[Clean Up Crew 01.0] The Beauty of Bucharest

by SJ Varengo

  More than once, Nicole was sure she’d chosen incorrectly as she negotiated the winding tunnels. The twin goals of keeping track of any trace of the woman she was tailing and not being discovered herself was having the same effect as an especially intense morning run. Her heart rate was increased, beads of sweat were forming on her forehead in spite of the chilled December air. But, also like a hard run, her senses were on full alert, her adrenaline was elevated just enough to help her stay watchful for any clue, whether it be auditory or visual. She’d moved to a different tunnel five times, twice following a faint sound, three times noticing a scuff in the dirt on the floor, or a piece of debris that appeared to have been kicked aside.

  But now she was standing still. She’d come to the end of the shaft she’d been traversing and now was met with three new choices. She’d heard nothing for several minutes, and as she scanned the floor here, she detected no obvious hints as to which of three (if any) Gabor had taken. The possibilities, she thought. Can’t even flip a coin! She was about to take the opening that went left, but at the last minute, turned to the right. There was no particular reason for the choice, just another hunch. If she’d been prone to poetic explanations, she’d have said she’d felt a tug. But this was not the time for poetry.

  The catacombs were a mixed bag as far as condition. Some sections had been cleared by workers and were being reinforced and repaired. These tended to have had some lights built onto the ancient walls, some of which were actually lit. Other areas had suffered ceiling collapse, and while this often made the footing more of a challenge, it allowed some of the light from the city to filter down through the open holes. The tunnel down which she was moving now was neither artificially nor naturally lit, however. The junction point she’d just left had a work light, but this way was pitch black. Reluctantly, she pulled her phone from the purse that hung from her left shoulder to use its flashlight function. In contrast to the absolute black, it seemed like a floodlight. Aware that it could betray her presence, she would shine it long enough to make sure she wasn’t about to fall over something, then turn it toward her body to mute it.

  After making her way along the dark passage for five minutes, she paused again, questioning her decision to come this way. Turning the light toward her surroundings once more, she suddenly found herself having to stifle a gasp, for on the floor not two feet from her was a body.

  The initial shock passed quickly, and Nicole reasoned that this probably wasn’t that uncommon. Like any city, Bucharest had its share of poor, desperate, homeless people, for whom the catacombs might be a viable place to seek shelter. She was actually surprised that she hadn’t come across anyone squatting in the shafts through which she’d already passed. This person might just be sleeping, but it was also not illogical to surmise that someone might crawl along the dark passages and simply come to the end of their mortal saga as they did.

  However, shining the light on this crumpled form quickly revealed that this was no indigent. Though lying face down, Nicole could see that the man was dressed well, not stylishly, but in new jeans and a warm, down-filled jacket. His head was shaven. She now doubted the person was just sleeping due to the awkward positioning of the body: its left arm was twisted around behind the torso, as though being held in a hammerlock. There was no blood, so she quickly reasoned there were either no open wounds or that the person had been killed elsewhere and deposited here. Cautiously, she knelt beside the body and, sticking her gun back in the purse so that the grip was again protruding for quick access, she grasped the arm and gently rolled the body face up. This time, a loud gasp escaped her before her discipline could prevent it.

  The man lying dead in the dark catacomb passage was her friend and handler, Viktor.

  Dan’s sleep was fitful. The state of the bed proved that: sheets crumpled and pushed toward the foot, the warm comforter wadded up on the left side of the bed, as far from Dan’s sleeping form as it could be without actually having fallen to the floor. Two of the four pillows had their cases pulled off; a third was dangling, ready to fall off completely with his next abrupt movement. He was dreaming.

  In his mental cinema, Dan saw Nicole, alone and dressed as he’d seen her last, wearing the brown wig that had so aroused him. But he felt no lust now. The sole emotion was horror, for he could see that his wife was in great distress.

