-minded journalist's way, that Billuns has something to feel guilty for."

"I wish to G.o.d you wouldn't call your father by that ridiculous name."

She narrowed her eyes in gathering anger but he went quickly on: "You said he feels guilty. Why, if he's not guilty in some way?"

"You're Irish," she said. "Are you telling me it's not possible for people to feel guilt even when they're entirely blameless?"

"No one is ever entirely blameless."

"Oh, don't give me that!" she said, her contempt as quick as a slap across the face. "You can do better than that."

"Then tell me why he feels guilty. There must be a reason."

"He feels guilty because he hated Charlie Varriker, and loved him, and because Charlie saved Mulholland Cable from disaster, and because Charlie killed himself. Don't you know anything about human beings?"

They sat for a long moment with gazes locked, and then went back to their plates. The day was ending and the green of twilight was intensifying. Manuela came and lit the two tall candles that stood at either end of the table, and went away again.

"Tell me what happened," Gla.s.s said to his wife. "Tell me what happened between Varriker and your father."

"Nothing happened. They were partners, or at least Charlie thought they were-my father is not the type to be a partner, as I'm sure you're aware. He ran Mulholland Cable like a department of the CIA, on a"-she smiled thinly-"on a need-to-know basis. Which meant no one knew anything beyond their own little area, except Billuns, who knew everything. That was the trouble, that secretiveness, that ... arrogance. My father treated men as agents, soldiers, fighters-killers, I suppose-but business isn't warfare, or espionage, either, whatever people say. When things started to go wrong he didn't know how to make them right. That was why he brought in Charlie Varriker. Because Charlie was charm-oh, pure charm. And Charlie fixed the business, mended it. And then ..." She stopped, and looked out at the rain and the gathering dusk.

"And then," Gla.s.s said, "he killed himself."

"Yes," his father-in-law said from the doorway, where he had entered unnoticed by either of them. "That's what he did." He came forward into the candlelight and the greenish glow from the window. His face was drawn and gray. "The G.o.dd.a.m.ned fool took my Beretta and shot himself"-he lifted a finger and pointed-"right here, through the eye."

13.

SOME LIKE IT HOT.

By morning the rain had cleared, and the vast blue sky was so pale it was almost white. John Gla.s.s sat on the pitch pine verandah with his coffee and his cigarettes and watched the sunlight stealthily leaching the night's shadows out of the trees. He had slept badly and woken at dawn. He had sat first in the big central living room and tried to read, but the silent house with other people asleep in it made him uneasy and so he had come out here. The salt air was cold still. Birds swooped down swiftly to the lawn in pursuit of the early worm and then flew up again.

He was wondering at what time Captain Ambrose started work. He needed to talk to the policeman; there were questions he needed to ask him. He had been wrong about Dylan Riley, all wrong. He had a sense of smoldering anger that at any moment might flare into flame.

Later, he was eating a silent breakfast with Louise in the big sunfilled kitchen when David Sinclair arrived from the city. His mother rose from the table and kissed him, and then held him for a moment at arm's length, scanning his face and touching him lightly here and there with her fingertips, as if to check him for damage. She worried about the places David frequented, the Chelsea clubs and dives where he spent most his nights. "I know so little of what he does," she would say. "He won't tell me anything." Gla.s.s had no comment to make; this was territory he did not venture into willingly.

"Uh-oh," David said now, lifting his head and pretending to sniff the air. "This atmosphere that I'm getting. Have you two been having a long day's journey into night? I can almost hear the foghorns." He was wearing a blazer with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and a crest on the pocket, and white duck trousers and an open-necked white shirt and a Liberty cravat. All he lacked was a yachting cap. The young man had as many personalities as he had outfits. And he had seen too many movies. Today he was Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, camp lisp and all. When his mother asked how he had managed to arrive so early he said he had driven up, setting out at six while the dawn was still an hour off. "They say the city never sleeps," he said, "but it does, it does. There wasn't a soul about, not even a bag lady." He turned suddenly to Gla.s.s. "Anybody else get shot since I saw you last?"

Big Bill appeared then, unshaven, in a terrycloth robe and purple velvet slippers. He looked greatly unwell. The tanned skin of his cheeks still had a grayish tinge, and the stubble on his chin glittered like spilled grains of salt. After her father had gone to bed the night before, Louise had berated her husband yet again for bringing up the painful subject of Charles Varriker and his suicide. "Don't you think he deserves a bit of peace," she had said, "after all these years?" Peace, Gla.s.s thought, did not come into it; peace was not the point.

"Good morning, Granddad," David Sinclair said, with exaggerated deference.

Big Bill gave him a sliding glance from under his eyebrows and muttered something and sat down at the table. Gla.s.s wondered how Louise had persuaded her father to let her hand over the directorship of the Mulholland Trust to a young man who was the old man's opposite in every way imaginable. Would he understand it, he wondered, if he had a daughter who herself had a son? The subtleties of familial loves and loyalties baffled him; his own father had died too young.

Big Bill drank the coffee that Louise had poured for him and crumbled a piece of bread in his fingers but did not eat it. Gla.s.s noticed the tremor in his hand. He had aged overnight. "Need someone to drive me down to St. Andrew's," he said. St. Andrew's in Sag Harbor was where he heard Ma.s.s on Sundays when he was at Silver Barn.

"You can do that, can't you, darling?" Louise said to her son.

