Taking Lives (31 page)

She was still angry with me, wound up tight, but it seemed to make her cold and clear. ‘And you didn’t find anything?’

‘Mello told me they found nothing.’

‘So you can go home now.’

She had me marked down as a perfect type of a visitor, the kind that always has very good reason to go away again: job, wife, children, house, mortgage, fear of alternatives and choosing between them.

‘I don’t have a home,’ I said. She didn’t listen. ‘This is where I come from.’

All the time I was a child, I missed the point of confession. I’d dredge up a few meagre sins for a busy priest, offer them as dutiful evidence that I was interested. Then I grew up and away from all that. But I had listened to Anna all morning, and now I really wanted to say everything at least once so it could die on the air and be out of my way; or so Maria would accept and forgive it all.

‘Listen,’ Maria said. ‘Did they take anything away?’

‘I’m not sure. Not much.’

‘Can I borrow your phone?’

She called the Guarda and asked to speak to Mello, but he wasn’t available. She asked what had been seized in Hart’s house. She asked about warrants. A sergeant told her nothing belonging to Christopher Hart had been taken from the house. Only when she put down the phone did she realize how oddly he had phrased his denial.

Maria didn’t waste time on me.

She first thought of storming the GNR barracks, demanding to see Mello. But an angry individual makes mistakes of etiquette, enough to be properly turned away. Instead, she phoned from the cool of her kitchen. She was very proud of her common sense when she told me that.

‘Is this about Arturo de Sousa?’ a sergeant said.

‘No,’ Maria said. ‘I wouldn’t call at this time about Arturo. This is about Christopher Hart.’

‘Yes,’ the sergeant said.

‘I’d like to talk to someone.’

‘You want to talk to someone tonight? You represent Mr Hart?’

‘I’m not calling as a lawyer.’

‘But you do represent Mr Hart?’

‘I am not calling as a lawyer.’

She never knew what convinced him to take her seriously. There was a pause, the phone seemed to fall, she heard some talk on the other side of the room. The sergeant came back.

‘Senhor Mello will come to see you. In fifteen minutes.’

She imagined Mello being dressed and polished by his quiet wife, packed into a car and put out to drive to Maria’s house. He would drive through the town with great self-importance, insistent the town acknowledge him. And he would be happy to correct whatever Maria thought of Hart.

‘This is rather unusual,’ Mello said when she opened the door.

‘I know. Can I get you a drink?’

Mello hesitated at the door. She could tell he wondered if it was entirely proper to be in a woman’s house after nine in the evening, that he would be far more comfortable if she were an old, pot-bellied chiseller of a lawyer who could be instructed over a billiard-table or in some clubby bar.

‘A drink,’ Mello said. ‘Perhaps a glass of -‘

‘A glass of port wine,’ Maria said.

‘Yes.’ Mello settled in the parlour in the pool of thin light from a standard lamp and looked about him. The old dark wood, the bits of fancy china and the heavy curtains seemed to reassure him. He was still in a branch of his own world.

‘Not white port,’ he shouted after Maria, patronizingly.

Maria put down a bottle of a twenty-year tawny. She was overdoing it, she knew, but she was playing an unfamiliar game: trading on mutual secrets of professional people, nothing to do with law, or due process, or justice.

Mello sipped. ‘What exactly can I do for you?’

She said: ‘I wanted to talk off the record, if that’s possible.’

Mello shrugged.

‘I wonder what you know about Christopher Hart,’ she said.

‘Mr Hart,’ Mello said. ‘You wouldn’t have a biscuit, I suppose -‘

She was the supplicant; he had the answers. She brought the biscuits.

‘I thought you were his lawyer,’ Mello said.

‘I found him the house and organized the lease. When your men want to get a message to him they ask me to pass it on. They often do that because I speak English.’

‘And very well, too, I’m sure.’

‘You searched his house today,’ Maria said. ‘That must mean you have some pretty serious suspicions about him. I don’t want to get more involved if there’s something I should know -‘

‘Involved,’ Mello said. ‘I thought you were already quite involved.’ He set the word up and hung it with assumptions: what women do, how the world should be, how well the cops know sin.

‘You know me,’ Maria said. ‘I know all the foreigners.’

