The kids and I carried our bags into the house while Ernie put the basket of flowers on his work table, an old oaken door we’d rescued from a dumpster in Évora a few years back. Rosie remained outside, scratching at the screen door, staring in with the loneliest face she could come up with, but a few seconds later – not having any gift for melodrama – she gave up and ran off.
The Villa Ernesto had no divisions – no rooms, cabinets, or closets. No place where an intruder could hide. And no mirrors.
The July sunshine had turned the yellow curtains to gold, and the earthen scent of the fields swept into the house through the open windows. The boys and I removed our shoes. Jorge slid across the wooden floor over to the rosebushes surrounding Ernie’s bed. He sniffed at a clump of red blossoms. Turning to us, he said in an announcer’s voice, ‘Mais perto do que pode pensar!’ A lot closer than you might think! It was a billboard advertisement for the Corte Inglés department store that he must have spotted on the way out of Lisbon.
Ernie said, ‘Try the flame-coloured ones, Sweet Pea.’
Jorge sniffed hard at the showiest of the blossoms and twirled his head as if he were about to faint from its perfume, then collapsed back on the bed. Whenever my brother was nearby, he turned into a circus performer, ever eager to earn his uncle’s spotlight.
Ernie had hung our framed photograph of Patsy Cline above his headboard. I read the dedication to myself: To Bill’s kids, Kisses, Patsy. She was wearing a plaid shirt and white cowboy hat, seducing the camera with that sassy, rodeo-queen look she’d perfected. Touching my fingertip to the heart she’d drawn above the i in Kisses, I remembered how Dad told us that he’d charmed Mom off her feet at Joe’s Steaks in Washington DC. Mom had been a freshman at Marymount College. She’d won a scholarship sponsored by the church back in Portugal.
If Dad hadn’t delighted her with his gossip about Patsy’s latest tour, and kissed her with such wild-hearted passion at the door to her dormitory, Ernie and I would’ve never been born. And Mom would still be alive. Which is proof, you might say, of an astonishing thing: that everything that has happened to you in your life has meant that a thousand other things never would.
Mom told me that before they were married Dad had been maravilhoso – wonderful. Once, she and I made a list in Portuguese of words she’d have used to describe him when they’d first met: elegante, espirituoso, charmante, maluco . . . He’d crooned songs to her by Cole Porter. And he was the first man whose hands seemed sure enough to lead her around a dance floor, too. It was only after they were married that he started to brutalize her. She never understood why he changed. My theory was that he never had; he just faked being wonderful wonderfully well.
My brother studied Patsy’s photo while looking over my shoulder.
‘Patsy drew a heart,’ I told him, pointing. ‘I hadn’t remembered.’
‘Our one brush with fame,’ he replied, ‘and it came before we were born!’
‘I don’t get it,’ Nati said.
I handed him the picture. ‘Dad was one of Patsy’s roadies,’ I told him. ‘She signed this picture for him in 1962. He and Mom only married in 1966, and I came along four years later. He asked her to sign it for his future kids – for me and Ernie.’
‘Wow, Grandpa sounds kinda cool!’
I was certain Nati said Grandpa to defy me, so I said in a tone of warning, ‘If he sounds cool, then there’s something badly wrong with your hearing.’
‘Whatever,’ Nati said dismissively. ‘Who’s Patsy Cline anyway?’ He handed the photo back to his uncle.
‘In my opinion, the best country singer of all time,’ Ernie told him. ‘But she died in a plane crash in 1963.’
‘And that was the end of Dad’s music career,’ I announced happily.
‘Why was that?’ Nati asked.
‘He had a reputation by then. No one would hire him after Patsy died.’
‘A reputation for what?’
‘For fucking up all the time.’
Nati eyed me because I’d only said the word fuck in front of him a handful of times. I slung my bag onto the middle futon. Sensing my emotions were about to go haywire, I started to add up the pluses and minuses of taking a Valium.
Ernie jarred me out of my calculations by clapping his hands. ‘That’s enough talk! Everybody to the dining table.’
