by Paul Park
So the fight was lost before it had even really started. But there was another place to resist, which was the hidden world. “Tell me,” she said. “In Mogosoaia that policeman stole my bracelet, my money, and my father’s gun. Later Domnul Luckacz returned the bracelet and the money, as you see.”
Already on the morning after her dream, Miranda had asked Jean-Baptiste to find the gun for her, search the baroness’s room for her if necessary, during the evening performance. And Jean-Baptiste had raised his eyebrow without saying a word. So Miranda had imagined she might try, except in this building there was always someone with her or near her. Now, maybe, with the Baroness Ceausescu standing triumphant in the middle of the corridor, something could be done.
Hands in the pockets of her red coat, she smiled. “The bracelet—I couldn’t take it from you. Soon the citizens of Bucharest will fasten it around my wrist. Already they know what you are—a potato-eating spy. So you may wear it a little longer. It has been in your family a long time. But the pistol, would you like to see it now? It has not been fired. You must have guessed tonight would be the night.”
She turned to lead Miranda the way she’d come. She didn’t look back, but spoke over her shoulder, because she knew Miranda would follow. “You know it has come to me just now. Why would this man Andromedes have brought the mother of the Chevalier de Graz to see me? What connection could there have been—I see it now. De Graz was your father’s servant, and he went with you to that place—what was it called? Massachusetts. Such a peculiar name. He was in the newspapers. But there was another one whose face I never saw. A lieutenant. So I think I know who that is, and why he comes. It is not for love, which is a relief.”
She was talking about Andromeda. “ … This man who insults me so freely. Sometimes in my life I have been cursed and despised. Other times they lick the dog shit from my shoes—that is his phrase, is it not? If I’m bored from that, so who can blame me? He is a handsome man, don’t you think so? Now I could have my servants follow him. But that will not be necessary. You will live to see him come to me.”
They had left the portrait gallery and passed down several other shorter corridors. Now they stood at the door of the baroness’s suite of rooms overlooking the Piata Revolutiei. It was ajar. “Enter, enter,” said Nicola Ceausescu. Pushing open the door, she led Miranda into her music room and stopped.
An ornamental fixture stood out from the wall. A glass bulb hung from it. The baroness fumbled at the screw with her right hand. The gaslight flickered up, revealing beyond the draped piano, at the entrance to the inner room, the shadow of a man.
A hiss from the baroness. Then she spoke over her shoulder to Miranda. “I’m glad you’ve come. I promise you there is no danger—who is it? Domnul Luckacz, is it you?”
The shadow didn’t move. The baroness let her coat slip from her shoulders onto the floor. Then she stepped over to the empty grate and seized a poker from the hearth. “Sir, show yourself,” she said. “Have you come to steal from me? I have nothing here.”
Jean-Baptiste stood in the doorway to the baroness’s bedroom. Miranda could see him now. “Ma’am,” he said, “there is no reason to be frightened. I have brought some linen.”
It was true. He carried a pile of sheets and towels in his hands. But his tone was too formal to be sincere, Miranda thought, and the baroness again let out a hiss of expelled breath.
“Oh, my friend,” she said. She had the poker in her hand. She looked back at Miranda. Then she smiled. Her lips were elegant and small.
“So you have come to rob me after all, while I stood talking like a fool. This is the plan for both of you, I see.”
“No ma’am, I brought the pillowcases.” The steward’s voice was soft. But he was nervous. Miranda could see the anxiety in his high, narrow shoulders, his thin face. What did he have to hide?
“Forgive me,” he said now. “I came to speak with you. But I did not expect …” Hands full, he gestured toward Miranda with his chin.
“Here I am,” said the baroness. “Speak to me.”
He looked down at the floor. “Forgive me,” he murmured with uncharacteristic humbleness. “I know it is not my place to come here late at night.”
Miranda clapped her hands together noiselessly, a gesture her adoptive father had sometimes used to show embarrassment. “Well, I guess I’ll be moseying on out of here,” she almost said. There was no chance, she thought, of retrieving the gun now. More important was to escape from this place, this prison. But what about Peter? What about her mother—Clara Brancoveanu?
