Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  Maybe they don’t know what it is, Juliet said.

  That’s possible. Have you heard anything from Raymond? I know it’s unlikely but —

  No, Juliet said. And I don’t expect to ever again.

  Or anyone else who has anything to do with the circus?

  No. And I’m really not pursuing that project at the moment, I’ve kind of put the whole thing on a shelf.

  To Sara, Juliet seemed oddly incurious. Was her lack of curiosity odd? Don’t you want to know what happened?

  I don’t know if I want to know, Juliet said. And I’ve kind of been taken up by looking for work.

  Mid-morning on Sara’s last day in Addis Ababa, she and Alazar had followed the directions given to them by Yitbarek’s aunt to the house of Gelila Melesse, the older girl contortionist who’d been one of those who fled the circus in Australia. In this house, too, there was a separate kitchen with a refrigerator in it, and electricity, and a curtain closed off a bedroom. It was a Saturday. Gelila’s mother, in skirt and blouse, let them in and insisted on making them Nescafé. Glimpsed through a window, in a tiny stone-walled yard, a younger girl was bashing laundry in a bowl while wet sheets on a line battered themselves around her. There was no sign of a man, a father, no shoes or coat or photograph. On the wall in the small and tidy living room hung photos of a teenaged boy in a school uniform and one of a younger Gelila in a gymnast’s leotard, another of her in the sequined pink trousers and top of a circus costume, body curled in her now familiar upturned spiral. By Addis standards, it was a middle-class house. Gelila’s mother worked in an office, Gelila’s brother, Yordanos, in an electronics shop. Her sister, Hermela, still in school, brought the Nescafé into the living room.

  They had spoken to her one time, Gelila’s mother said, sitting upright in an armchair. Gelila said they had to run away because they were frightened of the man. She said he’d hurt them but didn’t say how. In Australia, they were living in one place, but were moving to another, and they were safe and all together and looked after one another. In school, Gelila had done gymnastics, but when she saw the circus, it was all she talked about and all she wanted and circus became her life and it was all she did apart from school. He took them on trips. He made them famous here and in other countries. They were in newspapers and on TV. He told Gelila how talented she was. He said she had a great gift. She thought Gelila loved it, the travel, the fame, the circus, and she saw that Gelila was good at it, and was grateful to the man and the circus for all these changes in her daughter’s life. The opportunities. How he gave Gelila more opportunities. Gelila liked the fame, yes. Now she was upset and did not know what to think. Gelila said she was safe and not to worry, but she did not know if she would see her daughter again.

  They met the girl named Kidsit and her friend Lelise by the same tree where they were to have met the boys from Yitbarek’s house only Birook and Moses and Asefa had not shown up and none of the young men lounging near the tree had seen them. When he returned from a brief expedition to Yitbarek’s house, Alazar said once more the gate was locked from the outside, and no one answered when he knocked on it. The tree stood in front of a church, and squares of cardboard were strewn around the base of the wall that enclosed the church, the air pungent, young men and other boys wandering about. Kidsit, spirited, twelve-ish, head full of braids, said, The tree is where Alem and Dawit lived when they weren’t sleeping at Mr. Raymond’s house. They are gone, now, yes. They ran away. They did not like him and they were angry because they wanted to be rich. They thought the circus would make them rich and this made Mr. Raymond angry. No, they did not live at his house all the time, like Moses and Yitbarek and Bereket. Mr. Raymond wanted them to, but they would not because it wasn’t free. Free? Too strict, Alazar said that Kidsit said. The shriek of traffic from the street behind them. A babble of voices. He wished them to be all the time in school and doing homework and rehearsing. Sometimes Moses came to join them at the tree, and Kebede, who lived with his mother but his mother took his money and sometimes she beat him. Kebede also ran away. Did you want to run away? Did Mr. Raymond hurt you or make you frightened or touch you in a bad way? It was frustrating, relying on Alazar, who, Sara sensed, had only the roughest idea what she was asking and resisted what he did know. The day before, after their visit to Yitbarek’s house, she had tried to explain to him why she was asking these questions, what the sexual abuse of children was. Alazar said, She wants to show us something but only at her house. Overtop of her racing pulse, Sara said, But first can you ask if any of the other boys or young men know a boy named Tedesse who came from the Hope Village orphanage in Awassa or a white man named Mr. Leo Reseltier? It was such a long shot, like tossing a pebble into a swirl of bodies, but she’d had to ask. A young man in dirty, baggy trousers named Mulugeta had come close and said he knew a Mr. Leo. He had been to Mr. Leo’s house. In circumstances like this, it was hard to know what to believe, what people would say if they knew you had money and why, in turn, someone like Mulugeta would or should trust her. Oh, how her heart had thundered. Alazar, tell him I’ll pay him to take us to Mr. Leo’s house when we get back. Internally: Let him be here when we get back.

