He must have known, Sara thought, that in introducing her to Gerard, things would not go well for Raymond. If Gerard was obvious in his desire to bring abuse to light and punish its perpetrators, Ed’s intentions remained clouded — Make up your own mind, he’d shouted.
Have you heard from Gerard in the past couple of weeks? Sara asked. Or do you have any idea where he is now? He’s apparently left Calgary.
No. No. We’re not friends, Gerard and I. I don’t want you to get any kind of idea we’re in regular touch. Anyway, I’ve been upcountry and I’m going south in a couple of days.
She had been surprised to hear nothing from Gerard Loftus since Raymond’s death, no crowing or gloating call, and so the day before she had called his Calgary number. He isn’t here, his father had said. He won’t get any message.
Can you tell me where he is? Or when he left?
Not if you’re that woman journalist. Better he stay clear of the likes of you.
Has he gone back to Ethiopia, to Africa?
Did you hear what I said? He doesn’t need to be messed up in this business.
On the Monday, which marked a week since word of Raymond Renaud’s death had come over the wire, Sheila insisted on taking Sara to lunch, waiting until they’d exited the parking lot on foot before asking, How are you doing?
Fine, I’m fine. Actually, she needed two hundred more words to finish up a piece about two Sikh Canadians in Gambia who had set up a racketeering ring to take money from Gambians and stuff them into a shipping container with promises that they would be carried to Canada, only the plan had been intercepted, luckily before the Gambians had been sealed into their metal tomb. She’d been trying to finish the piece all morning; Nuala was waiting for it. Once that was filed, and edited, it would be time to move on to the piece about the Sikh community of Surrey, BC, where one group of worshippers had attacked another group with swords because the former wished to eat on chairs at tables at the gurdwara, and the others on mats on the floor. Sara had been calling around for someone to explain the conflict’s religious intricacies to her. There was comfort in work’s self-obliterating concentrations.
As they made their way through an alley between warehouses, their voices funnelled upward by the brick walls to either side, Sheila pressed, What about the other one, the former orphanage director, Templeton, any chance of following up on him? Obviously, to Sheila, the time for mourning and sympathetic restraint had passed and she could return to being what she really was: a hound on the crest of a hill, scenting.
I don’t think he wants to speak.
Well, he may not want to speak. The question is whether you can get him to speak, the way you did with the first one. Or can you dig up something more about his past behaviour?
The first one, Sara thought, but said, I’m the multiculturalism and immigration reporter, aren’t I? Pedophiles aren’t my regular beat.
Sheila darted her a quick look. I thought you’d want to follow up. You broke the story.
I’m not sure I want to. Which drew another sharp glance from Sheila.
On the south side of King Street, down a set of stairs, they entered a wine bar and stood waiting for a table, the man behind them bringing a cold wind in with him, the hubbub of voices around them as thick as steak. The closure that Sara wanted was not the closure that Sheila wanted, if Sheila wanted closure at all, not being interested in the dead as much as the living.
Above all, Sara thought at the end of lunch, she needed to find a way to his accusers, to hear from them, for they seemed the best route to further knowledge if not truth. She told Sheila she had to run an errand before returning to work, and it was an errand of a sort as well as an escape from Sheila: ducking into a café on the far side of King Street for an espresso. Everything in her felt on edge. And another espresso would help? Anywhere we can get a good cup of coffee, Raymond Renaud had asked as they’d set out that July night. And she had laughed. And here, and now: the ghost of him.
A hole had opened in her, into which grief poured: work and more knowledge and a dark, syrupy stream of caffeine seemed the best way she could think to fill it.
In the past couple of weeks, she had made a few attempts to contact settlement and Ethiopian cultural organizations in Melbourne and Sydney without making any progress in reaching the runaways. Sem Le seemed a dead end. Maybe someone in a similar organization in Toronto had contacts in Melbourne, or Sydney, knew someone who was in contact with the teenagers.
There was also Rafael Nardi, freelance journalist based in Melbourne, who’d been part of the team Sara had travelled with on her second Iraq trip. He lived in Melbourne but freelanced for the Sydney paper. She’d sent him an email at the beginning of the fall when she’d first heard about the allegations. And not heard back. Which likely meant he was busy and on the road. She took the espresso in the paper cup that the café cashier handed her.
Would Rafael Nardi help? They’d been through a lot together. On the way into Najaf, they’d been stuck at an army roadblock until she, swathed in scarf and long black coat, and Raed, their fixer, had managed to talk their way through it, while Rafael and the American and Norwegian cameramen waited in the van. That night, Rafael had interposed himself between her and the crazed Norwegian who’d insisted on stripping naked to sleep, the four of them in the same hotel room in the previously bombed hotel, squashed like maggots head to toe on the same mattress, the only mattress available to them. The next day, as they were eating a meal in the small restaurant attached to the hotel, Rafael had leaped up and saved an Iraqi man from choking, which was the day before they were held up at gunpoint and almost killed.
