Taking Lives (37 page)

After them all came Anna Costa.

‘I’m very grateful,’ Anna said. She was dressed seriously, but not in black.

‘I’m very sorry,’ Maria said.

Anna stared. ‘At least I didn’t have to find him,’ she said.

On the road, Anna seemed to relax a little, even to grin at olive trees overwhelmed by brilliant blue morning glory.

‘The police would like you to make a formal identification, I’m afraid,’ Maria said.

‘Is that even possible?’

‘It won’t be easy. After the fire, and the explosions -‘

‘Can I do that this afternoon?’

Maria said, ‘You’re sure you want to do that after travelling?’

The road crossed a long iron bridge. Below, on the shoals of a wide river, sheets were laid out to dry on the pebbles and children played in the shallows.

Anna said, ‘I wanted to come back, you know.’ Then, since Maria said nothing: ‘It must be terrible for you, too.’ And then, relentlessly, ‘You think they’ll find him?’

‘I’m sure they will.’

‘And how will you feel -‘

Maria concentrated on the road as it climbed through a steep valley, one side pines full of summer dust, the other the black spike remains of a burned wood.

She said, ‘Do you have anywhere to stay?’

‘I hadn’t thought. There’s the house in Formentina.’

‘Stay with me. There’s not much furniture, but it’ll be easier. You’ll need help with the police. Translating.’ When Anna didn’t answer, she thought she should add: ‘I won’t charge you.’

She went with Anna to the morgue.

Anna noticed the cracks in the white wall tiles, the cold air stale as a cave, anything except the body. That, she saw from the corner of her eye. The flesh was burnt and blistered away, bones broken up so it was hard to get the measure of the man on the slab if it was one single man; and the skull was wrecked, more like a carved totem than one particular person. This time, she didn’t bother to ask the questions about teeth or measuring the bones.

The cops showed her a ring from close to the body. She identified it. So she said the body must be John Costa.

The cops’ shoulders relaxed. They still felt the blasphemy in cutting up the dead just to give them a name.

At dinner that night, Anna said to Maria: ‘He belongs here, doesn’t he? I want to bury him here.’ Then she said: ‘This way it won’t be a failure, you see. John Costa and me. We never quite had the time to fail.’

Maria Mattoso poured wine.

She unlocked the office door. A postcard had been pushed under it; she almost slipped on a cliche picture of trees around some Metro sign in Paris with a boulevard falling back out of focus.

She picked it up and took it to the light. It was signed with a single letter, ‘C, made with a big and almost operatic movement of the pen; so it was Christopher Hart.

The message was in block capitals. ‘WISH YOU WERE HERE.’

I couldn’t believe I had disappeared properly. I thought there must be all kinds of official networks following me: police, banks, border guards. I cut off the grand roads and started towards the sea.

When I was a kid, I used to think that everything began and ended at the edge of the sea, that I could find a safe no man’s land with my heels in the surf. I thought if I just swam out between the waves and rested on the power of the sea I would be safe from anything that ever happened on the land.

But it isn’t that easy to find the sea now the Dutch have built their dams and defences against it. I drove slowly through a bit of Zeeland, flat except for the defensive dykes that carry the roads, full of bare autumn orchards. The water, when I got there, began slipping away from the shore, leaving a farm of stakes for the mussels and oysters. Far out, the raw waters chopped at themselves.

I found a small town, with a shelter above the harbour, full of old-timers smelling of wet and smoke, all variously crouched and bent as if they were complaining. I couldn’t hear anything for the wind.

I didn’t want to go to a restaurant and be the conspicuous outsider. I looked through the glove compartments in case there was a biscuit, maybe chocolate. There was a Virgin Mary, of all things, a little blue ceramic with a perfectly satin-pink face.

I soaked in self-pity. But you can’t pity a self that doesn’t properly exist. QED.

I started laughing.

Cities seemed to make sense, for safety’s sake. I secured myself in a stream of other traffic, sure of my direction, no idea of any destination. Perhaps Rotterdam would do. Perhaps Haarlem. Perhaps Amsterdam.

Then I knew I was exhausted.

