By the side of the road stood a man in a long white robe under a parasol glittery with gilt thread, beckoning.
Alazar, sorry to interrupt, but what’s that man doing?
He’s a priest. He wants us to visit his relics.
Raymond Renaud had travelled through this country, likely many times. Juliet, too, must have travelled this road on her trip south with the circus, another layer in a palimpsest of journeys.
Okay, please go on.
There, Alazar said as they entered the town of Shashemene, passing two men in a pony trap with bells jingling on its harness and boys playing at an ancient foosball table set up by the side of the road. See that flag with the tree on it, that is the flag of the Oromo, my people.
What will you do, Alazar?
What will I do?
Given the way things are going politically.
Oh. He grinned as several things flashed across his face. I will look for more work.
The nice hotel, as Alazar called it, and to which he brought her, was set close to a lake, Lake Awassa, where fish hawks perched in the trees near the water’s edge and monkeys swung among the green branches. Mosquito nets screened the windows of the room to which Sara was shown, a good sign. Having dropped her off, Alazar seemed anxious to be on his way — he would stay in town, he said, and pick her up at eight the next morning.
They had located the orphanage on a road outside of town before coming to the hotel. They had also stopped in the town itself, first at a roadside market, then in a café for espressos and spaghetti bolognese. Sara had asked Alazar to ask people what they knew of the orphanage and what they thought of it. No horrific rumours came their way. White men run it, Alazar told her after one conversation. Men? Yes, men, and it is a neat place. Neat, Alazar? Clean, they say it is tidy. Better to make their approach first thing in the morning, Sara decided.
At dusk, as she returned from a walk along the lake, distant bluish mountains visible over the indigo water, frondlike leaves quivering above gnarled tree trunks, Gerard’s words kept springing from under her feet: a ring of them.
It seemed too early for dinner, but after washing up, Sara set off down the hall to the dining room, ready for a drink, voices burbling ahead of her. Sometimes, even in the most remote places, she was beset by the possibility that, upon entering a room, she would find Colleen Bertucci, her accuser. Or Marie-Hélène Laberge, the Crown prosecutor, so ferocious behind the demure disguise of her baby-blue shirt in her attempt to undermine anyone’s, everyone’s belief in Sara. Would they recognize her after all these years? She was pretty certain, if not absolutely convinced, that she would recognize them. What a mess of emotion these thoughts aroused. Something riotous and charred. And rage. What could you possibly say to people who professed not to believe anything you said? Do you believe this? Or this? Or this?
Had Colleen Bertucci ever succumbed to any wrinkle of doubt, or did she, all these years later, remain self-righteously fixed in her conviction that the theft had happened as she said it did. The wallet: brown, leather, containing a Visa card, a YMCA membership card, her driver’s licence, fifty or so dollars in bills, some change, a fortune from a Chinese fortune cookie, a snapshot of her niece. As for Madame Laberge: had she simply been doing her job and fought for Colleen because she’d been paid to do so, or did she have to convince herself, at least partly, of her client’s version of events?
Sara had fantasized about running into Graham too but never had. He was married, she’d heard, to another much younger woman and had two small children.
Don’t get angry, Paul Kastner had insisted before their day in court. They had practised cross-examination techniques for hours. There was, in her story, the problem of having no good alibi after she’d left the Y for the span of time when the transactions with the stolen credit card had taken place. Alone, she’d wandered up Saint-Urbain and west along Sainte-Catherine, knapsack on her back, in no rush to get back to the apartment on de Maisonneuve, knowing that Graham would not be home until after five, oblivious to the fact that someone had decided she was a thief. The only shop she’d entered had been a drugstore, a Jean Coutu, where she’d bought a packet of condoms. Yes, she’d admitted that in court. The relationship had ended, she’d also said. This had been if not the most, then one of the most painful and humiliating moments on the stand. Paul Kastner’s voice kept repeating itself in her head: The most important thing is to stay calm. Don’t sound angry. It won’t help at all.
In the dining room, two white men, Australians by their accents, waved Sara over to their table. From Adelaide, they said. They were biking across Ethiopia. Yeah, it’s mad. We have stones thrown at us every day. Ah, but the country’s beautiful and we’re masochists. Fancy joining us for some doro wat?
I have to work, Sara said. She nodded to the notebook and pile of paper that she’d brought from her room. I’m a private consultant looking at some child-focused organizations and in the midst of a report.
They looked offended that their company didn’t suit her, or at the clumsiness of her excuse, but let her wander off to a table by the window, where night was eliminating the mountains and the lake and leaving white fairy lights to wind their way among the branches of the trees.
There were so many different kinds of lying: the conscious, expedient lies of social navigation, lies told to protect others and to shield yourself, the elisions, partial seeing, necessary secrets, deeper lies told to spare the self from pain, not to mention the inevitable rearranging of memory and the lies that weren’t really lies at all but alterations believed by those who told them, the problem of getting things wrong and needing to get things wrong because the truth was impossible to reach or impossible for the self to contain.
