Taking Lives (17 page)

‘I’m not going away,’ I said. ‘I’m here on family business.’

‘The Museum must be very understanding.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘For the moment, yes, it is.’

I was sure I left a threat in the air. He’d know he had only a short time to hand back what he had stolen. He’d know I was serious because he’d think there was a profit in this for me. I could leave him to worry now.

After all, we were neighbours, so he couldn’t move without either dodging or acknowledging me. I could monitor his morning walk, a late coffee at the bar, a trip to buy in the Vila Nova market. He had to worry, too, if all this was deliberate, or if it was just a malign coincidence born of the fact that it’s tough to find a house to rent, by the week, for a month in the summer.

Our stalemate had an address at last: a village halved by a road, and halved again by a stream, full of colour and stone. I was happy to be settled for a while.

I made coffee, as he did, longing for something to read, someone to talk to, looking out on the valley as he did, watching weather boil up black and furious out of the west. I really thought that I had only to wait.

I was right. I just had the equation totally wrong.

I know now, from the police file, that the Dutch had already asked the Portuguese Guarda Nacional to make discreet inquiries about anyone saying he was a Christopher Hart. It wouldn’t be simple; Hart was a European citizen, so he could move in and out of Portugal without a record; but they had the hotel registrations, and those were quite enough.

In a day or so, Martin Arkenhout would be quite sure of what he now suspected: that he had stolen the wrong life. He’d know, too, he had to cling to being Christopher Hart, or face the unravelling of a whole career.

I saw this happen. I just didn’t realize at the time.

He came down the slate steps carefully. Cloud overgrew the houses like old vine, broke up the geometry of their dark, solid shapes, whited out some of the woods and left the rest grey and shadowy.

He thought I couldn’t yet be awake, that the light in my house must be from last night. And if I was awake, I wouldn’t be dressed before dawn and ready to run out. And if I was, he could lose me.

He started the car. The cloud held the sound close to the road, but made it seem monstrously loud. I would be awake now, for sure, scrambling out of my morning system and routine.

From here, there were only two ways to go: up and down. Up, the road snaked into bare mountain, then fell away into a valley, a lake, a dam. Down, the road went to a familiar town, with a dozen choices of town after that.

Hart headed down. Looking back on the road, all he could see was a white wall of cloud. The village had vanished. He must have vanished, too.

He told me he thought about running for Guarda and the frontier and crossing into Spain. Or he could get to an airport, get a ticket out: anywhere people took less interest in Christopher Hart. He had a whole day ahead of him: a whole empty, resounding day.

Sometimes a great Volvo truck came up out of the white and went past with a speeding whine, sometimes there were car lights ahead; but that didn’t matter. Inside the cloud and the white, the tunnels of trees, he was alone enough. The day was opening ahead of him, sun burning off mist and cloud and drying the damp road.

He was moving again, in control again: invincible.

I heard the engine start. I made more toast. Hart’s anger, I thought, had to be useful: a man who feels trapped may give himself away, or even surrender.

I went up to his house, of course. Neighbours might notice, but on a weekday there are not many; and besides, foreigners were known to know one another, to be in and out of one another’s lives. The door was locked. I could see a plain, oppressive order, everything personal - even used cups, spare sweaters - tucked away out of sight. Hart hardly dented the house, let alone marked it for his own.

Nor did I. My own house was cold and dead, like all rented places. You wouldn’t want to know what last happened there.

I missed Anna. I waited to leave a message on the answering machine because I like to do that: I can say exactly what I mean to say.

Then I called the Museum. The Deputy Director was oddly expansive. He urged me to take my time. The more time I took, of course, the more certain I must be of resolving the problem of the Liber Principis; that was clear. But that did not seem like a serious issue. I thought Hart was nervous already, and his nerves were all I had to work on.

I thought how I would explain what I was doing in the Museum’s elegant and euphemistic official prose: what phrase I would use for intimidation. ‘Interim discussions’, perhaps. ‘Soundings’.

