Rebecca only worked half days on Friday and had gone home at one o’clock, worn out. She didn’t realize how much yesterday’s hostage-taking had fatigued her until the examining room started to swim before her eyes while a patient was showing her his poison ivy rash.
Once home, she curled up on the couch in her den and finished reading the last chapter she had of The Stolen Princess. She was astonished at how close she felt to these people, her apprehension at the troubling letter from a Dr. William Batty who was treating Sir Charles for a “mental condition.” It occurred to her that Dr. Batty might be the source of the expression used for people with a screw loose.
What did it all mean? Who was the stolen princess? She tried to remember what Michael had told her about his book. What stuck most in her mind was that something he had written in it contradicted the history books. How would she know what was contradicted if she didn’t know the history in the first place? He told her he was looking for his great-great-great-grandmother. Something like that. And that Stanislaw Poniatowski, who became King of Poland at some point, was the father of her child. It seemed obvious to Rebecca that he was writing about Catherine. Quite a sobering thought, that Michael could be the descendent of Catherine the Great. He said he had checked all the children of the king’s many mistresses and that all the offspring were accounted for. What about his child with Catherine? Rebecca would have remembered if he had mentioned her. Why hadn’t he? There was a conundrum there, and if she could unravel it, maybe she’d be closer to knowing what happened to Michael. Someone had taken the rest of the manuscript to make sure no one figured it out. Was that someone Teodor?
She dug up Professor Hauer’s card and dialed the number.
The secretary answered. “Department of Slavic Studies.”
“Could I speak to Teodor please?”
“Moment.”
She heard the secretary shuffle away.
After a few minutes, a hesitant male voice answered, “Yes?”
“This is Rebecca Temple. I came to talk to you about Michael Oginski’s manuscript a few days ago…”
“Yes?”
“Well, I’ve had a chance to read it since then and I need to speak to you about it. You remember we only found a hundred and forty pages — the rest are missing. You must know what happens in the end. I think the missing pages might have something to do with his death.”
She heard an intake of breath. Was she getting close?
“This is a dangerous business,” he whispered. “I can’t talk now. I can’t talk here. People listen…”
“Well, what about some place else? Would you like to meet somewhere for coffee?” Some place in public should be safe.
“I… That is possible.”
“How about this afternoon?”
“I’m busy in the office. And tonight I’m busy.”
“How about tomorrow morning?” Did he suspect?
He paused, breathed into the phone. “All right.”
“Eleven okay?”
“There’s a little café on Spadina just north of Harbord.”
“What’s it called?”
The dial tone hummed in her ear. She would find it.
That evening at her parents’ house she was particularly interested in her mother’s brother, Uncle Henry, whose teaching career she had never given much thought to before. He had remained a bachelor and came to dinner every Friday night, an integral part of the family. He and her mother shared a resemblance around the eyes, which were grey and animated. He was a small but fit man with a round head covered with springs of grey-blond hair. Rebecca waited until he had cut into his roast chicken.
“I’m reading a story about a young German girl named Sophie who travelled to Russia in 1744 to marry her cousin Karl.”
“Why aren’t you reading medical texts?” said her father, giving her the fish eye. “What for did I spend all that money sending you to medical school?”
“Quiet, Mitch,” said Uncle Henry. “It’s a trick question.” He held a forkful of meat near his mouth and flashed a toothy smile. “To which I know the answer. Catherine the Great.” In went the chicken.
“That’s amazing,” said Rebecca’s mother, Flo. “You must be an awfully good history teacher. Don’t you think so, Mitch?” She passed down a platter filled with broccoli and toasted almonds.
“‘Awful’ is the right word there,” said her father, unable to resist. Both her mother and uncle had played straight man to Mitch’s routine ever since Rebecca could remember.
“Have you heard of a Polish king named Poniatowski?”
He shook his curly head, spearing some roast potatoes with his fork. “I’m on shakier ground there. Poland was always overshadowed by the superpowers around her. Russia. Austria. Germany — or in those days, Prussia. Around the end of that century, if I remember correctly, they carved Poland up like a cake and divided it three ways among themselves: Russia on the east, Prussia on the west, and Austria on the south. Your grandparents came from the Austrian side. That’s why we all had German last names.”
Rebecca had never thought to ask why her mother’s maiden name, Wagman, was German when her parents, Rebecca’s grandparents, came from Poland.
“Not all of us had German names,” said her father. “Temple comes from Templitsky. We were from the Russian side. It was a mixed marriage,” he said, smiling mischievously at Flo.
Rebecca knew the derivation of her last name, but had never understood the context before.
