by Davyne DeSye
“I so hate to leave her,” Petter sighed, as they turned from the railing.
“Do not trouble yourself,” Erik answered. “You will find your dearest one waiting when you return.” He, of course, was not thinking of Constance as he spoke.
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Petter answered. Love-struck as Petter was, Erik heard the uncertainty in his answer. He smiled as he led Petter from the rail.
CHAPTER 14
PETTER LEARNS PART OF THE TRUTH
They were entering the Strait of Dover, and the white cliffs of the southeast coast of England could be seen across the water when Petter left the deck, knocked at the door to his father’s cabin, and announced himself. The lock disengaged, and the door swung open. As soon as he entered the room, the door was closed behind him and locked again. At no time had Erik stood where he could be seen.
“I am pleased you finally removed your mask, Father,” he said, with a wry smile, as he turned to face his father. With a perverse curiosity, he gestured toward the mask where it lay at the foot of the bunk, “May I?”
“Certainly,” Erik responded.
Petter lifted the mask in both hands, and peered into it. “It must be very uncomfortable,” he said. “Why bother?” He had seen his father’s face every day of his life, and was disturbed at the idea of his father masking himself. Somehow it seemed an unnecessary weakness in a man he had always considered so confident.
“Surely you are not naïve enough to think my deformity normal or pleasant,” answered Erik.
“Well… not normal, no, but not unpleasant. It’s just the way you look,” Petter answered. “Appearance is not the measure of the person.”
“Ah, so the saying goes. But there are some who are turned by a pretty face,” Erik answered, with a glint of humor in his eyes. Petter did not understand the reason for his father’s sly smile, and answered defensively. “No one cares that you lack a nose!”
Erik chuckled. “So my friends treat me. So you have only seen anyone treat me. But there was a time when I only ever ventured out in a mask.”
“Why on Earth?” asked Petter, and then, as the answer occurred to him, “Were you ashamed?”
“Mm,” Erik answered, and Petter sensed a looming history behind the utterance. “Your mother convinced me that it was unnecessary. Perhaps even bothersome.” Erik winked at this last statement, and Petter heard the suggestiveness in his words.
Petter smiled as he recalled how often his parents embraced or kissed – when they were home of course, in private – or how often his mother touched his father’s face with affection. “I imagine.” His mind filled with the sensual warmth of Constance’s lips against his own, and he smiled. He would not want a mask separating them. With an effort he pulled his thoughts from Constance and back to the question that had brought him to this room.
“Where is Mother – I mean, why is she in Paris? Why did she not come to London with you?” He asked the questions in quick succession, somehow apprehensive that he would not like the answers, but unable to avoid the topic any longer.
“Mm,” Erik answered again, face lengthening. He moved to lean against the small desk before speaking again. “Sit down, Petter.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Petter, foreboding filling him, and he dropped to sit on the edge of the bunk. He had never known his parents to be separated from one another for more than an afternoon, or perhaps one of his father’s short fishing trips with his sailor friend. “Please don’t tell me that she is ill. Or that you… that she…”
“Your mother was well when last I saw her.” After a weighty pause he continued, “And we are still very much in love.”
Petter huffed in relief. “All right…” he said. A bubble of impatience rose in him as his father continued to look across the space between them, expression unreadable. He seemed reluctant to explain the situation, or to be searching for words, and this only increased Petter’s apprehension. Just as Petter opened his mouth to prompt his father further, Erik spoke.
“Your mother is not in Paris,” Erik said.
“But you told me…,” Petter started.
“I told you I hoped we would be joining her soon. I also told you I wanted you to accompany me to Paris. Both are true.” Petter pressed his lips together and waited for the explanation to the puzzle, disturbed at his father’s circuitousness.
“I did not wish to worry you,” Erik said after a pause.
“Father! You are worrying me. Is she ill? What is it?” Petter heard the impatience in his tone and willed himself to remain seated.
