Taking Lives (33 page)

But there was still a man called Christopher Hart, up in his long, white house on the mountain. He seemed like the ghost now: a stunt projected on the sky, flickering, insubstantial, fantastic as his stories and the places he’d been. She’d liked his lies, once.

There was also this specific, bloody thing.

She couldn’t stop herself. ‘What did it smell like?’ she asked. And then: ‘Can I use the phone?’

She dialled my number in Lisbon, still thinking it would be so easy to save my life by keeping me in the city. I didn’t answer.

She says she called me seven times that morning. It’s a magical number; perhaps she is exaggerating. But I was out in any case, or asleep. She worried I might have left to come home already, that I’d be waiting in Formentina and Hart would be waiting for me.

She called one more time, just in case.

Maria was used to fire. I saw it only on the nightly TV news, where it was generalized to orange flames, sooty wreckage and firefighters struggling with old-fashioned hoses.

Hart, however, was in the thick of it.

The fire rested overnight, but next day the flames hunted each other uphill, faster and faster. Fire had been just a rumour, a stink on the wind, but now it was driving home.

Hart must have heard the bells and sirens down below Formmentina. It wasn’t the police; he knew the police come silently. It was volunteer firemen, working round a small clump of houses between the village and Vila Nova. He Could make out trucks at the roadside, men running pipes to take water down from the little brick reservoirs on the lull, using the few minutes they had pressure to flush away the tinder grasses and wet the earth down. They made a broad line of mud around the houses, and they moved on.

Hart had everywhere to go, so he had nowhere to go. He didn’t have anything out in the woods to protect. So he did what everyone else did: he waited the fire out.

There’s no way you can go to meet fire and block it at a distance. It’s alive. It can flare away from you with the wind, crackle up an old tree’s dry dead branches and sparkle prettily into dry grass, fan out in a dozen directions all at once. It does seem to attack sometimes, but even in retreat it is emptying out and blackening the woods. You wait and wait until you can fight it at home.

Some of the older women went to the chapel to pray together, then joined the men who were watching the woods from every angle. The smoke, they could see, was grey now, which meant there was no juice left in the leaves. The woods were burning dry.

Maria had wanted to talk to me. Now she needed to talk to me. She thought I might quit Lisbon and come running back to Formentina. She thought Christopher Hart would be waiting for me.

She says she thought of going to Lisbon. She couldn’t. She says she needed to distract Hart. And there was another reason: the police, finally, decided that Arturo had done nothing worth prosecuting, and were putting him out of the jail at nine in the morning. Somebody had to collect him.

The old man was thinner still, his strong forearms gone almost white. He was resigned to being released, as he had been resigned to being imprisoned, and he seemed unsurprised that there were no charges at all. He knew Zulmira had died of natural causes. He simply could not face the fact, not for days, not even now.

He asked about the fire, but Maria did not have the exact local knowledge he needed, about the wind and the tracks around Formentina.

Fire blustered in the grass, crackled in the trees.

Hart told Maria he was on the steps of his house and a moth, like paper under gold leaf, flew out of the bushes. It circled, rose as though it had caught some tiny thermal, and then burst into flames in mid-air.

Maria was brave, I know that. She wanted to distract him, to save me. But she also wanted to stay at the centre of this one story she had lived. She had been ragged with waiting. She was not going to miss a single scene.

A few roads were already blocked off, makeshift trestles in the way where the smell of smoke started. Beyond the trestles, the edges of the road were soft and vague, as if in evening light. There was an occasional rain of soft, black smuts.

She took short cuts on paved lanes, rocked along over sharp stones, and found a back way on to the mountain road. The sky was varnished brown at the edges. The air smelt used and dusty; in back of it was the taste of great heat. You couldn’t mistake it for the night perfume of woodfires in the villages or a bonfire upwind; it was a great breathing body just out of sight.

She crashed gears for the steep switchback road. She tried closing the car windows, but she stifled. With the windows open, she coughed; it wasn’t much of a choice.