“Catherine was not good for the Jews,” Uncle Henry continued. “She was the one who created the Pale of Settlement.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Rebecca said, “but I never understood what it was.”
“Ah.” He nodded, his grey eyes glinting with implication. “Jews were not considered good for Russia — they were stubborn and wouldn’t assimilate, and when Catherine acquired the eastern chunk of Poland in the partition, she inherited the large population of Jews that lived there. Everyone was afraid the Jews would leave the territory and spread out into Russia. So she decreed that all Jews, Polish and Russian alike, had to settle in the new area. The Pale. As in ‘stake,’ or ‘picket.’ They were especially eager to expel the Jews from cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow and sent them to live in villages in the new part where they couldn’t own land or get higher education.”
Rebecca felt betrayed, led on by the empathy she had felt for the character in Michael’s story. She remembered the old rabbi’s vision and foreshadowing of evil when Catherine was still Sophie on her way to meet her future husband.
Uncle Henry chewed on his potatoes, fixing an eye on her. “What’s this sudden interest in European history?”
Rebecca took that moment to turn to her mother. “Chicken’s really good tonight, Ma.” She popped a piece in her mouth.
“Thanks, dear. And I’m glad to see you’re taking an interest in something other than work.”
“Don’t listen to your mother,” Mitch said, his mouth on an angle. “Medicine is interesting enough. History’s passé.”
Rebecca acknowledged the joke with a smirk. “But I am curious about a few things, Uncle Henry. For instance, how does history view Catherine?”
They all turned to Henry, who solemnly put down his fork and adopted his teacher’s face.
“Catherine is seen as an ambitious, ruthless woman who had her husband murdered so that she could become empress of all the Russias.”
“Murdered?” Rebecca said. “She didn’t seem to be capable of that in the story I’m reading.”
“Well, there’s no evidence that she actually gave the order to kill him, but shortly after becoming emperor her husband was put into prison. Catherine’s lover at the time, a popular Russian officer, helped her stage a coup. Once her husband was in prison, it wasn’t long before he was killed. Though she denied it, people always murmured that her lover had done what she asked him to do. But afterwards, she appeared on her horse in a Russian soldier’s uniform and people cheered.”
“Her husband would’ve been a disastrous ruler,” she said.
Her uncle smiled. “You have been reading. All in all, Catherine was an excellent empress. She tried to overhaul the whole legal system of Russia. She was sympathetic to the serfs and tried to better their lot, and most important of all, she won a great victory over Turkey in a war she was expected to lose. That was where she acquired her title. After that war Russia was considered one of the great powers.”
“Did you know she had an affair with the Polish nobleman who became King of Poland? That she had his child?”
Henry’s mouth pursed while he ruminated. “I don’t know anything about that. It sounds like he was a footnote in her eventful life. And how much could she have cared for him if she made his country disappear?”
Rebecca recalled the tale the rabbi had told Sophie about the two souls who were eventually torn apart by the woman’s ambition. It was so hard to fathom, the sweep of a life.
He spooned more potatoes onto his plate. “That’s why history is so fascinating. We live our lives on the tip of an iceberg and only begin to understand why we’re here when we splash around and look below.”
“Gee, Henry, I never realized you knew so much,” Mitch said. “Maybe you should be a teacher.”
“Do you know who the Jacobites were, Uncle Henry?”
“The Jacobites, my dear, were followers of the Catholic King James of Scotland. The word comes from ‘Jacobus,’ the Latin for ‘James.’ His son and grandson were called Pretenders because they tried to take the throne from the reigning monarchs of England. Quite a to-do at the time.”
Flo gazed at her younger brother with pride.
“If you’re that interested,” Henry said, “I’ve got some books on the period at home…”
“Anyone want to hear a joke?” Mitch said, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
“… if you’d like to borrow anything.”
“Thanks, Uncle Henry. What I’d really like to know is what happened to the child Catherine had with Poniatowski.” That seemed to be the obvious place to look for Michael’s great-great-great-grandmother.
“Do you remember the kid’s name?”
“Anna.”
“I’ll check out my eighteenth-century shelf when I get home. How late can I call you?”
Rebecca grinned at his enthusiasm. “If you find something, let me know. Whenever.”
Rebecca glided toward the light in the distance, her gown rustling as she moved, a gossamer silver trimmed with pearls and pink roses. People stepped demurely to a minuet around the high-ceilinged ballroom. Rebecca stopped at the doorway, knowing they would want to bow as she entered the room. Floating across the ballroom, she gave them the opportunity to admire her chestnut hair piled elaborately on top of her head, decorated with jewelled combs and aigrettes, her white skin glowing with rouge.
