Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  “Easier to go up,” he said. “We can see our way from there.”

  “In Switzerland they have signposts on the mountains. I miss them.”

  “We’ll be fine,” he said.

  We walked a little faster now we had a purpose: to find our way. If we’d been boys, we’d have had everything to discover and talk about. As men, we just sometimes talked. At each fork in the path we slowed down because either fork would do and sometimes it was not clear which would lead consistently upward.

  “If you want to make things good, you can,” I said. “That’s why I’m here and not the police.”

  Hart scuffed at white stones on the path.

  “Think about it,” I said. I walked on briskly.

  I had no idea who was walking with me. I felt entirely safe, even here in the woods, where a man can slip, slip in the path of a hunter’s gun, lie in the path of a fire and, presto, out of the woods comes a whole new John Costa, a tall and blond one, off where nobody knows him. Cartagena, maybe; Arkenhout had seen films made in Cartagena. He liked the thought of a colonial, tropical place.

  I was well ahead now, walking soundlessly on the baking clay, making my point by being ahead and walking fast just like my father used to do. I turned and shouted for Hart to come on.

  Hart wasn’t there. He had cut off the track, to piss perhaps.

  I stood there dutifully. The weight of the day came down on me: hot, sullen, with erratic, furious movement in the air somewhere distant. Far across the valley, where there was brown smoke in among the haze, lightning sliced the sky horizontally, straight as a knife. The woods seemed very dense suddenly, as regimented as planted fields.

  Hart must be in the brush and the scrubby oak bushes and the heather. Perhaps he was watching me now.

  I turned around, turned around again. I could sense a new, hot wind on the path: a shift in the weather, nothing more.

  The lightning cracked the sky one more time.

  I started running. I wanted to be out of the woods before the storm came. I wanted to be clear of whatever Hart was doing.

  I missed my step on a tree root and I fell. My ankle turned under me, and the shock of the pain made me grunt like a hog.

  Baked white tracks ran down and up through the trees, forking and twisting. I wasn’t sure I knew my way home anymore.

  I am sure I heard footsteps going away.

  I couldn’t stand for a moment. I thought the hot wind behind me might be fire, just out of sight, set somewhere behind a rack of stones or a thicket of new, bright eucalyptus. I didn’t know how to run from the fire, or where to run.

  Hart said, “You all right?”

  He stood almost over me.

  I said, “Give me a minute. I’m just winded, I think.”

  He was carrying a long strip of eucalyptus bark, the tough stuff shed from the trees like raw ribbons. He snapped it against itself.

  Then he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. I couldn’t move for the moment, so I watched the match flare and die as though that was interesting, watched it fall still lit on the ground, just out of my reach. The ash fell after it, and finally the lit butt of the cigarette.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got the day ahead of us.”

  He walked ahead now; he’d won that point.

  I heard the birds clatter high up in the eucalyptus.

  We were always going upward. I told myself that was common sense, that we would never easily find the track back down the hill, that we had to climb until the woods cleared and we were out on the bare serra.

  But Hart’s pace was racing fierce and mine had to match his.

  I asked for water. He passed me a bottle, but he did not pause.

  “You know you have some explaining to do,” I said. “Why you didn’t notice the Liber Principis was damaged—if you didn’t damage it yourself.”

  “I have some explaining to do?” Hart said.

  “We want the pieces back, unharmed. If we get them, probably the Museum will ask no further questions.”

  “You’re a keeper,” Hart said. “You’re not a policeman. So why did they send you?”

  “If this is an aberration, the Museum has no interest in pressing matters. We’re only concerned with the paintings. To call in the police at this stage—”

  “You mean you don’t want people to know.”

  “I want the pieces,” I said. “I’m not leaving Portugal without them.”

  The ground was too rough for easy, steady speed. Animals had slipped about in the wet spring, and left steps in the baked mud. There were stones, sometimes fallen tree trunks. In places, the pines massed so close they killed out any green thing living at their roots, and their fallen needles wrapped the ground ahead like rough brown paper.

  “Nobody’s leaving,” Hart said.

  I realize now what he had to think about. This crime of Hart’s had acquired a name, at last, and some specifics. If he’d touched up a librarian, the Museum wouldn’t care so much; nor if he embezzled, drugged, or indulged in interspecies dating. They wouldn’t have sent anyone if all he’d stolen was an idea. But they cared enough to leave this John Costa here for days, even weeks, all because of something official, something with an index card and an accession number and an identity.

  It was Hart’s crime, just like killing Hart was Paul Raven’s crime: it could not touch his moral holiday. But it could seriously disrupt his chances of a next life.

  His arms pumped like an athlete walker, like a prizewinner. I was infuriated all at once by the thought of following him, but not sure enough of my ankle to try to overtake.

  He was waiting for me to try, or to ask to stop. I wouldn’t stop.

  He didn’t say anything now.

