‘Worse?’ Darya wondered, sitting down. She wished she’d researched better and booked in advance, but she’d been short on cash and had gotten bored of Bucharest—a concrete, graffiti-splashed, urban jungle. She’d wanted to leave quickly.
‘At least this one has charging points,’ he said. ‘And ventilation.’ He gestured to the train’s open door.
After a few minutes, ‘I love that,’ Darya said, pointing at the tan backpack lying next to him. The words ‘Matt & Dean’ were imprinted on it. ‘Fancy,’ she added.
He smiled. Two deep dimples emerged, impressive even under the leathery ridges and faint stubble of his cheeks.
Darya took a closer look at him.
Brian was short and slender, with stringy blonde hair that grew down to the nape of his neck. A wispy beard covered his narrow cheeks. His nose was crooked. His eyes were tiny mercurial globs, bright and melancholic. His baggy beige pants and nondescript T-shirt looked like they’d not seen a washer for some time now. Heck, Brian didn’t look much washed himself. The bag appeared misplaced next to him, as if he’d shoplifted it from one of the upscale Lipscani boutiques.
He cleared the air for her.
‘It’s a gift from my mum,’ he explained. ‘Surprisingly handy despite how it looks.’
He’s young, so young, Darya sighed. He looked barely eighteen.
They sat with their legs and bags spread out, while strangers waded in and out. Darya looked at Brian from time to time, scrunching up her face, rolling her eyes, and he nodded in commiseration.
But their acquaintance on the train’s floor was short-lived.
The ticket checker arrived. You have to find seats, he growled in broken English and demanded to see their tickets.
‘I’m going to Brasov,’ Darya yelled, as the man prodded her on towards the train’s narrow passageway, where he’d told her an empty seat lay waiting. ‘I’m going to be there for a few days.’
‘And after that?’ Brian yelled back. He’d been instructed to go to the adjacent bogie.
Darya shrugged. She hadn’t planned anything. ‘What about you?’ she asked.
The ticket checker motioned frantically, sweeping his arms up and down, as if a swarm of flies were on them. He said something with a shake of his head to the rotund woman who’d vacated the seat now being passed on to Darya. She glared at Darya, who returned it with a grin.
The train screeched to a halt. Doors opened wide. The woman leaned on her good knee, picked up her bag, and struggled out. Two more entered.
Darya had to take her place before it went. ‘Where will you be?’ she shouted.
‘I’m going to Brasov, too,’ Brian answered. ‘From Brasov to Cluj, and then to Sibiu for three months.’
‘What’s in Sibiu?’ she shouted as she heaved her suitcase behind her.
‘Closure.’
‘What?’
‘See ya.’
They do say what you seek is seeking you. If you’ve thought up an idea once, and put all your life’s energy into it, even for a fraction of a second, and never thought about it again, it stays in your subliminal, ticking like a time bomb.
Darya hadn’t fallen for Brian or anything like that. There was nothing romantic about it. He was, after all, at least a decade younger than her. But she’d seen something in his eyes.
There was a mystery to be solved.
And how could Darya have let that go?
She’d thought of Brian so often in the days that followed in Brasov that she wasn’t surprised to see him conjure up on her last night in town. She hadn’t been looking for him. Swear.
He was standing at the back of a line at a shop that claimed to sell the best papanași in town. She gestured for him to join her at the front, a bit too excitedly, she admitted to herself later.
‘You again?’ she mocked, when he’d walked up to her.
‘Been following me?’ he quipped. The hair on his forehead had grown longer; they almost covered his eyebrows now. He seemed perkier from the last time they’d met. As if he’d heard good news. Or was high on something.
‘Might just land up in Sibiu, too,’ Darya joked.
She’d expected a roll of his eyes or a grimace in response, but ‘cool’ is all he said.
They were disappointed by the papanași. She asked him to join her for a drink. To flush the taste out, not a date, she clarified, and was surprised when he agreed.