  It was difficult to make out her surroundings; she was shrouded in darkness. He could see the expression on her face, however, and that was the source of panic. Nicole’s beautiful features were twisted into a mask of pain and terror. Perhaps the worst part of the dream was that Dan couldn’t determine what was causing her anguish. All he could make out clearly was her tortured face.

  No, that wasn’t the worst. Far more horrible than even the pained expression was the fact that he could not reach her to help her. Dan sensed in his dream-logic that he was actually present in the scene but was somehow restrained. He could feel every muscle in his body screaming to break free of whatever was holding him back from coming to Nicole’s aid, but he struggled vainly. He couldn’t even call to her; his voice was rammed back down into his throat every time he opened his mouth to cry out.

  The hotel bed was drenched in sweat as he thrashed about wildly, even as his dream-state body was paralyzed. And then his eyes shot open. With a rasping gasp, he filled his lungs and screamed, “COLE!!”

  Dan sat up weakly and swung his aching legs off the bed. He wiped his hand across his face as sweat ran into his still sleep-blurred eyes. “Jesus Christ!” he said aloud. His voice sounded distant to him, foreign. Someone else’s. Too goddamn much whiskey, he thought. After a few moments, his breath grew less ragged and his vision began to clear. He looked to the clock on the nightstand, its inch-tall red digits proclaiming 3:47 a.m.

  Although some of the night’s events were a little foggy in his memory, he recalled enough. He remembered coming out of the men’s room at the Red Angus to find Cole had ditched him. He remembered the woman with the blue hair had approached him and told him about the nightclub. He remembered stumbling across Cole in her disguise across from the bar and her dressing him down quite roughly before taking off and leaving him for the second time in the same evening.

  He shook his head. He hadn’t come with her to Romania thinking that somehow by doing so everything was going to start making some kind of laser-sharp sense. His still alcohol-dented brain wasn’t calculating the passage of hours extremely well at the moment, but the amount of time that had transpired since finding the body of the family-killer in Nicole’s trunk was still, in relative terms, just a moment ago. Yes, he felt a tiny bit better after talking with Wally and Darlene. Their absolute surety that the true function of Clean Up Crew was righteous had begun to erode the boulder of resistance to any acceptance of Nicole’s “other life.”

  But, goddammit, this was still an extremely fucked-up puppet show. Had he been a paying customer, he’d probably have gone to the box office and demanded his money back. He turned to see the empty space on the bed that should have been occupied by his gorgeous wife. “Fucked-up puppet show,” he said aloud. Again the sound of his own voice took him by surprise, assaulting him.

  He stood up unsteadily and walked to the table on the other side of the room, where a pitcher of ice water sat. It had been there since they’d checked in. He remembered that then it was sweating almost as profusely as he was now. Pouring a glass, he turned back toward the bed. In the pale light of the artificially illuminated Bucharest night now filtering through the hotel window, he made out the corner of the duffel bag Nicole had pushed under the bed, peeking out slightly. As he drained the cup of water, his eyes locked on it, not moving.

  As if pulled by some magnetic compulsion he could not resist, Dan walked over to the bed. Bending, he grabbed the black canvas gingerly, as if he expected touching it might hurt. He pulled it slowly from beneath the bed, and then stood looking at it for a moment, inert on the floor. Eventually, he bent again and grabbed its handle, lifting
it, then dropped it on the mattress. He found the zipper and slowly pulled it open. Perhaps he secretly hoped it would be empty, or maybe it contained a roast beef sandwich (for his stomach had rumbled hungrily at that exact instant) instead of a cache of guns. But it was all weapons in there, and no food.

  Again he allowed himself to just look, as if expecting them to do something. But the guns and ammo and… grenades?... just sat there, useless without the vital element that made them dangerous... a human hand to hold, to operate. And so, almost without realizing he was doing so, he reached inside and grabbed the P30. He pulled it out of the bag and looked at it. It was heavier in his hand than he expected it to be. He wrapped his fingers around the grip and turned it at various angles, studying it from each one. He identified the safety and slid it off, hearing it click. He re-engaged it, and then put his finger on the trigger. For a moment, he just held it like that, still sideways, examining the entire length of the handgun. Then he tightened his grip and held his arm out straight, looking down the sights.

