Taking Lives (28 page)

Hart had one hefty blue vulcanite suitcase on wheels, a kind of cabin trunk, called Globetrotter. He fumbled the irregular surface of its bottom, wondering if there could be something false. One of the white inside straps came away.

He started laughing.

He knew then he’d taken Hart’s small but perfectly formed credit and left behind a physical fortune. He could surely have played Hart well enough to sell the pictures. He could have had money of his own, for once, which would not run out like other people’s credit runs out when people start asking questions. The money could have bought him a life of his own.

He went to the verandah. The sun had begun to go down, and the mass of the pine woods was a little gold, a little pink: decorator calm. It was an ordinary show, seen from an ordinary kind of place. He was ordinary, too, caught now in a name and a history like everyone else.

He went back to the Globetrotter, with a knife. He levered up the bottom of the case, under the lining.

Nothing.

He couldn’t be Hart, he decided. He couldn’t satisfy this John Costa and produce the stolen paintings; so being Hart meant perpetual trouble.

If he was John Costa, though, then the link between Arkenhout and Hart was broken for good. He’d leave behind a body and a name that could carry all his crimes and adventures.

He told me he had never thought about a death this way before: as something satisfying, not just necessary.

The next days were like dinner that night: a kind of dance, two people transfixed with each other, life and death, a third cutting in. Sometimes it was Hart who felt like the intruder, he said. Sometimes it was Anna. She says she could not calculate what kind of story was happening between Hart and me. We all had business that politeness forbade us mentioning, let alone finishing: a theft, a foundering marriage, the possibility of murder.

Hart’s sleep broke up, so he told Maria later, on dreams - dreams that the summer had been brutal in Holland, too, and the water in the River Vecht was running low. He knew it was the Vecht from the bends, the chestnuts, the mansions and the constant river traffic: small, brisk boats between the lawns.

His mother sat at a lock, drinking tea. The lock opened and a long boat edged in. The gates shut, and the water drained. But the water wouldn’t stop draining until the floor of the lock was shining mud.

His mother was in the lock, trying to shift the boat with her shoulders. She couldn’t move it. Her feet slipped. She was in the mud, her face up against something bare and white. She looked eye to eye into the hollows of a skull.

She said out loud, ‘Martin. Are you all right, Martin?’

This happened; but it was not Mrs Arkenhout who made the discovery. It was a boy called Piet, eleven years old, son of an artists’ union official and a teacher, who was helping on the lock and moved much faster than the old, official lock-keeper. He pulled out the skull, and said he wanted to keep it because it had wounds, and must be a famous warrior, probably Krull or Conan.

The police wouldn’t listen to him. Instead, they started to run tests.

Maria came to see Hart in the afternoon. ‘The police have been asking about you. Again,’ she said.

‘I don’t know why.’

‘Checking on foreigners, maybe.’

‘They never check. Do they?’

She’d invented him already for the afternoon: fugitive in hideaway, risk of death. She put down a loaf on the kitchen table and stood there, slight and fragile in her summer skirt. ‘You ought to keep the shutters closed,’ she said. ‘People will know you’re here.’

He couldn’t complain. His life, all his lives, depended on just this: being what people expected him to be.

She went about checking doors, closing shutters, drawing curtains in the dark. The light left was the shine on skin, the bar of bright wood under the front door, a few prickles of light where the slats in the wood ceiling stood proud of each other.

She came up to him in the doorway. She undid his shirt, began to tug it off, and then she threw herself against him as though she could force into this moment all the desperate, big-screen passion in all the cinema houses of the world, and she was smiling. Then she kissed him, forcefully.

He knew the cues, too. He had his hands high under her skirt, moving fast, no need for persuasion; she’d imagined them in a film noir, lost souls throwing themselves on this last fire. The choreography failed only at the usual moments, tucking out of pants, standing clear of jeans. Then bodies took over from the scenario, and there wasn’t time or life to lose - him standing, her legs around him, her whole weight, it seemed, concentrated on bringing him as deeply as possible into her.

Their skin was slick and hot, their breath desperate. It was all as urgent, as proper for a condemned man’s last night, as she could stage.

