by Paul Park
His voice trailed away. Holding his hat by the brim, he fished into the lower pocket of his coat to remove a clothwrapped bundle. This he placed on the closed lid of the piano, and with a flourish that was marred only by the awkwardness of not knowing what to do with the hat in his left hand, he untied the straps to display first a revolver, then a bracelet of gold beads.
A hiss escaped the baroness’s lips. Softly she closed the cover on the keyboard and then rose to stand beside him, troubling as she did so the candle flame, the smoke from the burning cigarette.
To Luckacz’s surprise, she did not reach for the bracelet, though he knew she coveted it, or had once coveted it: the ancient sign and symbol of the white tyger, which the first Miranda Brancoveanu had worn in the days of the old Turkish wars. Instead she picked up the revolver, a weapon that had once belonged to Frederick Schenck von Schenck. He had inherited it from his father and grandfather—an old-fashioned weapon whose long octagonal barrel was inlaid with precious metals, a device of silver and gold vines or briers that covered the drum and the stock as well. The grip, however, was unornamented, except for two panels of bleached bone from some fallen enemy of the house of Brancoveanu—a macabre weapon, in fact, which had brought nothing but bad luck to Great Roumania.
The baroness’s hair shone in the candlelight, a shade that was both red and brown. She stood close to the policeman, too close to make him comfortable, and he could smell the bitter and astringent scent that clung to her. She had changed after the parade and the celebration, and now wore a virginal blue dress with a ruffled neckline that laid bare, nevertheless, the lines of her collar bones. She held the gun up to the ceiling. She peered at the hammer and the firing pin.
“Ma’am, it is unloaded,” he said. And he watched a shiver moving up her spine into her neck, a tremor he saw only because he stood so close to her.
“It is never unloaded,” she murmured, words that were false and made no sense. Suddenly he imagined this might be the start of some terrible accident; how could that be? Luckacz himself had opened the revolver before he brought it here. He had spun the empty shells into his palm.
“I know you wanted the bracelet, ma’am,” he said, his voice harsh and ugly. “I brought the pistol only to show you … .”
“Where are they?” she interrupted.
“Ma’am, I have just told you. They are in Mogosoaia at the railway station until—”
“Are they well treated? I ask that they be treated well.”
Radu Luckacz shook his head. “A wound is septic on de Graz’s hand. He is weak from it, which is lucky for us.”
“Please find a doctor to examine him. It is my wish.”
“Ma’am, your compassion is well known. But these are dangerous criminals responsible for many deaths, including men from my department who themselves have wives and children. They also are in need of comforting from you.”
Her eyes were a violet color. Watching her now, Luckacz saw with astonishment that they were full of tears. “Please,” she said.
“Ma’am, I was under the impression that this bracelet …”
“Ah.”
She replaced the revolver on the piano’s lid. She reached for the golden string of beads, then paused. As always, Luckacz studied the imperfection of her hands, her big knuckles, stained fingers, torn nails and cuticles—a peasant’s hands, and for that reason touching in the context of such beauty and refinement.
The beads themselves were hollow gold, each in the shape of a tiger’s head. “I wonder if you should give this back to her,” murmured the baroness as if to herself. “Yes, I think you should give it back.”
“But—”
“It does not belong to me. Nor would it be right to steal it by force. People would laugh.”
“But—”
“It is not something you can take or steal,” murmured the baroness. “It is something you are, or you are not. If Miranda Popescu herself came to lay it in my hand …”
“But ma’am, she shot a man, a policeman in Braila. I assure to you …”
Again he let his voice trail away, struck by the moisture in the baroness’s eyes—not tears, because they did not fall. But watching her he felt a lump form in his throat—why? For what reason? This was a great day, long anticipated.
“Did you not say,” whispered the baroness, “that you took this gun from the Chevalier de Graz?”
“Certainly, and he will be punished for his crimes. But in Braila there were witnesses!”
