by Paul Park
The baroness stripped away the shawl, revealing her bare shoulders. The light shone on her flawless skin. Under the shawl she was dressed in a yellow camisole. The elector was astonished by her beauty and the beauty also of the jewel she carried, the purple tourmaline that he now saw for the first time.
Entranced, he watched her slide it over her skin as if it were a bar of soap. Stolen from Claude Spitz the jeweler, nevertheless it was a piece of German property—Kepler’s Eye, dug from the brain of the famous scientist. It contained a natural and verifiable power, which is why the elector craved it.
With the stone there was no limit to the good he could accomplish. Always up to now his plans and aspirations had been thwarted by prejudices of the mindless, sabotaged by his own ugliness, his cold and unlovable nature. Once he had the stone in his possession, he intended to make a scientific study of the phenomenon, how a lifeless mineral could ignite passions and emotions, love itself—now he understood the trick. This was not a real emotion he was feeling as he watched the movement of the baroness’s naked arm. No, it was something artificial, motivated by the jewel. Nicola Ceausescu was a repellent, brutal slut, tonight as always.
He could see that now, too late, and could see also her face and her violet eyes in the looking glass, her triumphant, smiling mouth. She had darkened the glass, and now it cleared. Too late he understood that she’d been watching him all along. His hand, as he reached out with the derringer, felt leaden and crippled. Any second-degree adept could have recognized the language of her gestures, the hypnotic trance that now disabled him. The pistol fell to the floor.
* * *
“YOUR GRACE, I’M pleased to see you,” said the Baroness Ceausescu. “Soyez le bienvenu—be welcome, please.”
She spoke in French, the language of the cultured classes in Roumania. She took one of the brass candlesticks from the mantelpiece. Squatting down, she held the burning taper beside his face. “Have you really come alone?” she said. “Your grace—you are a brave man.”
What a difference a few hours made! When she had reached out to touch him on the hotel stairs, she had been afraid of the elector’s strength. But now he knelt between her boots, his body under her authority. She let the light play on his seamed and pitted face, a chaos of broken features out from which peered two big, chocolate-colored eyes.
She put the candle down on the stone hearth. “Your grace,” she said, “permit me.” She had stripped one of the tasseled cords from the window curtains. The softness of her voice as she secured his hands was utterly unfeigned, as if she were inviting him to join her in some intimate refreshment.
It was her exploration of Medea’s sympathy for Jason (the father of her slaughtered lambs, poor man!) that had made the Moscow performances into a triumph. And for the elector too she felt such pity, while at the same time she pulled the cord so tight it cut into his wrists. When she recalled the contemptuous and public way he had humiliated her in the pastry shop, she pitied him. How terrible to be at the mercy of someone you have wronged! Particularly someone who could not forgive you. Because forgiveness was the opposite of sympathy.
“I’m afraid you are not comfortable,” she murmured. “Believe me, it is only for a little while.”
The numbing curse, magnified and made more potent in the mirror, nevertheless would not affect him for long. That was the reason she was tying him so tight, with loops of rope around his ankles and his wrists, now joined behind his back. This was how she’d trussed Aegypta Schenck before she died. Daily she reminded herself, punished herself for that. Doubtless she had positioned the elector to remind herself again. She knew he could speak to her. “Speak to me,” she murmured near his delicate, small ear.
“I have something you want,” he mumbled, his lips numb.
It was true. He held her only child, her son, a prisoner in Germany. How unkind to have mentioned it!
“I could arrange for his return,” he muttered.
How heartless to give her the choice! No, she would not be fooled. She would not bargain for her son. No, she could only hope he was well treated in Ratisbon, in a modern clinic or in her enemy’s house. She could not care for him now, penniless as she was, running from the police. When she was established as the white tyger of Roumania in whatever form that took, then she would command him to be sent to her.
She did not deserve, in any case, to see her son—not yet. Just in these last days she had betrayed a boy in her care, used him and discarded him. Now he lay in prison if he was even still alive. Daily, hourly she thought of him to punish herself. But surely she could not allow his sacrifice to be for nothing. He’d been willing to die for her.
Now the man she’d wanted him to kill was in her hands. She could not let him go, not even for her own son’s sake.
“I will put him on a train to Bucharest,” said the elector. “Allow me to send a telegram. You have my word.”
His word—what good was that? This was some new trick. “Your grace,” she murmured near his ear. “You must not expect me to bargain like a shopkeeper.”
The effect of her small conjuring was wearing off. She had pulled up his dress cuffs, and now she watched his slender forearms clench, his wrists turn as he searched for a looseness in the rope. She must be quick.
On the mantelpiece under the portrait of her husband stood a celadon jar, a gift from the Maharajah of Hokkaido, a Korean nobleman who long ago had come to hear her sing. Inside the jar was a blue apothecary’s bottle with an eyedropper screwed into its top. Kept in its place of honor, the bottle contained the same quick poison—extract of castor beans—that her husband had used to take his own life eight years before. Depressed by his wife’s coldness, his son’s illness, but most of all by his betrayal of his only friend, he had put a single drop onto his tongue. Now the baroness wondered what another drop would do, when placed upon the liquid, trembling surface of the elector’s eye.
