by Paul Park
But perhaps it would be prudent to do nothing, and send Jean-Baptiste to turn the beast away: Vladimir O’Brien, the temptation outside her door. And she would let Radu Luckacz find the boy, track him down in the university district, arrest him, put him on trial … no, it was impossible. Kevin Markasev was five years dead. Only Luckacz and herself knew it was not so. The Baroness Ceausescu had spoken at his funeral, her first public oration and the first step of her journey to this room. However noble her purpose had been, how could she admit now she had lied? It was only her popularity, the crowds inside the theater every night and in the square outside, that kept the Germans from replacing her. Besides, what stories could the boy not tell before a judge?
She put her lamp on the desk and sat on the edge of her leather armchair. She pulled a piece of stationery onto the blotter, dipped her pen into the inkpot. “He must not be recognized,” she wrote.
She blew the letters dry and then put her hand over it as if blocking away the words. This was all useless speculation and self-punishment if she was not able to discover where the boy was hiding—the university district. Five years before, chased from her house in Saltpetre Street, she and Markasev had explored those streets together. She had bought him clothes to match his eyes, conceal the effect of his white skin.
Radu Luckacz would find him, she had no doubt. He would cast a net of officers around the district and then draw it closed, moving from house to house. But she had investigative tricks as well. Methodical police work was not among them.
The planchette on the ouijah board was quiet now. The crystal pyramid was empty. Yet still she felt the Baron Ceausescu’s lurking, malicious presence, caught a trace of his barnyard stink. She lit a cigarette.
There was much about the crystal pyramid she didn’t understand, and she imagined she employed it to a small percentage of its capacity. There was no mention of it in her husband’s notes, but this she had discovered on her own: Even without precise coordinates, any room or street or house that she had actually seen, any place that she had actually visited, she could conjure up a vision of it within the glass, as if through an exercise of memory. And some of these images would be ethereal and ghostly, and some as sharp as diamonds with each detail intact, according to the value of her memory. So now she summoned a small vision of the Strada Inocentei and the alleys branching off from it near the School of Mines. It was an area of cheap rooming houses and student cafés, bookstores, flea markets, butcher shops, and bakeries. Because she’d been happy there, or at least because she remembered being happy, soon the tiny streets behind the Dance Academy took shape, at first with missing blocks and buildings. But because memory is the father of the muses, and because great artists are above all skilled in the mnemonic arts, soon the ghostly, wavering, silver streets acquired edges and colors, as if at the moment of sunrise over the chaotic rooftops—soft and dusty hues at first, but then harder and deeper as morning wore on.
At first the baroness sat with her back to the pyramid, blowing on her cigarette, examining the glow. But then she got up from her leather chair to stand above it like a goddess who had conjured it to life.
In all creative arts there is a moment when an exercise of memory turns into something else, some power that is uncontrolled and separate, and corresponds no longer to anything interior or subjective, but instead to literal truth. So as the baroness stood up with the lamp in her hand, now suddenly she could see the place not as it was five years before when she had lived there with Kevin Markasev, but now. And not just bricks and cobblestones, but people, too, and animals—there was a cart stuck in the gutter with a broken wheel, right there at the corner of Rosetti Mews. The driver, with liquor on his breath, stood with his whip and cursed.
And after an hour of looking, she found him, a stranger in expensive clothes, moving through the crowd. He carried a walking stick, had a newspaper under his arm. He had yellow hair under a slouch hat, and a face that was both wild and delicate. Now she saw his eyes were gray, gray with flecks of blue and green. The baroness reached out her hand, almost touching the smooth surface of the pyramid. And when he finally paused before the steps of a narrow building, she bent her neck to peer inside.
One day soon she would need spectacles. But for now she could still make out the number on the blue enamel plate affixed to the crumbling pilaster. And she had recognized the door even before she saw the number—351 Strada Camatei. Of course Markasev would have found it again. She and he had stayed there briefly in the old days.