The day opened around me, cooler than most, with a bright sky clotted with huge white clouds. Now Hart was gone, I had only one pressing duty, and that was personal: to complain, again, about my father’s grave.

The Guarda Nacional Republicana had a brick barracks in a maze of low, wired walls and an incongruous fig tree sprawling over its military neatness. Inside, there was an odd air of hospital, but a hospital where people sweat.

I asked for someone whose English was better than my Portuguese, the self-deprecation trick. I gave my name and sat on a bench. A breeze tugged at the photocopies of faces on the wanted board.

‘You are John Costa?’ a man said.

He must be senior, old even, in his starched white shirt. He wore his paunch like decorations under a long, thin face that didn’t match the body. He had the manner of an officer trying not to pull rank, just this once.

I stood up. The man didn’t seem to have the usual blankness of a policeman, the wall on which you’re supposed to project all your guilty thoughts. He almost seemed kind. I expected him to say something doctorly: ‘What seems to be the matter, then?’

Three cops in boots and uniform saluted him crisply, and the kindness dissolved.

‘I am Captain Mello,’ he said, in English. ‘At your service.’

I said I was sorry to disturb him. ‘But someone has vandalized my father’s grave,’ I said. ‘I wanted to see what was happening.’

‘These things almost never happen here,’ Mello said. ‘I’m sorry.’

I thought we might apologize the day away.

‘They’ve spray-painted on the back wall,’ I said. ‘The usual scrawl, and a date: 1953.’

Mello shook his head.

He said, ‘It’s a very unchristian act. Unforgiving.’

His concern seemed gentle, unlike a policeman, and intense. He said my name again. ‘John Costa. Such a pity.’

I said, ‘Should I make a report -‘

‘No, no. That won’t be necessary.’

‘But you don’t even know where the grave is.’

‘We have the report. We’re doing everything we can.’

I thought this must be the standard bromide for a distressed son, but he was watching me as though he expected to find something out.

‘I didn’t understand the figures,’ I said. ‘1953.’

He said, ‘Vandals. They don’t understand what they write half the time.’

‘But you have an idea, don’t you?’

I was brushed off and out of the barracks in minutes, an exercise of authority I hardly noticed until I was in the car park.

And then I was alone in my father’s country, perfectly ignorant, with everything to discover.

It was one of those rare days when you snatch back a little of a child’s most ordinary privileges - to wonder, to chase after wonders, to put together a landscape, a history, a place as you want out of stories, dreams, misunderstandings and what you see. There are no experts, revisionists, conference papers, no reasoned catalogues and guidebooks and politics to cut in between you and sensation. Everything is sharp, and not yet spoiled with words.

I thought Mello could have told me my father’s story. Then I put the thought aside, and I gloried in the high colours and the brilliant light.

I made an expedition. I followed the Mondego River down past castles, green rice paddy, down to the sea. Then I went north a little, where the coast is rocks and alcoves, but it wasn’t a day for that kind of craggy wildness. The sea just persisted at the foot of cliffs.

South, then. There was a fishing village with rooms to let that opened on to a vast crescent of a bay, white sand filled in with more white sand, cabanas in striped canvas rows along a city of boardwalks. The place smelled of coconut oil and iodine. There was a circus tent closed up and waiting for the evening, and a few fishing boats with high bright prows and sterns pulled up by the sea of car park tarmac.

Everyone edged out on the hard, hot sand. Beyond that, the sea stopped them: grey, busy with kelp, alarming small children with its cold and its spitting and sucking.

A father was taking his son to the edge of the water, showing him the whole ocean. The boy stared, and wouldn’t move.

We don’t have children, Anna and I. We never had the clean mercy of a scientific explanation, not until it was too late; we thought it was a pain we had to share and tend. We came to confuse it with love, I think now.

I couldn’t see the ocean any more, just the concrete blocks, pink and white like a matchbox town, that ringed the wide sands and the sea.

I saw Hart, glimpsed him really, in a serious working port, with freighters riding rusty and high. He must have taken a wrong turn. He glared at me, and accelerated out of town over the long, high river bridge which is an estuary wide.

