A Princess of Roumania Read online

  She had recruited them in Cluj, where they’d retired from active service. Since then she’d paid them badly and infrequently, and she now wondered if the princess opened her mouth, if she gave a command, whether the men would turn to her, help her extinguish the burning book, throw the baroness out into the gathering snowy darkness, as she deserved. But Aegypta Schenck did nothing, merely stood with her hands clasped together, and then after a moment strode across the smoky room and out the door.

  And when the soldiers followed her, and the baroness was alone, she breathed in the smoke as if it were incense on the altar of Cleopatra’s temple. It was the smell of the narrow triumph she liked best, and without thinking, and because she had pictured for a moment the statue of Cleopatra in her mind, she started to move. Even in riding boots, her feet remembered the old paces of Cleopatra’s dance, which she had performed on the boards of the Ambassadors Theatre when she was still a girl. The dance comes at the end of the opera’s second act, and in it the goddess-queen destroys the synagogue of her enemies—lithe and graceful, now the baroness was stirring around the room, and with her flat, open hands was swatting at the strings of onions and garlic overhead, knocking away the crystal goblet and the teacups. They shattered on the floor. Then after a minute, her movements still passionless and stylized, Nicola Ceausescu was pulling down the plain curtains and overturning the chairs. The book was smoking, and she smashed a kerosene lantern over it and upset the jug of liquor so it spilled into the rag carpet and flared up. In the opera the dance had lasted several minutes, and had been always greeted not with applause but with bewildered silence—she had been barefoot and half-clothed, her lips red and her eyes black with kohl. The applause had come later and the howls of delight, and by the time she finished now the room was on fire. She stood on the threshold. It was starting to snow.

  Princess Aegypta was on the walk, hands on her hips. The baroness stepped down onto the slates and stood beside her, watching her and not the fire. She could hear the soldiers farther back, muttering to each other, and the baroness could feel their confusion and disapproval, as if a smaller fire burned behind her. They were wondering what they should do—should they bring buckets from the cistern? And if the princess had begged them, if she had cried or cursed they would have done what she wanted. They were soft-hearted men, not like the baroness, who was already feeling the tickling of remorse—they would not have burned a defenseless woman out of her house, a princess of Roumania, whose brother was von Schenck the traitor, but a hero before that.

  If she had shown any expression, doubtless they would have helped her. But it was Nicola Ceausescu who was buffeted with emotion. The princess’s face was quiet as she watched the glow behind the dirty windows.

  After fifteen minutes they had to stand back from the heat. Snow fell on their heads. Aegypta Schenck von Schenck reached out to warm her hands. She needed nothing, the baroness decided. There were many who would take her in near here. Her family had been well loved.

  Still, it was a cold night. And the baroness always had to press a little farther. “Give her your coat,” she said to the soldier who stood behind her, who was beckoning to them now to go.

  * * *

  IN 1966, THREE LOCAL DISTRICTS had combined to build a new junior and senior high school in northern Berkshire County, on a hill above a dairy farm several miles from town. The building was made of glass, steel, cinder blocks, bricks, and consisted of four single-story corridors around a central courtyard—not the kind of building that would easily burn. But the fire set that night got into the walls and ceilings. Several classrooms were damaged on the west side of the building. Until it started to rain, eighteen hours after the first alarm, the roof over the library was still smoking.

  Andromeda didn’t hear about the fire before she went to bed, because she was talking to Miranda on the phone. On Tuesday morning, Andromeda’s mother let her sleep late. After breakfast there were a lot of phone calls to make, so she didn’t hear from Miranda again until past one o’clock. Andromeda assumed she was calling about volleyball practice, but then it turned out there was something else, something hard to understand, because she was gulping and swallowing her words. Then she calmed down.

  Miranda had left her backpack in her locker at school. The bracelet, the old coins, the bag of strange items she had inexplicably lugged around for the past few weeks, now she was afraid she’d lost them in the fire. That morning she’d made Stanley drive her out, but the police hadn’t let them in the parking lot. She said she’d gotten out of the car and run over to the soccer field where there were some other people standing around. “The whole west corridor was hidden in the smoke,” she said.

