Tourmaline Read online

  "We'd started to be friends before," she'd told him once. "There's no reason that has to stop." He remembered her expression when she said this, at the same time that Raevsky was describing the small lines that curled around the edges of her lips, when Nicola Ceausescu smiled.

  That was enough for Peter. He couldn't listen anymore. There was something useless about this, he thought, something that felt like masturbation, particularly if Miranda was in Roumania or wherever. Far away, but he would find her before Raevsky did. What else was he supposed to do? He would take Andromeda and find her, and one day they would wake from this.

  Immediately he heard Andromeda's long howl, as if it had been conjured by her name. It was closer than before. She had come out of the pine trees and was standing on the bank above the river. Now he saw her silhouetted against the lighter distance, stopping on three legs with her foreleg curled, her muzzle raised

  Saltpetre Street

  THAT SAME DAY, WHEN the Elector of Ratisbon collapsed on the marble stairway of his hotel in Bucharest, there was some limited pandemonium. He was helpless to prevent two junior officers and the ballroom manager from carrying him into the lobby and placing him on a settee. Unaware of his disgrace, they brought him water and smelling salts, while at the same time the hotel doctor chafed his wrists and loosened his cravat. The doctor was not able to suppress a sniff at his atrocious ugliness—even though his head was spinning, the elector noticed this, and it brought him to his senses quicker than the stink of the ammonia under his nose. Always he was braced and refreshed by the bad opinion of fools.

  In any case the doctor was a quack, neither taking his pulse nor listening to his heart, where it was obvious the trouble lay. He wanted to remove the patient, as he called him, to Brancoveanu Hospital, which was out of the question. One Roumanian was bad enough, and the elector certainly would not permit himself to be touched by more than one. He would not be prodded by barbarians, who doubtless still used maggots and leeches in their operating rooms.

  But he was able to prevail upon the natural chauvinism of the German officers. He had a ticket on the seven o'clock train to Munich. If he could send a telegram, he would have his personal physician meet him at the Bahnhof. Lying on his back on the settee, even to himself he was not able to admit the truth: that General Stoessel was frog-marching him back home to answer charges of conjuring, prestidigitation, and reanimating a corpse. And the general, when he was summoned from his room, was not able to admit it either. An old-fashioned gentleman, he allowed the elector to retain a molecule of dignity. Or perhaps courtesy had nothing to do with it, and it was more a question of German prestige: The elector would be escorted to his suite to rest there and arrange his packing, until a diplomatic attache arrived to take him to the train. Stoessel knelt beside him to murmur the details. He wouldn't place him under guard. In return he asked for a promise to go gracefully and not make any trouble.

  From his place on the settee, the elector gave his solemn word, while at the same time he observed with contempt the gray hair in the general's ear, the flecks of dandruff on the collar of his uniform. The elector was a modern man, a man of science and a patriot. He would not be bound by idiotic conventions, and not just because these specific charges against him were false. Whatever ghost or spirit had appeared in Greuben's room, the elector had had nothing to do with it.

  No, there was work to be done, and even in his weakened state the elector was the only man in Bucharest to do it. No, he would not break his sworn parole to benefit himself. But it was not by following social niceties that he could serve his country and its civilizing mission in Roumania—an antique martinet like Stoessel couldn't be expected to understand. Because of his prejudices, he could not even be depended on to see the threat, which came out of the hidden world.

  The elector had lost consciousness for only a few moments. Now he was able to get up and walk to the elevator without incident. Doubtless Stoessel thought he'd lost his balance on the stair, light-headed from the turn of Fortune's wheel. Bashed his head on the marble balustrade—the general would have no sympathy for any illness, much less for the effect of any conspiracy or curse. So it was important for the elector to pretend nothing had happened, to walk alone, unaided, and to maintain his strength until he reached his own fifth-floor suite. Then he staggered to the armchair under the portrait of Inez de Rougemont—a society belle of the previous generation, painted in Gypsy costume. He was grateful for the warmth of the afternoon sun that spilled through the high windows. Gasping for breath, he lay back against the cushions while he pondered what to do.

