The Night Watchman (43 page)

The nurse, whose name was Rita, explained to me that the IV was giving me antibiotics and added that the doctor making his rounds would check on me later. She showed me where the bell was at the side of my bed and told me to ring for her if I needed anything. I took it in my hand, and when I looked back up, she was already rushing out of the room.

‘Folks sure move quick round these here parts,’ I said in my best Colorado accent.

Ernie laughed, then sat beside me, and we talked in conspiratorial voices about our favourite childhood meals. While he was going on and on about some
posole
stew he swore we’d eaten in Denver when we’d gone to the zoo, I remembered a statue of the Buddha wrapped with bath towels. And big, metal suitcases.

‘How many days have I been gone?’ I finally cut in.

‘You were shot two days ago and operated on right away.’

I tried to think back to the operation. All I remembered was a very strong light burning my face. ‘What time is it now?’ I asked.

He checked his watch. ‘Ten to nine in the evening.’

‘Were we going somewhere with metal suitcases?’

‘No, it was Maria Dias who was leaving – the woman you questioned.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Coutinho’s daughter by his first wife.’

I nodded as though I understood, but I had only the vaguest recollection of the Coutinho family. When I asked where this Dias woman was headed, Ernie patted my chest, as though he were making sure I was more solid than I sounded, and told me about her trip through Spain to France. None of it sounded familiar.

In reply to my next questions, Ernie told me that the man who’d shot me was named Alberto Trigueiro. He had been only about fifteen feet away from us when he fired. That distance stuck in my memory like a splinter, but I didn’t know why. He told me that killing Trigueiro made him feel sick at first, and as though he’d tumbled off a high cliff. He gave me a look that meant he needed me to say something meaningful, but I didn’t know what that could be, so I said instead, ‘What was the cliff made of?’

He thought about that a while. ‘Maybe it was made of every good thing I’ve ever tried to do,’ he said. ‘The thing is, Rico, after the ambulance took you away, and while I was standing alone on the street, looking down at your blood all over my hands and trying to keep from screaming, I realized that defending the two of us meant that we had the right to be alive. And that I hadn’t fallen off anything at all.’

Since he looked so relieved, I said, ‘That’s a very good thing.’

‘You know, sometimes it seems as if I’ve spent my whole life apologizing for being alive,’ he continued. ‘But all that blood you lost . . . It ended all that. Or maybe killing someone did. I never in a million years thought that would happen.’

We looked at each other, and I could have been eight and he could have been four, and we could have just started to learn about the cramped, combative, irrational dimensions of the life we’d been born into.

‘I feel really terrible about lying to you all those years ago,’ he said.

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘I told you I was afraid that Dad would come back and take me away – after he disappeared, I mean. But that wasn’t true. I’m really sorry, Rico, but I was afraid that the police would come for you and accuse you of making him disappear. And take you off to prison. That was why I made you swear you’d never talk about how he vanished to anyone.’ Choking up, he added, ‘That’s why I made you lie to Ana and the kids. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did.’

‘It’s okay, Ernie, don’t worry about it. You didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do.’

He pressed his thumbs into his temples and closed his eyes. Noticing that the sleeves of his shirt were too short, and wanting to divert his attention, I asked, ‘So whose clothes did you steal?’

‘Yours,’ he said, grinning.

‘Who gave you permission for that?’

‘No one, but I had no other choice.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘You refused to stop bleeding all over mine, even when I asked you really nicely not to!’

Ernie’s provoking me back felt like just the right move and we had a good laugh. His laughter seemed an amazing sound, as if it were the best thing about him and what I’d fought all my life to save, and what made even getting shot worthwhile.

For years, I tried to find the roof above all I felt for my brother, but listening to his happiness I realized there was none. In Ernie’s presence, I was open to the sky.

He said that Luci had introduced herself to him after the ambulance took me away. She’d ushered him into the back of a police car and asked him to tell her what had happened. ‘She didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t tell things in much of an order, and that I had to keep stopping to get my breath,’ he told me. ‘You lucked out with her.’

‘True.’

