“Oh, but Daddy resented the contraption. Jealous, he was. “The Devil’s voice box,’ he called it, though he listened along with us all the same. Mum would say, ‘Ain’t you feared you’ll become a sinner by listening to the wireless?’ Daddy’d get all red-faced and say ‘No!’ Then Mum would laugh at him, and say, ‘Too bad, Myles. Sinners are ever so much more interesting men than saints.’
“And this made so much sense to me and Aidan. What do you suppose two Carlow boys would rather do of a long cold evening—read a book of catechisms, or tune into some place in the world where there was jazz music and people laughing?
“Mum knew very well what she was doing. She was intoxicating us. Curiosity drunked us more than whiskey ever done to Daddy. Furthermore, every time the old man’s back was turned, and many a time it wasn’t, she’d feed us subversive notions.
“She had certain visions of us, and meant us to see the same. We were both of us bright and worthy, she decided, but different as could be; I was her practical one, Aidan possessed a mind in need of soaring.
“To me, she said, ‘Liam, it’ll serve you well to know it’s not work that makes money, it’s money that makes money. There’s no way you’re likely to see this principle put to practice in Carlow here, so I’m seeing to it you go to London and learn, for London’s where the money is.’
“Now, my brother loved two things: reading literature, and listening to voices from America over the wireless. Mum said to him, ‘It’s Dublin where you’ll be going for your education in letters, Aidan. To Trinity College, and never you mind it’s full of Prods; I know of a priest who’ll grant your dispensation. No people put the English tongue to better use than Dubliners. You’ll find Dublin a writers’ and talkers’ heaven, but you mustn’t stay longer than need be. New York’s the place for you. No people in the world have more need for lettered men than New Yorkers.’
“Well then, she saw us off, the both of us, the funds coming from the mysterious place where she got all her fancy things. We didn’t ask questions, we went like shots. First me to London, which Daddy cursed as hell; then Aidan to Dublin, which Daddy thought no more savory a place.
“I cannot tell you much of what happened to your own daddy in Dublin for the next several years, for we lived in two so very different worlds. Aidan’s dreamy world of books and Dublin literary cafés and such things, and mine of working in a London bank and taking night classes and generally trying to learn all I could in the great councils of finance.
“I wasn’t keen for Aidan’s interests, and he no more for mine. I used to think he sounded so much like Daddy when he’d screw up his face and say money was ‘nothing but dirty paper.’
“But anyway, there come a day I left London for Dublin myself, to continue in my financial pursuits, which eventually resulted in this house we’re enjoying now, among other things. Aidan and I began seeing one another when I got to Dublin … maybe not as regularly as two brothers should, but time and separation had changed things between us, see.
“We both got letters from Mum, never from Daddy. She’d be all on about how bad it was becoming between them, back in the place neither one of us called home no more. Only once did we go back there, on account of the scandal that’s no doubt bruited about the pubs of Carlow to this day …”
Liam paused, as dramatically as any ham at the Abbey Theatre, waiting for either Ruby or me to coax more from him. Snoody had no doubt heard this story many times before, judging by his blank expression. Ruby finally asked him, coolly, “The scandal?”
“Aye, bonny,” Liam said. He asked me to pass him the decanter, then he filled his cup with whiskey, spotting it with tea. “Mum and Daddy, as I suppose we might have anticipated, did no go gently unto night …”
I asked, “Meaning—?”
“The postman become suspicious when he saw how the box was filling up, and how it appeared nobody was around the old place,” Liam said. “So, one day he leaves his bicycle up on the road and goes down to the house for a look-about. There he finds Mum laid out on the kitchen floor, full of wounds from the knife she always used to pare the crust around her pies. And Daddy, he wasn’t far away nor in any better condition. Slumped down in front of his chair by the hearth, blood and brain shot out of his head and his shooting hand still wrapped around the old family horse pistol …”
For a while, I could not hear what Liam was saying. Maybe this was only for a few seconds, but it seemed at the time so very long. My mind was buzzing and full of moving pictures, racing in front of my eyes at crazy speeds. No sooner was I imagining my father as a young man trying to make his way as a writer, of all things, I was imagining the grandmother and grandfather I never knew—the two of these ferocious squabblers, and the scandal of a murder-suicide.
