‘No, I don’t want anything of his – anything he’s touched,’ she replied. ‘So what’d they get – the oil paintings?’
‘No. We’re not sure what they took just yet. Do you still have your gun?’
‘It’s with my sneakers – under fifty feet of water.’
‘In the Tagus?’
‘Yeah. There’s a lovely boardwalk in Vila Franca de Xira now. I went there on Saturday. You can see a lot of birds if you go early – herons, egrets . . .’
She spoke as if she were talking about a relaxing day in the country. And with her father no longer stalking her thoughts, it probably had been. I could easily imagine her watching her gun sinking into the jade-coloured water and whispering to herself, If we follow our destiny far enough, we are rewarded with the world’s beauty.
‘The key to Coutinho’s house – where did you get it?’ I asked.
‘I took it from Sandi’s backpack when she came here for lunch with Monica and Joana. I told the girls I’d forgotten a bottle of wine in my car. There’s a tiny shop around the corner for making keys. I was gone only a few minutes.’ She gazed down and laughed to herself. On looking up, she steeled herself for another battle. ‘You can’t imagine how I hoped that Coutinho wouldn’t have more children. Or would change. If I hadn’t killed him, he’d still be molesting Sandi.’
She looked at Ernie as though needing his agreement, but he’d had enough of her pressured glances by then and turned away. Reading his wariness as a criticism, she shouted, ‘Sandi killing herself wasn’t supposed to happen! I was trying to prevent that! I was the only one helping her!’ She pointed a damning finger at me. ‘What do you ever do to help the kids who are being abused in this fucking country? The police do nothing.’ Turning to Ernie, she shouted, ‘Your brother does nothing!’
Ernie jumped up, his anger in the ferocious depth of his eyes and the wide set of his shoulders. ‘You have no idea how many bad people my brother has put in prison,’ he told our host in a quivering voice. ‘And you have no idea what we’ve been through.’
Looking up at him, she took a sharp intake of breath and shrank back. Did she realize she’d understood nothing about the depth of complicity between my brother and me? Maybe she simply felt the more basic terror of being outnumbered by men.
Although Dias seemed keenly intelligent, she also seemed to me to be unable to see the shape and scope of what others were thinking about her. Later that week, it would occur to me that she’d only glimpsed the vaguest outlines of Sandi’s tormented feelings and had mistaken them for her own need for vengeance. Maybe she even thought that Sandi had given her unspoken permission to murder their father.
In a wounded voice, trying to win us back to her, Dias said, ‘I only meant that it’s impossible to prosecute child abusers in Portugal.’
I couldn’t tell if her remorse was genuine. I didn’t even want to make the effort. I wanted to leave and see my kids, and ask Ana to let me back into her life. Ernie’s gaze had turned inside and he had begun to shiver. I stood up and took his hand. I imagined we looked ridiculous, two grown men holding hands like little kids, but appearing ridiculous has often seemed the world’s way of telling me I was doing just the right thing.
Dias showed us a harsh, judgemental expression, and it was gratifying to discover I didn’t care. ‘I have just a few more questions,’ I told her.
‘Good, because I need to get back to packing,’ she told me in a businesslike tone.
I gave Ernie’s hand a final squeeze and let it drop. ‘So do you think Sandi’s mother realized what was happening to her?’ I asked.
‘I doubt it. Sandi hoped she’d picked up on her clues, but she didn’t want to know.’
‘You tried calling the girl over the weekend, but she wouldn’t answer.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Were you going to tell her you killed her father?’
‘She must have figured that out already. She guessed what I was thinking of doing when I told her I understood what she was going through.’
I realized then that Sandi had been trying to protect Dias when she’d denied knowing anything about the painting that had been taken by the killer. Very likely, she’d also hidden – or destroyed – the photographs of the living room that her mother couldn’t find.
‘Did Sandi ask you not to do anything violent?’ I questioned.
