by Paul Park
One step, Pieter knew, was all he was allowed. Now he stood still and let the man come closer. Dysart kept the cigar in the corner of his mouth away from his good eye, so the smoke wouldn’t bother it. He kept his lighter in his right hand, the gun in his left. Pieter smelled the burning tobacco as he came close.
And as he stepped forward over the uneven ground, the horse grew restive and unquiet. It jerked sideways suddenly and laid its ears back. The reins, which had been looped around a broken branch, came free.
At two meters’ distance, Dysart paused again. He held up the lighter, flicked the flame alive. I’m a dead man, thought Pieter, and he wondered what his old friend Sasha Prochenko might have accomplished at that moment, what words he’d have spoken, because this was the time for words.
But he said nothing. If Dysart was surprised to see him, he gave no sign. “The Chevalier de Graz,” he said. “Still at his post.”
Doubtless some words could be spoken. They were old comrades, after all. At that moment it was a liability. Prochenko would have said something. I’m a dead man, Pieter thought again.
When Dysart fired the gun, Pieter leaped backward and to the right, away from the man’s good eye. He tripped and sprawled over the ground. His head fell back, and he felt rather than saw what happened next, the horse surge forward into the line of the second shot, blocking the way. Then without thinking Peter struggled backward, scuttling like a crab through the sapling stumps until he flopped over in the tall weeds and scrambled up the slope. Behind him there were shots and the horse screaming. When Pieter looked back through the trees, he saw the horse was down, kicking and screaming—a terrible sound that Pieter suddenly remembered in his guts, from Nova Zagora and many other places long ago. A circle of furious movement in the high weeds—he hoped Dysart had the decency to put the beast out of its pain. The man stood below him with his feet apart, and a shot rattled through the trees near Pieter’s head.
* * *
IN THE SECRET world Miranda heard the crack of the gun. She thought a branch had snapped in the sterile wood behind her.
She didn’t turn around. She stood on the duckboard between the rows of little houses, peering in again at Rachel’s image. The creature inside the house was lifeless, motionless, grotesque, yet even so Miranda felt a surge of nostalgic yearning that was like nausea. Was this her private, hidden world, populated with cold, chalk-white figures from her vanished life? Or else some kind of obstacle or test, a scrim she had to tear through to proceed? Or were these warehouse sheds, where Aunt Aegypta kept her broken puppets? She’d come back here after glancing into each small house. Each had contained a frozen figure from Miranda’s life—teachers, people she had known; she couldn’t stand it. Turning away, she hurried down the long duckboard, desperate to see a living creature.
At the end, she paused. The trees were broken around a strange, ruined structure that seemed to have been excavated from the stony ground—an archaeological dig, perhaps. More lifeless ruins: She put her fist against her chest, against her beating heart. But then with a spasm of relief she saw her horse, her own horse, Telemonian Ajax, whom she’d ridden to Braila and across the plain. He pricked his ears forward as he came toward her out of the wood, moving with a smooth, silky gait that was not like him. He made no noise in the undergrowth among those cold trees. But he was happy to see her, she could tell, although he didn’t neigh or nicker. He reached out his big head as he walked toward her, and she ran to meet him and put her arms around his neck. “Good boy,” she said, “Good boy,” and wished there was something to give him, some piece of sugar or an apple in this terrible place. In the real world, she wondered, who was caring for him now? Who was currying him down and combing out his tail? Not that pig Dysart or the man with the black moustache. She had left Ajax in a stable by the Brancoveanu Palace, his first night in a stall.
She burrowed her face into his black coat, hoping to liberate some smell, some rough stink of sweat, but there was nothing. Nor did he make a sound. Miranda knew there was something wrong, knew that the real horse was elsewhere. But even so she took a comfort from his black cold mass, and he was moving forward, urging her forward, so she swung herself up bareback, holding onto his mane. His steps were smooth and noiseless as he carried her up out of that place, and up a long hill in the blue, strange twilight. And she felt she was ascending out of the low, stale air into a more rarefied place: Surely this was the glass hill from the fairy tale. Without the black horse she would never have been able to climb so high. She would have slid down over and over. Surely sparks rang from his hooves.
