by Liam Durcan
It was logical that Globomart, paying Neuronaut large sums of money to analyze its most recent advertising campaign, would fully expect the Chief Scientific Officer to be on-site, ready to troubleshoot. Marc-André reminded them all that for Patrick to simply be out of the office was troublesome. For the only person who knew the science to be away in another country, indefinitely, was a slap in their billionaire Lutheran faces. Marc-André had turned to the other people in the room: “And we haven’t even brought up why he needs to go. Who wants to be the one to explain to the Olafsons that he’s going to a war crimes trial? Public relations-wise, this is a worst-case scenario. Welcome to Chernobyl.”
At this point the other two founding board members, Jessica Stallins and Steve Zaks–or “Steve Zaks from Baltimore,” as he inexplicably liked to call himself–both began frantically pacing around the main meeting room as if they had been suddenly transported to the listing promenade deck of the SS Titanic. Jeremy Bancroft, who had been parachuted in as CEO just five months before, sat motionless and listened. At one point, when the discussions got heated, he took a long, almost thirsty look out the window in the direction of the Charles River.
Marc-André continued pressing Patrick–if he thought the Olafsons didn’t appreciate him disappearing at this critical phase, he should try imagining how the shareholders would react. Just mentioning the shareholders–evoking images from their inaugural meeting one year ago where they had stormed the ballroom, commandeered microphones, and forced him to answer endless questions–made Patrick wince. Marc-André reminded him that the shareholders loved nothing more than to punish flighty moves like this, and their desertion could be sudden and would cause the very ground beneath them to crumble. Marc-André finished his summation, sat down beside Patrick, and, knowing his colleague would understand French, whispered in his most irritating Parisian accent: “Tu restes, cowboy.”
Then something quite unusual happened. Bancroft said that he, for one, supported Patrick making the trip, and the room rolled into another silence. Even though he was the CEO and had been incredibly quick to absorb the technological details behind Neuronaut, Bancroft was still the outsider and had not yet imposed himself in that CEO-way on “internal” issues like this. It was like watching a stepfather’s first foray into an old and foreign family squabble. The stepchildren were all a bit stunned.
“It isn’t Patrick, but his ideas, that are indispensable,” Bancroft said, and Patrick remembered thinking that he would have preferred a simple, autocratic edict rather than the business school clichés. “We can’t afford to be so dependent on the physical presence of one person, can we? It would be valuable to prove that to Globomart. Besides, Patrick has brought somebody on board specifically to handle data situations like this when he’s inaccessible.”
“Sanjay?” Jessica said, alarm and disbelief fusing in her voice.
Sanjay Gopal was a post-doc from his old lab, hired two months before on Patrick’s recommendation. On paper, Sanjay was perfect: brains and drive and a monthly student loan statement heavy with the weight of mounting interest. He was also, despite his designation as protegé, miserable in the office where his recent arrival and prepubescent appearance combined with the insecurity of the business-types to bleed credibility from him. Sanjay had offered his resignation three times in the last month; with a bit of supportive psychotherapy and an implied challenge to his intelligence–motivational tactics Patrick had mastered as a thesis supervisor–he agreed to stay.
Jessica looked around for support but all eyes were on Bancroft as he held up his right hand and leaned forward ever so slightly, a CEO-grade gesture that was authoritative and commiserating at the same time. It was nothing and yet it was perfect, a boardroom martial arts move that disarmed his colleagues and made Patrick understand why they were paying him.
“We need to prove to our clients, to our shareholders, that we’re more than a boutique operation. We can’t be dependent on one person. Patrick trusts Sanjay. I think we should all trust Sanjay.”
Jessica groaned and Marc-André put his head in his hands. Bancroft turned to Patrick, obviously looking for a peacemaking gesture, some quick concession offered from the victorious party. Patrick promised he’d be available, e-mail, phone, whatever, no limitations. This was, after all, the way the world usually did business, he reminded everyone. Jessica, apparently still wordless, snorted. The other two seethed. But Bancroft agreed with him. Bancroft knew it was Patrick’s expertise that drove the company, just as he understood it was Patrick who had taken the biggest risks–quitting his university job and going to court to win the right to take his research results into the private sector. He knew who had made all of them wealthy in the last year.
