Accusation (27 page)

As once, long ago, as her trial had approached, then at the trial, she’d lived with the sense that she hadn’t been canny enough or given enough forethought to the potential after-effects of some of the anecdotes she’d shared with Juliet during her first weeks in the Esplanade apartment. Nights they’d sat up late in Juliet’s bedroom or at the kitchen table, drinking from a bottle of cheap red wine and she’d comforted Juliet in her pining after a student actor and raged about Graham and regaled Juliet with stories from her youth, like the time, during the months she’d spent hitchhiking through Europe two years after high school, when a trucker had fleeced her out of what cash she had as she was making her way south through France so that she’d had to beg a woman in a village pension to give her a free room for the weekend. Or stealing toilet paper from restaurants and sleeping on the beach with a boy at Narbonne Plage. Or about the dwarf trucker who’d ferried her into Spain, along with a girl whom he insisted was his sister, although his hand on the girl’s thigh and the way they disappeared together into a tent at night made this unlikely, the girl looking no more than fifteen. How, while they’d slept, she’d eaten food they’d left in the truck cab: baguette, apples, a hunk of salami.

Thanks, Juliet said over the phone. I appreciate the offer, but it’s unlikely I’ll go back to the film.

Why not?

Because the whole thing’s turned so morally icky and that’s really not the kind of story I want to tell.

Juliet gone, Sara pulled Monday’s paper toward her and opened the front section to World News, her eye roving again to what she’d written.

She’d heard nothing from Gerard Loftus since his call on the Saturday morning. There’d been no peep from him when these words had appeared in print the day before. And her words were helping to spread news of the allegations far and wide, and now other journalists would be searching for Raymond too, for him and the other men to whom she’d linked his name, Templeton, Reseltier, journalists potentially more ruthless than she was. She’d emailed Ed Levoix to ask if he knew anyone in Addis who might be in touch with Raymond Renaud, and Ed had responded that other than the circus guy Tamrat and the children he had no idea. She’d sent out queries to schools in south India and Thailand that were hiring or had made recent hires since, that night in the car, Renaud had mentioned travelling to both these places. It was like reaching for a needle in the dark.

David’s voice: Sara encountered his jubilation from the instant she picked up the phone; it sprang from the air around him, from his hello, as an email from a school in Kottayam, in Kerala, popped into her inbox. David said, We got the results this morning. All clear. I am breathing a sigh of relief like you cannot believe, I am whooping like a wild dog. I wanted to tell you as soon as I could. I know you’ve been wondering, and it makes such a difference, all your good care.

Dear Mrs, We are apologetic to be of no service in this matter.

Such good news, Sara said.
Your good care.
I’m so thrilled. For you and for Greta.

I won’t be able to see you tomorrow night, David said, his voice tumbling on. Is that okay? I just can’t. We may be going out. But next week. I do want to see you. I want you to know that too.

This was the song of his happiness, the swoop of him.

So not tomorrow but what about another night this week? It wasn’t even that she wanted to see him exactly, as much as she wanted to know how he’d respond.

Sure, maybe. Let me see.

His wife was in remission. He hadn’t been punished, none of them had been, the way she thought David had feared irrationally, with the appearance of the second tumour. She had never wanted to love a man the way her mother loved her father, with such fervid exclusivity, the refusal to be like her mother felt even more strongly after the end of her relationship with Graham, but this also seemed clear: she couldn’t or wouldn’t love David in an arrangement like this anymore.

I’ll call you soon, David said. Did he sense some shift in her? Take good care of yourself.

Take good care. Could he not hear the desolation in her? While over her shoulder, in the dark of her car, Raymond Renaud shifted in his seat and said, My father had to choose between the Désir sisters.

Thursday morning, not long after ten, Monsieur le directeur of La Maison des Enfants de Beau Soleil, an orphanage in Jacmel on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, having switched, at the sound of Sara’s voice, from Creole to more neutral French, said, Monsieur Raymond Renaud, yes, we do have. And the straightforwardness with which this man offered up Raymond’s name was stunning.

In French, Sara said, He’s new. He hasn’t been with you very long.

Yes, Dieufort Alexis said, since September.

Is it possible to speak to him? I’m calling from Canada.

But he’s in the classroom. Classes have already commenced for the day.

Is it possible to ask him to come to the phone? It’s very important I reach him as soon as possible.

Who I should say is calling?

Please just tell him it’s a call from Canada.

Now she sensed the man’s caution. Wait, please, he said.

A great fluidity took hold of her. Her free hand waved among the papers on her desk until it located her clip-on microphone, which she attached to the edge of the phone receiver. She pulled a new tape from her top drawer, checked that there were others, in case she needed them, and inserted the tape into her recorder, whose red power light glowed brightly, yes. To one side of her, the wheels of Paul’s chair cackled on their piece of hard plastic matting as Paul cleared his throat and said something to someone that sounded like, There’s a monster in all of us.

There would be no more privacy than this. No dark car, no hurtling alone together through the night. And if Sara had, instead, simply thanked the director of the House for Children of the Good Sun for that information, hung up, and begun a whirlwind of preparations to take her down to Haiti in order to waylay Raymond Renaud in person? It would have taken days, at least a couple of days, and there was the risk, if Raymond guessed someone had stumbled upon his whereabouts, that he might vanish again. She had a pad of paper and a pen in hand and a back-up pen. By now, presumably, the orphanage director had spoken to Raymond. He could choose not to come to the phone. Who would he imagine was calling him? He was walking toward her, tall, with the supple and muscular gait that she remembered, away from a room full of children along a corridor of painted cinder blocks latticed with petal-shaped holes through which came an uproar of horns and bright fists of light.

