by Paul Park
She spoke in English, and he answered in French: “C’est loin?”
“Not far.”
They walked on south. In time they saw the station on ahead, the four long platforms and the high gas lampposts, under whose light they could see black-coated janissaries and dogs.
But the train was there too, halted for the late dinner hour, taking on coal for the trip north. The long black steam engine led a row of silver passenger cars. Beside them men and women smoked and talked, while the guards walked back and forth.
“Mejid Pasha,” whispered Andromeda.
“Vous êtes fou.”
Folle, Andromeda corrected in her own mind. But she said nothing. It didn’t matter. They stood in the cinders of the track, in the darkness under the half moon.
The engine was the second in the line. In front of it there stood a gray, closed, metal car without windows or markings. Sometimes, Andromeda knew, the trains from Constantinople would push empty freight cars in front of them in case Bulgar bandits had mined the track near the frontier. But this was different.
The track went round a curve north of the station. On the outside of the curve it ran along a raised embankment. De Graz and Andromeda now descended part of this steep small hill, so they could approach the station out of sight. The gray car protruded beyond the station platform, outside the circle of gaslight into the dark.
Now on their hands and knees, pulling themselves along the dry bushes, they came along the outside of the curve. Gouts of steam rose to the sky, and they were spattered in the hot spray. Presently they heard the long hiss. The platform was hidden by the arc of the train as they approached the mysterious gray car. Now in this one place they could stand upright, hidden even from the headlights of the engine, which shined through the struts of the car. They could see the driver’s compartment, still empty. And it was impossible to imagine they could climb upon the car itself, under the driver’s nose. And it was impossible to think they could find their way among the brightly-lit passenger cars. Surely the dogs would smell her, Andromeda thought, would smell her scent.
She put her hand to the smooth gray metal. Above her was a curved, padlocked door. Squatting down, she looked into the carriage’s underside. Once she’d seen a movie about people escaping from the Nazis—yes, it was just possible. Between the track and the recessed bottom of the car there was a distance of about three feet. Above the system of axles and struts there were steel spreaders at intervals, and between them a woven metal grille. These spreaders were not structural to the car, but they supported five oblong blocks of cork. Lying on her back, Andromeda dug her fingers into them. They were saturated with cold water.
“Help me,” she whispered. But de Graz did nothing. He squatted on his heels on the railroad tie, peering into the greasy dirty belly of the carriage as she worked at the cork blocks.
“Get underneath here,” she whispered, afraid that the engine driver would soon take his seat. The headlamps of the train shed a harsh, indirect light, which shone on both sides of the track. The cork blocks were made to be removed; you could slide them inch by inch off the edge of the grille until they fell—greasy, sodden, heavy—to the cinders.
“Slide them down,” she whispered. But de Graz did nothing, and so she pushed them off herself. Instead of rolling down the embankment, they lay in the debris that lined the outside of the curving track. Now there was a space between the spreaders and the cold roof, and the grille would hold them. Above, a steel grating was set into the bottom of the car. Water leaked from it.
She and de Graz climbed into that space and lay on their stomachs end to end, peering down at the track two feet below them. They lay there a long time. Once they saw a man’s boots as he walked around the car. Andromeda thought he’d have to notice the discarded blocks. But there was enough anonymous junk along the track to hide them.
Toward midnight, with much screeching and hooting, the train started to move. Then, and in the next hours, Andromeda realized that the movie she had seen had not in any way tried to reproduce the experience of riding on the underside of a railway train. Thrown up from the track, chunks of cinder pelted them. And they were soaked with the cold water from the grate. Nor was it quiet under there. Nor was her position a comfortable one. She listened to the pounding shudder of the track for several hours, the screech of the bare wheels as they went around a turn. The ties were like a ladder below her, and she was clattering up the ladder to Roumania, Roumania, Roumania.
