Taking Lives (8 page)

My name is John Michael Snell Costa. That explains almost everything.

Costa is a Portuguese name. Snell is English, my mother’s name, but it is there only by Portuguese custom. The first two - John Michael - are what a Portuguese father calls a boy born in London when he wants him to pass for English.

I do pass very well, on the whole: perhaps too dark, shorter than the absolutely average, the name a bit odd. I suppose I’m sometimes too obviously serious - about women, about the art I file away in solander boxes. I’m reserved even when I drink too much; I don’t have a boisterous, slap-happy, separate drunk self. My accent started with the BBC and got a bit demotic later as fashion changed.

But don’t think I belong. I would hate to belong.

I’m out on monochrome streets, on my way to work, passing people all in a blind, resentful rush who long for the day to colour up. I’m rushing, too, that’s the cleverness of it all. I’m in step on the escalator, always in the right line. I know how to box myself into the right moves.

I look around and see the self-conscious stylists who’ve bought and paid for their identity - biker, jock, queer, Armani, banker - and I’m right there with them. Because I fell in love with paintings, hopelessly, I play a Keeper at the Museum. I have the clothes, mostly flannel. I have the degrees.

I like the job, I should say. On the streets, everyone is running in this pale, stressed present tense, no history, future indefinite, scrambling to invent themselves every minute just to stay whole. We keepers get to mediate between a past that’s stored and documented, that is registered as important, and some possible future in “which people will look at it again.

I’m also a romantic, without much opportunity. What I do is keep drawings, tend and study them: reddish lines, brown wash on paper that stains and crumbles. I protect these things.

But I’d guard wonders, given half a chance. I’d be a knight in armour, by a grail in a tower, kneeling on watch for centuries.

The taxi dropped me at the North entrance.

There was a gentle riot all along the Museum railings, crowds blowzy in open summer clothes. At ten, exactly, the guards consulting their watches with great drama, the gates folded open. The mob promenaded ruthlessly up to the famous portico. The daily invasion of the public, physical Museum had begun.

But I walked past them, and through the green door of a decorous Georgian house to the side. Keepers know that the Museum itself - its powers, purposes and history - is in these offices and it looks out on the plant that supports it the way Victorian mill-owners looked at their mills: which is to say, unseeingly.

I walked the warren of students’ rooms, past labs that cut up bodies of stones and fussed with odd worms in exotic woods, down corridors painted in pale, official colours with a sense of respectable dust even in mopped corners. I loved this walk. I was deep inside the Museum, opening up the soft privacy of this solipsist’s place that was kept separate from the big, open circus of the public galleries and the wider world only by doors marked (I noticed this on my very first day) ‘Emergency Exit’.

I cut through a basement like locked cells, each stacked with objects, a world tour in bric-a-brac. I passed the Hindu sculpture where a scream of cats came to be fed, offices where small broken things were filed in drawers until a monograph could be built on them. All the higgledy-piggledy confusion of the Museum’s private parts, its lack of maps and its trick, dog-leg corridors, were an occasion of triumph: I won through.

I was on my own territory, under the dome. The sense of achievement died quickly.

Carter was waiting in my brown and stuffy office: a small, neat, anxious man, like a mouse in a cleaning coat, with a vigorous toupee on a tired face. He had four folios balanced on his knees.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Good weekend? Yes? I thought you should see these. I’m not responsible.’

He waited for me to clear a corner of my desk, and put the books down. They were perhaps twelve inches by twenty-four, bound in slick white parchment that had stained with time, their edges shaggy like a pile of thick papers.

I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ knowing that Carter always thinks there is a problem.

‘See for yourself.’

I went to touch the books, but Carter coughed. ‘Gloves, sir,’ he said.

I said, ‘You can’t do anything without latex nowadays.’ It’s a ritual joke that slightly stirs Carter’s dust, which is the point. I pulled on thin, white surgical gloves.

‘Fifteen pages,’ Carter said. ‘There are pages missing. Someone has taken fifteen pages.’