  He understood, or thought he understood, two things. First, that Miranda Popescu had disappeared out of his hands. And second, that the Baroness Ceausescu was implicated in her disappearance. At least she was involved in the attack on him—as he'd pitched onto the landing of the hotel stairs, he had smelled the aroma of pig shit and brimstone, too subtle for anyone but him to notice, and in any case it had dissipated by the time he'd woken up. The brimstone was the stink of conjuring, and the barnyard odor was the signature of the Ceausescu family—the red pigs of Cluj. And if Nicola Ceausescu was able to attack him, knock him to his knees in the middle of a crowded hotel, then it was clear the elector had misjudged her. His natural contempt for women had allowed him to underestimate her strength. Was it possible she had the Popescu girl?

  Not content with stealing the tourmaline that was essential to his plans, had she been able to steal the girl also?

  During his crisis on the stairs, the elector had been able to extract Miranda Popescu out of her American wilderness, a mental feat no less prodigious for having been unplanned—a product, he supposed, of his unconscious intellect. Now, seated in his armchair under the spring sun, with separate parts of his mind the elector was searching the Hoosick riverbank in North America, and at the same time the environs of Prince Frederick's castle in Roumania, where the girl should have arrived safe with all the other bric-a-brac he had transposed. But everywhere he looked, Miranda Popescu was not there. She was not among the tall pines where the boy and the dog and the gray-haired soldier searched along the river, and she was not among the scrub oaks and the overgrown roses of her father's garden on the Black Sea.

  Yet when he brought his gaze in closer, and tried to penetrate the slate roof of the baroness's house near Elysian Fields not two kilometers from where he sat, he found himself baffled—repulsed by an active power. What had Stoessel said? He'd sent half a dozen soldiers to arrest her for complicity in Claude Spitz's murder. But the elector suspected the priority might be low or even nonexistent for the military commander of the city. Because he had no appreciation of the science of conjuring, Stoessel couldn't understand the kind of threat the baroness might pose, not just to the elector's life—which after all didn't concern him—but to the future of German interests in Roumania.

  The elector pulled his watch from the pocket of his waistcoat. It was only five o'clock. He had more than an hour before Stoessel sent a car for him. At his elbow a bottle of Abyssinian whiskey stood on a low table, and he poured himself a small, restoring glass.

  He had been on the edge of triumph when he'd suffered his little heart attack. Weakened by Greuben's accusation and the prospect of a trial in Germany, nevertheless he'd been about to rid the world of Miranda Popescu. She would no longer, by virtue of her nature and the superstitions of her people, pose a threat to Germany. The simulacrum of himself that he had animated in the Hoosick wilderness was reaching out its knife. But then the elector was struck on the hotel stairs, and the little world he had assembled on the river-bank to lure her from her boat—all of it had disappeared when he'd lost consciousness. Her childhood home in Constanta, which he'd managed to restore from his own memory of Prince Frederick's estate, had been sucked back across the ocean in a current of mnemonic aether, the model subsumed into the original again.

  What a stupendous effort that had been! No wonder he was exhausted. With unprecedented mental skill he had made a
thousand objects if not real, then at least substantial enough to fool the girl for twenty minutes, half an hour—though doubtless she'd been caught in her own trance of remembering. Stuck like a fly in a web of memory, but she'd escaped by the time the elector raised his head up from the marble stair.

  And as all those imagined objects had come back across the ocean, had she come with them? But if so, where was she now? Neither on the riverbank nor in Constanta. Instead, what if the baroness had snatched her as if out of the air, by some new process of conjuring unknown to the elector? And if so, what use did Nicola Ceausescu have for the white tyger of Roumania, who held latent in her silly, girlish body the power to defeat him and the German army, as she'd already demonstrated on the day she was born?

  He took another sip of Abyssinian whiskey, the finest in the world. No, this was a nexus of strength that could not be permitted, that must be challenged and destroyed. And not by General Stoessel, who'd think he was a foaming lunatic if he tried to explain—or worse, a criminal. No, by the elector himself, and there was no one else. Greuben and the others who used to do his work, now it was obvious he could no longer depend on them. And probably that was more of the baroness's cleverness. Doubtless it was she who had sent Spitz's corpse into Greuben's room. Who else but she could have guessed he was the murderer?

