The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  “Ah, God,” he murmured as she told the story of the last years, how she’d tricked and fooled her way into the People’s Palace. Luckacz was exhausted, wrung out, yet still she didn’t lose or let flicker the unbearable concentration of her art. In the crowded theater, Luckacz sat as if alone while she performed on his own private, bare, inner stage. But at the same time he was aware of the combined power of the crowd, especially as she built to the events of the past months, her persecution of Miranda Popescu, her intimate betrayal of Kevin Markasev. Everyone could guess how the story might come to an end here in this building on this night. Everyone could leap ahead to one of several ends, no doubt for himself or herself as well. Without a single conscious thought, Luckacz came to understand the error he had made, sitting here in Bocu’s seat, allowing this to happen. There would be no possibility of his old job, or any municipal employment of any kind. He would be lucky to escape prison. All of this was a public outrage. Tonight he would go home and try to explain things to his wife, and see if he could find some shelter there under the wreck of all his hopes.

  He noticed there was no song about Andromedes. But after the murder of her younger son, Nicola Ceausescu made a resting place. What was to come? Here she was. Bocu and Luckacz had tracked her down. From the evening gown she’d worn on the balcony above the Mycenaean Gate, she stripped to nothing once again. And then again the conjurer’s trick—she had a snake in her hands, a little, writhing, hooded snake that slithered up her arm and rose above her shoulder. She had a knife in her other hand, a cruel, curved blade, and as every man in the house rose from his seat, she drew it across her naked breasts, puncturing them, and what came out was like blood.

  TIRED AND FLUSHED, and sensitive to every small current of emotion, the baroness sat in the secret alchemical laboratory beyond her bedroom in the People’s Palace. She had arrived to the end, and she felt some of the peculiar sense of dissatisfaction that came to her after every performance, dissatisfaction and an urge to laugh. What would she do now for an encore? Perhaps she could let the simulacrum burst into flames. That would close the theater, make its renovation necessary.

  Or else she would take her knife and plunge it into Radu Luckacz’s face while she stood above him naked, poised on the arms of his fauteuil. He had betrayed her—no. Perhaps it was all for the best. Perhaps he was her old friend after all.

  Jean-Baptiste pounded on the outside door. “There’s no time.” And so she let the simulacrum lie, shifting and deflating beyond the circle of lights. She looked around her room without regret. She’d never come here again. She had some belongings wrapped in an old cloth, but now she pulled the bundle open on her lap. It was too heavy. On a whim she discarded the revolver and the black book, laid them out on the lighted altar of Cleopatra—she hoped she had not given any offense. She hoped the end of her performance had contained nothing the goddess might find insulting or presumptuous, because she had rejected Cleopatra after all.

  She had chosen Medea and the chariot of dragons. And she’d take with her just a change of clothes, and the manuscript of her musical score. Now she had some new ideas for it, and she imagined an entire new act, which she might work on in Trieste or in the little house in Geneva by the lake.

  “It’s past time,” yelled Jean-Baptiste. Then he left her to attend to the horses, the first stage to Beograd and Sarajevo. She would meet him in the east wing by the cleaning closet and the servants’ stair.

  She was dressed as a chambermaid in a rough skirt and apron, her chestnut hair tied up and covered with a cotton cap. But she was sure of her abilities, sure that no one would see her or recognize her on the way, even if she strode through Rudolph’s Gallery in her most formal clothes, or else stark naked. Again she laughed, a soft explosion of breath.

  She stood up, swung her bundle to her shoulder. She walked past the screen into her bedroom, laying her hand for a moment on the iron frame of the unmade bed—oh, she had many regrets. Though at that moment she wasn’t thinking about Aegypta Schenck or Kevin Markasev or little Felix. All that was in the past, expiated on the stage of the Ambassadors, where she’d had her first triumph years before. Now a new act was beginning, and she was only thirty-nine. There was much good to be accomplished, she was sure, among the people of Italy or Switzerland. There was much comfort she could distribute as a patron or a model or a symbol for the poor.

