The Night Watchman (51 page)

‘It was her father who killed her!’ Morel hollered at me.

‘We could at least ruin their reputations,’ I told him.

In a slow, beseeching voice, Morel replied, ‘We can ruin their reputations only by letting everyone see what happens to Sandi. Her face at minute seventeen will end up on the Internet. Millions will see it. And Susana will not survive such a thing. And neither will I. So the question becomes, Monroe, do you want to kill the two of us?’

On hanging up, I walked to my room and eased the door closed behind me because I didn’t want to draw attention to my decision to leave behind the kind of world where Sottomayor and his friends would never pay for their crimes. Shouldn’t we refuse to play the game if the rules always favoured the other side? Wasn’t it our moral duty to go on strike?

Once I was alone, I removed the bandages from my shoulder and stood naked in front of our wall mirror. Studying my railroad-track scars, which were deeper and uglier than I’d feared, I apologized to my mother, because she’d brought me into the world without a blemish and had nursed me at her breast, and I should’ve taken better care of everything that she had given me.

After closing the curtains, I sat in the dark, trying to understand how I had reached this impasse. Where would I be now if I’d died? A question that makes no sense at all, but I asked it anyway, over and over, as though calling into the darkness after someone who might soon vanish without a trace.

That evening, Ana made Leonardo da Vinci’s recipe for polenta with prunes to improve my mood, but I refused to leave my bed. Nati carried supper to me on a tray. Looking at the apprehension in his eyes, I remembered – with a violent shudder, as though a rocket were taking off through my head – that he’d been frantic over his project on bossa nova music. I asked him to forgive me for not helping him.

‘It’s okay – ancient history,’ he said.

‘Not so ancient,’ I told him. ‘Just a couple of weeks ago.’

‘It was before you were shot.’ He fought back tears.

So it was that I learned that my son’s short life already had a before-time and an after-time, just like mine. Silly of me not to have understood his depth of feeling. When I hugged him, his slender chest trembling against mine made me realize for the first time that there was a great deal of my own past already in him, transmitted in ways that had been under my radar. That realization was enough to make me return – briefly, hoping to feel as little as possible – to my own small version of hell: I told him – in fitful stops and starts – about the first time my father had tested me and Ernie.

I gripped Nati’s hand while I spoke, and he didn’t resist me. He must have sensed I could not do this alone. Maybe, too, he already understood that touching was a great comfort to me at my worst times. When I was done, he asked, ‘Did your father ever test you again?’

‘He sure did. And sometimes I didn’t find Ernie in time, so Dad would hurt him. He hurt your uncle very badly on a few occasions.’

‘So there was no rototiller?’

‘We had a rototiller, but that wasn’t how Ernie got his half-an-ear.

‘You should have run away!’ my son exclaimed, as though my brother and I still had a chance to make an escape; the unforgiving border between the past and present had proved impossible for me to accept at his age as well.

I explained that Ernie and I realized while on our way to Crawford that Dad might teach Mom a final lesson if we ran away, and we’d be responsible. He nodded as if he understood exactly what had been at stake for us, but I could see he hadn’t a clue what I was really talking about. Which was probably a good thing.

‘You and your brother – you aren’t . . . aren’t like other people,’ he said, shrugging with frustration, because he’d been unable to find the words he wanted.

‘Maybe kids who grow up the way we did can overcome the borders that keep them separate from each other. Their identities aren’t so protected. Under certain circumstances, they might even merge into each other a bit. I think your uncle and I were almost like the same person for a while.’

Nati nodded to acknowledge that he understood my meaning. ‘Listen, Dad,’ he said, as though he were about to say something I wouldn’t like, ‘I don’t want you going back to work. Not ever.’

Before I could reply, he burst into tears. Ana came running. After we’d calmed the boy down and they returned to the living room, I realized I’d do what my son had asked me. I didn’t see I had any other choice, in fact.

At bedtime, on slipping under the covers with me, Ana asked if I was still on strike.

‘I think so.’

‘So having sex with me is out of the question?’

