Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  The professor was not so elegant he’d carry about a perfectly washed shirt for months.

  Hart tore off the plastic. Where there should have been card in the body of the shirt, there was paper and plastic and some kind of protective tissue. Between the tissues were bright painted images.

  He took the first of them and went back to Maria.

  He showed her a great cat confined in a cage of watercolor wash, the black in its coat as bright as new ink, the force of its jaw and teeth made obvious. He offered it.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  At the door, she said, “I don’t want anything. You’ll be gone soon.”

  He sat down on the tiled floor. He was stalled—everything to do, no will to do it, like an athlete who breaks with age and finds his muscles will no longer throw him off the ground.

  He’d found Hart’s damn pictures now it was too late simply to get the Museum man off his trail and move on. He had waited too long, been stuck with other people’s questions. He needed my life for his own.

  He’d offered the best he had, better than stories, better than promises, and Maria had turned it down.

  He was a killer. He deserved the really black headlines, politicians’ speeches, a spike in the sales of the very best mortice locks and pepper sprays and 9mm guns. And here he was, confined to a village because of some incident that was more like an image: a dead woman walking in her husband’s arms.

  It was much worse than he imagined, of course.

  Christopher Hart had a dentist in Cambridge, who faxed the records to the local police, who copied them on to Amsterdam and Inspector Van Deursen.

  There was no reason a skull found in a river lock in Holland should match the records of a British citizen still officially alive. But it did.

  Hart considered the pictures. He set each in a plastic envelope.

  It made no sense for him to keep such things. He did not acquire or collect. He moved on; that was the essence of his scheme for a life.

  Hart’s crimes were not his crimes. These things might be better with me.

  He slipped one plastic envelope under my door.

  I watched it arrive, shining. I picked it up. I saw that the cat was ruckled a little, that the paper was bruised at the edges. I felt again that clean, inspiring anger at a perfect thing spoiled.

  Everything extraneous had to go.

  Of all the issues, Anna was easiest. The police said she could leave now they no longer needed the cover of investigating Arturo. She had a ticket home out of Oporto, and although she said she’d take a later flight, and wanted me to come back with her, she also had her teaching duties and her visible exasperation with the place.

  The drive to the airport was unbearable. She nursed me with bits of memory on the way: sometimes big issues, how I was the only one who never showed surprise that she gave up music, how much that had helped; sometimes shared trivia, like the time we were lost out walking in Switzerland, or a meal in Siena, the tiny cuttlefish with crisp tentacles and bodies unctuous with ink.

  “I read all your thesis,” she said. “Every word.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “I wanted to.”

  All this was in the manner of a deathbed conversation: someone determined not to let things lie unsaid, but afraid there would never be another opportunity to say them. She told me about an afternoon in Siena, a white room, the Bach pieces for unaccompanied viola, the breeze slight and warm on our bodies. The image was lovely, but it wasn’t memory anymore, not wired into our lives.

  At Oporto airport she said she needed The Guardian, and bustled into the newsstand. There were all too many foreign papers; she thumbed through French scandals, Billboard, pink Italian sports. She found what she wanted, and came back to me on the concourse.

  “Don’t wait,” she said. “There’s no point in your waiting. I’ll go through and get a coffee.”

  “But it’s an hour before the flight.”

  “I might buy some presents,” she said.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. I love you, too.” She said, “Doesn’t do us much good, does it?”

  She passed the police check and the security check and I could just see her still. Then she turned to passport control for flights to London, and she was gone, truly gone.

  I called Mello from the airport. I said I had something I’d like to explain, and could I come to the Guarda station.

  I showed him the picture: the great cat roughed up by careless handling. I explained that fourteen others were missing from the Museum, that Hart was the suspect, that this picture had been put under my door.

  “Prima facie evidence that the man carries stolen goods,” I said. “I need police help now.” Then I heard the communal voice of the Museum, a great chorus of quiet. I added, “It’s a slightly tricky matter.”

  Mello grinned. “We don’t want complications, either. If the pictures are there, you take them back to London. There are bigger issues.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We don’t even know how to charge the man, not yet. We couldn’t make a legal search without you. The Dutch police were very insistent on a legal search.”

  Two carloads of men went with us, and the convoy hit Formentina deliberately, a statement on wheels. The village froze: men moving gently by the beehives, walking out with the goats up the mountain; the two women picking beans; the barman stacking gas bottles by the roadside. The police stormed up the slate steps between still people who watched and only slowly, whisper by gesture by whisper, started to move.

  Mello thundered on Hart’s door. There was no answer.

  “His car’s not here,” I said, helpfully.

  Mello beckoned three heavy-shouldered men forward and they went through the door as if it were paper.

  An old man among the beans in his garden shouted. His wife pulled him inside.

  The house was pitch black and smelled of old breath and sweat. There was a mess of laundry in the bedroom that the cops picked over fastidiously. Every drawer was opened, rifled, shut. Hart’s jackets hung in a shallow closet; each pocket was checked. Passport. Credit cards. Checkbooks.