8
A Murder
LIEUTENANT PROCHENKO STOOD with his hand on the rusty railing. He looked up and down the street, searching for policemen in the lazy summer crowds. In uniform or out of uniform—in the piata he had seen an omnibus disgorge twenty men in identical blue suits. They had gathered to receive directions from a single police officer.
He could not shake the impression he was being watched. As always since he’d returned to Europe with the Chevalier de Graz, he could imagine several reasons for the police to be interested in him. That day, for example, he was just returning from a pawnshop in the Strada Stavropoleos, where he had dispensed with Elena Beau-cul’s diamond earrings and her brother’s overcoat.
But that was a small matter. If the authorities were searching for Kevin Markasev, he’d have to be careful not to get caught in their net. He had entered the country illegally on the Hephaestion, and had no documents of any kind.
But even that was a small matter. He was capable of living indefinitely by his wits. More was required of him, and of the oath he’d sworn to General Schenck von Schenck. Those words, spoken with his fist clenched to his heart, had sustained him in the strange life he had led.
One of the blue-suited men had come into the bend of the street. Prochenko turned to set his back against the warm wall of number 351. He unfolded his newspaper, hooked his stick over his arm, pulled his hat over his eyes, and settled down to watch the policeman, who appeared to be bargaining for something with a roadside vendor. A cone of roasted nuts, Prochenko saw—he imagined he could smell them even at that distance. The policeman, fat and badly dressed, ate his cashews in the middle of the street.
The newspaper was just a blind, but an appropriate one. There on the front page of the Roumania Libera, after the war news but above the speculations on the possibility of a cease-fire, was a story about the general’s daughter.
Apparently she had been freed from the manipulations of a retired soldier, a former captain of dragoons who’d been arrested after a murderous rampage. The young woman, named “Popescu” as a sort of honorific title, had been reunited with her mother in the People’s Palace. There was no mention of the dead policeman in Braila. But a Gypsy girl had been shot and killed by the ever-watchful metropolitan police. And it was speculated that her father had been the leader of a criminal Gypsy band who had kidnapped Miss Popescu and held her captive for seventeen years, ever since her aunt had left Mamaia Castle. Just this spring they had released her to take part in some criminal scheme against the government and her own family.
“Patty Hearst,” the lieutenant murmured to himself. Where had that name come from? A rich girl who’d been kidnapped and trained to rob banks in California …
In the warm air of Camatei Street, pungent with the smell of garbage and fried food, Sasha Prochenko remembered something. He heard the English words as clearly as if they had been whispered in his ear: “When you want to trust what you read in the papers, you’ve got to remember the misspellings and mistakes in any story when it’s something you know something about … .”
Who had said that? Now he remembered the flat-roofed 1960s house on Syndicate Road where his American mother had tried to teach him about the world.
As he watched the man in the blue suit walk methodically down the road, first to one side and then the other, it occurred to him that his safest and most rational course was to leave Kevin Markasev where he’d said good-bye to him after lunch, in the fifth floor room they’d
shared since the other evening in the Champ de Mars. The lieutenant had all his money, everything he owned and then some, in the pockets of Valentin Bibescu’s trousers.
What had he told them at their champagne picnic in the sun, with the Duesenberg parked by the side of the road? What had he told the Bibescu soeur et frère—that he was suffering from amnesia? Then he had meant it as a lie, a way to avoid awkward questions. But it had turned out to be true, and it had required Kevin Markasev to show him. From the moment he had seen the boy’s gaunt tortured face and stripped off his woolen cap in the Champ de Mars, he had felt an odd awakening in his body, an ache like blood returning to a sleeping hand or foot.
Nor could he give it up, for somewhere in that new remembered knowledge was the key to his own nature, which since the wreck of the Hephaestion he’d fumbled after without finding it, a drunk on the steps of his own house. Now he pushed his hat back, refolded the Libera, took his stick in his right hand, and clambered up between the pilasters of number 351.
