The Night Watchman Read Free Page B

December day when Dad found him under our porch. Sometimes, when my brother and I didn’t speak for a few days, it even seemed to me as though Dad had suffocated him, then or at some other time, and that all of my adult life has been a dream.
    ‘Stay away from the blood,’ my brother told me now. ‘And look both ways before you cross the street.’
    His last advice was our childhood code that meant: be careful at all times. When I agreed, the time came to hang up, but I couldn’t; I was stopped by all that I didn’t dare say but needed to. Most of all, I wanted to tell Ernie that if Dad showed up, I’d kill him – and not only that, but that I’d trained as a cop to be sure that I’d stay calm enough to put a bullet right between his eyes and dispose of his body without anyone finding out.
    Pires had picked up all the pens that had scattered across my floor by the time I got back to my office. After thanking her, I went to Director Crespo’s office to explain what had happened with Moura. His impatient, get-on-with-it look disoriented me so badly that I forgot the word for CPR in Portuguese and I had to say it in English. I hated the way I sounded far away and helpless – as if I’d fallen off the edge of the world.
    ‘Where did he keep the cyanide?’ Crespo asked me when I’d finished my story.
    I held up the square of aluminium foil I’d found. ‘In this. He dropped it on the floor.’
    ‘Careful with that!’ he said, thrusting up his hand. ‘It may still have poison on it.’
    While folding the foil in four, I told him I’d ask Forensics to dispose of it. I tucked it in my shirt pocket for safekeeping.
    Crespo took a stick of gum from his pack – he’d been trying to give up cigarettes for more than four years, ever since the new legislation against smoking indoors had come into effect. ‘Look, Monroe,’ he said in the overly patient tone he adopted when he was trying not to show how annoyed he was with me, ‘there was nothing you could do. Just write up your report and get on with your day.’ He came around his desk and patted my shoulder. ‘The guy was a nutcase – a total loser. Just forget about him.’
    My anger, quick and demanding, made me lean away from him. ‘I don’t see what made him a loser,’ I said.
    While chewing greedily on his gum, Crespo sized me up, wondering how honest he could be with me. ‘We all know life sucks half the time, Monroe, but we keep fighting. The losers give up. It’s as simple as that.’
    I knew that giving up wasn’t simple at all, but I was afraid I’d shout something rude if I started to argue with him. I told myself that Crespo wasn’t worth the effort to make him understand how many years of despair you needed to suffer in order to find the courage to walk to the end of your life and jump off.
    In a conciliatory tone, he said, ‘Look, you aren’t going to win any medals by taking these things personally. Go have a shot of brandy at the Açoriana after you get the paperwork out of the way. You’re white as a sheet.’
    ‘I don’t drink, sir.’
    ‘Christ, Monroe, a shot of brandy isn’t drinking, it’s coping!’
    I scrubbed my hands and typed up my report. By then, it was almost 11 a.m. Ana would be at her gallery. Liliana, her assistant, answered. When my wife took the line, I told her about Moura. ‘I really fucked up,’ I concluded. ‘I didn’t need to be so clever.’
    ‘Listen, Hank, if he hid the cyanide, it meant that he decided he was going to take his own life long before he started talking to you.’
    She spoke in that no-nonsense voice of hers that’s usually my road out of hell, but not this time. ‘I . . . I identified with him,’ I stammered, and I explained how he’d invented a son to oblige himself do the right thing.
    ‘Look, he told you he was lucky that you were the one who questioned him,’ she said. ‘So stop blaming yourself.’
    Comforting words, but death was still lodged in the pulsing at the back of