A mutter of voices, mesi, mesi, a murmur of footsteps, and then someone lifted the phone and his voice spoke into it, Oui, allo?

In English, Sara said, Raymond, it’s Sara Wheeler from Toronto. Do you remember me —

How ridiculous to feel caught out as much as that she was catching him out. She was doing him a favour, giving him a chance to speak, she had done everything she could to find him. She was cleaving his present from itself and violently realigning it with his past.

Yes, I remember you. She would have been a fool to expect friendliness from him. Thanks again for the lift. How did you get this number?

The lift, she thought,
the lift
? I spoke to a cousin of yours in Montreal. I was looking for your aunt.

My aunt? My aunt’s dead.

Yes, I know that now. And that both his parents were also dead.

Which cousin. Oh, forget that, it doesn’t matter. What do you want?

Okay then, she thought, I’ll return bluntness with bluntness. And said, I want to talk to you about what happened with the circus, about the performers who fled in Australia.

Listen, I am sorry, but that is all over. That was another life. Okay? I understand you want to speak but no. No. This is my place now and these are my people and I have a class of children waiting for me.

Raymond. It was as if he had no idea of the precariousness of his position, at least as seen from where she was. To remind him of the fact that some months ago he had said if there was ever anything he could do for her seemed ludicrous because it was like a promise made before a bomb went off, and trying to retrieve a small thing plaintively across the wreckage of a bombsite. This is your chance — I’m giving you this chance to respond to the allegations. Maybe you want to take this opportunity —

Why? Okay, wait, what kind of call is this. Respond how? Are you saying these things have been reported on? There?

Yes. Yes, here.

You’re reporting on them. Your calling me is part of your job.

It’s not just a job. Please believe that, but yes.

He didn’t swear but from the sucking in of his breath he might as well have done — to him what she was doing registered as betrayal. In his eyes, how could it not? How could she possibly defend herself?

I went looking for you in Addis Ababa.

When was this?

After I heard what happened in Australia, which I read about by chance online, in one of the Australian papers. That some of your performers fled, about the allegations. Three weeks, a little more than three weeks ago. You’d already left Addis.

I don’t understand, you happened to be there.

No, I went to Addis. It seemed pointless to say to him, You invited me to Addis.

Why?

I wanted to see the circus.

After you heard about the allegations.

I wanted to see the circus, what Cirkus Mirak was. And speak to you.

What the circus is, because you will know then, it still very much is, despite what happened, despite that some people are trying to destroy it.

So what is your version of what happened?

And you will write all this up in an article for your newspaper, is that it?

With your permission. But you know if I don’t, someone else will. I’m taping this, I need you to know that too.

Maybe if I call you back later?

No, Raymond, but if there’s somewhere that’s quieter — where are you, in the director’s office? Do you have your own office?

Her heart beat fast at her own foolishness, because she’d given him an out, an opportunity to slip away. And she was an old hand at this. He could put down the phone, put her on hold, never return. Then again at every instant he had the choice to hang up on her.

A minute, please, he said, and he did put down the phone, and his footsteps tocked across a stretch of floor, and his voice spoke quite conversationally in Creole to someone, a woman who murmured something in reply, and Sara closed her eyes, as if that made it easier to take in everything she could of him, close herself off from the clocks and the bodies surrounding her, Alan Marker in a pink shirt, and then a door closed, and Raymond Renaud’s footsteps came close again, and he picked up the phone.

Maybe I should not have taken them overseas. Maybe that was a mistake. They saw what life is like outside Ethiopia and they did not want to go back. For this, can I blame them? Others leave all the time. They started talking to people in the expat communities, Ethiopian expats, or these people spoke to them, when they came to our shows. I know this happened. And people in the communities started feeding them lines, maybe this didn’t happen until Australia. Does he do this to you or this? Is he cruel? Does he beat you? They say, You will have to say this, and they ask, Does he touch you? and when they say, Yes, because when I work with them, yes, I touch their bodies to show them how to do things, the expats say, These are the kinds of things you will have to say if you want to stay. They weren’t thinking of me, they were thinking of themselves. I was in the way.

You’re saying you think they made the allegations up in order to make an asylum claim.

Exactly.

These are pretty strong accusations — physical and sexual abuse, profound mistreatment. The words were like stones in her mouth.

Well, yes, they needed something strong to make a refugee claim. You would know this. It never occurred to me, never, never, they would do a thing like this. Say these things. It makes me sick. I thought we had a dream, we all shared it, we were all making it together, in a place it had never been done before.

Though it’s a children’s circus, and the ones who fled are teenagers, aren’t they?

They could teach, help, we were building other circuses, you know? Yes, it’s hard work, it takes commitment, a desire to think beyond yourself.

So you’re saying you did not do what they accused you of.

No. I didn’t.

What about Yitbarek —

What about him?

There were children, boys living in your house. And after the accident, from what he said, you were quite intimately involved in his care.

I can’t believe you would imply anything about that. I cannot believe it. You went there and —

I’m not implying, I’m simply asking questions. I have to ask. You did not abuse Yitbarek?

No. No, this is sick. He has a terrible injury. I helped care for him. What would you have me do?

And the other boys?

They needed a home. You think they’re better off in the street?

Raymond, I have to ask you one more question. There’s a man, Mark Templeton, who ran an orphanage outside of Awassa, where I believe you went to set up a circus program, am I right? But you knew him from before, is that right, in Sri Lanka?

The sucking in of his breath, again, but this time a rising volatility, of anger or panic? The shriek of a chair’s feet underneath him. You’ve been digging around. You’re not trying to help me, are you? I don’t even know what questions you asked Yitbarek. Of all of them.