‘Of course,’ Mello said.

‘But I wouldn’t say I understand Hart’s story.’

‘You ought to know,’ Mello said, ‘it’s a very extraordinary story. I don’t know how he presented himself to you - a professor, I suppose? With a university and all his degrees. It wasn’t a very interesting story, so I don’t suppose anyone would have bothered to question it. He came down from Holland, where he was supposed to spend his sabbatical year. Except,’ Mello fiddled with a biscuit, mock delicately because he was in a woman’s parlour, ‘that he encountered someone on a tram in Amsterdam who thought she recognized her own son. Not Christopher Hart, but Martin Arkenhout - who was supposed to have died in Florida ten years ago. They found Hart’s hotel, photocopied his passport, and this Mrs Arkenhout said it was just like Martin would have looked.’

Maria said: ‘You’d like some more wine? Just a copito?’

But Mello was in serious mode. He laid out the story of how Arkenhout’s travelling companion had later vanished, too. ‘You see the pattern,’ he said. ‘I would like some more wine.’

Maria poured.

‘We did search Hart’s house. We found an identity card in yet another name - a man who was reported missing in the Bahamas. A man of independent means, that sort of thing.’

‘You haven’t arrested Hart?’

Mello said, ‘The evidence is in six or seven different countries. There isn’t much of it. There’s a story that needs explaining, that’s all, and there are plenty of those.’

Maria paced the small parlour like a courtroom, three paces across, three paces back, edging past the low sharp-sided table. ‘I suppose -‘

‘If the Dutch police are right,’ Mello said, ‘then this man will kill and go away. But he’ll go away with a new name.’

‘He couldn’t find anyone in Formentina,’ Maria said.

‘You know John Costa, don’t you?’ Mello said.

Maria poured herself a half-glass of port, although she hardly ever took wine. She raised her eyes to meet Mello’s gaze.

She said, ‘I thought he’d be the last person you put at risk.’

‘You think I’m a saint?’ Mello said.

‘But he’s the son of Jose Costa.’

‘We can’t touch Hart at the moment. We need him to try just one more time.’

Mello stood up as though manners required it.

‘Just to try,’ he said.

Everything else extraneous had to go.

My father’s story itched and nagged at me, spoiled my concentration; it had to be resolved. I didn’t realize, at the time, how information hollows a man out, takes away the faithful knowledge of boyhood and offers only thin facts. I was becoming just the shell that everyone recognized: John Costa, a man with no more secrets.

I know libraries. I’m a library rat, a museum person, dust on my whiskers; I turn back to books when I need to know things. I turned to the big, brown-bound Encyclopedia when I was a child, with its postage stamp pictures of what seemed to be absolutely everything. My father was very proud of the Encyclopedia, of having books.

The local library was new and white and empty. It wouldn’t do. The university library, twenty miles away, was barricaded by spinster angels who admitted only the ticketed few. But I charmed them with the authority of my Museum card.

Index boxes, sense and order. I sat at a desk with every book I could order on the history of the Portuguese secret police. The generalities would not do any more. I wanted names.

There were histories of resistance to the old dictatorship, immensely long studies of how everything worked, studies of the links with German and Spanish and especially British Intelligence; even a 1920 account of a five-day monarchist revolt in Porto. I found diagrams, theory, cartoons - crude ones from a magazine called O Verdade or The Truth - that showed what might have happened in any white room in a basement: electrical chairs, men with the faces of angular heroes being beaten by men with the faces of capitalist beasts.

I could pass as an expert 111 a few hours. I didn’t want to go for lunch, because I was absorbed, because I feared the spinster battalion might throw me back next time.

I did not find my father’s name, not in studies of the P’ortuguese Legion which helped out the secret police, nor in the memoirs they kept bringing to my desk: about a Fortress of Resistance, a Communist Intellectual, the memoirs of an Inspector of the PIDE, of prisoners, of A Life in Revolution and time spent in ‘Salazar’s Inquisition’.

But I did find Mello.