A new minuet starts up and Count Poniatowski stands before her, eager to begin the dance. He smiles with soft curved lips, his long hair waved and yellow above straight shoulders. She takes the hand he offers and steps into the music. The floor dazzles with light from crystal chandeliers. The courtiers bow to her as they pass by, sparks flying from their diamonds and gold.
“I am only sorry our dance ended so soon,” he says.
Since they have just begun, she wonders at this, but when she looks up into his face, it’s Michael, his blue eyes smiling at her. Her heart lifts and she opens her mouth to frame a question, a thousand questions, but her voice is stuck somewhere in her throat. Then an irksome noise begins.
A bell rings in her ear. Then his face, her gown, the room melt away. It rings again and she’s awake.
“Hello.”
“Did I wake you?”
Her brain rearranged itself into the present, her bedroom in Toronto, 1979. “It’s okay, Uncle Henry. Did you find something?”
“Not good news. I looked up my biography of Catherine the Great and she did have a child named Anna by Stanislaw Poniatowski in December 1757. But the child died in the spring of 1759 when she was fourteen months old.”
“Oh.” Now Rebecca understood why Michael hadn’t counted on the offspring from that side.
“Catherine didn’t forget him, though,” said Henry. “You piqued my curiosity and I read ahead. Shortly after she became empress, Augustus, the king of Poland, died. He was also Elector of Saxony, but that’s another story. Anyway, there were a few candidates for the job of king, but Catherine sent Russian troops to Warsaw to make sure her ex-lover was chosen. She was the ruling power in those days and the man she chose to be king would become king. It seemed less a personal choice than a political one though. She wanted someone who would do her bidding. And who better than a man still besotted.”
“What do you mean?”
“Poniatowski seems to have gone to his grave loving her.”
“So first she made him king,” said Rebecca, “and later she took away his kingdom.”
“Just so.”
She remembered the rabbi’s story in Michael’s book, the magic grain of wheat that the young man worshipped and the young woman failed to comprehend — Rebecca realized it was Poland.
A few minutes before eleven in the morning Rebecca found the University Café on Spadina Avenue just north of Harbord. She sat down at a table for two. Then she waited. She drank a cup of decaffeinated coffee. She watched customers come and go. And she waited.
By 11:30 she decided Teodor was not coming. Maybe he thought he could get her off his back by making an assignation he had no intention of keeping. She wasn’t that easily put off. If he had killed Michael, she would find him. Except that she was at a disadvantage now because she didn’t know his last name. The Slavic Studies office would be closed on Saturday. Just for good measure she called.
In the phone booth on the corner she listened to the signal ringing, ringing. Then she remembered something Edward had said about Teodor’s last name.
She dialed Sarah’s number.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Sarah, how are you?”
“Fine, dear, how are you?”
“This is going to sound strange but I need to know a word in Polish. The word for green.”
There was a moment of silence, which Rebecca took to be surprise rather than thought.
“Zielony. The word for green is zielony.”
“I’ll explain it some other time. It’s a long story. Could you spell it please?”
Once she had hung up, Rebecca pulled open the well-thumbed Toronto phone book attached by a chain to the booth. There were only two Zielonys in the book, only one with the initial T. She dialed the number. It rang five times before she pressed down the button and dialed again. Maybe he was on a flight back to Poland. She recognized his street address; it was just a few blocks away, walking distance to his office. Which made sense. She had to go back that way to her own office where she had left her car. But if he’d killed Michael, she wasn’t going there alone.
Pushing another dime into the slot, she dialed again.
“Hi Iris. Are you busy?”
She walked slowly down Spadina Avenue and took a few side streets until she reached College Street. Hauer may’ve been a pompous clown, but what he said about Teodor rang true. It all fit. Especially now that he was avoiding her.
She came to a small street that ran south off College. Teodor lived in a low-rise apartment building identical to all the others on the street. Though she had the address, she didn’t have the apartment number. Lucky for her, the names of the tenants were listed on the mailboxes. He was in the basement.
She hung back in the shadow of a spreading chestnut tree on the corner. Finally, Iris drove up in her silver Pontiac. She parked at a meter on College Street.
“Did you ring the bell?” Iris asked, her blond hair swept up in waves off her neck. Even in casual khaki trousers and a print blouse she looked tailored. Rebecca had briefed her on the phone and Iris was ready to go.
She rang the buzzer for the basement. No response. She rang again. Nobody was coming in or out; it was very quiet for a Saturday.