  At that moment, he made a decision. No. That wasn’t quite true. The decision made itself and insinuated itself into his consciousness. He set the gun on the bed and reached for his clothes, which he had apparently discarded in a heap on the chair next to the bed at some point. He pulled them on, smelling the smoke from the restaurant and the whiskey he’d spilled on his shirt. Then he walked to the hook on the wall and grabbed his camelhair duster, and slipped his arms into it. He walked back to the bed and picked up the pistol, sliding it into the inside pocket of his coat. He was surprised to find it fit well, and even more surprised to find that the weight of it felt good as it tugged down from its nest. He buttoned the coat and walked to the door.

  The elevator took a long time to reach the eighth floor from the lobby, and he wondered if the delay might not be the universe telling him to turn around and go back to bed. But before he had time to falter, the doors slid open and he stepped through them.

  The lobby was quiet, save for the night desk clerk’s soft laughter at the show he was watching on the tiny TV that sat on a small folding table next to where he was seated. He looked up as Dan walked toward the front door. “Mr. Pruitt, do you need I call a cab for you?”

  Dan shook his head. “No, thank you very much. I think I’m going to walk.”

  “Very good, of course, very good. Please to be careful, though. Not everyone in Bucharest is friendly as me!”

  Dan smiled at the clerk’s exuberant but grammatically rumpled English. “I promise,” he replied.

  Then, with no clear idea of where he was going, he stepped into the face-slapping cold of a newly minted Bucharest morning.

  8

  The Autonomic Nervous System Does Its Job

  Nicole’s brain snapped into a mode that even she didn’t fully understand, but that she knew had saved her on more than one occasion. Some of the functions were autonomic. Her pupils became dilated further than they’d already been, and even in what was near pitch black, she could now detect degrees of shadow and minuscule light. Deep within her inner ear, the muscle called the tensor tympani, which was attached to her malleus bone (the so-called hammer) relaxed slightly, as did the stapedius muscle, which modified the function of the bone called the stapes (or stirrup, as it’s commonly known). When these muscles contract, they combine to protect the ear from loud sounds, but now they did the opposite, making even the tiniest of noises come into clear auditory focus. There is a process called “accommodation,” which occurs in the central nervous system to reduce the sensations felt by the receptors in the skin, such as water, which feels uncomfortably hot at first, then becoming warm and pleasant, even though the temperature of the water hasn’t changed. Her brain inhibited this response now, so that her skin felt the slightest breeze and continued to feel it, immediately detecting any changes.

  All of this meant that at the moment Nicole recognized Viktor as the body on the catacomb floor, she simultaneously became aware of a slight movement at the edge of her vision, heard the faint sound of fabric moving against fabric as an arm was slowly raised, and felt a disturbance in the air currents that she’d begun to feel as she approached the end of the current tunnel. In a single motion, she let the phone slip from her hand onto Viktor’s shirt, pulled the gun from her purse, and fired a single round in the direction from which all of these perceptions had come. Her heightened senses were assailed by the sudden ferocity of the gun, even with the suppressor in place. And an instant later, they caught the sound of a groan as the bullet found its target.

  After firing the shot, she froze in place, allowing her senses to scan once more for any sign of activity. After several seconds, she heard none, aside from the sudden cessation of the sound of tattered breathing from the area into which she’d fired, and of her phone sliding off Viktor’s body onto the ground.

  She felt on the floor for the phone and turned it around, so that the already activated flashlight could once again show her Viktor and the area in which she’d found him. She saw that she was indeed near the terminus of the passage she’d chosen, and that it abutted another tunnel, angled to the left and seeming to slope upward. It was from here that she’d sensed the slight airflow, and she reasoned that it must either be another place in which the ceiling had collapsed or that it was a path to the surface. She also saw the crumpled form of a rather large man in an expanding pool of blood. She stood and walked to where the man lay and saw that her single shot, aimed based upon a faint sound and the perception of shadow shifting within shadow, had struck the man in the center of his chest. He had died within seconds. She rifled through his pockets but found them empty, and she recovered a very nice Smith & Wesson model 360 .357 magnum. The snub-nose revolver had a full cylinder and she pushed the safety lever on. She noticed that the serial number, which should have been right beneath the safety, had been filed away. She slipped the gun into the pocket of her jacket and looked carefully at the man’s face.

