Taking Lives (7 page)

But there is always the possibility of a parallel life. So Arkenhout waits a few more days, goes for long walks in the country, goes fishing one day, then hires a car and waits for Hart to use his VW to go to his other life, whatever it is, if he has another life. All this time, Arkenhout is the bit of shadow under the tree across the road.

Arkenhout checks Hart on the Web, checks his taste for anything troublesome with a few key merchants of worldwide sucker lists: no kiddie porn, no need for mail-order sheets, not wicked, not domestic. He is nothing in particular, available to be stolen.

Arkenhout finds himself asking all the questions, except the right ones.

Hart comes out of the back door covering his head as if it is raining. But it is only mist. He gets into the car, creeps down the drive, creeps into the road. Arkenhout can’t follow like that, can’t keep him in sight without tailgating because of the mist. Besides, he can’t drive that slowly. It isn’t in him.

Hart seems such a cautious bastard, afraid of trees and the green and the mist and the cars on the road. He parks at the station and takes the Amsterdam train. Nobody knows him. Fine.

At Amsterdam Central, Hart walks off like he is hiking mountains. He bustles down streets full of early morning hookers suss-suss-sussuring from the red windows, and students piling their bicycles alongside the bookshops or the cafes. The man needs a life, Arkenhout thinks, which strikes him as funny in the circumstances.

Hart goes to the side of the Rijksmuseum, through those little formal gardens with their bits of sculpture, and through a door marked Prentenkabinet. He is still researching, evidently.

Around lunchtime, Hart leaves to eat in a cafe across Museumplein. He orders croquettes, of all the low things. He eats fast, he drinks one beer and he goes back to work.

Arkenhout decides to take a chance, and come back only at closing time - watching like a father who tactfully watches his son come home on his own. The day has tired Hart. The brisk lope has turned to slack shoulders and a dutiful stride. There’s nothing ahead of him except the evening.

The station, the train, the VW, the house. The daily woman has gone. One light comes on in what must be the kitchen, another in what must be the living room: probably some huge, open, cold living room. Another in the gable of the house which must be his bedroom, reached by sharp, narrow stairs. Arkenhout wonders why an Englishman would feel at home with what the Dutch like.

He feels his skin go cold.

Hart lets him in; why wouldn’t he? If he’s surprised, he puts it down to different manners, another country, and he’s glad of company. He brings beer into the tall, open living room, by a hearth whose huge stones seem cold and shiny damp. He waits for Arkenhout to come to the point.

There’s just one more thing that Arkenhout feels the need to know: if Hart went away, where would he go? He needs Hart’s life for only a brief time, so he wants no complications.

‘I shouldn’t have come home,’ Arkenhout says. He can sense Hart draw back. The man doesn’t like confidences; his alertness is pure defence, not curiosity.

‘Five years in Germany,’ Arkenhout says. ‘Frankfurt. In a bank. Better than nothing, I guess.’

Hart says, ‘I’m off next week, actually.’ He only means he’s not available for this kind of chat, but Arkenhout can’t believe his luck has finally turned. ‘To Portugal. I thought I’d get as far away as possible.’

‘The Algarve?’

‘God, no. Somewhere in the centre by the mountains. Where nobody goes.’

For the first time, Arkenhout checks out Hart as something more than a useful set of data. He’s a fine case of presentation, who does just enough at the gym to stave off scholar’s stoop in his narrow shoulders, who has one Dolce & Gabbana jacket to hang on a gawky frame, who animates his eyes and face even when he’s not interested, like a man who some day wants to be on TV.

He’s training to be a star of some kind, Arkenhout thinks.

But what kills him is the fact that he’s already written the letters - they lie unposted on his desk - that tell his university in England and his hosts in Holland that he’s going to Portugal for a while.

By the time Hart is dead, the Brahms CD has reached the Academic Overture: ‘Gaudeamus igitur juvenes dura sumus’. A little effort, and Arkenhout is starting out again.

Hart is alive for the first two movements of the Second Symphony, though. The garrotte goes round his neck at the start of the Allegretto grazioso, keeps turning like you turn a can opener until the breath is out of his body and his neck is cut through.

