Taking Lives (36 page)

I squatted down beside him. ‘Tell me what you did,’ I said.

This is where I meant to play the hero. But mostly I wanted to fill the man’s file and put him on proper record: the instinct of an archivist.

‘What I did?’

‘And where the pages of the Liber Principis are now.’

‘I’m not Christopher Hart,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you? I was Christopher Hart for a while. I’ve never been in the Museum.’

I hit him once across the face. It was pure cinema. It didn’t mean a thing and it couldn’t possibly be useful.

‘You want the whole story,’ he said. ‘Do you?’ He thought he could defend himself with this whole story, and make me step back. He thought the story was some kind of advantage.

‘I take lives,’ he said. ‘I take people’s lives and I use them better than the previous owners ever could. So I’ve had all kinds of names and passports. I’ve been many ages.

I’ve had cards and papers that prove I am a dozen men. And you know what? I get to make all the choices I want, one good choice after another. I make a mistake, I start again, in a different skin. Do you ever make a choice, John Costa?’

‘Give me the names.’

‘I don’t remember half the names. Why should I? I have to forget the names when I’m someone new. Did you ever slip out of your skin, John Costa?’

I didn’t know why he was using so much of my name. Sometimes my father’s friends did that, out of confusion about whether to use a name like an i.d., as Americans and the British do, or like a history as the Portuguese do, with the family names lined up in a grand row.

I shouldn’t have let myself think that, not for a minute. He wanted me distracted.

He had his hand up on the kitchen table, reaching. I couldn’t stop him. He tugged down the oil bottle and it broke on the tile floor. He held the broken bottle.

In that moment, I could act. I, the man who was a spectator at the ruins of my own marriage, who only looked on when my father died and did not even know what had happened, who did nothing effective to bring back the pages and pictures I had come here to find. But now I was licensed to act.

The man had killed. The police wanted him, at least out of the way. Nobody would mind what I did. I had never before been so sure that I was morally superior, the better man.

I still couldn’t take on all that glory and make myself kill. But I kicked at his hand and the broken glass flew in an arc of oil across the room.

The blood from his hand was very dark. He smeared a little on his face.

‘Is this what a killer looks like?’ he said.

He painted a bar across his forehead, another at his neck, all in blood.

‘You look,’ he said.

He put his hands on the table and levered himself upright. I could see that his cut hand bent back at an odd angle.

He kept painting the blood across his face, stripe by stripe, as though he were inventing a monster everyone would recognize. Then he stood, and he waited.

He must have thought that every second I delayed was a chance for him. It meant I was indecisive. It meant I was still attached to my sense of order and reason.

And I was. I was mad with reason. I went for his throat.

He let himself die. He was younger, more resilient, had better wind, but he let me force the breath out of him. I broke his head on the tiled floor. I loathed the man. I obliterated the man. I reduced him to a mess of blood and fibre.

I never heard a silence quite like that one. The world seemed to be keeping its distance from me, leaving a cold vacuum in which I could hardly breathe. I sat down heavily on a kitchen chair and waited for my heart to stop sounding in my head.

There was paper on the table, and a pen.

I drew a tree. It started simply, two pairs of branches, a solid trunk. I fussed with it, put branches to the branches, and then added twigs that criss-crossed: a bare tree. I began a geometric shape, a kind of rhomboid, and then put on each face another shape, until I had a mosaic of empty, awkward boxes.

I suppose I could have been a hero, there and then. I could have walked out of the house and declared myself the man who brought down a killer. But if I did that, I was shackled back in my old self, John Costa only: the same home and garden, marriage, hopes and prospects.

I broke the shell. I was thinking of Maria when I picked up the pen and I began to write purposefully: to draw a signature, then to practise and practise the signature of Christopher Hart.

The dawn started over the mountain: only a wash of pale white, clouds touched up a little, a rooster shouting early, dogs shouting back, people already regretting their beds.

Nobody had slept very well. Fire was on everybody’s minds.

