by Liam Durcan
After four years of having Marta’s book on his shelf like a totem, Patrick finally read Moby-Dick in the last year, initially as a tribute to Marta García, maybe even hoping to evoke a safe García memory, but instead found himself casting the Garcías into the book. Hernan was Ahab, of course, then Ishmael, then the whale. Then Celia and Roberto took turns in a variety of cameos. And of course there was the marginalia, the notes and annotations that Marta had left alongside the text, the parsing of Melville’s words for deeper meaning. An extra book, written in the margins, at times chastising or cheering Melville, clarifications, historical or biographical annotations. It was Marta’s book, undisputedly; a book that she read and reread and wrote on until it wasn’t really a book any more but a document of her life as well.
It was in the margins that Marta made sense of the world, through Melville and her own hard-won understanding. There were other notations whose significance Patrick never understood: on page 26 there was a column of numbers added with the sum–$1,129.31 underlined twice. Celia’s name appeared on page 112 with the word “flowers” written beside it, a single word that for the first time he found incredibly sad. He found the phrase “ask Michael Patrick” written in the margins of page 381, next to the underlined passage musing on phrenology and describing how the whale’s brain was hidden deep within its head “like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications of Quebec.”
Eventually, Patrick’s gaze drifted down from the title of Chapter 117–The Whale Watch–to the space over the lines of the first paragraph. Below a telephone number with a Montreal area code (now out of service–he tried), Patrick found a line of letters that he’d seen a number of times before, but which now stood out, arranging themselves into initials.
JMF JG AO
José-Maria Fernandez, Juan Guererro, Arturo Ortega. Three of the disappeared, according to The Angel of Lepaterique, which he had begun to read as a companion to Marta’s book, cross-referencing for names and dates, worrying the details like Marta herself. And while it felt like an accusation, like evidence being considered and admitted in the mind of a friend, it could have been anything. He chastised himself for thinking that way, for the overheated Hardy Boys sleuthing.
But there were less disputable entries. On the inside back cover, written in pencil, in Marta’s clear script, and taking up most of the empty space, Patrick found a summary of the hearings they’d watched together that summer, a meticulously constructed diagram that tried to make sense of the movement of money and arms and force in central America in the early eighties, along with names of the congressmen who served on the committees and the witnesses who gave testimony. He had joined along then and learned the names of all the principals too, and fifteen years later he found these very names on the back page of her book, a roll call of the Reagan administration. At the bottom of the page, she had written the letters “CIA” and circled the acronym repeatedly, with multiple arrows drawn from the word, indicating her understanding of the extent and direction of the agency’s involvement, a hydra of influence. The darkest arrow linked the CIA with the name of Álvarez, a name known to every Honduran, a name that cast the connections further, closer.
On the opposite page were the words “Democratic Voice,” written without any clear connection to the other parts of the diagram (although its inclusion on the adjacent page was the first troubling inference Patrick had about the organization). It was also here that he had come across Oliveira’s name for the first time, along with the names of the former senators and opinion makers who had founded the think-tank in the early eighties. Marta had diplomatically credited all their names with a large question mark.
Elyse would never know how Marta tried to understand, attempted to come to terms with history. If Elyse had known any of this, Patrick thought she would have at least appreciated the effort and analysis. She would have understood the risk in unearthing difficult truths. Perhaps she would have even allowed a feeling of kinship toward Marta rather than the broader, easier verdict of contempt. What was written on the back page made Patrick want to place the book in Elyse’s lap, as much to have the satisfaction of seeing Elyse’s smug theories refuted as to have Marta García exonerated.
But there were other things written in the book that made it impossible to give to Elyse. One notation gutted Patrick, physically pained him when he had to think of Marta feeling the need to write the words; it was on the last page of Chapter 73–Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him.
él lo hizo, él lo hizo, él lo hizo
Patrick knew enough Spanish that it registered: he did it, he did it, he did it. Not directed at anyone, just a declaration. Words sitting there, demanding Patrick ask who (the penalty for having left the book on his shelf for years) and demanding that he answer. Reading it for the first time a year before had shifted a sentiment inside him, made him come to resent Hernan. He must have let Marta come to the conclusion herself, even then practising the silence he had now perfected. He went about his business in Le Dépanneur Mondial as Elyse arrived and the accusations began. He said nothing as Oliveira slouched into their lives. And this was the response. Words like a fist banging on a door, an angry admission of not just the truth but of betrayal. It was evidence, he thought, circumstantial, but something Lindbergh would want to see. Maybe even something he suspected existed, but couldn’t prove. For a moment he thought about the wisdom of having brought the book to Den Haag and considered hiding it, wrapping it in a towel and shoving it behind something somewhere, the way criminals disposed of evidence in movies. But he reconsidered; it had taken him four years to find the words buried there. If anyone thought to look through it, he thought, they deserved to find what she’d written.
He closed the book and was tempted to sniff at it, to remind himself of something else, but knew that any trace of Marta was gone. It had been his book for years by this time. Now it smelled of him.
