by Paul Park
Certainly it was peculiar watching from above, as if standing in the expensive box seats. Had all this urgent motion been rehearsed and choreographed for the stage? With one part of his mind he could not but admire de Graz’s cunning and ferocity—he had grabbed one of the men from behind with his maimed arm and was dragging him along not to the shelter of the piata but back into the amphitheater, where Miranda Popescu and the boy came down to join him. But with another part Luckacz was analyzing the incompetence of these men, because it was eighteen to one, after all, even though most of them were untrained irregulars, armed only with sticks. And with a third part he realized with disgust that his romantic dream was over suddenly, at least for this particular night.
“By God, he is the devil,” he murmured as de Graz threw down the man and stepped into the circle of the central lamppost and met Miranda there; they clung and kissed.
“Yes.”
The baroness’s voice was calm, as if she, too, had achieved a sort of separation. “The devil’s stink—can you smell? There’s conjuring here. This isn’t what you see,” and she was right. There was some kind of mephitic odor that was tickling his nostrils, a swamplike smell of vegetable decay, borne to him on the hot wet air. “I thought she was a marker in her aunt’s dead hand or else a pawn. Maybe she was—not now. This is not de Graz’s fight.”
Then she turned toward him and her face was near his own. “I need men I can depend on,” she said.
For a moment he didn’t know what she was talking about. In the amphitheater some of the militiamen had run away, scattered beyond the pillars into the dark square. Luckacz wondered if a detachment of German guards had been attracted by the sound of gunfire. Perhaps that’s why the men had fled, though several still lay where they had fallen, wounded or stunned. It could not be that this one man had beaten all of them, even if some kind of sorcery or conjuring or trickery was involved—what had the baroness said? De Graz stood with the Popescu girl like the hero and heroine of some sentimental opera. But they were killers, both of them, monsters of an arrogant, decadent class.
“They must be caught,” murmured Nicola Ceausescu. “Don’t let them get away.”
Was that even a possibility? Surely German soldiers would soon appear to restore order. But what was he doing now, that fool Jean-Baptiste? He had stepped into the light, motioning to his broken-down horse and two-wheeled hansom. Some other man had already stepped onto the box.
“They must not get away,” the baroness repeated, fumbling with something in her cloak. Now suddenly her voice was hard with urgency, and she leaned forward with her left hand on the balustrade while she struggled with something.
He didn’t want to see what it was. He understood her and his mind leapt ahead. She meant there was a part for him in this drama, if he hoped to claim his prize. One more thing—there was always one more thing for him to do. As he left her, as he climbed in through the French doors, he could imagine the last words of his former self, harsh, nasal, awkward: “Ma’am, I am desolated to remind you that I do not have the correct authority under the circumstances, and no official position whatsoever. The Committee for Roumanian Affairs has seen it appropriate to …”
Unspoken, they filled his ears as he made his way downstairs through the dark corridors toward the gate.
THE BARONESS WAS correct. Incompetence or cowardice could not have by themselves explained de Graz’s victory over the militiamen and thugs in the stone amphitheater. But in the hidden world the white tyger protected him. She had climbed out of the water in the flickering darkness. And in a circle of dead stumps she had found a shallow indentation or a dell. The chicken ran behind her, clucking softly, its indignation conquering its fear.
There was another animal in the bottom of the dell, an animal she’d searched for and was glad to see. It was hampered or wounded, a small brown ape with a hurt paw. And she knew or suspected or felt the presence of another anomaly, a living insect in the primate’s heart or brain, that served the same purpose as the living tourmaline inside Johannes Kepler. Or else not the same purpose but a similar one—analogous, as her adoptive father might have said. Or else not the same at all, maybe, but she had faith. Inside the wounded man was the boy she had once known, a beetle with a scarlet carapace, the prettiest insect in the world, at least to her after long last.