The baroness anticipated her. “Please stay. You could not think that you might trick me and then go to bed.” Then to the steward, “Speak to me.”
The miserable man bowed his head. Sweat stood out on his high forehead. “Ma’am,” he said—“Downstairs. I saw Madame de Graz in the lower gallery.”
“And?”
“And she was in tears.”
The baroness let the point of the poker sink down. “I don’t believe you,” she said. Then she stepped across the room to the piano. With her left hand she pushed away the long embroidered cloth that covered its closed lid, revealing a box. She opened it awkwardly with her wrong hand, and drew out something wrapped in leather.
Miranda knew what it was. She could tell by the shape and the weight, the way the baroness’s slender wrist sagged down. “Is this what you were looking for?” she asked. “She wanted it, the whore. Did she ask you to steal it for her?”
“No,” said Jean-Baptiste, which was a lie, of course.
It must have shown on his face. “Come here,” said the baroness.
She laid the poker on the piano lid and unwrapped the gun, and switched it to her right hand. Then she held it up with both hands clasped together. It didn’t seem to Miranda that she knew how to hold it safely, and perhaps the steward thought so, too. His eyes were big. Nevertheless, he placed the cube of folded pillowcases onto the piano stool, gave the top of it a little pat, and moved closer to the light.
The baroness came to meet him with the gun in her hands. She reached out with the muzzle of it and touched his unshaven cheek and chin. With the inlaid steel she caressed his neck and the front of his stained shirt, a gesture that seemed intimate and dangerous at the same time; Miranda longed to be elsewhere. What would happen if she left? No, she couldn’t leave now, even though she could not believe the baroness would actually shoot this man, not with that expression of longing and remorse on her face. But maybe he thought so, because he cleared his throat and began to speak. “Ma’am, I didn’t have any plan like that, I swear. You’ve known me a long time.”
“Yes,” murmured Nicola Ceausescu. “And I did not believe you’d feed my soup to Radu Luckacz. I thought he was a friend of yours! I see you didn’t even taste a drop. Didn’t you trust me?”
Miranda thought he would take the gun from the baroness’s hands, bat it away. But he scarcely moved. “Ma’am,” he said, “I shouldn’t have come. These people—Madame de Graz—they didn’t know you, but I know you.”
The sweat stood out in drops on his high forehead. “For years I’ve seen you every day. Believe me when I tell you this is changing you, all this. Kevin Markasev—how could you have done that? We lived—the three of us—in Saltpetre Street. In those days you complained to me about the Germans, how they took your son from you. Stole him away. And now he lives in the floor below this, and you don’t visit him. Yes, you spy on him, that’s all. But I remember when you first came to the baron’s house, so humble yet so proud.”
Miranda brought her hands together. “Gosh, look at the time,” she almost said, although as long as the gun was in the baroness’s hands, she couldn’t leave.
Nicola Ceausescu tapped the steward on his breastbone with the muzzle of the long revolver. “You must not chastise me,” she said at last. “What are you saying—I’m a monster? Yes, I’ve felt you pull away.”
She glanced at Miranda, and then looked back. “Don’t think I
haven’t noticed and it hasn’t hurt me. Don’t think it doesn’t hurt me to be judged by someone I trusted, and for choices I’ve made not for myself. Don’t you think it would make me happy to leave this prison, let go of these responsibilities? Live with you and Felix in Saltpetre Street, devote myself to art?”
Will you look at that? I’ve got to fly, Miranda thought.
But at the same time she felt as always a perverse admiration for the baroness’s skill. These were obvious lies, the words she’d spoken. No one in the room believed them. Nor was she helped in any way by the language she had used, which was stilted and insincere. It was as if a mediocre playwright had written a mediocre part for a superb actress. “It hurts me so terribly,” she said. “As for the revolver, it is not loaded.”