Finally they slowed and stopped. Andromeda expected they had reached a station, but there were no lights and no sign of a platform. Even the headlamps of the train for a moment were extinguished. Andromeda was in the throbbing, quiet darkness. “This really sucks,” she whispered.
But when she turned her head she saw de Graz was gone. Above where he had been, the drainage grate into the car had been removed. Maybe this whole way he’d been working on it, and now she saw he’d managed to pry it from its bracket. It lay on the metal grille, a rectangle maybe eighteen inches square—enough to climb through.
She slid backward and then poked herself up through the hole just as the train started to move again. It lurched forward as she pulled herself up into a cold black space. “Are you there?” she whispered.
“Oui.”
She sat down on the wet metal floor. Now the headlamps were lit again, and the only light came from the square hole. After a moment her eyes adjusted, and she saw de Graz standing near her, holding onto a bracket as the train went around a curve, examining a kerosene lantern that was set into the wall.
“I’ve got a match,” she said.
There was a box of phaetons in her pocket, which she gave to him. And when he lit a match, she reached back to cool her hand against one of several refrigerator-sized blocks of ice, tied together in the center of the car.
The metal floor was wet, but she didn’t stand up. She sat next to the square hole and watched the track go by. There was a small open space around the blocks of ice, illuminated by the kerosene lantern. But most of their car was taken up with freight: boxes of fruit, wooden crates of jars and bottles.
The light shuddered to the rhythm of the train. It fell on Pieter de Graz in his wrestler’s clothes. She found herself staring up at him and he stared back. There was nothing else to do.
She cleared her throat. “Hey, you looked really cute out there without your pants.”
She was talking about him in the wrestler’s pitch, grappling naked with the Spanish fighter. She said it to goad him, but was not prepared for the ferocious look he gave her. His face, contorted with disgust, bore no resemblance to the face he’d had that evening when she’d first seen him at the pitch. Every feature was the same, but she saw no trace of Peter Gross.
“So are you still in there at all?” she asked, but he said nothing.
She persevered. “Do you still remember how Cardillo kicked you out of music class? I thought that was so cool. You just sat there with your eyes closed, humming that song, and you wouldn’t look at him. Or what about the next time when you had that fight with Kevin Markasev?”
“Je me souviens—I remember.”
“And Nova Zagora?”
“Je me souviens.”
And that seemed to be it in terms of conversation. He swayed above her with his hand on the bracket, hour after hour. She leaned her back against a crate of pickled mangoes, stretched her legs out. In her pocket she found a packet of cigarettes, but every single one of them was spindled and damp. Hoping they would dry out, she held two of the best ones in her cupped palm. She put her head back, and even though it was cold in that cramped space, she found herself nodding to sleep. Once she looked up to see de Graz eating fish eggs out of a bottle. His lips were smeared with black.
“Vous avez faim?” he asked. But she wasn’t hungry. She felt sick to her stomach in a way she recognized.
III
The Secret World
14
The House on Spatarul
IN BUCHAREST ON that same night, Nicola Ceausescu had left the People’s Palace by a servant’s door. She knew of the Hephaestion’s departure from Constantinople, though there were yet many hours before it crossed the border. She’d arranged for Jean-Baptiste to meet it at the Gara de Nord, and to supervise in secret the unloading of her crates.
What was in them, she scarcely knew. Something deadly and important that had changed the politics of northern Africa. Some chemical or virus that had been developed by important scientists, and not a conjurer among them. Yet their descriptions of its properties suggested conjuring, as well as a slow, long-lived poison that could contaminate an entire city—that was the weapon she would use against the potato-eaters in Berlin! That was the weapon she would use against the Elector of Ratisbon, whose skill as an alchemist had blocked every attack out of the hidden world.
In any case she had not yet found time for much research! Jean-Baptiste had seen to the details. Everything would be all right. The Abyssinian technician would show her what to do. Jean-Baptiste would find a hotel for him; Radu Luckacz was away from town, she’d made sure of that! And even though she knew it was important to maintain appearances, still she had canceled her evening performance, a reading of Euripides she had prepared for a small audience at the National Theatre.