Maria still sat by the chapel. She says she knew she could not budge either one of us from our private war and she preferred to wait, and deal with the consequences.

The dawn made a muddle of shadows up and down the hill. The first thing she saw was not a man moving, because anyone could move at will and stay invisible in the dappled light, but fire: orange flames that licked up suddenly in a straight line, then ran like a fuse round the corners of a building to the side of the village. She’d been looking at Hart’s house, but this was lower and closer. The fire sent up dervishes of hot grass.

The building must be the old oil-press, she thought: a stone square full of old wood and iron. There might be oil still lying there. The shadows played shapes on the wall, ghosts faded by the rising sun.

Then the building lifted, or else the shock rocked her on her feet. Flame came from inside: no smoke, just clean orange fire. For a moment, she couldn’t think what blew with such drama, but every house had propane gas for cooking and heating water, and a single tank might throw out that force. A minute later, a second tank blew, and then a third.

Someone must have put space heaters in the oil-press. She liked an explanation, any explanation.

The sound of the explosions ricocheted between the folds of the mountain and only when it died away softly did she hear the crisp, distinct sound of flames.

The village opened at once: courtyards with gates swinging, doors wide, shutters back and windows open in the same grand morning gesture that usually welcomes clean air. But the fire at the oil-press was dirty and chemical - the petrol she remembered smelling, the propane tanks she knew must be there - and the sound and stink of it were unfamiliar, even here where fire visits every summer.

She ran up the slate steps, people joining her from each side, a riot of worry. The houses were so close there was no chance of making a firebreak; they had to fight the fire directly. Some of the men disappeared into the woods to open each farmer’s reservoir, and run the water in fat rubber hoses to wet the oil-press down. Women came out with buckets and set them down by the public fountain, ready to start a chain of water up the hill. Some brought brooms, still hoping the fire was a natural one that would keep its distance.

The village didn’t have time for words. It was all muscle, bringing down the heavy snakes of hosepipe, dragging up water from the fountain. The smoke fretted inside lungs, made eyes bleed red tears. The slow rise of the dawn had made the shadows on the mountain faintly pink, like an echo of fire.

Maria felt the weight of the buckets wrench her shoulders. She’d seen so much evidence go up in flames each day: petty evidence, garbage in woods, grass flattened by lovers, skins where snakes passed, bottles and what was in them. Fire took it all. But now the fire was inside the walls. It threatened the contents of houses, the shapes of lives, the crops in the fields and the woods themselves, which were crops, after all.

The village was impersonal like a machine. Some of the younger women, strong and round, beat the flames round the oil-press so at least the fire could not jump. Three men played water on the roof, to stop the tiles cracking and bouncing out of place, to soak the old eucalyptus beams below. But the heat inside caught at the old oiled wood and melted it down.

It seemed everyone was busy with the fire. Nobody stopped; stopping was not an option. And yet, in the shouting, Maria heard a car start down below.

Later, when the fire was down and a small, sooty crowd stood round outside the bar drinking wine and listening, she saw that Christopher Hart’s car had gone.

Fire found out everything natural inside the oil-press and ruined it. The walls, of mud, stones and clay, were blown out and baked; the water that fought the fire had soaked them and they fell down to rubble. Inside, the different levels were still clear on the hillside, and there were huge bent metal cogs, but everything else was a kind of archaeological trace. There was a steel band running round the top of the walls, the kind used to hold houses together; it must have concentrated the explosion.

She got into the building while the stones were still hot, and spars of wood or metal sagged overhead. She picked her way over timbers whose resin had boiled away in blisters. She dodged the remains of circular machines and stones. She wanted to be the first one, even pretended to be quasi-official, because she did not want the children to see what she had to see.

Gears had fused; they looked like eels in a bag. The floorboards were burnt and ashy. Scorch marks flared up and down the walls.

He could be under timbers, or under the stones themselves, or the fallen metal details of the two presses. Perhaps the explosion had been enough to blow him apart. She stopped in her tracks, appalled at the thought, but only for a moment. She had to know.

