The Last Witness

by John Matthews

  * * * *

  Viana couldn’t help looking around as she stood in the boarding gate queue for her flight to Haiti at New York’s JFK, afraid that Roman or one of his goons would appear at the last minute and stop her escape. She’d done the same at ticket check-in just an hour ago and at check-in and boarding for her flight from Montreal to New York at 5.14 a.m that morning.

  Only five people ahead of her in the queue now. She could hardly believe her luck that she might actually get away.

  The first warning sign had been Azy early on last night. ‘You know that Georges has disappeared. What happened with you two the other night?’ Azy looked heavily concerned and kept his voice low, even though he’d chosen a moment when there was nobody at the bar. He obviously saw her answer as potential dynamite, not for anyone else’s ears.

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know what you mean.’ She acted nonchalant.

  He leant closer as he gave the bar a couple more wipes. ‘Look, Viana. What you get up to in private is your own business. But the thing is I saw you get in his car the other night. And then the very next day he disappears. Gives you plenty to think about, no?’

  ‘It was nothing. He just gave me a lift home, that’s all.’ She shook her head and got up from the bar. ‘How should I know what’s happened to him?’

  But she could tell by Azy’s eyes following her as she went back to dance that he’d picked up on her nervousness, was doubtful.

  Then Roman came by the club two hours later with the same thing. ‘He disappeared the night after your place. Not a trace since. Hasn’t been on to you, has he? If nothing else to ask what happened at your place that night.’

  ‘No, no. Nothing.’ She tried to read the bluff in Roman’s eyes, but as usual she just couldn’t tell: poker face, poker heart. Then she recalled him gloating at Georges powerless on the bed and him pinching her cheek and telling her not to worry about what was going to happen to Georges. She felt certain in that moment that Roman had killed Georges: he’d been dumped at the bottom of a river or chopped into two or three sacks for a garbage-truck mangle or incinerator, never to be found again. And all of this was just a pretence to throw her off the scent. He didn’t want any possible leads back to his connection.

  But how long was that going to last? At some stage he was going to panic that with her knowing about the sex sting with Georges, she could provide a lead back. And that would come sooner rather than later if Azy let slip to Roman that he’d seen her get in Georges’ car that night. She’d be next for the garbage sacks and incinerator!

  Roman kept her dancing for him for four records in a row, and it was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. She was desperately afraid that he’d notice how nervous she was – a couple of times she’d had to lithely snake away from his hand in case he connected and felt her trembling – or how hard it was for her to force a smile and keep the small talk going. He stayed another twenty minutes nursing a brandy at the bar with Azy – all the while her panicking that Azy might mention about her getting in Donatiens’ car. Then as soon as he’d gone she headed for the bathroom and emptied her stomach.

  She resolved then to leave that night: she couldn’t face Roman another minute, let alone night after night sitting like a caged bird waiting on when he’d finally decide to kill her.

  She got clear of the club at 2.18 am, and forty minutes later she was packed and heading back out of her apartment to Mirabelle airport. New York, Atlanta and New Orleans were the best hubs for Haiti: the earliest she could get on was the 5.14 am to New York. Now the 12.10 pm from JFK to Haiti.

  A smiling stewardess held out one hand for her boarding card and welcomed her on board.

  Viana couldn’t resist one last glance back to make sure that she’d actually made it before returning the smile. ‘Thank you.’

  Elena found her eyes drifting to different objects in the room as Sotiris Stephanou talked: a decorative plate with five different harbour and city views of Limassol, photos of a boy and two girls at what looked like their holy communions, a horribly syrupy wedding portrait in sepia with its edges fading into misty, heart-shaped clouds. Elena could still see the likeness in Sotiris of the young man he was then, but it was harder to discern in his wife Nana, now a good fifty pounds heavier, ferrying in with halva and cakes and a pot of thick strong coffee both to show good as a host and presumably the fuel to help her beloved recall events from almost thirty years ago.

  Sotiris shook his head. ‘A tragedy. A real tragedy.’

