The Night Watchman (46 page)

For eating Chinese food on two occasions at the Mandarim Restaurant in the Estoril Casino, he had received credit for Asian history and culture.

For seeing the DVD of
Avatar
with his nephews, he’d passed both Game Theory and Computer Science.

For driving to work at the National Assembly in his Mercedes CLS . . .

Stepping back from our banter for a moment, I realized I’d have preferred a minute of silence – from everyone in Portugal – as a form of protest against the kind of corruption and influence-peddling that had brought him to power. Or a candlelit march down the Avenida da Liberdade – a funeral ceremony for the small but hopeful democracy we’d thought that Portugal would one day become.

And I realized, too, that our filtering system was badly broken: instead of weeding out the most unscrupulous people, our political system allowed them to rise to the top.

Just before my colleagues left, I asked them to keep watch over Luci for me and let me know if she was having trouble with Romão. Once I was alone again, I began to wonder if the person who had had me shot was another of the provincial go-getters in fancy suits who now ran our country. And if he lived so high up that I’d never be able to bring him down.

That evening, after my family went home, a surprising guest appeared in my doorway. It was after visiting hours, almost nine p.m., but he told me that he’d been able to get past the ‘guard dogs’ at reception because he was good friends with the Director of Surgery, who often played golf with him and the head of the Bank of Portugal at the . . .

Sottomayor proved himself a terrible namedropper that evening, but I didn’t mind. It seemed just one more of his aristocratic flourishes – the verbal equivalent of the red and yellow paisley cravat tied so elegantly around his neck.

He’d brought along an assortment of Godiva truffles the size of a Monopoly box. ‘We should make sure to eat extra sugar and fat when we are feeling vulnerable,’ he said, which was so opposite the advice I’d received from Ana and Ernie that I had a good laugh.

After opening the box, he tilted it to show me the impressive selection.

‘Take one,’ I encouraged.

‘Dare I?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows like a rogue.

When I nodded, he popped a dark one in his mouth. He chewed with a side-to-side motion, like a sheep. Feigning a swoon, he said, ‘I lucked out, it’s whisky-flavoured!’

He put the rest of the box on my night table and sat down in the chair by my bed. He scratched his chin and shrugged as though lost for a purpose, so I told him that hospitals were a bore and that he was under no obligation to stay. To my surprise, he wagged a finger at me and said in a concerned tone, ‘I absolutely insist that you be more careful with yourself! You gave us all quite a scare.’

It was comforting to hear his worry on my behalf, though I didn’t entirely believe it. It was as though we both agreed to participate in a harmless little farce intended to make us feel that the world still valued consideration and good manners. A man who lived in the tower was being kind to one of the little people. No one could blame him for such an act of generosity, not even me.

‘I’ll do my best to stay away from bullets from now on,’ I told him.

‘And I don’t want you going to the Cayman Islands or anywhere else that’s far from home. I retract my offer to pay your airfare.’

‘Duly noted.’

‘How long are you going to be out of commission?’

‘A few months. I’ll need physical therapy after I leave – I’m told I may have a limp for quite some time, maybe forever. I’ve got muscle damage, and my anklebone may never be quite as reliable as it used to be.’

He grimaced. ‘I find that there’s an atmosphere of predatory violence on the streets of Lisbon these days,’ he said. ‘Have you been to the Rossio at night of late? The young men walking around there look as if they’d slit your throat for fifty cents.’

I told him that our most recent statistics indicated that our murder rate had fallen over the past year, and that he was probably reacting to the obsession of television news reporters with violent crime, but he waved off my recitation of the figures and told me, ‘I have something more important to tell you. In fact, that’s why I’ve come.’

Leaning back and crossing his legs, he told me about an operation he’d had for skin cancer in Zurich seven years earlier. On regaining consciousness after the procedure, he’d taken one look around at the sixteen vases of roses and chrysanthemums in his room – ‘My rather-too-easily impressed eldest son had counted them for me!’ – and realized he was stuck in a life he hated. ‘The day I was discharged from the hospital,’ he continued, ‘I told my wife I wanted a divorce and I moved into my office. We’d been married twenty-eight years, Chief Inspector. And though these past seven years without her have been the happiest of my life, I know now that I needn’t have bothered separating from her.’

