There is a lot I’ll never understand about this woman, was what I thought over the entire first hour of talking to her, because her no-nonsense temperament seemed so different from mine and because she seemed to have such an easy confidence in herself.
Lena and I talked for two straight hours, double the usual length of a session. When she asked me what I most wanted to tell her, I said, I’ve got a lot of things I should probably talk about, and she said Pick one, and I got onto the subject of my father having vanished when I was fourteen, and how I was always waiting for him to show up, which was when she came to the same conclusion I had and said, ‘Maybe there are some mysteries we’d prefer not to solve.’
I said that I thought she was right, but that I believed I was ready now to know what happened to him.
‘Then we’ll find out together,’ she told me invitingly.
Her smile made me go all tense, as if she were trying to trick me, and I couldn’t stop myself from replying in a harsh tone, ‘I can’t see how, unless you plan on flying to Colorado with me and following a trail that went cold nearly thirty years ago. Or unless you are in touch with Nathan.’
‘Nathan?’
I explained who Nathan was and about the possibility that he might have murdered Dad or somehow forced him to go away, though I didn’t mention anything about what his connection to Ernie might be. That would have to wait.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But I’m betting there are things you might have overlooked – clues in your memory that you’ve never looked at for very long. I can help you with that.’
She sounded as though she wanted to persuade me it would be an adventure – like Huck Finn’s raft trip down the Mississippi – which made me have a good laugh, because going back to America with me wasn’t going to be scenic at all.
About halfway through our session, she brought up Gabriel and asked me if there was anything that I wanted to tell her about him, but her being so direct about him made me want to rush out of the room.
‘Maybe you could write to me about him,’ she suggested.
‘Write to you how?’
‘Start writing letters about him to me. I’ve done that before with patients. Lots of people can write down what they can’t say.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, meaning no.
‘Just think about it. There’s no rush. We’ll take it one step at a time.’
Very near the end of our session, when Lena asked me if there was anything more that I needed her to know before we separated, I told her about the day Mom died. I admitted that when I was feeling most angry at her and lonely, I hoped that she had been in crushing pain for two or three seconds after her crash and before her death. ‘It’s the thought I’m most ashamed of,’ I said, ‘and I don’t want to have it any more.’
‘Because?’
‘Because it makes me feel that I’m a very bad person.’
‘Being bad is appropriate at times. At the very least, it’s human. Don’t you have a right to be human?’
‘I suppose, but I don’t want to be human in that way.’
‘These bad thoughts about your mother . . . What would happen to you if Ana and your kids knew about them?’
‘They might think a lot less of me.’
‘And then what would happen?’
‘I might lose them.’
‘You think that Ana would leave you and take the kids with her because you occasionally have bad thoughts about a mother who abandoned you?’
‘She didn’t abandon us!’ I said with an anger that shocked me.
‘If I understood what you told me, she took her own life when you and your brother were kids. Isn’t that right?’
‘You don’t understand. She had no choice.’
‘Maybe so, but she still left you and your brother at a time when you couldn’t possibly take care of yourselves. But let’s get back to your wife for now. It sounds as if you think she might abandon you, too.’
‘She got very angry at me the other day. I was terrified I’d never see her again.’
‘But she made up with you. She didn’t leave you.’
‘True.’
‘Might your terror be connected to what your mother did?’
Lena was trying to imply that I’d missed the obvious. And maybe I had. My sense of shame made me squirm.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘That I was a big disappointment to my mom,’ I replied.
‘If you take the guilt all on yourself, your mother is free to be a wonderful person. Are you aware of that?’
After our session, I stepped into the sunshine outside her office building, so grateful for the warmth and light that I closed my eyes and held my arms open as if I were unfolding my wings. I came to myself nearly two hours later on a bench in the Praça de Alegria. In my coat pocket was a pack of Marlboros with two cigarettes missing and a small blue lighter.
G had tossed my crutches into the bushes behind my bench. After I retrieved them, I made my way down to the Avenida da Liberdade and took the Metro to the Baixa, where I caught the number twenty-eight tram back home.
The next day, just after lunch, Gabriel brought me to the same scruffy little park. I watched an old woman crocheting a yellow baby outfit, and a bearded man in a blue tracksuit jogging up the hill, and a young woman walking her bouncy, overweight collie, and scores of others rushing around. They seemed as though they were participating in a grand exhibition passing before my eyes. I sat very still so I could appreciate the freedom of not having to be in their show.
Later, while riding up through the Alfama on the tram, I realized that I seemed to have landed outside the flow of time, on a very small planet of my own. Being on strike seemed a very good thing.
The next day, however, at just past noon, I came to myself on the Avenida Estados Unidos da América. I made my way past the gigantic, hideous residential blocks to the Roma Metro station. It was only after I boarded my train that I realized I’d been standing in front of the building where Forester and Sottomayor had their apartments.
Forty-five minutes later, while waiting for my usual tram, a young man asked me for a light; as I reached in my pocket for G’s lighter, I found Sandi’s ring. Surrounding it in my fist, I knew what G was telling me, but I wasn’t ready to leave the quiet of my own little planet. I wrote on my hand, Give me time to think things out.
