by Michele Lang
I had but little experience behind the wheel of an auto—Bathory had a driver who would take me on errands, a gentle creature named Janos with moth-powder skin, who wore dark glasses day and night. But the roads, though treacherous through the mountains, were all but deserted.
After I got clear of the mountains, the motorcar ride to the border passed in a whir, my mind racing faster than the wheels could spin. The ease of my journey troubled me. I imagined the Staff observed every step I took back from the brink of the Berghof. He had let me go—why? The answer to that uncomfortable question evaded my conscious mind.
Once at the border, with a few well-placed bribes, I slipped into Switzerland, and from there procured a map and some gasoline. After a picturesque and rather uneventful tour of the Swiss countryside, I left the car with yet another witchy cousin in the gorgeous Lake Geneva town of Montreux. There I caught a train for Lausanne and from there to the great railway hub of Paris. Despite my murder, the demonesses had left my satchel and money intact, and when I converted my pengös into francs I was suddenly rich—and Bathory’s credit was good everywhere.
Now that I was free of the Reich and had plenty of cash to spend, my fugitive taint was an all but invisible shadow. But in my dreams . . .
Whether I slept in a motorcar on the side of a Swiss mountain pass, a humble third-class berth on the train to Paris, or in the Hotel Bastille, with clean sheets and a tidy common bath in the hallway, my nightmares stayed the same. Every night, the werewolves waited for me, and their fangs ripped my body apart. The wizard stole my soul and tortured me for evermore. And over all my sufferings, looming high in the thunderheads, brooded the hate-filled face of Hitler himself.
I hid from sleep, avoided rest. And alone in the watches of the night, Raziel stayed with me, so close that I could almost touch him. I never called him down from heaven to travel by my side; the reality of Raziel in my world frightened me rather more than my fear-inflected nightmares of wolves, wizard, and tyrant. But the knowledge that Raziel existed, that angels watch over us as we stumble along our destined paths, was a talisman that I kept close to my heart all the way to Paris.
Daytime was another matter entirely. It did not do, my looking haggard. So on my second day in Paris, I resolved to look the part of vampire’s emissary. Rather than invest in a cumbersome trousseau, I went to a certain fine boutique at 31 rue Cambon and spent my ready cash on a single Chanel suit with braided trim, and with buttons like coins, impeccable and perfect in every way. I all but bankrupted myself to match it with a pair of ravishing alligator pumps.
Thus armored in sartorial perfection, I went in search of the only man in Paris who could help me: Robert Capa, world-famous war photographer, the man who had made his fame capturing iconic images of the Spanish Civil War. He was also the boy who’d pulled my pigtails at the gymnasium, in another world, many lifetimes ago.
14
JULY, 1939
PARIS
I was lucky. I found Capa at a little round table outside the Café du Dôme; he sat alone, smoking cigarettes one after another, lost in the same melancholy reverie as the other denizens of the immortal city.
I found Paris’s doldrums somewhat difficult to understand. Paris, unlike Budapest, was still a free city. Yet, Paris was wrapped in a gloomy pall, completely at odds with the glorious, not-too-hot summer weather. Geraniums bloomed with wild abandon, feral cats haunted the charming bistros, and the echoes of that lovely, melancholy melody, “J’attendrai,” trailed after me, whispered out of radios propped in open windows.
Capa had apparently succumbed to the same sullen tantrum as the rest of the city. I smacked him on the shoulder, the way I’d once done as a bratty girl at our Sunday family séances. His little brother, Cornell, had liked me better, but Capa was the only Hungarian I knew who now lived in Paris, and I needed all the help I could get, no matter the source.
“Hey. Greatest photographer in the world. Give a girl a cigarette, will you?”
His eyes smoldered and he wheeled on me, glowering, his thin lips curled into an unspoken retort. Behind his displeasure I detected desolation, and I remembered: his father had just died a few weeks before, and his breathtaking fiancée, the “Little Blonde” Gerda Taro, had died in the Spanish Civil War not all that long before that. In this, Capa prefigured us.
