The Night Watchman (20 page)

I got home at twenty to noon. Jorge ran to me at the door with his little red backpack already on. He told me his mother had just left. As soon as we were all buckled up in Ana’s Passat, which was more reliable than my old Ford, I sent Ernie an SMS saying we were leaving. Nati sat up front with me as my co-pilot, our Automobile Club map of Portugal spread across his legs. He seemed to have gotten over his disappointment in me and filled me in breathlessly – as if running downhill – on the latest comic and tragic absurdities at his school. As we entered the freeway, he confessed he was worried about a project on Brazilian music he’d been assigned. Yet beneath even his apprehension and doubt, he seemed to be telling me he felt at home inside the intricate complexity of his life.

Jorge sat in the back seat with his wooden giraffe, whose name was Francisco. On the bridge over the Tagus, he jiggled Francisco up and down behind my head and asked questions in his giraffe voice, which was high-pitched and squeaky: ‘Do we need to worry about lions around here?’; ‘When can we stop to eat from the treetops?’

Our ongoing gag was that Francisco always had the opposite opinion as me about everything, and I kept telling him in a furious voice to
put a lid on it!
That expression made Jorge squeal with laughter. Today, I kept panting with my tongue out and complaining about the heat and Francisco kept telling me in a chill-induced stutter that it was
f-f-f-freezing!

We ended up caught in heavy traffic on our way south to Setúbal. Still, it charmed me the way Nati traced his finger along the line of freeway to show me where we had to go. I loved how serious he could get about almost anything. But only when we spotted the hilltop castle of Montemor-o-Novo coming into view did I let myself feel the freedom of the hinterland.
No one in Colorado has ever heard of this place,
I thought, tingling with gratitude. Soon the horizon widened into reassuring vistas of rolling hills dotted with silvery-branched olive trees. I lowered my window for the earthy, extravagant, sensual scent of summer flowers and drying grasses. When we stopped for gas, the kids bought snacks while I filled up the tank, then sat on the kerb by the tyre-pressure meter as I washed the windshield. Nati nibbled on potato chips while Jorge gobbled down his chocolate bar. They shared a Coke. I waved. They waved back. The absurdity of waving to my kids even when they were only a few feet away from me never ceased to make me feel as though I’d stolen somehow into an affectionate universe.

The Alentejo had nothing monumental about it, no snowcapped mountains or towering buttes like the American West, but the whitewashed houses and cobblestone streets were so ordered and neat, and the varied greens of its landscapes so sweetly comforting – like a child’s dream given form – that it seemed to be just the right place for me and the boys.

About ten minutes after leaving the gas station, I noticed that a battered white Fiat seemed to be following us, however. It refused to pass me even when I slowed way down. With my heart jumping in my chest, I eased onto the gravel shoulder of the road. When the Fiat came to a halt fifty yards behind us, my apprehension came out as anger.

‘Don’t move!’ I told Nati. ‘And you stay put too!’ I said, turning to Jorge.

‘What is it, Dad?’ Nati asked anxiously.

I patted his leg. ‘Everything will be fine. Just stay here.’

There are moments when you become little more than a single overriding emotion. I got my handgun out of the trunk. And this I knew: I’d feel no remorse about killing anyone who threatened my kids.

A young man with short dark hair was driving the Fiat. I strode toward him with my gun drawn. He shifted into gear and began to turn in a tight circle, so I fired in the air.

He screeched to a halt. He had a gaunt face and unshaven cheeks. He yelled something out his window, but I didn’t catch it; blood was throbbing in my ears.

‘Get out of your car!’ I shouted.

He pushed out on his door and stepped outside with his hands over his head. He was tall and lanky. He looked to be in his early thirties. ‘Don’t shoot me! I’m a journalist.’ He tried to laugh off his terror but it came out more like a moan.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘I wanted to talk to you about Pedro Coutinho. I expected you to drop your kids somewhere and drive to police headquarters. When you got on the freeway, I didn’t know what to do, so I followed you. I’m sorry.’

I lowered my gun. He lowered his hands.

‘I want to interview you,’ he said. ‘I work for
Record.’

‘What the hell has a sports newspaper got to do with Coutinho?’ I asked.

‘He was a big supporter of Sporting.’

