by Michael Pye
She pulled the shutters tight and sat in the dark living room. Some spare feathers on the birds were singeing in the oven, sharp as vinegar on the air, before the full, practical smell of skin and flesh cooking. The singeing smell was all right, she told herself. It was really all right.
I brought back water from the spring and carried the boxy five-liter jars into the kitchen. I called her name, but she didn’t have anything to say. I put on the light in the living room.
“Oh,” I said, “there you are. How are you?”
She went into the bathroom and ran water from the tap. But she couldn’t drink the water, she remembered, and in case she had any doubts, it ran stained like coffee. She reached down for a bottle of the water from the spring, but it was empty. She took the prescription jar of painkillers and for a moment she thought she’d never be able to calm this sense that she was being reduced by pain to someone incompetent, without ordinary sensation, fumbling, even old.
I handed her a glass of clean water. She took the pills. I said, “Come and lie down. Please.”
“You’re supposed to ring someone called Mello,” she said. “The number’s on your book.”
“On the book?”
“I scratched it.”
She must have heard me on the phone, and wondered about my distinct, official voice. “I’ll see him this evening,” I said. “I’ll be glad to help.”
I knocked on the door exactly like a policeman: six loud knocks expecting instant attention.
“I think we ought to have a talk,” I said.
He sat across the table, his hands folded like a steeple.
“You won’t object if I have a look around,” I said, without much of an interrogative rise at the end of the sentence.
“Hey,” Hart said. He clearly thought he had the upper hand.
“I’ve been very patient,” I said. “I’ve waited weeks. I thought you understood that I will not go away until we’ve recovered the Museum material.”
Hart said, “What material was that?”
He had a reasonable grudge: being treated like some minor sneak thief, a professor carting off the odd Coptic portrait, Greek leg, bit of gold, when really he had stolen much more. He was something that slipped around in people’s sexiest fears, if only they knew. And to be threatened in this amateur, bureaucrat’s way, told what to do on pain of upsetting the way things are, when he was headline stuff and far more dangerous: that hurt.
This time, I did have an advantage. “The police wanted to know,” I said, “if you knew a man called Martin Arkenhout?”
He paused only a couple of beats, but it was jarring, like a late woodwind in a bit of Bach. He got up and offered wine.
I couldn’t know what I had said. I took the wine.
“Mello couldn’t reach you on the phone,” I said. “Then Anna sent me up. To see if you’d like to come down to dinner. She’s cooking.”
Hart was astonished. We were going to be so perfectly mannerly, so social, foreigners allied in a strange land, even though what brought us together was some crime. Sherry might be offered, might be taken. Probably we’d talk about Tomar since that was virtually all the three of us had in common.
“What exactly do you expect me to give you?” Hart asked. I thought he might be bargaining.
“There are at least fifteen images missing,” I said. “I want them all in perfect condition. If any of them have been sold, I want to know where to find them—exactly where to find them, not just a dealer’s name. If any of them have been damaged or destroyed, then there’s no deal.”
“And then?”
“Nothing after that. I go back to London, you do what you like. I’m not a policeman.”
“What’s Anna cooking?”
“She’s roasting chicken. With herbs,” I said.
“What time, then?”
I said, “Nine o’clock.” From the door I added, “Let’s have everything settled by then.”
I didn’t go home. I hung in the shade, with a view of his windows. I learned that from Hart, the way he sometimes left silence open for other people to fill.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing.
He was tearing open cases, one by one, emptying them in a muddle of shirts and shoes and plastic laundry bags on the floor.
He opened the black-bound notebooks Hart had bought in Amsterdam, tried to read the writing that fluttered like the line on some medical gauge. He examined books that had been butchered and digested, pages turned down, lines marked, notes spiraling around someone else’s text like those snail’s trails that freaks leave on library books; and he checked bundles of photographic prints of paintings and etchings, very new and shiny. He must have packed too few objects when he cleared Hart’s house. He assumed the objects had been rented along with the house. He never guessed.
He now knew someone had made the connection properly: from Arkenhout to Hart. They would be checking along the chain for missing persons, sudden moves. There would be evidence soon; you could never clean all the blood, or be sure that all the cuts of a body would stay separate and nameless. The cleverness in what he did had been the lack of connections, and now that was all over.
I saw panic in his face.
Martin Arkenhout was back; that’s how he explained it later. Arkenhout claimed Hart back so thoroughly he could hardly breathe. He settled a discontinuity of ten years as though it did not matter at all, opened up tracks he thought were hidden, and connections as subtle and chaotic as all those mathematical headlines about how the fall of a leaf in a distant galaxy can spoil your billiards shot at home. It was Arkenhout he had killed in Florida, Arkenhout who lumbered about in his memory, the thing that must at all costs be repressed and put away. Now the name was in the air again, and Arkenhout was like a cartoon ghost, a graveyard joke.
He could be laid to rest if my life was available for taking; but it couldn’t be taken yet. Meantime, there was this dead life of Hart’s to inhabit.
