Taking Lives (20 page)

He wasn’t inquiring any more. He was checking.

He took me to the good restaurant by the castle and bought shrimp stewed in oil with bay leaves and garlic, and then roasted salt cod, and a bottle of serious wine: Caves Sao Joao Reserva, 1986, big and woody and red. It was his way of thanking me for saving his life, and surrendering mine. It was like being courted.

I don’t know if it was the wine, in quantity, but I was stark awake at midnight, sitting up in bed. The silence seemed unusually deep: none of the machine noises of the wet woods, no cicadas and frogs like musical saws, no whirring nightjars. The world had narrowed down to this tight valley, and it was waiting.

Low in the woods, across the serra, there was the abrupt sound of branches tearing, a shout, a shriek and then a fearful whining. Then there was a great sigh that seeped into the night like water into dry ground.

I closed the shutters then and crashed about the house, pulling down glasses, slapping them on tables, running taps, anything to break the silence that was waiting for me at the windows.

The next morning there was a neat parcel on my doorstep: a leaf of cabbage as tough as canvas and tied up with stems. Inside was a piece of meat still filmed with blood.

My neighbour across the pathway, a man in his fifties with a grin suspended on two teeth, watched me open it. ‘Pork,’ he said. ‘Pork from the mountains.’

I looked puzzled.

‘They got a pig last night,’ the neighbour said. ‘There’s been a pig around the maize fields and they went after it.’

I said, ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

The neighbour nodded, approvingly. ‘It’s good stewed,’ he said.

I introduced myself; so did Arturo.

‘You bought the house,’ Arturo asked.

‘I’m just here for a few weeks.’

‘Oh. You want a copo?’

‘It’s a bit early -‘

‘I thought you were Portuguese.’

‘My father was. We lived in London a long time.’

‘And now you’re coming home?’

I said, ‘You never know.’ I couldn’t tell him I would certainly go back to London, back to my official self.

‘You want a copo?’

We went into the shed alongside the house, a tiled cave that smelt of spilled wine and was masked in by the flourish and tendrils of vines. Arturo opened the tap of a barrel and poured.

‘That’s good,’ I said, even though it was raw, thin stuff. I drank slowly; my father told me once there’s a half-wild grape that makes a methanol mixture that can stop the brain.

Arturo waited for me to finish, and poured another; there was only one glass. He settled on a concrete wall, still smiling.

‘We didn’t see you. We thought you might be sick.’

‘I was here,’ I said. ‘Just busy.’

‘We’re always busy.’

‘I’m from London.’

‘I was in Bordeaux. Ten years. I drove taxis.’

‘Beautiful town.’

‘I love the city. Any city. The country’s just work and dust. Work and dust.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re married?’

‘I’m married. She’s in London.’

‘She’s coming here?’

‘I’m going back.’

‘I came back from France,’ Arturo said. ‘People don’t believe it, but I did.’

‘What took you to France in the first place?’ But that was a dumb question.

‘Hunger. We didn’t have anything to eat,’ Arturo said. ‘So I left one morning and I went to France and when I’d got construction work and got somewhere to sleep I wrote to my wife and told her what I’d done. Then I sent money, of course. Then I drove taxis. I knew all the night people. Every whore in Bordeaux.’

I felt the wine scouring my stomach. ‘That was in Salazar’s time?’

‘I sent money,’ Arturo said. ‘What else could I do?’

‘You liked France?’

‘I like towns,’ Arturo said. ‘Out here, you never go anywhere. You just stay.’

‘It’s very beautiful here.’

‘Oh yes,’ Arturo said.

‘I didn’t know there was wild boar around here.’

‘Too many. You’re not supposed to kill them. They’re “rare”.’ He put the word in sardonic commas. ‘Then they get in the maize fields and twenty minutes later you don’t have food for the winter. So what are you supposed to do?’

‘You stew the meat?’

‘Zulmira was going to cook it for you, but maybe you don’t like our cooking. She could get you onions, and bay leaves and some garlic. I’ll leave them for you.’

‘Thank you.’

Arturo said, ‘We thought you might have come to stay.’

I said, ‘I thought about a garden.’