How do you dislike parts of a man? Patrick asked himself as he went down to the lounge at the Metropole, realizing the distaste he’d already established for the composite parts of Oliveira’s persona. A name scrawled in Marta’s handwriting, a reputation (itself a mosaic of animus), the look of him as he spoke with Celia in the foyer of the tribunal building. The grandiosity that came with being called Caesar. Even the pronunciation of his last name irked Patrick, with its idiot rim-shot of open-mouthed vowel sounds followed by the animal snarl and spit of the last two. Patrick was in the elevator again–suddenly despairing at the miles he’d covered travelling in elevators, bracketed by time spent in guest rooms and lobbies to form that endlessly recurrent triathlon of hotel life–wondering why he hated Oliveira so. They both wanted the same thing. They had both offered help to the Garcías, the only difference was that Oliveira had actually provided tangible assistance. Assistance for which Celia was obviously grateful.
Despite having seen Oliveira before, Patrick still carried the image of him as outsized, garish in that kingpin sort of way, a veneer of sophistication failing to conceal a man full of coiled, meaty aggression. Patrick attempted to dismiss his preconceptions as he approached them in the bar of the Metropole, tried to imagine a business meeting. Forget the players, concentrate on the proposal. Upon seeing Patrick, Celia and Oliveira both stood up. After he and Oliveira were introduced and shook hands, Celia leaned over and kissed his cheek, a gesture that seemed performative and fraudulent and distracted Patrick with the thought that perhaps love was like hate in that way, as easily constructed from composite pieces.
Up close, Oliveira was pleasantly underwhelming. Slightly shorter than Patrick. A frame that carried a little less weight. Immediately affable, offering the two-pump handshake and the quick release. Professional. Receding hairline and an unlined face sporting a pair of wire-rim glasses, all of which combined to give him the look of an actuary fresh from the floors of one of the larger Den Haag insurance houses. But any reassurance Patrick felt at not being met by a physically imposing presen
ce almost immediately began to have the opposite effect, hinting that Oliveira’s reputation and status had to be based on something else, on pure effectiveness, perhaps.
They sat down at a booth, with Patrick marshalled into the spot between the two of them, with Oliveira on his right, up against the eggplant bruise on his face. Oliveira was cool enough not to bring up the bruise, eyes fluttering over it for a second, understanding it was just a feature of another landscape he’d have to negotiate. The bar of the Metropole was accordingly empty for a weekend night–only a couple of single drinkers, both up front, gargoyles flanking the bartender. There was one television in the entire hotel bar, a paucity of screens that Patrick had come to realize provoked a particular, calculable anxiety in his American travelling companions, a screen-deficit that located the bar better than an atlas. But Oliveira had no need to look at the television.
A waitress appeared as if she’d been waiting just offstage. Oliveira ordered a martini–at last, a grudging, partial confirmation of Patrick’s preconceptions. The martini had a name Patrick had never heard before, something nonsensical and arbitrarily vulgar, as though it had been christened by the first person who’d become drunk on it. People were meant to chuckle when they ordered one.
“No, two, right Celia?” Oliveira said, and Celia nodded. When his turn came, Patrick wrinkled his nose. He wanted his refusal to have a drink with them to seem like a symbolic gesture of his autonomy, but it seemed like nothing more than a sulk. So he cited stomach issues, non-specific, as the cause for not ordering a third whatever-they-were-drinking. Water would do.
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Oliveira said to him from an odd angle, unique to conversations held in U-shaped booths. Patrick felt his lips pull tight against his face, assuring himself this was a smile. Particles of hostility scattered from him like a new form of energy. Fissionable. “I’m very impressed by Neuronaut.”
“We’ve had a good first year.”
“I wasn’t talking about the business. Success in business doesn’t particularly impress me. Your work impresses me, it always has.”
Patrick tried not to think about having Oliveira as a fan. “Thank you.”
“You’re not doing badly, especially with Globomart.”
“It’s been a great experience working with them.” Oliveira listened to Patrick’s wooden tone and smiled, not the thousand-kilowatt smile Patrick would have predicted but a slow deployment of a smile.
“As you may know, the Democratic Voice has been involved in Hernan’s case since the initial charges were laid.”
“They found the witnesses,” Patrick said.
“It took some legwork,” Oliveira added, in a way that dismissed the fact it wasn’t his legs that did the work. “It was just a matter of deposing them and getting them here. And we’ve played a role, of course, in certain elements of Hernan’s defence.”
“You got di Costini to contact me,” Patrick said, feeling Celia staring at him from another oblique angle in the booth.
“We did,” Oliveira answered.
“He said you were asking about brain imaging studies.”
“We’ve, in fact, leased time on the magnet and technical time with Cervotech in Amsterdam. Mr. di Costini tells me that you don’t think much of the idea.”
The drinks arrived. Oliveira and Celia leaned back as the martinis landed along with a glass of water that the waitress placed in front of him with considerable ceremony.
