Garcia's Heart (6 page)

Patrick became aware of Elyse Brenman again; though she was as nondescript as ever, something today was different, something from her buzzed in his peripheral vision like a bulb that demanded replacement. Patrick tried to ignore it but gave in and looked over to see Elyse staring straight at him. Then, of course, she waved. He stood up, fumbling with the cord of his earphones and shrugging his jacket on, all one continuous,
incompetent motion. The gallery spectators and guards registered his departure, casting disapproving glances as he edged along the row and climbed the stairs to the door.

Outside the tribunal building, he was immersed in light and air and relief and felt the urge to walk, anywhere, just away from the glass walls and industrial-carpet smell of the tribunal. He reached the fountain in front of the Congress Centrum when he heard his name being called.

“Dr. Lazerenko.”

He turned and saw Elyse Brenman. She was trotting from the tribunal building toward him. Another wave, golden-retriever friendly.

“Patrick, hello, I saw you in the gallery. I didn't know you'd be here.”

“Likewise.”

Elyse Brenman smiled as she approached. It was her default facial expression, one that she likely learned to deploy from her first day as a reporter. Her demeanour softened people. Patrick knew first-hand how difficult it would be for someone who didn't know Elyse's purpose to slam a door on that friendly face. It had worked for her faultlessly when she'd first appeared at the Cognitive Neuroscience Department office at Caltech in 1998 and asked for him. A cold call, the paradoxical stealth of Elyse Brenman. The departmental secretary, a fearsome lady in her sixties widely treasured for her ability to be a Berlin Wall of administrative hostility to unexpected visitors and their queries, turned out to be a true Berlin Wall and collapsed under the weight of Elyse Brenman's charm. The secretary phoned Patrick in his new post-doc's office–a fluorescent-lit converted utility room the size of a confessional–and said that he had a visitor. Elyse was ushered in and at
first Patrick assumed she was a student in one of the labs he was teaching. She quickly corrected that impression by pulling a notebook and a tape recorder out of her backpack and introducing herself as a reporter who needed to talk to him about Hernan García.

Elyse summarized what she knew, and what she was about to report in a series of articles. And so his first experience with Elyse was of a miscalculation followed by a visceral sense of alarm, causing his hands to dampen and his heart to make that thin-air, no-ropes climb into his throat.

With Elyse sitting there in his office that first time, he remembered being momentarily speechless, then having individual words appear and clot together, not having enough meaning to emerge, until finally he stuttered out a plea of ignorance of anything about Hernan García's former life. It was true, he had worked for him but he was only a teenager then and knew as little as any worker would know about their employer. And yet, Elyse countered, not all employees date the boss's daughter. With that she launched into a dozen other questions before Patrick realized that he didn't have to talk to her, that he could pick up a phone and call security and it would be over. But that would provoke her, and he decided, to his credit, that to get rid of Elyse Brenman he would have to prove he was no use to her. That he had no story to tell. So Patrick Lazerenko rhapsodized the vague details of his adolescence in Montreal, of growing up in
NDG
and working for the Garcías in their store, Le Dépanneur Mondial. Banalities, dull summers of stoner glory, a splash of teenage angst. It worked: Elyse Brenman turned off her tape recorder. He had no way of knowing that Elyse would reappear in his life–a message left on his machine, an e-mail asking how he was
doing–every six months or so, certain that he wasn't telling her everything, that he was some sort of cog in the evil empire of Hernan García and was holding out on her in some way, hoping that the accrued weight of guilt would convince him to speak to her more truthfully.

But their first meeting ended civilly enough. Elyse thanked him and closed the door, leaving him in that small office, the light humming, his body aching in such a way that he could believe the confrontation had been, at least in part, physical.

