The Carnival of Curiosities (Matt Drake Book 27)

by David Leadbeater

  “I’ve often wondered about magic and escape artist tricks,” Dahl said. “And how they’re done.”

  “I’ll explain some of that,” Cam said. “But that night my father offered to show the trick to Anyana, and to let her perform it under instruction. She was young, only eighteen, and knew very little of the feuds. Hagi prefers not to involve his sons and daughters in dark business, whereas my father believes the opposite, that they were born only to help.”

  Cam took a deep breath, then continued: “Anyana entered the water tank whilst her boyfriend watched. My father then drowned her in front of him. Once that was done, he killed her boyfriend and left their bodies on the site of the Carnival once it had departed, deliberately stoking the Hagis to war. That is the kind of man he is. Seeing the death of an eighteen-year-old girl with her whole life before her as a means to an end.”

  “We’ve dealt with worse, I guess,” Alicia said. “We’ll deal with him. Shall we tell the others to meet us in Romania?”

  Cam looked away as Dahl and Shaw nodded. Alicia could tell he was emotional. She stood up, walked over, and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “You’re with us now,” she said. “This is what we do.”

  “And the dangerous president?”

  “He’s going nowhere. He can wait a few more days. Fate will bring us back around to deal with President Lacey very soon.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Marko Lupei wasn’t done with his sons and daughters just yet. The hardest shot for them to take was still to come.

  A loud and forceful gust of wind stilled his words for a long moment. A blast of air swept through the campfire, driving the flames this way and that, shooting demonic sparks onto cold grass and warm clothing, forcing his children to look away from the heart of the fire.

  It was a fitting moment. In the deepest dark, with a face wreathed in flame and surrounded by sparks, Lupei delivered his cruelest instruction.

  “Drink your vodka,” he said. “And heed me now. This is for you, Oana and Alba.” He waited for his daughters to give him their full attention. “In the coming war, military help may not be enough. And I do not want to put all my eggs in one basket. I do not trust Dumitrescu enough to pull out all the stops and give me everything that I need. So, with that in mind, I have decided to marry you into the clans Grotsu and Balan.”

  He waited for the expected explosion and it came quickly.

  “What? Tată, you can’t,” Alba blurted.

  “I will not be traded like an animal,” Oana said. “And I certainly won’t marry a man I’ve never even seen.”

  “I am your father. It is my wish. And you will both do exactly what I tell you to.”

  “But Tată—” Alba began.

  “You are young. You will come to understand that I am right. And you will come to love your husband.”

  “You can’t make us do this,” Oana said.

  “It is for the family. For the whole Lupei clan and everyone that spends their lives working for the Carnival. Not just me. We need help from those two clans if Hagi attacks us, help that only marriage vows can attain.”

  “But it’s backup help,” Oana protested. “In case Dumitrescu doesn’t come through. You’re destroying our lives for some kind of secondary support?”

  Lupei shrugged. “If I feel that it is necessary...” He let the sentence hang, inciting rage.

  “I won’t have it!” Oana cried, leaping to her feet. “You just can’t—”

  Aurelia jumped up to face her eldest daughter and dragged her to the ground. “You will listen to your father,” she hissed into Oana’s face. “And now your mother. You are young. You have no voice. No opinion. No will, other than the one we choose to give you. If your father says you are to marry, then you will marry, and you will keep that man’s bed warm night and day if he so desires. You will do as he bids and keep him happy so that his father never hesitates to come to our assistance. And then, one day, you will rule at his side.”

  Oana’s face had fallen several times during her mother’s discourse. On seeing her mother’s raised hand and then feeling a slap across the cheek, it fell even further. Lupei was proud of his wife—herself a blind and arranged marriage. At first he’d doubted her, but she’d turned out to be a strong asset, always taking his side.

  Oana had no words. Instead, she turned and walked away, heading back for the campsite and the vans. Aurelia made to stop her but Lupei signaled her to stand down. A night alone, dwelling, would do Oana good.

  He turned to Alba. “And you? What will you say?”

  “Why?” Alba asked simply.

  “The clan comes first. The clan and my profits. If business is good, everything filters downward. I know you understand that. I understand that you are making a sacrifice, but it will benefit the wider scheme. Once Hagi and his supporters are dealt with, the land is ours.”

  As Roma, they wanted nothing more than freedom. Lupei hadn’t known real freedom his entire life. Maybe a better time was coming. But then he remembered Dumitrescu and the slaves who, even now, sat trussed in trucks parked close to the Carnival, waiting to be taken to auction. He was sure that Dumitrescu worked for someone, someone much bigger and nastier than he, but preferred not to know. Too much knowledge could get a man killed. Lupei had been content in his crime-ridden traveling lifestyle—the Carnival offering nightly diversions—but all this business with Hagi had changed that. Now they had to gear up for a Romany battle the like of which they’d never previously seen.

  Maybe a chat with Dumitrescu would help.

  Lupei sent Alba away, noting the ugly, scared light in her eyes before turning to his sons and wife.

  “They have no choice,” he said as a way of ending that conversation and then went on: “I will feel out Dumitrescu tomorrow, see how far we can push him. Only then will we know if two clans will be enough.”

