Glass made no comment. David Sinclair was Louise’s son by her first marriage, to a Wall Street lawyer who seemed to have passed through her life leaving hardly a trace, except, of course, the young man who now occupied the center of her world. Glass looked round for the waiter and the wine list; if his stepson was joining them he would need more than a glass of Prosecco.

Their food arrived and they ate in silence for a time. The small rain wept against the windowpane and the cars and taxis going past shimmered and slid as in a wet mirage. Glass was wondering why he felt the need to be so secretive about Dylan Riley. Bill Mulholland’s life was emblematic of the last two-thirds of the chaotic, violent, and dizzyingly innovative century that had ended not so long ago. No one would expect a biographer to do unaided the extensive research that would be required for the writing of the life of such a man-no one except that man himself. Bill Mulholland was the original rugged individualist and required those around him to be made of the same stern stuff. What sort of sissy writer would hire someone else to do the donkeywork? He had offered the commission, along with a million-dollar fee, to his son-in-law because, as he had said, he trusted him; trusted him, that is, as Glass well understood, to leave certain overly heavy stones unturned. It was Glass himself-not his father-in-law, as he had told Dylan Riley-who wanted all the facts, even, or especially, the inconvenient ones. Glass believed Aristotle was right: he that holds a secret holds power.

He took a drink of wine and studied his wife. She was attending to her plate of greens with the long-necked, finical concentration of a heron at the water’s edge. She had urged him strongly to accept her father’s offer. “You used to like nothing better than a challenge,” she had said, “and writing my father’s life will be nothing if not that.” He had noted then, too, the tense employed. Used to. “And a million dollars,” she had added, with a lopsided, ironical smile, “is a million dollars.”