The Night Watchman (23 page)

She didn’t remember any details about the woman in the portrait that Morel had identified and hadn’t any idea why anyone would steal an anonymous painting.

‘How about Maria Teresa Sanderson?’ I asked. ‘Ever hear of her?’

‘No.’

‘Then tell me about Fernanda Aleixo,’ I said.

‘Christ, you really are lost, aren’t you?’ she said, as though she were losing hope in me. ‘Fernanda is in her fifties, and shaped like a beefsteak tomato, and the woman you’re looking for is younger and cuter than I am, Monroe. Or haven’t you even figured out yet what gets ageing Portuguese men singing in the shower?’

That evening, Jorge had two helpings of our beet and basil risotto, but Nati picked over his food as if I’d poisoned it. Every time I tried speaking to him, he gave me a withering look. Still, at bedtime, he allowed me to wish him goodnight without turning away or groaning. Or pressing delete on me. A minor triumph.

I awoke once in the night needing to pee and discovered the taste of chocolate in my mouth. A sheet of paper was folded in two on my belly. I tiptoed out to the porch and pulled the cord of the Chinese lantern hanging from the ceiling.

Opening the paper, I discovered it had been printed with one of the photographs from Coutinho’s vacation in Phuket over Christmas of 2011: at the left was a crescent-shaped beach bordered by slender palms; at the right, a turquoise sea with a sailboat in the distance. A circle had been drawn in green ink around a bright patch of sky. Inside it were several lines of minute writing, too small to read. The writing seemed to be in the photo itself.

Turning over my hand, I read:
H – The tiny red lights ended up giving the game away.

I found my laptop still open on Ernie’s desk. An Arcadia chocolate bar wrapper was scrunched into a ball by the keyboard. Carrying the computer outside, I opened the Phuket file and found the picture G had printed out. It was the nineteenth in the series, and a tight cluster of minute red sparks showed up in the area that he’d circled on the photo. On zooming in a thousand per cent, the lights became a string of numbers, as well as values in euros and dates. The first line read:
8 2 12 5 10 14 6 1 10 10 4 6 11 2 6 – ten thousand euros – June 1.
There were twelve such lines.

If they were payoffs – as I guessed – then the numbers were probably coded names.

I opened the file of pictures taken a year before, during Christmas of 2010, when Coutinho and his family had vacationed in London. The nineteenth photo showed Sandi standing outside a clothing shop, shading her eyes from the sun. Above her left shoulder floated a similar cluster of sparks. When enlarged, the list indicated values ranging from four thousand euros up to twenty-two thousand.

On hearing footsteps, I turned around. Ernie pushed open the screen door and shuffled out to me. ‘Hey there, what’s up?’ he asked sleepily.

‘Just finishing some homework.’

‘You sound cheerful.’

‘I think I found what I was looking for.’

Rosie pushed out on the screen door with her nose and padded out to us. She dropped down by my feet with a snuffling sigh.

‘Just lock the door securely behind you when you go to bed,’ my brother told me, and he kissed the top of my head before going back inside. Rosie stayed. She was already snoring softly.

The earliest vacation in the folder was 2000. If I was right, I’d just found Coutinho’s register of bribes for the last twelve years. I’d have to contact a specialist to work on decoding the names.

A few minutes later, while I was checking the list for 2008, the screen door opened again and Nati zombie-walked out in his T-shirt and boxers. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘Great. Listen, I’ve got a question – how would you paste tiny writing onto a photograph?’

‘You got top secret information you want to conceal?’

‘Not me, the vic.’

He yawned and scratched under his arm. Rosie stepped to him and looked up with a pleading face. As he picked her up, he said, ‘You copy any text you want, outline the area on the photo where you’d like the text to go and then paste it down. How could you not know these things?’

‘I was born eons ago, Nati. Dinosaurs still roamed the earth.’

He waved goodbye.

‘Wait a minute,’ I pleaded in a whisper. ‘Why were you angry at me?’

He turned, unsure of what to say. ‘You didn’t listen to anything I said in the car driving over here.’

‘That’s not true. I remember all about your food fight in the school lunchroom, and the girl who fell asleep and started snoring in your mathematics class, and—’

‘No,’ he interrupted, ‘you hear half of what I say and then you say something you think is amusing. It’s not the same thing as listening.’