The bends were sharp angles, the road like a spring that might any minute snap in the heat and fling the cars off the mountain. I know how she thinks. She’d rather worry about the road as a spring, which was absolutely impossible, than think of what she had to alarm her: the heat, the smoke, what she had to say to Hart. How she’d get home. If she’d get home.

Arturo studied the roadside for clues to the fire. At a blackened clearing, gold threads of straw still standing, he sat up very straight.

She made up mantras as she went along. So she thought she’d be safe when the water was safe, up above other houses with nothing to spoil it. These high woods weren’t so dense, so they wouldn’t burn the same way; and there were firebreaks cut up and down the mountain. Anyway, there was always mist and cloud in the mornings, even in high summer, to smother the fire.

But she didn’t feel safe.

She imagined herself saying, in a neutral voice: ‘But you did kill those people, didn’t you?’

She imagined Hart saying, ‘Well, if you put it that way. I suppose so. Yes. Does it matter?’

Arturo insisted on knocking at his own door. His daughter answered, and they stood looking at each other for a moment until Maria turned away. She never knew if they cried or held each other because she knew it could not happen if she stayed.

She locked the car as if she were in the city, climbed the slate steps. She was out of breath all at once. It was only the dust and heat, but it felt like the moment your diaphragm forces all the air from your body. The girl was dizzy. She might as well have been in love.

‘Hey,’ Hart said.

He was on the porch of his house, framed in daisies. But you can’t sit anywhere in Formentina without the big, white shine of daisies. He looked like one of those wooden puppets artists use, all gangling articulation.

Maria said, ‘They’re closing roads in the valley.’

‘Good of you to come.’

‘I had to talk to you.’

He pulled his cellphone out of his jeans.

‘Face to face,’ Maria said. ‘We don’t have much time and I don’t want anyone listening in.’

Hart shrugged. ‘Come on up. There’s no air, but I can get you some water. Or some wine or some soda or some beer?’

Maria looked around her. This day the whole valley looked sepia, like a photo lying on flames.

‘I’ll have some water,’ Maria said.

‘I’ll get it,’ Hart said. ‘Or come in.’

She stepped into the shade.

‘The police came back,’ she said.

‘Really?’

‘The next thing,’ she said, ‘they’ll want you down at the Guarda Nacional. They’ll want you to volunteer for questioning. Of course, you’ll need to prove identity.’

‘I’ve got a passport.’

‘To prove it,’ she said. ‘Beyond doubt.’

‘They don’t believe papers any more?’

You can rest your eyes on this landscape. People expect it. Hart saw a train of goats come down the steps, followed by a man in his fifties with a sweet, senseless grin and a quick dog.

‘I’ve got credit cards,’ he said.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘They’re serious.’

The goats seemed to know their own way.

‘It must have been tough driving today,’ Hart said.

She shrugged.

‘You’d better come in,’ Hart said. ‘Put a fan on. Let’s move the heat about a bit.’

The house seemed dark, even after an occluded sun. The walls were white, the floors bare, the furniture a clutch of expedients spaced apart: couch, chair, table, a dresser with four embossed paperbacks and an ornamental cockerel from Barcelos. Add company, and it was obvious this was what someone thought would be just enough for someone else’s summer.

Hart turned on two fans to blow into each other. A picture - amateur watercolour, bougainvillea on white stucco - rattled against the wall. Where the shutters were slightly open, the dust went scouring through the block of light.

‘Cool enough for you?’ Hart said.

Maria went to open the shutters wide.

‘Hey! Don’t let the light in. You’ll let the heat in.’

Indeed, the air was stifling: new ash as well as all the dead ash.

‘I know that you do have papers, Christopher,’ she said. ‘Whose papers are they?’

‘Christopher Hart’s papers. So I’m Christopher Hart.’

She said: ‘It might help if I could give them something they could check. Perhaps you wouldn’t have to go down to the GNR then.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘You won’t like interrogation.’

‘I mean, what can they do?’

She said nothing, but her body squared off like an exclamation mark.

She’d left her purse on the table so he fumbled about in it, fingering her own plastic parts. ‘It says here,’ he said, ‘you’re Maria de Sousa de Conceicao Mattoso. I bet the bank card says how long you lived in town. The i.d. has your medical record. It certainly says you live in your mother’s house and you do law.’

