by Peter Hayes
“I did,” I said, stepping back from the door.
“Lootenant Mick Houlihan,” the first one pronounced in flawless Brooklynese. “And this here’s Detective Sergeant Lee Raposo.”
“You’re American,” I told Houlihan.
He looked at me mirthlessly. “So’re you.”
They entered. Houlihan had a presence about him: a looming, raw-boned menace to his movements that made one instinctively back out of his way. His one saving grace was a pair of crystalline eyes, pale as rain on the Irish Sea. They were at once outraged and wistful-looking, as if they’d seen more mayhem than any living soul has the right to endure but still hoped, against all hope, for a vision of the Virgin.
The one from the Yard was slim and dim. He had almond eyes and elephant ears from which depended long, Buddhistic lobes, like those mournful heads that lean from the sand on Easter Island. He was probably Italian. So why did the word Samoan come to mind?
Big as they were, filling the small foyer, they had a wonderful air of detachment about them, as if they were in the apartment, yes, but not of it; investigating a murder, yea, but not besmirched by it in any way.
I closed the door and led them down the hall to the study. I had expected them to be inured, but at the sight of Jai’s body, Raposo sucked a breath as though slapped. The flies, aroused, boiled up from the corpse and began careening around the room, like numberless tiny black bats out of Hell. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Raposo said.
For his part, the New York Celt just stared at Jai for the longest time, then plucked and squished a fly from his cheek, adding, almost mournfully, “Better call the M.E.”
“Who was he?”
“Dr. Jai Prasad.”
Houlihan drew a notepad from his pocket. “What kinda name is that?” he wondered.
“Indian,” I said. And so there’d be no confusion: “From India.”
“You the wife?” the one from the Yard—Raposo—asked.
Vidya nodded.
He continued: “Two of you gank him?”
I didn’t understand him. Neither, apparently, did Vidya, for she said, “I don’t know. I just found him like that. When I came home.”
“From where?” Houlihan interrupted.
“. . . the theater.”
“When was that?” Raposo wondered.
“Oh, around . . . four.”
“In the morning? That what time the theater quits?”
“No. I stopped off . . . for a drink.”
“Uh huh. And where was this?”
“At an ‘after hours’ . . . I don’t know which . . .”
“There’s hundreds . . .” I added.
“You were with her?” Raposo asked.
“No.”
Then shut the fuck up, he told me with his eyes.
“You alone? Friends?” Houlihan wondered.
“Alone,” Vidya said.
“How long?”
“What? Oh, was I there? . . . some hours.”
“Yeah?” Houlihan nodded. “And then what?”
“I came home. Found Jai . . . lying there. I called . . . Xan.”
“Why him, not us?” Raposo asked, sounding almost hurt.
“I don’t know,” she said, quietly, in a way that would have melted any decent person’s heart. “I . . . needed help.”
The four eyes shifted in my direction.
“And you are . . . ?”
“Xander Donne.”
“Relation to deceased?”
“Former student. Friend.”
“Hey, you do this one together?” Raposo wondered, just like that.
“This one what?” I asked.
“Lee,” the lieutenant begged, “go easy.”
Lee just shrugged.
“Excuse me,” I told Houlihan. “I’d like to have a word with you.” And I stepped into the hall. The flies, disturbed, poured from the study and began to circulate the rooms.
Sighing with the effort, Houlihan got up from the arm of the couch, and followed me out.
I turned on him. “What in hell’s the NYPD doing here?”
He gave me that flat, blank, gunmetal glare that cops reserve for just such questions: “Leeayzing.”
“Great,” I said. “Liaise all you want. But don’t tell me you think that . . . that girl in there had something to do . . . with this.” I waved in the direction of Jai’s body.
Houlihan appeared transcendentally unmoved. “Lemme ask ya. You wouldn’t be screwing Mrs. Vidya?”
“Mrs. Prasad,” I corrected him. “And no, I wouldn’t.”