  Elena found it hard to catch up, assimilate it all. She’d been starved of detail for so long: twenty-nine years without hardly thinking about it, then the forced drought of the last days and weeks, and suddenly there was a torrent of information hitting her all at once. A car accident over twenty years ago, the boy’s stepmother Maria killed, his stepfather Nicholas – Sotiris’ younger brother by three years – heavily injured, the boy surviving with only minor injuries.

  When Sotiris’ eyes had clouded with the first mention of tragedy and accident in the same breath, her heart fell like a stone thinking for a moment that her son was dead. She quickly masked her look of relief as Sotiris filled in the details, nodding in sympathy as Sotiris remarked what a terrible ordeal it had been for his brother and how he’d never really recovered from it.

  ‘Believe me, the last thing he wanted to do was let the child go. If he could have possibly avoided that, he would. But he just couldn’t cope.’

  The second stone fall. ‘What – you mean let him go to another family?’ Elena’s voice was slightly high-pitched, strained.

  ‘No, that would have taken eight or nine months, even if at that age – little Georgiou was almost four by then – he could have been placed anywhere. And when the problem hit with Nicholas, it hit hard and quick. He felt he couldn’t cope another day, let alone months.’ Sotiris cast his eyes down, found it hard to meet her searching stare directly. ‘I’m afraid the only choice in the end was an orphanage.’

  The third. But this time the stab of pain went deeper, made her feel emptier and number inside than a whole bottle of valerian pills. Her eyes shifted inadvertently to Lorena in the car outside. Oh God how she’d fooled herself. She’d clung to the false hope all those years that at least he might have had a good life somewhere, but in reality it had been little more than a living hell: one stepparent dead and then the other giving him away to an orphanage when he was barely four. Tears started to brim in her eyes and she kept her gaze turned away as she bit at her lip for more composure.

  Sotiris still clearly saw her distress and tried to lighten the impact. ‘It was a very good orphanage – run by Gray nuns if I remember right. Nicholas visited a couple of times and it was a nice place, apparently. They were very kind, very caring.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that. But what I don’t understand is why your brother didn’t keep him.’ She’d managed to push back the tears, but still her voice was strained. ‘Why he didn’t at least try to make more of– ’ Elena broke off. Lorena in the car outside! With her explaining the reason for her visit and then Sotiris talking, she’d got carried away with time; at least half an hour had gone. She checked her watch: she should leave now for the session with Lowndes, but there was so much more she wanted to find out. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this – but my young daughter is in the car outside and she needs to be downtown urgently. Do you know of a good, reliable cab firm?’

  Sotiris looked genuinely relieved at the shift to more comfortable ground, where he could also be more helpful: his cousin worked as a cabbie. ‘…I’ll make sure it’s either him personally or one of his close friends that he knows he can trust.’ You didn’t want a ten-year old girl jumping in any old cab.

  Because it was a quiet time of day, they were able to get his cousin Dimitrios. He arrived in only four minutes and Sotiris gave him instructions that he was to walk the girl right to this doctor’s door and she wasn’t to be left on her own for a minute.

  Elena told Lorena that she’d be ther
e as soon as she could, twenty minutes or half an hour. ‘But if I’m late, stay right there at the doctor’s. Don’t go anywhere.’

  In the four-minute wait for Dimitrios, Sotiris explained that his brother had been crippled by the accident. He wasn’t a permanent wheelchair case, otherwise he might have got permanent help – only one leg was affected. So he was allocated a home help two half days a week to take care of washing and chores, but the rest of the time he was on his own. He tried to cope, but what got him in the end was self-pity because with half a leg lost he felt that both his job prospects and his chances of finding another woman were slight. He felt that Georgiou needed a woman’s touch and love. And so he hit the bottle, decided to drown out what he’d lost and what he felt he could no longer provide for the boy. ‘…Within two months he was a hopeless case, and the orphanage became practically the only option.’

