by Paul Park
He winced. "They haven't yet stood trial."
"And do you blame me for my morbid thoughts? Did they curse me? Did they curse my name?"
"No," he said, which was the truth. She was distressed, and he yearned to c0mfort her. But it was hard for him to look her in the face, to tolerate her clear eyes and perfect skin, the bitter smell that clung to her. So he stood looking at the drawing of the naked woman until she turned away from him back to the piano, and he felt he had to speak again, grind forward in his nasty, nasal, Hungarian-accented voice. "Madam, I am pleased to have good news for you. This is from several sources, including someone who has come recently to join us. It is news from Antonescu, who can't keep his men from running away. The so-called empress is on her deathbed. Valeria Dragonesti. She will not last the week."
He couldn't look the baroness in the face. She dropped the cover on the piano keys, which made the strings vibrate a little. "What about the train?" she asked. "The Hephaestion? That was Antonescu's work."
"But they achieved no benefit. Obviously there were armaments inside the baggage car. Whether they were meant for him or else for some other faction has yet to be determined. But they were detonated by the force of the explosion. The train was wrecked, but there were only several injuries, because of the heroism of—"
She interrupted him. "That's your news? A queen of Great Roumania is dying? My friend, I had hoped for better news than that. What about Miranda Popeseu? Have you found her?"
"No. There must have been another exit to the cave, though we have searched—"
"And how many of my citizens have gone to join her in Mogosoaia? Tell me!"
"Ma'am, there are always malcontents."
"Tell me!"
"I don't know the number. It is troublesome. That's why I say the German ambassador—"
"Always it is you and your German ambassador! What does that say about my people's love if I must call in the potato-eaters to protect me? I must call in the soldiers of our enemy—"
"Ma'am, they are not. . ."
He couldn't finish, couldn't hear himself say the words. But she understood him. "What do you say? Weren't they the enemy when they burned Buda-Pest and drove your father from his house? When they marched into Transylvania? Haven't they stolen my son and kept him away from me?"
She'd come close to him, put out her hand to touch his sleeve. He was staring at the pen-and-ink drawing, the small breasts and narrow thighs. "It's so cold in here," she complained, turning away. "I'll have Jean-Baptiste lay a fire."
"What I say, ma'am, is there is a worse enemy than they."
"Tell me about that."
"Ma'am, I've already—"
"Tell me!"
He ran his forefinger along the drawing of the woman, then put his whole hand over it and raised his chin. He turned to face her as she leaned over the sheet music, rubbing her arms—the music was handwritten. He could see that now. The light shone on her chestnut hair, tangled and unbrushed. He observed for the first time what she was wearing, a high-necked blouse, stiff and starched over a black wool skirt. She fumbled with a jeweled cigarette box, the property of the former empress. She drew out a sobranie cigarette and held it under her nose. "I must give these up," she said. "They're hurting me."
"What does your doctor say?"
She shivered. "I will not let him touch me. What does it matter?" She flicked her jeweled lighter, lit the cigarette and sucked on it. "Tell me about this enemy who comes to fight me from another world."
"Ma'am, I've already—"
"Tell me again!"
She turned to face him, blowing smoke in a long stream, and he could see her violet eyes. As always when she looked at him, he took a refuge in lame-footed pedantry. "I believe the Germans can help us because of what they have achieved in their own country. This is in spite of their arrogance and the misery they have brought to weaker nations. Perhaps because of it—they are entirely modern in their own affairs. If there still remains some religious activity, it takes the form of nationalistic celebrations—public prayers to Odin, harvest festivals, occasions of that nature. It hurts me to say it, because of the harm they have done you and the contempt with which they treat you, but we can learn something. . . ."
He let his voice trail away. Blue smoke coiled above her in the darkness above the candle flame. He could see now there were dark shadows under her eyes. Had she been weeping? She stood hugging herself, and perhaps it was just an irritation from the smoke, but her eyes were full of tears.
"Tell me about Miranda Popescu," she whispered.
