Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  Mello sipped. “What exactly can I do for you?”

  She said, “I wanted to talk off the record, if that’s possible.”

  Mello shrugged.

  “I wonder what you know about Christopher Hart,” she said.

  “Mr. Hart,” Mello said. “You wouldn’t have a biscuit, I suppose—”

  She was the supplicant; he had the answers. She brought the biscuits.

  “I thought you were his lawyer,” Mello said.

  “I found him the house and organized the lease. When your men want to get a message to him they ask me to pass it on. They often do that, because I speak English.”

  “And very well, too, I’m sure.”

  “You searched his house today,” Maria said. “That must mean you have some pretty serious suspicions about him. I don’t want to get more involved if there’s something I should know—”

  “Involved,” Mello said. “I thought you were already quite involved.” He set the word up and hung it with assumptions: what women do, how the world should be, how well the cops know sin.

  “You know me,” Maria said. “I know all the foreigners.”

  “Of course,” Mello said.

  “But I wouldn’t say I understand Hart’s story.”

  “You ought to know,” Mello said, “it’s a very extraordinary story. I don’t know how he presented himself to you—a professor, I suppose? With a university and all his degrees. It wasn’t a very interesting story, so I don’t suppose anyone would have bothered to question it. He came down from Holland, where he was supposed to spend his sabbatical year. Except”—Mello fiddled with a biscuit, mock delicately because he was in a woman’s parlor—“that he encountered someone on a tram in Amsterdam who thought she recognized her own son. Not Christopher Hart, but Martin Arkenhout—who was supposed to have died in Florida ten years ago. They found Hart’s hotel, photocopied his passport, and this Mrs. Arkenhout said it was just like Martin would have looked.”

  Maria said, “You’d like some more wine? Just a copito?”

  But Mello was in serious mode. He laid out the story of how Arkenhout’s traveling companion had later vanished too. “You see the pattern,” he said. “I would like some more wine.”

  Maria poured.

  “We did search Hart’s house. We found an identity card in yet another name—a man who was reported missing in the Bahamas. A man of independent means, that sort of thing.”

  “You haven’t arrested Hart?”

  Mello said, “The evidence is in six or seven different countries. There isn’t much of it. There’s a story that needs explaining, that’s all, and there are plenty of those.”

  Maria paced the small parlor like a courtroom, three paces across, three paces back, edging past the low, sharp-sided table. “I suppose—”

  “If the Dutch police are right,” Mello said, “then this man will kill and go away. But he’ll go away with a new name.”

  “He couldn’t find anyone in Formentina,” Maria said.

  “You know John Costa, don’t you?” Mello said.

  Maria poured herself a half-glass of port, although she hardly ever took wine. She raised her eyes to meet Mello’s gaze.

  She said, “I thought he’d be the last person you put at risk.”

  “You think I’m a saint?” Mello said.

  “But he’s the son of José Costa.”

  “We can’t touch Hart at the moment. We need him to try just one more time.”

  Mello stood up as though manners required it.

  “Just to try,” he said.

  Everything else extraneous had to go.

  My father’s story itched and nagged at me, spoiled my concentration; it had to be resolved. I didn’t realize, at the time, how information hollows a man out, takes away the faithful knowledge of boyhood and offers only thin facts. I was becoming just the shell that everyone recognized: John Costa, a man with no more secrets.

  I know libraries. I’m a library rat, a museum person, dust on my whiskers; I turn back to books when I need to know things, like I turned to the big, brown-bound encyclopedia when I was a child, with its postage-stamp pictures of what seemed to be absolutely everything. My father was very proud of the encyclopedia, of having books.

  The local library was new and white and empty. It wouldn’t do. The university library, twenty miles away, was barricaded by spinster angels who admitted only the ticketed few. But I charmed them with the authority of my Museum card.

  Index boxes, sense and order. I sat at a desk with every book I could order on the history of the Portuguese secret police. The generalities would not do anymore. I wanted names.