Nobody said a word when Patrick tried to give his assurances. He’d thought Bancroft would be the swing vote, but, looking at the people around the table, he realized he’d been wrong. Bancroft was the only vote, and he had voted for Patrick. Sanjay was his voice in his absence. He’d be leaving on Monday.
Explaining the situation to Heather–the woman he’d been seeing for the last year–was tougher. He would have preferred to say nothing, to let her assume it was nothing more than a business trip that became unexpectedly prolonged, but she had seen an information package about the tribunal lying around the condo and she had begun to comment on the books he read, books about–as she put it–“people who do terrible things.” He started off by admitting that he knew Hernan García personally, which, to his surprise, she was relieved to hear. (Apparently, it made those books and his interest in the details of the trial less creepy.) And if she’d been quietly miffed that he hadn’t confided in her, her anger found its fullest voice when he told her he had a ticket for Den Haag and needed to pack his bags. Several hours of interrogation ensued, always narrowing down to the same question: “Why are you going?” The most convenient response, the one he settled on, was actually the truth. Hernan’s lawyer had asked him to come. She left without saying goodbye.
During that first telephone conversation, di Costini hadn’t volunteered how he had found out what Patrick did for a living or how he got his number, and Patrick never asked, assuming the decision to call had been one of Hernan’s last requests before he chose to stop speaking. Only later did di Costini let it slip that it had been Celia, Hernan’s daughter, who asked him to approach Patrick. This complicated matters for Patrick, making him think that this was a more personal appeal from the Garcías. But as the calls from di Costini continued, increasing in frequency, it became apparent to Patrick why he was being contacted.
At first the questions were vague (“Could Hernan have a brain problem?”) before becoming progressively, frighteningly, sophisticated (“But if brain activity is largely determined, and determined by physical attributes of brain structure, then where is his decision-making capacity? Where is his intent?”). He was impressed by the lawyer’s interest in neuroscience and flattered by his suggestion that Patrick come to Den Haag to continue the discussion in person. It hadn’t occurred to Patrick that anyone would take a biological approach to Hernan’s defence. Marcello was asking questions Patrick had begun to ask himself, questions that intrigued him and made him uneasy at the same time. Of course, the facts of the case remained.
Hoping to find some brain malformation that could potentially explain aberrant moral reasoning, Marcello even had Hernan undergo an MRI (“Ridiculously normal, can you believe it?” Marcello hissed). Patrick had never mentioned any of this to Heather. If she were around when Marcello called, Patrick would cover the phone and mouth the word “Business” before finding a door to close.
Initially he had declined di Costini’s invitation to meet in Den Haag, deciding it was better to keep his distance from the Garcías and their problems. But he made the mistake of watching the news. It started with a glimpse of Hernan during an international update, and in no time he was searching through the newspapers, until finally he was running through the posted transcripts of the trial on the trib
unal’s Web site, all the time telling himself he was only keeping informed, overestimating his detachment even as it waned and then vanished altogether. After the first two weeks of proceedings, watching the evidence mount, he realized this might be the last time he would be able to see Hernan. He decided to take di Costini up on his offer.
Patrick stared up at the ceiling of the auditorium, from which one of those huge UN-certified mobiles hung. Mysterious symbols (geometric shapes, representations of people, a cow with what looked to be a lightning bolt shot through it) floated through space above the oblivious participants. He scanned the ceiling and counted fire sprinklers that were like little toadstools pocking the great smooth face of the ceiling at regular intervals, another marking of grand institutional design. He imagined the spray from the sprinklers soaking the blue industrial carpet until it buckled into a wave pattern, the water peeling paint and warping wood and popping out the mahogany inlays. The mobile would whirr about as the deluge continued, slowing as it dripped before settling into a frozen, rusted grimace. But now, it only sat there. A nebula system slowly precessing in silence.
