Garcia's Heart (18 page)

When he returned to the table, red-faced, the hair at the front of his head still damp, he was met by the Garcías all sitting silently around the table. Order had been restored. Hernan patted him on the back and said plainly: “That was a jalapeño.” Roberto then apologized.

“Cake?” said Marta.

At the end of the table sat Celia. All evening he had tried not to watch her, to concentrate on what Hernan or Marta said, but she would appear at the edge of his vision and he would have to look. Now embarrassed, he avoided her eyes. She and Roberto were engaged in another argument–he was animated and loud, while she was trying to affect a look of boredom. Patrick turned in the other direction, wanting anything else to concentrate on, studiously watching Marta slicing the cake, fingering the pleats in the tablecloth. Finally, he glanced up as he passed a plate around Nina to Celia. And that's when it happened. She looked at Patrick and smiled. The memory of that smile was encoded deep within his temporal lobes, spliced with the lingering autonomic throb it produced, filed away with other landmarks, those moments when life seems to blossom ridiculously into something more beautiful than can be imagined. A second. Two. No one else noticed. No, that was wrong. Roberto noticed.

“Did you bake this yourself, Mopito?” Roberto asked, Hernan glaring at him as he said it.

“Yes,” Patrick said flatly, knowing it was probably the only answer that would shut him up. At this, a corner of his vision cracked open like a door onto daylight. Celia smiled again. He remembered the Garcías like this, a composite of retrieved sensation: tears in his eyes from the jalapeños, the sweet taste of cake in his mouth, Celia smiling.

 

EIGHT

Patrick sat up and swayed in Den Haag's early morning daylight. Grey outside, grey on the far wall of the room. The Garcías he loved seemed to exist only in memory. The room floated as he passed through it to the bathroom. There, he dug through his toiletries for more Tylenol. Next, a container that spilled out blue and white capsules, little armoured bugs of better mood, of improved sleep. The right side of his face was a bloated bruise, demanding that he touch the skin for verification, but he resisted, letting the eye rest, preserved in the bunker of his face. He showered in the darkened room.

Patrick's computer and cell phone told him he was the most popular man in all of Holland. He had more e-mail. His business associates, having given up on calling the hotel and having to go through Edwin or Pieter, were storming the beaches with wave after wave of message, direct to his cell phone.

“Hello? Do you hear me? Hello?”

“I just wanted to let you know that one Barry Olafson is
planning on coming. That's right, Olafson
fils
. The hatchetboy.”

“Sanjay is fucking it up.”

Marc-André summed it up in his most recent e-mail. Neuronaut's analysis of the new Globomart campaign was definitely stalled, and even with Sanjay pulling a series of all-nighters remodelling the data, none of the ads or visual cues were eliciting anything close to the results from the Values campaign. This meant that Globomart, which had such faith in Neuronaut that it didn't have a Plan B, was, for the first time in its corporate history, faced with postponing the start date of its new advertising campaign, which was the retail equivalent of scrubbing a space shuttle launch during the final countdown. Mere rumours of the decision were already creeping onto the business pages, with its stock expected to take the predictable tumble–and Neuronaut's right after it–and Barry Olafson had indeed flown from the Globomart world headquarters in Medina, Minnesota, to Boston to meet with Bancroft, a meeting that featured some high-amplitude finger-pointing at the meeting and Barry Olafson's request to meet the “guy whose bright fucking idea this all was.” This, Marc-André said, was doubly noteworthy as it was the first time anyone from Medina, Minnesota, had used profanity. In Patrick's absence, Sanjay was offered up as the technical spokesman and he tried to handle the situation, but Olafson and his entourage left after tossing him back like a worked-over goat carcass. Then Marc-André got personal:

 

You've completely deserted us in a crisis where you are to blame.

I won't take the fall for this, you coward.

Bancroft should be bringing you back in shackles.

 

Patrick would have been angry had it not been for what he discerned as honest emotion. But it was typical of them all to overreact. He typed in a response:

 

If it can be fixed, I'll fix it. Tell Sanjay to send me the data. I'll analyze it here. I need the data.

 

Then he put his laptop on the desk in the room, swearing that, other than corresponding with Sanjay, he would not use it for the rest of his time in Den Haag. Yes, a vow of silence. The ascetic in his hotel suite. Ted Kaczynski does Europe. He decided to clear all his messages, snuff the red light once and for all, and then unplug the phone. He keyed in the codes and heard that polite Dutch voice–a woman's this time, thin and bland as a slice of Edam–telling him he had two new messages.

“This is Marcello di Costini calling for you, Professor Lazerenko. Patrick, if we could meet tomorrow morning around nine, at my office, M-218 at the tribunal building. You will have to bring your passport. Ciao.”

Patrick replayed Marcello's message while searching for a pen to write down the office number. Then he rifled through the contents of his briefcase for the folder that held the notes and references that Marcello had asked to see.

Marcello, in a manner so pleasant and collegial that Patrick only vaguely felt like an underachieving grad student, had asked him to review the entire literature relating to the neurobiology of criminal behaviour and guilt. He was still convinced that there was some biological explanation that they were not exploiting (
pursuing
was the word he used, but essentially he was trolling for loopholes based on some form of
physical evidence, something to counterbalance the reams of photographs and depositions that implicated Hernan). Patrick had warned him that such defences had been advanced before but they rarely succeed. Even juries in the States, conditioned by an endless number of television shows to regard forensic evidence as unimpeachable truth, smelled something not quite right about a neuroscience defence. They could sense the loophole and they wouldn't buy it.

