The Lemur by Benjamin Black

his daughter.
    John Glass 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 glass 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. Glass, and then we be wishing for the cool days again.” There was a touch of the poet to old Lincoln.
    Glass went up in the little elevator. It was a venerable and somewhat rackety contraption, and he was never comfortable in it, feeling constricted and vaguely at peril. He refused to let himself make of this a metaphor for his life in general. He was a free man, no matter how narrow his circumstances might have become recently. Yes, free.
    The elevator opened directly onto a private hallway leading into the apartment. The first time he had entered here he had been more impressed, cowed, even, than he would have cared to admit. Now he called out “All hands!” as he always did; he could not remember the origin of this manner of announcing his homecoming. From far inside the apartment he heard Louise’s muted answering call. He found her in the library, seated at her desk, an eighteenth-century escritoire, with a little pile of cards and envelopes, and her fountain pen. She was wearing the gray silk kimono that some Japanese bigwig had presented to her when she visited Kyoto as a UN Special Ambassador for Culture. She gave her husband a glancing, absentminded smile. “There you are,” she said, and went back to her cards.
    He stood behind her. He caught her sharp perfume. What was the word? Civet. The same perfume smells differently on every woman. Or so he had been told. He felt curiously unfocused, adrift, somehow. He supposed it was the aftermath of his meeting with Captain Ambrose, and all the adrenaline he had used up. “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “Invitations for Tuesday.”
    “Tuesday?”
    “The party for Antonini.”
    “Oh. The painter.”
    “Yes,” she said, imitating his flat tone. “The painter.”
    “I think he has a soft spot for you.”
    She did not turn, or lift her head. “Do you?”
    “Or a hard spot, more likely.”
    “Don’t be coarse.”
    “That’s me, coarse as cabbage.”
    He admired the way she wrote, in firm, swift strokes, so confidently. He had not used a fountain pen since he was in primary school.
    Why did she not ask about the call from Captain Ambrose? Could she have forgotten?
    He moved away and sat down on the low white sofa, where he was surrounded on three sides by bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. It struck him that he had not lifted a volume from those shelves since … since he could not remember when. They stood there, the books, sorted, ranked, a battalion of rebukes. He had not done that book of his own that he had always planned to do. The unwritten book: another cliché.
    “By the way,” Louise said, and still did not turn, “did you speak to that policeman?”
    “Yes.”
    “What was it about? Was someone murdered?”
    “Yes.”
    Now she did turn, setting an elbow on the back of her chair and looking at him with a faint, questioning smile. “Someone we know?” she said lightly.
    He put his head back on the cushions and considered first one corner of the ceiling, then another. “No.”
    When he failed to continue she waggled her head in a parody of regal impatience and said, “Weh-ell?” in her Queen Victoria voice. He lowered his gaze and fixed it on her. Her eyes shone, and her glossed lips caught points of light from the chandelier above his head and glittered. Why was she excited? It must be, he thought, the prospect of the