I knew it when I had to jerk the wheel to keep out of the path of a huge black truck in the fast lane. I thought I heard a siren, but it was the truck’s horn fading on the wind. I couldn’t afford to be pulled in for some traffic offence, so I slowed as though the car were crippled and went off at the next exit.

I stopped almost at once on an avenue of poplar trees. I wound down the window of the car. The sound of the rain merged with the rustle of wet tyres on the motorway.

A heron sat at the edge of black water, grey and bearded, completely still.

It occurred to me, the first time because I was not always thinking straight, that the only reason all Christopher Hart’s cards still worked must be that they left an easy trail across Europe: statement by statement, buy by buy.

So I thought about selling the car. It was the one major asset left: muddy, but with a shine underneath, and a quite new model. But selling meant turning over papers, meant opening the chance someone would get to ask why Christopher Hart, who’d been murdered twice already, was doing business with some garage in a small Dutch town.

I wanted somewhere to stop and get warm and be noticed, even known, by someone else: to find some boundary of myself.

I woke up in full dark.

I turned on the car lights and started the engine. The world could have seen the sudden burst of light and sound across the bare flatlands, in between the thin trunks of the poplars. I edged forward.

The trees kept cutting into the beam of the headlights, a flicker of silver bark. My foot slipped on the accelerator. As for my hands, they were a little late on the wheel. The car jerked forward off the road, veered over the wet grass and hung at the edge of the water.

I heard the rain beating on the roof.

You fret like a child at moments like this. I kept worrying that I had no truly rainproof coat, that I’d get a cold and not be well enough for the rest of my life.

I tried to reverse, but the wheels had no traction on the slick grass, and the front wheels were catching on the muddy sides of the water. I heard the wheels spin, and the car jolted forward again.

I got out fast, collected what I could, pulled a leather jacket round me to keep my papers dry. The papers still seemed to matter. I remembered to pull the wad of banknotes out of my trouser pocket before they turned to papier mache.

The car slithered forward, paused, moved again, paused again, settling very slowly past the borders of the water, off the grass and mud and into the river. I didn’t know how deep the water might be.

I couldn’t save the car. So it had to drown before anyone turned off the road and tried to be helpful, and asked the same kind of questions that had ruined Arkenhout before me: careful questions in a logical line.

I pushed. My feet slithered on the grass. I pushed again. The car levered up in the dark, nose down. It stayed put, lights now below the water, metal belly flashing to the world. The river glowed from the lights, like quick and brown stained glass.

I should report this. Walking away is a crime. It’s curious how much more proper and exact you become when you have a killing to forget: a model citizen.

I washed my boots off in a puddle of still water, being as neat as I could.

The lights under the river went very bright and died. I heard a nightbird call through the new dark.

The car listed to the right with a comfortable creaking sound.

At last, that was a process I could help. I pushed and the car began to shift in the air, from an upright monolith stinking of oil to a ruin at an angle. It stopped again. I felt the mud of the bank slipping under me. I jumped inland just in time as the car swung down and bit into the water, and then settled, threatened for a moment to float, sucked air down deep into the river as it settled under the water.

I saw myself in the car, under the brown water, breath coming in a sigh of bubbles and then stopping dead. But I knew I would struggle and shout against dying. Even this doubtful, hollow self of mine had a quite horrifying will to go on.

The rain started up again.

I picked up a plastic shopping bag of food and water, and the flight bag I’d bought in Paris, a bag on wheels that I couldn’t drag through the puddles, and I started walking. I could smell oil on my skin, feel the mud caking wetly on my legs. I came to the railway line three miles on. I changed in the station lavatory, stuffed my wet, muddy clothes into the plastic bag and walked out almost respectable, but with sodden hair.

The first train was for Amsterdam Central.

The carriage was empty except for a restless boy who N kept rolling and re-rolling a cigarette as though he wanted to make something perfect.

When I travelled with Anna, a long time ago, two seats on a train became a warm and private room. I remembered this. I kept the boy in sight all the time.

The next postcard was from Amsterdam. Maria called Mello at once.

He seemed glad of the information, such as it was.

She said to Mello: ‘I’m sorry Jose Costa’s son had to die.’

