The White Tyger

by Paul Park

Then, after another moment: “I want to know how to behave so I can get what I want. I feel everything is in this kind of code. And what I want is to help Peter, get him out of here. Can you help me with that? I’m standing here dressed like a Barbie doll, while downstairs in this same building he’s …”

  Barbie doll? What was this? But Miranda’s anguish was plain to see. “The Baroness Ceausescu has been very kind to us,” muttered the princess. “Perhaps she didn’t have the advantage of a high birth, but the world is changing. I am sure there is no question of bad treatment for the Chevalier de Graz.”

  Stubborn, the girl rolled her eyes. And the Princess Brancoveanu had no desire to get into another conversation about Pieter de Graz, his suitability as a friend or even an acquaintance, or the advisability of ever seeing him again. In her mind she returned to the earlier question: How must a woman behave to get what she wanted?

  But why would anybody ask her that, of all the women in the world? What information could she possibly offer on that subject? To deflect her thoughts from it, she came back to Nicola Ceausescu, who was after all an authority. “I must tell you the truth. It is entirely inappropriate how she mentions her son for you as a companion. You are right to laugh.”

  Only it wasn’t laughter, but just a coarse expulsion of breath: “Believe me, mother. I can vividly remember my fourteenth birthday party.”

  What did she mean by that? It didn’t matter. “Mother,” she had said, a word that was like a drop of water in the center of a thirsty flower—though it did not have the same charm, for example, as the French “maman.” Still it was enough to drive any thought out of the princess’s head, until the boy himself came in from the next room, Felix Ceausescu, the baroness’s son. He also had not been raised by his own mother, which was a bond of longing, doubtless, between the two women. Or it could be a bond of longing between the two children—doubtless also.

  THE PRINCESS COULD feel these bonds, though the baroness could not. She stood beside the ironwood table in her laboratory, watching over her crystal pyramid. She saw the boy as he entered Clara Brancoveanu’s sitting room, saw his flushed, small face.

  Since his arrival in the palace, she had not spoken to him directly, of course. What would she say? No, her task was to watch over him and protect him from his enemies. One enemy in particular: her jealous husband, the old baron, whose wrinkled spotted hands, she imagined, were now stretching out to grasp him from the land of the dead. Now and always she regretted having told the ghost her terrible lie, that the boy was not his child but Koenigslander’s.

  A terrible lie with terrible consequences, not just for the Danish choreographer. But the Baron Ceausescu had used Markasev to strike against her—not that she cared about that. Her life was always balanced on a tightrope. But now Markasev was dead, grotesquely murdered because of a misunderstanding. And Vladimir O’Brien—after the incident in her dressing room, she’d had him sent back to Mogosoaia in disgrace.

  In any great tragedy or comedy, any performance where a woman stands alone upon the stage, the way forward is full of obstacles of her own making. There is no triumph in overcoming anybody but yourself. Here in her secret room, she felt the presence of a brooding, watchful eye above her, an audience of the dead. Couldn’t his father see, she thought, how the boy favored him? Couldn’t he see himself in Felix Ceausescu’s empty eyes, his long, grasping fingers? The baroness could see these things, and they disgusted her.

  Now she heard Jean-Baptiste pounding on her bedroom door. Suppressing a smile, she closed the lamps in her laboratory, locked the door. She moved quickly through her sparse, ascetic chamber through the long squares of summer light that slanted from the windows. She was surprised how late it was.

  “Here I am,” said the voice of Jean-Baptiste. He was waiting outside in the music chamber. “What do you want?”

  Always his rudeness was refreshing to her. Perhaps he was the only one who saw her as she truly was, treated her as she deserved. “Thank you,” she said, opening the door. “Come in.”

  He hesitated in the doorway. This was unusual; she rarely invited anybody into her intimate space. The bed was unmade, the windows were locked. The air was humid, and it stank of her, her perfume and the smells of her body, though she was modestly dressed in a long green robe that covered her arms.

  “Thank you,” she repeated. “My old friend.”

  And he looked old as he stood there, a spry, emaciated figure with long arms and legs, always dressed—as some sort of ironical statement, she imagined—in an untidy livery that was too small for him. The collar cut into his neck. She watched his Adam’s apple swallow and subside, swallow and subside. She admired his high, bald forehead, his sharp, big, narrow nose, his eyes too close together.