She snatched the purse back.

Hart could hear men striding down the steps; to be exact, their talk, grim and contained. He could see Maria wanted to be outside because it seemed much safer there, even with the prospect of fire. She didn’t like to be with people like him, who slip out of their proper selves at night and go about nameless.

He said: ‘It’s like this. Don’t you ever think of being someone else? Of starting again, but radically? You could make up a whole new life.’

‘I don’t know what you’re playing.’

‘You could be anyone or anything. You could be in any of those places you see in magazines, not just Vila Nova. You get to finish off someone else’s life and do it better than they do.’

‘I love fantasy,’ Maria said. ‘I don’t live it.’

‘But why not? When you were a girl, didn’t you want to be Ines de Castro and die for love, or Madame Curie or Lizzie Borden, or Marilyn Monroe? Didn’t you want to choose a new world for yourself?’

‘I chose a world,’ Maria said.

‘Are you happy there?’

‘Happy?’ Maria said. ‘Listen, I don’t have time for this. You are someone the police want to interview. It’s serious. I’m your lawyer. This isn’t play.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘You think you can reinvent yourself before they get here?’

‘I’ve got time. If the fire is like you say, they won’t be here for a while.’

‘You could give them an account of where you teach,’ she said. ‘Your subject. What your last book said, what’s in the new book. You do know that, don’t you?’

‘Why do they want to know all of a sudden? Nobody here ever asked me for a lecture on Dutch imperialism. Hell, that’s why I came here.’

‘That’s good. It’s good you talk about Dutch imperialism. They’ll believe that.’

‘You really want Christopher Hart?’ He couldn’t help sounding a shade disappointed. ‘I thought you wanted someone you could change. Someone you could make up as you went along.’

Maria slapped her hands once on the wall.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere to go. I could tell you things.’

‘I don’t need to know.’

‘You’re talking as my lawyer?’

She shook her head.

‘So what’s the problem? You don’t want to know about other lives, other places?’ He bent at the waist and put his face against hers. ‘You’d disappear if you left here, wouldn’t you? If it didn’t say “lawyer” after your name. If people didn’t know you, your father, your grandfather.’

She said, ‘The police are serious.’

He slammed the shutters together and tried to force the bolt into place.

‘Are the lights working?’ she said.

‘Maybe.’

‘I’d like the light on.’

‘Sit. We won’t do anything. You just listen.’

It would have been easier to touch just at that moment. The room crackled with the fact that they were not touching. Breath stuck in the throat.

A sound began overhead: mechanical, distant. The sound became more distinct: one of the small planes that go up from the local airfield to spot fires. It circled and then seemed to veer across its own path. Then it must have passed over the ridge, because the sound was distant again, and then gone.

‘Hey,’ Hart said, and he was laughing. ‘You want someone to save you?’

I went round the bookshops on the Carmo while I was waiting for her: great vaults of books, odd hallways with trestles of books, shelves of paperbacks treasured so long they seemed almost pathetic, old art books from the twenties with their air of embalming culture and sewing it up in good cloth.

I couldn’t concentrate, of course.

I called Mello. When finally he took the call, he was brusque and impatient.

‘I took your father to the barracks,’ he said, ‘so he could understand what he did. He never knew what he did. He was out of the country before the worst happened.’

‘I apologize,’ I said. ‘I apologize for my father.’

‘We’ve had a revolution since then,’ Mello said. ‘We’ve tried to change. You forgive and you get on with things.’

‘You showed me that white room.’

‘I should never have done that. You’re entitled to a father who’s a hero. Maybe he was a hero when he got to London.’

‘I need to talk -‘

‘John Costa,’ Mello said, ‘half this district is on fire. The roads are shut down. Maria Mattoso’s left town, and she’s probably up with your friend Christopher Hart. Now we’re waiting to bring the bastard in for questioning but we can’t get to him. I don’t want apologies. I want you out of the way.’

‘Is Maria all right?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Is she all right?’