Castle Rouge (30 page)

The woman quickly set the object, which had a flat bottom so it wasn’t a complete ball, down between us.

The eyes so dark that they seemed all pupil glanced at me as she spoke several words in another language.

Irene translated in her smooth basso. “Natural rock crystal eons old from the Ural mountains of Russia, tinged with malachite for the green shade the lady so obviously admires.” Irene conveyed even the Gypsy’s taunting tone as she answered my unspoken skepticism.

I was not impressed. Like myself, or a performer like Irene for that matter, these carnival hucksters become adept at reading the smallest change of expression or posture. Ordinary, unguarded people give away at least half their thoughts without even thinking about it.

I forced myself to widen my eyes with surprise like the greenest girl.

The woman ignored me and hunched over her crystal ball with its supposed exotic ancestry…more like cheap, green, wine-bottle glass from Czech factories that also produced so many of the faux glass gems called Rhinestones, after the German river. Poor Bohemia, always an imitation.

The globe was fashioned so that the sparse candlelight that lit the chamber was amplified into a universe of tiny stars within its curves. In this regard, it made a pretty curiosity.

The Gypsy gazed into the orb, then into Irene’s eyes.

“The gentleman,” she said, “is well traveled and will travel farther still soon.”

Irene’s mastery of languages alone could tell a dolt that.

“There is a woman paramount in his mind, a foreign woman for whom he has great love and concern. She is not a beauty, but I see another woman as well, who combines great beauty and ugliness. She too is foreign. Seek one and you will find the other, but you will not like it.”

“Ridiculous!” I grumbled in English to Irene. “I get the usual tall dark men, who elude me, and you get…what, the short, fair women, who elude you?”

“I see a third woman,” the Gypsy went on in her suspiciously fluent English. “She is not what she seems. I see her fate entwined with that of a tall, dark man. No…two tall, dark men! Both are far away, and one is in terrible danger of his immortal soul.”

Did Gypsies believe in souls? I wondered. It was an interesting question. What religion did they follow, if any, besides the Great God Manna?

Irene had leaned forward, the walking stick upright between her leather-gloved hands. She acted as if she was actually interested in what the woman had to say.

“You have visited me before,” the Gypsy suggested, her words half-assertion, half-question.

Irene shrugged, an answer as ambiguous as the Gypsy’s comment. The woman’s seamed palms caressed the globe, shaded the dozens of tiny points of flame dancing deep inside it.

“You visited me before with another woman,” the Gypsy said, more strongly, “yet your heart is true. Most interesting. I have never seen within my globe a soul so surrounded by great danger. Yet you yourself may truly be impervious while all around you fall. You walk like the undead, casting no shadow but an illusion.”

“The undead?” I challenged.

Black Gypsy eyes drilled in my direction. “My words may be wrong in this language that is native to you, Lady. The undead are deathless, ancient.”

“Vampires,” Irene intoned in a truly spooky baritone like a bad magician casting a phony spell on stage.

“Vampires?” The Gypsy echoed the word. “Many words, many languages. Always the same ending. They live, and others die. They are deathless, though they grant death.”

“A living, walking corpse,” Irene explained to me. “She is right. The tradition exists in many countries.”

“The Golem?” I wondered.

Irene nodded solemnly. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes, in some ways a vampire.”

My words had silenced the Gypsy, who made a series of signs that set her gold coins ringing like miniature bells.

Irene leaped into the evidence of her superstition. “The Golem has walked in Prague, has it not?”

“So it is said.”

“Centuries ago.”

She nodded again. “Rabbi Loew, a great magician of the city, is said to have created it.”

“And before rabbis with magical powers,” Irene said, “there were alchemists in Prague.”

“Prague is a magical city.”

“And Gypsies were in Prague then, at the time of the alchemists?”

“Gypsies were in Prague always.”

“Gypsies are older than the Golem, the medieval alchemists?”

The old woman nodded, her fingertips caressing the crystal. I wondered if it felt cold, as crystal should, or hot, like fevered flesh. Almost I extended a gloved finger toward it.