Arkenhout lays him on the patio on the usual bed of garbage bags. It is dark and there are fences. He waits for an hour so the blood will ooze instead of spurting, and he trims Hart’s identity with a good sharp knife to a rerun of the Allegro con spirito. You always cut the balls, because if they do find the body, that suggests some sexual motive. Sex makes it anonymous.

It is careful work. Arkenhout washes away the blood with ammonia. He operates so the body can be wrapped and weighted and sunk into water in several places. If you don’t cut, the body keeps its natural buoyancy and comes up black and accusing.

He dematerializes this Christopher Hart so well that by the time he drives away in the VW that night he is Christopher Hart - alive, well, creditworthy, just on the move.

Gaudeamus igitur. He gets himself a beer.

Later, the cops will say Arkenhout is a master of disguise. But he never tries to change his face, his body, his way of walking or dressing. He simply takes papers, money and a whole life, to live as himself under someone else’s name.

He checks the details like nervous travellers check their cash and tickets. Paul Raven has disappeared, which is what you would expect him to do in his circumstances; and if he was dubious enough to be slung out of Switzerland, who’s now going to be surprised that he has gone to earth? Christopher Hart is going to Portugal, where he always meant to go. No questions at all arise.

He wants to find the same escort girl from Utrecht, and show her a good time this time: no neediness, no all-night warmth, just action. But he’s not stupid. It’s his good time so any girl will do.

Later, he packs Hart’s clothes: not many, mostly khaki. Better not to leave them in the house. He remembers to leave money for the cleaning lady, so she won’t talk. The keys he will take with him, as Hart would, since the lease has six months to run. He likes that phrase: six months to run.

Mrs Arkenhout always goes shopping in Amsterdam.

She’s the mother, decorous, docked like a neat little boat outside Marks and Spencer with a bag of black socks, knickers and sweet wine, wondering if she has time for a piece of pie and a coffee before the train.

Then, amid the mutter and clatter of Kalverstraat, she sees the dead walking: Martin, her son. He is tall, blond and just as he should be.

She hugs a few cliches to her. Martin, she thinks, to the life. These young people all look alike. Nowadays. A face in the crowd. A mother knows. Then she sees how the tug and pull of the street is taking Martin away, just like ten years before, and this time she won’t stand for it. She knocks her way through the crowd. She ricochets off the nicest people, not even meaning to say ‘sorry’.

He stops in front of an open store, by a machine that makes business cards while you wait. He’ll need cards, being a proper professional man. She can see him feeding his name to the machine, who he is and where he lives and how to reach him, the name of his company and his position, what has became of him since the telegram - ‘the’ telegram, always - announced his death.

But the man feeding the machine turns out to be another blond.

She panics. You can’t meet the dead and then lose them, not in a pedestrianized precinct, not in a nice mall. It isn’t right.

She thinks of shouting Martin’s name. But even in passion, she’s proper. She only stares around, and people watch her stare. She feels herself change in their eyes from a doctor’s wife with a position and a garden into a ghost of herself, an unremarkable, dotty and disrespected lady in an oddly nice skirt.

She sees him again in the line for a tram to Central Station. She can’t waste time because the tram might come and pull away and she’d lose him. The train doesn’t matter any more. She thinks she can explain why dinner is late.

The tram pulls up. It is painted over with huge eyes, like an articulated billboard, advertising sunglasses, but she doesn’t have time to see that. Martin gets on, so she gets on. Her heart bothers her.

He is at the snout of the tram, she is at the back. She pushes and frets forwards, her shopping bags following awkwardly and clashing with people’s shins and buttocks.

She is just behind him.

She thinks about how long she must cook the pork for dinner. She tries to remember when the next train goes. She sees a boy with earrings and she is glad Martin doesn’t wear earrings.

And now, if he doesn’t suddenly turn and acknowledge her, she is going to have to speak.

She knows about thank-you letters, and the size of invitations and when to offer sherry and when genever. But there is nothing in her books for this.

‘Excuse me,’ she says. But she doesn’t touch him.

The tram sways on a bend, pitches her against him. Her shopping bags fall and leach neat socks across the floor.