The next morning, G wrote back, If you give me some time, too.
I thought of calling Luci to have her take the ring as evidence, but it seemed entirely possible now that she’d been chosen by people high up as the perfect person to win my confidence and report back to them about me. Maybe she’d been ordered to steal Coutinho’s flash drive and crash Sandi’s disk.
I liked Luci a lot, and it was nearly impossible to believe she could have betrayed me, but it seemed clear to me at that moment that I ought not to trust anyone outside my family. And in any case, I couldn’t risk turning her thoughts towards this case again. When I was ready to move on to the next stage of my life, I’d invite her and her husband over for dinner and we’d have a long talk.
Two days ago, I found out exactly what Gabriel meant by ‘if you give me some time, too’; I disappeared from two in the afternoon until five-thirty and came to myself at home in my kitchen, with a cup of hot tea waiting for me on the counter and two express mail receipts stuffed in my pocket. One package had been sent to Tom Bagnatori at the Minestério Público on the Avenida Marechal Câmara in Rio de Janeiro; the other had gone off to Denis Gershon at the Prosecutor’s Office on the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris. Each package had weighed 148 grams.
On checking my cell phone registry, I discovered that G had made three calls to Rio de Janeiro over the past three days, and two to Paris. On calling the Brazilian number, I discovered it was the Prosecutor’s Office. The same was true for the French number.
Gabriel obviously hadn’t felt as morally obligated to Susana and Morel as I did.
The return addre
ss he had used on the express mail receipts were inventions. The name he’d written – Santorini – was Ana’s maiden name.
To check my reasoning about what he’d sent off to Brazil and France, I called Joaquim.
‘Hey, Henrique, I’m really glad you called,’ he said in a relieved voice.
‘Why’s that?’ I asked.
‘You didn’t seem yourself when you came over.’
‘I’ve been a bit disoriented of late,’ I told him. ‘But listen, I called because I think I forgot to ask you what I owe you for the copies of the DVD you made for me.’
‘You must be joking, Henrique. If you get any of those bastards, I’ll pay you!’
Bagnatori called yesterday evening at just after seven o’clock, Lisbon time. He asked for Gabriel Santorini and told me that he’d just watched the DVD I’d sent him. ‘Uma gente inacreditavelmente ruim,’ he said in his singsong Brazlian accent. Unbelievably bad people.
‘Yes, I’d very much like to see them prosecuted.’
‘Who wouldn’t!’ Bagnatori went on to say that he’d been accumulating evidence on Forester for years.
‘So why haven’t you arrested him yet?’ I asked.
‘He’s well connected and smart. And the girls won’t testify against him. You have to understand a lot of them are so poor they’ve never been in a hotel before. He takes them to the shops in Ipanema to pick out dresses from New York and the Palace Hotel in Copacabana to drink French champagne. They’ve never seen a crystal chandelier before. Or waiters in dinner jackets. They’re from the favelas. And they discover that it’s nice to sleep in a bed with satin sheets. It makes no difference that a sixty-year-old slob pants on top of them for a few minutes. They figure that’s his right for buying them so many presents.’
‘Is there anything you can do about the other men in the movie?’
‘When we spoke, you told me one lived in Portugal and the other in France.’
‘Sottomayor – the guy with the cane – lives here in Lisbon. The fat guy – Gilles Laplage – lives in Paris.’
‘Unless they come to Rio, there’s nothing I can do. I told you that already.’
‘If they are friends with Forester, maybe you could somehow lure one or both of them to Brazil. Maybe you could arrest foreigners more easily than Brazilians.’
He laughed in a burst. ‘You ever been to Rio de Janeiro, Monroe?’
‘No.’
‘Sex tourism is the main industry here. Tens of thousands of American and European men fly to Rio every month, eager to drink caipirinhas and fuck Brazilian pussy until their dicks fall off.’
I replied with silence.
‘Look, I know you’re disappointed,’ he said, ‘but that’s the way it is. You wouldn’t want me lying to you. It’s economics. If we started arresting men like Sottomayor for getting some young tail while on vacation, then our fancy hotels would all go broke and my boss would have my ass!’
Denis Gershon hasn’t phoned yet. I don’t expect him to. I no longer have any hope of convincing anyone in a position of authority to take over this fight for me.
When we fail at something, we are reminded what is possible and what is not, and I think that maybe I’ve known all along that this wasn’t going to end in any sort of satisfying way. I thought that I couldn’t hear the messages the world was trying to tell me of late, but it’s possible that I’d already heard them and simply couldn’t accept what they had to say.
And yet it’s also true that the idea of embarking on a slow and solitary campaign for justice – entirely in secret – appeals to me. After all, in a year or two, or maybe only in a few months, Sottomayor is sure to miss the sly pleasure of telling a thirteen-year-old girl to get on her knees for him. Given his personality, I think it’s very unlikely that he’s going to give up such extracurricular enjoyments just because one of his partners in crime met a violent end. Or because he had a bit of trouble with a Colorado-born cop who can’t even speak Portuguese correctly.