  She passed the threshold of her music chamber, where she had spent so many happy hours. Then she was in the corridor—no, it was here, the source of her regret, behind the locked door of the adjoining room. There were doctors in Switzerland, competent specialists, she knew. She’d left instructions for Jean-Baptiste. She’d specified a private railway compartment to follow after her; she would meet the train at the frontier. She’d known Jean-Baptiste for many years. He was her oldest friend. But what if he also betrayed her at long last? She knew his opinion of Sasha Andromedes.

  She must go. But at the final moment she slipped the key from around her neck and unlocked the door to the dark room, just to say good-bye, or au revoir, or even à bientôt.

  Just a minute, only for a minute, then. She locked the door from the inside.

  A quarter of an hour later, the exasperated Jean-Baptiste climbed up the stairs from the Spanish Gate, where the black carriage waited. In the corridor he was in time to hear a scream, a single crystalline note that shattered suddenly. He recognized it from the final page of Lucian’s opera, when the dragon appears onstage, the beast that pulls Medea’s airborne chariot. Muttering and cursing, he pounded on the door; he’d never had a taste for this music. He couldn’t believe the baroness would waste her opportunity to escape. This was her plan, after all.

  But when he rattled the handle, she didn’t respond. He spoke her name, then hurried back to the top of the stairs to listen for Bocu’s men. Full of doubts and frustration, he pulled out his skeleton key. Did he have the boldness to unlock the door?

  There was a conversation drifting up from down below, and he climbed down to the landing to listen. At the second turning of the stair, he heard a crash from up above.

  But he was not in time to see the beast slink down the corridor the other way. He stared in horror at the lower panel of the door, the lacquered wood scratched to pieces. He did not see on the stairs or in the corridor the coarse gray beast, larger and fiercer now than she had ever been in Massachusetts, or on Christmas Hill, or on the Hoosick River in the snow. Larger and fiercer than she’d been in Chiselet.

  She hid inside the doorway of the Diamond Ballroom as the servants and the soldiers passed, running for the elevators and the upper floors. Then she made for the servants’ quarters, her nails slipping on the marble tiles. Oh, she was clever and secret—Andromeda was used to this. She climbed down through the Mycenaean Portal and out into the piata, which was empty now.

  The colonel had imposed a curfew. Past midnight the beast went slinking through the streets to wait outside his house in the Strada Italiana. She leapt onto the roof of a low shed, pulled herself onto a sloping pile of bricks, and reached the garden wall behind the house. When Elena Bibescu went walking among the flowers just at dawn, she knelt in the dirt under the trees to push her hands through the stiff fur. At first she thought the beast was hurt, because there was so much blood.

  ALSO BY PAUL PARK

  A Princess of Roumania1

  The Tourmaline1

  The Hidden World12

  Soldiers of Paradise

  Sugar Rain

  The Cult of Loving Kindness

  Celestis1

  The Gospel of Corax

  Three Marys

  If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories

  No Traveller Returns

  Praise for Paul Park and the Novels of Roumania

  “Paul Park is one of the most gifted and subtle story writers I know.”

  —Jonathan Lethem

  “Complex, ambitious, lively, engrossing, and entirely original … If you like the work of Philip Pullman, Ge
ne Wolfe, or Ursula Le Guin, you ought to be reading Paul Park, too.”

  —Kelly Link

  “Deft, inventive, and intelligent, The White Tyger opens a window onto a world where imagination rules. This is as deeply pleasurable to read as Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.”

  —Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever

  “These books are dangerous and as glittering as amber and bloodstone and, yes, tourmaline. An embarrassment of riches—the Baroness is one of the great characters of fiction. Like Miyazaki or Pullman, Park is not afraid to write real risk and beauty.”