‘You want to make a garden? You can’t plant in summer.’

‘Just something.’

‘Flowers?’ Arturo said. ‘You like flowers?’

‘There won’t be time for beans or cabbage,’ I said.

Hart would not avoid me now; he refused to run. Since the police came calling, I was his very useful colleague, to be cultivated.

He was good at silence, I remember. I told him more about Anna than I quite meant to, and without saying anything in particular. We mentioned the Museum. At least he provided a kind of occupation while I bought death certificates - impossible numbers, at exorbitant prices, from satisfied clerks - and adjusted all my father’s goods and papers. I could have left the whole business to Maria but it had become part of settling my father down.

So we ate together: young chickens done on the barbecue with hot piri-piri, or bacalhau a bras - the soft, golden dish of egg and salt cod and tiny sticks of potato, the essence of fish and chips and eggs for breakfast all in one; salads of tuna and black-eyed peas, spiked with garlic. We worked our way through a culture of the seas, hot African pepper, a pig in every shed, a bean-eating nation with a taste for garlic and the sour edge of cilantro.

I’d have known my father better if I had thought of those meals as information, not just lunch. I know that now.

Hart became some kind of social director, the man who kept us amused. He proposed an expedition, at lunchtime in a cafe when Maria was there. He said we should all go to the monastery church at Lorvao. He’d read about it in the Michelin guide, maybe, and he imagined some spectacle of white and gilt.

Maria gave him an odd look, as though he must be making an inexcusable joke, but at the time I missed it. She did not come with us.

We drove zigzag roads, round bends of olive trees all tangled up with the brilliant blue of morning glory, past windmills on a bare hill. I had to stop him playing Abba at full blast on the car stereo.

The monastery was impossible to miss, the core of a small town with a fussing river: a white, palatial range with windows surrounded in stone the colour of the crusts of new loaves.

The windows also had bars. I said something about that, but only jokingly.

The high metal gates lay open. I drove carefully ahead, past civic lawns and geometric beds of marigolds and red salvia.

‘Ask someone,’ Hart said.

There was a man standing by a kind of kiosk, with a cigarette hanging unlit in his mouth.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me where the church is?’

He looked at me as though he were looking in a mirror. And you don’t answer yourself; people might think you are mad.

A second man came up behind the car, and stood still. A third arrived.

Hart said, ‘What is this?’

The stillness around the car was uncanny. Nobody spoke. Nobody made a social gesture: no smiles, no pointing, no pompous or angry shouts to tell us we were trespassing or in the wrong place. The men moved around us as arbitrarily as fish.

A door of the monastery opened and shut quickly. Two men bustled out wearing white coats. They seemed to be arguing.

I tried to get their attention by sounding the horn.

They turned briefly. ‘Closed,’ one of them shouted. ‘Closed.’ They waved us away.

Hart said, ‘They’re doctors.’

‘I guess they are.’

‘Then they’re fucking madmen, these men,’ Hart said. ‘I didn’t know this was a madhouse.’

‘We just reverse out of here,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Hart said, ‘Maybe they’re lepers. It’s something contagious. I know.’

I missed reverse the first time I tried.

Hart rolled up the window. He put the men on TV and watched them like a child watches danger on the screen: face slack, body rigid, open-eyed.

We crept backwards from the monastery door. I was afraid the men would not part to let us through, but slowly they did. One of them, as we passed, remembered about smiling. He shifted his lips, opened his teeth; but his eyes stayed dead.

At the roadway, I said, ‘We should have asked about the church. You said we could get into the church.’

Hart said, ‘I want to get the hell out of here.’

I drove quickly up the hill.

Hart said, ‘Maria should have told us.’

‘I suppose she thought everyone knew.’

‘I saw my mother like that once,’ he said. ‘She smiled like a doll. She couldn’t move all the time. I -‘

Then he remembered that he was a man who must have no history.

‘I could use a drink,’ he said.

The drink must have occupied him, because his car was missing when I went for a walk that evening, even when I came back in failing light, with the sky gone the colours of a Cecil B de Mille ending: peach, scarlet, pale blues and greens, all ladled indiscriminately across monumental clouds.