She saw him in the bottom of the stone amphitheater near the open truck. In the hidden world he was beset by a different kind of enemy, a dozen or more wild pigs that were the tyger’s natural food. Panicked, they could already smell her. She didn’t even have to open her mouth for them to lose themselves in fear. And the ape, emboldened, moved away from the rocks where he’d been cornered. With a few slaps of his paw he knocked one over and scratched open its belly. They were squealing now.
Then in the circle there was another creature that now showed itself, a mother hen. Behind the tyger, the young chicken screamed and staggered down the slope. Wings raised, it beat the air. Miranda was glad and touched to see its energy and courage as it scrambled down the last stone blocks, a boy in ripped pajamas. “Mother, please,” he cried.
And he was scolding the militiamen who hung around the old woman underneath the lamppost—not so old, maybe. And even if she’d suffered a long time, still she was capable of acts of kindness, as she showed now in the simple way she reached out her arms. And there was Pieter de Graz, of course, the Chevalier de Graz, a gun in his left hand. Miranda went to meet him in the light.
THEY HAD BEEN careless because they did not think him capable without his hand. They thought he was weak and broken after beating him every day and pissing in his water. They didn’t know he was used to this, and had learned to store his strength in the Eski Seray in Adrianopole. Before that in his Berkshire County high school he had understood what it was to be underestimated, a sweet joy when he was younger and now a source of strength.
For days they had kept him in a dark hole below ground level, with greasy brick walls. They had taunted him with news of his condemnation. His wound had scarcely scabbed over, and they had not changed his bandages. But he kept himself clean now. He studied the endless moments even in the dark, searching for his opportunity. He was wiser than the Chevalier de Graz, less impetuous.
Now he stood under the lamppost while Miranda pressed her face into his filthy, stinking shirt. These men turned out to be stupid fools, once he had a pistol in his hand. He pulled Miranda out of the light, while at the same time he could see the steward who’d been kind to him during the first part of his confinement. Kind to him, and he had forced others to be kind. Now he gestured toward a horse-drawn carriage. “It’s all right,” Miranda said. “We’ll go with Jean-Baptiste.”
Even in this chaos, he noticed something odd about the way she spoke. Even with his wounded arm around her waist, he noticed an odd distance, a stiffness in her body. Part of her was gone from him, he thought, which made him look around the amphitheater in a wide circle, past the steward, past the middle-aged woman who was soothing the crying boy, past the men who were massing to attack, past the wounded men on the stones, past even the bald man in the gray clothes who was running through the seats above the lion gate—did he recognize him?
But this was not the only movement. High above there was a balcony that jutted from the wall. It was lit from below and to the side. A woman stood there, and when she leaned over the balustrade she cast a wild, gesticulating, enormous shadow on the stucco wall. She had an old-fashioned revolver in her hands, something left over from the Turkish wars—no, he recognized it, too. He almost felt the weight of it, especially when he saw the long shadow of the barrel droop and flutter. The woman was too weak to fire it. Her wrists were too weak to hold it straight. Now she opened it and fussed over the drum—she wouldn’t hit anything, he thought, except by luck. It would have been a hard shot even for him. He pulled Miranda down out of the light and did not change the angle of the pistol in his left hand, which searched among the militiamen for the first one with th
e courage to step forward. The bald man—certainly he had seen his face before!—was shouting in Roumanian. And there was a crash from Prince Frederick’s big revolver, and a scream from up above, and the long black shadow of the barrel jumped against the stucco wall and disappeared. She’d lost it, dropped it, missed them by a mile. There were other things to worry about now.
IN THE HIDDEN world, as graceful as a debutante, Miranda stepped into the center of the dell. The wet ground sucked at her boots. The pigs had squealed and run away. But Miranda felt the presence of one more, a big lurking brute of a red boar, above her somewhere indistinct in the dark undergrowth. The mother hen clucked over its chick. Small dangers had been thwarted. Big dangers remained. Unexpected dangers—just as Miranda turned her head, she saw a cat on a stump above the crooning birds. One-eyed, bitten, baggy knees, it was a cat she recognized.
