The fact that Sandru had raised the subject of buying and selling made the matter easier 
to broach.
  	"I do know Katya would love to have something from her homeland to take back to 
Hollywood," he said. "She's built a huge house, so we have plenty of room."
  	"Oh, yes?"
  	'And of course, she has the money."
  	This was naked, he knew, but in his experience of such things subtlety seldom 
played well. Which point was instantly proved.
  	"How much are we talking about?" the Father asked mildly.
  	"Katya Lupi is one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood. And I am authorized 
to buy whatever I think might please her."
  	"Then let me ask you: what pleases her!"
  	"Things that nobody else would be likely-no, could possibly-possess, please her," 
Zeffer replied. "She likes to show off her collection, and she wants everything in it to 
be unique."
  	Sandru spread his arms and his smile. "Everything here is unique."
  	"Father, you sound as though you're ready to sell the foundations if the price is 
right."
  	Sandru waxed metaphysical. "All these things are just objects in the end. Yes? 
Just stone and wood and thread and paint. Other things will be made in time, to replace 
them."
  	"But surely there's some sacred value in the objects here?" The Father gave a 
little shrug. "In the Chapel, upstairs, yes. I would not want to sell you, let us say, 
the altar." He made a smile, as though to say that under the right circumstances even 
that would have its price. "But everything else in the Fortress was made for a secular 
purpose. For the pleasure of dukes and their ladies. And as nobody sees it now...except a 
few travelers such as yourselves, passing through...I don't see why the Order shouldn't 
be rid of it all. If there's sufficient profit to be made it can be distributed amongst 
the poor."
  	"There are certainly plenty of people in need of help," Zeffer said. He had been 
appalled at the primitive conditions in which many of the people in the locality lived. 
The villages were little more than gatherings of shacks, the rocky earth the farmers 
tilled all but fruitless. And on all sides, the mountains-the Bucegi range to the east, 
to the west the Fagaras Mountains-their bare lower slopes as gray as the earth, their 
heights dusted with snow. God knew what the winters were like in this place: when even 
the dirt turned hard as stone, and the little river froze, and the walls of the shacks 
could not keep out the wind whistling down from the mountain heights.
  	The day they'd arrived, Katya had taken Willem to the cemetery, so that she could 
show him where her grandparents were buried. There he'd had proof aplenty of the 
conditions in which her relatives lived and died. It was not the resting places of the 
old that had moved Willem; it was the endless rows of tiny crosses that marked the graves 
of infants: babies lost to pneumonia, malnutrition and simple frailty. The grief that was 
represented by these hundreds of graves had moved him deeply: the pain of mothers, the 
unshed tears of fathers and grandfathers. It was nothing he had remotely expected, and it 
had made him sick with sorrow.
  	For her part, Katya had seemed untouched by the sight, talking only of her 
memories of her grandparents and their eccentricities. But then this was the world in 
which she'd been raised; it wasn't so surprising, perhaps, that she took all this 
suffering for granted. Hadn't she once told him she'd had fourteen brothers and sisters, 
and only six of them were left living? Perhaps the other eight had been lain to rest in 
the very cemetery where they'd walked together. And certainly it would not be uncommon 
for Katya to look coldly on the business of the heart. It was what made her so strong; 
and it was her strength-visible in her eyes and in her every movement-that endeared her 
to her audiences, particularly the women.
  	Zeffer understood that coldness better now that he'd spent time here with her. 
Seeing the house where she'd been born and brought up, the streets she'd trudged as a 
child; meeting the mother who must have viewed her appearance in their midst as something 
close to a miracle: this perfect rosebud child whose dark eyes and bright smile set her 
utterly apart from any other child in the village. In fact, Katya's mother had put such 
beauty to profitful work at the age of twelve, when the girl had been taken from town to 
town to dance in the streets, and-at least according to Katya-offer her favors to men 
who'd pay to have such tender flesh in their bed for the night. She had quickly fled such 
servitude, only to find that what she'd had to do for her family's sake she had no choice 
but to do for herself. By the age of fifteen (when Zeffer had met her, singing for her 
supper on the streets of Bucharest) Katya had been a woman in all but years, her 
flowering an astonishment to all who witnessed it. For three nights he'd come to the 
square where she sang, there to join the group of admirers who were gathered around to 
watch this child-enchantress. It hadn't taken him long to conceive of the notion that he 
should bring her back with him to America. Though he'd had at that time no experience in 
the world of the cinema (few people did; the year was 1916, and film was a fledging), his 
instincts told him there was something special in the face and bearing of this creature. 
He had influential friends on the West Coast-mostly men who'd grown tired of Broadway's 
petty disloyalties and piddling profits, and were looking for a new place to put their 
talents and their investments-who reported to him that cinema was a grand new frontier, 
and that talent scouts on the West Coast were looking for faces that the camera, and the 
public, would love. Did this child-woman not have such a face, he'd thought? Would the 
camera not grow stupid with infatuation to look into those guileful yet lovely eyes? And 
if the camera fell, could the public be far behind?

  	He'd inquired as to the girl's name. She was one Katya Lubescu from the village 
of Ravbac. He approached her; spoke to her; told her, over a meal of cabbage rolls and 
cheese, what he was thinking. She was curiously sanguine about his whole proposal; 
practically indifferent. Yes, she conceded, it sounded interesting, but she wasn't sure 
if she would ever want to leave Romania. If she went too far from home, she would miss 
her family.
  	A year or two later, when her career had begun to take off in America-she no 
longer Katya Lupescu by then but Katya Lupi, and Willem her manager-they'd revisited this 
very conversation, and Zeffer had reminded her how uninterested she'd seemed in his grand 
plan. Her coolness had all been an illusion, she'd confessed; a way in part to keep 
herself from seeming too gauche in his eyes, and in part a way to prevent her hopes 
getting too high.
  	But that was only part of the answer. There was also a sense in which the 
indifference she'd demonstrated that first day they'd met (and-more recently-in the 
cemetery) was a real part of her nature; bred into her, perhaps, by a bloodline that had 
suffered so much loss and anguish over the generations that nothing was allowed to 
impress itself too severely: neither great happiness nor great sadness. She was, by her 
own design, a creature who held her extremes in reserve, providing glimpses only for 
public consumption. It was these glimpses that the audience in the square had come to 
witness night after night. And it was this same power she would unleash when she appeared 
before the cinematrographic camera.