Garcia's Heart (3 page)

During that first telephone conversation, di Costini hadn't volunteered how he had found out what Patrick did for a living or how he got his number, and Patrick never asked, assuming the decision to call had been one of Hernan's last requests before he chose to stop speaking. Only later did di Costini let it slip that it had been Celia, Hernan's daughter, who asked him to approach Patrick. This complicated matters for Patrick, making him think that this was a more personal appeal from the Garcías. But as the calls from di Costini continued, increasing in frequency, it became apparent to Patrick why he was being contacted.

At first the questions were vague (“Could Hernan have a brain problem?”) before becoming progressively, frighteningly, sophisticated (“But if brain activity is largely determined, and determined by physical attributes of brain structure, then where is his decision-making capacity? Where is his intent?”). He was impressed by the lawyer's interest in neuroscience and flattered by his suggestion that Patrick come to Den Haag to continue the discussion in person. It hadn't occurred to Patrick that anyone would take a biological approach to Hernan's defence. Marcello was asking questions Patrick had begun to
ask himself, questions that intrigued him and made him uneasy at the same time. Of course, the facts of the case remained.

Hoping to find some brain malformation that could potentially explain aberrant moral reasoning, Marcello even had Hernan undergo an
MRI
(“Ridiculously normal, can you believe it?” Marcello hissed). Patrick had never mentioned any of this to Heather. If she were around when Marcello called, Patrick would cover the phone and mouth the word “Business” before finding a door to close.

Initially he had declined di Costini's invitation to meet in Den Haag, deciding it was better to keep his distance from the Garcías and their problems. But he made the mistake of watching the news. It started with a glimpse of Hernan during an international update, and in no time he was searching through the newspapers, until finally he was running through the posted transcripts of the trial on the tribunal's Web site, all the time telling himself he was only keeping informed, overestimating his detachment even as it waned and then vanished altogether. After the first two weeks of proceedings, watching the evidence mount, he realized this might be the last time he would be able to see Hernan. He decided to take di Costini up on his offer.

Patrick stared up at the ceiling of the auditorium, from which one of those huge
UN
-certified mobiles hung. Mysterious symbols (geometric shapes, representations of people, a cow with what looked to be a lightning bolt shot through it) floated through space above the oblivious participants. He scanned the ceiling and counted fire sprinklers that were like little toadstools pocking the great smooth face of the ceiling at regular intervals, another marking of grand institutional design. He imagined the spray from the sprinklers
soaking the blue industrial carpet until it buckled into a wave pattern, the water peeling paint and warping wood and popping out the mahogany inlays. The mobile would whirr about as the deluge continued, slowing as it dripped before settling into a frozen, rusted grimace. But now, it only sat there. A nebula system slowly precessing in silence.

One of di Costini's colleagues stood and addressed the justices. The first thing Patrick noticed, aside from her unnaturally good posture, was how young she looked. Early thirties, maybe still in her twenties. He watched her trying to argue a procedural point, interrupted by a flurry of words–di Costini stood, as did another lawyer who had been seated at the other table–the argument ending with the chief justice of the tribunal rebuking the young lawyer and di Costini. She sat, and Patrick continued to watch her in her chair until his attention drifted back to di Costini. This was a place of contentiousness, Patrick was reminded, a place where every word had repercussions. To an outsider, the tribunal was daunting. A body of knowledge and a system of rules, all foreign to him at first. But he'd told himself before he came to Den Haag that the trial was like anything, that it could be reduced to facts and principles. Anything could be broken down and understood, its threat defused. He had become a student of the tribunal, learning that, in contrast to all the disputed histories that can arise in the aftermath of a civil war, the birth of the tribunal itself had been surprisingly smooth and uncontested. The International Tribunal for Crimes in Honduras had been established by the United Nations along the lines of the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Various attempts at reconciling atrocities committed in the civil war in Honduras had failed, and the government, continually stung
by the international community's hectoring and increasingly slow-to-arrive economic development cheques, threw up its hands. All it took was the added carrot of upcoming G8 talks on debt forgiveness, and the president of Honduras almost sprained a wrist in the rush to sign the agreement granting authority to the
UN
. Once it became somebody else's problem, the pace of activity picked up dramatically. There were arrests in Tegucigalpa and Florida and, finally, in Canada. Deportations were fast-tracked and the planes touched down long enough on the tarmac at Tegucigalpa for a ceremonial refuelling and repatriation before taking off for Den Haag. It didn't stop there, of course. The archives of the secret police were opened and there were names named. More arrests followed, and some scores were settled along less explicit jurisdictional lines. The period of relative calm in the 1990s was replaced by the familiar sound of gunshots heard throughout the night from anywhere in Tegucigalpa. Hernan García wasn't implicated in these first wild weeks of reckoning. By the time they thought to look for him, he had already been gone fifteen years.

