The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  14

  A Defeat on the Bug

  THE NEXT MORNING, Sasha Prochenko sat at the bar of the Hotel Moskva.

  For most of the past week he had done nothing except walk the streets of Bucharest and play at whist or Boston in the upstairs rooms of the Flamingo Club, which he had joined under an assumed name—the rules were not so strict anymore. Any riffraff could come up and play.

  In the afternoons he sat at the long bar reading newspapers. Especially he followed the society gossip in the Evenimentul Zilei, which represented German interests in the capital.

  Twice during the week he had brought private letters, sent to his rooming house in Floreasca. He had opened them and smoothed them out on the varnished mahogany, as now. This third letter was like the others: “Dear A., I can’t come to see you. I’m like a prisoner. If they turn you away, just ask for Jean-Baptiste. Please help me.”

  The handwriting hadn’t changed. Always Miranda had written in a careful, precise cursive, like an elementary school teacher. Always Prochenko had found the sight of it a little bit irritating; the paper was expensive and embossed. He smoothed it out next to his brandy glass, then folded back the flimsy pages of the newspaper again. He was interested in several different articles, already a day old. Already he had glanced at them, episodes in a coherent narrative. Or else several different narratives, depending on the order he looked at them. His fingers were smeared with ink.

  This was the order he now chose: First, the chief of the metropolitan police had been replaced in light of the continuing emergencies—the riots in the south and now a religious disturbance close to the capital in Mogosoaia (a policeman had been attacked by Gypsies in the vicinity of St. Mary’s Fountain). Inspector Luckacz’s replacement had a German name, and was a member of the German-speaking minority in Bucovina. He had not yet arrived in the capital to take up his post, and it was to be wondered if criminals or subversives would take advantage of an opportunity.

  Second, representatives of the German Republic were to present the State Medallion of Achievement to Mme. Nicola Ceausescu in a public ceremony. Traditionally considered the final capstone of an illustrious artistic career, the medallion brought with it a public pension, which matched the people’s gratitude for contributions to the allied cause. In anticipation, Mme. Ceausescu had already refurnished her mansion in Saltpetre Street.

  Third, Princess Popescu von Schenck was expected to reopen the new Targoviste Bridge, after the original had been damaged in an anarchist’s attack the previous year.

  Fourth, Felipe Romanov, the czarevich of all Russia, had died suddenly of a heart attack only a day after his release from German custody, as his train arrived at Vitebsky Station in Petersburg. No one knew how this might affect the balance of ongoing negotiations. The czarevich, of course, had been a leading advocate for war.

  Fifth, a man named Peter Gross had been found guilty of kidnapping and murder, and was scheduled to face a police firing squad at Jilava Prison in one week’s time.

  Since Chiselet, Lieutenant Prochenko had been nursing a low fever. Now he rubbed his forehead with a linen napkin from the bar. This was the first time he’d seen Peter mentioned in the paper, even—as now—in a fragment of a larger column of criminal news.

  As at many other moments since the crash of the Hephaestion, Prochenko tried to decipher his own feelings. Jilava Prison—that was where Prince Frederick met his end, shot down, supposedly, while trying to escape.

  Now, clueless as to what he thought, the lieutenant brought his attention down to the messages of his own body: fever, trembling, giddiness, nausea. Anger, that was it, and now his eyes were watering. He wiped them on the napkin—this was an insult to Prince Frederick, and the Ninth Hussars, and the honor of the Roumanian army. The Chevalier de Graz, after all, was a hero of the Turkish wars, decorated with the Order of Hercules. It was contemptible to sneak him to his death, and under an assumed name.

  Images of Pieter de Graz now came to him—at Nova Zagora returning from Turkish lines, his face marked with blood, oil, dirt, and a demented joy. At Sophie’s guesthouse with the prince. And then many discrete images from Mamaia Castle on the beach, where they had lived with Aegypta Schenck when Miranda was a little girl—all that seemed distant and confused, hard to remember, hard to put into a story. What had they been doing all those years? Babysitting, fending off occasional attacks, pursuing intrigues with women from the villages. Closer to hand were pictures from Berkshire County: Peter Gross cutting his lawn on White Oak Road, running the power mower with his left hand. Or that moment on Christmas Hill when everything had changed. Kevin Markasev had been there, too.