  —Maureen McHugh, author of

  Mothers and Other Monsters

  “Readers can revel in every twist of the Baroness’s descent into madness … . This is another interesting addition to the series.”

  —Starlog on The White Tyger

  “This volume offers a lot of intriguing, exciting matter for our appreciation … . The villain has grown so monstrously alluring that the temptation to let him or her take over is enormous and hard to resist. But what a detailed, microscopic, insightful, unforgettable portrait Park presents!”

  —Scifi.com on The White Tyger

  “All the best writers are explorers. Only a few are discoverers. Paul Park is one of those rare talents in SF, like Gene Wolfe or William Gibson, who have opened entire new worlds, hitherto unimagined and, indeed, unimaginable. Is it any wonder that his fellow writers are among his most eager readers?”

  —Terry Bisson

  “The plot is enthralling, the prose is graceful and clear, the themes important and intelligently handled. But it’s the characters who kept me reading late into the night, each of them vivid, faceted, and utterly real in a world in which reality is mutable.”

  —Delia Sherman on The Tourmaline

  “Paul Park knows fairy tales, contemporary and classic fantasy, and literary science fiction, and he borrows tropes from all these genres … . At times, though, it’s bound to remind you of the Harry Potter books, Philip Pullman’s novels about Lyra Belacqua, and even Gene Wolfe’s recent The Knight and The Wizard, as well as such older classics as The Wizard of Oz, Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite chronicles, and even Philip K. Dick’s classic The Man in the High Castle. But then all these works draw from the same well of fantasy, the same pool of dreams and nightmares.”

  —The Washington Post Book World on

  A Princess of Roumania

  “Complex, elusive, haunting, written in a transparent prose that slips you from one world to another with prestidigitous ease, A Princess of Roumania is a quietly and profoundly original novel. To compare Paul Park with Philip Pullman or John Crowley gives a hint of the kind of satisfaction his fiction provides.”

  —Ursula K. Le Guin on A Princess of Roumania

  HE SQUATTED DOWN and slid his hook into Adira’s neck just above his breastbone. Delicately, with the point of his prosthesis, he unbuttoned the front of Adira’s tunic. “I felt this before. I wonder what it is.”

  In the afternoon, Peter’s company would return to the front line, and there were rumors of a push. He had no time to waste here, but he was curious about the envelope over Adira’s heart—was it the same as his? A memento, a talisman, a good-luck charm? Peter didn’t think so. With his left hand he unfolded it, opened it up. Underneath, tucked into Adira’s undershirt was a wad of reichmarks. This was what the man had meant when he had talked about paying him.

  The paper on the inside of the envelope was sky-blue with threads of silk. There were pages of hieroglyphs drawn in gold. Andromeda might have been able to read them, Peter thought.

  So: an African carrying messages from Africa. Under the bare trees in the dead, long grass, the world was calm. Corporal Adira, if that was really his name, was sniveling because of his broken leg. But even that was a hopeless little noise.

  There were birds in the branches above Peter’s head. And in the dawn light, on the hill south of the town he could see the battery come to life, the men pulling the howitzers out of their pens. It was quiet in that wood behind the line, the day-long hush before the evening thunder.

  “Tell me what this says,” he said.

  “I—I don’t know. It is from Abyssinia.”

  “I can see that. You don’t know what it says?” Peter removed the wad of currency. “Where are you taking this?”

  “To Brasov, sir. Dispatches. The money is for my sister and my mother. Not for myself—I swear it.”

  Peter wrinkled up his nose. “And you’re from Abyssinia?”

  “Yes. No. My father—”

  “And you think this will help?”

  “Yes. Yes I do. Yes, sir. Something must be done.”

  “I wonder.”

  Around them the day was gathering. The men on the hill were unwrapping the long muzzles of the 75-millimeter cannons.

  Peter Gross looked up. “Twenty-five years ago, we marched through this country carrying rifled muskets with percussion caps. Now we have machine guns and grenades—from Africa, but they supply both sides. It’s for the money, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s what I think. It’s too much money to resist.”

