The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  They had stumbled out into the darkness, and the mud walls that constrained them had disappeared, and they were in the swamp itself, a mixture of effluent, sewage, and fresh water that bubbled unexpectedly to the surface in limpid pools. The mud was so deep, in some places it was thick with fossils, the calcified remains of other creatures that had struggled in these same waters, only to succumb to a common enemy. And the monster fought in a way that seemed to maximize this threat, searching always for deeper water or unstable ground, and stroking her or seizing hold of her with his repulsive, webbed, spatulate fingers. At the same time he secreted a poisonous liquid through special glands, which weakened her and made her numb.

  Though she was stronger, better armed, always he found a way of twisting away from her so that her claws and teeth couldn’t find anything to bite or scratch. At the same time she was filthy, hampered by the mud, and hampered also by another creature that now came out of the darkness, the monster’s minion or henchman. He was a scarecrow, though at other times, as now, he appeared in his true or natural form, the crow he claimed to scare away, guard against—an ugly, immense, bald-headed, red-eyed bird. Help, she imagined, and help was with her—the wolf that had been her companion all her life, and now struggled to reach her as she fought on shifting ground. But the crow swerved to meet him with its claws outstretched, buffeting his face and snatching at his eyes.

  * * *

  “COME THIS WAY,” said Ana, the chambermaid. “Follow me.”

  She led them through the servant’s corridors, a labyrinth of little rooms and flights of steps and hallways that nestled inside the larger palace, unperceived, reached only by secret, designated portals, small doorways behind tapestries or under stairs. There was no light, but she carried a candle in a glass frame, which threw uncertain shadows. They climbed to the upper, private apartments and came out near Bocu’s chamber, an ornate suite of rooms that had been furnished fifty years before in a massive, dark, faux-baroque style: carved cornices and low-relief paneling in oiled and polished wood. Axes and bayonets, arranged in roseate circles, decorated the walls. Radu Luckacz stood at the entrance, a crowlike, bald old man dressed in the gray livery of the palace staff. Prochenko could see him when he opened the door to the servant’s antechamber—the old policeman who had hunted him in Stanesti-Jui. “You stay here,” he told the princess. “I’ll bring her back. Ana—we might need your brother now.”

  “Bless you, lieutenant,” said Clara Brancoveanu, hands to her mouth.

  He sauntered out into the hall. But these were not clothes that let you stride down the corridor, hands in your pockets, shoulders hunched, collar turned up to hide your face. No, this was another part of his nature, he thought as he spun in a half circle under the lamp, then tripped lightly down the long carpet past the wall covered with weapons—little steps, and his arms turned out to display his bosom or lack of it—chin up.

  “Mademoiselle. The colonel is occupied at this present time,” said the policeman, or inspector, or valet or whatever he was now. He also wore a costume that disguised his true abilities.

  Under the feather mask, Prochenko’s face was hot. He opened his mouth so he could sweat. A breathless giggle: “I believe I am expected. Please…”

  “The colonel must not be disturbed,” said the old man. His voice was harsh, and he spoke in a Hungarian accent.

  A smile: “Do you think so?”

  So Miranda was already inside. Radu Luckacz couldn’t be happy about that. Unless he also had been bewitched by Nicola Ceausescu.

  The doorway took up the entire end of the corridor, with false fluted pilasters and a mahogany pediment. The door itself was lined with russet leather and embossed in brass. Radu Luckacz stood with his gloved hands at his sides, a bald old man with a lined face and bloodshot eyes. He had been drinking, maybe. Prochenko took a step closer and the scent came clear—absinthe. The old man’s upper lip was unshaved. He was attempting to grow a moustache. He had even used some paint or colored pencil to further the impression.

  Prochenko took another step. He stripped off one of his long gloves and used his bare hand to pull back the skirt of his long gown, switch it back and forth, show his ankle. “The colonel is expecting me,” he said. “He will be disappointed.”

  And he saw some doubt in the old man’s eyes, red-rimmed with broken blood vessels. Once they had been blue. His eyebrows also had some paint in them.