  “I have heard you have been taking your meals with Miranda Popescu,” she said. “I want to thank you for that little gesture of welcome. She must feel she is alone in a strange world.”

  He grunted, looked around. The baroness watched the flare of his nostrils as he took in the rich smells. Her chamber pot was under the bed. No one had emptied it.

  “I would like you to continue doing that,” she said. “Eventually, of course, time will have passed. People’s memory will blur, and she will be able to take her appropriate place at social gatherings and so on. She will be seen. And by then she will have learned some things about how to dress herself and what to say. How to sit at a proper table. I was even thinking you might want to talk about these things. I remember all the lessons you used to teach me when I first married the baron. How innocent I was! You taught me how to be a hostess.”

  It was true; he’d been invaluable. What must he be thinking now, standing in this room where she lived like an animal in a cave? Perhaps all his lessons had been for nothing, which fork to use. But the world had changed.

  She continued. “I was wondering if I could play a part in welcoming our guest and making her at home. I’ve given orders to the kitchen to prepare meals for her. Perhaps you could bring them on a tray. Simple, country food, which I think is more appropriate. No doubt she’ll crave it later, after a few banquets at the German embassy. There is a cold potato soup that my mother made for me when I was young, cold potato and leeks in chicken broth and cream. My mother made it to comfort me. I would like you to bring it as a gift.”

  JEAN-BAPTISTE GRUNTED. BUT later he remembered what the baroness had said, when he stood outside Miranda Popescu’s door with the cold soup on a polished silver tray. He had stopped by the kitchens as the baroness had requested, and had received there also the greasy packages that contained his own supper; he carried them and the bottles of beer that had become a ritual on the same tray. But the soup was in an elegant porcelain dish, and beside it lay a silver spoon.

  “She came down and fixed it with her own hands,” the kitchen maid had said. “Not prepared it, but attended to it. Served with her own hands.”

  Now as he knocked and entered, Jean-Baptiste indulged himself in a cold feeling about this cold soup. But only for a moment; the girl turned and smiled. Woman, he corrected himself, but there was still something girl-like in the way she came to him and took the tray. An impulsiveness, maybe.

  “I was hoping you’d come,” she said. “What’s this?”

  She put the tray down on the carpet and sat cross-legged next to it, as if they were on a picnic. With a little bit of difficulty he sat down also. His pants were too tight for this kind of thing.

  “Please, don’t mind me,” she said. “What’s this—vichyssoise? My mother used to make it. Stanley said it was invented in the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”

  Jean-Baptiste found it hard to imagine Clara Brancoveanu making this particular dish. Or Aegypta Schenck—was that whom she meant when she said “mother”? And who was this Stanley? And where was this Fifth Avenue?

  He unwrapped his meatballs and tomato sauce. There was enough of it to offer her some when she said, “But it tastes a little strange.”

  He chided her gently: �
�You should try to eat a little more. The Baroness Ceausescu …”

  But he was relieved when Miss Popescu turned her spoon over as she heard the name, turned it over onto her napkin and gave the bowl a little pat, a childlike, definitive, charming gesture. There was still a good deal of soup left in the dish.

  “The beer is from Bohemia.”

  “I don’t mind if I do,” she said, and smiled.

  The beer was unusually gaseous. After a while she gave a little burp. They talked about several things—the floor plan of the palace and the entrances and exits, and where it might be appropriate for her to go. Other state properties and so on; Jean-Baptiste didn’t know much about it. As she spoke he was imagining his small room in Saltpetre Street where he had lived with the baroness and been happy. And even here at first, when they’d just opened one small portion of the building. Now there were all kinds of people hired directly from the German embassy. Whole wings were now being used as a hotel for foreign visitors and bureaucrats. Soon there’d be no room for him or the baroness either.

  “They have intentions for you,” he said.