  In a two-room house with magazine photos of blond movie stars glued to the walls and no electricity and no visible parents, Kidsit and Lelise, in their worn T-shirts and sweatpants, had solemnly folded themselves in tandem backward until their hands reached their ankles, lowered their chests to the foam sleeping mat beneath them, and opened their legs in unison above their heads in the splits. Now Tamrat teaches them. At first only the older ones can do this, Alazar told Sara, but now they can do it. And Sara had thought, That’s it?

  Her night flight to Heathrow left at ten that evening. At four, outside an unassuming gated house not far from the Italian embassy, she and Alazar and Mulugeta had talked to another watchman who said the English man, Leo Reseltier, was gone. He used to work for South Sudan Aid. Sometimes boys stayed at the house. Once the watchman saw a boy climb out a window. The boy looked frightened. The man went back to England. Mulugeta said, I touch him and he pay me five birr.

  As Sara had frantically packed her bags in her hotel room, having paid for an extra night so that she could have the room through the evening, the black phone rang, and amid the static of her own adrenaline, Tamrat Asfaw yelled, Leave all the children alone. I try and make circus. It is not helping us what you do.

  Had it been luck, or the appalling opposite of luck, or something uncanny that had found her seated, on the London flight, next to a smooth-ish, middle-aged English man who told her he’d taken a trip north to the churches at Lalibela but was planning to retire to Kenya, he liked the climate and the people and he’d decided to do a little good while he was at it and open a home for orphans. Sara hadn’t been able to believe her ears. Every word he uttered made her suspicious of his motives. His very ingenuousness could be a front, yet he offered up a business card without hesitation, Rupert Bart of Topsham, Devon, and seemed disinclined to secrecy, and maybe ordinary people did things like this, dumbly altruistic yet not pedophiles. Her suspicion turned them into potential pedophiles. She took his card out of her wallet, laid it on her newsroom desk, and thought, Am I obliged to pass on his name to someone?

  The transcribing of her tapes, the emails, the phone calls, the phone interviews. Alan, standing by her desk on Tuesday morning, said, Can you get me something by next Monday? That’ll leave three days to edit. Doable? And Sara said, I’ll try.

  Gerard’s voice, Richard Langley’s, Fasika Azeze’s, not to mention Kidsit’s and Mulugeta’s and that of the watchman outside the missing Leo Reseltier’s house. She left a message with the secretary of Kim Guest, a man and the executive director of the Hope Village Foundation in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, assumed that Richard Langley would have told him about her visit to the Village. She tried Gerard Loftus at the Calgary number he’d given her, his family home she thought he’d said, and a man who might be Gerard’s father told her that Gerard was
in Vancouver and wasn’t expected back until the end of the week.

  By phone, Kim Guest confirmed that as soon as he’d been informed of the allegations of misconduct by Mark Templeton, he’d removed Templeton from his position. Yes, Templeton had already fled the Awassa Village. What could he have done to prevent that? No, he didn’t know where Templeton was. Yes, the allegations had been passed on to the Ethiopian police. The address and phone number that he had for Mark Templeton were in the United States, but most of Templeton’s work experience was overseas. For three years in the early 1990s, he’d directed a project for children in Eldoret, Kenya. Before that, he’d taught at a school in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Before that, he’d directed an orphanage outside of Negombo, also in Sri Lanka. Before that he’d taught in Kerala in southern India.