Sporting was one of Lisbon’s two main soccer teams. ‘Tell me, do journalists in this country think they can do anything they like?’

‘It’s an important story. If I don’t get it, I could lose my job. Times are tough.’

‘You think you can use the economic crisis to justify scaring me and my kids!’

‘Look,’ he said, a plea for solidarity in his voice, ‘how about if we talk for just a few minutes? It would really help.’

He flashed what he must have regarded as a winning smile. Worse, he took my stunned silence as assent. ‘I think it’d be best if I record our conversation,’ he said.

‘Forget it!’ I told him.

‘Then I’ll just take notes,’ he said amiably, and this time I was sure he misunderstood my meaning on purpose. My head was pounding by then; G had stepped up right behind me. I breathed deeply to hold him off. ‘Listen, don’t ever follow me again or I
will
shoot you!’ I said. ‘Now get in your car and get out of here!’

After he’d started off in the direction of Lisbon, I stowed my gun back in the trunk. Jorge pushed open on his door and ran to me. By the time he reached me, G was gone.

‘He was just a journalist,’ I told the boy as I embraced him, but he must have scented my distress and began to tear up. The passenger door opened, then slammed closed. Nati scowled at me from the shoulder of the road. I dried Jorge’s eyes and ushered him back into the car. Nati got in as well. After sliding in behind the wheel, I apologized to them both.

‘Why was he following us?’ Nati demanded.

‘The guy whose murder I’m investigating knows a lot of important people.’

Thinking of the bad things that could happen to me, I fell into a dark silence as we got under way. Nati gazed at our map convincingly, but I could tell he was still panicked – and furious at me. Thankfully, Jorge had Francisco to keep him company in the back and was holding an animated conversation with him about their friends at school.

‘Hey, how big are the mountains in Colorado?’ Jorge squeaked in Francisco’s voice as we turned off N354 onto the nowhere-land road that would take us to Ernie’s house.

‘I need to think about that,’ I replied; I was still jittery.

A little later, I spotted the abandoned pomegranate trees Ernie had mentioned. I figured we could use a few minutes in the sunshine. Nati waited in the car, talking on his cell phone to his friend Binky. While Jorge and I picked the glowing orange flowers, I told him, ‘Sometimes, baby, the mountains in Colorado are as big as the whole sky.’

‘So there’s no sun?’

‘Nope, it just vanishes. And no moon and no stars either. The mountains are everything. But the strange thing is, that kind of everything has two sides.’

My father used to tell me and Ernie and Mom that. I was never sure what he meant until now.

Jorge dropped the last of his flowers into my wicker basket. ‘Which two sides?’ he asked.

‘The side you can see and the side you can’t.’

On which side did you and Uncle Ernie live?

Jorge didn’t ask me that. But if he had, I would have replied, ‘That’s just it – on the side that no one could see.’

The down-payment on Ernie’s house used up a third of what we’d saved from the sale of our home in Colorado. I got it cheap because the walls and roof were in ruins. Also, the property’s five acres of overgrown olive fields and weedy vineyards were scattered with trash – broken bottles, oil drums, even a rusted bed frame. On my first visit there, when I stepped through what had been the front doorway, a feral cat – white, with a grey tail – poked his head out from under some shattered roof tiles, hissed at me satanically, then tore off, doing his best to convince me that he was a bad omen. Still, I knew right away, with the easy certainty of a reader turning a page, that I’d already decided to buy it; from this high corner of the hinterland, Ernie would be able to gaze out at the horizon in all directions. In the spring, a sea of wildflowers would guard him – and keep him supplied with blossoms for his artwork.

Rebuilding began on 9 December 1996. I remember the exact date because I’d met Ana three days earlier and was already crazy in love. Workers knocked down all the inner walls after putting in steel pylons, and on Saturday 4 April 1997, I spotted a small, fraying sack peeking out of some rubble. Inside it were greenish-brown coins with uneven edges and a sour smell. Ernie and I counted fifty-four of them, all of them the same, with a portrait of a wreathed monarch on one side and an angel on the other. Later that week, a coin dealer in Lisbon identified them as Roman sestertii dating from the fourth century. They were bronze and had been minted in Constantinople. The regal portrait on the front was of the Emperor Constantine. What we’d guessed was an angel was actually Winged Victory, the Roman equivalent of the Greek goddess Nike. Unfortunately, they were worth a lot less than we thought – only a few thousand dollars – so we ended up holding on to them.

