The Night Watchman (47 page)

‘I don’t find it the least bit depressing,’ I assured her.

‘No?’

‘Luci, did you know the Nazis started sterilizing deaf people in 1933, as soon as Hitler was elected? It was even forbidden for deaf Christians to use sign language in public with their deaf Jewish friends.’

‘No, I didn’t know. And you like reading books that make you upset and angry, sir?’

‘Rage is an undervalued emotion, Luci. It has proved very useful to me on many occasions.’ I might have added but didn’t,
And I get the feeling that if I’m going to be able to keep this case from closing forever, I’m going to need all of it that I can muster.

‘Whenever I’ve needed rage, I’m afraid I didn’t have enough,’ Luci confided, and I was reminded of the depth hiding inside her. And of her willingness to be seen by me.

An hour later, while I was napping off my preoccupations about the case, a heavyset man in an oversized grey suit and rumpled, midnight blue tie – perfect for the small-town funeral director in an American sitcom – knocked on my door. Ana had returned a little while earlier. He introduced himself as Lourenço Brito and told us he was from the Personnel office at the Judiciary Police. He had the wheezing respiration and sweating brow of a man grinding his way towards a heart attack.

He sat with me and began a wordy explanation of official police policy with regard to officers injured in the line of duty. He tapped a pen against his knee the whole time. Given my pay cuts over the past two years, I interpreted that as a menacing sign.

‘Have I been fired?’ I interrupted.

‘No, of course, not.’

‘So I’ll continue to get my salary for as long as I’m out?’ I asked.

‘The limit is ten years. And even after that, if you have a relapse of your health problems, you can get further benefits.’

‘So what’s the bad news you have for me?’

‘There’s no bad news,’ he assured me. ‘You’ll be taken care of.’

He continued his explanations, and they sounded reasonable, but the moment he was gone, Ana said she’d bet me fifty euros that a notice would arrive in the mail – limiting my benefits – within a month.

I took the bet and we shook hands on it.
‘Cop Shot Twice on Duty, Loses Benefits
would make a really bad headline,’ I told her. ‘They won’t take the risk.’

‘Hank, where have you been? Nobody in the government cares about bad publicity any more. That’s all they get! They just add up figures, and if the sum is too high, they start erasing things – including people like you and me.’ She showed me a hard look. ‘I’ll want the fifty euros in cash, if you don’t mind!’

My final visitor that day was Chief Inspector Romão. He arrived in the late afternoon with a present for me of eucalyptus honey. He handed the jar to me stiffly, his head erect, wearing that invisible crown he struts around in. When we got down to serious talk, I told him why I thought whoever had had me shot wanted to keep me from investigating the Coutinho case. I made certain to purge emotion from my voice, since the way he leaned away from me in his chair was his way of reminding me he was uncomfortable around any displays of weakness. No more than five minutes into my explanation, he started looking at his watch, which rattled me badly. God only knows if I even once used the subjunctive correctly. He told me – as I’d expected – that Trigueiro’s bank records didn’t show any payments he might have received for the hit on me. Also, his phone log had turned up nothing suspicious. And he had no leads for whoever had broken into Coutinho’s house. ‘Things don’t look good for us,’ he concluded.

Us?
His body language and manner told me my injuries had nothing to do with him. Realizing that Romão was already certain that we’d never find out more about who had ordered me shot, I moved on to Coutinho’s illegal housing development on the Sado Estuary and asked him to follow up with Maria Teresa Sanderson. Before leaving, he shook my hand hard, as though to instil confidence in me. To keep our pretence alive, I assured him I’d send him a summary of my notes over the next few days.

At two in the morning, I awoke to the sound of footsteps crunching across ice. My heartbeat raced off, as though towards the exclamation point always waiting for me at the edge of my fears. I turned on the lights, but no one was there.

Lying back, a still, quiet, perfect sense of safety – of being safer than I’d ever been before – seeped through me like a warm liquid. I was alive. My life was real. And the soft voices of two women conversing in the hallway were the night’s way of telling me that all was well.