She eyed me angrily. ‘You want to hear her death is my fault, don’t you? Let me tell you something! Not even her looking like a skeleton put Coutinho off! If you could have heard her voice when she told me that . . . She was so desperate. She told me she didn’t want me to hurt him. It’s true. But she was telling me one thing with her words and another with everything else about her! Still, I agreed not to hurt him if she’d do something for me.’
‘What?’
‘I told her I’d give the police an anonymous tip about him. I assured her that no one would ever hold her responsible for his arrest. But I also told her that we had to try to find some photographs of him with other girls – as evidence. But she couldn’t find them anywhere. At least, that’s what she said. I had the feeling she’d have preferred starving herself to death to getting Coutinho in trouble or participating in any way in my plan. So I sneaked over to her house once when her parents were away and made her search with me. We didn’t find any pictures, but something in her manner, something reticent and anxious . . . I began to suspect that she’d found the photos already and wasn’t going to tell me where they were – which gave me no other choice but to take matters into my own hands.’
I sensed Gabriel standing by the door again. Somehow, I was certain that he wanted me to disregard my professional and personal codes and let Dias go free.
‘I’m guessing you’ll get rid of your cell phone at some point,’ I said, needing to buy myself a little time. ‘So how do I reach you? In case someone else in the police figures out it was you.’
‘I suppose I could give you my mother’s number in Bordeaux,’ she said, as if it were being charitable.
I jotted it down.
Did she see something accusatory in Ernie’s eyes while I was writing? She slashed her hand in the air between us. ‘I don’t regret what I did!’ she shouted. ‘You can both think I should, but I don’t!’
Chapter 26
You step outside after a disagreeable interrogation and are surprised to find that it’s still early morning, and you trace a streamer of sunlight across the pale yellow façade of the building across the street, and you marvel at how it folds, jagged, around the bevelled column of a black street lamp just ahead of you, and you count one, two, three, four, five motorcycles parked on the traffic island at the centre of Rafael Bordelo Pinheiro Square, and you watch a white cat with a pirate-like black eye-patch crouching under a silver Honda – maybe scenting its own mortality in the dry wind sweeping in from Spain – and finally, calmed by the give and take of friendly voices coming from an apartment above you, you look up and spot two pigeons on a rooftop and imagine – smiling to yourself – that they’re having the conversation you’re eavesdropping on. You see all these things as though they were necessary, because you believe – improbable though it may sound – that all of them are sure to become important at some point in the story. Which story? Your own and the world’s, for at that moment there is no separation between the two.
I turned around to Ernie. He smiled his sideways smile, and it was reassuring precisely because it was his and always had been. He put his arm over my shoulder and told me something that made me laugh, and although I doubt it was about how I used to call him Wyatt Earp when he was a kid, that’s the way I remember it.
When Ernie was nine, I started secretly teaching him how to load and fire the Colt cap and ball revolver that Dad had given me for my thirteenth birthday, and within a few months, he could hit a Dr Pepper can from thirty yards nearly every time.
Ernie doesn’t recall what he said that amused me. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t about Dias, however. She l
eft us both feeling as if we’d escaped a battlefield. I do remember the weight of his arm. It seemed to hold me in place, but in a good way.
Were presentiments not only possible but inevitable? Maybe that was why I looked from the street lamp to the five motorcycles to the cat and to the pigeons. They were like props to an actor; I needed to make sure they were there – each in its right place – before my life went off in the direction it had to.
When I think of that moment now, nearly a month later, I have a vague sensation of falling. And I recall an explosion so loud that I wasn’t able to hear anything for a few seconds afterward. It seems to me the explosion came after my fall, but that can’t be.
According to Ernie, we started walking down the street towards our car, and I told him I’d call for backup once we got there. When he asked if I was going to arrest Dias, I replied, ‘She was largely responsible for Sandi’s death, so what else can I do?’ And he said, ‘You could let her go.’ And then a figure wearing a hoodie was standing in front of us.
