Taking Lives (21 page)

I thought the light was playing tricks at first, although beyond the verandahs and shutters of my house there was little light to play. Something seemed to move inside.

I thought of an animal out exploring, a cat wanting a home. The third day I was in Formentina, there was a thud on the metal front door. I opened it to a small, wagging pack of wild dogs, all smiling.

Animals don’t unlock doors, obviously.

The house had a solid door at the front, and a bolt-hole at the back, up against the sharp side of the hill. I had never tried the bolt-hole before, never needed to. I pushed past brambles and grazed myself on stones to get there, stumbled on half an oil drum buried in yellowing grass.

The door opened too easily.

I didn’t go through it at once. I knew there was a jumble of tools, cleaning chemicals, an old clothes horse and paint cans just inside an eccentric kind of hallway, and I didn’t want to send the whole pile clattering on to the tiles.

The pile, I could see, had been tidied to one side.

I was the righteous home owner, returning to confront some thief, but that was not how I felt in that hallway. I felt oddly exposed. The invasion was so orderly, so methodical.

The door to the kitchen stood ajar. I edged through it, trying not to make the hinges sing, and I kept low like a soldier, an odd instinct for a sedentary man.

One time in London, we found the house prised open and smashed, drawers tilted out, all our organized life scattered about at random, and shit in the centre of the living-room carpet. But nothing had been touched in this kitchen. The two onions, the bottles of red wine, the bananas with their flight of tiny midges, the cups and glasses were all in place.

I heard my own breathing. I thought I would need to cough. I listened so fiercely, and I could make out nothing in the next room except the fact someone had been here, might still be here.

I couldn’t dislodge a tool from the hallway pile, not without noise. I picked up a wine bottle.

I threw myself forward, knocked open the door to my living room.

The contents of my jacket were spread out on the table: credit cards, tickets, i.d.s, my passport, two cheque books, a little leather pouch of cards.

I checked, but all of them were present, all the signs and proofs of John Costa’s life and credit. That fact was more alarming than anything. I put the wine bottle down.

It might have been someone else, I told myself, and not Christopher Hart. I did not convince myself.

He came to my house the next morning, asked if I wanted to come for a walk. The situation was in danger of becoming absurd: two men married by a crime, never quite losing sight of each other, but keeping quiet as though quiet made everything ordinary.

He showed me bottles of water in his knapsack, some chocolate. The walk was a challenge, not a casual thing.

We went up by Jesus on his white cross and kept walking up the goat track into the fringe of the woods. There was a little breeze. There was brown bracken, lavender in flower, heather and foxgloves and scrubby oak that grew like bushes; and through it the foresters had cut roads as wide as a bulldozer, clay-white and hot.

I suppose lovers go for walks that seem like this: inconsequential walks, for the sake of company. Hart paid me a kind of attention that was also a demand.

We didn’t say much for the first mile. Then we both noticed that the roads had twisted about, that the folds of the mountain were more complicated than we had supposed. We weren’t entirely lost, because we had up and down, the direction of the sun, and some sense of how the hill ran; but we couldn’t point to home any more.

‘Easier to go up,’ he said. ‘We can see our way from there.’

‘In Switzerland they have signposts on the mountains. I miss them.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ he said.

We walked a little faster now we had a purpose: to find our way. If we’d been boys, we’d have had everything to discover and talk about. As men, we just sometimes talked. At each fork in the path we slowed down because either fork would do and sometimes it was not clear which would lead consistently upwards.

‘If you want to make things good, you can,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here and not the police.’

Hart scuffed at white stones on the path.

‘Think about it,’ I said. I walked on briskly.

I had no idea who was walking with me. I felt entirely safe, even here in the woods, where a man can slip, slip in the path of a hunter’s gun, lie in the path of a fire and, presto, out of the woods comes a whole new John Costa, a tall and blond one, off where nobody knows him. Cartagena, maybe; Arkenhout had seen films made in Cartagena. He liked the thought of a colonial, tropical place.