Miranda had scarcely breathed since the baroness had pulled the gun out of the box. Now she gulped at the air, took physical pleasure in her sense of relief. Jean-Baptiste managed a smile. But his eyes were still big, and there was still a sheen on his high forehead and his narrow, bladelike nose; he opened his mouth to speak. But the baroness continued, and the playwright had gotten a little better this time, and the words themselves were disconcerting—“Not in the conventional way. Mademoiselle Popescu doesn’t know. The time has come for her to learn. Always we must learn new things. Mademoiselle—please—there is a book inside the box. Magister Newton, Isaac Newton—you have heard of him? Read me where the marker is.”
She still held the gun in her clasped hands, the muzzle pressed against the steward’s shirt. Her fingers were against the trigger. If she’d meant to murder him, surely she would not look like that, her face expressing remorse and triumph, pity and contempt and a dozen other things, the gaslight in her chestnut hair.
Miranda walked behind her to the piano. The box underneath the embroidered shawl was wide and flat, ornately carved. There was a book in the bottom of it, not like the book she had lost, The Essential History. But it was bigger and older and it smelled of mold, and the black leather binding was turning into dust.
The pages were still strong, and seemed to be made of a kind of cloth, as Miranda saw when she opened the book. “Read where the marker is,” the baroness said again.
Jean-Baptiste gave her a pleading look, and Miranda paused. “Please, mademoiselle. You have no choice,” said Nicola Ceausescu.
The marker was a wide, flat ribbon close to the end. “Can you see in the light?” asked the baroness. “There are matches by the candle.”
Both of her index fingers were locked around the trigger of the gun. She didn’t look back at Miranda, but stared instead at Jean-Baptiste. “Read it,” she said. “Where it starts at ‘Mintbean.’”
Miranda lit the four candles in the candelabrum on the right side of the keyboard. More things were visible now, and she could see, for example, the sheaves of handwritten music on the stand. And in the book she saw the place the baroness meant. Two-thirds of the way down the big page there was a rubric in red ink.
The black book also was handwritten. Except for the rubrics in the right-hand margins, the letters were heavy and brown. Miranda glanced up at Jean-Baptiste again, but in the new light she couldn’t see him quite so well; he was out of the flickering circle. And the gun wasn’t loaded. The baroness had said so. It couldn’t be loaded. This was just a joke to scare them both, a stupid, cruel joke.
This much was true: She had no choice. The text was in English, which surprised her. But some of the letters were unfamiliar and hard to read. Opposite the rubric was a double line, written in a different, spidery hand. Hesitantly, she spoke the words:
Flee to me remote elf.
Egad a base life defiles a bad age.
So that doesn’t make much sense, she thought, relieved. But there was obviously a puzzle, and she was good at puzzles. She started to think about the words, which must hold some kind of clue. There was a crash, and on the other side of the piano Jean-Baptiste staggered back. The baroness had fired the gun.
Miranda, who was used to the sound it made in the open air, was confused to hear it so much softer in the enclosed space. This confusion was the first of a quick sequence of emotions and thoughts: Had the steward’s body acted as a kind of silencer? She felt a cold, stunned interest in part of her mind as, horrified, she scrambled around the piano’s bulge to support Jean-Baptiste as he collapsed—but he was still alive! And unwounded. Had he fainted from the shock? Or had the baroness put up the gun at the last instant before firing, in which case the sound would have been louder, wouldn’t it? There was no stink of gunpowder, no ringing in Miranda’s ears.
He had fallen back against a padded armchair and she helped him into it. And he seemed unhurt, his white shirtfront stained only with soup or whatever it was; she heard the chattering of his teeth. When she touched him on his chest, he flinched. So there must be a bruise there; had the baroness used some kind of fake cartridge or a blank? She still stood with the gun held out straight, and as Miranda watched, the barrel seemed to glow. And there was smoke from the muzzle—no, more solid, difficult to see in the uncertain light.
But it was there, a little creature perched on the barrel of Prince Frederick’s revolver. “Mintbean,” whispered the baroness.
It was human in shape, naked, pallid, male. It moved and swelled a little bit. Miranda saw it had a pair of wings that now unfolded like a butterfly’s. And maybe they were wet, and maybe drying in the heat from the gun barrel, for they shifted, moved, almost transparent, almost invisible in the uncertain light. Just a flicker of iridescence above the creature’s head.
