The Night Watchman (49 page)

Or, in this case, who thinks he has.

It was that smile that told me the truth.

‘Forget about the important issues in life. Don’t concern yourself with who’s winning and who’s losing in this sad little country of ours. There are obviously some very dangerous and violent men out there who don’t mind hurting good police officers like you. So enjoy your kids. Fly to Madeira and work on your tan. Let your colleagues deal with the bad guys.’

He’d been hoping I’d let the case drop, and warning me for later recall – in the event that I learned about his preference for young girls – that he was at the very top of the list of violent men who considered me expendable. And before this last warning, he’d been trying to get me sidetracked on the bribes Coutinho paid.

He’d pretended to be gay to win my trust – and because it must have amused him to fool me so completely.

When I explained what I’d figured out to Ana, she said she was only astonished that he hadn’t poisoned the Godiva chocolates he’d given me. But he hadn’t needed to do that, of course; he’d achieved exactly what he’d wanted with the two bullets he’d paid for.

After locking the DVD in the drawer where I kept my handguns, I realized I was not nearly as brave a man as I thought. Or perhaps I’d lost the last of my innocence and credulity; I no longer had any doubts that the men who ran Portugal – and their well-placed friends in other parts of the world – would kill me in order to avoid having to answer for their crimes. Having to hobble around my house – and maybe limp through the rest of my life – was proof of that. Falling a thousand feet to the cobblestones of Lisbon or Porto – or Shanghai or London – was the last thing any of them would permit to happen. They would much rather that I took that fall for them.

Or you. Remember that, even if you remember nothing else.

Ana told me that she realized as well as I did that Sottomayor was a dangerous man, but that I had to bring the DVD to the State Prosecutor’s Office. ‘We have to try to protect other girls like Sandi and Mariana,’ she insisted.

She didn’t realize that we no longer had that option. ‘They might put two bullets in you next – or in one of the kids,’ I told her.

Just voicing such a possibility made my legs go weak and the world start spinning around me. I sat down on our sofa and bent my head between my legs.

‘Look, Hank,’ Ana said, ‘we can’t live in fear. Once you start to do that, then you—’

‘Why did your parents flee the dictatorship in Argentina?’ I interrupted.

She bit her lip and turned away from my challenging gaze. She didn’t reply to my question because we both knew they’d emigrated because her uncle Javier – her mother’s older brother – had been arrested by the police for leading a student protest and murdered. His skull was found twelve years later in a mass grave in the garden of a shoe factory outside Buenos Aires. He was identified using dental records.

When I started hiccupping, Ana fetched me a glass of orange juice. After I’d gulped it down, I told her, ‘This goes way to the top.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘The DVDs stolen from Coutinho’s house must show some high-flyers with girls like Sandi – ministers, ambassadors, corporation presidents . . . They won’t let anything about what they’re really like become public. They had to have the house robbed – before Susana Coutinho or someone else found the filmed evidence of what they’ve been doing.’

‘All right, so what are we going to do?’ she asked.

‘Ana, I think we’re going to have to forget what we’ve seen.’

I took enough painkillers that evening to set me soaring up the coast of Portugal all the way to Santiago de Compostela, but at dawn I found myself sprawled like a drunk on a bench in Santa Marinha Square. My crutches had been tossed in the children’s playground. On my left hand, G had written: H –
While dying with you on a Lisbon sidewalk, I watched the city vanish. It took less time than you’d think for all those crumbling old buildings to disappear. The last thing to go was the river.
On my right hand, he’d added,
The river had embraced the shoreline for thousands of centuries, and it just wouldn’t let go! H – I don’t know what to do now. Am I real? Are you?

After hobbling home, I scrubbed the ink off my hands and hid my police notebook in the set of silverware that Ana had inherited from her grandmother. Tiptoeing into Nati’s room, I woke him up and told him never to tell any of his friends about the DVD.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he assured me.

I stood up and went to the window to make sure no one was watching us. Returning to my son, I pressed my hand to his chest. ‘You can’t even mention it.’

‘I won’t.’

