The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  He let his hand drop. The unfortunate lieutenant stepped back, brought his fingers to his forehead. “Sir, if I may, I’d like to volunteer—”

  “Nonsense! Nonsense! You’ve made garbage out of this, and that’s enough. And I can’t spare the men—I’m joking!”

  “Chief, I appreciate that. I want to say again that this was not my fault. This fellow—”

  Looking at the colonel’s face, Luckacz could tell the young man had made a mistake. “Not your fault?” Bocu asked, his voice suddenly cold. “May I remind you that Domnul Luckacz was once chief of the metropolitan police under Nicola Ceausescu and the German occupation of this city?”

  “But that says everything! He was a traitor! A collaborator! How can you trust a man like this?“

  Bocu tensed the muscles of his jaw, balled his hands into fists. “Maybe,” he said softly. “But he was not too stupid to understand I wanted the Popescu girl alive, and her mother, too—a woman who is, I remind you, a heroine of Great Roumania and our struggle against foreign domination. And I am not so stupid as to not have kept an independent witness to these events. You meant to kill them—these defenseless women. Isn’t it so?”

  “Sir, I—”

  How was it possible, Luckacz thought, that the lieutenant could have made such a mistake? Or was it only now that Bocu had reconsidered, changed his mind? He smiled again. “The Rezistenta does not fight against women. On the contrary, we embrace them. Luckacz is not so stupid that he doesn’t understand I am a widower. Maybe you saw the flags at the station, the black crêpe. A man like me—though I am shy to say it, I need women around me. This Popescu girl is heiress to the oldest family in Roumania, descended from gods, I seem to remember from my schoolboy days. Did you find her beautiful?”

  “Chief, I—”

  The young lieutenant was desperate now. Luckacz wiped his hands on the shapeless crown of his hat. Startled, he wondered what he should do or say—nothing, obviously. Miranda Popescu was a known fugitive, of course, wanted in connection with the murder of a policeman in Braila, never brought to trial. But did it matter? Obviously not. Bocu didn’t care. History had turned the page.

  “You did not find her beautiful?”

  “Sir, I had no idea. If you had told me … It was not my fault!”

  Again, a terrible mistake. This time Bocu was not forbearing. He tilted his head, an odd, wry expression on his face. “Lieutenant—this is what I heard. Nicola Ceausescu’s steward—the man was sixty-five if he was a day. I heard he attacked you with a pair of tongs, killed some of your men in that farmhouse, chased the rest all down the drive. I heard you abandoned their corpses in a ditch where they were mauled by wild beasts. Their bodies lay in a ditch, bitten and mauled—is that your fault? You blame Antonescu’s men, but they are not responsible for this. How many did I send with you? How many have returned? Just now their mothers and fathers have been asking me.”

  Suddenly he was in a rage. He reached out to clamp his powerful hand around the back of the lieutenant’s neck, pulling him forward and off-balance. Luckacz rose to his feet, but it was too late to intervene. The lieutenant staggered and fell backward. Bocu seemed to have punched him once on his breast over his heart, and now he fell back onto the floor. He shuddered, sucked at the air, and now Luckacz could see the blood on his uniform where he’d been hit—not really so much blood.

  It was like a conjuring trick. Bocu knelt over him, pushing his lank hair from his forehead. “Poor boy. Poor boy. There. It’s all right. That’s the end.”

  When he stood up he had a knife in his hand, an edgeless stiletto which he wiped on a handkerchief. How had he produced it so quickly? Did he have it hidden in his sleeve? He turned toward Luckacz. “This is unfortunate. I will never get used to it. My opinion is a man in my position is a coward to rely on others, some judge or court-martial. A man has a right to look me in the eye. Smell my breath. But I won’t forget how terrible this is, terrible and cruel. So it serves a double purpose. A man in my position. Unlike you, this fellow had no family, of course. Otherwise…”

  Bocu was quite obviously insane, Luckacz thought. He stood polishing the edgeless blade, grinding his teeth, his face furious. Then he smiled. “When I came in I thought I was rude to only bring two glasses. Now, you see…”

  He dropped the knife onto the table as if it were suddenly too hot to hold. He poured two glasses of champagne, but did not drink. “Help me,” he said, and Luckacz helped him pull down a curtain on one side of the antechamber, wrap the body in the heavy velvet cloth. “A man must do these things himself,” Bocu said. “Otherwise you forget.”

