“It’s wonderful,” said Kate. They had strolled around the east side of the lagoon past the noise of the playground, crossed a bridge made of cement logs and twigs, and paused to watch couples rowing in the connecting waterway below.
Father O’Rourke nodded and leaned on the railing. “It’s always too easy to see just one side of a place. Bucharest can be a difficult city to love, but it has its attractions.”
Kate watched a young couple pass below, the young man wrestling with the heavy oars while trying to make it seem easy, his young lady reclining languorously—or what she thought was languorously—in the bow. The rowboat seemed to be the size of one of the QE2’s lifeboats, and appeared to be just about as easy to handle. The couple rowed out of sight around the bend in the channel, the young man sweating and swearing as he leaned on the oars to avoid a paddle-boat coming the other way.
“The Ceauşescus and the revolution seem very far away, don’t they?” said Kate. “It’s hard to imagine that these people had to live for so many years under one of the planet’s worst dictators.”
The priest nodded. “Have you seen the new presidential palace and his Victory of Socialism Boulevard?”
Kate tried to force her tired mind into gear. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“You should see it before you go,” said Father O’Rourke. His gray eyes seemed absorbed with some inner dialogue.
“That’s the new section of Bucharest he had built?”
The priest nodded again. “It reminds me of architectural models Albert Speer had made up for Hitler,” he said, his voice very soft. “Berlin the way it was supposed to look after the ultimate triumph of the Third Reich. The presidential palace may be the largest inhabited structure on earth…only it’s not inhabited now. The new regime doesn’t know what the hell to do with it. And the Boulevard is a mass of gleaming white office and apartment complexes—part Third Reich, part Korean Gothic, part Roman Imperial. They march across what used to be the most beautiful section of the city like so many Martian war machines. The old neighborhoods are gone forever…as dead as Ceauşescu.” He rubbed his cheek. “Do you mind if we sit down a moment?”
Kate walked with him to a bench. The sunset had faded in all but the highest clouds, but the twilight was the slow, warm melting of a late spring evening. A few gas lamps were coming on down the long curve of path. “Your leg’s bothering you,” she said.
Father O’Rourke smiled. “This leg can’t bother me,” he said, lifting his left pant leg above the athletic sock. He rapped the pink plastic of a prosthesis. “Just to the knee,” he added. “Above that, it can hurt like hell.”
Kate chewed her lip. “Automobile accident?”
“In a manner of speaking. Sort of a national auto accident. Vietnam.”
Kate was surprised. She had still been in high school during the war, and she assumed that the priest was her age or younger. Now she looked carefully at his face above the dark beard, seeing the webwork of laugh lines around the eyes, really seeing the man for the first time, and realized that he was probably a few years older than she, perhaps in his early forties. “I’m sorry about your leg,” she said.
“Me too,” laughed the priest.
“Was it a land mine?” Kate had interned with a brilliant doctor who had specialized in VA cases.
“Not exactly,” said Father O’Rourke. His voice was free of the self-consciousness and hesitance she had heard from some Vietnam veterans. Whatever demons the war and the wound brought him, she thought, he’s free of them now. “I was a tunnel rat,” he said. “Found an NVA down there that was more booby trap than corpse.”
Kate was not sure what a tunnel rat was, but she did not ask.
“You’re doing wonderful things with the children at the hospital,” said the priest. “The survival rate on the hepatitis cases has doubled since your arrival.”
“It’s still not good enough,” snapped Kate. She heard the edge in her tone and took a breath. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “How long have you been in Romania…uh…”
He scratched his beard. “Why don’t you call me Mike?”
Kate started to speak, then hesitated. “Father” was wrong; “Mike” didn’t seem quite right.
The priest grinned at her. “Okay, how about ‘O’Rourke’? It worked fine in the army.”
“All right—O’Rourke,” said Kate. She extended her hand. “I’m Neuman.”
His handshake was firm but Kate perceived a great gentleness behind it. “Well, Neuman,” he said, “to answer your question… I’ve been in and out of Romania for quite a bit of the last year and a half.”
