by Paul Park
At receptions and official functions, at all social gatherings, Nicola Ceausescu felt a constant tremor of pride and shame, wondering if each old or middle-aged man remembered seeing her as she'd appeared as Ariadne, or Medea, or Mary Magdalene, or Saint Joan, or Miranda Brancoveanu, or Cleopatra with her breasts uncovered at the end of the last act. As they bent to kiss her hand, she wondered if they were at that moment imagining her in greasepaint as she stood upon the boards of the Ambassadors in Bucharest, or on similar stages in many foreign capitals. Perhaps that was why she felt such sympathy now for Mile. Corelli, a tiresome girl in many respects—why she felt tears now on her own unpowdered cheek. "You would not turn your own daughter away?"
In spite of the professor's pale complexion, she could tell his nature was choleric—she could see the blood rise to his face. And in spite of his good looks, there was something in him that recalled a gnawing, biting animal, a marmot or a squirrel perhaps—she could see his long fingernails and big front teeth. "Yes, I recognize you," he cried. "You're the start of this."
He had his fingernails on the doorpost, and with his other hand he held onto the knob so that the way was blocked. "That night she sneaked away from home to one of your performances," he chattered angrily. "She came back telling me she'd be an actress, which meant a whore in your case as the old baron found out soon enough. A whore in her case, too; the whole city knows it. Not that I blame her—a nation of whores now, and Germany has hired us by the hour . . . ," on and on.
At every repetition of this ugly word, she felt Mile. Corelli cringe as if she had been slapped. And the baroness felt also the force of what he said. Was it true she had destroyed this family? She'd heard Corelli's wife had died, though she was not yet old. And the son was now a soldier in the Ukraine.
But surely the professor could have used the power of the tourmaline to save himself, protect himself, protect his home. So he was a coward after all, without the strength to do what's necessary. In her heart the baroness felt a surge of music, and she imagined momentarily how various themes from the overture of the first act would repeat in the third—she had risen from the streets to the top of her profession. And yes, she had betrayed her country to the Germans, but she would rise above them, too, and all Roumania would profit, and all its citizens would thank her, finally.
Now more than ever she had need of the jewel, useless in this coward's hands. "Please," she murmured. "Everything you say is true."
As she spoke, she put a spell into the words, a small piece of conjuring she had learned out of her husband's books. She knew the spell was powerful because of what she was, a beautiful woman who now pulled her gray shawl from her neck. And Corelli was silent, his voice extinguished as she reached out and put her gloved finger to his lips, while at the same time she pushed him backward with the weight of her gloved forefinger. She tightened her grip on the daughter's arm, and pushed her father back against the door. "Please," she said. "May we come in?"
"No," said Mile Corelli. "He doesn't want me here." But she also was powerless to resist as Nicola Ceausescu pushed her way into the hall. It was a comfortable old place, smelling of smoke, lined with red wallpaper and glass-fronted cabinets. And on the left-hand side, a mirror, in which she caught a glimpse of herself—her helmet of copper-colored hair, her unlined, small-featured face. A beautiful woman, as all the world agreed. And if she couldn't see it, if even momentary, sidelong glances were enough to shake her confidence, that was a tragedy to be explored in the first act of her drama and then again in closing scenes. Now there was no time for it as she felt the small effects of her conjuring begin to dissipate and drift away. Corelli struggled to speak. The girl twisted her arm away and pulled it free.
The baroness slammed the door behind them, and they all stood together in the narrow hall. There were doors with velvet curtains on the right-hand side, a staircase up ahead. On her right a row of cabinets displaying Roman glassware and ceramics and other curiosities, all painstakingly labeled, and among which she searched in vain for mineral samples or uncut jewels. She needed the tourmaline, needed to find it, if only to defeat the self-doubt that now assailed her—"Gaston, Gaston," Corelli managed to say, and for a moment the baroness felt a thrill of fear. What would he do, call the police? But the police were already outside, would arrest him and burn down the house if she gave the order— no, that wasn't the reason she had come. Now she knew: she had come here to rectify the damage she had done to this family, to earn the trust her people had in her, to demonstrate she was the white tyger in more than just a name. What had Corelli called her? The Germans' hired servant? Something uglier than that.
