Taking Lives (27 page)

Hart and I stood each side of the gap in the grass, and looked down. There was a pause of dark air, no walls to be seen, and then a pool of water. I thought the pool had shores rather than edges.

‘One of the guides went down there once,’ Manoel said, brightly.

We peered into the dark. All Hart would make out was a cave with black water, but just for a moment I saw the castle as it was in my father’s stories: a place where heroes mount a strange, heroic defence of mysteries.

‘What did he see?’ I asked.

Manoel said, ‘He was on a rope, so he didn’t walk around down there.’

‘Yes?’

‘He said there seemed to be two doorways, either side of the pool. With stone across them.’

Hart coughed.

‘He said the stones looked almost like human figures. Like knights on guard.’

I saw them breathe in my mind’s eye.

Anna said, ‘We should get back.’

Hart thought he’d found a fault line at last, between the odd sense of obsession in me and the practicality of Anna. He didn’t have to be right. He only had to know that other people might have guessed the same thing, that it might not be surprising if John Costa went suddenly away on some quest of his own.

‘Well,’ Manoel said, startled by all the sudden feeling in his audience, ‘there could be passageways.’

Hart said, ‘It’s almost lunchtime,’ and stuffed a banknote into Manoel’s hand.

In the safe cloister beyond the ruins, Manoel was explaining to Anna this theory a friend of his had thought out, about water, air, fire, earth, spirit and where their signs might lie, about the inner meanings of the coral and the artichokes. Anna listened very kindly.

Outside the Charola, in light that made us tie up our eyes, Anna took a picture: pines, tiles, architecture and two men putting on the required smiles.

Afterwards she turned to me, cold and angry for a second. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

Arturo sat on the steps of his house, cutting green beans.

‘Women’s work,’ he said.

‘Everything all right?’ I asked.

‘More or less. Mais ou menos. Everything all right with you?’

‘My wife’s here.’

‘She’s Catholic?’

It was not a possible question for me, so I said nothing; and Arturo took my silence for a ‘yes’. ‘Then she can get the key to the chapel from Zulmira if she wants it. Zulmira always has it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Then I realized I’d stepped back involuntarily while we were talking. ‘I’ll tell her.’

I did, and Anna said, ‘Don’t men go to the chapel?’

‘I think praying is women’s work,’ I said.

‘What’s men’s work, then?’

‘Going away to France to make money so women don’t starve,’ I said. ‘Being alone there and waiting.’

‘That old man did that?’

‘He didn’t even tell his wife. She got a postcard a week after he got to Bordeaux.’

‘And she was left alone.’

‘Alone with the children. You always think life can be made fair, don’t you? Balanced somehow. Well, it can’t always. He suffered, she suffered, the children suffered. But they ate.’

‘That makes it all right?’

I walked away.

‘That makes it all right?’ she said again.

I still didn’t turn.

‘What makes you think I don’t know about pain? You think I just fake it, is that it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, of course I don’t. But that’s you and this is Arturo in a village called Formentina. There aren’t always the same rules and the same manners for everyone everywhere.’

‘I know that,’ she said. ‘Are you sorry I came?’

‘I was going to take you out to dinner. A good dinner. Somewhere you’d like.’

‘So I go away with good memories?’

‘It’s a start.’

She put her arms around my waist.

When we were driving up the mountain for a breeze, she said suddenly, ‘The Museum are being very understanding.’

I said, ‘I suppose they are.’

She noticed how I accelerated at once.

Maria changed the rules for Hart. He never did local things, met settled people who saw inconsistencies; he was a traveller. He would never have asked Maria to the festa, but she asked him.

Even then, he only thought she might be lonely. He didn’t reckon loneliness, except as a failure of planning that meant he should move on. He liked moving on. It saved him from a whole garden of tempting fallacies, like the notion that nothing is true until it is shared. And now he was set in someone else’s identity, and alarmingly close to thinking the only way to save his self was to share the big bumper annual of his past doings with someone else.

Also, he would have liked someone to fight with. He got nostalgic for raised voices and clear diction.

