Children of the Night

by Dan Simmons

  “Yes, it is,” snapped Kate, slamming the clipboard down on the radiator so hard that the clash of metal on metal echoed in the small room. “It’s an extremely rare disorder…perhaps fewer than thirty children worldwide…but it’s treatable. In the States we use—”

  “A synthetic enzyme called PEG-ADA,” Lucian finished for her. “But I doubt if there is any PEG-ADA in Romania. Perhaps not in Eastern Europe.”

  “Not even in the Party hospitals?”

  Lucian slowly shook his head. Kate noticed how strong his chin was, how smooth the skin of his cheek. He had put on a pair of round tortoise-shell spectacles to read the lab report, but they just made him look more boyish rather than older or more serious.

  “I can requisition the enzyme from America or the Red Cross,” she said, “but by the time they get the shipment through all the red tape, a month or more will have passed and Joshua will be dead from some virus or the other. No, it’ll be faster for me to take him to the States.” She paused. “Lucian, you are good to know about the adenosine deaminase deficiency. Most GPs in the States wouldn’t have heard of it. What did you get on your finals?”

  “Four point oh, oh, oh,” he said. “Outstanding in all areas, just like my lovemaking.” He bent over the crib again. “And you, you little homunculus. You’d better get your tiny little Transylvanian ass to Boulder, Colorado, with Doctor Mama Neuman here so they can puncture it with a shot of PEG-ADA.”

  In his crib, Joshua seemed to ponder the statement a moment before he clenched his fists tighter, screwed up his face, and began crying loudly.

  Chapter Eleven

  KATE went to the American Embassy the next morning, walking down Bulevardul Bălcescu to the landmark of the Intercontinental Hotel, then up Strada Batiştei a block to Strada Tudor Arghezi. It was not yet nine A.M., but already there was a long line of Romanians crowding the narrow street. Feeling guilty but knowing that she did not have the hours or days to queue up with these people, she walked to the head of the line. The Romanian soldiers peered at her passport and waved her to the gate; the Marine inside nodded and spoke into a black telephone.

  Kate looked across the street to where several protesters stood against a brick wall. The banner on the wall read: A.V.C. WE ARE WAITING FOR IMMIGRATION VISAS 1982-1987. The signs they carried said HUNGER STRIKE FOR IMMIGRATION VISA and WHERE IS THE FAIR PLAY and STOP THE INJUSTICE and WASHINGTON SAID YES WHY ROMA SAID NO WHAT DOES AMERICAN CONSULATE SAY?

  The Marine returned, the Romanian soldier opened the black iron gate, and Kate walked into the embassy courtyard, nodding her apologies to the stoic people left in line.

  Inside, she passed through an airport-style metal detector, handed her purse over for a search, and then submitted to an inspection performed by a bored guard carrying a hand-held metal detector. Her purse was returned and she was buzzed through a doorway into the first floor of the embassy.

  The once-grand hall here had been partitioned into a waiting room and a dozen office cubicles. People stood in lines everywhere: Romanians seeking visas standing in the longest line at the far end of the room, Americans in shorter lines at every cubicle window. There were eight rows of chairs in the main waiting room and most of these were filled with American women holding Romanian babies and toddlers. The cacophony was disturbing. As Kate waited in the first line to check in with the watch duty officer, she felt her heart sink with the hopelessness of it all.

  Two and a half hours later, that hopelessness was confirmed. Kate had spoken to four people on the embassy staff and had threatened to scream unless she was allowed to speak to a higher-ranking official. Someone from the Ambassador’s office had come downstairs, pulled a folding metal chair out and straddled it backward, smiled, and slowly explained exactly what the first four functionaries had explained.

  “We simply cannot allow these AIDS children in the States,” the man said slowly. His teeth were perfect, his haircut perfect, the crease in his gray trousers perfect. He had introduced himself as Cully or Cawley or Crawley. “The United States has a serious enough AIDS problem of its own. Surely you can understand this, Mrs…ah… Neuman.”

  “Doctor Neuman,” Kate corrected for the fifth time. “And this child does not have AIDS. I am a specialist in blood diseases. I can attest to this.”