  She didn’t cry, but she sounded numb and stupid. “I would have stayed, but Stanley had to go to class,” she said. “I promised Mom I wouldn’t go out by myself. Now I’m here alone.”

  She never called Rachel “Mom.” It was a bad sign. “So what are you doing?”

  “Watching TV.”

  She never watched TV. Andromeda canceled some things and rode over Miranda’s house, which was on the green in the center of town. She parked her mountain bike in the yard next to the fence. She went up the steps to the screen door and, sure enough, there was the sound of canned laughter inside the house. So she pounded on the open door until Miranda came out, and together they went bike riding in Petersburg Forest. It was a beautiful October day, the sky full of clouds, the trees orange and red and gold.

  “I can’t think what would burn,” Andromeda said once when they’d stopped beside the stream. “I mean the doors are wood, I guess.”

  Then they rode out to the firehouse and watched the trucks come back. “They’ll wait until it’s safe and then go through,” Andromeda said. “In the meantime you should call the principal’s office. There’s probably a lot of valuable stuff left inside. Probably a lot of people lost something.”

  But it couldn’t be that simple. Something was obviously on Miranda’s mind, but she wouldn’t talk about it. At six o’clock they went back to her house for supper. Rachel had prepared Mexican food, and Stanley was telling them about what he thought were some amazing developments in the Horse Head Nebula, seen through the Hubble telescope. He was a professor of astronomy and a sweet man, though very thin. When he got excited, as now, Andromeda thought he was kind of cute—at least for a dad.

  After supper, upstairs, Miranda pulled back her windows to watch the rain falling in the backyard, the first rain for months and a welcome sight. She’d hardly said a word all day, but now she was full of news, mostly about current events in Eastern Europe. This had never before been a subject of conversation. She turned on the computer and showed Andromeda some Web pages from Romania.

  “What’s this about? What is wrong with you?”

  “I had a dream last night. After we talked on the phone.”

  “Great,” said Andromeda, who was easily bored. Miranda often told her about her dreams, which tended to be complicated. Even so, they always managed to retain that special boring quality. Andromeda herself had never dreamt of anything that made sense, or that she remembered thirty seconds after she woke up.

  But now she found herself sitting cross-legged on the bed while Miranda spoke. “It was night time. I was in the woods. I was lost. I came into a ring of birch trees. There was a woman, and she talked to me. It was in a foreign language, but I could understand. She was an old woman with a big nose. She said someone was trying to hurt me, and when I woke up, the first thing I heard was someone lit the school on fire.”

  “And the connection would be…?”

  Miranda rolled her eyes. She was sitting on the side of the bed, a candle in her hands. Outside it was getting dark.

  “Life is not just about you,” said Andromeda.

  But Miranda interrupted. “She said she couldn’t have spoken to me before, because then people would know. But now people knew anyway, and they would try to hurt me. They were sent by enemies of hers and mine. Do you remem
ber the kids in the quad? She said I would know who my friends were. She told me not to turn away from my friends. She told me I had two friends I could trust and who’d do anything for me. She said one of them would show me some kind of sign and talk to me about my own country. He’d show me something from my own country. He’d offer me something, and that’s how I’d know to trust him. I can’t believe it. I’ve been so unfair.”

  “I don’t know about ‘anything,’” said Andromeda. “I don’t know if I’d do anything for you. It was just a dream.”

  Which turned out not to be the right thing to say. Miranda was staring at the candle flame, trembling in her trembling hands. “It wasn’t just a dream. It was more real than you. I saw the light on the birch trees. Frost on the yellow leaves. I smelled the smoke. This woman grabbed hold of me, and I could feel her hands. She said she was my father’s sister. Then she told me that my mother was in a place called Ratisbon, and she touched me on the forehead with her fingers.”

