Taking Lives (18 page)

Apparently, he did think I might have dreams and fancies. But he thought they were just cinema, finished without consequences when the lights went up. He didn’t know much about movies, either.

It was the first time he thought about killing me. He promised me later he dismissed the thought almost at once.

By the time he caught up to me, suggested lunch, asked advice on which among the unfamiliar fish he should eat, bought me a glass of white port like some tourist with a sweet tooth, he was almost adhesive.

‘I ought to be flattered,’ he said. ‘You following me. I thought I was just an anonymous professor.’

‘I just happened this way. I’m hardly invading your privacy -‘

He said, ‘You’re here, though. You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’

I shrugged and poured vinho verde.

‘If you weren’t here,’ he said, as though he was thinking matters out, ‘nobody would know me.’

‘Maybe not.’

I didn’t want to have some freshman talk about identity, or be eyewitness to some premature mid-life crisis.

‘But if you’re here -‘ he said.

‘You know I can’t leave until we have things sorted out. The Liber Principis.’

‘Really?’ he said.

‘You know that.’

‘I can count on that?’ he said. I thought he was being ironic.

We took the fast road home, a two-car convoy under a turning sky that was no longer blue and bright, but sepia, smudged with black. There was a smell of baked air. Where light ought to flicker through the trees there was only smoke, until the road pulled us on, out of the woods and on to flat, wet rice paddy. Then the smoke stood behind us like a wall.

Hart stopped abruptly by a castle at the roadside: battlements, underpinnings, a church built inside the walls.

I overshot for a moment, then quit the road fast, alarming the posse of small cars running behind me.

The castle was stuck with a crown of bright blond stone, newly fixed, and everything below had been hollowed into the hill: caves, sooty cooking places, old holes for latrines, stones rounded by a hundred years of romantics who wanted a seat with a view, enclosed by an outer wall that had mostly become a high grass dyke. I wandered. A goat stared at me. I trailed around the entire outer wall and climbed to the stone enclosure at the top of the hill.

I didn’t look for Hart. I assumed he would want to find me.

I crossed into the inner keep, down on to a floor of set stone rubble. I could see nobody, hear nothing moving except the cars streaming past on the road below. The stillness bothered me.

I ran the steel steps and gantries up to the battlements. The view was red earth and the dusty greens of summer trees, and villages like clusters of white boxes. But I wasn’t looking properly. I was listening and looking out of the corner of my eye for Hart.

The man had nowhere to hide. He had no reason to hide. There weren’t even pools of shadow to hide him under a high, overhead sun. His absence hung in the air.

I stood against the cross-shaped arrow slit in a corner of the battlements, looking down and around the circle of the keep. I thought I heard a door close. But a ruin has no doors that close with that tight, quick sound.

The afternoon heat came down like hammers on my mind. I told myself that was the problem.

I walked the battlements, checking where I could see down into the keep or on to the hill around the castle. I came down quickly to the main tower, and the way out.

Hart’s car was still there.

I couldn’t imagine what he might be doing. I assumed he’d turned off to see the castle as a distraction, that he was playing the tourist for a moment.

I went back to the undercrofts of the ruin, the hollows and caves of the place. I went gratefully out of the sun.

Papers blew about. A fine small breeze worked the olive leaves on the hill.

I found a hollow behind the main cooking cave, and walked into it: just curious, I told myself, about the place. A dog flustered out, nervous and yelping. I turned back towards the sun.

Hart was standing in the entrance of the cave. He had a knife in his right hand, something solid in the left.

I said, ‘I thought I’d lost you.’

I couldn’t see the expression on his face.

He took the knife and began turning an orange in his hand so he could pare away the peel in a neat spiral.

‘We’ll have to sort this out,’ I said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m only interested in the Liber Principis. If we can just sort out -‘

‘I guess it interests everyone.’ He didn’t know what he was saying, so he was perfectly deadpan.

I said, ‘We’d better go.’

He dropped the orange peel to the ground, where it glinted like oil in the sun.

