by Paul Park
Instead she led the girl to the settee and pushed her onto it. She rang the bell. When Jean-Baptiste put his head in the door, she asked him for coffee and to build up the fire. Sobbing now, the girl didn’t see him. After a few moments he came in with a brass pannier full of charcoal and birchwood chunks. He looked more frail, more gaunt, more emaciated than usual, and the baroness noticed he hadn’t shaved. Hair bristled on his long chin, his long neck. She watched his Adam’s apple knot and relax, knot and relax. Some anxiety was making him swallow over and over again.
Later he put coffee and chocolate toast on the small table. “What did happen?” the girl asked. “He was going to take you home in his cabriolet. You should have come with me.”
Sitting beside her, the baroness stared at the back of Jean-Baptiste’s old-fashioned, light blue coat. She stared at the threadbare space between his shoulder blades and imagined he was listening. So she spoke evenly and calmly. “That was all. I don’t know. I got out at the corner of Elysian Fields. He continued to his hotel. When I saw the story this morning, I was as terrified as you.”
Mlle. Corelli shivered. “You should have come with me in my carriage. Why did you go off with that man?”
“My dear, it was out of your way.”
She herself was curious why her own carriage hadn’t come. It was supposed to wait in the piata with the others. Maybe the driver had stayed away in protest, because she hadn’t paid her livery account in six months.
The simulacrum had accepted a ride in Monsieur Spitz’s cabriolet. You couldn’t have expected it to be discreet. She felt no responsibility for its actions. But Monsieur Spitz was cruelly murdered, after all.
She waited until Jean-Baptiste had left the room before she turned back to the girl. “Here’s what you must do. I know a jeweler in the Strada Stavropoleos. I myself have had to sell my jewels one by one, and he has made me copies. I have seen in his window duplicates he has made of famous stones. In any case, I believe tourmalines are not the most expensive. Let us hope your father does not examine it too closely. As for the cheque, sign it over to me. I will give it to my accountant, and he will make enquiries. Maybe it can be turned into money for some percentage of its written value. That’s all we can hope for. Do you have it with you?”
The baroness imagined that she understood Mlle. Corelli’s frustration, because she also had money she was afraid to use. The bag of currency she had taken from Aegypta Schenck’s armoire, she had not even counted it. Maybe it was enough to save her, pay her most pressing debts. But if the princess’s money was marked or accounted for in some way, that would be the end.
No, she wasn’t responsible for what the simulacrum had done. Claude Spitz was nothing to her. But at moments all morning she had been revisited by the sight of the princess’s protruding eyes and tongue, the spirit bird fluttering on her lips. She would feel a sudden flash of heat within her body, which was the sign of her regret. There was no time to linger on those thoughts and feelings, with complications and difficulties piling upon her. The past was nothing, and she would find a way to conquer this.
Even so, she could not but remember the series of bad decisions that had brought her to this crisis—caught between two murders, and to protect herself against suspicion of one was to invite unanswerable questions about the other. It was her fault, it was all her fault. In the first place she had gone to visit the princess before she even had her hands on Miranda Popescu—why? Was it to gloat, to prove that she also was a powerful woman who could influence the fate of nations? And then the second time—was it to punish her? Ask for her forgiveness, her help? Not to kill her, but that’s what she’d done, and at the same time she had let her simulacrum loose in the empress’s palace. Did she think it wouldn’t be affected by her own moods, her own violence?
This was the way she always did things, she reflected later, after Mlle. Corelli had gone away. She lay back on the horsehair settee, the folded cheque in her hands. She was an artist, that was it. An artist, not a criminal, and if she found herself involved now in murder and robbery, she had been driven to it, she was sure, by desperation and the cruelty of others. Once when she was sixteen years old, an Italian critic had called her one of the great artists of her generation, and the way to art was not to think too clearly, not to plan things out, but to follow where your heart and emotions led. Well, they had led her into a cesspool now, and it was time for thinking to take over.
