Then he stops, amazed. Why has the maid gone to bed, and the palace in such a state? Where is the porter? Did they seek his permission to retire?
Irritated, he turns abruptly into the Paris room. Here as always he checks himself. The chamber is fragile, intimate: tables on does’ legs, bowls of lacquerwood and antique silver, a tea service set out for visitors who never come. Anton feels a trespasser here, even though the maid crosses the room day and night. Does she sense what he does—the trembling of a thousand crystal minnows in the chandelier, the narcotic murmur of the divans in their dust-shrouds, a room tossing in its sleep?
He crosses gingerly to the far corner, where a stair curls tightly down to the maid’s chambers. He leans over the rail. No light whatsoever reaches his eyes from below.
“Tatiana!”
She is a long time answering, a mumbled acknowledgment that might be, “Your mercy.”
“You ought to know to fasten the shutters, little mother, or do you want us all to freeze? And really, you haven’t left me so much as a warm coal. Come up now, we must see to the galleries at least.”
She says nothing, and Anton waits a very long time for the first drag of her clubfoot over the granite floor. Her candle is barely visible, a salamander-shine in a dark pool.
“It’s truly cold, Tatiana.” He does not know what else to say. He knocks against a tea table, turns with a scowl, rushes from the room.
On the great stair his temples throb, his footsteps ring loud and individual. Yet another open window at the landing, where he pauses for breath. He snatches at the wind-whipped curtain, tugs it aside.
Here is the west yard, scrubbed clean of straw and cigarettes by the gale, the fountain’s spray tossing far beyond its basin. Under the hay wagon, a lone gull shudders from foot to foot, looking as if it wishes to speak up against its circumstances. The flags on the parapet crack like whips.
Granite frames this yard on three sides, but the last is a tall, solid hedge. Cutting through at its exact center is an arch of laurels: the path to the memorial gardens. Just inside the arch, grotesquely large, Charonic, face like a rhinoceros beetle, frowns Wagner. Further in, Strauss’s imperious arm rises over a sickly magnolia. It was the Magar’s idea: diversify the garden’s populace of marble kings and generals with statues of composers. Like the older figures, these are gigantic, fawning. Not one Romanian stands among them.
Yet.
Anton looks up. In the moonlight the distant Carpathians slash the sky in two: blue-black above, midnight down to the horizon. He must smile for lovely Bicazului Pass, the corset of ice that declares the ridgeline.
But—where are the lights of Constanta?
The city is dark.
The entire plain is dark. A blackout.
“Oh no.”
He sees them, then: dull metal beads on a taut string, high over the plain. The gray wings are cruel, the bellies deep. He cannot hear the engines. Russians? Turks? He counts in a panic—ten, fourteen, eighteen—then fumbles and leaps up the last steps.
In a Spartan room on the left, half hidden beneath scraps of his own wriggling shorthand, is the telegraph key. He is tapping before his other hand has even found the crank: wake up, wake up, Lupescu!
Colonel Lupescu is a kind man, even when dragged from his bed, but now his response is curt.
“Talk.”
Anton taps: “Eighteen maybe twenty aircraft capital blacked out heading north in file—”
“Stand by.”
The distant station is silent for some minutes; Anton waits in terror. Lupescu would be confirming the blackout with Bucharest or Constanta, or verifying the planes’ trajectory, or warning the army to the east. The rain begins, a soft hiss at the window.
At last Lupescu responds. “Tchavodari Palace.”
“Here!”
“Anton?”
“Sir!”
“Anton, how are your studies progressing?”
“Did not copy—”
“I believe you were preparing for the conservatory.”
Anton pulls back his hand, as though the key might snap at him. Lupescu cannot tap code at such speeds. No one can.
“Anton.”
He pounces on the key, taps like a lunatic: “Repeat unknown aircraft northbound—”
“The viola, isn’t it?”
“Constanta—”
“I don’t think I ever told you I played the cello.”
Anton touches nothing.
“I was really quite accomplished in my twenties. I played in Sienna before the Lady Sofia di Bali Adro. She actually cried, at the end of Schumann’s Fourth.”
Anton cannot transmit to any other station. He is miserably cold again.
“Are you serious about music, Anton?”
What to do? His hand gropes to the key. “Yes.”