by Liam Durcan
For someone not permanently employed at the tribunal and in possession of one of those laminated all-access passes, getting from the office level of the building to the tribunal level was somewhat more complicated than emigrating to Afghanistan. Patrick’s attempt caused so much alarm and grimacing among the security personnel that in the end it would have been easier for him to leave the building and re-enter through the same entrance, as though he were rebooting a clunky computer. In the end, he gave up. The day’s proceedings were due to begin at 1:30, and with his high-noon meeting with Anders Lindbergh still a couple of hours away, he had time to kill. Den Haag was beginning to make him think of time in that way.
The mid-morning curtains of cloud and fog had been drawn back, revealing the otherworldly buzz of Dutch sunshine. He shook out a couple of tablets from a bottle of Tylenol he had stashed in his coat pocket and started off to the southwest down Johan de Wittlaan. He had to concentrate to remember that it was Friday, counting the number of sleeps he’d had, backwards to the last normal day, early in the week, five time zones ago in Boston. What followed was predictable, a conditioned response: guilt. A pang over turning off the phone and provoking anxiety attacks in his partners, reacting like frightened children, none of them trusting that Sanjay would send the data if he couldn’t solve the problem himself. They had imprinted on him as surely as if he’d been Lorenz trotting about in his yellow wellies, and now that he was gone he imagined them scuttling around the office in noisy disarray. He also thought about money. Although he didn’t admit it, he thought a lot about money. And now that the Globomart project seemed to be skidding into disaster, he felt a fleeting panic at the thought of having nothing again. As if to acknowledge the terror of this thought, and his embarrassment at having it, he turned his mind to other matters. There was, for instance, the larger issue of Hernan.
He hadn’t left Marcello’s office on particularly good terms with the lawyer, unable to hide his anger at feeling duped in order to get him to the trial. Come to Den Haag! Let’s talk about culpability! Marcello even seemed offended that Patrick would leave without shaking his hand. On the way to the elevators, Patrick had tried to remember the expression that would describe the way in which he’d been manipulated. He was terrible at these things, always confused by the plot of movies about cons and scams, never able to guess who had the upper hand. He’d got out of the tribunal building and put the meeting behind him when the phrase “bait and switch” came to mind.
Even if he did everything Marcello asked, endorsed the idea that the technology could be used as a lie detector, there wasn’t a chance of it holding up in court. The prosecution would call their own people, with no reason to exaggerate any technological claims. Patrick could imagine someone like his former lab supervisor Ed Phipps springing to the stand, refuting every claim Marcello wanted Patrick to make, running all his photocopied articles through the shredder. Patrick would lose all credibility, and not just in the tribunal.
Then, as if to stake her claim, came thoughts of Heather, who, if she was thinking of him at all, was likely re-assigning him to that category of mistakes to be put behind her. Patrick hadn’t called her, and she would say that this is pure him, making a decision through sustained avoidance. Then he thought about his mother, for no particular reason except that it seemed to be the logical way to complete his trifecta of guilt.
He walked as fast as he could without provoking the right side of his face. After twenty minutes, he felt the threshold precisely, tightrope-walking at a pace where he could barely feel the little accessory heartbeat under his right eye. The boulevards that led away from Johan de Wittlaan had a freshly evacuated emptiness to them and he was happy for it, glad there weren’t many on the sidewalks, only a few whose understandable stares he had to duck.