Experimentation is the key to alchemical success. She stood up, aware as always of her body’s language. In her light camisole she ran her fingers up and down her arms. She had studied the elector’s face in the mirror when she’d done her little dance. From his expression she had guessed he had enjoyed it, though she had not thought he was that sort of man. Still it was kind to give him pleasure at the end.
“Tell me,” he said, and she could tell by his enunciation that the numbness of his lips was wearing off. “Do you have the white tyger here?”
“Yes,” she answered. In the mirror she watched his ruined face.
“Where is she? How did you bring her here?”
“She came in by the door the same as you.” The baroness smiled, not for his benefit. “She is in this room.”
And he must have been an idiot after all, because he actually moved his head to peer around, as if he expected the white tyger to appear among the armchairs and sofas of the small square room. Rain fell against the windows.
“I mean Miranda Popescu,” he began.
The baroness watched him in the glass. Seen from that angle, she realized with surprise, his face showed a perverse beauty. Perhaps it was impending death that suddenly ennobled it, or else in the mirror she was able to forgo comparisons with other human faces, forgo also an instinctive horror of disease. Gratified by her own generosity, she saw how the spots and fissures of his face made a pattern that gave meaning to his eyes, as if they appeared at the center of a whirlpool. At the same time she was fumbling for the bottle in the celadon jar. There was a box of phaeton matches, a few graphite pencil ends, all the usual detritus that accrues in such places. But the poison was gone. Maybe Jean-Baptiste had moved it, worried the police might search the house.
And she was thinking about what the elector had said about Miranda Popescu, the daughter of Frederick Schenck and Clara Brancoveanu. The girl had occupied too much of her time over the past months. First she’d had to dig her out from the artificial world where her aunt Aegypta had hidden her, extract her like an escargot from an elaborate, conju
red shell. Once free of it, the girl had reawakened in the North American wilderness, where the elector and the baroness had squabbled over her.
Now, evidently, she had disappeared. Nicola Ceausescu had sent someone to catch her, had sent that fool Raevsky, who had failed. Where was the girl now? And more than that—who cared? For as it turned out, she was not the white tyger after all, the savior of Roumania, who would throw out the potato-eating Germans. No, she was just another unlucky girl. The white tyger—as the baroness imagined she’d discovered in the last few hours—lived in this house in Saltpetre Street, stood in this room with her nicotine-stained fingers searching the bottom of the green jar, and was justified in any act of cruelty in the fight against her enemies, her country’s enemies. But damnation, where had Jean-Baptiste hidden that little bottle?
All this time she had been watching the elector in the mirror while she fumbled with the jar. He knelt behind her and had let his face sink down so she could see the bald spot on the crown of his head in a circle of black hair. Now she looked away so she could search the mantelpiece. Immediately she heard a crash and felt herself dragged down.
The elector had freed his hands, had reached up to slide his hands under the waistband of her trousers. She could feel his hands on her bare skin. The cloth ripped and she felt his hands on her body as he pulled himself up. And when she turned to face him and hammer at his head with her palms’ heels, she stumbled backward over the lip of the hearth. She fell on her back across the stones, while he dragged himself on top of her. She felt his weight on top of her.
His face was near her own as she scratched and pulled at his hair and ears—even now she could not bear to touch his face. Until the roaring in her head drowned out all blame, still she reproached herself for making such a sloppy knot. The gilded, satin rope had been too slippery. She understood that now. Under no circumstances should she ever have turned away from him. But mostly she was horrified to see his face so close, and smell his perfumed breath, and see his exquisite small teeth in his distorted mouth. She flailed at him to keep him at arm’s length. But he had his hands on her throat, and she couldn’t breathe. As her consciousness wavered, again she imagined his face as a sort of whirlpool or a drain.
* * *
THE ELECTOR OF Ratisbon clutched her slender neck, tried to subdue her body underneath his own, though he was not a heavy man. He clutched her with his hands, but he could not bear to look at her, and as her mouth opened and her tongue came out, he turned away. He could no longer hear the ticking clock, and so he looked for it behind the armchair in the corner, watched the oscillating pendulum in the high case, the carved iron hands—how long would this take? Already he could not endure it. Lying across her body with his ankles tied together, he told himself that he would not have touched this hateful woman except in self-defense. He straightened his arms, raised himself so as to press with his entire weight. He stared at the golden clock face—what a waste this was! What a waste of time and effort, this last quarter of an hour!
This creature, he realized now, was no threat to Germany. In his hotel room he had given her too much credit. Now he regretted his missed train, his broken promise, his lost career, which made it even more essential to secure the jewel—frustrated, he knocked the back of her head against the stone tile. It was clear this woman knew nothing about Miranda Popescu. By God, where was the girl? She was not in this house, it was sure.
But the baroness’s struggles were weaker now. The candles on the mantelpiece, out of sight from where he lay, flickered and made shadows in the little room. The old-fashioned horsehair furniture loomed above him. He was conscious of his own breathing as the baroness’s breathing failed. His thumbs had found the ribbed tube of her windpipe. She no longer buffeted him around the head. She no longer tried to writhe away. Still the clock hands had not budged.
