by Liam Durcan
After Patrick first heard the accusations from Elyse in a small room at Caltech in the summer of 1998, when they were no more than absurdities, he clung to the most harmless explanations, that the allegations were trumped up or that it was all nothing more than a case of mistaken identity. But as the months passed and Elyse’s articles appeared and no rebuttal came, Patrick was finally forced to consider that Hernan could have been present during such acts; yet this admission was always qualified by the belief that Hernan must have been coerced or tortured himself. Hernan had to have been a victim too.
After a year at Caltech, he’d accepted a faculty position back in Boston, and it was there, in the autumn of 2000, that he heard the news that Hernan’s wife, Marta, had died. Patrick had been away for ten days in Portugal–a vacation grafted onto the tail end of a meeting, the young academic’s standard mode of travel–and returned home to hear his mother’s voice on his answering machine. One message among many, right after the reminder that his car was due for servicing. His mother said there had been an accident, and she gave him the slim details she knew, but Patrick wouldn’t remember any of them. All he could think about was Marta. Already dead a week. Already buried. What had he been doing on that day the week before? Was that the day he skipped a plenary session to do some sightseeing in Lisbon? For some reason, he was obsessed with trying to remember what he’d eaten that day, hoping it hadn’t been something he’d enjoyed, wanting it to be anything other than a local delicacy savoured at the very moment his friend lay dying. Then came the thought of Marta’s children and Hernan, weathering through a life that had become absurd in its clustering of grief. The funeral had come and gone, and embarrassed about the reason he’d missed it, he’d sent a card to Hernan instead of calling.
He’d listened to his mother’s message again and again. She had been uncharacteristically vague about what had happened, and it wasn’t until a few days later, when the newspaper clipping she sent finally arrived, that he understood why. The article was one of those matter-of-fact page three summations filled with the details of murders and drownings and other violent misadventures of the last news day. Below the fold he saw her name. Marta García, age fifty-seven, wife of the NDG resident under investigation for possible war crimes, had been killed in a car accident. Single vehicle. Seat belt unused. The concrete support of an overpass and an icy road at night cited as contributing factors. An investigation was ongoing.
The next spring, with the publication of The Angel of Lepaterique, Patrick was faced with the final, definitive assault on the Garcías. There was no surprise in the attack on Hernan–most of the allegations had been made in the newspaper reports. But in addition to what was expected about Hernan, Elyse had speculated about the nature of Hernan and Marta’s relationship, going so far as to claim that Marta’s death had been no accident, but was instead the deliberate act of a woman who knew the truth, a confirmation of the charges against her husband. But the bulk of The Angel of Lepaterique was focused on Hernan, making it clear that the man present in the interrogation rooms at Lepaterique had been him, positively identified, his presence documented and corroborated and in no visible way coerced. Unlike so many Hondurans who had disappeared into the grasp of Battalion 316, there was never any evidence that Hernan had been kidnapped. Marta had filed no report with the police after that first absence in 1981. He left and came back three days later, nine days after Álvarez’s initial memo was drafted.
But Hernan García also had his supporters, who didn’t deny he was present at Lepaterique but argued that instead of committing barbarous acts he had tried to save countless lives amid the most atrocious, coercive conditions imaginable. There were dissenting witnesses to support this notion–two former detainees and two military personnel who attested that Hernan’s actions during the interrogations were more consistent with someone wanting to give aid. Another witness claimed it was Hernan’s voice she heard shouting “Enough” during one of her interrogations. There had also been a groundswell of dissenting opinion in America that, on days when Patrick felt hopeless, could be psychologically reconfigured into support for Hernan. A well-known right-wing American radio personality had, in the midst of his daily invective, taken up Hernan García as his cause célèbre: a man falsely imprisoned on trumped-up charges to be tried in a court that had no authority, a situation that no American would countenance, but one that the weak-kneed folks up in Canuckistan would bend over backwards for. In his eyes, he said to his audience (syndicated to 112 stations nationwide, local numbers in the Arbitron ’05 report showing a 5.1 share in one of America’s biggest markets, and pistol-whipping competitors in the prized 25-to-44 demographic), Hernan García was a patriot and a victim of revisionist history–after all, hadn’t President Reagan awarded the Legion of Merit to the head guy involved in all this? Was this how we repaid our compatriots who fought the war on communism? Was this how we treated a man who had served in a war on terror before we even knew what a war on terror was? As the trial started, Hernan’s name began speckling the blogosphere–most sources regarding his silence as a noble gesture, as a tacit refusal to acknowledge the authority of the tribunal–and a detailed daily recap of the trial’s progress appeared, where the case against him was dissected and mocked by a thousand echoing voices and the whole process dismissed as little more than a liberal-guilt show trial. What followed from these new ethereal supporters was an alternative narrative of Hernan García to refute the one put forward by Elyse Brenman, García as hero and healer, successful immigrant small-business owner, now a convenient victim offered up on the altar of internationalism and political correctness. Patrick watched uneasily as Hernan was championed in this manner, a Dreyfus for the neo-cons. It was a relief, in a way, the political antidote to The Angel of Lepaterique, and Patrick supposed he would have welcomed it had those involved not been completely indifferent to Hernan the person, and their motivations not been tainted by ideology and a reflexive bias against Elyse Brenman’s version. As the trial approached, noise from both sides of the argument rose in unison: there were candlelight vigils for the victims of Lepaterique at college campuses throughout New England and news that the Democratic Voice, a think-tank specializing in Latin America policy-making, had offered support to the Garcías and were sending a representative to Holland to observe the proceedings–“simply to ensure fairness.”