Then she collected her clothes.

‘I just wanted you to know about the police,’ she said. ‘So they can’t surprise you.’

For a moment he wasn’t sure if this, too, was part of the matinee story they had just played.

My house acquired a routine in those days. It had been my cell, a refuge, a place without associations like a hotel room; but Anna’s presence filled it with our shared life. The arrangement of chairs mattered now; it defined how we would talk in the evening. The bed was aired and crisply made.

And food was needed. The markets in Vila Nova were on Wednesday and Saturday. Anna had this vision of Provence laid out on tables from a glossy magazine: a dozen goat cheeses, maybe, and good leaves for salad.

We negotiated our way past the legless beggar, the cake seller, the flower persons and the butcher’s shops into the market hall: narrow ways between narrow tables, women standing over bunches of greens, plastic bags of eggs or white or scarlet or dark brown beans, furred peaches, forests of high orange montbretia, resigned cilantro, and onions wet with juice. Beyond the women’s territory were the cheese stalls, the boards of salt cod, the sausages strung on poles, the man who sold young chickens, the professional greengrocers with their sad green peppers, and kiwi fruit and nectarines from Spain.

The hall was practical enough: supplies of watercress or bacon, grainy apples or potatoes. But it was also medieval in its crowded insistence, in the way the women called you over, in the small heaps of what had flowered or fruited that morning all set out to be changed into cash. You could imagine you should be sliding on straw on mud, instead of civic concrete.

I said, ‘What do you need?’

‘Ham, presunto. Maybe some fish.’

There were long, spiny fish, like armoured eels, and cuts across some coarse, dark-fleshed creature. There was nothing entirely familiar. The sardines lay under the tables, some boxes lightly salted, some under blizzards of salt; those at least she knew. She bumped against the limits of her curiosity and her interest all at once: she wanted clean cod, filleted salmon.

I said, ‘We could always have chicken. We could eat somewhere.’

‘I want to cook fish.’

So she bought corvinho, not quite sure what it was, and a nubbly kind of snow peas, and potatoes, and cheese, and peaches. She added parsley, lettuce and some branches of dried lemon verbena to make tea. She took back specimens of the place.

I waited for her, up against the railings with the other gossiping knots of men who buried themselves in the talk and business of the place.

I saw Arturo, but not standing with the gossips. He was walking between the lines of tables, a bucket in either hand.

I knew men never come to sell in the women’s zone.

People stepped to let him through because he should not be there and, besides, the market had been open two hours and the best was all gone.

He set the buckets on the table. He poured out pink, waxy potatoes that went running every way off the narrow stone table.

The women nodded. Nobody spoke to him, though, or looked directly at him. The places on either side were empty.

I thought of him as a friend, an ally. But I didn’t know how to acknowledge him, either; it was as odd for a man to be buying as selling at the tables.

Anna came out of the crowd, laden with thin blue plastic bags. I took some of them, and I walked her briskly out of the market hall.

At home, she spread out the foods she had bought in the kitchen, as though she could read them like a map.

She laid little ambushes for me, too. ‘I wish I knew why you’re so preoccupied,’ she said. And: ‘Did you find out anything about your father?’ She said these things when I was sitting before a sunset, when I was cleaning boots, as though they might slip under my conscious guard.

Then, after a day when I said nothing in reply, she was suddenly angry: ‘I’m trying. Why won’t you try?’

I stared at her.

‘You’re drifting,’ she said. ‘You don’t engage with me. You don’t call the Museum. It’s as though London doesn’t exist for you any more.’

I don’t remember how I answered her. I hope I didn’t say ‘Don’t be stupid.’ I expect I did.

We went to bed in the afternoon, separate sides of the bed because of the heat, so we both assumed. She broke the divide. She put out a hand and I thought she wanted me to hold it, but she wanted to touch me along the line of the spine as I lay there. Her fingers grazed my skin, made me anticipate.

‘Turn over,’ she said.

I turned. I was hard, of course. She was smiling. But instead of falling together, instead of laughing or delighting in the moment, we were frozen with a kind of embarrassment. Desire was there all right, the usual responses; but it suddenly seemed inappropriate, almost embarrassing to take things any further, as though we’d only be passing the time.

