by Liam Durcan
Lazerenko, Patrick: Dépanneur Mondial, 216–17; José-Maria Fernandez and, 230, 231, 252–54; Celia García and, 229–31, 248–50; medical school, 231; protegé of Hernan, 228, 229–30.
He took the book with him everywhere, even when he visited Tegucigalpa on the way back from a vacation in Costa Rica. He spent two unsatisfying days there, wandering like a faithless pilgrim through the streets of the Colonia Palmira neighbourhood where the Garcías had lived. He held The Angel open in front of him, hopeful of finding inaccuracies and mistakes that would discredit its premise. But it didn’t help. Not a bit. The allegations against Hernan outlined in the book were like anti-matter, altering the rules of the universe as he knew it. Evil was introduced and made real. Evil not as the adjective that he’d always imagined it, but as the noun, the big dark cloud of human doom. Then there was the Fernandez reference, the assertion made by Elyse that this particular victim of Lepaterique had a special significance to Hernan, and, by extension, Patrick. There was no way he could talk to Hernan after that.
In the middle of the Churchillplein, Patrick felt the fight-or-flight thing again, the Pavlovian Elyse Brenman reaction that he had apparently been hard-wired for. He turned from Elyse without a word and walked away. Elyse’s footsteps rang out on the plaza pavement. She was following. Trot to canter. A full-fledged arm-swinging sprint was next in the chain of embarrassing adult movements.
“Can we talk?” she asked, pulling up beside him.
“I’m going into town.”
Elyse pointed ahead of them to a tram stop.
“I was headed that way too. We can take the Number 10.”
Patrick didn’t want to go into town, it had just seemed the best way to dodge Elyse. But she had a habit of making evasion difficult through affability and pure helpfulness. He had learned that among journalists, this made Elyse fairly unusual. Less than a year ago, travelling to Boston in another effort to convince him to be interviewed for an upcoming article, she crashed a dinner Heather and he were having at a restaurant–introducing herself right there at the table, flirting with him in that asexual, joking way that she knew wouldn’t make Heather uncomfortable, enough so that it was only natural for Heather to suggest that she pull up a chair so they could all have a chat before the food arrived. To Patrick’s surprise, Elyse didn’t mention the case at all, choosing only to intimate that she and Patrick were childhood friends from the old neighbourhood in Montreal, just two kids from NDG who’d made good, and that this crossing of paths was nothing more than a coincidence. At first he didn’t know if Elyse had actually deluded herself into thinking that they were friends. There was no way he was going to bring up the subject of Hernan García in front of Heather, and he sensed that once Elyse knew this it was as though something between them changed, as though she took pleasure in enlisting him in some sort of game, that it was them against Heather in a bit of a con. He didn’t let on anything–he barely said a word as the two women spoke–more out of mortification than willingness to play along with any charade. Elyse talked with Heather about global warming and vacation spots and the latest minivan crash-test data. It was like watching a dare. When Heather wasn’t looking, Elyse would turn to him and smile, and he couldn’t figure out if he was chilled or excited. All he could think about was why she would be doing this. Was it done to show him that they were somehow in this together, bound up in lies? Maybe she was just telling him that she was there, insidious and in no hurry. She kept talking to Heather, and he realized he had no idea about her. And if he’d been impressed by her restraint in not grilling him about Hernan, it was more than balanced by the creepiness of her knowing where they were eating and what time they had reservations.
He should have shooed her off, he thought. Right then and there he should have come clean with Heather about who Elyse was and explained the entire García situation. In the end he was rescued by the waiter’s arrival with the food and the fact the table was too small to hold another place setting.
Heather raved about Elyse, of course. She had never met any friends of his, from Boston or Montreal or anyplace else for that matter, and the fact that he was even capable of having friends, much less fascinating journalist friends–non-threatening female ones at that–who thought enough of him to abandon part of their own evening to reminisce, impressed her. Why hadn’t he told her about Elyse before? she asked in the car on the way home. She thought Elyse was fantastic, that was the word she used, with the accent on the first syllable, the American way to say it. She said Elyse reminded her of her sister, a grad student at Northwestern, except for her sister always being stoned, that is.
Patrick used to think that it was only annoying to have someone so pleasant dog him, that Elyse’s manner must be an obstacle to her advancing in her trade. He would even admit to feeling sorry for Elyse for having a personality so seemingly at odds with the job she had to do. But it became clear to him that over time people like Elyse gained your confidence and insinuated themselves into your life until your story became their story. And then it was everyone’s story.
Just then, as if to justify Patrick’s bias, she produced tokens for the Number 10 tram–one for him, which she dropped into his inexplicably opening hand–and pointed out the stop, and before he could come up with a plausible alternative excuse to get away from her they were heading south together into the city centre.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I haven’t decided.”
“I’ve been here for weeks. The trams are the best way to get around.”
