by Michael Pye
I suppose she wanted a hero to replace the fugitive she had lost.
“—Arturo is well. He didn’t need an operation. It’s raining a lot, but that’s the season—”
I thought of a life between green mountains, in cropped forests, under skies with eagles, on ground that smelled of mint and anise from the leaves you crush while walking.
“—the grape leaves are still on the vines. They’re so red, they look like stained glass with the light behind them—”
Today, I crossed the road to conservation to watch them working on the Liber Principis. They have such ingenious expedients to meld the paper fibers along the cuts. They make sure the pictures again lie in the arbitrary order we knew and cataloged, the order that survived centuries.
“We can’t make it perfect again,” my assistant, Carter, said. “It’s not possible. The pictures were not at all well kept.”
“It wasn’t ever perfect,” I said.
He looked shocked.
“It’ll do,” I said. “It’s what we have, and it’ll have to do.”
Then I came back to this borrowed apartment and lay down to sleep.
I dream too much nowadays. Sometimes, there are mountains, Maria, even Anna’s face, a memory of castles and wine.
Martin is always there, also: the child who was scared in the warm and in the light, in the smell of baking and in his mother’s arms. I try to stay awake not to dream those dreams, which do not ever seem to end.
Michael Pye
Taking Lives
Novelist, historian, journalist, and broadcaster Michael Pye is the author of ten other books, including The Pieces from Berlin, The Drowning Room, and Maximum City: The Biography of New York. He is currently raising from the dead the criminal king of the nineteenth century, for a novel.
ALSO BY MICHAEL PYE
The Pieces from Berlin
The Drowning Room
Maximum City:
The Biography of New York
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2004
Copyright © 1999 by Michael Pye
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Pye, Michael, 1946–
Taking lives / Michael Pye. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Serial murderers—Fiction.
2. Imposters and imposture—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6066.Y4 T35 1999
823’.914—dc21
98-28256
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42804-2
v3.0