He eyed me in a way that made it clear he wanted me to ask why, which – ever eager to please my visitors – I did. To my surprise, I found it pleasant and comforting to do what he wanted – like having a good role in an entertaining play.

‘I needn’t have bothered, because my darling wife had fallen out of love with me years earlier,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t give a damn if I slept around. But people can be perverse animals, so when I asked for a divorce, she swore to me that she’d make my life a misery. She ended up taking me for quite a bit more than the half of everything she might have been entitled do. And she told all our friends that I’d abused her
emotionally.
I wasn’t sure what that even meant, but our friends were. Many of them have never spoken to me again, and, additionally, I had to listen to the insufferable lectures of my two lamentably moralistic children. Still, her lies cost her badly,’ he added, smiling mischievously, as though he were a little boy who’d got away with murder. ‘I kept her in the courts for nearly four years. She ended up going through hell!’

My expression must have given away what I was thinking. Pointing his cane at me, he said, ‘You’d have thought I was Colonel Gaddafi from the way she described me to the judge. It was shameful!’ Lowering his cane, he took a calming breath and said in a contrite voice, ‘Though you’re quite right, I should have behaved more nobly. In any case, what I mean to say is, don’t make any big decisions until you’ve been out of the hospital for at least a couple of months. Give yourself time. Relax. Forget about the important issues in life. Don’t concern yourself with who’s winning and who’s losing in this sad little country of ours. There are obviously some very dangerous and violent men out there who don’t mind hurting good police officers like you. So enjoy your kids. Fly to Madeira and work on your tan. Let your colleagues deal with the bad guys.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Good man!’

Before leaving, he patted my good shoulder, as though we were fighting in the same platoon and said, ‘As long as your ding-dong still works, you’ll be fine.’

For ding-dong, he used the word
pirilau.
It seemed a fatherly sort of comment. Or maybe that was only how I wanted to hear it.

‘My ding-dong is just fine,’ I told him, permitting myself a smile, ‘but it may be the only part of me that is.’

He raised his arm and made a fist in that way the Portuguese do to indicate an erection and said, ‘If you can make you and your wife happy two or three times a week, the rest is just icing on the cake.’

The next morning, Friday, I woke up out of the covers, with my blanket on the floor, and my mouth tasting of chocolate. It was just after six a.m. While I struggled to find a position that would relieve the howling in my leg, I discovered that Ernie had already arrived. He was sitting in one of the two chairs in my room, a paperback open on his lap.

‘When the hell did you get here?’ I asked.

‘A little while ago. I couldn’t sleep.’ He stood up and came to me, resting his hand on the top of my head. ‘How’s the pain today?’

‘Maybe a little better.’

He frowned. ‘I thought you weren’t going to lie any longer.’

‘To Ana. To you, I can say whatever comes easiest.’

He covered me with my blanket and dropped down next to me. ‘If it helps, you can be as mean as you want,’ he said, grinning like he does when he’s sure he’s being cute. ‘You can yell and call me names. I won’t mind.’

‘That’s a generous offer, Ernie, and maybe I’ll take you up on it sometime. But don’t you have to get back to your garden one of these days? The roses and azaleas must be worried about you.’

I wanted him to leave so that I could finally lose myself in tears; the steady and slow accumulation of physical pain – and my frustration at having key evidence vanish – had just become too much for me.

‘Luisa is watering everything,’ he said. ‘I thought I told you that?’

Luisa was a neighbour – a retired schoolteacher.

‘Ernie, don’t tell Ana, but the pain is worse. And being stuck in here is killing me.’

‘Wait here, I’ll be right back!’ he declared, and he rushed away.

Twenty minutes later, he led the physician in charge of my recovery into my room. Dr Amorim had failed to shave this morning and pouches of skin sagged under his eyes.

‘A long night?’ I asked.

‘Dinner at my niece’s house. She’s about to get married. Seven courses, and the flan is still in my stomach. So what seems to be the trouble, Chief Inspector?’