He'd been at Caltech for little more than a month after finishing four years of a residency in Boston, and he thought, if anything, the succession of American place names would have given him a soothing distance from Montreal and the Garcías' problems. But even in America, where international news was treated with indifference or, at best, with an almost patronizing anthropological curiosity, it became impossible to avoid the story Elyse eventually broke. Patrick had never been a great sleeper, and his habit of keeping the television on an all-news station was rewarded with the occasional television image of Hernan trapped in that stock pose of categorical denial, shielding himself from a camera. Elyse's story led to more coverage, a television crew camped out on the sidewalk in front of the Garcías' store, other images appearing: photos of the victims–including a picture that he would come to know in too much detail–and the accusers who were marshalling opinion and demanding justice. He could only watch and call his mother for more details from Elyse's newspaper reports.

And after hearing all the crimes that his friend had been accused of committing, Patrick Lazerenko did what ended up troubling him for the next seven years. He did nothing.

It didn't start out as nothing. It started out as a calm assessment of the facts, taking one's time to figure out what was obviously a complicated situation. Hernan would understand, he wouldn't want anyone just jumping to his defence as a point of personal loyalty. No. He would demand that the case be analyzed. But there were so many facts, so many allegations. Then it came to seem that too much time had passed, that to call now would be to patronize Hernan or admit failure for not calling in the first place.

He concentrated on his own life: getting back to Boston after Caltech, accepting a faculty position and creating the infrastructure of a research program. He wrote grants and went to meetings and worked at developing that necessary reputation as someone on the rise, someone who could publish citable papers, manage a lab full of post-docs, and, in the words of his former departmental chairman, “develop the necessary public-private partnerships that would see us into the next century.” All of this was understandable, he reassured himself, and he became a bystander as the Garcías came under siege.

He wished that his inaction could be chalked up to the dedication of a young faculty member feeling the pressures of being freshly tenure-tracked, that he was too occupied with starting a career and developing a reputation as a researcher to care about the allegations, but the truth was that during that time he collected every piece of information about Hernan's case. He couldn't avoid buying
The Angel of Lepaterique
when it finally came out a couple of years after that first visit from Elyse, and when its spine split from use he bought a second copy. He wasn't alone; the book spent the better part of two calendar years squatting in various locations on the best-seller list.
The Angel of Lepaterique
won awards and thoughtful
appreciation, and the indictment levied in the book was probably the cause of a Royal Commission investigating how refugee status was granted. The book, which read like a grand narrative of infamy, changed everything for Patrick too. Elyse was not content for the book to be just a recitation of García's actions in the context of Honduran history.
The Angel
was also a journal of the family's flight from Honduras and arrival in Canada, a history of lies and delusions and fear. It was also a story heavy with personal details and psychological analysis of the Garcías' lives and, to a degree, his own. In it were portraits of family and married life whose intimate tone shocked Patrick. How had she known these things? It was here that Elyse brought together the photos of the victims, here that Patrick had the first chance to see the only existing photo of José-Maria Fernandez, the most famous detainee at Lepaterique, a young man whose story Elyse found so compelling, and so similar to Patrick's–both of them coming into contact with Hernan García at a critical moment in their lives–that she twinned them throughout her book. It was while searching through the sixteen-page index to the book that he had first found his name mentioned, as a prelude to being summarily analyzed. The sight of his name, not as the senior author of a paper or being cited for the work he'd done, but among the others embroiled in this secret history, brought a shock of recognition as sudden and disorienting as a physical blow:

Lazerenko, Patrick: Dépanneur Mondial, 216–17; José-Maria Fernandez and, 230, 231, 252–54; Celia García and, 229–31, 248–50; medical school, 231; protegé of Hernan, 228, 229–30.

