Accusation (26 page)

Yes, but he was in the process of setting up circus programs in various places, not just there.

You said he knew the orphanage director, the known molester.

According to Gerard Loftus.

And the allegations are in the public record.

Yes, though I don’t think they’ve been reported here.

Well. David took a sip of wine. And, once again, how calm he was. Why can’t you say all of what you just said?

Thursday morning: Sara picked up the phone at work and the voice of Gerard Loftus, live, said, Hello, Sara. Gerard, it has to be early where you are. He said, Yes, he’d just got the message she’d called when he arrived back in Calgary the night before, at his parents’ house, and he was extremely pleased she was doing this and did she have everything she needed because he would help in any way he could. He made it sound as if they were working on something together. Which was unsettling. And, because the phone number for Mark Templeton that Kim Guest had passed on was disconnected, she had to ask for Gerard’s help. Can you think of any friends or colleagues of Templeton’s who might have his number?

A little after noon, her RCMP contact, Dan Greco, called and said he’d run some searches with the names of the men she’d mentioned, and a Scotland Yard source had come up with this: a Leo Reseltier, of Maldon, Essex, had returned to the UK about a month previously from Ethiopia and filed a legal application to change his name.

The current director of the school in Kandy, Sri Lanka, where Mark Templeton had taught before coming to Africa, said Templeton had been asked to leave due to management problems, and she knew no other details. Management problems was an ambiguous phrase, Sara thought, which could hide other things.

Toward the end of the next afternoon, a friend of the friend of the friend of Mark Templeton, whose number Gerard had provided, passed on a phone number in Sweetwater, Florida, a town that, Sara discovered when she looked it up online, had once been a retirement community for circus dwarves. The voice of the man who answered the phone sounded more sleepy than wary, a hint of the nasal, but ordinary, even warm. When she asked if he was the Mark Templeton who had worked at an orphanage in Awassa, Ethiopia, he said yes before something seized him and he hung up with a crash. These discoveries leaped in her. She’d found him, he wouldn’t speak but she’d located him: an electric shock that nevertheless registered distantly.

That night, listening to phone messages from the kitchen while she poured soup into a saucepan — her friend Soraya Green saying, Where are you, I haven’t heard from you in weeks! — Sara cast her mind around the globe trying to land on wherever Raymond Renaud was. If she was going to mention the allegations against him, she wanted to give him the chance to respond. Which meant locating him. The night before, she’d started out of a dream, one whose content seemed blindingly self-evident. He was stepping out of her car, not her actual car but one that nevertheless was hers. When she looked again, he was gone, the world around her dim and enclosed and crepuscular. She went looking for him in a train station, down into the basement of the station, yet there was no sign of him; only his absence registered, like a shape in the place where he ought to be. She had no leads and so little time. Would he have stayed in Africa: it would be easy enough to disappear in Africa, head south or west or north, yet her hunch was he’d gone farther. Why? Somewhere he could get a job with relative ease. Yitbarek had said he’d said he needed to find work. Somewhere he’d been before, had contacts? Sri Lanka, unlikely. Which still left huge swaths of the wide world. Gerard said he had absolutely no idea where Raymond Renaud was and seemed affronted that she’d think he’d know anything. She did not want to scapegoat Raymond.

She pulled a spoon out of the cutlery drawer, and something— a mouse? — skittered in the wall behind the counter. Matt Johansen had told her a story of a man he knew, a teacher accused by a female high school student of sexual abuse. The man denied the accusation and had no prior record of misdemeanour, yet he’d lost his job, and his wife had left him. The girl accusing him was young and seemed vulnerable and why would she lie about so terrible a thing? The man lost access to his own children, Matt said, and was forced to move, and when, later, he won his case in court, the vindication hardly mattered for it was impossible for him to reconstruct his life.

Soup bowl in hand, Sara paced back and forth between kitchen table and stove. She did not want to be shielding herself from the truth, but for the moment something outweighed the reasons for mentioning the allegations against Raymond Renaud. A gnawing discomfort held her back.

Saturday, a week later: through the dark came the tock of a newspaper hitting the wood of the porch. A car engine throbbed its way in slow, accelerated bursts up the street, and half asleep, Sara imagined a dark-skinned man, Tamil, resident of one of the towers on Jameson Avenue down by the lake or, more likely, a house to the east in Scarborough or to the north in Brampton filled with recent arrivals like him, reaching into the back seat of an old sedan for another newspaper from the stacked piles and hurling it houseward through the open car window. Her own words rolled in an elastic band made their way out into the world. She curled in on herself, pushing the pillow under her head, wanting praise or reassurance, which was ridiculous. She was a professional: why this time did she want someone to call her up and tell her she’d done a good job?

The ringing of the telephone roused her. Full daylight, almost eleven, my God. By the time she made it down the hall and into her office, whoever was calling had hung up. And left no message. David? Usually left a message. She was woozy in the way that happens when you are yanked from deepest sleep, the collapsing of two weeks of late nights, writing, editing, the hashing out of the shape of the article’s two parts with Alan Marker, and Sheila Gottlieb, back from a conference, and Paula Brown, the features editor. The house was cold, the temperature outside must have dropped overnight. As Sara stumbled down to the first floor, barefoot, having pulled on a sweater and jeans, the phone, phones, both the one in her office upstairs and the portable one on its stand in the front hall, rang again.

