by Paul Park
"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 anaesthetic 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.
"See, I'll put it down."
But Pieter couldn't see. He stood beside the knothole with his back against the wall. "Ah," Dysart continued. "Of course. The Gypsy must have taken the money. How stupid of me. She's probably halfway to the coast."
"Probably," Pieter said, and took another step. There were two windows in the wall, two meters or so apart. Pieter stood between them, his shoulders pressed against the
dark, rough surface.
"So we're back to the reward," Dysart said. "Luckacz will be here soon. You don't have much luck, I think. Not without a gun. I'll make a bargain. Help me take her out. I'll give you half. And I promise she won't get hurt."
Pieter wondered about this, and turned to press his cheek against the wall.
"For old times' sake," said Captain Dysart. "You remember that time in Thessalonika. Two men with guns and just a handkerchief between them. You know how hard it is to shoot a man."
Pieter had no memory of this, thank God. He listened for Dysart's step on the floorboards. He listened for the movement of his voice. So far as he could tell, the man hadn't budged.
"She'll be all right. They always are. What did you get out of the Havsa campaign? I got seventy-five piastres a month, with one eye and a ruptured ear. It took years for me to learn to shoot again.
"I think a change is coming," Dysart went on. "What do you think? Something has got to break. I think it's time we went beyond these princes and princesses. That's all in the past."
"Yes," Pieter said, in spite of himself. He took a step toward the far window.
"So, what do you think? Do we have a bargain?"
Pieter wondered what Prochenko would have done. His own mind was empty save for physical sensations—his cheek against the bark. The pain in his right hand. A birdcall in the dark, summer woods.
"You can't save her," continued Dysart. "So we might as well. . ."
The important thing, Pieter thought, was to get into the room. "All right," he said and pounded his fist against the wall. Then he stepped back to the knothole. Peering through, he saw Captain Dysart near the opposite wall. He had indeed put up the gun. The plain bone handle stuck out from his belt.
Crouching down, Pieter could see better. The man had his hands held out. In the firelight Pieter could see his fawn-colored trousers and white shirt, smeared now with mud. A twig was tangled in his long white hair. And behind his head there was a hint of motion. Squinting, Pieter could see Ludu Rat-tooth with a piece of firewood above her head. Maybe she had crept over the windowsill. There was a window in the far wall.
"All right," he said again, and pounded on the bark next to the knothole. Making as much noise as he could, he ran to the door, in time to see Dysart pluck the gun out of his belt and turn. But the girl managed to club him with the stick over his head, and then grab hold of him as he shot once, twice, three, four times. The explosions were deafening in that little space. Pieter leaped in over the threshold just as it seemed Miranda came awake. Her body shook and spasmed, and he jumped past her to where the man was struggling with the girl.
Pieter jumped over the uneven boards, some of which had broken to show the black dirt beneath. Dysart was clumsy, slow. The Gypsy had broken the skin on his pale forehead.
Pieter grabbed him by the arm and twisted his arm up. But there were no more shots. The gun fell to the floor. The girl was free and had collapsed onto Miranda's quilts while Pieter staggered and almost fell. The man had kicked him on the inside of the knee, stomped on his foot.
But he pulled Dysart down and fell on top of him. The white shirt had some perfume in the cloth. Dysart's body was slippery with sweat and slipped away from him. Pieter had him by the shirt, though, and with his left hand he was reaching for the gun, fallen in a gap between the floorboards. He could feel the metal underneath his fingers, and he thought he was going to let go of the shirt as it was ripping now, as Dysart pulled away. Pieter felt a pain in his right hand as he reached out with his left, intent on the gun, and unaware of Dysart's knife until that moment; he'd flailed backward at Pieter but couldn't reach him. But he could reach the hand clutching his shirt, and he slid the blade between Pieter's middle and fourth fingers. He was cutting down between the bones toward the hole in Pieter's palm, and the bandage was giving way.
But Pieter had the gun by the barrel. His arm moved slowly, gathering the strength of his body as he rolled back, as he pulled Dysart down. He hadn't let go with his right hand. And with his left he swung the gun as if through layers of interference, and caught Dysart on his forehead once again, next to the row of tiny blood drops where the girl had marked him. Then he let go with his maimed hand and rolled onto his stomach, holding the gun out in his weak, left hand, where it felt oddly comfortable. It was a six-shooter. He had two shots left, with any luck.