‘We can talk later,’ I said.

As I went past him, I thought I felt something like a shiver across my hand.

Hart said, ‘I’m sorry.’

He smiled. I never saw a smile like that before.

In the car, I watched a fine line of blood open on the back of my hand. I wiped it away. I thought at first it must have been some accident I’d failed to notice, but my hand smelt of oranges.

On the way back, he drove kindly so we moved in the lockstep of a convoy: safe, protected.

But he hated the idea of ‘protection’. He told me later he much preferred the idea of being pursued; it was less alarming than the awful, regulating persistence of goodwill.

He took a wrong turn. But it might not have been a wrong turn, so I followed. He ran several bends ahead of me, then felt obliged to slow for a while.

Two kids were hitchhiking at the roadside: stringy, blond, undressed, too young and foreign-looking and gigglingly innocent to be trucker’s tarts. He stopped.

The two blonds scrambled up to the car and smiled energetically, as though they didn’t know enough to calculate their appeal. He laughed back.

The kids wanted the next town but one. They packed in beside Hart. I could almost smell the oil and the baked blond skin on the girl and the boy; I was interested, too.

Hart showed off driving, of course.

But then he stopped the car suddenly and pitched both kids out on to the roadside. They looked startled at the failure of skin and charm. They stood while he drove off and the girl gave him the finger.

Then he was the one, again, who suggested a drink. He came bounding down the steps before I could wash my face and change my shirt. A little above my house he slowed for a moment, settled his collar, arched his back and then walked on as though he was distracted by all kinds of professorial thoughts. I watched the change.

He said: ‘Maria left me a note. The police have been asking where I am.’

‘Did she say why?’ I knew the Museum would have made no official complaint; we are discreet about sin in general, and the sin of theft implies the sin of inattention to security.

‘Someone trying to find me, I suppose.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a good job I’ve got you to vouch for me,’ he said, brightly. ‘You’re official. You matter.’

‘And you have the reputation,’ I said. ‘We just have titles in the Museum. We just wear the titles for a while, nothing personal.’

He said, ‘But your being here, it makes things easier.’

Later he said, ‘The mountains close in on you after a while. You’ll see.’

‘I like the mountains.’

He was restless like a boy in his chair. He stood up, went to the window, paced a little, said his apologies and went out to walk down the crease of the valley.

He broke a stick from a dead bush and thrashed at brambles and tall grasses. A dust of yellow powder hung in the air. But on the way back, he remembered to turn to my house and he waved and grinned like a good holiday neighbour.

Maria was reading a book about fire that summer. Someone must have left it in one of the houses for rent: a book full of diagrams and graphs, pictures of spiked plants from burned places. Some days it filled a whole afternoon.

The wind was coming hot from Spain each day, and in the afternoons Vila Nova was closed. Open a shutter, and the whole house would sink under the heavy rush of the heat; you could bruise yourself on it. Even the smell of the town was cooked: pine and eucalyptus in the lumberyards, market rubbish, a thin fume of glue from the carpet factory, hot roses in dry gardens.

The foreigners were all pinned down by the heat, as you’d expect - too hot even to fret or feud and call a lawyer. So Maria could read about grass trees and orchids that flower only after fire, how animals don’t panic in fire, that they double back through the firewall to the safety of ground that has already burned. She read about hawks that fly into the smoke plumes to catch the escaping grasshoppers, and beetles that dance into fire itself, scramble down branches where the sap is still boiling and the wood is red hot. Even English beetles do this.

Fire was on everybody’s minds that summer. Only Hart and I were too foreign to be worried.

Maria was curious enough to go back to the site of the fire where she saw Hart dancing. She told herself she wanted to check the book, to see if ants came out to steal the hard poppy-like seedheads of the eucalyptuses, if bushes broke into flower on scorched stems and small, round mice came stirring up the ash. Maybe there’d be a grass tree or an orchid; she could dream.

