Once

by Elisabeth Grace Foley et al.

“Myself?”

  “Yourself, via the police, the mafia, I don’t care. Find her. And if you can’t find her, come home and clear out your desk so I can get someone more competent to take your place. I’ll put in a call to Moshe.”

  “Yes sir.”

  A beat. “That all?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Okay, Skywalker—”

  Heath crashed the phone back onto the receiver and passed trembling hands over his face. His father, the original Fischer, had founded the film company with Brandon Thurman’s father. Worked there for years until his greed caught up with him and he was caught in multiple scandals. That had all blown over by the time Heath came of age—or so he thought. But it seemed the sins of the fathers do pass on to the sons. Heath had come to Fischer-Thurman for a job after a corporate scandal that, though innocent, he’d been implicated in. As much as Heath hated the Thurman family’s arrogance and blind distrust of anyone who didn’t make six-figure incomes, he knew a job there was the only chance he had to erase his father’s shame. He’d keep this job, have something new on his resume, grow a new reputation, get a job someplace else. Rebuild.

  And now look at him, come to rest in a Romanian hotel room perfumed by sixty years of cheap cigarettes smoked under its low ceiling.

  His heart flipped sickeningly in his chest cavity but Heath forced calm. He facial I.D’d his options:

  A.) Call the police. Face the consequences described by that golden tour-hussy.

  B.) Call the embassy. Face vague suggestions that he find a local way to handle the matter.

  C.) Handle the matter himself.

  The options appeared equally unpromising but not nearly as lurid as the fourth course which Heath found himself adopting. He grabbed a jacket, his wallet and passport, and headed outside. He was going to find that tour guide again and demand she help him. It was her ridiculous book anyway. All he had to do was find someone who knew where she lived.

  September lay sweetly on the mountainside and everyone but Heath appeared in the highest humor. He chose one of the many bars which opened onto the street, took a seat beside an enormous old peasant, and ordered a Coke. The bartender girl brought it to him without ice and Heath, too world-weary to request any, drank it warm. The familiar, tannic flavor soothed him. As the light faded, Heath watched passersby in the street, watched a bus jerk to a corner, make a five-point turn, and head back downhill after depositing its load of tourists.

  The giant man belched and exited the bar. Someone else plopped onto the cracked, red pleather seat just vacated and ordered one Coke, a pint of beer, and a pot of lemonade.

  Intrigued by the apparently boundless depth of the newcomer’s thirst, Heath shifted so he could see what sort of person it was. A boy; small, dark-eyed, dark-haired, pale-skinned. The child grinned frankly at Heath and spoke to him in Romanian.

  Despite his current ill temper, Heath felt the corner of his mouth slide into a half grin. He shook his head. “Nu stiu.”

  “Ahhhhh.” The boy’s tone husked and cracked in several places. His eyes danced. “American?”

  “Yeah. Dah.”

  Into the boy’s possession came the beer, the Coke, and the lemonade. He smacked his thin chest with a mannish fist. “Daniel.”

  “Heath.”

  Daniel’s nose wrinkled. “Heat?”

  “Heath-th.”

  “Heeeeeeeeeeat.” Daniel slurped his lemonade and shook his head, laughing. He babbled on in Romanian, sharing some story Heath was evidently meant to appreciate, as the boy would occasionally nudge him with his elbow.

  As the child spoke, a gypsy man entered the bar. Heath blinked as the bar’s neon lights rang off the Romani’s gilded presence. Gold ring on his finger, gold rings in his ears, a black leather jacket trimmed not with chrome in the American way, but unabashed gold. The gypsy swaggered over and clamped a hand over Daniel’s shoulder.

  Heath prickled a little at this. He felt protective, somehow, of the kid. This kid should have nothing to do with a man that experienced looking. The boy pushed the mug of beer into the man’s hands and hopped off the stool so he could have a seat.