Anna, at the kitchen table, cut an onion. The knife slid off its wet shine, not like the soft, docile onions out of a supermarket at home. She set chickens on a tin dish, sparse and bony birds you could imagine on the run, unlike the plump, settled pillows she was used to buying. The tomatoes, too, were woody and green; they had a dusty redness close to their hearts.

She turned on the stove. The bottled gas seethed for a minute and settled to a low burn, and then went out. She propped the door open and tried again. This time, she burned her fingers on the metal of the door, but the stove stayed lit.

The phone rang, my cellphone. It was bothersome and persistent like all phones, but it was faint and she couldn’t quite place where I had left it. Her hands were greasy from handling the chicken skin. She washed them, half hoping the phone would simply stop, but it didn’t. She found it in the pocket of my jacket.

‘My name’s Mello. Perhaps your husband will call me.’

‘Yes. Of course. I remember. Your number -‘

There was no pad and pencil, of course. There was a paperback with a heavy, laminated cover and she scratched the number into the shine with her fingernail.

She opened the door and stood out in the still air. Over where she thought the sea must lie, very distant, the sky had turned to a band of sepia. The afternoon heat even felt like a fire. She couldn’t think why she had decided to cook on a day like this, in a place like this.

She went walking, slipping from one patch of shade to another, going slow up the steps. The blackberries were almost ripe, she saw. There were bushes of spiky rosemary up against a drystone wall. She felt breathless in the dry heat. She knew she’d feel a hard ball of pain behind her eyes very soon.

She picked rosemary. The stems wouldn’t break at first; they were too woody and resinous. She took tiny sprigs from around the curious dead coloured flowers, sprigs that could almost be fir or pine. She crushed them between her fingers and then she buried her face in her hands and the smell of sharp, medicinal oil, a concentrate of the rosemary she knew from cooler places.

A car droned down the curves of the mountain.

She realized suddenly that she had left the stove burning. She sprinted the steps and almost fell into the kitchen, tested the air with her hand as she walked in. She forced the rosemary sprigs into the cavities of the chickens, stuffed the tray into the hot oven and smelt her hands again: fat and medicine. The smell was in her mouth, too.

She pulled the shutters tight and sat in the dark living room. Some spare feathers on the birds were singeing in the oven, sharp as vinegar on the air, before the full, practical smell of skin and flesh cooking. The singeing smell was all right, she told herself. It was really all right.

I brought back water from the spring and carried the boxy five litre jars into the kitchen. I called her name, but she didn’t have anything to say. I put on the light in the living room.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘there you are. How are you?’

She went into the bathroom and ran water from the tap. But she couldn’t drink the water, she remembered, and in case she had any doubts, it ran stained like coffee. She reached down for a bottle of the water from the spring, but it was empty. She took the prescription jar of painkillers and for a moment she thought she’d never be able to calm 1 his sense that she was being reduced by pain to someone incompetent, without ordinary sensation, fumbling, even old.

I handed her a glass of clean water. She took the pills. I said, ‘Come and lie down. Please.’

‘You’re supposed to ring someone called Mello,’ she said. ‘The number’s on your book.’

‘On the book?’

‘I scratched it.’

She must have heard me on the phone, and wondered about my distinct, official voice. ‘I’ll see him this evening,’ I said. ‘I’ll be glad to help.’

I knocked on the door exactly like a policeman: six loud knocks expecting instant attention.

‘I think we ought to have a talk,’ I said.

He sat across the table, his hands folded like a steeple.

‘You won’t object if I have a look round,’ I said, without much of an interrogative rise at the end of the sentence.

‘Hey,’ Hart said. He clearly thought he had the upper hand.

‘I’ve been very patient.\a146 I said. ‘I’ve waited weeks. I thought you understood that I will not go away until we’ve recovered the Museum material.’

Hart said, ‘What material was that?’

He had a reasonable grudge: being treated like some minor sneak-thief, a professor carting off the odd Coptic portrait, Greek leg, bit of gold, when really he had stolen much more. He was something that slipped about in people’s sexiest fears; if only they knew. And to be threatened in this amateur, bureaucrat’s way: told what to do on pain of upsetting the way things are when he was headline stuff and far more dangerous; that hurt.