  “Mademoiselle—his directions were fully explicit. It is not possible I might have made a mistake.…”

  But then the door opened. There wasn’t much light inside. Bocu was there. He had taken off his mask, unbuttoned his shirt to show his hairy chest. He had an unopened bottle of muscadine in one hand. “What is this noise?” he said, more curious than angry, and when he saw Prochenko, he immediately smiled.

  There was no drunkenness in him. He showed his square, strong teeth. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “I think I must have died and gone to heaven. They say that heroes in the Elysian Fields don’t have to choose between the things they want. That was what my mother said. She meant it as a reproach, but if she could see me now—or maybe not,” he continued, laughing in the light from the corridor. “Please come in. Would you enjoy a glass of wine?”

  Prochenko stepped over the threshold. At the last instant he turned to glance at Radu Luckacz, which was a mistake. He smelled the policeman’s breath, saw again his moment of uncertainty. Too late. He looked away—too late. The old man had caught sight of his eyes through the feather-fringed holes of his mask. Luckacz had recognized his eyes.

  And then his gloved hand came up, and Prochenko pulled back his head. But the policeman sunk his fingers into the soft feathers and snatched the mask away. The cord snapped. “Oaf,” said Bocu, “what are you doing? Mademoiselle, please—”

  He dropped the bottle of muscadine, which did not break. And he put his hand under Prochenko’s elbow, pulled him into the darkened room.

  “Your excellency,” said Luckacz. “It is An—”

  “Mademoiselle Andromeda, yes. Idiot—I know her name. We have been introduced.” He closed the door in the policeman’s face, then drew Prochenko into the dark bedchamber. “Mademoiselle, I must apologize. May I say I am not disappointed? Of course these masks are the first things we shall lose. You see I myself…” He gestured toward his head.

  Miranda stood next to the enormous bed, a canopied four-poster with carved columns as thick as elephants’ legs. And it was true—she wore no mask, except for the mask that was her entire body under these circumstances.

  Light came from a lamp on a low table. As Prochenko stepped forward, he could hear a soft hiss from Miranda’s lips. “So. It is you.”

  Bocu spoke from behind him. “You know each other? How delicious—”

  “Oh, yes. We are old friends,” Miranda said, her voice soft. She came to meet Prochenko in the middle of the floor, and she spoke as if they were alone in the room: “Je t’en prie—you must not think poorly of me. I was here to negotiate a bargain. I did not mean to seal it, not here, not ever—oh, you must not reproach me. It’s just that there are things that I can still accomplish for the sake of Great Roumania.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Tu ne me crois pas.”

  “Of course I do.”

  Miranda spoke in French, Prochenko in English, and if Bocu understood them, he gave no sign. “Sa nu va mai—none of this kind of talk,” he said. “Dar trebuie—I must swear to you. I won’t have this kind of talk. We are in Bucharest, in the People’s Palace. Besieged on all sides. So we will speak to each other as Roumanians. But this will be a night to remember.…”

  “Je te jure…,” said Miranda, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I tell you there are many ways we have been able to misunderstand each other. Fate has kept us apart, and I have many regrets. So, so many regrets. But you must believe me, I have tried to please you in my own fashion. Everything I’ve done. Even this,” she said, stretching out her arms, displaying not so much
the small white dress as the body inside of it, “even this I chose for your sake, because I knew it pleased you. Miranda Popescu—am I right? She was a whore for you?”

  Prochenko shook his head. But then he crossed the last few meters between them, put his hands on her waist and drew her to him so he could whisper in her ear. “You must come with me.”

  He felt her trembling under his hands, one gloved, one bare. He listened to her short, soft breath. But then the leather door opened again, and light spilled in from the outside corridor, and Radu Luckacz was standing in the gap, his shadow spilling into the room; it was to be predicted. He wouldn’t leave them alone. Probably he was fortified with another drink, maybe a weapon, too. “Excellency,” he said. “I must insist for you to hear me out. I must insist that you discover a good look. It is Sasha Andromedes, whom you call Prochenko, I must insist.”