Mello said, ‘Any death is terrible.’

‘But of all the men -‘

‘I forgave the father,’ Mello said. ‘How could I want to harm the son?’

Maria waited him out.

‘I said, how can you think I would have wanted to harm the son? I tried to keep him in Lisbon. Of course I did. I’m grateful for your information. Please inform us if you receive any other communications.’

Mello’s men took the card away with ceremony as though it might contain the whole story encoded somewhere in the picture of gabled houses, the stamps with the Queen’s head, the usual message: ‘Wish you were here.’

They left Maria furious with Hart. He must think she could see a body blown apart and take it as just another story like all the others, a sensation to share down a phone line at night. Or else he was teasing her: the cliches on the cards, picture and message, suggested a tease. She wished the police had left the postcard behind, so she could hold it, stare at it, try to sense with her fingertips what he meant and what he was doing: wandering, without a life after taking so many lives of his own, looking for his next name.

The phone rang in her office. She thought of letting the machine answer; she didn’t want another boundary dispute, another minor criminal escapade or urgent rewriting of a will until she had closed the matter of Christopher Hart. Anna Costa, at least, had something to bury.

It was a reverse-charge call. She could hear the operator’s voice through the machine: speaking English, but over-precise, maybe Dutch. She picked up the phone but the line had already gone dead.

She knew it was Hart. She couldn’t say precisely why, whether she was truly sure, or whether she was just eager for the comfort of finishing the story. But she stayed in the office for a while, waiting.

There were no more calls that day.

I put down the phone. It wasn’t sensible to call. It wasn’t possible to avoid it. Maria was my only connection to my own whole story, the one who knew what nobody else must or could know. I thought I needed her.

I had a headache at all the empty time I now owned. The hotel corridor, pale walls, shining linoleum, the off-white of cheap fluorescent light didn’t help; but I could hardly choose. This hotel did not seem unduly interested in passports or papers. It was cheap. The management, briskly, took a cash deposit for a week.

I counted out the money I’d drawn driving north. I walked over to Dam Square, a wide-open shine of black cobbles in the rain, to find the automatic change machine.

I fed it pesetas, French francs, Belgian francs; it handed back guilders. I felt organized for a while.

I slept with the money by my pillow, shifting throughout the night to check it was still there, like a boy with a treasure or a man in the wilds.

I couldn’t talk to anybody. I couldn’t talk to nobody. The subject I had to discuss was responsibility for a death, and it had to stay private; but without chat, bluster, jokes it always threatened to burst out like some madman’s kerbside sermon.

I needed dinner, anyway. I found a Portuguese restaurant, took the table next to a man who was working in construction in Brussels, no family, up for the weekend to riot about and drink beer. Then, overcome with saudade, which is to nostalgia as a whirlwind is to a breeze, he’d come to this restaurant for something familiar from home: pork and clams, maybe, the authentic cracked egg of pudim Molotov and some red wine from Bairrada. He had a list in his mind of how to conjure his home on a table: pig, sugar, rice, potatoes, wine.

‘You know Portugal?’ he said, the second time.

‘I was in Vila Nova de Formentina this summer.’

‘Everything’s good there?’

‘Everything’s good. You got family there?’

He shook his head. Then he said: ‘I’m from the Minho. I had a wife but she died. I haven’t been back to see my parents in two years, not since we buried her.’

‘It’s all work,’ I said. ‘You want a drink?’

After a quiet moment, I said, ‘Everything’s new around Vila Nova. New buildings. New houses. They’re building a new swimming pool.’

‘Indoors?’

Another beer.

‘Work’s easy in Brussels?’

‘There’s work. And you come in legally now. It’s good to be in Europe.’

‘There must be other Portuguese -‘

‘They have families. I don’t. They stick to themselves mostly.’ He wanted to change the subject, obviously. He wanted to claim a bright, good life for himself. So ‘What’s money?’ he said, and ordered a serious bottle of Colares red, which he poured with a flourish. ‘I once drank the wine at Bussaco,’ he said. ‘In the palace. In the gardens. It was a white wine, very old. Tasted of varnish. But good varnish.’