by Paul Park
DEMON HORE U KILLD HIM MRDRER U KILLD R SUN—etc., etc. He was so boring, the baron—yes, that was it. He had bored her to distraction when he was alive. Besides, all this was his fault. Him and his vitriolic acid, which conveniently he had failed to mention. How could he reproach her now?
She turned her head. The pyramid on the ironwood table had begun to glow. She almost expected to see some manifestation of the baron inside, perhaps the pig of Cluj itself. Almost expected to see its red eyes glowing in the heart of the pyramid, smell its barnyard stink despite her calculations, the number she had pressed into the machine.
But no—she caught a tiny, hesitant fluttering noise as the glass came clear. She sniffed a smell of Eau de Floride, one of the bottles she had seen on Aegypta Schenck’s bedside table five years before in Mogosoaia. An old lady’s scent—at the time the baroness had mocked it to herself. God help her! Her hands were still burning from the friction of the rope.
And now came the tap tap of the planchette: DEMONIC WHORE. Oh, she was laughing at her. Aegypta Schenck was laughing at her, wherever she was—it served the baroness right. When Nicola Ceausescu died, her spirit would not take this insubstantial and delicate shape, which now stood on one leg in the center of the pyramid and ruffled out its long, iridescent feathers. The baroness had long since given up the idea of ever finding in herself a trace of a tyger or any other noble or even beautiful beast. Perhaps a ripped-up alley cat, something like that. Yet even so she had succeeded in dragging out Aegypta Schenck from the Elysian Fields or the Brass Circle or wherever her soul lingered, happy, perhaps, or else in pain.
She finished the whiskey in her glass, then lit a cigarette, a Turkish sobranie. The smoke made a wayward spiral round the candle flame. “Tell me what I want to know,” she murmured.
The planchette paused, was silent. “There were no books in your house in Mogosoaia,” the baroness went on. “Or in the house that burned. In Mamaia there was nothing, or in the servant’s cottage—I had them searched. Nor in your house in Bucharest, where you had your laboratory. It is an orphanage now, maintained by the German government.”
Silence. No longer could she hear the flutter of the bird’s feathers. The smell of the cologne also seemed to have dissipated, or else the baroness had gotten used to it. The planchette didn’t move.
“Where is the black book?” she said.
After a few minutes, when the cigarette had burned out, she reached over to her desk. She unwrapped the gold-chased revolver of Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck. “I see what you have done,” she said. “This is your inheritance, your legacy. And because of your niece’s carelessness, no one will know. These spirits you have made—Magister Newton’s spirits. No one will ever know. Surely it was your intention to use them …”
She paused. Then, “ … for the good of Great Roumania,” she went on. But while speaking she had snapped open the drum, had seen the word Mintbean incised under its hole. And that word brought a sudden image of Domnul Andromedes, his gray eyes, his predatory beauty.
She was not a strong woman, and the revolver was too heavy for her wrist. It sagged down, and she could feel the ancient steel on her cheek, and then her neck, and then her chest, and then her stomach and her thigh. She rubbed it on the cuff of her silk stocking, slipped it inside. Suddenly flushed and overheated, she felt the cold steel as a relief; she didn’t know much about firearms. But this was an object of enormous power, she understood.
Thinking about Andromedes, she leaned back in her chair. Nor did Aegypta Schenck say a word to her. But in time she looked over to the long table with the pyramid at one end. On the table lay a figure she knew wasn’t real. There was no reason to be afraid.
It was a skeleton, almost a skeleton. Rags of flesh still hung from it as well as rags of cloth. It was the figure of a woman, the baroness guessed from the long gray hair. A woman of medium height. She had a book clasped in her bony hands.
Nicola Ceausescu leaned forward. She replaced Prince Frederick’s pistol on her desk. She picked up a letter opener and then rose unsteadily to her feet. She almost intended to use the brass letter opener to pry the book out of the woman’s hands. But this was not real leather, real cloth, real flesh, real bones. When she reached out with her own hand she saw the difference, just before the skeleton dissolved, sighing in a breath of wind.
