Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  Maria said, “What’s provenance?”

  “History,” I said. “Who owned a painting and when, and where it’s been.”

  “You mean they don’t mind buying stolen goods?” Maria said.

  I smiled. It was meant to be a knowing, sophisticated but noncommittal smile. I was lucky it didn’t fade under the glare of all that interpretation.

  “We must have dinner,” I said to Hart. “We have a lot to discuss about the Liber Principis.”

  I could see Maria was about to ask questions again. But Hart got in first.

  “How long will you be here?” he asked, as though he was sure it would not be long enough for a meeting.

  “For a while,” I said. “I have family business to settle. I’ll be around.”

  The whole conversation, Maria thought, was like listening to the radio and having the battery die on you slowly.

  When we left, Maria says, she had more coffee and more water. She was puzzled. Foreigners usually arrive when they’ve run out of life elsewhere: tired, retired, maybe angry, looking for a change so complete they often forget mere material details like having an income. They don’t come, like Hart, like John Costa, trailing their old lives with them and living them still, strongly enough to start a fight.

  Something truly foreign had arrived.

  It was too hot for business, but Maria went to her office anyway, shut off the phone, and sat. She would have gone home, but it was lunch hour, and Amandio would be there.

  He now came to sleep at the house. Her mother was kind in the evenings, distracted in the mornings, stocking and managing and watching Amandio like the shop itself. One night, she tried to make broa, even though the cooking cousin was around. She fixed flour and water, fed sugar to the yeast, pummeled the dough, and let it rise until it got up out of its bowl and started over the table in a soft, deliberate flood. She squeezed it, pummeled it, but it had a fearful resiliency. She slapped it onto a metal sheet, still growing, still moving, and burned it thoroughly.

  Amandio tasted. He smiled vigorously. Maria didn’t.

  “It doesn’t bother you, me being here?” he said.

  “Of course not.”

  “I wouldn’t want to bother you,” he said. He was eating the broa steadily, doing his duty by Maria’s mother. Maria wasn’t. Her mother looked on.

  “I know you’ve been used to having Mother to yourself—”

  Maria said, “I have to go to the office.”

  She felt displaced for the first time. It wasn’t just a matter of losing the steady comfort of home. Home was life. The local rule says people stay in their family, at the family house, until they’re married. True, she should have married years ago, but despite her different kind of life home still bound and defined her: this house, this town, this valley.

  Anywhere else, like the few weeks she once spent in Paris, she’d have to rely on illusions and sketches: other people’s maps, guides, histories, geographies, memories, anxieties, what you read in the paper, what they tell you on TV news, a road-sign world, all warnings and indications, which she’d never be able to grasp as entirely as this small place. Here was the place she knew best, knew in her bones and on her skin, season in, season out.

  She found Amandio snoring in a chair one night, flesh like the raw yeast rising in the broa and a slick of oil on top.

  The next day, she bought a new dress, two new dresses. One was quite short. She thought about changing her hair color. These were not things that usually concerned her, but it was good to make such tiny decisions. It was practice.

  One afternoon, she looked at an apartment in the nearest big town: three rooms, fourth floor, a block painted the color of smoked salmon. The walls didn’t seem enough to separate people’s lives, and the blocks were jammed together in a new part of town; there was scaffolding and raw brick in every direction.

  She liked that. She didn’t smoke in the apartment, although she wanted to, because she needed the place to be full of new air.

  I crowed to the deputy director, explaining punctiliously how I had done the impossible: found Hart.

  “And?” the deputy director said. “And now what?”

  Christopher Hart lay in blue water in a borrowed pool, staring at a blue sky: suspended like a vacationland billboard or the covenanted pleasures of a cheap cigarette.

  Maria watched. She had found him the pool, after all.

  They were on a hillside, looking out to trees and scree and fields, but Hart said he saw only perfect blue. He told Maria he wanted the English words for this particular blue: robin’s egg, perhaps. Gentian. Cerulean. He thought about drowning in this blue. He wanted to live forever in this water until the faint, mean chlorine bleached him white.

  That would have been easier, I suppose.

  He can’t have liked people who knew his stolen self, who had business with Christopher Hart. In the places he used to choose to be, people take you at face value, then they take your face value and pick that apart, then they magnify rumors and tease one another with possibilities. Everybody makes up themselves and then everybody else.

  Anytime he touched the poolside, levered himself out of the water, he would have to be Hart the professor again: a character already written. He had to cope with whatever it was that this John Costa reckoned Hart had done, or might yet do. But he wanted to be any Christopher Hart he could imagine—subject to credit and bank balances, of course.

  In the water, still cool under a hot sun, he turned and swam a couple of lengths, water smoothing muscles down. Out on the dry tiles he expected a world he already knew, more or less: wild daughters, people who teach, probably a cokehead falling out of a dress, unintellectual people with days so empty they start to hunger for a new book, people who take up art, the gardeners, people who drink, and, of course, the designated fuckers: the ones who produce the gossip for the rest. There would be divisions by nationality, each group allowed its interest in the old country—because it was ruined, polluted, black-faced, or steely, because none of them meant to go back. There would be class divisions for those who liked them.