  Her colleague Matt Johansen gave Sara the name of an RCMP contact, a windy talker, who worked in the sex crimes unit and specialized in international pedophile and child smuggling rings, who said yes, it would be extremely hard to track anyone down if they hadn’t actually been charged with a crime, and no, there were no formal registries of sex offenders, and no, you couldn’t be charged with a crime that had taken place overseas although there was certainly a push to create such registries and to make it possible to be charged for a sex crime that took place in another country. And, yes, the targeting of aid organizations was a growing problem, especially as awareness and oversight increased in the West; some pedophiles had even invented charities to gain access to children, since when it came to small, privately funded organizations that set themselves up in developing countries, it could be hard to monitor precisely what was going on. The man from the Canadian Humanitarian Relief Agency confirmed this. Yes, he was aware of the problem, yes, they were trying to increase monitoring in the NGO sector generally.

  Wednesday night, David showed up at Sara’s door bearing a bag of groceries and a bottle of wine, saying he’d cook, as he often did. She’d been working from home all day. Three days back and she was already exhausted, as she’d told David by phone. At the sound of his arrival — his ringing of the doorbell, the turning of the key she’d given him in the lock — she surged downstairs, determined not to slather him with her myopic and distracted energy.

  Steak, which, when Sara pulled it from the bag, seemed a particularly bloody choice. And a Barolo, nice. David hung his coat on a hook and, in the kitchen, opened cupboards and drawers and pulled out wineglasses and knives and cutting board without asking where anything was. In his way, he was at home in her house, and had stopped making kind jokes about her Goodwill furnishings: the chest of drawers and the sofa that had actually come from a Goodwill, and, apart from her mother’s crystal tumblers, her assemblage of mismatched plates and cups in lieu of a set of dishes. Sometimes they went to bed before dinner and sometimes after. The one thing Sara had done, after moving into the house, was buy a new bed. Usually they cooked together, though Sara took her orders from David, since her own approach to meals was decidedly more improvised. Two weeks apart, and in all ways she was ravenous. Touch, the ongoing wonder of it. His skin. The bed of his lips. And they had the whole house to themselves, no whisper of a presence from the basement, since Kumiko was out. No word as yet, David said in response to Sara’s question about Greta’s latest CT scan. But soon they hoped, and no one had given any sign that there was cause for alarm and no immediate follow-ups had been ordered and if this one was clear they’d go from three-month to six-month monitoring. Greta was back at work part-time, Sara knew, although David had said she still tired easily and had some short-term memory issues. He said she had started to go out by herself. And if this scan was clear, what might this mean for them, as in David and Sara? Across the kitchen table, she tried to read David, what his face and body revealed without words, or revealed without meaning to and here, too, was what she wanted to see obscuring what she ought to be seeing?

  Are you allowing yourself to think ahead?

  Not really, not yet, David said. After this, after we get these results, if all’s well, I think everything will feel different then, given what happened the last time we got to this point. Everything seems to be going well. I can’t remember if I felt exactly this way last time.

  The last time Greta had reached her third three-month scan, after two all-clears, Sara had asked David an impetuous question. If all went well, could the two of them, she and he, go away together, overnight or for a weekend? It had been close to her miscarriage. She’d felt so many complexities of longing. I’ll see if that’s possible, David had said, and then came the grim word of the second tumour, which had again changed everything.

  On many occasions, they had drifted together toward sleep, dozed entangled, before rousing themselves. They had never accommodated each other’s bodies through the hours of a night and woken together in the morning. Yes, they’d spoken of it. Though not recently.

