Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  He told me he stared in a bookshop window, trying to connect with titles, subjects: not just to know what they were, but to bring back what he knew about them and thought about them, to reconstruct himself around that skeleton. It didn’t work.

  There was a packed bar across the road, sociable to the point where people rubbed against one another as if they weren’t quite sure they could stand.

  May be we grazed each other during those days. I was in a bar one night and I remember a face at the window, which struck me as odd: it was a grown man, thirtyish, stoned, big gray eyes, playing the part of a child waiting for Daddy, staring with wonder at a grown-up world. But the wrong drugs could turn anyone that way.

  I didn’t seek out Hart at first, not while there were museum people, collegial types, to see. I knew I was no policeman, not even a moralist; I was in Amsterdam just to help clear up an embarrassment. I could never track and shadow and bluster. I never understood the English criminal and cop in whodunits, both so decent the killer leaves the room to kill himself when he’s found out, to avoid any social awkwardness; and I don’t have Bay City luck, where the private dick is hired by the woman who did it, sees the guns go off from the heart of a martini, and coincides with crime so often he breathes complicity and suspicion along with the gin. I felt very separate from Hart’s crime, across a sea of call slips and study rooms.

  I did what I do best, which is talk to colleagues.

  “So what do you want?” Van Ostaade said. He was a short, slight man, with a face on the point of vanishing entirely into fine-etched lines, a curator at the Rijksmuseum.

  “Want?”

  “Of course you want something. If you were just here for sex and drugs and rock and roll, you wouldn’t be calling the museum.” I thought it interesting that his museum, too, was “the” museum.

  “Could you tell me,” I said, “the five most likely fences in Amsterdam for mid-seventeenth-century paintings.”

  “Attributed or not?”

  “Attributed.”

  “Good names?”

  “Known names.”

  “How many?”

  “Enough.”

  “You’re having a rough time, aren’t you? I heard about the Persian book covers. And the Japanese chest. And the Medici casket and those Louis XIV bottles. You ought to be more careful.”

  “Security,” I said, “is being upgraded. So they say. Meantime, these pictures are my department, which is why I’m here.”

  “You think they might be on offer in Amsterdam?”

  “It’s a big market. Our thief, if he is a thief, is here. You do have some nice, plump, shiny dealers with very interesting back rooms.”

  “I hope you haven’t been doing business with them,” Van Ostaade said. “I could tell you stories about people at your Museum—”

  “Before my time,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Van Ostaade said. “Yes, of course. What are these paintings—landscapes and burghers?”

  “Flowers. Birds. Insects. Animals. People.”

  “That about covers it,” Van Ostaade said. He finished his beer noisily.

  But my answer had to be careful; he knew that.

  He was grinning anyway, features a bit slack and wet with the beer. The volume in the bar turned up suddenly. “You’re talking about the paintings everybody thinks they understand, so everybody wants them,” he said. “Anybody could sell them. There’s nobody you could rule out.”

  I said, “I need the dealer. A likely dealer.”

  “Are you buying stuff back? I’m not sure the police would like that.”

  “No,” I said. “Not buying. Maybe anticipating a deal. Negotiating, if I have to.”

  Van Ostaade was kind enough not to skewer me with a few shrewd guesses. He did say he would ask around to see if anything spectacular was on offer in town. He’d be truly discreet. He’d be happy to check their own print rooms, too, in case the same gentleman had come visiting: would I tell him again just what kind of pictures were involved, and who was suspected?

  I didn’t, of course.

  We drank for a while, and the woman at the next table plumped down off her chair and scrambled back, her face loose and grinning, then fell down again and was propped by her little squirrel hands on the table. Everybody agreed she was a great little drinker, always had been.

  The police file has Hart’s credit card statements, so we know he didn’t find anywhere to sleep; there is no hotel record. His eyes must have been open on needles.

  At four in the morning he was out in the huge, shiny spaces of Schiphol Airport buying a ticket to Oporto. Nothing much moves in an airport at that time. There were Surinamese women pushing wide mops, and banks of unmanned check-in desks like stalls at some fair that would open soon. Or perhaps the fair has been abandoned forever: just steel and plastic, no prospect of escape or business or fantasy, nothing moving ever again. But it was clean.

  He checked in for a 9:50 flight at 4:35. I guess the check-in clerk said something: maybe just “You’re early. Rough night?” The clerk was so obviously right he expected no answer.

  Hart showed his passport, his boarding card to get into the main concourse.

  He never usually had a sense of anxiety when he tried out a new identity. He was one in a crowd, no reason he should be checked and cross-checked. But it was odd to be in the airport so early for a flight, and he was the only one crossing the immigration line.

  Hart’s passport was the old-fashioned British kind, a black, covered volume. The immigration man could have given him his full attention, but he only waved him through.

  The police were interested in Christopher Hart. Immigration were not.

  The shops were mostly shuttered, nowhere to duck out of sight.

  He was among the overnight losers whose planes never came, who snored and kicked and curled up miserably where they could: trainee refugees just waiting to go back to the middle class.

