Garcia's Heart (42 page)

The pictures in the Mauritshuis were a distraction, of course, a temporary and insufficient escape from Elyse's grand unified theory, in which, it seemed, every second person in the western hemisphere was in on the acquittal/silencing/beatification of Hernan García. It was ridiculous, he told himself. He needed the crowds, he needed
Delft
to keep out freshly planted doubts about Bancroft's motives, amazed at how easily his boss's tolerance and amiability mutated into sinister designs. And when his suspicions of Bancroft faded, they were replaced by the depressing thoughts of how Oliveira was going to manipulate the data from the study he felt obligated to arrange. He imagined images mislabelled, key information deleted. It must have happened before, in the early days of fingerprinting or
DNA
evidence. Now, his technology was new, the science mysterious and compelling enough that it would be difficult to dispute the results. His only hope was that Hernan would refuse the test, that he would understand its inherent fraudulence from the way Patrick explained it (would Oliveira even let him talk? Or would he be kept in the corner, allowed to nod in agreement as a more optimistic sales pitch was used?). But he wasn't even sure what Hernan wanted. Maybe Hernan wanted out.

Throughout the course of the day, whenever feelings of guilt tugged at Patrick for conspiring to free a war criminal, he assuaged them by calling on the standard parole board rationalizations that Hernan García posed no threat to other people. Perhaps justice was less about judgment and more about testifying to what happened, he reasoned, remembering other countries where a tribunal would have gratefully traded truth for amnesty. And had there been any reasonable statute of limitations, Hernan would have never been arraigned in the first place. His children would have their father back. He would see his grandson. Patrick owed Hernan. He owed him this.

Patrick turned left on the Korte Voorhout and crossed the Prinsessegracht where the density of pedestrian traffic steadily increased. For the first time in Den Haag, he had to alter his step to avoid others. Another half-block and there were now people standing on the sidewalks near where the street opened into a large green space. The novelty of a crowd, the planetary density, slowed him as much as the adjustments he had to make in his stride. People ahead stared in the direction of the southeast corner of the park where a stage had been erected and others were speaking. Ahead of him, the overflow from the park blocked the sidewalk completely. At the buckling edge of the crowd there were people balanced on the sidewalk's curb, leaning forward for stability, attention divided between listening to the speakers and eyeing the cars that wheeled past
eighteen inches behind them on the busy outer lane of the Prinsessegracht.

Patrick stopped. For the first time in the city he was not surrounded by typical Dutch faces. The women wore hijab and there was nothing he understood in the words around him, Dutch or Arabic; not the words shouted by a man with a megaphone on the stage or the phrases chanted back by the crowd. He couldn't judge the mood of the gathering crowd beyond feeling the tension. That alone would usually have prompted him to an increased pace and a search for a way out, but the crowd had closed in around him, making it impossible to move in any direction. He tried to turn back, pivoting into the face of another man who had been walking closely behind him, and that's when he heard it, the sharp stab of brakes and the
da-daup
sound of syncopated impact against a hollow object. The crowd turned with the sound, a non-vocal sound, then a quasi-vocal sound before it was articulated into a scream, a woman's scream, and there was a torrent of movement that settled into a fixed frenzy of ten to twelve people crouched by the curb and then someone shouted, a male voice this time, a voice calling for an ambulance, it must be for an ambulance, Patrick thought, and three people around him were on their cell phones, one already looking around, shouting. For directions? A cross street? A word was shouted out–a name, he thought–and the man with the cell phone repeated it with harried precision, his free index finger applied to the tragus of his other ear, keeping out the noise of the crowd now that he had his answer.

The crowd convulsed in a sudden lurching movement and Patrick strained to keep his feet. There was shouting and an atonal crescendo of car horns. Patrick watched the crowd
around the curb, witnessed the cries and gesticulations as if that was what would bring the ambulance more quickly. And he didn't know why, but he said it then, at first loudly enough only to be heard by the man next to him, who turned and said it back.

“
Dokter
?”