“’Cause you got her lipstick on your chin. You aware of that?” Instinctively, I reached in my pocket for a tissue. “Hankie, too,” he said, eyeing it shrewdly.
“Look,” I said, wiping my face, “the lady was . . . bereft. I . . . we embraced. It was . . . solace.”
“She’s about your age. And gentleman in the study, he’s a good deal older than the two a you.”
“What the hell does that mean? I don’t know how old Vidya—Mrs. Prasad—is.”
“. . . twenty-six, -seven, maybe. And a very sexy twenty-seven, too. I mean, look it, I wouldn’t blame you. By the way, what’s that dot on her forehead mean?”
“That . . . she’s married.”
“Well,” he sighed, “guess she’s gonna have to redo her makeup.” He sighed once more. “This Prasad. Now what kind of doctor of what was he anyway?”
“A doctor of linguistic and religious anthropology,” I said, aware I had lost control of the conversation.
“Yeah? And who’d wanna kill a guy like that? Doctor Religious Anthology and all.”
“I don’t know,” I said, pointedly. “That’s what you’re here to figure out. Remember?” I looked around. “Maybe it was a robbery.”
He looked around, too. “Anything taken?”
“Maybe the murder weapon.” I pointed to the rack of swords on the wall of the study. “Two nights ago, there were four swords there. Now there’s three.”
“Anything else?”
“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask his wife.”
“Doesn’t look like a robbery, less they knew what they wanted.”
“Look,” I said, disturbed by the general tenor of the conversation. “You’re not suggesting . . . ?”
Houlihan shrugged. “Don’t really know who did it. Do we?” he asked, pleasantly enough. “It’s just . . . the energy.” He seized on the word. “Daughter, Celeste, she’s always saying things to me like, ‘Daddy, I don’t like his energy,’ or ‘There’s something bad with the energy there.’ Energy, for cryin’ out loud.” He chuckled to himself. “When I was a kid, energy was friggin’ coal, know what I mean? Now . . . anyway, that’s the problem, least ways I see it. Something’s funny with the energy. I mean, guy’s dead, cut to ribbons, and you and the wife are sitting around like youse just swallowed the fucking canary.”
“Maybe we’re both in a state of shock.”
He appraised me coolly for a moment or two. “Yeah,” he nodded, “could be that.”
Some years back, in my student years, when “liberation” groups were proliferating daily, some wags got together one night on drugs and founded one called Dead Liberation. “Treated like dirt,” their manifesto read: “Can’t work, can’t vote, the most downtrodden folk on the face of the earth.”
Now, watching a small army of forensic technicians invade the apartment, I saw that what they’d said was true; at least it was for murder victims. Having been deprived of your life, you forfeited all your other rights, too: your drawers were searched, your mail opened, your wife questioned, your pockets turned inside out, your bank statements analyzed, the dirt beneath your fingernails culled and your hands sealed in Ziploc bags—even your genitals swabbed for emissions—while at the autopsy to follow, your liver and lights would be weighed in the balance, like some bardo procedure in The Book of the Dead.
I went to the kitchen and sat down beside Vidya. She squeezed my hand, and in
stantly, I felt better. For wretched as everything was at that moment, there was this other thing in the air between us. Whatever it was, it cast a glory light and weird, sweet beauty upon the sorry business all around us: the technicians dusting for prints, the ringing phone, the constant traffic.
Houlihan returned, requesting that we come down to the station and make a statement.
“Mrs. Prasad’s solicitor will be joining us.”
“Hey, whaddaya, whaddaya need a lawyer for?” he complained. “We just wanna axe ya couple of more questions.”
“You already did. And maybe if you and your friend from the Yard hadn’t framed them as accusations, we might be feeling differently. But you did, so we don’t. You want anything else from us, talk to our attorney.”
For their harassment was outrageous. Jai had been butchered in a frenzy by some maniac wielding a sword or machete. One of his hands was almost severed at the wrist. A great red medallion of blood, like molten metal, was pooled on the floor, hardening along its edges. I had no intention of being bullied or of allowing Jai’s widow to be victimized by New Scotland Yard and New York’s Finest, even as his body rotted in the study.