  She shrugged, made a face, wrinkled her nose. What was it about her? At times—no. it was absurd. But at times she reminded him of the baroness herself, not as she was now. But when the baron first brought her to the house, and she was—what—fifteen, sixteen? She’d had some of the same transparency. She’d given the same impression you could know her thoughts by looking at her face. In the baron’s wintry house she’d circulated like a current of spring air. When had she learned how to deceive? Or was she deceptive and manipulative even then? Already that year she was a famous actress. She’d been invited to the Venice Festival.

  Now Miss Popescu was talking about a subject Jean-Baptiste could have predicted. It was the possibility of visiting Pieter de Graz in his cell. “I inquired about it,” he said. “These guards are bored and they need money. Luckacz doesn’t pay them much.”

  Her expression was both hopeful and disappointed. “That sadist stole my money in Mogosoaia.”

  “Whom do you mean?”

  She told him. Then she talked for a bit more, and he interrupted her. “Miss, do you love him?” meaning the Chevalier de Graz.

  Like her father’s, her ears protruded slightly. Now he watched them turn pink. “No,” she said. “He’s just my friend.”

  But like old men everywhere, he thought, he was happy to warm his hands at a little blaze of love. Like Luckacz, too, whose name he’d just mentioned; later he sat waiting for Luckacz in his room. He brought the tray up with him, and while he waited he sat looking at the white soup in the bottom of the dish.

  He had an hour. So while he waited he went down to the kitchen again, where one of the boys had a box of kittens. He brought a kitten up—long-haired, black and white—and put the bowl down for him. The kitten circled the dish and put his tongue out experimentally; he had to climb inside the dish to get at the cream soup. But at the last moment Jean-Baptiste picked him up. Then he sat reading with the kitten on his lap until Radu Luckacz knocked at his door.

  The policeman never seemed to go home anymore. Once a week for a year now he had found himself in Jean-Baptiste’s apartment, where they would sit and play chess. And in this past month he’d come more frequently—several times a week. It was a habit they’d adopted when Jean-Baptiste was in prison.

  Five years later, neither of them was yet proficient at the game. They would swap openings and defenses, and sometimes analyze the board as if both were playing on the same side. Friendless, elderly men, even with each other they had not achieved any obvious intimacy. Sometimes entire matches would pass without a word.

  Now, toward nine o’clock, they sat on opposite sides of Jean-Baptiste’s table, studying the outcome of a Queen’s Gambit. Neither could understand the point of the doubled pawn. “Tell me,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I read in the newspaper about a crime, a murder in the university district.”

  “Three fifty-one Camatei,” murmured the policeman.

  Jean-Baptiste was aware of the address, which he had read in the Libera, and previously on a piece of notepaper in the baroness’s handwriting. But it hurt him to hear it said aloud. “I was disgusted to read the details,” he said. “I wondered when I’d hear of an arrest.”

  They sat on stools. Radu Luckacz touched his luxuriant gray hair, touched the end of his black moustache. “There was evidence recovered at the scene,” he said. “Also in the street outside.”

  Playing black, his pieces in a muddle, Jean-Baptiste peered doubtfully at the board. “So you’re close,” he said. But the policeman didn’t respond.

  The kitten was asleep on a pillow. Radu Luckacz rubbed his nose. “What is this smell?” he asked.

  The porcelain dish was close at hand, perched on a chest of drawers. “It is soup,” said Jean-Baptiste. “The baroness made it.”

  “For you?”

  “For Miss Popescu. But she didn’t like it.”

  Jean-Baptiste made a move almost at random. The policeman pondered it. “The girl doesn’t deserve it,” he said at last. “She is guilty of murder, conjuring, and prestidigitation. Still, the baroness’s compassion …”

  Drawn to the dish, he got up and bent down over it. “You didn’t taste it?”

  “It was not for me. Besides, I didn’t know what was in it.”

  Jean-Baptiste spoke carefully as he studied the board. But he could not prevent the policeman leaning over his shoulder and removing one of his pawns.

  “You are dozing, my friend. What is in it? I smell chicken and potatoes. So?”

  “I didn’t know what was in it,” Jean-Baptiste said again. And then he changed the subject. “Miss Popescu has given me a complaint. She tells me there’s a Sergeant O’Brien who took money from her in Mogosoaia.”