It’s not that uncommon a name, but this Mello was in Vila Nova de Formentina, about the right age. But he wasn’t a policeman, fretting about change and the state of the youth. He was in the opposition to Salazar and he was betrayed. The informer, of course, was not named. It seemed that one in ten Portuguese had reported at some time to the secret police, or helped denounce people of ‘bad character’, who kept ‘bad company’, who dared to wear red shirts in public or missed Mass. There were far too many names to remember.

My father had asked Mello’s permission to come back. My father owed Mello some old duty.

My own father betrayed Mello.

I said out loud, ‘Am I making this up?’

My father was born in 1920. In 1953, when he left, he was thirty-three: a grown man. But Mello was now around sixty, still in uniform, still working. In 1953, he would have been - what? - seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. A boy. My father gave the PIDE the name of a boy.

Listen. You think you’re walking in a garden and suddenly you’re on the lip of a cliff. You think you’re swimming in the comfort of a great pool and a current starts to take you out between high waves. This was a moment like that.

I wondered which would be worse: to invent this story, to libel my own father, or to find this scenario was fact? I sat at my desk, the examinee looking hard into space.

I knew that if my story was right, then everything my father told me about Portugal and being Portuguese was tainted, the smell of police behind each heroic frieze of courage and victory. I just lost all the history I thought I had regained.

Suddenly I was very afraid of being my father’s son.

Mello ordered me to the barracks with all the authority of law and uniforms, and he ordered me out of town. I needed, he said, a few days in Lisbon. He said he had a friend who insisted I have his apartment.

1 couldn’t resist Mello. He was practical: he said the police would be making certain searches while I was away and he personally would be responsible for seeing that my interests, the Museum’s interests, were considered. But I couldn’t stay around, because I would complicate matters.

‘I wanted to discuss my father,’ I said.

‘We can discuss that later,’ Mello said. ‘I don’t know how to impress on you the seriousness of all this. The issue is -‘ and he seemed to be trying to snatch a euphemism out of his limited stock, but he failed -‘murder.’

I hadn’t expected that. Why should I have expected that? Murder is a subject for novels and headlines. I didn’t expect my life would take in either.

But I wouldn’t be distracted. ‘Your officer took me to see .1 room,’ I said. ‘A white room in a basement. Why was my lather there? When was he there?’

Mello tried to pretend he never heard the question.

‘I need to know,’ I said.

I remembered: trying to reach my father in that high climate that settles round grown-ups, trying to make him listen to my questions about Saturday or why he was rutting back the roses.

‘There are things you can’t tell a son about his father.’

‘Tell me.’

Mello sighed. I know now what he must have been thinking. He had chanced into a multiple murder case, complicated by these allegations of theft from a great Museum, and he found himself ploughing up a past he long ago survived.

He said, ‘He was in that room five months ago. Now will you go to Lisbon? Please?’

‘Why?’ I heard myself at four or five: always that same question, after every statement, ‘why?’ ‘why?’ ‘why?’, the last time we’re all philosophers.

‘Listen,’ Mello said. ‘We all have a duty to forgive those that trespass against us.’

‘But why -‘

‘I just wanted him to understand what he did,’ Mello said.

‘I don’t understand how you knew each other. He was miles away from Vila Nova de Formentina.’

‘I don’t have time for this.’

It was not a very dignified struggle. I simply sat there.

‘Vila Nova’s a long way from anywhere,’ Mello said, after a while. ‘Things happened there, things that couldn’t happen somewhere like Lisbon. The Communist Party had conferences there, late forties, early fifties. They met and talked and planned. Of course the PIDE wanted to know every move.’

‘You were a member? My father was a member?’

‘You don’t know what it’s like to live under a dictator who wants everyone’s lives opened up and visible and the same. You want to fight, but the only ways you know are the ways the dictator keeps denouncing and forbidding. So you use those ways.’

‘What did my father do?’

‘People just forgot what it was to betray someone else. It seemed ordinary.’

I had my moral certainties all lined up like toy soldiers, but Mello seemed determined to forgive, to glory in forgiving.

‘After the Second Congress, the PIDE chased your father down. He could have confessed. He could have denied everything. He didn’t do either. He sort of confessed, said he did know people who knew about the CP in general. They said they’d let him go for one name.’

‘Your name?’

‘I suppose he thought nothing would happen to me because I was too young. He didn’t think they would take the story seriously. Or I would get away.’