The Night Watchman (39 page)

‘And if she doesn’t believe us?’ I asked.

He lifted his hair off his sliced-off ear. ‘I’ll show her my scars.’

‘You can’t do that,’ I said. ‘It would be—’

‘Rico, I’ll do anything I have to do!’ he declared. ‘I’m going to tell her what it was like when Dad took out his knife that first time and I realized that he’d never let me reach adulthood! And to know that I was the reason that he’d never allow you to grow up either.’

Before we left my office, I turned on my phone and found more messages, from Mesquita, Fonseca, Sudoku and Luci. Luci’s was the only one I opened:
Sir, I’m worried about you. Please call.

After I apologized for waking her, she told me to wait a moment so she could leave her bedroom. ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

‘At headquarters.’

‘Are you all right, sir? I can’t stop thinking that you’re in bad trouble.’

‘Thank you, Luci, but you needn’t worry – I’ve been at this since you were ten years old. So there was nothing highlighted in the dictionary?

‘No – nothing at all. Is that important?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking that the dictionary might contain the code for deciphering the names in the list of bribes Coutinho kept in his vacation pictures. It would make sense for him to have somehow indicated it there. But if nothing is highlighted, we have no way of finding it. The problem is, Coutinho would only have told someone conspiring with him that he kept a flash drive with incriminating information on it in his library. And I don’t see how the burglar could be both a close confidant of his
and
someone he bribed. When things make no sense like that, Luci, it means we’re being fooled – or failing to understand something obvious.’

‘We don’t know who he bribed, but we
do
know a couple of his good friends – Morel and Sottomayor.’

‘Yes, except that Morel lives in France. I find it hard to believe he’d be involved in the victim’s day-to-day business dealings in Portugal. And Sottomayor told me he didn’t know anything about where Coutinho kept his records.’

‘But did you believe him, sir?’

As Ernie and I walked to his car, I checked my outgoing calls and discovered that G had phoned Maria Dias again, just before my quarrel with Ana. Their conversation had lasted almost twelve minutes. To wake up Dias the middle of the night, G must have had something essential to ask her – or tell her.

When she answered my call, she said as though pleading, ‘I really hope you aren’t having second thoughts.’

‘No second thoughts,’ I assured her, to go along with whatever G had agreed with her, ‘but we need to talk in person.’

‘All right, come over. We’ll talk while I pack.’

G must have told her something that would make her leave Lisbon in a hurry. All I could think of was that he’d figured out who the murderer was and was certain that the man would try to hurt her. But why keep me in the dark as to his identity?

Dias surprised me by hanging up before I had a chance to say goodbye. That must have also caught someone else off guard; a man’s voice – barely audible – said something about being hungry. With my hand over the mouthpiece, I told Ernie that someone careless was apparently listening in on my phone call and asked him to try to make out what he was saying, since my brother could eavesdrop in Portuguese better than I could.

Ernie listened, angling his head down, exactly as he’s done since he was a toddler, then handed the phone back. ‘I heard a man talking as if he were conversing with someone next to him. But the only thing I heard clearly was,
Monroy isn’t easy to predict.
After he said that, the line went dead.’

Having my cell phone tapped might have meant that my investigation had been seriously compromised, but it also pleased me that whoever had murdered Coutinho and robbed his house feared me and what I could do. And now that I knew I was being observed, I could play a trick or two on them.

I turned off my phone to keep its signal from giving away our position and rejoined Ernie. His hulking Chevrolet was parked just down the street. Rosie was curled in the driver’s seat. With her straining to lick my face, I lifted her up and put her in the back.

I headed to Dias’s apartment along the Rua da Escola Politécnica. Twenty minutes later, I squeezed into a parking spot by the São Carlos Theatre.

‘Stay here,’ I told my brother. ‘I’m going to take a quick look around.’

I didn’t dare tell him that whoever had been listening to my calls might confront me, but he must have figured that out, because he touched his index finger to his forehead, which was our sign for:
Be very, very careful.

‘Always,’ I replied. ‘But listen, I’m going to call you in a few minutes and tell you I’m headed somewhere crazy.’

‘Where are you going?’ he asked suspiciously.