And at the top stood the castle of the princess in the fairy tale. It was the little town in Massachusetts where the princess had once lived, and she rode silently down Main Street under a black, summer sky. And she saw no one, and there were no lights in the windows until she reached the castle walls, and dismounted in the front yard of her old house near the college green, with gray clapboards and high dormers and bright windows and red shutters, or “raspberry,” as her mother had called them. She slid down off the horse, walked forward a few steps, and when she turned around Ajax was gone. He had moved away under the trees. Miranda climbed up the porch steps, and the door was open.
“Rachel,” she cried out. “Stanley!” Every light was on, but no one was home. And the house was a terrible mess, she saw as she moved from room to room downstairs. More than any other single thing this was upsetting, because Rachel had always been so fastidious a housekeeper. But maybe no one had lived here for many years; the rugs were stiff with muddy footprints, the upholstery streaked with grime. Windows were broken. And there were vermin in the house, fleas hopping on the cushions, roaches burrowing in the breakfast cereal that was spilled over the kitchen floor. In every corner there were corpses of dead roaches and ladybugs—Rachel always had had a peculiar horror of roaches, which were rare in Berkshire County.
Rats and squirrels scuttled in the walls. Everywhere there were the droppings of small animals. Mice had chewed the old newspapers into shreds. All the kitchen cabinets were open. The cleaning cabinet was open, and Miranda seized one of the brooms. “Rachel,” she cried. “Stanley!” No one was home.
Overcome with tears, she started to sweep all the spilled food into the center of the kitchen floor. If Rachel could see me, she thought. But where could she start? Pursued by a sudden loneliness, she ran up the stairs to the third floor, to her room, which was completely trashed. Never had it ever looked like this, Miranda thought, standing on the threshold, even when she had been trying to piss Rachel off. All her clothes were pulled out, flung around. The bed was ripped down to the springs. The books were pulled out of their shelves. They lay in a heap in the middle of the floor. Miranda bent down to pick up one broken-backed volume, The Essential History. Some of the pages were ripped out.
But how was it that the book still existed? Kevin Markasev had destroyed it in a fire on Christmas Hill, had burned it up and brought her into the real world, her and Peter and Andromeda. The book had contained a whole false life, and now here it was again, or some version of it. Still, it cheered her to hold it in her hand.
She slid it into her pants pocket. Then with the broom held like a weapon, she descended the stairs again, because she’d heard some movement in the dining room. And on the middle of the table on a filthy doily sat a cat, a big, ripped-up, orange marmalade. Furious suddenly, because she remembered the campaigns Rachel had conducted against her own kitten, Frosty, before she was hit by a car, Miranda struck out with the broom. But the cat raised up its paw to show its claws. It bared its teeth. One incisor had been broken off.
Angry beyond reason, Miranda grabbed the creature up with her bare hands. Its coat was greasy and matted, and it was hard for her to keep her grip because it twisted and scratched and bit. But Miranda had it by the ribs, and she took it to the front door and threw it down the steps. Then she went back to the cleaning cabinet to find some hydrogen peroxide to wash out her cuts; her hands were all scratc
hed up. But when she disturbed the bottles and spray cans at the back of the cabinet, the roaches crawled out and she had to back away.
There, next to the peroxide was a silver canister. Once they’d rented out their house one summer and gone to Colorado. When they returned, they found the place infested with fleas, and Rachel had set off some bombs, one in each room on the first floor. That had done the trick.
Now there was one left at least. Miranda pulled it out and set it upright on the linoleum. The spray nozzle was still intact.
* * *
IN HER GARRET in the People’s Palace, the Baroness Ceausescu was brushing her hair. She was humming softly to herself. For the moment there was nothing to be done. Radu Luckacz would bring the girl to her. He would bring her Miranda Popescu. She glanced into her handheld mirror, frowned, made a face, and put it down. She put down the brush and comb and climbed onto her iron bed where she lay looking up at the ceiling, arms stretched to each side.