Marcello di Costini now rose and approached the bench where he conferred with the three tribunal judges. Four heads leaned in toward something being said. There was some sort of agreement that the prosecution team appeared to have no objection to. It was easier to bear without the earphones, without the words deadening all the possibilities.

Patrick was glad that Hernan García was absent. He had wanted to see the chambers without having him there; ideally, he would have liked the gallery empty, to be able to sit and in some way demystify the place and its strange customs before having to face Hernan here in his new role as a criminal. He
wanted to separate the place from the man, and in that way limit all the accusations to that little glass booth, that aquarium where a new species of Hernan García could be contained. But listening to the testimony, that plainsong of physical horror and depravity, made him despair that nothing was capable of detoxifying this place. He put the earphones back on.

Patrick scoured the gallery for a face that he could recognize, not holding out too much hope that he'd immediately find any of the Garcías. That's when he saw Elyse Brenman sitting on the far bank of seats. When Patrick had first met Elyse, she was still a reporter for a Montreal newspaper, knocking on his door to interview him for one of a series of articles she was writing about the fresh allegations made against local corner store owner Hernan García. The articles became a book called
The Angel of Lepaterique
, and the book became a best-seller and now Elyse didn't work for the newspaper any more. He hadn't thought she'd be here, and it was only after spotting her that it seemed logical: the story hadn't yet come to a conclusion. She wore jeans and a cloth jacket, and with the knapsack at her feet she could have passed for a student in a lecture hall, taking notes and lifting her gaze occasionally in the direction of the tribunal judges. He lowered his head and began fiddling with the earphone cord, trying to roll it up, bringing his attention back to the proceedings.

Witness C-129 finished his testimony and was escorted from the stand. The door used for trial participants closed behind him. Patrick had read that the defendants were caged in an ultra-secure holding cell under the building but he knew nothing about the witnesses. Would C-129 be dispatched back home now? Just a quick Den Haag cameo, get it all off your
chest and then a cab back to the airport? It was a bit cold. He hoped that they at least had a room for witnesses somewhere in the tribunal building–for some reason an anteroom resembling a business-class lounge in an airport came to mind–where they could put their feet up and get a handshake from a local dignitary or maybe have a drink while they sat through the mandatory debriefing from a
UN
-approved psychiatrist.

The chief justice declared a recess until the next morning. Patrick waited for the clap of a gavel, but that was an American thing. This was definitely not an American thing. The lawyers just got up and placed their large binders into larger briefcases. The crowd rose and some stretched in silence, as though they had just sat through a disappointing movie or a game where the home team lost, not unexpectedly, by a couple of goals. Maybe they had all come to see Hernan. It was an odd crowd: mostly people on their own who studied each other as they put on their coats. Some exchanged a word or two of greeting, and he began to think that there was such a thing as “regulars” here, lonelies who had set up shop on the banks of this foul river. He moved quickly to be the first at the door, not wanting to come across Elyse Brenman as he ducked through the crowd.