And by the end of that night, she decided to follow Brian to Sibiu. She wasn’t going to tell him she was doing it—he would’ve been suspicious, alarmed even—but Darya had an obstinate, addictive streak within her: Once she was fascinated with somebody or something, she couldn’t let it go.
And Brian fascinated her.
Week 12: The Present Day
‘I heard of Mihai’s passing,’ Darya murmured. ‘Please accept my condolences.’
Ana-Maria lowered her eyes perfunctorily. ‘Thank you.’
‘Was it …?’
‘Heart attack. The medication had weakened his arteries and he had an embolism.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Darya said. ‘My uncle died the same way.’
Darya had been introduced to Ana-Maria’s father one time, not by Ana-Maria herself but by Alina—the owner of Handsome Monk—the café where Darya was volunteering for three months in exchange for stipend and lodging. Alina had told her afterwards it was Mihai who’d wanted to meet Darya—he was always interested in newcomers to the café, asking to talk to them.
The modest café had hardly looked like a place for the patriarch of a successful Sibiu business family to spend his time in, but Alina had explained. ‘This is his peaceful place. He comes by every Friday afternoon, sits in his favourite corner, and watches people.’ The ‘corner’ was a slightly elevated portion of the café, next to the backdoor and the WC, separated from the main section by a narrow landing. It was easy to get a view of the rest of the café from this secluded corner without being observed. ‘Now and then, he handpicks someone to talk to. Most people he asks for are usually thrilled. The family is well known. I guess they imagine they’re in for a handout,’ Alina had said.
Handsome Monk was a cozy café, done up in orange, yellow, and black. It could seat about fourteen people at one time—ten in the main section, four inside where Mihai sat—and when the weather allowed it, about twenty people could sit outside. The café served only coffee, croissants, and cookies. After 5 p.m. it also served local craft beer—mostly pale ale, IPA, and a luscious red beer called Draculina. The menu was limited, but the quality and the prices were good. The coffee itself was delicious; made with freshly ground beans, using an expensive coffee machine, and by a well-trained barista. Thus, it ranked among the top cafés in the city. Luckily for Darya, they’d had an opening when she’d only casually enquired.
The ‘well-trained barista’ was Bogdan. Tall, lean, bearded, with nicotine-stained teeth and his hair cut close to his skull, he was genial, glib, and an incessant whistler. Alina treated him extra nicely, letting him take all the breaks he wanted, giving him overtime without being requested, and never taking umbrage when he was rude, except if it was with a customer. Whenever she gossiped, it was out of his earshot. ‘Do not want him to regret working with women,’ she said as a way of explanation, but Darya knew Bogdan to be a big gossiper himself.
The three got along well. Alina took the orders and the payments, Bogdan made the coffee, and Darya served it. Occasionally, she made use of her barista training to prepare coffee too, but that had to take place under Bogdan’s close scrutiny.
Darya brought her attention to the present as Ana-Maria laid out two cups of coffee and a plateful of biscuits on the table. Christine had brought it up for them, discreetly knocking on the door to hand it over, as she had the last time Darya and Ana-Maria had talked in this very same room. To all outward appearances, Christine was lovely, chirpy, and obsequious—an assistant stereotype. Darya knew her to be her employer’s favourite and that their closeness was fodder for
many lurid townsfolk jokes.
‘Please help yourself,’ Ana-Maria gestured and leaned back in her chair. On the wall behind hung a gold-framed landscape on fabric, showing rolling farmlands, shingle-roofed houses, goats and sheep, a tall church spire—a typical Romanian countryside scene. By now, Darya knew where the landscape was from and what the golden Romanian letters embroidered underneath meant. The outline of a pair of sleepy eyes stared back at her at the very end of the phrase, looking much like the eye-shaped skylights on roofs everywhere in Sibiu. She’d found this part of Sibiu culture intriguing—the eerie eyes on every roof—as if glaring down at her. For the longest time, she didn’t know why they were there at all.
But now she did.
Darya adjusted her body to sit more comfortably in her chair. The coffee tasted grainy and alien in Darya’s mouth, but she was grateful for it. She had been craving the warmth, the comfort of its sharp acidity.
