Afterwards, we checked on Jorge but he’d already fallen back to sleep. While leaning my chin on Ana’s shoulder, I gazed out the window, admiring the twittering exuberance of our Portuguese swallows and the pink haze that was painting the old houses of Santa Marinha Square with pastel colours. Lisbon was sacred at this hour, and its crumbling, emaciated charm made me feel as if I’d stepped into a fairy tale. ‘It would be such a shame if our economic troubles destroyed all this,’ I said, and for one slightly mad moment I thought that before conditions got any worse – and more people started emigrating – I ought to invite everyone who lived on the square over for tea.
I’d confessed to Ana that I might want to have another kid while we were getting dressed, and she said now, ‘It wouldn’t be fair to bring another baby into Portugal at a time like this. Besides, the world population is way too high.’
‘Except that Ernie’s not going to have any kids. We can have three and my family average will only be one and a half.’
She kissed my cheek as her way of saying no. ‘We couldn’t afford it,’ she told me.
I held both her hands. ‘Ernie’s taking care of two other gardens now, so he’s stopped using up our savings. We’re going to be all right from now on.’
Back downstairs, I sat cross-legged on the sofa, quiet and warm, daydreaming about a new baby in my arms. Eager to pass on my good feelings, I called Ernie and told him that the kids and I would be coming over in the afternoon – maybe even for lunch, if I could finish up my work in time.
‘Really – today?’ he asked excitedly.
My brother and I had once watched a squirrel dash sixty feet to the top of a maple tree with an almond we’d handed him, ecstatic with his good fortune but also worried that one of his rivals would steal it from him. That little grey fur-ball, swaying on a slender branch, keeping one eye out for a thief, was Ernie on receiving any form of good news.
‘Yeah, though Ana can’t come. She’s got too much work at her gallery – lots of tourists in the summer.’
‘Too bad. When will you guys get here?’ Then, regretting his inquisitiveness, he said, ‘Though I don’t want to force you into any specific time.’
‘I’m hoping we can leave about noon, and in that case we’ll be there around a quarter to two. And yes, I’ll send you a message when we leave.’
Silence. My brother was considering all he’d have to do before our arrival: hide his medications from the kids, test his door locks, pick vegetables . . . Rushing him would only fluster him, so I crossed the room to the window overlooking the square. Lisa, the little dark-haired girl who lived on the first floor of our building, was walking her family’s fluffy white Persian cat on a leash.
‘Rico, do you think Jorge and Nati would eat eggplant and rice, and maybe some salad?’
‘They’ll eat anything you decide to make. You’re an excellent cook.’
‘They’ll have to be a bit flexible.’
‘Ernie, don’t you think the kids have figured out what kind of meal to expect from you?’
‘Sorry. I’m nervous. You scared me yesterday. Can we start over?’
That was what Ernie and I asked whenever the other got irritated.
‘Done,’ I agreed.
It was Aunt Olivia who’d invented the technique of beginning conversations over. She hadn’t been prepared for an out-of-control fourteen-year-old and his morbidly quiet younger brother, and every time we overwhelmed her to tears, she learned to say, Can we start over? The amazing thing is that – after a year or two – Ernie and I developed the ability to rewind our emotions whenever she asked, as if she had spoken an incantation.
Maybe we all need at least one magician in our life. Aunt Olivia had been ours. What amazing luck we’d had that she was so eager to have us live with her!
‘Oh, I need something!’ Ernie exclaimed. ‘When you turn off towards Quinta da Vidigueira, you’ll see an abandoned farm with a few pomegranate trees. Pick me some flowers. If you don’t mind, I mean.’
‘Of course I don’t mind.
‘You know, Rico, pomegranate flowers are the exact colour of summer sunsets in Colorado!’ In a whisper, he added, ‘I hope Ana isn’t angry at me for stealing you from her for a night. If she is, you don’t have to stay over.’
