The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  “You must reassure yourself we will dispose also of the Chevalier de Graz,” continued Radu Luckacz. “He will not escape us. No escape is possible. None of this will arrive as a surprise to you, or to your associate Andromedes who—”

  He grimaced, choked, could not continue. “Who?” Miranda asked.

  “But you know this man! You must not lie to me! God help me!” Now suddenly he seemed in pain. His back arched off the floor, then subsided.

  Miranda took her hands away from him. “I know the name. It’s a little strange hearing you use it. I’ve known her since I was a child.”

  Miranda said this almost without thinking, though maybe she had meant to calm him, because it was clear he considered Andromeda a menace of some kind. But now he was even more agitated, his eyes wild and round as he turned toward her. His scalp started to bleed again.

  “What are you saying? Is it true?”

  “Hush, be quiet. Don’t worry about—”

  He grabbed hold of her hand. She pulled away; there was no reason to talk to him anymore. Where were Inez de Rougemont and the others? She didn’t want to be alone with this man anymore. “That’s enough,” she said. “It’s useless—”

  * * *

  BUT IT WASN’T useless. During the time he’d spent locked up in the People’s Palace, some of the details of the baroness’s last days had receded from him. Certain facts had been expunged, as if his guilt had wiped hers away. Now they all came back. All his suspicions—how could it have been true about Sasha Andromedes? “I have known her…”—what did it mean, this disgusting feminine pronoun? In the amber gallery Sasha Andromedes had been writhing on the floor. Yet he had been able to see her small breasts under her clothes. And if that was true, then was it also possible that Nicola Ceausescu had murdered her own son and Kevin Markasev before him? Surely all of it was a disordered fantasy, invented to make Luckacz’s betrayal seem less awful in the long, cold, naked nights inside his cell.

  Now he lay on his back in the conjurer’s library, the table overturned, Miranda Popescu kneeling over him. This was what one old man could do—it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Nothing had been right since Nicola Ceausescu died.

  Now in the doorway he could see a man he recognized, the baroness’s steward, Jean-Baptiste, still wearing his old jacket with the red lapels—what was he doing here? “Inspector Luckacz,” he said now as he came into the room. “What is this?” he said, reaching down to grab hold of the Rezistenta badge, a cheap enamel pin in the shape of an eagle’s foot. He ripped it away from Luckacz’s coat, tossed it across the room.

  Luckacz stared up at the steward’s face as he bent over him, his astonished red-rimmed eyes. Was it possible this man had been his friend?

  “There is nothing for you here,” said Jean-Baptiste. “You must leave us alone.” He was holding onto Luckacz’s arms, pulling him to his feet, when the window broke and one of the short-barreled carbine rifles pushed in through the glass, pushed through the curtain, fired.

  * * *

  THE SHOT WAS loud in the enclosed space. And now suddenly the room was full of people. The wind from the broken window sucked at the lantern flame. The light, which had seemed sufficient for her and Inez de Rougemont, now could not separate the blundering, chaotic shapes. Miranda made no sense of it, and she was struggling to her feet when Jean-Baptiste collapsed. At first she didn’t know what had happened. But he was hurt, and he pulled her down with him as he fell. She had her arms around his narrow shoulders, and his face was near her own. He hadn’t shaved for a few days. His breath stank of anise or fennel, something like that.

  She closed her eyes, groped in the darkness for the tourmaline. When she touched it, she found she was sitting in the upland pasture among the rocks below Johannes Kepler’s tower. And it wasn’t raining, and the dark clouds hurried overhead. She sat in a cold patch of sunlight on that windy hill, and she had a hedgehog on her lap in her cupped hands, curled up tight around its wound; it never would uncurl. “No,” she said, “no, no,” because she just couldn’t stand this, not again.

  In the dark, crowded library, she helped the old man down, laid him on his back. “You leave us—alone,” he said again. In the high place in the hills Miranda saw the bald-headed crow close by her among the rocks, and a blind badger poking his nose out, and there were other creatures in the grass. She saw the ruined tower and the Elector of Ratisbon on the stone platform looking down.

