SHE HAS MY NAME....A short story published in Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction Volume 1

SHE HAS MY NAME by Timeri N Murari She waited exactly where she had told him she would. Round the corner from the metro station, down the quiet, residential street with free parking. She was prepared to wait all day. She had her phone, a book, a thermos of coffee and samosas. He would come. Would she recognise him? He would have to change his appearance as his bearded features were recognisible in the newspapers and on television. But he could not be able to disguise those heavy-lidded, piercing eyes. It had been many years since she had seen him in the flesh. He came into the country for the body of his daughter. He knew it was a trap but believed she should lie in the land of his birth, and not in the enemy's. She had been killed, so young and beautiful, to pay for his sins against the State. The State had shaped him on the murder of his father, a man of wisdom and steadfastness of purpose against the injustices of the State, when he was around the same age as his daughter. It had murdered his daughter to draw him out, knowing that he would not rest until he had recovered her body to lie beside the graves of his father, mother and grandparents. His brothers too lay in the same graveyard. The men who helped him enter the country on his new passport, with a false name, and in the photograph clean-shaven and so youthful, did not ask for money. They wanted only a favour, to kill a man for them, and then they would take him and his daughter’s body safely back to his homeland. They were from his country, exiles who claimed to support the cause, and were overly deferential to him. You are our hero, they said in unison, and bowed in unison, expecting him to be swayed by such flattery. They gave him the photograph of the man he would kill, a gun, and left him outside the building, telling him they would wait for him in the car. When he returned to the street, the car had gone. This betrayal didn't surprise him. He expected that, always. He didn’t drop the weapon but tucked into his waistband, and walked unhurriedly up the street towards the metro station. It was winter in the city and he wore a light, leather jacket, pressed jeans and an open neck shirt. He didn’t look out of place but a good citizen. It was mid-afternoon, and the street deserted. The town and the streets were familiar. The homes were behind high walls, the gates protected by sleepy guards in crumpled uniforms. He passed a parked car in which a man and a woman were arguing fiercely with the windows closed. He didn’t pause when the man slapped her hard, and only hesitated when he heard the shot, a muffled crack. He glanced back as the woman climbed out of the car. Inside, the man slumped against the window. Will you help me? she asked. He said nothing but returned to the car and helped her heave the body onto the back seat. He guessed it a shot to the heart, no sign of blood, quick and clean. He took the gun, a .38 automatic, levered a round into the chamber and returned it to her. She dropped it in her handbag. Ride with me, she said and he climbed in. The imprint of the man’s palm was fading from her cheek as she drove. You don’t say much, she said as she steered quickly through traffic, but then you never did. He nodded and, knowing he was safe, fell asleep. When he woke, it was dusk and they were deep in the country. I’m taking you home. Is that okay? He merely closed his eyes in agreement. How have you been? she asked. She turned into the drive, a long one, to a house set well back. It showed no lights, and she was not bothered he hadn’t answered. We’ll bury him in the rose garden, she said, he loved roses and he’d like that. She pointed to the side of the house. There are gardening tools there. Obediently, he went and found them and they took turns digging up the rose bed, the soil was soft and loamy. She took the dead man’s feet, he took the shoulders. They dropped him in the grave and shovelled the earth back. When they finished, he meticulously patted the earth flat and then helped her re-plant the roses. He couldn’t tell the colour in the darkness but their smell reminded him of his homeland where roses blossomed to the size of a fist, and caressed the air with their perfume. Why did you marry him? he asked when they were sitting in her catalogue kitchen, gleaming with gadgetry, all wasteful in his eyes. His taste in food was austere and simple - leavened bread, spiced vegetable, pungent onions - enough to sustain him in the mountains. He noted, but said nothing, that she had used a key to open the front door while the kitchen one was unlocked. She poured herself chilled Chablis but didn’t offer him, as she knew he didn’t touch alcohol. I fell in love, I suppose, why else does one marry? She had a worn beauty, like a well-rubbed coin, still revealing the profile of a queen or a princess. He was gentle in the beginning, she continued, then he became the beast, as all men do with the passing of time. He knew you were coming and he knew I’d be waiting for you. I never stopped waiting for you, and he knew that too. He knew my password, it’s her name. When I typed it in I thought of her and now when I do I am reminded of her. You took your time. I have time, he said. So do they. How did they kill our daughter? He waited until she refilled her glass, the wine sending a faint blush through her cheeks. They found her found hanging from the clothes hook on the back of the door in her room, she said in a whisper. They said it was a suicide, young people do that in their depressions, they said, and then they said it was a drugs trip. My heart broke into small pieces when I saw my dead daughter and it will remain in lost pieces until the day I die. I didn’t know until then