by Paul Park
She changed in a downstairs cloakroom, for which she kept the only key. Once in her apartment, though, she scarcely had time to undress and take a bath. Jean-Baptiste was knocking on the door with a message that had come from the Committee for Roumanian affairs.
He left it in the music chamber. She read it in her dressing gown. The stationery was crisp, rich, embossed with the arms of the German Republic.
Madame la Baronne,
It is with regret that we receive the answers to our first enquiry, which we undertook following the wreck of the Hephaestion and the outbreak of violence. We should like to provide the opportunity for you to challenge the authenticity of the cargo receipts and bills of lading that we have recovered, both here and in Constantinople.
In the meantime, after consultation with the foreign secretary, it is the request of the committee that you remove yourself into your former residence in Saltpetre Street, until such time as all these facts have been revealed.
Etc., etc., she read—generous annuity, years of service. And then this:
We are pleased to learn of the return to Bucharest of Mlle. Miranda (Brancoveanu) Popescu Schenck von Schenck, and of her reunion with her mother. Because she is the daughter of a Roumanian patriot, whose love for his motherland was only strengthened by his descent from an ancient Prussian family, and who gave his life for the dream of a Roumanian-German federation that would be a political reflection of his own mixed ancestries, it is the opinion of the committee that Mlle. Popescu might provide an appropriate replacement for you in your official duties as the “white tyger,” until such time as you have cleared your name. Would you, then, convey our interest to Mlle. Popescu in this matter …?
Despite their power in the world, in some ways, the baroness reflected, these potato-eating Germans were like babies. What did they think? That the white tyger was like some kind of deputy assistant secretary? Or did they think, after all these years of knowing her, that Nicola Ceausescu would slink back to Saltpetre Street like a frightened cat?
Or perhaps, because they were so powerful, they thought ordinary diplomatic politesse was now beneath them. “What’s that news?” Jean-Baptiste called out from the corridor. He had left and come again to stand beside the half-opened door.
She shrugged, although he couldn’t see her. After her performance, her unsettled night, and difficult morning, and now this, she felt exhausted and squeezed out. Nor had she even begun, as the potato-eaters might have said, her official duties for the day.
No, maybe she was not the daughter of a famous German family. She had been born in a wooden hut in the Carpathians where pigs lay in the mud. But she would rather die than give up what she’d won from her own courage with the world against her. In the name of all the goddesses who struggle against the gods, she’d rather die. Which was why, she supposed, the goddess had delivered to her Prince Schenck von Schenck’s revolver, taken from that girl’s unworthy hands.
No, the baroness was far from defenseless. The gun was sufficient power, if she could find a way to use it. What was it Isaac Newton had said? No, Aegypta Schenck had said it, in the letter to her niece: Always remember as Magister Newton …
“I’ve opened up the house on Saltpetre Steet,” said Jean-Baptiste from the other room. She could hear him fussing around in there. What did he know about this?
But she would not be distracted, and she recovered her thoughts: What did Aegypta Schenck know about Isaac Newton? Magister Newton, as she called him. Only in his alchemical research had he used that title, and those books were hidden, secret, lost.
After the destruction of the English islands, many thousands of refugees had floundered ashore, Isaac Newton as a lecturer in optics at the University of Krakow. Later, the Prussian king had brought him to Berlin, where he had published his Principia and many other treatises on natural philosophy. But in time he’d been invited to Roumania, where alchemical research was not yet illegal. There he had commenced the last work of his life, his black book of alchemical inquiry, which was not published. Even the hint of its existence was enough for the German authorities to silence him, censure him for blasphemy, heresy, conjuring, and prestidigitation. He had died of syphilis and mercury poisoning in Potsdam, a drunken, broken man.
The black book was never found. It was thought to have been destroyed. Quotations from it survived, small excerpts in the work of other censured writers. These her husband had collected in his notes, and Nicola Ceausescu had read all of them, she’d thought. But the words Aegypta Schenck had mentioned in her letter, those were new.
Despite his precise diagram, the baron had not predicted any of this. He had not known—the baroness saw now—anything much about it. The phenomenon Aegypta Schenck had captured in her brother’s revolver before she died, surely that was only explicable in terms of Newtonian metaphysics. Even the names of the eminences, carefully incised in tiny letters around the bottom of each firing hole, were English: Mintbean, Treacle, Abcess, Rotbottom, Flimsie, and Thorpe.
Magister Newton had been given to puzzles and word games, apparently. These idiotic and demeaning names, did they contain some clue, or else some English joke? Where were the instructions to unlock the mystery? Where was the letter of instructions to the girl, Miranda? She’d lost it, didn’t have it, never had read it, obviously. Had it been destroyed?
All this time Jean-Baptiste had been talking to her, and she hadn’t been listening. Now he knocked again. “Domnul Luckacz is here.”
“Tell him I will meet him downstairs.”
Then after a moment she continued: “Arrange breakfast for us, please, although he will have eaten. For me the usual, though of course I am not hungry. My friend, you must allow me to dress!”