And if she needed a reward for her efforts, a small but valuable token that nevertheless would enable her to achieve more, heal more broken families, who would deny her? Not some nervous professor with a face like a rodent's, who had made no use of it himself. "Come," she said, muttering another small curse under her breath and turning fiercely on the girl, who cowered against the closed door.
In order to heal them, first she must cause pain. "Tell me where it is."
"Ma'am, I . . ."
"Where does he keep it? Tell me quick!"
But the fool wasn't paying enough attention. Instead she was looking toward her father, even reaching out to touch him in spite of the cruel thing he'd said. And she was right to be concerned—the man was flushed and stammering. Still impeded by the fading spell, he touched his throat, and with his other hand gestured toward his servant on the stairs. There the door led to to the servants' quarters. When the baroness glanced that way again, the door stood open and the boy had disappeared.
It didn't matter. If he left the house by the back door, then her policeman would pick him up—she'd given orders to arrest anyone who tried to leave. "The tourmaline—tell me now!" she said, while at the same time she repeated in her mind the formula for squeezing and tightening, which she'd learned in her husband's book. And it was having a renewed effect. Corelli staggered back against one of his cabinets, hands at his throat. He was a coward and a weakling, and the girl, too. "Please, ma'am," she begged, holding her hands out beseechingly—her cloak had slid aside, revealing her whore's clothes, the dark material cut low over her breasts. Still she could not keep herself from looking toward the second pair of velvet curtains and then looking away.
It was enough. And once they had surrendered—father and daughter, both—then the baroness could afford to be generous again. Corelli could breathe easier again, as the baroness reconsidered. Not cowards but lost sheep from a dispersed flock, now reunited at long last.
"Ma'am, he has a weak heart," protested the girl. Nicola Ceausescu seized her by the elbow. Then she was shepherding them both through the curtains, and they came into a drawing room and study. There were bookcases, dark furniture, leather chairs. On the side away from the street Corelli kept his chamber of curiosities, a small area like a stage that was lined with cabinets and shelves. Light came from sconces set into the walls, chimneys of frosted glass with the flames turned low. The baroness had a vague impression of apothecary jars and bones, animal skeletons and stuffed hunting trophies, as she surmised. But on the floor beside an armchair was the safe.
"Tell me," she said to Mile. Corelli, but the girl was useless now, in tears. Her cloak had fallen back from her shoulders, exposing her bare arms. Her father stood in the light, and any suggestion of a squirrel or a mouse had vanished from his face, ennobled now with suffering and concern. "Natalie," he murmured, wringing his hands, though still he did not dare to approach the girl. "Open it," said Nicola Ceausescu.
But Corelli had recovered his capacity for speech. "You have no right to come in here," he protested. "We are private citizens in our own house. Gaston will tell them at the station house that you are trying to rob us. There are policeman in the next road!"
So it was already "our house"—his and the girl's! In five minutes the baroness had brought them together under one roof. But she could do more. She still had Mile.
Corelli by the arm. She could twist her arm and hurt her, or else more than that. Delighting in the moment, the baroness closed her eyes. And she imagined reaching out with some small spell or conjuring, something that would mar the girl in subtle ways and punish her inside, damage her so that her own father would no longer feel his heart touched in her presence.
It wouldn't take much. The girl was already so close. Smiling, cocking her head, the baroness opened her eyes.
Always her power as an actress—supernatural, some people said—was in the way she could allow her intentions to be read in her expressions and the language of her body. Groaning and defeated now, Corelli went down on his knees to fumble with the combination of the safe. With her hand around his daughter's elbow, the baroness listened to her own harsh, even breath, listened to the sobbing of the girl. What contempt she had for this man who now knelt at her feet, and who all these years had kept in a steel box one of the wonders of the world, a jewel that had grown inside the skull of Johannes Kepler the alchemist, a symbol of his entry into a mystic brotherhood of conjurers.
