Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  Her mother said, “You’re not going out this evening? You’re thinking of sleeping here?”

  “Yes,” Maria said. “You don’t mind?” She poured wine into her mother’s water glass almost by accident, and her mother drank it anyway. “We’ll be company for each other,” Maria said.

  She shouldn’t have said that. By way of apology, she said she would wash the dishes.

  “You don’t know how,” her mother said. “Lady lawyers don’t do that sort of thing.” The two women got up simultaneously and moved plates to the sink.

  “He’s just making a trip,” Maria said quietly. “It’s nothing serious.”

  “Perhaps not for you,” her mother said.

  Maria touched her mother once, very lightly on the shoulder, and as she expected, her mother brushed the hand away and also smiled.

  “He’s been very useful,” Maria said. “Amandio.”

  “You didn’t like him. But yes, he was.”

  Maria should have picked up on the tense and worried out its meaning. But she felt too tired, and too kind.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I’ll do the dishes.”

  When the phone rang again, her mother went to answer it, and Maria heard her talking flatly. When she came back, she said, “It was that Senhor João. Costa. I told him you weren’t here. He sounded drunk.”

  “Thanks,” Maria said.

  I wasn’t drunk, but the words still butted up against one another and bent and scattered when I tried to say where I was, who I was, what I felt.

  I climbed into the bath, in the shade of the sharp gold swans, and I lay there for a moment before panicking.

  I ran through the apartment, wet and naked, and found toast burning on the stove. So I was right to panic, I thought.

  Christopher Hart could be sleeping with Maria. I could not. I hated Hart, wanted him arrested and confined; or dead.

  I was the hollow man, no solid past anymore, no father’s reliable stories, no place of birth that mattered, no residence, no wife. But I had been a hollow man for years, doing things at one remove, respecting systems and courts and orders and regulations. I was unused to this rush of feeling, like bile or hormones. I thought it could fill me up with purpose and found a new life.

  But perhaps she’d come down to Lisbon, after all. One more call tomorrow. I could always make one more call.

  I imagine this next part, from everything I know.

  There was a road, a sand track, a man with bagpipes, one with a big drum, one with a snare drum. Beside them walked other men, one with a bunch of raw-looking rockets in his hand, just paper pockets of blast. They weren’t going to war. They were only announcing a festa.

  The youngest man lit up a fuse like the wreckage of a cigar, and waited until it glowed. He held a rocket in his left hand. He pushed the lit fuse into the touch paper and waited for the rushing sound, and then, just in time, let go, with a twist and a curl like a javelin thrower.

  The mortars almost always went up. Sometimes they’d raise some dust, or some bird nests in a drain; but usually they flew and a few minutes later exploded and left farts of brown smoke high on the air.

  This one didn’t. It rumbled. It flew. But it flew flat horizontal. It cleared vines and phone wires and bougainvillea, made a pig scream, grazed a neon cross on a tiny white chapel, and shot out of the village into the woods.

  The men lit the next mortar.

  But the first wasn’t history yet. It zipped through pines and eucalyptus until it caught in a ball of loose bark and let off brown-yellow smoke.

  The next mortar—and I’m guessing here—shot up into a bare blue sky, and the next: a flash, a bang, then smoke. You could hear and see them in the next valley. In that part of Portugal, you can’t have a village festa without advertising: loud, explosive advertising. You can’t have a party, a sacred procession with banners, without the sounds of trench warfare.

  Back in the woods, the trails of bark from the eucalyptus began to smoke. There was a weak little wind, but that was enough. A few leaves, the new ones heavy with oil, burned down to their veins and blew around. Some scorched the grass, which had overgrown itself in a wet spring and was now dried out to brown tinder.

  The woods went quiet for a moment, then little flames began to chatter, as insistent as water over rocks and, for a strange moment, just as soothing.

  The young eucalypts were still brilliant blue-green and juicy; they went up like fireworks, orange and yellow. Swags of old bark went dusting through the branches, flaming dead twigs and leaves. Bits of fire fidgeted about in the light, sparkling, jittering.

  The men in the village most likely thought the rogue mortar had spluttered out without doing damage. They were out raising money for the chapel, so they went back to their rounds, the bagpiper roughing up “Y Viva España” on a red and gold bladder, with jazz riffs, and the bridge passage done without breathing.

  The drummers drummed.

  There were two fires in the woods now. The grass fire baked pine cones and opened them, licked the scaly seeds inside. It heated up the spindles of heather and lavender. Smoke left a track along the rocks.

  As the fire fanned out, the treetops started to spit and crackle. There were fatty white squares on the pine trunks where they had been cupped for resin; the squares burned with a pure gold light, aisles of terrible candles.

  The two fires married at a thicket: the ground fires tumbling up the trunks, the tree fires throwing down flame.

  Then the wind got up. It blew away from the village, so there was no taste or soot to warn the men with the mortars.

  By nightfall, the fire had roots. The grass was cool; the fire rested. The next day, the flames grew up like sudden vines, and the fire bent the trees in its direction. Now it was going uphill, it seemed to move even faster.

  Maria went to the GNR station because Mello had something to show her.