Patrick stopped at a corner where the street sign read “Carnegieplein.” Across the street a perfect green hedge-wall guarded a building with an elegant tower. Then, for the first time since he’d been in Den Haag, he walked with purpose toward some feature of the city rather than just passing the surroundings. Patrick discovered a breach in the great wall of shrubbery and the hedge entrance opened up to a formal garden, kept in the manner one would expect in a city filled with institutional money. It was a short walk to the building; he had never been good with styles of architecture and this one eluded him too, except to say that it was beautiful and if a building had a soul, then this one’s was much less troubled than the tribunal building or the Congress Centrum. He realized that his impression could be wrong, and for all he knew he could be walking toward the front door of the North Korean Embassy, in which case the sight of a rifle was likely trained on his forehead, but he decided he wanted to see the damn building and, armed with a tourist’s sly immunity, he marched up to the front door. A wall plaque announced that Patrick had arrived at the front entrance of the Vredespaleis, or Peace Palace. The building was open and he was feeling emboldened by not already being stopped by any security personnel. Sequestered on Bermuda for a weekend conference, he had once wandered around the parliament buildings in Hamilton for an hour before coming face to face with a man who eventually introduced himself as the prime minister. Patrick had explained who he was and lied that he was lost. Nice guy, the prime minister. Looked a bit tired. And although he grimaced when others give him travel tips, he highly recommended just meandering through interesting places until told to go away. Of course, this mode of sightseeing would get you killed in certain parts of the world, and so it had to be applied with some discretion.
The foyer was impressive, not too heavily marbled, although each footstep echoed. He kept walking, a good clip, like he knew where he was going but still prepared to deploy a tourist’s arsenal of excuses should he be questioned. Patrick saw a sign for the International Court of Justice and thought this could be Bermuda all over again, that he would open a door and find himself in chambers with the justices as they worried over the details of a fishing dispute.
But then a tiny blond woman stepped out from nowhere. She just stood there, dressed in a Peace Palace blazer, which made her look small and young, precociously competent, an adolescent superhero. Patrick smiled his pained smile that was supposed to declare “I know where I’m going, kiddo,” and he started walking about as fast as a person can without breaking into a run.
She lifted her hand and, seeing the beginning of the act, Patrick flinched, foreseeing a Taser or a canister from which she’d empty a blast of pepper spray into his face. But the hand was empty, and the woman smiled. Not really a smile but a sexless grimace favoured by those trained to deal with large crowds.
“Are you here for the ten o’clock tour?” she asked.
“Yes, I am. I was told to meet here.”
Her name was Birgita and on a November Friday morning at ten o’clock, Patrick lied his way into being her only charge. And while he was disappointed to have his wanderings curtailed, this was tempered by the pleasant thought of being the only one on a tour, avoiding that sense of the herd that defined the typical tour dynamic. They talked for a while before setting off–Patrick told her he was Canadian (although, for a tour of the Mecca of internationalism, simply not being American was probably more valuable than being Canadian), and, as he was the only person present, Patrick gave her the option of calling the whole thing off, which she refused in a way that told him the gesture already endeared him to her. She pointed to the side of her face and asked him what happened. Patrick told her he had been assaulted and solemnly gave her enough vague details that she was able to construct a plausible history of an altercation with some Dutch skinhead. Birgita dropped the Peace Palace-approved repertoire of underwhelmed postures, settling into what he felt was a more natural friendliness as she told him the provenance of the place.
The building was constructed on land donated by Czar Nicholas and the plan was to have every nation send representative building materials or furnishings, which resulted in, according to Birgita’s diplomatic assessment, an
unfortunate pastiche. To Patrick, the place looked like a fin-de-siècle Pier 1 showroom. Now, she assured Patrick, most of the tchotchkes were safely catalogued and kept in a locked vault with all the other physical evidence of crimes against humanity, but the place was still garish enough to evoke a certain schadenfreude dekorativ. Birgita laughed, and so did he. His face hurt. So what. The main hall was impressive though, and as the Gilded Age grandeur vaulted and arched above them, Birgita told him that the Peace Palace was finished just as the world arranged to meet for four years of limb-shearing annihilation in the mud fields of Europe. Apparently the point of the place was lost on most.