Patrick found a seat as the tram gave a metallic shout and pulled away from Churchillplein. Elyse sat beside him and said nothing. Her silence made him squirm as he imagined her biding her time purposefully, as someone capable of using nonchalance as some form of long-term tactic, trying to elicit a silence as fraudulent as that spiel in the restaurant. This is crazy, he told himself, calm down. He tried to remember Elyse that first day she came to interview him, wanting to conjure up an image of her being disorganized and inexperienced, but he couldn’t recall her as anything other than competent. Focused. Even as an inexperienced reporter covering the purgatorial beat of the Community News Desk, she had been smart enough to sense that the call from that customer who’d recognized Hernan was something big. And when the newspaper tried to get one of their more senior feature writers to take the story over, Elyse had supposedly made a stink and held onto her scoop with both hands. And while she would have probably been a good reporter even without ever having met the Garcías, she wouldn’t have been famous. The story of Hernan García had been more than a great story for Elyse, it had become award-winning, career-making. She had ridden it for years, parlaying the investigation and subsequent allegations, the sad arc of the García family–Marta’s death, Hernan’s estrangement from his son, the near failure of the store–into a series of articles that had appeared in increasingly prominent magazines and had metastasized into The Angel. Elyse had been transformed into a journalist, flying to Tegucigalpa to research the details of her subject’s past life and now setting up shop in Den Haag for long enough to become familiar with the tram lines and the local points of interest. They had that in common, Patrick thought. They both owed Hernan García everything.
They crossed an avenue, passing a building Elyse told him was the Gemeentemuseum. He chose not to look back at the museum, more intent on the succession of bare plazas and tidy Dutch streets rolling past. The sky had been steadily darkening but at one point the clouds thinned and it appeared as though the sun would break through, but it never did. Throughout the ride, squalls from the North Sea dropped rain at regular intervals, speckling the tram windows and making Den Haag pass by all the more indistinctly.
Elyse followed him off the tram near the Binnerh of just as it began to rain more heavily, chasing people off the streets, holding newspapers over their heads. Elyse had remembered to bring an umbrella, which she opened after pausing dramatically to register his umbrella-deficient state. Th
e umbrella was big enough, typically, and she was only too happy to share.
“You hungry?” Elyse asked, taking great pains to position the umbrella exactly between them.
“No,” he said, and regretted sounding so petulant.
At that moment a wave of fatigue crested over him. Perhaps it was the jet lag or sitting in the gallery hearing the testimony or tramping around the city in the rain like an idiot, but he felt ankled by a sudden, shuddering fatigue, something definitely not physiologic but deeper, a weariness, a narcoleptic ache to close the eyes.
The street narrowed and the facades of buildings darkened with stains of water and soot. They stood watching traffic pass. Wordlessly. It was a dream, a recollection of a street from moments before.
He caught a glimpse of a street sign that read “Frederikstraat” and he felt the need to say the word aloud–Frederikstraat–to hear the sound, as if saying the name could give him a better sense of where he was.
“Frederikstraat,” he said. It made no difference.
“What?” Elyse asked.
“Nothing,” he replied.
“Let’s get something to eat.”
He was too tired to refuse. He needed to sit down. Elyse found a Javanese café just entering the lunch rush, and they were seated at a table near the clatter of the kitchen. Patrick ordered the bami goreng along with a beer. Elyse asked for something he wasn’t familiar with and then filled the silence with an elaborate ethno-cultural history of the dish.
The hectic sway of the restaurant ebbed, and his fatigue passed with it. He studied the pattern on the tablecloth, unwilling to look up at her, aware that she was watching him. When he finally looked up, he found her studying the wine list.
In a world full of people now very interested in Hernan’s life, the woman sitting across from him probably knew more about it than anyone. More than family, more than he. She had built a career amassing the details of Hernan’s life before Canada, constructing that plausible, abhorrent reality, and had seen Hernan through a different set of biases than family loyalty or ideology or pure defensiveness. Elyse knew the facts; everything he knew of Hernan was coloured by friendship. No wonder he hated her.
“I thought he’d be in the courtroom,” Patrick said finally, as the waiter brought their food. She paused until the waiter left the table. Her eyebrows tented and she stirred her bowl of curry with her fork.
“He has been, but he’s been sick,” Elyse said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. He won’t talk to me, of course, and neither will Celia or Roberto.”
“So they’re here?” Patrick said. He knew they were here. He’d been searching through the gallery for Celia’s face when he’d spotted Elyse. A dubious consolation prize. “Is he getting medical treatment?”
“I’d say so. Although I imagine it’s hard to give a cardiologist advice about his own health.”
“I can try to speak with his doctors.”
“There’s a little thing called doctor-patient confidentiality,” she replied, smiling.
Eventually, the plates were cleared away and he began grudgingly to appreciate Elyse’s company. It was a relief to talk to anyone after three days of travel and hotel rooms. Elyse told him how she’d tried to make the most of all the weeks in Den Haag, how she’d visited every museum and then made her way through the B-list stuff like the amusement park where the city of Den Haag was reproduced in miniature, and he was amused by this thought, the image of Elyse towering over the city, inadvertently terrorizing a good part of coastal Holland. But Elyse said after a while a sense of indigenous Den Haag claustrophobia had set in and she had recently started fleeing the city for a regular weekend of respite in Amsterdam.
