The Night Watchman (50 page)

The disappointed smile he showed me seemed to mean that this might be the last time we’d ever see each other.

‘Give my best to Ana,’ he said.

And then I woke up.

My fever grew worse over the course of that morning. By lunchtime, I was too weak to leave my bed, and I discovered that I couldn’t keep down any solid food. My father-in-law, Esteban, was a radiologist, and he came over to examine me later that afternoon. He assured me that my wounds were healing fine and hadn’t become infected.
‘Parece que apanhaste uma gripe, filho,’
he said, shrugging.
Looks like you caught the flu, son.

I was worried my kids would get it next and didn’t let them into my bedroom over the rest of that day. Jorge sat with his toy giraffe on the floor just outside my doorway reading his Dr Seuss books. When he grew bored, I had him fetch his sketchbook and suggested he do my portrait. I ended up looking like a frazzled blue bird in a nest made of tissues and newspapers.

I got no word from Gabriel that day. Maybe he would walk west forever.

In bed that evening, while wondering if I could make a life without him, I remembered Sandi as she’d been on the day I’d questioned her. It occurred to me then that she might have reacted so badly to menstruating for the first time because she had already sensed that her father had a special fondness for pubescent girls. And maybe she herself had been the figure in her nightmares who entered her house and hurt her parents. Her dreams were a warning for her to keep quiet. Like me and Ernie, Sandi had figured out that if she ever told the truth, and managed to convince anyone of how she was being abused, she’d put her father in prison and destroy her family.

By the next morning, I was feeling well enough to sit up in bed and eat some toast with jam. It was Saturday 28 July. Ana needed to work that afternoon. She left the apartment around 11.30 a.m., after having made me alphabet soup for lunch. I still wouldn’t let my kids get too close to me, which started Jorge crying, so I had to pick him up in the end to calm him down. We sat together on our sofa for a good part of the day, watching the Olympics on television. We saw mostly the swimming and cycling, but towards evening we also caught the synchronized diving competition. The mirror-image oddity of the two divers twisting and rolling through the air seemed silly at first, and a bit pointless, but the more we watched, the more it seemed like a true art – like the human need for kinship and solidarity given form.

I slept nearly ten hours that night and woke at just after nine a.m. – alone in bed – with a message in my left hand:
H – Forgive me for walking east. I had no choice.
In my right hand, he’d written a name:
Jean Morel.

I knew immediately what G was proposing. I threw off my covers and got to my feet.

I called Joaquim at home because it was Sunday. He agreed right away to help me. I still had a low fever and Ana was in favour of me staying home, but when I told her I’d take a taxi if I had to, she agreed to drive me there. Joaquim made me a copy of the DVD that Sandi had left me and agreed not to ever tell anyone.

I next called Morel and asked him to come over and see it.

That was the day Morel identified the two men who’d participated in the filming – along with Coutinho and Sottomayor – as Gilles Laplage and Sebastian Forester. After he’d watched the first twelve minutes of the film, he refused to see more, but I insisted he take a look at minute seventeen.

Morel agreed to my plan after seeing 17:43, but made me promise never to tell Susana about the existence of the film. Since he spoke almost no Portuguese, I dictated a note for him to hand to the prosecutors, explaining how he’d found the DVD in Coutinho’s library and a summary of what was on it. Knowing that Coutinho must have kept his pornography hidden inside classical music CDs in his locked cabinet, I also had him write that we’d found the DVD in question in Pascal Rogé’s recording of Debussy’s preludes, since Ana owned that CD and had agreed to donate the cover and liner notes to our cause. Morel drove Susana’s car to the Prosecutor’s Office.

I was sure that anyone who read the text I dictated would believe Morel’s story; no one would suspect I’d found the DVD and given it to him. My family and I would be safe from reprisals.

Morel and I spoke that evening. He’d given the film and our note to Bruno Cerveira, the government prosecutor assigned to the case.

Two days passed without word from Cerveira, but I was mostly over the flu and feeling confident, as though G and I had struck an important blow in a war that most people didn’t even know was being fought. And as though I’d returned from a trip that took me so away from myself that I’d needed Gabriel’s help to return.