By mutual consent, they skipped the tour of the museum and the Peace Palace’s new wing. Instead they had a coffee. Patrick realized that at this point things could become awkward–they were strangers after all. But they had already spent time together in that no-risk way that most people find intoxicating. Secondly, caffeine is a wondrous drug and whole economies don’t run on it just for the taste. Urged on, they talked. Birgita told him she was doing her degree in public policy. She liked working in Den Haag, she said, the park around the palace was beautiful and the job looked good on her resumé. She smiled and Patrick couldn’t help but notice how his first impression of her had been altered. At first she had seemed so small and young and animated by the blazer’s sanctioning threat, but now, as she told him a few details of her life–about the books she read and how she liked to go to the beaches in nearby Kijkduin or Scheveningen, even if they were, in her words, kitschy-touristic–she seemed taller and looked, more appropriately, like a woman in her mid-twenties. A person appeared. And yet, for all the authenticity these details brought to her, Patrick was aware that this reappraisal was not just objective. Example: her close-cropped blond hair, which before seemed sexless and juvenile, was now stylish. She became human to the degree he allowed her to be. It was a repulsive thought, as much as it excited him. He looked at the pendant around her neck, how it nestled in the hollow right above the sternum and between the thin, twin straps of her sternocleidomastoid muscles. He thought she could be lonely but that maybe he was just projecting his own loneliness onto her, the first stranger with whom he’d spoken at any length in the last week, with whom he’d made any real connection. He didn’t know if she was happy, but hoped she was. This was probably a projection, too.
One thing was certain, he couldn’t imagine talking to someone like this in the States. Mutual fear and imagined pathologies would have kept them firmly on the tour, on time. Away from the dangers of coffee and talk.
She asked Patrick what he did for a living and he told her he was a doctor and a researcher and then she asked why he was in Den Haag and he told her about Hernan, not feeling the need to lie or embellish. She didn’t appear to make any new appraisal of him after hearing any of what he said. Instead, she drank her coffee. He watched the grounds settle in the bottom of his own cup and felt guilty for saying he’d been mugged by one of her countrymen.
They said goodbye and Patrick gave her his card from Neuronaut. He asked for directions to the Metropole, even though he was already fairly certain how to get back. But he felt no embarrassment–after all, he was a tourist in this city.
“Do you know Johan de Wittlaan Boulevard?” she asked, pointing.
“Yes,” he said, “I think I know that one.”
TEN
This was his memory of it–
One Saturday morning Patrick arrived at work to find Hernan loading up his Ford Taurus with supplies from Le Dépanneur Mondial. Marta García looked on in silence as her husband stuffed dry goods into the trunk. Patrick stood there, next to her, watching him bring over box after box to the curb. He remembered her face, muscles tightened into a hard-held mask of spousal tolerance.
“You can manage?” Hernan said to Marta. He was leaning into the trunk of the car, pulling intently at something.
“I can manage, Roberto will be here. And Madame Lefebvre,” she replied. Hernan looked at Patrick, and said, “You’re coming.”
Even though he didn’t understand what was going on, Patrick gave himself credit for intuiting the curbside dynamics that were at play on that late-August morning in 1986–he looked over at Marta García for her permission. She thrust her head toward the car.
“Go. Roberto doesn’t want to.”
Patrick got in the car. It was perhaps a measure of just how bored he was with his life–or how much he trusted Hernan–that he would get in the car like that without asking where they were going. But he bounded into the back seat like a golden retriever. Then, to Patrick’s surprise and undying gratitude, Celia came out of the store carrying a cooler and sat in the front seat beside her father. It was four days since she had smiled at Patrick at dinner and the memory had been mentally replayed to the point where he wondered if it had been his invention in the first place.
As they drove toward the Mercier Bridge, Hernan addressed Patrick, intermittently meeting his eyes in the rear-view mirror.
“You’re not curious where we’re going?” Hernan asked, and Patrick shrugged, meaning it in the best possible way. “Have you ever met anyone from Mexico?” he continued.
“Sure, I mean you guys are Mexicans, aren’t you?”
Hernan and Celia looked at each other. Hernan shook his head and Celia laughed.
“But, besides us, Patrick, have you met any?”
“No.”
