Accusation (24 page)

Nothing was clear here, nothing felt clear. With Abiye, everything had, in a sense, been easier, despite Gerard’s insinuations and rumours and Richard Langley’s veiled threats. She’d been seeking confirmation of something already acknowledged, and Abiye had recounted a story he’d told before. She didn’t know the extent of abuse at the orphanage, but some boys had clearly been abused. Here, what she encountered were denials and ambiguous intimacy and nothing as yet to corroborate the runaways’ allegations. Would Yitbarek protect Raymond, who after all was paying his rent?

He says, Alazar said at last, Mr. Raymond asks them to do things and they want to do them and he believes at all times they can do it. He shows them carefully. He says they can be the best in the world at circus, but they have to work hard. Sometimes even in a big circus an accident happens to a great athlete and such turns of fate must be accepted because it is God’s will and overcome.

Do you, does he know some of the circus performers ran away in Australia?

After a moment, Alazar said, He knows it. The boys and Mr. Tamrat tell him. Mr. Tamrat said they ran because they did not wish to be in the circus anymore.

What did the boys say?

They say the others are not happy. They do not like Mr. Raymond. Because he shouts at them.

Why did he shout at them?

Because they’re big, and they do not want to do it the way Mr. Raymond wants them to do it.

Do what?

The work.

Did he hurt them?

I do not think so.

Did Mr. Raymond shout at Yitbarek?

He does not. Excuse me — there was a shift in Alazar’s tone, a severity that Sara had not experienced from him before. It is enough. He is tired.

Thank you, Yitbarek, Sara said, and it seemed true, there was a loss of focus in him, a wilting, and in her persistence to ask a certain kind of question and pursue a line of thought, she’d been oblivious to it. Of course his strain could be another kind of strain. Yet she would get nowhere without Alazar’s assistance.

Can you juggle in your chair? she asked Yitbarek.

Yes, he said quietly, and his head indicated the bucket of balls. Not now. A gust of sadness, rather than anger, swept across him. It was true, he did not seem angry. Then he brightened. Look. And raised himself in his chair from his seat, balancing on the strength of his arms as Alazar explained this was one of the exercises he had to do.

Alazar, can you ask if there’s anything they need, any supplies we can bring, medical supplies, anything we can find here in Addis or something I can perhaps get someone to bring back from Canada?

I will ask it.

And is there a toilet?

To stand and walk out of the room felt like the flaunting of a flamboyant gift. The bathroom, off the kitchen, was of a more flimsy construction than the rest of the house, built of scrap wood, slits of light filtering between the boards and underneath them. Outside voices rang from close by. A red plastic bucket filled with water sat beside the toilet, and a row of four buckets in front of the freestanding tub held sheets and possibly cloth diapers, the scent of human waste tamped down by strong wafts of detergent and bleach.

In a hotel in Amman, in the heady wake of their return from Najaf — after the Australian Rafael Nardi’s saving of the Iraqi man who’d almost choked to death in front of them, and the carjacking — one of the others, Peter Cross, an American photojournalist, had told Sara how, as a child, he had been sexually attacked by a man known to his parents. The man, who lived in the same building as Peter, had coaxed him into his apartment one day after school, while both his parents were still at work, and tried to molest him, but Peter had fought the man off and escaped into his own apartment and locked the door. The man had called through the locked door and said, If you don’t come with me, I’ll tell your parents you did and how you touched me and how you liked me touching you, and if you do come with me, I won’t say a word.

What did you do? Sara asked. I was so angry I dared him to say something to my mother, and that frightened him. Did you tell her what happened? Yes. And were you believed? Yes. What happened then? She told my father, who beat the man so bad he never went near me again. You were lucky, Sara said. I was, Peter said, but probably others weren’t.

In the public change room of the local rink in Ottawa where she’d skated as a teenager, there was a man who bought hot chocolate for boys whose parents left them at the rink on their own, a man whom all the teenagers knew to avoid. A girl she’d known in boarding school had been raped by an uncle in the bathroom of the family home. Another molested by a priest. There were so many different ways for children, and teenagers, to be damaged and abandoned.

The ones who had accused Raymond had not accused him of abusing Yitbarek or not that Sara knew of. As she’d understood it from Sem Le, they’d accused him of abusing them. So many of them, male and female. Possible. Though the story could have altered, been altered. They had altered it. Or they had been misunderstood. They had known or suspected one thing. They’d said another. Or having been misunderstood, they’d agreed to the new version. Turning on Raymond, they’d said what seemed to best serve their case, wanting so intensely to get away from him and from the circus.

She did not see how she could go on in her questioning, not here, not now, without running the risk of hurting Yitbarek further. If nothing had happened, she would be the one forcing him to imagine acts he’d never thought of. She was no police officer or counsellor. Nor was she Gerard Loftus. All she’d gained was more complication and murk, and the ability to hurt someone, her ability to do so lurking in every direction she looked. She was in the presence of some intimacy. She had a day left in her trip. She could try to talk to Yitbarek again. Yet she also wanted to talk to some of the other boys. And girls. Their parents.

What if, walking back out into that room, she were to ask Yitbarek: Did you ever want to run away from the circus? Did you fall on purpose, as a last-ditch means of escape from that man’s clutches? Did he touch you like this? Like this?

Always there were the questions you meant to ask and didn’t, the questions that came too late, or you were interrupted, the questions that went on yawing inside you.

After peeing, Sara emptied the water from the red plastic bucket into the lidless, rust-stained toilet tank, flushed the toilet, waste water trickling and gurgling away beneath the exterior wall and into the street. She refilled the bucket. The mirror above the sink was backed by a mess of peeling silver, her reflection impenetrable. A car backfiring made her jump. After wiping her wet hands on her jeans, she picked up her bag and returned to the room where Alazar and Yitbarek and Dassala, heads drawn close, spoke quietly to one another.

