by Michael Pye
There was paper on the table, and a pen.
I drew a tree. It started simply, two pairs of branches, a solid trunk. I fussed with it, put branches to the branches, and then added twigs that crisscrossed: a bare tree. I began a geometric shape, a kind of rhomboid, and then put on each face another shape, until I had a mosaic of empty, awkward boxes.
I suppose I could have been a hero, there and then. I could have walked out of the house and declared myself the man who brought down a killer. But if I did that, I was shackled back in my old self, John Costa only: the same home and garden, marriage, hopes and prospects.
I broke the shell. I was thinking of Maria when I picked up the pen and I began to write purposefully: to draw a signature, then to practice and practice the signature of Christopher Hart.
The dawn started over the mountain: only a wash of pale white, clouds touched up a little, a rooster shouting early, dogs shouting back, people already regretting their beds.
Nobody had slept very well. Fire was on everybody’s mind.
Maria still sat by the chapel. She says she knew she could not budge either one of us from our private war and she preferred to wait, and deal with the consequences.
The dawn made a muddle of shadows up and down the hill. The first thing she saw was not a man moving, because anyone could move at will and stay invisible in the dappled light, but fire: orange flames that licked up suddenly in a straight line, then ran like a fuse around the corners of a building to the side of the village. She’d been looking at Hart’s house, but this was lower and closer. The fire sent up dervishes of hot grass.
The building must be the old oil press, she thought: a stone square full of old wood and iron. There might be oil still lying there. The shadows played shapes on the wall, ghosts faded by the rising sun.
Then the building lifted, or else the shock rocked her to her feet. Flame came from inside: no smoke, just clean orange fire. For a moment, she couldn’t think what blew with such drama, but every house had propane gas for cooking and heating water, and a single tank might throw out that force. A minute later, a second tank blew, and then a third.
Someone must have put space heaters in the oil press. She liked an explanation, any explanation.
The sound of the explosions ricocheted between the folds of the mountain and only when it died away softly did she hear the crisp, distinct sound of flames.
The village opened at once: courtyards with gates swinging, doors wide, shutters back and windows open in the same grand morning gesture that usually welcomes clean air. But the fire at the oil press was dirty and chemical—the gasoline she remembered smelling, the propane tanks she knew must be there—and the sound and stink of it were unfamiliar, even there where fire visits every summer.
She ran up the slate steps, people joining her from each side, a riot of worry. The houses were so close there was no chance of making a firebreak; they had to fight the fire directly. Some of the men disappeared into the woods to open each farmer’s reservoir, and run the water in fat rubber hoses to wet the press down. Women came out with buckets and set them down by the public fountain, ready to start a chain of water up the hill. Some brought brooms, still hoping the fire was a natural one that would keep its distance.
The village didn’t have time for words. It was all muscle, bringing down the heavy snakes of hoses, dragging up water from the fountain. The smoke fretted inside lungs, made eyes bleed red tears. The slow rise of the dawn had made the shadows on the mountain faintly pink, like an echo of fire.
Maria felt the weight of the buckets wrench her shoulders. She’d seen so much evidence go up in flames each day: petty evidence, garbage in woods, grass flattened by lovers, skins where snakes passed, bottles and what was in them. Fire took it all. But now the fire was inside the walls. It threatened the contents of houses, the shapes of lives, the crops in the fields, and the woods themselves, which were crops, after all.
The village was impersonal as a machine. Some of the younger women, strong and round, beat the flames down around the oil press so at least the fire could not jump. Three men played water on the roof, to stop the tiles cracking and bouncing out of place, to soak the old eucalyptus beams below. But the heat inside caught at the old oiled wood and melted it down.
It seemed everyone was busy with the fire. Nobody stopped; stopping was not an option. And yet, in the shouting, Maria heard a car start down below.
Later, when the fire was down and a small, sooty crowd stood around outside the bar drinking wine and listening, she saw that Christopher Hart’s car had gone.
Fire found out everything natural inside the oil press and ruined it. The walls, of mud, stones, and clay, were blown out and baked; the water that fought the fire had soaked them and they fell down to rubble. Inside, the different levels were still clear on the hillside, and there were huge bent metal cogs, but everything else was a kind of archaeological trace. There was a steel band running round the top of the walls, the kind used to hold houses together; it must have concentrated the explosion.
She got into the building while the stones were still hot and spars of wood or metal sagged overhead. She picked her way over timbers whose resin had boiled away in blisters. She dodged the remains of circular machines and stones. She wanted to be the first one, even pretended to be quasi-official, because she did not want the children to see what she had to see.
Gears had fused; they looked like eels in a bag. The floorboards were burned and ashy. Scorch marks flared up and down the walls.
He could be under timbers, or under the stones themselves, or the fallen metal details of the two presses. Perhaps the explosion had been enough to blow him apart. She stopped in her tracks, appalled at the thought, but only for a moment. She had to know.
She found him in the lower of the oil reservoirs, curled in a circle and crushed. The body was so blackened that, for a moment, she failed to see that it stopped at a garotte, the wire like a stopper on the body. The head was somewhere else.