That month “the usual” meant poached eggs on black toast, which she had eaten every day since Victory Day, the anniversary of the Peace of Havsa. Often the baroness had cravings that transformed her diet for six weeks at a time or so. She would eat one food to the exclusion of all others until, finally sated, she abandoned it without regret. At official dinners she would spoil and pick at any number of lavish dishes, only to gorge herself in private on tripe and breaded brains, for example—a recent infatuation. Since the murder of Aegypta Schenck she’d eaten a great deal of meat, a penance, she imagined, though it felt more like a compulsion.
Having changed into a light yellow gown, she stood at the top of Baltic Stairs. She watched Radu Luckacz plodding toward her over the marble floor, an explorer trudging over arctic ice. Grim as death—when had the joy gone out of him? His black moustache, his pinched, creased face. His hat seemed heavy in his hands.
Touching the brass banister, she descended to meet him. At the landing she could smell the poached eggs in the Court of the Sarcophagus, where Jean-Baptiste had pulled a glasstopped table against the railing. The baroness felt her stomach rise. All kinds of falsehood and hypocrisy disgusted her, which was the secret of her artistic success. She almost felt like confessing everything that had occurred. Before she could open her mouth, Radu Luckacz started in, looking up at her from the bottom of the stairs.
They were alone, but he spoke softly: “Ma’am, I am the unlucky carrier of unlucky news, which is as usual that I might have trusted your instincts, for you were right. Now, is there somewhere we are able to speak privately, for this will be a blow. Perhaps we can be sitting down.”
A blow, and she could feel it on her heart. Sometimes it was difficult to breathe. But always one of her great gifts on the stage was the ability to swallow down her own emotions; with a puzzled expression on her face she reached his level and then led him through the door into a quiet corner near the railing, between two stone cenotaphs of an enormous size, brought from Luxor in the reign of Queen Sophia.
“Please,” she said. “I asked Jean-Baptiste to prepare something.” She motioned to the table, on which was laid out two plates of eggs, toast, watercress, sardines, and juice from Turkish oranges. Obviously disgusted, as he had every right to be, Luckacz ra
ised his hand. But he sat close beside her on the delicate, wrought-iron chairs.
She saw tears in his eyes, and he looked away. “Tell me,” she said. “When Princess Aegypta’s house in Bucharest was searched after my husband’s death, you said the police discovered an alchemical laboratory that contributed to her disgrace. You did not say: Was there a library?”
In Aegypta Schenck’s two cottages near Mogosoaia in the woods, the baroness could not remember having seen a single book except for The Essential History, which she had burned before she set the house on fire. And in the other house, of course, she had pulled the soft cord tight around the old woman’s neck until she died, an old lady who had never done her any harm! Oh, she was an evil woman, and now she also felt tears on her cheek. Looking down at her plate, she saw the two eyes of her eggs staring up at her.
She listened to the soft, ugly, Hungarian-accented voice of the policeman. “Ma’am, your compassion is well known, and I am not fooled by this attempt to enter into other subjects, because I am afraid this one can’t wait. I think you know why I am here.”
What did he mean? How could she know? Was her guilt as obvious as that? It crossed her mind for a moment to imagine he was here to arrest her either for one murder or another, and it would be as much as she deserved. But no, he would not have come alone like this, would not be pawing uselessly at the glass tabletop, as if he wanted to take her hand.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Ma’am, I must tell you I have brought you two small objects that we found at three fifty-one Strada Camatei in an upstairs room. This was the locality where we’d observed the assassin from two nights ago in the Field of Mars, whose attack was prevented there. I mean the traces of vitriolic acid that were recovered. At the time you suggested a certain identity, which I found unlikely to believe. I would have done better not to doubt you, because of your woman’s instinct in these matters. Now I tell you one of these two objects is immaterial, but the other …”
He drew an envelope from the inside pocket of his black coat. He drew out a tin medallion, stamped with the head of Kevin Markasev. And then much heavier, a golden locket on a chain.
“I ask you whether it is possible to remember …”
Opened between the policeman’s dirty thumbs, the locket showed a photographic portrait, together with a lock of chestnut hair.
“That was a gift to him,” she said. “How could I forget?”
Time went by. “I realize this is an event with sensitivity,” said Radu Luckacz, finally. “The body is now resting in the city morgue.”
“And was he … recognized?”
“No, ma’am. There is no use worrying on that subject.”
“Why?”
“I do not want to say. Because of the nature of his injuries …”
She understood. But always she wanted to go a little further. “I don’t understand.”
“Ma’am, he was cruelly beaten.”
She felt she could not breathe. She remembered the feel of the gloves she had taken from Vladimir O’Brien. The leather was crusted, scored, still wet with blood.
She turned her head to look over the railing at the four painted sarcophaguses in the palm court. “And was anyone arrested?” she asked.
“Ma‘am, there was another man staying there. Others in the building were the witnesses to what he said. When he returned after seven o’clock last night, the crime was already made. He could not have accomplished it in the clothes he wore, nor did he have any others. It was this man who brought a doctor. There was no reason to misjudge him, finally. And we discovered other evidence. Another man was seen leaving the place at the hour of the first disturbance. Witnesses have placed it.”