  The newcomer leaned on the counter away from Heath. The gold studs of his jacket clinked sweetly against the counter. Absolute power emanated from him. Corrupt, absolutely, Heath thought, but a not completely unpleasant corruption, somehow. Fascinating in the way all wildly powerful men are fascinating, even if when one knows their power must end in disaster at some point. Somehow, he reminded Heath of the woman tour guide. Maybe it was all the gold. Either way, Heath grabbed his courage by the forelock.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you speak English? Engleza?”

  The gypsy turned slowly. “Dah.”

  “Do you? That’s good.” Heath put a shaking hand to his chest, suddenly nervous. “Heath Fischer.”

  “Flavian.”

  “That’s a nice name.”

  Flavian rippled back, draining his beer, clashing the glass onto the counter. “So what do you do, Heath Fischer? Why are you here?”

  Flavian looked more genie than man and with every movement of his curiously tattooed hands, Heath almost expected to be ensnared by some untoward sorcery.

  I’m sorry, sweet girl. I’ll get you. I promise.

  “I work in the film industry,” he answered.

  Flavian’s eyebrows buckled. “You are doing a movie at Peles?”

  “No. My boss and I were conducting research at Peles for a set design film project. The movie’s going to be filmed in New Zealand or someplace, I guess.”

  Flavian smiled. “Your boss, he is easily bored with staying in one place?”

  “She,” Heath corrected automatically, thinking of Maria and how apt Flavian’s question was as applied to her.

  “Ah, she.” A knowing grin, a subtle gesture for a refill of beer from the girl behind the counter. “This she, is she here at the bar?” Flavian leaned back to see down the seats past Heath.

  Heath beat on the counter with his empty Coke bottle. The glass thrummed. “She’s not here.”

  “You are leaving her alone in a strange place?” He made a wry, golden face. “Ohhhhh, is she one of those strong women?”

  At this question, Heath laughed outright. “In her own way. She’s a rare mix of spirit and sweetness and brains. And complete idiocy.”

  Flavian laughed too, baring an alarming and attractive smile. Heath wasn’t accustomed to being the less handsome man in the room. He was glad Maria wasn’t here to think the gypsy handsomer than himself.

  “So this girl. I’d like to meet this Mixy one,” Flavian said. “Where is she?”

  “Missing.”

  Flavian stilled. “She ran away?”

  “Well, I guess you could say that. She disappeared.”

  Daniel’s eager face peeked around Flavian’s shoulder. His eyes gleamed as he said something in Romanian.

  “Like a magic trick?” Flavian interpreted.

  “Yeah.” Heath raised his hands hopelessly. “Vanished. Right into a wall.”

  “Yeah?” Flavian laughed and shook his head. “Doamne, the things you can see after getting drunk.”

  Heath’s conscience bit at the nape of his neck. He’d gone too far, telling the Romanians about Maria. He should leave it here, let them think he’d been drunk and hallucinating, but he couldn’t.

  “Actually, hard as it is to believe, I was perfectly sober. It happened up there in the palace.” He breathed steadily through his nose, quelling the desire to smash his bottle against the counter edge and rage through his utter frustration with the world. “I’m looking for the tour guide at the palace. Do you know her?”

  Flavian squinted at him over the rim of his refilled beer stein. “We are having many, many guides at Peles, but I know a few of them. What is her name?”

  “I… I don’t know.” Incompetent, that’s what he was. “She appears to be Romani. Her eyes are… gold.”

  “Carlotta.”

  “You know her?�
�� Heath hadn’t meant to sound as excited and relieved as he felt.

  “Yeah. What is it you want with Carlotta?”

  “I want to make her help me find my boss.”

  “The Mixy one.”

  “Yes.”

  “How can Carlotta help when the Mixy one is gone? It isn’t Carlotta’s doing.”

  “Maria broke the bookcase, a door opened, and she stepped through,” Heath explained.

  “Oh, yeah.” Flavian nodded. “I’ve heard they have a secret staircase there.”

  Heath leaned in. “This wasn’t the same case.”

  “Wasn’t?”

  “Nope. This was the opposite wall. A wall four inches thick. But a passage opened. Poof! Like that. Then my boss vanished along with the book and the passage closed behind her. I know it’s crazy.”