I was well ahead now, walking soundlessly on the baking clay, making my point by being ahead and walking fast just like my father used to do. I turned and shouted for Hart to come on.

Hart wasn’t there. He had cut off the track, to piss perhaps.

I stood there dutifully. The weight of the day came down on me: hot, sullen, with erratic, furious movement in the air somewhere distant. Far across the valley, where there was brown smoke in among the haze, lightning sliced the sky horizontally, straight as a knife. The woods seemed very dense suddenly, as regimented as planted fields.

Hart must be in among the brush and the scrubby oak bushes and the heather. Perhaps he was watching me now.

I turned around, turned around again. I could sense a new, hot wind on the path: a shift in the weather, nothing more.

The lightning cracked the sky one more time.

I started running. I wanted to be out of the woods before the storm came. I wanted to be clear of whatever Hart was doing.

I missed my step on a tree root and I fell. My ankle turned under me, and the shock of the pain made me grunt like a hog.

Baked white tracks ran down and up through the trees, forking and twisting. I wasn’t sure I knew my way home any more.

I am sure I heard footsteps going away.

I couldn’t stand for a moment. I thought the hot wind behind me might be fire, just out of sight, set somewhere behind a rack of stones or a thicket of new, bright eucalyptus. I didn’t know how to run from the fire, or where to run.

Hart said, ‘You all right?’

He stood almost over me.

I said, ‘Give me a minute. I’m just winded, I think.’

He was carrying a long strip of eucalyptus bark, the tough stuff shed from the trees like raw ribbons. He snapped it against itself.

Then he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. I couldn’t move for the moment, so I watched the match flare and die as though that was interesting, watched it fall still lit on the ground, just out of my reach. The ash fell after it, and finally the lit butt of the cigarette.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the day ahead of us.’

He walked ahead now; he’d won that point.

I heard the birds clatter high up in the eucalyptus.

We were always going upwards. I told myself that was common sense, that we would never easily find the track back down the hill, that we had to climb until the woods cleared and we were out on the bare serra.

But Hart’s pace was racing fierce and mine had to match his.

I asked for water. He passed me a bottle, but he did not pause.

‘You know you have some explaining to do,’ I said. ‘Why you didn’t notice the Liber Principis was damaged - if you didn’t damage it yourself.’

‘I have some explaining to do?’ Hart said.

‘We want the pieces back, unharmed. If we get them, probably the Museum will ask no further questions.’

‘You’re a keeper,’ Hart said. ‘You’re not a policeman. So why did they send you?’

‘If this is an aberration, the Museum has no interest in pressing matters. We’re only concerned with the paintings. To call in the police at this stage -‘

‘You mean you don’t want people to know.’

‘I want the pieces,’ I said. ‘I’m not leaving Portugal without them.’

The ground was too rough for easy, steady speed. Animals had slipped about in the wet spring, and left steps in the baked mud. There were stones, sometimes fallen tree trunks. In places, the pines massed so close they killed out any green thing living at their roots, and their fallen needles wrapped the ground ahead like rough brown paper.

‘Nobody’s leaving,’ Hart said.

I realize now what he had to think about. This crime of Hart’s had acquired a name, at last, and some specifics. If he’d touched up a librarian, the Museum wouldn’t care so much; nor if he embezzled, drugged or indulged in inter-species dating. They wouldn’t have sent anyone if all he’d stolen was an idea. But they cared enough to leave this John Costa here for days, even weeks, all because of something official, something with an index card and an accession number and an identity.

It was Hart’s crime, just like killing Hart was Paul Raven’s crime: it could not touch his moral holiday. But it could seriously disrupt his chances of a next life.

His arms pumped like an athlete walker, like a prizewinner. I was infuriated all at once by the thought of following him, but not sure enough of my ankle to try to overtake.

He was waiting for me to try, or to ask to stop. I wouldn’t stop.

He didn’t say anything now.

