Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3)

by Brian David Bruns

  “Aren’t things supposed to be dead before you eat them?” I joked. “But seriously, we pasteurize it so people don’t get sick.”

  “Eating old food is supposed to make you sick,” Bianca chided gently.

  Good point.

  For perhaps the first time, I reflected upon my eating habits. When I had worked in an office environment, my lunch was either microwaved food or fast food, and breakfast in the car was common. I had always been more excited about the act of eating than the substance of it. I had also been thirty pounds overweight. Was I really such a zombie that I was incapable of asking myself whether or not my habits brought me joy? Was this, like, the beginning of wisdom and stuff?

  Huddled beneath our respective umbrellas in the dreary afternoon, the Pops made plans in Romanian. I opted out of trying to decipher their blur of words, but thought Bianca’s point about opening up to learning was valid. I instead noted a nearby sign. It was white with red letters and a picture of a snarling dog. It read ‘Câine rau.’

  “OK,” I said, “At least I need no translation for that one. Câine rau means ‘beware of dog.’”

  “It’s pronounced cu-eenay and rau rhymes with how,” Bianca corrected. “It literally translates as ‘bad dog.’”

  “Ham ham,” Piti agreed, nodding.

  Confusion, always hovering nearby, again pounced.

  “Ham?” I said. “So I’m supposed to feed bad dogs ham to keep them happy, or what?”

  “No, bamboclat,” Bianca chided. “Ham ham is what dogs say.”

  Chapter 3. Bad Dog

  1

  Though the weather was rainy and cold, our tour of Brașov was still cozy. I had dressed appropriately—meaning something other than Piti’s sweater vest—but was mostly warmed by sharing an umbrella with Bianca. When she slipped her arm through mine, I realized I had never actually strode arm in arm before. Bianca was a physical person, I was learning, and even held hands with her parents. My family was also loving, but three boys made affection a contact sport. As far as women went, my super hot ex-girlfriend had rarely been seen in public with me—no doubt to retain plausible deniability for all the other men she insisted she didn’t see. My ex-wife, of course, was warm as North Atlantic cod.

  Puddles were everywhere underfoot, as were cracks and other hazards: apparently plenty of people walked their dogs without bothering to clean up afterwards. People were everywhere: all walking, all wearing dark colors—black predominating—and all dressed nicely. This is not to imply expensively or formally, but merely that everyone gave some thought to how they looked before leaving home. No doubt this was why Walmart never bothered with Romania.

  To my surprise, all the street signs were in both Romanian and German. Indeed, everyone looked German rather than Russian, though their suspicious glances implied the latter. I wondered if they knew that the Iron Curtain had, in fact, been lifted.

  “Do my clothes really stick out so much?” I asked Bianca, concerned. “Really, I tried to dress appropriately. No tennis shoes and T-shirts and all that. But everyone is staring at me.”

  “We are speaking English,” Bianca explained. “And I look Romanian. You not noticed that everyone here has black hair? Your hair is your name.”

  “My hair is my name?” I asked, confused. This was fast becoming my new normal.

  “Brun is Romanian for brown,” she answered.

  “Really?” I said, surprised. “But my ancestry is German.”

  “Transylvania was populated by Germans for centuries, Mr. Brown,” Bianca pointed out.

  “I thought you were all Russian.”

  “Most Americans do,” she agreed.

  Etymology aside, Bianca was quite right. I had indeed noticed that everyone was homogenous in color. So were the buildings. Whatever the communists could not build with concrete was instead drowned in a pool of it. The weather amplified everything: structures, streets, walks, parks, expressions—all were dismal and depressed.

  We approached a long, pedestrian-only street. Two buildings flanking the entrance were both modern—one even contained a McDonald’s—but otherwise the entire street was filled with fascinating, centuries-old architecture shouldering the sky. A procession of name-brand clothiers receded into the distance. Now this was anything but communist!

  “This is Strada Republicii,” Bianca observed. “It leads to cool stuff.”

  “Strada Repooblichee,” I repeated.