On my way over, I stopped at Ernie’s desk to study his latest painting. A slender yellow figure with emaciated arms was climbing up a black, ominous, pyramid-shaped mountain made of burnt twigs and seeds. The sun – a soft circle of fire-coloured leonotis blossoms – was melting over its peak in waves of violet and blue. At the corner of the landscape, in a lush, cup-shaped valley that was both protective and imprisoning, were two tiny men and an elderly woman. With their heads raised and mouths agape, they seemed astonished by the view – and hemmed in by the perilous wall of darkness they faced. They stood with their hands touching, like paper cut-outs – wanting to help one another, but intimidated.
I knew I was the blue man with an orange head; Ernie always made me with wild delphiniums and California poppies. He’d told me once that they were the flowers that appeared to him whenever he thought of me.
The climbing woman’s slight build and angular awkwardness implied that she’d never make it to the summit.
‘This is the first time you’ve put Mom in one of your paintings,’ I called to Ernie, who was carrying a tall vase of pink gladioli to his dining table.
‘Did you know it was her right away?’ he asked, smiling gratefully.
‘Of course,’ I assured him.
My brother called the kids to the table. In his black ceramic salad bowl were home-grown greens crowned by yellow and orange nasturtiums. There was a big bottle of Coke for Nati and Jorge, and a carafe of carrot juice for Ernie and me.
Our place settings – from Thailand – were made of shimmering pink silk, and our glasses – Mexican – were thick and blue, with greenish air bubbles caught in the glass. It often seemed to me that Ernie was like a man recently cured of blindness – always seeking to surround himself with colour.
Jorge and I took our usual places but Nati said he’d wait until the food was served. He stood by the window overlooking his uncle’s rose garden.
‘Sure thing,’ Ernie told him. Putting on Aunt Olivia’s Christmas-tree potholder gloves, he clanged open the door to the oven and lifted out a white ceramic casserole of stewed eggplant. At the table, he eased it down on top of a tile trivet and stood back to check on its position. Finding that it wasn’t in the right place, he slid it closer to the salad bowl. That didn’t work either, so he moved it nearer the edge.
Life for Ernie often came down to a chess match against himself. Rushing him only caused him to lose, so I told him it wasn’t a problem when he apologized for taking so much time to get everything ready. Nati gazed out the window. I imagined he was picturing himself walking on the main road to Évora and catching a bus home.
After my brother’s seventh move, Jorge asked me what his uncle was doing. I’d explained before about Ernie’s compulsive behaviours, but the little boy had forgotten. ‘He needs to get things lined up just right.’
Finally, when Ernie had everything in the right position, he sat next to Jorge, and Nati dropped down next to me on the other side of the table. My brother asked me to say grace. I used it as an opportunity to broker a truce with Nati. ‘We thank the soil of the Alentejo and the plants themselves for the gifts they’ve given us today,’ I began. ‘We are grateful to Ernie for his gardening and cooking, and to Jorge and Nati for giving up a Saturday in front of the television and on the Internet. And we solemnly apologize for any wrongs we’ve committed since we were last together.’
Solemnly was Aunt Olivia’s word. Solenemente. I could still hear the abundant roundness of that word as she pronounced it. She had made it part of many an incantation meant to turn two lost boys into something like men.
‘Amen,’ Ernie said, smiling at me for having
thanked our aunt in code.
I was hoping for an all-is-forgiven expression on my eldest’s face, but he turned away from me as though I were intruding into his thoughts. Nati’s taut silence during the rest of the meal was like a neon sign flashing I’m Miserable And It’s All My Dad’s Fault! When it came time for dessert, Ernie’s famous chocolate and cinnamon brownies, the sulking young man patted his belly, said he was stuffed, and found refuge on the screened-in porch with Moby Dick.
Jorge grew sleepy halfway through his third brownie, leaned his head down on the table and closed his eyes. ‘Time for your nap,’ Ernie told him, taking the rest of the brownie from his limp fingers and handing it to me. He cradled Jorge in his arms and hoisted him up, then showed me a concerned look. ‘Is it okay?’ he whispered.
‘Jesus, Ernie, you know you don’t have to ask,’ I told him in a frustrated voice.