  When Viktor had enlarged the photograph of Ana Albu’s outdoor fashion shoot to show her Ileana Gabor’s presence in the crowd of onlookers, Nicole had also carefully noted the faces of the people in the general vicinity of the blue-haired thug. Straining to recall the picture in her memory, she felt fairly certain that she recognized this fellow as someone who’d been standing not far from Ileana, positioned slightly closer to where the model had been posing. It was difficult to be certain, of course, but Nicole prided herself in her ability to remember this level of detail. She moved the light to illuminate the body from a slightly different angle. Yes, she thought. I’m almost positive he was in the crowd.

  Now that the spontaneous brain functions had done their jobs, Nicole’s mind began to work analytically, also with a level of Spartan efficiency. Viktor’s body being here is no coincidence. It was put here both as a message, and, they’d hoped, bait... a distraction sufficient to cause me to focus on him and not be aware of the presence of this former mouth-breather. There is no longer the slightest bit of doubt that I’ve been made. Not only did Ileana finger me at the restaurant... I was the reason she came there in the first place.

  Somehow, Viktor had been compromised. Whether it was someone in The Pub where they’d met or someone attached to Grigorescu who’d recognized him before she’d even arrived in Bucharest, it was clear to her now that any thought of her presence in Romania being undetected needed to be discarded.

  There was little chance that Ileana Gabor was still in the catacombs. It was even more unlikely that she was going to come out of the tunnels to find Bogdan Grigorescu seated calmly in a deck chair in the backyard of a lovely bungalow, sipping a hot cocoa and waiting for her to mete out justice. She was back to square one. Not even that far along, truth be told, because now she had no handler in the city to gather her resources with a simple text message. She walked back to Viktor.

  She was struck by the contrast with the body she’d just added to the décor to Viktor’s clean, bloodless corpse. As she looked more closely, she c
ouldn’t find any obvious signs of trauma at all... no blunt force damage to his skull, no stab wounds, no bullet holes. She gently touched his face and opened his eye. There were no signs of petechia, nor was there any discoloration around the neck. Just as she was about to stand and decide on her next move, Nicole did notice something amiss. As she looked more closely at Viktor’s neck, she spotted two small punctures. “Oh, come on!” she exclaimed aloud. “How much of a cliché is that?”

  Her reaction to the wounds stemmed from the fact that, upon quick examination, they took on the appearance of the classic vampire bite. Is this supposed to scare me? she thought. My dead friend was frightening enough without adding hack movie makeup. But as she shined her light directly on the two dots, she realized the marks were too small to have been caused by a bite, even from elongated canine teeth. They were also off-kilter, not in perfect alignment like Dracula’s calling card. She realized that they were actually two needle marks, one with slight bruising. Viktor had no doubt been injected with some killing agent, and apparently the tough son-of-a-bitch had needed to be dosed twice. The bruising around the one she assumed was the first indicated that his blood was still circulating until the other injection occurred. The lack of bruising around the next led her to believe he’d passed fairly quickly after the second needle was jabbed into his neck.

  Now Nicole had a handful of decisions to make. As much as she hated to do it, she was going to have to leave Viktor where he lay at least for now. When she’d entered the catacombs, she’d formed several mental scenarios, from the best case to worst. Since the subterranean hike had turned out to be worse than the worst she’d imagined, she was now thinking in terms of getting out, getting back to the hotel, cleaning up, and regrouping. The original drudge of staking out the half-dozen possible locations Viktor had briefed her on was probably going to have to happen after all.