Kate was surprised. “Working with the children all that time?”
“Mostly.” He leaned forward, idly rubbing his knee. Another rowboat passed by. Rock music, the lyrics indecipherable, drifted across the lagoon from the island restaurant. “The first year or so…well, you know about the conditions of the state orphanages. The first task was to get the sickest children transferred to hospitals.”
Kate touched her tired eyelids. Amazingly, the sick-feeling fatigue was retreating a bit, allowing a simple tiredness to fill her. “The hospitals aren’t much better,” she said.
Father O’Rourke did not look at her. “The hospitals for the Party elite are better. Have you seen them?”
“No.”
“They’re not on the official Ministry of Health list. They don’t have signs out front. But the medical care and equipment is light-years ahead of the district hospitals you’ve been working in.”
Kate turned her head to watch a couple strolling by hand in hand. The sky was darkening between the branches above the walkway. “But there are no children in these Party-elite hospitals, are there, O’Rourke?”
“No abandoned children. Just a few well-fed kids in for tonsillectomies.”
The couple had strolled out of sight around the curved path, but Kate continued to stare in that direction. The pleasing park sounds seemed to fade into the distance, “God damn,” she whispered softly. “What are we going to do? Six hundred-some of these state institutions…two hundred thousand or more kids we know of out there…fifty percent of those exposed to hepatitis B…almost as many testing positive for HIV in some of those hellholes. What are we going to do, O’Rourke?”
The priest was looking at her in the fading light. “The money and attention from the West has helped some.”
Kate made a rude sound.
“It has,” said Father O’Rourke. “The children aren’t penned up in cages the way they were when I first arrived on the tour Vernor Deacon Trent arranged.”
“No,” agreed Kate. “Now they’re left to rock and grow retarded in clean iron cribs.”
“And there’s always hope for the adoption process…” began the priest.
Kate rounded on him. “Are you part of that fucking circus? Do you round up healthy Romanian kids for these beef-fed born-again American yahoos to buy? Is that your role in all this?”
Father O’Rourke sat silently in the face of her anger. His face showed no retreat. His voice was soft. “Do you want to see my role in all this, Neuman?”
Kate hesitated only a second. She felt the fury rising in her again like heated bile. Children were suffering and dying by the thousands…by the tens of thousands…and this Roman-collared anachronism was part of the Great Baby Bazaar, the strictly-for-profit sideshow being run by the thugs and former informers that were the greasy Mafia of this country.
“Yeah,” she said at last, allowing the anger to emerge as a verbal sneer. “Show me.”
Without another word, Father O’Rourke rose from the bench and led her out of the park and into the dark city.
Chapter Nine
PITEŞTI was a wall of flame in the night. A solid wall of refinery towers, tanks, cooling towers, and silhouetted scaffoldings spread for miles across the northeastern horizon, flame rising from a thousand valves, dark domes, and black buildings. It was a refinery town, Kate knew, but it
looked like Hell to her as they approached.
O’Rourke had stopped by his room in the UNICEF building on Ştirbei Vodă Street and changed into what he’d called his mutant ninja priest suit: black shirt, black coat, black trousers, Roman collar. He had led Kate to the small Dacia sedan parked behind the gothic building and they had rattled across bricks and cobblestones to the Hotel Lido on Magheru Boulevard. Instead of stopping, O’Rourke had turned down Strada C. A. Rosetti and driven around the block, slowing each time he passed the darkened hotel.
“What are we—” began Kate the third time they inched past the hotel.
“Wait…there,” O’Rourke had said and pointed. A couple dressed in Western clothes had come out of the hotel, chatted with a tall man in a leather coat, and then all three got in the rear seat of a Mercedes waiting in the no-parking zone at the curb. O’Rourke had pulled the Dacia into the darkness under the trees on Strada Franklin and turned the lights out. A moment later, when the Mercedes pulled out into the thinning traffic, he followed.