‘Do I know you?’ Martin says.

It is Martin, she’s sure - his eyes, his manner, shoulders too broad for the bookworm face, the fingers like tapers blunted at the end. She knows that he knows her, and still he is saying in that offensive tone and in English, ‘Can I help you?’

She is meant to say, ‘I made a mistake. I’m sorry.’ But she hasn’t made a mistake, and she isn’t sorry, and she will stay here until the end of the line and she will make him remember.

‘Martin, I’m your mother,’ she says.

Martin pulls away.

She knows he knows her. Mother and son isn’t a matter of a face uncertainly etched into memory; it’s body memory, very old.

She says, ‘Martin? I am your mother.’

He is leaning on the door button when the tram next stops but he doesn’t run. He allows two girls to get down before him, leggy, juicy girls. He turns back then, and he says, ‘My name is Hart, Christopher Hart.’

He says it in English, although she spoke in Dutch; which is odd because the English hardly ever understand Dutch.

The tram door snaps shut. She stoops to salvage the socks, absently rolls some into balls out of habit, all the time apologizing to the air.

The nearest police station is on Warmoesstraat, not a respectable street. Mrs Arkenhout arms herself with her position as a doctor’s wife, and sweeps past the pushers, the chip-eaters, the bleary dummy people who stand quite still on corners like a bored audience at their own lives; and past the sex-shop windows, people and their pets, splayed ladies, industrial equipment; and the coffee houses crowded with the kind of people she doesn’t know, but maybe Martin has become.

She explains the problem to one of those designated kind policemen they have in Amsterdam. Afterwards, she realizes how it must have looked: a red-faced woman talking so exactly and carrying wine, explaining how she had seen her dead son walking on the street and asking for something to be done about it. Naturally, the policeman offers her something hot and sweet.

Then he makes a show of checking a computer file, and tries not to look surprised when he finds an old story on the screen: Martin Arkenhout, Dutch exchange student, found dead in Florida.

‘I want to see the inspector who asked us questions,’ Mrs Arkenhout says. ‘The one who investigated Martin’s death.’

‘You understand that Martin is dead, don’t you?’ the nice cop says.

‘Please,’ she says. She knows what she knows, which is photographs, a neat, clean, manila file of them presented to her ten years ago: details, all horrible, in silt. A forearm with a fake-gold Timex, with roots of flesh where the shoulder had been. A fragment of chest with an indented nipple; she didn’t know about Martin’s nipples, not a boy’s nipples. Some perfect teeth, scattered in sets. All these and more, the policeman said, had been pulled from a great river of grass.

‘Martin is alive,’ she says. ‘I saw him.’

‘I’ll make a report,’ the cop says.

She hasn’t wasted her time, she thinks. For the wife of a doctor, someone will do something. Surely?

Leave Martin Arkenhout for a moment. He’s catching his breath at the back of some cafe, taking an interest in a beer. He’ll be telling himself that his mother didn’t know him, that the meeting never happened, that officials will calm her down and send her home and think she’s sad. But she’ll make sure the authorities do something, he knows. She’ll want to find him out of love but, being the decorous woman she is, she’ll pretend she’s just offended by the untidiness, the impropriety of seeing the dead on public trams. The whole chain of his life depends on disconnections, so he knows his situation is bad. He just doesn’t know how much worse I am going to make it.

I am not a policeman.

I am not a fanciful man.

I’ve simply tried to tell you all this in one of his languages: what he’d done, who he had been, before he broke into my life.

He fooled me, but then he had many languages. He knew art English and plain English, and bar English and dinner party English in expatriate mouths with that odd precision you get from too many euphemisms. He knew how to dress up his mind in a language, not just get the vowels and endings right.

He chose who to be. He chose what happened next, and where. He animated each minute because he never dared let anyone else do it. He must have been a fearfully busy man. I find it more relaxing to have this single personality of mine, formed like yours by the usual circumstance and history.

Now I want my own words for what happened next.

I know some of this because I lived it, some because people told me, some because in the end there were police reports. I have put this together like a history from documents and interviews and memories.

Everything here is true. I don’t want anyone making the mistakes that I made.