In the dark of her bedroom in Toronto, Sara was instantly alert at three a.m., which would be eleven in the morning in Addis Ababa. At five, she got up, the heat of the bed still on her, pulled her hair into an elastic, and stepped over her open suitcase. How quiet the room was after Addis, only the low throb of the highway that ran along the lakeshore audible through the closed window at this hour. Without switching on the light, the city night bright enough to see by, she retrieved her notepad from her carry-on bag, altered before leaving Addis to look like a diary, an old trick. And the tapes and rolls of film she’d stuffed into socks and also placed in her carry-on bag, separate from camera and tape recorder, another habit of years past. Just to be safe. And she was back and all was safe, and now she would have to see what happened next. By seven-thirty, wrapped in her blue wool coat, she was stepping out the back door of a streetcar at the corner of King and Spadina, where no children shouted or launched themselves at her and there was no odour of charcoal or diesel fumes, only the rattle of the streetcar clearing the intersection at her back, the zoom of a car trying to overtake it, wind blowing up from the lake, tapes and film and notepad in the bag slung over her shoulder.

At eight, Alan Marker, deputy foreign desk editor, appeared amid the pod of news editors’ desks, his wide back shifting within the tight constraints of a mauve shirt, and after Sara approached and asked when Sheila Gottlieb, the foreign desk editor, would be in, Alan said, Sheila’s out west this week. Why?

Then can we have a little chat in a meeting room?

Inside the windowless room, Alan took a seat on the far side of the conference table while Sara closed the door behind her. She’d made him curious. She’d spent the whole of the two flights back to Toronto pondering what she was going to do. For some reason she decided to stay on her feet.

I’m just back from Ethiopia and I want to pitch a story to you.

Ethiopia, Sara? I noticed you were away. What the hell were you doing there?

When she said she’d been on vacation, he looked at her askance. When she told him about the orphanage and what had happened there and that as far as she knew the perpetrator had not been apprehended, and the man who’d flushed him out was Canadian, so there was that angle, she had his whole attention. There may be a second suspect, she said.

You went to Ethiopia on holiday and somehow stumbled upon this?

Pretty much. Someone tipped me off. I got introduced to the whistleblower at a party in Addis.

Alan gave a little grunt, as if crediting her with a bullish avidity similar to his own. Blunt yet quick. He’d never reported from overseas but had a good eye, a keenness for what worked on the page. An editor. His coffee mug abandoned in front of him. Sara had worked for him previously, during the years when she’d reported directly to the foreign desk. Sounds like you’re getting restless for your days in the field, Alan said. Are you?

Of course he was glad to hear that as far as she knew no one else was on the story. You’ve got enough we can talk feature-length? We’ll discuss details in the story meeting. How soon do you think you can pull something together?

In this way it was decided. Back at her desk, Sara pulled the earphones that she used when transcribing tapes out of a drawer, procrastinated by going upstairs to the world’s dreariest cafeteria to fetch an awful coffee, emailed David to say that she was back in town and let’s talk soon, and set to work.

How disorienting it was to sit at her newsroom desk and, through her earphones, hear nothing but the insistent inflections of Gerard Loftus, the winnow of wind of that day half a world away and not quite a week ago, the chime of her coffee cup against saucer on the patio of the Addis Ababa Hilton, as she typed out his words, not all but most of them, those that would be of use to her, Gerard so present yet disembodied. A little after nine, she’d spoken to Nuala Johnson, her editor on the national desk, about taking this break from her immigration and multiculturalism work. At ten-thirty, after the story meeting, she returned to her desk and the list of phone calls and emails that she needed to make and to the taped sounds of Gerard’s voice. A little before noon, after yanking the earphones from her ears, shrugging her shoulders and shaking out her wrists, she considered the small, nagging voice that said she really ought to get in touch with Juliet Levin. She’d sent Juliet one email from Addis letting her know that Raymond Renaud seemed to have taken off.

You’re back, Juliet said at the other end of the phone line. And?

Having called Juliet from her desk, Sara wished she hadn’t. To one side, when she checked over her shoulder, Paul Rosenberg had his own headphones on and was clattering away at his keyboard, and on the other side Nellie Wuetherick’s chair was empty. No one would be listening to her.

Can I call you back in a minute?

Sure, Juliet said with a note of puzzlement.

At the far end of the meeting room, where she’d conversed with Alan first thing in the morning and gathered with others an hour or so before, Sara perched on one of two faux-leather armchairs and picked up the receiver from the phone on the low table and pressed the button that would give her an open line.

I’m going to be writing something, she told Juliet. Not about the circus. And explained about meeting Gerard and the orphanage and the former director and the boys, that it wasn’t clear how many but boys. That Raymond seemed to have left Addis, not just gone on a trip, and Tamrat Asfaw had taken over running the circus, and Yitbarek was indeed paralyzed but making some progress in his recovery and his spirits seemed good. She hadn’t been able to substantiate any of the runaways’ accusations. Tamrat said Raymond denied them. Tamrat denied them. There had obviously been children in Raymond’s home, living there, staying there, and, it seemed, disagreements between him and the teenagers, and who knew if there’d been some laxness in their supervision during training, but none of the children had spoken about inappropriate touch.

Maybe they don’t know what it is, Juliet said.

That’s possible. Have you heard anything from Raymond? I know it’s unlikely but —

No, Juliet said. And I don’t expect to ever again.

Or anyone else who has anything to do with the circus?

No. And I’m really not pursuing that project at the moment, I’ve kind of put the whole thing on a shelf.