“Wait here!” Iris said with the same authority that had made her indispensable in the office. She marched around the side of the building in her low-heeled pumps.
A moment later, Iris called out. Rebecca stepped around the corner and found her assistant grinning as she held the back door open for her. It had been left propped ajar with a piece of wood. Someone must have wanted fresh air.
They stepped down the linoleum-covered stairs toward Teodor’s apartment. The same linoleum covered the floor of the hallway, worn, but clean. It didn’t look like the home of a killer. But evil was banal, wasn’t it?
Iris knocked on his door. They waited. She knocked again, an impatient clamour in the quiet hall. Did he think they would just go away?
“We know you’re in there!” Iris said. “Open the door.”
Maybe Iris knew he was in there. But Rebecca thought he’d probably skipped town, once he realized she suspected him. And she didn’t want Iris to break down the door. Then she noticed it was not firmly set in, the way it would be if it were locked. She tried the handle and it turned easily.
She pushed the door open. “Teodor?”
The apartment was dark inside, as if the curtains were still drawn from the night. A musty basement odour escaped into the hall.
They stepped into the front entranceway and both gasped together. In the centre of the living room, a body hung suspended from a rope around its neck. The other end was attached to a light fixture. Rebecca found the light switch. Iris looked away. It was Teodor. His eyes were bulging, his neck a mottled purple. His skin had the waxy appearance of someone who’d been dead for a while.
Iris stayed rooted to the spot. Rebecca approached gingerly, looking around. She touched one of his hands. It was ice cold and a bit stiff. Rigor mortis had come and gone. He had probably been dead all night. An overturned stool lay beneath him.
She found a phone in the kitchen and called the police. Iris retreated back into the hall to wait for the cops to arrive. Rebecca avoided looking at the body hanging in the middle of the room while she prowled around with great care, being sure not to touch anything. On a desk near the window lay an orderly sheaf of papers. She stood beside it and read the top sheet. She recognized the type, the uneven pressure of some of the letters, the slight break in the letter “o” —it was the same as Michael’s manuscript:
My life is unbearable. I cannot go on. I’m sorry about Count Oginski, I shouldn’t have done it. But he took away my future. He made history into popular culture, debasing it into a cheap novel. Everything I worked so hard for, it all seemed so senseless. I thought if I could use some of his research — but it is impossible. My thesis is a shambles and will never be accepted. My failure is too much to endure.
The initials, “T.Z.” were written by hand at the bottom.
She read it over again. I’m sorry about Count Oginski. I shouldn’t have done it. There it was. He had killed Michael. Why, she wasn’t quite sure. He blamed Michael for ruining his thesis. Hauer had said he had trouble keeping up with the work, that he was desperate. Michael had been a scapegoat for an unstable mind. Following in his father’s footsteps. He seemed paranoid about Hauer; maybe he had been living in some delusional system that she never got the opportunity to observe.
A bell went off in her head. She stared at the pile of paper beneath the suicide note. It wasn’t thick enough to be the rest of the manuscript, but it was something.
She didn’t want to touch the note so she bent over and blew it gently until it moved partly away. Peeking from beneath, the page read, “The Stolen Princess, February 1759.” So there it was.
Constable Woolrich arrived first, a lean, fair-haired young man who assumed a business-like manner while speaking to Rebecca and Iris but who seemed shaken by the corpse in the living room. Standing in the hall, his back turned to the open door, he dutifully wrote down in his notebook the story Rebecca told him of Michael’s death and how it seemed connected to Teodor. She mentioned the suicide note.
“A detective will be by shortly,” said the constable. “He’ll sort out all of that.”
Within the hour, Detective Frohman arrived, followed by forensic people in white coveralls. Still in the hallway, she repeated everything to the detective, a portly, middle-aged man with brush-cut hair who smelled vaguely of stale cigarette smoke.
When she mentioned the letter, he stuck his head in the doorway.
“Hey Phil,” he called to one of the forensic guys, “dust the letter on the desk, will ya?”
“You’ve been a big help, Doctor.” He turned to Iris. “Ma’am. Now if you’ve given the constable your addresses and phone numbers, you’re free to go.”
Rebecca remembered the small pile of papers beneath the letter.
“Would I be able to… I mean, would it be all right if I took the pages sitting there on the desk? Once you’ve finished your investigation. They’re part of a manuscript that Teodor took from Mr. Oginski and I’d like to give them back to his son.” After she had photocopied and read them.
“You’ll have to wait till forensics is finished, Doctor. That’ll still be a while. Do you know who his next of kin is?”