Back in the newsroom, the espresso roiling through her, she began to type:
Rafael, forgive me for getting in touch only when I need something. Do you remember the Ethiopian teenagers, the circus performers I wrote to you about a couple of months ago? They’re in Melbourne now. I’m still trying to get hold of them. If you have any time or tips about how to locate them, let me know? I found the man their alleged abuser and after I spoke to him he killed himself, and I’m a bit of a mess about it.
Mark Templeton’s phone number in Sweetwater, Florida, was disconnected, Sara discovered when she tried it. She did that much. Others would be on to him, and if someone else dug up something about him, so be it. It was the teenagers who held her attention, out there somewhere.
The photograph of Raymond Renaud lay on her desk. Once more she picked it up. Altered, hopeful, Raymond in his striped T-shirt smiled at her. Just because it had been mailed in America did not rule out its having originated in Haiti. Whoever had sent it could have lucked into someone returning to the United States and asked this person to drop it in the mail, knowing that this way it stood a better chance of reaching its destination dependably and sooner. The postmark from a week ago: in New York. Mailed a week after his death. Did whoever had put the envelope in the mail know that he was dead? Someone wanted her to see him smiling and transformed, wanted her to confront the possibility of his happiness.
Tant a minit, tant a minit, said the same woman who’d answered the first time that Sara had called the Maison des Enfants de Beau Soleil. In French, Sara asked to speak to Monsieur le directeur de l’orphelinat.
And he, Monsieur Dieufort Alexis, guarded and guttural, children’s voices audible behind him, a baby wailing somewhere. In English: What is it you want?
Did you by any chance send me a photograph of Raymond Renaud, the man who was teaching for you and —
You say I what?
Someone sent me a photograph of Raymond Renaud, who was teaching for you. I called and spoke to you, then him a few weeks ago. Then he committed suicide. I called you after that to —
I don’t know what to say to you. If this is a good thing that has happened, that you have done, or a terrible thing. I cannot know. For the children what happened is a small disaster. The police told me about this, what they say in Australia, and now I must ask the children questions, delicate
ly, you know, but maybe we are and they are saved from a bigger disaster.
But you didn’t send me a photograph. Addressed to me at the newspaper where I work. Mailed in the US.
No, I did not send a photograph to you.
Is there anyone who might have done? He’s with children, outside, in front of a wall. I thought maybe it was taken at the orphanage.
Maybe it is one Frédeline, she is one of our instructrices, took? But you know, this photograph, it is the least of my worries.
Did you speak to him, that day, after he got off the phone with me? Or do you know anyone who did?
No, no, and maybe, you know, I know even less about what happened than you do.
Do you know people he was friendly with or people he might have confided in?
He was friendly. My first impression was, I liked him. He had good credentials. But he was here only one month. He joined us for dinner. Already he was working with us on a soccer program for orphans and street children. Now —
Did he juggle?
What?
Did you ever see him juggle — jonglait, ou c’est avec les enfants qu’il faisait ça?
Two women were conversing very close to him in French or Creole, closer than the swallowlike swoops of children’s voices.
No, no.
Did he say anything to you about the circus?
He said it was time it is run by an Ethiopian. Thank you. There is someone here for me in the office.
She had suggested to David that they meet at a restaurant, as they had done more frequently in the past and hadn’t for a while: her house felt overrun with Raymond Renaud’s voice and presence and her internal disarray and actual disarray and her failure to do anything to tidy it. There were Polish and Indian restaurants not far off, places where they were unlikely to run into people they knew. Or people they both knew. They tried to avoid running into friends when out together yet had never pretended not to know each other. Why not Indian, David had said, by which he meant the restaurant where he’d once made the wild claim to the men at the next table that the two of them were Russian journalists or Canadian journalists living in Russia who happened to be in Toronto on vacation. I’ll meet you there, okay? Even though they were both coming from downtown, their offices not far from each other, it had always been their habit to travel separately, or to arrive separately, David likely by car, in his old green Saab.
Knapsack on her back, Sara stepped through the rubber-lipped back doors of a streetcar and found herself moments later in the Sha-li-mar before David or any other diners. A man in a white jacket popped his head through the swinging door of the brightly lit kitchen and nodded at her. She could have stopped at home first and dropped off her bag. Everything ought to feel ordinary yet didn’t. After ordering a Kingfisher beer, she pulled her knapsack onto her lap and the envelope from it and propped the photograph against the small vase in the middle of the table and stared at bearded, Afro-ed Raymond Renaud surrounded by children.
Asked point-blank who had sent the photo, she’d have said Raymond himself. It was possible to imagine him, even in extreme distress, cajoling a friend, an acquaintance, a relative, a blue-helmeted UN peacekeeper like those with whom she’d travelled through Port-au-Prince, or one of the clean-cut evangelical Christian Americans who were all over the place down there, to carry an envelope back to New York and drop it in the mail. As, in a different state of duress, he had convinced her to help him get to Montreal by embarking on a crazy, six-hour night drive. Had he known when he folded the photograph into the envelope and sealed it and wrote her address on the front what he was going to do next, his extremity seeping into the paper through his fingers. If she touched the envelope, she touched this. The letters of her name and address looked to be written at speed, pen lines trailing from letter to letter. She had never seen another sample of his handwriting. When they’d parted in Montreal, she had given him her business card, along with a hundred dollars in bills. Hadn’t she? Or had she passed him a business card in the circus tent, when she’d been standing with him and Juliet? She couldn’t remember. He’d sent the photograph to her because he wanted her to see something. There was a message here if only she knew how to read it. The new life that one way or another was about to be stripped from him. For her to feel guilty, feel haunted.