And on the bare stones of the Mycenaean Gate she heard a scream of horror as she pulled away from Peter de Graz. Clara Brancoveanu was on her knees, and the boy—Felix Ceausescu—had been hurt. He lay with his legs twisted and the blood leaking around him, staining his yellow silk pajamas.
“Come,” said Jean-Baptiste.
“Mother, come.”
But she didn’t come. She knelt crooning and crying over the wounded boy. She wouldn’t even look at Miranda or say anything to her. But instead she plucked at the sleeves of her old cardigan. Nor was she able, Miranda saw, to offer any solace or comfort or assistance, or anything but her own suffering, her gift to the world.
“Mother—please come,” but it was useless. The hen had lost her chick.
That was the image Miranda took with her. After a few minutes, in the cab, she might have wanted to ride forever through the streets of Bucharest, gripping Peter’s strong left hand. In the hidden world she was alone, and she took a few steps backward from the bottom of that dell where the mother hen poked at the little yellow body. Other creatures were now appearing from the shadows, but Miranda left them behind. She climbed up onto the high pinnacle of rocks, where she now found herself still dressed in her nightgown, the jewel gleaming in her hand. That place, that rocky overlook, she would recognize it as a fulcrum or a transition point, however it appeared to her; she laid the tourmaline in a mossy crevice at her feet. Once it had left her fingers she could no longer see the ice mountains at the horizon or the steaming wetlands below her, the heavy curve of the river. Her single reality was the dark, cramped, jolting interior of the hansom cab as it raced around the carrefour and up the Strada Stirbei Voda.
She lay back against the ripped leather banquette. She might have wanted to ride north and west forever, away from the gate where they had left her mother and the boy. But after five minutes they turned the corner, and the horse pulled up beside the entrance to Cismigiu Park.
She found she had her eyes closed, and like an animal she was trying to decipher all the smells—the grime and grease inside the cab, the horse and its urine. She felt the springs release as two men clambered from the box. “Come,” said Peter. The door opened from the outside.
And she opened her eyes, and Peter handed her down the tiny metal steps. Jean-Baptiste was there. Miranda would have said something, only he started in at once. “Mademoiselle, you must hurry now. Take the path down to the boathouse. The Chevalier will show you. Madame de Graz is there, and the other gentleman.”
It was cool and quiet here so close to dawn. They had stopped under a row of enormous trees. Two other private carriages were also at the curb, and the high-hatted coachmen were smoking cigarettes and talking. “What about you?” Miranda asked.
Jean-Baptiste grimaced. “I’ll go back. My services—”
“You can’t go back. Did you see? She shot her own son from the balcony.”
Again he winced. “It was confusion. No one can say—”
“But I saw her. Everyone saw her.”
The steward shrugged his narrow shoulders. “You cannot know this. And you must hurry now. There is no time to discuss such things. You cannot know. Did you hear her crying?”
Agitated, he rubbed his pale cheek. Then he blundered on. “You know more than anyone that pistol could not be fired. This was an accident. Your mother will stay there till the doctor comes. Doctor Hartnagel—the boy will recover, you will see. The baroness is brokenhearted now. Who could comfort her if I could not?”
Peter was tugging at Miranda’s arm. But astonished by the old man’s stubbornness, she would not go. “Mademoiselle,” he continued, “I cannot expect you to understand. I say again this is not the safest choice for you. The German embassy is not so far, as I suggested. All of you, I think. It would be better to take refuge there.”
“No. We are Roumanians.”
There would come a time, Miranda decided, when words like these wouldn’t sound so implausible in own ears when she said them. But Jean-Baptiste seemed to buy the concept. He nodded, grimaced, turned his head until she could see the outline of his big blade of a nose in the light from the lamppost across the street. “You’re the one who needs a refuge,” she said.
