Taking Lives (32 page)

‘But he was safe to leave for London.’

‘I never wanted to leave,’ Mello said. ‘I didn’t mind him leaving. It made everything easier.’

‘Was it easy to forgive him?’

‘I don’t think he understood what happened in those white rooms. I had to explain to him. He should have known. Everyone sort of knew.’

I stood up.

‘I do not think the sins of the fathers should fall on the sons. If they did, we couldn’t have a country.’

Sometimes you feel entitled to examine a man: to study him for traces of old rhetoric, choosing the simplest things to say, for bullshit or simply lies. I was part awed by his capacity for forgiveness, part suspicious. I didn’t know what part of him to trust. Maria told me later he was the kind of cop who did best when things were impossible, who in ordinary circumstances was an official bully.

‘Just go,’ Mello said. ‘Go to Lisbon. For Christ’s sake, go.’

*

Maria woke up cold in her own bed, she told me. For comfort, she dressed and went down to the kitchen where her mother and Amandio were drinking coffee.

‘You’re up early,’ Amandio said.

‘I woke up very suddenly.’

‘Someone calling you,’ her mother said.

Maria poured coffee from the pot.

‘I said, someone calling you,’ her mother said.

‘Love,’ Amandio said, beaming, oiled with easy certainty as always.

Maria was shivering.

She called Hart twice, tried to suggest she could come out for the afternoon.

She said to me, when she came to the bar for her usual coffee and water: ‘I hope you get the pictures back.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It doesn’t seem a good idea to be around here for a while.’

‘Mello told me to go.’

‘To go where?’

‘Lisbon.’

She sighed. ‘I could go to Lisbon,’ she said. ‘Go to the opera, go to the fado, go somewhere. I need to go somewhere.’

I said, ‘Please come.’

‘I’ve got some business to sort out. I suppose I could come this week.’

‘Tomorrow?’

I hadn’t expected to be so eager, a schoolboy’s eagerness.

The apartment was in a new block on Avenida do Brasil. It was a paradox of a zone: where the aeroplanes come roaring low, but well-off people still like to flaunt their closeness to the airport. The view was jacarandas, the pavements blue with the old flowers, and at the back, a courtyard of washing lines.

I checked the place. The living room was stuffed with bulky green sofas. The bathroom had taps in the form of gold-plated swans, forever vomiting water down the drain. And the main bedroom, a square box of intolerable dry heat, had a triangle for a bedstead like some altarpiece, set about with cherubim and seraphim in rows and ranks up to a fat fairy at the very top. I pulled open the drawer in the bedside cabinet: spare seraphim.

There was no fan, no air conditioner, and the flat had been empty for weeks. I tried lowering a blind and opening a window, but new heat crept in to disturb the blanket of old heat. I tried showering, distracted by the odd glitter of gold swans around my feet and the water that ran lukewarm from either bird.

I took Luso water from the fridge and drank from the bottle.

I didn’t know how to make a place ready for someone else. I knew what Anna would want, but I wasn’t expecting Anna. I wondered what I should do: buy wine, buy bread, buy coffee. Buy condoms, nowadays. Make sure the rooms seem fresh and appealing. I was entirely out of practice because it was so long since I had chased, or courted, or even furiously desired.

But that was my occupation now: desire. It was like being drunk, like a headache, like anything obsessive and chemical. Only I was alone, and in a stuffed, airless flat in .1 city I didn’t know.

I wanted to be outside more than anything. Not that the streets were promising: broad and without character, pale cream blocks. I could not find a cafe in the shade. There was, however, a seafood bar with tables under a tree, and in its window were piles of crayfish, salt-water and freshwater. I ordered some of both, picking between the piles, trying to judge which one I liked best and therefore which one I should offer Maria when she came.

I didn’t even eat for myself any more.

I could watch myself doing all this, as though from a great height, see the absurdity of it all; and yet I went on. This was infatuation without excuse, without even the object of desire. I couldn’t even call Maria until this evening. I didn’t want to leave messages on the office machine, if I could avoid it. Maybe she’d be home, maybe not.