“No, I hardly knew him. But you could ask his supervisor. Anton Hauer. I have his office number.”
He copied the number down from the card she retrieved from her wallet.
The forensic team worked quietly in the shadow of the body suspended from the ceiling. After the coroner arrived and had a chance to examine the body in situ, Teodor was at last cut down and laid out on the floor. As a physician she had seen death in many forms, but violent death was rare in her practice and never failed to shock her. Iris was uncharacteristically quiet. Her hair still swept up from her face, though her features had fallen.
Once outside, Rebecca breathed in great gulps of fresh air. Iris looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
Rebecca felt guilty for asking her to come. She walked Iris to her car. “How about dinner tonight? We’ll go out for Chinese.”
Iris gave her a baleful look. “For a change I have no appetite.”
Rebecca tried to smile, gazed numbly at the leafy linden trees. “It’ll come back by tonight. Think of it this way: Teodor felt guilty for killing Michael and chose to end his own life. It doesn’t make things any more palatable, but it does put them into perspective.” She put her hand gently on Iris’s arm. “Meet me at the office at seven o’clock and we’ll stroll over to Spadina Gardens.” Iris’s favourite restaurant.
“I’ll drive you to your car,” Iris said, without expression.
“No, that’s all right. It’s just a few blocks. I’d like to walk.”
She watched Iris, looking dazed, step into her Pontiac and drive off.
Rebecca turned south. The afternoon sun warmed the Victorian stone houses of Beverley Street, just like yesterday. As if nothing had changed. As if Teodor was too small to count in the scheme of things.
Her empty office seemed curiously peaceful in light of the afternoon’s events. Suddenly her head became too heavy for her neck. She eased into the leather chair behind her desk and put her head down to rest on her arms.
An hour and a half later she startled awake. She blinked at her watch: 3:30.
In the bathroom she splashed cold water on her face, catching herself in the mirror. Her dark hair lay in unruly waves around her face, a pale, unwholesome apparition. She had missed lunch and began to feel the gnawing of an empty stomach.
In the drawer of her desk she found an old Three Musketeers bar and took a few bites. Some roasted almonds kept it company until she chewed them up. After downing a glass of water, she set out for Teodor’s apartment again.
When she arrived, a few people were leaving the building and let her in the front door. There was yellow police tape across the apartment door but no constable guarding, which, she assumed, meant they had finished their preliminary investigation. She kicked herself for falling asleep. They had probably locked the door. Well, they had probably tried, but it didn’t quite fit into the doorframe. She turned the handle, and to her surprise, it gave way.
Ducking under the tape, she stepped into the apartment. The body was gone, but an unsavoury odour lingered. From the distance she could see the pages on the desk. They had been left behind. Lucky her.
She should probably get permission from the cops, but that would take time. She picked up the pile of paper reverently and estimated the number of pages: only about ten. A chapter. It was titled “Escape and Rescue.” Where was the rest of the manuscript? If Teodor had killed Michael, the manuscript had to be here.
She began pulling open the drawers of the desk. There was a manuscript, a thick one in a binder, but it was Teodor’s thesis, titled, “The Disappearance of Poland: Life during Partition.” It was riddled with red editorial markings, entire pages dismissed with jagged, irritated lines, presumably made by Hauer. The middle drawer held file folders filled with copious notes in Teodor’s hand. In the bottom drawer she found a handwritten letter:
I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your manuscript. It is a masterpiece! You made history come alive, writing about the real people who created events. We historians start with events and try to discover why they happened and only incidentally talk about the people. I wanted to tell you how much your book has influenced my work and come to make me view “history” in a different way. Do not be concerned about the scholarly approach of some academics who —
How two-faced he was! Or just conflicted. He hated Michael’s book. He loved Michael’s book. Very unstable. A fragile personality.
Then a shock came over her. It was her phone call that had pushed him over the edge! Her wanting to talk to him about Michael. He realized she knew. And he couldn’t face the consequences. He was fastening the noose around his neck while she was having a pleasant dinner at her parents’ house. If she hadn’t called him…
She distracted herself by continuing to search for the manuscript. It was a bachelor apartment with a pull-out couch where he must have slept. The closet and the dresser in the corner contained only his drab, simple clothes, corduroy trousers and washed-out shirts.
She couldn’t think straight. Her stomach was growling and she needed to pay attention to it. Maybe some Chinese takeout. The thought of food nauseated her in the middle of this pathetic apartment, the chaos of a life lost, the possibility that the life had been lost with her help.
Picking up the chapter of The Stolen Princess, she tiptoed out of the apartment.