12
The Chief of Police Loses His Hair
IT WAS HIS daughter Katalin who first noticed it one Saturday when she was home from boarding school in Brasov—Kronstadt, as the Germans had renamed it formally. “Father,” she had said, and it was true. That morning his comb had been full of hair.
Radu Luckacz didn’t think of himself as a vain man. He was past sixty. But both his father and his mother’s father had kept their hair—iron gray like his, combed back straight. As for his moustache …
This had been an anxious spring, the city during wartime and under occupation—nothing new, except the people were dissatisfied. In Chiselet, Oltenita, and Calarasi, German troops had fired on the crowds. Daily he expected riots and demonstrations in the city.
It was possible whatever fever he’d contracted at the wreck of the Hephaestion, combined with gastric distress that was now chronic, had resulted in this. He slept poorly, and he was exhausted, after all. Because he had pledged his word to Nicola Ceausescu, and because the crime scene had affected him, he devoted many hours every day to the case of Kevin Markasev—he didn’t call him that. At the house in the Strada Camatei, the boy had registered under a false name.
When his wife asked him why he expended so much energy on this case, he couldn’t tell her. This Markasev was an anarchist, after all, thwarted in the middle of a conspiracy. But independent of his promise to the baroness, Radu Luckacz found himself affected. There was something in the boy’s fate that suggested the fate of his adopted country, caught between larger powers. Five years before, when Luckacz had questioned him after the assassination of Sergeant-Colonel Blum, it had been clear that Markasev had scarcely known what he had done. Morbidly suggestive or else hypnotized, he had struck somebody else’s blow.
Now, obviously, something of the same kind had happened again. What possible motivation could he have for an attempt against the baroness’s life, a woman who had saved him and protected him and been a second mother to him, in her house in the Strada Spatarul?
So on the second day of the week, for the second time Radu Luckacz took the train to the Mogosoaia station to question Vladimir O’Brien. The first interview had revealed Miranda Popescu’s money—gold coins still in a woman’s filigree bag—carelessly thrown into a desk drawer. The man had scarcely bothered to deny what he had done. Then he had persisted in imagining that Luckacz wanted a percentage. The fellow had criminal tendencies and no pride, and it gave Luckacz pleasure to take away his rank. What had the baroness said? “Sergeant O’Brien—oh, but not a sergeant for much longer, I feel sure!”
Now, of course, the matter was more serious. On the soft banquette of the first-class compartment, Luckacz felt an ache in his belly. Why had he not taken his own vehicle and a detachment of officers? No, he was afraid of what O’Brien might have to say for himself. He could scarcely admit it, but he was afraid.
He himself had taken charge of the investigation. He himself had traced the gloves found in the Strada Camatei—an expensive pair in an unusually large size, sold only in a few fashionable shops. O‘Brien was a dandy, after all. And Luckacz himself could remember having seen those distinctive fawn cuffs as he waited with O’Brien in the People’s Palace, the same day of the murder, as it happened—he had promised the baroness he would solve this ghastly crime. She had begged him with tears in her eyes. He would not disappoint her.
But still he had an ache in his stomach. When the doors opened for Mogosoaia he almost didn’t leave the train. But then he wandered off the platform, through the gate, and down the street to the police station. It was dusk.
Entering the small sub-prefecture, h
e found more evidence of how much he had changed. The officer of the watch didn’t even recognize him. As was his custom in the evenings, he was wearing ordinary civilian clothes, his rusty black gabardine suit and his slouch hat.
“O’Brien, he has gone to Mogosoaia to the shrine. He said there was a disturbance.”
This was common. Gypsies and superstitious peasants often drank and visited at Mother Egypt’s grave or Mary’s fountain. They slept out in the woods, waiting for apparitions and seeing them, too—they drank so much.
In Buda-Pest, already under German influence when he was born, there had been less of this nonsense. Always it was unthinking faith—or in this case some sort of folk mythology—that was the enemy. Claiming to lift men up, it dragged them down into the mud. Faith, irrational faith, was a source of misery. Faith in government, or law, or in oneself or one’s own feelings—these were the devil’s weapons. Doubt, as every policeman knew, came from God’s hands.