Now she turned to face him. “Ah,” she said, softly and delicately, and he could see her perfect teeth, feel her cool breath, she was so close. “She is just a girl. Who will protect her if I don’t? Tonight her mother is my guest, a hero of Roumania. I have opened up a suite of rooms that was long disused. My son—it is obvious my son is much attached to her.”
“I see,” mumbled Radu Luckacz, which was an exaggeration.
“I thought I could bring her here,” continued Nicola Ceausescu. “Perhaps to heal some of this division. I thought of it tonight. Perhaps I could be generous. Perhaps she and my son might enjoy each other’s company.”
This seemed preposterous to Radu Luckacz. “There is a difference in their ages,” he muttered stupidly, and she laughed.
“Not today! Not right away! Please don’t make fun of me! I try to think of what is best for Great Roumania.”
AND IT WAS true. She had thought about it that evening, when on the station platform she had seen her son for the first time in many years. How grown up he looked, fourteen or so at least! Dressed in an ikat jacket made of purple silk, she had stood in the departure hall under the great clock, surrounded by German officials and Luckacz’s men. The crowd, sequestered behind velvet ropes, carried furled umbrellas and raincoats over their arms. The brass band played the music she’d requested, the triumphal march that introduced the third act of her drama, The White Tyger. The accompanying text, of course, was still unwritten, and as the baroness watched her son climbing the iron stairs from the train platform, a new idea occurred to her.
Bewildered, shy, dressed in clothes that were too small for him, the boy would not relinquish Clara Brancoveanu’s arm. He rubbed his cheek against the shoulder of her threadbare cardigan. The princess stood blinded and wan under the high dome, close to tears, maybe, and overwhelmed. But the boy, Felix—how handsome and how innocent he looked! And as the horns played, for the first time Nicola Ceausescu caught glimpses of how The White Tyger might finally end: not in some Ragnarok of fire and death. After all, her shipment of radioactive material had been exploded by Antonescu’s partisans, which surely was a sign from the gods.
For the first time she imagined that the ending of this story might not even be with her, Nicola Ceausescu, her apotheosis or else her flaming, doomed destruction. But perhaps there was an ending that might not even involve her, a marriage ceremony that might heal a wound after the potato-eating Germans were defeated, of course. And then the music from the third-act overture would come back reconfigured, intimate and joyous, a wedding march or ode, an epithalamium—that was what it was called. She would look it up.
“You will return this to her,” she said now, meaning the bracelet of gold beads, meaning also Miranda Popescu, daughter of Clara Brancoveanu and Frederick Schenck von Schenck. She turned to the policeman and placed her hand upon his shiny cuff, examining, as was her habit, the roots of his dyed moustache. How preposterous he looked, after all! Like an actor on the stage of a musical comedy. Was there a part for him in The White Tyger?
Always she took care to stand a little close to him, so she could feel the ticking, sputtering engine of his love for her. That evening already she had given up the tourmaline, forswearing both the jewel itself and the dream it represented. In Professor Corelli’s house she had abandoned the chase, preferring to imagine herself standing on her own feet, depending on no one but herself. And so tonight she forswore also the gold bracelet, hoping for a greater and more poignant glory in not picking up
what after all did not belong to her. She could be forgiven for indulging herself now, with one hand on Prince Frederick’s gun (she would not give that up!) and one on Radu Luckacz’s sleeve. She could be forgiven for listening to the labor of his love, the throaty rasp of his breath, the catch in his throat as she squeezed his wrist. It was not for the sake of any jewel or bracelet that he loved her, after all.
“And you will bring her here to reunite her with her mother. I know it works against your sense of justice, my old friend—but we will see.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “And you will bring the Chevalier de Graz.”