  The dark in between the trees, which was a lack of life as well as light, began to break in strips and patches. Grass, mint, a little fennel reappeared, but only in clumps where the light caught. As we climbed, the clumps became little gardens and sometimes the gardens were like meadows.

  We came out suddenly onto the high serra. The light was as hot as it was brilliant, a hammer on the skin. Lightning cut across the sky, and left the trees shivering in the electric wind.

  In common sense, we should have turned back, not walked out onto bare moor with an electric storm massing above us. We should have looked around and got our bearings; so far our only direction had been upward. We should have stopped.

  I wouldn’t be the first to stop. He wouldn’t be the first to stop. So we raced over the rough, dusty grass as though we had some destination in mind.

  When I called Anna next, I chose my time carefully, so I could hear her instead of the digitized voice on the answering machine.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “It’s a kind of stalemate,” I said. “I just have to wait him out.”

  “Can I come? For a weekend?”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be here. It might all be finished this week and then—”

  “I could come this weekend.”

  She couldn’t, I was almost sure. She never could simply tear things up, not even an empty day in a diary; she guarded herself with timetables.

  “If you want to,” I said. I meant to be cruel.

  “I’ll surprise you,” Anna said.

  I’d stopped making a formal daily report to the deputy director. Hart was alive and well and behaving as you might expect, I told him, although he had no apparent routine for work. We were both shocked at this. At least I still had the sense to know that I should call, sometimes, in case I started to seem dispensable.

  My trouble wasn’t Hart, not yet. It was this place, this Formentina, this Portugal. It always came back to my father. He had returned to Portugal because he was settling again, so he’d chosen the practical low ground: with water pressure, power lines, daily buses, minimarket. I didn’t need that. I could live high and picturesque, like any transient. The landscape to me was pleasure, a pleasure not unlike holiday: allowing the e
yes to open wide without cutting a place down to the road you have to take, the address you have to find.

  The trouble was, I was not in a hotel where people in uniforms replaced one another daily. I couldn’t help starting to see the particular people in Formentina—to know their names, something of their stories.

  I knew Arturo from his passion to explain things. He had fields of new apple saplings, planted as close as beans, and he said he had linden trees, his own plantation somewhere up among the pines; he also kept bees that blundered, drunk and fat, through the sweet bells of linden flowers. The condition of every day was work.

  “I’m going to have an operation,” he said, quite abruptly.

  I said, “What’s wrong?”

  “They don’t know.”

  I said, “It’s a biopsy?”

  “They’ll know when they’ve done it.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if you could take us to the hospital. On Friday.”

  “Of course,” I said. “What time?”

  “Eight in the morning. They could send an ambulance, but I don’t feel like an ambulance. I feel like going down in an ordinary way, while I can.”

  His face was wrecked skin and utterly open eyes. He was very afraid.

  I thought of my father dying. I must have seen the moment, when he was propped in the door, when he was in my arms on the steps, but I missed it, too: the exact moment when the body was empty at last, the moment of difference. It was too powerful to be imagined.

  But then, I could hardly imagine who my father was and what he felt when he was there.

  It wasn’t enough to say he loved the place, dreamed it; you can tend love, keep dreams, without ever going back. Usually, it’s better that way. There’d been moments, away from Anna, when I got myself in and out of love in a day or so, in hotels in different countries, so as to have memories; but that was transitory, conference stuff, and I never wanted to go back.

  Arturo came out of the shade and stood watching me, and I him.

  He wanted to explain. He just didn’t know what to explain. And I sat there, still unable to make up a life for him out of what I knew. He seemed almost content, but he sometimes sat down suddenly on stones as though movement had stopped being possible.

  His wife, Zulmira, kept the key to the chapel, I knew that, and every night she went there to set a light burning; but how she ordered the world through saints and the Virgin, kept alive the hope of sudden miracles in a place that never seemed to change, I had no idea. I ought to understand it in my blood, for my father’s sake. Perhaps it was the secret of how he, too, organized the world.

  Arturo shouted up: “The grapes used to be a marvel at that house.”

  “Sure.”

  “Someone could plant grapes there again.”

  That day three policemen, no sign of Mello, parked on the road and ran up to Hart’s house and opened it up like you open a tin can: without violence, but everyone can see what has happened.

  “Papers,” one of them said.

  Hart said, “What do you need?”

  He fished in the pockets of the Cerutti jacket, the one that was still a bit too smart for the valley, and he pulled out a passport.

  The senior of the three cops took it, opened windows and put on a desk light, and peered at page after page. He seemed to care about the views of Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State, about the date and place of issue and the date of expiry, about the American visa with the barely readable photograph of Hart copied onto it. He ran his fingernail over the visa, checked the figures at the bottom against the birth date on page 4. Then he checked the emergencies section on page 94, which Hart, like everyone else, had left blank. Only then did he put the passport to one side.

  “Do you have any ID?” he said.

  Hart said, “You must be joking.”