* * *
SHE TURNED OVER and was instantly asleep. In Ratisbon the elector was sitting by the window, rubbing at an itch in his sore and swollen throat. He sat looking out over his garden where policemen were digging by torchlight in the rhododendron bed.
He had almost choked to death. But the poisoned nut in his throat had come dislodged when he fell. Or else pounding on his back, Lieutenant-Major Lubomyr had managed to dislodge it. Since yesterday they had been searching for his body.
Soon they would find it, the elector had no doubt. In the meantime there was no reason to be impolite. With him were two detectives from the military police. He had served them coffee with his own hands, and talked to them about political developments as they unfolded. That day the government had suffered losses, preparatory to the general election. There was talk of a vote of no confidence, as several smaller parties were abandoning the coalition. Worst of all, three ministries had been compromised. The foreign secretary had been struck by an automobile while he was crossing the street, and was thought unlikely to recover. The minister for war had shot himself while cleaning his own gun, after a public accusation of corruption—all on the same night. Worst of all, General von Stoessel’s body had been discovered in a homosexual brothel in Kaunas, five hundred kilometers from the front line.
“Tell me,” murmured the elector. “In what condition was the body found? Had he been mauled or attacked in any way? Perhaps by a wild animal—were there tooth marks or claw marks in his flesh?”
“Please?”
They thought he was insane. How could such fools call themselves detectives? They were handsome, dark young men, and they stood in their overcoats sipping coffee from his beautiful Limoges cups. They had not taken their gloves off. In the afternoon he’d shown them through the house, the princess’s apartments, empty now—“You see I have nothing to hide!”
“So you live here by yourself?”
“As you see.”
“We had reports of a servant.”
“He has left me.”
“Ah.”
They were idiots, and soon they would be dead. They stood behind him looking out into the garden where it had started to rain. The diggers were close now. Lubomyr was under the pear tree in a dignified spot.
The elector leaned forward, and with his thumb and forefinger he plucked a powdered ball from the bowl on the table. For the tenth time he examined it. He had thought it was a macadamia nut and almost choked on it. But it was larger than a nut, and covered with an anesthetic powder that had numbed his throat. In other words, a piece of sorcery. Who was responsible? he asked himself for the tenth time. Lubomyr himself, he’d thought as he was gasping for breath, but now he wasn’t sure. More likely the ball had come out of Roumania, from one of the three women there who had destroyed his life.
Now he regretted his impulsiveness. But in one way things were better and clearer since Lubomyr’s death. His prisoners were gone, and there was nothing now to keep him here where he was not appreciated, where his patriotic contributions were ignored. Behind him the men were discussing the possible cease-fire. “Why not?” one asked. “Now the tsar will give us what we want. We were fighting for the German citizens of Lithuania. Is it not so?”
They disgusted him, their smooth faces and dark sideburns. Doubtless they took him for some strange variety of circus freak. A sick, demented man in an old house, a murderer, perhaps. Well, they would see. Dr. Theodore had done for Lubomyr, but Dr. Theodore had gone away. They’d find the elector was not yet too frail to do his own work.
Near him in the shadows stood a suit of armor. It had belonged to the first Elector of Ratisbon, who had worn it at the siege of Bern. The shield was decorated with the symbol of his house, a coiled serpent. Inlaid in Damascus steel, the figure seemed more like a dragon or a centipede in this incarnation, with numerous small feet and hands. It had a human face.
The policemen had started underneath the pear tree where the dirt had been disturbed. The elector squeezed the soft, white ball between his fingers. It had a poison on it, a salted dust that had numbed his throat and made it impossible for him to swallow, a dust that had almost killed him. Surely it had been reasonable at that moment to convince himself that Lubomyr was an assassin, had been directed by the Office of Domestic Security to dispose of him. And even if before he died, Lubomyr had made a case for his own innocence, still the elector, stung by the ingratitude of his own government, had made no effort to fight against the enemies of Germany as they’d come thieving in the night. Now he was recovered, though.
