The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  And if this was part of being a princess, maybe there was another part. Maybe people would do what she told them, just because of who she was. “Please,” she said. “You must take me to the Chevalier de Graz.”

  She turned to face her persecutor and stare her down, a woman who—Miranda guessed—was beautiful at any moment or in any clothes. Now she smiled, her thin lips cruel and delicate. “I believe you already have a rendezvous.”

  “No, please. He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he’s here. You have guessed it. But he also has a … schedule.”

  Miranda closed her eyes, then opened them. “What do you mean?”

  “He is a dangerous man. And he has required medical attention. When we took him he was very ill, because of the wound in his hand. Really, he might have died.”

  Miranda was staring at the expression of the baroness’s lips after she said these words. I’m looking at a smirk, she thought. This was what a smirk looked like—she’d never known.

  All Nicola Ceausescu’s expressions seemed to come with words attached, they were so clear and definite. “He was very careless,” she said.

  “But—but he’s all right now.”

  She had to believe it. The baroness shrugged. “He would be better if they’d used sufficient morphine in Mogosoaia. But you understand, a prisoner under guard. He was not yet under my protection—would you like to see? Maybe he could spare you several minutes. I thought it would be natural for you to want to see your mother first. More convenient, too, because he is in an older section of the keep. For the sake of our security. He is a dangerous man, I must insist.”

  She opened the door, then slipped in front of Miranda to lead the way into a long gallery, lit with chandeliers and decorated with portraits of men in blue uniforms. Grumbling about the inconvenience, she nevertheless was smiling as she walked. Miranda could see her face reflected in the mirrors between the paintings, the curl of her thin lips. It was obvious she was only pretending to be glad to do this for her guest. But whatever her expression and whatever she said, Miranda suspected she really was glad to do it, though for reasons that had nothing to do with pleasing her, but probably the reverse.

  Even so, Miranda felt she had prevailed. And she wondered if part of what allowed her to prevail was the distance she had kept from her emotions. Of course she was worried about Peter and desperate to see him. Of course she was worried about Clara Brancoveanu and desperate to avoid her. And when one surge of feelings threatened to overcome her, she would force herself open to the other, according to the method Stanley had once taught her. More than that—she had been able to concentrate on her idiotic clothes, the absurd spectacle she must be making right here and right now, as a way of managing the rest of it, which was a chaos of anxiety and dread. What had the baroness said about the morphine?

  But as they began to pass by clumps of actual men who seemed to be doing nothing except standing there in the portrait gallery, Miranda let herself imagine the worst, partly to be prepared for it, and partly as a way of reducing her present embarrassment—these men, in coattails or again in uniform, just stared at her as she went by. One old fellow with mutton-chop sideburns was actually clapping his gloved hands, as if Miranda were an actress making an entrance. At least the shoes didn’t have heels, though they seemed too flimsy to run in. The air was sweltering out here. The small high windows were all closed.

  Then they had passed that gantlet, but one of the men had peeled away from the wall to follow them, a narrowshouldered man dressed in some kind of livery, a short jacket with red piping that took the place of lapels. He had a high bald forehead and a face like the blade of a hatchet. He was thin, almost emaciated, with an Adam’s apple that stuck out above a collar that was not clean, as Miranda noticed with surprise; he was walking close behind her and a little to one side. The baroness had hurried on ahead.

  They passed through double doors and around a corner, and rejoined her in a square room with a marble floor where they waited by a pair of elevators. “This is Jean-Baptiste,” announced the baroness. “He will take you downstairs. Then to Princess Brancoveanu’s apartments.” Abruptly she stalked away toward another opened door, where a white-haired woman and a number of military officers were waiting. “The German ambassador,” murmured Jean-Baptiste.

  Miranda glanced at him in surprise. Then the door to the elevator opened, the attendant opened the cage, and the three of them descended in that hot small clanking space. Miranda, staring up at the massed bulk of the building from the courtyard the previous night, had estimated its height at three or four stories, but already they were farther down than that.

