Garcia's Heart (7 page)

Just then, as if to justify Patrick's bias, she produced tokens for the Number 10 tram–one for him, which she dropped
into his inexplicably opening hand–and pointed out the stop, and before he could come up with a plausible alternative excuse to get away from her they were heading south together into the city centre.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I haven't decided.”

“I've been here for weeks. The trams are the best way to get around.”

Patrick found a seat as the tram gave a metallic shout and pulled away from Churchillplein. Elyse sat beside him and said nothing. Her silence made him squirm as he imagined her biding her time purposefully, as someone capable of using nonchalance as some form of long-term tactic, trying to elicit a silence as fraudulent as that spiel in the restaurant. This is crazy, he told himself, calm down. He tried to remember Elyse that first day she came to interview him, wanting to conjure up an image of her being disorganized and inexperienced, but he couldn't recall her as anything other than competent. Focused. Even as an inexperienced reporter covering the purgatorial beat of the Community News Desk, she had been smart enough to sense that the call from that customer who'd recognized Hernan was something big. And when the newspaper tried to get one of their more senior feature writers to take the story over, Elyse had supposedly made a stink and held onto her scoop with both hands. And while she would have probably been a good reporter even without ever having met the Garcías, she wouldn't have been famous. The story of Hernan García had been more than a great story for Elyse, it had become award-winning, career-making. She had ridden it for years, parlaying the investigation and subsequent allegations, the sad arc of the García family–Marta's death,
Hernan's estrangement from his son, the near failure of the store–into a series of articles that had appeared in increasingly prominent magazines and had metastasized into
The Angel
. Elyse had been transformed into a journalist, flying to Tegucigalpa to research the details of her subject's past life and now setting up shop in Den Haag for long enough to become familiar with the tram lines and the local points of interest. They had that in common, Patrick thought. They both owed Hernan García everything.

They crossed an avenue, passing a building Elyse told him was the Gemeentemuseum. He chose not to look back at the museum, more intent on the succession of bare plazas and tidy Dutch streets rolling past. The sky had been steadily darkening but at one point the clouds thinned and it appeared as though the sun would break through, but it never did. Throughout the ride, squalls from the North Sea dropped rain at regular intervals, speckling the tram windows and making Den Haag pass by all the more indistinctly.

Elyse followed him off the tram near the Binnerh of just as it began to rain more heavily, chasing people off the streets, holding newspapers over their heads. Elyse had remembered to bring an umbrella, which she opened after pausing dramatically to register his umbrella-deficient state. The umbrella was big enough, typically, and she was only too happy to share.

“You hungry?” Elyse asked, taking great pains to position the umbrella exactly between them.

“No,” he said, and regretted sounding so petulant.

At that moment a wave of fatigue crested over him. Perhaps it was the jet lag or sitting in the gallery hearing the testimony or tramping around the city in the rain like an idiot, but he felt ankled by a sudden, shuddering fatigue, something
definitely not physiologic but deeper, a weariness, a narcoleptic ache to close the eyes.

The street narrowed and the facades of buildings darkened with stains of water and soot. They stood watching traffic pass. Wordlessly. It was a dream, a recollection of a street from moments before.

He caught a glimpse of a street sign that read “Frederikstraat” and he felt the need to say the word aloud–
Frederikstraat
–to hear the sound, as if saying the name could give him a better sense of where he was.

“Frederikstraat,” he said. It made no difference.

“What?” Elyse asked.

“Nothing,” he replied.

“Let's get something to eat.”

He was too tired to refuse. He needed to sit down. Elyse found a Javanese café just entering the lunch rush, and they were seated at a table near the clatter of the kitchen. Patrick ordered the bami goreng along with a beer. Elyse asked for something he wasn't familiar with and then filled the silence with an elaborate ethno-cultural history of the dish.

The hectic sway of the restaurant ebbed, and his fatigue passed with it. He studied the pattern on the tablecloth, unwilling to look up at her, aware that she was watching him. When he finally looked up, he found her studying the wine list.