He couldn’t look at her. Under his hands he could still feel her stubborn life. His fingers pressed into her neck—part of this was not a waste, he told himself. He would take Kepler’s Eye from the baroness’s body. Where had she hidden it in these small clothes? He would restore to Germany a piece of German property, and the stone would do for him what it had done for her. Johannes Kepler had been an ugly man.
He risked a glance at her and saw her eyelids were sealed shut. The job was done.
For a moment he relaxed his hands. But he’d been premature, and now her eyes stretched open. Horrified, he shouted out. Please God this was the death spasm, the last rage as the body gave up hope. Her face was red and mottled, her hands scratched at his wrists. Her back bent under him and lifted them together off the floor. Oh, he could not tolerate this. If not for his duty to his country and himself, even now he would release her, let her up, give her some brandy with his own hands, make her promise not to meddle in politics or conjuring—no, her promise was worth nothing.
This woman who twisted under him, whose back bent like a bow, who hurt his ears with her gurglings and gruntings that were worse than screams, her husband had been a powerful alchemist. After the creature died—gave up and died, for the sake of all the gods—he would explore the house and find the baron’s laboratory. Maybe he had books the elector had not seen. He would climb the hall stair onto the second floor.… In his mind the elector began an exploration of the house. Room by room he wandered through it, a meditation technique that he had read about in Chinese manuscripts, and which he now hoped would lift him up above the horrifying present, where two animals were locked together in a struggle to the death—he the serpent, the symbol of his house, and she—he could see it now. Moments before he’d been afraid to look at her. Now he could not take his eyes away. He could not but stare at her, and he saw now there was something catlike in her face. If she’d deluded herself into thinking she was the white tyger, then that delusion had come out of the stone. He’d have to guard against megalomania when the jewel was in his power, but right now he could almost believe in what she said. He would make certain at the moment of her death, which was fast approaching—let it be soon, by the bowels of God! His fingers ached. He could not press any harder.
It was horrible, but even now her staring eyes and contorted face maintained a kind of beauty, her chestnut-colored hair lit by an oblique shaft of gaslight from the alley outside the tall window. Worst of all he sensed some pleasure in himself. There was pleasure in feeling this woman subside under his hands. He was conscious of his sweat and her sweat also on her slippery neck and breasts—her camisole had come undone. One strap was ripped away. Part of him could celebrate the natural dominance of men, which at the same time surprised and disgusted the other part—oh, he was eager to be gone! And he would snatch up the tourmaline, and maybe a few books, and stagger out into the night—just one moment more! He could feel the shuddering of his heart, the pounding of the blood through his body. From a medical point of view as well, it had been a mistake to come here, when all he needed now was to rest in the saloon car to Germany, or in his sleeper after the results of this terrible day. The blood was hammering in his brain, mixing with the sound of his own cries, mixing with another sound that now he heard for the first time, a stick or a fist on the front door, and men’s voices shouting out in German: “Polizeistreife! Sicherheitspolizei!” etc. He had not thought he’d been loud enough to raise the watch.
No, but here were Stoessel’s men, shown up too late. The baroness’s throat was bruised under his hands. He tried to fall on her, add to the pressure there, because the slut was still alive, he could feel it. The long hand of the clock had scarcely shifted.
Now the police were here. He could let go and leave all this to them. He tried to move but found his ankles still tied stupidly together, found his fingers still locked around the baroness’s throat. He could not budge them.
Besides, the policemen had found the door open and had already come in. He could hear their boots in the hall, and now they were surrounding him, helping him up. “Herr lieutenant,” he gasped. “I’m glad to see you!”
>
In their exuberance they were a little rough. He counted six stalwart men in the brown uniforms of the Hanoverian Guard. The elector was out of breath, but he managed to gasp out as he was pulled across the room, “General Stoessel wants to examine her in the matter of Herr Spitz. If you search her you will find the jewel she stole from him. I am…”
But the lieutenant was squatting over the baroness’s body. “I know who you are,” he said. With what the elector supposed was commendable chivalry, he took the green shawl from where it lay on the carpet and used it to cover the woman’s torn camisole and torn trousers. At the same time, with commendable professionalism he was attempting to revive her. “Madame la Baronne,” he said, “Je vous en prie—are you all right?” And then in German to one of his men: “Get me some water. We are not too late.”
It was true. After an episode of spasmodic coughs and gulping breaths, the baroness’s limpid eyes crept open and she turned onto her side.
If he had been a better student of theatrical history, the elector would have recognized in her movements the beginning of the last act of Ariadne in Love, where the heroine is wakened by the rescuing god after a night of violent excess. On the beach in her ripped costume, Ariadne also turned onto her side, stretched out her naked arm, murmured, “Where am I—ah!”
“If you search her, you will find the evidence of the crime, which is a priceless piece of German heritage,” said the elector, suddenly aware of his croaking, ugly voice and clumsy gestures. How embarrassing to be tied at the ankles like this! Two men supported him to keep him from falling over. “I am…,” but again the lieutenant interrupted.