The brambles were just spiked tangles of black string. There was a small new clearing, some uphill scars on old trees. She was glad the fire had been beaten back. Mountain people live the same way with snow and its sudden, deadly shifts, flood plain people with rivers; they’re nervous, and they like a little triumph.

She walked into the wood, reading the fire: how it moved, where it started. It had spread out from a single point, as a fan does, and it had stayed small enough for the point to be obvious.

It was Thursday, hunters’ day. Guns popped in the quiet, popped again and again. After lunch and wine, there’s a lot more ammunition used, a lot less blood spilled; anything moving is a target when you can’t quite see through the trees. Men start shooting eagles and wondering why the dogs can’t find them. They fill a cat with shot in the hope it might still turn out to be a rabbit.

She was in a clearing under the black knots of a burned mimosa. All the fire’s tracks led back here.

She felt uneasy. Hart was far away, but she’d seen him here, and his presence or absence had started to matter to her. She was ready to make a story out of anything she found.

Under the mimosa were burned sheets of paper. That’s not unexpected; people dump rubbish out here because it’s easier than finding a legal way to leave it, cars sometimes, tyres and metal angles often, drums and plastic and cans and the five-litre wine bottles, papers that nobody misses much.

This leaf of paper was thicker than usual, though, thick as a photograph. Its surface was badly blistered. She picked it up and turned it over.

She couldn’t read it, of course. But she was sure for a moment she was looking into eyes.

My house was under siege: buses lining the road, blocking the tight corners, letting off a muddle of old people in good clothes who all tried to stand in the shade. I watched from my window like a village spinster.

The old herd seemed to remember a purpose suddenly, and they moved off up the hill. I thought the path would break them, but they went steadily forward and upward, hauling their bodies ahead: hundreds of steps, irregular and sharp-edged so you had to come at them with your mind alert and work your calf muscles to go up.

It was too hot to dress, too hot to move. I stood at the window in shorts, trying to make sense of the old people moving with such grace and purpose. They were going to a cross that bore a Christ with the wounds painted in.

They had found their own speeds now, women in black linen, men in clean shirts. The path zigzagged on the slope, so they seemed to fill my whole field of vision, to take a quiet landscape and fill it up with effort. Some women went on their knees. Some went on bare, bloody feet. A few stalled like flies caught on paper, and some looked back to call to the others, but mostly they went forward in a serious, concentrated quiet.

My father was never part of this, I think. But I can’t be entirely sure. He came from here, and he knew about these things; they could be buried deeper than a son can ever find.

I thought I heard someone at the door. I went to open it, and there were five peaches piled on the doorstep.

Hart watched the pilgrims from his steps. He was thinking he’d chosen a place that was all too particular and special.

He told me:

Before, he’d always chosen places that were nice, neat generalizations, the kind people choose when they run away to spend their money, with mansions, often pink, and gardens with palm trees and pools, people endlessly tan, just enough booze and drugs to ease you through days in the shade and the water. There might be boats like floating houses, too, and servants attuned to whims of iron. These, usually, were his places of choice. People didn’t talk about salvation, much less crawl on their knees about it. It would have been bad manners.

He’d chosen average people, too, with credit. Christopher Hart was turning out different, not all what he had seemed: which was a fixed quantity, anonymous, professorial, predictable, who had half of a sabbatical year left that anyone could steal. This other Hart interested people: museums, even police.

Well, he was interesting enough now. His life had been stolen. He was fairy-tale stuff: alive and dead at the same time.

He tasted the sweat on his forearms. He went to the shower and let the brown water stain him. The past few days, the world had dried up so much that water now came unfiltered, because filters could impede the slow flow.

He didn’t want any more to see the bent, dark figures who were coming back down the scorched hillside, as though they’d found something at the top.

Maria de Sousa de Conceicao Mattoso stood in the doorway. She didn’t announce herself; she was just there, a silhouette against strong sun.

‘I was passing,’ she said.

Hart brought her in.

‘Everything OK?’ she said. ‘Tudo bem?’