Martin had always been the winner, the man who knew how to reinvent himself perpetually, Faust with no need for some cramping contract with any passing devil. He did what other men just dream of doing, which is to change all the incidentals and take with him, life after life, only what’s essential.
Until that moment, he had never doubted that there was something essential.
I lost him for a moment under the level of the windowsills.
He upended a small attaché case out of which fell neat, clear plastic envelopes of insurance documents, bank statements, letters, papers to show at a frontier. It seemed odd that Hart carried so much in a Europe without frontiers, as though in his mind he were adventuring off to some deep-woods Colombian silver mine or a dubious island or a country with a serious regime.
I couldn’t tell what he was hunting. The papers shuffled over one another, skidded over the plastic envelopes; he made chaos around the room. But I had no notion, then, that he even needed to hunt for anything, or why I could see panic on his face.
He did tell me, later. Christopher Hart seemed alive and loose in that long, white Portuguese house: a dissembler, a twister, who was hiding things from this second Hart, his heir, himself.
Hart had one hefty blue Vulcanite suitcase on wheels, a kind of cabin trunk, called Globetrotter. He fumbled the irregular surface of its bottom, wondering if there could be something false. One of the white inside straps came away.
He started laughing.
He knew then he’d taken Hart’s small but perfectly formed credit and left behind a physical fortune. He could surely have played Hart well enough to sell the pictures. He could have had money of his own, for once, which would not run out like other people’s credit runs out when people start asking questions. The money could have bought him a life of his own.
He went to the verandah. The sun had begun to go down, and the mass of the pine woods was a little gold, a little pink: decorator calm. It was an ordinary show, seen from an ordinary kind of place. He was ordinary, too, caug
ht now in a name and a history like everyone else.
He went back to the Globetrotter, with a knife. He levered up the bottom of the case, under the lining.
Nothing.
He couldn’t be Hart, he decided. He couldn’t satisfy this John Costa and produce the stolen paintings; so being Hart meant perpetual trouble.
If he was John Costa, though, then the link between him and Arkenhout and Hart was broken for good. He’d leave behind a body and a name that could carry all his crimes and adventures.
He told me he had never thought about a death this way before: as something satisfying, not just necessary.
The next days were like dinner that night: a kind of dance, two people transfixed with each other, life and death, a third cutting in. Sometimes it was Hart who felt like the intruder, he says. Sometimes it was Anna. She says she could not calculate what kind of story was happening between Hart and me. We all had business that politeness forbade us mentioning, let alone finishing: a theft, a foundering marriage, the possibility of murder.
Hart’s sleep broke up, so he told Maria later, on dreams—dreams that the summer had been brutal in Holland, too, and the water in the River Vecht was running low. He knew it was the Vecht from the bends, the chestnuts, the mansions, and the constant river traffic: small, brisk boats between the lawns.
His mother sat at a lock, drinking tea. The lock opened and a long boat edged in. The gates shut, and the water drained. But the water wouldn’t stop draining until the floor of the lock was shining mud.
His mother was in the lock, trying to shift the boat with her shoulders. She couldn’t move it. Her feet slipped. She was in the mud, her face up against something bare and white. She looked eye to eye into the hollows of a skull.
She said out loud, “Martin, are you all right, Martin?”
This happened, but it was not Mrs. Arkenhout who made the discovery. It was a boy called Piet, eleven years old, son of an artists’ union official and a teacher, who was helping on the lock and moved much faster than the old, official lockkeeper. He pulled out the skull, and said he wanted to keep it because it had wounds, and must be a famous warrior, probably Krull or Conan.
The police wouldn’t listen to him. Instead, they started to run tests.
Six
Maria came to see Hart in the afternoon.
“The police have been asking about you. Again,” she said.
“I don’t know why.”
“Checking on foreigners, maybe.”
“They never check. Do they?”
She’d invented him already for the afternoon: fugitive in hideaway, risk of death. She put down a loaf on the kitchen table and stood there, slight and fragile in her summer skirt. “You ought to keep the shutters closed,” she said. “People will know you’re here.”
He couldn’t complain. His life, all his lives, depended on just this: being what people expected him to be.
She went about checking doors, closing shutters, drawing curtains in the dark. The light left was the shine on skin, the bar of bright wood under the front door, a few prickles of light where the slats in the wood ceiling stood proud of one another.
She came up to him in the doorway. She undid his shirt, began to tug it off, and then she threw herself against him as though she could force into this moment all the desperate, big-screen passion in all the cinema houses of the world, and she was smiling. Then she kissed him, forcefully.
He knew the cues, too. He had his hands high under her skirt, moving fast, no need for persuasion; she’d imagined them in a film noir, lost souls throwing themselves on this last fire. The choreography failed only at the usual moments, tucking out of pants, standing clear of jeans. Then bodies took over from the scenario, and there wasn’t time or life to lose—him standing, her legs around him, her whole weight, it seemed, concentrated on bringing him as deeply as possible into her.
Their skin was slick and hot, their breath desperate. It was all as urgent, as proper for a condemned man’s last night, as she could stage.
Then she collected her clothes.
“I just wanted you to know about the police,” she said. “So they can’t surprise you.”