It was a building full of students and Turkish immigrants with large families. At every landing of the splintered stairs he paused to listen to the shrieks of children. All the windows and the doors were open, and at the end of every corridor he paused to look out over the courtyard, crisscrossed with laundry lines.
As he climbed up he felt his heart grow light, even as he pondered his next steps. All that time in North Africa and Adrianople with the Chevalier de Graz, they had scarcely spoken of their plans. To cross the frontier and to find Miranda, that seemed difficult enough. And perhaps they had assumed Aegypta Schenck would tell them what to do, Aegypta Schenck who had been dead for years—how stupid they had been! How much time they had wasted! And then everything had blown apart with the Hephaestion, and now here he was alone.
Or not alone. Kevin Markasev was with him, and maybe finding Kevin Markasev had been an act of fate, and maybe he was always meant to play a role in this story. Markasev knew many secrets about the Baroness Ceausescu. Over the past day and a half he had revealed some of them: how she dabbled in sorcery and conjuring, how she had kept him prisoner for five long years. If nothing else, Prochenko thought, the boy’s existence was enough to bring Ceausescu down, and maybe he could help Miranda in that way.
He climbed up through the storage boxes on the last flight of stairs. Now he stood in the last corridor, rubbing the point of Valentin Bibescu’s boot into a crack in the floor where the fiber mats had worn away. For a moment he thought maybe he should go to the German authorities or else the offices of the Libera, or maybe even tell his story to the fat man in the blue suit. That would kick over a wasp’s nest, he was sure. No, it was impossible—the boy trusted him. It would be cruel to betray that trust for some advantage he could not even foresee.
All the boy’s life the baroness had used him. And there was something about him that had touched the lieutenant’s heart. He remembered the assessment of the girl inside of him. “Cute,” she’d called him in that town in Massachusetts, in that house on Syndicate Road, meaning partly he seemed older than she was, already shaving. And partly she was talking about his dark, single eyebrow and his menacing, tragic, European sophistication, about which she knew nothing, obviously—it didn’t matter.
Now Prochenko paused before the door, its green chipped paint. In the Champ de Mars he had wrestled Markasev away from the curb, pulled him into the crowd. Once away from the street, it had been easy for them to slip away from the police, who seemed confused and doubtful about the nature of the attack—there was no mention of it, for example, in the newspaper. Harder to shake was Elena Beau-cul, who had grabbed hold of his sleeve. He had twisted away from her, not without regret. But Markasev had recognized him instantly, which had made his grip the stronger; he had come without resistance. As the lieutenant pulled him through the crowd, already he was mumbling and muttering about the few weeks he had spent in Berkshire County. And when Prochenko had brought him back to his lodgings—here—even then he could not shut up about the time he had spent in that lost, mythical, artificial world, as if it were the only place his life had had a meaning.
In the pawnshop Prochenko had bought a heavy walking stick with a silver handle in the shape of a wolf’s head. Now he knocked it twice against the door and waited for Markasev to unlock it. He heard the crunch of the stiff bolt and pushed open the door. “We’ve got to leave,” he said before he’d even crossed the threshold. “We can’t stay here.”
He spoke in English. Naked to the waist, Markasev stood in the slanting light, rubbing his shoulders with one of the stupid cotton rags that passed for towels in this country, so different from the fluffy ones Prochenko had grown up with—no.
“Yuck, gross,” he thought, again as if someone had whispered the words into his ear. And then he smiled because he was not in fact disgusted in the core of his girl’s heart. There was nothing threatening about the boy as he stood there, tall and famished in the warm light, his skin so pale it was almost green, his long face wet from shaving, his eyes dark-hollowed under his big brow.
“Please …” he said in the broken English Prochenko remembered from Massachusetts, the fifty words or so that he had learned in the few weeks he had been there, but which he used with an odd expressiveness. “Please, stay. Don’t … go … again.”