  And when the corpse was stowed against the wall, he sat down with Luckacz on the settee. “Something is not right,” he said. “Something is not right with this story of Jean-Baptiste, the demon steward with his tongs. I heard he was bleeding from a gunshot wound. So I must ask you. Inspector Luckacz, in your capacity as a policeman. What in hell happened in that place?”

  “Your excellency, it is difficult—”

  Bocu raised his hand. “Not another word. No excuses! This is a matter of your future, after all!”

  Perhaps, Luckacz thought, they might put him in a different cell. Something above the surface of the ground. Something with a window.

  And yet how was it that he still felt any loyalty to Nicola Ceausescu, who had betrayed him so shamefully with Sasha Andromedes or whatever his name was—he could not bear to think of her as a woman! How could he still feel any loyalty to someone who had murdered her own son, as well as that boy in the Strada Camatei? “Do you have an experience with ghosts?” he said at last.

  Bocu laughed, an expulsion of breath. He clapped him on the shoulder. “You do amuse me, inspector—please, I must not interrupt!”

  Sullenly, hesitantly, Luckacz tried to tell him what had happened. It was possible sometimes for dying soldiers on the battlefield to be possessed by something larger than themselves, some force or power that allowed them to perform feats of strength that were impossible—many scientists had observed this. And at certain moments, the body can be impervious to pain. Yes, it was true—Jean-Baptiste had murdered seven men, and he had bludgeoned the first two casualties at least with a pair of iron tongs. But after that he had picked up another weapon, a carbine with a fixed bayonet.…

  But Jean-Baptiste was already dead! It was a different spirit that inhabited him. As he spoke, Luckacz listened mournfully to the sound of his own ugly and officious voice, while at the same time he was remembering the Baroness Ceausescu, how she had stood before him and whispered to him like a lover, “You stumbled at the end, my old companion.…” How could he express all that?

  He tried. And at the end Bocu was staring at him, smiling. “I think we kept you locked away too long, my friend. I think you need some rest and quiet, and some country air.”

  Then he raised his hand, tilted his head as if listening for some sound outside the door. “Maybe listen to some music—hah! In the village bandstand.”

  And then his smile changed. “I understand you must have suffered much from your bad treatment. These are explanations from the past, while I look to the future.” He gestured toward the dead lieutenant, wrapped in his cocoon—“This man failed me. So have a care! Go—now go! I am a busy man. Too busy for such foolishness.”

  Gripping his hat by the brim, Luckacz staggered to his feet. He moved toward the door, then paused. From Bocu’s expression, it was impossible to believe this wasn’t a cruel trick.

  But when he looked back, he saw the colonel was laughing at him. He sprawled back on the settee, one hand raised, feet spread apart: “You will find I have not even interrupted your pension, with a supplement for various services!”

  He rose suddenly to his feet, came toward Luckacz with his hand held out. He had cut himself with his own knife, Luckacz saw—just a beaded scratch along his forefinger. “You think I’m playing a game,” he continued. “You tell yourself one man lives, another man dies—where’s the justice
in that? Then you console yourself—‘He is arbitrary, like a tyrant!’ I tell you, in the dark of night, lying next to your fat wife in your own bedroom, you must not even think these things.” Again he indicated the lieutenant in the corner of the room.

  He is mad, Luckacz thought, as he scuttled out the door. It was no comfort to imagine Bocu thought the same of him.

  * * *

  THE DEAD LIEUTENANT in the antechamber had given one description of what had happened in the farmhouse library the night Jean-Baptiste had died. Radu Luckacz gave another. But all things have their analogue in the secret world. That night in Stanesti-Jui, needing to protect her mother and herself, Miranda had clenched the tourmaline in her right hand.

  She had come to herself on the bare hillside underneath Johannes Kepler’s tower. She was surrounded by ghosts and the spirit creatures of the Rezistenta soldiers, small animals that climbed out of the scree. But there was the Elector of Ratisbon in his cutaway frock coat, a silver derringer in his hands. And there was Nicola Ceausescu, crouched on a boulder with a strange flash of sunlight in her copper-colored hair. Elsewhere the storm was breaking and the sky stank of ozone and the wind blew the mist away.

