The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  11

  A Reunion

  LIEUTENANT PROCHENKO, WHEN the summons came, had moved away from the fifth-floor room in the Strada Camatei. On the evening of the murder he had gone out to find different lodgings for himself and Kevin Markasev. Now he lived there, down the street and off an alleyway. He was easy to find. As instructed, he had left his new address with the captain of police.

  In the hidden world, a radioactive effluent was still poisoning the area around Chiselet, and there were riots there. Feverish and disgusted, Sasha Prochenko spent his days rediscovering the streets of Bucharest, spending the money from Elena Bocu’s diamond earrings. At night he lay sleepless in his single room, alternating between plans for the future and visions of the past. He would find Miranda Popescu.

  Already he detested the sight of German soldiers in the cafés and piatas, smoking and laughing. He detested the sound of their arrogant voices. He would find Miranda and—what? Most of the newspapers were full of German propaganda. But from the Roumania Libera he learned she was a prisoner in the Palace of the People.

  Always in the streets or sleepless on his bed he was tormented by images: a seven-year-old Miranda in the castle of her martyred father or else on the beach, looking up at him with eyes full of girlish admiration. Or Miranda in high school in Massachusetts, or playing soccer after school, or riding bikes in the woods, everywhere just trying to have fun. Oh God, it was not so long ago.

  These images sometimes were interspersed with more recent ones, things Lieutenant Prochenko was trying to forget, and against which he had raised a wall of memories. But it had many gaps, through which seeped a tide of bloody liquid: He had returned around seven o’clock, and Kevin Markasev was still alive.

  Against this memory he had erected others that led to it specifically—other moments when he had seen or spoken to Kevin Markasev, in Berkshire County in the field on Christmas Hill. Or else here in Bucharest during the brief time they had spent together. His single eyebrow and his handsome face: These images Prochenko tended as a kind of memorial, different from the stone monuments that disfigured the city, or the stone mausoleum in Baneasa Cemetery, five years old already, where Kevin Markasev the brave had supposedly been buried. Sometimes as he lay awake Prochenko wondered whether now at that moment the sextons were breaking the lock, slipping the new body inside. Or had they found him a new unmarked grave?

  How to progress? And then in the morning, the summons came. It was delivered by a policeman. A printed note. The Baroness Ceausescu would like to speak to him.

  Walking to the palace, he was amazed at her boldness. Surely it was the baroness herself who had committed this murder after the incident in the Champ de Mars. Surely she had dispatched one of her assassins, and the police detective—Radu Luckacz—must have been aware of it. What a farce! All the time he’d been questioning Prochenko, the policeman must have known the truth. He must have known the truth or guessed it as with a look of real anxiety he scratched the edges of his Groucho Marx moustache, more boot polish than hair!

  In the bright sunshine Prochenko arrived in the Piata Revolutiei. He strolled the length of the palace’s eastern façade under the ionic colonnade. He loitered in the crowd in front of the wrought-iron gates; he’d never been inside this building. In Prince Frederick’s time this had been the winter residence of the Empress Valeria and the center of her political party. Enemies of the prince, they had destroyed his reputation and then killed him, scattering his followers to Mogosoaia, Mamaia, and other places.

  Valeria had been the tool of Antonescu and the generals. Through her, under emergency powers they had dominated the country. Prince Frederick was a danger to them, a military hero who was nevertheless a liberal, eager to experiment with land reform and parliamentary self-rule.

  Most of his ideas he had distilled from German political philosophy. So it was a disgusting irony to see German soldiers at the palace gates. Whatever freedom was enjoyed by ordinary citizens in the German Republic, none of it had crossed the border with the army.

  Full of a suppressed fury that seemed to creep under his skin, Prochenko delivered his letter to the German officer in charge. Deliberately insouciant, swinging his wolf’s-head stick, left hand in his pocket, he strolled up the steps between the Prussian guardsmen. Waiting, he whistled a folk song from Moldavia before a footman appeared to guide him through the maze of the palace’s first floor.

