Garcia's Heart (41 page)

 

EIGHTEEN

He said goodnight to Celia at the entrance to the Metropole. A polite kiss on the cheek and she turned to wave for a taxi and then she was gone, as quickly as if she'd stepped off a riverbank into a fast-flowing current. Oliveira was long gone too, choppered out or whisked away in an armoured Humvee convoy or in whatever way passed for an imperial mode of departure. Patrick stood on the pavement, unsure of what to do next, squinting with the doorman under the marquee lights.

Inside, the Metropole was quiet. Even the bar and its half-hearted disco ambition couldn't shift the mood. He floated through the empty lobby and found several elevators idling in wait, doors yawning.

Patrick entered the nearest one. As it was about to shut tight on the frame, the elevator door shuddered and recoiled like jaws that had closed on something surprisingly hard. Then four slim fingers appeared, curling around the metal edge as the door opened more fully, and in one deft commando manoeuvre, Elyse Brenman swept into the elevator. Patrick
said nothing, the cumulative effects of Celia and beer and listening to Oliveira all inducing a dreamlike state–rendering him entirely suggestible, compliant. Yes, Elyse
would
appear like this. In the elevator. It's Elyse. Of course. Welcome, Elyse.

“I saw who you were talking to.”

“Are you stalking me?”

“I saw you with Caesar Oliveira. He's like the
macher
for the Democratic Voice.”

Patrick ignored her, spinning in his gauzy beer haze. He felt the elevator start to climb.

“You shouldn't be dealing with people like that. Definitely out of your league.”

“I'll decide who's in my league or not, okay?”

Elyse didn't press any buttons, choosing just to watch Patrick, who lifted his eyes skyward, focusing on the array of lights above the elevator door and contemplating the twelve feet per second rate of ascent. Fifteen seconds of ride time. Maybe twenty.

The elevator emoted its gentle keening beep and after a minor geophysical moment, the doors opened. Patrick took off down the corridor and reached into his wallet for the key to the room, all the time hearing Elyse behind him, even though he knew it was impossible with the carpet sucking up all sounds of human movement. But he heard Elyse, he swore he did, footsteps like the beating of wings.

“Where do you think you're going, Elyse?”

“We need to talk.”

“Just have them subpoena me. That would be easier for everyone.”

“Here's how I figure it. Caesar Oliveira is meeting with you for a reason. Either you know something exculpatory about
Hernan, which I doubt, I mean you would have said something, what, five years ago, or they want something from you, your expertise.”

“Maybe it was just people having a drink,” he said as he jabbed the hotel card key into the locking mechanism of his door. “Did you think of that?” The little red light on the mechanism flashed. He tried again, with the deliberateness of a man asked to defuse a bomb. Then the green light blinked and the handle gave way and he turned to look at Elyse still standing in the hallway.

“Good night, Elyse.”

“Do you know what the funny thing is?”

He sighed. “What?”

“In a way, you already work for him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sentient Systems.” He shook his head in that manner of the truly, hopelessly lost. He needed Birgita, or someone capable of reorienting him on the tour of his life. “They're a multinational–”

“I know who they are.”

“But you don't know they've been a major contributor to the Democratic Voice since its inception. That's putting it mildly; ‘founding patron' would be more exact.” Patrick stood there, a foot against the partially open door, caught in a headlock of semi-drunken, partial recollection. “Sentient bought a sizeable chunk of your company's
IPO
, and in the last six months they increased their stake to about 26.6 per cent. Roughly. I checked this morning.”

“So this company acquires some shares in my company for millions of dollars in order to potentially affect a trial that
wouldn't occur for a couple of years. Wow, that's a brilliant strategy. That's just great business.”

“I'm not saying they have some grand plan, but their influence is pervasive.”

“Do you ever listen to yourself?”

“Bancroft worked for a Sentient subsidiary in the mid-nineties.”

“So?
We
hired Bancroft.”

“After consulting with your financial backers.”

“
We
chose
him
.”

“Why are you here? Do you ask yourself that? I know you think you're here of your own free will, personal duty and everything, but who called you? Celia. At Oliveira's urging. You were supposed to be here, Patrick, that's why. The Democratic Voice has their hands all over this.”

“Is this how you do all your research? Wild conjecture?”

“Whatever you do, Patrick, whatever you give them, they'll spin it. They don't need to get Hernan off, they just want to create doubt. They want Hernan to go to jail quietly, looking like he's wrongly convicted. Then, they're seen as impassioned defenders, good-guy underdogs. You think they want Hernan walking free and talking to people, naming names? If they wanted him acquitted, they'd have a hundred witnesses testifying that Hernan was a saint and that Lepaterique was a spa and he'd be back at home selling melons. Hernan in jail with his mouth shut is their ideal scenario, and whether or not you want to be a part of
that
is up to you.”

Patrick was beginning to envy Elyse. The truth for her was zero-sum; if she had it, then others didn't. She was certain and he was jealous of that certainty. Elyse could speak to him
the way she did because she thought he was crazy or bought or scared or any of the conditions that made a person wrong, wrong, wrong.

