After two days of rest and antibiotics, she was fine, easy-peasy. But if she hadn’t gone to the ER, she might have died that very night. Sometimes you can put it off. But sometimes you really can’t.
She climbs the steep stairs, and steps inside.
“Bom dia,” she says to the sergeant at the front counter. “My husband is missing.”
*
Ariel is trying to absorb the uniformed policewoman’s long string of rapid-fire Portuguese, which sounds at turns like statements, accusations, maybe a couple of questions.
“Desculpe,” Ariel says, using the word she learned from listening to other people apologize. “I don’t know Portuguese. Is there anyone here who speaks English?”
The policewoman glares.
“Desculpe,” Ariel repeats, trying to look sorry, pathetic, worthy of sympathy.
More glaring. How can she fix this?
“Ah!” Ariel pokes up a finger, the universal signal for one moment, please. Although Ariel didn’t learn much Portuguese before this trip, she did purchase an app. The typical American approach to any problem: buy something. This was one of the things she hated the most about the people she hated the most: the reflex to throw money at everything, as a matter of routine.
But here she is, typing into her phone too quickly, making too many errors, and just one is too many. There’s no way for a translation app to guess at misspelled intentions. She holds up a finger again, mutters another apology, then hits TRANSLATE, and hands over her phone.
The policewoman looks down at the screen, takes a couple of seconds to read. Then she looks up at Ariel, reassesses this jabbering woman who strode into the police station first thing on a Monday morning. Her face softens, and she says, “Um momento.”
*
“My husband.” Ariel looks back and forth between the two detectives.
“He is missing, you say?” the male detective asks. António Moniz has a warm, open face, but Ariel can already see the skepticism in his eyebrows, in the slight narrowing of his eyes.
“Well, I don’t know about missing. But I can’t find him.”
Moniz nods. “When did you last see him?”
“About midnight.”
Ariel’s final memory of the night was John standing at the open window again, gazing off at the night, at his tomorrow. She doesn’t know precisely what time it was when she finally slipped out of consciousness, but midnight seems reasonable.
“Midnight?” Moniz looks surprised. “Midnight of last night?”
“Yes.”
“That is”—Moniz checks his watch—“ten hours?”
“Correct.”
The policeman inhales deeply. He obviously doesn’t know what to say next, what to tell this woman. He exchanges a glance with his partner, an attractive but severe-looking woman named Carolina Santos who thus far has said nothing.
“I understand,” Ariel says, “that this hasn’t been much time.”
“No,” Moniz agrees, perhaps too quickly, too heartily. “It is not.”
“But this is really not like him.”
“Of course,” Moniz says. “Of course,” he repeats, but it doesn’t seem like a reiteration, more like a contradiction, or perhaps sarcasm.
This conversation is not yet about John. This is still about Ariel, and her credibility.
“I’m worried.” Ariel looks back and forth between the two cops, looking for support, finding none. Not only has Detective Santos not spoken, she hasn’t even picked up her pen. Her role here seems to be to stare at their visitor. Ariel is a little scared of Santos.
“Does your husband run?” Moniz asks. “For exercise? Is it possible that he has gone running?”
“No.” Ariel shakes her head. “His running shoes are in our room.”
“Does he have the—how do you say it, when you are having trouble with the sleep?”
“Insomnia? No.”
“I am sorry, that is not what I mean. Because of travel? Time changes?”
“Jet lag?”
Moniz snaps his fingers. “Yes. The jet lag. Perhaps because of the jet lag he is awake too early, and he goes for a walk? Is this possible?”
“Maybe, but why wouldn’t he leave me a note? Or call? Or answer my calls?”
“I do not know, senhora. Can you think of a reason?”
She shakes her head. “Anyway, John took a sleeping pill last night. Me too. To help us adjust. So that he’d be well-rested for work today.”
“Work? You are in Lisboa for business?”
“My husband is a consultant, visiting a client.”
“Have you contacted the client? Maybe he is already at the offices.”
“I can’t. I don’t know who the client is. John told me, but I can’t remember it. I should’ve written it down, I know. But I didn’t.”
“And you?” he asks. “Are you also here for business?”
“No. I’m here just to come along.”
Ariel notices that Moniz has a spot of something on his tie, grease or sauce, something oily.
“Do you have an idea, Senhora Pryce? About where your husband is?”
“No. I’m just worried.”
“What is it you are worried about?”
It could be so many bad things, couldn’t it? John could be the victim of some crime or accident, in a hospital, struck by one of those trams, or a car, a truck, anything. Or facedown in an alley, mugged, bleeding, unconscious. He could be dead in some abandoned fish market on the far side of the Tagus, chained to a rusty pipe, his blood sluicing into industrial drains, washed out to mingle with the brackish river.
Maybe he has been falsely accused of something, under arrest at another police station, interrogated at an embassy. Or down in Tangier, detained by security forces, accused of being a spy, a smuggler, a fugitive from justice.
And maybe the accusation isn’t false. Ariel doesn’t know every dark corner of John’s history. Maybe he has a questionable past that has finally caught up to him, or a questionable present that he’s adept at hiding. He could be engaged in money laundering, fraud, tax evasion, hiding behind the disguise of consultant; who the hell knows what a consultant even does.
Or of course he could be fine. Ariel will end up looking overprotective, insecure, silly. Exactly what she’d been accused of before: unbelievable.
“I don’t know,” she admits.
Moniz taps his pen on his paper, which Ariel notices is almost entirely blank. She hasn’t said much worth writing down.
“Senhora, I hope you understand that it is not possible for the police to search for every man whose wife cannot find him in the morning. We would never do anything else!” His attempt at a joke falls flat, he sees that immediately, and pushes past. “I am sure it is nothing. Your husband is at work, and he will return to your hotel at the end of the day.”
This is the kind of bland baseless optimism that Ariel abhors. Like an athletic coach. Ariel can’t stomach pep talks.
“He will have an explanation, and it will be an explanation that is okay to you, or an explanation that is not okay to you, but either way it will not be a criminal explanation. Not a serious one. And in any case, he will return.”
Moniz extends his hands, drawing a conclusion to the story.
“But what if he doesn’t?”