She wanted to throw up. But without the head, she wouldn’t know which one of them had survived; she knew now how little was proved by cards and papers.
She kicked about in the ash. She looked at the base of the great screw for the larger oil press. She looked up, and falling soot cut at her eyes.
She found a skull, broken, with coy veils of flesh and no eyes. It lay by one of the propane tanks. She made herself look carefully. She’d seen something almost as bad in Mello’s office: the face of Christopher Hart. But this thing was terrible because it had not yet been put away in the secure category of evidence. It was suggestive, like a guessing game.
She turned away and the wind went out of her belly all at once, and she crumpled and propped herself on a hot, wrecked mass of gears and pulled her hand away burned.
This skull belonged to a man she knew: the man who made love to her and told her stories, or else the man who came chasing to save her, the one she tried to save from dying quite so soon.
She could not tell.
Eight
The first night, John Costa stayed in a small hotel on the road out of Oporto: short, square bed, red silk flowers, and a bathroom stinking of new paint. It took me ten minutes in a cafe to decide what name I’d use to take the room.
I still had this sense of continuity, maybe honesty.
But the next morning I was Christopher Hart on the road across Spain. John Costa killed a man. I couldn’t be John Costa anymore.
I let the road carry me north, across a bare red plain, skies cracked with occasional storms, as if some old Victorian panorama were unfolding alongside the car: a wall of paint and make-believe, not hot land dowsed in sudden rain. The road placed me, told me the names of destinations, but also stopped me from ever quite reaching them; I was always on the outskirts, behind screens of fence and wood that were meant to keep my traces, sight and sound, from the living, settled people.
Three and a half days I rolled on like this. I did not stop unnecessarily. The nex
t time I risked a hotel to sleep and shower, I woke up angled like a driver in my bed.
I liked borders best when I had passed them. At least they put some necessary definitions in the continuous roll of the road: signs to prove that I had left Portugal for Spain, Spain for France, France for Belgium.
Then I worried that I hadn’t been cleared at the borders, so I might be checked and challenged anywhere on the road.
This fizz of nerves changed to anger. There was nobody, not even paid bureaucrats, to care who I was. The anger became fear. I broke off from my past entirely, a perfect escape, but I escaped into emptiness, carrying nothing. I particularly could not carry, didn’t have the shoulders or the back to carry, the fact of killing someone.
The weather soured around me. After Paris, I crossed the flatlands around Lille, the brick skirts of Brussels, tracking rail lines and power lines. The rain was persistent. It curtained off some gray towns, some cold neon ones, a few churches, and once a stretch of plant with high chimneys between a scaffolding of pipes.
I drew money as I went, bank machine after bank machine, a fat pocketful of colors: pesetas, French francs, Belgian francs. The cards might stop working any day and I had to be ready. The name Christopher Hart could wear out.
I risked another hotel.
Nobody ever checked the signature for the credit cards. For a while, only incongruity would give me away: a dead man traveling.
I wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror to look at myself. You fade as you age, gray about the muzzle, eyes softened, face less full of blood and life; and I was fading.
I kept wiping the steam away with my sleeve, but all I added to the picture was a reflection of white walls, the plastic shower curtain, the glimpse of a bed through the door.
Maria Mattoso saw the Oporto train coming from a distance: a great shiver of orange metal in the haze. People crowded the shade on the platforms, bags and cases and kids in piles, old ladies with fans, very young soldiers. Gentleman travelers with shirts still magically starched went picking their way between them all.
She finished her water and waited for the train to come to a perfect stop. She was here out of duty. She had no wish to rush things.
The train opened. The crowd milled at the doors, scrambling up, struggling down. Some families, from aunts to newborns, pushed past.
After them all came Anna Costa.
“I’m very grateful,” Anna said. She was dressed seriously, but not in black.
“I’m very sorry,” Maria said.
Anna stared. “At least I didn’t have to find him,” she said.
On the road, Anna seemed to relax a little, even to grin at olive trees overwhelmed by brilliant blue morning glory.
“The police would like you to make a formal identification, I’m afraid,” Maria said.
“Is that even possible?”
“It won’t be easy. After the fire, and the explosions—”
“Can I do it now?”
Maria said, “You’re sure you want to do that after traveling?”
The road crossed a long iron bridge. Below, on the shoals of a wide river, sheets were laid out to dry on the pebbles and children played in the shallows.
Anna said, “I wanted to come back, you know.” Then, since Maria said nothing, “It must be terrible for you, too.” And then, relentlessly, “You think they’ll find him?”
“I’m sure they will.”
“And how will you feel—”
Maria concentrated on the road as it climbed through a steep valley, one side pines full of summer dust, the other the black-spike remains of a burned wood.
She said, “Do you have anywhere to stay?”
“I hadn’t thought. There’s the house in Formentina.”
“Stay with me. There’s not much furniture, but it’ll be easier. You’ll need help with the police. Translating.” When Anna didn’t answer, she thought she should add: “I won’t charge you.”
She went with Anna to the morgue.
Anna noticed the cracks in the white wall tiles, the cold air stale as a cave, anything except the body. That, she saw from the corner of her eye. The flesh was burned and blistered away, bones broken up so it was hard to get the measure of the man on the slab, if it was one single man; and the skull was wrecked, more like a carved totem than one particular person. She didn’t bother to ask questions about teeth or measuring the bones.
The cops showed her a ring from close to the body. She identified it. So she said the body must be John Costa.
The cops’ shoulders relaxed. They still felt the blasphemy in cutting up the dead just to give them a name.
At dinner that night, Anna said to Maria, “He belongs here, doesn’t he? I want to bury him here.” Then she said, “This way it won’t be a failure, you see. John Costa and me. We never quite had the time to fail.”
Maria Mattoso poured wine.
She unlocked the office door. A postcard had been pushed under it; she almost slipped on a cliché picture of trees around some Metro sign in Paris with a boulevard falling back out of focus.
She picked it up and took it to the light. It was signed with a single letter, C, made with a big and almost theatrical movement of the pen; so it was Christopher Hart.
The message was in block capitals. “WISH YOU WERE HERE.”
I couldn’t believe I had disappeared properly. I thought there must be all kinds of official networks following me: police, banks, border guards. I cut off the grand roads and started toward the sea.
When I was a kid, I used to think that everything began and ended at the edge of the sea, that I could find a safe no-man’s-land with my heels in the surf. I thought if I just swam out between the waves and rested on the power of the sea I would be safe from anything that ever happened on the land.
But it isn’t that easy to find the sea now the Dutch have built their dams and defenses against it. I drove slowly through a bit of Zeeland, flat except for the defensive dikes that carry the roads, full of bare autumn orchards. The water, when I got there, began slipping away from the shore, leaving a farm of stakes for the mussels and oysters. Far out, the raw waters chopped at themselves.
I found a small town, with a shelter above the harbor, full of old-timers smelling of wet and smoke, all variously crouched and bent as if they were complaining. I couldn’t hear anything for the wind.
I didn’t want to go to a restaurant and be the conspicuous outsider. I looked through the glove compartments in case there was a biscuit, maybe chocolate. There was a Virgin Mary, of all things, a little blue ceramic with a perfectly satin pink face.
I soaked in self-pity. But you can’t pity a self that doesn’t properly exist. Q.E.D.
I started laughing.
Cities seemed to make sense, for safety’s sake. I secured myself in a stream of other traffic, sure of my direction, no idea of any destination. Perhaps Rotterdam would do. Perhaps Haarlem. Perhaps Amsterdam.
Then I knew I was exhausted.
I knew it when I had to jerk the wheel to keep out of the path of a huge black truck in the fast lane. I thought I heard a siren, but it was the truck’s horn fading on the wind. I couldn’t afford to be pulled in for some traffic offense, so I slowed as though the car were crippled and went off at the next exit.
I stopped almost at once on an avenue of poplar trees. I wound down the window of the car. The sound of the rain merged with the rustle of wet tires on the highway.
A heron sat at the edge of black water, gray and bearded, completely still.
It occurred to me, the first time because I was not always thinking straight, that the only reason all Christopher Hart’s cards still worked must be that they left an easy trail across Europe: statement by statement, buy by buy.
So I thought about selling the car. It was the one major asset left: muddy, but with a shine underneath, and a quite-new model. But selling meant turning over papers, meant opening the chance that someone would get to ask why Christopher Hart, who’d been m
urdered twice already, was doing business with some garage in a small Dutch town.
I wanted somewhere to stop and get warm and be noticed, even known, by someone else: to find some boundary of myself.
I woke up in full dark.
I turned on the lights and started the engine. The world could have seen the sudden burst of light and sound across the bare flatlands, in between the thin trunks of the poplars. I edged forward.
The trees kept cutting into the beam of the headlights, a flicker of silver bark. My foot slipped on the accelerator. As for my hands, they were a little late on the wheel. The car jerked forward off the road, veered over the wet grass, and hung at the edge of the water.
I heard the rain beating on the roof.
You fret like a child at moments like this. I kept worrying that I had no truly rainproof coat, that I’d get a cold and not be well enough for the rest of my life.
I tried to reverse, but the wheels had no traction on the slick grass, and the front wheels were catching on the muddy sides of the water. I heard the wheels spin, and the car jolted forward again.
I got out fast, collected what I could, pulled a leather jacket around me to keep my papers dry. The papers still seemed to matter. I remembered to pull the wad of banknotes out of my trouser pocket before they turned to papier-mâché.
The car slithered forward, paused, moved again, paused again, settling very slowly past the borders of the water, off the grass and mud and into the river. I didn’t know how deep the water might be.
I couldn’t save the car. So it had to drown before anyone turned off the road and tried to be helpful, and asked the same kind of questions that had ruined Arkenhout before me: careful questions in a logical line.
I pushed. My feet slithered on the grass. I pushed again. The car levered up in the dark, nose down. It stayed put, lights now below the water, metal belly flashing to the world. The river glowed from the lights, like quick and brown stained glass.
I should report this, I thought. Walking away is a crime. It’s curious how much more proper and exact you become when you have a killing to forget: a model citizen.