He carried Jorge to his futon and tucked him in with quick and precise hand movements. I realized I admired my brother more than anyone I knew, and watching the delight in his eyes as he slipped a pillow underneath my son’s head salvaged my day. It was as if I’d managed to give both him and Jorge the gift they’d most needed. I’d already made Ana promise that if I died before the kids were adults, she’d make sure that Ernie was a constant presence in Jorge’s life. From my brother, my son would learn to surround himself with simple and beautiful things – and maybe even stop running from silence. And my brother wouldn’t be broken by my death if he knew the boy was counting on him.
After we’d done the dishes, Ernie fetched his photos of our ranch. He took off his latex gloves, reasoning that his nephew would feel more at ease with him if he looked a little less deranged, as he put it to me with a wily grin.
I peeked at the two of them from behind the curtain. Nati sat on the old bench that we’d painted yellow a few years back. Ernie sat in one of his wicker chairs. He let my son flip through the pictures in silence, then talked to him about how we used to look for scorpions on the rim of Black Canyon, and how the hinterlands of Colorado had been our true home. ‘Everything we saw in the wild accepted your dad and me just as we were,’ he said.
‘And your parents didn’t?’ Nati asked.
‘Not our dad.’
‘He yelled bad things at you, didn’t he?’
Ernie gripped his bolo tie – a silver Kokopelli, the trickster god of the American Southwest – and gazed out towards the horizon. ‘He didn’t want to, Nati, but he did.’
Guilt at invading their privacy took hold of me, so I moved to Ernie’s desk and traced my finger around the petals forming our mom’s outlines in his latest painting. When he came back inside, he told me that their talk seemed to go well, then scrubbed his hands at the sink. When he was done, I retrieved my evidence bags and asked him to come for a walk with me.
On the way to his grove of broad, heavy-limbed carob trees, we detoured into the rose garden, and he picked a praying mantis off a leaf. The insect was stick-like and greenish-brown, with long prickly legs and a serene, noble, upright head – the ballet dancer of the invertebrate world. Ernie told me he’d distributed two thousand baby mantises around his garden a month before. He’d ordered them from Spain. They’d devour aphids and other insect pests all summer long. Sometimes they managed to sneak into the house, even into his bed, but he didn’t mind.
Under the shade of the oldest and shaggiest of Ernie’s carob trees, seated together on the green blanket Ernie had brought along, I handed him the bag containing Sandra’s knife and explained about finding it under her bed. His eyes widened with apprehension. ‘Why show it to me, Rico?’
I had a lie prepared. ‘You remember how we used to hide our dinner plates under your bed until we were ready to wash them? I thought maybe you’d have some idea why she’d have hidden the knife.’
He shook his head. I could tell he was keeping something from me. And he knew I knew, which made him fidgety. After a while, he stood up and walked down the lazy hillside toward the dry stream bed where we sometimes found edible mushrooms. I caught up with him while he was searching behind a fallen oak. I showed him the honey dripper. ‘I discovered this, too – tucked into a corner of the girl’s bed.’
‘Why do you care so much what’s wrong with the vic’s daughter?’ he asked.
‘Because she won’t tell me or anyone else about how she’s being threatened or hurt. All she’s got to hold onto is her own silence. And Ernie, you and I both know it isn’t going to be enough to save her.’
When my brother walked off this time, I didn’t follow him. I went back to his house and sat on my futon with our bag of Roman coins on my lap. At that moment, their jangly weight meant to me that the past sometimes sent us messages, and that some of them could change our lives in the present.
Ernie stepped inside a half-hour later. The knees of his trousers were grimy. Had he been praying?
He caught the Roman coin I tossed him and nodded knowingly, as if he knew I’d been communing with lesser gods in my own way.
‘Give me a little while and I’ll tell you what I know,’ he said.
Chapter 13
‘Don’t try to trick me,’ Ernie said resentfully. He was kneading a scuffed old baseball in both his hands.
We were seated on his stone patio, under his trellis of kiwi fruit, which were dangling down out of the thick vine like furry brown earrings. Jorge was still snoozing. Nati was reading Moby Dick under the shade of an orange tree on the Via Enrico.