In a world full of people now very interested in Hernan's life, the woman sitting across from him probably knew more about it than anyone. More than family, more than he. She had built a career amassing the details of Hernan's life before Canada, constructing that plausible, abhorrent reality, and had seen Hernan through a different set of biases than family loyalty or ideology or pure defensiveness. Elyse knew the facts;
everything he knew of Hernan was coloured by friendship. No wonder he hated her.

“I thought he'd be in the courtroom,” Patrick said finally, as the waiter brought their food. She paused until the waiter left the table. Her eyebrows tented and she stirred her bowl of curry with her fork.

“He has been, but he's been sick,” Elyse said.

“What's wrong?”

“I don't know. He won't talk to me, of course, and neither will Celia or Roberto.”

“So they're here?” Patrick said. He knew they were here. He'd been searching through the gallery for Celia's face when he'd spotted Elyse. A dubious consolation prize. “Is he getting medical treatment?”

“I'd say so. Although I imagine it's hard to give a cardiologist advice about his own health.”

“I can try to speak with his doctors.”

“There's a little thing called doctor-patient confidentiality,” she replied, smiling.

Eventually, the plates were cleared away and he began grudgingly to appreciate Elyse's company. It was a relief to talk to anyone after three days of travel and hotel rooms. Elyse told him how she'd tried to make the most of all the weeks in Den Haag, how she'd visited every museum and then made her way through the B-list stuff like the amusement park where the city of Den Haag was reproduced in miniature, and he was amused by this thought, the image of Elyse towering over the city, inadvertently terrorizing a good part of coastal Holland. But Elyse said after a while a sense of indigenous Den Haag claustrophobia had set in and she had recently started fleeing the city for a regular weekend of respite in Amsterdam.

Patrick admitted to a certain curiosity about how she worked, now that she didn't need to write for a newspaper. The success of the book had freed her. She worked when she wanted to. And when she was working she was on the road a lot, she said. She missed Montreal, missed her boat.

“A boat?” he said, a tone of genuine surprise asserting itself before envy could arrive. A boat. Affluence squared. The confluence of money and stretches of leisure time. He'd never had both simultaneously.

She brought out a photo of herself on her sailboat on Lake Champlain. Bright interlocking pentagons of lens flare trailed off into the Vermont summer sky. It looked like a warm day. A perfect happiness. He wondered who took the picture. Elyse was in a bikini top with some sort of sarong-like skirt around her legs. And while he smiled and nodded appreciatively as he held the photo, he could feel himself grow irritated at being unable to look away from her tanned legs and her boat, unable to get thoughts of the boyfriend holding the camera out of his mind and he held his breath against the feeling of jealousy billowing, categories of jealousy compounding. He handed the photo back. Elyse asked if Heather and he were getting serious, and he told her he didn't have a clue where things were going. It was a pleasure to tell a journalist the truth. She paused, and Patrick dreaded that she was going to offer him advice.

“I see that your company's doing well,” Elyse said, changing course. “I read about it in
Business Weekly
.”

He nodded and was prepared to leave it at that. The one rule he had learned during his brief career in business was that information was a commodity. His lawyers had pointed out that he had been celebrated and sued and made rich, all
because of information, and if they were at the table, they would tell Patrick not to say a word about Neuronaut or his research or the Globomart work. But the lawyers were far away. They hadn't been alone for three days or seen the photo of Elyse relaxing on her boat.

“We're pleased. Thirty-five employees, thirty-six if you count one of my former post-docs we just hired. We have our own machine, an
MRI
machine,” he said, and gestured with his hands trying to convey the
bigness
of the machine, “and in a few months we'll be having our second annual general meeting.”

“Congratulations. It's like the nineties again. Technology types like you getting rich.”

He enjoyed the envy in Elyse's voice.
Technology types
. “Except we actually have a service to offer.”

“I heard someone was trying to buy you out before the
IPO
.”

“That's old news.”

