by Paul Park
Miranda shrugged. “I have money.”
“Yes, I saw. Moldovan gold rubles. You are rich.”
Miranda shrugged. “What about Codreanu? You said…”
“You are safe here. And Queen Mary’s hermitage where we spend the night. In the daytime he is weak. So we must be there before darkness.”
As she washed the pot, she answered Miranda’s questions. She had answers to everything. “When the Germans came, Nicola Ceausescu was homeless in the streets of Bucharest. She was the baron’s widow, but she had no money. But there were people in the German high command who’d seen her on the stage. The white tyger, it’s a part for her to play. And they keep her son a hostage to control her—it was perfect, see? She was always a whore, and now she spreads for them.”
“A hostage?’
“Yes, in a castle in Germany. In Ratisbon.”
This was a surprise. Miranda’s birth-mother, whom she’d never met, was a prisoner there. Raevsky had said so, and her aunt.
Nicola Ceausescu was the one who had sent Captain Raevsky to America, Miranda knew. And if he hadn’t managed to kidnap her, it was mostly bad luck that had prevented him. To the end, to the last day she’d seen him, still he was always trying to persuade her to come willingly, telling her what a grand time she’d have in Bucharest as Nicola Ceausescu’s guest—a beautiful lady, he had called her, much misjudged.
Now Miranda wondered if there were not some hidden reason why Nicola Ceausescu wanted her, something that might involve her mother and the baroness’s son. “This man Codreanu. Why is he chasing me?”
Ludu Rat-tooth grimaced. “Isn’t it obvious? It’s your bracelet. People see you, they’ll know Nicola Ceausescu is a fake.”
“Don’t they know already?”
“Yes, they know. But they’re not sure. And there’s nothing else, no one for them to love. Nothing to believe in. Valeria Dragonesti was no better. No—one thing. She kept the Germans out.”
The sun had not shown its face all day. A high gray mist covered the sky. The girl packed up the camp. “The generals put her on the throne when you were a baby,” she said. “Your father was half German, but he was a man, a friend of the Gypsies with his sister. Baron Ceausescu betrayed him and he died in prison. Then your mother ran to Ratisbon where you were born, and sent you back with Mother Egypt and the invasion plan from Germany—you see you saved us once before!”
Miranda was glad to hear this story of her aunt’s confirmed, and she asked many questions about it. “How is it possible you do not know these things?” said Ludu Rat-tooth, not for the first time. “Your mother, no one knows. People say she is locked up in Ratisbon. Still now after more than twenty years.”
Hearing this repeated, Miranda wondered why it made so little impression on her. Obviously she should be rushing off to Ratisbon, wherever that might be. Obviously—or at least it should have occurred to her to do so. And maybe she was a bad, unnatural daughter, but when she tried to imagine her mother’s face, all she ever saw was Rachel in the Massachusetts house, the picture in Miranda’s locket notwithstanding. Clara Brancoveanu was a prisoner in Germany. It was just words.
And anyway, how could her mother have given her up, surrendered her after one day when she was just a baby? Miranda pondered this as in the afternoon she and Ludu Rat-tooth walked their horses away from the water. Below the ridge they crossed northwest into an older forest of oak trees and beeches. There was no path, but the trees were widely spaced. Miranda’s pony followed the gray horse, and Miranda did nothing except duck under the limbs of trees. Then they came to a dirt road through the forest and could make better time.
They saw no one on the road. The branches arched overhead. The dirt of the road was rutted and moist, and the horses’ hooves made a soft, stamping noise. Miranda experimented with her pony, trying to turn it subtly, or make it slow down or speed up. She shifted her weight on its back, and increased the pressure of her right knee or her left. But the horses went hour after hour at a fast walk, and nothing she did made much difference, which was just as well. She was hungry by the time the girl pulled up the gray horse, and the pony stopped, too.
“Here is the place,” said Rat-tooth.