‘I’m not trying to trick you!’ I snapped, though I was. ‘I had a flash of memory about you hiding a knife around our room when you were little.’
He tossed me the ball and turned over his left arm to show me his jagged scars. ‘How did you think I got these?’
‘I assumed Dad made them when I wasn’t around.’
‘No, they’re not deep enough for his work.’
He gazed back at his house, apprehensive, the same silent boy with the ever-watchful eyes who fumbled his replies at school and who never trusted words – which was another way of saying that they’d never done him any good. There were moments one was never prepared for, and I sensed this was going to be one of them.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ I told him.
‘I started cutting myself when I was a kid,’ he said.
My heart took a sharp dive. ‘With a knife?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Sometimes my chest felt like it would explode. Cutting myself helped.’
‘So it didn’t hurt?’
‘Of course it hurt!’ He kicked his head back and had a good laugh. ‘But when it hurt badly enough, I’d go all numb.’
He held his hands open and jiggled them, so I threw the baseball back to him. ‘How often did you do it?’ I asked.
‘Maybe once a week.’ He tossed the ball high in the air and caught it in one hand.
‘Even when you were real little?’
‘No, only after Dad disappeared. I started worrying that he’d come back and take me away with him, and that you’d never be able to find me.’
‘Do you still cut yourself?’ I asked. My hope that he didn’t was clenched inside me, afraid to breathe.
‘No, never,’ he declared.
I didn’t believe him; he’d spoken too definitively. Still, we had an unspoken agreement not to pursue each other into our hiding places, so I kept quiet. He balanced the ball on top of his shoulder and, leaning slowly to the side, set it rolling down his arm into his hand. It was a trick Dad had taught us and that Ernie had mastered. I was certain he was telling me in the language of our past that he could be just as secretive as I was.
‘Listen, Rico,’ he finally said, ‘have a paediatrician check the daughter’s arms and legs. And in more . . . intimate places, too.’
While I considered what might have made Sandra Coutinho hurt herself, Jorge shouted ‘Dad!’ He was waving from around the side of the house and wearing his pyjamas.
‘Don’
t come out here barefoot!’ I hollered back. ‘Change into real clothes!’
He went back inside. Ernie and I pretended to study different areas of the horizon; sometimes our intimacy was too much for us.
Jorge came out in shorts and a T-shirt, wearing his beloved Puma sneakers – red high-tops with blue emblems on the side. My brother asked him to take care not to step on any of the mantises, then sat the boy on his knee so they could play Rodeo Star. Ernie was a wildly bucking stallion named Pillsbury and Jorge a grizzled rodeo veteran named Ferndale Hawkins, which was the name Ernie and I had invented as kids.
Ferndale kept tumbling off and dusting himself off and getting right back on Pillsbury, though he complained that Ernie bucked too hard. My brother whinnied and shook his head to express his disagreement. He made a fine horse.
Watching Jorge jerking up and down, his arms flailing, laughing crazily, I realized he was a tough little guy.
When Ernie and Jorge headed off to see how the olive trees were enjoying the summer, I went back into to the house to make some calls. My cell phone rang just after I turned it on. It was Yosoi Kimura. He had a clipped Japanese accent but his Portuguese was very good. ‘The writing you sent me is the name Diana,’ he told me.
‘And does the name Diana have any special significance in Japanese culture?’
‘Well, it can mean big hole. Except that then it would be written with Chinese-style characters. The way it has been written is just a name.’
After thanking Kimura and disconnecting, I turned on my laptop and consulted Fonseca’s photographs of Coutinho’s address book. Two Dianas were listed, one with a Lisbon address, the other in Coimbra. I wrote their full names and phone numbers in my notepad, then called Inspector Quintela.
He told me he had with him a list of the victim’s incoming and outgoing calls over the last two weeks. He checked the numbers I read him and soon confirmed that Coutinho hadn’t spoken with either of the two Dianas. He’d spoken to only two women other than his wife and daughter over the last week: Fernanda Aleixo, his secretary, and an architect named Maria Teresa Sanderson. He’d called Aleixo once on Tuesday and Sanderson twice on Wednesday, the day before he was murdered.
The Night Watchman Page 17