I experienced feelings of quiet ecstasy on and off for the next two days, most often in the middle of the night, inhabiting the soft islands of noise in the warm reef around me.

On those two wondrous nights, I realized clearly that
loss
was the voice that the past had always used to get my attention. But I saw now that I might be able to change the way it spoke to me.

On the third afternoon, Ana sat on my bed and told me about a transsexual dancer in Berlin whom she’d interviewed on the phone that morning. Listening to her speak of the history of ballet – and other things I knew nothing about – was like being saved from a shipwreck. In such ways throughout my life I have learned that I prefer listening to talking.

When she finally grew silent, I said, ‘Meeting you was the single most exciting thing that ever happened to me’ – because I couldn’t let any more time pass before telling her one of the things that unexpected joy had taught me.

She embraced me and kissed my hands, breathing in their scent with her eyes closed, as if they reminded her of moments long gone, which proved once again that she could be counted on to make the right moves even when I didn’t have any idea what they were.

The next day – Wednesday 18 July, nine days after my operation, I was transferred to a private room with a window. The view was modest – of some down-on-their-luck apartment buildings and a grizzled café. But what a thrill to see the sky! I was eager to look in on all those strangers’ lives, too, like Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window,
but the tenants kept their blinds tightly closed.

‘The selfish bastards never open them!’ I complained to Ana that evening.

‘Three hundred years of Peeping Toms in the service of the Inquisition and dictatorship have made the Portuguese just ever so slightly wary,’ she reminded me.

She’d been peeling me a mango and put a first piece in my mouth. ‘Where do you think we’ll be in twenty years?’ she asked me.

‘If the kids are still here, we’ll be in Portugal.’

‘What if they’ve emigrated by then?’ She showed me a sorrowful look. ‘I don’t like not being able to predict what’s going to happen.’ She snuggled close to me and leaned back. ‘Uncertainty doesn’t work for me.’

I realized then that it had cost her a lot to be so strong since I’d been shot. I rubbed her shoulders just like she liked, and after a while she closed her eyes, and I told her she could drift off if she wanted to, and she did.

To celebrate being able to see the outside world, I decided not to take any painkillers that day. It was while I was fighting the murderous throbbing in my leg that I had my first useful thought about the case in days – that Maria Dias’s mother might not have burned the compromising photograph of her husband with young girls. She might even have threatened him with it in order to make sure he never abused their daughter or anyone else ever again. That was, at least, what I would have done.

I reasoned that one of the men pictured in the photo might have remained friends with Coutinho after all these years – and could have been the person who’d had me shot. But even if that wasn’t the case, obtaining the incriminating snapshot might enable me to identify some men who ought to have been locked away somewhere where they couldn’t get at teenaged girls.

Senhora Dias was surprised to hear someone speaking Portuguese on the line, but after I identified myself, she told me that she already knew that her ex-husband had been murdered; Monsieur Morel had discovered her phone number and called her a few days before. When I told her that I’d questioned her daughter about a week earlier, she stuttered, ‘But I . . . I thought you said you were in Lisbon?’

‘That’s right.’

‘My daughter hasn’t been in Lisbon all summer. She’s been in Paris.’

‘I understand that she might have told you that,’ I replied. ‘Maybe she even made you promise to say that to anyone who called. But I can assure you I was with her in her flat in Lisbon this summer.’

‘Please don’t argue with me, Inspector. Nothing you say or do will be able to convince me that I’m wrong about this.’

Her definitive tone led me to believe that insisting would indeed prove pointless. And it seemed a clever strategy; by sticking to this particular lie, she could effectively block most lines of questioning the police might try.

‘Don’t worry, senhora,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to arrest Maria. In any case, now that she’s in France, she’s safe. None of my colleagues has any idea of where she is or what she’s done.’

‘So why did you call? What do you want from me?’

‘There’s something important I need to know. Do you still have the photograph that Maria found of your former husband with two young girls and some other men? She found it in—’

‘Look, I’m not going to talk to you about that or say another word to you about my daughter!’ she cut in, and with such sudden, incontestable fury that I knew I had no chance of changing her mind.