  Sotiris waved one hand towards the photos on the side cabinet as they sat back down inside. ‘We would have gladly had him ourselves – but we already had three of our own, and money was tight. Very tight. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, I understand. I… I suppose I’m just looking for others to point the finger because of my own guilt.’ She hadn’t told Sotiris that her baby had been practically ripped from her arms. She just said that she’d been under-age, there’d been a bit of family pressure and it had all very awkward at the time. Finally she made the decision to let him go. The wrong decision she felt years later with the benefit of hindsight – but she’d mainly blanked it from her mind and hadn’t troubled to look for him until now.

  Her eyes stayed on the cabinet for a second: it was stuffed with silver and silver framed photos, with decorative plates dotted in-between, mainly from Cyprus and Greece. She saw only one from Canada: Niagara Falls. The cabinet marked the main separation from the dining-room beyond: dark wood furniture and still more decorative plates, an oil painting of a terraced olive grove and a dark velvet and silver-thread embroidery of the Acropolis. In contrast the lounge where they sat was modern: beige leather sofa, glass coffee table, and an abstract and a David Hockney print duelling from opposite walls. It was as if the dining area represented their old life in Cyprus and the lounge their new life in Canada; or perhaps Sotiris and Nana had already filled the dining room with family heirlooms, so the children took charge of the lounge’s decoration.

  And she suddenly realized why she was so interested, sucking in every small detail: Sotiris had mentioned that his brother hadn’t lived that far away then, only eight blocks: she was trying to get some measure of what Georgiou’s environment might have been like those few years. She stopped the chain of thought abruptly, chiding herself. Only eight blocks, but a million miles in heart and spirit: stepmother dead and a stepfather intent on blotting out what little life he felt was left with drink. The only hope was that Georgiou had been too young to remember it all, that the scars wouldn’t have been too long-lasting.

  ‘We wondered at the time, didn’t we?’ Sotiris aired this more towards his wife than Elena.

  Nana just nodded as she nibbled at some halva.

  ‘…There was all this talk about some problem with them having children and getting fertility treatment from some doctor in London…’

  ‘Dr Maniatis?’ Elena prompted.

  ‘I… I don’t remember. I’m not even sure they mentioned a name at the time.’

  Maniatis was the only likely middle-man Elena could put between her father and the childless Stephanous. She nodded and Sotiris continued.

  ‘Well, anyway… suddenly there was a child. But the gap seemed to short, and we thought we would have heard something as soon as she was pregnant.’ Sotiris ran one hand through his thinning hair. ‘We guessed that they’d probably adopted, but we never stuck our noses in and pushed them on it. We thought maybe Nick had heard the problem was down to him and they were embarrassed to talk about it. You know, male pride and all that. Especially Greek male pride.’ Sotiris forced a weak smile.

  ‘And the new name, Stevens – my God we argued over that.’ The smile quickly died. ‘I told him he should be proud of the name Stephanou like I was, not try and bury his roots and his heritage. But he said that he wanted to make a fresh start, didn’t want to be seen as ethnic and have any possible discrimination that might hold him back – or his new son for that matter. We didn’t see eye to eye on that one, I can tell you: things were strained between us for quite a while.’

  They were silent for a second.

  ‘What happened to your brother?’ Elena asked.

  ‘He met someone else eventually – about five years later. And a few years after that they ended up going to Cyprus to settle there. Too many bad memories here, I suppose.’ Sotiris’ eyes drifted slightly: melancholy at the lost years or something that would have been best left not recalled. ‘I think he felt a lot of guilt later about giving up Georgiou, but by then it was too late.’

  ‘Why – what happened?’ Elena’s interest was piqued, though the last thing she wanted was to empathise with Nicholas Stephanou, especially not on the guilt front. She surely had the market cornered there.

  ‘Well, not long after meeting this woman and finally getting his act together, clean of the drink once and for all – he went to the orphanage hoping to see Georgiou. But he was too late: he’d already left and been placed with a family.’

  ‘How long before?’ Elena’s spirits raised a fraction: maybe he’d had a more settled and happy family life the second time around.

  ‘Fifteen, eighteen months, I think.’ Sotiris shrugged. ‘I’m not totally sure.’