"Well, as you know, we'd been alerted by the mercenary, Dysart. We surrounded the place with twenty men. Twenty-one, myself included. You know the place. It was the Aphrodite fountain where Aegypta Schenck was killed. A painful circumstance, although because of it I was able to introduce myself and offer you my services—I tell you only what I saw. The place was kept by that degenerate race of aboriginals that so disgusted your late husband, though I am a liberal in this matter, I assure you. We must build our nation out of whatever lumber . . ."
A tear dropped down the baroness's cheek. "Miranda Popescu," she whispered.
What would he have given to have taken out his handkerchief and wiped that tear away?
"Ma'am, I'm coming to that. Believe me when I say I have no explanation. She came out of the mouth of the cave, and I saw her. There was light from the doorway and the cave itself, lanterns on her aunt's tomb. I saw her clearly. She is as I told you. It doesn't help to tell these things again—"
"It helps me."
"Very well. Only it reminds me of my failure. She is medium height and dark. She was dressed in riding clothes. When she saw me, she slipped from Dysart and ran back into the cave. My men were after her, except at that moment—how can I explain it? This was an illusion that came out of the ground. It rose out of the tomb, some miserable piece of prestidigitation, I can assure you. Something a magician might perform upon the stage. Smoke, colored lights, perhaps, and I am ashamed to say my men would not go forward past the entrance of the cave. There was darkness and some kind of electricity or thunder in the air. I am ashamed to say I cannot explain. For this reason if for no other, I wish I had a consultation with the German scientists, or else the extracts from the meetings of the scientific conference in Basel—"
"Please," whispered the Baroness Ceausescu.
"As you know, I went in by myself. And she had disappeared. There was no crevice in the rock where she could hide. Of course when daylight came we searched the complete locality."
"Of course."
LUCKACZ HAD STOPPED SPEAKING, AND for a moment all was quiet in the little room. Nicola Ceauseseu ground out her cigarette in the gilt ashtray. But her hands couldn't be still. She picked a fleck of tobacco from her tooth and then gnawed briefly on a hangnail while she watched him. She rubbed her hands together, put them behind her back while she stood watching his starved, diminished face, his long gray hair combed back, his glossy black moustache. Next to the German ambassador he was the most powerful man in Bucharest, she had to remind herself. Now that he'd allied himself with German interests. . . . Then why was it that every day he looked more crowlike and unkempt in his rusty suit of gabardine? "What would you suggest?" she asked.
"Ma'am, since the day you moved into this building, there have been no German soldiers here in Bucharest or tara Romaneasa out of respect for you. Now I think that is unwise. Mogosoaia is two stops on the train."
How was it possible, the baroness thought, that in so short a time she could have lost her people's love? Everything had changed since Miranda Popescu had come, since Kevin Markasev had left the house on Spatarul, and most particularly since she had thrown away the tourmaline. But no, it was a fake! It was quite obviously a fake, unless (and this would be a bitter injustice) Mademoiselle Corelli had lied to her. How horrifying it would be, she thought now, as she'd lain awake thinking the previous night, to have thrown away the real stone, thinking it was false. How much
worse than her reliance on a false stone, thinking it was real!
But no, the girl was too stupid for such a trick, and what would be the point? She had come during the day, and the baroness had fed her and given her money, spoken to her kindly in this room, though with an anxious heart. And the girl had told her about the safe where her father kept his jewels and curiosities, the secret place she'd mentioned in the street. Unless the girl was a spy, a creature of some foreign power, or else Radu Luckacz's creature, or else the Elector of Ratisbon's . . .
Tears in her eyes, the baroness imagined what would happen if Luckacz turned against her, because without the stone she had no hold on him. He easily might slip away once she had lost the secret of his affections. Tears in her eyes, she examined the roots of his black moustache. Without the stone there was nothing to keep him here, certainly not the charms of a defenseless, guilty woman in her thirty-ninth year.
"I won't allow it."