“As a form of lie detection? At best, it’s inadmissible. The technology is too new. It’s like trying to use DNA evidence to acquit someone in 1954. I told di Costini that it doesn’t have a precedent.”
“The case won’t be won or lost on one piece of evidence. This isn’t about one test, it’s about the accumulation of supportive facts. There’s no forensics to speak of. And as for eyewitness accounts after twenty-five years, you know the value of that. Any additional, technical evidence could be vital. Did di Costini mention that?”
“I told him it was ridiculous for me to testify.”
“Not to testify. No, no. Just oversee the design of any testing. There aren’t twenty people in the world with your credentials. The court would recognize that.”
“What happens if the court refuses to admit it?”
“Then Hernan looks like a man willing to take the test, thwarted by the court.”
“What happens if he fails?”
“Do you believe he’s guilty?”
Celia’s face floated like a spring moon over his other shoulder. “I don’t know, but you have to be prepared if he fails the test. Hernan has to be prepared.”
“Absolutely. But, correct me if I’m wrong: in some ways the technique is imprecise and there is a margin of error. Lie detection alone requires interpretation of the images. Design of the experiment could play a major role,” Oliveira said, looking up from his martini glass. “Which is not necessarily a disadvantage.”
“Lindbergh is aware of all this,” Patrick said, trying to invoke some authority Oliveira might respect. “They know what I do. And if they know what I do, they’ll just get their own experts, those without any personal connection to the case.”
“I don’t think we’d object to that,” Oliveira said blandly, and seeing Patrick shaking his head in disbelief, he added, preemptively, “Don’t you see? That would mean we’d engaged our opponents on our terms. They would be forced to address Hernan’s innocence as something that could be proven. Something we could prove.”
“Why do you care so much about Hernan? Why is this so important to you?”
Oliveira looked at Celia and then back at Patrick. “Hernan García is a good man. The charges against him are without merit.”
“I don’t mean you personally. Why would a policy think-tank get involved in a Honduran torture case?”
“The Democratic Voice doesn’t limit itself to issues of policy making with regards to Latin America. It’s true, we’re a think-tank, and as such we wish to promote policy initiatives consistent with certain values–”
“We’re talking about Honduras in the eighties. Values like what? Kidnapping? Torture?”
Oliveira turned to Celia, as though remarking on a prediction having come true.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s not complicated at all.”
“Dr. Lazerenko, would you like to get into a debate about ethics? You don’t seem to have any problems working for Globomart, but to many people that sort of involvement seems very complicated. Globomart is the subject of how many Justice Department investigations? Bribing, zoning boards, union busting, ‘non-competitive practices’–”
“It’s not torture.”
“People like you frustrate me, Doctor. Democracy doesn’t survive because of its inherent righteousness. Athens didn’t flourish because of its moral claims, but because it was a military power. It’s easy to forget what the world was like in the eighties. But a battle was fought in the Americas, and it was won, country by country. Peru, Grenada, El Salvador–”
Patrick swivelled his head to try to gauge Celia’s response, hoping for an arbiter of the world views competing in front of her. She was looking at something in Belgium. “Celia, do you hear this?”
“…Nicaragua…”
“What about Álvarez?”
“Álvarez?”
“Gustavo Álvarez, I’ve heard the name a few times at the trial. Where do you stand on him?”
“Winner of the Legion of Merit.”
“I don’t think we have anything more to talk about,” Patrick said, and began sliding out of the long padded bench of the booth. He tried to make eye contact with Celia as she shuffled sideways ahead of him, tried to make sense of a person he thought he knew, but it was no use.
Then, as she got to the end of the seat, she turned and faced him, a person summoning reserves for one last stand, “Patrick, wait, just listen to him. For me. For my father.”
Patrick was still looking at C
elia when he heard Oliveira’s voice again. “I expected more from you, Dr. Lazerenko. I would have thought as a scientist you’d have left the ideology and bickering to someone else. Look at the world empirically. Like it or not, the region is more stable. GDP is up. People are living better lives. We’re all trading partners now. Forget politics. Our politics are prosperity. We have invested too much of ourselves to let this victory be taken away from us. That’s why I’m here.” Patrick was sitting at the end of the booth with Celia, and he couldn’t help but think that to Oliveira they must look like two rubes playing out a drama. “Even if you disagree with me, Doctor, it is not me you would be helping. You have to ask yourself how much you want to help the Garcías.”
The waitress, circling in a holding pattern halfway between the bar and the booth, returned to her other customers. Raised voices will do that.
“You talk about Hernan like he’s a political prisoner.”
“All conflicts have a political element to them.”
“Does Hernan know you’re doing this?”
“We’re planning to meet with him.”
“What good will that do?”
“We’re going to present the proposal to Hernan after the proceedings on Monday. We’ll lay out what we plan to do. He doesn’t have to say a word. He sits and listens. If he objects, fine, we’ll back off. We’ll explain that the test is a newer, more sophisticated lie detector. We need you there to speak to him.”