  The stacks of paper were winnowed for the wrong documents. The computer was treated like some kind of contraband, turned on to check that it was what it seemed to be rather than for any information it might contain. And I, for the first time, was licensed to go rummaging where I wanted to go.

  I wanted the pictures. I also wanted to know why. I turned the piles of paper upside down and spread them slightly, checking for anything with a different weight or texture. I went through drawers of socks and shirts. I could be a good thief too; a licensed thief.

  I opened a promising cardboard roll that contained only a poster. But the poster was interesting in itself: a van Gogh, a field of poppies under a placid, almost plastered sky, a dark parade of grass, a huddle of houses off to the right, and a great sense of flatness. It lacked ferocity or decorative form, and I looked at it too long because I kept wondering why Hart, an Englishman programmed to dream of sea-shores, Tuscan hills, dales, and everything that rolls, should put such a value on flatness.

  Mello said, “Find anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We got one thing. An ID from New York in the name of Thomas Galford.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Maybe it’s an ID for somewhere you give false names,” Mello said. “It’s just a laminated card.”

  One of the policemen held up the old Vulcanite trunk. Mello felt for a false bottom.

  We went looking for some kind of attic, or at least a hidden crawl space in the roof: nine men looking upward, hands and eyes up to the ceiling made of fine wood strips. I found a rectangular cut in the wood in a corner of the main bedroom.

  “Ladder,” Mello shouted, and his men stamped away to find one. While they were gone, Mello said, “These are pictures you hope to find?”

  “Pictures,” I said. “Painti
ngs from an album. It makes no sense for him to bring them here, not if he meant to sell them, but you saw what came under my door last night.”

  The ladder came and Mello, out of kindness more than deference, let me be the one who went up and pushed aside the rectangle of loose wood. I found my face pressed into raw fiberglass insulation. I coughed. I brought up the flashlight and looked around where the beam stabbed over the lawn of fiber to the ridges of the tiles. I felt around, too. My fingers closed on a plastic envelope.

  I was so hopeful for a moment. “I’ve got something,” I shouted, voice smothered in the fibers.

  “Everybody hides something,” Mello said. “It doesn’t always matter.”

  I came down the ladder carefully. “It might not be his,” I said.

  It was a clear, foolscap envelope, full of receipts, an airline ticket, scraps of the kind of documentation people keep to prove their lives for tax purposes. I handed it automatically to Mello, but he let me open it.

  The airline ticket was from Amsterdam to Lisbon on KLM, business class, open, paid for with a Visa credit card.

  “But he drove down, didn’t he?” Mello said.

  There were car rental papers, but they did not fit the car Hart was driving. There was a driver’s license, expired, in the name of Gregory Keller, with a photograph very like Hart. There was a used Dutch railway ticket, Amsterdam to Utrecht. There was a pass for the Bobst Library at New York University, soap from the Georges V in Paris, a pack of cards from a Nassau casino, a single Ting Ting ginger candy, several taxi receipts from different cities, and a ticket on the rack-and-pinion railway that climbs Mount Pilatus just outside Lucerne.

  “Souvenirs,” I said. I tried to keep the disgust out of my voice.

  “I’m taking the driver’s license,” Mello said. “Is there anything you need?”

  The men put back the envelope, tidied the papers as they were, closed down the shutters once more, and made the house dark and tight.

  Once they stepped outside into the sun, they were plain officialdom again.

  A woman watching from her gateway came forward, stolid and strong and nerved up to talk to officialdom. “Arturo?” she said. “What about Arturo?” She spoke very politely, but she said only those words, as though she didn’t trust language to carry her any further.

  Mello said, “You’ll have to talk to headquarters.”

  The small gray army marched to the cars, slammed doors officiously, and drove off fast, leaving me on my doorstep.

  I could see the woman still standing at her gate. Children tugged at her dress, and she gathered them to her and stepped out of sight. She was smiling, or rather giving a smile like a present to the children.

  Nothing. Fucking nothing, I thought, except the oddity of a few strangers’ names. I was too angry to waste time wondering what Hart’s other names might mean. I only knew that Hart was taunting me now, binding me to him with the possibility of bringing back those pictures. I had become his joke.

  Maria Mattoso made sure I could hear her arrive: a squeal of tires on tarmac, then a revved engine, then a slammed door. She seemed unsure for a moment whether she should go straight up to Hart’s house, or see me first. She chose me.

  “Thank you for calling,” she said. “It was the Guarda, was it? And they spent how long at the house?”

  “Thirty minutes maybe.”

  “You were with them?”

  “Look, I just called you because Hart wasn’t here and I thought someone should know—”

  “But you didn’t think I should know while the search was going on? You waited until the evening.”

  “I had to take Anna to the airport—” I said. It was not a workable excuse, but I needed something to say.

  “Did you find anything? Did they?”

  “I don’t know what they were looking for.” But I could have told her: discrepancies, gaps in the record they could fill with investigation and suspicion.

  “You’d better come up with me,” Maria said.