  So the world was full of violence, currents as strong as wind and water. These wars, these political upheavals, and people on their little boats alone, spinning in the flood. Markasev had already gone down. Peter Gross was foundering. No, by God, the lieutenant would not sink like that. By the untouched breasts of Artemis the Great. Something could be done.

  Face flushed and hot, eyes watering, Prochenko took a gulp of brandy. In the long mirror above the bar he was able to survey the diners in the restaurant behind him, an area of small round tables and white tablecloths where fashionable couples were eating lunch. Someone was watching him—no, he looked up and there was no one. But when he turned his stool he saw, beyond a wrought-iron balustrade not ten meters away, Elena Bibescu sitting with a man. Fiftyish, powerfully built, with a gray moustache and close-cropped hair, he was stylishly dressed in a military uniform that nevertheless displayed no insignia or identifying marks. Prochenko had no doubt he was observing the notorious Colonel Bocu, who had saved an ancient family from bankruptcy for reasons that were plain to see.

  Light came through the high windows and played with the massed crystal, silver, and empty dishes; they must have just arrived. Waiters stood around. Prochenko watched Elena’s beautiful face in profile. She was aware of him, he knew.

  Supported on his elbows, Prochenko leaned back against the bar. Idly, to distract himself, he watched the colonel’s face as he watched his wife. Palms on the tablecloth, sitting forward in his chair, he had evidently asked her a question. Prochenko examined his intelligent, expressive face, which nevertheless in that light seemed to demonstrate a kind of coarseness and sensuality—why did Prochenko think so? Was it because of what he knew about him, the rumors and gossip he had already heard at the Flamingo Club? Or could you really tell these things by looking?

  He watched Elena Bibescu’s beautiful ears, just tinged with red. Her brown hair was gathered up on top of her head, held in place with a tortoiseshell comb. Because it was a warm day, her dress was light—a lavender and purple floral print, with ruffles around the neck and sleeves. She wore jewelry. With a start Prochenko remembered her diamond earrings, now in a pawnshop off the Strada Stavropoleos if they hadn’t been sold.

  Well, so maybe it was time to pay his tab and leave. Prochenko sat up on his stool, and at the same time Elena turned to look at him.

  Men—he had always had a hard time understanding them or reading their faces. Women—that was different. There was no anger in her gaze, or else not much. Instead he saw a kind of wordless appeal, which he would have been churlish to ignore.

  Besides, there was something in her face that spoke to him, the simple surfaces that made her cheekbones, jaw, nose, neck, forehead. She was like a sketch made of a few thin lines, and easier to read than something full of subtle contour or complicated colors—Miranda, for example. What was Miranda to him now? A combination of stories that couldn’t fit together, and in each of which Prochenko played a different role—oh, he had been lonely these past days.

  He let Elena’s gaze fall over him. If she had been alone he would have smiled, would have made a gesture with his hand. But now the husband had turned his head, was looking toward the bar with a brutal malevolence that seemed intended to repulse just such a handsome young man as he appeared to be; he yawned, scratched his jaw, left his money next to his glass.r />
  Then he sauntered toward the cloakroom out of sight in a small maze of corridors beyond the lobby of the hotel. He waited in an alcove that contained some kind of bell pull. He had a long time to wait, but it was worth it just for the expression on her face. She had expected him, she had not expected him. She was angry, she was not angry. It didn’t matter; he pulled her into a small secret place behind the coat racks, and she was in his arms, and he was kissing her, and she was making the same small exclamations of surprise that he remembered from the half hour in her room. Oh, he remembered this all right, the sweetness now intensified because he’d seen her husband, and recognized in him the kind of man who must be punished for his money, his power, his arrogance, his success, punished in all the intimate ways. How dare he have a wife this young, this sweet?

  At the same time Prochenko imagined he had missed this girl, and all the painful disassociations of the past few days would have been easier if he’d been with her like this, if only for stolen moments. He needed comforting, and she could have comforted him; he pushed his mouth against her mouth, rewarded by her little gasp. He wanted to mark her in a way that he only could see, a way that would be hidden from her husband. At the same time he had lost himself in all her smells, and was clawing at her bosom until she said, “Enough,” and pushed him away.