I am off in a corner by myself wondering about a guy who once so loved a woman twenty-five years ago that he married her, then one awful day hated her so bad he diced her all over the kitchen linoleum. The way I see it, this big murder story is no story at all. The real story is what happened during those twenty-five years … Here now would be The Truth. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the messy and complicated truth so help me God.
Then came my uncle back into view, and the pictures slowed. Him with his whiskey and tea, tapping a finger on the envelope in front of him. And moving on through the dreadful family saga, raising a hundred questions for later with every word he said now.
“Well, so before we beat it back to Dublin, Aidan and me stayed in the old house together, long enough to sell the animals and other such tasks of closing down two hardscrabble lives. It was very much on our minds how we were ending the line of Hockadays in Carlow, a long line surely now ending with less than great pride. The funeral, if you could rightly call it that, was short and bitter.
“No church in all Carlow would take Daddy into its cemetery since he was a murderer and, even worse, a suicide. Aidan and me, we decided against separating our two parents, knowing as we did how cruelly Mum must have rode Daddy before he could take no more. No priest agreed to so much as sprinkling a bit of holy water over the coffins, not even when nobody was looking on …
“… And this includes the randy priest who Mum was carrying on with for all the years she was providing us the fine things, beginning with the wonderful wireless. Thus, our trusty postman informs us.
“The priest’s name was Cor. The postman dishes this up like a regular magpie, right during the little service we had at Daddy’s sheepeen before we had Mum and him cremated.
“The postman says, ‘Myles, he knew all about Cor and his Finola. Never complained, though, mainly on account of how he was kept well provided with whiskey in appreciation of his tolerance. We all come to know it here in this sheepeen. I remember your daddy come to mocking himself as a cuckold, too. He’d say, “My sporting days is over, my little light is out, what used to be my sex appeal is now my water spout.”’
“I ask you, Neil, wasn’t that a fine thing to be discovering in our bereavement…?
“Well, that night, at home after the burning, when it was just Aidan and me alone together, we talked of Mum and Daddy until the dawn, about the war that was their marriage. We come to grips with the matter of Cor. We drank a mighty lot that night, and cried, too, wondering if Myles was our own true daddy indeed.
“And that started me telling Aidan of the old man’s drinking and carrying on that night of his birth … how he warned me of the Brits in no uncertain terms.
“Then soon it was me sounding like our wounded, besotted old dad. I myself was moved to telling Aidan what I’d not admitted to any other man—the true reason I’d left London as I did.
“Only I gentled it down a good deal. I said to my brother, ‘At the bank, I worked at the teller’s desk beside this great oaf bigot, an Englishman. Clever as a box of rocks, this one. He’d greet me every morning with the same: ‘Up the long ladder and down the long rope, God bless King Billy and go fuck the pope. Ain’t that right, Paddy?’
&
nbsp; “Aidan’s face grows dark and queer like Daddy’s as he’s listening to me. I go on, telling him, ‘You can’t imagine how this grates you, brother dear. After a while, you can bear it no more. You either got to leave, or take one of them out. Me, I left for Dublin.’
“Then we had a final jar to the troubling memory of Mum and Dad. Aidan poured drops from the bottle out onto the floor in respect for the two who gave us life. Then we climb into the beds up in the little room we shared, back all those years ago listening to the wireless as boys waiting for the chance to flee.
“And in the dark, before we drift off, Aidan asks me, ‘Liam, do you hate them for how they slurred you?’
“‘Hate the English, you mean?’ I said. That’s what he meant. And so I said, ‘Well … yes, I confess it, I do.’
