Silviu proved to be a tall, wispy person, wearing a somewhat soiled lightweight cream suit. His eyes seemed to me very blue, and his English was quite good. What an honour to be meeting a famous colleague of famous Max.
We descended to the street, to climb into an elderly white Dacia that had suffered bumps and scrapes through the years. Although it was early evening by now, the air was still sultry and cloying. I felt a strange mixture of reinvigoration due to my sighting of the crone of the cottage, and languor, as though I was surrendering to whatever the night might contain.
First, we went to an open-air restaurant to drink beer called Ursus and eat rolls of minced meat and salad, and spend, or rather, squander, some time. Time seemed to have a way of melting in this city. Apparently we were to meet a mad genius. But after an hour the man phoned, depressed—his father had a sudden brain tumour. Maybe an excuse, maybe true or half-true. And that was the last I heard of the genius. Silviu went off and brought back a newspaper, and the murder did feature. Silviu translated the story, but already I knew more than the reporter had discovered.
Then Ovid phoned my mobile.
“Paul, where are you?”
I consulted with Max, who took the phone and said, “We’re at the meech”—I think—“place on,” and he named a street. “But we’re going to Herastrau afterwards.”
They talked for a while, then Max ended the call and handed my phone back.
“He’ll try and join us.” Then, surveying our surroundings, he remarked that under Communism people went to restaurants for show, not for the food—to be seen in such a place, rich enough to buy a meal, of which they would then eat every morsel, instinctively, even if it burst them. Silviu listened politely and nodded. He had cleaned his plate, and I guessed that Max would be footing the bill, unless he and I shared it. I wondered if the crone of the cottage had ever been near a restaurant during her entire life. I thought of an appetite so voracious that a person would ravage a body bloody in a lift.
———
Herastrau proved to be a sizeable lake within a park. By now evening had arrived. We halted on a tree-lined roadway inside the park, behind a line of cars far more luxurious and up-to-date than Silviu’s. Silviu seemed edgy. Dogs lay round in the gloom like mounds of earth. On a bench a shaven-headed man, dressed in a leather jacket, was lounging.
“It’s all right, Silviu,” said Max. “I’ll give him a little money. Car insurance,” he told me. “Even though Silviu’s car is an old wreck, best to be on the safe side.”
Evidently Max knew how much, or how little, to give. I felt a double sense of mild menace at Max’s casual determination to show me how au fait he was with life here, and at the implications of my not knowing the ropes. My host, full of bonhomie, was also my rival. Which would explain, in retrospect, this particular outing tonight.
Scarcely had Max returned from paying Leather Jacket to keep an eye on the car than Ovid drew up behind us in his BMW. Getting out, Ovid waved casually at Leather Jacket, but Ovid certainly didn’t bother to cross the road to say anything to the man. So probably Max had wasted his money, seeing that we were now associated with an Inspector of police. It struck me as only mildly sinister that Ovid should turn up immediately after us, almost as though we were back in Securitate times when everyone’s exact whereabouts were monitored.
A short walk brought us to a big, though modestly lit, building on the shore of the lake. Two suited bouncers stood outside, smoking.
Inside, a few men sat at tables with beautiful girls, and a little crowd of likewise lovely tall girls were shuffling round in a slow dance to the background music. A trio of the Bleached Boys sporting gold looked like pimps in this setting.
“The girls aren’t in their underwear here,” Max pointed out. “They can wear casual clothes, so there’s no pole dancing, if you’re disappointed. This is classy sleaze.”
We sat and ordered beers, the cheapest option.
“Anything new about the lift murder?” I asked Ovid.
“Autopsy,” he said. “Terrible claw-like injuries and animal-like bites. The Turk may have worn specially adapted gauntlets and not had his own teeth anymore but special false fanged ones. If he needs false teeth, maybe he’s fifty or sixty years old, though very strong.” After saying which, he winked at me. Was he teasing me? Or satirizing himself? And avoiding confiding whatever the police now knew?
When our beers arrived, girls came to sit with us. One plumped herself on my lap and wiggled about.