In this she was following the precepts of Hermes Trismegistus to gather all your hostages into your hand, under your roof. That night also, listening to the trumpets under the mosaic dome of the Gara de Nord, she felt a spray of triumph as she realized the princess and the boy—her son, she had to keep reminding herself; how he’d changed!—were symbols of her new power as an alchemist. For they had been the hostages of her enemy, imprisoned by him in his castle at Ratisbon, now freed into her hand. And perhaps because her mind was no longer obsessed with the jewel and the bracelet, she could now appreciate the strength she had. The Palace of the People, which for five years she had lived in like a boarder or a transient, she would set it ablaze with lights. And in various wings and annexes she would gather all these people as her guests. She would throw open the gates to the citizens of Roumania, and would feed upon them not like a tyrant or a jailer, but like a performer on the stage, who holds her audience as if in iron chains, but without them doesn’t exist.
She stepped back to allow Radu Luckacz to leave her. But he stood fussing with his hat. “This morning I was at Chiselet,” he said in his unpleasant Hungarian voice.
In the afternoon, before her visit to Corelli’s house, he had mentioned something about this. Now he knew more—a riot had occurred there after he had left the site of the wreck. He had received a telegram. The work crews had risen against their German overseers. They had disarmed a small detachment of Hanoverian guards, destroyed a clinic, and beaten several medical personnel. The German commander at Giurgiu had responded. Order had been restored.
The baroness shuddered, closed her eyes. Always she felt a small frisson of pleasure at bad news. She had spoken to several German officers that evening. General Schnibbe and Colonel Eulenberg had accompanied her to the Gara de Nord. Why had they not mentioned any of this?
“There is another problem of concern,” continued Radu Luckacz. “I spoke this morning to a Herr Doctor Beck about the contraband in the baggage car of the Hephaestion. I suggested that it had its potential terminus in Buda-Pest, Vienna, or even Germany, because I had no knowledge of any group or person here who might require such a cargo. Antonescu himself might come to mind, except it was he who brought the matter to the attention of the German authorities, and of course it was his people in the first place who attacked the train. Then I suggested the supporters of Miranda Popescu, which did not occur to Doctor Beck. But he understood the train was going for Bucharest, nor did he want me to reveal to you our conversation. But—”
Nicola Ceausescu interrupted gently. “Why didn’t you tell me this this afternoon?”
The policeman shrugged. He would not meet her eyes. Suddenly he seemed old to her, tired, used up, unable to protect her from the suspicions of the potato-eaters. No wonder Schnibbe and Eulenberg had said nothing.
Radu Luckacz fiddled with his hat, shifted his weight from foot to foot, opened his mouth to answer. But now she was the one to turn away. Placing the revolver to one side, she rewrapped the Brancoveanu bracelet in its cloth package, then laid it in the policeman’s hand. “Please, I’m very tired,” she said, and smiled. “We will talk about this later.”
He brought her hand up to his lips; impatient, she snatched it away. How drab he seemed in his gray raincoat and black suit, how sad his eyes, wrinkled in the corners now, she noticed.
“Go, please—my old friend. I shall expect you tomorrow with the prisoners. Sergeant O’Brien, you must bring him also to accept my thanks.”
But the policeman didn’t go. He had something more to say. “Ma’am, I ask you for the last time to reconsider this request and instead let justice run its race. De Graz is weak from septicemia. Beyond that he is a dangerous madman, and it is better to remember it. As for the young woman, certainly it cannot be your intention to bring back this parasitic race of kings and queens … .”
Nicola Ceausescu laughed. “My friend, you are so serious! Is it so bad to give the people something they can wave at when it marches by? You see how they enjoyed themselves this evening in the Champ de Mars.”
“Ma’am, I must insist you do not know. And I insist also these are conjurers and magicians—do not laugh at me! If you could see de Graz’s face of a young man, identical to photographs of his promotion in the army when Prince Frederick was alive, more than twenty-five years ago! And the girl, who has been hiding in some magician’s secret hole, I mean her aunt Aegypta Schenck the alchemist—”
The baroness raised her hand. “Stop, my friend—I think I had no idea you were so superstitious in these matters. Stop, I will promise to hang their rooms with mirrors and wild onions, smear myself with garlic when I speak to them!”