  It was a portrait, formal as anything in a ruff and a gallery: Christopher Hart, who’d broken surface in a muddy lock when the Vecht was running low in summer. Mello called it the “real” Christopher Hart.

  But it was only a head on a clinical white background, details fudged, teeth broken with pliers, one eye out, hair shaved, cut marks of a garotte still clear at the neck. It had been manipulated as though by an artist, planes changed, soul exposed with a few surprising lines, but mostly it had been savaged for the sake of rudimentary disguise.

  “They haven’t found the body yet,” Mello said.

  “I see,” Maria said. “So you’ll want to talk to him?” The name Christopher Hart no longer applied. The man had slipped into a category of appalling things that could exist without names.

  “You’ll be seeing him?” Mello asked.

  Maria made herself look again at the photograph. The head had been hacked. The black must be blood scabs. She didn’t feel revulsion; the image was as remote as a car wreck on the nightly news or a painted martyrdom in a church. If she’d had time, she could have taken an interest in the technical, forensic details.

  But there was still a man called Christopher Hart, up in his long, white house on the mountain. He seemed like the ghost now: a stunt projected on the sky, flickering, insubstantial, fantastic as his stories and the places he’d been. She’d liked his lies, once.

  There was also this specific, bloody thing.

  She couldn’t stop herself. “What did it smell like?” she asked. And then: “Can I use the phone?”

  She dialed my number in Lisbon, still thinking it would be so easy to save my life by keeping me in the city. I didn’t answer.

  She says she called me seven times that morning. It’s a magical number; perhaps she is exaggerating. But I was out in any case, or asleep. She worried I might have left to come home already, that I’d be waiting in Formentina and Hart would be waiting for me.

  She called one more time, just in case.

  Seven

  Maria was used to fire.

  I saw it only on the nightly TV news, w
here it was generalized to orange flames, sooty wreckage, and firefighters struggling with old-fashioned hoses.

  Hart, however, was in the thick of it.

  The fire rested overnight, but next day the flames hunted one another uphill, faster and faster. Fire had been just a rumor, a stink on the wind, but now it was driving home.

  Hart must have heard the bells and sirens down below Formentina. It wasn’t the police; he knew the police come silently. It was volunteer firemen, working around a small clump of houses between the village and Vila Nova. He could make out trucks at the roadside, men running pipes to take water down from the little brick reservoirs on the hill, using the few minutes they had pressure to flush away the tinder grasses and wet the earth down. They made a broad line of mud around the houses, and they moved on.

  Hart had everywhere to go, so he had nowhere to go. He didn’t have anything out in the woods to protect. So he did what everyone else did: he waited the fire out.

  There’s no way you can go to meet fire and block it at a distance. It’s alive. It can flare away from you with the wind, crackle up an old tree’s dry dead branches and sparkle prettily into dry grass, fan out in a dozen directions all at once. It does seem to attack sometimes, but even in retreat it is emptying out and blackening the woods. You wait and wait until you can fight it at home.

  Some of the older women went to the chapel to pray together, then joined the men who were watching the woods from every angle. The smoke, they could see, was gray now, which meant there was no juice left in the leaves. The woods were burning dry.

  Maria had wanted to talk to me. Now she needed to talk to me. She thought I might quit Lisbon and come running back to Formentina. She thought Christopher Hart would be waiting for me.

  She says she thought of going to Lisbon. She couldn’t. She says she needed to distract Hart. And there was another reason: the police, finally, decided that Arturo had done nothing worth prosecuting, and were putting him out of the jail at nine in the morning. Somebody had to collect him.

  The old man was thinner still, his strong forearms gone almost white. He was resigned to being released, as he had been resigned to being imprisoned, and he seemed unsurprised that there were no charges at all. He knew Zulmira had died of natural causes. He simply could not face the fact, not for days, not even now.

  He asked about the fire, but Maria did not have the exact local knowledge he needed, about the wind and the tracks around Formentina.

  Fire blustered in the grass, crackled in the trees.

  Hart told Maria he was on the steps of his house and a moth, like paper under gold leaf, flew out of the bushes. It circled, rose as though it had caught some tiny thermal, and then burst into flames in midair.

  Maria was brave, I know that. She wanted to distract him, to save me. But she also wanted to stay at the center of this one story she had lived. She had been ragged with waiting. She was not going to miss a single scene.

  A few roads were already blocked off, makeshift trestles in the way where the smell of smoke started. Beyond the trestles, the edges of the road were soft and vague, as if in evening light. There was an occasional rain of soft, black smuts.

  She took shortcuts on paved lanes, rocked along over sharp stones, and found a back way onto the mountain road. The sky was varnished brown at the edges. The air smelled used and dusty; in back of it was the taste of great heat. You couldn’t mistake it for the night perfume of wood fires in the villages or a bonfire upwind; it was a great breathing body just out of sight.

  She crashed gears for the steep switchback road. She tried closing the car windows, but she stifled. With the windows open, she coughed; it wasn’t much of a choice.

  The bends were sharp angles, the road like a spring that might any minute snap in the heat and fling the cars off the mountain. I know how she thinks. She’d rather worry about the road as a spring, which was absolutely impossible, than think of what she had to alarm her: the heat, the smoke, what she had to say to Hart. How she’d get home. If she’d get home.

