Accusation (35 page)

Perhaps her own performance on the stand had tipped Juliet into doubt. Something about the way she spoke, what she’d said or hadn’t said: she had seemed too sure of herself or not sure enough. The undeniable fact of that hour or so between her leaving the Y and meeting Graham back at the apartment when she’d wandered unaccounted for on Sainte-Catherine, and there had been no ubiquitous store security cameras in those days to monitor her entrances and exits. Graham’s refusal to testify. Maybe, to Juliet, Colleen Bertucci’s version of events had become the convincing one, or had been convincing enough to upset her belief in Sara. If the wallet had been in Colleen’s unlocked locker, yes, Sara had had the opportunity to steal it. The effects of Sara’s cross-examination. The difficulty of proving something in the negative. That the police had found no evidence of the stolen goods in her possession might simply mean that she had dumped or fenced them.

All Juliet had to do on the stand was attest to Sara’s good character. Juliet had dressed to look sombre yet pretty in an antique black dress and little black cardigan, intent on displaying a hint of the bohemian. In fact, Juliet looked terrified, her hands gripping the sides of the wooden podium. Yes, she said, Sara was a responsible person. She was studious and dependable and always paid her rent on time. It hadn’t been a given that the prosecutor would want to cross-examine Juliet, but she had. This made Juliet appear even more terrified. What kind of coat does Sara Wheeler wear, can you describe it? What does Sara Wheeler spend money on? Does she have much money? One last question, Mme Laberge said in her accented English. What colour are Sara Wheeler’s eyes? Paul Kastner objected to this, how was it relevant, but the judge in his ravenlike wisdom let the question stand.

Juliet looked then like she was clinging to a raft while lost at sea. This was impossible to forget. How strange, Sara thought from the courtroom bench where she sat beside Paul Kastner, she doesn’t know the colour of my eyes. Had she loved Juliet Levin? Not sexually, but in other ways yes, moved by Juliet’s kindness and loyalty. Juliet’s eyes were brown. But there were those, Graham, for instance, whose eye colour Sara was suddenly less certain of. Friends, intimates. The realization was unnerving. Blue, Juliet said, but her rising voice made her response a question. Then she broke down in tears. I don’t know, she said. I really have no idea. Of course it was a small thing, although Juliet’s hesitation shook the credibility of all her testimony, as the prosecutor must have hoped for.

It wasn’t that moment as much as how Juliet behaved after the trial that had felt so revealing. Her evasiveness and her refusal to acknowledge her evasions. People look through eye colour, not at it, Sara had said, yet Juliet did not want to talk about the trial other than to make effusive apologies for her own part in it and say how glad she was that Sara had gotten off. Her awkwardness made Sara long to put immediate distance between herself and Juliet, get as fast as possible out of the Esplanade apartment.

Doubt: once it enters your mind and body, how difficult it is to get rid of it. If not impossible. In the edit suite, Sara had watched Raymond gather the boy onto his lap and from that moment doubted him.

Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up the past, Sara said to Juliet, as, behind the bar, the bartender in his grey wool hat danced along to the music. Maybe that was selfish. It’s all so long ago and if you did doubt me, I forgive you.

How strange, she thought, after all these years, that this would prove to be their point of rupture. Juliet looked frozen, as if forced to stare at something she didn’t want to see. If that’s what you thought, I’m sorry, she said.

It was unlikely, even if they were to run into each other, that they would ever make plans to get together again.

The orphans’ Christmas dinner at Soraya Green’s was weeks ago, as was the Christmas phone call to her parents, her mother worried about her father and her father consumed by the Russian elections and the state of Boris Yeltsin’s heart. One night in January, after an impulsive late-night movie with a couple of others also toiling after hours at work, Sara arrived home to a blinking red light on her answering machine and, when she pressed the play button, out poured Rafael Nardi’s voice.