Ernie told me that Luci knew Trigueiro’s name and that he’d been twenty-seven years old because he’d had his wallet in his front pocket. Later, she learned that he had served two years in the state prison in Paços de Ferreira for a series of burglaries in Porto, which gave us the idea that he’d probably been responsible for trashing Coutinho’s house.

Manuel Marques, another of the chief inspectors, had questioned Ernie at headquarters.

‘Was he tough on you?’ I asked, fearing the worst.

‘No, not at all. I expected the good-cop, bad-cop routine, but he was the only one who talked with me, and after I told him how you’d been shot, and how I’d ended up firing at Trigueiro, we talked mostly about the Alentejo, because he’d learned by then I lived near Redondo. Did you know he was born a few miles from Elvas?’

‘No.’

‘His sister still lives in the family farmhouse. She has a fifteen-foot-high Canary Islands Dragon Tree in her front yard. Imagine that, Rico! He invited me to visit sometime.’

It was one of Ernie’s talents that he could get almost anyone conversing about plants. While I was considering how he did it, he asked, ‘So why do you think Trigueiro tried to kill you?’

‘He didn’t,’ I said, because hearing that question voiced aloud made it clear why his distance from us – at the moment he shot me – had lodged in my mind. ‘He fired from close range,’ I continued. ‘He could have put a bullet in my heart if he’d wanted to. He just wanted to put me out of action for a while. At least, at first.’

‘Why did he need you out of action?’

‘Because I must have been getting too close to whoever told him to shoot me.’

‘And who was that?’

‘That’s the big question, Ernie.’

My brother stood up and gazed off, and it seemed to me he was weighing this new information against the finality of having ended another person’s life.

‘You did the right thing,’ I told him.

He faced me doubtfully.

‘He’d have killed both of us if you’d missed on the first shot,’ I continued. ‘Whoever organized this isn’t playing around. The stakes are too high. His second shot was meant to put me in my grave.’

Ernie nodded as if he agreed, but I could see I’d need to reinforce my message over the coming months. A few seconds later, we heard Jorge approaching from down the hallway. He was jabbering away about a cartoon, and my mother-in-law was trying to get him to speak in a quieter voice. Stepping into the room, his mouth fell open and Francisco dropped out of his hand, which made me realize I must have looked pretty scary.

When I opened my arms, he hesitated, as though he were testing what it would feel like to hold himself back for just a second from all he needed, then shouted
Dad!,
and rushed to me like I was his promised land.

Ana got his shoes and trousers off while I was kissing him, and Nati helped manoeuvre him into bed beside me without him banging into my bad leg or shoulder. ‘Cem
por cento fruta!’
the little monster shouted once he was settled with my arm around him.
A hundred per cent fruit!

‘The new ad campaign for Bongo juice,’ Ana explained with a comic groan.

Jorge nestled his face into my neck. His breathing was warm, and his weight against me seemed a talisman against everything bad that could still happen to me. After a minute, he was sound asleep.

Nati sniffed at the air around me – clearly a member of the Rabbit Clan – and said, ‘Dad, I hate to break this news to you, but this room of yours stinks like fifty years of farts.’

I laughed with Ana and Ernie, but mostly because seeing Nati – those serious eyes of his, and the expressive way he gestured with his hands – reminded me of so many happy surprises that he’d given me over the years that only laughter could contain them all. He asked me if I wanted a back rub, but turning over would have required painful contortions. ‘Just sit with me,’ I told him.

He was too young to know that the most useful thing he could do for me was just to let me hold him, so he showed me a disappointed face, and for a moment he looked so much like my mother that apprehension made me turn away.

Once he was seated, Nati lay his head to my chest, ear down, as though listening to my heartbeat. I loved the astonishing rightness of that.

I awoke at dawn the next morning with a message written in my hand:
Coutinho may be six feet under but that bastard goes right on saying cheese!

I took that to mean two things: that the tragic consequences of what he did were still very much present in the world; and that – like Dias – G was sure that Coutinho had kept pictures of himself with teenaged girls.