  Andromeda sat watching the candle flame until Miranda blew it out. “I spoke to Peter Gross,” she said. “He’s going to meet me in the yard. We’re going over Christmas Hill.”

  Andromeda stared at her. “I’m missing something. You told me—”

  Miranda interrupted, shook her head. “Maybe I wanted to believe it, because I hadn’t called him. Maybe I wanted not to trust him. But he’s got to be my other friend who’s trying to protect me. That’s why he got into that fight.”

  “Well, come on. I don’t think you should change your mind because of some dream. You said that animal was in the place where you’d last seen him. That dead woodchuck or whatever. You said you’d been talking to him about Romania. You said he probably stole one of your Romanian coins. That he was angry at you for dumping him.”

  “I didn’t dump him. There was nothing to dump. This was a modern coin. Rachel kept a few from when they went.”

  “So maybe he broke into your house. Besides, how do you know your dream was about him? Maybe it was about that guy Kevin. He’s the new kid. He’s from Romania or someplace. He’s the pretty one. Maybe Peter Gross is the bad guy. The one-armed bandit in the night.”

  She wasn’t serious, but Miranda was. “Don’t you get it? Maybe he did nail that thing up, but that’s the sign. The thing from my own country. It’s not as if he hurt me. And besides—you’re wrong. You don’t even know him. He’s a nice guy. How did he know I’d go back there?”

  “Yeah, well, suit yourself.”

  After a moment, Miranda spoke. “I tried calling you this morning. But your phone was always busy, so I called him. He knew immediately why I had to go. I didn’t have to explain it.”

  To Andromeda, this felt like a rebuke. She decided to stop teasing. “You’re walking to the school?”

  Miranda nodded. “Someone would see us on the road. Peter doesn’t ride a bike.”

  Because he was missing his hand, Andromeda thought. His right forearm ended a few inches past his elbow, and then there was an odd stump covered with scaly skin and what looked like warts. His clothes looked like his father shopped at Wal-Mart. He wore sneakers to school even in winter, and his teeth suggested bad nutrition. He lived in what was basically an old farmhouse out on White Oak Road, with a lot of garbage and broken-down trucks in the front yard. Andromeda had seen him mowing the lawn once, when she was going on a run.

  Actually, she had seen him more than once, as she often ran out that way. But once she’d stopped to watch him. Actually, she’d been impressed to see him work the power mower with his one hand.

  Miranda emptied the books out of her green satchel. Now she filled it with two hammers, two flashlights, and a coil of rope, which she took out from underneath her bed. She put on running shoes, black jeans, and a black sweatshirt—a ridiculous ensemble, Andromeda thought. “How about a gas mask and rubber gloves?” she said. “You’re probably not even going to be able to get inside.”

  “Probably not.”

  “I don’t understand why we can’t go by ourselves. It’s nothing we can’t do alone.”

  Miranda shrugged.

  “Hey, I can drive you out there,” Andromeda continued. “What can he do for you?”

  Later she rode her bike home in the rain. She slipped in through the side door and stood in the dark kitchen, running her fingers through her wet hair. She was watching the light through the closed glass doors that led into the living room. She could hear her mother talking on the phone, and she supplied in her mind the words of another drunken call to California, her mother talking on and on when there was nothing to talk about. Her father was a patient man.

  She took the keys to the Volvo from her mother’s purse. After midnight when the rain had stopped, she drove back into town. The brake and clutch felt good under her wet, bare feet. The risk made her happy, which was nice, because she’d been depressed before. The fact was, she was curious about Peter Gross. She wanted to see him and Miranda together. Maybe she was jealous. She didn’t have boys fighting over her, especially not older boys.

  They were waiting for her at the corner, as they’d prearranged. They slipped into the back without a word. They sat together in the darkness, and Andromeda had to drive them like a chauffeur. The gearshift was a little rough. “Do you have a license?” Peter asked when they reached Field Park—a stupid question. How old did he think she was? She had learned to drive that summer, though, in Greece.