“Your mother…” Erik paused and then shook his head and sighed. “Your mother has been kidnapped.”
“What?!” Petter leapt to his feet.
“It is difficult to explain…”
“Explain!” Petter interrupted, angry in his fear.
“I am attempting to!” Erik answered. A deep breath, then: “Please,” he said, eyes pleading, and gestured again to the bunk, “sit down.”
Petter sat, but his hands clenched and unclenched where they rested on his knees. The idea of his mother kidnapped seemed ludicrous in the extreme, but perhaps the purpose of the trip to Paris was to ransom her. Outrageous notions – kidnapping and ransom – but he would hear his father out.
“A very long time ago – long before I met your mother – I spent time in the Persian nation of Mazenderan.”
“Where you met your friend, Mr. Akhtar,” Petter interposed. He was confused by his father’s apparently unconnected statement, but waited for the connection to his mother.
“Yes,” Erik answered. “Without explaining the details, which are unimportant, I left Mazenderan a wanted man.” His father paused as if expecting another interruption, but Petter held his tongue. “Mr. Akhtar was exiled for helping me… leave.” Petter felt certain that his father had meant to say, “escape,” but again, he waited. Intriguing as the story sounded, it was all difficult to believe, and Petter wanted nothing more at this point than for the story to reach its conclusion, so that he could attempt to digest the whole.
“Now, I have been asked to undertake a task in Mazenderan, which I am unwilling to do. A… dangerous person has taken your mother to ensure my performance, knowing that I would never return to Mazenderan of my own choice.”
“Can you not ransom Mother?” Petter asked. “I assume…”
Erik shook his head as he answered, “The task is the ransom.”
Petter opened his mouth to ask about the nature of the task, or why his father would refuse it when performance would secure the safety of his mother, but Erik held up a restraining hand. Petter closed his mouth again.
“As you have seen, I am injured, but even so, I intend to rescue your mother. I hoped you would assist in that endeavor,” Erik said.
Petter waited to be sure his father had finished. Then he burst out, “Of course!”
“It will be dangerous,” his father said. “Even after more than forty years, I may still be a wanted man.”
Petter’s mind twisted away from the track on which it ran to another. “Wanted for?” Petter asked. When Erik shook his head, Petter asked, his voice a whisper, “Are you wanted for murder?”
“No,” Erik answered. Petter was surprised that his father’s answer was not more vehement, or that it did not reflect shock and outrage at what Petter feared was an outrageous question. “I knew – know – secret information which the Shah did not want known to others.”
“The Shah?” Petter asked, awed that his father would have such information, and yet relieved at the banality of the answer.
“We are going to Paris so that I can consult with the Shah’s former daroga – my friend, Mr. Akhtar. He may be able to provide me with needed information.”
“But, Father…” Petter stopped, unable to formulate a statement or question, his mind whirling with questions and suppositions.
“I would rather not discuss the particulars of the situation, son,” Erik said. “I would not have come to you but
for my injuries,” he added. He ducked his head before bringing his eyes back to Petter. Petter thought he saw pleading in his father’s round eyes.
Petter swallowed, and rocked his head back, eyes closed, feeling confused and pained by his father’s secrecy, his mother’s predicament.
“What… What if they hurt Mother? What if they kill her?” he asked.
“Then I will kill them!” Erik roared, standing from the desk upon which he leant, then turning and pounding the wooden tabletop with a fist. “I will kill as many as I can reach!” The vehemence and volume of the response startled Petter into silence. When Erik turned to face Petter, he could only stare at his father’s anger-distorted visage.
“Father,” Petter said, “you don’t mean that. Do you?”
“With all my heart,” Erik answered, although with less volume. He seemed to be panting in his anger. For a frightening moment, Petter saw a rage in his father’s eyes, a savageness he never guessed could exist there. Then Erik turned away, his burning gaze directed blindly toward a wall lantern rhythmically swaying on its swing-handle.