"Ma'am—"
"I won't allow it. You must not suggest it to me. Go—you have upset me now. Do you really think I would consent to this? That I need foreign soldiers to protect me in my own city? Or is this just a plan to make me more unpopular? I notice you have tried to keep me shut up here. I notice the piata and the park are full of your men. I won't have it—let my doors be open! I have no secrets—I'm an artist."
"Yes, ma'am."
Artist she might have been, famous throughout Europe at one time. But this was not her most effective speech, the baroness decided. She needed Luckacz to come toward her, sighing, wringing his hands or holding his hands out. She needed to feel some heat from him because the room was cold. Instead he scratched his ear, scratched his jaw, and looked down at the drawing of the mausoleum that she'd planned for Belu Cemetery. "Go," she said. "You must not keep me like a prisoner. You have hurt me and disappointed me and kept me from my work tonight—my life's work, though whether it's a comedy or tragedy is not so plain."
Why was he so stubborn? Why did he cock his head and peer at her, curious as a crow? This much was clear—she'd lost his love for her, and she'd lost Kevin Markasev's love, and she had lost her people's love.
And now Antonescu had robbed her of the weapon she had bought from the Abyssinian colonels. Broken the treasury to buy them, or at least she'd emptied the discretionary account the Germans permitted her, except for the money Jean-Baptiste had secreted away. That weapon had figured in the third act of her play, when she'd decided to become the white tyger in more than name alone. She'd decided to throw out the potato-eaters and redeem her country; now that option was closed to her. Or was this just another obstacle to overcome?
She picked up the sheet music from the piano stand. She made a show of studying it as Luckacz bowed, let himself out. There was another reason why she'd chased him away, why she'd wanted him gone. She looked at the square clock on the sideboard. It was almost eight o'clock.
She had prepared something for this night, a conjuring. If she'd managed to receive the weapon, it would not have been necessary. But without the weapon, she felt she must know something, or else what? She'd go mad—no, that was not true. That was the kind of sentimentality she'd always tried to avoid in her work. But she had lain awake the previous night, and she had thought of it like this: There were things she wanted to know, and felt she must know if her life was going to achieve the shape of a great piece of art.
If she was to overcome the obstacle of the derailment, she must find out the truth about Johannes Kepler's Eye. Had she been blessed by the great sorcerer or stumbled forward on her own? Who could tell her now but her own husband, the red pig of Cluj, dead for thirteen years? He was the one who'd given her the secret, spelled it out on the ouijah board in her house on Saltpetre Street. That had been a long time before, and already his soul was in the circle of brass. It would require a great conjuring to reach him now.
That afternoon she'd given a matinee, but cancelled her evening's performance. At nineteen minutes after eight, the God Saturn, caught in his dark, frozen round, would pass over the point of Cleopatra's spire near her temple in the old court. Things were possible at that moment. A word in the proper place might brush against his cloak, might catch there like a burr, might travel far. It was a chance, but it wouldn't do to prepare for it. No rehearsal was the best rehearsal, as she'd learned from her years on the stage. So she studied her sheet music a little bit more, calming herself, waiting for the chimes of the small clock—they didn't come. She looked again. The gold hands hadn't moved, still marked three minutes to the hour. The clock had stopped.
Then all her calmness left her in a moment and she fled the room, calling for Jean-Baptiste, hurrying up the stairs. The clock on the first landing told her it was twenty minutes past. But when she was running down the hall toward her personal apartment, she saw an ormolu timepiece on a small table—ten minutes after eight. It wasn't until she'd crossed the threshold of her bedchamber, pushed aside the rice-paper screen that hid her secret alcove, that she saw she still had time. Her absolute chronometer stood on a lacquer table, a gift to the former empress from the Maharajah of Singapore. The spheres were turning. She had ninety seconds left.
"What do you want?" called Jean-Baptiste, rude as always, from the hall outside her room.
"I have a headache. I must not be disturbed."
"I don't believe you. Who'd come see you anyway on such a night?"
"Go!"