“You can talk free for ten minutes,” whispered Max, “then she’ll ask you to buy her a drink. That’s only about ten dollars, so you decide.”
“What’s your name?” I asked my sexy burden, whose face was unusually broad, her eyes wide-spaced, though her figure was impeccable.
“Luciana. And what do they call you?”
Quite soon I said, “Where did you learn such good English?”
“In school, of course. I also speak German and Italian. A lot of Italians live in Romania, and Germans visit.”
“So, Luciana, do you like working in this place?”
“It’s better than my hometown. But I’d like a real job sometime.”
“What do you mean by a real job?”
“Oh, a shop assistant, for instance.”
“My God, speaking four languages you could at least be an interpreter or an air hostess.”
Max whispered, “If you ask a schoolgirl in the countryside what she wants to be, she’ll say a prostitute, so she can meet foreign men.”
Ovid and Silviu were talking in Romanian all this time, ignoring the girls on either side of them, who reacted by chattering behind their backs, displaying nail varnish.
“Will you buy me a drink?” asked Luciana. “Or else I can’t stay with you.”
I decided to do so, as did Max for his own blonde companion.
“If you want to take yours to the flat,” mentioned my host, “it’s best you both arrange to meet outside, then the club doesn’t get commission.”
“Doesn’t the club object?”
“No, it’s understood. So long as you don’t actually leave the premises along with her.”
Prompted, Luciana squirmed and said, “I love sex. Will you take me home tonight for a hundred dollars?”
“Offer her two thousand lei.”
“Oh no, that is much too little,” protested Luciana. “Fifty dollars.”
“But I already have Adriana,” I told Max.
“Maybe you ought to have variety. In case you overvalue Adriana.”
Evidently Max had my best interests at heart!
Just then Ovid’s mobile jangled and his side of the conversation certainly intrigued Silviu and all of the girls.
Ovid looked across at me. “There’s been another killing. Same MO. Modus operandi,” he added. “I must go.” He threw an arm around his neglected girl and hugged her. “Don’t worry, the arm of the law will protect you.” She giggled.
“May I come with you?” I asked.
“Yes. No. Yes. Why not? Taxi for you afterwards.” He threw down some money.
“How much do I owe for the drinks?” I asked Max.
“We’ll sort it out tomorrow. You’ll need a key.” He fished in his pocket. “Oh, do you mind if I take a girl home with me?”
“Of course not.”
How could I possibly mind? Yet I did. Not for any moral reason, but because this seemed a bit, shall we say, oppressive, as regards myself rather than the girl. However, I was about to walk out on my host.
The crime scene, as I reckoned when a summoned taxi finally returned me, was only about three kilometres from Max’s flat, in a big apartment block not completely fitted out inside, and consequently only semi-occupied. Not a lift, this time, but a coin-operated mini-laundry in the basement. The victim was another young woman. The discoverer was her boyfriend, when she failed to return to their flat; although he had been taken back upstairs for questioning, and the body was about to be zipped up
by the time Ovid and I walked in. I glimpsed something from a butcher’s shop, or abattoire, like paintings by Soutine of carcasses of beef. Flayed, was my impression. A torn, blood-soaked skirt and blouse, and other scattered garments, lay as if really needing the services of the half-full washing machine which yawned open.
I thought of Luciana and so many others like her, innocently vulnerable in the city, yet eager for money. In fact this murder had nothing to do with prostitutes, but my writerly brain was
at work.
When I emerged from my bedroom relatively early, Max was through in the tiny kitchen drinking coffee boiled in a steel pot on a gas ring. His own bedroom door stood open. No evidence of any prostitute.
“Has she gone already?”
“I changed my mind. The girls ask less after midnight when they get worried they won’t earn, but I couldn’t be bothered to wait.” If that was true—if he hadn’t just wanted to have an effect upon me. “So what of the second atrocity?”
“Atrocities involve lots of people, not just one.”
“Two now. Could be a cumulative atrocity? How many does it take? Actually, a single act of brutality qualifies as an atrocity.”
I ignored this casuistry, even if he was right.