Clean sheets. Good coffee. Wine, of course; but what kind of wine? Did she even drink? I knew her only in circumstances where perhaps she considered herself on duty, and she drank only water and coffee. I needed good soap in the bathroom, too: what my mother used to call ‘nice’ soap.

I didn’t know affairs, you can tell. I could fancy the notion of the plot: the fake phone calls to establish alibi, the calculated meeting, the rush and grapple and then leaving the moment two bodies were tired enough to separate. I could see a certain excitement in all that. But my habits were far too constant and domestic.

A woman passed. She was lovely enough: rounded, ample, eyes bright as knives. But she was the wrong woman. Just for a moment, I thought I knew how to cure myself, to prove I was riddled with non-specific romance. I’d stand, talk to her, drink a glass of wine, go to bed with her and join together fiercely enough for nothing else to matter, and remember this even when, hours later, it was only memory on the skin, not the scaffolding of some new domestic life. Then I wouldn’t need to fuss about which crayfish, sea-water or freshwater, or both, the decisions which showed how prissily difficult I found it to do what I knew I would inevitably do: call Maria Mattoso, call her now.

I thought I was just being human.

I didn’t call her that night. Instead, I sat in the apartment with a loaf and some cheese, watching an old Portuguese film about students at Coimbra University. The men wore black academic gowns and sang fados in the corner of small rooms. The girls frisked about on steps, or sat romantically still in windows to be serenaded. The two did not seem to connect very much. It was a love story.

I left my number on Maria’s machine, just as a reminder. I asked if she wanted to see the new King Lear at the National, or some visiting ballet out at Belem.

She thought this could wait, she says. She had a life in Vila Nova de Formentina that could not be interrupted on a whim - certainly not by a man unconnected and not at home, who might as well be on holiday.

She sat down at table with her mother.

‘Where’s Amandio?’ she said.

Her mother chewed both her meat and her wine.

‘Travelling,’ she said, after a minute. ‘He has to make a living, you know.’

‘Gone far? For long?’

‘Santarem. Then he’s going to the Alentejo. Evora.’

‘I like Evora,’ Maria said. ‘I remember a lemon tree hanging over a white wall.’

Her mother glared at her.

‘And the fountains. They have lovely Moorish fountains.’ She watched her mother work a piece of bread into oblivion, first between her fingers, then between her teeth.

Her mother said, ‘You’re not going out this evening? You’re thinking of sleeping here?’

‘Yes,’ Maria said. ‘You don’t mind?’ She poured wine into her mother’s water glass almost by accident, and her mother drank it anyway. ‘We’ll be company for each other,’ Maria said.

She shouldn’t have said that. By way of apology, she said she would wash the dishes.

‘You don’t know how,’ her mother said. ‘Lady lawyers don’t do that sort of thing.’ The two women got up simultaneously and moved plates to the sink.

‘He’s just making a trip,’ Maria said, quietly. ‘It’s nothing serious.’

‘Perhaps not for you,’ her mother said.

Maria touched her mother once, very lightly on the shoulder, and as she expected, her mother brushed the hand away and also smiled.

‘He’s been very useful,’ Maria said. ‘Amandio.’

‘You didn’t like him. But yes, he was.’

Maria should have picked on the tense and worried out its meaning. But she felt too tired, and too kind.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘I’ll do the dishes.’

When the phone rang again, her mother went to answer it, and Maria heard her talking flatly. When she came back, she said: ‘It was that Senhor Joao Costa. I told him you weren’t here. He sounded drunk.’

‘Thanks,’ Maria said.

I wasn’t drunk, but the words still butted up against each other and bent and scattered when I tried to say where I was, who I was, what I felt.

I climbed into the bath, in the shade of the sharp gold swans, and I lay there for a moment before panicking.

I ran through the apartment, wet and naked, and found toast burning on the stove. So I was right to panic, I thought.

Christopher Hart could be sleeping with Maria. I could not. I hated Hart, wanted him arrested and confined; or dead.

I was the hollow man, no solid past any more, no lather’s reliable stories, no place of birth that mattered, no residence, no wife. But I had been a hollow man for years, doing things at one remove, respecting systems and courts and orders and regulations. I was unused to this rush of feeling, like bile or hormones. I thought it could fill me up with purpose and found a new life.