Breathless, Nicola Ceausescu moved five steps sideways to the window. Keeping the gun immobile in her right hand, with her left she reached behind her to push open the window and the screen. “Go,” she whispered in English. “You know what I want.”
The creature shifted its big wings. Then it drifted into the air as lightly as a bubble. From the chair Miranda watched it, her arms around the thin shoulders of the old man. He lay back against the pillows with his eyes closed.
No, Miranda thought. No, really, I can’t stay, thanks all the same.
The creature drifted up, caught and buffeted by a soft current of air from the open window. “I thought it was appropriate. The white tyger of Roumania could speak the spell,” the baroness said.
Her cheeks were painted with a soft glow. Closer to the delicate, drifting fairy, she seemed entranced. But almost before it disappeared, sucked out the window in the soft, rising breeze, she turned away as if unsatisfied, back into the room. “There is another one,” she said, “on the next page. ‘Abcess.’ Read it.”
“No,” Miranda said.
She pushed the steward’s lank hair from his forehead, slimy with sweat. But he was opening his eyes. His lashes fluttered, and he stared up at the ceiling as the baroness stood over them. “No?”
“No,” Miranda repeated, more firmly. “The gun is mine.”
And she couldn’t but punish herself now for having lost her aunt’s letter, which doubtless would have made sense out of all this. And she couldn’t but punish herself for not keeping the gun safe, and not retrieving it when it was lost, and not grabbing hold of it now—it was an evil tool in the wrong hands, that was sure. No, she would grab hold of it and take it away, as Inez de Rougemont and Mrs. Chatterjee and all the other witches had required in her dream. No, she would—but at that moment Jean-Baptiste came suddenly alive and seized her by the elbow. “She’ll kill you,” he murmured.
The baroness laughed. “Oh, I will,” she said. “Nothing can take this away from me.” As she half-turned to retrieve the book, her feet made a little tripping stutter almost like a dance step. Instead of crossing in front of Miranda, she moved the other way around the piano. When she stood in front of the dark entrance to her bedroom, she bent down over the keyboard. And with the index finger of her left hand she picked out hesitantly a little tune, which Miranda in time would come to recognize. In the third act of The White Tyger it would build to a cr
escendo, the whole orchestra sawing and blowing and pounding away: Nicola Ceausescu triumphant as she accepted the burden of her destiny.
Then she reached out for the book and turned it around so she could read it under the candelabrum. “On a clover if alive erupts a vast pure evil a fire volcano,” she said. Pointing the gun at them, she fired, and Miranda felt the hot blast of air. She saw fire spit from the muzzle. Holding up the pistol in her right hand, the baroness blew out the candles one by one.
Now everything was lit by the soft glow of the gas, or almost everything. Traces of light still lingered by the baroness’s upraised hand. It was a hot red glow, different from before, and the creature that materialized on the long barrel was different also. It crawled out of the muzzle and squatted above it, an ugly, toadlike creature.
Isaac Newton: Inventor of the palindrome, Miranda thought for a split moment.
“Do your worst,” murmured the baroness. And the toad leapt immediately for the open window, suspended on the air by a repulsive flap of skin that stretched between its arms and its knees. It glided down to the windowsill and leapt away.
Miranda felt a terrible relief to see it go, a sense of terrible foreboding. Later the relief dissipated but the foreboding did not.
When the creature leapt into the air above the Piata Revolutiei it did not disappear. Already the next morning it was lurking in the corner of the council chamber in Petersburg, where the czar’s foreign minister delivered an ultimatum to the German ambassador, together with a public accusation. The czarevich had been poisoned, murdered, destroyed by cruel treatment while he was in German hands, his majesty was sure.
And the next day it was gliding in the wet clouds above staff headquarters on the River Bug, as General Antonescu rejoined his old comrades from the sixth army. Enormous and impressive on his white horse in the rain, he was greeted as a hero by the assembled officers, and by the soldiers also when he toured the forward trenches under his command.