  Aurelia spoke up before their three sons dwelled too deeply on that comment. “Already, I see Hagi’s downfall. This could be our hardest time, but it will lead to our greatest victory. It is never failure that finishes you, it is quitting.”

  Lupei thought her words a little flowery but was pleased that they appeared to elicit the right effect on her sons. The sound of the Carnival flitted through the trees then—the noise of the smaller rides and men shouting from their food carts and game stands. Music leaked through the forest trees like an errant wisp, darting back and forth.

  “We should close down,” Lupei said. “Our work tonight is done.”

  They rose and kicked the campfire to death. Lupei waited for the others to leave before taking a long, last look at the woods and the dark places between the trees. This was his arena, the place he loved. Nothing stirred him more than the darkness around a carnival site, and then looking in, back at the Carnival, at its comings and goings. It was the one place where he found a certain peace and stillness. A haven.

  There was a saying among his people; his closer people: The Carnival is traveling. It’s meaning was several-fold, but mostly meant: The game is on. Lupei felt that the game was well and truly on now. Lines had been drawn. Strategies made. Many blurred lines would be crossed.

  Hagi wanted a Roma war.

  That suited Lupei just fine. The killing of Anyana had been planned around just this outcome and how Lupei’s heart had leapt when, less than a year ago, he saw Hagi’s daughter in the audience. Hagi had sent her, an innocent, into his camp, a mere lamb to the slaughter. The old fool had been hoping to mend fences. Lupei had happily and cruelly destroyed those fences forever.

  The Carnival has ended, he thought. But only temporarily. Once Hagi and his friends were out of the way, a whole new world would open up. A world where he could transport his slaves far more easily. A world where he would emerge as king. A leader of his people.

  Lupei was sure of it.

  For a long while he stood among the trees, watching as tonight’s carnival began to shut down. Nobody saw him lurking. He was a man whom darkness enfolde
d. It clung to him like roots, spreading tendrils from his head to his toes, wrapping around and consuming him.

  Lupei was ready.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Oana ran. She ran from the campsite and from her father, from her brothers and mother. She ran from hatred and responsibility and servitude. They can’t make me do it.

  But they could.

  As she ran, a light drizzle fell. The water soaked her face, mixing with trails of tears. Her eyes were full. As she approached the Carnival she screamed. The lurid colors, mingling crowds and thunderous noise was all she’d ever known. As a young girl she’d been innocent, loving the days and months, the journeying and the different daily adventures it involved. Only as she’d grown older and wiser had she seen the insidious side of the life her father had made.

  Gaudy strobe lights flashed across her face, blue and red and green. The Ferris wheel creaked, the Wall of Death and the Madhouse were surrounded by shrieking, half-drunken youths. She ran between the Carnival’s main byways, flitting around the backs of rides and past their noisy, stinking generators, leaping over power cables thicker than her arm, smelling diesel fumes and cotton candy, cigarette smoke mingled with a sharp alcoholic reek and then the fresh, beautiful bouquet of newly cooked donuts.

  Oana dodged between groups of people and couples. Her shoes came down in mud and then grass. She fell to one knee, but quickly rose and kept running. Her chest was heaving, her lungs screaming. She was spent but embraced the pain, anything to keep her mind off what her father wanted.

  She’d known for some time now that Lupei was a bad man. That the deals he struck were criminal. She’d known he wanted war with the Hagis and anyone else that wouldn’t acknowledge him as a leader. But she hadn’t quite understood just how far he would go.

  Oana fell to the ground when her legs would no longer carry her. She hit the earth, bouncing face first into a mound of soil, and felt blood instantly flow from her nose. She lay with her face crushed into the grass, unmoving, unseeing, unwilling to look out on the cruelest of new worlds. When arms reached down to help her up, she batted them away.

  I would rather die...

  She sat up, surrounded by the bright lights and sounds that shaped her life. Passersby looked down at her with concern or amusement—a snapshot of the assorted characters that made up the world. What do I do? Where do I go? What about Alba? She couldn’t leave her sister to a fate worse than death.

  Her reluctance had nothing to do with the man she might marry. It had everything to do with her parents and brothers and how they considered everything mere goods to be bargained with. Even me. My parents hoped for girls so that, one day, they could make a profit from them.

  It was a harsh, painful truth. Camden and Ruby had known the depths to which her family would sink and had left when they could. Oana wondered briefly where they might be now and wished for their company, but terrible reality soon returned. The Carnival was winding down, the people knowing their night was over and heading home. Oana would be left with darkness and the disheveled and weary shell of a fairground façade made up to be something that it most definitely was not; like an aging face plastered with makeup so that it appeared younger, refusing to accept that it was past its prime. When the makeup was removed you were left with the reality. Her father’s answer was to plaster more makeup on day after day, year after year, tie all the failing bones together with twine and sticky tape and—if that didn’t work—bury the worst attempts.