  “I lost you in the crowd,” she said. “The police came between us and I lost you. I was afraid I’d never see you again—have you remembered your name? Or was that just a lie or something like that? I must go back to Colonel Bocu—where are you staying?”

  He gave her the name of the place. “Sasha Andromedes,” he gasped. Then she put her hand on his mouth—she was the one who had marked him. He could taste the blood on his lips. “You must not think this is not difficult for me,” she said. Then in a moment, breathlessly: “The colonel is returning to his regiment.” Then she was gone, and again he remembered the diamond earrings and the stolen money—gifts from her husband, he told himself. So she must not have cared about them.

  He pulled himself together, straightened the lapels of his linen jacket. Emerging from the alcove, he examined himself in one of the high mirrors. Bellboys moved back and forth behind him in their brass-buttoned uniforms and pillbox hats. Any one of them could have seen and recognized Elena Bibescu. Yes, she had bitten him or something. There was blood on his upper lip. He licked it away.

  After retrieving his gloves, stick, and hat from the consignment desk, he walked straight across the lobby with his left hand in his pocket, not even glancing at the entrance to the restaurant and bar, from which now issued the sounds of a piano. He pushed out through the revolving door into the bright sun. He had several kilometers to walk before he reached the area around Lake Herastrau—he knew the house he was looking for. He had had it pointed out to him from across the street.

  Whistling a tune from Kiss Me, Kate, a favorite of Andromeda’s mother in the house on Syndicate Road, he strolled along the sidewalk until he reached the alley between two rows of houses—a shortcut if you could manage to avoid the drainage ditch. But he’d scarcely gone a dozen meters when a man called out from behind him. Silhouetted in the alley’s mouth, the sun behind him, he looked harmless enough. But when he came close, Prochenko saw he wore the same kind of unmarked uniform the colonel had worn in the hotel restaurant—cream-colored broadcloth buttoned to his chin. His neck was thick, his skin was flushed, and you could say he was as thick and ugly as a fireplug, and no manners either. Maybe he understood that dogs or wolves like Prochenko had pissed on him his entire life and he was sick of it, especially because he knew or half suspected it was about to start again. A bully, in fact, though he showed signs of anxiety and nervousness the way immediately he started asking for papers and identification, all of which Prochenko still had not a sniff.

  “Who’s asking me?” Prochenko asked, because you had to be high-handed with these fellows.

  “Oh, so that’s it. Don’t you know there’s a war on?” the man said. “We’ll soon put you right. We’ve got fairies like you in the Branco Artillery,” he said, naming Elena’s husband’s regiment. Immediately Prochenko understood what this was all about.

  “Your colonel’s a piss-pot,” said Lieutenant Prochenko, to hasten things along. He wanted to get this over before other men like this one joined them in the alley behind all the overflowing garbage cans from the hotel. He shouldn’t have come this way. It stank.

  “You tell him I said so,” he continued, looking back toward the alley’s mouth. Then he turned and struck the fellow with the heel of his hand below the nose. Then he hit him with the wolf’s-head stick, imagining how satisfying it might have been to tear apart the bully who’d attacked Kevin Markasev, a bully like this one. What did Bocu think? That he was going to have beaten up or arrested any man his wife even glanced at casually in a crowded hotel?

  “‘Oh, kiss me, Kate,’” he murmured. “‘And twice and thrice …’” He’d never really been able to carry a tune.

  The man had stumbled on the filthy cobblestones and fallen over. Prochenko stood above him, massaging his gloved fingers. Whatever happened, he was glad of this, because already he’d been in Bucharest long enough to see how the power in the city had devolved into the hands of bully-boys like this, members of private militias who were connected on one side to criminal or quasi-criminal enterprises. And on the other side they were protected by corrupt colonels or corrupt bureaucrats, all flourishing under the German occupation—though to be fair, Antonescu and Ceausescu and Valeria Dragonesti had been just as bad. A general, a baron, and an empress—no, you had to go back to Frederick Schenck von Schenck to remember any kind of hope, Prince Frederick whom they’d put against the wall at Jilava, doubtless the same courtyard where they planned to shoot the Chevalier de Graz—his friend.