She slipped out of the saddle. Taking hold of the horse’s mouth, she turned aside under the trees, and Miranda followed her straight in under the beech trees on the left-hand side. Her whole body ached. She was grateful to be on the ground again, although her feet were hot, her leather boots uncomfortable. She stepped carefully over the fallen leaves, trying not to leave a mark.
In time they came to a clearing in the woods, and a small, round pool of water. There was high, soft grass, and some kind of ruined structure. “Queen Mary lived here for a day and a night,” murmured the girl, as Miranda looked up at the darkening sky. “We should be safe.”
Then immediately she would have started on her round of tasks with the horses and the camp, only Miranda held her arm. Miranda had been thinking long, gloomy thoughts. “Tell me,” she said—Ludu Rat-tooth knew a lot. It was conceivable she might have heard, conceivable that in five years … “Tell me,” Miranda said. “Have you ever heard the name de Graz, Pieter de Graz, or maybe Sasha Prochenko? Have you heard those names?” she asked. The girl shook her head, pulled her arm away.
* * *
BUT PETER LIFTED his head as if he’d heard Miranda’s question in the night air. In time and space he was much closer than she feared.
She would have been shocked to see him as he stood under the bridge. When she had left him his right hand had been thick and heavy on his boy’s arm. Now his body matched it. He’d put on muscle and height, but less flesh than he needed. Even so he was a more handsome man than he’d ever been a boy. His brown hair, brown eyes, and crooked teeth were still the same. And she would have recognized many of his gestures and mannerisms.
Now he stood cursing in the dark, his lips twisted into a scowl. Photographs of the Chevalier de Graz, taken before his disappearance, would have shown this same expression. They would have shown him riding with his regiment or hunting bears in the Carpathians, or standing with his brothers and sisters and their dogs outside the Schloss de Graz in Satu Mares. They would have shown him with his parents, bluff, hard-drinking Roumanian aristocrats—whatever filter his character had passed through, it had not yet allowed any of those memories. Toward dawn, standing in the mud under the Kanuni bridge in Adrianopole, cursing after the lost dog, Peter Gross had no recollection of the place, even though the Chevalier de Graz had driven over the same road with Frederick Schenck von Schenck after the battle of Havsa on his way to meet the Turkish generals.
Part of this was an effort of will. He wouldn’t give up his own mother and his father for a couple of battered sepia photographs. Peter’s memory was much stronger, much more subtle than the chevalier’s, and he had used it to protect his childhood, everything he was. Since he’d climbed out of the pit in Heliopolis, at free moments he’d gone back into the past, unearthing memories that were sometimes painful or touched with pain; it didn’t matter. He had no desire to grow into something else.
And he associated de Graz with a dark part of his mind, an unreflective part that led him into violence and chaos. Raevsky had died, his spirit animal had scampered away. The man on the snowy bridge had grabbed hold of Peter’s ear. Some memories he could not tolerate.
Certain skills had come back to him. He could speak Roumanian and French. A little Turkish might have come in handy, though. He pulled his boot out of the mud and strode down the slope under this other bridge. Beggars lived there in wooden packing crates and under oilcloth tarpaulins. This was the poorest section of the town, full of Bulgar refugees.
In the moneyless life he and Andromeda had led since they’d come out of the tiled well in Heliopolis, they’d passed months in neighborhoods like this, in Tunis, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. Though in his short life he had spent huge sums, the Chevalier de Graz had had no skill at generating cash. Neither did Peter Gross�
��his livelihood depended on the dog.
In the sophisticated cities of North Africa, he and Andromeda had been protected by people’s ignorance, their lack of superstition. Even in Constantinople no one had glanced at the beast. But now finally they had reached the borders of Europe. These Bulgars, Hebrews, and Gypsies had a ruder knowledge. Sometimes as the dog passed, Peter had seen them make the sign of the evil eye.
Andromeda had been away for hours and he was worried. He’d been searching all afternoon. He stumbled down the embankment onto level ground, a wet stretch of cobblestones between the Tunca River and the pilings of the bridge. Overhead, the night traffic had almost ceased along the line of Byzantine stone arches, though occasionally a bullock cart still rumbled toward the city gates.