But he would miss this room! Everything here, every piece of furniture or art, he had chosen for its healing or restorative properties. Each object was a treasure, a source of ongoing delight. But they would be hard to carry with him, impossible to find again. Under his stool he’d put his small valise, packed the night before. Some money, a change of clothes, some books, and of course the passport he had taken from Lubomyr’s baggage, filled out in his name and signed by the foreign secretary, now in a coma in a Berlin hospital—it didn’t matter. By dawn he’d be across the border, one way or the other. The war was ending here, but he would bring it to Roumania.
One of the policemen in the garden now stood up and laid aside his spade. He turned toward the window, made a sign, and it was time. The Elector of Ratisbon picked up his demitasse, sipped from it, and laid it down. At the same time he placed the poisoned nut in the pocket of his vest, removing the silver derringer he ordinarily kept there.
* * *
PIETER DE GRAZ stood under a beech tree, his hand against its silver trunk. Below him in the dell, Captain Dysart stood over the body of the black horse, quiet now at last. He was reloading his revolver. Now he snapped it shut.
For a while he stood peering into the darkness, listening for movement, but Pieter didn’t move. He supposed he could have run away into the deeper woods, and Dysart wouldn’t even have bothered to shoot. But Pieter wanted to keep the man in the open where he could see him in the half-light, in his white shirt, pale pants. He wanted to be the one who chased him as he moved. And so he waited for Dysart to turn around and climb out of the dell, up the west side toward the cottage in the pine trees where Miranda lay.
Now immediately Pieter realized his mistake. He should have run into the trees, drawn the man away. Once at the cottage there was no predicting what he’d do. He wasn’t strong enough to carry Miranda out, not with Pieter waiting. Surely the horse had been valuable to him, vital to his plan. Ludu Rat-tooth’s life was not as valuable, nor Miranda’s either. Luckacz would pay a thousand marks if she wasn’t harmed. But doubtless he’d pay something for her corpse.
Fearing the worst, Pieter blundered through the trees. But as he moved, he remembered some of the habits he had learned in Berkshire County when he was a boy. Soon he was on all fours, pulling himself along under the briars—he could move quicker that way. He climbed over the brook and paused to drink. In three minutes he was at the cottage, but Dysart had preceded him.
He hadn�
��t heard any shots, but as he came to the window, Pieter could see that Ludu Rat-tooth had run away. Dysart was alone in the little house, bending over Miranda where she lay near the hearth. He had the pistol in his left hand. Its octagonal barrel was pointed to the ceiling. The light shone on the intricate pattern of gold and silver briars, chasing each other over the dull, blue, tempered steel. When de Graz had made his oath to Frederick Schenck von Schenck, that same long-barreled revolver had lain on his bedside table.
With his right hand, Captain Dysart was searching in Miranda’s shirt, causing her to groan and move. In the darkness outside the hut, Pieter squeezed his wounded hand into a fist, feeling the inflamed flesh under the bandage. What was the man doing? No, he was searching for something.
“Come inside,” he said in English. “I know you’re there.”
Pieter stood outside the wooden wall twenty feet away, near the broken corner of the roof. “Don’t worry,” Dysart said. “I give you my word. I’ve never broken it.”
In a niche of the stone chimney, serving as a mantel, Pieter saw the Gypsy’s images of King Jesus and Queen Mary Magdalene. Traces of oatmeal clung to their painted faces. “She had two purses,” Dysart went on. “One was a drawstring leather bag, or cloth, I think. The other was a beaded purse for ladies. One was full of Moldovan double-eagles, the other with thousand-drachma pieces. She didn’t even know how much money she had.”
He pulled the quilt from Miranda’s body. “Damn it, where is it? Have you seen it?”
“No,” Pieter said, and took a step beside the wall.
“I looked for it before. Then I found the general’s gun. Isn’t it a beauty? Don’t worry. I give my word.”
He had risen now and turned to stand facing the window. Pieter stepped away out of sight and put his back to the bark-covered planks. There was a knothole that gleamed red and yellow near his hand, and he wondered whether it was visible from the inside. He didn’t want to get drilled though the eye as he stooped to take a peek.