Outside, Patrick decided against waiting for a cab and risking ambush by Elyse, opting instead for a brisk walk. It was not yet four o'clock and already getting dark, darker than it would have been in Boston for that time of day in mid-November. Other than that, Den Haag could have been Boston's sister city. The air was a big bowl, sharp with sea smells, and a fog had installed itself, squatting most thickly in empty areas of the public parks. Placemat-sized wads of leaves clotted the sidewalks. All that was missing was a Red Sox fan
staggering through the mist, muttering about something epic and trying to find the train to Newton. He pulled his jacket up to his chin and headed back up Johan de Wittlaan, looking for the Hotel Metropole's corporate symbol floating in the fog. No luck.

Eventually, the Metropole appeared out of the darkness across the boulevard, its lobby of marble and glass glowing like a festive Las Vegas crypt. As he passed through the lobby, a tall man waved him down from behind the front desk. Up close, Patrick saw the man wore a name tag that said “Edwin.” Edwin was not a happy man. Tragically prominent ears sat on either side of his head like satellite dishes, picking up bad vibes from the entire Metropole constellation. Apparently Patrick was the cause of that day's crisis. Edwin told him that the front desk had received numerous calls for him, incessant calls, some quite provocative and rude. He was requested to turn on his cell phone and check his e-mail. “Immediately, please,” Edwin said, lowering his gaze to emphasize the obvious seriousness of his request. And with that, Patrick was dismissed. While he hadn't been hungry before, speaking with Edwin stirred an appetite in him, and instead of rushing off to comply with Edwin's wishes, he turned and let the concierge watch as he walked over to the Metropole's deserted restaurant, where he proceeded to eat an early dinner with deliberate, almost malicious leisure. But he began to feel ashamed of himself before the meal was over. This was the extent of his defiance, he scolded himself, churlishness. Passive-aggressive dining, all to spite his colleagues and put an officious concierge in his place. It was a short journey from the restaurant to the bar. It wasn't stalling, he told himself as he ordered a scotch, the bar was simply a transition phase, a recuperative moment.
But Patrick couldn't help dreading the thought of all those messages lining up in his inbox, each communication dense with the thinly veiled wrath of his partners, still upset that he'd chosen to disappear just when the Globomart project was launching, cursing his technical indispensability, and not believing for a moment that Sanjay was up to the task.

After a second scotch, the feelings of nostalgia for Boston and everyone at Neuronaut began creeping onto the surrounding barstools to keep him company. They were the closest he had to friends. He remembered how Bancroft had called him into his office, weeks before he'd publicly endorsed Patrick's decision to leave. Bancroft had sat him down to tell him that he'd heard about “his troubles” and what was going on in The Hague and said he would help in any way he could if Patrick needed anything. He was friendly and vague, with a tone somewhere between a guidance counsellor and a distracted older brother. Patrick asked Bancroft how he'd found out–for all his scotch-induced reveries of the people at Neuronaut, he'd never actually confided in anyone there–and Bancroft told him he'd read
The Angel of Lepaterique
that summer, that he knew about Hernan and all the Garcías and Patrick himself.

“A damn shame,” Bancroft said, and Patrick nodded, unsure of what his boss found most shameful.

The bartender stationed himself at the other end of the bar, diverting his attention from the glasses he wiped only to register the business people as they came and went. The other patrons gathered in clusters that broke up and reformed as the evening passed. Patrick listened to conversations and was able to pick up the rough rhythm of joke telling, a prosody that was unmistakable, even in Dutch or German. It occurred to
him as he eavesdropped on another Hans regale another Jurgen that he was not yet part of this type of life, this nightly fellowship gathering in hub cities across the corporate world. He always thought it was chummy and a little slurred and pleasantly benign and that he'd enjoy it. He was far more familiar with academics in situations like this, loosed in a bar in a foreign town between plenary sessions of some world congress, without their spouses or departmental colleagues or post-docs to rein them in; after about an hour the scene would deteriorate into low-level roundtable sniping, a
schadenfreude
skit where the only common spirit would be glee over someone's lost grant or retracted paper. The temporary descent of otherwise intelligent, decent people. He had been a part of it and now the thought of them–under-socialized and overwrought, unfettered and myopic; academics on the loose–appalled him. Patrick had imagined business would be different–maybe only more honestly, openly crude–but now he wasn't so sure.