had given Katya and Zeffer a history of the Fortress the previous day; though as Zeffer remembered it there was much in the account that had sounded bogus. The Order of St Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had something to hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped in secrets; but nothing particularly bloody. There had been no battles fought there, he claimed, nor had its keep ever held prisoners, nor its courtyard witnessed atrocity or execution. Katya, in her usual forthright manner, had said that she didn’t believe this to be true.
‘When I was a little girl there were all kinds of stories about this place,’ she said. ‘I heard horrible things were done here. That it was human blood in the mortar between the stones. The blood of children.’
‘I’m sure you must have been mistaken,’ the Father had said.
‘Absolutely not. The Devil’s wife lived in this fortress. Lilith, they called her. And she sent the Duke away on a hunt. And he never came back.’
Sandru laughed; and if it was a performance, then it was an exceptionally good one. ‘Who told you these tales?’ he said.
‘My mother.’
‘Ah,’ Sandru had shaken his head. ‘And I’m sure she wanted you in bed, hushed and asleep, before the Devil’s wife came to cut off your head.’ Katya had made no reply to this. ‘There are still such stories, told to children. Of course. Always stories. People invent tales. But believe me, this is not an unholy place. The brothers would not be here if it was.’
Despite Sandru’s plausibility, there’d still been something about all of this that had made Zeffer suspicious; and a little curious. Hence his return visit. If what the Father was saying was a lie (a sin, by his own definition), then what purpose was it serving? What was the man protecting? Certainly not a few rooms filled with filthy tapestries, or some crudely carved furniture. Was there something here in the Fortress that deserved a closer look? And if so, how did he get the Father to admit to it?
The best route, he’d already decided, was fiscal. If Sandru was to be persuaded to reveal his true treasures, it would be through the scent of hard cash in his nostrils. The fact that Sandru had raised the subject of buying and selling made the matter easier to broach.
‘I do know Katya would love to have something from her homeland to take back to Hollywood,’ he said. ‘She’s built a huge house, so we have plenty of room.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘And of course, she has the money.’
This was naked, he knew, but in his experience of such things subtlety seldom played well. Which point was instantly proved.
‘How much are we talking about?’ the Father asked mildly.
‘Katya Lupi is one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood. And I am authorized to buy whatever I think might please her.’
‘Then let me ask you: what pleases her?’
‘Things that nobody else would be likely – no, could possibly – possess, please her,’ Zeffer replied. ‘She likes to show off her collection, and she wants everything in it to be unique.’
Sandru spread his arms and his smile. ‘Everything here is unique.’
‘Father, you sound as though you’re ready to sell the foundations if the price is right.’
Sandru waxed metaphysical. ‘All these things are just objects in the end. Yes? Just stone and wood and thread and paint. Other things will be made in time, to replace them.’
‘But surely there’s some sacred value in the objects here?’
The Father gave a little shrug. ‘In the Chapel, upstairs, yes. I would not want to sell you, let us say, the altar.’ He made a smile, as though to say that under the right circumstances even that would have its price. ‘But everything else in the Fortress was made for a secular purpose. For the pleasure of dukes and their ladies. And as nobody sees it now … except a few travellers such as yourselves, passing through … I don’t see why the Order shouldn’t be rid of it all. If there’s sufficient profit to be made it can be distributed amongst the poor.’
‘There are certainly plenty of people in need of help,’ Zeffer said.
He had been appalled at the primitive conditions in which many of the people in the locality lived. The villages were little more than gatherings of shacks, the rocky earth the farmers tilled all but fruitless. And on all sides, the mountains – the Bucegi range to the east, to the west the Făgăras Mountains – their bare lower slopes as grey as the earth, their heights dusted with snow. God knew what the winters were like in this place: when even the earth turned hard as stone, and the little river froze, and the walls of the shacks could not keep out the wind whistling down from the mountain heights.
The day they’d arrived, Katya had taken Willem to the cemetery, so that she could show him where her grandparents were buried. There he’d had proof aplenty of the conditions in which her relatives lived and died. It was not the resting places of the old that had moved Willem; it was the endless rows of tiny crosses that marked the graves of infants: babies lost to pneumonia, malnutrition and simple frailty. The grief that was represented by these hundreds of graves had moved him deeply: the pain of mothers, the unshed tears of fathers and grandfathers. It was nothing he had remotely expected, and it had made him sick with sorrow.
For her part, Katya had seemed untouched by the sight, talking only of her memories of her grandparents and their eccentricities. But then this was the world in which she’d been raised; it wasn’t so surprising, perhaps, that she took all this suffering for granted. Hadn’t she once told him she’d had fourteen brothers and sisters, and only six of them were left living? Perhaps the other eight had been laid to rest in the very cemetery where they’d walked together. And certainly it would not be uncommon for Katya to look coldly on the business of the heart. It was what made her so strong; and it was her strength – visible in her eyes and in her every movement – that endeared her to her audiences, particularly the women.
Zeffer understood that coldness better now that he’d spent time here with her. Seeing the house where she’d been born and brought up, the streets she’d trudged as a child; meeting the mother who must have viewed her appearance in their midst as something close to a miracle: this perfect rose-bud child whose dark eyes and bright smile set her utterly apart from any other child in the village. In fact, Katya’s mother had put such beauty to profitful work at the age of twelve, when the girl had been taken from town to town to dance in the streets, and – at least according to Katya – offer her favours to men who’d pay to have such tender flesh in their bed for the night. She had quickly fled such servitude, only to find that what she’d had to do for her family’s sake she had no choice but to do for herself. By the age of fifteen (when Zeffer had met her, singing for her supper on the streets of Bucharest) Katya had been a woman in all but years, her flowering an astonishment to all who witnessed it. For three nights he’d come to the square where she sang, there to join the group of admirers who were gathered around to watch this child-enchantress. It hadn’t taken him long to conceive of the notion that he should bring her back with him to America. Though he’d had at that time no experience in the world of the cinema (few people did; the year was 1916, and film was a fledgling), his instincts told him there was something special in the face and bearing of this creature. He had influential friends on the West Coast – mostly men who’d grown tired of Broadway’s petty disloyalties and piddling profits, and were looking for a new place to put their talents and their investments – who reported to him that cinema was a grand new frontier, and that talent scouts on the West Coast were looking for faces that the camera, and the public, would love. Did this child-woman not have such a face, he’d thought? Would the camera not grow stupid with infatuation to look into those guileful yet lovely eyes? And if the camera fell, could the public be far behind?
He’d inquired as to the girl’s name. She was one Katya Lupescu from the village of Ravbac. He approached her; spoke to her; told her, over a meal of cabbage-rolls and cheese, what he