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pursing up, the little blond goatee wobbling, those starting eyes furiously agleam. “Right. The next call you get about this won’t be from me.”
    The line went dead.
    That day thirty years before, when Glass and Louise had first met at John Huston’s house, St. Clerans, in Connemara, the director had taken him for a walk after lunch. By then Big Bill and his daughter had left—the Atlantic wind was still in her hair, Glass caught the coolness of it when she passed him by going out—and Glass, too, was anxious to be on his way, for he had a deadline to meet. But Huston had insisted on them taking what he called “a tramp” together. He went away and came back half an hour later—Glass had filled the time listening back over the material he had taped—wearing tweed plus fours and a tweed jacket with a half-belt at the back, and plaid wool socks and walking boots and a floppy peaked cap reminiscent of a cowpat. He looked as if he had been dressed by a drunk in the costume department for a leading role in Brigadoon . He caught Glass’s incredulous glance and smiled broadly, showing off his big yellow tombstone teeth, and said: “What do you think, would I pass for a native?” Glass did not know if he should laugh.
    They had walked along a boreen and down into the valley. Sunlight and shadow swept the dark green hillsides, and the birds were whistling madly in the thorn trees, and there was the sound of unseen waters rushing under the heather, and the gorse blossom was already aflame. Huston had lately finished filming The Man Who Would Be King and was in a reflective mood. “Who’d have thought,” he said, “a Missouri boy would end up here, owning a chunk of the most beautiful country God ever made? I love this place. I’ve been an Irish citizen since ’64. I want my bones to rest here, when the time comes.” They arrived at a wooden gate and Huston stopped and leaned an elbow on the top bar and turned to Glass and said: “I’ve been watching you, son. You get so busy asking questions you forget other people can see you. You’re ambitious. I approve of that. You’re a little bit ruthless, and I approve of that, too. Only the ruthless succeed. But there’s something about you that kind of troubles me—I mean, that would worry me, if you were really my son. I’d be kind of scared thinking of you out there in the big, wide world. Maybe it’s that you expect too much of people.” He unlatched the gate and they walked on along a path into a dense stand of tall pines, where the light turned brownish blue and the air was colder somehow than it had been when they were in the open. Huston put an arm round Glass’s shoulders and gave him an avuncular squeeze. “Knew a fellow once,” he said, “a mobster, one of Meyer Lansky’s numbers men. He was a funny guy, I mean witty, you know? I’ve always remembered something he said to me once. ‘If you don’t know who the patsy in the room is, it’s you.’” Huston gave an emphysemic laugh, the phlegm twanging deep in his chest. “That was Joey Cohen’s gift of wisdom to me—‘If you don’t know who the patsy is, it’s you.’” The director’s big, shapely hand closed on Glass’s shoulder again. “You should remember it, too, son. Joey knew what he was talking about.”
    Now, in his office teetering high above Forty-fourth Street, Glass held the phone in a hand that refused to stay steady and tapped out a number. A bright New York voice answered, doing its singsong yes-how-may-I-help-you?
    “Alison O’Keeffe,” Glass said. “Is she there? Tell her it’s John—she’ll know.”
    He drummed his fingers on the desk and listened to the hollow nothingness on the line. Can there be, he was thinking, any more costly hostage to fortune than a mistress?

4
     
    ALISON
     
    Glass had first met Alison O’Keeffe the previous winter outside a bar in the Village. It was, she was, every middleaged male smoker’s fantasy made flesh. There he stood,