Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  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 Festival Overture: Gaudeamus igitur juvenes dum sumus. A little effort, and Arkenhout is starting out again.

  Hart is alive for the first two movements of the Second Symphony, though. The garotte goes around 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 spurt, 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 travelers 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 & 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 clichés 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 shopping street, not in a 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 anymore. 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 forward, 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 gin. 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 coffeehouses 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. Afterward, 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.

  Two

  My name is John Michael Snell Costa. That explains almost everything.

  Costa is a Portuguese name. Snell is English, my mother’s name, but it is there only by Portuguese custom. The first two—John Michael—are what a Portuguese father calls a boy born in London when he wants him to pass for English.

  I do pass very well, on the whole: perhaps too dark, shorter than the absolutely average, the name a bit odd. I suppose I’m sometimes too obviously serious—about women, about the art I file away in Solander boxes. I’m reserved even when I drink too much; I don’t have a boisterous, slap-happy, separate drunk self. My accent started with the BBC and got a bit demotic later as fashion changed.

  But don’t think I belong. I would hate to belong.

  I’m out on monochrome streets, on my way to work, passing people all in a blind, resentful rush who long for the day to color up. I’m rushing, too, that’s the cleverness of it all. I’m in step on the escalator, always in the right line. I know how to box myself into the right moves.

  I look around and see the self-conscious stylists who’ve bought and paid for their identity—biker, jock, queer, Armani, banker—and I’m right there with them. Because I fell in love with paintings, hopelessly, I play a keeper at the Museum. I have the clothes, mostly flannel. I have the degrees.

  I like the job, I should say. On the streets, everyone is running in this pale, stressed present tense, no history, future indefinite, scrambling to invent themselves every minute just to stay whole. We keepers get to mediate between a past that’s stored and documented, that is registered as important, and some possible future in which people will look at it again.

  I’m also a romantic, without much opportunity. What I do is keep drawings, tend and study them: reddish lines, brown wash on paper that stains and crumbles. I protect these things.

  But I’d guard wonders, given half a chance. I’d be a knight in armor, by a grail in a tower, kneeling on watch for centuries.

  The taxi dropped meat the north entrance.

  There was a gentle riot all along the Museum railings, crowds blowsy in open summer clothes. At ten, exactly, the guards consulting their watches with great drama, the gates folded open. The mob promenaded ruthlessly up to the famous portico. The daily invasion of the public, physical museum had begun.

  But I walked past them, and through the green door of a decorous Georgian house to the side. Keepers know that the Museum itself—its powers, purposes, and history—is in these offices and it looks out on the plant that supports it the way Victorian mill owners looked at their mills: which is to say, unseeingly.

  I walked the warren of students’ rooms, past labs that cut up bodies of stones and fussed with odd worms in exotic woods, down corridors painted in pale, official colors with a sense of respectable dust even in mopped corners. I loved this walk. I was deep inside the Museum, opening up the soft privacy of this solipsists’ place that was kept separate from the big, open circus of the public galleries and the wider world only by doors marked (I noticed this on my very first day) EMERGENCY EXIT.

  I cut through a basement like locked cells, each stacked with objects, a world tour in bric-a-brac. I passed the Hindu sculpture where a scream of cats came to be fed, offices where small, broken things were filed in drawers until a monograph could be built on them. All the higgledy-piggledy confusion of the Museum’s private parts, its lack of maps and its trick, dogleg corridors, were an occasion of triumph: I won through.

  I was on my own territory, under the dome. The sense of achievement died quickly.

  Carter was waiting in my brown and stuffy office: a small, neat, anxious man, like a mouse in a cleaning coat, with a vigorous toupee on a tired face. He had four folios balanced on his knees.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Good weekend? Yes? I thought you should see these. I’m not responsible.”

  He waited for me to clear a corner of my desk, and put the books down. They were perhaps twelve inches by twenty-four, bound in slick white parchment that had stained with time, their edges shaggy like a pile of thick papers.

  I said, “What’s the problem?” knowing that Carter always thinks there is a problem.

  “See for yourself.”

  I went to touch the books, but Carter coughed. “Gloves, sir,” he said.

  I said, “You can’t do anything without latex nowadays.” It’s a ritual joke that slightly stirs Carter’s dust, which is the point. I pulled on thin white surgical gloves.

  “Fifteen pages,” Carter said. “There are pages missing. Someone has taken fifteen pages.”

  Each book was labeled “Liber Principis,” the Book of the Prince. I knew of them, of course, although they were kept in the cage of a reserve collection: albums of paintings, seventeenth century, made by artists attached to Prince Maurice of Nassau when he was governor of Dutch Brazil. They were lovely things, full of exact living animals, trees, snakes, and people, but they were much more: the first attempt to record precisely what was in the New World instead of populating it with conventional monsters. It was as though, on each page, you could see wonders directly through the eyes of the past.

  “I’d never have known,” Carter said, “but for the routine checks. We’ve been having dehumidifier trouble in the cage. Staff have handled them, conservation had them three years ago. Besides that, there’s only one person. Professor Christopher Hart.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “We have a suspect.” I could see that Carter was hot for mousy vengeance, but he said nothing.

  “You’re absolutely sure that no other member of the public saw these?”

  “Hart had to get special permission, you remember. In the circumstances.”

  Carter blam
ed me for the permission, I could tell, blamed me for the fact that the books did not stay safe in their wire cage. I saw the ghosts of liveliness penned up in those cages. He saw his few surrogate possessions, to be protected like his pension and his mortgage.

  I had my hands, palms down, on the scratched white parchment of the covers.

  “I’ll handle it,” I said.

  Christopher Hart at that moment was these things on a table: three credit cards, a bank card, a Eurocheque card, four library passes, one photo pass that opened doors to his university department, a gym card, two frequent flyer cards, one out of date, one colored gold, a passport, an American visa in the new style with a photograph, a driver’s license, a separate identity card, a red season ticket to Arsenal Football Club, a computer warranty card.

  They were all Martin Arkenhout needed, usually.

  They’re what authority requires to let us walk onto a plane, look at books, touch our own money; they don’t just prove who we are, the cards are our identity itself. Power wants us numbered and not named, carded and not just remembering our name, address, telephone number, purpose, social security number, PIN, and so forth. Power has good reasons. As long as we have papers, we cohere; we don’t shift like character or personality or desire. We’re available to be managed.

  In the end, he boasted to me about all this: how all he had to do now was to fill in the details—what Hart wants, eats, loves, hates, believes. He was already sure he could make a better life for Hart than Hart ever could have.

  He doesn’t know about Hart, you see. I do, which is knowledge that can kill me.

  “ You understand the problem, ” the deputy director said. He was a fleshy man, the ruins of a rugby player, out of whose bulk came short, sharp puffs of startlingly aesthetic opinion.

  “I think so,” I said. “These books are not supposed to be in the Museum in the first place.”