“Friends of yours?” asked Kate, a little put off by this cloak-and-dagger nonsense.
O’Rourke’s teeth looked very white between the dark lines of his well-groomed beard. “Americans, of course. I knew they were meeting this guy about now.”
“Adoption?”
“Sure.”
“Are you involved in it?”
O’Rourke glanced at her. “Not yet.”
They had followed the Mercedes down Bulevardul Magheru until the street became Bulevardul Nicolae Bălcescu, swung west behind the Mercedes at the traffic circle in Plaza Universitatii, and followed it until the broad avenue of Bulevardul Republicii became Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Once across the cement-trenched canal that once had been the Dimboviţa River, they drove west through a section of Stalinist apartment buildings and electronics factories. The streets here were wide, littered with deep potholes, and largely empty except for clots of dark-garbed pedestrians, the occasional rushing taxi, and rattling trollies. The posted speed limit was fifty kilometers per hour, but the Mercedes soon accelerated to a hundred and O’Rourke flogged the Dacia to keep up.
“You’re going to get stopped by a traffic cop,” said Kate.
The priest nodded toward the glove compartment. “Four cartons of Kents in there if I do,” he said, swerving to avoid a group of pedestrians standing in the middle of the boulevard. The avenue was illuminated by the sick yellow glow of occasional sodium-vapor lamps that were very far apart.
Suddenly the ghastly apartment complexes grew fewer, then disappeared altogether, and they were suddenly out in the country, accelerating even faster to keep up with the Mercedes’ taillights. Kate saw a road sign flash by: A-1, AUTOSTRADA BUCUREŞTI-PITEŞTI. PITEŞTI, 113 KM.
The ride took a little more than an hour, and she and the priest spoke very little during it: Kate because she was so exhausted that she found it hard to form words, O’Rourke apparently because of a preoccupation with his own thoughts. The road was a shoulderless, potholed version of an American Interstate, although the countryside passing on either side was much darker than farmland Kate remembered in the States. Only the occasional village was visible in the distance from the highway, and even those glowed feebly, as if from a few kerosene lamps rather than electricity.
Piteşti was that much more of a shock with its wall of flame rising into the night.
The Mercedes took the first exit off the main highway into Piteşti and O’Rourke followed, accelerating now to close the distance. The access road soon took them to a dim avenue, then to a narrower street without streetlights. The apartment complexes here seemed grimmer than those in Bucharest; it was not yet ten P.M. but only a few lights glowed through curtains. The raw-cement buildings were backlighted by the pulsing orange glow reflected from low clouds. Kate and O’Rourke had rolled up the Dacia’s windows, but acrid fumes from the refineries still entered the car and made their eyes water and throats burn. Kate thought again of Hell.
The Mercedes pulled down an even narrower street and stopped. O’Rourke pulled the Dacia to the curb just beyond an intersection.
“What now?” said Kate.
“You can stay here or come into the building with me,” said O’Rourke.
Kate got out of the car and followed him around the corner, across the street to the hulk of the apartment complex. The sound of a few radios or televisions came from the darkened upper stories. The spring air was chilly here, despite the hellish glow above them. The elevator inside was out of order; they heard footsteps echoing on the stairs above them. The priest gestured for her to hurry and Kate followed him up the steps in a half-jog. They could hear the heavy scrape of four people above them, but O’Rourke’s footfalls were almost inaudible. She noticed that he had kept his Reeboks on and she smiled a bit even as she began to pant with the exertion.
They paused on the sixth floor, what would have been the seventh floor in America. O’Rourke opened the door from the stairway and they were assaulted by old cooking smells almost as abrasive as the chemical stink outside. Voices echoed down the narrow corridor.
O’Rourke held up one hand, motioning her to stay in the pool of darkness by the stairway, and then he moved silently down the hall. Kate thought that “mutant ninja priest suit” was about right; the tall man blended into the shadows between the dim lights.