Oh you’re there, said Gerard Loftus, loud. I was calling back to leave a message. I saw your piece. It takes up a lot of space. That’s good. And it’s good there are photographs. The photo of Abiye. And most of what you say is good. That you found Templeton and the thing about Reseltier. Amazing. This morning I thought, I’m glad of all the people I could have met, I met you. But I have a few issues. Like what you say about what happened when Templeton left the Village. If you think I should have told the boys to keep on going to his house until someone in New Jersey decided to do something or the police did something, think again. Oh, and it says there’s a second part, so is that when you’re going to mention Raymond Renaud, because there’s nothing here so I’m checking.

How she wished she had never given him her home number. It was only nine in the morning where he was. Determined had been Ed Levoix’s word for him, hadn’t it? Or adamant. Outrage was not going to be the best response. If he could hear the sleep in her voice, he was not going to acknowledge it. The sun was bright in her eyes through the living-room window. In his eyes, she was nothing but his mouthpiece.

Gerard, Sara said, sinking into the sofa, losing her body heat, aware of the coiled paper out on the cold porch, the headline that she hadn’t seen but could guess at, something to do with Abuse and Expats, the photo that she’d taken of Abiye looking angrier than she remembered, glowering in his striped shirt. I appreciate all your help and I understand all you have invested in this story, but it’s not up to you what I say. She’d made a few more stabs at finding Raymond Renaud, had even called Sem Le in Sydney, but he knew nothing and so far she’d come up with nothing.

Because if you don’t say anything, I’ll have to let your editors know.

Let them know what?

We wouldn’t want it looking like you’re protecting him.

We, Gerard?

Well, I mean you.

Listen — outside, the reddening leaves on the Norway maple trembled like little souls and beneath the floorboards Kumiko sang as she vacuumed — you don’t need to threaten me. I’ve decided to try to find Renaud before repeating the allegations against him. He should have the chance to respond to them.

You need to say there’s a ring of them.

And how, she wondered, on her feet with the phone dead in her hand, had she managed to get herself in a position where Gerard Loftus had this kind of menacing power over her?

After the first surges of anger and self-justification, as Sara stepped out of the shower and wrenched a towel from the rack to wrap around her head, another thought came to her, What if Gerard found out that she had driven Raymond Renaud to Montreal? It seemed far-fetched to the point of paranoia to think that he would ever learn of it. She had told no one other than Juliet Levin and David. She had no idea to whom Raymond might have mentioned the trip, or her name. He might have said enough to someone that Gerard, learning of the journey, could figure out the truth. She barely knew Gerard Loftus or who he was or who he knew or what he was capable of. No, she had some sense what he was capable of. She wiped another towel across her face and wrapped it around her body, not frightened but unnerved. And if by some rare chance, Gerard did find out that she had driven Raymond to Montreal, she had no doubt that he would use the knowledge against her to dismantle what semblance of objectivity she had.

She didn’t want to hurt the circus. The circus, as far as she could see, meant nothing to Gerard. There was all the joy and hope that seemed to have sprung from it, the good that seemed to have its own life. Surely there was good there. She wanted no hand in destroying it.

Do you have a partner, Gerard? She didn’t think he had, perhaps he’d never had anything but fleeting sexual encounters. With men, with women? Why was she wondering about this now: she was trying to parse the source of his insistence. Was he thinking only of the boys, of helping the boys. There was an urge to punish in him. How had he been betrayed? Had he possibly been abused himself, and this was a hidden source of his fire. His father was a minister, she thought he’d said at one point. He was an outsider, with an outsider’s needs and grievances.

She had the rest of the weekend to rework her copy. It had been edited, even copy-edited, but she could call Alan or Sheila and say she’d discovered something else. Such things happened all the time. Still wrapped in the towel, Sara dashed upstairs. By car, she could be at the office in less than half an hour. Monday’s paper would not go to bed until Sunday night.

Tuesday morning by phone, Juliet said, I thought you should know, their Canadian tour’s been cancelled. Remember the circus was supposed to come here in the spring, here and Montreal, and the US? I got a note from their presenter this morning saying they were told the embassy in Nairobi wouldn’t issue them visas. The message from Foreign Affairs said they were worried about defections and they didn’t necessarily believe the performers were coming here for the reasons stated in their applications. Maybe they read in your piece yesterday about what happened with the performers in Australia and that had something to do with the decision.

Just back from a story meeting, Sara had reached across the expanse of loose pages, faxes, empty packets of dissoluble vitamin C, balled-up tissues, pens, the copies of Saturday’s and Monday’s papers containing the two parts of her article, to grab the receiver from the ringing phone on her desk. There were reprint requests, Alan had announced at the meeting, from as far away as the UK and Australia, and because this had happened on his watch, he was going to take what credit he could, how pleased, even salaciously pleased he was. On one of the TV monitors overhead, American President Bill Clinton smiled and mouthed a truth or a lie, and the pixellated numbers on the clocks of the world on the far wall switched over from one minute to the next: 11:52 in Beijing became one step closer to midnight.

They don’t want defectors, Sara said to Juliet, and swept some of the detritus on her desk into the wastebasket. It has to do with the fact that the performers fled and less to do with why. And it doesn’t have to do with him. He wouldn’t even be with the circus when it came here.

They’ve been tainted, Juliet said. By all of this. The whole circus has. It’s so sad.

That’s not necessarily his fault. You can’t hang all that on him, or you can’t do it yet.

Whatever, Juliet said. Really, it’s your story now, not mine. You’ve taken it over, and I wish you luck with it.

She sounded cool but not cruel. At least she hadn’t used the word
steal
, Sara thought, yet the word hung in the air. If you still want to make a film about the circus, I’m happy to give you access to any of my interviews, help with the research, help in any way I can.

She couldn’t believe that she was making this offer: where did the urge come from other than a need to reconfirm Juliet’s trust.