  She stood there engaged for once, not edging out of the center of things at all. I’d never had occasion to see her so clearly before.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  She strode up the slate steps. I was watching her legs work, the round of a walker’s calf, the slim, busy thighs. Her presence was electric to me, like a charge in a vacuum jar, now I was so absolutely on my own.

  The door was back on its hinges, but it rocked slightly when Maria opened it. She walked inside.

  There was something almost metallic on the air along with the sweat and breath: the smell of uniformed intruders. It wasn’t just papers, clothes, that were subtly out of place. A cleaning woman could do that. A thief could do that too. The insult came from men who poked about in private places to discover a story, or make it up. There was simple proof how little they understood: they could never put things back as they were.

  They probably found traces of Maria, too, and traces was all they wanted. From traces, they could invent sagas, romances, mysteries.

  “Who was it?” she asked.

  “Mello,” I said.

  “He had a warrant?”

  “I think so.”

  “How many men?”

  “Seven. Altogether.”

  “With guns?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they explain exactly what they wanted?”

  “Mello said it was a question of identity.”

  “And what did you want?”

  She pinned me with the words and I stood there with my eyes standing wide open and my hands neatly at my sides. I felt exhilarated. Her attention seemed huge enough to animate all the lacks and spaces forming in my life.

  “What did you want?” she said again. “I take it you didn’t find it, or you would never have called me.”

  “You know why I’m here, don’t you?” I said. I felt entitled to confide at last. “The Museum believes that Christopher Hart stole something. I’m here to get it back.”

  “Pictures,” she said. “He showed me one of them. I couldn’t believe he was just some thief who cuts pictures out of albums.”

  “So you put it under my door?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t think of that.”

  “This—something—these pictures—the Museum shouldn’t have,” I said. “So they want it brought back without anyone knowing they own it, let alone that it was ever stolen. You see.”

  She was still angry with me, wound up tight, but it seemed to make her cold and clear. “And you didn’t find anything?”

  “Mello told me they found nothing.”

  “So you can go home now.”

  She had me marked down as a perfect type of a visitor, the kind that always has a very good reason to go away again: job, wife, children, house, mortgage, fear of alternatives and choosing between them.

  “I don’t have a home,” I said. She didn’t listen. “This is where I come from.”

  All the time I was a child, I missed the point of confession. I’d dredge up a few meager sins for a busy priest, offer them as dutiful evidence that I was interested. Then I grew up and away from all that. But I had listened to Anna all morning, and now I really wanted to say everything at least once so it could die on the air and be out of my way; or so Maria would accept and forgive it all.

  “Listen,” Maria said. “Did they take anything away?”

  “I’m not sure. Not much.”

  “Can I borrow your phone?”

  She called the Guarda and asked to speak to Mello, but he wasn’t available. She asked what had been seized in Hart’s house. She asked about warrants. A sergeant told her nothing belonging to Christopher Hart had been taken from the house. Only when she put down the phone did she realize how oddly he had phrased his denial.

  Maria didn’t waste time on me.

  She first thought of storming the GNR barracks, demanding to see Mello. But an angry individual makes mistakes of etiquette, enough to be properly turned away. Instead, she phoned f
rom the cool of her kitchen. She was very proud of her common sense when she told me that.

  “Is this about Arturo de Sousa?” a sergeant said.

  “No,” Maria said. “I wouldn’t call at this time about Arturo. This is about Christopher Hart.”

  “Yes,” the sergeant said.

  “I’d like to talk to someone.”

  “You want to talk to someone tonight? You represent Mr. Hart?”

  “I’m not calling as a lawyer.”

  “But you do represent Mr. Hart?”

  “I am not calling as a lawyer.”

  She never knew what convinced him to take her seriously. There was a pause, the phone seemed to fall, she heard some talk on the other side of the room. The sergeant came back.

  “Senhor Mello will come to see you. In fifteen minutes.”

  She imagined Mello being dressed and polished by his quiet wife, packed into a car, and put out to drive to Maria’s house. He would drive through the town with great self-importance, insistent the town acknowledge him. And he would be happy to correct whatever Maria thought of Hart.

  “This is rather unusual,” Mello said when she opened the door.

  “I know. Can I get you a drink?”

  Mello hesitated at the door. She could tell he wondered if it was entirely proper to be in a woman’s house after nine in the evening, that he would be far more comfortable if she were an old, potbellied gouger of a lawyer who could be instructed over a pool table or in some clubby bar.

  “A drink,” Mello said. “Perhaps a glass of—”

  “A glass of port,” Maria said.

  “Yes.” Mello settled in the parlor in the pool of thin light from a floor lamp and looked around him. The old dark wood, the bits of fancy china, and the heavy curtains seemed to reassure him. He was still in a branch of his own world.

  “Not white port,” he shouted after Maria, patronizingly.

  Maria put down a bottle of a twenty-year tawny. She was overdoing it, she knew, but she was playing an unfamiliar game: trading on mutual secrets of professional people, nothing to do with law, or due process, or justice.