Patrick became aware of the look of confusion he must have worn as the man repeated, “
Dokter
?”, this time pointing at Patrick and fixing him with a dead-serious stare. He nodded and the man shouted the word in the direction of the people gathered at the curb who turned en masse, a movement that seemed to catapult Patrick toward them. People moved aside and Patrick found himself standing over a man, unconscious on the pavement, limbs arrayed in a way that confirmed sudden, terrible force applied to a body. Thirty feet away, a car had pulled over, hazard lights pulsing a redundant warning.

He knelt down next to the man and looked into a face that at first appeared remarkably untouched. A man in his twenties, dark-skinned and slender, lying on his side, mouth agape, one eye open. An earlobe newly webbed in blood. He groped for a pulse and the skin of the man's wrist was cool and wet. In the crowd, on the asphalt next to the man, what came next to Patrick wasn't the predictable panic or visceral alarm but only the oddest relief. Patrick looked again at the face and all he could attest to was a remarkable suspension of self-doubt, as though every apprehension he'd had about himself had been sequestered to another part of his body. He could help this person.
I am a doctor; this is what I do
, he thought and the faith wasn't ridiculous, the faith was a fire that he'd never felt before. Looking into that blind eye with its sinkhole of a pupil, he felt such intoxicating certainty, a sense of calm
beyond any pharmaceutical, a calm that seemed profane in the tumult of the crowd around him. This was how Hernan must have felt, he thought, imagining a brain bathed in dopamine, a brain revelling, already priming itself, already begging to be tweaked to feel this good again. Any other day, he'd walk away from such a scene just as he'd find a way to duck out of a hospital room during a difficult moment, but his hand was clamped to the injured man's wrist and its impoverished pulse, and he didn't want to go anywhere, wouldn't go anywhere.
I am here. I will help.

A man in his fifties dropped to his knees beside Patrick, hoarsely shouting some directive at him, indicating in the broadest possible manner that they should turn the injured man over and Patrick shook his head and pointed to his own neck. Across from the man in his fifties was a young woman, squatting on her haunches, wearing a hijab of the most amazing blue, a colour matching her wide eyes, made to seem wider for the fact that they were the only part of her face he could see with her hands brought up to her gasping mouth. Sister or wife. He put his head back down to the pavement to see how the injured man was doing, and he would swear it was another man now, in similar clothes and circumstances, yes, but now a different category of man, a dying man. His euphoria was an airborne memory, leaving him to face the incontrovertible facts of injury and the knowledge that he could do nothing for this man. He was going to die. A crowd of the injured man's friends and family circled in, and Patrick felt the weight of their gaze on his chest like a tightening python. He looked up for any sign of an ambulance, not with hope but for relief from having to kneel there and carry the weight of the crowd's expectation. Patrick lay down again, this
time flat on his stomach, ostensibly to be better able to see the man's face. One eye open, its pupil even more dilated, a depth from which no return was possible. The sound of traffic on the other side of Prinsessegracht was a constant dull roar behind him and the voices of the people around him seemed to ride on it, feed off it. The injured man gasped, a shuddering, deep visceral sound, an agonal sound that would have dropped Patrick had he not already been face-flat against the pavement, seeing the man's lips move with each increasingly tenuous breath. He let go of the man's wrist.

The sirens came. Ambulance. Police too, and half the crowd in the park gathered for the demonstration cleared out with their arrival. The injured man was put on a backboard and loaded into the ambulance, which departed with full lights, full siren, perhaps as a concession to the man's family, the woman in the blue hijab and the man in his fifties somewhere among the people wailing behind him. The police waded through the tension in the crowd to take statements from the car's driver and a few witnesses. When they got to Patrick, he explained that he had seen nothing, that he was just passing by. They told him he was free to go. A few steps away, an ambulance attendant stopped him and sat him down, going through the drill of first aid until Patrick explained the bruises on his face were nothing new and the blood on his shirt was not his own.