For a moment he wasn’t sure if this, too, was part of the matinee story they had just played.
My house acquired a routine in those days. It had been my cell, a refuge, a place without associations like a hotel room; but Anna’s presence filled it with our shared life. The arrangement of chairs mattered now; it defined how we would talk in the evening. The bed was aired and crisply made.
And food was needed. The markets in Vila Nova were on Wednesday and Saturday. Anna had this vision of Provence laid out on tables from a glossy magazine: a dozen goat cheeses, maybe, and good leaves for salad.
We negotiated our way past the legless beggar, the cake seller, the flower persons, and the butcher shops into the market hall: narrow ways between narrow tables, women standing over bunches of greens, plastic sacks of eggs or white or scarlet or dark-brown beans, furred peaches, forests of high orange montbretia, resigned cilantro, and onions wet with juice. Beyond the women’s territory were the cheese stalls, the boards of salt cod, the sausages strung on poles, the man who sold young chickens, the professional greengrocers with their sad green peppers and kiwifruit and nectarines from Spain.
The hall was practical enough: supplies of watercress or bacon, grainy apples or potatoes. But it was also medieval in its crowded insistence, in the way the women called you over, in the small heaps of what had flowered or fruited that morning all set out to be changed into cash. You could imagine you should be sliding on straw or mud, instead of civic concrete.
I said, “What do you need?”
“Ham. Presunto. Maybe some fish.”
There were long, spiny fish, like armored eels, and cuts across some coarse, dark-fleshed creature. There was nothing entirely familiar. The sardines lay under the tables, some boxes lightly salted, some under blizzards of salt; those at least she knew. She bumped against the limits of her curiosity and her interest all at once: she wanted clean cod, filleted salmon.
I said, “We could always have chicken. We could eat somewhere.”
“I want to cook fish.”
So she bought corvinho, not entirely sure what it was, and a nubbly kind of snowpeas, and potatoes, and cheese, and peaches. She added parsley, lettuce, and some branches of dried lemon verbena to make tea. She took back specimens of the place.
I waited for her, up against the railings with the other gossiping knots of men who buried themselves in the talk and business of the place.
I saw Arturo, but not standing with the gossips. He was walking between the lines of tables, a bucket in either hand.
I knew men never come to sell in the women’s zone.
People stepped to let him through because he should not be there and, besides, the market had been open two hours and the best was all gone.
He set the buckets on the table. He poured out pink, waxy potatoes that went running every which way off the narrow stone table.
The women nodded. Nobody spoke to him, though, or looked directly at him. The places on either side were empty.
I thought of him as a friend, an ally. But I didn’t know how to acknowledge him, either; it was as odd for a man to be buying as selling at the tables.
Anna came out of the crowd, laden with thin blue plastic bags. I took some of them, and I walked her briskly out of the market hall.
At home she spread out the foods she had bought, as though she could read them like a map.
She laid little ambushes for me, too. “I wish I knew why you’re so preoccupied,” she said. And: “Did you find out anything about your father?” She said these things when I was sitting before a sunset, when I was cleaning boots, as though they might slip under my conscious guard.
Then, after a day when I said nothing in reply, she was suddenly angry: “I’m trying. Why won’t you try?”
I stared at her.
“You�
��re drifting,” she said. “You don’t engage with me. You don’t call the Museum. It’s as though London doesn’t exist for you anymore.”
I don’t remember how I answered her. I hope I didn’t say: “Don’t be stupid.” I expect I did.
We went to bed in the afternoon, separate sides of the bed because of the heat, so we both assumed. She broke the divide. She put out a hand and I thought she wanted me to hold it, but she wanted to touch me along the line of the spine as I lay there. Her fingers grazed my skin, made me anticipate.
“Turn over,” she said.
I turned. I was hard, of course. She was smiling. But instead of falling together, instead of laughing or delighting in the moment, we were frozen with a kind of embarrassment. Desire was there all right, the usual responses; but it suddenly seemed inappropriate, almost embarrassing to take things any further, as though we’d only be passing the time.
She kissed my forehead once and lay down again, distant as though she’d still been in London, close as the length of my fingers. I got up and went to the shower and ran the brown water, hoping it would clear.
She made an elaborate fresh lemonade later, and we sat watching the valley down below: shine on the slate roofs, birds twitching between trees, the run of the stream.
I said, for want of anything else I could bring myself to say, “It’s funny Arturo was in the market. I haven’t seen Zulmira, either.”
She nodded.
We both knew that afternoon was something more than a bad day in bed, naturally repaired in the next easy night. It wasn’t desire that had failed us. It was connection.
“You could go to see them, ” Anna said. “Maybe you’d better go to see them.”
So I climbed the steps to Zulmira and Arturo’s house, knocked on their metal gates, then tried the gates and walked through into the courtyard. It was an open space, with mounds for marigolds and lettuce, wood stacked under steading, rooms on two sides up concrete stairs, and animals: a pig parked in a corner, rabbits in mesh cages, a convoy of chickens picking at the world, and a kid springing at the end of a rope and halter. Geraniums went striving up one wall.