That evening, I typed up my notes on my laptop and transferred them – along with all of Coutinho’s vacation files – to a flash drive. Ana agreed to drop it off at headquarters.

The next morning, when I called the French High School, the assistant director retrieved his file on Maria Dias. He surprised me by informing me that she’d started teaching four years ago, not eight, as she’d told me, which probably meant that she’d come to Lisbon in pursuit of Coutinho, since he had moved to Lisbon at close to the same time. He also mentioned that she’d been a world-class archer and was training two senior girls for the national championships. Dias had told him that it was her father who’d taught her to use a bow and arrow.

It was then that I realized why Coutinho had called her Diana when she was a girl. She hadn’t wanted me to know, but he must have chosen a pet name for her that was equal to her talent: Diana was the name of the Greek goddess of the hunt.

I was allowed home on 22 July, twenty-one days ago, after nearly two weeks in the hospital. A walking cast had been put on my left ankle. I couldn’t put any pressure on my foot, so I was completely dependent on crutches to get around.

Once I was back inside our flat, Ana helped me take off my right shoe and sock, and as I hobbled around, my bare foot began to read the familiar grain of our old parquet, translating what it discovered into a relief so deep that it might have been all the love I’d ever felt.

Ana put her hand in mine and led me from room to room like a girl showing a long-lost friend her secret hideaway.

After I’d gone to the bathroom to dry my eyes and wash my face, Nati helped me into my favourite nightshirt, and Jorge let me hold Francisco, and I hobbled back downstairs, leaning on my wife harder than I needed to because I needed her to know I trusted her to help me remake my life. I napped on and off all day on the floral-patterned couch in the laundry room, because across the street is a big old apartment house with a façade of blue tiles that reflect so much sunlight that we call it the Super-Nova. A house made of light is hard to come by, even in Lisbon, and it reminded me of all the nearly forgotten beauty that was waiting for me at home – patiently, never asking anything in return – all the time I was in the hospital: Ana’s yellow pencils with their tooth marks, Jorge’s and Nati’s wicker hamper, my own down pillow . . .

On my second afternoon at home, Ernie decided to collect seeds at the Botanical Garden, and he took the kids with him because – out of the blue – Morel had called to ask if he and Susana Coutinho could join us for tea. When they rang our bell, Ana was still upstairs, changing out of her sweatpants and T-shirt. Susana stepped in first, as though she feared a false step might make the floor give way, her right hand ready to grab for a wall. She wore faded jeans and sandals, and a white peasant blouse that must have been a loan from her hippyish sister-in-law. She wore neither lipstick nor make-up. Her voice was raw and hesitant, her eyes washed-out and grey. From the way she fought to smile just before we kissed cheeks, I saw that she had not yet left her daughter’s graveside. Did any of us have any right to ask her to be anywhere else?

She handed me a big pink box – a fruitcake from the bakery of the Versailles café. After thanking her, I searched for something to say that would be of some small help, but the best I could come up with was, ‘While I was in the hospital, I thought about you and Sandi nearly all the time.’

She smiled at me again, but from the urgent appeal for help she showed Morel, who rushed up behind her to take her arm, I saw that I’d spoken a name aloud that she’d have preferred to hear only in her own head.

I’d seen no point in handing over the earrings that she’d given me to Inspector Romão, and I had them ready for her in a small envelope. Handing it to her, I said, ‘You left these with me for safekeeping.’

On peering inside, Susana exclaimed, Oh, my goodness – I’d completely forgotten.’ She poured the earrings onto her palm, then looked up at me worriedly, as if she just realized that she might have inadvertently offended me. ‘I intended them as a gift,’ she said.

‘I know, and they’re very beautiful, but you were under a lot of stress when you asked me to have them.’

She handed the earrings to Morel and took both my hands in hers, which seemed to change everything about the way I looked at her that day. And even the way I would soon see her in my dreams.

‘I want you to have them more than ever,’ she told me. Her eyes held mine, and it was as though she were telling me that we were not nearly as different as I might think. ‘I owe you a gift for being so kind,’ she added. ‘And for risking your life.’