“It's just that I'm freelancing,” she said, pausing. Patrick wondered what else Elyse thought about besides ruining Hernan García's life or side-swiping his own. “I've been reading about the work you're doing. Neuroeconomics is a fascinating field.” He watched her mouth move, as though it were easier to understand her that way than by only having her words to go by. “I was thinking of maybe writing a feature on it. The technology and applications, the personalities. It could be very good for your company, good for you. I mean, you being here, at the trial, that can't be good for Neuronaut or your clients.” Elyse played with her crumpled napkin. Information was a commodity, he reminded himself. He tried to think of speaking to Elyse as a form of conversational tennis, just keep a rally going. Say nothing, he told
himself, or just keep talking. Platitude, platitude, generalization.

“It's an exciting field to be in right now.”

“What exactly are you working on?”

“I can't say.”

“You are
so
paranoid, Patrick,” Elyse said, easing into a conspiratorial smile. “You don't have to say. It would take me ten minutes to find out, if I wanted to.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me or threaten me?”

“Neither. Asking you is a courtesy. Everything can be off the record, okay?” Elyse was clearly relishing his discomfort. “This is a conversation between friends in a restaurant. If I want to interview you, I'll let you know. So what are you up to?”

Patrick recalled a phrase from his company's Web site, a description that soothed and puzzled prospective clients and investors in that way that only technospeak could. “We've developed a prediction-valuation model. The way the brain compares the value of future acts or stimuli, how economic decisions are made. We're able to see what parts of the brain are activated during these decisions.”

“Just economic?”

“We're interested in economic decisions.”

“I heard that you're working for Globomart.”

“Well, no. Not really. We don't ‘work' for anyone. They're one of many clients, but we have–”

“What do you do for them?”

“Basically, it's an advanced form of market research,” Patrick said. He wouldn't say more. He'd made that mistake at a party recently, explaining his work to the boyfriend of one of Heather's co-workers/friends, Josh or something similarly soulful. Patrick had had a couple of beers and been cornered by Josh on a back patio where all the party's significant others
were quarantined, and when the chit-chat ended and his “market research” explanation for what he did drew a stare, he'd felt the need to elaborate, saying that Globomart, like any big corporation, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, so they wanted to develop a strategy first. And it was natural that they'd want to test their strategy before they fully invested in a product or an ad campaign. His job, he said to Josh, was to use a brain-imaging machine to determine how the brain responded to whatever: a product, an environment, an advertisement; looking for a pattern of response that correlated with eventual “success” for the client.

Josh said nothing, choosing instead to frown performatively, which segued into more explicit outrage, as though he'd been forced to listen to Robert McNamara gush about the efficiencies of incendiary bombing. “He should have introduced himself as a consumer activist,” Patrick had complained to Heather as they left, the trumpet of Josh's raised, righteous voice ushering them out. Of all the things said, Patrick remembered the “crypto-fascist mind-control theorist” insult most distinctly, mentally cataloguing it to cross-reference with the threatening letters he'd received.

Elyse spoke in vague terms about coming to Neuronaut headquarters in Cambridge when all of this was over. She wanted to sit down with the team and get a feel for what neuroeconomics was all about.
Yeah, right
, he thought and nodded, wondering where he could get her picture to better warn security that she might show up. She'd like to see Heather again too, she said, maybe have dinner. The waiter brought another beer to the table. Patrick didn't remember ordering it.

“I heard one of your big fans from the Democratic Voice is coming,” he said, taking his time pouring the beer into a glass,
enjoying the theatricality of turning the tables on Elyse. But Elyse just shrugged, as though he'd described an extended forecast of rain.

“I'd be disappointed if they weren't here,” Elyse said. “I'm happy they're here. I find being on the other side of an issue from the Democratic Voice reassuring. I mean, everyone knows their agenda”–her voice descended to a practised, reason-enumerating drone–“protect American corporate interests, maintain and protect puppet dictatorships friendly to said American corporate interests, reframe the debate so that anyone who opposes them looks like a Marxist dupe. Am I missing anything? And it's not like they dispute the facts. They're lining up behind what Hernan did, behind everything that happened in Honduras. They'll probably be there when they try those soldiers for what went on at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”