  “So,” said Flavian.

  “So,” said Daniel.

  “So,” said Heath. “I guess…” he groped through the mist in his mind to find a solution that could be logically expressed, but the words that came to him were the words he’d forbidden himself to even think this whole afternoon. The words that made him look incompetent, childish, and more helpless than ever:

  “So I guess… it was… it has to have been… magic.”

  “Darling Itty.”

  Maria finished peeling the rind from an orange and looked up. The queen’s sweet face bloomed with tears as she reached across the table and squeezed Maria’s hand.

  “God has spared you to us. I can think of nothing else. Each time I try a new refrain it comes back to this and only this: Fi binecuvantat, Mariechen.”

  The family sat at table in the dining room, enjoying the final course of a summer supper. A dessert of grapefruit, half-peeled to look like blossoms, reposed on silver trays. The King reclined in a mahogany chair, if the slight relaxing of his spine could be counted as such. A cigar dangled between his resolute lips, at odds with the apparent immovability of its owner. Such a leisure piece clashed with his mien. Beyond the King’s shoulder, enormous mirrors reflected the family over and over again: an incandescent mother, a sober, thoughtful father, a daughter who was stranger and heir to them both. Reflections seeming to multiply into eternity down the corridors made by the mirrors and Maria felt she recognized less and less who those people were and what they did there, so quietly and strangely grouped.

  She twisted in her chair to view another angle and caught Ioan’s sardonic eye. He fluttered on the borderland of shadow beyond the table, pouring a glass of claret from a decanter. Quickly, she settled in her chair and began to pleat a napkin to save her fingers trembling.

  “May I ask something?” Her voice rang too loud for the confines of this costly room with its fine wood table polished to clarinet-black.

  The queen nodded. The king observed her yet without words, that imperturbable cigar lying in state.

  “What happened… to… to me?”

  No answer. Almost imperceptibly, Ioan rotated from the bar, glass in hand, and glided back to his seat. The queen’s skirts rustled. The king’s lips pursed around his cigar, then opened, and a wreath of fragrant smoke encircled him like another crown.

  “There was a sickness,” the queen sighed.

  “Then what?” Maria pressed.

  “You died,” the King curtly answered.

  Maria blushed at being spoken to thus. “And? How am I here now?”

  “You were not dead,” countered the queen. “You but slept.”

  “Well, you buried me.”

  “In boxes to let you grow, and inscribed what we believed above your tomb.” An insane hope brightened the queen’s sweet, wilted beauty. “ ‘Do not mourn. She is not dead but sleepeth.’ ”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor would you.” The king removed his cigar. His eyes claimed Maria’s and in them she sensed much confusion, much pain. A measure of agony the weight of which she could barely guess. “For your sleeping-death was not of natural make.”

  “What—”

  He cut her off with a brusque motion of a hand. “I do not know if in your modern age the world is more accepting of magic.”

  “Disney’s pretty cool about it,” Maria quipped, and immediately regretted the use of humor.

  The king—her father—raised his chin. Here was a man who weighed times and customs in his right hand and chose what he would. “Regardless, magic conducted your living death. A vengeful gypsy, a queen among her people.”

  Maria caught the end of a regal, wounded look from her mother. “A gypsy queen killed me?”

  “She was never a queen,” Queen Elisabeth spoke. Her tone wore a coronet inlaid with years of mistrust. “And she will never be.”

  “And she never would have been,” King Carol countered. He spread a frustrated hand on the tabletop.

  Ioan’s fork clinked at his plate. He murmured a near-silent apology. Maria watched the faintest flush of pink creep over his still, molded features stretched in a way that could have been a smile. What amused him so? And what caused this tension which passed with a kinetic frenzy between the king and queen?

  With a patience foreign to her, Maria kept these things for later. She picked a grapefruit from the platter and gently tore away one petal. This princess thing, you know, wasn’t too bad.

  When their fruit had been eaten and coffee sipped, the queen excused herself.

  “Come to me soon, Mariechen. Your father would speak with you.” She rested her gentle hand on Maria’s shoulder in passing.

