The Night Watchman (48 page)

Thankfully, Ana came down the stairs and saved me from having to make a reply. After I introduced everyone, Susana held up the earrings. ‘I intended your husband to give you these a few weeks ago, but he apparently believed I might change my mind.’ She gave them to Ana. ‘I really do want you to have them.’

My wife dangled them in the air. ‘They’re gorgeous!’ she exclaimed. ‘But they must cost a fortune. I’m sorry, I just can’t accept them.’

She tried to hand them back but Susana waved away her effort. ‘They were a gift to me and now I’m giving them to you.’

From her definitive tone, I realized her husband had given them to her.

‘I think it would be rude not to accept them,’ I told Ana, to avoid more heartache.

My wife leaned forward and kissed both of Susana’s cheeks. On separating, Ana’s eyes shone with admiration for our guest, which pleased me because it meant that we shared the same opinion.

While Ana showed Susana the view of the Tagus from the second floor of our duplex, I confirmed that Morel had told her that Coutinho had molested Sandi.

‘I have no choice,’ he said. ‘The mystery of why Sandi kills herself becomes too much to bear. At least now she has an answer.’ He reached out for my arm. ‘Is there a place where we can talk in private?’

I led him to the encampment I’d made for myself in the laundry room.

‘So Susana believes what I learned about her husband?’ I asked.

‘She knows it is true but she still denies it. It is a compromise she makes to continue living.’ From the Gallic puffing sound he made with his lips, I believed he intended for me to understand that he, too, had chosen to make a compromise, and I had the feeling it was this: to live as though he could never have figured out that his goddaughter was being repeatedly molested.

‘Now tell me what you learn,’ he said urgently.

I explained about Maria Dias – and about my conversations with her and her mother.

‘Where is Maria now?’ he asked.

‘Back in France,’ I said, and then I told a lie: ‘Before I could arrest her, she fled the city.’

Morel stood up and went to the window. His eyes looked sad and defeated. Lighting a cigarette with anxious hands, he drew in the smoke as if his will to go on depended on it. It was then that I should have told him that Sandi had been pregnant, but I feared now that Susana might take her own life if she knew.

‘Do you mind telling me what you know about Pierre, Maria’s brother?’ I asked instead.

‘Pierre? After the divorce, he quits school. He starts taking drugs, loses contact with his mother and sister . . . He has trouble with the police. Maybe he is still in prison. Or perhaps he is dead. I must say I do not understand it at the time – this self-destructive behaviour of his.’

‘But you understand it now?’

Morel smoked thoughtfully. ‘If he finds out what is happening to his sister . . . If she needs him to defend her and he is not there . . . Yes, Monroe, I understand it
very
well.’

‘What will you and Susana do now?’ I asked.

‘We go to France. When her doctor is happy with her progress. There is only death for us here.’

The next morning, Ernie announced that he and Rosie were heading back to the Villa Ernesto. He hadn’t wanted to tell me the day before because it might have kept me up all night. Ana prevailed upon Jorge to help her dry the breakfast dishes so I could say goodbye to my brother alone. Panic was squeezing hard on my gut, and I ended up accompanying him outside to give us a few more minutes together. I put on the black cowboy hat he’d found for me at a shop on the Rua da Rosa and grabbed my crutches. We walked to his car as though to a graveside, which I hated, but the short time left to us gave us no other option. Rosie trotted behind us, her tail drumming, sniffing at the world of wonders hiding in our Lisbon sidewalks.

After Ernie was buckled up in his seat, he removed his surgical gloves and took my shoulder. Rosie had flopped down in the passenger seat. ‘You’ll be okay, Rico,’ he said.

I grabbed his hand and kneaded it, imagining him as the little boy he’d been. After a few seconds, he tried to take it back but I didn’t let him; I’d decided that if I never let him go, nothing bad could ever happen to either of us.

‘You sure are a handsome critter in that hat, Rico!’ he told me, giving a low whistle. ‘Who bought it for you?’

‘You did,’ I said.

He smiled with exaggerated pride, doing his best to lighten our mood. He seemed the older brother at that moment, leading us both away from despair, but the best I could give him to repay his effort was a glum little nod.

