Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

“Isn’t it?”

  “You think you can reinvent yourself before they get here?”

  “I’ve got time. If the fire is like you say, they won’t be here for a while.”

  “You could give them an account of where you teach,” she said. “Your subject. What your last book said, what’s in the new book. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “Why do they want to know all of a sudden? Nobody here ever asked me for a lecture on Dutch imperialism. Hell, that’s why I came here.”

  “That’s good. It’s good you talk about Dutch imperialism. They’ll believe that.”

  “You really want Christopher Hart?” He couldn’t help sounding disappointed. “I thought you wanted someone you could change. Someone you could make up as you went along.”

  Maria slapped her hands once on the wall.

  “Sit down,” he said. “There’s nowhere to go. I could tell you things.”

  “I don’t need to know.”

  “You’re talking as my lawyer?”

  She shook her head.

  “So what’s the problem? You don’t want to know about other lives, other places?” He bent at the waist and put his face against hers. “You’d disappear if you left here, wouldn’t you? If it didn’t say ‘lawyer’ after your name. If people didn’t know you, your father, your grandfather.”

  She said, “The police are serious.”

  He slammed the shutters together and tried to force the bolt into place.

  “Are the lights working?” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d like the light on.”

  “Sit. We won’t do anything. You just listen.”

  It would have been easier to touch just at that moment. The room crackled with the fact that they were not touching. Breath stuck in the throat.

  A sound began overhead: mechanical, distant. The sound became more distinct: one of the small planes that go up from the local airfield to spot fires. It circled and then seemed to veer across its own path. Then it must have passed over the ridge, because the sound was distant again, and then gone.

  “Hey,” Hart said, and he was laughing. “You want someone to save you?”

  I went around the bookshops on the Carmo while I was waiting for her: great vaults of books, odd hallways with trestles of books, shelves of paperbacks treasured so long they seemed almost pathetic, old art books from the twenties with their air of embalming culture and sewing it up in good cloth.

  I couldn’t concentrate, of course.

  I called Mello. When finally he took the call, he was brusque and impatient.

  “I took your father to the barracks,” he said, “so he could understand what he did. He never knew what he did. He was out of the country before the worst happened.”

  “I apologize,” I said. “I apologize for my father.”

  “We’ve had a revolution since then,” Mello said. “We’ve tried to change. You forgive and you get on with things.”

  “You showed me that white room.”

  “I should never have done that. You’re entitled to a father who’s a hero. Maybe he was a hero when he got to London.”

  “I need to talk—”

  “John Costa,” Mello said, “half this district is on fire. The roads are shut down. Maria Mattoso’s left town, and she’s probably up with your friend Christopher Hart. Now we’re waiting to bring the bastard in for questioning but we can’t get to him. I don’t want apologies. I want you out of the way.”

  “Is Maria all right?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Is she all right?”

  Mello said, in English, “Don’t you be a fucking hero.”

  Two men rattled Hart’s door, then landed fists on it.

  They stood there, shoulders deep as they were broad, skin stained with smoke over shiny red cheeks. Maria opened the door.

  “The fire’s moving,” one man said. “We’re cutting a new break.” Hart said, “What do they want?”

  “Help,” Maria said. “You got scythes or anything? Brooms, then. Anything.”

  “I suppose there are brooms.”

  She found a scythe tucked back under the sink. Hart carried a broom. They followed the two men down the slate steps to the road. Nobody talked, not even about what the outsiders were meant to do. They walked until they were out of sight of the village.

  Hot air smothered them. The path wound about, no wider than a goat track, then opened to show the whole valley below.

  It was like a harvest day: a stir of people in field clothes, bent, cutting, thrashing, breaking down and clearing out the stuff that could burn between the woods and the village. There was a dust of seeds and broken stems that prickled the throat. The ground itself felt hot. A half-dozen women, round and young or old on their bones, cut grass and pulled it away on two-wheeled carts, tugged up bramble with hard, cut hands; and sometimes stopped as if they were listening for the fire.

  Dark birds circled where everyone was working, hawks, even an eagle waiting for the woods to give up all the winged things flying from the fire. Dragonflies flared up out of the grass in natural panic. Gold beetles lumbered into the sooty air. And the moths mobbed the working line, soft, velvety creatures, some tiny, some broad as small birds in dark and phosphorescent blues and greens, a plague of them born out of a long, wet spring and a sudden hot summer. They flew into eyes already reddened with smoke and work and wine. They fluttered on women’s thighs as they tugged the carts, making skin sing over tired muscles. Hart felt their wings like powder clumped on his wet back.

  The birds above kept turning and diving, closer and closer to the eyes and the dry throats of the people working below.

  “ You won’t get home,” one of the village women said. “They must have the roads closed.”

  “I could go down the other side of the mountain,” Maria said. “Something has to be clear.”

  The barman said he’d rung the trout farms that lay just over the ridge, and they said the roads down were pretty much impassable. Nobody had bothered to close them because nobody would try to get through; most corners were dark with soot and smoke, and around any of them you might meet live fire. He pushed another espresso to Maria across a table filmed with fine dust.

  “We’ve got some time,” Hart said. She reached for a cigarette.

