‘I’ll try.’
‘Good man!’
Before leaving, he patted my good shoulder, as though we were fighting in the same platoon and said, ‘As long as your ding-dong still works, you’ll be fine.’
For ding-dong, he used the word pirilau. It seemed a fatherly sort of comment. Or maybe that was only how I wanted to hear it.
‘My ding-dong is just fine,’ I told him, permitting myself a smile, ‘but it may be the only part of me that is.’
He raised his arm and made a fist in that way the Portuguese do to indicate an erection and said, ‘If you can make you and your wife happy two or three times a week, the rest is just icing on the cake.’
Chapter 31
The next morning, Friday, I woke up out of the covers, with my blanket on the floor, and my mouth tasting of chocolate. It was just after six a.m. While I struggled to find a position that would relieve the howling in my leg, I discovered that Ernie had already arrived. He was sitting in one of the two chairs in my room, a paperback open on his lap.
‘When the hell did you get here?’ I asked.
‘A little while ago. I couldn’t sleep.’ He stood up and came to me, resting his hand on the top of my head. ‘How’s the pain today?’
‘Maybe a little better.’
He frowned. ‘I thought you weren’t going to lie any longer.’
‘To Ana. To you, I can say whatever comes easiest.’
He covered me with my blanket and dropped down next to me. ‘If it helps, you can be as mean as you want,’ he said, grinning like he does when he’s sure he’s being cute. ‘You can yell and call me names. I won’t mind.’
‘That’s a generous offer, Ernie, and maybe I’ll take you up on it sometime. But don’t you have to get back to your garden one of these days? The roses and azaleas must be worried about you.’
I wanted him to leave so that I could finally lose myself in tears; the steady and slow accumulation of physical pain – and my frustration at having key evidence vanish – had just become too much for me.
‘Luisa is watering everything,’ he said. ‘I thought I told you that?’
Luisa was a neighbour – a retired schoolteacher.
‘Ernie, don’t tell Ana, but the pain is worse. And being stuck in here is killing me.’
‘Wait here, I’ll be right back!’ he declared, and he rushed away.
Twenty minutes later, he led the physician in charge of my recovery into my room. Dr Amorim had failed to shave this morning and pouches of skin sagged under his eyes.
‘A long night?’ I asked.
‘Dinner at my niece’s house. She’s about to get married. Seven courses, and the flan is still in my stomach. So what seems to be the trouble, Chief Inspector?’
After I told him, he said that my pains were normal under the circumstances but prescribed something stronger. A nurse brought the pills to me a few minutes later, and forty minutes after that, I lifted effortlessly out of my body and floated out through an imaginary window behind me. The warm wind swirling around me helped me rise high enough to have a breathtaking view over a city of red tile roofs and hidden gardens that seemed far more real and beautiful than the one I normally lived in.
Somewhere inside ourselves, we are always floating. That’s what I concluded while sailing over the Belém Tower. And if we were floating all the time, then maybe other things even less likely were also possible.
That evening, when I told my wife and kids about what I’d learned, they laughed; I kept it a secret that I was absolutely serious, though I decided to share the truth with them after I was safe at home – as part of our celebration.
Ernie arrived the next morning at sunrise once again, this time with Jorge – in his Tweety Bird pyjamas – cradled in his arms. He woke me up when he stepped in.
‘Sweet Pea made me promise to bring him along,’ he whispered.
He eased my son into my chair, took the boy’s favourite blue blanket out of the duffel bag he’d brought along and covered him tightly, making him look like an Egyptian mummy.
When Rosie poked her head out of the duffel bag, I jumped. She was preparing to bark so I pointed a threatening finger at her. ‘Don’t even think about it!’ I told her.
‘You can’t bring a dog in here!’ I whisper-screamed at my brother, though I was charmed to be part of a conspiracy involving a small dog, a seven-year-old kid and a cowboy. Ernie’s orchestrated chaos was like being home again.
‘Of course you can,’ my brother told me, lifting Rosie out. ‘Portugal,’ he said, opening his arms as if to embrace the entire country, ‘is where all rules are just suggestions!’
The dog wriggled and whined, so excited that her tail was slapping against Ernie’s arm.
‘What’s going on over there?’ the new man sharing my room called out from behind the curtain that separated us. He had introduced himself to me the evening before. His name was Duarte, and he was a plumber.
‘Sorry,’ I called back. ‘My youngest son and my brother have arrived.’
‘One of them sounds like a dog,’ he noted.
‘That would be my son. He’s part poodle.’
The Portuguese generally didn’t understand my humour but Duarte laughed hard, which energized me. And I was suddenly in the mood for comedy. Sensing that, Ernie held Rosie’s forepaws and stood her on my bed like a circus dog. She danced around, straining to kiss me. I fended her off while imitating Frank Sinatra crooning ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’.
Jorge squirmed out of his blanket, stood up, and zombie-walked over to me, leaning in for a kiss. He smelled of sleep and old leather. ‘Have you been going to bed with your soccer ball again?’ I asked.
He nodded and threw his arms around me.