Hearing the discomfort in Ernie’s voice, Rosie sat up in the back seat and barked.

‘Nowhere. I want to confuse whoever has bugged my phone – keep him running around. After we speak, join me in Camões Square.’

After walking some way down the street, I shifted my gun to my coat pocket, calmed by the feel of death inside my fingers.

As I turned onto the Rua Serpa Pinto, a fist-sized piece of cement smashed into the sidewalk across the street. The explosion made me jump back and sent my heartbeat racing. It also put a dismayed look on a walnut-faced old lady leaning out from a second-storey window. I looked up past her to see where the cement had come from and discovered a tell-tale gap in the moulding below the roof tiles.

‘Mais um meteoróide lisboeta,’
the old woman called out to me, outraged.
Another Lisbon meteorite.
‘Nobody cares that the city is falling apart,’ she added with a sneer.

Up ahead, in the slender divide of pavement at the centre of Bordalo Pinheiro Square, a young woman in skintight snakeskin pants and a halter top was checking messages on her phone while waiting for her shrunken-looking, hairless chihuahua to squeeze a dump out of its shivering behind. Out front of Dias’s apartment house, two shaggy-looking young men – their thick hair combed forward over their eyes – were leaning against an old BMW with a coat hanger for an antenna.

The orange and yellow light blazing off the tile façade of the building at the top of the square made me look up again, where I discovered a perfect dome of cerulean sky. Under other circumstances, I’d have dragged Ana and the kids hiking in some nowhereland out past Ernie’s house.

While crossing to the other side of the street, it occurred to me that the same guy who’d bugged my phone might have leaked Coutinho’s murder to the press on Friday. After all, who couldn’t use a little extra cash during an economic meltdown? He’d probably been hired by one or more of the politicians bribed by Coutinho. Maybe he hadn’t provided his friends in the press with any further details on subsequent days because his employers had discovered what he’d been up to. I also had a possible answer as to why no ministers or their assistants had called to question me about my progress; the ones with the most to lose must have already had transcripts of all the phone conversations I’d had since the start of this case!

Whoever was tracing my movements had counted on my naiveté. And if Coutinho had bought ministers, then he might also have passed some cash to high-ranking cops. For all I knew, Mesquita might have made it seem as though he were doing me a favour by keeping me on the case so I wouldn’t begin to wonder about him.

And then it hit me: Mesquita had regarded turning my phone off as a personal affront because he’d been tracking me!

That revelation stopped me dead in the street. I sensed that I was standing below a tower that had been invisible to me until now. Without knowing it, I’d been circling its base since Friday morning, down here on the overheated pavement with the old beggars and dog-walkers and Lisbon meteorites. There, at the top, thousands of feet above us, were the men who bought and traded people like me. And who were following every move I made.

If I tried to bring their tower crashing down, they’d have me fired and blacklisted.

Tingling, alert, feeling as though I’d just jumped on a train heading where I’d long wanted to go, I rushed back down the street to Camões Square, scattering a group of pigeons pecking through a pile of sand outside an eyeglass shop. Turning on my phone, I took the steps of the Carmo Church two at a time and told Ernie that I was about to leave for the train station in Santarém, where a witness who could identify the burglar who’d trashed Coutinho’s house was going to meet me at nine thirty. I also said I’d have Coutinho’s flash drive with me.

Santarém was at least an hour from Lisbon. It was now 8.05. Even if whoever was tracking me figured out sometime after nine thirty that I’d tricked him, and even if he called friends in Lisbon for backup, Ernie and I would be able to move around freely for an hour and a half.

After my brother joined me, I asked him to take off his surgical gloves before meeting Dias. She buzzed us in as soon as I gave her my name. My brother took one look at the rusted handle of the elevator and started up the stairs.

‘Okay, we’ll give Anselmo a break,’ I told him; we always joked that these homemade-looking Portuguese elevators were actually pulled up and down by a poor old slob named Anselmo who slaved all day at the bottom of the shaft.

I climbed ahead of Ernie, picturing Ana lying alone in the dark, regretting the years she’d wasted with me. My brother could often see things in my eyes that no one else could, so when I turned around to check on him, he said, ‘Stay calm. I’ve got a secret plan.’