My heart gave a little twinge, a pinch of remorse. “Sorry, Endre,” I said softly, calling him by his original, Hungarian name. “Budapest sarcasm doesn’t sound like wit here in Paris, yes?”
Capa started, ran his blunt fingers through his thick black hair. He shook his head, as if to get the dreams out. “My God, it’s Magdalena Lazarus, isn’t it.”
He squinted hard, took my chin in his fingertips and tilted my face up to the shifting twilight for proper inspection. “Fantastic. Something about the planes of your face . . . completely different.”
I said nothing, realizing that a professional photographer with such an expert eye would surely see the troubles written clearly on my face. I let him examine me, and enjoyed the pressure of his fingers on my chin, the rustle of his body in his thin silk shirt.
“Your skin is etched in marble, Magda. Uncanny.”
I shrugged, not sure whether to take his observation as a compliment or not. “Well, you look different too, my friend. It’s been a long time since you went away from Budapest.”
He sighed and let go of me. “Long years. Bad years.”
I kissed him on both his cheeks, reached for his hands and squeezed them hard. Like the rest of us, he’d lost a lot of family since 1933, but for some reason his heartbreak moved my stone-cold heart with pity. “But you are still ever the lady-killer, Capa.”
He half smiled, an unlit cigarette still tucked between his lips, and I saw that my flattery pleased him. “But not of you, little Magduska, Lady Lazarus. You were always immune to my lady-killing.”
I plucked the cigarette from between his lips and snatched the lighter off the table. “Immune, surely no. Resistant, perhaps.”
The Zippo felt heavy and cold in my fingers, and I luxuriated in the ritual of flicking, lighting, deeply inhaling the smoke. “I need your advice, dear Capa. Do you have a moment for me?”
His half smile broadened into a low, throaty laugh. “For my beautiful friend from Budapest, always. But only if you tell me all of your secrets: why you have come to Paris. How long you plan to stay.”
I took a long, slow drag on the cigarette to calm my jangled nerves. “Oh, I’m just passing through, on my way to Amsterdam. Family business.”
Capa really was the world’s best photographer, and a master of the human face. His photos of the Spanish Civil War and the ghoul attacks in Guernica were published the previous winter in Life magazine, and rightly had made his fame. I had tried to keep my voice casual, but Capa’s eyes were too sharp.
He leaned back, closed his eyes, and smiled, his thoughts far away. When he opened them again, our gazes met, and he conveyed his hidden pain to me, a knowing and unspoken kinship with the hunted ones of this world.
I knew he saw the shadow of death over my mask of unstudied elegance. I had been at pains to look the part of a sophisticated Continental traveler, but Capa, like me, could see through the surface disguises we all employ to hide ourselves. And he didn’t need magic to do it.
“It’s really bad in Budapest, isn’t it.” He merely stated the fact, didn’t bother to dress the sentiment up as a question.
I affected nonchalance, but Capa, with his melancholy eyes, could see through it. “It’s bad everywhere.” And I shrugged and smiled; no point in bewailing our collective rotten fate.
“If you need money, Magda, I must warn you that fame and fortune are two separate creatures.”
A fat, buttery croissant tempted me on Capa’s table. My stomach rumbled, hopefully too quietly for him to hear. “Oh, no, don’t worry about it. I have my way to Amsterdam mapped out. I only wanted to know if you could introduce me to anybody you know in Amsterdam, any
Hungarians. I have my formal introductions all lined up . . .”
I hesitated, saw Capa still followed me. “But I wouldn’t mind having a secondary plan in case the first falls through. I know you passed through there in your travels, after . . .” After Gerda died, I almost said.
“Yes, after.” His smile, so sweet and sad, could have melted the heart of any other woman in Paris, I am sure.
I gave him the privacy of his grief and took a peek at the cluster of chairs and tables assembled on the pavement outside the Dôme. It was as perfect a Montparnasse café as anyone could imagine, with both human and magical customers, real coffee, and sausage and pastry in wild abundance. No matter where I ended up, at least I could say that, before my life ended, I had spent some time in the City of Light, in Paris, in the year of the Christian God 1939.