She felt the tears drip down her cheeks.
“Ma’am, I promise you that we will catch this murderer. I swear it to you. It is not possible that a man should kill our citizens under our moustaches in the middle of our capital … .”
“Thank you, my dear friend. I can depend on you, I know.”
And in a moment she continued: “The man living there—what was his name?”
“Andromed, or Andromedes. Turkish or Greek, mixed parentage, he claimed, although he spoke Roumanian without an accent, so my deputy says. I myself am not a judge of this. I come from asking him these questions. He has plenty of money but no papers of identity. He has moved from that place, but we have him under watch.”
“Ah,” said Nicola Ceausescu. She blotted her cheek with one of the napkins from the table. The soft cotton square was embroidered in one corner with a tiger’s head.
“Will you bring this man to me?” she said. “Not today, I couldn’t bear it. But I think he must have been the last to see my boy alive.”
10
Cold Soup
SOME DAYS LATER, Miranda stood in her mother’s apartment on the third floor of the People’s Palace. “Can we speak in English?” she asked.
“If you would like. I must confess I am not current—how is it?”
“Fluent.”
“Ah! But I will struggle on.”
After some missteps, she thought, Clara Brancoveanu had made progress in these daily visits, which at first had been awkward and painful. Of course she had said all the wrong things! But what could be expected after so long?
She sat on the chaise longue beneath the window. Her daughter, standing upright in the middle of the room and wearing neither powder, rouge, nor jewelry—except for the Brancoveanu bracelet—was strange to her. No, not entirely, for the girl was like her father, not so much in her face (though there was some of that) as in the language of her gestures. Always there was force behind her, strength. Aegypta knew this language, too. Aegypta also, when you saw her in a frock, looked as though it were the first time she had ever worn one. What was it she had said once? It had seemed scandalous. “You don’t need good manners if you’re rich enough.”
“I want you to tell me what I can and can’t do,” Miranda went on. “It’s like I’m always breaking rules, and I want to know what they are. Can I go outside, for example? I notice you never leave this room.”
“Where—in the street?”
“Yes, in the street. Can I take a walk?”
“But where? Where would you go?”
From the impatient, dismissive gesture of her daughter’s right hand, the princess knew she’d made another mistake. She tried to concentrate. “I suppose you could take a carriage or a motorcar. But you must advise the steward. And there would be crowds.”
Again the angry movement of the hand. Aegypta Schenck von Schenck, the princess’s sister-in-law, had had these gestures, as if there was a force of will behind the smallest movement, and always you could tell what she was thinking.
Aegypta had been able to bully her. Aegypta had made so many of the decisions that composed the princess’s life, ending with her long imprisonment—she would have taken her baby in her arms and left Ratisbon on that first day. Was that so terrible? Was that such a selfish crime, to have held her only child to her breasts? Later, she’d had to tape them up to keep the milk from flowing. She must have been sedated from the pain of childbirth, to have given Miranda up so easily.
Now it was too late, almost, to reestablish these bonds of nature. But she would try! “That means everyone knows what I am doing in advance,” Miranda said. “I want you to advise me. This morning I had a meeting with the German ambassador. She came to meet me here. Ambassador Moltke—does everyone know what she talked to me about?”
“I don’t … .”
“‘We want you to come out more often, so the people see you. Go to the theater or to social gatherings … .’ These are her words.”
She had her hands on her hips now, and more than ever the princess was reminded of her dead husband, who also was a stranger in most ways—she’d been so young! She’d seen him in Kronstadt a few times when she was a child, picnics and so on. Then for a few weeks, and they had gotten married. Then he was always away, and she would read
about him mostly in the newspapers until the Peace of Havsa. He was a hero, naturally. But always she had felt the weight of his authority, when he was standing with his hands on his hips like that.
“I don’t know. I think the people love to see a beautiful young woman of your social clasps … .”
These words, which had meant to soothe, now had the opposite effect. “Oh, come off it,” Miranda said—what did she mean by this?
Perhaps she did not consider herself beautiful. Which was true in some ways. Her dark hair was cut as if she herself had hacked at it with scissors. Her eyebrows had never been plucked. Her rough, country complexion, as if she’d lived outdoors. Her mouth that was too big. Her solid shoulders, her ears sticking out—all that could be hidden or repaired. It was this language of expressions and gestures that was more difficult. Truly, you could know what this girl was thinking just by looking at her, as if she were a child.
The Baroness Ceausescu, now, there was a woman to be admired, if for no other reason but her taste in clothes. But her face also was expressive, within a subtle range—she barely seemed to move it. The difference was, whatever she appeared to think or feel was just that: an appearance only, though sometimes you felt you had to sit up and applaud, the performance was so cunning. That was what a lady was like, her best protection in a world of men. Aegypta had never learned the skill and she was dead, murdered by some soldier, the baroness had confided, though the mystery had not been solved.
“I’m sure the Baroness Ceausescu’s opinion would be more useful than mine … .”
Oh, could the girl ever learn to restrain herself from frowning like that, shrugging her big shoulders? “Please,” she said, “don’t tell me to talk to her. She’s a terrible person. Can’t you see that?”