Hello, darling. I tried you at the paper, on the assumption you might be there, but I guess you’re out gallivanting. I assume you’ve heard, but perhaps you haven’t, your gang here has had their refugee claim denied. That came down yesterday. It’s in the papers here today, not much detail. Insufficient evidence, it seems. Not clear what will happen to them now. I told you, didn’t I, about meeting Louise, through Alice, who’s been teaching them English. Louise used to be a gymnast, she’s a trainer now, and she’s got them access to a gymnastics club in Footscray, where they can practise, which I gather is better than wherever they were practising, and it seems they’re intent on keeping up their circus skills. They don’t have money so she’s getting up early to let them in before anyone else is using the place, and letting them stay late, and helping to ferry the younger ones about and generally spending a lot of time with them. Their English is getting better. She says they’ve begun to talk about what they went through, how domineering he was, how punishing the pace, how they felt trapped, about not being paid. Any minute, I’m sure your machine’s going to cut me off. Anyhow, quickly, they talk about having a hard time, being terrified, and they’re desperate to stay, but she also let on, this, obviously, in confidence, that none of them has said anything to her about or alluded in any way to any sort of sexual abuse, which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but I pass this on.

There were no other messages. Sara stood for a long moment, letting Rafael’s words settle, wanting to cast them off but feeling them settle. Then she began to hunt for the portable phone, which was not on its stand, not on the little table where the answering machine was, no sign of its small dark carcass in the kitchen when she tugged on the pendant light and glanced about, the pulse of her blood like running footsteps. The phone wasn’t in the living room or on her desk upstairs, it was on a shelf behind her desk. Rafael wasn’t home, the bastard, the line ringing as Sara stepped onto the landing at the top of the stairs, three doors open around her, the dark like smoke.

Sem Le was in a meeting, said his secretary or receptionist or whatever she was. He was still in a meeting when Sara tried again, an hour or so later, far from sleep, still dressed, at the mess of her desk, the screen an infernal moon, where, four and a half months before, she’d read for the first time about the allegations the teenagers had made against Raymond Renaud.

And again: I’ll keep trying if he’s there. Is he there?

He’s busy. He’s just back from court.

This won’t take long, I promise.

It was as if Raymond were in the room, watching her from his white wooden chair, making up his own mind about her. He was draped across the ceiling, across the sky above her head, so that she couldn’t look up without seeing him, yet when she put out her hand it went right through him. She couldn’t see into him, he who as a child had longed to be seen.

Sem Le said, This has got to be quick. I don’t even know why I am talking to you. Are you writing something more about this? I will be making an appeal for them to stay on compassionate grounds, an appeal based on artistic merit. It is a unique case, as it has always been. And they say it is all or none. Either they all stay, or they all go. And there is no question of their exploitation, this man went into an extremely poor country and exploited some extremely vulnerable young people.

What about the specific allegations of sexual abuse?

They were forced to work under extremely dangerous conditions, sometimes to the point of serious injury, were bullied, shouted at, suffered inappropriate touching, and a lot of money was made off them whilst they were never paid a wage.

What about those specific allegations?

The story is more precise now, Ms. Wheeler. It is clearer. We are moving forward with the leave to stay on compassionate grounds.

A story of exploitation isn’t a refugee story.

The air kept ringing: she was alone in the dark with this rising thing. They had changed their story or the story had changed, as stories did, because it was necessary to have a credible story, a watertight story that held up to repeated tellings in front of a tribunal or a judge. If something sexually abusive had occurred, perhaps its nature had been murky, or it was something they’d observed, and it would be difficult to prove, and also it wasn’t useful in legal terms since he wasn’t doing it any longer. Whatever the truth was, there was damage. Someone, somewhere, had been betrayed.

She was cold in a way that no blast from the furnace was going to touch, frost grown like a forest over the windowpane, real cold seeping in around the frame.