  Nicola Ceausescu’s face was scarred and torn. When she raised herself up, Miranda saw she was naked.

  And there was Aunt Aegypta climbing up the hill, dressed in her veil and fox-head stole, her gloved hand outstretched, shouting out some kind of warning or direction. Miranda didn’t want to hear any of that. She had made up her mind what to do. In the farmhouse library, the lieutenant stood with his gun cocked. Miranda didn’t have much time. She placed the tourmaline on a flat stone, gave it a little pat. She couldn’t hold it in a tyger’s claws.

  When a tyger moves, the world surrounds her in a sphere of silence. Birds don’t sing. Weaker beasts lie still. Except for her hunger, she might be happy to accept an illusion, that she is the only creature still alive. But it is her hunger that makes her stretch and move, and there were creatures in the rocks. She ripped open their refuges and found them. She tore into their backs and the rest ran shrieking away.

  This was a matter of a few minutes. But when she looked up with her tyger’s eyes, the world had changed.

  She had an impression of a marmalade cat that crouched above her on the boulder in the light, its coat matted and seedy, its face split and ripped, its teeth missing or broken—she had seen this cat before! It was not a threat to her. Nor was the elector a threat, coiled among the rocks in his snake’s shape.

  What was happening in Stanesti-Jui? Miranda saw a little bird, a brandywine bird with iridescent feathers, pushed and buffeted by the wind in the pass. The snake had crawled down from the tower and was poised on a flat rock, its hooded head raised up, while the bird stooped and struck at it as if it had been a lizard or a worm in the hedge on a summer morning.

  Could it be possible the bird thought it was protecting the tyger? There was no need! The snake rose up and struck, and the bird was in its mouth, caught by one wing.

  And then the tyger was bounding up the slope, and with its heavy paw it crushed the snake, pulled it apart, freed the bird who fluttered down into a gap between the stones. And the tyger bit the snake’s head off, ruined it so it would have no life or future in this world or any other. She pulled its flesh from its bones and then, unsated, looked down through the rockfall for the cat. But it had disappeared.

  Miranda felt both tired and exhilarated. What was happening in Stanesti-Jui? What had she managed to accomplish there? Her mother and Andromeda—were they safe? She left the bird fluttering in its crack among the stones. She descended down to where she’d left the tourmaline.

  By that time she had resumed her human shape. She had rebuttoned her clothes. She had found the stone where she had laid the jewel, hidden it for safekeeping. But when she came back it was gone.

  She searched on her hands and knees in the waning light, combing through the grass. It couldn’t have gone far. This was the rock—she was sure this was the rock. It was still damp, still slick with the jewel’s grease.

  Once before it had seemed to migrate under her fingers when she went to discover it again. But this was different. After fifteen minutes’ search, she sat back on her heels. Someone had taken it, some animal or man. Was that why the Elector of Ratisbon had been spying on her from Kepler’s tower? Was that why the marmalade cat was stalking through the rocks? She’d been an idiot.

  The wind came up again and she was cold, her arms covered in gooseflesh. She was wearing inside clothes, a linen shirt, wool trousers, boots. She fingered the bracelet on her wrist, then got to her feet. She ran her hands through her hair, combing it back. First things first.

  The brandywine bird had disappeared. Miranda did not look for the corpse of the Elector of Ratisbon. It had fallen into a crease between the rocks, and all she could see was the ripped sleeve, the small white hand. The wind had blown the clouds away. The sky was full of stars.

  Often Stanley had taken her to the observatory at the top of the science building, or else they’d just lain out in the backyard while he named the stars and planets and told her stuff—a long way away. She climbed up the slope again, over the rock slope where the little stream ran down out of the tarn. She washed the stains from her hands, washed her face, and then continued up toward the shelter of the tower. She didn’t want to get much colder than she was, didn’t relish the idea of sitting up outside the stone cell with the hidden creature in it—for how long? What were night and day in this place? She would wait for morning and she would search again.