  At 5:15, he took a bed in the day hotel. They have pure, cool boxes of rooms. I don’t imagine he slept well. He sat on the edge of the bed, trying to think things out, brain racked and thoughts kicking his eyes from the inside.

  Then he remembered: Hart’s VW. How would he explain Hart leaving his new car in Holland when he would need it in Portugal? He had to go back and get it and he had to do everything meticulously. He seemed to be acquiring a talent for doing things wrong.

  The next morning, I went to look for Hart. It sounds absurd, but I had the polite assumption that everyone would tell me the truth, the arrogance to think Hart would fold the moment I found him.

  I had never met the man, remember, never seen him; he was a reputation to me, someone I’d read in the journals, who was constantly needing more from the Museum. I preferred to stand back when he made his demands, let him apply in writing, answer him in writing. I’m not good at being importuned, or bullied.

  I took the double-decker train and a taxi to the university, where Hart was last seen: a shy institution just outside an inland town, low glass boxes covered in shrubbery and quick-growing trees. I found the department, and the department secretary, a practical woman, and I put on charm like a suit.

  She said people were always asking for Hart, but he was never there. He’d been there, of course, taught for a semester, but they hardly saw him now. People were “always” asking for him? Well, people did ask for him. More often than usual. Usually people didn’t ring up for academics at the department, because they knew they would never find them there.

  She thought Hart was living just out of town. He’d found a farmhouse to rent. Something in her tone suggested he had been too ambitious, that he should have settled for rooms or a small apartment, camouflaged himself like the block in which she sat. “Of course,” she said, “he did talk about going to Portugal. For the summer, I suppose. Somewhere remote, near Coimbra. I don’t know if it was just talk. He never notified us he was going, so probably he hasn’t gone.”

  I wasn’t any kind of hunter yet.
I was still exasperated, as you are when someone breaks an appointment without warning, arrives late for a meeting or, worse yet, exactly on time for dinner. I put myself on an old solid bicycle, a two-wheeled tank with gears, and I spun out along the roads in the direction of Hart’s house.

  I could have phoned him, of course. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t phone him meant I was already hoping to surprise and shock him: the well-tempered bureaucrat eager, without admitting it, for the chance to be the kind of avenger who rents out by the hour in paperbacks.

  But he was not at home. Home didn’t even look like a home. The garden had not been touched in weeks; it had rained and the growth was fierce in all directions. There was no car visible, although on the drive at the side of the house there was a dry patch where a car could have stood quite recently.

  I walked up to the windows and looked in on a high cream living room with a piece of dubious art on the fieldstone mantelpiece: southern surrealism with round alabaster breasts from every angle and in every plane. The house was clean enough, but dead.

  I imagined I could make a true story out of the room. I only had to look long enough.

  The police file notes that Hart was a no-show for the Oporto flight. A handwritten note—I should by now be able to distinguish between the inspector and the sergeant—says simply: “He drove?”

  But it can’t have been that easy, not on the long, long roads south. He had too much time, without distraction, to think about how quiet and convincing he had to be for a while, until the police lost interest in his mother’s odd visions; and how he could start all over again. He said once he liked the look of the fjord country in New Zealand: crisp, bright, and far away, black water, cut mountains, white snow.

  Meanwhile, there must be nothing of interest about the predictable, respectable Christopher Hart.

  He may have thought, too, about what kind of life he would take next. Of course, he never told me this.

  The cat lay in the wrong corner, paws bent under, waiting. I put down the garment bag, walked into the living room, and he rose politely to greet me. At once, he sagged down. I picked him up and carried him into the kitchen.

  Anna had everything ready: needles, plastic-capped, and a solution of electrolytes hanging from the wall in a fat plastic bag.

  I laid the cat down on a towel on the kitchen table.

  You watch a kitten, a young cat in its first few years; you watch it hunt and play. But when a cat is this age, you’re far more conscious of all the times he has watched you: your witness, proof of what happened while you were together.

  Anna showed me how to check the flow of liquid, how to snap the plastic cover from the needle, how to find a fold of loose skin and slip in the needle. Only she didn’t quite do it right. The cat leaked, fur drenched black, a little trace of blood. We got it right the second time, and waited while the fluid slowly dripped into the sick animal.

  “His stomach’s blown up,” Anna said. “And he’s very thin. He cries at night.”

  It was as though we were both fighting for our shared history, as tired and vulnerable as the black-and-white cat that was dying more slowly thanks to us. We were so fiercely concentrated, we felt grief as though it was just an interruption to what we could do.

  Two days later, the cat started to shift about, unable to find comfort. He was all spine and stomach now, a great cancerous ball suspended from a sagging back. His fur spiked up from lack of interest in grooming.

  “Fine,” Anna said, before I could say anything.

  The vet offered to catheterize the cat “so it would be quicker.”

  Neither of us wanted the animal to suffer more. Neither of us wanted the power to decide on his end. We were in such confusion, we didn’t stop the vet and the nurse taking the cat away, and bringing him back, after a while, with a plastic tube sticking from a bandaged paw.

  Anna bent down to mark him, her cheek against his cheek.

  The vet fed the plastic tube.

  The cat collapsed like a balloon without wind, suddenly but also radically so that the familiar, animated creature was cold bone and fur.