  There were histories of resistance to the old dictatorship, immensely long studies of how everything worked, studies of the links with German and Spanish and especially British Intelligence; even a 1920 account of a five-day monarchist revolt in Oporto. I found diagrams, theory, cartoons—crude ones from a magazine called O Verdade, “The Truth”—that showed what might have happened in any white room in a basement: electrical chairs, men with the faces of angular heroes being beaten by men with the faces of fascist beasts.

  I could pass as an expert in a few hours. I didn’t want to go for lunch, because I was absorbed, because I feared the spinster battalion might throw me back next time.

  I did not find my father’s name, not in studies of the Portuguese Legion, which helped out the secret police, nor in the memoirs they kept bringing to my desk: about a Fortress of Resistance, a Communist Intellectual, the memoirs of an Inspector of the PIDE, of prisoners, of “A Life in Revolution” and time spent in “Salazar’s Inquisition.”

  But I did find Mello.

  It’s not that uncommon a name, but this Mello was in Vila Nova de Formentina, about the right age. But he wasn’t a policeman, fretting about change and the state of the youth. He was in the opposition to Salazar and he was betrayed. The informer, of course, was not named. It seemed that one in ten Portuguese had reported at some time to the secret police, or helped denounce people of “bad character,” who kept “bad company,” who dared to wear red shirts in public or missed Mass. There were far too many names to remember.

  My father had asked Mello’s permission to come back. My father owed Mello some old duty.

  My own father betrayed Mello.

  I said out loud, “Am I making this up?”

  My father was born in 1920. In 1953, when he left, he was thirty-three: a grown man. But Mello was now around sixty, still in uniform, still working. In 1953, he would have been—what?—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. A boy. My father gave the PIDE the name of a boy.

  Listen. You think you’re walking in a garden and suddenly you’re on the lip of a cliff. You think you’re swimming in the comfort of a great pool and a current starts to take you out between high waves. This was a moment like that.

  I wondered which would be worse: to invent this story, to libel my own father, or to find this scenario was fact? I sat at my desk, the examinee looking hard into space.

  I knew that if my story was right, then everything my father had told me about Portugal and being Portuguese was tainted, the smell of police behind each heroic frieze of courage and victory. I just lost all the history I thought I had regained.

  Suddenly I was very afraid of being my father’s son.

  Mello ordered me to the barracks with all the authority of law and uniforms, and he ordered me out of town. I needed, he said, a few days in Lisbon. He said he had a friend who insisted I have his apartment.

  I couldn’t resist Mello. He was practical: he said the police would be making certain searches while I was away and he personally would be responsible for seeing that my interests, the Museum’s interests, were considered. But I couldn’t stay around, because I would complicate matters.

  “I wanted to discuss my father,” I said,

  “We can discuss that later,” Mello said. “I don’t know how to impress on you the seriousness of all this. The issue is”—and he s
eemed to be trying to snatch a euphemism out of his limited stock, but he failed—“murder.”

  I hadn’t expected that. Why should I have expected that? Murder is a subject for novels and headlines. I didn’t expect my life would take in either.

  But I wouldn’t be distracted. “Your officer took me to see a room,” I said. “A white room in a basement. Why was my father there? When was he there?”

  Mello tried to pretend he never heard the question.

  “I need to know,” I said.

  I remembered: trying to reach my father in that high climate that settles around grown-ups, trying to make him listen to my questions about Saturday or why he was cutting back the roses.

  “There are things you can’t tell a son about his father.”

  “Tell me.”

  Mello sighed. I know now what he must have been thinking. He had chanced into a multiple-murder case, complicated by these allegations of theft from a great museum, and he found himself plowing up a past he had long ago survived.

  He said, “He was in that room five months ago. Now will you go to Lisbon? Please?”

  “Why?” I heard myself at four or five: always that same question, after every statement, “why?” “why?” “why?”; the last time we’re all philosophers.