  He knew that was wrong. He’d cleared Customs often enough in different countries to understand that you stand respectfully while they examine your papers because the papers don’t interest them; they want your submission, or they want you to show nerves.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

  The university ID had a photograph. So did the back of his bank card. The Indians had done a wonderful job on both of them.

  But he hadn’t asked them to change the gym card. He’d meant to dispose of it, he should have left it in Hart’s house, no reason for him to carry a card for a London gym all the way to Portugal. But Hart had carried it to Holland, of course.

  The senior policeman was playing out cards now, dealing them into lines with a casino precision.

  He’d see the gym card. It would be incongruous. It would be enough.

  It was too late to take the card back. He’d volunteered it.

  The computer repair card. The library card. The Greenpeace credit card, biodegradable.

  “Where were you on the nights of June twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh?” the senior cop asked. He held the gym card in his hand. The photograph was just a Polaroid snap, colors fast settling toward beige and magenta; it was inconclusive, surely. The cop gave it the same grave attention he had given to every other scrap of Hart’s official, carded being.

  “I don’t know,” Hart said. “I could look in my diary—”

  The cop threw the gym card down.

  “Let me know,” he said. “Or Captain Mello. At the police station. People in Holland want to know.”

  He shuffled the cards again and stood up, flanked by his juniors, with his perfectly inexpressive policeman’s face.

  “Just those dates,” the cop said. “I need an answer by the end of the day.”

  When they had gone, Hart fell to the floor and started to do push-ups, for the sake of something he could control.

  He was seriously alarmed, not by the check, which could have been any routine check on foreigners, but by the demand that he go down to the police station to fill in the last detail. They could have waited while he found his diary. He could have told them at once.

  They couldn’t possibly know what had happened on June 27, because it was nothing that left traces. He had to check the date himself. It was the night he went drinking in a warm, brown bar, sat about, and hunted; the night he met Hart for the first time.

  Maria let herself into the house. He was lying on the bed, fitfully asleep and still fully dressed.

  She snapped on the light, abrupt as a policeman would be.

  “Olá,” she said. “You sleeping?”

  She looked at him with a directness he did not expect. It wasn’t politely usual, or conventional. It had something in common with the directness of the older peasant women who had never learned any other way of seeing the world.

  “I’m sleeping,” he said. He lay still.

  “Imagine if the cops came back,” she said. “If we only had ten minutes—”

  She turned off the light.

  Five

  I drove Arturo to the hospital in the morning, slowly, like some black car in a solemn procession.

  The old man must have seen the mist in the trees most mornings of his life, seen it shift out of shape and drift through the headlights with the tar steaming below, but now he chose to stare at it; and Zulmira sat upright in the backseat. The two of them were sharp as scared animals.

  Their daughter, Isabel, tried to take Zulmira’s right hand. She couldn’t break Zulmira’s grip on herself.

  The hospital had the manageable look of a picture in a prospectus: oleanders, parking spaces, towers of glass. But inside, it was frantic like a market, women in black, bags and bundles, a whole civilian population turned out to mourn its men in the wars: men cut up by machines, men whose hearts exploded or whose brains stopped because of the drink, men broken, men who wore out when they could least afford it. Every grating and corner was full of people waiting; the hard glass and tile of the walls had gone soft with cloth and eyes and hands.

  Arturo wasn’t quite exp
ected, was about to be shunted aside to wait in line for an office that could tell him which line he should wait in next. There were processions of the sick between this office and the next.

  I couldn’t bear the sight of his resignation, his patience. I barged up to the admitting desk and used my proper bourgeois manner and the oddness of my accent to get attention. After a few minutes, a nurse came for Arturo and led him away, cardboard case in one hand, down a long, dark corridor that sometimes shone with the light from a far window.

  Zulmira went after him at once. But a squadron of doctors bustled by, and she stopped out of deference. She sat down in the corridor and began to check the food she’d brought in another bag.

  “He won’t need that,” Isabel said.

  “They don’t feed you in places like this.”

  “They won’t let him have it.”

  “I brought the right thing, didn’t I?” She appealed to me as if it was my business, a jamjar of bean stew in one hand.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He won’t be able to eat much before the operation, and afterwards maybe he won’t feel like it.”

  “He’ll want this. To build him up.”

  Isabel said, “You don’t have to stay. We’ll stay.”

  Zulmira looked at me directly. Her right hand had relaxed a little, and in it was a crucifix: a metal Christ on a wooden cross. The crucifix had bitten her hand hard.

  She went entirely blank for a moment, face like paper, eyes dead; and then she came back to us, still focused only on Arturo.

  “He’ll want the food,” she said.

  “You know he can’t have it,” Isabel said. “We’ll bring him food when he’s getting better.”

  “I made it for him,” Zulmira said stubbornly, but she had no more energy. She’d watched over Arturo all night in this hospital before, watched him shaved and white, on his back on a gurney like something being moved in a barn, his face tired even though he was coming out of chemical sleep. She thought everyone has a measured portion of luck, and she wasn’t sure if he would be there this time when he woke up.