At three-fifteen, Rafael Nardi said, You’re not sleeping. Here I’ve just stepped in and am making a cup of tea. That’s me slopping milk into it. Have you tried drinking? And it hasn’t worked. I take it you hadn’t heard.

About their claim being denied. No, but it’s not that, it’s the other thing, which their legal agent is also no longer willing to talk about. I reported allegations, only allegations of sexual abuse, but the power of an allegation. Raf, what have I done? I feel sick.

This is the one that’s gotten under your skin. There’s always one, or more than one.

I’ve tried that line of thought. There must be others, betrayals, deaths, because of things I’ve, or you, or any one of us has — think of all those children lying without supplies in the hospital in Najaf, so many of them likely to die, and I felt implicated then, politically, and personally, there are all the things not written about as well as the things that are. But this — can I tell you why this feels so personal?

She was lying on top of the comforter, wrapped in another quilt, shivering as the bedside lamp shared its huddle of light — and he, never a lover, not that kind of spark. Rafael had been married when they’d crossed out of Jordan in that little convoy, although his marriage was disintegrating. Two journos, two photojournos plus one driver-cum-fixer in a white van. She’d seen Rafael unshaven, smelled him unshowered, breathed in the particular odour of fear and adrenaline that was released through his pores as she stared at the black hairs at the back of his neck. Rafael had been sitting in the front seat beside Raed, their driver, when a man stopped them in a Najaf street and pointed his cocked semi-automatic through Raed’s open window. The man wore no uniform, maybe he was a former insurgent, and political betrayal was mixed in with his anger at the Americans sticking it to the Iraqis with their embargo and no-fly zones, leaving those like him on the ground to get slaughtered by government soldiers. None of the four of them was American or British, and maybe that enraged him further or it didn’t matter, they were outsiders from the so-called West. He shot a bullet through the back windshield, just missed Tobias, the Norwegian, told Raed to get out of the driver’s seat, yelled in English that he was going to kill them all. Maybe his desire was simply to blot them out, take the van, their stuff. They offered him money. He took their money. Somehow Rafael and Raed managed to talk him out of killing them.

She told Rafael about seeing the circus in Copenhagen, and her night drive with Raymond Renaud from Toronto to Montreal, and how hearing about the teenagers’ allegations had stirred up what had happened to her years before in Montreal and spurred her trip to Addis Ababa. Maybe my own experience made me less objective, but all I’ve wanted was to leave space for the possibility of a wrongful accusation, in part because such allegations are so damning. I’ve always been prepared to believe them, and yet now I can’t help feeling like I’ve destroyed or helped destroy someone, and I don’t know what to do about it.

It’s bound to be complicated.

What is?

Whatever happened.

Yes, yes. So on this tape, he’s holding one of the boys on his lap. Maybe he does nothing more than this, but there’s desire. And they observe enough of his behaviour to sense it. Have you met them, Raf? Have
you
spoken to them? Do you know if they’ve said anything about anything like this to, what’s her name, Louise?

Not that she’s told me. And nothing to me. I did go out the other evening with them and the lovely Louise.

The lovely Louise?

Former gymnast, yoga instructor. I admit at this point to being intrigued — all of this, I remind you, I have undertaken on your behalf. Up before dawn, off to this converted garage in Footscray. And if there are a few perks, well. However, I have not completely trampled on my so-called objectivity. I’ve seen their billet, these two shoddy rooms they’re all squashed into, a kitchen and two mattresses. I can’t tell you what you want to know from anything I’ve heard or seen.

Your marriage?

Long over. And Louise. She’s the sort who’s able to draw things out of people. She has the knack. I can attest to it. She and some mates have a plan afoot to start a circus school and found some new sort of outreach-oriented circus, so she says, and are on the lookout for a warehouse space, and want this crew involved, I gather that’s part of the plan. To work with immigrants and refugees and indigenous communities. They seem very keen on the philosophy that anyone who wants to should be given the chance to try the trapeze, and even those who don’t want to should be strenuously encouraged.