  “Listen,” Mello said. “We all have a duty to forgive those who trespass against us.”

  “But why—”

  “I just wanted him to understand what he did,” Mello said.

  “I don’t understand how you knew each other. He was miles away from Vila Nova de Formentina.”

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  It was not a very dignified struggle. I simply sat there.

  “Vila Nova’s a long way from anywhere,” Mello said, after a while.

  “Things happened here, things that couldn’t happen somewhere like Lisbon. The Communist Party had conferences here, late 1940s, early fifties. They met and talked and planned. Of course, the PIDE wanted to know every move.”

  “You were a member? My father was a member?”

  “You don’t know what it’s like to live under a dictator who wants everyone’s lives opened up and visible and the same. You want to fight, but the only ways you know are the ways the dictator keeps denouncing and forbidding. So you use those ways.”

  “What did my father do?”

  “People just forgot what it was to betray someone else. It seemed ordinary.”

  I had my moral certainties all lined up like toy soldiers, but Mello seemed determined to forgive, to glory in forgiving.

  “After the Second Congress, the PIDE chased your father down. He could have confessed. He could have denied everything. He didn’t do either. He sort of confessed, said he did know people who knew about the CP in general. They said they’d let him go for one name.”

  “Your name?”

  “I suppose he thought nothing would happen to me because I was too young. He didn’t think they would take the story seriously. Or I would get away.”

  “But he was safe to leave for London.”

  “I never wanted to leave,” Mello said. “I didn’t mind him leaving. It made everything easier.”

  “Was it easy to forgive him?”

  “I don’t think he understood what happened in those white rooms. I had to explain to him.” Mello stood up. “He should have known. Everyone sort of knew.”

  I stood up too.

  “I do not think the sins of the fathers should fall on the sons. If they did, we couldn’t have a country.”

  Sometimes you feel entitled to examine a man: to study him for traces of old rhetoric, choosing the simplest things to say, for bullshit or simply lies. I was part awed by his capacity for forgiveness, part suspicious. I didn’t know what part of him to trust. Maria told me later he was the kind of cop who did best when things were impossible, who in ordinary circumstances was an official bully.

  “Just go,” Mello said. “Go to Lisbon. For Christ’s sake, go.”

  Maria woke up cold in her own bed, she told me. For comfort, she dressed and went down to the kitchen, where her mother and Amandio were drinking coffee.

  “You’re up early,” Amandio said.

  “I woke up very suddenly.”

  “Someone calling you,” her mother said.

  Maria poured coffee from the pot.

  “I said, someone calling you,” her mother said.

  “Love,” Amandio said, beaming, oiled with easy certainty as always.

  Maria was shivering.

  She called Hart twice, tried to suggest she could come out for the afternoon.

  She said to me, when she came to the bar for her usual coffee and water, “I hope you get the pictures back.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It doesn’t seem a good idea to be around here for a while.”

  “Mello told me to go.”

  “To go where?”

  “Lisbon.”

  She sighed. “I could go to Lisbon,” she said. “Go to the opera, go to the fado, go somewhere. I need to go somewhere.”

  I said, “Please come.”

  “I’ve got some business to sort out. I suppose I could come this week.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  I hadn’t expected to be so eager; a schoolboy’s eagerness.

  The apartment was in a new block on Avenida do Brasil. It was a paradox of a zone: where the airplanes come roaring low, but well-off people still like to flaunt their closeness to the airport. The view was jacarandas, the pavements blue with the old flowers, and at the back, a courtyard of washing lines.

  I checked the place. The living room was stuffed with bulky green sofas. The bathroom had taps in the form of gold-plated swans, forever vomiting water down the drain. And the main bedroom, a square box of intolerable dry heat, had a triangle for a bedstead like some altarpiece, set about with cherubim and seraphim in rows and ranks up to a fat fairy at the very top. I pulled open the drawer in the bedside cabinet: spare seraphim.