As they sipped on the coffee in silence, Darya wondered, and it was not for the first time, how someone as rich as Ana-Maria was this unassuming and lived how she did.
The house they were in at the moment was a two-floor bungalow on the secluded and affluent General Magheru Street. It was built in neo-Romanian style with pale orange outer walls and large rectangular windows made of antique distorted glass. Two central windows—one of which had been transformed into a door—opened to a balcony with an arched base and enclosed by a wrought iron grid. But the house’s most eye-catching detail was its pyramid-shaped roof, made of thick wooden shingles, preserved that way for over two hundred years. The colour of chocolate syrup, dense, and resplendent, it blended dramatically with the orange of the walls below and made the whole structure look like a dowager’s ball gown. Like all the other houses in Sibiu, the roof had four eye-shaped skylights, disposed on two levels. A solid wooden gate, painted in deep red and dotted with black rivets, opened into the front lawn. The well-kept garden inside was surrounded by three mini apartments and an office. This was where Ana-Maria’s helpers and assistants lived and worked. Wicker chairs were set out in the garden around a glass-top centre table where Darya assumed Ana-Maria entertained the rare visitor. Or her staff did.
Darya had been led up to the attic. It was more private, Ana-Maria had explained; the lower floor was exposed and carried voices. If they were to have a prolonged and private conversation, that wasn’t the best place to do it.
Darya had been to the house only once before today; that was when she’d been tasked with the job she was delivering on now. Both times she’d been led straight up without a pause as soon as she’d come in, by Ana-Maria herself. Infrequently, she’d heard hushed whispers and tiptoes outside the door, followed by the quiet delivery of water and food to them, but not much else.
The loft was bright and sunny during the day, dreary during the night. It was a stark space: bare, white walls, a faded lime-green carpet, a couch, a chair, an oak table. The platforms that protruded inwards into the room from the skylights held pert geraniums in tiny white pots. When the sun disappeared behind the sea of surrounding roofs, a floor lamp lit up the space, but it was less than adequate.
Not unlike an interrogation room, Darya mused wryly.
The first time they’d met, Darya had mistaken Ana-Maria to be one the assistants. Darya had not seen her before, not even in a picture, and had only had Alina’s description to go by. Ana-Maria was known to be a recluse, rarely showing up at the café or any of her properties. There were no close-up pictures of her on the internet either. So, Darya had no way to know. It was only when they’d settled into their chairs and she’d begun telling her about the task at hand that Darya had realised this was her employer.
Her words were soft, her demeanour self-effacing. Before she’d come to meet her, Darya had been fed some fantastic gossip, and when she was with Ana-Maria, she laughed at the memory of it. She’d heard tall tales that Ana-Maria was into wild orgies, bred hybrids, kept sex slaves, was into forbidden experiments, stalked the streets at night, slept with both men and women ... Alina and Bogdan had been her main sources of information, and they’d claimed to be repeating what the townsfolk said, but Darya understood later that the two had only been trying to scandalise her.
At least one thing Alina had said had been validated. It recurred in Darya’s conversations with Ana-Maria: Keeping up the honour of the Rosetti name and serving its establishments was the only thing that mattered to her. She’d even sacrificed her personal life so she could perform her duties without distraction. Darya had been informed Ana-Maria had a multitude of health issues and survived on medicines, but she pushed herself to work every day, kept long hours, and was always available on the phone, for any problems her customers or employees might have.
The first time they’d met, she’d gotten to the point quickly.
‘Alina recommended you. I need your help,’ she’d said, worry lines creasing her forehead. ‘Nobody’s looking for the boy, but I want to. He disappeared from one of my properties, after all.’
‘No one has reported him missing,’ Darya had said. ‘Perhaps he’s not.’
‘Sibiana—the hostel he was staying at—belongs to us. The manager called me to say Brian hadn’t shown up for two days and his things were still in his locker,’ she’d said.
‘What about his backpack? His phone?’
Ana-Maria had looked startled at the question. ‘I don’t know the details.’