  Then there’s this. Sara pushed aside her plate, steak aswim in reddish juice, half-eaten, which she noted David noting, distraction circulating through her along with the wine, I have everything that went on at the orphanage. There’s the confusion of the boys who recanted and the problem of the man getting away, partly or wholly thanks to Gerard Loftus, but what went on is relatively straightforward. And horrible, and traumatizing, but it’s relatively clear what he did. There seems to be this other man, Gerard says he visited the orphanage, and so did Abiye. I don’t know if he actually did anything at the orphanage, but he seems to have solicited boys for sex in Addis. I met a boy who attests to that. So I have a lot, really if you want to put it like that, I have plenty. Then there’s the circus director. There are the existing allegations. But I couldn’t find anything in Addis to substantiate them. The current circus director says he denies them. From what I can gather from the kids I spoke to, the ones making the allegations wanted more money than he paid them, and complained that he was strict. I’m so wary of repeating allegations like these that can be so destructive, that have the power to destroy someone’s life.

  He visited the orphanage.

  Yes, but he was in the process of setting up circus programs in various places, not just there.

  You said he knew the orphanage director, the known molester.

  According to Gerard Loftus.

  And the allegations are in the public record.

  Yes, though I don’t think they’ve been reported here.

  Well. David took a sip of wine. And, once again, how calm he was. Why can’t you say all of what you just said?

  Thursday morning: Sara picked up the phone at work and the voice of Gerard Loftus, live, said, Hello, Sara. Gerard, it has to be early where you are. He said, Yes, he’d just got the message she’d called when he arrived back in Calgary the night before, at his parents’ house, and he was extremely pleased she was doing this and did she have everything she needed because he would help in any way he could. He made it sound as if they were working on something together. Which was unsettling. And, because the phone number for Mark Templeton that Kim Guest had passed on was disconnected, she had to ask for Gerard’s help. Can you think of any friends or colleagues of Templeton’s who might have his number?

  A little after noon, her RCMP contact, Dan Greco, called and said he’d run some searches with the names of the men she’d mentioned, and a Scotland Yard source had come up with this: a Leo Reseltier, of Maldon, Essex, had returned to the UK about a month previously from Ethiopia and filed a legal application to change his name.

  The current director of the school in Kandy, Sri Lanka, where Mark Templeton had taught before coming to Africa, said Templeton had been asked to leave due to management problems, and she knew no other details. Management problems was an ambiguous phrase, Sara thought, which could hide other things.

  Toward the end of the next afternoon, a friend of the friend of the friend of Mark Templeton, whose number Gerard had provided, passed on a phone number in Sweetwater, Florida, a town that, Sara discovered when she looked it up online, had once bee
n a retirement community for circus dwarves. The voice of the man who answered the phone sounded more sleepy than wary, a hint of the nasal, but ordinary, even warm. When she asked if he was the Mark Templeton who had worked at an orphanage in Awassa, Ethiopia, he said yes before something seized him and he hung up with a crash. These discoveries leaped in her. She’d found him, he wouldn’t speak but she’d located him: an electric shock that nevertheless registered distantly.

  That night, listening to phone messages from the kitchen while she poured soup into a saucepan — her friend Soraya Green saying, Where are you, I haven’t heard from you in weeks! — Sara cast her mind around the globe trying to land on wherever Raymond Renaud was. If she was going to mention the allegations against him, she wanted to give him the chance to respond. Which meant locating him. The night before, she’d started out of a dream, one whose content seemed blindingly self-evident. He was stepping out of her car, not her actual car but one that nevertheless was hers. When she looked again, he was gone, the world around her dim and enclosed and crepuscular. She went looking for him in a train station, down into the basement of the station, yet there was no sign of him; only his absence registered, like a shape in the place where he ought to be. She had no leads and so little time. Would he have stayed in Africa: it would be easy enough to disappear in Africa, head south or west or north, yet her hunch was he’d gone farther. Why? Somewhere he could get a job with relative ease. Yitbarek had said he’d said he needed to find work. Somewhere he’d been before, had contacts? Sri Lanka, unlikely. Which still left huge swaths of the wide world. Gerard said he had absolutely no idea where Raymond Renaud was and seemed affronted that she’d think he’d know anything. She did not want to scapegoat Raymond.