The woman’s quick warning look froze me in midgesture. She was as sharp and lethal as some hawk guarding her eyrie. I did not doubt that a dagger lay concealed somewhere about her person or the room.

“There are other walking undead,” Irene said, almost dreamily.

I saw that she was speaking in a measured, almost Mesmerizing way again. She spun the head of Godfrey’s walking stick between her hands, the clouded amber carving seeming to absorb light and then move within itself.

This was fascinating: the duel of one charlatan with another!

“Death is alive in Prague,” Irene continued.

“Death rules all cities.”

“Death in brutal, violent guise.”

“Death is always brutal.”

“But death is most often natural, however cruel. I speak of Death as murderer.”

The woman drew her hands back from the crystal as if they suddenly had become too hot, or too cold. “A murderer is a criminal.”

“Unless he cannot be caught. Then he is something else, maybe he is a cousin of Death, of the undead you mention.”

Another flurry of signs, as frantic as Catholic crossmaking in a cathedral. These motions were not Christian, though. They were older than that. I had never rubbed shoulders with the Old World in all its truly ancient garb. For a moment the Gypsy woman in her drooping skirts and blouses and golden coins seemed some goddess of untold ages. Through my dazed mind passed images of Chinese conjurors, of temple dancers and Mongol concubines, of everything exotic since the beginning of the world. Oddly enough, the semblance of Red Tomahawk crossed my mind like a warding gesture. I thought of Indian medicine men and of how little my fellow citizens had plumbed the ancient roots of the races we were so good at driving into the wastes and even to the raw edges of the Continent, and killing one way or another.

I wished I had a fringed shawl like the old woman to wrap around myself, for warmth, for remembrance of the past that wove it.

But all I had was my secret mission.

For an instant I wondered if that was all that Jack the Ripper had, and perhaps even the Gypsy woman’s legendary “undead.” And the Golem of Prague. We were all “undead,” weren’t we, because we were the living? Or at least the waking and walking. Was someone who had succumbed to a Mesmerist temporarily undead? There were many ways to sleepwalk through life, I decided.

“Your people,” Irene was saying in her deepest, lulling voice, “wander by their own will. They love music and laughter, and the joy of shifting reality in other people’s eyes.”

Her one gloved hand juggled an invisible ball so real that I thought for a moment the Gypsy’s crystal had leaped into her fingers. She was not hypnotizing the woman, I realized, she was performing for her!

The old woman blinked away from her. “You have done this, too,” she accused. “You do it now.”

“It is not owned by the Gypsies.”

“No. But we are best at it.”

“Are you as good, too, as serving as tools for other people’s illusions?”

“We serve ourselves only. No people in the world are so free.”

“But you are free because you appear to serve others…to mend pots; to tell fortunes, for fortunes; to play music; to give young girls to old men.”

The woman whisked out a scarf and draped it over her crystal, as if protecting it from Irene’s words. Her eyes couldn’t darken, but they sharpened.

“The pots crack,” Irene said, ruthlessly. “The music ends. The fortunes become true or false as the clients make them so. The young girls are not virgins, and they take more than they are taken.”

The woman said nothing.

“Still, as you say,” she went on, “the Gypsies are free. Why then would they accept the yolk of the non-Romany? Why would they conceal madmen and murderers?”

“Who is to say who is mad? Who is to say what is murder? We take gold and go our own way.”

Irene reached into her jacket pocket. I feared the revolver. She brought out another coin, this one gold, elevated it between forefinger and thumb, then snapped it away. It landed on the thick cloth, next to the slightly green rock crystal.

“Gold.” Irene produced another coin and snapped it away again.

They thumped to the cloth, one after another, a rain of old coins, a Gypsy ransom.

The woman snatched one up, clamped her teeth on it, hungry as a wolf.

“Not gilded tin,” Irene said. “Ural mountain gold, mined millennia ago by trolls and Tibetan monks.” She was grinning at the extravagance of her claim.

The Gypsy woman’s eyes narrowed to thick black lines in her lined face. She pointed a witchlike finger, knobby with arthritis, curved like a scimitar.

