No Country: A Novel

For daughters, lost and found

They lay together as if they had just disengaged from a long embrace. His right hand was stretched across her breast, his head thrown back, seemingly in laughter, pillow tossed aside. Her right leg was flexed at the knee, and her curved instep showed pale and vulnerable from where I stood at the door, looking at them in silence. The curtain stirred in the slow light, a fall afternoon that had the crispness of a seasonal apple.

The bed was streaked red, deepening to brown around the edges. Her eyes were half-open, as if she were about to speak to the man beside her. The cut on the brown skin of her neck was easy to miss, for around it was a slight necklace, its garnet beads vivid as pomegranate seeds, and her open palm next to it, covered by a film which I knew was dried blood. There was a damp pool in the gather of the bedsheets. The man had less blood around him, although the kitchen knife was impacted in his chest. A thin pencil mark of red ran from his left temple to his right jaw, as if someone had swiftly canceled his face before burying the blade.

A window by the bed had been left open an inch, but there was no sign of its having been forced from outside, nor any footprints or ladder marks or signs of entry from outside. The only prints clearly matched the man’s.

“Chief,” I heard someone calling me from the stairwell. “They’re waiting, the morgue guys.” Young Delahanty, first week on the job, uniform crisp, his manner earnest and uncertain. He’d be talking about this day for the rest of his life. The photographers were done. The fingerprint people had come and gone.

Her secretary had called the police when the female victim, a doctor, had not arrived for a scheduled morning surgery, and no one at home had answered her repeated calls.

They had died together, the husband and wife, unclear in which order. Tomlinson from the medical team had told me the approximate time the homicides had happened. About eleven.

The grown-up daughter was downstairs, brought in a squad car. She had seen the bodies, then stayed downstairs with Caitlin Roach, our female cop on duty. She hadn’t spoken a word.

“I’ll go talk to her now,” I told Delahanty, “alone.” He left. He didn’t babble. I liked that about him. I lit my sixth cigarette of the morning, careful not to drop the ash on the gray carpet.

Nothing was missing from the house, nothing shifted, except the knife from the kitchen below. The daughter sat still as stone on a brown hassock in the study, her bare feet on the hardwood floor, her hair uncombed, her shoes lying forgotten beside her. Outside the window, the deck lay sepia in the afternoon light, octaves darker than the garden behind it.

“What did you fight about?”

She looked absently at me, as if surprised to find me there.

“We didn’t. I was angry. I left the dinner table.”

“Did you have dinner?” I had seen only two smeared dishes in the sink.

“I left before it was over.”

“Who did you quarrel with, your father or your mother?”

“It wasn’t a quarrel.”

“It wasn’t?”

“I was angry with myself.”

“And they end up dead in bed?”

She looked at me, eyes growing wide. Then she said slowly, “You are so wrong,” as if to herself.

“Did I say it was you?” I whispered, shaking my head.

So far we knew that she had stopped for gas on her way home a little after seven thirty and paid with her credit card at Bailey’s service station three miles away. The gas station attendant had recognized her picture. She rented an upstairs apartment in a two-story detached house, like many graduate students in that university town a dozen miles down the road. Her mother, a gynecologist at our nearby hospital, returned from work a couple of hours later, shortly before ten.

The girl, Devika Mitra, had slammed her bedroom door at around eight. Mrs. Sharon Nolan, her landlady, had heard it and asked her to come down for some pumpkin pie of which she was very proud, but Devika had refused. Her car sat in the driveway for the next few hours. Mrs. Nolan had to wake her at around eleven, apologetic for doing so, but Devika’s car was blocking her son’s in the driveway.

Mrs. Nolan had gone to her bedroom, which was right under Devika’s room, and she heard Devika pacing about for an hour after that. She read for more than an hour, unable to sleep, because she had had coffee after dessert, which always kept her up.
She thought she might have heard Devika crying, but decided to let her be.

I had let her talk, hoping for some scrap of information: She rambled on about how bad she had felt about Devika, all alone for Thanksgiving. How could these Indian immigrants let their daughter spend Thanksgiving alone! Even the boyfriend was away—gone to New York City to see some relative—she thought Devika had said. Mrs. Nolan was fond of Devika, who was usually cheerful and had helped her rake the fall leaves a couple of times, unasked.

The boyfriend had taken the Greyhound bus to the city on Monday and had not yet returned. Devika had said that he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel. I had NYPD check that.

I stepped outside and, fishing around for a cigarette, realized it was the last one in the packet. I lit the Camel carefully, exhaling in the evening air.

No motive, no unexplained fingerprints, no witnesses. Yet, inside this house in a drowsy cul-de-sac, a husband and his wife, both born half a world away, lay dead in each other’s arms, in my hometown. Three months to retirement, I did not want this case to go cold, to enter the lore of small-town police in upstate New York, and become a private burden I would carry into my quietest moments, knee-deep in some trout stream.

I remembered, as a rookie in the city, what canny old Detective Jim Henderson used to say: “No more than two degrees of separation—if that—in murder cases, unless burglary is involved. Often the unlikeliest connections.”

