A World I Never Made (2 page)

“Yes,” she replied. “The Moroccan official who vouched for her diplomatic status is out of the country. Did she ever mention any Moroccan friends or acquaintances?”

“No, never:”

“When did you speak to her last?”

“On Christmas Day.”

“Where was she?”

“She said she was in Paris:”

“Where in Paris?”

“She didn’t say.”

“And she didn’t tell you she was ill?”

“No.”

“Do you find that unusual?”

Through the window behind LeGrand, Pat could see the crows beginning to stir. One of them had taken flight and then circled back and attacked another one on one of the top branches. They left the tree and continued their fight, if that”s what it was, in the air, while the rest raised their wings and lifted their beaks, no doubt to express their contempt—or glee—at the spectacle above them.

“No,” Pat answered.“I don’t.”

“Were you estranged from your daughter, Monsieur Nolan?”

“Yes and no:” Pat had been avoiding asking himself this question for twelve years. His answer surprised him in that it wasn”t a definite yes.

“I see. Well ... She arrived in Spain from Morocco on May 16. She checked into her hotel in Paris on December 24. She must have traveled by rail or bus because her name does not appear on any airline manifests from Spain or anywhere else. We do not know where she was from May 17 to December 24.”

“What about her credit cards?”

“The last charge was at a hotel in Casablanca on May 15. There is no record after that:”

“So she might have been in Spain?”

“The EU’s borders are open now, Monsieur Nolan. She might have gone anywhere in those seven months:”

“Have you checked the hospitals, clinics?”

“Yes. There is no record we can find of her receiving treatment for her cancer. She killed herself on December 30. Her concierge says she had one visitor, a woman who arrived on the thirtieth and stayed for a half hour. Do you know who that might be?”

“No,” he answered.

“She came to Paris often. Who were her friends here? Her associates?”

“I don’t know. I thought you were certain it was suicide:”

LeGrand looked down at her paperwork before answering and Pat took the opportunity to study her.
Were you estranged from your daugbter, Monsieur Nolan? The EU’s borders are open now, Monsieur Nolan.
Her voice not quite neutral, not quite professional. To the pain of Megan’s death was now added the pain—the dishonor—of having to expose their failed relationship to the contemptuous eye of Inspector Geneviève LeGrand.
French
Inspector Geneviève LeGrand. He would not, at least, give her the pleasure of showing in the slightest how he felt.

“I am,” the inspector said finally.“But it is a curious suicide. Your daughter did not live an ordinary life, Monsieur Nolan. Her passport has dozens of entries in Europe and North Africa over the past ten years. She never returned to America. Was she ever married?”

“No.”

“Are there other next of kin? Her mother? Siblings?”

“No. Her mother died giving birth to her. I’ve had no other children. Are we done? I like to bury my daughter.”

“Bury? Her note talks of cremation:”

Megan, who held strong opinions on many subjects, had never mentioned any squeamishness about being buried. But there it was, in her neat cursive hand, and he would abide by it.

“That’s what I meant:”

“The body is at the morgue at the Hospital of All Souls, not far from here on the river. I have arranged for one of my officers to take you there to officially identify it:”

“Can I have the note?” Pat asked.

“I will give you a photocopy. The original must stay in the official file:”

“I would like to visit her room:”

“Mademoiselle Laurence will take you there:”

“Mademoiselle ... ?”

“She is the officer who will accompany you to the morgue. She must be present at the identification:”

“I see. Are there any male police officers in Paris?”

“They are busy hunting hegemonic imperialists:”

Pat Nolan was careless about his looks. Some would say he could afford to be. A lifetime spent outdoors had kept his six-foot-three, two-hundred-twenty-pound body trim and supple, and burnished his naturally high color to a reddish gold, a perfect setting for his clear, forthright, and often piercing eyes. The lines around these eyes and on his brow when it knitted in thought added a depth and interest lacking in the faces of men who are young or who haven’t lived much. His thick black hair, swept away from his forehead and carelessly long, framed a face that was handsome in a wry, laconic way. His feelings, more often than not, went unexpressed. Much more often than not. But Inspector LeGrand had turned human for a second and so, despite his predilection to dislike her—to caricaturize her—he smiled. He could see her features soften for a brief moment when he did.

“Yours is not an easy job;” he said, rising and extending his hand to Inspector LeGrand, who also rose. For a second, they made eye contact.
You have been touched—physically and sentimentally—by the prototypical American bête noire, Pat thought. Have no fear, you will survive.

“Where are you staying, Monsieur Nolan?”

“Le Tourville. Do you know it?”

“Yes. Officer Laurence will collect you there. Say at noon? She will have your daughter’s effects and a copy of the note:”

“Thank you:”

“De rien
... Monsieur Nolan.”

“Yes?”

