The Night Watchman (25 page)

‘Did your parents take Ernie to a hospital?’ Nati asked.

‘Yeah, we ended up in an emergency room in Grand Junction.’

‘The wound must have bled a lot.’

‘You got that right!’ I shrugged as if it was just a minor nuisance. ‘Dad made us put an old blanket down to protect the upholstery in his car.’

‘He did what?’ Nati asked in a shocked voice.

‘His Plymouth had fancy white seats – real leather. He loved them. He’d have been furious if Ernie had bled on them.’

‘Was your father crazy or something?’

‘His car was a ’56 Belvedere. It was red and white, and it had wings at the back. It was beautiful! Wow! Your uncle and I used to feel like celebrities in it – like astronauts in a parade! I was Neil Armstrong and Ernie was Buzz Aldrin.’ I waved at the make-believe crowd around us as though I were in a slow-motion newsreel.

‘So what happened at the hospital?’ Nati asked.

‘Ernie was in shock by the time we got there. He almost bled out. The doctors said he was so young that the part of his ear that was lost would mostly grow back.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘It started to, but then it got infected and that ruined everything.’

‘How old was Ernie?’

‘He was four.’

‘He must have been really scared.’

‘Yup. We all were.’ Nati seemed to want more drama and emotion from me, but I had used up my allotment years before. ‘Your uncle and I cried for years over what happened,’ I told him. ‘But then we realized that things were the way they were and weren’t going to change. The ink dried and could never be erased.’ I patted my son’s leg. ‘Though it’s easy for me to imagine a parallel universe – an unforgiving one – in which Ernie died that day. I’ll tell you a secret, Nati – I feel the chill of that universe in my bones every day of my life.’

‘You should stay here in the real world, Dad,’ Nati told me, as if that were as simple as having a conversation with me in his mom’s car.

‘I do – most of the time. But knowing what could have happened to Ernie . . . That’s why I’m so glad you have the chance to know him. I know he’s weird, and that you . . .’

‘It’s okay, Dad, I like him – I like him a lot. He just makes me impatient sometimes.’

‘He often has that effect on people.’

‘So how did his head get caught in a rototiller?’

‘He was a curious kid – and always wandering away from me.’

Thankfully, Nati didn’t ask how a boy barely four years old had figured out how to start an engine.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘Uncle Ernie can wear his hair in a ponytail if he wants to. I wouldn’t mind.’

‘Tell him that. He’ll appreciate it. But we’ll also have to be sure Dingo is prepared.’

We sat inside the easy quiet we made together. Nati was assimilating the new information about his father and uncle. And maybe, like me, he was thinking about the way this present moment was hurtling as fast as it could into the past. To stop time – even for just a day – would be the magic trick I’d most want to be able to perform.

‘Sorry for scaring you before,’ I said.

‘You went pretty berserk.’

‘I saw Jorge in Ernie’s bed, and for a second I thought that Ernie was my father. I must have still been half-asleep.’

‘Your father was
that
scary?’

‘Yes, Nati, he was. Though every once in a while he was really great, too.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘Neither do I. And I don’t think I ever will.’

Breakfast was Colorado French toast, which called for mashed apple to be added to the egg. While the kids did the dishes and Ernie got down to work on his latest painting, I dragged the hose over to the azalea garden – twenty-seven bushes, and all of them shaded by red and yellow umbrellas that Ernie and I had bought at the market in Évora and tied to stakes, since the flowers tended to burn on the hottest days of summer. I gave the bushes all the water they could handle, creating the muddy mess their roots seemed to love.

About a half hour later, after I’d started sprinkling the herb garden, Luci called.

‘Good news!’ she told me excitedly. ‘Remember the building being remodelled on the Rua do Vale, with the scaffolding? One of the construction workers there spotted a woman coming out of the victim’s house on the morning he was murdered – at about ten o’clock. He tried to start a conversation with her, but she told him to fuck off. Just this morning, he saw an article in the paper about the case and went to the police station in the Restauradores. I’ve got a portrait of her made from his description right in front of me.’

‘I’m at my brother’s house. He has a fax. Send it to me.’

‘Of course, sir, but listen, the portrait isn’t so great. She was wearing a hat pulled down over her forehead and the guy only got a good look at her face for a second, when she glared at him. But he noticed she had a strange tattoo on the back of her hand.’