She found him in the lower of the oil reservoirs, curled in a circle and crushed. The body was so blackened that, for a moment, she failed to see that it stopped at a garrotte, the wire like a stopper on the body. The head was somewhere else.

She wanted to throw up. But without the head, she wouldn’t know which one of them had survived; she knew now how little was proved by cards and papers.

She kicked about in the ash. She looked at the base of the great screw for the larger oil-press. She looked up, and falling soot cut at her eye.

She found a skull, broken, with coy veils of flesh and no eyes. It lay by one of the propane tanks. She made herself look carefully. She’d seen something almost as bad in Mello’s office: the face of Christopher Hart. But this thing was terrible because it had not yet been put away in the secure category of evidence. It was suggestive like a guessing game.

She turned away and the wind went out of her belly all at once, and she crumpled and propped herself on a hot, wrecked mass of gears and pulled her hand away burned.

This skull belonged to a man she knew: the man who made love to her and told her stories or else the man who came chasing to save her, the one she tried to save from dying quite so soon.

She could not tell.

The first night, John Costa stayed in a small hotel on the road out of Oporto: short, square bed, red silk flowers and a bathroom stinking of new paint. It took me ten minutes in a cafe to decide what name I’d use to take the room.

I still had this sense of continuity, maybe honesty.

But the next morning I was Christopher Hart on the road across Spain. John Costa killed a man. I couldn’t be John Costa any more.

I let the road carry me north, across a bare red plain, skies cracked with occasional storms, as if some old Victorian panorama were unfolding alongside the car: a wall of paint and make-believe, not hot land doused in sudden rain. The road placed me, told me the names of destinations, but also stopped me from ever quite reaching them; I was always on the outskirts, behind screens of fence and wood that were meant to keep my traces, sight and sound, from the living, settled people.

Three and a half days I rolled on like this. I did not stop unnecessarily. The next time I risked a hotel to sleep and shower, I woke up angled like a driver in my bed.

I liked borders best when I had passed them. At least they put some necessary definitions in the continuous roll of the road: signs to prove that I had left Portugal for Spain, Spain for France, France for Belgium.

Then I worried that I hadn’t been cleared at the borders, so I might be checked and challenged anywhere on the road.

This fizz of nerves changed to anger. There was nobody, not even paid bureaucrats, to care who I was. The anger became fear. I broke off from my past entirely, a perfect escape, but I escaped into emptiness, carrying nothing. I particularly could not carry, didn’t have the shoulders or the back to carry the fact of killing someone.

The weather soured around me. After Paris, I crossed the flatlands around Lille, the brick skirts of Brussels, tracking rail lines and power lines. The rain was persistent. It curtained off some grey towns, some cold neon ones, a few churches and once a stretch of plant with high chimneys between a scaffolding of pipes.

I drew money as I went, bank machine after bank machine: a fat pocketful of colours, pesetas, French francs, Belgian francs. The cards might stop working any day and I had to be ready. The name Christopher Hart could wear out.

I risked another hotel.

Nobody ever checked the signature for the credit cards. For a while, only incongruity would give me away: a dead man travelling.

I wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror to look at myself. You fade as you age, grey about the muzzle, eyes softened, face less full of blood and life; and I was fading.

I kept wiping the steam away with my sleeve, but all I added to the picture was a reflection of white walls, the plastic shower curtain, the glimpse of a bed through the door.

Maria Mattoso saw the Oporto train coming from a distance: a great shiver of orange metal in the haze. People crowded the shade on the platforms, bags and cases and kids in piles, old ladies with fans, very young soldiers. Gentleman travellers with shirts still magically starched went picking their way between them all.

She finished her water and waited for the train to come to a perfect stop. She was here out of duty. She had no wish to rush things.

The train opened. The crowd milled about the doors, scrambling up, struggling down. Some families, from aunts to newborns, pushed past.