 

Patrick opened the taps wide enough that the mirror fogged above the sink. He checked the ridges of his nails and found no visible blood but his fingertips had that smell to them, and so he lathered and scrubbed and drowned them in the blast of water. By the time he was finished washing, his hands were
newborn piglets in the sink. He had never told anyone, but an added benefit of research was escape from that never-ending intimacy with death that defined his specialty. The catastrophes were bad enough: mushroom clouds of blood, acres of brain scorched and salted, insurgencies of bacteria and viruses–but he couldn't bear to contemplate a life spent cowering from patients who were aware that death approached. They could see his fear. He knew it. They'd faced it themselves and conquered it or been pulled under, but either way they knew. They'd watch as he came into their room in the morning and inquired about how the night had passed; they'd see traces of it in him as he examined their withering muscles or checked their eyes for evidence of pressure that was building from the little garden of metastases ripening inside their brains. They'd look at him and it would seem that they all knew his secrets and he sensed how it diminished him as their doctor. He had mastered the details of illness, acquired a superior working knowledge of the nervous system, and yet, in the most basic sense, he could not be what these people needed. There was no way to learn this skill. It should have been achievable, like everything else. It should have been fair. It galled him to see classmates almost inadvertently stumble into that sort of confidence, that calm authority that ministering to the ill demanded. It was like watching them be admitted into a secret society from which he'd been excluded. Nothing had been beyond him except this. Not having that ability–and what
was
it, he thought, the delusion of confidence, a benign hubris, the denial of death–had been the biggest disappointment of his life, one that he couldn't admit to someone like Hernan, someone who had been so endowed.

He thought that seeing his father die would have granted him some immunity, something, some understanding or coping mechanism, but the opposite had happened. Every case had that point on the horizon, the approaching end, and every death became a cause for deep, festering panic. There was no disputing it; his patients smelled it, and no amount of washing could get rid of something like that.

He tried to take off his clothes, shivering through the act, having to concentrate on his fingers as they stumbled blindly around the buttons of his shirt. He clattered a hand through the minibar and found a couple of the small bottles of scotch whose contents he shook into a plastic cup. After downing it, a tablet of Valium followed, and then two more and after fifteen minutes the man coiled on the asphalt of the Prinsessegracht wasn't there at all but instead he was safe in a hospital bed, somewhere in Den Haag, the hard work done, the broken bones set and the haemorrhaging staunched, months of hard work ahead of him, yes, but alive. It was with this thought, of a man hovering above his injuries, floating toward a distant but certain recovery, that Patrick fell asleep. He drifted through stages of sleep, surfacing as the last suppressive traces of benzodiazepines disappeared from his system and the loop of images from the Prinsessegracht began its relentless play. He saw the face on the grey plane of asphalt, the open eye and the last breath of the man escaping, drifting up to a white plane that he thought must be the sky or maybe heaven, but which was really only the ceiling.

Patrick finally awoke in a quiet and amniotically dark room. The tremors had stopped and slowly he was able to gather himself enough to get to the window where he separated the curtains to reveal the latticework of Den Haag streets below.
On the Prinsessegracht he had that unassailable certainty that he could do anything, go to any lengths, for a man dying in front of him. Wrong as he had been, he thought of Hernan, and felt he understood him clearly. He understood how a man could have believed in the righteousness of one's actions for so long. Patrick had felt it too. But he had neither Hernan's faith nor skill and so the delusion lasted only for a moment and brought him no place more incriminating than the pavement of a Den Haag street. He understood. If there was no coercion needed to get Hernan to Lepaterique, then he must have wanted to go. And if Hernan was not a man filled with hate, then what, if not a sense of duty, could have brought him there, could have misled him so? In the tribunal, Hernan had come face to face with the people he thought he'd helped, listened as they gave testimony that demolished his notion of innocence. For the first time, Patrick thought he understood the silence at the trial, understood that the judgment Hernan had evaded for years–since the initial charges, since the death of his wife–had finally been rendered. The only problem was a life that continued, a heart that kept beating in its cell ten blocks away.