  Anna went down to the ground, too, and I had to push bits of furniture under her as she fell. I couldn’t see for a moment. We were entirely separated by a common sorrow.

  The vet left us with the body as you might leave parents with a dead child; but of course, we never had children. Some women are allergic to the sperm of some men, but by the time science knew all that, we’d been through five miscarriages—all the hope, then the rush of clotted blood, then the sheer confusion of hormones and emotions. You flush futures down the toilet because there’s nothing else to do. We didn’t go to any more doctors after that.

  I helped Anna up from the floor. I did it only as a friend.

  The deputy director agreed I must go to Portugal. I didn’t suggest it, but somehow he agreed, and then insisted. I did say that my father had newly moved there—the deputy director thought of some ruin in the Sintra hills, with jasmine, lemons, roses, and Moorish features— and I would like to take a few days to see him. The deputy director agreed again.

  Anna didn’t. “They can’t make you run about the continent looking for people,” she said. “That’s the job of the police.”

  “I can’t talk to the police,” I said, patiently. “It isn’t like that. It’s what the English call ‘delicate.’ ”

  “What do you mean, what ‘the English’ say? You’re English.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You can’t just detach yourself.”

  “I know.”

  “So when are you coming back?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “Surely they can tell you—”

  “Nobody tells me. I have a job to do. It’s that simple.”

  I put down the phone. I had things to do: a memorandum to revise about what we might buy from some truck tycoon’s collection just passing through Sotheby’s, a few sharp calls to maintenance about a suspect piece of glass in the roof above our prized Solander boxes of Raphaels and Leonardos, a personnel matter—a promotion of one grade—that would probably take longer than any of the above. And there was the constant nagging issue of visibility: the Museum’s and therefore mine. Our department had so far failed to produce a thick, shiny gift book, and scholarly monographs were no longer enough. The Museum press needed product.

  Anna would call back. I’d call back. She might be able to leave things hanging this way, to be continued, but I never could. I can never stop trying to reason.

  She called back within a half-hour.

  “Listen,” she said. “Some doctor called from Portugal. His English wasn’t good. But I think there’s news about your father. It wasn’t a good line.”

  I hacked at some odd lamb on the plane to Lisbon, drank a small plastic bottle of red Bairrada wine. I have to tell you: all sense of rush and purpose simply stopped. I just felt cold. The white cloudscapes mocked me: a baroque, sentimental sky that ought to have fat, pink cherubs lollipopping about.

  For this news about my father was disconcertingly vague, filtered through the doctor’s English and Anna’s understanding of it. I didn’t know the doctor’s threshold of panic, but I did know my father would never see a doctor without some alarming reason; anything else was “wasting the doctor’s time.” So the news could require great feeling from me—grief, compassion, horror—or nothing more than exasperation at a false alarm. If it was a false alarm, my father would blame me for coming. I couldn’t be ready, either way.

  I couldn’t lose him.

  I’d always been able to judge myself against my father, tell who I was by not being my father, and now the measure and the history might be going out of my life.

  Everything started all over again, strapped in a bus seat at 35,000 feet, in the vague place and time above clouds.

  I stopped for coffee on the motorway north, somewhere the espresso was parceled out from a chrome-and-white samovar and the sandwiches were date-stamped. F
oreignness began to register, first on the ears—the high, rushing pitch of a man’s sentence, the way a thought rose at the end to peck at the air. Then there were the municipal buses, shipping cargoes of ancient widows from town to town; a folklore group in black hats and red scarves; a man holding his mobile phone nervously in his hands, always aware of it, aware of it not ringing; everyone else, phone to ear; and the drivers tailgating as though travel were a social business, in tiny white cars with no speed to speak of, but every electronic and assisted and automatic thing there is. Portugal, as my father liked to say, is overrun by the Portuguese.

  There was the gray shine of olive trees, vines thrusting and clambering, roses boiling out of lawns; and villages called Inferno and Chaos and Valley of Darkness, choices you could make off the modern moral path of the motorway.

  I chose the turning to Fátima, and stopped after a few miles in what was now my father’s town. It looked like the other places I’d passed: the shop with the gas bottles lined up outside, the church which was a box freshly whitened, houses thrown up against one another with a fountain, some ice-cream signs, some trees, some old onlookers standing awkwardly still. There was a black circle of ash at a crossroads, remains of an old bonfire; that was odd.

  For a moment I thought this little town was as I remembered it, but then I realized I remembered nothing at all. I had seen pictures, read letters, heard my father assemble our hometown like a model kit for Christmas—always under stars on a clear night—but I had never stood there before.

  I called into the shop, which had one side selling coffee and drinks. I introduced myself: the son of José Costa.

  The man behind the bar said, “I’ll send Miguel to fetch him.”

  “I’ll walk there,” I said.

  “He’d rather come here,” the barman said, with authority. “You don’t know the way. He does.”

  I know what I expected: warmth, perhaps, men smiling, women kissing me, being put at a table with a glass of aguardente, being accepted back as another missing piece of the village. It didn’t happen. I was baffled like a grandchild out visiting whose grandparents go on playing cards.