Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  I washed my boots off in a puddle of still water, being as neat as I could.

  The lights under the river went very bright and died. I heard a nightbird call through the new dark.

  The car listed to the right with a comfortable creaking sound.

  At last, that was a process I could help. I pushed and the car began to shift in the air, from an upright monolith stinking of oil to a ruin at an angle. It stopped again. I felt the mud of the bank slipping under me. I jumped inland just in time as the car swung down and bit into the water, and then settled, threatened for a moment to float, sucked air down deep into the river as it settled under the water.

  I saw myself in the car, under the brown water, breath coming in a sigh of bubbles and then stopping dead. But I knew I would struggle and shout against dying. Even this doubtful, hollow self of mine had a quite horrifying will to go on.

  The rain started up again.

  I picked up a plastic shopping bag of food and water, and the flight bag I’d bought in Paris, a bag on wheels that I couldn’t drag through the puddles, and I started walking. I could smell oil on my skin, feel the mud caking wetly on my legs. I came to the railway line three miles on. I changed in the station lavatory, stuffed my wet, muddy clothes into the plastic bag, and walked out almost respectable, but with sodden hair.

  The first train was for Amsterdam Central.

  The carriage was empty except for a restless boy who kept rolling and rerolling a cigarette as though he wanted to make something perfect.

  When I traveled with Anna, a long time ago, two seats on a train became a warm and private room. I remembered this. I kept the boy in sight all the time.

  The next postcard was from Amsterdam. Maria called Mello at once.

  He seemed glad of the information, such as it was.

  She said to Mello, “I’m sorry José Costa’s son had to die.”

  Mello said, “Any death is terrible.”

  “But of all the men—”

  “I forgave the father,” Mello said. “How could I want to harm the son?”

  Maria waited him out.

  “I said, how can you think I would have wanted to harm the son? I tried to keep him in Lisbon. Of course I did. I’m grateful for your information. Please inform us if you receive any other communications.”

  Mello’s men took the card away with ceremony, as though it might contain the whole story encoded somewhere in the picture of gabled houses, the stamps with the Queen’s head, the usual message: “Wish you were here.”

  They left Maria furious with Hart. He must think she could see a body blown apart and take it as just another story like all the others, a sensation to share down a phone line at night. Or else he was teasing her: the clichés on the cards, picture and message, suggested a tease. She wished the police had left the postcard behind, so she could hold it, stare at it, try to sense with her fingertips what he meant and what he was doing: wandering, without a life after taking so many lives of his own, looking for his next name.

  The phone rang in her office. She thought of letting the machine answer; she didn’t want another boundary dispute, another minor criminal escapade or urgent rewriting of a will until she had closed the matter of Christopher Hart. Anna Costa, at least, had something to bury.

  It was a collect call. She could hear the operator’s voice through the machine: speaking English, but overprecise, maybe Dutch. She picked up the phone, but the line had already gone dead.

  She knew it was Hart. She couldn’t say precisely why, whether she was truly sure, or whether she was just eager for the comfort of finishing the story. But she stayed in the office for a while, waiting.

  There were no more calls that day.

  I put down the phone. It wasn’t sensible to call. It wasn’t possible to avoid it. Maria was my only connection to my own whole story, the one who knew what nobody else must or could know. I thought I needed her.

  I had a headache from all the empty time I now owned. The hotel corridor, pale walls, shining linoleum, the green-white of cheap fluorescent light, didn’t help; but I could hardly choose. This hotel did not seem unduly interested in passports or papers. It was cheap. The management, briskly, took a cash deposit for a week.

  I counted out the money I’d drawn driving north. I walked over to Dam Square, a wide-open shine of black cobbles in the rain, to find the automatic change machine. I fed it pesetas, French francs, Belgian francs; it handed back guilders. I felt organized for a while.

  I slept with the money beside my pillow, shifting throughout the night to check it was still there, like a boy with a treasure or a man in the wilds.

  I couldn’t talk to anybody. I couldn’t talk to nobody. The subject I had to discuss was responsibility for a death, and it had to stay private; but without chat, bluster, jokes, it always threatened to burst out like some madman’s curbside sermon.

  I needed dinner, anyway. I found a Portuguese restaurant, took the table next to a man who was working construction in Brussels, no family, up for the weekend to riot and drink beer. Then, overcome with saudade , which is to nostalgia as a whirlwind is to a breeze, he’d come to this restaurant for something familiar from home: pork and clams, maybe, the authentic cracked egg of pudim Molotov and some red wine from Bairrada. He had a list in his mind of how to conjure his home on a table: pig, sugar, rice, potatoes, wine.

  “You know Portugal?” he said, the second time.

  “I was in Vila Nova de Formentina this summer.”

  “Everything’s good there?”

  “Everything’s good. You got family there?”

  He shook his head. Then he said, “I’m from the Minho. I had a wife, but she died. I haven’t been back to see my parents in two years, not since we buried her.”

  “It’s all work,” I said. “You want a drink?”

  After a quiet moment, I said, “Everything’s new around Vila Nova. New buildings. New houses. They’re building a new swimming pool.”

  “Indoors?”

  Another beer.

  “Work’s easy in Brussels?”

  “There’s work. And you come in legally now. It’s good to be in Europe.”

  “There must be other Portuguese—”

  “They have families. I don’t. They stick to themselves mostly.” He wanted to change the subject, obviously. He wanted to claim a bright, good life for himself. So “What’s money?” he said, and ordered a serious bottle of Colares red, which he poured with a flourish. “I once drank the wine at Bussaco,” he said. “In the palace. In the gardens. It was a white wine, very old. Tasted of varnish. But good varnish.”

  He was dark like me. Our builds weren’t very different, except he had used his body hard, so its mass was entirely solid, like good rope.

  I saw he was paying cash. I wondered if he even had credit cards, bank cards.

  “I need a walk,” he said. “I need somewhere with girls.”

  “There are girls in the windows.”

  “I need someone to talk to. I can fuck anytime.”

  We strode along the canals, although we had nowhere particular to go, just the hope of a low, warm bar with company.

  He said his name was Boaventura.

  “Good name,” I said, weighing it in my mind.

  Maria went back to Formentina, just to check on things. The morning had been cold and wet, but the sun had broken through and the lanes had begun to smell of grapes—musky, sweet grapes—and the quite separate smell of the new wine rising.

  The oil press, she could see, was now a low ruin. The scorch marks shone black. Water must be getting into the rubble walls. She was glad it couldn’t stand much longer.

  She climbed the side track, alongside the ashy edge of the forest, to what had once been Christopher Hart’s house.

  She needed to organize a new door because policework had left the old one only parked in place. She thought: He paid all the rent in advance, so there’s no urgency in letting the place again.

  She pushed th
e door open carefully and propped it against the wall.

  The house was dark and stale, which is what she expected; she had closed all the shutters and windows herself. Even the brilliant light from the door made only a tentative square on the floor.

  In this darkness, she kept just missing things from the corner of her eye. She thought events must somehow have imprinted themselves on the dust and the dead air. If she wasn’t careful, she’d start catching hints and signs in the corners.

  She put on the lights, to be reasonable.

  The kitchen and the living room both were empty now and unmarked by anything that had happened: it was a house for rent again, just enough chairs and spoons for the summer. She checked some of the drawers in case she had missed something: a book, a brush, something small.

  She looked into the bathroom. The rack held a little survey of sunscreens, in white bottles, orange tubes. They seemed useful, so she’d left them.

  She stood at the door of the bedroom. It was framed in surprising light.

  He was there, she thought, in the next room, always in the next room. She kept opening doors to find him.

  She pushed open the bedroom door.

  A man stood in the middle of the bright room. Against the sun from the open windows, she thought at first she was seeing Hart: tall, head down, hands laced together. She imagined how he would be when he turned to her.

  But when he turned, she knew he was wrong. Hart had never carried a sack of a stomach. The hands, too, were wrong: the fingers did not taper as she remembered.

  It took her a moment to accept that she was facing Mello.

  “Why are you here?” she said.

  Mello was not used to being challenged. Besides, it was as though she had interrupted him in prayer or meditation, and he had to remind himself to answer her.

  “I’m sorry if I alarmed you,” he said.

  “There’s no police car down below.”

  “I walked here from Vila Nova.”

  “Why would you walk? You never walk.” She knew his grand and impressive transits into other people’s lives, his official progress through the town.

  “I wanted to be here for a moment,” he said. “On my own.”

  “I have to inspect the house,” she said. “We’ll need to rent it again—”

  “I needed to be on my own.”

  Maria said, “I have things to attend to.”

  “Please,” Mello said. She thought of him as a presence in uniform, with very still eyes; it was startling to see his face properly for the first time, all animated with lines and feeling. “I wanted to think.”

  Maria went to close the shutters.

  “You’ll have to leave,” she said.

  She wondered if he had walked here as some kind of pilgrimage.

  “You know I killed them both,” Mello said.

  Maria, disconcerted, said, “Both of them?”

  “John Costa. And his father.”

  “But how could you kill his father?”

  “The PIDE beat me. They used water and sound on me. I’ve had a ringing in my left ear ever since. It never stops. Then they decided I was too young to know anything, so they talked about crippling my legs so I couldn’t get into more trouble, and they could catch me if I did.”

  Maria said, “I don’t want to hear all this.”

  “José Costa didn’t want to hear, either, at first. But I went to talk to him the day he died.”

  “He died of a heart attack. He wasn’t a healthy man.”

  “He was healthy. He was stronger than I am, and healthier.”

  The brilliance of the sun, the white of the walls, isolated Mello in an interrogator’s light.

  “That morning, I thought everything was resolved. After all these years,” he said. “I was glad he came back, glad I could settle things. That afternoon, when I heard he had died, it was as though I was suddenly to blame, as though I had to take back the burden of my own damned suffering. And then John Costa comes, and John Costa dies and—”

  Maria saw the man’s officialdom and authority broken down into tears. She was frightened. She knew he would have to reassert himself, deny everything he was saying, in order to go back to being the policeman who expects compliance. He would assert himself against her later, she was sure.

  He said, “I thought I was such a good man that I could forgive José Costa. I suppose I wasn’t. I suppose John Costa’s death proves that.”

  Maria watched him make his back rigid again, and his face stern, and his eyes dry.

  She said, “If Hart had never come here—”

  “Some things would be just the same,” Mello said.

  At the door to the house, she asked him, “Will you ever find the people who vandalized the grave?”

  “No,” Mello said.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Everyone knew the story. It could be anyone.”

  She realized what he meant: that it was a civic duty to enforce the memory of even little treasons. He had put on authority again, and he would not be questioned.

  I thought I should use Hart’s bank card while it lasted.

  I looked for a bank machine, stepped up, fed the card to the wall, opted for the English language and three hundred guilders—a nice, average transaction, the most the bank wanted to hand out.

  The transaction is being processed. There was a sunflower on the screen.

  A few people milled behind me, waiting in the rain.

  The transaction is being processed. The sunflower stayed.

  An English tourist started bobbing from one side of me to the other, as though I was willfully taking my time, and other people’s. I couldn’t be bothered to explain.

  The transaction is being processed.

  The transaction cannot be processed. The sunflower did not change.

  The card came back.

  Christopher Hart was dead.

  I slipped the card into my shirt pocket and closed my jacket against the wind. I thought I could try John Costa’s card, but the little line of people was radiating impatience. Besides, John Costa must have lost his credit by then; Anna is a practical woman.

  I walked briskly. I felt a boy’s shame at being noticed or conspicuous. Then I was all mind, working on the possibilities. I didn’t feel the cold for a while.

  Maybe the machine in Dam Square was just a bad moment in the wired world. But if anyone wanted to know where to find me, I’d just told them: a walk away from Dam Square, with no extra money for a cab.

  That night I dreamed I was a schoolboy out running, cold and wet and breathless, pounding along mud tracks and suburban streets in a convoy of misery. I couldn’t leave the course; I’d be seen. I couldn’t stop running because I was being timed.

  I woke up cold.

  I had lost all my possible names and lives, except one: Martin Arkenhout. I even thought, just as he had always thought, that I could do it better.

  Boaventura said his father had worked one time in London, but not for very long. He should have gone when he was twenty, but that was during the world war, so he had to wait. He came back when he couldn’t bear the separation from his real life anymore, and he was famous for buying a little car—a third-hand Renault—which he still drove too fast through the village, too slow on the big roads.

  It was very early in the evening to ease down into drink, but it was pleasant enough. Besides, I didn’t want to show Boaventura that I was jealous of a father who had come back to him.

  He would be my father, anyway, if I was Boaventura.

  The idea of killing was still quite abstract. I had no weapon, no plan, no notion of what to do with a body in the middle of the city, except perhaps that it could be weighted down and dumped into a canal. I could see only the need to be someone else, and the possibility of being one thing at last, which is Portuguese, and not a half-dozen mixes of class, nation, attitudes. I would put away the complications and become whole.

  But to get there, I had to stab, sh
oot, bludgeon, drown, or throttle this particular man, had to edge myself out of jealousy and into a clear sense of superiority: Arkenhout’s perpetual state of being the northerner in Europe, and sure he was somehow better, more advanced, more rational than anyone else.

  “Those women,” Boaventura said. “They’re smiling.” He called over the waitress and had her take a couple of beers to the two blondes, around forty, faces like good bread, who were sitting together at another green baize table across the bar.

  The women did smile. One of them beckoned us over.

  You can’t agonize so much under a blanket of beer, thighs brushing up against you so casually, time passing without it mattering, a plate of mussels with sauces and bread to mop up the drink and the talk about families, homes, intimacies so casually brought to strangers like children bring each other their favorite toys.

  Nobody went home with anyone else, either, except that the two women caught the Metro to the south and we saw them off. They kissed us, big kisses full of beery warmth.

  Boaventura wandered off, happily. He said we should go drinking the next night, too. See how our luck holds. See what comes up.

  I kept walking. I walked half the next day, despite the wet and the cold. I walked the long, blank avenues leading out of the city, with their parade of warm windowscapes: parlors, cats, libraries, kitchens so white and clean they looked like a lesson in morals. Then I doubled back into the old city, dodged into alleys between leaning buildings, past the pimps trying to keep casual on the street corners. I stopped every so often for a beer or a coffee, just to be sure I could still get warm again.

  I do not remember thinking about murder, or Boaventura. I felt myself as clean and empty as paper taking impressions.

  I came up against all the Gothic spires of the Rijksmuseum, on the other side of a cold, black canal. I saw it as a refuge, and not just because everything inside was subtly ordered, period by period, case by case. All my life, I could always lose myself in paint and forms and signs, even in the jostle of a public gallery. I knew where my history must be: in books and pictures.

  I paid and entered. I walked the steps, and I turned into the print room: cases full of engravings, all country scenes and hayricks and tavern drunks, so I imagined. I couldn’t see them for the lights shining in the glass; at least I thought the problem was the lights.