  “Check the bullet holes,” she suggested, pointing to the tops of the two modern buildings. “Those ones are from machine guns during the revolution.”

  Little holes peppered the upper floors of the concrete buildings, reminding me of a middle-aged man with acne. I paused to marvel, then finally asked what had been on my mind for a while. My friend Mihaela had always refused to talk about it, but now the subject had been broached.

  “What was it like during the revolution?”

  “Not good,” she said dismissively, tugging on my arm to continue.

  “But your dad wasn’t retired then,” I pressed. “He was in the army. What was his role in all that mess?”

  “Check your McDonald’s,” she said instead. “Beside Dolce & Gabbana, as if both are equal premium. Ha!”

  Bianca obviously didn’t want to talk about the revolution any more than Mihaela, so I dropped the subject.

  Strada Republicii was indeed cool stuff, and I gawked at the buildings like a peasant entering his first city. I had always imagined that super old buildings would look, well, super old. Yet these were beautifully maintained structures with scrubbed marble and painted pillars.

  We browsed a bit in the shops, but the high prices would have sent a Manhattanite into cardiac arrest. Though I knew there were many thousands of Romanian lei to the US dollar, seeing eight digits on the tag for a suit freaked me out. All the employees, with slender bodies and slicked-back hair, were intensely attractive—and intensely indifferent. If Dracula himself flew in on bat wings and attacked me right there in the showroom, no one would have noticed.

  The strada opened into a huge, irregularly-shaped square. It was more of a lopsided triangle, really, defined by red-tiled merchant houses from ages ago. A wide, low fountain burbled noisily in competition with the drizzle, but the real focus of the piața was a yellow building topped with a tower.

  “That’s Trumpet Tower,” Bianca explained.

  “Good God,” I joked. “The Donald has prime real estate everywhere, doesn’t he?”

  Bianca leaned back in order to look at my face. “What’s a Donald? Anyway, Trumpet Tower was originally a watchtower looking for barbarians. I think you’ll like Biserica Neagră better. Check her in the corner there.”

  She waved a hand with grand flourish. I gasped.

  “The Black Church,” she proudly introduced.

  The horror geek in me took over. I couldn’t help it. Here I was in Transylvania, home of Dracula, standing before the largest Gothic cathedral I had ever seen, called the Black Church. This place must have more than merely bats in the belfry!

  “It’s spectacular,” I breathed, staring at the stained glass windows rising ramrod straight, from pavement to tiles, marching down the long flanks of the building. Heavy stone supports offset the glass, each accented with slender columns that spiked above the slanting roof. A single, squat tower rose from the huge structure.

  “She was a small church long ago,” Bianca narrated. “But was destroyed by the Mongols in the 1200s.”

  “The Mongols?” I asked, surprised. “The Mongols were in the steppes and stuff.”

  “They were from Asia, yes,” Bianca said. “Remember they invaded Europe, too.”

  I just nodded, embarrassed to find my historical knowledge was shallower than I had thought.

  “We rebuilt her, but the Turks destroyed her again in the 1400s. So we rebuilt her again. She got the name Black Church in the 1600s when the Hapsburgs invaded and burned her down. The smoke turned the foundation black, and it took one hundred ye
ars to fix her up again.”

  As the tour continued, we eased up increasingly steep cobblestone streets, narrow enough to prevent cars, and meandered outward from the old city’s center. The base of a mountain loomed above: tall, but predominantly a long, lumpy ridge smothered in thick forest. A neat cut of trees bisected the mountain’s flank in deference to a cable car. The top of the funicular accessed a restaurant and radio tower, while the bottom platform rested near an ancient defensive wall and an accompanying tower of old, beaten stone.

  “How old is this?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Pretty old,” Bianca said, shrugging. “I don’t know when it was first built, but this one was rebuilt by Vlad Țepes. Actually he made the guilds do it. That’s how it was done in those days.”

  “Vlad Tepes, the Impaler?” I asked, excitedly. “You mean Dracula?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “It’s pronounced Tse-PESH. The T and S have tails, making them different.”