Ernie let Rosie go, and she started licking us as if we’d been away for years, which made Jorge giggle and clamp his hands over his eyes, since he didn’t like the dog kissing him there.
Later that day, while Ernie, Jorge and Nati were taking Rosie for a walk in the Estrela Garden, Luci arrived. Ana was sitting with me. After the introductions, Luci smiled at the two of us timidly and handed me a small white box. ‘I made you some . . . some almond biscuits,’ she stuttered, perhaps fearing that my wife might react badly to a friendly gesture from a pretty young colleague, which was why I munched down a biscuit right away and told her it was delicious.
‘And they don’t have any cholesterol,’ Luci observed proudly.
‘Do I look that fat?’ I joked.
Instead of easing her discomfort, as I’d hoped, Luci flinched. ‘Oh, no, that’s not what I meant at all. I was just saying—’
‘Luci, it’s okay,’ Ana cut in. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn not to pay too much attention to my husband’s so-called humour.’ She blew a kiss in my direction and added, ‘Hank can sometimes be too adorable, if you know what I mean.’
Through such tender-hearted criticisms of me that day, my wife was able to start a friendship with Luci. After she went out for some decent coffee, my young colleague pulled up a chair close to my bed. When I asked her about the Coutinho case, she confirmed that Romão hadn’t done anything about it since I’d been shot.
The despair that shook me seemed connected to my ongoing doubts about ever fully recovering the use of my leg and shoulder. I hadn’t realized how much hope had still been in me until it was gone.
Sensing our conversation was dependent on her now, Luci pointed to the book on my night table, Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe. ‘Maybe you should be reading something less depressing,’ she said.
‘I don’t find it the least bit depressing,’ I assured her.
‘No?’
‘Luci, did you know the Nazis started sterilizing deaf people in 1933, as soon as Hitler was elected? It was even forbidden for deaf Christians to use sign language in public with their deaf Jewish friends.’
‘No, I didn’t know. And you like reading books that make you upset and angry, sir?’
‘Rag
e is an undervalued emotion, Luci. It has proved very useful to me on many occasions.’ I might have added but didn’t, And I get the feeling that if I’m going to be able to keep this case from closing forever, I’m going to need all of it that I can muster.
‘Whenever I’ve needed rage, I’m afraid I didn’t have enough,’ Luci confided, and I was reminded of the depth hiding inside her. And of her willingness to be seen by me.
An hour later, while I was napping off my preoccupations about the case, a heavyset man in an oversized grey suit and rumpled, midnight blue tie – perfect for the small-town funeral director in an American sitcom – knocked on my door. Ana had returned a little while earlier. He introduced himself as Lourenço Brito and told us he was from the Personnel office at the Judiciary Police. He had the wheezing respiration and sweating brow of a man grinding his way towards a heart attack.
He sat with me and began a wordy explanation of official police policy with regard to officers injured in the line of duty. He tapped a pen against his knee the whole time. Given my pay cuts over the past two years, I interpreted that as a menacing sign.
‘Have I been fired?’ I interrupted.
‘No, of course, not.’
‘So I’ll continue to get my salary for as long as I’m out?’ I asked.
‘The limit is ten years. And even after that, if you have a relapse of your health problems, you can get further benefits.’
‘So what’s the bad news you have for me?’
‘There’s no bad news,’ he assured me. ‘You’ll be taken care of.’
He continued his explanations, and they sounded reasonable, but the moment he was gone, Ana said she’d bet me fifty euros that a notice would arrive in the mail – limiting my benefits – within a month.
I took the bet and we shook hands on it. ‘Cop Shot Twice on Duty, Loses Benefits would make a really bad headline,’ I told her. ‘They won’t take the risk.’
‘Hank, where have you been? Nobody in the government cares about bad publicity any more. That’s all they get! They just add up figures, and if the sum is too high, they start erasing things – including people like you and me.’ She showed me a hard look. ‘I’ll want the fifty euros in cash, if you don’t mind!’
My final visitor that day was Chief Inspector Romão. He arrived in the late afternoon with a present for me of eucalyptus honey. He handed the jar to me stiffly, his head erect, wearing that invisible crown he struts around in. When we got down to serious talk, I told him why I thought whoever had had me shot wanted to keep me from investigating the Coutinho case. I made certain to purge emotion from my voice, since the way he leaned away from me in his chair was his way of reminding me he was uncomfortable around any displays of weakness. No more than five minutes into my explanation, he started looking at his watch, which rattled me badly. God only knows if I even once used the subjunctive correctly. He told me – as I’d expected – that Trigueiro’s bank records didn’t show any payments he might have received for the hit on me. Also, his phone log had turned up nothing suspicious. And he had no leads for whoever had broken into Coutinho’s house. ‘Things don’t look good for us,’ he concluded.
Us? His body language and manner told me my injuries had nothing to do with him. Realizing that Romão was already certain that we’d never find out more about who had ordered me shot, I moved on to Coutinho’s illegal housing development on the Sado Estuary and asked him to follow up with Maria Teresa Sanderson. Before leaving, he shook my hand hard, as though to instil confidence in me. To keep our pretence alive, I assured him I’d send him a summary of my notes over the next few days.