  The attendant pulled back the door, and then she and Jean-Baptiste were walking through a maze of smaller, brick-faced corridors. Guards carried long rifles and bandoliers of cartridges. A pair of them stood on either side of a narrow door, which one of them unlocked when he saw Jean-Baptiste.

  “Thank you,” said Miranda, and no one looked at her. She had spoken in French, but now she repeated in Roumanian—“Multumesc”—but still nobody paid attention. Jean-Baptiste opened the door and stood aside to let her in.

  He did not follow her, for which she was grateful. At least I’ll be alone, she thought. But there was a soldier on the other side as well. He carried a pistol. The room was stinking, filthy, hot, a stone-faced chamber with a single barred window on the bottom of an air shaft. Outside the corridors had been lit with bulbs of gas, but here there was a candle in a wooden stick next to a chamber pot. By its light Miranda could see a ripped mattress stuffed with straw, and Pieter de Graz with his legs shackled together, naked in his underwear, his face puffy and his body dark with bruises, his hand covered with red bandages.

  “You may leave us,” she said to the soldier, first in French, then in Roumanian. “Please, go,” she said, but he did nothing, didn’t even look at her, though she was standing right next to him in the open door.

  Angry, frustrated, she stepped past him into the room. De Graz turned toward her and he smiled, revealing his familiar teeth, irregular, slightly splayed. He tried to speak—a broken whisper, and she pulled her dress up to squat down beside him. The guard made no movement as she bent down to hear what he was saying: words she recognized, almost the first English words that she had heard in his mouth since she had rediscovered him in Mogosoaia.

  “Oh life is a marvelous cycle of song,” he quoted.

  Among all the disgusting smells in that chamber, at that moment nevertheless she caught a whiff of hope as he continued:

  “Of wonderful extemporanea.

  And love is a thing that can never go wrong,

  And I am the Queen of Roumania!”

  SLUT THAT SHE was, she actually embraced him, as the baroness witnessed in the alchemical laboratory that adjoined her bedroom overlooking the Piata Revolutiei. She couldn’t hear what the girl said, but in the center of her crystal pyramid she saw her go down on her knees in the filthy straw—now there was a dress quickly ruined, after all.

  The baroness was disappointed. Her interview with the German ambassador, short as it was, had been unsatisfactory, anxiety-provoking. She thought perhaps she’d find some comfort here, or else not comfort, exactly. A woman of exquisite sensitivity, Nicola Ceausescu had imagined she’d be able to decipher something in the undissembling language of Miranda’s body. She imagined she’d be able to feel some of the girl’s pain at discovering her hero and protector beaten, defeated, maimed—the baroness, also, had suffered a great deal when she was young, and even still.

  But as she watched Miranda underneath the glass, again she felt disappointed and impatient. She did not feel the surge of empathy that was as necessary to her as coffee mixed with chocolate. In the girl’s gestures she thought she could see anger, certainly, and pity, certainly, but also something else that was not sorrow and was not familiar.

  The surgery in the Mogosoaia police barracks had not been entirely necessary. Perhaps a competent private doctor would ha
ve been able to save his hand. But de Graz was dangerous in many ways, a fugitive and a criminal who could not have expected the best care. The baroness put her hand toward the crystal surface of the pyramid; she almost touched it. The image was occluded as if a mist or a cloud or some ectoplasmic ghost were in de Graz’s cell with him. But through this vague shadow the baroness saw Miranda put her cheek against de Graz’s bandaged forearm. And it was true, her shoulders shook with sobs. Doubtless she was in tears. But even so, the baroness’s view of the girl’s face was unsatisfactory, and her view of de Graz’s expression was the same.

  Momentarily she expected to hear the bell that would summon her to her appointment with Radu Luckacz and Sergeant Vladimir O’Brien. Still she lingered, disturbed also by the mist that seemed to cling to the inner surface of the pyramid. She lingered long enough to watch her steward, Jean-Baptiste, draw the girl away. Then there was nothing but a foggy blackness until she saw some furniture take shape, indistinct also, the interior of Clara Brancoveanu’s sitting room, and the baroness had to move around the table to achieve a better view.

