by Paul Park
Luckacz straightened his jacket, dusted the mud from his sleeves. It was important to take command of this situation, in which he had not yet distinguished himself. “I am asking you again to reaccompany me to the bureau. As I said, I will accept your statement as to the events of—”
This brought more laughter from Vladimir O’Brien. “Chief,” he said, “I’ll give you my statement now. You can do what you want with it. You know it all already. She paid me two thousand marks. I’ve never done anything like that before. I tell you it’s a black business. A man slaps a baby because it won’t be quiet. On and on—we’ve all heard stories like that. On and on, it never stops. It was like that. One, two, three … Oh, I was there for twenty minutes.”
Luckacz picked the book up from the grass. There were some cobwebs on the moldy leather binding, and he wiped them with his sleeve. “Two thousand marks for a thing like that,” O’Brien said. “You ask me why this doesn’t bother me, nothing like this. Nothing ever again.”
Luckacz hadn’t asked him anything. He left him there. He said nothing to the Gypsies when he passed them in the clearing, even though they stopped their music and the old man called to him. But Luckacz came back through the woods as quickly as he could. He would send others to apprehend O’Brien; why had he wanted to come alone? Was it because he was afraid of something like this?
He wanted to put as much distance as he could between himself and those stinking smells. He scarcely looked at what was in his hands until he was sitting in the night coach to Bucharest. He knew what it was, or else the kind of thing: one of a list of proscribed volumes, published and updated for the Baron Ceausescu’s office when he was still alive.
Actually, it was the first book on the list, as he saw when he opened the slimy cover. From the Gara de Nord he took a hackney carriage to the palace, arriving after ten o’clock.
He spoke to a steward and an underfootman and lingered on the stairs, waiting for them to send up word. Then he made the long, slow climb, it seemed to him. The door of the music chamber was open when he arrived, and so he knocked. He waited for the sound of her voice. Under his armpit he carried the book. In his hand he held the document he had received that morning from the Committee for Roumanian Affairs.
Standing by the pianoforte, the baroness was in deshabille. She wore a simple peach-colored robe of Chinese silk. It fell below the knee. Always she had the power to astonish him; how could she receive him, dressed like this?
But she was one of those people who broke all rules because she made them and controlled them. She had silk slippers on her feet. She stood beside the lighted candle, smiling at him. If she saw the book, she gave no sign. But there was also some worry and concern in her expression. “You find me going to bed. But I must always discover time for you—my dear friend,” she said, “have you been ill?”
How could he not confide in her? He was feeling old and tired. Now she came forward and reached out her hand. She almost touched his hair.
He heard a hiss, a soft expulsion of breath. “Have you changed your routine?” she asked. “I am concerned for you. Has your diet remained the same?”
He couldn’t think, couldn’t remember. It seemed to him he scarcely ate. “Come sit down,” she said. “Whatever you have to tell me, it can wait.”
“Ma’am,” he said laboriously. “I am afraid that you are incorrect, and what I have here cannot wait. I confess I am here to tell you of this document that I received, demanding that I find a way to … compel you to vacate these apartments and take up your former residence in Saltpetre Street. As it is expressed, this is a test of my competence, and my ability to continue in my present position of responsibility, which also in other circumstances might be expanded. The language is unequivocal. As you see.”
The baroness gave her low, throaty laugh, which at that moment seemed as nourishing to him as food, as her own soup. “They do not equivocate, these potato-eaters,” she murmured. “Please don’t concern yourself. These are just words. We will speak of them another day. Come sit down so I can look at you.”
Heartbroken, he put himself down on the settee, while she stood over him with her hands on her hips. “You remember,” he said. “Downstairs in this same building I promised you that I would find the murderer of Kevin Markasev or else the person who employed his murderer for two thousand marks. I am here to tell you that I have not broken my promise, and I must ask you to consider this offer from the Committee for Roumanian Affairs, which must be the best choice after all.”