I was too jittery to eat breakfast. After the kids had wolfed down their cereal, I locked myself in the laundry room so I could think things out. To keep from panicking further, I told myself:
Don’t do anything more for now. You have time.
I ended up getting out my laptop and listening to the YouTube video of ‘Dog Days Are Over’. I sang the song to myself until I had the melody and lyrics memorized. I needed it to be a part of me.

When our doorbell rang, I discovered Luci on our landing. She’d brought along a fold-up bicycle – silver, with a basket in front. The relief of seeing her made me want to kiss her, but I didn’t want to embarrass her.

Jorge ran in from the kitchen and cornered Luci before I could stop him. ‘Hey, is that for me?’ he asked.

‘No, sorry, it’s for your father,’ Luci told him.

I tugged Jorge a few steps back from our visitor, then asked her to come in. Once we’d entered the living room, I held my son’s shoulders to keep him from getting out of control and asked her if it was really for me.

‘Yeah, I was told it would be good for helping you get back the muscle tone in your leg.

‘I want a bicycle, too!’ Jorge whined, looking up at me with enough hope in his big dark eyes to immediately defeat all my arguments against the purchase.

‘If you leave me and Luci alone for half an hour,’ I told him, ‘then I’ll buy you one on my first trip out of the house.’

He jumped up and down, then punched me in the belly to reinforce his point. ‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

Once Nati had managed to lure Jorge out of the room, I told Luci she shouldn’t have purchased me an expensive gift.

‘It’s okay, I got a good discount,’ she replied. She smiled with the pleasure of being able to help a friend, but a shadow seemed to fall over her face when I asked her to come into the kitchen and talk with me about the Coutinho case. I’d decided by then to ask her not to discuss our investigation with anyone.

Once I had her seated at our kitchen table, I asked her what was wrong.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a slender black chip – only a little bigger than a SIM card. She handed it to me.

‘What is it?’

‘A bugging device. It was found taped to your desk – under the rim. We’ve already checked for fingerprints but there’s nothing on it.’

I knew right away who’d put it there. ‘Sottomayor wore leather driving gloves the day he came to see me,’ I said. ‘And I – stupidly – figured it was just another of his affectations.’

‘So what do we do, sir?’

‘Is it in working order? Can it still send out a signal?’ I figured that Romão might be able to trace it back to the people who’d been listening in on my conversations.

‘It stopped working a while ago,’ Luci said. ‘The techs told us it was only meant to last a few days.’

‘Did they have any ideas about what we should do?’

‘No, they said it’s homemade, so there’s not even a manufacturer we can contact.’

While working this new discovery into my list of grievances against Sottomayor and his buddies, Luci shocked me with a question I hadn’t let myself ask: ‘Sir, do you think it’s possible that Chief Inspector Romão might not be interested in finding out who had you shot?’

‘At this point, Luci, I think anything is possible.’

She looked as if I’d informed her of a death in her family, so I added, ‘Listen, I don’t want you to talk about me or Coutinho or this case with anyone. Not even with your husband.’

‘Did you find out something I should know?’

‘Just that Sottomayor isn’t as innocent as he’s made himself out to be,’ I told her. ‘Has he threatened you?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ I lied. ‘In any case, it’s better for you not to know too much about him.’

‘He’s the one who had you shot, isn’t he?’

Had something in my tone of voice given away the truth? ‘Luci, I’ll be very angry with you if you ask any more questions!’ I told her, trying to sound fatherly and gruff.

‘What were we getting too close to, sir?’ she asked.

‘Luci!’

‘I’ve a right to know.’

‘We may never know for sure,’ I said. ‘The important thing is that you have to keep quiet about anything you suspect. We can’t risk you ending up like me.’

‘I don’t like this at all. It’s not why I joined the police.’

‘Look, there’ll be plenty more cases where you can try to be Dr Watson,’ I told her, trying to make our current dilemma sound insignificant. ‘For now, just do what Romão tells you, and if anyone asks you about me being shot, or about Coutinho, tell them that you’ve had way too much work lately to think about all that.’

Eyeing me as if this were life and death, she said, ‘All right, but when you’re back to work, I want to be reassigned to you. I won’t work with anyone else!’