  The little bar by the road was a single white room, branches of bay drying over a coffee machine, a rank of bottles, a counter with jug wine under it, and a shelf of odd groceries: hot sauce, firelighters, tampons, biscuits. It usually smelled of work or of Sunday best. That day, it smelled of the smoke and sweat of everyone’s skin. Nobody was rushing to go home to their own houses, not while they were mounting a communal defense; they’d be weaker apart. But it was almost dinnertime.

  “I’ve got food,” Hart said. “In the freezer.”

  “There’s no electricity.”

  “Then we’d better eat what’s left.”

  She couldn’t go now. The women were watching them as though they were a couple.

  “I’m going,” Maria said.

  So he stood up, too. There wasn’t anything to say because she had no hope of leaving, and the whole village thought she was with him.

  They faced each other for a moment.

  There’s no rule here about how you fight in public. Shouting, the village might have understood.

  The barman said, conversationally, “Everything all right?”

  “I’m all right. Tudo bem,” Maria said.

  “You could stay at my place. There’s a couch,” Hart said. Then, after a pause: “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  The barman said, “It’ll get cold soon. Colder, I mean. The fire doesn’t move so fast at night.”

  “You mean we can all sleep?” Maria said.

  She looked around the room, the people packed against one another on benches: old women in print smocks, old men in trousers they might recover someday for church, the few younger people, all used to using their bodies fiercely
all day but still, with the prospect of fire waiting just below them, desperately tired.

  “Go sleep!” the barman said. He implied: the rest of us are stronger. We’ll stay awake for you.

  And I lay staring up the skirts of seraphim, fretting from one side of the bed to the other, surprised at how I could be in a big city and stay bored and purposeless. After all, I was visiting; I could be a tourist. I could remember my expertise and search out art, fuss about relationships between Flanders and Portugal, Italy and Portugal, about whether the Portuguese imported their Renaissance, and the Italians who built great churches in Lisbon. I could always eat: bacalhau or a fine John Dory or shrimps in hot pepper sauce. I could take trams or boats, the funiculars, or the lace-sided elevator up to the sociable bars. I could drink. I could whore, I supposed. Why shouldn’t I, now, treat sex as just another appetite to be routinely satisfied? You don’t feel unfaithful buying a meal away from home.

  All these years, I’d completely lost the habit of being alone, of shopping for a life. I knew the sense of someone else breathing in the house, of surprise, of things happening without my always willing them to happen. Piles of books, the top shelf of the fridge, morning letters all grew for two. I did like touch I hadn’t organized, words I did not expect.

  No Anna. Nobody.

  There was Maria, but she was far away. Maria. Golden black hair on her forearms; I’d never noticed that on a woman before, much less liked it so much, much less got hard when I thought of it. Not a fetish, I promised myself; a detail.

  There was never this much time to think inside my marriage. But I realized there were details of Anna’s body I could not precisely remember. I could remember the touch and warmth of her, but I was used to looking away as a body grows looser, older, to seeing her with my own weakened eyes and not noticing; she returned the favor. But now I had time.

  I wanted Maria in detail.

  They rigged a hurricane lamp, all pale gold light out of embossed steel, and cooked half-thawed pork steaks on the gas stove, and opened a bottle of wine.

  “Listen to me,” Hart said.

  But Maria only ate, furiously. On an ordinary day she’d eat very little. She’d worked under the sun, had unfamiliar twists in muscles and bones, but that didn’t explain her appetite. She was eating just to be ready.

  “Suppose the cops are right,” Hart said.

  She said, “I don’t know what the cops are saying.”

  She slipped her plate into the sink. She opened a set of inner windows and fanned herself.

  The air seemed cooler at last.

  The first lip of a huge moon came up over the mountain, and spread into a block of cold, plain light. The valley went quiet, cicadas stopped, frogs abandoned their rasping song.

  She turned to him and she held him. She says they made love watching each other’s eyes: sex as interrogation. But she only keened, and Hart grunted, and they separated awkwardly like stuck paper. She didn’t know any more afterward. Hart didn’t tell.

  She found her watch by the bed. There were seven hours still to dawn, seven hours of this steel light outside and the quiet. She just had to occupy this man for seven hours.

  I drank too much, so I woke up fast, knowing things.

  I knew Maria couldn’t be safe with Hart, with a man whose record cut across murder and who shifted name and identity so willfully.

  I knew because of paperbacks and films, the stories that sink much deeper than fact. We fancy ourselves—scholars, students—held up by a net of references. If you want to talk pictures, churches, dukes, or politics, cire perdue or monetary union or pentimento, or Proust or last night’s news, that works very well; the books are everywhere, securely knowledgeable, referenced and footnoted. But when it comes to the melodrama of love, killers, risk, and nighttime terrors, then we have read nothing truly authoritative except the airport chillers. So that’s where we learn what must happen next.

  Since Hart was a villain, Maria must be the victim. If Maria was the victim, then in two hours’ fast drive I could at long redemptive last be what Mello thought I never should be: the designated hero.

  Do you understand that I never once thought this was madness talking in my head? The drink helped convince me.

  Stillness. The huge moon. Maria stood looking out on a shining suspense, a world stopped and top-lit.

  She heard Hart say, “You wanted to know about New York . . .”

  Hart stood just behind her. He was wonderfully absorbed in his stories; he still thought he was a whole library to her. He seemed not to know that the stories amounted to a confession, and confession reduced him to one thing: a killer, that’s all.

  There was the disturbing smell of green things smoldering. The village was still, but not settled, just exhausted. The moon caught the rush of the stream, and even that cool light flickered like a parody of fire.

  “I was very young when I was in New York,” he said. “Seventeen.” The cool and the moon soothed her eyes. She was happy with the shine of the world. But she made herself turn, smile, appreciate him.

  She couldn’t go with him this time: to parties, to bluffing through the art world, to Hamptons summers, dealers on the edge, to watching the famous work their way through the pharmacopeia and, sometimes, back again. He sounded like a gossip sheet, or like a brief exposé in some Saturday magazine, as though he had no history of his own, only this shell of other people’s stories. He said only one interesting thing: that he’d been in the art world after it was heroic—the Abstract Expressionist heroes wrestling wild paint—and before it became social work to improve the nation. He’d had the fun: the years of the souk.

  So she could at least act interested. She wanted him absorbed until he said things she could report.

  She closed her eyes. She didn’t mean to do it. She saw, also shining, the cut head in the photograph, the mouth gaping on teeth that had been gouged out after death.

  She’d had this man inside her only an hour ago. Now she couldn’t be sure of his name. If she had wanted to tell him to stop, instead of pulling him to her, what name would she have used?

  He was edging around the house, bigger than she seemed to remember, magnified by the vagueness of the light and the big night shadows. He rattled knives in a kitchen drawer, just to find coffee spoons; but she thought of the knives.

  He shouted, “Don’t you want to know?”

  She thought she heard dogs shifting in a yard, throwing themselves against corrugated iron, claws rattling.

  “I mean,” he said, “I thought you’d want to know everything now.”

  “I have to make a phone call,” she said.

  “Use the cell phone.”

  “I was going to.”

  She began to dial a number. It wasn’t local, he could see, since it started with a zero. She waited for the faint clicks of the old rotary system to fade.

  “John Costa?” she said. “This is Maria Mattoso.” Pause. “Yes, I’m sorry. I just wanted to tell you the roads are closed. Yes, fire. In Formentina. The roads are very bad indeed. You must stay in Lisbon a few more days.” Pause. “I’d love to come to Lisbon,” she said.

  She put the phone down on the table.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

  She called back only once. And late. She didn’t say where she was, except that I was not to come back to Formentina.

  She was the victim. She was with the villain, Mello said so. So she could not be saying what she meant. She was saying I ought to come back to Formentina. She must be there. She was in peril, a gun up against her, eyes desperate for the sight of a hero.

  If Maria was in Formentina, she must be with Hart. If she was with Hart, she must be in danger.

  I finished dressing, threw my dirty clothes in a bag, forgot about the shaving gear in the bathroom, and ran down the wide building stairs. The street was a fluorescent blank: the blues and oranges of artificial light and linden shade and full moon. I ran for my car and found myself wondering what
a cop would think if he saw me: a man running for no reason, therefore running away.

  I missed a turn between low concrete factories, tried again along avenues of wasted oleanders. I got down almost to the river, to the warehouse blocks with their old graffiti and the rust-red freighters whose masts grew convincing after dark, before I picked up the signs for the highway north.

  I’d driven this road before, straight off the plane from London, going to find my father and bury him, to bring back what Hart had stolen. I was as various as anyone then: a mess of memories, mistakes, decisions made and avoided, feelings buried, indulged, and simply forgotten for the time being, a husband, an official of a great institution, a predictable statistic tied to my credit rating, my parking space, my medical record, my morning route to the Museum, my dietetic tendencies. On the road this night I was—I thought the word was distilled. All the detail had been subsumed in one great, purposeful fire.

  I almost knew (a long train of a truck passed me going fast) in my heart (I noticed bright bar lights in a small town, saying Sousa’s Bar, in English) that this was (the road ran in a tunnel of trees) madness. But diagnosis mattered so much less than the chance to act at last.

  After an hour I was still rolling, but the certainties had begun to fade. I’d been used to making cases, adjusting to the office, not always telling Anna what I meant exactly, tacking my way through; now I was trying something simple, to be a hero.

  It was tough to hold on to a great moral cause while the road slipped under me, a banal carpet. Besides, sleep was tugging me down. I blinked, and the blink seemed to last a minute, like a blackout. I shifted in my seat, made myself concentrate again. I could sleep my way off the road very easily.

  I was a ghost now, without all the details that anchor a man in a particular life, no wife, no father I’d acknowledge, going after a man who had thrown away all those details. I was rushing through a landscape proper for such a war of ghosts: visions and spinning suns, guardian knights, hidden treasure, hidden princesses. I didn’t know the particulars, only the postcard, guidebook notions, so I could flood this countryside with any story I ever knew, with a thief of lives, an ogre and a knight, killer and cop, all avatars of an old business that grew more literal as the story aged.