“If your husband continues to be missing tomorrow morning, please return to us. Or telephone to me.” Moniz takes a business card from a brass box, extends it to Ariel.
“Listen, I know it’s been only a few hours. I know I don’t have any evidence. I know I don’t have as much information as I should. I know all that. But I’m really worried. He’s not answering my calls or texts, he didn’t leave me any note, and he’s not that type of guy. So can’t we start looking for him now?”
Moniz nods, understanding her lack of understanding.
“Senhora, these informations that you are giving us, these are not evidence of wrongdoing, if they are evidence of anything. And this amount of time that you have not seen your husband, this is not enough time. Right now there are hundreds of people in Lisboa, perhaps thousands, who have not seen a family or friend since last night. Whose wife or husband does not answer the phone or return a text. These days, we expect everyone to be always available, to be in contact with us during all the hours of all the days and nights, merely because it is possible. But just because it is possible does not make it desirable. Not all of the time, not for all of the people.”
Moniz is definitely right about that.
“So that’s it?”
There’s no point in arguing with him, is there? Not with a man who has made up his mind.
“I am sorry that we cannot take any action at this moment.” He stands, proffers his hand for a shake. “I hope you understand.”
Ariel very well may need the police’s help in the future, so she doesn’t want to fight an unwinnable battle now.
*
António Moniz watches the American woman walk away. “What do you think?”
His partner takes a few seconds before answering. “I think that this woman does not know her husband as well as she believes.”
In Moniz’s experience every cop is cynical, but Carolina Santos takes it to a whole different level.
“This is of course true for almost all women,” Santos continues. “We are all lied to. All the time.”
Moniz does not argue with Santos. Her fuse can be awfully short on this subject. Plus he does not disagree.
“Hey, Erico,” she calls out. A few desks away, a younger detective looks up from the football pages. “Did you see that American woman who just left?”
“Yes.”
“Follow her.”
CHAPTER 4
DAY 1. 10:44 A.M.
“Good morning, my name is Saxby Barnes.” He extends his hand for a shake that lasts a fraction of a second too long. “Please, if you’d be so kind as to follow me.”
Barnes is a doughy man wearing both the flag-pinned lapel and the plastered-on smile of a politician. A smile that everyone knows is bullshit, but we all agree to pretend otherwise, the smilers and the smilees, a vast covenant of feigned ignorance.
He swipes a magnetic card, then leads Ariel through a large open-plan room, glancing over his shoulder a couple of times, probably to make sure that she hasn’t separated herself to run amok. There’s a lot of security here at the US embassy, forms and formalities and filtering, an emphasis on preventing something negative from happening to this facility, instead of providing a positive anything to visitors.
From across the room Ariel feels an insistent gaze. She glances over just long enough to absorb a middle-aged man in a short beard and a rumpled oxford shirt and something that might be a press badge.
“So I understand that you can’t locate your husband,” Barnes says as they turn a corner.
“That’s right.”
“And I guess we know that he hasn’t simply left you.”
Barnes turns back with a smile, and Ariel gives him a quizzical look.
“How could any man leave a woman like you?” Now he’s beaming, proud of himself, of finding a way to hit on a worried married woman within a minute of meeting her.
“Certainly no sane man,” he adds, looking at her expectantly. He wants her to be grateful for the compliment.
Ariel makes a conscious effort to see the humanity in everyone she meets. She tries to start every new relationship by granting the benefit of the doubt. But this guy is going to make it hard.
She swallows her pride, and obliges Barnes with a smile.
“In here,” he says, holding open the door to a small, tidy office. As Ariel passes him, she catches a whiff of booze on his breath. Today’s? Or still last night’s? She knows this type of guy, who never passes up the opportunity to have a drink, and never has just one.
“So, Mrs., um …”
“Ariel Pryce. Ms.”
“Right. Ms. Pryce,” with a smirk. “May I offer you something to drink? Some water?”
“No thank you,” as gentle as possible. No in the tone of yes.
“You look a little, um …”
It had taken a while to find a taxi in the beating sun, and the car’s air-conditioning was unconvincing, then she’d needed to wait outside the embassy, and then in a close crowded room filled with frustrated people. What Ariel probably looks like is a sweaty mess.
“It’s awfully hot out there,” she says.
“Portugal in July! To be expected. But this heat is quite familiar to me; I’m from Georgia.”
Of course he is, pink-faced Saxby Barnes, ogling Southern gentleman in his tight blue seersucker suit and regimental tie and white bucks. The whole costume.
“You’re sure? No water?”
Barnes clearly doesn’t understand how a woman could reject this everyday politeness that he’s trying to inflict, unsolicited and undesired. Ariel has learned that it’s the excessively polite ones whom you should trust the least, the ones who try to convince you of their gentlemanly manners, their generosity, their chivalry.
“Fine,” Ariel concedes. “I appreciate it.”
Barnes grins at this tiny victory of aggressive solicitousness, this conversational cudgel: foisting a favor upon her, with the expectation of extracting something later.
“Don’t take no for an answer,” his mother had no doubt told him, teaching her son the proper manners of a polite host. “Don’t take no for an answer,” his father had told him, teaching his boy how to succeed in business, in politics, in any profession. “Don’t take no for an answer,” his frat brothers had told him, teaching him to trust his own judgment of what a girl wants, despite what she may say. So now here he is, trying to do all at once, just like he’s been told all his life, by everyone.
Chivalry can be just another form of hostility. Chivalry can be the weapon itself.
“Sparkling all right? I’m afraid I’m out of still.”
Of course: give something, take something away.
“Sparkling is perfect.”
It looks as if Barnes is practically caressing the door handle. Ariel realizes that it must be a recent acquisition, this refrigerator. Something Barnes had to earn, or wheedle. He’s proud of this little unit of his.
“Thanks again,” she says. “You’re very kind.”
“You’re quite welcome.” He takes a seat. “All right then, we need some, um … details …”