  Luckacz strolled around the room, hands in the pockets of his drab black coat. “Miss Popescu has nothing to complain about,” he said. Then, “Of course thievery and corruption will not be tolerated. This O’Brien is a criminal. You have not seen him here?”

  Jean-Baptiste shrugged. One of his rooks was now in jeopardy.

  “He broke into the baroness’s dressing room,” the policeman continued. “You have not seen him here?”

  “I WOULDN’T KNOW him,” said the steward.

  “Then let me delineate him. Tall and with red hair.” Then Radu Luckacz continued, describing the red-haired scoundrel with his cleft palate or whatever it was, his wet lips. In an excess of jealousy he described him, watching the steward to see some trace of recognition—yes, there it was. A startled look. Had the creature been invited here, the baroness’s guest?

  Hands sweating, he sat down. Now, examining the board, he realized suddenly that by taking his opponent’s pawn, he’d left his knight uncovered—what stupidity! After all these years! It was because he was distracted, sick, unwell. At night he’d lie awake with a racing heart, his fat wife beside him sunk in sleep.

  “It has been difficult,” he confided. “You read in the paper, but there is a lot you cannot read. Yes, there is a truce in Moldavia while the cease-fire is discussed, but this fighting could be recommenced at any moment. Now there are these riots in Chiselet and elsewhere the Germans have put down—what will become of this? Now this murder you speak of. I know why you ask, my friend. I know how it is painful that this boy, this Markasev—the baroness is disheartened also. But you knew him, is it not so? Also when he was a guest in the Strada Spatarul?”

  Again that startled look. “What do you mean? Kevin Markasev died years ago. It was before I was released. Otherwise I might have—”

  “Yes, of course.” Hand to his lips, pondering his knight, Luckacz nevertheless glanced sidelong at his latest blunder. Was it possible the steward had not known the boy was still alive? What else didn’t he know?

  “What do you mean?”

  Radu Luckacz put his fist to his mouth.

  “Are you telling me the boy at three fifty-one … ?”

&
nbsp; “Please,” said Luckacz, frowning. “I cannot speak about a case that is continuing.”

  But Jean-Baptiste wouldn’t stop staring at him, even as he reached out for the knight. “Pah, what a disaster,” murmured the policeman.

  The steward did not smile. “You will have better luck another day,” he said.

  But he was wrong. On the subsequent evening Radu Luckacz performed even worse. This was partly due to the recurrence of his sickness—the fever he had picked up in Chiselet from (he was convinced) the radioactive contaminant. The nausea and headaches had diminished on his return to Bucharest, but now they had come back and they prevented him from sleeping.

  And for the next few nights he returned to the palace to be defeated there. This was particularly irritating, as he and Jean-Baptiste had long established a rough parity in their level of play. Surely his sickness had something to do with his new inability to concentrate. Surely his insomnia had something to do with it.

  After a checkmate that had seemed inevitable from the first move, he would find himself wandering the halls of the People’s Palace, hoping to catch a glimpse of Nicola Ceausescu after everyone else was asleep. No doubt she also had a secret burden, a sadness that kept her awake. Sometimes he would wait in the corridor outside her apartment, hoping to catch the sound of her pianoforte.

  He felt he could not approach her or speak to her until he’d caught the murderer of Kevin Markasev. Yet how could he even attend to his own work, distracted as he was? No, his only comfort were these chess matches and (admit it!) the soup he drank in Jean-Baptiste’s room, which had become an odd sort of addiction.

  It was always the same. The steward would tell him he had brought the soup back to his own room after the Popescu girl had rejected it—the arrogance of these Brancoveanus and von Schencks! Didn’t she realize? The baroness had made this food with her own hands, or else caused it to be made—what condescension!

  Evidently Jean-Baptiste was too kindhearted to return it to the kitchen untasted. The baroness had sensitive feelings, it was well known. Radu Luckacz approved of his delicacy in this matter. But why then did he insist repeating the same story over and over, while all the time he was staring at Luckacz with his narrow eyes? Why was he so reluctant to offer him the soup, even when the other option was—as he insisted—throwing it away? Why did he ask him over and over whether he was sure he wanted it? Why did he purse his lips, shake his head, rub his badly shaven chin? And why in God’s name did he never have any himself? It seemed a crime to waste it.