I felt I had been left one of those old books whose pages would have to be carefully slit open, the separating of each page a deliberate act. I whispered to myself in Hungarian, the only language
I knew as a five year-old when I had first come to America,
“A konyvek nema mesterek; világos, nint a vakablak . . . feher liliomnak is lehet fekete az ámyeka.” Books are silent masters; clear as a blind window . . . even a white lily casts a black shadow.
In this book I knew how just one chapter ended, the last one. The preceding narrative was still terra incognita, its geography yet unexplored.

I was a small boy when the landlords’ tax men came to deal with those who had fallen into arrears. I remember the fire. So lovely and terrible a hue. What God creates such beautiful color and flickering shapes as it leaps and rules upon a cottage, completing its unroofing and ruin? It is the landlords’ weapon, a different thing altogether from our humble potboilers, grey embers where we cook our potatoes. Its red eye appears, jolly and heartless, as black smoke wreathes and twists about it. And those who lived below that roof—some for generations—stand clenching their futile fists, their cold sweat of defeat warmed savagely by it. Odd it is, this burning—with the hard bullyboys spitting and watching—and the man of the house clutching his woman, the children fearful and openmouthed by the suddenness of it all, waking into a nightmare long predicted.

These are the landlords’ lands, these cottages built stone upon stone, the soddy thatch, all theirs. But it is our tenant lives that are on fire. When they battered and torched our mate Fintan’s cottage,
his da stood grinding his teeth, his ma on the ground as if lamed, and Fintan with great round eyes, crying and forgotten, watching the chimney slide onto the broken earth.

From under his cowlick, my best mate, Padraig, watched silent and narrow-eyed as our Fintan’s cottage burned. The fire was the colour of dark rose and madder, climbing rose and gorse—all our Irish colours. And then—for it was our Ireland and our times—everything turned to ashes. The evening mist settled. And there was nowhere to shelter the head in this land that all belongs to the landlords. There were only some planks close by, pulled up and out, to be hauled away by the bullyboys. They would trundle them away next morning when they came with the carts, for they did not want the fire to spook the horses. The planks would turn soft and soggy-like in the blue evening dew. For the last time the family would sleep on the floorboards—at least the children would—Fintan’s da too full of bitterness to lie down under the hard stars. From that day, my friend Padraig and I never saw Fintan or his small brothers anymore.

On that selfsame day I first saw that hard glint in Padraig’s eye, his small palm clasping a stone, eyes taking in that destroying fire. In the following years I realized that his hand would forever seek that hard rock until there would be no holding him back from striking a mortal blow or, in the attempt, fall off the world.

•  •  •

I
AM
B
RENDAN
McCarthaigh of Mullaghmore, County Sligo, seventeen now, as addled in love as ever by words and books, and already in a fair way to becoming Mr. O’Flaherty’s apprentice. It’s odd how I became that, with nary a word spoken, as if my
love of books and learning found its natural harbour right here, under the old schoolmaster’s benign eye. Even when we were wee ones, Mr. O’Flaherty would open unexpected windows for us. Together in our one-room hedge school, Padraig and I would listen entranced to Mr. O’Flaherty’s tales about the heroes who traveled far, bravehearted, but broke their own hearts forever, Oisin, and Finn McCoul. He would talk of Cuchulain, or about the battles before windy Troy, telling us about our Irish Brian Boru, about Drogheda, about the Druids. He had us staring into the sloping afternoon with wonder in our eyes, imagining ourselves into those old worlds. He would hold us enthralled with the doings and sayings of our own present-day Daniel O’Connell, as if we ourselves were at the very edge of a great beginning in our history.

The Sunday harangues of Father Conlon washed over our nodding heads like cold seawater, and we knew his relentless yellow eye was forever on the collection basket. But the centre of our young lives was not Father Conlon or the gathered prayers of the elders and the black-shawled bent women. That was a habit, like our miserable tithes. No, for us it was Mr. O’Flaherty’s school. A hedge school, it would be called by the English, ’tis certain, for it had no halls and mighty rooms with great benches and a high table for the master. Although our great Daniel O’Connell had brought about the Catholic Emancipation, for us in this far western village near Sligo, there was no other school to attend. The priest got us on Sundays, but the rest of the week we went to Mr. O’Flaherty. Old Malachi he was called behind his back by some fools in their liquor, but to his face, he was always Sir or Mr. O’Flaherty, to one and all.

Our great landlord Lord Palmerston—who extracted his ample income primarily from his vast Sligo lands—came to our
Sligo just thrice, each about a decade apart, and seeing no schools the first time about, set one up. But our priests told us that it was a way to turn us from our Catholic faith. No student ever darkened its doorway in Inishmurray. The English schoolmaster stood about for a couple of years, and went back, never having had a single pupil to teach.

Next time Palmerston came across our Mr. O’Flaherty, who never talks at all about his meeting with the English lord, but I have heard tell from others that the peer found a deep and quiet knowledge of books in our Mr. O’Flaherty—even in Latin and Greek. It was understood forever after by his local agent, the English Mr. Arkwright, that he was to leave Mr. O’Flaherty and his little ground on which stood his few trees and potato patch and wheat corner alone, and no rent asked for or given. This Lord Palmerston was a man of sweeping avarice, but also known for the odd act of generosity; he had a great love of books and learning. In short, as full of contradictions as many another mortal.