On my third day of waiting for a reply from Cerveira, a physical therapist assigned to me by the Judicial Police came to my apartment for our first session. His name was Pavlo and he looked to be about thirty. He was from Kiev and had lived in Portugal since 2004. His thick black hair, parted in the middle, formed wings over his ears, giving him the slightly comic but highly romantic look of a Hollywood heartthrob in a silent movie. From the way Jorge stared at him, open-mouthed, squirming as though he needed to pee, I became convinced that my son had been pierced by Cupid’s arrow for the first time. He dashed off awkwardly to his bedroom, tripping over himself, which gave me the idea that he might even have sprouted an erection.

I surprised myself by not being the least bit upset. Instead, I was filled with amused admiration for the little demon.

Under Pavlo’s guidance, I was soon able to get around on my crutches much better. He became more concerned about my shoulder than my leg because the muscles had stiffened badly, and I could no longer lift my arm over my head. He went over a series of stretching exercises with me that I was to do twice a day.

It cheered me up to be given orders by a young man who seemed to regard me as a worthy human being simply because I was older and more experienced than him.

That night in bed, when Ana and I got to talking about Pavlo, I found myself telling her that I thought that Jorge might be gay. The dramatic tone I blundered into – fearing that she might be disappointed in our son or upset – made her snort. ‘You can’t really think that what Jorge might do in bed would bother me,’ she said.

‘I thought that his being our son might make it different.’

She kissed my brow as if I were her third child – and the one most needing her guidance at the moment. ‘You love him so much that you worry too much. He’s going to be okay.’

‘He might not have it easy,’ I insisted. ‘There’s still a lot of prejudice.’

‘He’s stronger than people think. He’s a tough little guy.’

‘How long have you suspected?’

‘For a couple of years.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Who’d have thought he’d go for Rudolph Valentino?’

‘So you noticed, too?’

She pointed her index finger straight up and gave me a cagey look. ‘I’d appreciate it if you told him what a hard-on is for, when you have a chance.’

‘Why me? You know what it’s for at least as well as I do,’ I shot back, which made her wrestle me onto my back.

‘There’s one other thing,’ I said, looking up at her, pleased to have a wife who liked to take charge now and again.

‘What?’

‘Ernie told me that he’s slept with men. So I guess that makes him gay.’ I left out that he’d gone to bed with prostitutes.

‘Big news,’ she said, pretending to yawn.

After the lights were off, the pressure to tell her even more made me put her hand over my eyes like a blindfold.

‘What’s wrong now?’ she asked.

‘There’s something I never told you about me.’

‘You enjoy your close-ups of my pussy far too much to be gay, so don’t try any bullshit on me!’

‘No, but I had sex with boys when I was in my teens. In Colorado. And then in Évora.’

She turned around. Her breathing was warm against my face. ‘Very enterprising of you to have sex on two continents, Chief Inspector.’

‘I never told anyone till I told Ernie a couple of weeks ago. Aunt Olivia never knew.’

‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘She loved you to the end of the earth. She could never have been disappointed in you.’

‘My father would say I was an embarrassment.’

She sat up. ‘Oh, Hank, you can’t really care what he’d think!’

‘I might.’

‘Well, don’t!’ she ordered, and she bit the Thunderbird tattoo on my arm to make her point.

Easing back onto her side of the bed, she turned on her side with her icy feet nudging my good leg, which meant that she wanted me to spoon up behind her, so I did.

‘What about when Jorge figures out he’s gay – if that’s what he is?’ I asked.

‘What about it?’ she whispered.

‘Maybe he’ll get upset.’

She pulled my arm around her and said, ‘If he needs any pointers, he can ask Ernie.’

‘He may not be very knowledgeable on the subject.’

‘Well, then he can ask his father.’

‘I’m serious, Ana.’

‘Hank, you have an uncanny ability to worry about everything! Stop! Besides, if Jorge is already getting erections at the age of seven, he’s going to be very popular!’

The next afternoon – 2 August, nine days ago – Morel phoned. Cerveira had just called to tell him there was nothing on the DVD that he could use to prosecute any of the men involved.

‘How is that possible?’ I asked.

‘Because Sandi is dead. So she cannot testify against Sottomayor, of course.’