  In the big corridors there were crowds of people doing nothing. The footman led him to the bottom of a staircase. Miranda stood above him on the landing, surrounded by a bunch of women with their hair pinned up.

  She was wearing a yellow dress that almost touched the floor. She looked like a total goofball. Once in Massachusetts, the high school drama department had tried to do a production of Tartuffe.

  They looked at each other for a few moments, Prochenko at the bottom of the staircase, Miranda above him on the landing. Knowing her so well, Prochenko saw a kind of defiant embarrassment in her expression, in her eyes. She drew a lock of hair out of her face, perched it behind her ear.

  “That is the Princess Popescu von Schenck,” murmured the footman at his elbow. “Please, if you come this way …”

  The lieutenant paid no attention. He forced himself to smile, then pursed his lips to blow a little kiss. What a freakout, he was thinking, an expression he had learned from his mother on Syndicate Road.

  In that warm high atrium he felt a chill. And he felt the baroness’s presence before he saw her, felt her and smelled her, too—a mixture of bitter herbs and lemon oil and rank sweat. At first a gentle insinuation, in a moment it had all but overcome the other smells, the warm stone, the waxes and the powder. Prochenko recognized her with an animal sensitivity that made the hair stir and rise between his shoulder blades. The note in his pocket had delivered some of the same smell.

  But all this time he was looking at Miranda on the stairs. He didn’t turn around. After a moment, among the soft echoes of the atrium he heard the baroness’s throaty cough, her soft, low voice. “She is a woman of no importance. Blink and she will disappear.”

  “She is beautiful.”

  A hiss of indrawn breath. Then a slow exhale that brought with it a tobacco smell. “Domnul—sir. You should not praise one woman to another. It is not polite.”

  Above him on the stair, Miranda was speaking to someone. But her eyes were on him, and when a lady passed in front of her, she turned her head so they could still keep contact. “Oh, but she is young,” he said. “You should not be jealous, a woman of your experience.”

  He was enjoying this. A cold-hearted animal—he could feel her by his elbow. “I admire her freshness,” he went on. “Look, she’s had the sun in her cheeks.”

  “Because she’s been sleeping outside like a Gypsy whore,” murmured the baroness. “Domnul—sir, I’d like to speak to you.”

  Now he turned to her, a slender woman standing too close to him. She had changed since he’d last seen her on the boards of the Ambassadors. Because she was so close, he could see the lines around her eyes, the blood vessels at her temples.

  Behind her stood a man dressed in a jacket that seemed too small. A fellow like a scarecrow, thin and gangling, with high shoulders and a bulging Adam’s apple. He had scarcely shaved. His hair was clipped short on his high forehead, and his narrow eyes were bright. He came forward without a word to take Prochenko’s stick and hat, which the lieutenant was holding by the crown.

  “Domnul, please come this way,” said the baroness. “This is the Peacock Room.” She led him away from the staircase into a chamber decorated in a stuffy, old-fashioned, cluttered style. The walls were panels of dark wood, ornately carved.

  The steward left with his hat and cane. The footman took his place inside the door. But the baroness drew Prochenko toward the window, where she turned to stare at him, a game she couldn’t win.

  After a moment she averted her eyes. They were a peculiar violet color, much discussed in the vanity press, a
s he’d discovered in the past few days. Up close, the hue was quite unpleasant.

  “Domnul Andromedes—is that what I should call you? Your papers …”

  “ … Were destroyed. I was on the Hephaestion. I lost my luggage in the fire, including my passport from the embassy in Constantinople. I would like all that replaced, so I won’t be inconvenienced by these questions.”

  He was enjoying this. The baroness glanced up at him and looked away. Her hair was a peculiar shade, as though she dyed it in henna. She wore a gray velvet dress despite the heat.

  “Sir, I asked you here because I wanted to hear from you about that horrifying crime, that boy who was killed, that young man, I suppose. Because you were with him when he died—you shared a room with him. Tell me, did you know his name?”