  “You—leave us.” The room was full of shouts and stamping feet. There was a smell of oil or kerosene, and the smoke stung her eyes, too. Some idiot had brought a torch into the room. A burning drop fell to the carpet and was extinguished by someone’s wet boot. But in the new light Miranda could see a soaked, bedraggled bunch of men in identical beige-brown suits, their carbines in their hands. A young man with a thin, greasy, pockmarked face was giving orders. The Condesa de Rougemont wasn’t there, nor Anton, nor the other men from the farm. Madame de Graz wasn’t there. But the men had caught Miranda’s mother, dragged her out of bed; she was barefoot, dressed in her nightgown and nightcap. She had a man on either side of her. Their hands seemed huge on her elbows. She gave Miranda a timid smile as if to reassure her. And Miranda was reassured, because in another part of her mind she grasped hold of the tourmaline and felt the juice on her fingers. Soon she would get up and unsheathe her bright claws, rip these little men apart.

  The greasy lieutenant with the yellow skin and the bad teeth was standing in the middle of the room, a pistol in his hand. He was talking to Radu Luckacz. “You. You’re a disgrace. What made you think you had the stomach for this? This is men’s work, not for babies, and I’ll tell the chief about it. Why should we risk our necks for you?”

  But then he noticed Miranda, and he brought his gun around. “So,” he said. “The last of the Brancoveanus. I suppose it’s time.”

  Then he was interrupted by two more men coming in, and they brought Andromeda between them and pushed her down onto the floor. She was dressed in some of Miranda’s clothes, a shirt and trousers. She scrambled away from the muzzles of the carbines, crawling on her butt toward Miranda on the hearth, where she was kneeling over Jean-Baptiste. The old man’s eyes were closed.

  Andromeda seemed pretty calm under the circumstances. She yawned, let her tongue loll out. “This really sucks,” she said.

  The greasy man stood above her with his pistol out. Rain still dripped from the brim of his hat. “Domnul Andromedes,” he said. “This is very good. You, we’ll take this one back for the chief.”

  “I can’t wait,” murmured Andromeda.

  Miranda closed her eyes. Now is the moment, she thought. Her fingers were slick with the juice. She sat among the rocks on the high mountain. She would lay the little hedgehog down among the dry stones, and she would let the beast come out of her. She would do it now.

  In the secret world, the day had closed down, the mist come in. The valley and the peaks were hidden, the tower loomed out of the fog. Above her was the smell of ozone and the storm breaking. A rock fall in the pass sounded like gunfire.

  She flexed her fingers.

  * * *

  “MADEMOISELLE,” SAID THE soldier in the pale uniform. In the farmhouse library, he stood above her with his pistol out. Clara Brancoveanu heard a crack of thunder, and the rain against the windows. “Iorgu, Mihai, get the men outside. Take this gutless fool,” he said, gesturing toward Inspector Luckacz—Clara recognized him from her time in Bucharest. “And this one,” the man continued, kicking Lieutenant Prochenko with his muddy boot. “Then come back.”

  Someone pulled Prochenko to his feet, pulled him away. Miranda knelt by Jean-Baptiste in front of the dark fireplace. He lay on his back and his eyes were closed. Blood was on his shirt, but not much. There wasn’t a lot of blood.

  Clara watched the gun in the soldier’s grip, watched it turn. She screamed, wrenched herself away from the big hands that held her by the elbows. She threw herself across the room, hiding Miranda’s b
ody with her own.

  The torch had gone out, or had been taken out, leaving a layer of oily smoke. The door was crowded with people as they tried to leave, to give the Rezistenta man the room to fire. But he did not, and when Clara looked up again, she saw his face transformed.

  All the cruelty and purpose in it was replaced with fear, and she watched also, horrified and amazed, as Jean-Baptiste stirred and stretched and tottered to his feet. When he opened his mouth, Clara knew what she was hearing. She could not but recognize his hoarse, soft, well-remembered voice, which all of them had heard in theaters, or at political gatherings, or on wax recordings, or in the first scratchy and indistinct radio broadcasts from Bucharest that summer: “Oh, my friends. What have you done to me?”