In the evening it rained. Along the black, quiet river, traffic had almost ceased. Under the bridge, though, a crowd of men had gathered. Some carried torches. The span closest to the water had been bricked up on the downstream side so that it formed a high-arched cave. Fifteen or twenty men stood in the entrance to that cave, swearing and shouting, and some laughed. Peter saw Andromeda’s footprints in the wet mud.
He couldn’t understand what the men were saying. But some of them had picked up stones. One of them held a pistol, an old, double flint-lock affair. He was a squat, evil-looking brute, dressed in a brown leather jacket (though it was a hot night), on which still hung some fragments of fur. Instinctively Peter selected him as the leader of this group and made his way toward him over the uneven ground. As he brought the gun down, Peter came behind him and seized hold of his wrist. One of the plates flashed and misfired.
Some Turkish might have been useful, though there was no time to talk. No time even to think what he was doing—Peter brought his right arm over the man’s shoulder and pushed his forearm into the man’s thick throat. At moments like this he gave himself into the hands of the Chevalier de Graz. He pulled the gun down as the man tried to stamp on his foot. Others had dropped their stones and come around now, a ragged, drunken, broken-toothed bunch of losers, Peter told himself. Some had their knives out, but Peter had the upper hand. They yelled at him; he didn’t know what they were saying. He had their leader, though, and was hurting his windpipe as the man struggled and flailed. Then he found the second trigger, and his pistol fired.
There was a smell of smoke and powder. The shot resounded in the arch. Peter put his back against the wall and turned the man’s body from side to side; he knew he’d won. The other men were worried now because the noise might draw down the janissaries from the guardhouse on the bridge. Some were already staggering away. The squat little man was struggling, and Peter used his body as a buckler, turning it from side to side as the others came closer with their knives. He was waiting for the sound of the policemen’s whistle, and when it came, most of those who faced him turned and ran. He adjusted his arm so the little man could breathe, and then he threw him down completely on the muddy stones. Grimacing and roaring, he made a half-run toward the men who still remained in the entrance to the cave, then turned and ducked inside against the bricked-up wall, a distance of perhaps twenty feet.
The damned dog was in the cul-de-sac, crouching over a capon she had stolen, and she growled as Peter approached. In their journey from America she’d changed as he had, growing bigger and more fierce. Now she yawned, stretched her tongue out and then picked up the capon by it broken neck. Its viscera hung in the mud.
Again Peter heard the shrill whistle of the night janissaries. At the entrance to the cave the fat man lay groaning. But Andromeda wanted to play. She thrust her forelegs out, then bounded past him with the capon in her mouth. Peter was able to get a hand on the bird, whose head tore away. Then Andromeda was gone, disappearing out the open archway.
The bird was still warm, stolen from the henhouse of some citizen. Peter tucked it into his coat. He slipped under the arch and into the small space between the piling and the embankment. It was partly blocked with rubble, but he managed to climb through without making any noise, and then he followed the riverbank into a thicket of small trees.
The police were at the bridge now, and he waited in the thicket to make sure they wouldn’t follow him. Night came. While he waited, as was his custom, he ran over some poetry in his mind, then checked in with his father in the house on White Oak Road. Flexing the muscles of his memory, he recalled many things—small words of his mother and then something Miranda had said to him in high school when he was in ninth grade. It was in the corridor by Ms. McDonald’s classroom. She hadn’t really known him then. But he knew who she was.
This was a way of subduing the Chevalier de Graz, whom he had allowed to possess him in the fight. Now he shivered in his wet coat. When everything was still, he walked downstream for a couple of miles before turning in a circle to the road again. Two hours later he crossed the bridge without incident and reached his hotel before dawn.
It was a waystation for impoverished travelers, called the Dardanelles. Far from that body of water, it sagged on its foundations in a dirty, unpaved part of town. Peter and Andromeda’s room was on the third story in the back, with a single, glassless window overlooking a bricked-up court. The floor was muddy and the plaster walls streaked with red where lodgers had crushed centipedes and other vermin. There was no furniture except a single, sagging bed, on which Andromeda lay sleeping when Peter came in.