In the warm evening, Luckacz took the track into the woods. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ignorant people made this journey every year. The way was well marked. Gravel had been laid down for the first kilometer or so along the lakeside. Across the water he could see the massed dark bulk of one of the old Brancoveanu palaces, visible intermittently through the trees. He turned into the darker woods. Perhaps he’d meet O’Brien coming back.
But instead after an hour’s walk, in the full darkness he saw a circle of pilgrims at one of the registered camping sites. They had lit a fire. He almost thought he would ask them for their permit, but he had other work. Someone was playing a guitar and someone was singing—women’s voices, pleasing, actually—and he could smell the roasting vegetables. Nor was there any obvious drunkenness or signs of struggle. As always in these wartime days, he saw mostly women and old men. No, two boys in uniform. Maybe they had been called up.
Luckacz stood among the trees, looking into the clearing. After a few minutes he came forward into the light, and demanded (harshly, officiously) if anyone had heard of any sort of disturbance, which had been reported, so he understood, to the police.
There was silence, then one old man in a wide-brimmed hat spoke up. His eyes were rimmed with red, and he had a Gypsy’s silver chain around his neck. Was he drunk? No, Luckacz decided. The Gypsy told him, on the contrary, the police were already here. A single policeman had said the shrine was closed, had kept them away, told them not to pass the last marking stone, which you could see beside the track up ahead.
So: the opposite of a disturbance. What was O’Brien doing here, off-duty, in the dark?
“He had a shovel,” volunteered the Gypsy.
“Multumesc.”
Useless to speculate. Luckacz continued on until he saw another light up ahead. Ordinarily the lamps were lit at the small house where Mother Egypt had died. It was built into the cliff-face near the entrance to the sanctuary, and the doors were always open. Light came also, ordinarily, from hundreds of small oil or kerosene lamps, or else candle stubs in pearshaped jars that were for sale in the town. These were set in niches on the grave itself, a mound perhaps a meter high and covered with flowers, books, photographs, rosaries, letters, handwritten lists of supplications, coins, sticks, medallions, crutches, food, bottles of Florida water, as well as many other miscellaneous cult objects. All of it in Luckacz’s grim opinion gave the grave a tawdry, ragged look, suitable for an alchemist and conjurer whose meddling in natural philosophy had done a great deal of damage over a period of years. The place stank of incense and superstition, and something else.
A carbide lantern hung from a sapling branch and threw a harsher light than any of the others. It illuminated the back side of the mound, the entrance to the grave itself—a square padlocked gate low to the ground. A man stood there with a shovel in his hands, and from the way he reeled and staggered Luckacz understood he was the drunken one. He was the disturbance. Now he unbuttoned his pants and urinated in a long stream on the threshold of the shrine, a rough hole in the rocks leading back to Mary’s pool.
It was Vladimir O’Brien. As Luckacz watched, he buttoned himself up, rubbed his big hands together, took up the shovel again. He hesitated for a moment. Then Luckacz could hear the blade of the shovel grinding on metal. From where he stood among the trees, he could not see the entrance to the grave. Instead he saw the man from the waist up, his face made frightful in the lantern’s oblique glare. But Luckacz knew what he was doing. He was breaking the padlock, desecrating the tomb.
Not long before, the first time Luckacz had attempted to arrest Miranda Popescu in these woods, he had cornered her right here, only to be thwarted by some superstitious manifestation. News of it had doubled the number of pilgrims here. Luckacz found it hard to imagine what their response might be to what Vladimir O’Brien was doing. There would be violence, certainly.
Now the man raised the long shaft of the shovel high above his head and smashed it down. Luckacz couldn’t see the blade. But he heard the blows on the iron grate and he stepped forward. “O’Brien!” he called out.
The man staggered back, threw down his shovel. He pulled a pistol from inside his shirt—an expensive fabric smeared now with mud.
“Oh, it’s you.” He slid the gun inside his belt again and laughed. His misshapen mouth was wet with sweat. Luckacz could see his teeth. Some had gold in them.
“You here to help me?”