how frail is the heart, it broke like dropped china. He waited, letting her weep, without consoling her. Always patient. He knew what she would say before she said it. You’re to blame because of who you are, she screamed at him, they killed her knowing it was only way to hurt you but they don’t know you as well as I do that you can’t be hurt by your daughter’s death. You feel nothing, nothing, you never did. He waited until she stopped crying, pouring himself a glass of water from the tap, savouring its cool sweetness, envying her only for that convenience. He had forgotten the ease of such a life, a tap, clean water, the very simplicity unavailable in his land. He drank slowly, remembering the times he had thirsted for water. Remembering too, despite his reluctance to recall the past, that she was wrong in her screamed accusation. He had felt, he had experienced, love. She had forgotten that in her anguished rage. There was that long winter of tenderness in their lives, the winter in which she conceived the daughter who was now dead. He had felt love for her though he had not articulated his emotions. And that was his fault, love needed to be spoken out aloud, and not confined to the heart. He had not spoken it so long ago, when they were young, because he knew he would not remain in her country long. She would not survive in his; the harshness would have killed her. When they assassinated his father, he had left her, without saying goodbye, never expecting to return. Knowing he had left a part of him in her body. He had under estimated her determination to make him remember, and had sent him photographs of the daughter, wrote about her too, and sent those messages to an email address that was not in his name or even remotely connected to him, except through layers of intermediaries. From that distance, he had watched his child grow into a beautiful young woman who also wrote to him. She wanted to know her father, meet and embrace him, though she knew too, from reading the newspapers, that he was considered a dangerous man, incapable of human warmth. His replies to her long, longing letters, were curt, dismissive of her suggestions, not knowing that rejection to a woman’s heart only increased her loving. The daughter knew, despite his curtness, that she had touched him and he had read her letters, otherwise he would never have even replied. By doing so, he realised now, that even his curt replies had endangered his daughter’s life. He had revealed, to those who watched for such signs, his vulnerability. If only he had stayed silent. He rose and washed the glass, letting the water run, listening to its music, and then wiped the glass clean before placing it in the rack. She remembered that he had always been meticulous in his movements, keeping them minimalistic, never wasting energy. He had the slight stoop of a man who crouched close to the earth in his movements, which brought him down to her height, almost. He’d lost some weight but wasn’t skinny, just lean and muscled and tried to imagine what kind of a haunted life he led. When he washed his hands under the running tap, she thought he was trying to wash the blood off his hands as he used the soap to scrub them, like a surgeon before an operation. Of course, his hands could never be cleansed. When she had known him long ago, he had not killed anyone, and was just an innocent boy she fell in love with. A solemn young man, yet with a wry sense of humour, and honeyed skin she loved to caress. That skin looked coarser, tiny scars criss-crossing the backs of those cleansed hands, and his eyes no longer held any humour. She could not see any laugh lines. Breaking the silence to distract him from hearing their approach, she said, my daughter insisted on using your name, you know, insisted, even though she had never set eyes on you and knew you only through my bitterness. I wanted her to use my husband’s name. He had adopted her, but when she reached eighteen, she dropped his name and changed it to yours. You had no right to her life, and she lived only another 18 months with your name. He nodded, yes she told me and I advised her, strongly, not to. It would mark her out for life. She was reckless? She heard beyond the question he asked, for the first time showing some curiosity for his daughter. She was brave, she replied, and she was beautiful and clever; she danced and sang and laughed with abandon. She was so alive, unlike other girls her age who walk and talk as if they’re dead, and she had a halo of friends who surrounded her wherever she went. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, commit suicide, not hang herself from a hook on the back of her bedroom door. The coroner said she had, no matter how much I insisted that the authorities murdered her because of her father. The coroner was one of those kindly looking men with metal hearts. He said I was mad with grief, as she was my only child, and I was fantasying such conspiracies. The authorities are kindly people too, he had said, they lived by the law and would not, could not, murder an innocent child for sake of punishing her father. The State would not do that, as it upheld high moral codes, respected human rights and practised democracy. It was men like her father who murdered the innocent, that’s what he told me in front of everyone. I begged him to order an autopsy but he said it was unnecessary. She had committed suicide. The Investigator, and here she used two fingers of both hands to place that word in quotation marks, sat in the front row, and he too looked at me with kindness and sympathy, as if understanding my unremitting pain. The Investigator was the one who broke the news of my daughter’s death to me. He came to the house early Sunday morning with his mourning face to tell me that there had been an