Ernie needed me to know he was ambivalent about us staying the night. And he was testing me, too. Part of him wanted me to disappoint him – to prove to him the uselessness of wanting to be part of our family. ‘Ana is only too happy to get rid of us once a week,’ I told him.
He laughed. ‘Okay, then look both ways before you cross the street.’
After hanging up, I took myself more coffee and went back to the breakfast table. I was thinking what a couple of loons Ernie and I were when a radio journalist from TSF called. It was still only ten minutes to eight. ‘How did you get my number?’ I asked.
‘A friend.’
‘Which friend?’
He passed over my question and told me he wanted just five minutes of my time to discuss Coutinho’s murder. Startled, I replied in a ruder voice than I intended that our Public Relations department would give him a lot more than five and disconnected.
When Ana started down our staircase, I sat on my haiku notebook. At such times, I realized that I had more secrets than any one person should probably have.
While my wife was wolfing down her bran flakes and blueberries, Mesquita, the deputy head of the Judicial Police, phoned. ‘Good morning, Chief Inspector,’ he began. ‘Have you seen the newspapers yet?’ His tone was falsely cheerful.
‘No, sir, sorry. I’m afraid I just woke up.’
Ana made an ugly face on hearing that I was on the phone with a superior.
‘Tell me, have you ever been strung up by your balls?’ Mesquita asked.
‘No, but I’m guessing it might ruin my day.’
‘I was warned you might try to be amusing.’
‘It’s a personality flaw, sir. Besides, my wife is here with me, and I like to keep her entertained.’ I waved at her, and she waved back.
Ana mouthed: Who is it?
Mesquita.
She picked up her cereal and rushed into the living room. She hated overhearing my work calls because she thought I gave in to even the most outrageous demands of my bosses.
‘Buy the Correio da Manhã,’ Mesquita told me, ‘then call me back.’
Two reporters were waiting for me just outside the door to our building, one from Visão, the other from Antenna 2. They pestered me all the way up to Graça Square. It appeared that my fifteen minutes of fame had finally come, but I made the stunning discovery that I no longer wanted them.
I bought the Correio da Manhã and went for coffee at the Concha, my usual café. The article on Coutinho was on page two and it noted that he had been shot with one bullet, gagged and left to die in his living room.
I was betting that Vaz had leaked this information. I called Mesquita to tell him I’d do some checking around, then get back to him.
As if that reply wasn’t good enough for him, he said, ‘I’m getting pressured to pick someone else to investigate the case.’
Stumbling backwards in my head, I stammered, ‘I . . . I don’t think that makes much sense, sir. We collected a great deal of evidence yesterday, and we’re still—’
‘No, you don’t get it, Monroe,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m being pressured to find someone more easily . . . let’s say, influenced. Not that they come out and say that. They just say that you’re too much of a loner and, and that you hear voices, and that . . .’
‘I really don’t think—’
‘Shut up and let me talk! Look, I want you to do whatever you need to do to solve the case quickly. Anything! Do you understand?’
Was he suggesting that I venture into illegal territory only a day after telling me to do everything by the book? I’d have asked him exactly what he meant, but he disconnected on me. For maybe the thousandth time since I’d become a cop, I wished I could have
spoken to my colleagues in English, since I was far better at hearing what wasn’t being said in that language.
At home, I found Jorge kneeling on the floor in the living room in his pyjamas, just two feet from the television, his face flickering bluish-white. Ana was at her desk, concentrating on her email. While I made my son strawberry waffles, his favourite meal, I figured out how to lay a trap for the person who’d leaked information to the press. I called Vaz first.
‘It’s Saturday, Monroe,’ he said grumpily, as if I didn’t know.
I explained that Coutinho’s laptop contained details of the bribes he’d recently paid to a businessman from Madrid connected to the Spanish Interior Ministry. The payment was made to win a contract for a shopping mall near Salamanca. I’d just been warned that members of the Spanish government might try to alter the course of our investigation.