  Elena calculated: three and a half years in the orphanage, almost eight years old before he was finally picked off the shelf again. She reminded herself that it would have been a far cry from the orphanages she was used to in Romania. If it wasn’t too austere or cool an environment, hopefully the experience wouldn’t have been… then quickly stopped herself again, realized she was just rationalising to ease the weight of guilt she’d felt settling heavier as Sotiris talked.

  She checked her watch again: she’d covered practically everything, and Lorena would already be over halfway through her session by the time she got there. ‘Do you remember the name of this orphanage?’

  ‘I don’t remember exactly, but it’s in a small town about seventy miles up-Province… Baie de something.’ Sotiris pulled at the air with his fingers for the exact memory.

  ‘Baie du Febvre,’ Nana prompted.

  ‘Yes, that’s it… du Febvre. And it’s the only orphanage there run by nuns I would think – so it shouldn’t be difficult to find.’

  Elena thanked them for the help and the coffee and cake, said that she’d better go. ‘Catch up with my daughter.’

  As they were walking along the hallway, Sotiris commented, ‘You know, it’s funny, we had a man phone a while back asking exactly the same thing about where young Georgiou had gone?’

  ‘When was this? Did he give a name?’ Elena turned by the door.

  ‘Five, six years ago. He didn’t give a full name – just said he was Tony, an old friend of Nick’s from when he had young Georgiou. Said he was curious what might have happened to the boy, that’s all.’

  Tony. Tony. Her nerves tingled, the name spinning in her head as she drove to Lowndes’ office… but she finally discarded it as a coincidence. Why bury the boy out of sight only to try and find him again years later? It made no sense. No, it was obviously just some other friend of the Stephanous.

  Lorena was forty minutes into her session when Elena arrived and the receptionist informed her that Dr Lowndes thought it best that she not interrupt, he’d talk to her afterwards and she’d be able to listen to the tape. So she decided to use the wait with the receptionist to find out the name of the orphanage in Baie du Febvre. Eight minutes of leafing through Quebec telephone directors and two calls later and she had the name: Convent de St Marguerite. She phoned and made an appointment: 4.00 pm that afternoon.

  Hanging-up, she tapped the d
etails she’d scrawled on a piece of paper thoughtfully with one finger. With the nightmare saga from Sotiris, she was already regretting coming on this odyssey: her son’s real life was so opposed to the gloss image she’d fixed in her mind to help ease her guilt. She wasn’t sure she could face any more nightmare tales.

  Michel Chenouda sat quietly as the three men the other side of the conference table leafed through the thick file before them, the exact same copy for each of them. He let out a quiet cough muffled with one hand at one point, then the heavy silence again: only the sound of flicking pages and the faint air-rush of the heating vents below the tinted-glass windows behind the men. The view was over Ottawa’s McArthur Avenue seven floors down.

  The man at the centre, Superintendent Neil Mundy, silver-haired with sharp blue eyes in an otherwise nondescript rotund, ruddy face, was the first to look up.

  ‘So, your claim is that the Lacaille family organized this hit now on Georges Donatiens, who apparently worked as a money man for their organization?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. It’s all there: dates, times, movements.’ Michelle pointed across at the file. ‘How they set it up is almost identical to a hit on Eric Leduc back in February, part of which was monitored by us during a surveillance operation.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that.’ Mundy flicked back a couple of pages before returning to the place he held with one finger by Chenouda’s summary notes. ‘Pretty cheeky, huh? Right under your noses.’ Wry, awkward grimace from Chenouda, but Mundy rolled straight on without waiting for response. ‘And your reason for coming to us here now is that you’re afraid there’s a leak in your department?’

  ‘Yes, I… I think it was how the Lacailles knew about the set-up with Leduc, and perhaps also how they knew they’d have to jump quick with Donatiens.’

  Mundy arched one eyebrow sharply, almost doubtingly, and as if to add support to what he was thinking at that moment, Inspector Kaufman to his right commented: ‘That’s quite a serious charge.’