“Just fine,” the reporter says. “What can I do for you?”
Saxby Barnes looks at the world in starkly transactional terms: He does things for other people so that they will do things for him. Every bit of information he comes across, every minute of work he does, is of value to someone else, and he’s intent on getting something in return. Not immediately, but eventually.
“Mr. Wagstaff, I find myself in possession of some information you might want to look into.”
*
“Yesterday afternoon, at a café. There was a woman.”
“Oh?” Moniz’s pen finds the next blank line on his paper.
“She thought she knew my husband, but she was mistaken.”
“Which café was this, please? Do you remember?”
“Not the name, but it was near that church that has no roof? Not far from here.”
“O Convento do Carmo?”
“Yes, that’s it. There’s a square with a café, maybe two.”
“Yes, I know the place. And there was nothing else, with this woman?”
“No, just that: She thought she knew John, he said sorry but no, she walked away.”
Ariel notices that Moniz has splashed some dinner sauce on the lapel of his jacket, to supplement the earlier breakfast stain on his tie, and some lunch on his shirt. His sparse hair, neatly combed earlier, is now flying off in untamed directions. She can detect a whiff of body odor. The day has progressively uncivilized him. Maybe he devolves the same way every day, starts afresh each morning. Ariel wonders how much of his schlubbiness is a put-on, how much genuine. Or if there’s any meaningful difference.
“When is the last time he is visiting Lisboa?”
“A couple of months ago.”
“Before that, how many times is he here?”
“Just one other that I’m aware of, but I’ve known him only a year.”
“One year?” It’s not quite suspicion in Moniz’s eyes, but it’s something. Ariel knows how all this must look to him. Hell, she knows how it looks to her: a short, rash courtship; a couple who don’t really know each other; a disappearance that could be almost anything, or nothing.
Moniz is wavering about whether to pursue his next line of inquiry. Ariel can see when he makes the choice. Here it comes, she thinks.
“How well do you know your husband?”
CHAPTER 10
DAY 1. 6:33 P.M.
Ariel makes a helpless face, what do you want from me? She turns to Santos, who remains unmoved.
“I admit,” Ariel says, “that I haven’t known my husband a very long time. But long enough.”
Moniz leaves his pen just above the surface of the paper for a long pause. Then he looks up at Ariel and smiles indulgently, not a smile of humor, not of joy, but of pity. He doesn’t want to say what he must say next.
“Senhora, I am sorry, I must ask a question that is perhaps uncomfortable.”
Ariel knows that a cop might imagine a lot of explanations for John’s disappearance, and many of them would be at least vaguely accusatory—accusatory of John, of Ariel, accusatory of both of them. These theories would not be very palatable for this policeman to say aloud, to her. It’s a bitter taste, but Moniz has no choice. Ariel can see this whole debate as it crosses his face.
“Does your husband use drugs?”
“No,” Ariel answers too quickly, aware that she’s protesting too much. “No,” she repeats, softer and more rational sounding, as if she’d given the question a second, more serious consideration, then came to the same fully reasoned conclusion.
“Here in Portugal, all recreational drugs are, how do you say, de-, ah, illegalized … ?”
“Decriminalized.”
“Yes. This law, it is changing a number of years ago. Marijuana, cocaína, heroína … their use is not against the law anymore. This is a choice we are making to fight the problems of addiction. Problems of disease, of crime, of poverty, I am sure you are familiar, in America.”
“Okay.”
“One of the side effects of this change is that Lisboa is being a destination for people who are wanting to enjoy drugs. As with Amsterdam, you understand? People are coming here for that reason.”
“No.” Ariel shakes her head. “Not John.”
“It is true that using the drugs is no longer a criminal act, but they still can be dangerous. Unhealthy. And the people who are selling the drugs, these people are not the most nice of people. And some of the people who are using the drugs, they too are not nice. The drug lifestyle, it is not criminal anymore, but it is still not nice. Still not safe. Do you understand?”
“That has nothing to do with John. He doesn’t use drugs.”
“Is it possible that he did, in his past?”
Ariel doesn’t have a quick answer. She doesn’t, in truth, have any answer. She knows only what John has chosen to share with her. By the time they’d met, he’d already lived half a lifetime, decades when he could’ve been doing anything, anywhere.
But that’s true of everyone, isn’t it? Pasts can be reinvented.
*
After their first meeting, Ariel had investigated John cursorily, the way you do these days, scouring the web, searching social media, clicking around. She hadn’t found much. Then when he became a more interesting proposition, she made a more rigorous attempt—anonymous calls, email queries using aliases. Ariel was prone to moments of paranoia, mostly when she was alone, lying in bed late at night. Especially when she’d been reading one of her crime novels; so many are about psychopathic men, pretending to be normal, who turn out to be doing unspeakable things to women.
In the mornings, Ariel recognized that most of her suspicions about John were preposterous. But not all.
She eventually admitted that her heart wasn’t really in it: She didn’t want to find anything wrong with John, didn’t want to find any lies, any deceptions, misrepresentations. This lack of impartiality was compromising the whole effort. So she hired a PI to do the parts of an investigation that she couldn’t, as well as those that she simply wouldn’t.
The investigator found out where John grew up, where he went to high school and college, his ROTC and military service, his jobs and his homes, his dead parents and his older sister who lived on another continent. All the basic information that can be found in databases, verifiable matters of fact, references checked with HR departments and registrars and landlords.
But that may not have been everything. It’s hard to search for sex-tourism jaunts to Thailand, or coke-and-callgirl weekend binges, or a Ritalin-fueled adolescence or meth habit or online gambling addiction, an on-and-off relationship with crack, freebasing, child pornography, domestic violence, sexual assault. Not unless these activities make their way into the legal system, and almost none do. These things are almost impossible to find unless you know precisely what you’re looking for, and where to look, and when.
The PI did find a few things that concerned Ariel, but not many, and they didn’t concern her that much.