‘All right, I’m listening now,’ I replied.

He sat down beside me and told me he was worried about his project on bossa nova music. He’d become muddled in unfamiliar chords and harmonies. He had only until Friday to complete it and every minute away from home was putting him in danger of failing. He had started to panic on the drive here.

Everything has been a potential disaster for this boy since he was five years old,
I thought, and I assured him that I knew – by heart – every album recorded by João Gilberto from 1959 till 1977. ‘Son, you’re looking at a true bossa nova expert!’

He didn’t look convinced, so I sang the first bars of ‘Corcovado’ to him softly.

‘Sounds pretty good,’ he said, fighting a smile, not quite ready to give up his anxieties.

I told I’d start helping him the next day, and though he didn’t fall into my arms, as I’d hoped he would, he at least let me walk him back to bed. Once he was tucked in, I stroked his hair so he’d fall asleep knowing I was beside him in my thoughts, but I wasn’t. I was wondering what might have caused Sandi Coutinho to cut herself with her knife – at night, when she was alone. And if Ernie still did.

I awoke cradling my pillow over my eyes. Sitting up into the soft, slanting light of dawn, I spotted Jorge asleep in my brother’s bed. The two of them had kicked off the sheets. Ernie had spooned up behind my son, his nose buried in the little boy’s soft brown hair, his big, coarse hand curled around his waist. Jorge’s arm hung over the side of the bed, reaching toward Rosie, who was snoring away on her little red rug, her head on her forepaws. The boy was wearing his beloved Tweety Bird pyjamas – big-hearted canaries paddling rowboats across cottony clouds. Ernie was naked except for the beaded Sioux headband he wore to keep his hair in place when the kids were around.

If I’d have become an artist like Ernie, this is what I’d paint,I
thought.

Then, a hand seemed to whack me on the head from behind, and a moment later, I was kneeling before Jorge, who was sobbing. We were outside Ernie’s house. My son was naked, and his pyjamas were on the gravel beside him. Nati was pleading with me to stop terrifying his brother. Rosie was snarling at me and barking as if I’d walloped her.

I’d been moved through time and space.

Nati tugged hard on my arm. ‘You’re scaring him, Dad! Leave him alone!’

Standing up, I lifted Jorge into my arms and pressed my lips to his cheek, which was moist with tears. The dog scuttled around me, growling, baring her teeth.

‘Do something about Rosie before she bites me!’ I told Nati.

He snatched her up. As Jorge’s weeping eased, I asked Nati what had happened.

‘You don’t know?’ His face was drawn and hopeless. Rosie wriggled in his arms.

‘No, just tell me.’

‘You grabbed Dingo and you started hollering at him, asking him to tell you what your brother had done to him, and he started crying. You ran outside with him in your arms, and stripped off his pyjamas and examined him all over, and . . .’ Nati, breathless, lost the trail of his words.

‘Okay, I get it,’ I told him. ‘Now, tell me where your uncle is.’

‘In the house.’

The front door was ajar. To Jorge, I said, ‘I’ll be right back. Nati will take care of you and get you dressed again.’

‘No!’ the little boy shouted through his tears. I handed him to my eldest son before my guilt could surround me completely.

Ernie was sitting on the floor between his bed and the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest, hidden behind a rosebush. He’d blindfolded his eyes with his hands. He was naked. I closed the front door behind me to keep Rosie out.

‘Hank, don’t come near me!’ he yelled as I approached.

I knelt next to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I shouldn’t have let Jorge climb into my bed!’

Blood was seeping out under his hands and dripping to the floor.

I began hiccupping. It happened sometimes – an overflow of emotions. ‘You’ve hit your head,’ I said, and I started to lift him to his feet but he shoved me so hard I fell on my behind.

Ernie was trembling with rage. I didn’t dare touch him again.

Two men sit together, sensing that all they have – and will ever have – is each other. ‘I need to look at your cut,’ I whispered.

‘No, you might catch something from me!’ he warned.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I could have a bad disease. I could even have HIV.’

‘How could you have HIV?’ I felt the entire world turning around his reply.

‘I’ve been with women.’

‘What women? Where?’

‘In Évora.’

‘Prostitutes?’

He nodded.

‘Did you protect yourself?’