‘I might make an exception just this once. At least, if we can figure out a way I don’t have to use my bad shoulder.’

‘I’ll be creative.’

‘I need to say something first.’

‘What?’

‘Would you be upset if I didn’t go back to work?’

‘Hank, is this because of Nati?’

From her tone, I guessed she was going to tell me that our son would soon get used to my work again. And everything would get back to normal. But I didn’t want things to return to normal. That would be an affront to what I’d seen at 17:43.

‘No, it’s because of me,’ I said. I told her about the men in the tower and said I’d no longer work for them – that I hadn’t figured out yet how I was going to fight them, but I would.

‘Maybe I’ll find out where Sottomayor likes to eat dinner and pay someone in the kitchen to slip cyanide into his food,’ I said. ‘Maybe his end will come when he’s least expecting it.’

Ana gave a little laugh. She thought I was joking.

While embracing her, it seemed possible that I’d gone on strike not so much as a protest against the unfairness of the world but really to keep myself from taking violent revenge on Sottomayor.

I imagine now that a lot of what I said to Ana that day seemed like lunacy or paranoia. Maybe she thought I’d taken too many painkillers over the past weeks. And probably, I had. Still, she listened to me without interrupting, and she kissed me on my eyes and nose and lips when I was done. A few minutes later, she climbed on top and drew me into her, but I turned the tables on her nearly right away and got her under me, needing, I think, to know again what it felt like to be in control, even if it was just for a few minutes.

I had my first therapy session five days ago. My psychologist, Lena Carvalho, has thick, shoulder-length brown hair and ever-curious green eyes that – happily for me – often seem to sense when they are asking too insistently for my thoughts and turn away to give me back my right not to tell her too much about myself. She must be about forty years old.

There is a lot I’ll never understand about this woman,
was what I thought over the entire first hour of talking to her, because her no-nonsense temperament seemed so different from mine and because she seemed to have such an easy confidence in herself.

Lena and I talked for two straight hours, double the usual length of a session. When she asked me what I most wanted to tell her, I said,
I’ve got a lot of things I should probably talk about,
and she said
Pick one,
and I got onto the subject of my father having vanished when I was fourteen, and how I was always waiting for him to show up, which was when she came to the same conclusion I had and said, ‘Maybe there are some mysteries we’d prefer not to solve.’

I said that I thought she was right, but that I believed I was ready now to know what happened to him.

‘Then we’ll find out together,’ she told me invitingly.

Her smile made me go all tense, as if she were trying to trick me, and I couldn’t stop myself from replying in a harsh tone, ‘I can’t see how, unless you plan on flying to Colorado with me and following a trail that went cold nearly thirty years ago. Or unless you are in touch with Nathan.’

‘Nathan?’

I explained who Nathan was and about the possibility that he might have murdered Dad or somehow forced him to go away, though I didn’t mention anything about what his connection to Ernie might be. That would have to wait.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But I’m betting there are things you might have overlooked – clues in your memory that you’ve never looked at for very long. I can help you with that.’

She sounded as though she wanted to persuade me it would be an adventure – like Huck Finn’s raft trip down the Mississippi – which made me have a good laugh, because going back to America with me wasn’t going to be scenic at all.

About halfway through our session, she brought up Gabriel and asked me if there was anything that I wanted to tell her about him, but her being so direct about him made me want to rush out of the room.

‘Maybe you could write to me about him,’ she suggested.

‘Write to you how?’

‘Start writing letters about him to me. I’ve done that before with patients. Lots of people can write down what they can’t say.’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said, meaning
no.

‘Just think about it. There’s no rush. We’ll take it one step at a time.’

Very near the end of our session, when Lena asked me if there was anything more that I needed her to know before we separated, I told her about the day Mom died. I admitted that when I was feeling most angry at her and lonely, I hoped that she had been in crushing pain for two or three seconds after her crash and before her death. ‘It’s the thought I’m most ashamed of,’ I said, ‘and I don’t want to have it any more.’

‘Because?’

‘Because it makes me feel that I’m a very bad person.’

