Full MoonCity

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Have lunch, or visit an appalling murder scene? I was incredulous. “Do you mean see the body?”

  The Inspector laughed. “No, an ambulance is taking it to the morgue. Although you can visit the morgue if you’re really curious. I meant the scene of the crime. I’ve been called there because of a Jack the Raper murder I was involved with last year. Do I mean raper? No, ripper. Rapers don’t often rip. They may strangle or stab, but not do complete ripping. Not usually.”

  “A solved murder?”

  “The murderer might have been a Turk,” he replied. “But he disappeared. Ankara couldn’t trace him, nor Interpol in case he hid among the Turks in Germany.”

  I couldn’t help wondering if he said Ankara and Interpol to enhance his importance. And I supposed I must attribute his comparative nonchalance, or what I took as nonchalance, first of all to the requirements of haste, and secondly to whatever other horrors he may have experienced in his job.

  We’d been a mixed bunch on that cultural island in the Danube: lots of beautiful Romanian girls, and handsome youths, too, the annual event being sponsored by the Ministry for Youth Development. A Bulgarian kick-boxing champion who gave open-air classes, an astronomer who appealed to science-fiction fans, several musicians and poets, an American from an Institute for Human Development who believed that immortality is within our grasp, an angry German feminist. I could go on.

  I would describe my own writings as psychological horror, or perhaps darkness, which illuminates the mundane world, paradoxically heightening our awareness, although I was published as Crime. Consequently, my “real world counterpart” was the Inspector, with his theories about order and disorder, darkness and light within society, and, of course, his wealth of practical experience, which he became intent on demonstrating to me, either for egotistical or for inspirational reasons, or maybe because he genuinely liked me. Hence his driving me back to Bucharest to show me things, which seductive Adriana was also intent on. In her case, maybe with a tentative motive of gaining an author from abroad as a husband, a foreign passport, a different life? Authors are esteemed unduly in some countries. Or maybe Adriana merely wanted some fun and to enjoy herself. When I explained that my surname, Osler, was originally a French name for someone who catches wild birds, Adriana had been highly amused.

  I’d been persuaded to pay my own, fairly minimal, airfare from England by fellow crime author Max Rigby, who was moving slowly around Eastern Europe and who had already enjoyed the free hospitality of the island the year before. Currently, Max was renting a flat in Bucharest, where I’d stay for a week. Other habitués of the island were driving Max back to the city.

  Max was seeking exotic foreign settings for future novels because, frankly, in my opinion, his most recent book, set in England, had seemed lacklustre and ho-hum. Competently done, to be sure, but lacking the additional frisson of strangeness which distinguishes a competent book from something exceptional. I’d said so myself in no uncertain terms in a review, which I certainly didn’t sign with my own name, concocting instead an alias-Martin Fairfax (a reviewer should always seem fair), which, ironically, as I realized later, was the name of a minor character in one of my early books, long out of print. Should I beware of impending Alzheimer’s? Not so long as I continued drinking red wine.

  With so many Eastern European countries joining the EU, and so many citizens of those countries settling in Britain for jobs, not least about a million Poles, obviously one should expand one’s repertoire, which was a reason why Max easily persuaded me to visit Romania.

  Badelescu, though I suppose I should more familiarly call him Ovid, placed a flasher on the roof of his BMW, and we sirened our way past trolleybuses, trucks, a convoy of giant Turkish lorries, decrepit Dacias, and flashier new cars, along tree-lined avenues, the trunks painted white.

  I pointed, and asked Adriana, “Is that so you can see the trees in the dark?”

  “Do you know why we’re giving a lift to Virgil?” she replied. “He wouldn’t get to the island otherwise. That’s because his wife crashed their car into the only other car on a huge empty boulevard.” She zigzagged her hands as if steering two vehicles. “From hundreds of metres apart they start trying to avoid each other. Virgil’s wife steers left, the other guy steers right. Then they change their minds and directions a dozen times. Until crash. It was incredibly bad luck.”

  “And neither of them slowed down?”

  “Why do that, on an empty boulevard?”

  Presently, the dilapidated city mutated into a Futureville of huge honey-white buildings adorned with balconies. Part-way around a huge piazza, police vehicles clustered, on and off a broad pavement. Ovid kept his siren howling to herald his arrival until we had parked.

  Bye-bye to Romulus and Virgil, who sauntered off with their rucksacks.

  “Oh, look,” said Adriana, pointing into the distance along a vast boulevard. “Ceaus?escu’s palace, there at the far end.”

  That was my first view of the dead dictator’s megalomaniac structure, supposedly the second largest building in the world. Even dwarfed by distance it loomed. And the great bright apartment building where the murder had happened was in direct line of sight.

  Ovid informed me, “This place was built for the Securitate, but it was only finished after the Revolution. Come on!”