It was dark in the room, except for the light that shone in from the court. Peter sat down on the bed and laid the capon on the floor, then fumbled for a bottle of water standing upright. He drew the cork out with his teeth and dropped it into his cupped palm. He was listening for a sound of movement from the bed. Soon it came.
There was the stub of a candle in a pool of hardened wax on the iron bed frame. When the water was finished, he broke the candle off and jammed it into the neck of the bottle, which he stood next to his boot. Pulling a box of phaetons from his pocket, he struck one of them and lit the wick, keeping the bottle low upon the ground. He did this out of a sense of modesty. He did not want to see Andromeda as she rose from the bed. He did not want to see her muscled body covered with a layer of fine hair. He didn’t want to see her long, naked legs as she swung them off her side of the bed.
None of this, he thought, was intended to provoke him. She was oblivious. She showed no longer, for example, any trace of the way she had teased and flirted with him on Christmas Hill. So maybe he’d been wrong about that after all; he began to tear the feathers off the bird and drop them underfoot. Caught in a swirl of air, they scattered to the corner of the room or underneath the bed.
Peter was hungry. Without looking he could tell Andromeda was standing in the glow from the window, outside the light cast by the candle onto his boot and his hands and the bird and a circle of the floor. She was looking into the triangular fragment of a mirror, fixed to the wall beside the door. “So where the Christ have I been?” she said cheerfully. He knew from experience she would be touching streaks of blood and dirt, chuckling over her bruises. Her feet, especially, would be filthy and sore.
“You don’t want to know.”
He glanced up as he pulled the capon’s breast feathers against the grain, and in the gathering dawn he saw her back as she shrugged off her linen shirt—she always dressed like a dandy, while he made do with rags. But it was true what she said. If she was to be let into card games and betting parlors, she had to look as if she had some money to lose.
She was rubbing her teeth, picking at them with her long fingernails. Something dislodged, and she inspected the ball of her thumb. “Must have been a hard night,” she said. “So what is it today?”
“A chicken.”
“Ugh.”
“I’ll give it to the kitchen. Though I see you’ve had your breakfast.”
“Yuck.” She turned to face him, hands on her hips, and he looked down. One of the small feathers blew into the candle flame, emitting a singed smell.
“So what’s our plan today?” she said.<
br />
He shrugged. “Still the same. We need a hundred fifty piastres each for new papers and visas. Plus what we owe for the room.”
Andromeda smelled her fingers. “I’m not paying for this.”
The creature who was dressing now in front of him bore little resemblance to the girl he and Miranda had known. There was nothing female about her as she pulled on her silk shirt, except of course for the obvious things, which now he glanced at furtively. It wasn’t that she was sexless now, but rather double-sexed, moving back and forth continually over a line—she’d always been flat-chested. She’d always been athletic and strong. That wasn’t it.
He had to admit that there was nothing sexual in the way she teased him. If anything, those feelings came from him, and sometimes at night he had lain sleepless beside her, thinking about Miranda, about kissing her and touching her body—it was useless. Where was she?
And there were moments also, in a certain light, when he knew Andromeda had changed less than he had. Certainly she was still beautiful, and not just to him. When she stalked the streets in her long boots, men and women turned their heads.
“I’m off to the Ali Pasa Carsisi,” she said—the covered bazaar in the Hurriyet Meydani. Which meant she’d spend the morning pickpocketing, a special skill. Pilfered merchants would forget their losses, abashed by her self-confidence. Surely she’d adapted to her triple nature—girl, dog, Roumanian staff officer—better than he’d adapted to his new right hand. Much about her made him jealous and disgusted him. When they slept in the big, sagging bed, here and in fleabags across North Africa, he was the one who kept all his clothes on, though he was a normal man.
“I think I’m sleeping in,” he said, looking up finally into her delicate, strange face, in which her animal nature now seemed to predominate. Sphinxlike, she smiled, though her pale eyes were wide and innocent.
“I need a cup of coffee, I swear to God,” she said, and licked her lips.