  In his thoughts the elector was like the captain of a steamship, lulled to complacency by the flat sea and the warm weather, who too late sees the iceberg loom out of the fog. Under the whiskey's influence he gave the baroness more credit than she deserved. But at that moment she appeared to him a terrible and subtle adversary whose strength had been concealed by his own prejudice. So it was with a kind of gallantry that he decided to confront her in his weakened and exhausted state, and more than that to sacrifice everything, to leave everything behind, even his luggage and his clothes. General Stoessel would never forgive him. The foreign minister would never forgive him once he heard.

  Nevertheless, the elector was happy as he struggled up out of his chair and slipped the bottle of whiskey into the pocket of his cutaway coat. A few hours before, he had dressed in formal clothes in order to receive a medal or a diplomatic appointment, he had guessed, because of his service to his country. Now he did not change his suit. There was no time for that. But over everything he put a raincoat, then he took his hat and cane. He wasn't naive enough to think he could escape the hotel unnoticed. His smallpox-pitted face made that impossible. If stopped, he would say he was going for a stroll, or to the tobacconist in Trajan's Row, or to the pharmacist around the corner. It was true he had the makings of a headache.

  He rode down through the elevator cage in the middle of its coil of stairs. And immediately the hotel manager skittered toward him across the tiles, wringing his hands and murmuring in his irritatingly proficient German— "Your grace, I am so sorry. . . ." And when the elector stammered his invented errands, the man begged to be allowed to send a messenger as well as a valet to help him pack. "Your train is not for seventy minutes. Is it not so?"

  "Yes. I will be back directly. I would prefer some of the fresh air. . . ."—it was he, the elector, who sounded like a foreigner. What was wrong with him? His voice was like an echo in his own ears.

  Once through the revolving doors and out into the Piata Revolutiei, he tried to lose himself among the crowds. But that was difficult because as always the unmannerly Roumanians drew back from him as if unwilling even to share a public street. Luckily, though, the sun was disappearing behind mottled clouds, and by the time he reached the smaller streets below the square, it had begun to rain. This allowed him to pull up the lapels of his coat, pull down the brim of his fedora; he glanced around. No one was following him. Stoessel was as good as his word.

  Under a gray drizzle he wandered down the Calea Victoriei. He passed the turnip-domed temple of Artemis, where some kind of mumbo-jumbo celebration was taking place. He passed the tiled facade of the Greek baths, and the crenellated armory where the empress had last appeared in public. When was that—a week ago? Everything had happened so fast. Since then she'd escaped into the mountains were she'd joined some partisan irregulars. Stoessel's dragoons, of course, had entered the city without incident, after the collapse of the Roumanian army.

  Now they patrolled the thoroughfares, mounted men in rubber capes, the rain sluicing from their high helmets. Proud of their discipline, the elector nevertheless concealed his face whenever they passed. He was afraid of being recognized, and so he stared instead into the plate-glass windows of the fancy shops. Always before he had taken a cab or a private carriage along this road. He had never noticed its magnificence.

  Now the day was drawing in. In forty minutes he stood in Saltpetre Street outside the baroness's house, a tall, narrow mansion in a row of others. The new German authority had kept the gaslights burning in the streets, but the rain was heavier now. Cold in his damp coat, the elector studied the candlelight that burned in several windows. What should he do? Greuben had told him about the corridor under the street, which led to the garden of the building opposite. But recently that house had been sold to pay the baroness's debts. And even though it still looked empty the elector was not the kind of man to slink and spy. No, he would walk up the front steps like a gentleman. In the pocket of his raincoat, he fingered his small silver derringer.

  As it happened, the front door was ajar. He slipped inside, into a small square entrance hall between the street door and another door of clouded glass that led into the house. A dim light burned behind it, and the elector paused. Was this the spot where Nicola Ceausescu had cracked the head of Spitz the jeweler, brained him with a candlestick? Then her servant had dragged him out, abandoned him in his own carriage. Greuben had found him by the Targu Bridge and finished the job, although the jewel was gone. The tourmaline was gone.