Dogs howled and yodeled, and a few moments later the building shuddered briefly.
“Minor earthquake, don’t worry. There’s glacial moraine under Bucharest. Some land moves horizontally, some vertically, some is mixed. That’s why it’s very expensive to build here … The atrocity,” he pressed me.
So I described the brutal scene, though I did not mention my image of paintings by Soutine.
Max took me for a walk around his neighbourhood, which was distinctly run-down, although parts were being poshed up by new money, seemingly at random. In the middle of a potholed back street, asphalt burned and bubbled blackly.
Max laughed. “Some builder needs hot tar for a job, so he set fire to it. Obviously the middle of the street is safer than the sides.” He laughed. “Romanians don’t think of consequences. They’ll run you over in the street because they don’t think of prison as the result. I’m not kidding. They will not stop. Oops,” and he caught my arm and dragged me well to one side because a battered pick-up truck was indeed heading our way, and to avoid the fire, the driver mounted the pavement. Max had hurt my arm with his grip, though for a perfectly good reason, so I tried not to show pain.
We must have seen a score of skinny, roaming dogs already, variously marked, although all of the same general build.
“Ha,” said Max. “That crime scene reminds me of a joke. Which I’ve already used, by the way,” he emphasized. “A forgetful man visits a shortsighted gypsy fortune-teller. She looks at his palm and exclaims, ‘I see men with knives coming for you—and blood!’ He starts sweating with fear. She examines his palm even more closely and finally says, ‘You forgot to take off your pigskin glove.’ ”
“Ha-ha,” I said. A perverse urge tempted me to add: “I’m glad you already used it.”
“As for drivers and future consequences,” he went on, as though I’d said nothing at all, “Romanian people choose to be suspended in eternity. It’s still difficult for them to get over the dictatorship. Safer not to take responsibility.”
“‘Suspended in eternity’ is quite a phrase. I suppose you’ll be using that, too.”
He nodded, appeased or otherwise I couldn’t decide. Time was melting again, like the runny hot asphalt. Already it was afternoon. So Max led me circuitously to a café he favoured, for some beer.
Halfway through the second can of Ursus, Adriana phoned me.
“Are you free this afternoon?” I asked her. “What are we doing this afternoon?” I asked Max almost simultaneously.
“I need to buy a camera card,” was Max’s reply. “You can come or not.”
I was, of course, eager for Adriana to visit me privately on my own, although not entirely for the obvious reason of possible sex. Max out of the way would suit me very well, doubly so.
Max had already buzzed off, and I didn’t know when he’d be back. Given the vagaries of Bucharest, maybe hours as yet.
I kissed Adriana enthusiastically. “Lovely to see you! Look, do you think we could pop over the road for a few minutes? I’m very curious about the old woman in that cottage. If it’s halfway possible, I’m dying to see inside and see her close to. Could we pretend that I want to buy some eggs?”
“I suppose so. She might sell some eggs.”
“Oh, and don’t tell Max, will you not?”
Adriana grinned. “How mysterious you crime writers are. Men of mystery are exciting.”
The crone’s door was intricately carved, and worn, as though it preceded the city or had been transported here from a farm in the country, perhaps one of the tens of thousands bulldozed under Ceaus?escu for a dam or for socialist rationalisation.
The owner’s face was rutted, like carved and varnished wood itself, though her brown eyes were alert. Blackness scarfed her and draped her. After Adriana explained in Romanian, the woman uttered a brief reply or a cackle.
“Tell her,” I suggested, “that I’m a writer and, in addition to eggs, I’m very interested in her life here surrounded by modern city. I’ll pay her for her time, twenty dollars, no make that thirty.”
“Twenty,” said Adriana, and complied.
Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, the crone—Madame Florescu now, to be polite—admitted us into a gloomy room and stuck out a hand dark with dirt or the resin of age, into which I counted four five-dollar bills, which she sniffed before promptly disappearing them within her neckline as though she was some much younger entertainer who used her cleavage for tips.