Click, click, click went the combination dials, spinning under Corelli's thin fingers. No doubt he was a scientist who neither respected nor believed the power of Kepler's Eye. No doubt he conceived of it as just another object in his collection of historical and natural oddities—one with a greater than average intrinsic value, perhaps, and certainly a romantic provenance.
A blinkered academician, he could not have been expected to understand. With his belief in rational categories, he would have had no mental compartment for an object that was described in different documents as a mineral, a bodily organ, and even sometimes as a piece of fruit—a grape, as the baroness had read in one possibly metaphorical poem. Or a berry, as she had read it described in one of Kepler's own journal entries—a pitted fruit that had improved his vision, made him what he was. It had grown inside him from a seed.
Now the door of the safe stood open. Nicola Ceausescu let go of the girl's arm. Hoisting up her skirt, she squatted beside the fumbling Corelli, and with her own hands she drew out the wooden tray of jewels. But there was nothing but garbage—fossils, petrified remains, and in another small box some diamond jewelry, some diamond and platinum trash that had doubtless belonged to the deceased and unlamented Madame Corelli—oh, this was a family of slaves!
Lips curled in disgust, she turned the professor as he labored to stand. She had scattered his wife's jewelry over the carpet, and with a cry he bent to gather them again. Doubtless he had been saving them for his only daughter, and doubtless also it broke his heart whenever he looked at them—there was something like that now in his face.
Enraged, the baroness raised her hand and saw his look of fear—what was wrong with him? Surely he could see that she was just one weak woman, weaker than he. Surely if he chose, he could punish her as she deserved.
But now she realized what he was actually afraid of, and it wasn't her, or at least not entirely. Maybe he'd been counting the minutes since Gaston had left, and maybe now he understood she had the power of the state behind her, and Radu Luckacz's police force, and the German army, all of which allowed her to do whatever she wished, behave like a lunatic inside his house, humiliate him and his daughter, too. They had no recourse. They had no recourse if she struck him across the face, as now, and watched a gash appear over his eye. Even inside her glove, the baron's golden ring must have caught him wrong.
They had no recourse if she batted his spectacles to the corner of the room, as now. "Stop!" cried the girl, tears disfiguring her face. "Stop, you monster!"
Was that the word? the baroness asked herself. Was that what Corelli had called her in the hall? No, it was an uglier word than that. No wonder she was angry now.
And the girl had stumbled across the room to fall over her father, raise him up, cradle him in her arms, blot away the blood on his eyebrow and the bridge of his nose. "Papa," she cried, "papa," and he was weeping, too.
The Baroness Ceausescu rose to her feet. All was quiet now except for their snuffling and the beating of her heart as she studied the room for other hiding places. There was the professor's desk, and on the blotter under the lamp stood a row of photographs in silver frames: a gray-haired woman with a kind, soft face. A boy in military uniform, a row of ribbons on his chest. And an exposure of Mile. Corelli with flowers in her hair, taken when she was eight or nine.
Nicola Ceausescu turned instead to the collection. It occupied the back end of the room, a small three-sided chamber with a raised floor that separated it from the larger space. The baroness stepped onto the bare boards, stepped into the chamber; again she had the impression she was stepping out onto a stage. She felt the same gooseflesh, the same sense of anticipation and self-consciousness. Corelli and his daughter were her audience. Caught in each other's arms, they stared at her with wet, frightened eyes.
But as always when she'd taken a few steps, she stopped caring about any audience. It was as if the missing fourth wall of the chamber now magically reformed, and she was there alone. Alone with her art, and with Corelli's strange collection of perplexing or disgusting artifacts—a row of fetuses in cloudy glass jars. Preserved specimens of enormous bugs. Human skeletons, wired together, hanging from hooks, and elsewhere bins of animal bones.