There was no light in Hart’s house. It seemed so quiet I would be bound to hear the car coming back.

I tried the door.

The room was a holiday vacancy, with a laptop computer on the table.

I looked around. Some odd, old scruple stopped me rifling through papers, checking cupboards and drawers; at least, for the moment. I could say I was just waiting for Hart. I was sure I was entitled to check on him, to find out about him; but I found it hard to play the policeman.

The laptop was connected to the mains, so there would be no loss of battery power to inform on me if I simply opened it.

I had no particular expectations. I just thought that somewhere in the work and letters, there might be some way to fashion a useful picture of Hart.

At least there wasn’t any question about how he worked; the machine went straight into Nota Bene. I checked the names of files, then their dates, and then the length. I found ‘outline’, a longish file, seventy-three kilobytes, that Hart had last touched a month or so ago.

I opened the file and read.

This was like meeting Hart at some cocktail party: a snapshot of Hart when he was trying to impress.

The outline was for a book about the time Prince Maurice spent in Dutch Brazil, a collar of land round Recife and Pernambuco. The prince went there, in the seventeenth century, to govern a tenuous colony that depended not so much on willing settlers as controlling the trading ports. He’d taken something with him. This new world was a place of monsters and legends, but he wanted to know what exactly was there, however strange, to give this unfamiliar stuff the same kind of names and classifications that the known world had. He threw away all the lovely myths in the hope of being modern.

He brought artists to record what grew and lived there. His doctor became his naturalist. He built palaces on an island (he never truly settled on mainland America at all) and from there he sent out painters and observers to find, fix, list and explain everything. He sent Frans Post, painter, to make pictures that would bring new settlers: landscapes with downstage chorus lines of safe, exotic animals, set against blue mountains, with sugar mills and old cathedrals to imply a long, tame European past. He sent Albert Eckhout, painter, to record the turtles, the crested and dishevelled hens, the beans, pallid mushrooms, great cats and knobbled, glittering lemons: anything new.

So far, so unremarkable. Hart had a nice historical vignette. He’d obviously thought about the art on the dust jacket. The only thing missing was a point.

It came soon enough: a knock-down, drag-out routine. Hart, it seemed, was outraged by science raping the Americas, by the brutal intrusion of the modern, even if the worst sin of the modern seemed to be collecting watercolours. The modern stood accused of seeking hegemony over the bright fruits, the living, chattering things, the human beings classified in the albums. All of imperialism, of Eurocentricity, of patriarchy probably and certainly modern science and its ills was implicit in these seemingly lovely pages. The proof was how aristocrats in the eighteenth century valued them: a confirmation that the albums were themselves corrupt.

It was exhausting stuff to read. The words were like millipedes in motion: articulated, shiny and weird. There was fury everywhere, a determination to accuse the founders of, say, a botanical garden of complicity in everything Hart found wanting, including History for its failure to be like Hart. The pages spat ideas like little weapons.

I was relieved, for a moment. There was nothing to suggest Hart had a passion for revenge on his material.

But then came the flashy stuff: a discovery, a name-maker and, even worse, headlines - about this great imperial Museum holding what it should never have had, about fifty years of concealment and bluff. Hart took it too far, of course; he ranted about the hegemony - always that big, blocky, violent word - of museums and historians themselves. He denounced, in no particular order, object-fetishism, elitism, imperialism, the historical process (which seemed to be distinct from history or writing it) and the great sins of being modern, even the crime of linear thinking and reason’s rape of the planet. But while he juggled shiny abstractions, he tried on a hero’s role: a hero of the stacks, a treasure hunter adventuring busily against evil, with a degree.

I thought I heard a car on the road down below. I shut off the machine and went out up the steps, away from my own house, so I could seem to come back casually from an evening stroll in the woods.

I saw people biting at the fields with picks, carrying greens for the goats. It looked like stage stuff, set against this drop of slate and stone. But then again, so did Hart, a Jekyll and Hyde: at once the scholar Hart, with his footnotes and his moral certainties, and the criminal Hart who stole pictures and bluffed so well. I had to help him choose which role he liked the best.