I took in the items of rustic home-made furniture, the blackened pots and pans and jars of herbs and other stuff. Rather a lot of green candles stood around in old brass candlesticks, understandable if Madame Florescu had no mains power, as seemed likely. A faint sickly odour emanated from vases of marigolds and ox-eyed daisies which were red rather than white, and, strangely, from lilies-of-the-valley, which surely should be past their season, unless the Romanian variety was different or else the crone had patronised a florist’s shop for blooms flown from far away.
Coincidentally, Adriana was translating, “A present from my son,” when she herself really noticed those flowers and gasped and crossed herself.
“My son visits me once a week of an evening after he finishes working hard, a good boy,” Adriana continued dutifully interpreting despite whatever had shocked her.
“You would like him. He also can tell you remarkable things—in your own English. He’s clever.” And can do with some dollars himself, I thought. “You sleep only over the street. If you see a red Dacia outside here, probably on Thursday, come and knock. A red Dacia which says taxi, but my son is more than taxi-driver.”
Thursday was the day after next. If only Max would leave me alone that evening.
Mrs. Florescu discoursed about geese and her water butt and her man who had been killed by the Securitate. Apparently her man was a black marketeer. After a reasonable time she dried up and looked expectant. My twenty dollars had run out as though all the while a taxi metre had been running in her head. I said that I’d love to hear more from herself and her son on Thursday. I was becoming hungry for Adriana before Max would return. Besides, rather than hearing more domestic details, I wanted to know what had visibly shocked Adriana.
I departed with three eggs clutched in my hand. Once we had recrossed the road, yet another dog wandered close. My body hiding what I was doing, in case Madame Florescu was looking out, I dropped the eggs to make raw omelette. The pooch sidled swiftly towards this in a flinching manner, sniffed, then lapped, crunchy eggshells included.
“Oh, Paul! Butterfingers. Isn’t that what you say?”
Of course I didn’t want Max to have a clue as to what I’d been up to, by leaving eggs in his fridge.
“The dog’s need is greater than mine,” I assured
her. “To tell the truth, I don’t like eggs much in any form.”
———
“Yes, it was those flowers,” Adriana confirmed once we were in the flat. “Those ones are used in the countryside to attract werewolves. Because of the smell.”
“To attract werewolves?”
“Maybe to control, or to cause. My own mother warned me never to wear the, um, the little white bells.”
I felt quite pleased with myself.
I felt even more pleased when Adriana amiably consented to test my double bed. The bench press was useful to dump our clothes on. Afterwards, she fell asleep, and looked very innocent, as though orgasm had drained away all cares.
The next day Max and I visited his Romanian publisher at home for lunch, by taxi. Only one of my books was published locally as yet—which was enough for me to be famous on the island—and I nursed hopes for more translations. Cezar, yet another displaced ancient Roman, was jolly and hospitable with beer, coffee, nuts, and nibbles. We sat, Romanian style, in a dingy courtyard, or patio-alley, running from front to back of his house. Inside, the house’s bare floorboards were dirty and the place was full of tat, as I found when I visited the toilet.
A coil of incense set on bricks burned under the plastic patio table. Sometimes the air smelled of patchouli, sometimes of sewage. A guard dog was on a long chain secured to the inside of its kennel. A white cat with a fluffy tail ambled around. A sizeable though twisted tree arose through the concrete of the patio without any evidence of how rain could possibly reach its roots; maybe those had broken through to the sewer for sustenance.
Apparently the crime market was flooded; thus, a publisher had to be careful, but if I posted my best books to Cezar he would see. More time dissolved, until the ubiquitous Silviu turned up with his car. And the same camera as, presumably, I’d heard about from Max. Cezar duly admired the camera. Then Max handed Silviu a memory card in its little plastic box. Silviu proceeded to install the memory card and take photos of me and Max and Cezar. This made no sense to me at all. If Max resented lending, or rather, giving, the three hundred dollars to Silviu, why then present him with a memory card? Was that in exchange for today’s use of petrol? As lanky Silviu focused, he looked like a tall, thin photographic tripod. Or bi-pod, I suppose.
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