  Supper began to sit unsafely in Maria’s stomach at the thought of being left alone with that sober, wood-faced king. He was her father but when had he yet showed the slightest warmth or love for her? Was he angry at her return? Did he hate the sight of her? Those years in foster care chalked a panicked, inaccurate score in the sudden blank of Maria’s thoughts: not smart enough, not pretty enough, not young enough, not old enough. People always had a reason you were not enough to let you stay. Perhaps her father, even now, would not want or allow her to stay.

  The queen’s footsteps pattered away toward the sanctuary of her colored-glass music room. Maria wanted to follow her instead of remaining here with a man no gladder in face than the peculiar Eastern rooms were in decoration, but he was her father and, she mused, her king.

  Many long, unripe moments of silence. Maria kept her eyes on the empty table and waited.

  “Itty, my… my child.”

  Were those—tears in his voice? Maria’s eyes snapped to the king’s countenance. Moisture gleamed in the corners of his eyes. Candlelight sparked on something wet in his beard. Ioan, as usual, kept to his own business across the table. His long, waxen hands fingered the stem of his glass and his lips spread in that non-smile.

  King Carol rubbed his thumb against his forefinger. His eyes spoke things she didn’t want to guess at, they were so bare and heavy. “Come here, child.”

  She hesitated a moment, then scooted back from the table and came to him, hands folded in her skirts. Her father put a hand to her cheek. Metal kiss from his signet ring, trembling flesh eager, yet cool against her face. She hardly dared to do so, but Maria raised a hand and tentatively covered her father’s with it.

  “Doamne, I’ve missed you,” the king softly swore.

  It was just a flash of a moment, hardly seen before he shuttered up again behind his unfathomable face. But Maria’s heart lurched happily as she nestled her hand again in her voluminous skirts. No one had ever spoken to her in that intense, immediate way. Somehow it reminded her of Heath—the same slow, slumbering fire unleashed all at once before growling back to sleep.

  “I am so pleased to have you back, Maria,” her father continued. “I am not a man of gentle or numerous words, but that does not mean I lack love for you. I love quietly, by my loyal service and long peace. This is something which confuses your mother.”

  “She thinks you do not love her?” The moment Maria said it, she regretted having asked so personal a question of a man w
ho had already bent knee before her.

  But the king only stood and managed a smile which wobbled on one side from lack of use. Maria thought it a darling expression, and her heart warmed even as he bade her goodnight and requested Ioan escort her to her mother, the queen.

  Presently, Ioan stood and slid to her side. Everything about him chilled Maria but even she could not deny his beauty. He seemed like a white moth to her, ever fluttering in darkness, flirting with the light. What harm could he do her? If her father trusted the man he must not be a bad sort. Not likely he could have helped being born with a bloodless face and would she hate him for that?

  Ioan bowed and crooked his arm. “Will you come, princess?”

  “Sure.” She slid her arm into his.

  He pressed her against his side as they exited the dining room and led a leisurely pace down the hall. When they reached the great hall, Maria thought her arm had spent long enough in the secretary’s possession. She extracted herself and clasped her hands behind her back.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” she remarked. “Why don’t they roll back the ceiling?”

  Ioan pinched off a smile for her. “If Your Highness wishes it, I am sure an exhibition of that wonder can be arranged, though it is generally kept for parties and guests of state.”

  Leave it to that bleached, brittle man to make her feel like an idiot for asking. All Maria’s black dislike pooled again in her skull. “Yeah, because I’m not important or anything.”

  “No.”

  His answer surprised her. “Yeah, I mean, I’m just the missing princess come home. Not like that’s worth celebrating or anything.”

  Ioan did not answer right away and when he did, his bland disgust slapped limply at her: “You say you are the missing princess.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you?”

  “You don’t believe me, do you.”

  “I watched you die. I watched them bury you.” A helpless anger swayed his body. “I watched them carefully as they mourned your passing, to be sure they did not mourn themselves into their own graves. It was finished.”

  “The king and queen know I am their daughter,” Maria sad. “Why would you doubt them?”