“Then today is a big day for you.”
They drove through fields quilted in crops, navigating progressively smaller roads, until they approached the American border. Hernan turned off on a side road and followed it until it led them to a field within sight of the Adirondacks. They pulled into a parking lot beside a very large building with a curved roof that looked like corrugated tin cut lengthwise and turned on its side, something Hernan told him later was a Quonset hut. In front of the hut sat a large rock painted with the words “Viva Mexico,” and a flagpole from which a Mexican flag hung limply. Two broken-down-looking school buses were parked beside the hut.
“What’s this?” Patrick asked, leaning forward, trying to get a better look and using the opportunity to smell Celia’s hair.
“It’s work,” Hernan said, bringing the car to a stop beside one of the buses. “Let’s go.”
Patrick helped unload groceries from the trunk of the car and brought them into the hut, his eyes aching and blinded as they adjusted from the brightness outside. He could barely make out Hernan in front of him and had to concentrate on his ghostly, shifting image as he was led to a makeshift kitchen. It was brighter there, and for the first time Patrick could see that he had been led through a dormitory of more than a hundred empty cots arranged in rows. Several cots at the far end of the building were occupied by sleeping men. They were met by an older man who had obviously been waiting for Hernan. He had a weathered face and a small, compact body. The man did not appear pleased. He and Hernan shook hands and spoke for a short time in Spanish. After that the man helped Celia and Patrick load the perishables into the refrigerator. More than just being allowed to tag along, Patrick was pleased to help. Charitable acts were, at that time, still a novelty to him–and to do all of this with Celia, to have the chance to bond with her in such a wholesome, magnanimous, asexual way, was producing a kind of mid-morning euphoria in him, but all of this was held in check by his impression of the dour stranger. By this time Patrick liked to think he was familiar with the expats who gathered around the coffee counter at Le Dépanneur Mondial. He was accustomed to the rhythms of their speech, even in Spanish; he was certain he could fish out the emotion in the voices of people enjoying each other’s company or tell when a conversation became contentious. So when Hernan and this man spoke, even Patrick sensed there was something less than unconditional gratitude being expressed. This unease was compounded by what Patrick swore were flickers of resentfulness beneath the man’s mask of stoic resolve. He didn’t know what to make of it. Years later, he would learn that humans are wired for
faces: a nice little portion of the parietal lobes were committed to parsing facial expressions, decoding the slightest nascent snarl or elevation of a brow. Then, it was only ominous to Patrick. He reasoned it was a territorial thing, a man who didn’t want an outsider like Hernan bringing in provisions. Maybe this was how a man having to accept a gift of food looked.
While the two men continued to talk, Patrick helped Celia put the rest of the groceries away in the kitchen. She worked without enthusiasm and sulked whenever Hernan asked anything else of her. When Patrick told her she looked bored, she denied it, admitting only to being upset at having to come out to this place. She had never liked it and this was her third visit with Hernan in the last six weeks. Her mother couldn’t go because of the store. Roberto always refused and Nina was too young. At that moment, Patrick heard Hernan’s voice again, raised, clashing with the voice of the other man.
“Who is this guy?” Patrick asked.
His name was Aguirre, Celia explained. He was from Guatemala. And although he supervised the fieldwork, Hernan had told her he was much more than a foreman. He was in charge of arranging everything: the hiring in Mexico, obtaining the temporary work visas, the lodging and food.
Until that moment, Patrick had been unaware of the foreigners crouching in farmers’ fields at certain times of the summer for different harvests. But Celia had been out with Hernan before, and she knew who did what: Sikhs for lettuce, Haitians for green beans, the Mexicans arriving in August to harvest sweet corn. The school buses would drop the workers off at the fields before dawn and bring them back to the dormitory at nightfall. In a couple of weeks they would decamp and move on to another harvest, other fields.
“What’s your dad got to do with it?”
“He says he’s helping them,” Celia said quietly, but loudly enough that Patrick could detect some shame in her voice.