The Progeny (30 page)

“This won’t work,” Luka murmurs.

“It has to,” I say, combing the bangs of my wig down toward my eyes.

“Audra.” He catches me by the arm. “We can still turn around and leave.”

But that’s the thing. We can’t.

I
persuade
the ticket agent to bump two other passengers from the last flight to Liverpool, which is as far as we can get on anything tonight. Which is to say, not far enough. I suggest, too, that I actually resemble the photo in my new German passport, which looks nothing like me.

Past the ticket counter, I pause to assess security. The agents who can be persuaded. The cameras that can’t. They’re not my only problem; an entire terminal full of passengers waits beyond the checkpoint.

“This is crazy,” Luka whispers. “There’s too many. You can’t do this alone.”

It is crazy. Jester, Claudia, and Piotrek together wouldn’t take this on. But I don’t have a choice.

I present my ticket and passport to the agent at the front of the line. Ignore Luka as he does the same behind me. Take the envelope out from beneath my sweater. Lay it, along with my shoes, jacket, and phone, on the conveyor belt. That is the hardest part: watching it pass from my possession. So simple and old-fashioned on that moving belt. So much trouble over a stack of papers. So many lives lost, families ruined. So much blood spilled.

Too much.

By the time we get through security, my nose is bleeding again. I retrieve the envelope, hurry to the bathroom, where I tuck it back beneath my sweater once I’ve gotten the bleeding to stop. I also take the opportunity to flush the note from Nikola down the toilet.

I stay there as long as I dare, head tilted back against the stall, eyes turned toward the ceiling. But I know Luka is waiting and I don’t dare let him out of my sight for long.

We move quickly through the terminal, sequester ourselves near a window at our gate. No one in a twenty-foot radius is looking, far too preoccupied with phones, children, conversations.
Anything. Anything but me.

I don’t have to try to keep my knee from bouncing; there’s no spare energy for the jitters. I turn my face against Luka’s shoulder, a wad of toilet paper held to my nose.

“How are you doing this?” he murmurs, holding me tightly against him.

I don’t answer. My head has begun to pound.

“Audra, you’re going to give yourself an aneurysm,” he says tightly.

I actually wonder if he’s right.

“It’s worse if you talk about it,” I say.

He pulls me tighter against his chest, holds my head in his arms.

“I was thinking,” he says, “maybe we go from Liverpool to Dubai.”

“Dubai?”

“We’ll get you a burka, make this whole anonymity thing a lot easier.”

I exhale a soft, pained laugh. But it’s not my anonymity I’m worried about.

“Whose idea was Maine?” I murmur.

“Yours,” he says, and I can’t help a small smile.

When they call boarding at last, he has to help me up.

By the time we get in line I’m swaying on my feet. His arm tightens around me. A woman behind us offers him a bottle of water. She thinks I’m sick. And I am.

Waiting in our seats on the plane is the worst. He lays his head atop mine, which is resting on his shoulder. I close my eyes and hold his hand.

I want to hold it forever.

I wait for the remaining passengers to straggle on and fumble for overhead space, for the tone to indicate that the door is about to close.

At the last possible second I unbuckle my seat belt and push up unsteadily.

He clutches me. “Where are you going?”

I cup my hand to my face, say I’m going to be sick. It’s not the first time I’ve told that lie.

He reaches for the airsick bag.

“No,” I say urgently. “Not here.”

I hurry past the flight attendants to the galley, grab a stack of napkins. Glance back at Luka’s stricken face.

Throw a last, massive persuasion behind me.

Don’t let that man off the plane.

The next second I’m out the door and sprinting up the jet bridge as fast as I can. Crying.

I’m almost to ground transportation when my phone starts ringing. I ignore it, hail a cab. The phone is relentless.

Finally, I shut it down.

36

I
close my eyes in the back of the cab, a tissue shoved up my nose. Head pounding, face swollen—from tears,
persuasion
. From life.

We drive past a field of windmills, giant turbines blade-silent against the gray sky. I pull the envelope from the waist of my pants, clutch it in my lap, and watch windmill after windmill go by.

It takes everything I have not to reassemble my phone. To call Luka, tell him I love him—again, again, and again. But not to say I’m sorry. I’ve had a shroud of death over my head since the day I was born, but he—he has to live. There are so few things of real beauty in this world. It cannot afford to lose one more.

Nausea and dizziness roll past me, leaving me wasted in their wake. I pull the tissue from my nose, glance at the envelope. Steeling myself, I loosen the tie, take out the stack of papers.

I carefully unfold the Scion map, lay it out on the seat beside me. And that’s what it is: a map of the organization through the ages, the chronicle of its power. The circles toward the bottom of the expanding tree are mostly blank, some of them filled only with the name of a financial institution, a government agency, or a surname. I don’t know how this information was collected, or how reliable it is. Can only imagine the cost of adding even one name to its morbid genealogy.

The lineage of the hunted on the other side is far more tragically complete. There’s a pen clipped to the seatback in front of me. I take it and carefully fill in the name of my mother’s killer:

Nikola, so-called Prince of Budapest. Traitor.