He took the book with him everywhere, even when he visited Tegucigalpa on the way back from a vacation in Costa Rica. He spent two unsatisfying days there, wandering like a faithless pilgrim through the streets of the Colonia Palmira neighbourhood where the Garcías had lived. He held
The Angel
open in front of him, hopeful of finding inaccuracies and mistakes that would discredit its premise. But it didn't help. Not a bit. The allegations against Hernan outlined in the book were like anti-matter, altering the rules of the universe as he knew it. Evil was introduced and made real. Evil not as the adjective that he'd always imagined it, but as the noun, the big dark cloud of human doom. Then there was the Fernandez reference, the assertion made by Elyse that this particular victim of Lepaterique had a special significance to Hernan, and, by extension, Patrick. There was no way he could talk to Hernan after that.

In the middle of the Churchillplein, Patrick felt the fight-or-flight thing again, the Pavlovian Elyse Brenman reaction that he had apparently been hard-wired for. He turned from Elyse without a word and walked away. Elyse's footsteps rang out on the plaza pavement. She was following. Trot to canter. A full-fledged arm-swinging sprint was next in the chain of embarrassing adult movements.

“Can we talk?” she asked, pulling up beside him.

“I'm going into town.”

Elyse pointed ahead of them to a tram stop.

“I was headed that way too. We can take the Number 10.”

Patrick didn't want to go into town, it had just seemed the best way to dodge Elyse. But she had a habit of making evasion difficult through affability and pure helpfulness. He
had learned that among journalists, this made Elyse fairly unusual. Less than a year ago, travelling to Boston in another effort to convince him to be interviewed for an upcoming article, she crashed a dinner Heather and he were having at a restaurant–introducing herself right there at the table, flirting with him in that asexual, joking way that she knew wouldn't make Heather uncomfortable, enough so that it was only natural for Heather to suggest that she pull up a chair so they could all have a chat before the food arrived. To Patrick's surprise, Elyse didn't mention the case at all, choosing only to intimate that she and Patrick were childhood friends from the old neighbourhood in Montreal, just two kids from
NDG
who'd made good, and that this crossing of paths was nothing more than a coincidence. At first he didn't know if Elyse had actually deluded herself into thinking that they were friends. There was no way he was going to bring up the subject of Hernan García in front of Heather, and he sensed that once Elyse knew this it was as though something between them changed, as though she took pleasure in enlisting him in some sort of game, that it was them against Heather in a bit of a con. He didn't let on anything–he barely said a word as the two women spoke–more out of mortification than willingness to play along with any charade. Elyse talked with Heather about global warming and vacation spots and the latest minivan crash-test data. It was like watching a dare. When Heather wasn't looking, Elyse would turn to him and smile, and he couldn't figure out if he was chilled or excited. All he could think about was why she would be doing this. Was it done to show him that they were somehow in this together, bound up in lies? Maybe she was just telling him that she was there, insidious and in no hurry. She kept talking to Heather, and he
realized he had no idea about her. And if he'd been impressed by her restraint in not grilling him about Hernan, it was more than balanced by the creepiness of her knowing where they were eating and what time they had reservations.

He should have shooed her off, he thought. Right then and there he should have come clean with Heather about who Elyse was and explained the entire García situation. In the end he was rescued by the waiter's arrival with the food and the fact the table was too small to hold another place setting.

Heather raved about Elyse, of course. She had never met any friends of his, from Boston or Montreal or anyplace else for that matter, and the fact that he was even capable of having friends, much less fascinating journalist friends–non-threatening female ones at that–who thought enough of him to abandon part of their own evening to reminisce, impressed her. Why hadn't he told her about Elyse before? she asked in the car on the way home. She thought Elyse was
fan
tastic, that was the word she used, with the accent on the first syllable, the American way to say it. She said Elyse reminded her of her sister, a grad student at Northwestern, except for her sister always being stoned, that is.

Patrick used to think that it was only annoying to have someone so pleasant dog him, that Elyse's manner must be an obstacle to her advancing in her trade. He would even admit to feeling sorry for Elyse for having a personality so seemingly at odds with the job she had to do. But it became clear to him that over time people like Elyse gained your confidence and insinuated themselves into your life until your story became their story. And then it was everyone's story.