Yes, I said. Although I don’t think he saw me, he was somewhat preoccupied. She blinked. I could see her recalibrating her thoughts, the parameters of the situation shifting before her. He was with a woman, I said reluctantly.
Oh, she said.
I don’t know the nature of their meeting, I said.
She leaned back and the air seemed suddenly charged with the added distance between us. Are they sleeping together? Her voice was brittle, she seemed almost another person. It doesn’t matter, she continued without waiting for a reply. I’ve often thought it was a woman that brought Anton to that neighborhood. She paused. Was she an escort? Anton likes prostitutes, he’s used them before. Her voice was too casual, as if she were speaking of a car or cleaning service, and some part of me recoiled.
No, I said. No. They were—they liked each other.
But what was she like?
I shook my head. I couldn’t really describe her.
She stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. Something about this whole thing has been wrong from the start, she said. I don’t believe Anton when he says he doesn’t remember anything about the assault. I know my brother well and I know when he is lying. But why wouldn’t he just tell me? Infidelity isn’t especially shocking, and it’s not as if I would tell Miriam, it’s not as if— She stopped. He should know that he can trust me.
Perhaps he feels embarrassed or ashamed, I said. I recalled his words in the restaurant. Relax. Nobody knows you here. Or perhaps the woman is married, I continued, and there are other reasons why he can’t involve the police. Perhaps it would expose her in some way.
Eline shook her head, and then gave a short laugh. He has the luck of the devil, Anton. The police haven’t a clue. Not a single lead. If he’s keeping quiet about something, he’ll get away with it. There’s no evidence, there’s nothing, in all the footage from that day. It’s as if the assailant never existed. She paused. He loves Miriam, you know. But it is hard to ask her to keep accepting the terms of his love.
Her voice was ruminative, and I knew that she was speaking to herself rather than me. I wondered to what degree she believed the assault had been invented out of whole cloth, another one of Anton’s stories. If so, it was a particularly dangerous one, the police would have looked to the public housing block for suspects, there would have been interrogations and more. Consequences that extended far beyond the confines of Anton’s and Eline’s lives. Perhaps something in my gaze betrayed my thoughts because she suddenly seemed embarrassed. We didn’t know each other well enough for these disclosures to bring us closer together, we had exposed ourselves in the wrong way, at the wrong time.
I had the feeling that I would not see her again. I realized it had been some weeks since I had spoken to Jana. I really was quite alone. Perhaps because of this, as we stood to go I asked, There was really nothing, in all those hours of footage? For a moment she wavered, she seemed to understand what she was saying about her brother. Then she shook her head. Nothing. Not so much as a ghost.
16.
One week later, the trial of the former president was put on hold. The presiding judge ordered the prosecutor to provide a brief, outlining how the testimonies and evidence submitted to the Court supported the charges against the accused. The order represented a sea change within the trial; the defense was succeeding in unforeseen ways. I was called into a final meeting with the former president. Despite the potential collapse of the prosecutor’s case, I was still unprepared for the atmosphere of strange excitation in the conference room when I arrived at the Detention Center. The former president, as soon as I entered, looked at me with an expression of triumph, he nodded to the chair beside him and told me to sit down. Only two members of his team were there, the scene had a last-day-of-school feel to it. I reached for a pad and paper, there were a handful of phrases that they wanted to check in the testimony of the last witness, the lawyer explained, would I oblige them.
From the start, the former president made little pretense of following the conversation, and it wasn’t long before he exclaimed, But none of this matters, none of this matters any longer. His manner was petulant, as it always was when he was confronted with the articulation of his crimes. The lawyer looked at him from across the table and then asked if he would like to take a break. The former president shrugged, his defense team had done an extraordinary job for him, and yet, even as the possible end of the trial drew near, his contempt for them seemed to grow, he could already see ahead to the time when he would no longer need them.