I sighed with bittersweet contentment. “Not bad, this Dôme place. Reminds me a little of Budapest.”
I made him laugh, and I saw he enjoyed my ability to coax mirth from him. “Almost. Paris has no Café Istanbul.”
I smiled, thought of my precious vampires. “Yes.”
Capa waved at the waiter, a Frenchman adorned with an elaborate mustache, and he ordered me a coffee and seltzer without my asking. As we watched the waiter shamble away, I wondered, not for the first time, if I would ever see Budapest again.
Capa’s soft voice broke into my thoughts. “Listen. My friend Lucretia will help you out—as long as you don’t bother her with too many questions. You’ll have to keep your wits about you, understand? She isn’t Hungarian, either. Belgian, I think.”
“You think? Some friend.”
Capa refused to banter with me, or to take up my teasing tone. “No, it’s complicated.” Ah, everything was complicated with Capa.
How comforting that some things hadn’t changed. I beamed at him, patted his arm. “It’s good to see you again, Endre. Like having Budapest here with us.”
Capa lit a new cigarette. “Budapest is not such a good friend to me. Or to you.”
My coffee arrived with a flourish from the waiter, and I made a great show of dressing it up with sugar, stirring it, taking slow, preparatory sips. I never felt cold anymore, but I could not get warm, either.
“You’re in deep trouble, Lady Lazarus.” Again, a statement, not a question. “I’m no good at rescuing fair maidens in distress, I must warn you.”
“Fear not, good knight. I am used to taking care of myself.” But my voice caught on the last word.
I decided to take a chance on getting at the truth. Capa thought of me as a little brat anyway. He could always laugh me off, and I would laugh along with him. I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “Tell me, Capa. What’s your secret? How do you walk right into danger and out the other side?”
He took my hand in his, stroked it like a dove nestled in a nest. “No secret. If I only knew . . .”
Ah, he meant Gerda, his doomed fiancée, dead in the Spanish war. I bit my lip; I didn’t mean to poke him. But he didn’t seem angry. He sighed and shrugged, his eyes still downcast. “I guess what you do is, you just read the wind. When it’s time to move, don’t hesitate. Just go. You might not survive, but at least you move in the right direction.”
He reached for my hand and played with my grandmother’s red-gold ring, twirled it around my little finger. “This ring is cute, shaped like a ribbon tied in a bow. I want you to use it to remind you of what I am going to tell you now.”
I looked into his eyes, and he looked up into mine. “Forget about being good,” Capa continued. “We don’t know each other so well, but I recall you are trying always to be all things to all people. Believe me, you can’t.”
I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly cotton-dry. “But what about the people who depend on you?”
“No. Even worse. You can’t save anybody in this world, Magda. Not a single, solitary soul. Forget it. Live your life, your life. Give up your imitation of a hothouse flower.”
His last words puzzled me. “Hothouse? Who mentioned a hothouse?”
“Oh, nobody. But I remember your father from when I was only about ten and you were a little sprite. He was already fading, you know, but he wanted nothing more than to hide you and your sister away. He was wrong. You’re more like Queen Anne’s lace, meant to grow wild.”
“Oh, a weed. Thank you so much.”
His grip tightened over my hand. “No. A wildflower, not an orchid. Stop trying to please your mother by being a perfect ornament—she’s dead. You’re not. And as for your little sister, she will have to make her own way just like the rest of us.”
He released my hand at last. I rubbed my knuckles and reached for my coffee, and cursed myself in a most unladylike way when I spilled half of it into the saucer.
Capa, mercifully, laughed at me so that I could breathe again. “Just go to Amsterdam. Do what you must. I will tell you all about Lucretia—but you better forget about being good if you plan to get along with her.”
15
I don’t believe in coincidence. The Lucretia that Capa knew turned out to be the same Lucretia, leader of the Daughters of Arachne coven, who Trudy knew as her distant cousin in Amsterdam. She and I were meant to meet, indeed.