  The Securitate: Ceaus?escu’s secret police, whose surveillance of Romania’s citizens was very exhaustive indeed, and whose network of informers, many of those against their will or wishes, may have comprised a significant percentage of the population.

  “I don’t want blood on my shoes,” said Adriana.

  If she went home, how was I going to find Max’s flat? The Inspector might become too busy to drive me there, and I felt dubious about trusting myself to a taxi driver in an unknown city when I only knew a few phrases of Romanian that Adriana and others had taught me on the island. Ah, Max could come and fetch me, because my mobile now had a Romanian simcard. However, Adriana spied a café. Yellow Bergenbier umbrellas-cum-sunshades outside sheltered tables and chairs. Half a dozen large mongrels lay nearby.

  “I’ll buy a magazine and wait for you in there, okay?”

  Accordingly, in went Ovid and I to find the Boys in Blue busy on the ground floor examining an open lift, the floor and walls of which were very bloody. I’d been at two or three actual crime scenes before, yet here it was as if a madman had thrown crimson paint around. The smell, however, wasn’t of paint but of a slaughterhouse. I presumed my presence was explained cursorily by Ovid, since various police nodded at me before, as I supposed, reporting circumstances to him in Romanian.

  “So, Mr. Story Writer,” Ovid said after peering assiduously, “what do you notice?”

  “Less blood on the floor outside than I’d have expected,” I suggested.

  “And that was probably caused by us police and by the ambulance people. It seems there are some bloody tracks and drops on the sixth floor, but again not too much blood is in the corridor up there.”

  “So she was attacked inside the lift, with the doors shut.”

  “Precisely. And I think I know how.”

  Ovid stepped inside the lift fastidiously, crouched, and peered at the paneled rear wall, which was almost unstained. Then he inserted his little finger somewhere amongst the woodwork and pulled. The rear wall split in half, opening as two floor-to-ceiling doors. Behind was a space large enough for a couple of people to stand, or kneel, between the true rear wall and the false wall. And the true rear wall was bloody, as were the insides of the doors.

  “Here,” said Ovid, “is where the killer hid, to burst out suddenly between floors. I told you this building was made for the Securitate, but about six thousand special spies spied upon the secret police themselves by such bizarre methods as this. No doubt a microphone would have been hidden inside the elevator, but here’s a back-up, just in case. A man sitting on a stool could look and listen through the tiny hole in the wall.”

  The sheer shock of
being between floors in an otherwise empty lift when suddenly the wall opened and another person emerged! The victim might faint or even die at once of a heart attack.

  Ovid explained in Romanian, and the lesser police looked at him in admiration.

  Of course we climbed the white marble stairs to the sixth floor rather than using the lift.

  It seemed to me that the tracks up there were rather narrow to be those of shoes or trainers. They became vague after not too many paces.

  Adriana pointed through the café window at one of the tall white apartments around the piazza, blue sky showing through ornamental turrets along the edge of the rooftop.

  “Sniper watchtowers,” she said. “You could shoot down into any rebellious crowds.”

  We were inside for the air-conditioning. So were some bleached-blond youths wearing gold chains, sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads, sons of the new rich.

  “You say the tracks of blood were narrow.” She shuddered and crossed herself. “I think a werewolf killed that woman in the elevator. Probably the Inspector thinks so, too, but he wouldn’t tell you that.”

  “Werewolves aren’t real,” I protested.

  “In Romania they are. And weredogs, priccoltish. With a million dogs on the streets it can’t be surprising if at least one is a weredog. It’s the perfect place to hide. Unless,” she added with what seemed at first a wonderful lack of logical connection, “Badelescu thinks a Turk did it. Maybe he hopes that’s the answer.”

  “Why blame a Turk?”

  “They ruled us for three hundred years; consequently, many Romanians don’t like them much. Better a Turk than a werewolf. I’ll see if there are any news reports yet.”

  Flipping open her phone, amazingly she googled.

  “How can you do that?”

  “You can do it anywhere in the city center.”

  I thought of old women draped in black guarding a single cow or a few geese by the roadside out in the country. Truly, the last shall be first technologically.

  “No, nothing yet.” Rather too soon for news.

  “Will you take me to Max? And maybe I can see you tomorrow?” In fact, I felt a bit tired, but also I wanted to make notes about the murder scene.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know. I’ll phone. Yes, probably.” She wasn’t going to seem overeager, but she wanted me to feel eager.

  Max’s place proved not to be far, just beyond the boundary where Ceaus?escu’s architectural master plan had erased a vast area of the old city-houses, churches, whatever was in the way-to make space for ostentatious modernity.

  The flat was on the top floor of a modest block. To the front, the outlook was upon a line of trees, then some open grass, then low houses with red roofs suddenly abutting a towering wall of vast white apartments. Directly below was a very modest old cottage to which were attached a clutter of small corrugated-roofed sheds, surrounded by rows of vegetables and bean poles-I even spotted some geese and hens-all within a green-painted picket fence.