  And Victor Bocu, for all his faults, was a man of action. For several minutes he’d been standing on the carpet, with an expression on his face that moved between exasperation, amusement, impatience, and delight. Now that was gone in an instant, replaced with a tremor of recognition and a murderous fury that transformed him, seemed to swell him up with blood, so that his veins stood out on his face and hands and neck, and his skin turned dark and red. Then there was a strange, clicking sound and a stiletto appeared in his hands, a steel needle that appeared out of nowhere, that had killed, Prochenko had no doubt, Elena Bibescu at the tomb in Belu Cemetery.

  Prochenko’s hands were on Miranda’s hips. He pushed her away, then turned to face his enemy just as the knife came toward him. Luckacz was behind him now. And Bocu leapt at him without any type of preamble, his compact, powerful body launched like a cannonball, the blade in his right hand. I will not die like this, Prochenko thought, looking for a weapon—he had seen it or half seen it as soon as he had entered the room, leaning up against a bureau in the corner, an ebony walking stick with a silver wolf’s head. Had Bocu kept it in his bedroom since he had found it at the baroness’s grave?

  Luckacz also had a weapon, an old-fashioned battle-ax that he had pulled from one of the ornamental displays in the corridor. The old man was close behind with the ax above his head. But the colonel was closer, solid with rage, the stiletto in front of him, its point not more than a few centimeters from the breast of Prochenko’s silver gown when Miranda grabbed his hand. A hiss escaped her. She fell on Bocu, bit him on the hand. “Assassins!” he roared. “To me!”

  Then the stiletto was at Miranda’s throat. Bocu fell on her; he was as strong as a dragon. Prochenko knelt under the falling ax; there was no time. He grabbed hold of the edgeless blade of the stiletto, twisted it from Bocu’s hands. He slid his fingers into the monster’s hair, greasy with pomade. He pulled back the monster’s head, and with the point of the stiletto he searched for the artery below the ear, searched for the windpipe. He forced the blade through the thick neck until the point came out the other side, and the grunting and roaring was extinguished, and his hands were full of blood.

  Miranda was unharmed. She lay on her back, dazed, and he saw the horror in her face; he knew what she was looking at. He was Sasha Prochenko of the Ninth Hussars. This was not his first fight. He knew that Radu Luckacz stood above him, his ax raised for another stroke. The stiletto was stuck in Bocu’s neck, and he flung himself across Miranda’s body as the blade came down. He twisted under it and reached for the wolf’s-head walking stick in the corner of the room—too far.

  * * *

  IN THE HIDDEN world, it was all done. The monster was in the pool, his bloated body turning and drifting as the blood spread away. He had died in his toad’s shape, mauled and bitten by the wolf, his throat torn open. His tufted ear had been torn from his head. But the wolf also was hurt, her body savaged by the crow’s steel beak, which in magic fashion had bit deep at the joint between the shoulder and the neck, and again under her armpit. Stunned, the bird had staggered under a bush and brooded there a dozen feet away.

  But for Miranda and Andromeda the spell was broken, and she drew her friend’s body to the bank, lifted her up beside a willow tree, smoothed her wet hair from her face. “Hey,” she said.

  There was a wind out of the swamp and a few drops of rain. Bruised clouds overhead, and a huge, sudden clap of thunder, so loud it disturbed the surface of the pool.

  * * *

  AND IN BUCHAREST, in the People’s Palace, the windows shattered on the east side of the façade. Enemy zeppelins had flown from Ruse eighty kilometers away, where the Turks had their aerodrome. Lit up for the celebration, the palace drew them like a beacon in the dark.

  Inside Victor Bocu’s bedroom, the casement split and folded inward, spilling broken glass across the floor. The curtains blew back from the force of the concussion. Radu Luckacz, lying against a corner of the wall, could hear the drone of the foreign engines. Some of the houses on the other side of the piata had already caught fire, and by the light of the burning rooftops he could see the first bloated cigar-shaped airships blunder from the clouds.

  The Turks dropped incendiary bombs as well as more conventional explosives. Luckacz could distinguish a great number of noises, as a man might, listening to an orchestra or a brass band, pick out the separate instruments: the crash of the detonations, the howl of the electric horns and the steam whistles, the thump of the motors as the zeppelins churned overhead. Then there were the anti-aircraft cannon opening up, and even at this distance, the clamor of individual shouts and screams.