One of di Costini’s colleagues stood and addressed the justices. The first thing Patrick noticed, aside from her unnaturally good posture, was how young she looked. Early thirties, maybe still in her twenties. He watched her trying to argue a procedural point, interrupted by a flurry of words–di Costini stood, as did another lawyer who had been seated at the other table–the argument ending with the chief justice of the tribunal rebuking the young lawyer and di Costini. She sat, and Patrick continued to watch her in her chair until his attention drifted back to di Costini. This was a place of contentiousness, Patrick was reminded, a place where every word had repercussions. To an outsider, the tribunal was daunting. A body of knowledge and a system of rules, all foreign to him at first. But he’d told himself before he came to Den Haag that the trial was like anything, that it could be reduced to facts and principles. Anything could be broken down and understood, its threat defused. He had become a student of the tribunal, learning that, in contrast to all the disputed histories that can arise in the aftermath of a civil war, the birth of the tribunal itself had been surprisingly smooth and uncontested. The International Tribunal for Crimes in Honduras had been established by the United Nations along the lines of the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Various attempts at reconciling atrocities committed in the civil war in Honduras had failed, and the government, continually stung by the international community’s hectoring and increasingly slow-to-arrive economic development cheques, threw up its hands. All it took was the added carrot of upcoming G8 talks on debt forgiveness, and the president of Honduras almost sprained a wrist in the rush to sign the agreement granting authority to the UN. Once it became somebody else’s problem, the pace of activity picked up dramatically. There were arrests in Tegucigalpa and Florida and, finally, in Canada. Deportations were fast-tracked and the planes touched down long enough on the tarmac at Tegucigalpa for a ceremonial refuelling and repatriation before taking off for Den Haag. It didn’t stop there, of course. The archives of the secret police were opened and there were names named. More arrests followed, and some scores were settled along less explicit jurisdictional lines. The period of relative calm in the 1990s was replaced by the familiar sound of gunshots heard throughout the night from anywhere in Tegucigalpa. Hernan García wasn’t implicated in these first wild weeks of reckoning. By the time they thought to look for him, he had already been gone fifteen years.
Marcello di Costini now rose and approached the bench where he conferred with the three tribunal judges. Four heads leaned in toward something being said. There was some sort of agreement that the prosecution team appeared to have no objection to. It was easier to bear without the earphones, without the words deadening all the possibilities.
Patrick was glad that Hernan García was absent. He had wanted to see the chambers without having him there; ideally, he would have liked the gallery empty, to be able to sit and in some way demystify the place and its strange customs before having to face Hernan here in his new role as a criminal. He wanted to separate the place from the man, and in that way limit all the accusations to that little glass booth, that aquarium where a new species of Hernan García could be contained. But listening to the testimony, that plainsong of physical horror and depravity, made him despair that nothing was capable of detoxifying this place. He put the earphones back on.
Patrick scoured the gallery for a face that he could recognize, not holding out too much hope that he’d immediately find any of the Garcías. That’s when he saw Elyse Brenman sitting on the far bank of seats. When Patrick had first met Elyse, she was still a reporter for a Montreal newspaper, knocking on his door to interview him for one of a series of articles she was writing about the fresh allegations made against local corner store owner Hernan García. The articles became a book called The Angel of Lepaterique, and the book became a best-seller and now Elyse didn’t work for the newspaper any more. He hadn’t thought she’d be here, and it was only after spotting her that it seemed logical: the story hadn’t yet come to a conclusion. She wore jeans and a cloth jacket, and with the knapsack at her feet she could have passed for a student in a lecture hall, taking notes and lifting her gaze occasionally in the direction of the tribunal judges. He lowered his head and began fiddling with the earphone cord, trying to roll it up, bringing his attention back to the proceedings.
Witness C-129 finished his testimony and was escorted from the stand. The door used for trial participants closed behind him. Patrick had read that the defendants were caged in an ultra-secure holding cell under the building but he knew nothing about the witnesses. Would C-129 be dispatched back home now? Just a quick Den Haag cameo, get it all off your chest and then a cab back to the airport? It was a bit cold. He hoped that they at least had a room for witnesses somewhere in the tribunal building–for some reason an anteroom resembling a business-class lounge in an airport came to mind–where they could put their feet up and get a handshake from a local dignitary or maybe have a drink while they sat through the mandatory debriefing from a UN-approved psychiatrist.