Over the past year she’d considered returning to the stage after an absence of two decades. This was her first attempt in that direction—it was not even a proper performance! Anxious beyond reason, after supper she resolved to walk the cobblestoned streets by herself, in her guardsman’s uniform and cape. She was hoping to relax herself, calm her nerves, find comfort from an indirect communication with her people, and visit Kevin Markasev in the Strada Spatarul.
This was the boy who had wandered onto her doorstep in Cluj, the boy she’d sent to fetch Miranda Popescu out of Massachusetts. This was the boy who’d been arrested for the murder of a German officer in the first days of the occupation—close to the wall that runs the length of the Calea Academei, she reached out her left hand and scraped it along the bricks. As always when she found the halfway point between the palace and the comfortable house she had provided for him, a surge of guilt came over her and made her weak, made her grasp at the coarse wall for support. Surely she was an evil woman who would get what she deserved. But no—wasn’t she a loving mother to her people, at least as far as the potato-eaters had allowed? Hadn’t she rescued her country from Zelea Codreanu the vampire? Even his corpse had not been found.
Waves of hot and cold came over her as she dug her knuckles into the wall. She would make the Germans pay for stealing her son.
But even as she surrendered to them, she realized these feelings were an indulgence, and they grew and thrived on idleness. Since the beginning of the eastern campaign the German government had dropped all pretenses. Official documents were now prepared for her signature by the Committee for Roumanian Affairs. The baroness had no responsibilities except to agonize and fret, and to reproach herself for the sake of Kevin Markasev.
But surely she was blameless there too, because she’d saved his life! If not for her, doubtless he would have been executed or imprisoned for the murder of Sergeant-Colonel Boris Blum outside the Palace Hotel. And if she still held him in a prison of her own, surely it was only to protect him.
Alchemists and conjurers require hostages to keep them strong, the baroness knew or thought she knew. Imprisoning another soul was like keeping money in a bank account. Scientists had proved this. Her husband had proved it, drawing on the ancient knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus. She had studied the passage in her husband’s notebook, and it was true. The Elector of Ratisbon kept her son and Clara Brancoveanu prisoners in his house. And she had Kevin Markasev.
That night as she approached the house on Spatarul, the baroness went over the justifications in her mind, which was her constant habit. It is an artist’s challenge to pick out of the chaos of life the random, subtle pattern of fate. She approached this task as she did everything, with creative skill. But because part of her greatness as an artist came out of her unrelenting honesty and pitiless self-examination, she returned again and again to the same facts and was not satisfied.
She was dressed in a guardsman’s uniform. Her boots made a clapping noise on the new stones. As she turned among the comfortable houses of the Strada Doamnei, she kept away from the streetlights. There were carriages in the road, men and women returning home from the theaters and restaurants of the old town. Instinctively the baroness took her hand out of her pocket where she had been fingering her tourmaline, Kepler’s Eye. It was the source of her people’s love, but she didn’t want to feel their adoration at that moment. She wanted to pass unperceived.
That night she was depressed and restless because no matter how she tried to manipulate and invent, Radu Luckacz had too grandiose a part in the third act of her play.
This was the project she’d been working on, toward which the reading from Euripides was just a feint. The title of it was The Tourmaline. Except for the music and the songs she had not yet written a line, but on long walks at nighttime she brooded over every scene—there was no problem with the first two acts. In her mind they were complete. The curtain would open on a village in the mountains, a young girl born in poverty. One day, standing in the cold stable with a bucket of milk, a waking dream occurs to her, a vision of herself. And because she drops the bucket, she is afraid of being beaten. She runs away to Bucharest and lives there in deserted buildings and railway sidings. She does a thousand disgusting things to stay alive. But because some talents are so great they cannot be broken, and because some characters are refined by suffering, by the time she is a woman she is famous in the theaters of the capital and abroad. She chooses to marry the deputy prime minister of Roumania, a hero who has saved his country from the Germans and the treachery of a half-German general. She retires from the stage. The gods and goddesses give her a child.