accident, that my daughter had hung herself from the hook on the back of her bedroom door. I didn’t believe him, she had called me the evening before, she called every evening, and told me she was going to a party with her friends as she had finished her assignments. She had that discipline too; she wouldn’t party until her work was completed. He listened without any movement, wishing he had met his daughter. She had wanted to meet him when she changed her name but he had coldly discouraged her. A curt: No. You married when you went home, didn’t you? Did you fall in love? And when he shook his head, just once, she continued: How many children? Three, two boys and a girl. He paused, not wanting to continue but he did in spite of his reticence. A missile hit our home, when I was very distant from them. It was the rumour I was there that killed them. In the silence, she wondered whether he had mourned that loss, and poured herself the third glass of wine, giving herself the false courage to continue with the evening. You’ve come to revenge my daughter’s death, haven’t you? No, he said, revenge against the State is futile. As she has my name, she must lie in the graveyard in my home. Where is she now? She had to laugh aloud at his audacity, though she knew the dangers of her contempt. I buried her in the land of her birth, in the town’s graveyard. She was my altar when she was alive, now her grave’s my daily pilgrimage. She will remain here. Who would she know in the graveyard of your ancestors? She didn’t even know your language and I will not allow her to lie among such strangers. Please, I beg you, allow me that, she said, though he heard no pleading note in her voice. It was more mocking. He felt no remorse when he knew that, because of her defiance, he would have to kill this woman he had loved. His daughter had to lie in the family graveyard, even as one day he will lie beside her there. Despite their years apart, she still knew how he thought and waited for them to come for him. They were near, just beyond the door. They both waited as he had been listening to the silence and knew it had been disturbed and, seeing her look, knew they were here. You told them? he said. Yes, I told the Investigator you would come for her. You knew that? Yes Yet, you came. For you and for her. She has my name. What did they promise you for me? I wanted you take your revenge but you won’t will you? No, I told you that. He still had the gun in his waistband; it felt so heavy, dragging him down. She saw, for the first time, that he was tired, not so much physically but spiritually. The Investigator came through the back door, not quickly, cautiously, and two armed men, who remained in the shadows, followed him. Their guns aimed at him. The Investigator stood facing them both with all the authority of his State. A square man, with a square face, receding dark hair and unforgiving eyes. Give me your weapon, he said quietly to the man, and accepted the gun slid across the polished table. He picked it up, hefted it, a 9mm automatic, then freed the clip. It was full and there was one round in the chamber. He sniffed the barrel. It hadn't been fired recently. He placed it far out of reach from the man and sat down. He had a gentle voice, it calmed the spirit of the listener. I’ve waited many years for us to meet. Patience pays off. You killed my daughter? The State ordered me. You are too famous and protected in your land. Unreachable. It was unfortunate but how else could I get you, so well hidden away in your land. Like a serpent in its hole, I had to tempt you out, somehow. I know your culture and your traditions; you couldn’t allow her to remain here. It was my persistence. I did not know you had a daughter here until she changed her name and it came up on our computers. I traced you back to the days when you were here, and read your communications with her. Even though your responses were brief, I knew she had touched you. Otherwise, you would never have exposed yourself. He sat very still facing the Investigator, and she knew the men would kill him as soon as they could. He knew that too. They would call it an “encounter”. He glanced at her, and she caught the tiny glint of admiration in his eyes. The Investigator turned to the woman and said, Thank you for helping me, and keeping me informed on his movements. Otherwise I could never have brought justice to this terrorist. Of course, he will be tried in a court of law. We believe in our democracy and just rule of our laws. And found guilty? That is up to the judge. And justice for my daughter? There is a reward of course, he smiled. There are only three of you? She asked. He’s a dangerous man, as you yourself said. Three are more than enough. When he turned to one of his men, she opened her purse that lay on the table. She took out the gun with which she had killed her husband, and killed the Investigator first, and then his two companions. I believe in revenge she said in the silence that followed the explosions. I wanted him here alone; I wanted to hear him boast about my daughter’s murder. I knew he would come himself so he could boast about catching you. You had to do it, not me, to free you of the hate for the man who killed our daughter. I can never be free of that. You will look after our daughter? Yes, I will. He reached over and took the gun. Carefully, he wiped it clean of her fingerprints and then gripped the weapon in his hand, pressing down firmly on both the butt and the barrel, then placed it back on the table between them. He smiled, reminding her of that youth, and she felt it gentle as a goodbye kiss. He rose, picked up his own weapon, tucked it into his waistband and walked through the door. She thought of offering him a lift but knew he would find the way back to his own land. ©Timeri N. Murari.