Marcello di Costini, with his client mute in the defendant’s chair, had the dissenting witnesses on the stand for the better part of two weeks prior to Patrick’s arrival in Den Haag, trying dervishly to spin their words into a larger narrative worthy of competing against the chorus of damning testimony. Several witnesses had gone so far as to attest that the conditions in the camp improved after Hernan had been brought there to replace the military’s doctors. Marcello spoke to Patrick on the phone after one particularly good day of testimony, excited and for the first time sounding optimistic, proudly telling Patrick that he had finally been able to advance the notion that Hernan was a man caught in terrible circumstances, a man whose instincts were to heal, whose intent was good.
But if that was Hernan’s intent, it was lost on many of the witnesses who were now on the stand. The majority of witnesses called said that Hernan García de la Cruz worked to prolong their misery, that unconsciousness was a relief of which he repeatedly deprived them. They swore that the first thing they saw as they regained consciousness was Hernan García’s face, that they looked into his eyes and saw nothing human there.
Patrick had clung to the mock-heroic fantasy for months himself, thinking it impossible for a man to do the things Hernan had been accused of and then carry on with a normal life. Then he read profiles of the physicians stationed in Auschwitz and learned of the common delusion among them: how the routine of selecting certain prisoners for death was perversely transformed in their minds into the act of saving others. Under the necessary conditions, any action could be rationalized as necessary, as inevitable, as morally justified. Men like Hernan had don
e terrible things and gone back to their quiet lives as husbands and fathers and physicians. Perhaps Hernan was deluded, Patrick thought, caught up in a situation that didn’t permit judgment, that paralyzed judgment.
But this was a matter of more than sincerity, more than what Hernan García believed he was doing. The tribunal was about what he had done.
And he was accused of doing terrible things.
Half of the next morning’s session was all Patrick could take. Again, no García in the courtroom. But the trial carried on and the testimony continued, intensifying even, making him wonder if Hernan was absent because he could not bear to hear what was being said against him. The facts arrived and were assembled into a wall of truth. Another witness, a thin man in his sixties with a face like hammered copper and thickets of white hair, took the stand and gave his account of events between November 1982 and April 1983. He had been a teacher and a grass-roots organizer in San Pedro Sula, where he had been picked up on a warrant for sedition. He had been beaten and revived, then more soundly beaten. He spoke about what was done to him after he could no longer talk. A mask made out of an inner tube had been tied around his head. Patrick recognized scattered Spanish words: cabeza and capucha. The union organizer’s testimony was disembodied further by its transmission through the voice of a female translator, a voice of gentle determination now describing, in first person, in smooth and impeccable English, the abuse his penis and scrotum were subjected to.
Patrick became aware of Elyse Brenman again; though she was as nondescript as ever, something today was different, something from her buzzed in his peripheral vision like a bulb that demanded replacement. Patrick tried to ignore it but gave in and looked over to see Elyse staring straight at him. Then, of course, she waved. He stood up, fumbling with the cord of his earphones and shrugging his jacket on, all one continuous, incompetent motion. The gallery spectators and guards registered his departure, casting disapproving glances as he edged along the row and climbed the stairs to the door.
Outside the tribunal building, he was immersed in light and air and relief and felt the urge to walk, anywhere, just away from the glass walls and industrial-carpet smell of the tribunal. He reached the fountain in front of the Congress Centrum when he heard his name being called.
“Dr. Lazerenko.”
He turned and saw Elyse Brenman. She was trotting from the tribunal building toward him. Another wave, golden-retriever friendly.
“Patrick, hello, I saw you in the gallery. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Likewise.”
Elyse Brenman smiled as she approached. It was her default facial expression, one that she likely learned to deploy from her first day as a reporter. Her demeanour softened people. Patrick knew first-hand how difficult it would be for someone who didn’t know Elyse’s purpose to slam a door on that friendly face. It had worked for her faultlessly when she’d first appeared at the Cognitive Neuroscience Department office at Caltech in 1998 and asked for him. A cold call, the paradoxical stealth of Elyse Brenman. The departmental secretary, a fearsome lady in her sixties widely treasured for her ability to be a Berlin Wall of administrative hostility to unexpected visitors and their queries, turned out to be a true Berlin Wall and collapsed under the weight of Elyse Brenman’s charm. The secretary phoned Patrick in his new post-doc’s office–a fluorescent-lit converted utility room the size of a confessional–and said that he had a visitor. Elyse was ushered in and at first Patrick assumed she was a student in one of the labs he was teaching. She quickly corrected that impression by pulling a notebook and a tape recorder out of her backpack and introducing herself as a reporter who needed to talk to him about Hernan García.