  The embassy man pursed his lips and nodded slowly, as if assessing some complicated data. “And has the Trojan Clinic verified this?”

  Kate snorted. The Trojan Clinic was a knock-off, walk-in doc-in-the-box place that had won the lottery when the American Embassy chose it to do all of its pre-visa hepatitis B and AIDS testing. Kate would have as soon consulted an astrologer as trusted the Trojan Clinic’s lab tests. “I have verified it,” she said. “We ran the HIV procedures at District Hospital One five weeks ago. And we eliminated the possibility of all the hepatitis strains at the same time. I have the tests…confirmed and verified in writing by Doctors Ragrevscu and Grigorescu, chief and assistant pathologists at District Hospital One.”

  The embassy man—Curly? Cally? Crawley—pursed his lips, nodded again, and said, “But we would, of course, have to have Trojan Clinic’s confirmation that the child is healthy. And, of course, written permission for adoption from one or both of the birth parents.”

  “God damn it,” Kate said, leaning forward so quickly that Mr. Crawley almost fell backwards off his straddled chair. “First, I will repeat for the tenth time: the infant has no record of birth parents, neither father nor mother. No records whatsoever. He was abandoned. Deserted. Left to die. Even the orphanage in Tîrgovişte has no records on who brought him in. Second, the child is not healthy—that is one reason I’m bringing him to the States. I’ve explained this fifteen times. But he’s also not contagious. No hepatitis B. No AIDS. No contagious disease of any sort. As far as we can tell, the infant has an immune-deficiency disorder that is almost certainly genetic and will be almost certainly fatal if you don’t allow me to get him somewhere I can help him.”

  The embassy man nodded, pursed his lips again, tapped a pencil against the desk, nodded toward the lower-echelon embassy man, folded his arms, and said, “Well, Mrs. Neuman, we’d certainly like to help you, but it would take at least a month to process the paperwork for a…ah…unusual child like this, and in all likelihood the visa application would be disallowed without written permission from the child’s birth mother and a clean bill of health from the Trojan Clinic. Have you considered adopting a healthy child?”

  Kate’s scream could be heard on the street outside. If she allowed herself to scream.

  A Marine security guard was escorting her to the door of the embassy when she saw the mutant ninja priest suit in the waiting room, a black silhouette amidst the riot of American summer pastels and Romanian grays.

  “O’Rourke!”

  The priest turned, started to smile, saw her face, and came quickly across the crowded room to her. He waved the security guard away, and the Marine hesitated only a second before releasing her arm. Father O’Rourke led her to a chair in the least-crowded corner of the room and kicked a stack of papers off for her to sit. She almost cried out his name when he turned and left her, but he was back a few seconds later with a paper cone filled with cool water. Kate drank it gratefully.

  “What’s going on, Neuman?” His voice was soft. His gray eyes never left her face.

  She told him everything, and even as she spoke a detached part of her mind was thinking. Is this what confession is like? Is this the feeling that religion brings…this turning over all your problems to someone else? She didn’t think so.

  When she was finished, O’Rourke nodded once. “And you’re sure the Romanian officials will expedite the release of the child by your departure date, even if the Americans won’t?”

  Kate nodded vigorously. When she looked down she was surprised to see that she was still clutching the paper cone with both hands.

  “And how much baksheesh?” he asked. “The Romanian official, I mean.”

 
Kate frowned. “None. I mean, I was expecting some…expecting to pay up to five or six thousand dollars, American…but, none. Mr. Stancu…the man at the Ministry…he never asked for any and I…none.”

  Father O’Rourke paused a minute at this news. She could see the disbelief in his eyes.

  Kate pulled a sheaf of documents from her purse. “They were ready this morning, O’Rourke. Look. Lucian says that they’re official and complete. I tried to show them to the embassy people here…our people…but these stupid sons of bitches have their heads stuck so far up their asses that—”

  “All right, Neuman. All right.” The priest’s hand was gentle but firm on her arm.

  Kate stopped, took a breath, nodded.

  “Just wait here a minute, would you?” he asked. He brought her another cone of water and touched the top of her head when she bent to drink from it.