At two in the morning, I awoke to the sound of footsteps crunching across ice. My heartbeat raced off, as though towards the exclamation point always waiting for me at the edge of my fears. I turned on the lights, but no one was there.
Lying back, a still, quiet, perfect sense of safety – of being safer than I’d ever been before – seeped through me like a warm liquid. I was alive. My life was real. And the soft voices of two women conversing in the hallway were the night’s way of telling me that all was well.
I experienced feelings of quiet ecstasy on and off for the next two days, most often in the middle of the night, inhabiting the soft islands of noise in the warm reef around me.
On those two wondrous nights, I realized clearly that loss was the voice that the past had always used to get my attention. But I saw now that I might be able to change the way it spoke to me.
On the third afternoon, Ana sat on my bed and told me about a transsexual dancer in Berlin whom she’d interviewed on the phone that morning. Listening to her speak of the history of ballet – and other things I knew nothing about – was like being saved from a shipwreck. In such ways throughout my life I have learned that I prefer listening to talking.
When she finally grew silent, I said, ‘Meeting you was the single most exciting thing that ever happened to me’ – because I couldn’t let any more time pass before telling her one of the things that unexpected joy had taught me.
She embraced me and kissed my hands, breathing in their scent with her eyes closed, as if they reminded her of moments long gone, which proved once again that she could be counted on to make the right moves even when I didn’t have any idea what they were.
The next day – Wednesday 18 July, nine days after my operation, I was transferred to a private room with a window. The view was modest – of some down-on-their-luck apartment buildings and a grizzled café. But what a thrill to see the sky! I was eager to look in on all those strangers’ lives, too, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, but the tenants kept their blinds tightly closed.
‘The selfish bastards never open them!’ I complained to Ana that evening.
‘Three hundred years of Peeping Toms in the service of the Inquisition and dictatorship have made the Portuguese just ever so slightly wary,’ she reminded me.
She’d been peeling me a mango and put a first piece in my mouth. ‘Where do you think we’ll be in twenty years?’ she asked me.
‘If the kids are still here, we’ll be in Portugal.’
‘What if they’ve emigrated by then?’ She showed me a sorrowful look. ‘I don’t like not being able to predict what’s going to happen.’ She snuggled close to me and leaned back. ‘Uncertainty doesn’t work for me.’
I realized then that it had cost her a lot to be so strong since I’d been shot. I rubbed her shoulders just like she liked, and after a while she closed her eyes, and I told her she could drift off if she wanted to, and she did.
To celebrate being able to see the outside world, I decided not to take any painkillers that day. It was while I was fighting the murderous throbbing in my leg that I had my first useful thought about the case in days – that Maria Dias’s mother might not have burned the compromising photograph of her husband with young girls. She might even have threatened him with it in order to make sure he never abused their daughter or anyone else ever again. That was, at least, what I would have done.
I reasoned that one of the men pictured in the photo might have remained friends with Coutinho after all these years – and could have been the person who’d had me shot. But even if that wasn’t the case, obtaining the incriminating snapshot might enable me to identify some men who ought to have been locked away somewhere where they couldn’t get at teenaged girls.
Senhora Dias was surprised to hear someone speaking Portuguese on the line, but after I identified myself, she told me that she already knew that her ex-husband had been murdered; Monsieur Morel had discovered her phone number and called her a few days before. When I told her that I’d questioned her daughter about a week earlier, she stuttered, ‘But I . . . I thought you said you were in Lisbon?’
‘That’s right.’
‘My daughter hasn’t been in Lisbon all summer. She’s been in Paris.’
‘I understand that she might have told you that,’ I replied. ‘Maybe she even made you promise to say that to anyone who called. But
I can assure you I was with her in her flat in Lisbon this summer.’
‘Please don’t argue with me, Inspector. Nothing you say or do will be able to convince me that I’m wrong about this.’
Her definitive tone led me to believe that insisting would indeed prove pointless. And it seemed a clever strategy; by sticking to this particular lie, she could effectively block most lines of questioning the police might try.
‘Don’t worry, senhora,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to arrest Maria. In any case, now that she’s in France, she’s safe. None of my colleagues has any idea of where she is or what she’s done.’
‘So why did you call? What do you want from me?’
‘There’s something important I need to know. Do you still have the photograph that Maria found of your former husband with two young girls and some other men? She found it in—’
‘Look, I’m not going to talk to you about that or say another word to you about my daughter!’ she cut in, and with such sudden, incontestable fury that I knew I had no chance of changing her mind.
That evening, I typed up my notes on my laptop and transferred them – along with all of Coutinho’s vacation files – to a flash drive. Ana agreed to drop it off at headquarters.
The next morning, when I called the French High School, the assistant director retrieved his file on Maria Dias. He surprised me by informing me that she’d started teaching four years ago, not eight, as she’d told me, which probably meant that she’d come to Lisbon in pursuit of Coutinho, since he had moved to Lisbon at close to the same time. He also mentioned that she’d been a world-class archer and was training two senior girls for the national championships. Dias had told him that it was her father who’d taught her to use a bow and arrow.
The Night Watchman Page 37