The light flickered from the sconces. Somewhere in here, she knew or thought she knew, was Kepler's Eye, a tourmaline (she knew or thought she knew) with a unique power. Johannes Kepler had a thousand lovers—that was factually correct. But he had also, as the baroness had discovered in last few days, won over a million marks at games of chance. On one occasion he had rolled eleven consecutive double-sixes with eleven sets of dice.
The Elector of Ratisbon, what could he not have accomplished with good luck? Now he was dead. Luck also, the baroness knew, had deserted the Corellis over the past five years—but was it possible the girl had lied to her? Was it possible, finally, the jewel was no longer here? That she had goaded the baroness into throwing it into the fountain—throwing it away!—by claiming it was false. Real or not, it had taken Nicola Ceausescu to the apex of her power.
And if the girl had tricked her, she would pay for it. The baroness now turned back into the room. The light flickered, and she saw the Corellis clutched together, only dimly now, unclearly as if through a scrim. At the same time she noticed on her right-hand side a line of stuffed birds. One of them she recognized, though she'd never been much for natural history. But she remembered the brandywine birds in the low bushes in the early morning when she was just a child.
And she remembered it flitting from Aegypta Schenck's cottage, after she had strangled her by Venus's pool. That was the same night she had found the jewel, taken it from Claude Spitz in the entranceway of her old house in Saltpetre Street—surely all her bad luck since that night had been the result of that double murder. Horrified, she gaped at the bird that stood suddenly lifelike on the shelf, its head cocked as if watching her, a dried berry in its beak.
Slowly, hesitantly, staring at the bird, she murmured a small prayer. It was a nostrum of her mother's, passed down among the villagers of Pietrosul. The baroness had heard her mother say the words, once when she'd lost a copper coin.
Hardly had the words left her mouth when the coin revealed itself in the dirt under a stool. Now, scarcely had the baroness finished when she spied a human skull on a shelf of human remains. It was unusually small, she thought. And there were holes in the cranium as if from a process of trepanning. And the bone gleamed like polished ivory. And there was a discoloration, a broken line over the eye ridge. And a tiny pasteboard placard: I. Kepler.
She struck out with her hand. The cranium separated, bounced away. Disturbed also by the sudden movement, one of the skeletons made a little dance. At the front of the skull there was an empty cradle in the bone—nothing there.
Corelli's murmured voice came from behind her: ". . . my jewel . . ." Slowly, frightened now, a lump in her throat, she turned around. But he wasn
't looking at her. He was talking about his daughter, whom he now raised to her feet. He was crooning over her. What now?
Unbidden to her mind came part of another prayer, which she had spoken in the room she'd shared with Kevin Markasev on the night Claude Spitz returned to life. And no sooner had it left her lips than she heard a fluttering and a whirring from behind her. What kind of a sour magic trick was this? When she turned, the stuffed bird had left its perch. It flapped around her in a circle and then out into the room.
Awestruck, she let it go. She stood murmuring her prayer in the little room, the prayer that brings dead things to life. For a moment she blinked stupidly and brought her hands up to her face, unsure of what to do. She was alone. Corelli and his daughter had already stumbled from the room. Should she chase after them? Should she call for the police? Should she send a message to the Ukraine, to the commander of Lieutenant Corelli's regiment? She had power to crush them all. And if she wanted, she could send Radu Luckacz's men to scour the area around Maximillian's fountain. They would question everyone who lived near there. Why had she not thought of this before?
The bird fluttered in a circle around the room. Then it too was out the door and in the chamber there was quiet for the first time, it seemed, in ages. Now the decision was hers, but first she must convince herself. Had the Corellis ever really owned the jewel, or had the baroness possessed it for a while and then lost it? She found herself immobile, balanced between possibilities.
But this she knew, or she suspected with a sudden certainty that was like knowledge: The tourmaline was gone out of her hands. It was gone like a fluttering bird, gone for good; and it was useless to search for it. And her husband had withdrawn his shelter, his protection, and the stone was gone for good.
"Ah, God," she murmured, unable to bear the thought of it. No, she would search at Maximillian's fountain. No, she would press the professor for the truth, even if she had to torture it out of him. She would know the truth.