Though it may end up in Nikola’s hands, it will at least show the truth.

I turn my attention to the rest of the assortment on my lap: several pages, worn and folded, my name written on one side. I unfold and smooth them out. Notes, penned in Hungarian, the English translation added more recently in the margins:

Trial documents sealed by Habsburg court—discovered by Jesuit priest 1720s

Thurzo wife multiple visits to E. 1612.
steals E.’s jewelry each time (payment???)

E. daughter Katalin visit—living at Keresztur? at time

2 weeks before E. dies, priests Andras Kerpelich and Imre Agriensy come to witness will from
Esztergom bishopric

Buried Cachtice—NOT removed to Nyirbator.

Lamosz Cemetery Budapest? No—no longer exists

Trnava, Slovakia

I gather that these are the details of Elizabeth’s visitors as she lived walled up in darkness. The potential burial site of her body, which as far as I read was never found.

This isn’t my handwriting—whose notes are these?

I flip through page after page like this, translations of the original notes written from the margins into the corners in thick, broad curves, and feverishly across the back. At least I wasn’t the only one seemingly obsessed.

The last three pages are penned in the same hand, their rushed and sprawling lines solely in English.

Audra, my heart, my love . . .

This is a letter addressed to me. I rifle to the last page.

It is signed “Amerie.”

These pages, like the others, were written by my mother.

I read with shaking hands.

Audra, my heart, my love . . .

How do you put a lifetime on a page?

The day you were born I felt more alive than I had ever been before. On the day that you look into your own child’s eyes, you will understand what I am saying: that I saw the face of God.

I had never known such love, such gratitude and humility, as the moment I held you. Such purpose, and fire, as the instant I let you go. Determination to change the future that pulled us apart.

In another life, I would have told you stories about your grandmother and made you dumplings, which are the only thing I ever learned to cook. I would have held you every night until you would no longer let me. We would have laughed and sung songs and played hide-and-seek. And I would have left you treasures as my own mother did when I was old enough to find them.

I would have told you everything I knew about your father, whose name was Tamas Vargha. The most noble man I ever met.

We would have fought, I am sure, over your independence, which I would have been fearful to grant you. Wanting to protect you, which I think, aside from love, must be the biggest instinct a mother has.

I did not know my own mother until I was the age you are now as I write this—eighteen. I knew her only a year before she was taken. I see her face before me every day, trace the faint lines of her mouth with the finger of my mind. I have always been like that, never forgetting anything I have seen, and so the image of your face—dangerously provided too few times throughout your life by a mutual friend—has always been in front of me. You are beautiful.

I hoped that we would begin a new life together one day. I will hold out hope until my dying breath, but you should know I have sworn to leave the Scions nothing. Having stolen you from my life, they will not benefit from its memory.

Maybe you resent me or even hate me for the fact that I had to leave you. Or maybe you have some vision of me greater than anything I can live up to. Nothing you do or have done or are could possibly fall short of my vision of you. You were perfect when you were born. You are perfect to me now. Perfect, even in your mistakes. Nothing—not even you—would ever convince me otherwise.

I seal this letter with several notes and hope I have time to give them to Imre. He knows to give them to you, and will not dare to look at them in order to protect them. You are too old by now for songs and I cannot hold you. But I leave treasure for you. Find it. Live. Let my life’s work be my humble offering for all the years I could not be the mother I hoped to you.

I love you, Audra, and will have many things to say to God about my loss of you. But many more to say for the gift of you.

Amerie . . . Mother

It is dated three years ago.

I read the pages again and again, searching every word for the cadence of her voice. Aching to hear it.

At last I cover my face out of sight of the driver, and sob.

*  *  *

W
e are fifty kilometers from the outskirts of Budapest by the time I fold her letter away and look again at her soaring notes. Churches, some of their names scored out. Names of people and estates written at various angles across the page where she ran out of space. The names of those who visited Elizabeth in her imprisonment, and took her last confession.

The next things in the stack are little pieces of paper like the kind you tear off a cube. I recognize Luka’s handwriting across all three of them, their lines short—the kinds of notes you leave on a countertop, on a refrigerator, or by a bedside.

I love you, Princess.

—L

Do you know how beautiful you are?

—L

One more day. I’ll be the man waiting at the altar.

—L

I stare, frozen, at the last note in my hand.

The paper beneath it is a marriage certificate.

37

I
’m married.

I glance at the date on the certificate: September 24. Last year.

Why didn’t he say anything? Why, when he saw the ring on my finger and I thought we were only engaged?

Because as far as he knew, I had seen everything in the vault. And then I deserted him on the plane.

I fumble for the phone, power it back on, and pray it still has a charge. When it comes to life, the screen floods with text messages and voice mails. I dial Luka’s number. He does not pick up.

No. Of course he doesn’t. With any luck he’s on his way to Liverpool. But I know he would never have willingly stayed on that plane without me, would have fought to follow me. In which case at least he doesn’t know where I am or what I’m about to do.

I page through Luka’s texts, sick at heart.