But as Dysart said, it's hard to kill a man. Maybe with his right hand Pieter could have managed it, but not his left.
He lay on his stomach, watching the blood pulse from between his fingers, and the long, smooth cut. Behind him, curled up with Miranda, the girl wept. Leaving his red knife on the floor, Dysart rose from his hands and knees until he stood upright, and Pieter rose with him. Bleeding from his forehead, the man staggered backward toward the door, while Pieter put his right hand into his left armpit. The pain was very bad when he pressed down. He closed his eyes for a moment, hardly more than a blink, and when he opened them Dysart was gone.
THAT NIGHT ALSO, AT 11:29, the Bavarian Hydra Express left Ratisbon Station, en route to Vienna, Belgrade, Bucharest. On it, in an ordinary third-class compartment in the middle of the train, Clara Brancoveanu and the boy sat side by side. On their laps they held some paper boxes of sandwiches and fruit. They planned to sit up all night, playing cards and reading. They had not been able to afford a private compartment, certainly not the luxurious first-class sleeper behind the engine where the elector sat at his table. Keeping inside his hired cab till the last instant, he had not seen them board the train.
In front of him on the small table lay some papers and notebooks, some letters and his letter opener. He had washed his hands before he handled them. But he was soon distracted. Now he lay back in his fauteuil and closed his eyes. His thoughts were far away.
It was only with his eyes closed that he could catch a glimpse of the dark town in the hidden world. And even when he stood as if above it on the slopes of Christmas Hill, he did not recognize the place. Nor could he see Miranda sitting on the porch of her parents' house, after she'd put down the silver canister.
She sat in the front doorway, watching the moon above the mountain peaks. On the surface of the threshold lay the book, The Essential History.
Closed inside of it was the small silver letter opener that Stanley had given her one Christmas. When she opened the book to the page that was indicated by the blade, she was discouraged to find there was some damage to it, a place where the onionskin paper had been dug away. No, that wasn't it. There was a bug living in it that had dug a long, meandering wormhole. When she opened the last part of the book she could see the bug itself, a worm or a centipede that now surged out onto the page. It was fully two inches long. "Ugh," said Miranda, and she pressed the point of the letter opener into its thin body, crushing it rather than stabbing it, so that its small guts left a smear.
Disgusted, she threw down the book, threw down the flat silver blade. And then she got up and walked down the porch steps, deciding to take a walk downtown while she waited for the pesticide to work. She knew the houses were all empty. She didn't have to look. Nor were the streetlights on. The whole town was deserted, and she walked down the concrete sidewalks across Main Street to Water Street, and down to the fieldstone gate. Without asking herself why, she wanted to visit once more the places she had visited with Peter Gross. More than that, she wanted to get away from the abandoned buildings. She wanted to walk instead among the maples, birches, and conifers that led down to the little cottage by the brook, the ice house with its broken roof and floor.
But in the darkness she couldn't find the path. Or else she found a path, but it wasn't the right one. It led her west and uphill toward the museum until she stood in a small grove of birches, their trunks gleaming in the moonlight. This was the place where she had found the woodchuck, or whatever it was, nailed to the tree. There was no sign of it now. But then a little way farther was the skull, a skull of a big animal, and there were some bones, too.
This was the lair of the white tyger. Miranda turned around. She felt calm, sleek, satisfied. There was a glint of metal under her feet, and she bent down to draw out of the moss, as if out of a scabbard, a small sword. The knob of the pommel was a curled-up snake. Inlaid snakes chased each other down the blade, which was short and heavy with a single edge.
Turning into the forest again, she saw a cat on a broken log, the same cat that had followed her from her house, mangy and unkempt, but with gleaming eyes—a big, baggy orange marmalade with a broken incisor. As Miranda watched, it jumped down from the log and disappeared.
Miranda was sweating and the wind moved through the trees. She could feel it in her hair. She was in danger, she knew, not from the marmalade cat but from something else, some colder and more subtle thing. As she searched for the trail again back toward the ice house, she was aware of other animals fleeing and scampering away, not from her, she thought. She pushed her way uphill through a tangle of brambles; no one had kept up the trail, she thought. Peter hadn't kept up the trail. All the undergrowth was higher, and she had to hack at it with the sharp sword. Then for a while it was easier going. The ground was bare. Ahead of her there was an animal that turned now and dragged itself toward her on its bottom, a little, naked ape, she saw, wounded in the belly. It sat hugging itself with long, hairless arms.