  In her mind the car ride was the bribe she’d offered them to be included. She pulled onto Route 6 out of town, and in five minutes they saw the sign at the top of the hill. They drove into the school parking lot, which had a new white trailer in the middle of it. Lights were on in the trailer. Cars were parked outside.

  “Shhh,” Miranda said, and that was stupid, too. Andromeda pulled into a space, turned off the lights, then killed the engine and they sat for a while. No one came out of the trailer to yell at them. So they got out of the car, just to see if they could take a look.

  Miranda hurried on ahead. Andromeda could see the beam of her flashlight when she and Peter passed the corner of the wall. Almost invisible in her black clothes, Miranda was waiting at the history department offices, and she shined her light across the field, then back at the narrow panel of safety glass in one of the steel doors. It was starred and crumbled, kept in place by wire mesh. The door itself hung ajar, fastened to the other by a padlocked chain that ran through both doors’ handles.

  “Let’s be quick,” Miranda said. She thrust the flashlight into Peter’s hand, and knelt to remove a hammer and a cold chisel from her bag. Then she was smashing at the padlock, obviously not caring about the noise, which was like the clanking of a bell.

  “Stop,” whispered Andromeda. She’d rummaged for a piece of cloth in Miranda’s bag and had come up with the second flashlight and a blue bandana, which now she wrapped around the lock. Peter put the light down in the wet grass and picked up a hammer. Andromeda held the chisel for him. In six strokes the mechanism broke apart.

  “Wait here,” Miranda said. But that was idiotic, so Andromeda followed her into the building, into the warren of small department offices. Some of the teachers’ desks in the common room had been pushed against the wall. Books and papers were scattered on the floor. The carpeting was soggy, covered with black footprints. There was a wet, charred, rotten smell.

  * * *

  THAT DAY AT HOME, after Miranda’s telephone call, Peter had imagined himself climbing through pits of charred rubble. He had imagined precarious ceilings and falling walls. Now, when they had passed the inner doors, he could see the line of blue lockers, which continued out of reach into the darkness. Things seemed disappointingly intact. Again there was a mess of sooty footprints down the center of the floor.

  He was wandering around, shining his light through some of the open classroom doors when Andromeda and Miranda returned, the leather backpack in Miranda’s hand. Without a word she led them back the way they’d come.

  Now it was almos
t an anticlimax how easy and uneventful this had been. There was no reason to be panicked or feel brave. The double doors stood open, but on the other side, of course, were two men waiting. Peter could scarcely see them in the bright, sudden light of their torches. He stood with Miranda on one side, Andromeda on the other, while the light played on their faces.

  And even that probably wouldn’t have been so bad. They hadn’t done anything terrible. The pack was Miranda’s property. This wasn’t the kind of thing that would have made his father angry. They hadn’t stolen anything, and he was helping a friend.

  The best thing would have been to try to explain. But there was no time. The two men had barely opened their mouth before Miranda bolted away into the darkness, running as fast as she could for the shelter of the trees. Then there was nothing to do but run after her, while Andromeda scattered in another direction.

  Of course Miranda had left her green satchel outside by the door. Of course it had her name and address printed on the inside flap in black magic marker. And of course he himself was highly recognizable, because of his arm. So that was that.

  He crossed through the woods behind the soccer field, then across Route 6 and up the Pollocks’ driveway on the way to Christmas Hill. When he came up the slope—shivering and soaked—he was surprised to see Andromeda waiting for him, ghostlike, perched on one of the pale boulders. He was surprised she’d gotten there before him. But now here she was, hugging her long, wet legs. She wore no shoes. Had she always been barefoot? Now her feet were covered with white mud and bits of grass.

  “This is stupid,” she said. “I can’t believe this. My mother hates to be woken up.”

  “Where’s Miranda?” he asked after a pause. She cocked her head past him up the logging road, which led under a row of sugar maples.

  “Shit,” Andromeda said. “She’s got what she wanted. It’s the two of us who are really screwed.” She climbed down from the boulder and followed him onto the road.