Each book was labelled ‘Liber Principis’, the Book of the Prince. I knew of them, of course, although they were kept in the cage of a reserve collection: albums of paintings, seventeenth-century, made by artists attached to Prince Maurice of Nassau when he was governor of Dutch Brazil. They were lovely things, full of exact living animals, trees, snakes and people, but they were much more: the first attempt to record precisely what was in the New World instead of populating it with conventional monsters. It was as though, on each page, you could see wonders directly through the eyes of the past.

‘I’d never have known,’ Carter said, ‘but for the routine checks. We’ve been having dehumidifier trouble in the cage. Staff have handled them, conservation had them three years ago. Besides that, there’s only one person. Professor Christopher Hart.’

‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘We have a suspect.’ I could see that Carter was hot for mousy vengeance, but he said nothing.

‘You’re absolutely sure that no other member of the public saw these?’

‘Hart had to get special permission, you remember. In the circumstances.’

Carter blamed me for the permission, I could tell, blamed me for the fact that the books did not stay safe in their wire cage. I saw the ghosts of liveliness penned up in those cages. He saw his few surrogate possessions, to be protected like his pension and his mortgage.

I had my hands, palms down, on the scratched white parchment of the covers.

‘I’ll handle it,’ I said.

Christopher Hart at that moment was these things on a table: three credit cards, a bank card, a Eurocheque card, four library passes, one photo pass that opened doors to his university department, a gym card, two frequent flyer cards, one out of date, one coloured gold, a passport, an American visa in the new style with a photograph, a driving licence, a separate identity card, a red season ticket to Arsenal Football Club, a computer warranty card.

They were all Martin Arkenhout needed, usually.

They’re what authority requires to let us walk on to a plane, look at books, touch our own money; they don’t just prove who we are, the cards are our identity itself. Power wants us numbered and not named, carded and not just remembering our name, address, telephone number, purpose, National Insurance number, PIN and so forth. Power has good reasons. As long as we have papers, we cohere; we don’t shift like character or personality or desire. We’re available to be managed.

In the end, he boasted to me about all this: how all he had to do now was to fill in the details - what Hart wants, eats, loves, hates, believes. He was sure already he could make a better life for Hart than Hart ever could.

He doesn’t know about Hart, you see. I do, which is knowledge that can kill me.

‘You understand the problem,’ the Deputy Director said. He was a fleshy man, the ruins of a rugby player, out of whose bulk came short, sharp puffs of startlingly aesthetic opinion.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘These books are not supposed to be in the Museum in the first place.’

‘I’m not sure the Museum would say that. I’m sure the Museum would say it cannot by law part with objects in its collections, however they arrived; that makes almost everything easier. But in this case, the Museum would particularly like not to say anything at all.’

‘Family secrets,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

‘For the record,’ I said, ‘I suppose we ought to review the history of the Liber Principis?’

‘Do we really need to?’

‘For the record,\a146 I said. I wanted as much distance as possible from any future awkwardness. I wanted the Deputy Director to handle the Museum’s honour, while I attended to the art. ‘The paintings were made by Albert Eckhout for Prince Maurice of Nassau. Maurice ran short of funds and decided to sell them - which he did, to two German princelings. Maybe each one thought he was getting the whole collection. At any rate, each bound up his own albums of the paintings, each called the albums the Books of the Prince. The albums all stayed in Germany.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the Deputy Director said.

‘Some time early this century, the Prussian National Library acquired both sets. War broke out. The holdings of the Prussian National Library were sent out for safekeeping in case Berlin was razed. The Liber Principis, along with some Mozart autographs and so forth, disappeared. It’s a matter of public record that one set turned up in Cracow, and decades later the Polish Government admitted that they had it and let in the scholars.’

‘A mistake,’ the Deputy Director said. ‘Books would live for ever if nobody saw or moved them. We could keep the whole universe of knowledge in perfect safety.’ He coughed, a little embarrassed at parodying his deepest instincts.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘it was easy to see how some books left in Saxony might make their way to Cracow. It is a little more difficult to explain how the other set arrived in London.’

‘Enterprise. Spoils of war. Most museums owe everything to enterprise and spoils of one war or another.’