‘And what in God’s name does that have to do with me?’ he questioned.
Our kitchen is open to the living room, and I was watching my son, who was walking around on all fours, imitating a cartoon lion, and he was so much more compelling than Vaz that I thought: I’ve lost way too much time with this asshole over the years.
‘You’re an unpleasant person,’ I stated for the record.
‘Why don’t you just go back to America where you belong?’ he shot back.
‘So you’ve finally said it,’ I told him.
‘You think we’re all a bunch of incompetent hicks in Portugal. You think the only sophisticated place in the world is where you come from!’
‘You can’t really be saying I think that rural Colorado was a sophisticated place to grow up!’ I erupted into laughter without waiting for his reply.
By then, the waffle was done, so I slid it onto a plate. Jorge and Ana were looking at me with questioning faces because I was still laughing.
‘What the hell is so funny?’ Vaz demanded.
I took a few calming breaths. ‘Despite what you’ve heard at Central Committee meetings, I wasn’t responsible for the coup in Chile or electing George W. Bush one and a half times.’
‘What are you talking about?’
When I put the breakfast plate down on the floor in front of my son, he brushed his head against my leg – a grateful lion cub. I said to Vaz, ‘I didn’t drop any bombs on Allende’s presidential palace. I can’t even fly a plane. Your inside information about me is all wrong. Though I will admit that I don’t care much for his niece’s writing.’
‘His niece?’
‘Isabel Allende. The House of the Spirits? My brother thought it was wonderful, but magic realism acts on me like a sleeping pill.’
I expected a huffing protest, or maybe a small, hesitant laugh, but Vaz disconnected without another word. If only he could have despised me for who I was instead of who I wasn’t.
Jorge was nosing his strawberries around his plate with his make-believe snout and biting at them. When I waved at him, he growled ferociously, which was comforting under the circumstances. I called Fonseca next and identified the crooked businessman in my invented story as French. I made the construction project an office building in Toulouse. On each subsequent call, I gave the bribe-taker a different nationality and put the construction site in a different country.
Upstairs, while I was dressing, Nati came to me, sipping on a mug of peppermint tea. I was feeling optimistic about my plan to catch the snitch on my team and gave him a quick kiss on his cheek. Since I’d caught him by surprise, he didn’t moan or lean away from me – a small triumph.
‘Can you make a file invisible?’ I asked him while slipping into my jeans.
‘Clarification, Chief Inspector.’
‘I was looking at a flash drive. I need to know if it’s easy to create a file that nobody can see unless they put in some sort of password or know exactly where to look for it?’
‘It must be, but you better ask your computer expert.’ Nati yawned. ‘Listen, Dad, what time are we going to visit Tio Ernesto?’
Of late, Nati found it amusing to call Ernie by his Portuguese name, probably because my brother dressed like an American country music singer and seemed much more like an Ernie.
‘Noonish,’ I answered. ‘And bring a change of clothing.’
‘I don’t suppose I could get out of sleeping over.’
‘No, your tio is counting on it.’ I eyed him closely. ‘Believe it or not, he thinks you’re still such a sweet little guy that you’d never even take a sip of beer without asking your dear old dad first.’
Nati made the cute-as-can-be grimace we called his turtle face. I wasn’t falling for it. ‘Remind me to talk to you about drinking on the way over to your uncle’s,’ I told him.
‘You can skip the lecture,’ he said, frowning. ‘I just had one sip.’
‘Is that why you smelled like a strip joint in Durango?’
‘What’s a strip joint?’
‘A club where women are paid to take off their clothes and dance for the customers.’
‘Sounds delightful,’ he said, making a gagging sound.
‘Nati, there are a lot of bored people in the world.’
‘So did you used to go to a strip joint in Durango?’
‘Amazingly enough, I had a life before you were born.’
‘Yeah, only you never tell me about it,’ he said resentfully. He gazed off. He looked too adult in profile for my liking. ‘Do you ever regret having me?’ he asked.