  Kate felt the anger surge in her like nausea. It had been years since she had been so out of control of a situation.

  Father O’Rourke leaned into the nearest cubicle. “Donna, can I use your office for a moment? Yeah, just a few minutes, honest. I’ll answer the phone if His Highness buzzes. Thanks, Donna, you’re a sweetheart.”

  Kate realized that she was blinking through tears as she watched the young woman leave. Father O’Rourke winked at her and slipped into the cubicle. She heard him asking the switchboard operator for a Stateside satellite line. Kate recognized the 202 as a District of Columbia area code.

  The conversation could not have lasted two minutes and she caught only snatches of it as her mind kept veering back to what she should have said to Mr. Crawley from the embassy.

  “Hello, Jim…yeah, Mike O’Rourke, right…great, great, how are you? No, not Lima or Santiago this time… Bucharest. Yep.”

  Kate closed her eyes. She was one of the fifteen top hematologists in the Western hemisphere and she was listening to some parish priest chew the fat with somebody on his Old Boy network, probably another priest at Georgetown University or somewhere…some pissant Jesuit with an in-law in the State Department.

  No, she corrected herself, priests don’t have in-laws. Do they?

  “That’s it exactly,” O’Rourke was saying on the phone. Kate realized that she had heard him summarize her visa problems in a dozen words or less. “That’s it, Jim…no moss growing on your brain since the Bike Patrol days. She’s one of the few Americans I’ve seen in the year and a half I’ve been here who’s trying to adopt one of the real orphanage cases…a very sick child…sick but not contagious in any way…right…and this putz in Visa section is making it impossible. Yeah… I agree, it amounts to a sentence of death.”

  Kate felt her skin go clammy when she heard someone else say that. Joshua. Dead. She thought of the tiny fingers, the trusting eyes. She thought of the scores and scores of small, unmarked graves she had seen behind the orphanages and pediatric hospitals she had toured in Bucharest and beyond.

  “OK, Jimmy. Same to you, kid. No, Kev’s still in Houston, I think… NASA…and Dale’s working on his next book up in the Grant Tetons or wherever. No, uh-uh, that was Lawrence’s third wedding. No, he invited me as a guest. They had some sort of Grand Prix driver who moonlights as a Zen guru do the actual ceremony. You too, amigo. Talk to you later.”

  He came out and touched her knee the way a father would pat the leg of a child who had been crying. Kate choked back her anger at herself and the situation. She was trying to think of the blood specialists, CDC administrators, media people, print reporters, and medical lobbyists she knew. Certainly, among them there must be somebody with more clout than O’Rourke’s Georgetown buddy. She would begin calling that afternoon. Somebody would put pressure on the State Department for her. In three days?

  “I’ll walk you back to the hospital,” said the priest.

  “All right,” she said. Before they got to the embassy’s inner doors, she squeezed his arm through the black coat. “Thanks, O’Rourke. Thanks for trying.”

  “You’re welcome, Neuman.”

  They were just out the doors when Mr. Crawley from upstairs came hurrying down the steps, almost sliding across the marble floor in his haste. His tie was askew. His hair was mussed. His face was flushed except where it was pale around the mouth, and there was a look in his eyes that made Kate think that some civil servant with a forgettable name had just had a preview of his career ox being royally and terminally gored.

  “Mrs…ah…Doctor Neuman!” cried the embassy man, relief visible on his features. “I’m glad I caught you. There’s been a mixup… I’m afraid I may have misspoke myself.” He thrust a sheaf of documents at her. “We’ll have the visa application processed by tomorrow morning. This temporary visa should satisfy the Romanian authorities if there are any questions on their part about—”

  Later, during the walk back to the hospital, Kate said to O’Rourke, “And what were you doing at the embassy, anyway?”

  “My job takes me there.”

  “Intercepting more inappropriate adoptions?”

  He shrugged. Kate thought, irrelevantly, that the man looked very trim, very handsome, and very Irish in his black suit and white collar. “Sometimes,” said the priest, “I expedite as well as interdict.”

  “You certainly expedited this situation. You may have expedited Joshua’s last chance to survive.” She paused to watch the traffic pass on the busy Bulevardul Bălcescu. “Can you tell me your friend Jim’s last name?”

