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 enthrall 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, Mister 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.”