While she spoke she'd been commencing an internal prayer, the kind that an experienced practitioner can set revolving among the lobes of the mind, a perpetual machine, and sometimes it took hours for it to slow and stop. It was a prayer to the goddess. At the same time she was fussing with Cleopatra's altar, a small brass statue she'd erected on an inlaid bench.
The statue was a clockwork one, and she wound it and got it moving with four seconds to spare. Now she was chanting out loud, a different prayer in contradiction to the first. For though the silent words were full of self-abasement ("Have mercy on me, forgive me, I am mud under your shoes. . . ."), the spoken words sounded presumptuous and proud: "I am the best-loved of your servants. Here I command you to help me to this terrible . . ." For it was only in the frictionless space between the prayers that the goddess's arrow might fly. The brass statue, which now was turning on its base, showed Cleopatra in the shape of the great huntress of the Nile on the day when she had overcome the crocodile. Dressed in padded armor, her beautiful head encased in a padded helm, she drew her bow and tilted backward as the crocodile swam through the arc of the heavens. It would become the brightest constellation of the summer months. It was not figured in the statue, though the goddess stood on a trampled nest of eggs.
But on the tiny brass arrow that would shoot a meter or so toward the ceiling, the baroness had affixed a tiny scroll. She had curled it and tied it around the shaft. It was not true she'd not prepared. On the scroll she had inscribed these words in minute letters: "My dear husband, please, we must adapt to the new times. . . ." It was the message that the goddess had dispatched to Julius Caesar after his death, begging him not to punish her for taking Marcus Antony for her second husband. But he did punish her.
That day the baroness had sent her steward, Jean-Baptiste, to Cleopatra's spire in the city. And in the secret, top compartment she had asked him to deposit a small bucket. On the handle of the bucket was the burr that she'd prepared, a sphere of wire hooks. In the bucket was the small silk nightgown she had worn throughout the previous week until it smelled of her. And pinned to a rosette of folded fabric in the center of the bodice, there was a piece of paper torn from the corner of an envelope, and one word in purple ink.
Jean Baptiste had unhatched the section of the roof over the compartment. That evening, at 8:19 and twenty seconds precisely, watchers in the square below might have observed a small, unsteady beacon rise into the sky. But in that spitting rain there were no watchers. In any case the beacon was soon lost among the clouds. Even the baroness, peering south through her bedroom
window, saw nothing. Alternately gnawing on her cuticles and smoking her sobranies, she settled on her iron bedstead and commenced to wait.
Past eleven she undressed and went to bed. But she left a single lantern burning on her nightstand. When she awoke, disoriented, in the middle of the night, she lay quiet for a moment, watching the shadows turn and dance over
the ceiling. At first she thought they came from outside her window. Lights from the traffic in the Piata Victoriei, although she couldn't hear anything. No, the lights from the carriages and trams had never reached into her room.
But perhaps there was some new brightness in the square. She remembered the bonfire lit by students on the night the Empress Valeria had left the city, while train after train of German soldiers unloaded in the Gara de Nord. Was it possible that she had seen the shadows dance across her ceiling from the light of that big fire? No, the window was dark, and when she raised herself onto her elbow, she could see the source of movement. The brass statue of the goddess was turning on its base, tilting backward as if shooting at the ceiling, though the quiver was empty and no shaft flew.
Now the baroness could hear the trigger in the statue's outstretched arm snap uselessly, over and over. She sat up in bed. "Are you there?" she called out.
She had left the window open a small crack, and now she felt the narrow wind that had managed to squeeze through. It troubled the flame of her lantern. "Are you there?" she cried out, already a little bit impatient at these histrionics, even more so when she smelled the barnyard odor that had always clung to the red pig, the smell of mud and food, excrement and death, that now was unmistakable.
What form would he take after so long? Surely he was trying to frighten her. It was intolerable—she slipped out of bed and ran to the window, closed the casement, turned the latch. The windowsill was wet. Below her the piata was deserted in the rain.