Message two followed di Costini, surprising Patrick.

“Hello, Mop. Roberto here. I just want to say I'm sorry for hitting you. I hope you understand why I had to do it. But it's done. I hope you're not hurt, anyway.”

Despite the assaults that had book-ended their relationship, Patrick had never felt Roberto was his enemy. They were never friends, though. Patrick would be the first to admit that when they met that summer in 1986, he was jealous of Roberto. As a teenager Roberto García had had an almost pathological confidence and ease with people. He was new in the neighbourhood, new in the country, for God's sakes, and within a month, it was
his
: he had dozens of friends and was going out with this incredible girl from Westmount who looked hypnotized when she was in the same room as him. He was an invading army of charisma, blitzkrieging from barbecues to pool parties to clubs downtown. Remarkably, he did all this without abandoning his life in the shop and as part of the Garcías. His friends would come into the store and say hi to Hernan or Marta and he'd be wearing an apron and holding a mop and he'd be totally comfortable. It was as though just being Roberto trumped everything.

Then, suddenly, it was over between Roberto and Jennifer from Westmount. While Roberto seemed indifferent, Patrick
watched, worried, having just established an entire cosmology based on his charisma. He was reassured days later when Roberto appeared with Isabelle, a film studies major who went to Concordia. Hernan and Marta were unimpressed. The fact that their seventeen-year-old son was seeing an austere-looking university student who wore black and watched Fassbinder movies for
fun
, seemed not to trouble, or even interest, them. To a feral teenage boy such as Patrick, this was more than impressive. This was climbing Everest without oxygen.

But that sort of charisma had a shelf life to it. It was a supernova thing, glowing most intensely in high school and college but it demanded a person go out and have an interesting life or they receded into the shadows of that memory. Roberto talked about travelling, but the store seemed to keep him grounded in
NDG
. In there somewhere, he had registered for a semester or two of management studies, but it didn't stick. So he stayed in the store and everything else kept moving. Patrick heard he got married and even had a child but that he and his wife had split up after Hernan's problems started and Marta died. Elyse had told him that, her voice trailing off and employing a look of wry disappointment to imply her opinion of cause and effect at work there.

Elyse had also been the one to tell Patrick that Roberto had taken over running Le Dépanneur Mondial by himself after Hernan's arrest, buying the property next door and expanding the store against the advice of just about everyone. He'd hired staff and for a time became one of the bigger independents in town, although there were so few now that that wasn't saying much. He overextended himself and came close to losing the place to the bank a while ago, but they had survived. Since then, Nina had been in charge–
Nina!
Forever still a child in
his mind, now finished a business degree and exercising authority enough to pry her brother's hands off the wheel of Le Dépanneur Mondial. Patrick had seen the store when he'd been in Montreal for his niece's wedding the year before. At first he thought about going in but reconsidered, leery about bumping into Roberto when he'd made no attempts at contact for years. Even though it was more of a supermarket now, the sign still read “Le Dépanneur Mondial.” After looking through the windows to make sure Roberto wasn't there, he'd decided to go in. Patrick had walked up and down the aisles, wanting that inescapable sense of place to swell inside him. He needed to feel better, to see those clean floors and smell fresh mangoes and get lost in those aisles. But almost everything inside had changed, and he felt pathetic standing there, pretending to look for something on the shelves. He wandered around for a while and then bought a pack of gum, paying the young cashier and walking out.

 

It was a little after eight in the morning, but outside it was still so dark and hazy that the streetlights of Den Haag remained on. Patrick dressed, the slow and deliberate act of an aching body. He put his folder of notes back into his briefcase. As he was about to leave, scanning the room for the credit card-sized room key, the room's phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Lazerenko?”

“Speaking.”

“My name is Anders Lindbergh. I'm calling from the tribunal.”

 

NINE

Marcello had yet to arrive, so Patrick was ushered into his office by his secretary. The office was pretty much what he expected, space used in that way familiar to anyone experienced with European hotel rooms or airplane washrooms. His desk was well-organized, no atrocity so unwieldy that it couldn't be contained in a file folder. Patrick noticed a couple of bound law journals sitting in various places around the room. He was used to the American style of having rows of them stacked high on bookshelves, forming an imposing gold leaf and Moroccan leather wall-of-law. Impossible to breach, expensive to scale.

On the opposite side of the room hung a framed photo from a newspaper, dated in the nineties, showing Marcello in action, assisting in one of those big organized crime trials that Patrick had read about, the type with half the town behind bars in the back of the courtroom like a Mafia zoo exhibit. Patrick leaned forward for a peek at the framed photos that sat facing the other way on Marcello's desk. He turned the photos around for a better look. Patrick presumed these to be
family photos: two children, not yet teenagers but already with that look of precocious competence, as though slowing only to pose for the photo before getting back to composing their operas or sight-translating some Latin. It was difficult to describe his wife's physical beauty, except to say that she looked just as attractive without Botticelli's clamshell wake-boarding her onto the beach. Marcello swept in and took off his jacket in one fluid movement, as though he were shedding a cape. He smiled, apologized for being late and Patrick realized that being in Marcello di Costini's presence would forever make him feel like he was wearing white socks. Marcello's forehead, up to now engaged in battle with his cheekbones and chin for structural supremacy of his chiselled looks, broke ranks and wrinkled into a look of puzzled concern.