  I stared in awe at the ruins. The city-side of the wall was about forty feet high, but being pressed up against the slope of the mountain would nullify such height from the outside—or so I thought. In fact, the entire hillside had been dug away from the base of the wall. There was no way to approach the defense without first walking into a flat kill zone.

  “Aaaah,” Bianca said, channeling her father’s enthusiasm as she pointed to some words cut into the stone. “This part was built by the shoemaker’s guild. See?”

  “This is so awesome!” I said. “Dug by hand six hundred years ago, at the order of Dracula himself! Maybe he even walked by to supervise. My friends are gonna die when they hear this.”

  “Oh, no,” Bianca groaned. “What are you, a peasant with superstitions and animal beliefs? Check, you like dead cheese and dead people! You even say your friends are going to die. Why you horror lovers all so creepy?”

  “Not all horror fans are creepy,” I grumbled, annoyed at her for dousing my enthusiasm. “Have you ever read the original book Dracula? It’s very good. Why do you think it spawned a century’s worth of fans?”

  “Bah! Tolstoy is very good. I no even think about death. Why bother, when life is so full of love and warmth? Still, if you like vampires so much, you’ll go coconuts when we go to my house in Sighișoara.”

  “Why, what’s there?”

  “You will see,” she replied cryptically.

  The low road stretched beneath the forest and along the defensive wall—built before Columbus was even born!—until we finally worked higher up the mountain. The lane was dripping with foliage dripping with water. We skirted the many pools on the path, pushing into each other with our hips and being generally playful. I felt fifteen years old, not thirty.

  “Tell me this isn’t where the teens go to make out,” I observed, eyeing the shadowed benches along the walk. I nudged her and teased, “Any stories you want to tell me? First kiss here?”

  Bianca harrumphed, then motioned to the mountain in general. “This is Tâmpa. She rises, oh, about 400 meters above the city. I don’t know how many of your foots that is. 1200 or something.”

  “So mountains are girls, then?” I asked.

  “No, mountains are boys,” she corrected.

  “But you called Timpa a girl.”

  “That’s because Tâmpa is a girl,” she said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “Ends with an ‘A’. And it’s Tâmpa, not Timpa. It’s an ‘A’ in the middle, one wearing a cap.”

  Not hearing any difference, I just nodded. I thought it funny how she engendered inanimate objects all the time.

  “Lots of walks wriggle around her,” Bianca continued. “Because she’s mostly a nature reserve now, with lots of rare animal species. Mucho bears.”

  “Bears?” I asked, surprised. It was a long ridge, sure, but looked awfully small to have ‘lots’ of bears. Why, the old city nuzzled right up to its base!

  “Mucho,” Bianca repeated cheerily. “Last week a bear killed a man here in Brașov, and mailed eight more.”

  “Mauled,” I corrected.

  “That one,” she agreed. “Don’t tell your mother, or she’ll throw her feet.”

  I was too busy looking for bears, or bear spoor—as if I knew what that looked like—to immediately realize what she said.

  “Throw her feet?”

  “You throw feet,” Bianca clarified. “And stomp them.”

  “You mean throw a fit,” I said, laughing nervously. I was very distracted and mumbled, “Your accent is showing, my dear.”

  The forest was already very dark around us. I swear I heard a growl. Do bears growl?

  “Here we go,” she said, nodding to a unique restaurant with a long stone deck sprouting heavy woodwork. It was the perfect blend of forest, traditional design, and clean modernity. “Casa Pădurarului.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “That’s almost as hard to say as your street name.”

  “Maybe we eat here sometime. They have bear on the menu. But first, up we go! Funicular is here, with café at top. The view should be good, too, because the rain stopped.”

  “Coffee sounds perfect,” I agreed, as we stepped onto the gently swaying cable car. Not surprisingly, it was painted to overtly advertise Coca Cola.

  The view on our ascent was, in a word, magnificent. Though the clouds obscured the sun, the hour was obviously late enough for darkness to creep into the valley. Below spread the entire old city with networked, narrow lanes aglow in lamplight, like a spider web glistening after a twilight rain. As we rose higher, distance blurred the scars of age to turn the red tiled roofs—each independently faded—into a speckled band of multicolored pebbles. The Black Church reared above like a boulder on a beach. By the time we topped Tâmpa, the forested mountains that sheltered Brașov became mere lumps of green.