The cheque was signed and countersigned. She unfolded it now and spread it out on the small table. It was for a half million francs, which was not as much as she had hoped. Hadn’t she heard Spitz say he would pay two million?
Domnul Luckacz was a fool, and she had led him by the nose. She couldn’t be sure all the others were as foolish. Mlle. Corelli had used the word “cabriolet” to describe Spitz’s carriage, meaning, she supposed, a hired cab. If so, was there a driver? Or had Spitz driven the horse himself?
Jean-Baptiste had served Turkish coffee in small red cups. It had gone cold, but the baroness took a small, sweet sip. She imagined this was the last time she would sit on this sofa, the last time she would sit in this room, because now it was clear to her that she must go. She had the cheque, the tourmaline, and the princess’s money, all of which were tainted and questionable, but they would have to do. She couldn’t stay here—that was certain—waiting for the police to search the house. But she would take the train to Budapest, across the border into German-occupied Hungary. She would write Mlle. Corelli from there, saying the cheque had proved worthless after all. If her fears were groundless and no danger followed her, then maybe she’d return.
She wondered whether she would take her son.
At that moment there was a knock on the door, and Jean-Baptiste came in with the mail. Bills and invitations, invitations and bills, and one small, anonymous note, reminding her of an appointment at two o’clock. What was that? Oh, yes. Her simulacrum had promised Herr Greuben she would meet him at Cathedral Walk. In a way it was a stroke of luck. If she was to cross the border, then she would need a German visa.
Jean-Baptiste had not left her. He stood in the middle of the carpet, his hands behind his back. She glanced up at him, aware once again of the tremor in his Adam’s apple. What did he know? There had been blood on her clothes, a strange and brilliant jewel. A policeman had come and gone. He must have his suspicions. No, but there was more, obviously.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Please, ma’am.” He was stuttering and afraid, which was unusual. “I-I-I wanted your permission to take your bedsheets and your clothes from last night. Burn them, ma’am. I wanted to burn them.”
She said nothing, only stared at him. His bladelike face. His high, narrow shoulders which were hunched now, as if he were expecting some blow from behind. His eyes were too close together, so that they looked as if they were set into the sides of his sharp nose.
“I’ve been with you, ma’am,” he stammered. “Last night I saw him push his way in—I would have helped. Don’t think I’m judging you for what you did. I dragged him down the steps after you went upstairs. I swear he was still alive. His carriage was at the curb and the box was empty. I drove him to the Targu bridge and left him.”
She stared at him, his high forehead and clipped, receding hair.
“Ma’am, you must know this won’t stop here. I cleaned the stairs and the tile floor. I took the candlestick. But with that boy upstairs—please ma’am, I know you are in trouble. I know you have no money, and this morning I heard from the butcher as I went to buy your ham—the baron’s pension was revoked. I-I-I have to tell you, I have a little saved. I bought the ham myself. I have a house in the mountains that my father left me, and I want you to know that you could always share it …
“As my w-w-w—,” he added after a pause.
She stared at him. It took a moment for her to understand. “As my wife,” he was attempting to say.
She tried to imagine what she must be feeling—her hands felt hot. Doubtless she
had a kind of affection for this loyal man, who would work for her forever without pay. His words were touching, but at the same time she was angry—how dare he? She was the Baroness Ceausescu. He was a servant, an ugly old man, almost as old, almost as ugly as her late husband.
The Baroness Ceausescu. But she was also a whore’s daughter with no place to go, not a five-leu penny to her name. No one but a lunatic would take her in—how dare he insult her by reminding her of that? Now, as was her habit, her thoughts resolved themselves into two competing claims. Of all women she was the cleverest, strongest, best. But at the same time there was no one in God’s universe as pitiful, as evil, as selfish, as contemptible as she.
“As my g-g-guest,” he finished, finally.
He was too much of a coward even to ask her. She looked up at his frightened face. She felt disgusted and polluted now. At the same time she was convinced that very soon he would reject and spurn her as she deserved. It was true—he was a worthy man, son of a respected schoolteacher in Cluj.