“Aidan’s quiet then, but all the same I hear him thinking. Finally, he says, ‘I do, too. God help me, I hate them all.’
“I think, We never betrayed Daddy after all. And maybe Aidan now hears my thoughts this time. He says, ‘Too bad Daddy didn’t live long enough to see there’s a way now of dealing with the bloody English, for once and for all—’”
Snoody cut him off.
“Hadn’t we best carry on with this later?” he said, glowering at me, then Ruby. Then, to Liam, “Really, I must insist.”
“Oh you must, must you?” Liam said, twitting him.
The two of them stared at each other for a while like a pair of tomcats about to have a spitting match. Liam sighed loudly, then looked away.
“Well, as mother hen wishes—another time,” Liam said to Ruby and me. Snoody quickly got up from the table and stood behind Liam’s wheelchair, ready to push.
“Before we call it a night, I want to give you this,” Liam said, handing the envelope to me. “Your father took to writing me letters when he finally left Dublin for New York. I haven’t got many left, but I found this one and thought you should have it. Like I say, I never did take to the literary side of life. But I do know from his letters, Aidan was a lovely, lovely writer.”
“I don’t know about you,” Ruby said, “but I feel like we’ve been through one of those … oh, what was it your uncle called a nasty storm?”
“Bleezer,” I said.
“That’s it. An awful bleezer, with a wind so stiff it blows sleet sideways.”
We were back down on the third floor in the red room, settled for the night and dressed in two sets of men’s pyjamas and robes that Moira had brought up for us with the fresh towels. Ruby was bustling around the room, unpacking all our things, tucking them away in the wardrobe and the dresser. I sat on the edge of the bed with the envelope in my hands, still unopened.
“Bleezer …” Ruby said again, thoughtfully. Then she stopped in front of me, pointed to the envelope, and said, “Well, are you ever going to read it?”
“Right now, I don’t really know that I’m up to it,” I said. “So far today, let’s see … I’ve learned my grandmother was some priest’s squeeze, my drunken grandfather got even with her—permanently, then popped himself out … Maybe that’s enough family history for one day.”
“You’ve heard worse in your time, Detective Hockaday.”
“About other people’s families, sure.”
“You jump in the ocean, you get wet. So what do you expect? Be a person, go ahead—read it.” Ruby lunged at me, grabbing for the envelope. “You want me to read it for you—?”
I pulled back. Ruby fell on top of me, laughing. And I was grateful for the moment’s diversion from my dark rain cloud of thoughts; so grateful for the feel of Ruby, for the sight of her breasts, brown as caramel beneath the white swaddle of terrycloth robe and the loose pyjamas.
“No!” I said. “I’ll read it … I will.”
“What’s stopping you? Liam said it’s lovely writing.”
“Do you trust Liam?” I surprised myself with this question as much as I surprised Ruby.
“That’s one hell of a question,” she said.
“He’s one hell of a talker. Answer me.”
“Your uncle’s a banker, so we know he’d steal. But lie…?” Ruby bolted upright in bed, and said, “Sure!”
She was very excited now, as if some of her own clouds had suddenly cleared. She straightened her robe. “You call your uncle a big talker, Hock?” she said. “No, he’s a bleezer … with wind enough to blow the words sideways. Follow me?”
“Well—no.”
“Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me how any half-competent detective ought to approach a case sideways?”
“What are you—?”
“Step on it, Sherlock. Your uncle drops a big storm tonight. What for? To make you feel sorry about the pitiful Hockaday clan? No. He talked up a storm for cover. Follow me now?”
Ruby gave me a second to catch up. When I did, I said, “He’s trying to talk past Snoody, you mean?”
“Yes—of course. We know there’s something very strained be tween them, and we know there’s something strange going on here. We know there’s some secret in this house. Your uncle’s trying to get this across to you, Hock. Indirectly, so Snoody won’t realize it … So what do you think?”
I thought of Liam’s words to me, earlier: When you solve it, you’ll start seeing answers to questions that have burnt you hollow.
