“Fourteenth-century—” Madame Vezerizac had begun her sales pitch, but Karou didn’t need to hear it. It seemed disrespectful to the knives to haggle, so she paid the asking price without batting an eye.
Each knife was made up of two blades, like crescent moons interlocking, hence the name. The grips were in the middle, and when wielded the knives provided a number of piercing and slicing edges and, perhaps most important, blocking points. The crescent moons were an optimal weapon for taking on multiple opponents, especially opponents with long weapons like swords. If she’d had them in Morocco, the angel would not have overpowered her so easily.
She’d also bought Zuzana a pair of vintage toe shoes and a lovely headdress of forlorn silk rosebuds, also from the turn-of-the-century Paris stage. “Want to get ready?” Karou asked her, and Zuzana, verklempt, nodded yes. They squeezed inside the puppeteer and tossed her other, unremarkable costume aside.
An hour later tourists were trooping across the bridge, questing toward the castle with their guidebooks under their arms, and a not-insignificant number of them had formed an anticipatory half circle around the giant puppeteer. Karou and Zuzana huddled inside it.
“Stop squirming,” said Karou, pausing with her makeup brush as Zuzana engaged in an unladylike tug-of-war beneath her tutu.
“My tights are crooked,” Zuzana said.
“Do you want your cheeks to be crooked, too? Hold still.”
“Fine.” Zuzana held still while Karou painted perfect pink rouge circles onto her cheeks. Her face was powder-white, and her lips had been transformed to a doll’s tiny Cupid’s bow, with two fine black lines out from the corners of her mouth, simulating a marionette’s hinged jaw. False eyelashes fringed her dark eyes, and she was dressed in the tutu, which did indeed fit, and the toe shoes, which had seen better days. Her white tights were laddered with runs and patched at the knees; one of the straps of her bodice hung broken; and her hair was a messy chignon crowned with faded rosebuds. She looked like a doll that had lain unloved in a toy chest for years.
A toy chest, in fact, stood open and ready to receive her as soon as her costume was squared away.
“All done,” said Karou, surveying her work. She clapped her hands once in delight and felt like Issa when she fixed Karou with temporary horns fashioned of parsnips, or a tail out of a feather duster. “Perfect. You look adorably pathetic. Some tourist is sure to try to carry you home as a souvenir.”
“Some tourist will rue the day,” Zuzana said, upending her tutu and pursuing the tights tug-of-war with surly determination.
“Would you leave those poor tights alone? They’re fine.”
“I hate tights.”
“Well, let me add them to the list. This morning you hate, let me see, men in hats, wiener dogs—”
“Wiener-dog owners,” Zuzana corrected. “You’d have to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs.”
“Wiener-dog owners, hairspray, false eyelashes, and now tights. Are you finished?”
“Hating things?” She paused, reading some inner gauge. “Yes, I think I am. For now.”
Mik peered through the opening. “We’ve got a crowd,” he said. It had been his idea to take Zuzana’s semester project to the street. He sometimes played his violin for change, donning a patch over his perfectly good left eye to seem more “romantic,” and he promised Zuzana she could make a few thousand crowns in a morning. He had his eye patch in place now, and looked somehow both roguish and darling.
“God, you’re adorable,” he said, his visible eye on Zuzana.
Usually adorable was not a word Zuzana relished. “Toddlers are adorable,” she’d snap. But where Mik was concerned, all bets were off. She blushed.
“You give me wrong thoughts,” he said, slipping into the crammed space, so Karou was trapped against the puppet’s armature. “Is it weird that I’m turned on by a marionette?”
“Yes,” said Zuzana. “Very weird. But it explains why you work at a marionette theater.”
“Not all marionettes. Just you.” He seized her around the waist. She squeaked.
“Careful!” Karou said. “Her makeup!”
Mik didn’t listen. He kissed Zuzana lingeringly on her painted doll mouth, smearing the red of her lipstick and the white of her face makeup, and coming up at last with his own lips rosebud pink. Laughing, Zuzana wiped it away for him. Karou considered touching her up, but the smear actually suited the whole disheveled look perfectly, so she left it.
The kiss also worked wonders on Zuzana’s nerves. “I think it’s showtime,” she announced brightly.
“Well, all right, then,” said Karou. “Into the toy box with you.”
And so it began.
The story Zuzana told with her body — of a discarded marionette brought out of its trunk for one last dance — was deeply moving. She started out clumsy and disjointed, like a rusty thing awakening, collapsing several times in a heap of tulle. Karou, watching the rapt faces of the audience, saw how they wanted to step forward and help the sad little dancer to her feet.
Over her the puppeteer loomed sinister, and as Zuzana twirled, its arms and fingers jittered and jumped as if it were controlling her, and not the other way around. The engineering was cunning and didn’t draw attention to itself, so that the illusion was flawless. There came a point, as the doll began to rediscover her grace, that Zuzana rose slowly onto pointe as if drawn up by her strings, and she elongated, a glow of joy on her face. A Smetana sonata soared off Mik’s violin strings, achingly sweet, and the moment went beyond street theater to touch something true.
Karou felt tears prick her eyes, watching. Within her, her emptiness pounded.
At the end, as Zuzana was forced back into the box, she cast toward the audience a look of desperate yearning and reached out one pleading arm before succumbing to her master’s will. The lid of the trunk slammed shut, and the music bit off with a twang.
The crowd loved it. Mik’s violin case filled fast with notes and coins, and Zuzana took a half dozen bows and posed for photos before vanishing inside the puppeteer’s trench coat with Mik. Karou had no doubt they were doing grievous damage to her makeup job, and she just sat on the trunk to wait it out.
It was there, in the midst of the school-of-fish density of tourists on the Charles Bridge, that the wrongness crept back over her again, slow and seeping, like a shadow when a cloud coasts before the sun.
27
NOT PREY, BUT POWER
You’re gonna live like prey, little girl.
Bain’s words rang in Karou’s ears as she looked around, searching faces in the throng surrounding her. Feeling exposed in the middle of the bridge, she squinted at the roofscapes on both riverbanks, her imagination running to the hunter sighting her through a rifle scope.
She shook it off. He wouldn’t, would he? The feeling faded and she told herself it had only been paranoia, but over the rest of the day it came and went in scattered chills as Zuzana danced a dozen more times, gaining confidence with each performance, and Mik’s violin case filled again and again, far exceeding his promised take.
He and Zuzana tried to coax Karou out to dinner with them, but she declined, pleading jet lag, which was not untrue but was also not foremost on her mind.
She was certain she was being watched.
Her fingertips fluttered against her palms. A prickle sparked there and traveled up her arms, and as she walked off the bridge and into the cobbled maze of Old Town, she knew she was being followed. She paused and knelt, pretending to adjust her boot as she pulled out her knife — her ordinary knife; her new crescent moons were in their case at her flat — and slipped it up her sleeve while scanning ahead and behind.