  But in the room itself there were more gentle noises. Propped up in a corner, he strained to listen to Mademoiselle Popescu’s quiet sobs. He recognized the sound, the intonation. He’d heard it before, that soft abandoned hissing. He remembered from the night Felix Ceausescu died.

  And with his eyes round as a bird’s, by the light of the explosions, he watched the girl sitting with the corpse on her lap—Sasha Andromedes, dressed as a woman for the masquerade. Mademoiselle Popescu had pulled out the ax where it had lodged in his shoulder, bit into the bone. She pushed his yellow hair from his face.

  Presently she lay back, as if she’d fainted or collapsed unconscious, or else fallen asleep. And even in the roaring wind, the blast of fire beyond the open window, Luckacz heard the chink of the golden bracelet. From where he was, he could see her chest rise and fall. But his eyes were round with terror, because he suspected what would happen. He had seen it before, or else some version of it in the farmhouse in Stanesti-Jui, which he had visited for one night in the rain. He had seen a corpse come back to life, and now he came aware of a small, spasmodic movement in the limbs of the dead man, the way a puppet, lying in a jumble on the floor, might come to life when someone touched its strings. In fits and starts he gathered to his feet, twitching and shuddering until he stood upright in his silver gown. He stepped away into an open section of the floor, where he stood erect among the shards of broken glass, the blood dripping from his arms.

  Fire burned behind his head, framed in the split casement. Beyond him were the tracers’ flare, the pounding cannonade, and now a larger explosion as one of the great ships caught fire. Luckacz could feel the heat on his face; he raised up his hand as if to push away the burning world outside the window. Then, instead, he strained to listen, strained to see, strained to understand: Students of Nicola Ceausescu, as Radu Luckacz had been in his own way, could recognize immediately the little dance that Ariadne dances on the beach. She gives the impression she has never danced before. And her movements, jerky, hesitant at first, then gather light and air and grace as she is touched by a fierce and angry God.

  In the performance, Dionysus never comes onstage. But his presence is indicated by a thunderstorm—flashing lights and rolling drums that shake the theater. Here also there was changing weather in the piata, the crash of lightning here, too, and then a siren in the night. Sasha Andromedes spun in a circle. His gown spun open from his legs. Blood spattered from his fingers. Then he stopped on one foot, his hands above his head. His red mo
uth sagged open. “Radu,” he said, “what have you done to me?”

  There was thunder in the piata, and the burning fire. “Do not be afraid, Radu my friend—n’aie pas peur. I will see you again, I promise you. Je te promets.”

  Then he collapsed again as if the strings had been cut. Mademoiselle Popescu didn’t stir. Nor did Radu Luckacz try to shift or budge, even when strangers came to take her away. A man dressed in the kitchen livery and a peasant woman in an embroidered dress, her head covered with several meters of white cloth. They bent down over Mademoiselle Popescu’s body, lifted her up onto the man’s shoulder—he was not more than a boy, really. He stumbled away with her, stumbled out the door.

  The building shook, and there were shouts and alarms. But it wasn’t for many minutes that Luckacz finally rose to his feet. He looked down at the body, Andromedes’s corpse in its indecent disguise, lit with garish intermittent flashes from the window. Nor could he keep himself from bending over it, drawing up the skirt to see what might be underneath.

  And there was Bocu’s body also, collapsed in a wet pool, the knife still stuck in his throat. Bocu’s ear had been cut from his head—had he done that? With the ax in his hand, he had slashed and slashed.

  But there was no blood on Radu Luckacz. Horrified, he backed out the leather door and down the corridor, where he saw the servant’s entrance was ajar. He found the marble stairs. No one paid attention to him. The building was on fire.

  He found the gate, then walked out into the exploding piata. Once out of the city center he found streets of quiet houses in the dark. But the fire was spreading in the center of the city; Ibolya was awake. She wore her nightcap, the long gray braid down her back. She let him into the hall of his own house, the parlor decorated with Hungarian watercolors, the stair with its varnished wood.

  “Radu,” she said, “oh, Radu,” and she took him in, gave him a bath and something to eat. His daughter was asleep upstairs. He wondered whether he should wake her, because he knew he didn’t have much time, and the soldiers would come for him later that same day.