  We arrived just in time for the café’s closing. We had been walking a long, long time and were desperate to get off our feet and drink something warm or alcoholic. Ideally both. It was not to be.

  “I think there are big rocks at the top with a view of the city,” Bianca said as she searched her memory. She pointed to a sodden path leaving our concrete platform to disappear into the dark, dripping forest. “Check there. What you think?”

  “I think it looks perfectly bear-sized.”

  “Bah! No bears here, papa.”

  “Lots of bears,” I mocked with an obnoxiously high voice, quoting her from earlier. “Mucho bears. Bears mailed eight people.”

  “My feet need rest, bears or no.”

  “Yeah, I’d hate to cram my fingers in those, too,” I said, eyeing her footwear. Below her swishing, full-length skirt were knee-high leather boots with high heels. “You sure? It looks pretty muddy.”

  “Is fine,” she scoffed. “Last tram leaves in thirty minutes. Mucho time.”

  Thus we entered the black woods of Transylvania. I was getting my horror geek on. Guided by occasional peeks of the city below us, we followed several different paths that radiated around the cluster of mid-ridge modernity. It was impossible to get truly lost, because the drop-off to the city was quite steep and there was no going down that. The woods were dense and gnarled, but stony outcroppings created enough gaps for the decreasing twilight to filter through. The city below snapped alive with orange lights, promising fantastic views once we found our seats. But, alas, we did not. After twenty minutes of muddy stomping, we still had not found the rocks Bianca was looking for. Or bears.

  After clambering up a wet, muddy slope, we suddenly found ourselves at the highest point of the whole mountain. The rocky outcropping was like an island over a sea of rippling forest—which dropped into the abyss like the ancient mariners feared lay at the end of the world. The city below was magnificent in night, with its orange lights burning the underside of the clouds.

  We had no hope of returning the way we came, but fortunately our exit was clear: a bridge descended from the exposed knoll, passed over a chasm, and ended at the café. We appreciated the view only briefly, because the fu
nicular’s last car was swaying at the gate, impatient to be done with its duty for the day. This should have been the end to a mini adventure.

  Should have.

  “He’s calling us,” Bianca noted, waving back to a skinny man—wearing black, of course—who stood in the tram’s gently swinging doorway.

  We crossed the bridge over the deep gap, when something horrible happened. It began innocently, when the back door to the café was kicked open and a cook tossed out a platter of scrap food. I smiled as a mother dog loped from the woods, leading three shuffling, tumbling little balls of fur.

  Suddenly I realized the food blocked our path to the tram. The bitch was a lean, street-tough sixty pounds or so, with swollen teats revealing the extreme youth of her pups. While they yipped and yapped and rolled happily in their food, their mother stood guard. The look she gave us needed no translation: she would block our exit as thoroughly as any border guard under the Iron Curtain.

  “How we cross?” Bianca asked, blinking in surprise at just how quickly the difficulty had materialized.

  “It could be worse,” I joked, “At least she’s not rabid.”

  The joke was on me when another dog approached, lured by the smell of a free meal. This was a larger, unkempt animal with extremely long legs. His fur was so shaggy that his weight was hard to gauge, but there was no mistaking whatsoever the flecks of white foaming at his mouth.

  “Damn!” I blurted, astounded at the coincidence. The timing was so perfect I would have laughed, had we not been trapped on a rainy mountaintop at night.

  The bitch growled a warning, but the feral newcomer ignored her—at his own peril. She leapt upon him, ferociously rending and tearing flesh and fur. The two savage combatants became a blur of spinning bodies, snapping fangs, and flying spittle. The bitch was particularly effective at darting in and slashing at her opponent, whose strategy appeared to be to stand firm and accept the attacks bodily while trying to clamp his foaming jaws upon her. This was a fight in earnest, a noisy, high-pitched ordeal of feral dominance and survival.