  “We talked about a lot of things.”

  She glanced up at him with a pleading look, but then quickly dropped her eyes again when he bore down on her, his eyes steady and impassive. “He told you his name?”

  “He told me everything.”

  A flash of defiance: “No one will believe you!” But he ignored her. He just had to wait and she came round again. “It was all lies,” she said. “He was a troubled boy. But it is true we were acquainted. I gave him money … places to stay … charity. Many orphans without homes—there was a house in the Strada Spatarul. The name we called him, it was a joke, of course. A stray resemblance to a national hero.”

  “It was the truth.”

  She gave a little laugh. “How could it be the truth?” And when Prochenko didn’t respond, she continued, “I just wanted to know. He was like a son to me, he and those others, those orphans I spoke of. Did he tell you about me? What did he say?”

  He stared at her. He guessed she was struggling with two thoughts. She was anxious to know what Markasev had told him. At the same time she was sincere. Prochenko could tell she was sincere.

  “A man beat him to death,” he said.

  Yes, she was sincere. She winced and dropped her head. “He came in when I was in the street,” Prochenko said. “He broke all the bones in his face. Kevin didn’t say much, I can tell you that. Nothing about you, not at the end.”

  Were those tears in the baroness’s eyes? She made Prochenko angry. “I don’t believe you,” he murmured at last. “What a hypocrite you are! What a murdering, lying hypocrite.”

  The footman stood inside the door, shoulders back, chin up. He was too far away to listen. Prochenko leaned forward so he could speak in the baroness’s ear. “It wasn’t the police, though they were looking for him. He wasn’t robbed. He had money in the drawer and so did I. A golden locket on the floor. Whom does that leave? You and your secrets!”

  When she turned toward him, their heads were close together. Her lips were near his own, and he could smell the cigarettes and something else, some astringent mouthwash. “Oh, domnul,” she murmured. “You have looked inside my heart.”

  “You are filth,” he whispered, enjoying this.

  “You are dog shit,” he elaborated, translating into French an American phrase that had been popular with the girl, Andromeda. “You are like dog shit on someone’s boot that has been tracked in here. Tracked all over these nice floors.” And then after a moment, “Your secret is safe with me. Needless to say.”

  Later he remembered standing close to her, filling his lungs with her smell, and he imagined he could have done anything he liked in front of the high windows of the Peacock Room under the blind gaze of the footman. He could have touched her any way he liked. He could have—and this is what he pictured at the time—reached out and bitten her on the cheek or on the ear or on the lips. He could have bitten her until the blood ran down her dress between her small breasts.

  What sort of freak was he? His nausea rose to choke him as he stumbled down the corridor, searching for his hat and stick and some way into the street, into the fresh air of the piata. His fever rose in him. But there was the steward in his tight livery and red lapels, obviously waiting, gesturing at the end of the hall.

  When Prochenko approached him, the fellow reached out and took him by the sleeve. “Come with me,” he said with peremptory rudeness; Prochenko snatched his hand away. He didn’t want to be tormented. “I’ve come from Miss Popescu,” the fellow said.

  Suddenly Prochenko remembered her above him on the stairs, remembered also the whole point of coming to this palace of decadence and lies. It hadn’t been to see the Baroness Ceausescu!

  “This way,” said the steward, and he led him through a pair of swinging leather doors into a servant’s area that smelled of boiled vegetables. There was a deep, dirty, four-sided stairwell. Down they went.

  The vegetable smell got worse, and the humid heat. He is taking me somewhere, and he will turn on me and try to kill me, because I have insulted the disgusting woman they all love, Prochenko thought. And it was true there were soldiers in these brick-faced lower hallways. He is taking me somewhere and he will kill me or imprison me, Prochenko thought. “Let them try,” he mumbled, and his fingers itched as he said the words. He felt an itch in his fingers and his palms, something it had never occurred to him could actually happen outside the pages of some overheated book.

  “What?” said the steward. And in a moment, “You were saying?”

