The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  “So you must…”

  Miranda didn’t want to hear it. She’d lived in her aunt’s book, studied the world wars in the ninth grade. If she’d learned anything from Mr. Oats, it was that these advances and assaults and counteroffensives meant nothing at all, or else nothing but slaughter. Victory was not to be found that way, not a victory that meant anything or did not lead to other wars—no doubt Aegypta Schenck had manufactured Mr. Oats to teach her this, make this point exactly. So that here upon this parapet, she would not be tempted to assume …

  “Don’t you see?” she said. “We can’t win that way. It’s an illusion.”

  “Yes, but we can lose.”

  Miranda considered the justice of this. If the Turks crossed the river in any kind of numbers, either by the open water or else by the bridge, with the bulk of the Roumanian army trapped on the south shore …

  That was Peter’s sector by the Tutrakan bridge.

  But even if he weren’t in danger, she would not decide between these competing claims, not now. The power was in her hands, and she would not use it to please one person or someone else. Instead she looked down at the map in the bottom of the pool, at the map over her knees, and forced them to coincide. She closed her eyes, sealing them together, and then she pulled herself away. She left the roof of the broken tower. The rain was a relief, but if she got soaked, she’d freeze. She looked for shelter underneath the stairway by the iron door.

  “What do you see?”

  “I don’t see anything!” But then she told the condesa about the door, which was locked with a heavy bolt of iron. On the lintel above her head she saw some pictures scratched into the stone.

  “But I think there’s something in here. It’s like a prison door. There’s something alive in here. I can feel it.”

  “Stop.”

  These symbols scratched into the lintel, she remembered them from Edith Hamilton’s Mythology—the mirror, and then a strange little round face. Once for about a week and a half, Andromeda had been interested in astrology.

  In the darkened library, Miranda asked for a glass of water. Then she said, “Do you remember that lady? That French lady on Borgo Pass? She said a German alchemist had tricked some kind of spirit or a god—”

  “Stop.”

  There was something in Madame de Rougemont’s voice, some hint of menace, but also a strange wistfulness. She stood in the shadow behind the chair, and Miranda couldn’t see her face. But there was no possibility at all that she would bring her something to drink.

  So Miranda, parched and with an aching head, labored to stand up out of her chair. As she turned, she could sense some kind of movement. The door stood ominous and silent and solid in its stone frame; she had her hand on the bolt. But there was movement in the rubble of the broken wall.

  This tower won’t last forever, Miranda thought. Expedite the inevitable. She saw the movement of a small creature that hesitated when she turned to face it. Then it was gone.

  The bolt ended in a ring. She tugged on it for a moment, banged it with the heel of her palm. Maybe something was suffering in there. How could she leave that big door closed behind her? She hammered at the bolt. It would not budge.

  “Oh, stop,” said Inez de Rougemont.

  “Tell me what’s in here!”

  Something shifted in the rock wall, and Miranda left the door to look out through the fallen gap, not toward the lake but toward a field of rocks and tumbled scree under the shadow of the mountain.

  Something was alive out there, or else not quite alive. She glanced back at the door. And when she turned again, she could see a man climbing toward her over the unsteady stones. When she watched him he stood still, but if she closed her eyes, or went back to the door, or fumbled with the water pitcher on the table in the library, she knew he’d take a few steps toward her, as if playing some ectoplasmic game of red light, green light. He was a ghost, she knew.

  The rain had gone away, the rocks were dry. He stumbled toward her and she recognized him. He was dressed in expensive clothes, a little man with a ruined face, whom she’d last seen on he banks of the Hoosick River. He was the Elector of Ratisbon, Miranda knew—her old enemy. He had kept her mother prisoner inside his house.

  And maybe all she’d have to do is flap her hands and he’d disperse, undone by a current of air. She went and tugged on the iron bolt a little more, but it was rusted shut; she was too weak. And as if conjured by that thought, she understood now she was vulnerable, and the nature of the danger had changed. It wasn’t just the man in the cutaway suit. But there were little animals all around her in the crevices in the rocks. Above her the sky was going dark, though it was still midmorning.