‘What’s it of?’

‘The number thirty. I’ll fax you our drawing of it.’

Throughout dinner with Ana’s self-obsessed Brazilian ceramicist, I sneaked glances at the angry eyes of the woman who might have been Coutinho’s lover. Since she’d chosen the back of her hand for her tattoo, she clearly intended the numeral 30 to be visible to herself and others. Had something life-changing happened when she was thirty?

Everything changed that year because I . . .

I excused myself just after we’d ordered dessert and ducked out to the street to call the only person I knew who might be able to help me narrow my list of possibilities for the end of that sentence. David Zydowicz told me that he’d had his father’s concentration camp number tattooed on his arm before the old man’s heart bypass surgery back in 1982. ‘Papa fled the room whenever I tried to discuss his experiences back in Poland,’ David told me, ‘so it was the only way I could think of telling him what I needed to say without actually saying it.’

‘What kinds of things did you need to tell him?’

‘That I’d never let him suffer alone again. And that there was nothing he couldn’t say to me. Other things, too, but I don’t want to speak of them. They’re too important.’

As to the number thirty, David told me, ‘It’s a numeral, so maybe what she needed to say was also beyond words.’

Back at the dinner table, I caught each of my wife’s cues for me to say something humorous or memorable to her artist, but I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t have sounded forced. Later, at home, Ana told me that I could have at least
looked
interested in him. Happily, she didn’t stay angry with me.

Unusually for me, I fell asleep nearly as soon as my head hit my pillow. I awoke to the ringing of our home phone. I jumped out of bed, sure that something was wrong with Ernie.

‘Sorry to wake you, Henrique.’

To my relief, the voice belonged to Chief Inspector Romão, who was on call this week. I sneaked a look at the clock; it was 7.14 a.m.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

‘Bad news,’ he said, and he explained that Susana Coutinho had phoned 112 two hours earlier, having found Sandra unconscious in bed. ‘The kid took a handful of her mother’s sleeping pills.’

‘Oh, Christ. Where is she now?’ I asked. I sensed myself standing on a fragile pinnacle high above this conversation.

‘The hospital. And please don’t freak out on me, Henrique, but the doctors were unable to stabilize her blood pressure. She was pronounced dead at six forty-seven.’

I made no reply. I had fallen into a cold ocean, and the miles of sea leading out to the horizon were everything I should have been able to predict.

Ana stirred behind me. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked sleepily.

I held up my hand to have her wait. The fatal heaviness in my arm made me realize I’d carry around this moment for many years to come. ‘I really hate this case,’ I said to myself more than to Romão.

‘Hang in there, Henrique.’

‘Did the girl leave any note?’ I asked.

‘Not a thing. Listen, I just tried to question her mother, but she’ll only talk to you.’

Susana wants to tell me that she’ll never recover,
I thought.
She’ll want me to know the truth even if she lies to her family.

‘Monroe, don’t you disappear on me!’ Romão said impatiently.

‘I’ll go see Senhora Coutinho,’ I told him, realizing that all he wanted was for me to take him off the hook.

‘What’s happened?’ Ana asked as soon as I hung up.

I’d sat down on the edge of our bed without realizing it. Her arms slipped around me. I told her about Sandi’s overdose in a clenched whisper. I was holding back a scream; if I let it out, I figured I might not stop for a long time.

Being touched when I was jittery made me feel trapped, so I lay back down and put my pillow on top of my eyes. Not ever getting up seemed my best option.

A man imagines he will never say another word – not to his colleagues, his wife, his children or his brother. He tells himself he will go on strike against the unfairness hiding under everything, but he knows it will really be against his own loss of control.

Ana whispered that she’d call in to work to say she’d be coming in late so that she could sit and talk with me, but kindness was the second most important thing I didn’t deserve at that moment, so I didn’t answer.

The phone started beeping; I must have put the receiver down badly. ‘Smash it with a hammer!’ I snarled.

After Ana had clicked the receiver back in place, she opened our window all the way. The dry breeze came in, trailing the chattering of swallows. It was reassuring to be reminded that there was a world beyond all of our human concerns, but I didn’t want any comfort; surely we should allow ourselves to feel the torment that compelled a young girl to take her own life, if nothing else.