  He levered himself out of the pool, shook himself like a dog. Maria says it seemed the pool was suddenly claustrophobic, that downtime was alarming him. He nodded to her, and ran off to change. He didn’t say good-bye to his hosts.

  He drove away up the hill. She heard brakes going on sharply, wheels dragging against stone in a sudden turn. He’d come to a dead end.

  He came down the hill at a furious pace, speeding and braking, until he could rush out onto the bends of the main road below. There, he drove like a man racing, a man with no destination or purpose except getting distance under his wheels.

  “I’m glad you got on with Christopher Hart,” Maria said disingenuously.

  “We’ve talked a bit since,” I said. “We keep running into each other, somehow.”

  “You’ll have things in common,” Maria said, meaning: coming from somewhere else, being part of cities and a world of words she didn’t know.

  “About my father’s house,” I said. “I think it’s time I moved on.”

  Maria said, “You want to shut it down, or sell it?”

  If I said “sell,” there would be an orderly, unemotional process of breaking up my father’s life and passing it on to someone else. It would not be my responsibility. I couldn’t stop it anymore.

  I said, “Shut it down, I suppose.” Then I added, because I needed someone to listen, “I can’t sell it yet. I feel strange selling something when I don’t quite know what it meant to him.”

  Maria said, “Lock it up. Go away and think.”

  “But I’ll be here a little longer.”

  “You have business?”

  “In a way.” I had a man to intimidate or persuade into confession, a man who so far seemed remarkably uninterested in my various hints and offers; if he had stuff for sale, he was not selling to me. I could hardly tell Maria this.

  But I did say I wanted a house. I asked if there mi
ght be anything in the village where Hart was living. Maria said that might be possible, because people had holiday houses in Formentina.

  She found me a house by the week, for at least a month.

  I called Anna to explain.

  “Come back,” she said, using her close voice, none of the crispness and diction of her usual talk. “You’ve been away long enough.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just that this Hart business—and my father’s estate isn’t settled.”

  “You have lawyers for that.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Personal stuff. That business with the grave.”

  “I can’t talk long. I have to get to college.”

  “I love you,” I said. I am a creature of habits—work, love, dinnertimes—and sometimes habit saves you from decisions. “I miss you, I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  “Just don’t get lost there,” Anna said.

  “I asked the Museum for a month more.”

  “I feel like bloody Penelope. Except I’m not knitting. I’m writing lectures.”

  “I’m coming back.”

  “You’re only saying that because you thought of staying.”

  I wondered if she was teasing me. I didn’t think so. Neither of us liked this sensation of a past cracking under us like ice.

  Maria came by just to see if Hart was all right, if the house was all right, on her way to fetch water, because she happened to be passing. But she didn’t feel the need to list the excuses.

  Hart couldn’t close the door on her, or send her away. He knew the rules for small places too well. He told me so.

  She showed him the spring, a mile and several folds of mountain away: a park big enough for seven trees, a pipe in a mass of official tiles where water always ran. But there were people there, two families packed up in a taxi and a pickup truck, and they were pulling leaves together to make a fire to cook a picnic. She pointed out the mountains to Hart, the purple of heather, the scent of pine, and she changed the subject to lunch.

  On the way back, she had run out of things to say. But the attention she was paying had become electric.

  I parked the car in Formentina. I took out weekday luggage, the kind that goes out on a Monday, back on a Friday: neat, black, on wheels, a statement that a man travels with a job to do. I carried it to the door of the small house just above the road. I unlocked the door.

  I put on all the lights in the house even though there was no need for them. I was signaling: I’m here, in the house between you and the road.

  Of course, a dealer wouldn’t need to do such a thing. His persistence would be so sweetly oiled that it seemed inevitable, and resistance simply bad manners. I didn’t have that trick.

  I went up to see Hart late that afternoon.

  He didn’t bother with any preliminaries. “Maria says you told her you work at the Museum,” he said.

  He could have known that already, known my name and the little hieroglyphic block of my signature from times he’d asked the Museum for favors.

  “I should explain,” I said.

  I had wanted him to think I was some corrupt dealer operating on the black. I just couldn’t bear the notion of doing it well, of convincing anybody: Maria, for example.

  “But you talk as though you deal in art,” he said. He paraded his sense of puzzlement.

  “I think I rather gave that impression,” I said.

  “You said as much.”

  “Dealing isn’t the point,” I said. “I am assistant keeper of drawings at the Museum. I’m concerned with the Liber Principis. The Museum is.”

  “You want to buy this book? For the Museum? Or one of those clients who doesn’t care about provenance?”

  “I’m not going away,” I said. “I’m here on family business.”

  “The Museum must be very understanding.”

  “Yes,” I said. “For the moment, yes, it is.”

  I was sure I left a threat on the air. He’d know he had only a short time to hand back what he had stolen. He’d know I was serious because he’d think there was a profit in this for me. I could leave him to worry now.