I followed, of course. He had to think I was on his trail, always. He had to be unnerved.

Below the road were salt pans, all as regular as Dutch fields, squared off and neat; but instead of a uniform green, they were sometimes full of dark water, sometimes almost white with salt, with a red tinge and a black vein in the white. There were buildings scattered about, too: huts, stores, refuges.

For a man who’s angry, this landscape is a melodrama. Someone running away could scrabble down to the salt water, fade from one dyke to another, hole up in a brick hut with nothing to drink or eat for miles. Death by condiments. He would drown, sucked down by the salt. He would be blinded by the whiteness of the salt and stumble into machines or deep water or the path of a car.

After the bridge, Hart turned off down cobbled roads, then a main road, then a kind of wrecked avenue with sea pines and yuccas and the occasional sandwich shop, the sort of road that always leads to some superannuated seaside town.

I saw just a man running. I didn’t imagine how he was reinventing me in his mind.

At the end of the avenue, he chanced on surfer heaven: a long, narrow beach that ran away for ever, slammed by waves, sea curling back as translucent as glass but with fine white lines of spray. The buildings stopped. Gulls massed. There were only occasional stark black figures in wet-suits. Once he was on the beach itself, he could see only sand and the ocean, and people playing in the sea, and a black dog on its hind legs trying to wrestle back the waves.

He spat on the sand three times to pardon himself.

The further he walked down that beach, into a distance of spray and light, the more he fancied staying there. He threw himself into that sea, worked his way out until he could feel the muscle of the water under him, and rode it back to shore. And when he was scattered back on the sand, there was still nothing beyond the glinting screen of the ocean, and the long procession of white sands. No distractions. No problems.

I wanted to be his problem.

He had no choices, either; I know that now. On that mile of spare sand, he was still the boy from an orderly childhood, rectangles of green dirt, straight-sided canals, glasshouses flickering at night like ghost industries. He had only the Arkenhouts for parents, and if ever he stopped moving on, he would fall back into the scrubbed regularity of their world and it would scour and sweep and shine him to death.

I watched him on the beach. I found the right road by luck, away from all those families on the big beach, and the girls in brash shorts working the truckers on the main road; but then, there aren’t many destinations on this coast. I saw his car parked among surfers’ vans; and then there was only one direction he could walk, on the edge of the sea.

I liked his agitation. But he didn’t see me as a guard on his life, or a Nemesis; and he wasn’t ready to crack. He saw me as the kind with a job, an office, a wife to tug me back to London. I’d leave him, soon. Besides, he had all the venom of an adolescent’s fine feeling: he was better than anyone settled. Settling was compromise. He didn’t compromise.

He waded out again into the water. I saw him flail at the waves, not swimming but fighting the ocean; and then he was washed back to the sands very suddenly on the fierce run of a riptide. He sat down on the sands.

He saw me waving from a distance. He knew nobody else, so he knew it must be me, even though I was far too distant and indistinct to be identified.

He stared out to sea. Civil servants came and dropped hints to him about stolen property, and then would not leave him alone. Christopher Hart might as well have had lovers.

And there was such a choice, a whole tribe he could have culled: solo barflies, solitary walkers, the disengaged, people abroad for reasons they’d forgotten; men out trying to think up a new life; the ones too absent-minded to keep friends, or too vicious; the dumb but creditworthy; the wanderers who might some day stop long enough to decide what they were pursuing - a people of lost boys who catch too many planes. But he hadn’t stolen one of these shiftless, rootless lives. He’d stolen Hart, and Hart was of interest to others.

He could always steal another life. He would get it right this time. There must be some expatriate whose sudden exit would surprise nobody.

He wondered again about me.

John Costa had a wife in London, a life, a job, certainly a mortgage: obligations and maybe loves.

But that meant John Costa was sure to have a passport and credit and all the vital things. John Costa was a museum keeper who dropped hints about stolen property, who might have reason to disappear. The longer I stayed, he reasoned, the less likely I would simply go back to the office. I was up to something.