  “You’ve been lying to me,” she said.

  She was thinking about the photograph on the library table—Inez de Rougemont, young and beautiful, dressed à la paysanne. In her mind the soldier with the blurred face had been replaced by the Elector of Ratisbon, and she knew why. The last day she had spent in America, she had seen this apparition—this little man in his formal suit, his face ravaged with smallpox. And at the same time Peter had seen this woman, dressed in Gypsy clothes, and he had recognized her and known her name—told Miranda later when they’d spoken of that crazy day, the first time she had seen him in the People’s Palace, when the doctors had cut off his hand—how could she have been too stupid to remember her name?

  * * *

  RADU LUCKACZ NOTICED the change in the weather as he walked up from the village along the dirt road. In the main square of Stanesti-Jui, looking up into the night sky, he had seen the stars, moonlight on snow peaks. The darkness was dry and fresh. But then in a moment the sky had clouded over and a mist had come, a thickness of the air. It clung to the torches Bocu’s lieutenant had insisted on lighting. Looking back along the road, Luckacz saw each flame surrounded by a dull, glowing sphere. And he was immediately dispirited, because he recognized the effect of some unfair conjuring—it didn’t matter. More men had joined them in the village in addition to the twenty who’d been with him on the train.

  Bocu had insisted on this show of force. He was unsure of the extent of his power, Luckacz assumed, and whether the local police would obey him. There were just a few peasants in the house itself, peasants and servants and women, and maybe Sasha Andromedes. Everything else was superstition and stupidity. So this was where the Condesa de Rougemont had found refuge all these years! It had been fifteen years at least since the newspapers had reported her death.

  This was a simple matter, and in the past it would have been unworthy of his personal attention. He paused to catch his breath. The torchlight shone on ditches full of wildflowers on both sides of the road. He rubbed his bald head and then replaced his hat. At the same time he stifled one of the gasping sobs that came over him from time to time as he remembered standing on the threshold of the amber gallery. The baroness had turned away from him, her hands over her breasts.

  She had asked him to come here to this mountain village, and he had disobeyed her. Now she was dead. The road, a long dirt and gravel cul-de-sac, curved up to the farmhouse among the long-needled pines. There was dirt on his boots, the cuffs of his trousers. It looked now it might rain.

  * * *

  KNEADING THE STONES, stretching her back, Miranda crouched down in the broken wall. Furry, blind, underground creatures moved among the rocks: badgers, rats, weasels, moles.

  She went up on her hind legs against the door and hooked her hand through the iron ring. This would do it, she thought.

  “For the love of God,” said Inez de Rougemont.

  It was a strange phrase under the circumstances. “I’m sick of this,” Miranda said, standing by her chair in the farmhouse library. “All of you with your secret plans. What’s the difference between you, except what side you’re on?”

  There really was a difference, and Miranda knew it. She persevered for the sake of the larger point, as Stanley might have said: “Don’t you want to try something else? All
of you, all of your struggling for wisdom and what’s good. Where are we now—a world war? I know all about it. I read about it in my history class. Olga Karpov—”

  “She betrayed us!“

  “But there’ll always be someone like that. Some part of you. That’s what I mean. You have to ask yourself, ‘What are you afraid of?’” Miranda asked herself aloud, to quiet her own fears.

  Surely there was something in this little prison in the mountain pass, something sealed up by Johannes Kepler centuries before. And the world could be one way, or else it could be another way—the door was too heavy for her hand. But the paws of the white tyger could pull it from its frame.

  Because she knew she had the strength, she stopped. “Certainty comes from weakness,” Stanley had once said.

  Now there were clouds over the sun, and a wind had come up out of nothing. The rain had blown away. Miranda felt a change of pressure in her ears. There was lightning, a momentary tree of light above her head, an explosion of thunder. She looked up to see a yellow hawk with its claws outstretched. There was a bald old crow among the rocks, and the hawk stooped down. But then it was caught up by the wind and overturned against the shuddering wall.