  After all, we were neighbors, so he couldn’t move without either dodging or acknowledging me. I could monitor his morning walk, a late coffee at the bar, a trip to buy in the Vila Nova market. He had to worry, too, if all this was deliberate, or if it was just a malign coincidence born of the fact that it’s tough to find a house to rent, by the week, for a month in the summer.

  Our stalemate had an address at last: a village halved by a road, and halved again by a stream, full of color and stone. I was happy to be settled for a while.

  I made coffee, as he did, longing for something to read, someone to talk to, looking out on the valley as he did, watching weather boil up black and furious out of the west. I really thought that I had only to wait.

  I was right. I just had the equation totally wrong.

  I know now, from the police file, that the Dutch had already asked the Portuguese Guarda Nacional to make discreet inquiries about anyone saying he was a Christopher Hart. It wouldn’t be simple—Hart was a European citizen, so he could move in and out of Portugal without a record—but they had the hotel registrations, and those were quite enough.

  In a day or so, Martin Arkenhout would be quite sure of what he now suspected: that he had stolen the wrong life. He’d know, too, he had to cling to being Christopher Hart, or face the unraveling of a whole career.

  I saw this happen. I just didn’t realize it at the time.

  He came down the slate steps carefully. Cloud overgrew the houses like old vines, broke up the geometry of their dark, solid shapes, whited out some of the woods and left the rest gray and shadowy.

  He thought I couldn’t yet be awake, that the light in my house must be from last night. And if I was awake, I wouldn’t be dressed before dawn and ready to run out. And if I was, he could lose me.

  He started the car. The cloud held the sound close to the road, but made it seem monstrously loud. I would be awake now, for sure, scrambling out of my morning system and routine.

  From here, there were only two ways to go: up and down. Up, the road snaked into bare mountain, then fell away into a valley, a lake, a dam. Down, the road went to a familiar town, with a dozen choices of town after that.

  Hart headed down. Looking back on the road, all he could see was a white wall of cloud. The village had vanished. He must have vanished, too.

  He told me he thought about running for Guarda and the frontier and crossing into Spain. Or he could get to an airport, get a ticket out, to anywhere people took less interest in Christopher Hart. He had a whole day ahead of him: a whole empty, resounding day.

  Sometimes a great Volvo truck came up out of the white and went past with a speeding whine, sometimes there were car lights ahead; but that didn’t matter. Inside the cloud and the white, the tunnels of trees, he was alone enough. The day was opening ahead of him, sun burning off mist and cloud and drying the damp road.

  He was moving again, in control again: invincible.

  I heard the engine start. I made more toast. Hart’s anger, I thought, had to be useful: a man who feels trapped may give himself away, or even surrender.

  I went up to his house, of course. Neighbors might notice, but on a weekday there are not many; and besides, foreigners were known to know one another, to be in and out of one another’s lives. The door was locked. I could see a plain, oppressive order, everything personal—even used cups, spare sweaters—tucked away out of sight. Hart hardly dented the house, let alone marked it for his own.

  Nor did I. My own house was cold and dead, like all rented places. You wouldn’t want to know what last happened there.

  I missed Anna. I waited to leave a message on the answering machine because I like to do that: I can say exactly what I mean to say.

  Then I called the Museum. The deputy director was oddly expansive. He urged me to take my time. The more time I took, of course, the more
certain I must be of resolving the problem of the Liber Principis; that was clear. But that did not seem like a serious issue. I thought Hart was nervous already, and his nerves were all I had to work on.

  I thought how I would explain what I was doing in the Museum’s elegant and euphemistic official prose: what phrase I would use for intimidation. “Interim discussions,” perhaps. “Soundings.”

  The day opened around me, cooler than most, with a bright sky clotted with huge white clouds. Now Hart was gone, I had only one pressing duty, and that was personal: to complain, again, about my father’s grave.

  The Guarda Nacional Republicana had a brick barracks in a maze of low, wired walls, and an incongruous fig tree sprawling over its military neatness. Inside, there was an odd air of hospital, but a hospital where people sweat.

  I asked for someone whose English was better than my Portuguese, the self-deprecation trick. I gave my name and sat on a bench. A breeze tugged at the photocopies of faces on the “Wanted” board.

  “You are John Costa?” a man said.

  He had to be senior, old even, in his starched white shirt. He wore his paunch like decorations under a long, thin face that didn’t match the body. He had the manner of an officer trying not to pull rank, just this once.

  I stood up. The man didn’t seem to have the usual blankness of a policeman, the wall on which you’re supposed to project all your guilty thoughts. He almost seemed kind. I expected him to say something doctorly: “What seems to be the matter, then?”

  Three cops in boots and uniform saluted him crisply, and the kindness dissolved.

  “I am Captain Mello,” he said, in English. “At your service.”

  I said I was sorry to disturb him. “But someone has vandalized my father’s grave,” I said. “I wanted to see what was happening.”

  “These things almost never happen here,” Mello said. “I’m sorry.”

  I thought we might apologize the day away.

  “They’ve spray-painted on the back wall,” I said. “The usual scrawl, and a date: 1953.”