“Thank you, Jean-Baptiste,” she said. “Thank you for your wishes and for what you’ve done. What time is it?”
“Past noon, ma’am.”
“Then I must go. I have an appointment at two. Put out my coat and some clothes into a bag. Here is the key to my closet. You are right about the boy upstairs.
“Don’t worry, I will close up that room. This afternoon, will you buy me a train ticket to Budapest? I feel…”
“With what, ma’am? There is no money in the house.”
“Then perhaps you can lend me a small sum.”
He stood for a moment, expressionless. “And the house, ma’am?”
“The baron left it to my son. Not to me.”
For a long time she had been aware of the small bell ringing on the fourth-floor landing. “I will bring some food to the boy. I will tell him to be on his way,” she said.
He nodded, turned to go. As soon as she caught sight once more of his retreating back, as soon as he opened the door into the front-door hall, she closed her eyes. Now suddenly she was overcome with horror. There in the vestibule where the policeman had been standing, there at the bottom of the stairs, the simulacrum had—what? Murdered a man? Or no—he was still breathing, thank God. How had she done it—struck him with a candlestick? Had the jeweler tried to touch her? No, not her, but an unfeeling and murderous automaton—Jean-Baptiste had driven the carriage to the bridge into the Gypsy town. Had anyone seen him? One thing was for certain. It was all her fault.
One thing was for certain: She could not continue in this way. This morning she would mark a new beginning, leave this place behind. She could do a hundred things. She was still beautiful, or at least men still told her so. She was only thirty-four years old. Across Europe there were dozens of theater managers who would hire her. She would take back her old name.
Eyes closed, she listened to the distant ringing of the bell.
* * *
KEVIN MARKASEV—THAT was not his name—had no memories from childhood. But because the mind abhors a vacuum, in his hours of captivity in the baroness’s house, he had invented a story for himself—a family in Odessa and Roumania. Trips to the Danube delta with his cousin. These were the stories he had borrowed from the woman with the crystal ball in Bucharest, and told to Miranda Popescu on the hill. In that place he had felt more alive than ever before, and almost by now those stories were his own. Without them, whole years were blank, effaced. But he imagined his family could not forgive a boy who was so sensitive. Who was consumed with nightmares and strange dreams.
Often in his dreams a man came to him and told him what to do, a small man with a big head and little, red-tinged eyes. He was a gentleman in elegant clothes, with a star around his neck. And Markasev obeyed him as he would have obeyed his own father.
Now as he sat thinking in the baroness’s cage, nothing seemed real—not this life, these dreams, or any part of his past. Yet there was a part of him that coveted normality. Every morning since the night when he had stumbled into the baroness’s house in Cluj, as he woke chained or caged in the half-light or the dark, he had lain still without understanding for a few moments, expecting to find himself safe in the whitewashed bedroom in his mother’s house in Odessa, and his mother calling him.
When he rang the bell, always he imagined she might come for him, though he could scarcely remember what she looked like. Now the door opened, and in the light from the yellow room he saw the baroness standing on the threshold. She had a bowl of hot milk and toast. He could smell it.
He thought of her as the lady of comfort and tears. He didn’t use her name. She had saved his life. Often she appeared to him, as she now did, dressed in soft, simple clothes, bringing food or water or a towel to wipe his face. Her hair, cut short around her face, was a soft color which combined black and brown and red, and when she bent down to wash him, as she often did, he could smell in it or on her skin a small odor of nutmeg or lemon oil, some rich and bitter fragrance. Her eyebrows were thick, and her eyes were very dark, very blue, almost purple in some lights. Her skin was pale without any red in it, but instead a kind of milky blue, the color of milk with the fat skimmed away. Her forehead was wide and smooth. There was no line on it, no wrinkle around her eyes or mouth, because when she was angry, as he’d sometimes seen her, she did not contort her face. And when she cried, as she often did, she did not wail or moan or change her breath. The tears brimmed on her lashes, flowed over her smooth cheeks. Now as she unlocked the cage and bent down over him, he could smell the butter and black pepper in the bowl she carried; the smell made him weak. She wore a man’s white shirt, partly unbuttoned. She put the bowl down on the small table and touched his forehead. Her hand, as always, was very cold—such a comfort on his sweating brow.