For Vidya was a stranger in a strange country; it was my duty to protect her. Jai would have wanted me to. And there arose in me a wondrous energy: masculine, mustachioed and patriarchal.
And anyway, I was in love with her by then.
Chapter 15
The Chiswick stationhouse was not what I’d expected, which was something more circus-like and Runyonesque: arguing prostitutes posed in doorways, telephones ringing, bearded men in inexplicable pink pinafores, weeping. It wasn’t like that. It was one of those modern amalgams of brick, glass and metal so abhorred by the Prince of Wales that manage to look too new for the neighborhood and rundown at the same time.
Vidya was, incredibly, still wearing her bloodstained sari. She reminded me of Jacqueline Kennedy, following her husband’s assassination, in that pink suit with black piping. The difference was that Jackie had a nation’s sympathy while Vidya, apparently, had none but mine.
My statement wasn’t long. I wrote down exactly what had happened with two key omissions: our passionate encounter and the bloodstained book. After that, I waited a very long time.
Finally, Houlihan appeared. He looked pissed off. “Girlfriend’s gonna be a couple more hours.”
“Not my girlfriend.”
“Yeah, you told me. Why don’t I believe you?”
“The real question is: how you can think she had anything to do with that? Christ, man, you know splatter. You cut someone up like that, you end up looking like a Jackson Pollack. But except for some transfer, her clothes are clean.”
Houlihan remained profoundly unmoved. “Coulda changed them.” He leaned in so close I could smell his cologne. “Knew this lady once, ‘porter for the Post? Did a story on this maniac what chopped up a waitress and afore you know it, she’s trumpetin’ his cause. I said, ‘Fuck is this, Margaret, you think this guy’s innocent? They found him, right? He’s walkin’ down a country highway, waving body parts at passing cars. Where he get Susan Radford’s arm, he didn’t do it?’ Know what she says? ‘I know his heart better than you ever will and he never could have done such a thing.’ And that was that. Evidence don’t matter. And this was not a stupid lady. So you see? Denial. Hell of a thing.”
Jai’s solicitor arrived around noon. I left the station and took a cab to the hotel. I wanted to bathe, not my flesh so much as my mind and memory, to delete from it the sight and smell of Jai’s body. Then I’d return for Vidya.
But once in my room, the emotional force of the morning’s events finally hit me, and I wept like I hadn’t wept in years. It didn’t feel like grief so much as pure emotion, as though Jai’s death and Vidya’s kiss had unstoppered my heart and the precious oils of all my feelings—feelings of love, feelings of horror, feelings I hadn’t known were there—were spilling out.
They scared me. They were overwhelming. I really couldn’t handle all of them now. Even my sudden love for Vidya, while intoxicating, felt frightening. If I let it in, where would it take me? Where would it lead, if I let myself go? And yet I also felt an animal alertness. For someone close had just been murdered and Houlihan’s vibe had a dangerous edge.
I showered, shaved and was getting dressed when Vidya rang. Her questioning was over with and, for now at least, she was free to go.
I returned to the stationhouse. A policewoman accompanied us to the apartment, where Vidya was allowed to remove her sari (which was impounded) and to pack her toiletries, along with several changes of clothing and, from the safe, her jewels, which she refused to leave. As the flat was a crime scene, she could not remain, and I insisted she return to my hotel, at least until we could sort things out.
We hailed a cab. No sooner had we entered my room and the door shut behind us than Vidya reached into the folds of her salwar kameez—a loose-fitting tunic emblazoned with miniscule mirrors over drawstring pants—and brought out the ancient book.
Her presence of mind to snatch it from beneath the noses of the cops was impressive. And I found myself moved that, in the midst of all her hurt and horror, she’d extended herself for me this way.
“So . . .” I said, “they give you a hard time?” It was the first chance we’d had to speak privately.
“Rah-tha.”
“What did you say?”