‘Of course, but that’s no guarantee.’

Time slowed to a halt. My body was heavy with the need to remain just where I was. We’d have to keep as still as possible – and not make any noise – if we were going to outlast everything that could go wrong.

Outside, Jorge had started sobbing again. My need to hold him made my hands ache. ‘Nati, bring your brother in here!’ I hollered.

Nati appeared in the doorway. ‘Dingo will be okay,’ he said. ‘I know the drill.’ He spoke with an adult determination I’d never seen in him before. He must have studied how I calmed down his brother without my knowing.

‘Call me if you need help,’ I told him gratefully. ‘I’ll come right out.’

Ernie had started rocking back and forth. I prised his hands from his eyes, which flooded with tears as soon as he saw me, so that mine did, too.

With my brother, it has always been important for me to assume command at the right moment, so I took off my T-shirt, wrapped it around my hand and pressed down hard over his cut. My movements were quick and sure. I should have realized you don’t forget how to care for a wound.

‘Go away!’ Ernie snapped, and he pushed me hard again.

‘I don’t give a damn if I catch what you have!’ I yelled back, and I pressed the palm of my hand over his cut. Ernie shrank away and refused to speak, seeming to back into that closed space inside himself where no one could find him, so I took his blood on my fingertips and painted streaks across my cheek and down my neck onto my chest. ‘Look at me!’ I ordered him. ‘We’re in this together. We always have been and always will be.’

His eyes fluttered close and he went limp in my arms. He might have been six years old again.

‘Nothing is any good in my life unless you’re okay,’ I told him. ‘I wish it could be otherwise, but it can’t be. I’m sure it’s the same for you.’

Summoned back to me by the uncomfortable truth we tried never to voice, he reached out for my hand. Joining through our fingers meant that we had passed another test. At length, I said, ‘You might need a couple of stitches.’

‘I’m not going to the hospital. I’ll sew myself up if I have to.’

‘You don’t know how to do that.’

‘I do. I’ve done it before. You’ve done it before, too.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Still, you know how to do it.’

‘Did I make the gash?’ I asked.

‘No, I banged my head into the wall.’

‘Why?’

‘I saw the way you were inspecting Jorge.’ He showed me a sharp, resentful look.

‘I got frantic. It was the suicide yesterday, and then the murder. When I’m really upset, I sometimes I lose myself and . . .’ This was when I should have told my brother about G, but a fist seemed to close around my neck. I drew his attention away from me by saying, ‘I hate it when you hurt yourself!’

He shook his head disappointedly. ‘Don’t you get it? This is nothing – I’m on my best behaviour while you and the kids are here. The moment you leave . . .’

I held up my hand to stop him from giving me the details just now. ‘Tell me where your first-aid kit is. We’ll figure the rest out later.’

He pointed to a box under his desk. Before retrieving it, I scrubbed my hands at the sink and took a peek outside. Jorge had his pyjama bottoms back on and Nati was tying a bow in their cord. I realized – as if having just added up a simple column of figures – that I’d never leave Portugal. Ernie and I would die here. We’d never make it home.

Giving up America for good would require me to think out a lot of things. But I was glad to have finally learned the truth: that the life Ernie and I now had was the only one we’d ever have, even if it wasn’t the one we ought to have inherited.

Underground rivers can carry us to unexpected regions of the heart, and as I watched my sons starting to play cat’s cradle with a long white string that Nati must have found around the house, I pictured the two of them hunting for fossils with me on the rim of Black Canyon. I waved at them because I needed them to sense in the way I watched them that Portugal would be enough for me as long as they were here.

‘Look, Dad!’ Jorge said excitedly, holding up the parachute design Nati had helped him make with the string.

‘It’s great! I’ll be out to watch in a few minutes.’

Nati twisted around to face me. His eyes were so worried that I knew that Ernie had been right; I couldn’t let him see his uncle – or me – at our worst.

Back inside, I discovered Ernie’s old stuffed cat Roxanne next to his first-aid kit. When I held her over my nose, I expected the oatmeal scent of my brother, but her short stiff fur had soaked up the scent of the camphor inside his box. On putting her back, I noticed a stack of Dad’s 78 records wrapped in clear plastic.

I dribbled rubbing alcohol onto a cotton ball and dabbed Ernie’s cut.