G had dug so hard into my flesh with the tip of my pen – on the word
bastard
– that I had to blot the blood from my hand with my hospital smock. Reaching behind me to my night table, I grabbed the new cell phone that Ana had bought me.

After I assured Luci I was fine and apologized for waking her, she stunned me – and maybe herself, too – by giving way to tears. ‘I’m really sorry, sir,’ she said, sniffling into the phone. ‘I know I’m being silly, but seeing you unconscious in the hospital and all bandaged up . . . I tried to prepare myself for the worst. And now, the relief of hearing your voice, it’s just too much.’

After I answered all her questions about my medical condition, I was able to steer her onto the subject of work. I explained that my old phone had been bugged and asked her to bring me Coutinho’s flash drive from its hiding place in my office; I wanted Joaquim to search it thoroughly before I made any other move. Luci agreed, but she also said that I ought to probably tell Romão I’d found it; he was now running the case.

I made no reply; having to take on my workload meant that Romão wouldn’t have either the time or the resources to fully investigate the case. Turning over the flash drive to him would be pointless.

‘I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, sir,’ Luci said in a cringing tone.

‘No, you’re absolutely right,’ I replied. ‘I’ll speak to Romão later today. Tell me, Luci, have you been reassigned to him?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Romão was a brilliant investigator but he was also a bully who believed that women were too emotional to make good cops. He’d never let Luci direct her own investigation into how the burglary at Coutinho’s might be connected to my shooting, which made this switch in assignment perfect for whoever had had me shot.

I tried to sit up – craving greater perspective over this downturn in our fortunes – but as I slid my left leg over the sheet, the pain made me howl. It felt as though a nail had been hammered through my wound into the bone.

‘You all right, sir?’ Luci asked.

‘Just a little discomfort. Listen, I’ve got to go – the doctor is here. We’ll talk later.’

Ana answered our home phone as though my voice had rescued her instead of the other way around. I didn’t like being so needy. I wasn’t sure she ought to trust a person with holes in him as deep as the ones I had.

When I told Ana that there might be a powerful politician or businessman who had hired Trigueiro to stop me from connecting all the dots around Coutinho’s murder, she asked how we could confirm that.

‘Given that Ernie put a bullet into our one link to whoever is afraid of me,’ I told her, ‘we’re not ever going to know.’

‘Maybe your colleagues can follow the payment that Trigueiro must have received.’

‘He’d have received cash. There’s not going to be any trail.’

Before Being Shot and After Being Shot. Two distinct continents, each with its own mountain ranges, river valleys and cities. And here, on the rugged, rocky coast of After Being Shot, would my wife believe I was telling the truth when we sat together on the isolated dock and I explained about my childhood?

Ana asked me about how I was feeling, and I told her about the crippling pain as if it were a joke. A test? She passed it by not laughing.

‘What if it takes me longer to get out of the hospital than the doctors think?’ I asked, wishing to tell her something about my fears by naming one of the least important of them.

‘You’re going to heal quickly. You’re strong. And we’ll all help. You’ll be home before you know it.’

Ana told me that Ernie had proved an easy guest. ‘And this morning,’ she said, ‘he and Jorge got out of bed early and made us all Colorado French toast.’ Happy to talk about trifles, she said, ‘They left a mess, too. I really wish you were here to yell at them!’

My wife passed the phone to our eldest son, who spoke to me about
Moby Dick
as a way of sharing something meaningful with me, and for the first time I realized there was a danger he’d live too fully in books. Why did it take me getting shot to see Nati’s resemblance to my mother so clearly? It seemed now that my job might become encouraging him to close the covers of his novels now and again and join me outside in the world.

‘Why do you think the novel starts with the narrator saying, “Call me Ishmael”?’ Nati asked. ‘Instead of something like “My name is Ishmael,” I mean.’

‘I’ve always thought it’s because Ishmael isn’t his real name,’ I said.

‘But why would he lie?’

‘Because he doesn’t trust his readers enough to give them any intimate details about himself – to know his real name. It’s only the first chapter, after all. How can Ishmael be sure that the reader is on his side? He needs to tell his story first. There are a lot of people who grow up without a single person they can trust, Nati.’