What was he talking about? Luckacz began to speak, his voice strange and foreign in his mouth: “I must warn you that after less than a week, I now find you indulging in another crime. Before I thought that I might give you the benefit of my doubts, because of your assistance in the apprehension of Miss Popescu. Naturally I did not think that I would find you now disgracing yourself, when I had come to discuss with you another far more serious matter, and had made a special trip by rail.”
O’Brien laughed again, a short gruff sound in which Luckacz nevertheless could detect a trace of desperation. “Stop it—stop your sermon. She’s got you by the balls the same as me.”
Confused by this vulgarity, Luckacz didn’t pause to decipher it. Unarmed, unafraid, he put his hands out. “Please step away. Please come with me.”
Ignoring him, O’Brien wiped his forehead. Then he spat ostentatiously on his big palms before he picked up the shovel again. There was another crash as he pounded it down into the grate.
Luckacz could smell the liquor all around him. There was an open jar of raki in the grass. Deliberately he kicked it over as he passed, as he seized hold of the shovel and tried to wrest it away. But O’Brien pushed him in the chest, and he stumbled backward and fell down.
“Enough,” O’Brien said. “I’m already a dead man.”
Then in a moment, “Did she kiss you, too? God, I can feel the poison on my lips.”
From where he lay Luckacz could see the broken padlock and the sagging iron grate. Inside, he supposed, there was the stone sarcophagus—the drunken fool stood over him, the shovel in his hands. He laughed. “Chief,” he said, “you’re going bald!”
Bugs flickered around the carbide lantern. O’Brien stuck the shovel into the earth. Then he turned, knelt, and pulled open the grate. At full length on his stomach, he tried to wriggle through it into the tomb.
But Luckacz seized hold of his legs, his expensive boots. On his knees he tried to drag him out. “Now I must tell you that I am here to apprehend you for the murder in the Strada Camatei, and I ask you to surrender peaceably. There is no reason to alarm the people in this place. I must command you to return to the bureau in the village. There I will apprise you of the charge, which I have had typewritten and witnessed. I will take your statement … .”
His voice drifted up into the night air. Now he was quiet, overcome with sudden nausea, a byproduct, he supposed, of the sickness that had pursued him since Chiselet. A byproduct of the condition that had caused his hair to fall out in bloody clumps, his moustache to turn gray, had caused him, in short, to become an old man suddenly and witho
ut warning.
But now there was something else. At first he thought it was the bugs, drawn to his sweat in the hot night air, a swarm of midges, perhaps. He tugged on O’Brien’s slippery boots; one of them came away, revealing a sock with holes in it. Luckacz sat back on his heels in the tough grass, the boot in his hand, and he watched an emanation or a manifestation take form above the grave—he should be used to this absurdity! Still there was something about it that weakened him and sapped his will, even when he was looking for the trick.
He had seen Aegypta Schenck before. He had seen her in the old days during various court proceedings and then later after the baron’s death. He remembered her big nose, gray hair, coarse features. She looked more like a farmer’s mother than a princess. He recognized the big hands that flapped around his head—no, not her hands, of course. But an insubstantial phantasm, a conjuring trick that nevertheless had the power to horrify him. He could almost feel the dead hands on his shoulders and his face.
Her hoarse voice whispered in his ear. “Tell me what you want from me. Tell me what you want.” It was like a horror story in a ten-sou broadsheet at the bouquiniste. And yet like the gullible reader of one of those cheap stories, he found himself distracted. His gorge rose.
But this apparition had no effect on Vladimir O’Brien. He was still at his ghoulish work inside the tomb. Luckacz heard the stone lid of the sarcophagus slide and crash. He put his fists over his face. When he took them away again, he found himself lying on his back in the damp grass. O’Brien was standing over him.
He said, “There it was, just as she told me. Caught in her bony hands. Ugh, I stink of death.”
Luckacz smelled the liquor and the sweet cologne. Disgusted, he grabbed hold of O’Brien’s foot and twisted him down. He expected a fight, but he didn’t get it. Drunk, O’Brien sprawled beside him as he got up. And he was rolling back and forth and laughing. “Oh, you want to take it yourself. Be my invited guest. I beg you. I don’t want to see her again. That hell-cat—”