‘Isn’t it too soon to be raising an alarm?’
When Ana-Maria had spoken next, her words had been slow and measured, ‘If he’s safe and sound, there’s nothing to worry about. That’s why I’m asking you. I don’t want any noise around it. Alina told me you’ve solved cases back in India. That you’re good at this.’
Darya had wanted to find Brian herself. If she were being compensated for it, the better.
‘Find out where he is. Find out if he’s safe. You’ll be rewarded well for your time. But if it takes more than two months, I’ll rethink our arrangement.’
Darya hadn’t needed much convincing to say ‘yes’.
She hadn’t known then what intrigues awaited her, and what she had committed herself to.
She was about to tell Ana-Maria all that she knew, what she was certain Ana-Maria had rather not know.
She resumed her story.
‘After Brasov, we met again in Sibiu. I got to know Brian better. I learnt he was lonely. That he had no family left. That he had chronic health troubles,’ Darya said. ‘He’d come all the way from Canada to Romania for a research project or so he said, but I could sense it was for something else. Something important.’
Week 2: 5 weeks before Brian goes missing
Darya gets to know Brian better and learns why he came to Romania.
They’d started the evening by having a good laugh at the waitress.
‘It’s such a hit and miss with them,’ Brian said, shaking his head.
‘Are Romanian waiters ruder than the French?’ Darya asked, her voice raised in mock horror. ‘You really never know if you’re going to get a sourpuss or a sweetheart, the type you can chat with into the night.’
‘You’ve gone that far?’
‘With one,’ Darya answered with a sly smile. ‘After endowing him with my sweetest smile.’
‘You do have a nice smile,’ Brian murmured, and Darya was glad he took that moment to put his backpack down on the ground, else he would’ve been witness to the embarrassing blush that crept up to her cheeks.
They were seated in an open-air area of a very popular local restaurant. The ambience was romantic: twinkling fairy lights, flowering vines on white walls, LED candles on their tables, soft Romanian ballads wafting through overhead speakers. Darya wondered briefly if that was why Brian had suggested it, and then, irritated with herself, shrugged it off. As always, she was reading too much into things, imagining adoration when there was none. Brian was simply introducing her to a recent discovery of his. According to locals, the restaurant they wer
e at—Harlequin—had the best sarmale for miles around. Brian had been here before and could confidently claim it wasn’t going to be a misfortune like the last time in Brasov.
He took a pull of his beer and asked Darya to read the back page of the leather-bound menu they’d been given. ‘That’s an interesting story,’ he murmured, wiping his lips.
Darya turned the menu over. Written in small, cursive letters was the following:
Some say it was a constructor’s funny painting which remained uncovered (constructors were allowed to paint for their amusement during the night, but they had to cover everything during the day). Others say a high priest got upset with the harlequins and punished them with supporting the church ceiling forever. The less imaginative claim it was a foolish prankster laying claim to the powers of a long-lost breed, the crazy yet clever harlequins.
Legends and stories are aplenty, but nobody knows for sure what the image of the harlequin is doing inside the church in Biertan, among the holy pictures.
And if you happen to visit the church, do remember to look for the mystery harlequin!
‘Aha! So, that’s the reason for the clown artwork on the walls. And for the colourful awning through which we entered,’ Darya said, placing the menu back on the table.
‘A clown!’ Brian smiled. ‘Ma’am, you insult the harlequin.’
‘What are they, if not clowns?’ asked Darya curiously. ‘They look like clowns, don’t they? Except for the eyes. Unusually distended eyes, probably for artistic effect.’
‘I’d say a harlequin is a sophisticated version of a clown,’ he answered. ‘They’re mime artists, while clowns are slapstick performers.’
Darya shrugged, not getting the difference.
Brian tried again. ‘A harlequin is a clever and elegant clown.’
Darya made a face, unsure why he was so hung up on it. ‘They look more elegant, sure. With their chequered clothes and fancy hats, but they’re pantomime fools, nonetheless.’
The Darya Nandkarni Misadventures Omnibus: Books 1-3 Page 53