He was dressed in a coarse woolen shirt such as prisoners wear. He lay on a straw pallet in the middle of his cage. He was not bound. Sometimes when he woke, he would find the chains around his wrists. The lady was afraid of the strength of his spirit animal, she said. A mountain lion from the northern forests, she said. But the chain had enough slack in it to let him reach the bell pull. It might take hours but she would come to release him, feed him, talk to him.
Now she touched his burning forehead, held his hands. “Where did you go?” she asked, and he told her about his journey into the forest where there was a great cave with a fire burning in its mouth.
“You will not go there again,” she said. “I have come to tell you I’ve petitioned the judge and he’s resolved to let you free. Wherever you wish. Only you can’t stay here. Whatever you want, I will try to provide it. I know a farmer in a place far from Cluj. Maybe he will take you in to work with the animals.”
“Praise God,” he said. As she was talking, he imagined the high meadows and the sheep. He imagined himself on the mountain all the summer months.
“Rest now,” she said. “Take these pills. I’m going out for the afternoon, for a little while. Then we’ll take you from this room.”
* * *
SHE DID NOT LIE. The baroness knew a family in the Bucovina region, a German farmer in her husband’s debt. They were under some version of German law there, and they would not turn the boy over to the empress’s magistrates. Regardless, he would not be able, she thought, to identify her house. Nor did he know her name, she hoped.
There was still danger, but the boy had suffered enough. She would find him clothes, pack him a suitcase with her own hands. She would give him a gift, something of value from her house, because whatever he had done, he was just a boy, some unknown woman’s son. She herself was the mother of a child she rarely saw, and for the sake of that child she would release the boy. If there was a risk to her, she would accept that risk.
These were her thoughts as she left the house and turned up the street, which debouched into Elysian Fields. This was a quadruple row of linden trees, a public park that was pretty in the spring and summer, with flower beds and shaded benches. On that cold gray
winter afternoon there was no color in it, except for the clothes of the people. Consumed by her own imagining, the Baroness Ceausescu didn’t notice, as she stalked in her high boots over the cobblestones, that the park was more crowded than usual. But when she came into the open place around Vespasian’s fountain and saw in front of her the blue-tiled dome of the Sulimanye Synagogue, then she realized she was on the outskirts of a crowd. And with her instinct for social hierarchy, she saw it was an unusual group, made up partly of rich men and women in fur coats, partly of black-robed Christian priests, partly of shopkeepers, partly of the poor—beggars even, dressed in rags on that chilly day. There were soldiers, as there were at every Christian procession.
The baroness watched while the priests unloaded a gilded coffin from the back of the hearse, drawn by six black geldings, restive in the cold. The patriarch, a bearded man in silver robes, blew on his hands. There were many signs of grief among the crowd. Old men blew their noses, wiped their red-rimmed eyes. Old women stood counting their rosaries. The baroness also felt some emotion, even before she realized she was standing in the middle of the funeral for Princess Aegypta Schenck von Schenck. She wore a gray cap on her head, which she now removed.
Beside the synagogue was a small Christian chapel built of dark, unpainted wood. The baroness could see it through the naked trees, see the people milling around. Here in the capital city, the empress had forbidden any public exhibition of the cross of Christ; there was a small square tower with a weather vane on top. For no reason at all, the baroness found herself staring up at it, staring up at the huge bird that perched on it. So she was able to see clearly when the bird spread its wings and fell into the air. It flew unsteadily over the crowd, a Gypsy eagle with many broken feathers. It looked exhausted, as if it had flown a long way. Now it pulled in its wings and fell onto the hearse, where it perched on the high ridge of carved woodwork behind the cab. Some of the men cried out, stamped their feet, bent down for stones to drive the bird off, until the patriarch raised his hands. He pointed. There on the bird’s breast, tied to its stringy thigh, was an iron crucifix.