‘The DVD testifies against him!’ I hollered.

‘He says it’s not enough. He must be sure she does not agree to what happens to her.’

The rage inside my chest was a form of explosive madness.

‘Does it look like she’s happy about what’s happening?’ I demanded. ‘She was only fourteen years old, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Cerveira confirms that fourteen is the age of consent in Portugal.’

‘That’s only true if there’s no coercion involved! Did you hear a word I said the other day?’

‘Do not yell at me, Monroe! You cannot imagine what I am feeling at this moment.’

‘I’m sorry. But listen closely. If a man forces a girl to do something she doesn’t want to do, he can be charged with statutory rape. She can be fourteen or fifteen or any other age.’

‘Still, he tells me the DVD is not enough to get a conviction.’

‘Did he watch the entire film?’ I asked. ‘Did he see minute seventeen?’

‘Yes, he tells me he watches it all.’

‘Did you remind him that the blood Sandi got under her fingernails proves she fought her father?’

‘He says Sandi is dead and her father is dead and there is no case.’

‘If he saw the DVD, he knows that Sottomayor forced himself on her, too. And that son-of-a-bitch is very much alive! We need to show the DVD to another prosecutor. I know others who—’

‘Cerveira tells me he speaks to two other prosecutors,’ Morel interrupted. ‘They all agree we have nothing.’

He excused himself to fetch his cigarettes. When he got back on the line, he said, ‘I need to explain something else, Monroe.’

He sounded glum. ‘What else has happened?’ I asked. ‘Is it Susana?’

‘Yes and no. Once, you and I speak of the mountains where you live when you are a boy. Do you remember?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘These last days . . . It is as if I am at the bottom of a high mountain – a mountain where I once live. I look up and I see the top, and I know I can never climb back up. I am too old and tired. I cannot fight any longer. When you are my age, you realize that life is always about fighting – fighting for what you want, fighting to be heard . . . It is a struggle from the first day to the last. But I cannot do this any longer. I am sixty-two. And the top of the mountain is very far . . . very high. And Susana – she is no longer there, in any case. She is down here with me.’

‘Which means exactly what?’ I asked.

‘Susana and I will stay where we are. We know we cannot win. And the worst has already happened, no?’

‘But what about Mariana? She may still be suffering somewhere.’

‘Cerveira says that maybe she is fourteen, too.’

‘No, no, no! She’s younger than Sandi – it’s obvious!’

‘Mon
Dieu,
you are impossible! The point is, we have no proof!’

‘You know what Cerveira is
really
telling us, don’t you? That nobody in the Prosecutor’s Office is going to pursue this case –
no matter what!’

‘Yes, Monroe, I understand,’ he said wearily. ‘I think I understand it before you, in fact. I grow up in a country where this also happens.
Egalité, fraternité . . .
It looks very good on old coins, but I do business in France for forty years and I know that how things work in the real world is different.’

‘How do things work?’

‘Either Cerveira already knows he will not win, because the odds are too big against him, or he is on the side of those we wish to fight. It makes no difference which.’

‘It does – morally.’

‘Morally?’ he repeated, as if it were an absurd notion. And he had himself a brief laugh, though I also sensed he was near tears. ‘What do you think morals have to do with this?’ he demanded.

‘Everything.’

‘No, they have nothing to do with it, Monroe! This is a negotiation – a business deal. And the outcome is already decided.’

I wanted to shriek something at him that would shame him for giving up. More even than that, I wanted to shout that I would kill Sottomayor or frame him for Coutinho’s murder. But the silence I let go on too long made me understand that I’d never permit myself to take such a risk – not as a husband and father. The only option left to me was to locate Mariana, but that could take years. And even if I did find her, Sottomayor and his friends would undoubtedly keep her from testifying – with money or threats.

As my last hope, I suggested to Morel that we go to the press with the DVD.

‘No!’ he hollered. ‘Susana does not want the world to see what happens to her daughter! Do not forget your promise to me! And what about Sandi? You think she would like the world to see her with her father?’

We both knew that her suicide was proof that the answer was
no.
‘But if we don’t give the DVD to the press, nothing will happen to the men who killed her,’ I said.