The second act is darker, minor-keyed. The evidence against von Schenck was forged, as it turns out, invented by her husband, a jealous old man now driven mad by guilt. Desperate to find purity, he beggars himself with alchemical research and writes new laws against political and racial corruption. The victim of one of these is his own son. Wrongly convinced the boy is illegitimate, he has him diagnosed and interned. Bankrupt, broken by remorse, he commits suicide and leaves his wife alone.
Oh, this was work she could be proud of, she thought—an oratorio or else an opera, though perhaps there would be intervals of dancing. By the end of the second act her fortunes will have come full circle. Chased from her home, she lives in the streets again, pursued by unjust enemies—the Empress of Roumania, a German elector, and von Schenck’s daughter. All she has to protect herself is her own wit and courage and a miraculous jewel. As the curtain falls, and the police swarm to arrest her on a trumped-up charge, and as German troops march through the streets of her beloved city, she discovers one more thing: her destiny, at last!
In front of her a group of officers came down the flagstone walk, laughing and chatting and smoking cigars. Afraid of being greeted or accosted, the baroness crossed the street and waited in the mouth of an alley between two houses.
The flaw in the plot, she knew, was in the final act, and it wasn’t just because the actual events were not complete. But the trajectory and shape had already gone wrong, though there remained two obvious contingencies. First, it was possible this drama was a tragedy, and that she herself was the tragic heroine, undone at the moment of triumph by her mistakes and sins. Oh, and if this were so, what a slaughter she would leave upon the stage!
But it was also possible that she would find a way to reassert herself, that she would chase the potato-eaters from her country and rule wisely and compassionately over Great Roumania. That she would become the white tyger not just in name. And even if she died in accomplishing this, the curtain would still fall on a crescendo of hope and love and the thanks of her joyful people.
So in
either case it was right for the first half of the act to be muted and doubtful. All that would change with the arrival of the Hephaestion at the Gara de Nord. All that would change when she had the weapon in her hand, the thunderbolt that she had purchased from the Abyssinians—a mineral so poisonous that it had to be transported in lead-lined cylinders, as Jean-Baptiste had explained.
This was her experiment, a new weapon for a new age. And she needed a new weapon. The Elector of Ratisbon had thwarted all the conjuring she had attempted at long range over the German border. Still he was protecting his own country, as she would protect hers with this new slow-moving poison, as effective as a curse.
Radu Luckacz didn’t know anything about it. There was a lot she’d hidden from him. She didn’t trust him not because he was unfaithful, but because he had usurped her place at the center of the drama, at least in the final act. At least so far. And her cruelty to Kevin Markasev, a boy who loved her, also was a difficulty, though it could be explained.
Here was the plot of the last act, as far as she had sketched it out: Domnul Luckacz was a police detective in District Station Number Three off the Elysian Fields, on that night in early spring when she had been arrested. This was when German soldiers were first loose in the city. She had been apprehended by a Hanoverian officer and then turned over to the Roumanian police. As it happened (and this was the coincidence necessary to all dramatic plots, to intimate the hidden role of fate), Kevin Markasev was being questioned at the same station after the death of Sergeant-Colonel Blum, who had been shot outside the revolving doors of his hotel.
Alone in her prison cell, Nicola Ceausescu feels the thrilling presence of two men who adore her. She hears the boy’s voice in the next room. The tourmaline vibrates in her hand. And it was true—when Radu Luckacz saw her that night, she begged for the boy’s life. How could she not? She was to blame for his predicament. It was she who had hypnotized him, given him the gun to use against the Elector of Ratisbon, also a guest at the Athenée Palace Hotel. And it was not her fault that the idiot boy had ended up shooting the wrong man!
