The Night Watchman (42 page)

When Ernie was nine, I started secretly teaching him how to load and fire the Colt cap and ball revolver that Dad had given me for my thirteenth birthday, and within a few months, he could hit a Dr Pepper can from thirty yards nearly every time.

Ernie doesn’t recall what he said that amused me. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t about Dias, however. She left us both feeling as if we’d escaped a battlefield. I do remember the weight of his arm. It seemed to hold me in place, but in a good way.

Were presentiments not only possible but inevitable? Maybe that was why I looked from the street lamp to the five motorcycles to the cat and to the pigeons. They were like props to an actor; I needed to make sure they were there – each in its right place – before my life went off in the direction it had to.

When I think of that moment now, nearly a month later, I have a vague sensation of falling. And I recall an explosion so loud that I wasn’t able to hear anything for a few seconds afterward. It seems to me the explosion came after my fall, but that can’t be.

According to Ernie, we started walking down the street towards our car, and I told him I’d call for backup once we got there. When he asked if I was going to arrest Dias, I replied, ‘She was largely responsible for Sandi’s death, so what else can I do?’ And he said, ‘You could let her go.’ And then a figure wearing a hoodie was standing in front of us.

Ernie would have sworn that the hoodie was grey, but it was green, according to the police report. As every cop knows, mistakes of that sort aren’t unusual: eyewitness – even alert ones – often get a lot of details wrong.

The man in the hoodie pointed his gun at us. Sensing he was about to fire, I threw myself over Ernie and shouted ‘No!’

The first shot hit me in the back of my left leg, three inches below the knee.

I didn’t reach for my gun because I must have decided – having only a fraction of a second to evaluate my alternatives – that I couldn’t get off a shot in time and had only one chance to protect my brother. Gabriel took over then, according to Ernie, who said that I crumpled to the ground and shouted at our attacker,
You’ll pay for that, you little fucker!
Bleeding all over the pavement, I still managed to kneel. I lifted my gun out of my pocket as a second shot hit me in my right shoulder.

Ernie must have picked up my pistol when it dropped from my hand but he doesn’t remember. When he fired, the man fell backwards and hit with a thud on the pavement. His eyes were open but were staring at nothing. At so much nothing, in fact, that Ernie began to wonder at the expanse of death, at how infinitely bigger than each individual life it was, and how it had now seemed to surround the three of us.

Ernie called 112 and said his brother had been shot twice in a square in the Chiado. ‘What square?’ asked the woman on the other end of the line. Ernie looked up and found the plaque indicating its name and told her, and he added for good measure, ‘My brother is a chief inspector for the Judicial Police. His name is Henrique Monroe. And I think he’s going to die if an ambulance doesn’t get here very fast.’

Amazing that he had the presence of mind to speak so coherently, but he told me that after an initial tremor inside him, a hypnotic clarity surged in him, and he knew exactly what he needed to say. While we waited for medical help, a crowd gathered. An elderly woman brought me a glass of water, he says. I like to think it was the same old lady who spoke to me about Lisbon’s meteorites.

Ernie had shot the hooded man above his left eye. He’d been aiming for the centre of his forehead, which means he was only about an inch off his target. Pretty darn good. My brother later claimed that he hadn’t fired a gun in twenty years, but Nati told me just a few days ago that he’d spotted his uncle shooting at Coke cans down by the stream that runs through his property just two years ago, while I was out buying groceries in Évora.

I don’t remember any blood, but Ernie said that I looked like something from a horror movie. My face had turned so pale that he figured I wasn’t going to make it. My hands were freezing. He said I was panting and that I told him I was having troubling getting enough air into my lungs. I don’t remember anything like that.

At some point, I said to Ernie, ‘Got any chocolate, kid?’

When he said he didn’t, I told him not to worry about it, but he asked the onlookers around us if anyone had any. A young man handed Ernie a Mars bar, and my brother helped me hold it while I took bites. Picturing the two of us working so hard to eat that gooey little chunk of chocolate – or the three of us, if you include Gabriel – sometimes makes me laugh out loud.

Since I wasn’t breathing well, chewing was a slow struggle, but I managed to finish the Mars bar. Ernie lifted the glass of water to my lips whenever I told him I was thirsty.

My eating that chocolate and then licking my fingers seems proof to me now that you never know what your last wish is going to be.