“Father,” Petter said, hoping to call to the man behind the rage. Thinking again of his mother, he asked, “Are you certain she still lives?” He was amazed that he could discuss the possibility of his mother’s death with such calmness – could scarcely believe anything he had heard. At the moment, his father’s rage seemed the only reality, and Petter wanted to sooth that rage, remove it from a man whom he had always known to be gentle and loving. “Father?” He rose and put a placating hand on his father’s tension-bunched shoulder. He squeezed, and then left his hand resting there until the tension dissipated.
“Yes. I am,” Erik answered, exhaling through pursed lips and lowering himself to lean on the desk again. Reason returned to his father’s eyes. “I would have no inducement to perform the requested task if she were killed. But,” he continued, raising a hand, “as I said, she is being held by a dangerous and deranged person.”
Hearing the calmness returned to his father’s voice, Petter released his father’s shoulder. He said, “Do you think we can rescue her?” His breath quickened as he thought of the chivalrous nature of the task, but he also worried that they were embarking on a fool’s mission – not that he would balk, if there was any chance whatever of helping his mother.
“Absolutely. I have certain… knowledge, certain talents.”
Another peculiar gleam came into his father’s eyes. Petter had a sudden unsettling notion that the floor beneath him had tilted, that his place in the world had been made unsure, that the man before him was a stranger. He thought with rising anxiety: There is much I don’t know about my father.
Petter returned to sit on the bunk and dropped his head to his hands, as much with despair over the plight of his mother as to hide his doubt-filled face from his father.
“This is all so unbelievable.” He was embarrassed to hear a quaver in his voice.
“Petter. Petter, my son.” Erik limped the few steps to stand before Petter. When Petter raised his head, the stranger was his father again, compassion reflecting from eyes too moist. “I am so sorry.”
Sorry for what? Petter felt lost and confused.
Petter stood, feeling like a child, and needing his father’s strength and support. He sighed as Erik embraced him, and clutched at his father, holding to the solid reality of the man. He heard his father’s sharp intake of breath and felt him flinch in his grasp as though in pain. Petter eased his grip and wondered again how his father came to be injured – a question Erik had declined to answer. The injury to his leg seemed not to be the only injury being borne.
When Erik released him to limp to a porthole, Petter sat again on the bunk, myriad questions rising and swirling through his mind. Erik turned away from the porthole and, obviously reading all the questions imprinted in Petter’s creased brow, spoke again.
“I wish no questions. For now, son, I ask that you trust me.”
“Of course, I trust you, Father,” he answered. He pressed his lips together to stem the flow of questions that threatened to burst forth, and only pleaded with his eyes for explanation. When his father turned away from him, Petter spoke out of his own desperation to understand. “Can you not, then, trust me?”
“Trust you? Of course I trust you!” Erik answered, the pain of the question clear upon his face as he crossed the small room to stand again before Petter. “I trust no one else to assist me! I came to you because I honor no other man with the trust I place in you.”
Petter held his father’s eyes as he said, “We are going to the daroga for assistance. He must know something of the matter.”
His father sighed, but did not turn away. “I am going to him for information only. Even so, I trust no one to assist me without inducements. Without question and without reason. I do so trust you.” His father limped to the chair beside the desk and seated himself with a small groan. When Erik spoke again, his voice was low, full of sadness. “My story is not easily nor quickly told,” he said. His eyes turned to a document lying on the table to his side, but he did not seem to see it. “I would not have you distracted with inconsequentialities.”
Inconsequentialities? Petter wanted to yell the word, but refrained. He paced the floor thinking, Mother kidnapped, and I am merely to trust? But he did trust his father, with a trust that overpowered his curiosity.
“Very well, Father,” he said. “I trust you to know best. And I will reward your trust in me by respecting your wishes with regard to this matter.” He paused before clarifying. “Until mother is safe.”
Erik understood the implication behind Petter’s final statement. After a hesitation, he spoke, voice laced with sadness. “There will come a time when I will tell you all, Petter, if that is what you wish.”