Elyse stood in the light of the corridor, squinting. It was dark inside the room. The doorway was open enough, closed enough that it was like they were speaking to each other from opposite sides of an animal's mouth. It would be so easy to close the door. Then she spoke and, for a person who before had seemed so certain, it surprised him to hear what sounded like an angry plea: “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to figure out somebody's life?”

“Yes,” he said, and closed the door.

 

NINETEEN

The answer to how long one can look at the
View on Delft
without a break is approximately twelve and a half minutes. Experiments on visual attention indicate that in any non-facial visual image, the edges and silhouettes are scanned for a quick outline of context identifiers and analysis of depth. Then the secondary details are attended to–and in
View on Delft
these details make up almost another entire painting; the play of light on water, the hyperrealist foreground representation and finally, the grey mantle of cloud that frames the entire sky. After surveying that, any attempt at further, intense visual concentration is rewarded with something that feels like anxiety. The painting moves in and out of focus, as if there is some process reflexively trying to avoid the cause of this anxiety. This is no fault of the artist, we are not equipped to stare at stationary objects for very long. Besides, the security guards at the Mauritshuis, ever observant, ever wary of those whose intense study cannot be attributed to pure art appreciation, were trained to intervene at precisely twelve
minutes, happy to ask any patron who has lingered that long if they can be of assistance. Patrick said no to the offer, his head snapping up to meet the great tonsured head of a security guard, the hypnotic state broken but the outline of Delft still lingering, echoing through his visual association cortex, playing out like a blueprint against the guard's facial features. He checked his watch, focusing on the novelty of the sweeping second hand at first, then checked the time. Twelve minutes thirty seconds.

It was past noon by the time he'd got up and out of his hotel room. A protracted, beer-stoked sleep was broken by a phone call from an Oliveira assistant. Patrick had been hooked and hauled into a flat boat of midday light, caught speechless, dry-mouthed and aching, but it didn't matter; the assistant did all the talking regarding their new liberate-García project. The call was concerning the follow-up contact–how professional, making it easy for him–telling Patrick what Cervotech's number was so he could call early Monday morning and speak with their scientific liaison, Dr. van der whoever, to make the necessary arrangements. The assistant said, “Okay? You got all that?” at the end of the instructions, the only sign that he'd appreciated it wasn't a machine he was talking to. The call, and its promise of more calls, was enough to chase him from the bed.

The day was overcast and the clouds clung like gauze to a Den Haag morning that ached sympathetically with him. In the distance a church bell sent out its sonic drop kick, sorely testing the effectiveness of the anti-inflammatories he'd downed and making him curse the lack of a more comprehensive atheism in the new Europe. Even with all this, his face felt surprisingly better, the swelling subsiding and the pain
a vague sense memory, its appearance giving way to a pageant of discoloured flesh, a craniofacial version of foliage season in Vermont. The staff at the Metropole were now familiar with him and the mysterious evolving disfigurement; the maids felt permitted to smile as he passed by their carts in the hallway. Even Edwin seemed more understanding, more forgiving of this injured man's earlier shortcomings regarding his messages.

It took fifteen minutes to walk to Korte Vijverberg where he found the Mauritshuis with its promise of diversion and solitude that he felt he needed as urgently as another lungful of oxygen. And after three hours, ending with his experiment with
View of Delft
, he felt better. A moment on one of the benches, among the crowd, many of whom clamoured around
The Anatomy Lesson
or
Girl with a Pearl Earring
like obnoxious groupies, and he felt a growing contrarian boosterism for the Delft painting, as ignored as the stucco-faced portrait of Rembrandt. Yes,
Delft
was his painting.

He could have gone to the Gemeentemuseum but instead chose the Mauritshuis. He didn't want to draw conclusions about the decision–the Mauritshuis was a longer walk and he wasn't as certain of the directions–but there was an indisputable satisfaction, a verifiability, in representational art that he found lacking in more modern works.
Delft
looked like Delft. He was as certain of the skill of the painter as he was of any craftsman. Celia would roll her eyes and bemoan his philistinism parading as a more noble sentiment, but she wasn't here. He hadn't looked for her once, hadn't turned at the sight of a stroller or the sound of a child's voice. If he were to come upon her here, swimming upstream through the flow of other tourists mobbing Vermeer's more crowd-pleasing canvases, he hoped he'd just pass by. Not a word. They were
strangers, really. Imagining they were something else, something more, was a delusion. Pulling José-Maria Fernandez into it, buying into Elyse's cut-rate psychoanalysis, was doing nothing more than aggrandizing himself, trying to turn an adolescent moment into an epic tale. He wasn't a surrogate for Fernandez. He was barely a surrogate for himself.
Delft
brought him back. There was no interpretation to
Delft
.
Delft
was Delft. It was beautiful and if it weren't worth ten million Euros and as heavily guarded as the main driveway of the White House, he'd wrench it from the wall and run.

He walked through the grand foyer toward the exit, and the estuary of indoor light changed as it mixed with the outside sea of daylight. The sky was clearing and it was warm enough to consider taking off his jacket. The streets had more people. Perhaps Sunday was the walking day, the day out.