My sense of failure eased somewhat after I convinced Luci of the need to keep quiet – at least I’d succeeded in protecting her. I was able to eat some dinner with my family and even help Jorge draw houses in his sketchbook. When Ernie called, I gabbed with him about his heat-dazed pear and apple trees.

At about ten o’clock, I started to feel the skin sensitivity on my arms that usually indicates I’m about to get a cold. I took two aspirin right away and went to bed, but I awakened at three a.m. with my forehead burning and a fever of 101.4. My throat was sore and my nose was stuffed. I didn’t want to bother Ana, and managed to fall back to sleep after a while, but she woke up when I started coughing. She put a cold compress on my forehead and made me take two more aspirin. I wanted to embrace her – I needed her affection to get me through this – but I also didn’t want to give her what I had.

When I fell back to sleep, I dreamed that Gabriel came to me at Black Canyon. His long unruly hair had greyed. And his slender, timeworn face was deeply creased with wrinkles. He looked to be in his late sixties. I could see him and hear him as well as I could see and hear Ana and my kids.

Was it a dream, or had the fever taken me to a twilight state where I was able to speak with my other half for the first time?

I know most of what G and I said to each other because – as soon as I came to myself – I wrote down what I remembered of our conversation on the inside front cover of
Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe.

‘You’ve aged,’ I told him. It seemed unfair and sad.

‘So have you, partner!’ he shot back, laughing.

We sat together on the canyon’s rim. Above us were cottony white clouds floating in formation towards the eastern horizon. Two thousand feet below us was a jagged, dun-coloured snake: the Gunnison River. We talked for a time about the landscape. It seemed to be his way of making me comfortable being around him. And then he said, ‘I didn’t like nearly dying.’

‘No, neither did I,’ I told him.

He apologized for not protecting me, and I told him it wasn’t his fault. His frown indicated that he didn’t agree. ‘Anyway, the thing is, nearly being dead taught me something,’ he told me in a confessional tone.

‘What was that?’

‘That all this might vanish.’

When I asked him if he meant Colorado, he unfurled his hand to indicate the land and the sky and even the river far below. ‘Colorado and Portugal and everything else,’ he said. ‘I wrote you about it. I saw Lisbon vanish – building by building. Every street faded to nothing, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. It was crazy. And upsetting. It took me a while to figure out what it meant.’

‘What did it mean?’

He patted my leg. ‘It’s like this, kid – I’m not built like you. I can’t just do nothing and let everything I’ve worked for disappear.’

‘Is that really what’s at stake?’ I asked sceptically; I thought he was exaggerating.

‘Either we win or they do – like Cowboys and Indians all over again. And you and me and Ernie . . . we’re the Indians!’

‘It’s not that simple,’ I observed.

‘Doing the right thing seems pretty simple to me.’

‘Look, I can’t risk losing my kids or Ana. You’re going to have to forget about bringing Sottomayor and his friends to justice.’

He looked east, towards the rising sun. Mountain sunlight was pouring over us, golden and warm.

‘I thought I lost my shadow when we were shot,’ he said. ‘It’s scared me badly.’

‘Yeah, you told me, but it’s right behind you now,’ I said, pointing.

He turned around. The shadow cast by him was long and slender, and edged with a faint reddish glow. It seemed less stark and sure than it would have been in real life.

‘Oh, that little thing,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I mean, at all.’

‘Then what do you mean?’

‘If you think you can live without me, then you figure it out!’

‘Why can’t you talk more clearly?’

‘Because I don’t want to!’ he shouted.

The enraged, defiant way he looked at me terrified me – but also made me understand what he meant.

‘You thought I was already dead, didn’t you?’ I said.

‘Yeah, and I panicked.’

‘All the more reason why both of us have to be a lot more careful now,’ I told him.

‘All right, then which way do I walk, east or west?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You have to choose for me. You’re the one who sets the rules around here, kiddo, even if you don’t think so.’

East is where Portugal is,
I thought. But I didn’t want him to join me there, because he might put my family in danger. ‘West,’ I told him.

‘You were always the sensible one,’ he replied.