I’ll have to study his routines closely, of course. And learn all I can about him. The tricky part will be coming up with a plan for trapping him that won’t put me or anyone I love at risk. Of course, it’s possible that I’ll end up having to admit that it just can’t be done – that he’s simply too high up in the tower for me to reach. But my childhood has made me resourceful and patient. And quietly devious, as well. I think it would be silly to bet against anyone who has survived what I’ve survived. Gabriel and me both.
Private detective work? It’s probably what I’ve been preparing to do nearly all my life.
Chapter 34
Today is Saturday 11 August 2012. I woke at dawn this morning and watched the pink and gold sunrise while sitting at my bedroom window. I considered floating up and away towards all that colour, but I preferred to stay with Ana and my kids.
When I stood up to go downstairs, my wife turned over and told me in a half-asleep voice that she almost forgot that she owed me fifty euros in cash since my police benefits hadn’t yet been cancelled. I told her I’d take her and the kids out to lunch at Nood with my windfall, and she puckered out her lips so that I’d give her a kiss, and after I did, she rolled on her belly and went back to sleep.
I’d decided the night before to return Sandi’s ring to her mother, but after eating my oatmeal and blueberries I discovered that it wasn’t in the spice cabinet where I’d left it, which meant that Gabriel wasn’t ready yet to part with it. Hunting for it gave me other ideas, and while my second cup of tea was steeping, I took out the box of my mother’s treasures from its hiding place and ripped open the yellowing tape I’d sealed it with twenty-eight years earlier. Mom’s copy of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems was at the bottom, under the charcoal drawings she’d done of me when I was little and the old amethyst brooch she wore every Sunday to church, and my half of the deck of her cards with Lisbon monuments on the back that I’d divided with Ernie. I didn’t know that her book was what I was after, but when I saw the cover – a white kite flying against a pale blue sky – my heartbeat began to race.
When I opened the book to the title page, a flower fell out – a golden columbine.
I put the papery, faded-yellow flower back where it had been and paged forward. The book smelled sour, like dust and vinegar. On opening the first page, I discovered it had been published in 1942 by Colleción Cometa. How did I remember after all these years that the quote I wanted was in the fourteenth poem?
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.
You could tell a lot about Mom just by seeing how perfectly straight she’d underlined those beautiful words.
The tip of her pencil had been right here, I thought, pressing hard below the first line, so that a fraction of her graphite would come off on my fingertip and become part of me. She’d looked at this page, right where I’m looking now.
Over breakfast, I called Ernie because I’d finally figured out that our mother had understood what she most wanted for us after reading Pablo Neruda. While I was having trouble putting the closeness to Mom I felt into words, I realized that what she wanted so badly had, in fact, come to pass, which meant that I didn’t need to explain much of anything. ‘We’ve had really good adventures, haven’t we?’ I said instead.
‘Yeah, it’s been amazing!’ he replied in his little brother voice.
‘And we’re not finished yet.’
‘No, lots of good things are sure to happen over the coming years.’
His enthusiasm prompted me to tell him about my therapy. When I was finished, he told me that I’d done really well. He also said he’d help pay for my sessions.
‘My benefits cover them,’ I told him.
‘Then I’ll start paying you and Ana back for what you’ve given me over the years.’
‘Ernie, did you rob a bank or something?’
‘No, I sold two paintings.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Two of my flower paintings
. . . I sold them. About two weeks ago.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘You’d just gotten home from the hospital and it didn’t seem the right time, and then we got to talking about other things – and anyway, I’m telling you now.’
Across the sixty miles between us, I could see the smile of a man racing so far ahead of our expectations for him that he could no longer even spot them behind him any more. ‘Who bought them?’ I asked.
‘The owner of a restaurant in England – it’s called the Jardine Bistro. It’s in a town called Wivenhoe. His name is Chris. He’s originally Swiss but he’s lived in England a long time.’
‘How did he find out about your work?’
‘One of his friends found it on my Facebook page. She’s interested in flowers. Her name is Jo. She told him about me. I’m in touch with them both.’
‘You have a Facebook page?’
‘Yeah, I made one a few months ago.’
‘And this Swiss guy bought two of your paintings?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Without seeing them in person?’
‘I have high-definition images of them on my Facebook page. I also took close-ups of the most important details and mailed them to him.’
‘Ernie, how much did he pay you?’ I asked in a suspicious voice; I was expecting that the restaurateur had taken advantage of him.
‘A thousand euros.’
‘For the two?’
‘No, each.’
That was far more than I’d expected, but something didn’t add up. ‘You asked for a thousand euros each?’ I questioned.
‘It’s way too high a price, I know, but—’
‘It’s not too high!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m just amazed you asked for a decent price.’
‘I asked so much so he wouldn’t buy them.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The ones he wanted I really liked, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to sell them, so I asked for a ridiculous price and he agreed. My plan backfired!’ He laughed merrily. It sounded as if he’d climbed up to a sunlit hillside inside himself.
The Night Watchman Page 41