“You are Romany now.” She produced the dagger I had feared from some part of her person…up a blousoned sleeve, from under a full skirt, who knew where?

With a gesture too swift to stop, she pierced her misshapen fingertip. A drop of blood fell onto a Tarot card she had thrown to the tablecloth.

She seized Irene’s gloved hand. The dagger tip slashed through thick leather into skin like a needle through silk. Irene never winced, not even when the woman pinched a ruby drop of her blood onto the card to mingle with hers.

“Show this pasteboard to any Romany whose aid you need. This is the Three of Swords, the card of revenge, which we understand as no other. Now. What else do you want for your gold?”

“A woman has died, brutally, in Prague. Where, and by whom?”

“Many women die brutally. Look for where Kings hide and ghosts of the undead walk. I say no more, for you have come to me before and know I see true.”

“And what of the outcome of our endeavors?”

The woman drew back the cloth to glance into the crystal ball.

It was like a wobbly planet pulled from its orbit into public view. A poor thing. A lump of glass, or, if she told the truth, crystal from the hidden heart of the earth. Either way it told no truths nor answered any questions.

The Gypsy woman shrugged, her grand gestures done. “It is up to you, as it always is.”

She swept the gold coins into the clanking custody of her swagged skirt, blew out the candle, and vanished.

We stood there for a moment, both of us having risen during that bizarre ceremony of blood and gold and Tarot card.

“It means nothing,” I said.

“Nothing always means something,” Irene answered.

We listened. For the clink of coins. For an exit of footsteps. Nothing.

“She is good,” Irene said in the dark. I could hear a smile in her voice.

“You gave her a king’s ransom.”

“My King is missing, and my Queen. Now I must find the Jack.”

25.

Alone

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubling, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before…

—
EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE RAVEN”

At first I kept vigil, wrapped in the tapestry bedcover, huddled on the floor beneath the window like a loyal dog who awaits his master’s return.

Every few minutes I would struggle out of my enveloping cocoon and, as the room’s chill air encased me like ice, lean as far out over the gulf as I dared.

Nothing changed. My interwoven strand of rope hung slack. Jerking on it didn’t dislodge it from the window into which Godfrey had vanished hours before, but neither did it result in an answering pull.

At last white-fingered dawn crept over the dark mountainsides, as ashen as the Wednesday beginning Lent.

I finally tottered on my numb feet to my sheetless beds and burrowed into the coverlet, sitting like a snail in my fabric shell, yet feeling no security. My heart was as cold as my feet.

Something had befallen Godfrey. Perhaps he had tried to return up the rope, slipped and fell to the rocks below. I had seen nothing among the rocks and brush beneath the pines that encroached upon the old castle like Burnham Wood on the march, not even when dawn’s thin light puddled on the ground like spilt milk.

Or…he might have fallen inside the castle, perhaps on a staircase of rotting timber.

Or…he may have encountered some of the savage Gypsy men, who took it amiss that he had gone a-roving….

Or wolves may have taken shelter inside the castle’s lower regions, and had fallen upon him in a pack and eaten him alive—!!

The longer I thought, the more dire the possibilities became.

I was shivering like a nervous lapdog now and moaning softly to myself.

I stopped suddenly.

Another moan had reached my ears. The wind sawing through the pines and then through the open window? Or…an interior moan? The echo of distant voices in the castle kitchen, perhaps, traveling far and faint and thinning into what might seem a moan to a suggestive mind?

Kitchen! I deluded myself. The meals we ate required no cook and no kitchen but were Gypsy campfire fare, was that not obvious? Ergo, no Gypsies need reside in the castle, or even work there, and from what I had glimpsed of their wildwood lives, a stone ceiling would be an abomination to them.

Speaking of ceilings, I glanced up to the one in my bedchamber, which I had ignored until now, when every detail of my prison room had become sharpened like a stick in my eye, reminding me of Godfrey, now gone, reminding me of my helpless condition, stranded like a princess in a tower, her rescuing prince having fallen off the glass mountain.

A moaning sound again!

Either there were wicked people about trying to frighten me or…