  They spoke in murmurs behind the ruined wall. The trees above them were full of little birds that suddenly took flight, turning all at once. Now a single long shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds.

  Deep in the east, the light came slipping toward them over the broken fields and the remains of last year’s harvest. “I’m going back,” said Captain Gross. “I’ll turn this over to my colonel. He’ll send someone to pick you up.”

  “Please, sir, no. For the love of God. It’s—it’s about Chiselet. The accident at Chiselet. This is an investigation by the government in Addis Ababa—that’s all. I swear to God.”

  Peter turned the papers over, examined the backs of them. “What do you know about Chiselet?”

  “Nothing, sir—I’m just a messenger.”

  Peter laughed. “And not a good one. You’re not the right man for this.”

  He dropped the wad of money in the dirt. The little man, still weeping, lying on his side, clutched at it feebly. “No, sir.”

  Peter got to his feet. He brushed off the knees of his trousers, stood for a moment squinting into the wide sun, sniffing at the air. From here, looking north toward the great river, you almost wouldn’t know there was a war.

  He turned and walked away through the orchard toward the communication trench. He would inform the military police after he’d returned to Theta Company. In the meantime he was being followed.

  He recognized the scent first of all, an animal and human mixture. In cheap hotels across North Africa and the Levant, he’d gotten used to it. Now he sniffed it with an odd sense of nostalgia. Rank and appealing, heavy and light, there had been a time when it had disgusted him. Those also had been difficult days.

  But difficult or not, now they seemed touched with gold, with the warm morning light that caressed every prewar memory, everything that had happened before the Turks had crossed the line. He turned and lifted up his nose, waiting for her to take shape somewhere in the dead weeds—dog, woman, or man. Standing over the idiotic spy, her name had occurred to him. Was that when he had first caught the scent? Maybe not, because he thought about her often, her and Miranda Popescu. Every hour, maybe more.

  “Where are you?” he whispered.

  “Behind you.” Her harsh, queer voice. Maybe she crouched on the other side of the stone wall. But he heard her clearly. “Don’t turn around,” she said.

  They spoke in English. “What do you want?”

  “Just to see you, first of all. You’re a hard man to find alone.”

  “I must go back,” he said.

  Then after a moment: “How is Miranda? Is she safe?”

  She didn’t answer him. “I have a favor to ask. For old times’ sake. Past times in the Ninth Hussars.”

  They had served toget
her under General Schenck von Schenck. Miranda’s father. That’s where they’d known each other first. So long ago, it seemed like the beginning of the world.

  “Yes?”

  “I know you’re having trouble with conscriptions, all the Transylvanian battalions. I want to know if I could volunteer, and you could bring me in.”

  Now suddenly he remembered that old campaign, the sights and sounds conjured to life as if by a few harsh, toneless words. The smell of leather and horses when they were camping in the birch trees above Nova Zagora. Brandy around the fire. The view from the ridge when on horseback he had taken his men down. Not like now, cowering in a hole.

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  Then, because she didn’t answer, he went on. “We’re not soldiers anymore. We’re up against machines. Machines stuck in the mud. You know, like those Terminator movies.”

  It was too tempting not to make a little joke, to bring back something from the other past they shared, when they had been kids together in Berkshire County. And she laughed.

  “No,” he said again. “You’re crazy.”

  She was laughing. “Please. Don’t make this hard. I beg you. Think of that: I’m begging you. Take me as a private soldier under your command.”

  He understood it must be true—this must be hard for her to say. She had not loved him then, nor did she love him now. She’d been a lieutenant in the old days, Sasha Prochenko on a big white stallion, so dashing and romantic in his forest-green uniform, high boots, fawn-colored pants, so popular with the ladies, his blue eyes flecked with silver. And later at Mamaia Castle on the beach …