She kissed my forehead once and lay down again, distant as though she’d still been in London, close as the length of my fingers. I got up and went to the shower and ran the brown water, hoping it would clear.

She made an elaborate fresh lemonade later, and we sat watching the valley down below: shine on the slate roofs, birds twitching between trees, the run of the stream.

I said, for want of anything else I could bring myself to say, ‘It’s funny Arturo was in the market. I haven’t seen Zulmira, either.’

She nodded.

We both knew that afternoon was something more than a bad day in bed, naturally repaired in the next easy night. It wasn’t desire that had failed us. It was connection.

‘You could go to see them,’ Anna said. ‘Maybe you’d better go to see them.’

So I climbed the steps to Zulmira and Arturo’s house, knocked on their metal gates, then tried the gates and walked through into the courtyard. It was an open space, with mounds for marigolds and lettuce, wood stacked under steading, rooms on two sides up concrete stairs and animals: a pig parked in a corner, rabbits in mesh cages, a convoy of chickens picking at the world and a kid springing at the end of a rope and halter. Geraniums went striving up one wall.

I called, ‘Zulmira? Arturo?’

Arturo came out of the shadow on the verandah. ‘Senhor Joao,’ he said. ‘Everything all right? Tudo bem?’

Arturo said, unconvincingly, ‘Tudo bem.’

‘Really?’

He shook his head a little. ‘If you could drive me, me and Zulmira, into the town. I think we should go to the little hospital in Vila Nova.’

‘Zulmira’s sick now?’

‘I’ll bring her down.’

I said, ‘Can I help?’

But he had gone back into the shadow, and I was half-blind from the brilliance of the sun.

Anna, too, wanted to help. She wanted it even more than she wanted me occupied, although she was treating me now with the elaborate kindness you show to someone in mourning.

‘There,’ she said. ‘There they are.’

Arturo was coming down the steps, Zulmira at his side. I knew how Arturo’s legs could sometimes fail him, but today he stared forward as though he was concentrating all his will on simply moving down. Zulmira seemed to hang on his neck. There were dark patches under her eyes, like old blood under the skin, and she stumbled, feet dragging on the stones.

I wanted to help. Anna wanted to help. We have the same instincts in such different forms: Anna is more sure that she can intervene in lives, while I was born to be a bureaucrat and find objections. But we are both kind, always.

Arturo didn’t acknowledge me. He kept walking with Zulmira’s arm around his neck. I was so used to her as a strong presence in the fields, chasing down a goat, cutting greens, picking at the ground with a hoe, that the slackness of her arm shocked me.

There must have been some sense of occasion, because Hart was watching from above. He caught my eye. He shrugged. The usual afternoon stillness seemed to weigh on us all.

Arturo and Zulmira reached the road. Arturo held Zulmira with one hand, and opened my car with the other; she couldn’t stand. He was using all the old stored strength in his body to keep her from tipping down to the ground.

He packed her into the back seat of the car. You never lock cars in villages where everyone watches out for everyone else.

Anna said, ‘You’d better go and help.’

I went scrambling down the hill.

Arturo sat in the passenger seat. I scrambled into the car, started the engine and looked back to check the traffic.

Zulmira sat with her head tilted back, her arms loose and slack. I saw that her eyes had rolled up in her head.

I recognized the smell, at last: a spoiled version of sweat and flesh, overlaid with sweet cheap soap. Zulmira was dead.

Nobody expected the police reaction. The kindly, courteous Mello was abrupt; he insisted that Arturo had concealed a death, found suspicious circumstances, had him taken down to the prison in the city for the duration of the investigation even though the man could walk only when he exercised all his will. The police occupied the village, checking everything and everyone; people came in from the fields to find their identification cards. Everyone was a material witness, quarantined in the village.

I loved Anna’s outrage. She would have thrown herself between the police and the women if she could. But she had no Portuguese, and she could never quite work out the exact wrongs being done around her, so her anger stayed general and ineffectual. She hated that.