‘Being bad is appropriate at times. At the very least, it’s human. Don’t you have a right to be human?’

‘I suppose, but I don’t want to be human in that way.’

‘These bad thoughts about your mother . . . What would happen to you if Ana and your kids knew about them?’

‘They might think a lot less of me.’

‘And then what would happen?’

‘I might lose them.’

‘You think that Ana would leave you and take the kids with her because you occasionally have bad thoughts about a mother who abandoned you?’

‘She didn’t abandon us!’ I said with an anger that shocked me.

‘If I understood what you told me, she took her own life when you and your brother were kids. Isn’t that right?’

‘You don’t understand. She had no choice.’

‘Maybe so, but she still left you and your brother at a time when you couldn’t possibly take care of yourselves. But let’s get back to your wife for now. It sounds as if you think she might abandon you, too.’

‘She got very angry at me the other day. I was terrified I’d never see her again.’

‘But she made up with you. She didn’t leave you.’

‘True.’

‘Might your terror be connected to what your mother did?’

Lena was trying to imply that I’d missed the obvious. And maybe I had. My sense of shame made me squirm.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

‘That I was a big disappointment to my mom,’ I replied.

‘If you take the guilt all on yourself, your mother is free to be a wonderful person. Are you aware of that?’

After our session, I stepped into the sunshine outside her office building, so grateful for the warmth and light that I closed my eyes and held my arms open as if I were unfolding my wings. I came to myself nearly two hours later on a bench in the Praça de Alegria. In my coat pocket was a pack of Marlboros with two cigarettes missing and a small blue lighter.

G had tossed my crutches into the bushes behind my bench. After I retrieved them, I made my way down to the Avenida da Liberdade and took the Metro to the Baixa, where I caught the number twenty-eight tram back home.

The next day, just after lunch, Gabriel brought me to the same scruffy little park. I watched an old woman crocheting a yellow baby outfit, and a bearded man in a blue tracksuit jogging up the hill, and a young woman walking her bouncy, overweight collie, and scores of others rushing around. They seemed as though they were participating in a grand exhibition passing before my eyes. I sat very still so I could appreciate the freedom of not having to be in their show.

Later, while riding up through the Alfama on the tram, I realized that I seemed to have landed outside the flow of time, on a very small planet of my own. Being on strike seemed a very good thing.

The next day, however, at just past noon, I came to myself on the Avenida Estados Unidos da América. I made my way past the gigantic, hideous residential blocks to the Roma Metro station. It was only after I boarded my train that I realized I’d been standing in front of the building where Forester and Sottomayor had their apartments.

Forty-five minutes later, while waiting for my usual tram, a young man asked me for a light; as I reached in my pocket for G’s lighter, I found Sandi’s ring. Surrounding it in my fist, I knew what G was telling me, but I wasn’t ready to leave the quiet of my own little planet. I wrote on my hand,
Give me time to think things out.

The next morning, G wrote back,
If you give me some time, too.

I thought of calling Luci to have her take the ring as evidence, but it seemed entirely possible now that she’d been chosen by people high up as the perfect person to win my confidence and report back to them about me. Maybe she’d been ordered to steal Coutinho’s flash drive and crash Sandi’s disk.

I liked Luci a lot, and it was nearly impossible to believe she could have betrayed me, but it seemed clear to me at that moment that I ought not to trust anyone outside my family. And in any case, I couldn’t risk turning her thoughts towards this case again. When I was ready to move on to the next stage of my life, I’d invite her and her husband over for dinner and we’d have a long talk.

Two days ago, I found out exactly what Gabriel meant by ‘if you give me some time, too’; I disappeared from two in the afternoon until five-thirty and came to myself at home in my kitchen, with a cup of hot tea waiting for me on the counter and two express mail receipts stuffed in my pocket. One package had been sent to Tom Bagnatori at the Minestério Público on the Avenida Marechal Câmara in Rio de Janeiro; the other had gone off to Denis Gershon at the Prosecutor’s Office on the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris. Each package had weighed 148 grams.