  After a few minutes the door opened and Jean-Baptiste came in. There was Miranda Popescu on his heels, disheveled, out of breath—the baroness could see that much. Princess Clara, who had stretched out with a book on the settee, now rose to her feet. But again it was impossible to see their gestures and faces with any precision, and of course nothing could be heard except a faint, ionized roar from the lacquered horn of the ansible in the corner. The baroness brought her fingers to her mouth to gnaw on them, and then she lit a cigarette.

  THE WOMAN HAD risen from the sofa, a book dangling from one hand. Miranda stared at her, unable to speak. And maybe it was good to have rushed here from some other place, her head and heart full of chaos. Because it had prevented her from imagining and rehearsing what she might say. Here was one more scene or encounter that was both unreal and fraught; she was getting used to them. She remembered the first time she had spoken to her aunt in tara mortilor after she had come up from the dock with all the creatures of the dead—was this as strange as that? Was it more strange?

  “Maman,” she said. “Mother, there is a man here who has tried to help us, you and me, and has now been punished for it. You remember my father’s aide-de-camp?”

  No, it wasn’t true she hadn’t rehearsed, but this line was the extent of it, conceived as the door opened to the princess’s chamber. Once it was spoken, Miranda stood with her hands to her hot face, staring at the woman who put down her book and who also appeared flustered and confused.

  They were in a small blue room, ornately furnished. The windows were closed; the window shades were down. Princess Clara was a smooth-faced woman, pale and gray-haired. Though it was stifling in the little room, she wore a cardigan whose sleeves she plucked at nervously. She was smaller than Miranda, and would not meet her eyes.

  She had flinched as her daughter spoke, glanced toward the mirror, the window, Jean-Baptiste, who still stood against the wall. When he made signs of leaving she gave him a pleading look. When the steward opened the door behind him, he did so gently and with scarcely a noise, a tiptoeing pantomime of solicitude.

  Miranda’s mother had been held prisoner in Germany for twenty-five years. Probably the world seemed strange to her. Maybe it was frightening and horrible to have a full-grown child burst in on her. So Miranda rubbed her sweating palms on the cloth of her blue dress and swallowed down her own feelings. And the two women continued to stare at each other like unfamiliar animals, Miranda thought, brought suddenly into the same space.

  THE SIMILE OCCURRED to Nicola Ceausescu also as she watched them in the glass. To her they were like cats trying to establish dominance—the white tyger, she mused. She couldn’t see the bracelet on Miranda’s wrist, but at the ironwood table in her secret laboratory she yawned and stretched, blew on her cigarette ash, frowned, and stubbed it into a gilt ashtray, a gift to the former empress from the Sultan of Bhopal.

  Sick of spying, the baroness gave her mind momentarily to other things. Laid out on the surface of the table were two more objects, Prince Frederick’s revolver and Miranda’s letter from her aunt. And the baroness imagined two more that were missing: first, Kepler’s Eye, the tourmaline, about which Aegypta Schenck had revealed a new, important piece of information in her letter. Second, the golden bracelet of Miranda Brancoveanu, the symbol of her authority.

  These two objects Nicola Ceausescu had given up, abandoned hope of their possession—not without regret or backward glances. The bracelet especially enticed her. Over the years she had adopted the identity of the white tyger as a ceremonial title. The potato-eaters had been only too glad to encourage her, perceiving no doubt a way to defang the legend of the tyger by reducing it into a civil post and confusing the issue of succession. But it had been a long time since the baroness (whose skill as an artist was dependent on unflinching honesty) had been able to persuade herself that the bracelet could belong to her by any kind of right. And how could she convince others if she could not convince herself? She would be the laughingstock of Bucharest if she ever had the impudence to fasten those gold beads around her wrist. Besides, they would only draw attention to her ugly, bigknuckled, tobacco-stained, chewed and bleeding hands.