  Arturo studied the roadside for clues to the fire. At a blackened clearing, gold threads of straw still standing, he sat up very straight.

  Maria made up mantras as she went along. So she thought she’d be safe when the water was safe, up above other houses with nothing to spoil it. These high woods weren’t so dense, so they wouldn’t burn the same way; and there were firebreaks cut up and down the mountain. Anyway, there was always mist and cloud in the mornings, even in high summer, to smother the fire.

  But she didn’t feel safe.

  She imagined herself saying, in a neutral voice, “But you did kill those people, didn’t you?”

  She imagined Hart saying, “Well, if you put it that way. I suppose so. Yes. Does it matter?”

  Arturo insisted on knocking at his own door. His daughter answered, and they stood looking at each other for a moment until Maria turned away. She never knew if they cried or held each other because she knew it could not happen if she stayed.

  She locked the car as if she were in the city, climbed the slate steps. She was out of breath all at once. It was only the dust and heat, but it felt like the moment your diaphragm forces all the air from your body. The girl was dizzy. She might as well have been in love.

  “Hey,” Hart said.

  He was on the porch of his house, framed in daisies. But you can’t sit anywhere in Formentina without the big, white shine of daisies. He looked like one of those wooden puppets artists use, all gangling articulation.

  Maria said, “They’re closing roads in the valley.”

  “Good of you to come.”

  “I had to talk to you.”

  He pulled his cell phone out of his jeans.

  “Face to face,” Maria said. “We don’t have much time and I don’t want anyone listening in.”

  Hart shrugged. “Come on up. There’s no air, but I can get you some water. Or some wine or some soda or some beer?”

  Maria looked around her. This day the whole valley looked sepia, like a photo lying on flames.

  “I’ll have some water,” Maria said.

  “I’ll get it,” Hart said. “Or come in.”

  She stepped into the shade.

  “The police came back,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “The next thing,” she said, “they’ll want you down at the Guarda Nacional. They’ll want you to volunteer for questioning. Of course, you’ll need to prove identity.”

  “I’ve got a passport.”

  “To prove it,” she said. “Beyond doubt.”

  “They don’t believe papers anymore?”

  You can rest your eyes on this landscape. People expect it. Hart saw a train of goats come down the steps, followed by a man in his fifties with a sweet, senseless grin and a quick dog.

  “I’ve got credit cards,” he said.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “They’re serious.”

  The goats seemed to know their own way.

  “It must have been tough driving today,” Hart said.

  She shrugged.

  “You’d better come in,” Hart said. “Put a fan on. Let’s move the heat around a bit.”

  The house seemed dark, even after an occluded sun. The walls were white, the floors bare, the furniture a clutch of expedients spaced apart: couch, chair, table, a dresser with four embossed paperbacks and an ornamental cockerel from Barcelos. Add company, and it was obvious this was what someone thought would be just enough for someone else’s summer.

  Hart turned on two fans to blow into each other. A picture— amateur watercolor, bougainvillea on white stucco—rattled against the wall. Where the shutters were slightly open, the dust went scouring through the block of light.

  “Cool enough for you?” Hart said.

  Maria went to open the shutters wide.

  “Hey! Don’t let the light in. You’ll let the heat in.”

  Indeed, the air was stifling: new ash as well as all the dead ash.
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br />   “I know that you do have papers, Christopher,” she said. “Whose papers are they?”

  “Christopher Hart’s papers. So I’m Christopher Hart.”

  She said, “It might help if I could give them something they could check. Perhaps you wouldn’t have to go down to the GNR then.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You won’t like interrogation.”

  “I mean, what can they do?”

  She said nothing, but her body squared off like an exclamation point.

  She’d left her purse on the table, so he fumbled in it, fingering her own plastic parts. “It says here,” he said, “you’re Maria de Sousa de Conceição Mattoso. I bet the bank card says how long you lived in town. The ID has your medical record. It certainly says you live in your mother’s house and you do law.”

  She snatched the purse back.

  Hart could hear men striding down the steps; to be exact, their talk, grim and contained. He could see Maria wanted to be outside because it seemed much safer there, even with the prospect of fire. She didn’t like to be with people like him, who slip out of their proper selves at night and go around nameless.

  He said, “It’s like this. Don’t you ever think of being someone else? Of starting again, but radically? You could make up a whole new life.”

  “I don’t know what you’re playing.”

  “You could be anyone or anything. You could be in any of those places you see in magazines, not just Vila Nova. You get to finish off someone else’s life and do it better than they do.”

  “I love fantasy,” Maria said. “I don’t live it.”

  “But why not? When you were a girl, didn’t you want to be Inès de Castro and die for love, or Madame Curie or Lizzie Borden, or Marilyn Monroe? Didn’t you want to choose a new world for yourself?”

  “I chose a world,” Maria said.

  “Are you happy there?”

  “Happy?” Maria said. “Listen, I don’t have time for this. You are someone the police want to interview. It’s serious. I’m your lawyer. This isn’t play.”