Signing the papers on a house that had been occupied for at least 1,600 years meant many things to me, but most of all that I was now part of a history way beyond my time and place. On the day Ernie moved in, I realized that I’d wanted to be part of something bigger than myself since he and I were small. Almost right away, we began calling the house the Villa Ernesto – after Ernie, of course.

After the builders had completed their work, in March of 1998, I hired a stone dealer to haul in six hundred pounds of smooth-surfaced grey and white pebbles, like the river stones we used to collect in Colorado. Ernie and I shovelled them into a three-foot-wide moat around the house. As a last touch, we planted twenty-four shoulder-high orange trees to flank the scabby road leading up to the house, which my brother insisted we call the Via Enrico. We had plans for a fountain of Pan playing the flute outside the front door, but by then we’d used up all but two thousand dollars of our savings.

I still regretted we’d never had Pan welcoming visitors to the house, however, and I started sculpting him in my head again while passing the tiny whitewashed houses of Quinta da Vidigueira, the last village before Ernie’s house. A phone call tugged me out of my daydream. I pulled over on seeing it was from Luci. She told me she was already at the victim’s house. Morel was there, as well, and Fonseca had called to say he was on his way over. To me, Morel’s willingness to return to Lisbon meant it was unlikely he’d had anything to do with the murder, but it was still possible that he’d menaced Sandi in some way. For now, I was hoping that Luci could jog his memory and that he’d recall having seen a jacket or some other item of clothing that would help us identify Coutinho’s last lover.

After we hung up, I called Susana Coutinho. She had a bad hangover. In a hoarse, gravelly voice, she told me she had remembered that Pedro had taken photos of the living room that might show some of the paintings, but that she couldn’t find them.

After I hung up, Nati said, ‘Who were you talking to?’

‘The victim’s wife.’ I patted his leg. ‘We’ll be at Ernie’s place in a few minutes. I’d like to talk to you about drinking before we get there.’

‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t give me a long lecture,’ he said, frowning.

‘I’ll try to be quick. In two months, when you turn fourteen, you can start with half a glass of wine with dinner. Or the same amount of beer. That would seem pretty fair to me. And prudent, given our family history.’

‘Prudent?’

‘Appropriately cautious.’

‘I know what it means, Dad.’ He rolled his eyes.

He must have decided that making this difficult for me was equally fair. ‘In other words,’ I continued, ‘I’m asking you to refrain from drinking for a little more than a year.’ I used
refrain
to make it clear I wasn’t about to limit my vocabulary just to keep him from making fun of me. ‘Do we have a deal?’

He gazed down, considering his options.

‘Francisco is hungry,’ Jorge chirped, and he poked his head around my seat to get my reply. ‘He wants a tuna fish sandwich.’

‘I’m having an important talk with your brother. Put your seat belt back on, please.’

He obeyed me grudgingly, folding his arms over his chest.
‘Quero uma sanduíche de atum,’
he grumbled in Portuguese, in case his English hadn’t made sufficient impact on me. To reinforce my uselessness, he exclaimed, ‘The way Mom makes it!’

Nati whipped around to face him. ‘Give it a rest, you little idiot!’

Jorge erupted in tears; he must have still been upset from my confrontation with the reporter. ‘Thanks a lot!’ I told Nati.

‘Não tem de quê,’
he replied, glaring.
Think nothing of it.

Jorge was sobbing. We’d descended into hell. And I hadn’t even felt myself falling.

I summoned the poor kid out of the car, swooped him up into my arms and placed his head against my chest. Hot tears were sliding down his cheeks and he was having trouble catching his breath. A couple of cars whooshed past. I took his pulse and discovered his heartbeat was racing. I carried him into the shade of a cork tree, sat him down on the grass and instructed him to look at me. ‘Just watch my eyes,’ I told him, smiling encouragingly. He was panting with worry, but I did my best to tell him with my expression that I’d never let anything bad happen to him. After a minute or so, his breathing slowed and his face brightened. But sweat was running down his cheeks. ‘Good work,’ I told him. I wiped his face with a tissue. His pulse was back to normal. With any luck, mine would soon be, too.