Tears came, but only for the selfish reason that I couldn’t bear having to slip back inside my professional demeanour and face Susana Coutinho. Ana rested her hand on my back as if to ask for my thoughts, but I didn’t tell her what they were because it would have seemed crazy:
if a swallow darts in through the window and perches on me or even on the bed, I will believe in God, and I will believe that eternal life awaits us all, and I will learn to pray again. And maybe, if I’m feeling generous, I’ll even forgive myself for all I could have done and didn’t.

None of the swallows took my challenge, of course. It was just one of the impossible-to-win games I invented when I wanted to be certain I was powerless to stop bad things from happening. And to remind myself that there was no God, even if Aunt Olivia had been sure He was watching over us.

After I gave Ana the terrible news about Sandi, she spoke to me in a sympathetic whisper, but I didn’t listen to her advice after the words,
You have to learn how to . . .
Instead, I got up and started to put on my shirt and underwear. I assured her I was better. I did a silly little jig to prove it, too – which I hated myself for even as I was doing it, because it made a joke out of what had happened.

Ana flashed with irritation. ‘Stop it! I don’t like it when you belittle yourself.’ She pulled me down onto the bed and had me sit with her. Combing my hair out of my eyes, she said, ‘You have a beautiful profile.’ Squinting for comic effect, she added, ‘Worthy of a Roman statue.’

‘I wouldn’t like not being able to move.’

‘Ssshhh! You know, sometimes I make believe you were a Roman nobleman in a past life. It’s those ancient coins you and Ernie found. I’ve made up a whole story about you.’

Not for the first time, I wondered if Ana’s secret life was as vast as my own. ‘What’s the story?’ I asked.

‘You lived with Ernie and the rest of your family in the Villa Ernesto in the fourth century. You had a huge formal garden with the most beautiful roses. And a farm with olive trees and grapevines and fig trees. You made olive oil that you sent back to Rome.’ Her face lit up. ‘You and Ernie were famous for it! Enrico and Ernesto’s Portuguese Olive Oil!’ She fixed me with a cheeky look. ‘You were drawn to those old ruins because a part of you remembered that you two nutcases used to live there.’

‘Was I a cop back then, too?’

‘No, I told you,’ she groaned, ‘you were a nobleman. You supervised production of your world-famous olive oil! Anyway, that sack of coins you found . . . You yourself hid them away sixteen hundred years ago, and that’s why you were able to find them.’

At that moment, the unlikeness of my having been alive sixteen hundred years ago didn’t seem so different from being who I really was. The arc of my life – of all I had seen and done – seemed impossible.

Ana took both of my hands in hers. ‘Now tell my why Sandi meant so much to you.’

‘You
can’t return the gifts you get in childhood,’
I murmured by way of reply – and without exactly intending to.

My wife showed me a confused look. I stood up to fetch my trousers. ‘I need to get to work,’ I said.

‘First, tell me what gifts you’re referring to,’ she said.

She pursed her lips and gazed at me with such hopeful interest that I decided to reveal a little more about what it was like to live on the side of the mountain that no one could see, but while slipping on my pants, my car keys tumbled out. Ana snatched them up and wouldn’t give them back. She said I was in no condition to drive. She insisted on taking me to Coutinho’s house.

I fought her in a mean-spirited voice, but she waved off my arguments and went off to tell Nati to look after Jorge. I was secretly grateful to her for ordering me around. At such times, Ana seemed like a chess champion who nearly always knew how to counter my cagiest moves.

From outside my son’s bedroom door, I listened to her and Nati whispering together, but not their actual words, and I thought:
These are the people I love most, but I’m too obsessed with this case even to listen to what they’re saying to each other.

As we drove across town, I practised how I’d express my condolences to Susana Coutinho, but I didn’t have any idea what the Portuguese expected to hear in such circumstances. Ana was still wearing a blue-striped pyjama bottom and one of my old white T-shirts. She adored going out in her bedclothes. She always said it made her feel as if she were living in a tiny village instead of a big city. I told her I was sure to make grammatical errors in what I said – I always did when I was upset. She didn’t answer me until we parked. Then, she caressed my cheek and said, ‘You’re a good person. And Senhora Coutinho will see that.’