  Light came from a single lantern, flickering in the air from the broken window. The room seemed empty now, because the men in their pale suits had pushed themselves back against the walls or bookcases or glass-fronted cabinets, leaving the carpet open, a natural stage. “And what have you done to this good man?” said the voice out of Jean-Baptiste’s clenched lips. “Look at him—he was my friend, faithful and loyal to the end of the entire tragedy—look at him now!” And Jean-Baptiste moved his hands down his dirty and disheveled shirt, stripped it away from his withered body; Clara had been wrong about the blood. But it had seeped into his trousers and his back was wet with it, and now his hands as he displayed himself, the angry lips of his wound. He did a little dance across the floor, and students of Nicola Ceausescu might have recognized a motif from the first act of Rafael Hoffman’s Madame Faust, which she had performed to such acclaim in Petersburg in the old days. “Faithful to the end,” she said, “and this is how he is rewarded, this man who took me into the old baron’s house when I was just a girl. And helped me and cared for me in the days when I had nothing. Even when I lived in the People’s Palace, he was the only one who never lied to me, who loved me for myself alone, my own self—not like some of the others here.”

  Two men had been pulling Radu Luckacz through the door, but now they left him, shrank away from him. Jean-Baptiste stepped lightly over the floor. He raised his bloody finger in a manner that was neither threatening nor accusatory. Instead he moved his hand in front of Luckacz’s face, a gesture that was delicate and soft, almost as if he meant to caress the old policeman, who stared at him round-eyed. “You almost kept with me,” she said. “You stumbled at the end, my old companion. But it heals my heart to see you, I promise. We played some tricks on the potato-eaters, you and I.”

  “Ma’am, I—”

  “Shush, be quiet. This is a special night. Do not ruin it by talking—I will come for you, never fear. You and I will have our reckoning, but not tonight. Before we make amends, first we must feel our separation. But as for you, domnul. What about you?”

  Lieutenant Prochenko stood beside the door, hands in his pockets, the back of his head against the yellow plaster. He opened his mouth, displaying all his teeth, but he said nothing. He was probably pretending, but he looked almost bored, Clara thought, and maybe Nicola Ceausescu thought so, too: “Oh, how you wound me. I mean in my heart, domnul—is that a terrible thing? When a woman surrenders her heart to you? And how is it that you could drop it, let it shatter like a piece of crystal? How is it possible to be so cruel? I tell you there was no damage to my body that did not come as a relief, because of what I suffered in my heart.”

  “You are such unbelievable dogshit,” said Prochenko in English.

  Jean-Baptiste flinched, and his high shoulders tensed. “I know you have suffered, too,” he said. “Anyone can see it, the burden that you carry. I thought there was a way I could help you share it, or else let it drop. But you are proud, domnul—I understand that. I also know what it’s like to be too proud!”

  Prochenko yawned. Jean-Baptiste stared at him, then continued his circuit of the room. He squatted down over Clara and Miranda, reached out his bloody hands. “Here you are,” he said. “I must confess I was a fool to think you were a threat to me. Let me see the bracelet—oh, it jingles. And so you must see I do not bear you any harm. Oh, I was in time! Why do you think these men are here, if not to shoot you like an animal and bury you in these woods? Why did they come so far if not for that? But if you live and you remember this night, remember also this is not for your sake. Your life, your death mean nothing to me.”

  And Jean-Baptiste moved his hand in front of Clara’s face. “Not for you. But for you, madame la princesse, with my thanks. And my debt to you is paid—you were the first and last to hold my little Felix in her arms when he was bleeding on the stones of the Mycenaean Theater. You could not save him as I have saved your daughter.…”

  Horrified, Clara Brancoveanu watched the bloody hand reach out almost to caress her, touch her cheek. Miranda had sunk backward, closed her eyes. Her mother leaned against the wall, shrank away from the bloody fingers. And in the corner of the hearth, her hand fell on a pistol, her husband’s old revolver, which Inez de Rougemont had stolen for herself.