“I am quite sorry for your loss:”

Inspector LeGrand’s words echoed in Pat Nolan’s head as he stepped outside of the police building and turned right toward the river.
Your loss.
For almost thirty years, Lorrie, his twenty-year-old bride, had been his loss. In the summer of 1974, he had married Lorraine Ryan—impossibly young and beautiful—impregnated her, and dragged her to Paraguay where he had been offered a job operating an earth mover at the site of what was to become one of the official Seven Wonders of the Modern World, the Itaipu Dam. Six months later, Lorrie was dead of eclampsia and Megan—the name Lorrie had chosen for a girl baby—was lying in an incubator across the border in Montevideo, Uruguay. Two months premature, sticklike, she clung tenaciously to life, oblivious to Pat’s weekend visits and haggard look.
If she lives and if it is your wish, we will help you place her for adoption,
one of the sisters at the hospital had told him, her face grim, as if she had read his angry, tortured thoughts. In the end, he had not given Megan away. But he had come close. He and a crew of five hundred had merely been in the midst of shifting the course of the Paraná River—the seventh largest in the world—around the eventual construction site. A one-point-three-mile long, three-hundred-foot-deep, five-hundred-foot-wide diversion. He would never get work like that again, not with a child to care for. That was his second loss. Or was it his first? The intervening years had blended the loss of Lorrie and of his big dreams into one, and then blurred them and worn them down until they were no longer separate and no longer hurt. They were long years, in which his sticklike girl baby had grown up and run away. Loss on top of loss.

Megan, who had left Bennington at the beginning of her freshman year and gone directly to Europe, claiming that America was so bourgeois she could not take another minute of it, had since then made her living writing and, not to put too fine a point on it, seducing men. The writing, mostly for women’s magazines like
Cosmopolitan
and
Glamour,
she could do from anywhere, which facilitated her lifelong urge to move from place to place, which in turn afforded ample venues for meeting men willing—gladly willing—to pay for having her on their arms and in their beds. Pat had met one or two of these victims early on and quickly got the picture. There would be no son-in-law or grandchildren in his future. No Sunday dinners with the family in rural Connecticut or Westchester when he got old, with a fire burning in the fireplace and football on the television. This wound also healed over in time.

Instead of getting a civil engineering degree and designing megaprojects around the world, he went into business with his older brother, Frank, building homes, strip malls, and car dealerships in the tristate area. When Frank had retired last year, Pat sold Nolan Brothers. He wanted no part of the office work that Frank had handled for thirty years. Since then he had been entertaining offers to manage projects, large and small, near and far, from companies and architects he had met in the course of a long career of completing jobs on time and at or under budget. He had brought a folder of these offers with him, and started looking for a not too pretentious café where he could sip coffee and read through it to kill time until twelve o’lock.

He found a place on a corner across from the Pont de la Concorde. It was nearly empty and its outdoor tables were set up to take advantage of the surprisingly balmy weather: fifty degrees Fahrenheit or so under a cloudless pale blue sky diffused even in the dead of winter with Paris’s famous silky light. Pat expected the waiter to sniff at him, and he did, his large Gallic nose rising higher with each step as he made his way from the front door to the table Pat had chosen in the full sun near the sidewalk. In his jeans, worn-out workboots, and thick black sweater, his Americanness was obvious.

Parisian condescension was not new to Pat. He had spent Christmas with Megan in Europe, usually Paris, for the past twelve years. In between they talked on the phone a few times and occasionally she sent him a short letter or a cryptic postcard. The Christmas just past had been the first one since she left home that they had not spent together. And neither had he heard from her since he left her in Rome the year before. She had finally called on Christmas day.

A few days later she killed herself.

Pat sat now, and instead of looking at his folder, which he carried in a canvas knapsack slung over his shoulder, he sipped his coffee and reviewed that last conversation.

“Dad, hi.”

“Hello.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine. Where are you?”

“Paris.”

Pause.

“Where have you been?”

“Traveling. No place special.”

Pause.

“How are you?” (Megan).

“I’m okay:”

Pause.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“For what?”

“That Lorrie died and not me.”

“Is that why you haven”t called?”

“I’m calling now.”

“How long will you be there?”

“I’ll probably leave tomorrow or the next day.”

“Where to?”

“I’m not sure exactly.”

“Megan ...”

“You’re angry, I know. I’ve had a hard year.”

“A hard year?”

“It’s almost over. My birthday’s coming up. You can bring me a present.”

“Megan ...”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I have to go. I love you.”

Click.

One of Megan’s former lovers, a famous novelist, had described a beautiful, twenty-five-year-old female character as having the ability “to slip in and out of your psyche in a matter of a few hot and thrilling seconds, exposing the thing you loathe most about yourself while whispering a promise of joy to your secret heart. Afterward you wanted more, oblivious to the bruise on your soul.” When the book came out, Megan sent Pat a copy of the page on which this passage appeared with a note on the margin that read, “Dad, I would sue this guy, but the writing’s so bad I be too embarrassed.” Pat knew the Megan the spurned writer was describing. The heartless Megan. Megan the cynic. This knowledge was one of the few ties that he felt bound her to him. Other fathers felt more positive things of course, but this was
something.
Something to cling to. He did not know the Megan he talked to on Christmas day, the one planning to kill herself. Such a bitter thing not to know, invalidating as it were their tenuous bond, exposing it for the sham it was.