“Ah,” whispered the baroness. She brought her hand up to her cheek. “Do you turn against me also, my old friend?”
“Ma’am, I must implore to you that I am speaking as a friend.”
She let a few moments pass. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “I see you’ve brought something for me.”
The book was beside him on the pillows of the settee. “Yes, I must say it is a painful circumstance. This was a proscribed book. The list was prepared for your dead husband years ago.”
Night air came from the open window, carrying with it a smell of petrol and manure. Luckacz could hear the sound of distant music. Several nights a week musicians practiced in the bandstand in the Piata Enescu, amid the soft horns of the carriages and motorcars.
Again he heard the soft hiss of indrawn breath. “Do you know why my husband published such a list?”
“Ma’am, all Bucharest knows, if they remember him. The baron was a man of principle. In this matter he had sworn himself the enemy of conjuring and superstition. It was because he burned these books, destroyed them when he found them.”
The baroness laughed, a noiseless sound. “It was because he wanted them for himself. And this book in particular, for his own library. Come, I want to show you something.”
Beyond the room Nicola Ceausescu used for entertaining and for musical composition—this room, her public room with its yellow walls, its bookcases of scores—lay her bedroom, Luckacz knew, though he himself had never crossed the threshold. Often he had imagined what it might be like, an intimate, delicate space with paintings of a feminine or romantic nature on the walls. Floral still lifes, he had thought, or genre paintings of ladies and gentlemen. Or else in the French style painted panels over the hidden closets that contained the baroness’s wardrobe and a color scheme of ashes of roses, set off perhaps with golden borders. And in the center, a large four-poster bed with a canopy of gauze. He had seen it in his mind a thousand times.
“Come,” she said, and he could hardly believe it. She was opening her bedroom door, revealing the dark inside. But not completely dark, because a light shone behind an ornamental screen. “Come, bring the book,” she said.
She touched him, led him by the hand. Immediately in the half-dark he could smell a pungent smell, and grasp an impression of disorder. Dresses and ladies’ undergarments were piled on the surfaces. He passed a narrow unmade bed in an iron frame, and then was past the screen and in a small, lowceilinged space without a window. A hidden alcove under the eaves. Candles burned on the altar of a personal shrine.
His heart thudded in his chest. This was a night of so many strange emotions. He was in Nicola Ceausescu’s bedroom. He hardly dared think it. Yet he had clasped under his arm the black book of Isaac Newton the conjurer. And in the shadows of the alcove he could see a great deal of dusty, old apparatus; he knew what he was looking at. He had seen an alchemist’s laboratory before. He had heard descriptions of the secret chamber of Aegypta Schenck, which the police had discovered in her confiscated mansion here in Bucharest.
“This is where my husband wrote his books and designed his experiments,” said Nicola Ceausescu. “No, not here, but in his workshop in Saltpetre Street. I brought his equipment to this room for sentimental reasons, I suppose. I myself have no use for most of it.”
A portrait of Cleopatra hung suspended above the shrine, which consisted of candlesticks, jars, bottles, and a few pieces of Aegyptian statuary. There was Prince Frederick’s revolve
r, too, laid out on a small table.
“Please, the book,” the baroness continued. And when he handed it over, he found he could only watch dumbstruck and drained of his last capacity for astonishment. She stood in the candlelight, dressed in her silk robe, on whose sleeves now he could see various embroidered motifs. She opened the book, leafed through it. “Ah,” she said. “This was what he might have been looking for.” And then she quoted in her low sweet voice some words in English from the text: “‘January Seventh. At dawn this morning in our house at Crevedia, I managed to extract from my alembic a quantity of pure white gold weighing the twelfth part of a gram. Present in the room with me were …,’”and then a list of names.
