Taking Lives (41 page)

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 catalogued for display: assault, fire, the explosions, the severed head and the poured petrol which did not fit a simple plea of self-defence, 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.\a146 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 which 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 prophylactic 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, drily. ‘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 bougainvillaea. 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 in her talk, 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.

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 fibres along the cuts. They make sure the pictures again lie in the arbitrary order we knew and catalogued, 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.

THE END