“The same thing I’d said before. Not that they believed me. The leftenant,” she added, “claimed that you had ‘spilled your guts.’ And that if I didn’t ‘come clean,’ I was ‘going down.’ I wasn’t certain what any of that meant, but it did sound disagreeable. Jai’s solicitor advised me not to answer. He accused them of trying to coerce a confession. But I didn’t mind. I told them there was nothing to which eye-tha of us would confess, as there was nothing criminal eye-tha of us had done.”
I nodded. “Thank you for your vote of confidence. So, if we didn’t do it, who do you think did?”
She shook her head.
“Because it doesn’t look like a robbery, Vidya. And I find it hard to believe it was some kind of fluke. I mean, could it be . . . political?”
“Such as . . . ?”
“I don’t know. Was Jai . . . a spy or something?”
This was not so far-fetched as it sounds. For years, anthropology was practically a subsection of the national intelligence agencies, for who better than an anthropologist has a reason to wander about the remote parts of a foreign land? And if on the way to your site, you happen to pass a military convoy or snap a wonderful desert view (with an atomic facility in the background), well, of course, you’re going to share it with your government, especially since it’s helping finance the dig.
“I met Jai seven weeks ago. You were his friend for many years. You would know far better than I. Jai was an intensely private man. Even on holiday, he spent many hours alone on some project. He could have been colluding with double ought seven, for all I know.”
He certainly could have. Though more likely it would turn out to be not that way at all, but one of those tragedies that make life look like a crapshoot, with snake eyes rolled in the form of the super’s son on leave from the bin who just happens to be visiting his dad that evening, bringing with him all his homicidal urges.
Yet even this scenario was preferable to another. For what if Jai weren’t the intended target? What if, because of her past, her beauty, or something about her that I didn’t yet know, it was Vidya—and Jai had simply been in the way?
I laughed, nervously. “You’re not a spy yourself, are you?”
“For whom? Kenya?”
Put that way, it did seem doubtful.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you mean well. I’m just—knackered. Let me make some calls, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Vidya,” I said. “You’re not leaving. There’s plenty of room here. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“You’re kind, but I won’t intrude.
Anyway, this is the last thing you need. These scandals have a way of . . .”
“I’m not concerned about scandal. I’m concerned about you. The last thing you need right now is to start schlepping yourself all over London, looking for a place to stay.”
“Look,” she said, and took a breath, dropping into a deeper gear. “I’ve thought about this thing . . . with us, I mean. I don’t know why that happened as it did. But whatever the reason, now is not the proper time . . . what with . . . everything else that’s going on.”
“Thank God, “I said. “Someone, at least, has their wits about them. I couldn’t agree with you more. Our timing was so . . . disrespectful. I’m sorry . . . I . . .”
She waved me silent, while coming closer and clutching my open shirt with her hand. “It was both of us. And the shock. But no one would understand that. Everyone else is bound to see it as the purest perversity—or some sort of desecration.”
“Well, of course, they would. And who could blame them?”
I took her hand and removed its clutching fingers. They made me tense—though I failed to let them go.
Vidya cocked her head and looked at me then with such an appealing sweetness that I shivered. “Well,” I said. “I’m glad that’s settled. I feel better already.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “and so do I.” And she gave a pained, unhappy sigh.
What happened next, I’m tempted to pass over. For our bodies suddenly snapped together, as though compelled by a force majeure. I covered her face and throat with kisses. I found her mouth and unlocked the vault of her throat with my tongue.
There was nothing cool or regal about her. She made sounds out of Africa and left bite marks on my shoulder.
And in the midst of it all, it began to storm. Lightning flared. Thunder rattled. The rain came down in wind-whipped sheets. Afterward, lying on the rug beside her, listening to the violent wind and weather, I felt content—and, despite Jai’s murder, happy—for the first time in my life.
While Vidya dozed, I opened my laptop. A new e-mail from Jai gave me a shock, until I saw it was sent the previous evening. There was no message. Yet it contained Jai’s parting gift to me: his translation of the ancient codex. And so I opened up the attachment and read:
