by Michael Pye
Then there was Boaventura and me. We had a few beers, some schnapps, and we were warm enough to brazen through the cold city.
The lights were low along the canals, meant to look like the light from torches a few centuries ago and warm the off-center gables and the bare trees. In this near-dark people passed, a few on bicycles even in the wet, a few heads down under the steady rain.
“You know about art?” Boaventura said.
I said, “A bit.”
“You know about Vermeer?”
If I were Arkenhout, I thought, Boaventura could slip on the cobbles, go over the side of the canal. Hearts stop in cold water, I remembered; the shock, and then the debilitating cold. But bodies float, and tell their own story; and besides, this body was no use to me unless I had his papers first.
“I saw some Vermeers. I liked them. I want to go to Delft,” Boaventura said.
If I were Arkenhout, each recess in the light would matter. There were gangplanks to the long wooden boats moored on the canalside, boats with wide windows and chimneys and potted plants. There were sometimes steps down to the water level, by a hotel, by a landing stage for pedal boats, by a marble monument.
I picked up Boaventura’s jacket in a bar, but he noticed what I had done. I said it was a mistake. He had a brochure about Delft in one pocket, with a picture of a church huddling behind this monumental shout of a tower and spire.
In my hotel room, I put all the images from the Liber Principis into the plastic case. There was a slight rust along the edge of the portrait of the elder, damp from the open window, perhaps, or the shower-in-a-box that stood at the foot of my bed. Either way, the paper had begun to soften.
I had one last duty attached to my old name: to return the pictures to London. I couldn’t pack them perfectly, but I wrapped each one in plastic and put card between them, and then assembled them in the plastic case and wrapped that. I put in a postcard of a van Gogh— poppies and yellow butterflies—and signed it “Christopher Hart.”
I checked out of the hotel the next morning. The management, two short men, didn’t mind; they had cash in advance, and they did not even think of returning it.
I wanted to go away. I was too tired to want to go far, but I wanted absolute distance between me and my life. I got only to the end of the street, where the tramlines cut across the stately, shabby file of apartment buildings.
Boaventura was standing there. He said he was looking for my hotel. He said he wanted to go to Delft.
I had tried to escape him. I couldn’t. I took that as an omen.
He did know about Vermeer, a bit. He had the idea of me as the senhor doutor, the learned man, who’d make sense out of all the culture that always seemed at arm’s length from him.
I left my flight bag at Central Station. I was traveling now with nothing to mark me or name me: a mirror man, reflecting only what people bring to him.
Boaventura expected lessons, explanations, news from Portugal that he could pretend was news from home. Sleet stung the windows, and he said, brightly, “It snowed one winter in my village. I remember. It was eleven in the morning, and everyone went outside to see.”
The skies at Delft were saturated grays and blacks, like washes of watercolor that are still wet. We had a beer and a piece of apple pie in the first bar before we went walking.
We found the site of the View of Delft, of course. We wandered through the Prince’s House. We had some lunch: Boaventura, by mistake, had a piece of chicken deep-fried in cornflakes. He looked startled.
Behind each range of pretty houses, each neat cut of canal, there was always the same bleak presence: that spire on a great blocky tower, a rise of cleaned gray stone, then a clock, and then another spiked Gothic steeple stepping up to a final cross. It was a corporate tower before its time, a monstrous boast on the genteel streets, aspiring to be the personal staircase between God and the best gentlemen of Delft. It haunted the corner of my eye whichever way we turned.
The pull of warm places was strong, especially places far away from windows.
Boaventura, though, liked shopping streets. He liked the windows of marzipan stew, chocolate pigs; of taps for a bathroom, cheap Bordeaux, computer monitors; a bookshop; clothes stores with beige mannequins under browns and greens; and televisions.
I saw my face on one of the televisions, held for twenty seconds, gone.
I stopped short, of course. Boaventura mustn’t see that. But I needed to know what they’d said, what the flash of my own face meant.
There was a newscaster, with that intense look that comes from speaking words she didn’t think or write.
A map of Bosnia.
I didn’t know how long the midday news might run, or whether stories were repeated, or whether we’d seen only the headlines and later they’d come back to the subject of the man whose face they had showed: a killer on the run, presumably.
A forest fire. I couldn’t tell where. A fireball bursting through trees.
I wouldn’t have understood the language, even if I could have heard it through the plate glass.
I felt panic, muddled with a kind of gratitude: after all these anonymous days and weeks, running nowhere in particular, I was known and wanted again.
The acknowledgment came a little too late.
“I’m in your hands,” Boaventura said.
The square opened quite suddenly: a parade ground of wet, slick cobbles, a town hall stuck with shutters like an advent calendar, the great dark tower and spire rising much too high on the far side.
Boaventura said, “It’s going to snow.”
“You want a beer? There are plenty of bars.”
“No,” he said. He looked disappointed in me.
I was almost afraid to enter the church. Its bulk spoke of a tradition that is not mine: a kind of personal, contractual claim on God like merchants have on one another, and a threat to the town in God’s name.
“You’ve seen all this before,” Boaventura said. “I haven’t. I want to see things.”
“We could go—”
But he had already gone in through the high front porch of the church. He negotiated in a kind of history boutique, all souvenirs and glass cases, for tickets to the tower and the spire. He handed me mine. He brushed through the turnstile that counts the visitors in and out.
I said, “But the weather—”
“It’s the wind you have to worry about,” the woman behind the counter said brightly. “It isn’t really windy today.”
I did not want to enter the narrow chimney that held tight wooden stairs, or to start the climb round and dizzyingly round between stone walls. Ahead and behind was never more than the sight of a few wood steps, an occasional slit of light from a dusty window, the walls always turning and turning.
The fact of climbing was real enough in my muscles, but there was no way to test how far we had gone, how high we now stood above the shine of wet cobbles on the square.
Once, I almost collided with Boaventura, who’d stopped to make sure I was all right. “It’s a long way,” he said.
I could hear only his footsteps. I imagined nobody else would climb the tower on such a threatening day. I began to feel dizzy with the constant repetition of steps, turns, steps.
I heard Boaventura slip and curse. I caught up with him on a tiny landing, by a window that showed almost no light.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“We could go down.”
He looked contemptuous.
I went ahead this time, working upward, sometimes checking my dizziness by holding the rough rope strung between iron circles on the wall.
I was an item on the news. I had to take the consequences, or I had to be someone else.
The stairs opened suddenly into a vast room full of church air, that odd mix of quiet, dusty light and reflections off metal. The room was full of bells: behemoth bells hanging high.
Boaventura saw doors to ledges around the tower, and he bounded over to see the view at last. He
also noticed that we could take the stairs still higher.
I was separate now from the world below, separated by dizziness, by muscular effort, by the sense that I had finally thrown off everything certain: my names, my possessions, my freedom if the police now identified me and arrested me. I looked down on everything.
All I had left, as we climbed on, was the shaft of the stairs as they turned ahead of me, and the fact that I was with Boaventura: a man who could be mistaken for me, who could be me, who could so easily slip again.
We came out at the highest point of the tower, onto narrow terraces fenced in with intricate stone. I saw the stone was softening, its details corroding in the air. I saw dark clouds out across the port at Rotterdam. I couldn’t quite make out whether we were above them or not before the sleet started.
Boaventura stood into the wind, braced like a man on a ship’s deck.
I tried to look over the stone and down to the shine of the square, the rank of official buildings, the angle of canal to one side. Anyone could slip. Nobody could survive the fall.
The sleet began to close down the world, take away the town below. Whatever happened, whatever I did, the world could only open up from now on—the sleet thinning, then becoming rain, visibility growing back a few hundred meters, then the rain stopping, the lights shining doubled from the wet stones below; and then, if I moved, other cities, other chances.
Boaventura said, “I thought we could see the sea from here.”
The world had shrunk to this tiny space inside a storm, a protected and comfortable place to make a choice.
I spent almost too long on thinking this.
Boaventura shivered, and he started again down the stairs.
I followed, keeping a turn behind him so I could not see him. I didn’t want to see him. Arkenhout had been such a different matter: a man who was nothing more than a murderer, one single dangerous word, whose names were uncertain and changeable like devils in a book. This man had wonder, panic, too much drink, the pain of separation from a dead wife and a distant family and a place whose very simplicity turned glamorous in memory. He was almost too particular to reduce to a corpse.
I missed my footing, slipped on the shine of worn wood.
Without my fixed place on the stairs, I thought I could fall forever inside this stone chimney, falling and bouncing against the great blocks in the walls.
I cannoned into Boaventura. I heard him let out breath like a fart. I grabbed for the rope rail, and as I stopped my own downward course, I realized that he was now the one falling and falling, arm bruised and torn against stone; and then he was out of my sight, a sequence of shouts and bumps and then silence.
I couldn’t imagine how he could stop falling.
I held on to the rope. Below me was such distance that I felt dizzy again; I needed to anchor myself. If I could have, I would have stopped there forever: a man suspended.
But I had to go down, and Boaventura was bound to be between me and the way out of the tower.
I found him lying across the stairwell just before the bell chamber. I heard the chiming of two o’clock in the afternoon, then the harmonics of the chimes persisting in the dusty air, then the sound of sleet cutting on glass.
He wasn’t dead.
I had slipped. I do not think I meant to kill him.
But here was a man with papers that connected him to innocence, to irresponsibility in a way, to another possibility of life. I could take those papers in a moment, and leave mine. Two foreigners in a tourist spot are easily confused.
I did not want Boaventura to live.
The presence of bells alarmed me: huge, judgmental engines on their high trestles.
So high above the ground, the windows showed only wild sky and not roofs, streets, and other human lives. I felt for a moment free to make whatever decision I wanted. I was in the spirit of that grim, tall tower: its defiant sense of moral superiority.
I went to the windows to look down. I saw only the weather skirling about me, so loud I was certain I could not be heard when I started to shout: “What do you want me to do? What do you want, then?” I had no idea who I was addressing: God, or my father or Boaventura or even Arkenhout.
The shouts set off a faint, shivering song among the bells.
It was then that I realized if I were truly free in this high place, then I was free to do the right and moral thing, not obliged at all to lift papers and switch them and abandon a man: myself.
I knew I could not give away the crime of killing Arkenhout. It stands as a debt I somehow have to pay.
I was speechless in the glassy, prissy shop down below, just pointing past the turnstiles, up the stairs. The woman had to guess what must have happened.
They brought Boaventura down on a stretcher. He was concussed, which he said felt like the night he lost his wife, and his arm was torn; his leg, too, had snapped across the shin. He wouldn’t work for a while, since his muscles and their perfect coordination were what he had to work with, but he would live.
Me, they put into a police car. Nobody said anything. In the local police station there was a flurry of phone calls, but of course they were in Dutch. Then I was put into the back of another police car, and driven out of Delft. I watched the tower of the church go back into the storm.
From the road signs, I knew we were going back to Amsterdam. I did not know what would happen to me next: whether I would be charged with Arkenhout’s murder, whether Boaventura’s accident would make me a double suspect. I was almost sure it was an accident.
But in the next police station, the same one on Warmoesstraat where Mrs. Arkenhout had begun to unravel her son’s history, the cops smiled too much and gave me hot, sweet tea. I suppose my Englishness seemed suddenly obvious.
“We’ve been looking for you,” Inspector Van Deursen said.
“I saw the television. I just saw the pictures. I didn’t hear the words. I wouldn’t have understood the words—”
Interrogated prisoners gabble this way.
“The Arkenhouts told us about your visit. So we had to assume the body was misidentified in Portugal.”
I said nothing, since he was right.
“So you know how Arkenhout died?”
I was being invited to confess murder, with a thick white mug of tea in my hands and an amiable policeman across the table not even scowling or shouting. All the pressure to speak came from a bundle of pressured nerves in my chest.
“You want to tell me about it?”
I tried to drink the tea but it was too hot.
“You can tell me,” he said.
He must have known everything already. There was no ambiguity in the record, except for the question of names and identities. The other facts were nicely cataloged for display: assault, fire, the explosions, the severed head and the poured gasoline, which did not fit a simple plea of self-defense; the flight, the theft of money from a dead man’s already plundered credit; the visit to the dead man’s family.
But I told it all, anyway. I wanted him to propose my penance.
He said, “You know, you’re a kind of hero.”
“What happened to Boaventura?” I said. “They took him away. Is he all right?”
“The guy in the tower, your friend? He’s fine.”
“You don’t want to know what happened there?”
He smiled. “I told you. You’re a hero.”
I stood up. “Don’t make fun of me,” I said.
“Sit down,” he said. “Sit down. We couldn’t have stopped Arkenhout, not yet. The evidence was all circumstantial, no witnesses, a dozen countries. We couldn’t make the case. Now he’s gone, and the file closes and we have you to thank—”
“But I stole the money,” I said.
He smiled. “You were in shock,” he said. “A good man who had to do a terrible thing, so naturally you were in shock. Nobody will condemn you.”
“I set fire to him,” I said.
He said nothing.
“You don’
t know the half of it—”
He said, “You just weren’t yourself.”
The Museum in winter has a shuttered look, the great stone portico closed up against the rain. The guards open the gates ceremoniously, but it is a ceremony without an audience; people come a little late to be sure they can go straight in.
I went back, of course.
I opened the letter from Anna’s lawyers, who seemed outraged at my bad manners in coming back from the dead. I found lawyers to answer it.
I walked again into the maze of corridors, grateful for the order underlying the apparent jumble of scarred columns, stones in pieces, bits of bone. The Museum offered me a kind of sanitary leave, embarrassed to have me back, knowing it was impossible to fire the new hero for drawing attention to himself.
“You did go to extraordinary lengths for the Museum,” the deputy director said dryly. “Rather too extraordinary for our dull Anglo-Saxon minds.”
Just once, Maria called me. She found me at work.
“I’m calling,” she said, “as your lawyer. In a way. I want to know what to do about your father’s house.”
I said, “I hadn’t thought.”
“There are other houses,” she said. “There’s one up by Granja, with seven terraces of olives, and a stream. And bougainvillea. It’s a stone house, white walls.”
“I suppose,” I said, “I must leave things as they are.”
But I could hear the warmth in her talk. If she’d been there, she would have brushed against my arm, smiled too much.
“You should have told me what happened,” she said. “I want to know.”
“It’s not something I can discuss here,” I said, retreating into my official and affectless persona.
“I almost came to Amsterdam, you know. The police said it might help them if I was there. Christopher might talk more.”
“You want to talk about Christopher?”
“You knew him. I knew him. I thought that gave us something in common. One thing in common, to start with.”
A possibility opened, a kind of prophecy, really: that I would redeem my murder by doing what Martin Arkenhout had planned and so nearly achieved, by going back to my father’s Portugal, to the place I knew, to the woman I had wanted so fiercely only a few weeks before, and to my own name with its new meaning. Then I could live my life better than before, and still put away the burden of killing a man.