After I told him, he said that my pains were normal under the circumstances but prescribed something stronger. A nurse brought the pills to me a few minutes later, and forty minutes after that, I lifted effortlessly out of my body and floated out through an imaginary window behind me. The warm wind swirling around me helped me rise high enough to have a breathtaking view over a city of red tile roofs and hidden gardens that seemed far more real and beautiful than the one I normally lived in.

Somewhere inside ourselves, we are always floating.
That’s what I concluded while sailing over the Belém Tower.
And if we were floating all the time, then maybe other things even less likely were also possible.

That evening, when I told my wife and kids about what I’d learned, they laughed; I kept it a secret that I was absolutely serious, though I decided to share the truth with them after I was safe at home – as part of our celebration.

Ernie arrived the next morning at sunrise once again, this time with Jorge – in his Tweety Bird pyjamas – cradled in his arms. He woke me up when he stepped in.

‘Sweet Pea made me promise to bring him along,’ he whispered.

He eased my son into my chair, took the boy’s favourite blue blanket out of the duffel bag he’d brought along and covered him tightly, making him look like an Egyptian mummy.

When Rosie poked her head out of the duffel bag, I jumped. She was preparing to bark so I pointed a threatening finger at her. ‘Don’t even think about it!’ I told her.

‘You can’t bring a dog in here!’ I whisper-screamed at my brother, though I was charmed to be part of a conspiracy involving a small dog, a seven-year-old kid and a cowboy. Ernie’s orchestrated chaos was like being home again.

‘Of course you can,’ my brother told me, lifting Rosie out. ‘Portugal,’ he said, opening his arms as if to embrace the entire country, ‘is where all rules are just suggestions!’

The dog wriggled and whined, so excited that her tail was slapping against Ernie’s arm.

‘What’s going on over there?’ the new man sharing my room called out from behind the curtain that separated us. He had introduced himself to me the evening before. His name was Duarte, and he was a plumber.

‘Sorry,’ I called back. ‘My youngest son and my brother have arrived.’

‘One of them sounds like a dog,’ he noted.

‘That would be my son. He’s part poodle.’

The Portuguese generally didn’t understand my humour but Duarte laughed hard, which energized me. And I was suddenly in the mood for comedy. Sensing that, Ernie held Rosie’s forepaws and stood her on my bed like a circus dog. She danced around, straining to kiss me. I fended her off while imitating Frank Sinatra crooning ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’.

Jorge squirmed out of his blanket, stood up, and zombie-walked over to me, leaning in for a kiss. He smelled of sleep and old leather. ‘Have you been going to bed with your soccer ball again?’ I asked.

He nodded and threw his arms around me.

Ernie let Rosie go, and she started licking us as if we’d been away for years, which made Jorge giggle and clamp his hands over his eyes, since he didn’t like the dog kissing him there.

Later that day, while Ernie, Jorge and Nati were taking Rosie for a walk in the Estrela Garden, Luci arrived. Ana was sitting with me. After the introductions, Luci smiled at the two of us timidly and handed me a small white box. ‘I made you some . . . some almond biscuits,’ she stuttered, perhaps fearing that my wife might react badly to a friendly gesture from a pretty young colleague, which was why I munched down a biscuit right away and told her it was delicious.

‘And they don’t have any cholesterol,’ Luci observed proudly.

‘Do I look that fat?’ I joked.

Instead of easing her discomfort, as I’d hoped, Luci flinched. ‘Oh, no, that’s not what I meant at all. I was just saying—’

‘Luci, it’s okay,’ Ana cut in. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn not to pay too much attention to my husband’s so-called humour.’ She blew a kiss in my direction and added, ‘Hank can sometimes be
too
adorable, if you know what I mean.’

Through such tender-hearted criticisms of me that day, my wife was able to start a friendship with Luci. After she went out for some decent coffee, my young colleague pulled up a chair close to my bed. When I asked her about the Coutinho case, she confirmed that Romão hadn’t done anything about it since I’d been shot.

The despair that shook me seemed connected to my ongoing doubts about ever fully recovering the use of my leg and shoulder. I hadn’t realized how much hope had still been in me until it was gone.

Sensing our conversation was dependent on her now, Luci pointed to the book on my night table,
Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe.
‘Maybe you should be reading something less depressing,’ she said.