  There was no question of using it to protect herself from this ghost. In any case, she thought, Nicola Ceausescu did not mean her harm. Soon the phantom pulled itself erect again, swung around toward the men who had regrouped at the far wall. The yellow-faced Rezistenta man was holding out his own revolver, and now he fired it—once, twice. Jean-Baptiste never paused. But his expression changed, and his gentle, melancholy face turned dark with anger. Blood dripped from his ear.

  Clara gripped her husband’s pistol. She raised her other hand up to her face, and through her splayed fingers watched the old steward pull the poker and the tongs from the hearth stand, watched him raise them above his head.

  Students of Nicola Ceausescu might have recognized the precise pose from the first act of Madame Faust, when the heroine gathers the two cavalry sabers from the floor, touches their tips together in an arc above her upturned face. The clean blades come together, a momentary hush before the carnage that precedes the curtain’s fall. Now in the farmhouse library, Jean-Baptiste swung his poker in a circle. The clawed end caught in the nostril of one of Bocu’s men, ripped a gash across his cheek while at the same time the sharp tongs came down.

  II

  The Brass Gates

  7

  A Giant Walking

  ONCE AGAIN ON Saturday there was an interval of quiet. In no sector of the line was it more welcome than in Staro Selo, where over the past week the Turks had managed to churn forward through the mud. There was fighting in the town itself. Several kilometers of trenches had been lost.

  There had been speculation that for once the Turks would continue through the Sabbath. But on Friday night their guns went quiet, and the Roumanians pulled their own guns back. Men on both sides sobbed and cheered, climbed out of the mud to stand up straight, lift their faces to the rain. They lit fires in the dugouts, unwrapped their accordions and guitars. At numerous places Turkish soldiers came across with identical baskets of oranges and figs, an organized effort that managed to cause something genuine and unanticipated even so. Later the Turks staggered back across the no-man’s-land, carrying half-empty bottles of schnapps.

  Captain Gross’s men were in reserve, and on Saturday morning he was called to battalion headquarters. This was in a farmhouse in a grove of poplars. He was in time for luncheon, which was not served to him. He stood where the secretary had directed him, and saluted as a parade of senior officers crossed the muddy floorboards and climbed the stairs. A dozen staff cars were drawn up in a field: long silver bonnets, little flags. The chauffeurs leaned against the doors to smoke their cigarettes. They helped push each other out of the mud.

  Peter recognized the colonel, a small man with a bald forehead and a semicircle of white hair, who gave him a disgusted look as he strode past. After several hours a sergeant-major led him to a little room lined with cupboards, and heated with an enameled stove on bricks. There were wooden chairs, but he did not sit. The rain was intermittent on the narrow window over the driv
e.

  Without preamble or announcement, a soldier came in and sat down next to the stove. He put his boots onto the grate.

  He was an enormous man. His thick neck was ridged with muscle where it met his skull. His bald head shone as if it had been waxed and polished. He wore a dark green uniform without insignia, but Peter recognized him from photographs: General Ion Antonescu, commander of the Roumanian armies. He rocked back on his chair so that the front legs left the floor. “Tell me,” he said, “why does a man refuse the Star of Hercules?”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me.”

  The previous Monday, the company commander had put in Peter’s name. On Wednesday he had withdrawn it, after Peter had requested it in writing.

  “Sir, this is not a war of individuals. I said I would accept on behalf of my platoon.”

  Antonescu fetched some hazelnuts and a steel nutcracker from the pocket of his tunic. He cracked a nut and threw the shell into the grate. “Is that so?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are wrong. One man can win a battle by himself. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Sir…”

  “Don’t talk to me. Heroes are different from good men, or even good soldiers. Real soldiers hate them, but they serve a purpose. I will send a photographer, and there will be a story in the newspaper. Is that understood? When I heard about this, I thought I had no use for one-armed officers like you. But I was wrong. I am sending you to Brasov.”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t play the fool. My men deserve more than to be led by cripples. Cripples who will not follow the commands of their superiors. That is intolerable—direct orders! You will follow them now, by God. The Star of Hercules, or a court-martial—what were you doing in the no-man’s-land, the night before the first assault? What have you to say to me? No, that is all. Have you ever heard of the Chevalier de Graz?”