  Oana took a deep breath and wiped her face. Her hand came away bloody. The rain helped wash her skin and she smeared crimson in the grass. Opposite, the high, arched entrance to the Freak Show discharged its stragglers. The doors were painted black and red, the overall appearance dark and broody. These days, the show was made up of charmers and mesmerists, hypnotists and fire-eaters, all displayed on pedestals and introduced by a man known as a lecturer. The paying group were led from platform to platform, where the “freak” was asked to perform whilst the charismatic lecturer filled the air with loud rhetoric. It was a show in a different style, a bygone era, and most of the public loved it.

  And the so-called freaks? Oana knew their feelings didn’t matter so much. Some of them were bound to her father through family, some through addictions such as alcoholism and gambling, some through debt, and others through a misplaced sense of loyalty. Lupei knew their weaknesses and preyed on them, and they didn’t seem to care.

  To the right of the Freak Show sat the large tent where her father performed once nightly. Lupei was the main attraction—a daring escape artist. Generally, he followed the exact same routine—the water tank escape that had been tried and tested for decades; but occasionally, when that day’s business had gone well, he threw in a new trick. The tent was white—or once had been—and tall, shaped like a tepee, with wooden poles poking out of the top. The entrance, a large tent flap, was thrown back until the show began and then sealed so that nobody could enter. The audience were quieted and thrown into darkness so that every eye was on her father when he appeared on stage. He was a showman, but also a narcissistic executioner.

  No underwater escape came without danger, which increased when the trick was completed in full view of the audience. The main container was a hard-welded unit made from thick steel and mounted on a plywood base. The cover and outside would be draped in eight chunky stainless-steel chains and locked down by industrial-grade padlocks. Lupei used a total of twelve different types of locks for the unit. Once the show started, Lupei would invite a member of the audience to inspect the tank whilst high-pressure hoses filled it with water.

  The key to the trick was in the construction of the tank. Although locks held the lid in place, the turning of those locks secretly released the lid’s hinges. Lupei’s hand and feet were secured with independently-tested handcuffs, yet he was a consummate lockpick. The thick steel bars at the front of the tank were designed to give an appearance of strength and yet they assisted in his climb to the top of the tank. Lupei could escape the tank in half the time he made it last, and he could hold his breath for over two minutes. Twice the time he spent “escaping.”

  Long ago, Lupei had designed the Carnival of Curiosities in the roots of nineteenth-century tradition, figuring everyone in Romania from young to old would have some interest in finding out what it entailed. His entire family was surrounded by circus myth, the carousels and fun-fair elements all harking back to old days. Lupei had used mythological creatures like dragons and unicorns to populate his carousel, keeping with the theme of mystery and magic.

  Oana knew that carousels in general derived from early jousting competitions in medieval Europe—where knights would gallop in a circle whilst throwing balls to one another—a skill that required great horsemanship. This game was introduced to Europe at the time of the crusades from earlier Byzantine and Arab customs and used as a combat preparation exercise. It evolved later, where riders had to lance small rings hanging from poles overhead as they galloped along a pre-set course. Indeed, the Place du Carrousel in Paris, an early version of the carousel, was built with wooden horses for children.

  Oana looked away from the escapology tent and the carousel, her attention drawn by the slowing Ferris wheel. Such a large part of her life—the wheel had been a staple of the world’s funfairs since 1893, although letters and descriptions of more rudimentary “pleasure wheels” where people rode chairs suspended by ropes that were turned by strong men had been around since the seventeenth century. It had always surprised Oana that the original Ferris wheel—designed and built by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr—had stood two-hundred-and-sixty-four feet tall when it was erected at the Chicago World Columbian Exposition, and carried 38,000 passengers a day. Oana had lost count of the number of times she’d ridden the wheel, even though she hadn’t gone near it in the last five years.

  She no longer saw life through the eyes of a child.

  Beyond the Ferris wheel, partially hidden by the forest and shrewdly arranged sheeting,
was a bare-knuckle boxing ring. Here, heavily-betted-on bouts arranged through the Internet and planned months in advance took place; the contestants and managers some of the best in the country, the money that passed hands both scary and sickening. It was a bloody, raw affair that Oana had never found interesting. Camden had been the best, followed by his brothers.

  Oana changed her gaze to the main thoroughfare of the Carnival where the various stalls and eateries were situated. Still, her eyes were glazed, her brain barely functioning beyond memory. Oana sat and reflected, preferring numbness to reality.

  There was a fortune teller and a tattoo parlor, the upshot from both places likely to be fairly sketchy. Tin Can Alley and Hook-a-Duck for the kids, an unclimbable ladder and a coconut shy. There was a test-your-strength game and a splat-the-rat game, a ring toss and a rifle range. Perhaps the stalls she’d most loved as a child were the donut and cotton-candy stands, where at least one older woman who’d now gone to that great carnival in the sky used to feed her the remnants of dough and spun sugar.

  What comes next?

  Oana needed a plan. Briefly, she looked to the far right where the risqué burlesque show was throwing out a dozen reluctant individuals from a tent frequented by men and youths far younger than they ought to be. Oana had never ventured inside the place, but she knew what happened there and talked often with the women that performed on stage, sharing in their jokes and their hilarious ridicules of the men that came to watch. Beyond that the Wall of Death had already gone silent and dark, the operators chaining the still-ticking motorbikes up to one side.