  Incongruously next to this relic of the past was a sizeable ultra-posh house in Art Deco style, gleamingly white.

  “Probably an old lady died there and her heirs accepted an offer they couldn’t refuse,” said Max. Max was short and burly and wore an assertively black moustache, although his hair had lightened and receded a long way. I didn’t know if he dyed the moustache.

  “So the old woman directly below hasn’t died yet?”

  “I’ve never seen her.”

  My room contained a double bed, a large wardrobe, and a bench press that seemed to have strayed from some gym. Frills were lacking, yet the furnishings sufficed for sport that I anticipated with Adriana. On the bed, I mean, not on the bench press.

  “Chap called Silviu may be coming round to take us somewhere,” Max told me. “Couple of days before I went to the island, Silviu told me the sad story of how his mother’s son by a previous marriage had suddenly died from premature kidney failure. He begged me to lend him three hundred dollars for the funeral because his mother couldn’t afford it. So I did. Very next day, I bump into Silviu and he proudly shows me this expensive new camera he just bought. You know, innocently shows me the camera because he’s so excited and happy. I ought to have got mad at him. But it was my own fault. You don’t lend money to people here unless you’re willing to regard it as a gift. Some day they’ll do something for you, perhaps. Well, Silviu phoned an hour ago and I said, ‘Come and drive us somewhere tonight, right?’ ”

  “Somewhere?”

  “Educational. In your honour. Writers in the crime line need to research sleaze.” So saying, Max cast himself upon a sofa and reached for an elegant, glossy English-language magazine, published for expats no doubt, its cover a stylish photo of giant terracotta garden urns. Thumbing to the back, he intoned: “Royal Orchid Male Sacred Spot Massage. A gentle digital technique for contacting these subtle places. In the internal way a lubricated finger will be inserted into the anus, and then it will gently massage around the chestnut-sized and -shaped prostate. This feels better when you are somewhat erect and excited and if it’s done during the intimate massage (don’t worry, the girls will take care of that). It will produce a very thrilling orgasm.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “I’m not. This is Bucharest. Take a look.”

  I looked, and it was true.

  “I thought that mag was the local Homes and Gardens.”

  “And casinos and escorts.”

  “Um, I don’t want a finger stuck up my bum, Max.”

  My writerly colleague grinned. “Do you have piles? Don’t worry, we aren’t doing any such thing. Tonight will only cost a few dollars for drinks. It’s purely educational. Background research. Anyway, what kept you?”

  “Ovid Badelescu got called to a murder site.”

  “Do tell!”

  I proceeded to, but didn’t inform Max about the concealed doors at the back of the lift-I might want to use that detail some day myself. I also excluded Adriana’s notion that a werewolf was responsible. Or a weredog, hiding out among the multitude of anonymous mongrels.

  Shortly before Silviu arrived, a long cry and a chorus of yapping from outside drew me to the window. The cry was like that of a muezzin calling worshippers to prayer. A middle-aged woman wearing a baggy multicoloured dress and headscarf was driving her horse and cart loaded with scrap metal and other rubbish that might be worth something. Her cry had excited the dogs. As I watched, she halted beside the humble cottage, dismounted, and rattled the picket gate with a stick. And waited.

  Presently, a black-clad shape emerged from the cottage, cradling what I identified as a broken old clock of some bulk. With a surprisingly sprightly step, the old cottager bustled to her gate and handed over the relic, to receive in return, after humming and hawing, some scrap of paper, which might have been a banknote-if so, here in Romania it would have been thin plastic that looked like paper.

  As the horse and cart and the scrap-woman’s outcry proceeded onward, the strangest thing happened. Half a dozen strays sidled from different directions toward that garden gate. The black-garbed cottager glanced about, as though to ensure that no one was observing her-she wouldn’t spot me at the window high up-then she offered her hand over the gate. Was she about to feed the strays with scraps? But she was holding nothing that I could see.

  One by one those desolate dogs proceeded to lick, or slobber on, her palm-I was put in mind of nothing so much as movies of Italian gangsters kissing the hand of their Mafia godfather! This done, the cottager withdrew her hand, and then herself quickly back into her home.

  Travelers in unfamiliar countries often misinterpret things and leap to the wrong conclusions, but I’ve always had a strong sense of intuition, a belief in quasi-magical linkages that others call coincidences. In my novels, such is the way that a dark crime is often solved. There’s a logical sequence of circumstances, yet this is only revealed-illuminated, if you like-by illogical means, by an illogic
al route. That Ovid should have driven me directly to that blood-stained lift in the former Securitate building, then that I should come to Max’s and overlook that cottage, cast adrift while time and town planning advanced, and that I should glimpse the owner, queen of canines, whom Max had never seen… this spoke to me inwardly, compellingly.

  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.