‘You might even have ended up as a star of big-budget Westerns if you’d gone to Hollywood,’ he said.

My breaths were hesitant and shallow, because I wanted so badly to say the right thing – the incantation that would make him feel free of me, unburdened by my love. ‘We could still go,’ I told him.

‘The hat is black – you’d have to be the villain,’ he pointed out.

‘No problem, they get all the best lines anyway.’

Even the silliest of conversations must sometimes be able to reveal what is hidden from your conscious mind, because I knew then what I had to tell him. ‘I want to see Mom’s grave again. I need your nephews to see it too.’ I pressed Ernie’s hand over my chest so he could feel all the urgency in me. ‘Maybe I’ll want to bring her body back to Portugal. We can decide that later. But I have to stand by Mom one more time now that I know what I know. I have to, Ernie.’

‘What do you know?’

‘She didn’t leave us alone with Dad on purpose. She couldn’t help herself – she was too depressed to do anything else. She’d have stayed with us if she could have. You see, I have to tell her I forgive her.’

He looked down. To keep from making him feel pressured, I looked up. Somewhere in the middle – conspiring together to understand how forgiving Mom might change us – were our speculations about the future.

He was unable to reply, so I leaned in through the window and kissed him on the lips. Would I ever fully understand how we’d become men? Would he? Maybe there were mysteries you didn’t really ever want to solve because solving them would make the past seem so much less unique. And we all have the right to regard our own life as singular and special, if nothing else.

Have any two boys ever journeyed further beyond the landscape that destiny originally planned for them?
That’s what I was thinking as I released his hand.

When he took off the parking brake, I tapped the door to get his attention and told him to wipe his eyes so he could see any wild animals that might try to cross the road, and he said:
What kind of wild animals?,
and I said:
I don’t know, but it would be nice to have some coyotes in Lisbon,
and he did what I said and wiped away his tears with his thumbs, because he was my younger brother even if he behaved more maturely than I did, and then his big, rusty Chevrolet started away, and pretty soon it was grinding down the street towards the river, and Rosie had jumped into the back seat and was staring at me longingly through the window, and I wanted to tell my brother that his silencer needed fixing, and I almost shouted it, but I didn’t want to cause him to crash, so instead I just kept watching him and Rosie leaving me behind until long after they were out of sight, because what other choice did I have?

The next day, my fourth at home, at three in the afternoon, Nati woke me from one of my floating dreams. I reached out for his hand because gravity had no power over me when I took a full dose of painkillers.

‘I’ve got something serious to tell you, Dad,’ he said.

I yawned and started kissing each of his fingers, since I was too far away to care that I was embarrassing him.

‘Dad, listen to me!’ he interrupted, tugging back his hand. ‘This is really important.’

‘I’m listening,’ I said, but I closed my eyes again because weightlessness was too beautiful an experience to give up so easily.

‘Remember that CD by Florence + the Machine?’ he asked. ‘The one that belonged to the girl who committed suicide?’

‘Of course, I remember,’ I said, but I wasn’t following his words; I was lifting high above our apartment, and my son was just a voice.

‘Dad! Dad, wake up!’ He glared at me.

‘I’m here,’ I said. Sitting up, I stretched my arms over my head in an attempt to return to him. ‘Stop making faces and get me some water.’

Nati fetched me a big glass. I gulped down half. ‘Okay, now I’m back in the world,’ I told him. And I nearly was.

‘I thought you said you listened to the CD by Florence + the Machine,’ he said.

‘I did. I wanted to study the lyrics, so I looked them up on the Internet and then watched the videos. I watched the one for “Dog Days” three times, I think.’

‘So you never actually listened to the CD itself?’

‘No.’

‘That’s what I thought. Come with me into the living room. You need to know what’s on it.’

I held out my arms to him. Pulling hard, he managed to get me to my feet. While fighting the dizziness, I bent over. On standing back up, I realized what should have been obvious; I’d failed to turn over Sandi’s CD as evidence. And somehow, Nati had got hold of it.

‘Where did you get the CD?’ I asked as a wave of guilt washed over me.

‘Uncle Ernie gave it to me.’

I picked up my crutches. ‘And where did he get it?’

‘He said that after you were shot, when you passed out on the street, he found it in your pocket. He took it for safekeeping.’