My mission to Amsterdam intersected with Bathory’s machinations, but they did not entirely coincide. Lucretia would help me, for Trudy’s sake if not for Capa’s. But my train for Amsterdam did not leave until the morning.
I decided not to take a room. I could sleep on the train when the time came, and in those days Paris didn’t sleep either. The Seine, sister to the Danube, snaked through the heart of the city of Paris. It smelled of algae, of chlorine, of unfinished dreams. It was dangerous to wander down to the river on the Left Bank, but danger was no stranger to me, and Capa was right—none of my virtuous ways, my attempts to become either an upright daughter of Hungarian society, or her mirror image, a wicked and purely doctrinaire Communist, had done me a single drop of good.
The darkened houseboats stretched along the river’s edge, slumbering silent in the dead of night, witches’ time, my time. I haunted the night of Paris, and she haunted me. I willfully refused to send my sight along the path where rats scrabbled and people with no home wandered. Let my enemies come. Let them.
I saw the face of Notre Dame reflected in the shimmering, dark water. A breeze rose and skittered along the quay below me, rattling the closed-up wooden kiosks where vendors sold used books and trinkets by day. Not a single human soul revealed itself in the night.
Ah, Capa was right. About everything.
On impulse, I reached heavenward, took a deep breath, whispered
RAZIEL
And obediently the air before me shimmered, opalescent. His wings manifested first, unfurled over me like a canopy of light. His heavenly form filled in next, encased in a tight, double-breasted suit with a chalk stripe—dove gray and perfectly tailored. Gisele herself could have done no better.
His fedora appeared next, cocked rakishly on his still-iridescent head. Finally, his face shone into existence, etched into my memory as well as the air, his visage as perfect as an El Greco saint’s.
Raziel’s face, still and serene, remained remote and closed to me. For once, I didn’t care.
“Beware, Magda. This way is death,” Raziel whispered, directly into my mind. He settled into manifestation with a barely audible sigh.
“No, to the contrary, my dearest angel. I’d rather be alive than saintly but dead.”
He blinked hard and smiled, a crooked little smile that looked out of place on his angelic face. He straightened the hat on his head, stretched his wings to their full, breathtaking span, and then carefully folded them like a paper fan against his broad back. “What does it mean—‘be alive’? To one such as you, or me?”
Raziel strolled closer to me, like any acquaintance in the street, and the breath caught in my chest, like all of the oxygen in Paris had shot up to heaven in his place.
He shook his head, shot his cuffs,
and licked his lips. “Tell me, Lazarus. What led you to break your solemn oath so easily?”
Wickedness was much more attractive and easy in theory than in actual, dangerous practice. My heart fluttered like a butterfly trapped inside my chest. And all at once, my emotions broke free, that butterfly escaped into pure delight. Instead of convention or the orthodox Party line, I stood alone, with my true, honest desire.
“I just wanted to see you, angel. And I wanted to thank you before it’s too late.”
The corners of Raziel’s eyes crinkled when he smiled, as if merriment set him free from sainthood too. He had a dimple high on his left cheek.
Raziel drew nearer still, and I smelled musk and cinnamon, heard a low murmuring of bells like a musical gust rushing toward me as he came. “What else is an angel for but to serve as a messenger of good tidings? We rejoice to receive these messages as well as to deliver them.”
His reply threw me into a grave confusion, a dizzy springtime fever of emotion. Far below us, I heard the soft slap of the Seine against the houseboats moored along the river’s banks.
I took a deep breath and tried to regain my bearings. “But I thought calling you, compelling you, was a dreadful sin. A twisting of cosmic law, no?”
He laughed out loud, a lovely, terrifying sound. And his mirth pierced me, shot me through the heart with a strange, inexplicable longing.
Raziel leaned against the railing and looked over the side to where the Seine flowed far below us. We stood close enough that I could study his long, soft eyelashes. “Mortal souls have called upon the Almighty and his Heavenly Host since time out of mind. Calling an angel to your side is no sin; to answer your call is why I am created.”
“But—Vienna. You were so angry when you appeared on that platform!”