Petter nodded. He had another thought and said, “Does mother know what you will not now explain to me?”
“Your mother knows all,” Erik answered. “She is the better half of my heart and soul – she knows all, and loves me still.” Erik spoke with the quality of a man musing at a miracle, as though he spoke to himself instead of to Petter. His head rose and he looked at Petter with vehemence, rage and violence again dancing in his eyes. “And I will not lose her!” he finished.
“Of course not, Father,” Petter answered, and again crossed the small room to place a placating hand on his father’s shoulder. He controlled the urge to lift a hand to the pinched brow over Erik’s two glazed eyes. “Of course not.” He waited, hand still resting on his father’s shoulder until the fire went out of his father’s eyes again.
“We shall be in France soon,” Erik said, as though awaking from a spell. “Be ready to disembark.” He stood and moved to the mask where it lay on the end of the bunk.
“I am ready even now,” Petter answered, with the same business-like tone.
“Excellent. We shall proceed with all possible haste,” Erik said, lifting the mask over his head.
Petter left the cabin, intrigued by all he had learned – and failed to learn – frightened for his mother, and frightened by his father’s mysterious transformation. He tried to imagine the same violent fire coming into his own eyes, but could not. Could not imagine what events in his own life would build such an internal forge. He was determined to learn. He would hold his father to his promise to tell all.
CHAPTER 15
MEETING WITH THE PERSIAN
Erik was angry. After years of sublime contentment and devotion – and yes, even inner peace – in Christine’s love, he had all but forgotten the old feeling of generalized anger he now felt building in him. Since her capture, the old anger seemed to grow and expand, ready to bleed from his very pores. The need to remain civil in tone and manner to those people with whom he must interact to accomplish his goal required a talent of restraint unexercised since his days in the Opera House. Only Petter remained immune to his desire to lash out in anger, and Erik thanked the twisted fates for contriving to injure him, bringing him to see
k out Petter. The boy exerted a much needed calming influence.
Erik’s excitement to see Paris – the city which he had, for so long, called home – rode alongside his impatience to be finished in Paris and leaving France in search of Christine. Together, these conspired to make the carriage ride from Le Havre port to Paris seem interminable.
Erik was pleased upon their arrival in Paris to discover that, while the city had changed – as London had changed – the overall beauty of Paris was not diminished. Paris remained the rich, romantic city of his recollection. He was surprised to find himself smiling as he gazed from the carriage window at the passing sights.
As they crossed the Boulevard des Capucines – the boulevard which led to his magnificent Opera House – he wondered if Christine would find the city as beautiful as he, or whether her fright-filled escape from Paris a score and more years ago would taint her view of its wonders. At the thought of Christine, a dangerous depression threatened to settle upon him, as though not only memories but other less comfortable wraiths were descending upon him. In an effort to break away from the sudden gloom, and the anger that would soon follow, he turned to gaze at his son. Petter’s likeness to Christine, and his youthful enthusiasm as he exclaimed over the passing sights washed over Erik like a cleansing light, pulling him from his lowering mood. He managed to enjoy the remainder of their ride, naming for Petter various of the sites they passed on their way.
They arrived at the daroga’s flat – the selfsame flat the daroga had occupied over twenty years ago when Erik had made his home in the basement of the Opera House. Erik rang at the door, and Darius, the same devoted servant of old answered the ring, although the man was more stooped with the weight of the years. Erik removed the oversized hood he wore over his unmasked head and climbed the stairs behind the obsequious servant, remembering the last time he had climbed these stairs. Then, it had been to perform an act of deception against the mysterious man known to most Parisians simply as “the Persian.” Then, he had acted from a position of strength. This time he would beg favors of the man. Erik did not like the contrast, although for many years now he had called the man friend. His desperation to save Christine and his injuries had put him in this position of weakness, and that feeling of weakness increased his anger with each step he took.
