far from home, she would miss her family.
A year or two later, when her career had begun to take off in America – she no longer Katya Lupescu by then but Katya Lupi, and Willem her manager – they’d revisited this very conversation, and Zeffer had reminded her how uninterested she’d seemed in his grand plan. Her coolness had all been an illusion, she’d confessed; a way in part to keep herself from seeming too gauche in his eyes, and in part a way to prevent her hopes getting too high.
But that was only part of the answer. There was also a sense in which the indifference she’d demonstrated that first day they’d met (and – more recently – in the cemetery) was a real part of her nature; bred into her, perhaps, by a bloodline that had suffered so much loss and anguish over the generations that nothing was allowed to impress itself too severely: neither great happiness nor great sadness. She was, by her own design, a creature who held her extremes in reserve, providing glimpses only for public consumption. It was these glimpses that the audience in the square had come to witness night after night. And it was this same power she would unleash when she appeared before the cinematographic camera.
Interestingly, Katya had shown none of this quality to Father Sandru the previous day.
In fact, it was almost as though she’d been playing a part: the role of a rather bland God-fearing girl in the presence of a beloved priest. Her gaze had been respectfully downcast much of the time, her voice softer than usual, her vocabulary – which often tended to the salty – sweet and compliant.
Zeffer had found the performance almost comical, it was so exaggerated; but the Father had apparently been completely taken in by it. At one point he’d put his hand under Katya’s chin to raise her face, telling her there was no reason to be shy.
Shy! Zeffer had thought. If only Sandru knew what this so-called shy woman was capable of! The parties she’d master-minded up in her Canyon – the place gossip-columnists had dubbed Coldheart Canyon; the excesses she’d choreographed behind the walls of her compound; the sheer filth she was capable of inventing when the mood took her. If the mask she’d been wearing had slipped for a heartbeat, and the poor, deluded Father Sandru had glimpsed the facts of the matter, he would have locked himself in a cell and sealed the door with prayers and holy water to keep her out.
But Katya was too good an actress to let him see the truth.
Perhaps in one sense, Katya Lupi’s whole life had now become a performance. When she appeared on screen she played the role of simpering, abused orphans half her age, and large portions of the audience seemed to believe that this was reality. Meanwhile, every weekend or so, out of sight of the people who thought she was moral perfection, she threw the sort of parties for the other idols of Hollywood – the vamps and the clowns and the adventurers – which would have horrified her fans had they known what was going on. Which Katya Lupi was the real one? The weeping child who was the idol of millions, or the Scarlet Woman who was the Mistress of Coldheart Canyon? The orphan of the storm or the dope-fiend in her lair? Neither? Both?
Zeffer turned these thoughts over as Sandru took him from room to room, showing him tables and chairs, carpets and paintings; even mantelpieces.
‘Does anything catch your eye?’ Sandru asked him eventually.
‘Not really, Father,’ Zeffer replied, quite honestly. ‘I can get carpets as fine as these in America. I don’t need to come out into the wilds of Romania to find work like this.’
Sandru nodded. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. He looked a little defeated.
Zeffer took the opportunity to glance at his watch. ‘Perhaps I should be getting back to Katya,’ he said. In fact, the prospect of returning to the village and sitting in the little house where Katya had been born, there to be plied with thick coffee and sickeningly sweet cake, while Katya’s relatives came by to stare at (and touch, as if in disbelief) their American visitors, did not enthral him at all. But this visit with Father Sandru was becoming increasingly futile, and now that the Father had made his mercenary ambitions so plain, not a little embarrassing. There wasn’t anything here that Zeffer could imagine transporting back to Los Angeles.
He reached into his coat to take out his wallet, intending to give the Father a hundred dollars for his troubles. But before he could produce the note the Father’s expression changed to one of profound seriousness.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Before you dismiss me let me say this: I believe we understand one another. You are looking to buy something you could find in no other place. Something that’s one of a kind, yes? And I am looking to make a sale.’
‘So is there something here you haven’t shown me?’ Zeffer said. ‘Something special?’
Sandru nodded. ‘There are some parts of the Fortress I have not shared with you,’ he said. ‘And with good reason, let me say. You see there are people who should not see what I have to show. But I think I understand you now, Mr Zeffer. You are a man of the world.’
‘You make it all sound very mysterious,’ Zeffer said.
‘I don’t know if it’s mysterious,’ the priest said. ‘It is sad, I think, and human. You see, Duke Goga the man who built this Fortress – was not a good soul. The stories your Katya said she had been told as a child –’
‘Were true?’
‘In a manner of speaking. Goga was a great hunter. But he did not always limit his quarry to animals.’
‘Good God. So she was right to be afraid.’
‘The truth is, we are all a little afraid of what happened here,’ Sandru replied, ‘because we are none of us certain of the truth. All we can do, young and old, is say our prayers, and put our souls into God’s care when we’re in this place.’
Zeffer was intrigued now.
‘Tell me then,’ he said to Sandru. ‘I want to know what went on in this place.’
‘Believe me please when I tell you I would not know where to begin,’ the good man replied. ‘I do not have the words.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly.’
Zeffer studied him with new eyes; with a kind of envy. Surely it was a blessed state, to be unable to find words for the terribleness of certain deeds. To be mute when it came to atrocity, instead of gabbily familiar with it. He found his curiosity similarly muted. It seemed distasteful – not to mention pointless – to press the man to say more than he expressed himself capable of saying.
‘Let’s change the subject. Show me something utterly out of the ordinary,’ Zeffer said. ‘Then I’ll be satisfied.’
Sandru put on a smile, but it wasn’t convincing. ‘It isn’t much,’ he said.
‘Oh sometimes you find beauty in the strangest places,’ Zeffer said, and as he spoke the little face of Katya Lupescu came into his mind’s eye; pale in a blue twilight.
Chapter 2
Sandru led the way down the passageway to another door, this one rather smaller than the oak door they’d come through to get to this level. Out came his keys. He unlocked the door, and to Zeffer’s surprise he and the priest were presented with another flight of steps, taking them yet deeper into the Fortress.
‘Are you ready?’ the Father asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Zeffer said.
Down they went. The stairs were steep, the air becoming noticeably more frigid as they descended. Father Sandru said nothing as they went; he glanced back over his shoulder two or three times, to be sure that he still had Zeffer on his heels, but the expression on his face was far from happy, as though he rather regretted making the decision to bring Zeffer here, and would have turned on his heel and headed back up to the relative comfort of the floor above at the least invitation.
At