David walked past the restaurant window in his wool coat, hand held to his ear. Seated at a table halfway down the restaurant, facing the street, Sara caught sight of him: he was holding a cellphone to his ear and talking into it. She had never seen him with a cellphone; he’d never mentioned owning one. It was new and/or his life was full of secrets. By the time David entered the restaurant, he’d slipped the phone into his pocket. Or she had imagined it. Nothing about him looked different. He was coming toward her, beautiful and familiar, smiling and seemingly unencumbered, but something torqued in her longing for him, a new restlessness asserted itself. There was a deer in her and it was running. She rose to her feet and kissed the bright cold of his lips, touched her fingers to the reddened skin of his neck.
Were you just talking on a cellphone?
He looked surprised. Yes, he said. It’s new. Greta wanted me to get one.
He didn’t pull the phone out to show Sara but pried himself free of his coat and suit jacket and loosened his tie. A couple of people at the paper had recently got cellphones. That David had one wasn’t so extraordinary: he was a lawyer and could certainly afford one. When the waiter appeared, David ordered a beer for himself and began talking about a case at work, something to do with a minute infringement of a patent on floor tiles. It’s driving me crazy. You’ve no idea how many volumes have been written on it. I’m drowning in paperwork. Or the years it’s taking to sort this out. It’s like the floor-tile version of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in Bleak House.
Sara handed him the photo across the table. Do you recognize who this is?
She had an advantage. Two photographs of Raymond Renaud had appeared in the newspaper: these were probably the only images of him that David had seen. In the first, which had accompanied her interview, Raymond, clean-shaven, in his baseball cap, had been standing by the road, the circus sign with its painted upside-down figure of the boy atop the wooden pole in the background. In the second photo, which had run with his obituary, Raymond in profile, arms raised, appeared to be giving instructions to a pyramid of backbending circus girls.
David stared at the photograph respectfully.
It arrived for me at work today, Sara said. Sent in an airmail envelope from the US, no return address. And no note, nothing to say who sent it. It’s Raymond Renaud, she said, after another moment.
Oh.
I presume it’s taken in Port-au-Prince. At the orphanage where he was teaching. I called the orphanage director this afternoon to see if he knew anything about it but he said he didn’t. He thought maybe it was taken by a woman who worked there. But he couldn’t explain who sent it or why. I’ve been thinking maybe Renaud sent it, or gave it to someone else to send.
The waiter reappeared with David’s beer and only then did they leaf through their menus and fix on some food, the brocaded walls and dimmed lights doing their best to offer an illusion of exotic comfort, the two of them as yet the only diners.
David peered at the photograph again. It’s a pretty good disguise.
You see disguise? It was funny: Sara had registered that possibility without really admitting it to herself.
Yes, David said. Why, what do you see?
There are other reasons for people to change their appearance. As a sign of some transformation or new beginning.
Had he grown his hair into an Afro to accentuate his blackness? she wondered. He had chosen to return to the place where his mother’s people came from.
When David passed back the photograph, his expression was difficult to read. Even if he sent it. Just say. To make you feel somehow like he’s come back from the dead, or more responsible than you already do, don’t — don’t let yourself get
too wrapped up in this. Okay? Get too obsessed. You were doing your job. Whoever sent it is trying to mess with you a little, and you’re going to need to let it, let him go.
There was a loose thread in the raffia placemat in front of her. Sara returned the photograph to the cave of its envelope, the photograph of the smiling dead man. How relaxed David’s posture was, a faint flush from the cold still visible in his cheeks, and the reddening of his neck, which sometimes happened, he’d told her, in response to the emotional complications of spending time with her. He’d admitted this but not voiced it as something that bothered him.
A pressure was building against her chest, like the weight of a palm. Sara said, There’s a piece of all this I haven’t told you. Something that makes it all particularly hard. I was once falsely accused of something, something so much smaller than this but. And then she unravelled the story of Colleen Bertucci and the wallet, watching David’s face take in her words. As she spoke, the palm on her chest released itself.
You didn’t plea? It went to trial? He listened with focused calm: lover and lawyer.
Yes.
How exactly did you get off?
There wasn’t enough evidence to convict me.
David nodded. For so long she’d put off telling him this secret because she hadn’t wanted to face his inevitable judgment. The risk of his doubt. Anyone to whom she told the story had at least fleetingly to wonder, imagine her as a thief, even if they immediately discarded this thought. Which David did so swiftly that Sara felt no inkling of it, only his belief, and trust.
What was it that Raymond Renaud had said in the car that July night, something about how when people believe a thing to be true it is very hard to convince them it isn’t. It is very difficult to prove something in the negative: I did not do it. Had he spoken with the vehemence of someone who’d already had an experience of trying to counter another’s claim, of not being believed?
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