  The ghost of Theodore von Geiss und Ratisbon had disappeared. But there were little animals among the rocks, small weak mammals that were the tyger’s natural prey. They cringed and hid in the cracks and crevices, afraid of her smell, she imagined. Except for the bald crow that hopped down the slope—she followed it. But by the side of the small tarn she stopped, turned around in time to see a bolt of lightning strike the ruined platform where Johannes Kepler had once stood. Maybe some other force was trying to free the creature in the dark cell, or else destroy the tower. The air was full of ozone. Miranda turned downhill.

  * * *

  BOCU’S YOUNG LIEUTENANT had a sickly face, unpleasant in the torchlight. There was a hedge that separated the road from the fields, and the building loomed up suddenly in the dark mist. A single lantern burned on the ground floor, a diffuse flickering light, because the curtains in that room were drawn. “Someone is awake,” murmured the lieutenant.

  Luckacz had disliked him more every step they took. His teeth were stained and ragged when he smiled, as now. All the way from Bucharest, Luckacz had assumed these men were under his own control. Now suddenly he didn’t think so. He had no official rank or position, after all. Why were all these men necessary for a simple investigation, a simple arrest?

  On the train and again in the village station he had made his plan, which was to knock on the door with these fellows in reserve, to take away the possibility of resistance. But now he understood the lieutenant had a different plan. “What do you think?” whispered the lieutenant. “We will set the barns on fire. Then we’ll have the light to shoot.” The man beside him unstrapped his rifle, a new bolt-action carbine from North Africa.

  Was he joking? Appalled, Luckacz raised his hand. “I will secure the house. Please wait,” he said. But then there was a stroke of lightning and a crack of thunder above their heads, as if the weather were as disgusted as he was by these young men in their uniforms without insignia—were they soldiers or hired criminals?

  Another flash of lightning, and the air stank and tingled. Some of the men threw down their torches. Oh, they were a fine, superstitious bunch, not one of them fit for army service or the metropolitan police.

  And the rain came in a sudden burst. The lieutenant pulled the men into the trees on the other side of the road. The torches flickered, wan and wet. Afraid of a little rain, Luckacz thought, and he pulled the brim of his hat over his eyes, strode to the door, pounded on it, tried the bar. It wasn’t even locked. He’d show Bocu’s thugs what one man could do, one old man in the rain with nothing but a spring-loaded pistol in his pocket; he wouldn’t even use it. No plan was necessary. A house full of women, and maybe a few fellows to help with the cows. No doubt they lived in a different structure.

  But as he pushed open the door, a third bolt of lightning struck the house itself, the chimney or the ridgepole.

  * * *

  MIRANDA GAVE THE tourmaline a squeeze, then descended to the farm outside the mountain village of Stanesti-Jui, which had been caught in the same storm.

  She imagined she would fall into her body with relief. But at first she couldn’t tell the difference. Thunder broke above her head.

  She came to herself in the darkened room. Her chair had toppled over. There was broken glass under her hand. Someone whimpered in the dark.

  Maybe the house had been struck by lightning. If so, maybe it wasn’t such a big deal. Nothing seemed to be on fire. The room was still intact. Miranda listened to the rain against the windows, and as her eyes cleared she saw the table had been overthrown. She remembered struggling to her feet, striving forward against all odds to find a glass of water. Had she done all this? She was surprised she’d had the strength to move such an enormous slab of wood.

  The door hung on its hinges, the lock broken, the jamb splintered. Had someone broken it down? Now it swung open and the woman came in, Inez de Rougemont, carrying a glass lantern in her hand. Miranda remembered the diving hawk, remembered also the bald crow. Where was he? Maybe there. In the improved light she saw a man wedged beneath the table, the back of his bald head against the floorboards. He had a nosebleed, and was bleeding also from a gash behind his ear.