“She will not hurt me. You will see. I will ride to the station and then return. You must be gone by then.”
With his foot on the metal step, he whistled to the driver. Peter motioned with his bandaged arm. Jean-Baptiste held the cab door open as the driver cracked his whip. “Mademoiselle, we will meet again in happier times!”
Miranda didn’t think so. Frustrated, she turned her back even before the cab had pulled away. Peter hurried her down the path, which divided a sculptured slope of grass. There was a smell of something sweet.
She felt tears on her cheeks, but she was angry at herself. “She wouldn’t leave him,” she said, meaning Clara Brancoveanu. “And now he won’t leave her,” she said, meaning Jean-Baptiste. “They’ll go to prison for it, maybe worse. It doesn’t matter. Not to them.
“But I left her in the mud,” she continued, meaning Ludu Rat-tooth. “I left her to die in the mud. I left her twice. I’m not like them. What does that make me? What kind of friends do I deserve?”
Peter cleared his throat. “Mademoiselle—”
“Don’t call me that! Please don’t call me that. It was horrible tonight, just horrible. You don’t even know everything that’s happened.”
She turned to him and put her hands on his arms. But he was stiff, uncomfortable, and he stepped away from her. “Je vous en prie,” he said, and then continued on in French. “It is my mother.”
Ahead of them there was some sort of lake or pond. Away from the streetlights, the dark could scarcely be penetrated, even though above them the sky was purple now. But there was a lantern on a raised dais, and Miranda could see some sort of brickwork, and beyond it the glimmer of the water.
Another lamp was lit. A voice came out of the darkness. “Pieter, is that you?”
And with a shock Miranda decided that her problems—what she’d done, what she’d failed to do, what she must do now—were not the only ones. What was Peter thinking now? Because of course his mother had died of cancer in the Berkshire Medical Center not so long ago.
Just a quick glimpse, and then back to herself: Regardless, either of Peter’s mothers was likely to be more alive to him than the strange, distant, defeated yet indomitable woman that Miranda had abandoned just a few minutes before. Doubtless at this moment she was in awful danger. If only Miranda had been able to convince her to leave. But if she had come, what then? Could Miranda have protected her? So, another failure altogether, like her failure to retrieve her father’s gun. What part of tonight’s disasters had been caused by the two spirits she had glimpsed in the baroness’s antechamber, hovering above the long, octagonal barrel of Prince Frederick’s revolver?
Peter had left her in the meantime, had hurried past her to the gazebo by the shore. The light was burning brighter, and Miranda could see the high, small, cylindrical colonnade, the roof like a witch’s cap. There were other people among the pillars, but in the center of the dais Pe
ter bent down to embrace the old woman, Madame de Graz. Miranda trudged up the steps feeling a rueful, self-critical resentment.
She was not alone. Inside the circle, she saw Andromeda leaning against one of the thin, fluted pillars. She was stylishly dressed in a black suit and a white shirt, and her arms were crossed over her chest. As Miranda hesitated at the edge of the light, she turned to her and rolled her eyes.
Then she came to stand beside her. With her back to Peter and his mother and her hands in her pockets, she stood looking out into the dark. As always, Miranda decided, there was something intimidating about her. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“Sort of a happy ending,” said Andromeda.
Miranda wondered. Sure, the old lady was laughing and crying, which was something she had read about but never seen before. Madame de Graz’s eyes shone milky in the lantern’s light, and she looked up at her son with an adoring expression, touching his face with her wrinkled hand. If Peter was conflicted, if he was remembering his other mother who had died, he didn’t show it. But he smiled as the old lady held the stump of his wounded arm, pressed it against her cheek and chest.
Andromeda giggled. “Please, enough already. Do you remember my dad?”
“Sure.”
“Once he came to visit from California. He brought me an autographed copy of a book called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. This was a long time ago.”