She turned to him, the book open in her hands. “Do you understand now why the Germans hate me and want to be rid of me? Would you be happy to see me ruined and humiliated while that Popescu girl takes my place? Let me remind you of the effort you expended to search for her and bring her to justice. Let me remind you how she shot a man, she herself. You bring me this story from Vladimir O’Brien, hints, perhaps, and accusations—whom do you believe? Me or that criminal, who murdered a young man in the flower of his life—do you know how I have suffered since that night? Do you know the tears I have wept here in this room? Two thousand marks—it was payment for the boy to go away. I had a place of refuge for him in Cluj. Vladimir O’Brien wanted the money for himself.”
Through the open window in the adjoining room, Luckacz could hear the faint orchestral music from the bandstand. Now as the baroness approached him, he could smell the bitter odors of her body. Now she was close enough for him to touch if he reached out his arms. Was it possible she wore no undergarments beneath her robe? The intimate clothing he had seen in her bedroom—was it possible that she had stripped it off in order to receive him after the underfootman had announced his presence on the stairs?
With a savage cry he reached to clutch her. Palm toward him, she put out her hand. And the silk was slippery; he found himself sinking, sliding down. Overcome, he fell to his knees, pressing his face into her leg and the peach-colored fabric. She stood above him with the book against her chest, and in time he felt her fingers in his hair. “So,” she murmured. “You are still with me now, my dear old friend?”
Then in a little while she raised him up, pushed him back into a leather armchair. “Let me convince you these phenomena are real, though I am not such an adept as my late husband whom you so admired. And I must tell you—there is a door for everyone, and if you step through you can’t go back. Let me show you something. Hand me the revolver now, behind you. There—it is unloaded. Let me show you.”
13
God’s Sewing Bee
THAT SAME EVENING, at a private dinner at the German ambassador’s house, Princess Clara and her daughter had sat not in the formal dining room but in a smaller, quieter chamber on the same floor. Contiguous to the embassy and recently refurnished, Ambassador Moltke’s residence projected the same modern practicality as she did herself. There were none of the cluttered spaces of the People’s Palace, the dark wood and glass-fronted armoires filled with bric-a-brac, the beaded lampshades and Turkey carpets. Instead the floors were polished wood, the furniture blond and severe, taking its beauty—as the ambassador explained—from the richness of the material and the purity of the form, rather than the density of the embellishment.
Instead of figured wallpaper and elaborate curtains, the walls were painted in subtle shades, and the windows let in natural light. In the evening the new electric lamps shone overhead. During supper they had eaten cutlets and steamed vegetables from simple porcelain plates, each one decorated with the seal of the German Republic. Now afterward they sat on hard gray pillows on the wooden chairs, drinking Riesling from unornamented crystal glasses.
The ambassador was dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, a man’s formal jacket, a white shirt and black necktie, together with a skirt below her knees. Miranda felt overdressed and uncomfortable in a jeweled necklace and ridiculous dark gown, chosen by her mother—she supposed she had to get used to calling her that. But the word still conjured up for her an image of her adoptive mother in Massachusetts. There, needless to say, she’d avoided the word and even the concept, preferring to call Rachel by her given name.
She took little sips of the sweet wine. Like most people in Bucharest, Ambassador Moltke spoke in French: “Vous comprenez—you understand. There is no reason, I think, why women must be accompanied at a gathering like this, and we have much to discuss. Miss Popescu—you don’t mind if I call you that? I feel I can speak frankly to you.”
That might be a relief, Miranda thought. There wasn’t a lot of frank talk at these places, not in her experience. She smiled in what she thought was an encouraging manner, nodded her head.
The ambassador spoke. “So in this morning’s editorial opinion in the Roumania Libera, I think we can see an example of Nicola Ceausescu at work—the artist, the white tyger. Have you seen her performances at the National? No? Really, it is worth the wait for tickets. But the same gift that makes her so effective in that sphere makes her a dangerous adversary and an ineffective symbol of German-Roumanian cooperation, especially in times like these. Really, I was expecting with the pension that we offered she’d be happy to return to private life.”
“I didn’t see the story in the paper,” ventured Clara Brancoveanu.