  The condesa limped around the room, opening the curtains and the shades. Light-headed, Miranda knelt down beside the injured man. She recognized him, she thought.

  She tried to push the table off him, but she was right. It was too heavy. She took a napkin from the floor and pressed it against the man’s ear to stop the flow of blood. Once in America a neighbor’s kid had hit her with a rake in the same spot. The wound was superficial, Stanley had said, though it had bled and bled.

  Where had she seen this man before? She remembered when he started to speak, his voice harsh, nasal, foreign: “Miss Popescu, it is futile to resist. It is my duty to inform you that you are in a state of criminal apprehension, because of your complicity in the murder of Felix Ceausescu on the twelfth of Thermidor. I advise you to come quietly and not attempt to abscond, as you have been known to do.…”

  This was Inspector Luckacz. She had seen him in Mogosoaia when she and Peter had given in to the police. Luckacz had had thick gray hair then and a black moustache. What had happened to him? It was not so long ago.

  The rain crashed against the dark windows. Madame de Rougemont had put the lantern on a low table, turned up the flame in the glass chimney. Grimacing and limping, she came toward them. “I’ll send Anton for the carriage,” she said.

  “No,” Miranda said, “I’m sick of this.”

  She held the napkin against the man’s bald head. “Why are you chasing me?” she asked as gently as she knew how, although her voice was trembling.

  “Miss, I believe you must expect because of your connections to the former royal family of this country that our laws and natural laws do not apply to you. Even in this room here I see evidence of conjuring and prestidigitation. Though you might have used it to disarm me, and even if I give my life for it, still I must assure you that—”

  He was interrupted by the Condesa de Rougemont’s contemptuous grunt. “Let him alone. We must be gone from here, all of us, tonight. He won’t have come alone.”

  “No, ma’am. There is no possibility to resist. The village boys were frightened of the lightning strike. But the house is surrounded. I have twenty-seven men, including several members of the Brancoveanu Artillery.”

  Inez de Rougemont paused at the doorway before going out. “Come with me,” she said, but Miranda ignored her. Why should she pay attention to a woman who had lied to her? Or at least had not revealed a connection to her enemy—she felt sequestered and sheltered by the rain around the house, as if the effect of the big world might be muted here. Everything had always happened so fast. But now the inspector lay helpless, stunned. He stirred feebly u
nder her hands, simultaneously rejecting and accepting her ministrations. There was a pitcher of water intact on the sideboard. She held a glass of water for him to drink.

  Maybe he was lying about the twenty-seven men. But if the house was surrounded, he was the man she had to convince. “You know I had nothing to do with this.”

  Alone with Luckacz in the room, she wet another napkin. It was streaked with marmalade, so she found a clean corner to wipe under the policeman’s nose. There was gray hair in his nostrils.

  “I’ve defended myself against men who wanted to kill me,” she said. “Peter, too.”

  The policeman flinched. The bump on his head was just beginning to rise. “Miss Popescu,” he murmured in his dry, irritating voice. “You were with the Chevalier de Graz when he fired on Felix Ceausescu, the child of our national heroine.”

  At least this was true: Miranda had dragged the boy from his bed, dragged him down into the courtyard where he’d died. His blood had spread over the cobblestones.

  “The Chevalier de Graz—”

  “You don’t really think that,” she interrupted. “That woman murdered her own son. She shot him from the balcony.”

  “The Chevalier de Graz—”

  “Are you insane? The boy was in my mother’s arms.”

  She pressed the napkin against Luckacz’s bald head. The cloth was saturated with blood, whose flow had lessened now. He continued in a whisper, his voice harsh and strained: “Miss Popescu, you must understand that you are not familiar with all types of firearms, as I am. And I must insist to you that in a circular space it is quite difficult to verify the source of this type of gunfire. There are echoes against the stone.…”

  He was hopeless. He was like Captain Raevsky and Jean-Baptiste. What was it with these men? Besotted, she supposed. In love. A kind of love.