Ernie says that after the empty wrapper dropped out of my hand, I hugged him tightly. He scented my fear. My teeth started chattering but I smiled at him and said that he was a man now and that everything would be all right, and that he had to be very good to himself or I’d be angry with him.

I don’t remember saying anything like that to him.

Ernie says that he could tell that Gabriel had given me back my body when I started grimacing from the pain. I have no memory of that either. Or of whispering that I was counting on him to help take care of King Kong and Godzilla. And finally, of asking him to apologize to Ana for me for all the lies I’d ever told her.

Ana was asleep in a chair near the foot of my bed. Her head kept falling to the side in a tortuously slow descent, then jerking back up. She looked as though she were caught in a time loop. She was also snoring, and it seemed to me that she must have been having agitated dreams. I watched her without speaking because my love for her was now a physical presence between us – patient and absolutely certain of its own importance – and it seemed to require silence.

The next thing I remember is feeling cheated that Ana wasn’t in bed with me and wondering why my pillow was lumpy and the air smelled like ammonia. I fought to sit up, but when I pushed off my right arm a slicing pain in my shoulder made me moan. Thick bandaging covered it, and the tenderness underneath flared into a burn at the probing of my fingertips. Looking to my side, I spotted an IV pole. A plastic bag full of clear liquid dangled from it, and I traced the long tubule carrying the liquid to a thick, mean-looking needle sticking into my forearm. I wanted to pull it out but I was sure that that would get me into trouble with Ana when she woke up.

My left leg began to throb, as though it had been badly singed. Had my car burst into flames? If Jorge and Nati had been with me, then . . .

When I called out to Ana, her eyes fluttered open.

‘Where are Ernie and the kids?’ I asked.

Without taking her astonished eyes from me, she jumped up and peeled off her coat, tossing it behind her onto her chair. While holding my head in both her hands, she kissed me on the lips. ‘You’re in the hospital, baby, and everyone is fine. We’re all okay.’

She smiled down at me as though I were a present she’d just received. Her lips were chapped and her hair was a bit shorter than I remembered it. ‘So nothing bad has happened to Jorge and Nati?’ I asked.

‘They’re worried about you, of course, but they’re all right. They’re with my parents.’

‘And Ernie is okay?’

‘Yeah, he just stepped out for a bite to eat. The poor man was starving.’

‘So he wasn’t killed in the accident?’ I asked. ‘There was no accident.’

‘I didn’t smash my car into a big tree – a walnut tree? Along the road to town.’

She shook her head and kissed my brow, then my eyes. The touch of her made me understand I was just where I was meant to be, even if I couldn’t remember what had happened.

‘And you’re okay, too?’ I asked.

‘I’m fine. We’re all fine.’

A tight knot of gratitude formed inside my throat but I didn’t cry. My emotions seemed stuck to the confusion in my head. Ana read what I was thinking and said, ‘You’re in the Santa Marta hospital. You were in the Intensive Care Unit but they transferred you to a regular room today.’

She pressed her lips to mine, and she smelled now of all the worry I’d put her through, so I said I was sorry I’d given her a scare and made her come to the hospital.

‘Better here than a few other places I can think of,’ she replied.

One of the curtains around my bed had a big yellowish stain. I don’t know why it interested me, but it did. ‘What got spilled?’ I asked, pointing.

‘Beats me.’

‘Are there other people in this room?’

Pointing to my right, she whispered, ‘There’s another patient over there. He had an emergency appendectomy yesterday.’ She mouthed,
He’s small and hairy – like an orang-utan.

Ana laughed like people do who’ve been crying. I took her hand and held it tight and rubbed it against my cheek. We looked at each other in silence for a long time, so that the place where I ended and she began seemed to merge.

‘So how did I get here?’ I asked.

Ana recounted what had happened, starting with my interrogation of Maria Dias. I didn’t remember anything about that. She said I’d been shot twice on the street, but that neither bullet had hit any arteries or vital organs; my left anklebone had been broken badly, however, and had had to be set in place with a metal rod. Today was Wednesday. I’d been operated on two days before, to extract the bullets and repair my anklebone. She had my bullets at home if I ever wanted to see them. There had been no complications. The surgeon had told her that if everything went according to plan, I’d be leaving the hospital in about ten days. He also told her I’d been extremely lucky, all things considered.