Did he recognize the girl he’d known at school there and then later that last night on Christmas Hill, when he had burned Miranda’s book, and fought with Peter Gross, and started all this? Did he recognize Andromeda Bailey who lived on Syndicate Road? Yes, because from the moment she had snatched him from the curb he had not spoken except in English words. But he’d said nothing about what he saw in her, what changes he had seen. And what could he have told her? Who was it who now stood in front of him in Valentin Bibescu’s clothes?
“I … am … too … much … scared.”
The night before, he had told Prochenko what he’d been doing in that time and place, how he’d been sent by Nicola Ceausescu to bring Miranda here to Bucharest. And if he’d failed, it was not his fault; he’d done everything the baroness had asked. But he’d been punished nonetheless, punished by the lady of comfort and tears, locked up in a cage and then in a rich house. What had been his crime? And now he was punished even more by these dreams that visited him nightly, or else sometimes when he was sitting by himself or even walking in the street—the old baron’s ghost, which he had seen and recognized in his attic dungeon in Saltpetre Street. Or sometimes when he closed his eyes he could see the face of the wild boar, the red pig of Cluj, who had threatened and cajoled him and brought him to that curbside in the Champ de Mars, a bottle of vitriol in his pocket. He had told Prochenko about this as they had lain side by side on the little bed, awake in the middle of the night.
Now he started in again. “I dream of porc rosu—red pig,” he said, rubbing the towel under his dark armpits, over his sharp ribs, down into the scraped-out hollow of his stomach. “He tell … man come … kill.”
Great, Prochenko thought. Just great. He put down his hat, stick, and paper on the enamel-topped table and surveyed the room, as if a trace of the red pig might remain. Not under the bed, whose sky-blue coverlet had been pulled tight. The night before, they had lain on top of it in the warm air, dressed in their clothes.
“We should find another place,” he said. Maybe even something swankier, he thought. He had been paid in reichmarks for the diamond earrings, and Markasev, also, had no lack of cash. “We should get you something new to wear.”
“Too … much … scared.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” thought Prochenko. It had been a favorite expression of his mother’s on Syndicate Road. Because of the appeal in Markasev’s dark eyes, the intensity of which attracted and repulsed him, he picked up his stick again and walked into the corridor. Muted cries—squeals of childish laughter, childish wrath—came up through the stairwell from the other floors.
The stairwell formed a long, flat oval on one side of the narrow building
. Prochenko looked over the banister and then pulled his head back. His hand tightened on his wolf’s-head stick. Even from the corridor he had heard the heavy stamping of a man on the stairs, the stertorous breath of the policeman. His sense of hearing and his sense of smell were sharper, he had noticed, since the train wreck.
On the banister two floors below him, he had seen the fat pink hand, the cuff of the blue suit. As a soldier, Prochenko had never been ashamed to run, to find a devious way—de Graz, of course, would already have been jumping down the stairs. But the lieutenant pulled back just as the hand paused on the banister, and he imagined the policeman sticking his head into the stairwell and peering upward—fat—faced, and maybe even wiping his forehead with a white or red-spotted handkerchief. In his mind Prochenko looked up with him, the stairs unpromising and choked with wooden boxes and debris, and dark and silent in a way that suggested inactivity, particularly after the noise and smells at the bottom of the building. It was true: Markasev was the only occupant on the top floor, and all the other rooms were full of old furniture and junk. And the concierge maybe was absent and could not be questioned. Prochenko had not seen him or her the day before, and not that morning when he’d gone out.
Soon he heard the clump, clump, clump of the policeman retreating down the stairs. Lighthearted suddenly, Prochenko made a flourish with his cane. Coming back to the green door, closing it behind him, he placed himself in the window alcove and looked down into the street. When Markasev tried to say something, he raised his hand. But when he saw the policeman totter out the door and down the steps, he turned. “Put your shirt on. Let’s get something to eat. Is there still that Abyssinian café off the Corsairs’? I’m starving.”
“Please … is too … much …”
“But we can’t just stay up here. Come on, it’ll be my treat. Aren’t you hungry?”