Taking Lives (38 page)

He was dark like me. Our builds weren’t very different, except he had used his body hard so its mass was entirely solid like good rope.

I saw he was paying cash. I wondered if he even had credit cards, bank cards.

‘I need a walk,’ he said. ‘I need somewhere with girls.’

‘There are girls in the windows.’

‘I need someone to talk to. I can fuck any time.’

We strode along the canals, although we had nowhere particular to go, just the hope of a low, warm bar with company.

He said his name was Boaventura.

‘Good name,’ I said, weighing it in my mind.

Maria went back to Formentina, just to check on things. The morning had been cold and wet, but the sun had broken through and the lanes began to smell of grapes - musky, sweet grapes - and the quite separate smell of the new wine rising.

The oil-press, she could see, was now a low ruin. The scorch marks shone black. Water must be getting into the rubble walls. She was glad it couldn’t stand much longer.

She climbed the side track, alongside the ashy edge of the forest, to what had once been Christopher Hart’s house.

She needed to organize a new door because police work had left the old one only parked in place. She thought: he paid all the rent in advance, so there’s no urgency in letting the place again.

She pushed the door open carefully and propped it against the wall.

The house was dark and stale, which is what she expected; she had closed all the shutters and windows herself. Even the brilliant light from the door made only a tentative square on the floor.

In this darkness, she kept just missing things from the corner of her eye. She thought events must somehow have printed themselves on the dust and the dead air. If she wasn’t careful, she’d start catching hints and signs in the corners.

She put on the lights, to be reasonable.

The kitchen and the living room both were empty now and unmarked by anything that had happened: a house for rent again, just enough chairs and spoons for the summer. She checked some of the drawers in case she had missed something: a book, a brush, something small.

She looked into the bathroom. The rack held a little survey of sunscreens, in white bottles, orange tubes. They seemed useful, so she’d left them.

She stood at the door of the bedroom. It was framed in surprising light.

He was there, she thought, in the next room, always in the next room. She kept opening doors to find him.

She pushed open the bedroom door.

A man stood in the middle of the bright room. Against the sun from the open windows, she thought at first she was seeing Hart: tall, head down, hands laced together. She imagined how he would be when he turned to her.

But when he turned, she knew he was wrong. Hart never carried a sack of a stomach. The hands, too, were wrong: the fingers did not taper as she remembered.

It took her a moment to accept that she was facing Mello.

‘Why are you here?’ she said.

Mello was not used to being challenged. Besides, it was as though she had interrupted him in prayer or meditation, and he had to remind himself to answer her.

‘I’m sorry if I alarmed you,’ he said.

‘There’s no police car down below.’

‘I walked here from Vila Nova.’

‘Why would you walk? You never walk.’ She knew his grand and impressive transits into other people’s lives, his official progress through the town.

‘I wanted to be here for a moment,’ he said. ‘On my own.’

‘I have to inspect the house,’ she said. ‘We’ll need to rent it again -‘

‘I needed to be on my own.’

Maria said: ‘I have things to attend to.’

‘Please,’ Mello said. She thought of him as a presence in uniform, with very still eyes; it was startling to see his face properly for the first time, all animated with lines and feeling. ‘I wanted to think.’

Maria went to close the shutters.

‘You’ll have to leave,’ she said.

She wondered if he had walked here as some kind of pilgrimage.

‘You know I killed them both,’ Mello said.

Maria, disconcerted, said, ‘Both of them?’

‘John Costa. And his father.’

‘But how could you kill his father?’

‘The PIDE beat me. They used water and sound on me. I’ve had a ringing in my left ear ever since. It never stops. Then they decided I was too young to know anything, so they talked about crippling my legs so I couldn’t get into more trouble, and they could catch me if I did.’

Maria said, ‘I don’t want to hear all this.’

‘Jose Costa didn’t want to hear, either, at first. But I went to talk to him the day he died.’

‘He died of a heart attack. He wasn’t a healthy man.’

‘He was healthy. He was stronger than I am, and healthier.’

The brilliance of the sun, the white of the walls isolated Mello in an interrogator’s light.

‘That morning, I thought everything was resolved. After all these years,’ he said. ‘I was glad he came back, glad I could settle things. That afternoon, when I heard he had died, it was as though I was suddenly to blame, as though I had to take back the burden of my own damned suffering. And then John Costa comes, and John Costa dies and -‘

Maria saw the man’s officialdom and authority broken down into tears. She was frightened. She knew he would have to reassert himself, deny everything he was saying, in order to go back to being the policeman who expects compliance. He would assert himself against her later, she was sure.

He said, ‘I thought I was such a good man that I could forgive Jose Costa. I suppose I wasn’t. I suppose John Costa’s death proves that.’

Maria watched him make his back rigid again, and his face stern, and his eyes dry.

She said, ‘If Hart had never come here -‘

‘Some things would be just the same,’ Mello said.

At the door to the house, she asked him, ‘Will you ever find the people who vandalized the grave?’

‘No,’ Mello said.

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Everyone knew the story. It could be anyone.’

She realized what he meant: that it was a civic duty to enforce the memory of even little treasons. He had put on authority again, and he would not be questioned.

I thought I should use Hart’s bank card while it lasted.

I looked for a bank machine, stepped up, fed the card to the wall, opted for the English language and three hundred guilders - a nice, average transaction, the most the bank wanted to hand out.

The transaction is being processed. There was a sunflower on the screen.

A few people milled behind me, waiting in the rain.

The transaction is being processed. The sunflower stayed.

An English tourist started bobbing from one side of me to the other, as though I was wilfully taking my time, and other people’s. I couldn’t be bothered to explain.

The transaction is being processed.

The transaction cannot be processed. The sunflower did not change.

The card came back.

Christopher Hart was dead.

I slipped the card into my shirt pocket and closed my jacket against the wind. I thought I could try John Costa’s card, but the little line of people was radiating impatience. Besides, John Costa must have lost his credit already,-Anna is a practical woman.

I walked briskly. I felt a boy’s shame at being noticed or conspicuous. Then I was all mind, working on the possibilities. I didn’t feel the cold for a while.

Maybe the machine in Dam Square was just a bad moment in the wired world. But if anyone wanted to know where to find me, I’d just told them: a walk away from the Dam Square, with no money for a cab.

That night I dreamt I was a schoolboy out running, cold and wet and breathless, pounding along mud tracks and suburban streets in a convoy of misery. I couldn’t leave the course; I’d be seen. I couldn’t stop running because I was being timed.

I woke up cold.

I had lost all my possible names and lives, except one: Martin Arkenhout. I even thought, just as he always thought, that I could do it better.

Boaventura said his father had worked one time in London, but not for very long. He should have gone when he was twenty, but that was during the world war, so he had to wait. He came back when he couldn’t bear the separation from his real life any more, and he was famous for buying a little car - a third-hand Renault - which he still drove too fast through the village, too slow on the big roads.

It was very early in the evening to ease down into drink, but it was pleasant enough. Besides, I didn’t want to show Boaventura that I was jealous of a father who had come back to him.

He would be my father, anyway, if I was Boaventura.

The idea of killing was still quite abstract. I had no weapon, no plan, no notion of what to do with a body in the middle of the city, except perhaps that it could be weighted down and dumped into a canal. I could see only the need to be someone else, and the possibility of being one thing at last, which is Portuguese, and not a half-dozen mixes of class, nation, attitudes. I would put away the complications and become whole.

But to get there, I had to stab, shoot, bludgeon, drown or throttle this particular man, had to edge myself out of jealousy and into a clear sense of superiority: Arkenhout’s perpetual state of being the northerner in Europe, and sure he was somehow better, more advanced, more rational than anyone else.

‘Those women,’ Boaventura said. ‘They’re smiling.’ He called over the waitress and had her take a couple of beers to the two blondes, around forty, faces like good bread, who were sitting together at another green baize table across the bar.