“No? There’s a copy on the sideboard. But let me summarize. It is a way of sabotaging your daughter’s position by reminding readers of the death of that fellow in Braila—we’ve talked of this before. You were involved in a struggle for the ordinary rights of the Dobruja Gypsies in the courts. This was for the sake of the family who took you in after your aunt was confined to house arrest under the old regime. And of course your mother was in Ratisbon, for which my government, again, extends a formal apology—we are not all like the Elector of Ratisbon! I believe the father of that Gypsy family was murdered by that same scoundrel Codreanu and his legion of assassins. These are the men you are accused of fighting, is it not so? It was a struggle against criminal injustice. Really, this is something to be celebrated. I am always pleased when women play these parts. We are preparing a story for the evening newspapers tomorrow … .”
Miranda decided she wouldn’t read it. Conjured by the ambassador’s words, images now came to her like importuning ghosts—Dinu Fishbelly with the blood on his lips, the policeman in the garden with his hand held out. They were painful to think about, difficult to think about, but even so the truth was preferable to these lies. Because the lies robbed her, blurred the pictures in her mind. These people in Bucharest, lying was like air to them the higher up you climbed. And it was hard not to breathe it in.
Now suddenly she could almost imagine herself fighting for the Gypsies against Zelea Codreanu and his thugs. She shook her head to clear it. “Aegypta promised me she’d keep you safe,” murmured Princess Clara.
Miranda shook her head, took a mouthful of disgusting wine. “And Peter Gross?”
She also, she was thinking, was not perhaps the best symbol for German-Roumanian cooperation, in times like these or any times. Ambassador Moltke clicked her tongue, touched the front of her white shirt. “Well, that is more complicated. I must tell you I have spoken to my government. They are concerned this might be perceived as an internal matter. The Chevalier de Graz—they are suggesting we let justice take its course.”
“This is not justice,” said Miranda. “This is a mistake. Peter Gross is not the Chevalier de Graz. How could he be? It’s just their names are similar.”
Ambassador Moltke’s hair was prematurely white. Her face was changeable—florid and sharp sometimes, or else pale and kind. The surface of her skin was covered with fine wrinkles, more noticeable whenever she smiled, as now. She looked not at Miranda, but at Clara Brancoveanu. “That is a concern,” she said. “Peter Gross—tell me his history. Where is he from? Why is he in prison for a crime he did not commit?”
; Miranda said nothing, only brought her hand to her forehead. “You will notice,” the ambassador continued, “that the story in the paper will contain no mention of the Chevalier de Graz.”
Then she relented. “It is true the Baroness Ceausescu is exerting pressure to bring this to a rapid trial. But we also have pressure we can bring. I think it might be possible to make a bargain for the sake of both our countries. Have you considered the attention you give him might itself be the source of the danger he is in? And if you gave him less attention then the danger might disappear? Really, the Baroness Ceausescu uses him to affect you. She knows you are under our protection.”
“This is what I’ve told her,” said Clara Brancoveanu. “But you know, a mother’s advice …”
The word “mother” brought a small quick image of Rachel’s dark hair and intense face. She also hadn’t liked Peter much. Miranda shook her head.
How exhausting she found this kind of talk. Exhausting and dispiriting, because she wasn’t good at it. There was a way forward, she knew, a combination of words and lies that would get her what she wanted.
She wondered, was it true? Was Peter in danger because of her? If she relinquished him then would the baroness lose interest, give up what Jean-Baptiste claimed was her stated goal, a private trial and a public execution in the Piata Revolutiei? Or was Miranda his only hope?
She sat on the gray cushion in the yellow wooden chair. The ambassador’s expression seemed to her astonishingly bland. Was it possible this woman and her mother—her actual mother, as she had to constantly remind herself—had her best interests at heart? And was it possible also that she had selfish motives, that she held onto Peter with a kind of desperation, because he knew her, remembered her, knew all about her, knew what she was?