I said, “This afternoon, while you were still asleep and Snoody was off on an errand somewhere, Liam sent Moira up here after me. In the time we had alone together, Liam told me a riddle.”
“Tell it to me.”
“A man without eyes saw plums on a tree. He neither took plums nor left plums. How could this be?”
“Now, let’s hear that letter.” Ruby reached for the envelope.
This time I let her take it. She opened it, and read aloud my father’s words, written in a firm hand, in blue ink:
Dear brother Liam,
In your last, you seemed incredulous as to why I persist in being here—here in this city of right angles and tough, damaged people. Though I hardly needed reminding of it, you nonetheless pointed out that my writing income seldom pays for the groceries, and that I have responsibilities to Mairead and the baby she’s now carrying.
I’ve thought long and hard about what sort of answer might satisfy you. What I have concluded is that my answer may only truly satisfy myself, and that you can expect no more. So, here it is:
New York is a fabulous lady who gives incredible parties. You’re never invited, but you know they’re there, and you know that once you get inside, it’s going to be great. Every time you’re packing finally to leave the city, this lady calls you up and says, “Hi, I’m having a party, as you well know.” And so you start unpacking your bag. Then she says, “I’m not inviting you to the party this year, but I’m keeping you in mind.”
Love, Aidan.
Ruby gave the letter back to me. I looked at the blue ink, and thought of the lines of verse penned on the back of Aidan Hockaday’s photograph. But the handwriting in these two things of my father’s, the letter and the photo, did not seem to match. I folded the letter and put it back inside the envelope.
Ruby said, “Uncle Liam was right, it’s lovely writing. And lovely sentiments about New York. I miss the city something terrible right now.”
“So do I.”
“Your father should have written books in New York.”
“There was the war instead.”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
“No. What we’re trying to find is the war within the war.”
“Which is to say, the politics. And another riddle.”
“It’s making my head hurt. Let’s go to sleep.”
We turned off lights, took off our robes and slipped under the covers together. Ruby shaped herself against me, and whispered, “I want to dream of New York. How about you, Hock?”
“I’ll be dreaming like a detective.”
“Meaning?”
“A good detective believes in the kind of moment when he
can see what people are doing, even when he’s not there.”
Chapter 20
Lieutenant Ellis reached out the narrow window and gripped the cement ledge, careful to keep his hands off any fresh additions to the crust of pigeon dung. He bent at the waist and squeezed his hammy shoulders through the narrow frame, pushing forward into the gray light of a tenement air shaft.
Gritty dust breezed up and down the shaft, along with swarms of flies and yellow jackets. In spite of it, tenants short on money for the corner laundromat strung their hand-washed clothes out on lines. The dust swirled in little wind tunnels every time someone opened a window to haul in clothes, or to dump something that could not wait for a trip down to the garbage cans on the street.
“Smells like a freaking Mexican sewer,” Ellis said, wiping his nostrils with a coat sleeve.
He leaned over and looked at the ground, down ten storeys of sooty brick walls and windows caked in grime. There was a gang of cops below, milling around a ten-foot square of broken glass, weeds, syringes, putrefying rubbish and a small nation of rats. The cops wore hip boots, gloves up to their elbows and gauze masks strapped across their mouths and noses. A dead man lay flat on his broken back in the middle of the fetid compost, wearing nothing.
Every few seconds, the air shaft blazed with the strobe lights from two cameras. Down on the ground, a police photographer slogged around the body, snapping the deceased’s final portrait. Up on the roof there was a second photographer working the aerial angles. From ten floors up, and in the strong flashes of concentrated light, Ellis could see enough of the dead man’s face to know for sure he was no leaper. Which he had already more than half figured anyway.
The lieutenant ducked his bald head back through the window into the apartment and stood up straight, stretching himself. He placed his hands back around his puffy middle and pushed hard, causing his vertebrae to make loud popping sounds. “Christ—finally!” he said, wincing.
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