Elyse summarized what she knew, and what she was about to report in a series of articles. And so his first experience with Elyse was of a miscalculation followed by a visceral sense of alarm, causing his hands to dampen and his heart to make that thin-air, no-ropes climb into his throat.
With Elyse sitting there in his office that first time, he remembered being momentarily speechless, then having individual words appear and clot together, not having enough meaning to emerge, until finally he stuttered out a plea of ignorance of anything about Hernan García’s former life. It was true, he had worked for him but he was only a teenager then and knew as little as any worker would know about their employer. And yet, Elyse countered, not all employees date the boss’s daughter. With that she launched into a dozen other questions before Patrick realized that he didn’t have to talk to her, that he could pick up a phone and call security and it would be over. But that would provoke her, and he decided, to his credit, that to get rid of Elyse Brenman he would have to prove he was no use to her. That he had no story to tell. So Patrick Lazerenko rhapsodized the vague details of his adolescence in Montreal, of growing up in NDG and working for the Garcías in their store, Le Dépanneur Mondial. Banalities, dull summers of stoner glory, a splash of teenage angst. It worked: Elyse Brenman turned off her tape recorder. He had no way of knowing that Elyse would reappear in his life–a message left on his machine, an e-mail asking how he was doing–every six months or so, certain that he wasn’t telling her everything, that he was some sort of cog in the evil empire of Hernan García and was holding out on her in some way, hoping that the accrued weight of guilt would convince him to speak to her more truthfully.
But their first meeting ended civilly enough. Elyse thanked him and closed the door, leaving him in that small office, the light humming, his body aching in such a way that he could believe the confrontation had been, at least in part, physical.
He’d been at Caltech for little more than a month after finishing four years of a residency in Boston, and he thought, if anything, the succession of American place names would have given him a soothing distance from Montreal and the Garcías’ problems. But even in America, where international news was treated with indifference or, at best, with an almost patronizing anthropological curiosity, it became impossible to avoid the story Elyse eventually broke. Patrick had never been a great sleeper, and his habit of keeping the television on an all-news station was rewarded with the occasional television image of Hernan trapped in that stock pose of categorical denial, shielding himself from a camera. Elyse’s story led to more coverage, a television crew camped out on the sidewalk in front of the Garcías’ store, other images appearing: photos of the victims–including a picture that he would come to know in too much detail–and the accusers who were marshalling opinion and demanding justice. He could only watch and call his mother for more details from Elyse’s newspaper reports.
And after hearing all the crimes that his friend had been accused of committing, Patrick Lazerenko did what ended up troubling him for the next seven years. He did nothing.
It didn’t start out as nothing. It started out as a calm assessment of the facts, taking one’s time to figure out what was obviously a complicated situation. Hernan would understand, he wouldn’t want anyone just jumping to his defence as a point of personal loyalty. No. He would demand that the case be analyzed. But there were so many facts, so many allegations. Then it came to seem that too much time had passed, that to call now would be to patronize Hernan or admit failure for not calling in the first place.
He concentrated on his own life: getting back to Boston after Caltech, accepting a faculty position and creating the infrastructure of a research program. He wrote grants and went to meetings and worked at developing that necessary reputation as someone on the rise, someone who could publish citable papers, manage a lab full of post-docs, and, in the words of his former departmental chairman, “develop the necessary public-private partnerships that would see us into the next century.” All of this was understandable, he reassured himself, and he became a bystander as the Garcías came under siege.
He wished that his inaction could be chalked up to the dedication of a young faculty member feeling the pressures of being freshly tenure-tracked, that he was too occupied with starting a career and developing
a reputation as a researcher to care about the allegations, but the truth was that during that time he collected every piece of information about Hernan’s case. He couldn’t avoid buying The Angel of Lepaterique when it finally came out a couple of years after that first visit from Elyse, and when its spine split from use he bought a second copy. He wasn’t alone; the book spent the better part of two calendar years squatting in various locations on the best-seller list. The Angel of Lepaterique won awards and thoughtful appreciation, and the indictment levied in the book was probably the cause of a Royal Commission investigating how refugee status was granted. The book, which read like a grand narrative of infamy, changed everything for Patrick too. Elyse was not content for the book to be just a recitation of García’s actions in the context of Honduran history. The Angel was also a journal of the family’s flight from Honduras and arrival in Canada, a history of lies and delusions and fear. It was also a story heavy with personal details and psychological analysis of the Garcías’ lives and, to a degree, his own. In it were portraits of family and married life whose intimate tone shocked Patrick. How had she known these things? It was here that Elyse brought together the photos of the victims, here that Patrick had the first chance to see the only existing photo of José-Maria Fernandez, the most famous detainee at Lepaterique, a young man whose story Elyse found so compelling, and so similar to Patrick’s–both of them coming into contact with Hernan García at a critical moment in their lives–that she twinned them throughout her book. It was while searching through the sixteen-page index to the book that he had first found his name mentioned, as a prelude to being summarily analyzed. The sight of his name, not as the senior author of a paper or being cited for the work he’d done, but among the others embroiled in this secret history, brought a shock of recognition as sudden and disorienting as a physical blow:
