Taking Lives (5 page)

John Gaul is going to the Bahamas. His passport, credit cards and letters of introduction go with him. There is nothing untoward in his New York apartment - although the maid wonders why he used all those garbage bags - and his car is parked in the proper spot. Nobody asks questions.

Raoul and Jeff think it’s a brilliant joke to put Arkenhout’s picture into Gaul’s passport: a social time bomb, waiting for the first sharp-eyed immigration officer.

Arkenhout reads the passport while Raoul and Jeff play with the pictures and make it his passport. He reads about tetanus and mumps shots, no Cambodian goods, all the plant and animal pests and diseases that could come with foreign meat, how mutilating a passport makes it INVALID. An American passport, to European eyes, is a three-volume novel.

David Silver insists on using all the time he’s paid for, as though he knows Arkenhout won’t stay. Arkenhout picks up toner for a laser printer, two dozen lilies, peach sorbet, a newly mended chair.

When he’s finished, he says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t come here again.’

The artist has a closed, turtle’s face, and it doesn’t change. He says nothing.

Arkenhout wants to start an explanation in the silence, but he stops himself.

Silver says: ‘Make sure you’ve been paid.’

In Nassau he gets the point of all this. He grows up. He isn’t some creature of circumstance, living someone else’s ambitions. He isn’t just his crimes, either. He can sample everything.

He gives the agent the lawyer’s letter, and he gets the keys. The house has been empty for years, the agent says, and they hardly knew his - John Gaul’s - uncle, but everything has been cleaned and painted and primped. She is glad to see someone living there.

It’s not, she says, the grandest part of Nassau. It’s a private drive of eight houses or so, all in their half-acres, all the colours of coconut ice and sherbets. When he asks about the house’s history she gets edgy; later he discovers that the house was once overrun during a drunk dinner party by robbers who kept the guests hostage for nine hours.

One day the house blossoms with termites, grubs boiling out of mattresses. Arkenhout stands outside and laughs with wonder; then he leaves the maids to cope, and walks down to the beach.

There is a zone in the water where the light and the sea become a flashy kind of lustre. Above, the sky is clear blue. Below, the sea is clear green over white sand, with tiny silver daggers of fish. Arkenhout comes up through the shine and goes down again where the soldier fish parade, breaks into the brilliance of the sun and back into the brilliance of the water. He’s found joy.

He boozes, goes fishing. Saturdays, he drives past the police cadets’ barracks while they’re burning the week’s evidence, and a parade hangs on the fence, inhaling. He takes up with the dowager class who make the introductions; very seriously, one tells him of his brand-new post office box that ‘the number says so much about you’. He sort of breaks some hearts, an upper-class resort boy who stays while the girls go home.

The house is pink, with two frangipani trees, pink wax flowers with the smell of his mother’s bath, and the red glare of poinciana blossom and the vanilla mauve of poor man’s orchid. Even the storms come to delight him with their jet black skies and their ferocious cuts of lightning.

He sails with new friends on seas that keep the promise of those small, square postcard pictures in the family encyclopedia. He comes to think of Miami as a kind of tropical Sears Roebuck you approach by plane; but he never goes there. He’s superstitious about testing his passport in America.

Mornings he sometimes sits down with the fishermen selling from underwater trays at Potters’ Cay, tells tourists who trust a white skin what they should pay for their lobster and grouper. Sundays, he goes down for the fried food and music on the beach at church cookouts, with large black ladies in frocks with proper white collars; and in the evenings, he has dinner. He almost becomes the protege of a property man who thinks he could learn things.

And he watches. He watches friends who leave cocaine blowing on mantelpieces. He watches the old ladies, and their tame tabby-cat priests, all carefully not talking about what they must know: the drug business all around them, a famous murder and its consequences, this marriage whose only problem is homosexual incest, another open arrangement where the husband is shamed if he doesn’t have a Friday night lover, and sleeps on friends’ couches so his wife shall not know. He assembles a pathology of people who aren’t where they belong.

They don’t ask questions, he notices. If you stay, they make up the story they want; the past doesn’t count if it happened off the islands.

John Gaul’s accounts and credit cards make him more than respectable - the people who have to stay out the summer in the islands are not at all rich - and his sailing and fishing are enough common ground with a few white Bahamians. Black Bahamians think of him as plain white, which shocks his Dutch heart at first. He soon learns to avoid the banking classes, not much more than English telex clerks, stiff as the pink starched napkins at their dinner tables; and the black Bahamian lawyers, who stroll in black wool suits in August as a badge of pride, and who have the kind of power he doesn’t understand. Some day, he may have to pay one, and that is relationship enough.

He goes travelling, on a whim. He takes the direct flights only, to London, to Kingston once, to Frankfurt. He buys books always. He graces places, his carefulness mistaken for manners because he seems so sociable.

He’s in Tunis, visiting. He wants to see Roman ruins, the low wreckage of old Carthage, things from school-books; he’s drawing on the images that remain out of schooldays so he can preserve some kind of continuity between his various lives. He has to remember he must not remember what Martin Arkenhout or Seth Goodman knew.

He goes to Gide’s village, not that he knows about Gide except as an entry in a kind of mental dictionary: French, queer, old. The village is white blocks stacked tightly together. There is a bar for tea, a great shaded room. On the wall hangs a single picture, like an icon: a young man stripped to the waist, muscles used more than built, but definitely posing. The photograph has been taken from a slight distance, not the forced closeness of pornography, and the man seems indifferent to the camera, except that the camera was the only possible reason he would strip and stand with his ribs of muscle flexed.

Arkenhout wonders: if this is the son of the house some generations back - the picture had a period air, fifties maybe; whether it was taken by a friend, an admiring uncle, someone who collected the man on the beach; why it had been given to the bar, and why it hangs as the one icon on tall white walls. It doesn’t seem to be about sex; at least it was some kind of desire that depends on never touching. The man’s body seems like function taken to a polished degree. Arkenhout wonders if it is some kind of bait.

He never forgets the photograph. It is an ideal: how to be a man, to be strong, calm and quiet in the face of the very desire that makes you worth recording, to concern yourself with strength that matters, and to be beautiful without caring. He forgets the details of the picture, even though it sends him off to a Nassau gym in a panic of self-consciousness, but it always stays in his mind as a square on a wide, white wall, larger than a snapshot, smaller than an eight by ten: instructions, somehow.

He takes out of Nassau two memories. There’s Junkanoo night, walking the dark streets with fires rolling in oil drums, the sound of cowbells and drums starting tentatively at first, then brazenly, then furiously. There was also a night of hurricane in a shuttered house, when the storm boards ripped off windows and he stared into a dark garden where the trees strained and broke against a faint grey light. He had parked the car, for safety, in the middle of the lawn. Its lights, uncannily, went on.

He doesn’t remember the next killing at all.

He picks new lives. He’s in Paris for a while, being an expatriate American, and links up with a small old lion of a movie director who’s forever being honoured, but not paid. He becomes a kind of secretary. He’s there when some fiftyish French movie star, once famously and now desperately blond, tells the director she doesn’t swim in the Mediterranean any more; ‘on ne se baigne pas dans une mer juive’. He watches the director transcend that moment, for the director is a Jew; but Arkenhout has too much moral certainty to forgive him. When the money runs out entirely, and the director is hocking his old Citroen, the pump-up kind, to pay to lose his stomach cancer, Arkenhout moves on.

He watches even lives he will never steal, collects them just for the information: two Guatemalans in Rome who fake eighteenth-century Sacred Hearts for the Florentine market; a poet who thrives on being rejected by women he fancies, and likes Arkenhout to steal them; a sect of devout fraudsters playing golf in Marbella; the floating life of a bodyguard, padded out with the authority of whomever he’s guarding; the life of parallel persons, the ones at airports who are not rushing with families, carrying half an office in a bag, fretting over bookings, who can travel whenever they want and wherever they want, if only they can bring themselves to want one specific time and place. It isn’t money that makes this possible, although they need money, of course. It’s a lack of mooring to the ordinary, crushing rhythms of practical life.

He’s in Brazil awhile, up in Fortaleza, where it’s fun to be rich but the mosquitoes still bite you, and then out in the grassland interior, sweating out days that smell of the leather of working horses. He thinks of trying Australia, but the visa seems too complicated. For a while, he roisters about, no fixed abode, but he finds he does like a community where people want to know him, but not much about him. He gets tired of beers and bars sometimes. He has a year on the fringes of the movie business, being part of entourages.

On the one hand, it works so well. He catches glimpses of other people stuck in jobs, places, marriages, credit ratings, and he glories in the fact that he alone knows how to reinvent himself at will, to get on with the next bright life.

On the other hand, he has a career like any other young professional, with its demands and crises: like the need to move on. He has to work at being casual and shiftless.

Then he makes a mistake.

It is 1996. He’s in Switzerland, on the great lake near Lucerne, with a lease on a small farmhouse on a slope of green velvet fields. He likes playing at being settled in a place where tourist strangers are always passing through. Guard down, he feels himself on holiday: in the quiet, in the morning mist and sun over the lake that makes eerie kingdoms of air, in the sound of cowbells and the regular passing of the lake steamers down below. He contemplates mountains. He lacks occupation, and doesn’t care.

His name, for the moment, is Paul Raven. He has an American passport again, collected from Raven’s office in Los Angeles where the man was scattering money about the town to break into movies. It made good sense for Raven to disappear to Switzerland for a while. Nobody would ask questions. It was Arkenhout’s idea he should disappear somewhere that nobody knew him.

He sometimes walks all day on the high paths, along the mountain ridges, until he’s not sure he can hold enough breath and summon enough will to make the last kilometre home. He swims in the lake waters, where they’re jade and not the black of shadow. He wakes early in the morning.

He hears hammering on the door.

Now, seven in the morning is a possible time to go calling in rural Switzerland. The neighbours have already tended cattle and pigs, have taken the first glass of coffee with sugar and their own pear schnapps.

Arkenhout goes down the wood stairs and opens the door.

There are three men in uniform.

‘Fremdenpolizei,’ the largest one says.

In ten years of wandering, he had always slipped past uniforms, not on the watch list at Customs, not anyone’s idea of an illegal migrant, solvent and sensible enough to raise no questions.

‘Foreigner police,’ the man repeats. ‘Herr Raven?’

For a moment, Arkenhout does not know whether to nod or argue.

‘You are in breach of your visa for Switzerland,’ the cop says.

‘I suppose -‘

‘Your visa expired yesterday.’

Arkenhout takes in the great black water of the lake, the last paper of snow on the mountains, the smell of coffee on the man’s breath.

‘So -‘ the cop says.

Arkenhout tries to remember what the problem is: whether he gave the wrong number somewhere, whether he’s overstayed his welcome, whether he seemed to seek employment just because one dumb night he was half-offered a job animating tours for the over-sixties, by a man who knew perfectly well he could not give the job away. Hut remembering doesn’t help.

He’s allowed to collect his personal papers, and a single suitcase. The police take the keys to the house.

He’s on a train to Basel, discreetly handcuffed to one of the cops. An old lady, in first class, picks apart the hems of napkins. She never looks at the police.

At Basel station, which is half-French and half-Swiss, he’s left to buy a ticket. He chooses Cologne. He knows there’s money in Cologne.

He is escorted to the train, settled in his proper seat. The handcuffs are removed only when he’s seated. The Frermdenpolizei

cover the end of the platform just to make sure he leaves.

And the train slips out into Germany.

He has never made a mistake before, not like this, not a mistake so catastrophic that he’s been noticed. He depends on not being noticed. He doesn’t even have the usual protections, the possibility of charging to the American consul and demanding protection, because authority must never take a particular interest in his name or movements. He shares this taste for privacy with all the major tax evaders he’s met: invisible when they move or settle or spend.

He has almost a day before the train reaches Cologne. He doesn’t have cash in his pocket. He has Paul Raven’s credit cards, of course, but the problem must be something he doesn’t know about Raven.