Patrick admitted to a certain curiosity about how she worked, now that she didn’t need to write for a newspaper. The success of the book had freed her. She worked when she wanted to. And when she was working she was on the road a lot, she said. She missed Montreal, missed her boat.
“A boat?” he said, a tone of genuine surprise asserting itself before envy could arrive. A boat. Affluence squared. The confluence of money and stretches of leisure time. He’d never had both simultaneously.
She brought out a photo of herself on her sailboat on Lake Champlain. Bright interlocking pentagons of lens flare trailed off into the Vermont summer sky. It looked like a warm day. A perfect happiness. He wondered who took the picture. Elyse was in a bikini top with some sort of sarong-like skirt around her legs. And while he smiled and nodded appreciatively as he held the photo, he could feel himself grow irritated at being unable to look away from her tanned legs and her boat, unable to get thoughts of the boyfriend holding the camera out of his mind and he held his breath against the feeling of jealousy billowing, categories of jealousy compounding. He handed the photo back. Elyse asked if Heather and he were getting serious, and he told her he didn’t have a clue where things were going. It was a pleasure to tell a journalist the truth. She paused, and Patrick dreaded that she was going to offer him advice.
“I see that your company’s doing well,” Elyse said, changing course. “I read about it in Business Weekly.”
He nodded and was prepared to leave it at that. The one rule he had learned during his brief career in business was that information was a commodity. His lawyers had pointed out that he had been celebrated and sued and made rich, all because of information, and if they were at the table, they would tell Patrick not to say a word about Neuronaut or his research or the Globomart work. But the lawyers were far away. They hadn’t been alone for three days or seen the photo of Elyse relaxing on her boat.
“We’re pleased. Thirty-five employees, thirty-six if you count one of my former post-docs we just hired. We have our own machine, an MRI machine,” he said, and gestured with his hands trying to convey the bigness of the machine, “and in a few months we’ll be having our second annual general meeting.”
“Congratulations. It’s like the nineties again. Technology types like you getting rich.”
He enjoyed the envy in Elyse’s voice. Technology types. “Except we actually have a service to offer.”
“I heard someone was trying to buy you out before the IPO.”
“That’s old news.”
“It’s just that I’m freelancing,” she said, pausing. Patrick wondered what else Elyse thought about besides ruining Hernan García’s life or side-swiping his own. “I’ve been reading about the work you’re doing. Neuroeconomics is a fascinating field.” He watched her mouth move, as though it were easier to understand her that way than by only having her words to go by. “I was thinking of maybe writing a feature on it. The technology and applications, the personalities. It could be very good for your company, good for you. I mean, you being here, at the trial, that can’t be good for Neuronaut or your clients.” Elyse played with her crumpled napkin. Information was a commodity, he reminded himself. He tried to think of speaking to Elyse as a form of conversational tennis, just keep a rally going. Say nothing, he told himself, or just keep talking. Platitude, platitude, generalization.
“It’s an exciting field to be in right now.”
“What exactly are you working on?”
“I can’t say.”
“You are so paranoid, Patrick,” Elyse said, easing into a conspiratorial smile. “You don’t have to say. It would take me ten minutes to find out, if I wanted to.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me or threaten me?”
“Neither. Asking you is a courtesy. Everything can be off the record, okay?” Elyse was clearly relishing his discomfort. “This is a conversation between friends in a restaurant. If I want to interview you, I’ll let you know. So what are you up to?”
Patrick recalled a phrase from his company’s Web site, a description that soothed and puzzled prospective clients and investors in that way that only technospeak could. “We’ve developed a prediction-valuation model. The way the brain compares the value of future acts or stimuli, how ec
onomic decisions are made. We’re able to see what parts of the brain are activated during these decisions.”
“Just economic?”
“We’re interested in economic decisions.”
“I heard that you’re working for Globomart.”
“Well, no. Not really. We don’t ‘work’ for anyone. They’re one of many clients, but we have–”
“What do you do for them?”
“Basically, it’s an advanced form of market research,” Patrick said. He wouldn’t say more. He’d made that mistake at a party recently, explaining his work to the boyfriend of one of Heather’s co-workers/friends, Josh or something similarly soulful. Patrick had had a couple of beers and been cornered by Josh on a back patio where all the party’s significant others were quarantined, and when the chit-chat ended and his “market research” explanation for what he did drew a stare, he’d felt the need to elaborate, saying that Globomart, like any big corporation, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, so they wanted to develop a strategy first. And it was natural that they’d want to test their strategy before they fully invested in a product or an ad campaign. His job, he said to Josh, was to use a brain-imaging machine to determine how the brain responded to whatever: a product, an environment, an advertisement; looking for a pattern of response that correlated with eventual “success” for the client.
Josh said nothing, choosing instead to frown performatively, which segued into more explicit outrage, as though he’d been forced to listen to Robert McNamara gush about the efficiencies of incendiary bombing. “He should have introduced himself as a consumer activist,” Patrick had complained to Heather as they left, the trumpet of Josh’s raised, righteous voice ushering them out. Of all the things said, Patrick remembered the “crypto-fascist mind-control theorist” insult most distinctly, mentally cataloguing it to cross-reference with the threatening letters he’d received.