At the end of their time together, Sara had asked Paul Kastner if it mattered to him whether his clients were telling the truth. She had been genuinely curious about this. And Paul Kastner, the now so-very-successful Montreal criminal lawyer whose name cropped up every so often in the news, usually when he was defending someone notorious, had said no, he worked with what people told him, although what he liked were cases where the credible version of what had happened was not the obvious one. Then there were cases, like hers, in which nothing was resolved, other than that Colleen Bertucci’s version could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Anyway, he’d said, people can believe they are telling the truth even when what they believe is far from what actually happened, as in, they aren’t, psychologically or physiologically speaking, lying.
From the waiter who appeared at her side not in a jacket but something that more closely resembled a white lab coat, Sara ordered a beer, a St. Giorgis. Rain began to drum against the windows. An Ethiopian man in a business suit stopped by her table and asked her where she was from. She said Canada.
Every journalist she knew who’d worked overseas had performed the toe-touch, a kind of lie. She had, on more than one occasion, the last time on the road to Damascus, of all places. St. Paul had had his conversion, and Sara had sat in the back of a car being driven from the airport into Damascus, close to midnight local time, desperately listening to interviews recorded by locals on the ground and brought to her by her fixer so that she could scribble notes taken from them and claim to have been on the ground in Damascus, which she was, technically speaking, when she signed off on the piece two hours later, even if she’d never left her hotel room or spoken directly to anyone she quoted.
In interviews people had lied to her. The Pakistani ex-army officer: I know nothing of those bombings.
She did not know what she would find at the orphanage. She would allow Gerard’s suspicions to enter her, his intimations of the worst, but not give in to them. She had to permit him the possibility of belief while maintaining her own vigilance. She should at least be able to confirm whether or not Raymond Renaud had visited. She’d come searching for ground truths, whatever the search would bring. She did not know what she hoped to find.
Two cinder-block pillars flanked
a wrought-iron gate. Over the gate a wooden sign arched like a rainbow, hand-lettered words across it, Hope Village in English, and presumably the same in Amharic. As soon as Alazar stopped at the gate and rolled down his window to shout at the watchman, children tumbled out of the bushes — in T-shirts, sweaters, a padded vest, an old duffle jacket, all brown with dirt. There were children everywhere. It was as if the bushes had turned into children, who came running toward the car, shouting. They ran their fingers over the dust-covered, mud-spattered metal, and, spotting Sara, cried, Mother, how are you? Mother, we are hungry. We come with you. The watchman opened the gate, shooing the children away with a stick, while Alazar, with a sideways grin, said, I told him you have an appointment.
They pulled up to one side of a wide dirt compound. Beyond them, an Ethiopian woman in a flowered dress watered greens in a vegetable garden with a plastic bucket. Low buildings, some of whitewashed cement, others of prefabricated metal, formed a loose circle around the yard. An enclosure of fencing was visible in the distance: some children were secured inside the ring while others were desperate to get in. A white Toyota truck napped beneath one of two trees, and at the sight of the truck Sara’s heart leaped, but on second glance it was bulkier than Raymond Renaud’s as she remembered it from Juliet’s videotapes.
Everything appeared outwardly in good repair. The red dirt that sprayed up the white walls looked to have been splashed by water thundering down in recent rains and tumbling unchecked from the runnels in the metal roofs. A chicken strutted across the ferrous earth. Through the door of one of the closest buildings stepped a white man in a pale-blue shirt, who stared at them with belligerent surprise, then hurried in their direction.
Something about his clothing, the button-down collar of his pale-blue shirt, his tan trousers, identified him as American. Of a certain kind. Almost blond. Not quite handsome. A too-strong jawline. When Sara stepped out of the car, he adjusted his expression. She might be a wandering idealist with money to give. As she approached, he held out his hand. Richard Langley. Welcome to the Hope Village. Do you know about our work with orphaned children? Would you be interested in a tour?
She asked, though she recognized his name, if he was the director. He said he was. She handed him her card. She said she’d met Gerard Loftus in Addis, and he’d told her what had gone on between the former director and some of the boys, and she wanted to talk to him about it. He stopped. Everything open in his face shut down although he went on smiling. He didn’t want to talk about it, yet if he refused to talk she might accuse him of trying to cover up a crime. She knew it. He knew it. Then she would pull out Gerard’s other revelation: that all those who worked at the orphanage had been told not to talk. That he seemed so taken aback suggested that she was the first of her kind to arrive.
You can’t be surprised that Gerard would speak to someone, that he’d want to get the word out. I’m here because I want your version of what’s gone on.
Come into my office. He still held up her business card.
Sara leaned through the open car window and told Alazar she’d find him if she needed him and he offered up a comradely if guarded smile.
Richard Langley led her into the building from which he’d appeared. Inside, the air was awash with the loud whirr of old and bulky computers, the high-pitched buzz of bluish fluorescent lights. In an outer office, he introduced her to his secretary, Mrs. Fesseha, a grey-haired Ethiopian woman, who nodded hello, and Barney Wilcox, a pink-faced Englishman on a volunteer placement, whose enthusiasm subsided when Richard Langley failed to offer any explanation for Sara’s presence.