  Nicola Ceausescu had stolen it. And tonight the Elector of Ratisbon would take it back from her, by force if necessary. He'd take it back to Germany where it belonged—the inside door also was unlocked. He placed his cane in the stand, then hung up his hat and raincoat. He put his hand on the curiously carved brass lever and stepped into the house. The smell of pigs and conjuring was stronger here, though doubtless his was the only nose in Bucharest that was delicate enough to smell it, an acrid back-odor that competed with something else, a hint of soft perfume.

  As quietly as he could, he fumbled down the darkened hall. Light came from an open doorway, and the sound of movement also, a quick light step. With the derringer in his hand he put his shoulder blades against the flowered wallpaper—no, nothing. There was silence for many minutes, until the elector crept down the hall again and peered inside the door.

  Immediately he was aware of a ticking clock. Light came from a pair of candles in brass sticks on the mantelpiece. Was it one of those that she had used on Herr Spitz? Between them hung a portrait of the old baron, the star of Roumania glimmering at his throat. There was a time when he'd been deputy prime minister, after his perjured testimony against Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck.

  The widow stood with her back to him, looking toward the mirror on the opposite wall. He shrank against the door frame, but the glass was angled away. She did not turn around. Her narrow shoulders were hunched forward and she was hugging herself, her arms wrapped in a silk shawl. It was patterned in green paisley with golden threads that caught the light, and under it she wore dark riding breeches and high boots. Now she looked down. The elector watched her upper vertebrae, the nape of her long neck, her helmet of chestnut hair, cut at the same line as her jaw.

  If he had followed more closely the artistic career of Nicola Ceausescu, perhaps he would have recognized the pose. It was from the third act of Florio Lucian's version of Medea, when the queen reveals that she has murdered her own children. There is no remorse or even melancholy in Lucian's piece, which the baroness had first performed in Moscow twenty years before. Medea rises fresh from the bath where she has drowned her young family, unclothed but for a shaw
l.

  The orchestra is silent even when the queen begins to dance. From her body's eloquence, as if through a process of synesthesia, the audience can almost guess the musical accompaniment. Watching from the doorway of the baroness's room, the elector could almost hear it. Nicola Ceausescu raised her knee and made a small kicking motion standing on one leg—a plaintive gesture in the original performance when her legs and feet were bare. Now there was something ominous in her booted kick, something triumphant that was foreign to the opera but appropriate here.

  The baroness had lost some of the innocence she'd shown at the premiere, or at least some of the pretended innocence—she had been homeless in the streets before the impresarios had found her. And though the elector had never been susceptible to female beauty, still he was astonished by what he felt in his damaged heart. He had the derringer in his hand, but he could not press the lever, even to extinguish a threat to Germany or to prevail against a woman who had tried to kill him not three hours before, and who would have shown him (he was sure) no mercy if their circumstances were reversed.

  The baroness stripped away the shawl, revealing her bare shoulders. The light shone on her flawless skin. Under the shawl she was dressed in a yellow camisole. The elector was astonished by her beauty and the beauty also of the jewel she carried, the purple tourmaline that he now saw for the first time.

  Entranced, he watched her slide it over her skin as if it were a bar of soap. Stolen from Claude Spitz the jeweler, nevertheless it was a piece of German property—Kepler's Eye, dug from the brain of the famous scientist. It contained a natural and verifiable power, which is why the elector craved it.

  With the stone there was no limit to the good he could accomplish. Always up to now his plans and aspirations had been thwarted by prejudices of the mindless, sabotaged by his own ugliness, his cold and unlovable nature. Once he had the stone in his possession, he intended to make a scientific study of the phenomenon, how a lifeless mineral could ignite passions and emotions, love itself—now he understood the trick. This was not a real emotion he was feeling as he watched the movement of the baroness's naked arm. No, it was something artificial, motivated by the jewel. Nicola Ceausescu was a repellent, brutal slut, tonight as always.