  Where was Miranda now? Prochenko thought. Was she still wondering what deals she could make with the German ambassador?

  He put his expensive boot—purchased with Elena’s money—against the fat cheek of the bully-boy, and saw for the first time how young he was. The tail of his jacket had pulled up, revealing a pistol in a holster. “You are a complete and total fascist piece of shit,” Prochenko said in English.

  But maybe he had managed to make some signal after all, because Prochenko could see men gathering at the mouth of the alley. He could see their shadows flickering in the light. He bent down to remove the pistol from its holster. It was a fine, light, modern weapon, spring-loaded, Prochenko thought, African or German made. Then he turned and ran up the alley; he knew this area of Floreasca well. It hadn’t changed in twenty-five years, the twisting, dark, cobblestone streets, remnants of the Wallachian medieval town.

  But then he was among the shacks and shantytowns and on the wooden bridge across the cesspool of the canal. On the other side was parkland, the hippodrome, Dinamo Stadium. He reached Lake Herastrau in the middle of the afternoon. In a block of wooden houses backed onto the shallow, reedy water, he mounted seven steps to a door once painted red.

  This was the residence of Magda de Graz, much reduced in circumstances. At one time hers had been an inspiring story. Daughter of a Ploiesti shopkeeper, she had won, in blind competition, a government scholarship to the national university, where there were seven women in her class. Active in republican causes, she had met and married the young Count de Graz—not because of her looks, as had been endlessly reported in the press. Small, big-featured, she had eventually learned to ride and had taken up fox hunting, according to the German style. But she had always kept her interest in politics, and her husband had been one of the earliest supporters of Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck. In the coup d’état that brought Valeria Dragonesti to the throne, the count had been arrested by Antonescu’s thugs, despite the heroism of his son in the war against the Turks. And when Ceausescu’s perjured testimony had brought down Frederick Schenck himself, most of his political supporters were shot outside of Brabova and buried in mass graves, supposedly for treason
. This was at the time, of course, when General Antonescu had repulsed the first incursions of the German army at Kaposvar.

  De Graz’s property had all been confiscated except for this one house, where his widow still lived. She rented out the upper floor and gave music lessons in the parlor. Standing on the weathered porch, looking up into the branches of the old fig tree, Sasha Prochenko listened to the sound of a viola deep within the house, playing endlessly a sequence of a few bars.

  Birds chattered in the tree, making an uneasy and equally repetitive counterpoint. Prochenko stood waiting for the lesson’s end, and he looked up and down the rutted dirt road, studying the peeling façades, the porches with their wooden gutters and old gingerbread fretwork. There was a fountain of Demeter at the end of the cul-de-sac, but the bowl was dry and the water no longer flowered or even dripped from her stone, eroded breasts.

  Flies buzzed. Nothing moved in the warm afternoon. Prochenko, as he often did, now surrendered himself to his preternaturally acute sense of smell. Closing his eyes, he turned his face from side to side, allowing small odors to come to him, some singly and some together—the hot wood, the paint, the dust, the mud, the grass, the rot, the bat shit, the yellow reeds, and the dozen stenches of the lake. Behind him the window was ajar, and a number of old-lady smells came seeping through the dusty curtains: furniture wax, and Madeira, and scented water, and farts. Prochenko opened his mouth, stretched out his tongue.

  When the door finally opened, he felt he already knew this woman, whom he had met once years before, after all. The student, a young man, carried his instrument case under his arm. Madame de Graz was with him, whispering to him, a little woman with white hair, her back bent with osteoporosis. Prochenko stood motionless in the shadows, hidden by the tree that grew so close to the house that part of the porch had begun to shape itself around it, the thin balustrade slowly buckling. Dressed in rusty black, the old woman stood in the open door, watching her student stroll down the brick path and down the street—no, she didn’t watch him. Like Prochenko she sniffed the air, moved her head this way and that, and the lieutenant saw that she was blind or nearly blind, her eyes milky with cataracts. But she had some peripheral vision, and when he moved she turned to him and did not look at him directly.