The women did smile. One of them beckoned us over.

You can’t agonize so much under a blanket of beer, thighs brushing up against you so casually, time passing without it mattering, a plate of mussels with sauces and stickbread to mop up the drink and the talk about families, homes, intimacies so casually brought to strangers like children bring each other their favourite toys.

Nobody went home with anyone else, either, except the two women caught the Metro to the south and we saw them off. They kissed us, big kisses full of beery warmth.

Boaventura wandered off, happily. He said we should go drinking the next night, too. See how our luck holds. See what comes up.

I kept walking. I walked half the next day, despite the wet and the cold. I walked the long, blank avenues leading out of the city, with their parade of warm windowscapes: parlours, cats, libraries, kitchens so white and clean they looked like a lesson in morals. Then I doubled back into the old city, dodged into alleys between leaning buildings, passed the pimps trying to keep casual on the street corners. I stopped every so often for a beer or a coffee, just to be sure I could still get warm again.

I do not remember thinking about murder, or Boaventura. I felt myself as clean and empty as paper taking impressions.

I came up against all the Gothic spires of the Rijksmuseum, the other side of a cold, black canal. I saw it as a refuge, and not just because everything inside was subtly ordered, period by period, case by case. All my life, I could always lose myself in paint and forms and signs, even in the jostle of a public gallery. I knew where my history must be: in books and pictures.

I paid and entered. I walked the steps, and I turned into the print room: cases full of engravings, all country scenes and hayricks and tavern drunks, so I imagined. I couldn’t see them for the lights shining in the glass; at least, I thought the problem was the lights.

I wandered into galleries of furniture: like parodies of settled, domestic rooms, but not yet cluttered enough by living people. There were doll’s houses, small lives sliced open.

I walked past paintings that I used to think were glories and lessons: because I used to let myself admire and revere. But now the paintings hung inert on the walls, a line of facts of oil, canvas, board.

I stopped in front of a painting by Frans Post. This at least should have some grand significance: it was painted, I knew, on the same expedition that produced the Liber Principis. The books were the catalogue of wonders and this big canvas was a window-dresser’s version of them all.

I saw a panorama, caught in a great carved frame of strangling vines. I saw: breadfruit clustered on a tree, scarlet birds, a louche monkey lolling, a pangolin snouting at a gourd, a great frog, a pineapple, all making a chorus line of specimens arranged on swags of bush in front of the big, wide stage of the picture; and on the stage, ruins of a cathedral and assorted visitors, whites ahead, blacks in respectful ranks, - and beyond that, blue ripples of hills merging up into a sky the same, faintly purplish blue. I could see each item, one by one.

But I wanted to be lost in the picture, to feel a prickle of excitement on my skin. Instead, my mind turned over like some card index. I picked out facts: Post was the first trained, official landscape artist to go to the New World; he painted this panorama in Holland when he came back, a propaganda piece; he’d taken the brilliance of a bird’s wing and made it just a flourish in a provincial mind.

Post took to drink soon after. I knew that.

I stood there long enough to start the guard fretting.

If I couldn’t read the picture for myself, perhaps I could read the picture as someone else would have done, say a Dutchman in the 1660s: proud the Dutch controlled this rich Brazilian coast with all its wonders, prouder still the Dutch had burned out the Portuguese who used to be there, and ruined a Catholic cathedral in the Protestant cause. But I was stuck on the dusty surface, among dates and facts.

I wanted to touch the frame. I suppose that was obvious.

The guard stood up and paced a bit. She used her telephone. She made long passes across the gallery, each one coming closer to me.

I was flattered she thought I was still capable of obsession.

I tried to look at other pictures, a contorted swan, a famous face, a landscape of fields and picturesque woods, but the Post drew me back. I had such a hopeless need to feel, and I felt nothing.

I panicked. I walked away.

The guard followed me into the next room, talking again on her telephone. Two guards appeared on either side of the far door.