‘And he gave it to you?’

‘Yeah, he asked me where he should put it, and I told him I’d keep it safe for you till you got home. Only I . . .’ He grimaced, as if he might be in big trouble. ‘I put it on my bookshelf and I meant to give it to you, but I forgot about it till just a little while ago. I’m really sorry.’

‘It’s all right. What with everything that’s happened, I—’

‘Dad, it’s not
Lungs,’
Nati interrupted.

‘What’s not
Lungs?’

‘What the girl left you – the CD.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘It’s not
Lungs!
It’s something else. Dad, you need to see what she wanted you to find.’

Once we were in the living room, Nati picked up the remote for the DVD, opened the drawer and placed the disc inside.

‘No, you’ll damage it!’ I hollered.

‘It’s all right. I’ve already checked.’

He handed me the controls, then stepped into the kitchen.

‘Don’t you want to see it?’ I asked.

‘I watched a minute or so by accident. That was more than enough.’

The DVD is forty-seven minutes in length, but I’ve watched only about twenty-five minutes of it. I don’t want any more of it in my head.

Four men are filmed with two girls. One of the girls is Sandi. She’s lithe and slender, with a fawn-like, hesitant grace. She hasn’t yet chopped off her hair.

The other girl is flat-chested and slim. She looks younger than Sandi. I’d guess she is twelve or thirteen – at the final edge of childhood. She has long black hair and a bronze complexion, a touch of the Brazilian rainforest in her eyes. I called her Girl Number Two at first, but Ana told me angrily that she deserved a name. We call her Mariana now.

One of the men is Pedro Coutinho. Another is Sottomayor. The other two have been identified by Morel as Coutinho’s Parisian notary, Gilles Laplage, and a Venezuelan sugar exporter now living in Rio de Janeiro named Sebastian Forester. Morel told me he is an old friend of Pedro’s.

When Morel came over to watch the DVD, he told me it was filmed at the flat Forester keeps in Lisbon. He had been there once for dinner and recognized the gilded furniture and Louis XVI wall mirror. The flat is a penthouse suite in one of the big monolithic eyesores that line the Avenida Estados Unidos da América. I discovered a week ago that Sottomayor lives one floor below him.

Susana Coutinho doesn’t know of the existence of the DVD. ‘You can be sure she will take an overdose of pills, like Sandi, five minutes after seeing it,’ Morel told me in the resigned voice of a man who has learned way too many lessons about grief over the last few months. He came to our apartment two weeks ago and watched the film, his head in his hands, chain-smoking, until he jumped up at minute thirteen and told us he refused to see any more.

It’s up to the viewer to guess how many times Coutinho has molested his daughter before making this film, but you can be sure it happened often enough to convince her that there was no point in resisting. Apparently, taking her virginity did not prove to be enough for him, as he must have first led her to believe. Or maybe Sandi told her best friends that because it was her last hope.

At seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds into the DVD, shortly after Coutinho has finished violating Sandi, and while he is kissing the back of her neck, she turns to the camera. Her eyes are vacant – all but dead.

Sandi looks at you and me and anyone else who is watching. Does she realize that some of the men who will end up watching her on this DVD will find her absent and anaesthetized submission to her father exciting?

The first time I saw 17:43, with shame slicing through me, I hopped across the room without my crutches and smacked the off button on the DVD player. I took out the disc and gripped it in my hand. I wanted to snap it in two – to crush it until my hand bled.

I might have really done that, but I needed to get to a bathroom quick. Ana sat on the rim of the bathtub while I got everything out of me and then helped clean me up.

Sandi looking at the camera makes everything so much more cruel. Being filmed at the worst moment of your life shouldn’t happen to anyone, least of all to a young girl.

17:43 is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

After Sandi looks at whoever will one day view this DVD, the camera changes angles, and for the next twenty-one minutes and four seconds, according to Ana, who has timed the filming, Forester and Laplage force themselves on Mariana.

The last eleven minutes and seven seconds show Sottomayor having his way with Sandi. Holding his duck-headed cane, bracing it behind the girl’s head, he pulls her toward him and smiles at the camera. It is the mischievous smile of a boy who knows he is getting away with murder.