Inside his office, he shut the door but did not switch on the overhead light. There was clearly power, since lights were on in the outer office, so this meant he’d made a choice. He was not going to do anything to make her feel welcome. If he didn’t turn on the lights, maybe she would leave faster. He stepped behind a large wooden desk, the kind a teacher might have in a classroom. The squat bulk of his computer, also switched off, lurked on a side table to his left. A pad of yellow paper lay open on the desk’s surface. From the window to his right, which opened onto the side of the building, he would, at an angle, be able to view the front gate and any arrivals. Facing him, Sara saw only the white cement wall and metal roof of another single-storey building. She wondered if he’d been sent out by the foundation to clear up the wreckage that had been left by the former director, if he was seen as the sort who would be good at this, or if he had chosen this assignment. He wore a wedding band, she noted. If he had a family, had he brought them along? A low shelf, beneath the window, held a few books: Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, some Ian Fleming.
Richard Langley motioned her toward an armless wooden chair, a student’s chair, in front of his desk. Please take a seat, he said.
He placed her business card in the far corner of his large grey blotting pad. He did not offer her anything to eat or drink, no tea, no water. He seated himself, and the straightness of his back had its own force. A man, Sara thought, who liked things to go his way, his strength and weakness being that he wasn’t bendable. What exactly have you heard? he asked.
She took her tape recorder out of her pocket, placed it on the desk, and asked him if he minded her taping their conversation. Richard Langley stared at the recorder as if it were a small, spiky creature and said, Go ahead.
Gerard told me what he’d observed, the boys going to the former director’s house, that he talked to Abiye and helped him write a statement and go to the police. That the former director left or took off. He attempted to help other boys who were also victims. He implied he was fired because of this.
Gerard wasn’t fired. He was asked to leave and offered severance. I told him it was impossible for him to go on working for an organization he seemed to want to destroy.
Destroy is a strong word.
Yes, he said. But he didn’t retract it.
The place seemed very quiet for somewhere full of children. The children, or most of them, were presumably in classrooms on the grounds, in other low-slung white buildings. Sara’s experience of orphanages, in Haiti, for instance, had been of more mayhem, smell, need, children wandering in compounds that were not — what was the word that Alazar had used — neat. Of course the nature of her visits had been different: she had usually been on tours, taken to see the children.
How are you funded? She wanted to get to the matter of Raymond Renaud but had to take her time.
Through private donations. We’re a charitable organization.
And you’ve been out here how long?
Me? I was brought out four months ago. I was at headquarters in New Jersey the two years before that. Before that at our Village in the Punjab.
Do women work for the organization? Or here, in the Village? Gerard didn’t mention any.
Yes. You saw Bethlehem in the garden.
Bethlehem?
The cook. She was watering vegetables when you drove in. I am alert to the need for gender balance in staffing, particularly in the case of international hires. And volunteers. Though we remain dependent on whoever wants to venture to a remote place like this.
It wasn’t really that remote, Sara thought. There were tourists and businessmen at the hotel, and the town itself was relatively large. The orphanage was set off on its own perhaps five kilometres outside of Awassa but wasn’t inaccessible. She said, Gerard described a situation, an abusive situation that was systemic or at least that went on for a couple of years and involved a number of boys.
Abiye. Yes. And we now know there were a few others. Three. We have also discovered there are those who said they were harmed and were not. They have confessed to this. They made statements with Gerard’s help, which they now say they did for money. They wanted the compensation money. We’ve brought in a counsellor to talk to them, the victims and all the children. It’s an extremely unfortunate situation. For all of us.
Does Gerard know about this? About the retractions?
Th
e false statements have come to light since he left. He’s been made aware. He could be charged because of it. I can’t comment further since all is in flux.
He’s leaving the country today, isn’t he?
I’m not privy to his exact travel plans. He is leaving.
If he leaves, how can he be charged?
Listen, I’ll grant Gerard this much. I believe he acted in good faith. I am grateful for his bringing this utterly regrettable situation to light. However, he also made a difficult situation worse.
Did anyone else notice what was going on or try to do anything?
Gerard was particularly observant. I cannot fault him in that regard. Most of the local staff wouldn’t know what to look for. They simply wouldn’t think of it. We believed we had a sufficient screening process, but we did not and we have put new measures in place. We wish to be accountable, but, you must understand, there are challenges when screening candidates primarily with overseas experience who wish to hide aspects of their past. And who’ve never faced charges. As an organization we were infected by an evil individual and have, in our own way, been victimized.
Victimized. She was trying to work out Richard Langley’s feelings for Gerard Loftus. She would have said Gerard aroused a mixture of disgust and anger in him, that he thought Gerard a wild card and paradoxically, the intensity of this man’s dislike made her feel warmer toward Gerard.
Infiltrated, Richard Langley said, and held her gaze, and his holding felt like a wrestling match.
What about Mark Templeton, where is he and has he been charged?
Accusation Page 15