  So the jewel she had abandoned and the bracelet also. As a reward the gods had favored her with this revolver. Perhaps Cleopatra herself had looked down from the slopes of Mount Olympos, and also Medea, and Hera, and Hecate, and Ariadne—oh, the baroness had played many such parts on the boards of the old Ambassadors! And perhaps the goddesses and their attendant muses had been able to appreciate how she had never tried to seize control of any audience with her own self-regarding art. Instead she had always been a humble vessel for some greater force. In this way she had risen above her rivals, Bernhardt in Paris, Caramanlis at the Meroë Festival, Nakamura in Canton—where were they now? Withered, old, and broken, mothers and grandmothers in rich men’s houses, while Nicola Ceausescu was still standing on the stage of all the world.

  Yes, Cleopatra and Medea had brought her this pistol by a circuitous path. They also had been passionate women who had suffered much and been unfairly judged. And doubtless if she honored them and prayed to them both in her life and in her art, they would bring her also the key to using it, which she still lacked.

  Aegypta Schenck, evidently, had discovered that key and cracked the coded language of the spell. Perhaps she had written out the words and Miranda Popescu had lost them through her stupidity and clumsiness. Or else the Princess Aegypta had intended to bring her niece to Mogosoaia while she herself was still alive. The baroness had interrupted that part of the scheme, throttled her to death in front of Mary Magdalena’s altar, a crime that still weighed on her and made her start awake at night—it was not her fault! It had not been her fault.

  But what one woman could discover, another could as well. Aegypta Schenck had offered her a clue.

  Now the baroness spread out the letter she had taken from Miranda’s pocket, separated it into its pages. There it was on the last page:

  … Always remember as Magister Newton tells us the events of this world have no probative veracity. But just as incidents occur differently in memory between two witnesses, also they are different at the time of their occurrence. So if we ask if something has an evidentiary value, first we must ask who had observed it and for what reason. For it is not in this world, nor the hidden world, but in the Empyrean World above, that scientific proofs will stand for equal witnesses, or an experiment, or any ordinary incidence. These events in your life that seem extraordinary, to another they have never once occurred. But oh my dear niece …

  “COMME VOUS ÊTES grande—how tall you are!” said Clara Brancoveanu. “You take after your father, obviously! You must know it is terrifying to see you like this with your red face. No, let me look at you—I had not dreamed you’d be so tall! Please, there is cold water in the washstand if you’d like to bathe your face, and I have powder also
and a hairbrush … .”

  This wasn’t promising. Say what you like, Miranda thought, about the time she’d spent between Christmas Hill and Mogosoaia, it hadn’t included a lot of this. After only five minutes, Princess Clara had begun to remind her of some hideous cross between the Baroness Ceausescu and her adoptive mother in Massachusetts—maybe that’s just what it was, to be a mother. Maybe that was just part of the deal.

  No, there was more: “ … Madame la Baronne Ceausescu tells me you’ve led quite such a life in these last months, hiding in the swamps and so on. I can well believe it now I look at you! She tells me you’ve been traveling with this man de Graz, whom I remember when he was with your father—just a boy, then! Younger than I! Really, on the train from Germany and as I’ve been sitting here waiting, I have thought it is past time you are married, and if I can achieve that I will die content. Is it true? I fear it would be better not to see this man again. It was not to be your husband that your father selected him. But he was a servant only, a trusted servant. At least your father trusted him though I did not …”

  This was just the kind of crap Rachel used to say about Peter Gross. Furious, stung, Miranda shook her hair back from her face. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She looked around the ornate, overfurnished parlor, and then worked her way back to the woman standing between the sofa and the low table. She examined her as if she were another object in the room—how old was she? Fiftyish, Miranda supposed. And yet her skin seemed oddly smooth, worn down. And all her gestures seemed old-ladyish—that was what you got, Miranda supposed, after half a life in prison.

  Her gray hair was pulled back from her face, fastened at the nape of her neck. Her eyes seemed both nervous and sad. And if immediately she’d started in with criticism and judgments, maybe that was out of nervousness and sadness. And if she worried the sleeves of her cardigan and made odd, plucking motions with her hands, if she persisted in talking like this, maybe it was because she had forgotten how to behave with people, or talk to them, or else she’d never known. She’d been about Miranda’s age when she had gone to Ratisbon.