In fact she was eager to decipher how de Graz had kept himself so young. Radu Luckacz seemed to have diminished just in the past five minutes in her room. His rusty gabardine suit, his porous nose, the rash across his cheeks—he had not shaved. The collar of his shirt was gray and worn. And of course his glossy and absurd moustache—she turned away from him. In the enameled ashtray, her cigarette had long since burnt itself out.
Radu Luckacz excused himself; she did not look at him. Instead she picked up the revolver and hugged it to her chest. She also felt in need of some alchemical rejuvenation, now, after a long night, close to dawn. She also could benefit from studying de Graz’s case, listening to his story, though at thirty-nine she was still a beautiful woman, as everyone agreed but her.
From the music room, with its walls of patterned silk, she passed into the bedroom of her private suite. Jean-Baptiste had turned down the blanket, lit the lamp, put out a sandwich and a glass of water, but she did not linger there. Instead she stepped behind a screen and through a hidden door and into a compartment underneath the eaves. What had Luckacz said? A magician’s secret hole.
There she had transported all her husband’s papers and utensils from the laboratory in Saltpetre Street. Some of the crates and boxes she had not yet unpacked, even after five years. But she knew what she was looking for: her husband’s book of experiments and notations, in which she had once read a description of this same revolver. Now she held it against her breasts as if it were the serpent that had stung Cleopatra’s life away. Eyes blind in the darkness, she knelt and fumbled at the altar of that deity, after having first deposited the gun onto the offering stand. Then she struck a match, lit the candles, and with a candle in her hand she went in search of the big book.
She found it in a stack beside the lectern. Pressing the candle onto its spike, with her other hand she set the book onto the wooden stand. She pulled back the leather cover and big pages, scanning the lines of the old baron’s cramped handwriting, some of it in code she had not been able to decipher.
How had her husband learned about this gun? The artifact itself was famous or at least notorious, handed down in the Brancoveanu family, forged (it was believed) from an ancient core of pitted steel, the shaft of a mace Miranda Brancoveanu had carried at the siege of Turnu Magurele, Kara Selim’s fortress on the Danube.
With the mace she had crushed the heads of several champions of the first Turkish war, and with the pistol Frederick Schenck von Schenck had murdered many others in more recent skirmishes. That history of bloodshed was what made the gun so valuable when, after her brother’s death, Aegypta Schenck had disassembled and rebuilt it.
That would have been in the first days before her disgrace, when she was still liv
ing at Mamaia Castle with her niece. How had the baron learned about it? They were enemies then, rivals in alchemical power, bent on punishing and destroying each other. Maybe the baron had had spies among the servants, or else more secret sources of information. His wife could only guess at them. No, here it was, as she remembered, the mechanism of the gun drawn carefully on the page in sepia ink.
The air was hot and close. The candle flame burned up without a tremor. The Baroness Ceausescu retrieved the pistol from the altar. She glanced at the icon of the goddess hung suspended in the air above some miscellaneous Aegyptian statuary, property of the late empress, whose house this used to be. She examined it more closely, a painted icon on a wooden board. It was a recent piece of work by a famous painter of religious scenes, whose spirituality, perhaps, had not prevented him from going to the opera. The pose, the modeling, the near-nakedness of the figure had quite obviously been drawn from one of the baroness’s performances at the Ambassadors Theatre in the old days, which was why, just as obviously, she had chosen it, although she had not made the connection or understood the reason until now.
Holding the revolver to the candle flame, she opened the clasp, levered down the grip, peered in at the works. There was the alteration Aegypta Schenck had made, the miniature screw that could be set clockwise or counterclockwise to reverse the rotation of the drum. And because no shells were in the chambers, the baroness could see the tiny letters above each hole, as well as the six new points of pressure for the firing pin; the pistol had been scarcely used, it seemed. Maybe de Graz had been ignorant of its new purpose, or had preferred instead to use it as an ordinary gun, storing up its power without expending it.