Ernie would have sworn that the hoodie was grey, but it was green, according to the police report. As every cop knows, mistakes of that sort aren’t unusual: eyewitness – even alert ones – often get a lot of details wrong.
The man in the hoodie pointed his gun at us. Sensing he was about to fire, I threw myself over Ernie and shouted ‘No!’
The first shot hit me in the back of my left leg, three inches below the knee.
I didn’t reach for my gun because I must have decided – having only a fraction of a second to evaluate my alternatives – that I couldn’t get off a shot in time and had only one chance to protect my brother. Gabriel took over then, according to Ernie, who said that I crumpled to the ground and shouted at our attacker, You’ll pay for that, you little fucker! Bleeding all over the pavement, I still managed to kneel. I lifted my gun out of my pocket as a second shot hit me in my right shoulder.
Ernie must have picked up my pistol when it dropped from my hand but he doesn’t remember. When he fired, the man fell backwards and hit with a thud on the pavement. His eyes were open but were staring at nothing. At so much nothing, in fact, that Ernie began to wonder at the expanse of death, at how infinitely bigger than each individual life it was, and how it had now seemed to surround the three of us.
Ernie called 112 and said his brother had been shot twice in a square in the Chiado. ‘What square?’ asked the woman on the other end of the line. Ernie looked up and found the plaque indicating its name and told her, and he added for good measure, ‘My brother is a chief inspector for the Judicial Police. His name is Henrique Monroe. And I think he’s going to die if an ambulance doesn’t get here very fast.’
Amazing that he had the presence of mind to speak so coherently, but he told me that after an initial tremor inside him, a hypnotic clarity surged in him, and he knew exactly what he needed to say. While we waited for medical help, a crowd gathered. An elderly woman brought me a glass of water, he says. I like to think it was the same old lady who spoke to me about Lisbon’s meteorites.
Ernie had shot the hooded man above his left eye. He’d been aiming for the centre of his forehead, which means he was only about an inch off his target. Pretty darn good. My brother later claimed that he hadn’t fired a gun in twenty years, but Nati told me just a few days ago that he’d spotted his uncle shooting at Coke cans down by the stream that runs through his property just two years ago, while I was out buying groceries in Évora.
I don’t remember any blood, but Ernie said that I looked like something from a horror movie. My face had turned so pale that he figured I wasn’t going to make it. My hands were freezing. He said I was panting and that I told him I was having troubling getting enough air into my lungs. I don’t remember anything like that.
At some point, I said to Ernie, ‘Got any chocolate, kid?’
When he said he didn’t, I told him not to worry about it, but he asked the onlookers around us if anyone had any. A young man handed Ernie a Mars bar, and my brother helped me hold it while I took bites. Picturing the two of us working so hard to eat that gooey little chunk of chocolate – or the three of us, if you include Gabriel – sometimes makes me laugh out loud.
Since I wasn’t breathing well, chewing was a slow struggle, but I managed to finish the Mars bar. Ernie lifted the glass of water to my lips whenever I told him I was thirsty.
My eating that chocolate and then licking my fingers seems proof to me now that you never know what your last wish is going to be.
Ernie says that after the empty wrapper dropped out of my hand, I hugged him tightly. He scented my fear. My teeth started chattering but I smiled at him and said that he was a man now and that everything would be all right, and that he had to be very good to himself or I’d be angry with him.
I don’t remember saying anything like that to him.
Ernie says that he could tell that Gabriel had given me back my body when I started grimacing from the pain. I have no memory of that either. Or of whispering that I was counting on him to help take care of King Kong and Godzilla. And finally, of asking him to apologize to Ana for me for all the lies I’d ever told her.
Chapter 27
Ana was asleep in a chair near the foot of my bed. Her head kept falling to the side in a tortuously slow descent, then jerking back up. She looked as though she were caught in a time loop. She was also snoring, and it seemed to me that she must have been having agitated dreams. I watched her without speaking because my love for her was now a physical presence between us – patient and absolutely certain of its own importance – and it seemed to require silence.
