The Lemur by Benjamin Black Page A

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 maître 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 maître 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 glass of milk. You tell that bastard, Mac said , that unless he gets his fat ass out here this minute I’m going to announce to this restaurant that the boss of the FBI is a skirt-wearing fag. 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.”
    Glass 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 glasses. Glass 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 glasses, 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. Glass could feel her not looking at him. He sipped his whiskey.
    “Your father was telling me,” he said, “how Hoover arranged the assassination 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,” Glass 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 Glass had felt