Despite his command to stay behind—or perhaps because of it—Kate followed him down the hallway, staying near the walls where it was darkest. She had a premonition of the scene she would see when she reached the open apartment door, and she was not disappointed.
Two Romanian men in leather jackets were standing with the American couple, translating and arguing with the man and woman who lived in the apartment. Three young children clung to their mother’s legs, and there was the cry of a baby from an open bedroom door. The apartment was small, cluttered, and dirty, with a threadbare carpet littered with pots and pans, as if toddlers had been playing with them on the floor a moment before. The air was thick with the odor of fried food and dirty diapers.
Kate glanced around the edge of the door again. O’Rourke actually stood in the shadows just inside the apartment, as yet unnoticed by the arguing adults in the lighted room. The two Romanian men who had brought the Americans here were the usual mafioso, money-changer type: greasy hair, one with a bandido mustache, the other with a three-day stubble, dressed in designer jeans and silk shirts under their leather jackets, both with a bullying, condescending attitude that Kate had seen on three continents.
The Romanian couple whose apartment it was were shorter, sallower, the wife hollow-eyed and frantic looking, the husband chattering away, his frequent smile little more than a facial tic. Amidst all of this, the American couple—young, blond, pink-cheeked and dressed in Lands’ End casual clothes—looked overwhelmed. The American woman kept crouching to hug or smile at the toddlers, none of whom were very clean, but the children kept slipping behind their parents or sliding away into the dark bedroom.
“How much for this one?” asked the American man, reaching out to tousle the hair of the three- or four-year-old clinging to his mother’s skirt. The boy pulled back quickly. The taller of the Romanian guides snapped a question, then cut the Romanian father off in mid babble.
“He says one hundred thousand lei and a Turbo,” said the tall guide, smirking.
“A Turbo?” said the American woman, blinking rapidly.
“Turbo automobile,” said the shorter and swarthier of the two guides. When he grinned, a gold tooth caught the light.
The American man pulled out a notebook calculator and tapped at it. “A hundred thousand lei would be about sixteen hundred and sixty-six dollars at the official exchange rate, honey,” he said to his wife. “Mmmm…but just about five hundred bucks at the black market rate. But the car… I don’t know…”
The taller guide smirked. “No, no, no,” he said. “They all ask for hundred thousand lei. No pay. These Gypsies…see? Very greedy people. Gypsy
baby is not worth hundred thousand lei. Their little childrens worth even less. We offer thirty thousand, tell them that if they say no, we go somewhere else.” He turned and tapped the Romanian father on the chest, none too gently. The little man twitched a smile and listened to the barked flow of Romanian.
Kate understood only a few words—America, dollars, fool, authorities.
The young American wife had moved to the doorway of the darkened bedroom and was trying to coax the two-year-old girl out into the light. The husband was busy with his calculator; his forehead glistened with sweat under the bare bulb.
“Ahhh,” grinned the tall guide. “The little girl, very healthy, they agree to forty-five thousand lei. Can leave tonight. At once.”
The American woman closed her eyes and whispered, “Praise the Lord.” Her husband blinked and moistened his lips. The shorter of the two guides grinned at his colleague.
“This is illegal,” said O’Rourke, stepping into the apartment.
The Americans jumped and looked sheepish. The guides scowled and stepped forward. The Gypsy husband looked at his wife, and both of their faces showed the pure panic of loss.
“It’s illegal and it’s unnecessary,” said the priest, standing between the guides and the American couple. “There are orphanages where you can carry out a legitimate adoption.”
“Cine sînteţi dumneavoastră?” demanded the taller guide angrily. “Ce este aceasta?”
O’Rourke ignored him and spoke directly to the American wife. “None of these children are being put up for adoption or need to be adopted. The father and mother both work at the refinery. These two…” He gestured toward the guides with a dismissive wave of his left hand, as if too disgusted to look at them. “They’re punks…informers…thugs. They chose this family because others in this same building have been intimidated into selling their children. Please consider what you’re doing.”