The next thing I remember is feeling cheated that Ana wasn’t in bed with me and wondering why my pillow was lumpy and the air smelled like ammonia. I fought to sit up, but when I pushed off my right arm a slicing pain in my shoulder made me moan. Thick bandaging covered it, and the tenderness underneath flared into a burn at the probing of my fingertips. Looking to my side, I spotted an IV pole. A plastic bag full of clear liquid dangled from it, and I traced the long tubule carrying the liquid to a thick, mean-looking needle sticking into my forearm. I wanted to pull it out but I was sure that that would get me into trouble with Ana when she woke up.
My left leg began to throb, as though it had been badly singed. Had my car burst into flames? If Jorge and Nati had been with me, then . . .
When I called out to Ana, her eyes fluttered open.
‘Where are Ernie and the kids?’ I asked.
Without taking her astonished eyes from me, she jumped up and peeled off her coat, tossing it behind her onto her chair. While holding my head in both her hands, she kissed me on the lips. ‘You’re in the hospital, baby, and everyone is fine. We’re all okay.’
She smiled down at me as though I were a present she’d just received. Her lips were chapped and her hair was a bit shorter than I remembered it. ‘So nothing bad has happened to Jorge and Nati?’ I asked.
‘They’re worried about you, of course, but they’re all right. They’re with my parents.’
‘And Ernie is okay?’
‘Yeah, he just stepped out for a bite to eat. The poor man was starving.’
‘So he wasn’t killed in the accident?’ I asked. ‘There was no accident.’
‘I didn’t smash my car into a big tree – a walnut tree? Along the road to town.’
She shook her head and kissed my brow, then my eyes. The touch of her made me understand I was just where I was meant to be, even if I couldn’t remember what had happened.
‘And you’re okay, too?’ I asked.
‘I’m fine. We’re all fine.’
A tight knot of gratitude formed inside my throat but I didn’t cry. My emotions seemed stuck to the confusion in my head. Ana read what I was thinking and said, ‘You’re in the Santa Marta hospital. You were in the Intensive Care Unit but they transferred you to a regular room today.’
She pressed her lips to mine, and she smelled now of all the worry I’d put her throug
h, so I said I was sorry I’d given her a scare and made her come to the hospital.
‘Better here than a few other places I can think of,’ she replied.
One of the curtains around my bed had a big yellowish stain. I don’t know why it interested me, but it did. ‘What got spilled?’ I asked, pointing.
‘Beats me.’
‘Are there other people in this room?’
Pointing to my right, she whispered, ‘There’s another patient over there. He had an emergency appendectomy yesterday.’ She mouthed, He’s small and hairy – like an orang-utan.
Ana laughed like people do who’ve been crying. I took her hand and held it tight and rubbed it against my cheek. We looked at each other in silence for a long time, so that the place where I ended and she began seemed to merge.
‘So how did I get here?’ I asked.
Ana recounted what had happened, starting with my interrogation of Maria Dias. I didn’t remember anything about that. She said I’d been shot twice on the street, but that neither bullet had hit any arteries or vital organs; my left anklebone had been broken badly, however, and had had to be set in place with a metal rod. Today was Wednesday. I’d been operated on two days before, to extract the bullets and repair my anklebone. She had my bullets at home if I ever wanted to see them. There had been no complications. The surgeon had told her that if everything went according to plan, I’d be leaving the hospital in about ten days. He also told her I’d been extremely lucky, all things considered.
‘Getting hit by two bullets isn’t exactly lucky,’ I pointed out.
I hadn’t intended to be funny, but Ana laughed until tears began sliding down her cheeks. As I fought to sit up, she embraced me as if we’d been apart for an entire winter, and the warmth of her must have reminded me of other things because I got hard in spite of thinking it wasn’t such a good idea, given that I probably needed all my available blood circulating around my bullet wounds. But just to make sure I was all right down there I reached for myself.
The Night Watchman Page 33