  There was no fan, no air conditioner, and the apartment had been empty for weeks. I tried lowering a shade and opening a window, but new heat crept in to disturb the blanket of old heat. I tried showering, distracted by the odd glitter of gold swans around my feet and the water that ran lukewarm from either bird.

  I took Luso water from the fridge and drank from the bottle.

  I didn’t know how to make a place ready for someone else. I knew what Anna would want, but I wasn’t expecting Anna. I wondered what I should do: buy wine, buy bread, buy coffee. Buy condoms, nowadays. Make sure the rooms seem fresh and appealing. I was entirely out of practice because it was so long since I had chased, or courted, or even furiously desired.

  But that was my occupation now: desire. It was like being drunk, like a headache, like anything obsessive and chemical. Only I was alone, and in a stuffed, airless apartment in a city I didn’t know.

  I wanted to be outside more than anything. Not that the streets were promising: broad and without character, pale-cream blocks. I could not find a cafe in the shade. There was, however, a seafood bar with tables under a tree, and in its window were piles of crayfish, saltwater and freshwater. I ordered some of both, picking between the piles, trying to judge which one I liked best and therefore which one I should offer Maria when she came.

  I didn’t even eat for myself anymore.

  I could watch myself doing all this, as though from a great height, see the absurdity of it all; and yet I went on. This was infatuation without excuse, without even the object of desire. I couldn’t even call Maria until evening. I didn’t want to leave messages on the office machine, if I could avoid it. Maybe she’d be home, maybe not.

  Clean sheets. Good coffee. Wine, of course; but what kind of wine? Did she even drink? I knew her only in circumstances where perhaps she considered herself on duty, and she drank only water and coffee. I needed good soap in the bathroom, too: what my mother used to call “nice” soap.

  I didn’t know affairs, you c
an tell. I could fancy the notion of the plot: the fake phone calls to establish alibi, the calculated meeting, the rush and grapple and then leaving the moment two bodies were tired enough to separate. I could see a certain excitement in all that. But my habits were far too constant and domestic.

  A woman passed. She was lovely enough: rounded, ample, eyes bright as knives. But she was the wrong woman. Just for a moment, I thought I knew how to cure myself, to prove I was riddled with nonspecific romance. I’d stand, talk to her, drink a glass of wine, go to bed with her and join together fiercely enough for nothing else to matter, and remember this even when, hours later, it was only memory on the skin, not the scaffolding of some new domestic life. Then I wouldn’t need to fuss about which crayfish, seawater or freshwater, or both, the decisions that showed how prissily difficult I found it to do what I knew I would inevitably do: call Maria Mattoso, call her now.

  I thought I was just being human.

  I didn’t call her that night. Instead, I sat in the apartment with a loaf and some cheese, watching an old Portuguese film about students at Coimbra University. The men wore black academic gowns and sang fados in the corners of small rooms. The girls frisked on steps, or sat romantically still in windows to be serenaded. The two did not seem to connect very much. It was a love story.

  I left my number on Maria’s machine, just as a reminder. I asked if she wanted to see the new King Lear at the National, or some visiting ballet out at Belém.

  She thought this could wait, she says. She had a life in Vila Nova de Formentina that could not be interrupted on a whim—certainly not by a man unconnected and not at home, who might as well be on vacation.

  She sat down at table with her mother.

  “Where’s Amandio?” she said.

  Her mother chewed both her meat and her wine.

  “Traveling,” she said, after a minute. “He has to make a living, you know.”

  “Gone far? For long?”

  “Santarém. Then he’s going to the Alentejo. Évora.”

  “I like Évora,” Maria said. “I remember a lemon tree hanging over a white wall.”

  Her mother glared at her.

  “And the fountains. They have lovely Moorish fountains.” She watched her mother work a piece of bread into oblivion, first between her fingers, then between her teeth.