The dark in between the trees, which was a lack of life as well as light, began to break in strips and patches. Grass, mint, a little fennel reappeared, but only in clumps where the light caught. As we climbed, the clumps became little gardens and sometimes the gardens were like meadows.

We came out suddenly on to the high serra. The light was as hot as it was brilliant, a hammer on the skin. Lightning cut across the sky, and left the trees shivering in the electric wind.

In common sense, we should have turned back, not walked out on to bare moor with an electric storm massing above us. We should have looked around and got our bearings; so far our only direction had been upwards. We should have stopped.

I wouldn’t be the first to stop. He wouldn’t be the first to stop. So we raced over the rough, dusty grass as though we had some destination in mind.

When I called Anna next, I chose my time carefully, so I could hear her instead of the digitized voice on the answering machine.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘It’s a kind of stalemate,’ I said. ‘I just have to wait him out.’

‘Can I come? For a weekend?’

‘I don’t know how long I’ll be here. It might all be finished this week and then -‘

‘I could come this weekend.’

She couldn’t, I was almost sure. She never could simply tear things up, not even an empty day in a diary; she guarded herself with timetables.

‘If you want to,’ I said. I meant to be cruel.

‘I’ll surprise you,’ Anna said.

I’d stopped making a formal daily report to the Deputy Director. Hart was alive and well and behaving as you might expect, I told him, although he had no apparent routine for work. We were both shocked at this. At least I still had the sense to know that I should call, sometimes, in case I started to seem dispensable.

My trouble wasn’t Hart, not yet. It was this place, this Formentina, this Portugal. It always came back to my father. He had come back to Portugal because he was settling again, so he’d chosen the practical low ground: with water pressure, power lines, daily buses, mini-market. I didn’t need that. I could live high and picturesque, like any transient. The landscape to me was pleasure, a pleasure not unlike holiday: allowing the eyes to open wide without cutting a place down to the road you have to take, the address you have to find.

The trouble was: I was not in a hotel where people in uniforms replaced one another daily. I couldn’t help starting to see the particular people in Formentina - to know their names, something of their stories.

I knew Arturo from his passion to explain things. He had fields of new apple saplings, planted as close as beans, and he said he had linden trees, his own plantation somewhere up among the pines; he also kept bees that blundered, drunk and fat, through the sweet bells of linden flowers. The condition of every day was work.

‘I’m going to have an operation,’ he said, quite abruptly.

I said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘They don’t know.’

I said, ‘It’s a biopsy?’

‘They’ll know when they’ve done it.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘if you could take us to the hospital. On Friday.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘What time?’

‘Eight in the morning. They could send an ambulance, but I don’t feel like an ambulance. I feel like going down in an ordinary way, while I can.’

His face was wrecked skin and utterly open eyes. He was very afraid.

I thought of my father dying. I must have seen the moment, when he was propped in the door, when he was in my arms on the steps, but I missed it, too: the exact moment when the body was empty at last, the moment of difference. It was too powerful to be imagined.

But then, I could hardly imagine who my father was and what he felt when he was here.

It wasn’t enough to say he loved the place, dreamed of it; you can tend love, keep dreams, without ever going back. Usually, it’s better that way. There’d been moments, away from Anna, when I got myself in and out of love in a day or so, in hotels in different countries, so as to have memories; but that was transitory, conference stuff, and I never wanted to go back.

Arturo came out of the shade, and stood watching me, and I him.

He wanted to explain. He just didn’t know what to explain. And I sat there, still unable to make up a life for him out of what I knew. He seemed almost content, but he sometimes sat down suddenly on stones as though movement had stopped being possible.

His wife Zulmira kept the key to the chapel, I knew that, and every night she went there to set a light burning; but how she ordered the world through saints and the Virgin, kept alive the hope of sudden miracles in a place that never seemed to change, I had no idea. I ought to understand it in my blood, for my father’s sake. Perhaps it was the secret of how he, too, organized the world.

Arturo shouted up: ‘The grapes used to be a marvel at that house.’