The chief justice declared a recess until the next morning. Patrick waited for the clap of a gavel, but that was an American thing. This was definitely not an American thing. The lawyers just got up and placed their large binders into larger briefcases. The crowd rose and some stretched in silence, as though they had just sat through a disappointing movie or a game where the home team lost, not unexpectedly, by a couple of goals. Maybe they had all come to see Hernan. It was an odd crowd: mostly people on their own who studied each other as they put on their coats. Some exchanged a word or two of greeting, and he began to think that there was such a thing as “regulars” here, lonelies who had set up shop on the banks of this foul river. He moved quickly to be the first at the door, not wanting to come across Elyse Brenman as he ducked through the crowd.
Outside, Patrick decided against waiting for a cab and risking ambush by Elyse, opting instead for a brisk walk. It was not yet four o’clock and already getting dark, darker than it would have been in Boston for that time of day in mid-November. Other than that, Den Haag could have been Boston’s sister city. The air was a big bowl, sharp with sea smells, and a fog had installed itself, squatting most thickly in empty areas of the public parks. Placemat-sized wads of leaves clotted the sidewalks. All that was missing was a Red Sox fan staggering through the mist, muttering about something epic and trying to find the train to Newton. He pulled his jacket up to his chin and headed back up Johan de Wittlaan, looking for the Hotel Metropole’s corporate symbol floating in the fog. No luck.
Eventually, the Metropole appeared out of the darkness across the boulevard, its lobby of marble and glass glowing like a festive Las Vegas crypt. As he passed through the lobby, a tall man waved him down from behind the front desk. Up close, Patrick saw the man wore a name tag that said “Edwin.” Edwin was not a happy man. Tragically prominen
t ears sat on either side of his head like satellite dishes, picking up bad vibes from the entire Metropole constellation. Apparently Patrick was the cause of that day’s crisis. Edwin told him that the front desk had received numerous calls for him, incessant calls, some quite provocative and rude. He was requested to turn on his cell phone and check his e-mail. “Immediately, please,” Edwin said, lowering his gaze to emphasize the obvious seriousness of his request. And with that, Patrick was dismissed. While he hadn’t been hungry before, speaking with Edwin stirred an appetite in him, and instead of rushing off to comply with Edwin’s wishes, he turned and let the concierge watch as he walked over to the Metropole’s deserted restaurant, where he proceeded to eat an early dinner with deliberate, almost malicious leisure. But he began to feel ashamed of himself before the meal was over. This was the extent of his defiance, he scolded himself, churlishness. Passive-aggressive dining, all to spite his colleagues and put an officious concierge in his place. It was a short journey from the restaurant to the bar. It wasn’t stalling, he told himself as he ordered a scotch, the bar was simply a transition phase, a recuperative moment. But Patrick couldn’t help dreading the thought of all those messages lining up in his inbox, each communication dense with the thinly veiled wrath of his partners, still upset that he’d chosen to disappear just when the Globomart project was launching, cursing his technical indispensability, and not believing for a moment that Sanjay was up to the task.
After a second scotch, the feelings of nostalgia for Boston and everyone at Neuronaut began creeping onto the surrounding barstools to keep him company. They were the closest he had to friends. He remembered how Bancroft had called him into his office, weeks before he’d publicly endorsed Patrick’s decision to leave. Bancroft had sat him down to tell him that he’d heard about “his troubles” and what was going on in The Hague and said he would help in any way he could if Patrick needed anything. He was friendly and vague, with a tone somewhere between a guidance counsellor and a distracted older brother. Patrick asked Bancroft how he’d found out–for all his scotch-induced reveries of the people at Neuronaut, he’d never actually confided in anyone there–and Bancroft told him he’d read The Angel of Lepaterique that summer, that he knew about Hernan and all the Garcías and Patrick himself.