I felt as if I’d been thrown from a speeding car. ‘Where’d that come from?’ I asked.
‘You never tell us about Colorado. And . . . and I said something mean yesterday.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said I might press delete on you.’
‘That wasn’t mean! That’s what kids all do sooner or later. Besides,’ I winked, ‘it won’t work. I’m un-deletable.’ I took his hands and swung them between us like a bridge. It was a game we’d often played when he was little. ‘Listen up, Nati, I never regret having you. That would be impossible. I don’t talk about Colorado because nothing of interest ever happened there.’
‘But what were your parents like?’
‘Like everybody else’s.’
‘Like everybody else’s how?’
I looked through the stack of Holocaust books on my night table to take the pressure of his gaze off me. ‘Mom stayed home and cooked,’ I said. ‘Dad worked at a sawmill. Ernie and I ended up on our own most of the time.’
‘Do you have any photographs of your parents?’
I picked out The War Against the Jews because it had statistics at the end that I could pretend to be studying. ‘I really hope not,’ I said.
He rolled his eyes. ‘Who do you look like, your mom or your dad?’
‘I have my mom’s nose and hair, my dad’s mouth and eyes. An unfortunate mix – my modelling career would have taken off if it were the other way around.’
‘So Ernie must have your mom’s mouth and eyes.’
‘Ernie doesn’t look like either of them.’ Untrue, but the very last thing I needed was my eldest son suspecting just what Dad had suspected.
‘And you’re sure you have no photos of your parents? I mean, you’ve looked?’
‘I didn’t bring any to Portugal. Besides, vampires don’t show up on film.’
‘Not funny,’ he said.
I went to the window and stuck my head outside. The breeze was already warm. When I turned around, I discovered Nati was still waiting for me to provide him with grandparents. I’d always suspected this day would one day come, but I’d have preferred putting it off for a few more years.
‘You must have pictures of your house, at least,’ he said optimistically.
‘Not me. Ernie may have a couple. We’ll ask him today.’
‘And both your parents are dead?’
‘I am absolutely certain I’ve told you all this before.’
‘Tell me again. I must have been too little to remember.’
‘You weren’t t
oo little.’
‘If I want to hear it all again,’ he said angrily, ‘then what’s it to you?’
‘Mom died first. I was eleven. Ernie was seven.’
‘A car accident, right?’
‘Yeah, she crashed head-on into a tree – a cottonwood tree. The biggest one on the road to the nearest town.’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘That must have been awful.’
‘It was, especially for Ernie,’ I replied.
‘What about you?’
I hated the idea of Nati feeling sorry for me. ‘Me? I did the best I could.’
‘And what about your dad?’
‘Oh, he was upset at first, but he did fine in the end. I took over doing the laundry, so I don’t think he even noticed she was gone.’
‘No, I mean when did your father die?’
I almost told Nati the truth, just to get it over with once and for all, but that would have led to questions about the police and how they’d located my father’s car but never found him, and how a forty-nine-year-old man could vanish without a trace. ‘Dad died three years after Mom,’ I told him.
‘In the same month, I think you once said.’
‘So you do remember, after all.’
‘Dad, just tell me!’
‘They died on the very same day in May – May the second,’ I said. ‘But three years apart.’
‘That seems impossible.’
It would have made sense to him if could have said, He decided to disappear on the day Mom died, but I was too deep inside my lie. ‘Strange things have happened to me my whole life,’ I said instead. ‘Me and Ernie both. You might even say we’re a magnet for the odd and unlikely. Though, to tell you the truth, I’ve always thought that Dad worked it out so he could die on the same day as Mom.’
‘How would he have done that?’
‘Doctors sometimes give people a morphine overdose if they’re in a lot of pain. On the sly, of course. I think my father may have asked for that.’
‘What did he die of?’
‘Pancreatic cancer.’ I’d heard it was always fatal and unbearably painful.
The Night Watchman Page 14