  Father O’Rourke scratched his chin through the short beard. “Why not? It’s Harlen.”

  “Senator Harlen? Senator James Harlen? The senator who’s head of the Foreign Affairs Committee? The one who Secretary of State Baker wanted as his number-two guy even though he was from the wrong party? The senator that Dukakis almost picked as a running mate in ’88 rather than Lloyd Bentsen?”

  The priest smiled. “Jimmy was right to think that that wouldn’t have been a smart move. I wanted him to run, which shows how naive I am. But he’s going to wait until ’96 to get into national politics…and that won’t be for a vice-presidential slot. He and Cuomo are the only Democrats left with real presidential timber…and I think Jimmy has the energy and new ideas to go with it.”

  “And you’re friends,” said Kate, realizing how dumb that statement was.

  “Were friends. A long time ago.” Father O’Rourke was staring at the ONT tourist offices across the boulevard, but his eyes were seeing something else.

  “Well, if I believed in miracles, I’d say that the last couple of days have been full of them,” said Kate. She felt a strange sensation as she said this. It’s real. It’s happening. I am going to have a child. Kate felt the way she had as a young girl, taking a dare, standing at the edge of the fifteen-foot-high diving board at Kenmore Municipal Pool: too scared to jump, too proud to retreat.

  “The only miracle was a Romanian ministry official doing someone a favor without major baksheesh,” said O’Rourke. When he saw her trembling he started to touch her arm again, then dropped his hand. Kate felt the force of his gaze on her. “Neuman, if the boy is going to survive, you’ll have to provide the miracles.”

  “I know,” said Kate. Then, realizing that she may not have spoken aloud, she said, firmly and clearly, “I know.”

  Chapter Twelve

  KATE and Joshua were set to fly to the United States on Monday, May 20, and by the evening of Sunday the nineteenth, she was sure that they would never be allowed out of the country.

  UNICEF, the co-sponsor, along with the CDC International Relief Fund, of her six weeks of medical aid in Romania, had sent the PanAm ticket weeks ago, and since Otopeni Airport did not allow telephone confirmations of flights, she called the Office of National Tourism almost hourly to confirm her reservations. Not satisfied with that, she had Lucian drive out to the airport twice on Saturday and three times on Sunday to confirm that the flight was still scheduled and that she had a seat reserved. Joshua would fly in her arms and needed no separate ticket. She also had Lucian
confirm this.

  Mr. Stancu at the Ministry had been as good as his word—he was a short, red-cheeked, cheerful man, the exact opposite of the stereotype of an Eastern European bureaucrat as well as the opposite of all the other bureaucrats Kate had met in the country—confirmed that Joshua’s exit visa was complete and cleared. They had waived the usual requirement for the signature of one of the birth parents. The Romanian end of the adoption process was amazingly simple.

  The American Embassy was slower, but by Saturday afternoon Mr. Crawley had expedited Joshua’s exit visa… Lucian had brought a Nikon to the hospital to shoot the infant’s photo, but it turned out that no photo was necessary…and the U.S. part of the adoption was begun through their liaison with Rocky Mountain Adoption Option Services. Their American headquarters was Denver, so Kate had no problems in completing the process once she got home.

  Mr. Popescu, the chief administrator of District Hospital One, was at first displeased that their fiery American visitor was taking one of the children out of their wards—especially without paying him for the privilege—but phone calls from the Ministry of Health and reassurances from the Romanian pediatricians that the child had almost no chance of survival and was a drain on hospital resources evidently reassured the little man to the point he merely smirked at Kate during her last day on the job.

  All paperwork was in place. Pan American had been notified that a very sick child was being transported to the States and had extra medical equipment standing by in Frankfurt. Kate was bringing her own medical bag aboard the aircraft, replenished as it was by Red Cross supplies and even bootlegged syringes, i.v. drips, and antibiotics somehow scrounged by Lucian from the medical school. The syringes were the Western disposable type, still in their sterile pacs. The antibiotics were from West Germany. Kate was deeply touched, knowing how much money such contraband would have brought on the black market.