But perhaps she’d come down to Lisbon, after all. One more call tomorrow. I could always make one more call.

I imagine this next part, from everything I know. There was a road, a sand track, a man with bagpipes, one

with a big drum, one with a snare drum. Beside them walked other men, one with a bunch of raw-looking rockets in his hand, just paper pockets of blast. They weren’t going to war. They were only announcing a festa.

The youngest man lit up a fuse like the wreckage of a cigar, and waited until it glowed. He held a rocket in his left hand. He pushed the lit fuse into the touchpaper and waited for the rushing sound, and then just in time let go, with a twist and a curl like a javelin thrower.

The mortars almost always went up. Sometimes they’d raise some dust, or some bird nests in a drain; but usually

they flew and a few minutes later exploded and left farts of brown smoke high on the air.

This one didn’t. It rumbled. It flew. But it flew flat horizontal. It cleared vines and phone wires and bougainvillea, made a pig scream, grazed a neon cross on a tiny white chapel and shot out of the village into the woods.

The men lit the next mortar.

But the first wasn’t history yet. It zipped through pines and eucalyptuses until it caught in a ball of loose bark and let off brown-yellow smoke.

The next mortar - and I’m guessing here - shot up into a bare blue sky, and the next: a flash, a bang, then smoke. You could hear and see them in the next valley. In that part of Portugal, you can’t have a village festa without advertising: loud, explosive advertising. You can’t have a party, a sacred procession with banners, without the sounds of trench warfare.

Back in the woods, the trails of bark from the eucalyptus began to smoke. There was a weak little wind, but that was enough. A few leaves, the new ones heavy with oil, burned down to their veins and blew about. Some scorched the grass which had overgrown itself in a wet spring and was now dried out to brown tinder.

The woods went quiet for a moment, then little flames began to chatter, as insistent as water over rocks and, for a strange moment, just as soothing.

The young eucalyptuses were still brilliant blue-green and juicy; they went up like fireworks, orange and yellow. Swags of old bark went dusting through the branches, flaming dead twigs and leaves. Bits of fire fidgeted about in the light, sparkling, jittering.

The men in the village most likely thought the rogue mortar had spluttered out without doing damage. They were out raising money for the chapel, so they went back to their rounds, the bagpiper roughing up ‘Viva Espana’ on a red and gold bladder, with jazz riffs, and the bridge passage done without breathing.

The drummers drummed.

There were two fires in the woods now. The grass fire hiked pine cones and opened them, licked the scaly seeds inside. It heated up the spindles of heather and lavender. Smoke left a track along the rocks.

As the fire fanned out, the treetops started to spit and crackle. There were fatty white squares on the pine trunks where they had been cupped for resin; the squares burned with a pure gold light, aisles of terrible candles.

The two fires married at a thicket: the ground fires tumbling up the trunks, the tree fires throwing down flame.

Then the wind got up. It blew away from the village, so there was no taste or soot to warn the men with the mortars.

By nightfall, the fire had roots. The grass was cool; the fire rested. The next day, the flames grew up like sudden vines, and the fire bent the trees in its direction. Now it was going uphill, it seemed to move even faster.

Maria went to the GNR station because Mello had something to show her.

It was a portrait, formal as anything in a ruff and a gallery: Christopher Hart, who’d broken surface in a muddy lock when the Vecht was running low in summer. Mello called it the ‘real’ Christopher Hart.

But it was only a head on a clinical white background, details fudged, teeth broken with pliers, one eye out, hair shaved, cut marks of a garrotte still clear at the neck. It had been manipulated as though by an artist, planes changed, soul exposed with a few surprising lines, but mostly it had been savaged for the sake of rudimentary disguise.

‘They haven’t found the body yet,’ Mello said.

‘I see,’ Maria said. ‘So you’ll want to talk to him?’ The name Christopher Hart no longer applied. The man had slipped into a category of appalling things that could exist without names.

‘You’ll be seeing him?’ Mello asked.

Maria made herself look again at the photograph. The head had been hacked. The black must be blood scabs. She didn’t feel revulsion; the image was as remote as a car-wreck on the nightly news or a painted martyrdom in a church. If she’d had time, she could have taken an interest in the technical, forensic details.