‘Until now,’ I said, ‘there has been no public acknowledgement that we hold the Eckhout paintings. I suppose unkind people would ask how we acquired them in the first place. They might talk of theft.’

‘Or transfer. The Museum taking responsibility when the Prussians failed to look after things.’

The books had a presence in the room: the embarrassment of something wounded on the sideboard. I lifted a volume and spread its pages with indecently bare fingers: they had a delicate smell of paper dust and perhaps some kind of old, scented pomade, as in the library of some grand house.

‘Unfortunately,’ the Deputy Director said, ‘we live in an age where everyone is supposed to be open, and everyone apologizes for history. We don’t send the Elgin Marbles back. But we don’t hide them, either. So the Director, in his wisdom, thought one younger scholar should be allowed to look at the Eckhouts. A confidential matter.’

I considered the pages. Each had a net of captions, but only the odd-numbered pages had pictures, sometimes more than one: the album was a plan for something more ambitious than itself.

‘We can hardly bring the police in.\a146 the Deputy Director said. ‘And it’s hard to avoid the inference that whoever stole these pages knew that very well indeed. It is an embarrassment to lose things. It is worse to lose something you should never have had.’

‘Only one person outside the Museum handled the books. Christopher Hart.’

‘You’re perfectly sure there could be no question of some insider at work?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m not a detective,’ I said.

‘This is very unfortunate. The Museum values its relations with younger scholars. The Museum depends on them. But it was Hart, definitely, and only Hart?’

Evidently some of the pictures had never been set in place, because the paper was evenly discoloured. I turned the pages like a policeman at first, noting the few places where the gaps were shockingly bright inside a weathered frame, where a painting had long protected the paper on which it was mounted. Then my eye caught on a page that had been cut close to the spine. The insult to the album brought the object alive for me, took it out of the inert category of evidence. I felt anger for the integrity of a perfect thing that had been spoiled.

I was not supposed to feel this. It was politically incorrect. It was historically dubious, too, since the albums were an arbitrary assembly of what survived, what patrons liked, what nobody had managed to steal or ruin over long years, including whoever found the books in Germany and then thoughtfully dropped them off at the imperial storehouse of the Museum.

But I found myself falling into the bright, exact pictures.

‘Perhaps you could talk to Hart,’ the Deputy Director said.

‘He’s in Holland, on sabbatical, so his department says. He hasn’t been seen for a while. He told everyone he might go to Portugal, but there’s no forwarding address.’

‘God,’ the Deputy Director said.

A tiny nameless insect, jagged crimson and black, crawled up the page. A snake, gold underneath, black above like a player come up to the footlights in a melodrama. Three snakes on a page: diamond-backed, splashed with red, saddled in black, all writhing to break the frame.

The Deputy Director said, ‘The bugger wouldn’t publish, would he?’

Goats, I saw, warm and a little nervous against mottled grounds, ears and horns turned in. Llamas with the faces of cartoon politicians. An anteater had proved so astonishing that it was a mass of uninvestigated brown hair ending in a snout. There were gorgeous cats, a monkey whose features - tired eyes, worn teeth, low ears - looked human and scared. I have never understood how people can pull back from the seduction and presence of paint, its physical depth and crust, and look only at slides, use abstract nouns, throw concepts and theory around instead of looking with passion. Paint is food to me.

‘I don’t have to emphasize discretion, I hope,’ the Deputy Director said. ‘Except for the record,’ he added, mocking me. I should have put the books down. I should have concentrated on this exchange, however empty and pompous it was. Instead, I was looking into a round, kind face at the front of the album, someone with a thatch of hair, shining cheeks, a faint suggestion of stubble above wide lips, eyes just out of focus as though the artist could not quite meet them, or perhaps the man was drunk.

The album was not a set of pretty things, a carnival of oddities: it was a new world seen with wonder. Instead of conventional assemblies of root, flower, insect and memento mori, the kind of overstuffed images the Dutch also made in that century, this was precise and astonished, and deeply personal. It was like a grandfather’s stories of discovery.