‘What kind of plan?’

‘If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret!’ He smiled his mischievous smile, which annoyed me, but there wasn’t time for a quarrel.

We found Dias’s door already open. I knocked twice and identified myself.

‘Come on in,’ she called.

She wore loose-fitting black sweatpants and a silvery camisole. Her muscular arms and shoulders glistened with sweat. She stood beside two metallic suitcases neatly packed with clothing, dark colours in the smaller one, lighter ones in the larger. Behind them, her statue of the Buddha had been wrapped with towels and tied with nylon cord. The glass top and wagon-wheel of her dining table were leaning together against the wall. On top of the base – a column of white marble – was a roll of packing paper and a small stapler. Her books were in three large brown boxes with
Jumbo –
the name of one of our supermarket chains – printed on the side.

I introduced my brother to her and said he was visiting me from Évora. ‘He knows what we’ve agreed on,’ I told her.

As Dias and I shook hands, suspicion narrowed her eyes. ‘Look, Monroe,’ she said, ‘I don’t want problems.’

‘We’re not going to have any,’ I assured her. ‘I just need to get some things straight.’

Ernie would have preferred never to shake hands with anyone, but when Dias reached out, she gave him no other choice. After the worst was over, he moved his hand behind his back, where he wouldn’t be tempted to touch himself.

His jaw was throbbing. If he were home, he’d have crawled into bed and curled into a tight ball.

Our host didn’t notice the discomfort in his face. In fact, she seemed amused by him. Maybe drugs made her unobservant. There was a stiff abruptness to her hand movements that made amphetamines seem a possibility – and that made it seem as if there was some dense, tangled underbrush inside her that allowed her precious little freedom of movement.

‘Are you a real cowboy?’ she asked Ernie with girlish curiosity.

‘My brother and I are from Colorado,’ he replied.

‘Which means exactly what?’ Dias asked.

‘Lots of people wear cowboy hats in Colorado,’ he told her.

‘But you’re in Portugal now.’

‘Yes and no.’

She kept her eyes on him as if he were a riddle needing solving. Anxious to draw her attention from him, I said, ‘You aren’t planning on returning to Lisbon, are you?’

She scowled at me. ‘Inspector,
you’re
the one who told me to leave and not come back. What the hell are you trying to pull?’

‘Nothing. How could I be sure you’d do what I suggested? You’re obviously a woman who likes to do things her own way.’

I expected she’d be gratified by my compliment. Instead, the displeased way she licked her lips gave me the impression that she’d just remembered why she didn’t like me.

‘You look like you’ve been up all night working on this case,’ she said, but without any sympathy.

I realized that my shirt was rumpled and that I hadn’t shaved. Unable to come up with a lie that seemed plausible, I said, ‘I had a quarrel with my wife.’

‘Not over helping me, I hope.’

Her green eyes shimmered with amusement. Perhaps that was her way of warning me that there was a great deal more underbrush inside her than I’d even guessed, and that I’d better not try to cross it.

‘Our quarrel was personal,’ I said. ‘So when do you plan on leaving?’

‘I’ll leave by noon even if I don’t have everything packed,’ she told me. Turning in a circle, she took in the disorder in the room, as though assessing what next needed her attention. ‘A friend will come by and ship whatever I don’t take with me,’ she added.

‘Where will you cross the border?’

‘At Valença. I’ll sleep somewhere near Bilbao tonight, then head up to Bordeaux. I spoke to my mother last night – she’s expecting me the day after tomorrow.’

‘She lives in Bordeaux?’

‘Yes, that’s where I grew up.’

A jarring sense of finality made me withdraw inside myself. I pictured Morel sitting in Coutinho’s kitchen, smoking languidly. He’d just told me about his old friend’s first marriage to a woman from Bordeaux and how the acrimonious divorce had ruined his relationship with his teenaged children. One of them had been named Marie . . .

‘Everybody must call you Marie in France,’ I said. ‘Rather than Maria, I mean.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Coutinho must have ruined his relationship with his first daughter long before his divorce, at the time she started becoming a woman. Gabriel had figured that out long before me. And he’d plotted against me in order to assure her escape.