  But in the litter of broken masonry she found something she didn’t remember, a pile of dry sticks. Stanley always said you should carry matches, but even he usually didn’t. Her pockets were empty except for some silver coins.

  She sat down in a crevice between some larger rocks and put her back against the wall. No, she couldn’t stay here in this high, exposed place. She would rest, and she would see if she could summon up the tyger once again.

  Because she was tired and alone, there was no reason to choose one moment rather than another. The stars moved overhead. And Miranda sat and thought about Stanley and Rachel and their house in Berkshire County. Or she thought about Peter Gross and Andromeda. These thoughts did not take the form of long chains of circumstance, stretching into the future and the past. They did not take the shape of decisions or possible decisions, or remembered circles of events. Instead she saw a sequence of disordered images laid down like playing cards—Rachel had a tarot deck. It was something like that. And at the same time there were wisps of unconnected feelings. She imagined herself in a space between worlds, between sleep and wakefulness. She saw a tower with the roaring beast inside. She saw the sun and moon together in the sky. She saw the map of the world, which disappeared when the wind disturbed its surface. She saw Peter in the brick gazebo in Cismigiu Park. She saw a flashing light before her eyes, an intermittent light in the darkness. She smelled Andromeda’s rank breath, and then a sequence of other smells—barnyard smells, pig shit and churned earth. Rachel had belonged to an organic farm on Route 43, and sometimes in the summer Miranda had gone to collect huge masses of bok choi and exotic lettuce—Andromeda had come, too, though she pretty much only ate hamburgers. Once she had caused a stink by smoking a cigarette in the distribution center. Miranda could smell it now.

  She saw the little light flashing in the rocks, and smelled the ordure and gunpowder and tobacco, and saw the old man materialize beside the wall, a cigarette between his lips, a lighter in his hand. He was thin and pale and dressed in formal clothes: a white waistcoat and wide, shiny lapels that were decorated with military ribbons and insignia, among them the eight-pointed Star of Roumania—she knew this man. She recognized him from his portrait in the People’s Palace, his big eyebrows and delicate wide ears, his bald forehead and his face covered with fine wrinkles. He was the old baron, Felix Ceausescu, Nicola Ceausescu’s dead husband, dead a long time.

  She got up f
rom the ground, put her hand out to keep him away. But he smiled, exhibited his splayed, gloved fingers, took a puff on his cigarette, ground it out under his heel. He started in at once: “Mademoiselle. This is a cold and lonely place for someone like yourself. Allow me—please? No? You understand who I am? Believe me, I mean you no harm, and in any case I am not strong enough. But I know what it means to feel cold, do you see?”

  He reached out his hands and turned them, as if absorbing warmth from her. “No? But I can help. Please,” he said, and he was kneeling down among the broken sticks, producing folded letters and envelopes and documents from the various pockets of his jacket. “There, you see? These are the official papers from your father’s trial. And there are more where those came from—I have a supply! Never a lack of them—look!” He crumpled them in balls and pushed them down among the sticks, then lit them with his silver lighter, engraved with some heraldic device. The flames leapt up, blue at first.

  Miranda was not reassured. She kept to her feet, watching, waiting. But the flames were a comfort, and the old ghost scarcely paid attention to her once it was started. He perched on the edge of a fallen chunk of masonry, drinking out of a silver flask and laying out some small meat pastries in his handkerchief on the corner of the stone. “Please,” he said. “It’s better, isn’t it?”

  And it was better, and it seemed to Miranda as if the firelight had made a little room around them, a room with walls and a ceiling defined by the reach of the light. A small, irregular-shaped room with one solid wall behind her. She leaned against it. And for a moment she imagined the dark chamber on the other side of the stone wall, where there was—something. Beyond the limit of sensation she could hear its weak breath, its furtive movement.

  Baron Ceausescu turned to her, the firelight glowing on the ridges and stretched membranes of his ears. She wondered if he knew what she was thinking. “What is that, I wonder?” he said. “What is that sound? Johannes Kepler was the father of us all—the explorers, I mean. The father of alchemical conjuring. He built this place and put a lock on this door, and the world changed. The patterns came clear—no, that would be too much to say. Not clear, not accessible, but … possible to think. Do you understand?”