"But of course," David said, with fake eagerness, and turned to his grandfather. "I'll come to Ma.s.s, too. Simply can't resist those gorgeous vestments."

He winked at Gla.s.s. Big Bill said nothing.

In the end all four of them climbed into David Sinclair's vintage open-top gold Mercedes, the old man in the pa.s.senger seat and Gla.s.s and Louise crowded together in the back. As they drew away from the house and set off down the hill Gla.s.s realized he had forgotten to call Captain Ambrose. Was he afraid of what the policeman might have to tell him? And would it be any more than he suspected, any more than he dreaded? Without wanting to, he knew now, he was sure of it, who had shot Dylan Riley. Or who had arranged for him to be shot.

At the church it was apparent that Big Bill expected them to accompany him inside, but Gla.s.s said he would take a walk down by the water, and insisted that Louise should come with him. The old man grunted and turned abruptly and set off across the street to the church. David looked at his mother and smiled inquiringly. "Go on," she said, "go with him. He'll be pleased."

There were not many people at the harbor, the season proper not having begun yet. They walked out onto the Long Wharf. The water swayed and wallowed, sluggish as oil in the calm of morning. Across the bay the low hills on Shelter Island, where the last of winter seemed to linger still, were a surly olive green. The sharp air, reeking of iodine and salt, stung their nostrils.

"Tell me about Charles Varriker," Gla.s.s said.

Louise was wearing knee-high black leather boots and a tweed cape over a heavy Aran sweater. She walked with her arms tightly folded against the chill of morning. She was pale, and her eyes had a faintly haunted look. He suspected she, too, had pa.s.sed a sleepless night. He wondered what she was thinking now; he always wondered what she was thinking.

"Tell you what?" she said. "What can I tell you, that I haven't already?"

"Why did he kill himself?"

"Why does anybody? No one ever knows."

"Did he leave a note?"

"Of course not." She stopped, and turned to him. "Why are you so interested in this?"

"Dylan Riley found out something, something I thought at first had to do with me but now I think had to do with Varriker. And before you ask, I don't know what it was."

They walked on.

"I wish," Louise said, "that you'd start being a journalist again. You need something to occupy you."

"That's what the priests used to tell us-an idle mind is the devil's workshop. Good t.i.tle for a book, don't you think? The Devil's Workshop . Maybe that's what I'll call Big Bill's biography."

"That's not funny."

"I thought it was."

"You love to needle me, don't you? It's a kind of hobby for you."

A little white sailing boat with sails furled and its outboard going came weaving through the throngs of millionaires' yachts, cleaving a clean furrow in the water that, close in here, had a milky shine like the inner lining of an oyster sh.e.l.l. A whiskery fellow in a sailor's cap and faded blue sailcloth trousers rolled to the knee stood in the prow with one bare foot planted on the topmost strake. It amused Gla.s.s that everyone here dressed the part, like hopeful extras waiting for the camera crew to arrive.

They came to a little restaurant adorned with knotted ropes and red-and-white lifebuoys and festoons of fishing net. They took an outside table from where they could watch the Old Man of the Sea tying up his boat to a post of rough-hewn timber. A buxom girl with a big toothy smile came and took their order. Louise sat low in her chair with her hands clasped under her cape and her booted legs thrust out before her, crossed at the ankles. "I don't want to talk to you about Charlie Varriker," she said.

"Then I'll ask your father." He waited, and she said nothing. "There's something not right here, Lou. And it's to do with Varriker, I'm sure of it. I don't know how, but I'm sure."

"Since when," she flashed at him, "did you start to care again about things not being right?" She continued glaring for a moment, then turned aside with her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. "Charlie was a good man," she said. "He didn't deserve to die. That wasn't right."

"Dylan Riley didn't deserve to die, either."

"Oh, yes?" she said, and gave him a sardonic look. "And you're going to avenge his death, are you?"

"I want to know for certain who killed him. Maybe I've decided to be a journalist again, as you say I should." He waited, then said: "What happened, with Charlie Varriker? Tell me, Lou."

The old sailor, squatting on his heels, was fashioning an elaborate knot in the boat's painter. He had lit a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, from where a line of smoke ran straight up into his left eye. He knew, Gla.s.s saw, that Louise was watching him; male vanity never ages.

The girl brought their coffee.

"Charlie was Billuns's best recruit," Louise said.

"At the CIA?"

She ignored the question as too obvious to require an answer. "Billuns was so proud of him. G.o.d knows the things he had got him to do-there had been some 'op,' as they used to say, in Vietnam that Charlie would never talk about, that had been a great success, just before the Tet Offensive. They used to get drunk together and make toasts to Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. They were like schoolboys, or like a schoolboy and his teacher." She stopped.

"And?"

Louise sipped her coffee and grimaced. "It's hot," she said, "be careful." The old sailor had gone. A family of five fatties waddled past, making the wharf groan under them. The three roly-poly children wore identical, brand-new Sag Harbor T-shirts. One of them, a girl, had an exquisitely pretty face encased in a football of fat. Louise resumed her cheerless sprawl, shoving her hands into the sleeves of her sweater. "And nothing," she said. "Billuns brought in Charlie to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong at Mulholland Cable, and he did, he fixed it. He could fix anything, with that way of his. And then he killed himself." She was looking out at the drab green hills across the bay, her eyes narrowed again and her mouth making tiny movements behind tightened lips as if she were biting on something small and hard between her teeth.