  They stood outside a plain wooden door, much scarred and seamed. “Let them try,” Prochenko repeated, and the strange man seemed to understand him. He unlocked the door. There, together on a stinking straw mattress in a stinking cell, holding hands and leaning back together against the stinking, greasy, stone-faced walls, sat Miranda Popescu and Peter Gross.

  “Hey,” Miranda said.

  “Hey,” answered Sasha Prochenko.

  It disturbed him they were holding hands. His own hands itched and trembled. Had he come all this way for this?

  Light came from a kerosene lamp on a wooden box. “Go in,” said the steward behind him. And Miranda got to her feet. “It’s all right,” she said in English. “This is Jean-Baptiste—he’s helping us. He got back my money and now we can pay off the guards. It’s all right—she can’t spy on us. These are our free hours when she leaves for the theater.”

  All this came out of her tentatively, breathlessly as she approached. She put her arms out, and Prochenko felt the itching in his palms. Tears were in his eyes, which Miranda misinterpreted. She put her arms around his shoulders, patted him awkwardly on the back. What kind of freak am I? Prochenko thought. “Nice tits,” he whispered savagely, in English.

  Miranda still was wearing the ridiculous yellow dress. Embarrassed, she stepped back. She brought a nervous hand up to her neck. But then she smiled. “Oh, A.—I know it doesn’t seem so long. But it’s been a long time.”

  “A.” was what Miranda had called him sometimes in Berkshire County, a nickname. She was still talking. “I guess it’s been since we were on the river and all that craziness in the snow.”

  The steward—Jean-Baptiste—had closed the door, leaving the three of them together in that hot, small place. “I don’t remember,” murmured Prochenko, and it was true. There was just a strange, four-footed dream he’d had before he woke up in the Aegyptian dig, naked with Peter Gross—not that anything had happened between them.

  Since then he’d lived suspended between three points, a man, a woman, and a beast. And what had happened at the wreck of the Hephaestion, to burn or anneal those three creatures into one? Was it the result of that radioactive disturbance, those empty canisters? If so, it didn’t seem to have affected the Chevalier de Graz or Peter Gross or whoever he was. He made no attempt to get up. He sat back against the wall, his eyes cold and suspicious. His arm was bandaged. He was missing his hand.

  “Sit down,” said Miranda. “We were talking about what to do. I was telling Peter what had happened—I had another meeting with the German ambassador. You know it’s all a kind of diplomatic language. No one says what they really mean. But they’re really sick of you-know-who. I guess they’d like t
o make a change.”

  Prochenko didn’t sit. He stood with his hands in his pockets. “Part of me just wants to go with that,” Miranda said. “You know, choose your enemies one at a time. But that’s not why I’m here, to open hospitals for the German government.”

  What was she talking about? Prochenko felt the tears in his eyes. Unbidden, a memory now came to him, something close at hand. He’d come running up the stairs of the house in the Strada Camatei … . Now he tried to chase that thought, that picture from his mind. “What are your choices?” he said, his voice a throaty whisper.

  “Jean-Baptiste can help us. I suppose we’ll have to try and take my mother—she just sits here doing nothing in one room with the curtains drawn. Then she tells me how terrible it was to be a prisoner. You have no idea what a farce it is, this princess thing.”

  Then Peter spoke. Prochenko saw at once that there was more of de Graz in him than he had first assumed. Surely he had lost some things when he had lost his hand. Lost them and recovered them, but of course not everything was gone. So maybe Peter too felt something of this fever of discomfort. But not like this; his words were reasonable. “You’re still thinking about this as some kind of family fight,” he said. “You know, kick the Germans out, and the empress, and General Antonescu, and this crazy baroness. You know—defeat all your father’s enemies and your aunt’s. But things have changed. Most of those people aren’t even around anymore. Now Lieutenant Prochenko’s here,” he said—he knew enough to give him his right name. “He can tell you the same as me. If this was what Aegypta Schenck had wanted, she would have made a different plan.”