‘Getting hit by two bullets isn’t exactly lucky,’ I pointed out.

I hadn’t intended to be funny, but Ana laughed until tears began sliding down her cheeks. As I fought to sit up, she embraced me as if we’d been apart for an entire winter, and the warmth of her must have reminded me of other things because I got hard in spite of thinking it wasn’t such a good idea, given that I probably needed all my available blood circulating around my bullet wounds. But just to make sure I was all right down there I reached for myself.

Ana took a look under the covers and grinned.

We kissed for a long time, easily, as if there would never be any need to rush again. When we finally separated, Ana fetched Debbie from her shoulder bag and hung her around my neck. On my request, she then held a glass of water to my lips. By the time I’d finished my drink, a wave of exhaustion had passed over me. Going back to sleep seemed like my best option.

‘I need to call the kids first,’ Ana told me.

I gave her the thumbs-up sign, then let my head fall back onto my pillow.

Ana’s conversation with Nati and Jorge was like soft scratching on the edge of my hearing – like an LP that has ended but is still going round and round on the turntable.

Jorge insisted on speaking to me so she shook me awake enough to take the phone. He asked me four times if I was all right and four times I tried different variations of
I couldn’t be better,
in both English and Portuguese. Finally, Nati grabbed the phone from him and told me, ‘I want you to quit the police!’

‘Right.’

‘I’m not joking!’

‘And I’m not entirely sure I’m fully conscious. Maybe we could start this conversation over.’

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not happy about this!’ he said. ‘Not happy at all, Dad.’

The knot of unfallen tears was back in my throat. I couldn’t even whisper a reply, so Ana took the phone. After finishing up with Nati, she told me that her mother and father would bring the kids over right away.

When I next awoke, a tall, wiry man with stubble on his cheeks, long, unruly hair and a bandage on his forehead was standing beside me, peeling off his surgical gloves.

‘Hello, doctor,’ I said, raising my hand in what I intended was a friendly way.

‘Hi, Rico,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’

He had rugged, work-toughened hands and loose-looking arms, and his crooked smile was all the way up there by the ceiling. When he opened his eyes wide, as though to ask me why I was looking at him with such shock, their deep green colour and long lashes gave him away, though he seemed older than I remembered.

I waved him down to me because I needed to make sure he was who I thought he was. His scratchy kiss and oatmeal scent confirmed it was him, which was a big relief.

‘Things seem a bit weird at the moment,’ I told him.

‘You’ve been through a lot.’

‘My leg feels as if it’s been burnt. And I’m not too happy about the needle in my arm. Where did Ana go?’

‘She wanted me to have a few minutes with you alone. She went to see if she could buy you some chicken soup at the Bela Ipanema.’

I wasn’t hungry, but I’d do my best to eat the soup if she went to all that trouble.

Ernie said something but I missed it. It might have been about his surgical gloves, because he set them down neatly on my bed. Dropping down next to me, he pressed the back of his hand to my forehead.

How had I become the only person he could touch without risking illness?

‘No fever,’ he said, giving me a satisfied nod.

‘What’d you eat?’ I asked.

‘Two lemon muffins. I brought you back two bran ones. You’ll probably need a lot of fibre because of the painkillers they’ve got you on. You want them?’ He pointed to a brown bag on a shabby white chair by the door.

‘Hasn’t anyone in the administration figured out that white vinyl shows every stain and scuff?’ I asked.

‘Rico, concentrate! I’m asking if you want a muffin.’

‘Are you sure they have muffins in Lisbon?’ I asked.

‘I just ate two.’

‘I guess that means you’re either sure or hallucinating.’

‘I’m sure. I never hallucinate anything worth eating!’

That seemed genuinely witty, but I still didn’t laugh.

A nurse darted in. She was in her thirties, I’d have guessed, with a pixie nose, Cupid’s bow lips and unruly black hair. She looked a bit like Debbie Harry circa 1980. When she heard my accent, she said she’d worked in Manchester for a year, in a Persian restaurant. All the customers thought she was Iranian and fleeing the ayatollahs and were disappointed when they learned she was Portuguese. Ernie and I looked at each other and decided not to spoil her fun, so we confirmed that we were from England – from the town of Woodford, I said. That name just popped out of me. Later, I remembered that Dad’s favourite saxophonist, Johnny Dankworth, came from there.