This time, I did have an advantage. ‘The police wanted to know,’ I said, ‘if you knew a man called Martin Arkenhout?’

He paused only a couple of beats, but it was jarring, like a late woodwind in a bit of Bach. He got up and offered wine.

I couldn’t know what I had said. I took the wine.

‘Mello couldn’t reach you on the phone,’ I said. ‘Then Anna sent me up. To see if you’d like to come down to dinner. She’s cooking.’

Hart was astonished. We were going to be so perfectly mannerly, so social, foreigners allied in a strange land, even though what brought us together was some crime. Sherry might be offered, might be taken. Probably we’d talk about Tomar since that was virtually all the three of us had in common.

‘What exactly do you expect me to give you?’ Hart asked. I thought he might be bargaining.

‘There are at least fifteen images missing,’ I said. ‘I want them all in perfect condition. If any of them have been sold, I want to know where to find them - exactly where to find them, not just a dealer’s name. If any of them have been damaged or destroyed, then there’s no deal.’

‘And then?’

‘Nothing after that. I go back to London, you do what you like. I’m not a policeman.’

‘What’s Anna cooking?’

‘She’s roasting chicken. With herbs,’ I said.

‘What time, then?’

I said, ‘Nine o’clock.’ From the door I added: ‘Let’s have everything settled by then.’

I didn’t go home. I hung in the shade, with a view of his windows. I learnt that from Hart, the way he sometimes left silence open for other people to fill.

I didn’t understand what I was seeing.

He was tearing open cases, one by one, emptying them in a muddle of shirts and shoes and plastic laundry bags on the floor.

He opened the black bound notebooks Hart had bought in Amsterdam, tried to read the writing that fluttered like the line on some medical gauge. He examined books that had been butchered and digested, pages turned down, lines marked, notes spiralling round someone else’s text like those snail’s trails that freaks leave on library books; and he checked bundles of photographic prints of paintings and etchings, very new and shiny. He had packed too few objects when he cleared Hart’s house. He assumed the objects had been rented along with the house. He never guessed.

He now knew someone had made the connection properly: from Arkenhout to Hart. They would be checking along the chain for missing persons, sudden moves. There would be evidence soon; you could never clean all the blood, or be sure that all the cuts of a body would stay separate and nameless. The cleverness in what he did had been the lack of connections, and now that was all over.

I saw panic in his face.

Martin Arkenhout was back; that’s how he explained it later. Arkenhout claimed Hart back so thoroughly he could hardly breathe. He settled a discontinuity of ten years as though it did not matter at all, opened up tracks he thought were hidden, and connections as subtle and chaotic as all those mathematical headlines about how the fall of a leaf in a distant galaxy can spoil your snooker shot at home. It was Arkenhout he had killed in Florida, Arkenhout who lumbered about in his memory, the thing that must at all costs be repressed and put away. Now the name was in the air again, and Arkenhout was like a cartoon ghost, a graveyard joke.

He could be laid to rest if my life was available for taking; but it couldn’t be taken yet. Meantime, there was this dead life of Hart’s to inhabit.

Martin had always been the winner, the man who knew how to reinvent himself perpetually, Faust with no need for some cramping contract with any passing devil. He did what other men just dream of doing, which is to change all the incidentals and take with him, life after life, only what’s essential.

Until that moment, he never doubted that there was something essential.

I lost him for a moment under the level of the window sills.

He upended a small attache case out of which fell neat clear plastic envelopes of insurance documents, bank statements, letters, papers to show at a frontier. It seemed odd that Hart carried so much in a Europe without frontiers, as though in his mind he were adventuring off to some deep woods Colombian silver mine or a dubious island or a country with a serious regime.

I couldn’t tell what he was hunting. The papers shuffled over each other, skidded over the plastic envelopes; he made chaos around the room. But I had no notion, then, that he even needed to hunt for anything, or why I could see panic on his face.

He did tell me, later. Christopher Hart seemed alive and loose in that long, white Portuguese house: a dissembler, a twister, who was hiding things from this second Hart, his heir, himself.