The Darya Nandkarni Misadventures Omnibus: Books 1-3

by Smita Bhattacharya

  November 1990

  It is being alleged that a now dissolved group called ‘Arlechin’ is behind the deaths at Biertan.

  According to a former church parishioner, the group was operational for about a decade and ceased when the communist regime was at its peak during Ceausescu. Police continue to investigate the deaths, but since a long time has passed, not many clues are left behind. But what is sinister is the parishioner’s allegation that while the group itself is disbanded, fragments continue to operate across cities, run by individuals for their own fancy …

  Darya met Danielle as she was hurrying out. She’d been hoping to escape without having to meet her, but later she realised how lucky it had been that they did meet.

  ‘Are you done?’ Danielle asked.

  Darya nodded, fingering her phone impatiently. ‘You were most helpful,’ she said. ‘Can I assist with those,’ she asked, pointing to the cardboard packing-box in Danielle’s arms. The top flap was open and it grazed Danielle’s chin.

  She made a tired noise through her nose. ‘We are always understaffed and overworked,’ she complained. ‘But don’t worry. This one is not heavy.’

  ‘What are they?’ Darya asked, to be polite.

  ‘Documentaries,’ she replied. ‘Old movies.’

  ‘Danielle,’ Darya began and then furiously debated in her head if she should ask the question. But this woman was all she had at the moment. ‘Do you know of the Arlechins?’

  To her surprise, Danielle nodded instantly. There was no wariness on her face. ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied.

  Darya steadied her breath and tried to make the question sound casual. ‘Do you know if anyone in Sibiu was part of them?’ She couldn’t have asked about Zaltan directly, because word might go back to Ana-Maria that Darya was poking around, asking for her grandfather’s involvement in a murderous cult.

  Danielle’s face scrunched up in thought. She took a couple of seconds before slowly shaking her head. ‘Sorry. I don’t know. May have been. But it was a long time ago.’ Then, as if sensing Darya’s disappointment, ‘I wish I knew more,’ she murmured.

  ‘The bodies they found in the Rosetti farmhouse, could that be the work of the Arlechins?’

  Danielle didn’t seem surprised at the question. ‘There were rumours … but the Arlechins are gone now. They existed before the communists.’ She shifted and adjusted the box in her hand. ‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s for a research project,’ Darya replied. ‘I am looking up stories about unique cults.’

  ‘Then … my friend,’ Danielle muttered, lowering herself to place the box on the floor, ‘you’re in luck! I have just the thing to help in your project. My husband calls me a genie. And soon, you shall too.’ She fell to her knees, buried her hands inside the box, and plucked out a CD. Sibiu: Arhiva Nationala de Filme (ANF) was written on the cover in sketch pen.

  ‘This movie is from the Nineties,’ Danielle said. She got to her feet. ‘It was briefly shown on television and then taken off and never shown again. I don’t know why. But this will help you in your project.’ She waved the CD in front of Darya. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  As expected, it was difficult for her to understand the video; the spoken language was Romanian, and although there were English captions at the bottom—most likely inserted recently—they were infrequent and random. Darya deciphered a few words and wrote down a few to check later, but mostly she gauged the documentary’s story by watching the visuals. She willed her eyes to stay unblinking so as to not miss anything important and took pictures using her mobile phone when she could. The film was thirty minutes long—and most likely for artistic effect—shot with a hand-held camera.

  The documentary opened with newscasters announcing unexplained deaths in various parts of Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova. Rotting bodies and skeletons had been found in caves, in remote forests, in abandoned shops and hospitals, in cellars of old homes, in the trunk of a car headed to the scrap yard. The bodies were all accidentally discovered and at different time periods over the last half of the century. Only now was a link being drawn between them because of the commonalities: they were found many months or years after their deaths, the bodies were small-framed and deformed, traces of poison had been found, they’d been discovered in deserted locations, and most of them had not even been reported missing; in only rare cases had a relative been looking for them.

  The story then moved on to investigating teams across cities—Kharviv, Dnipro, Bydgoszcz, Gydnia, Craiova, Biertan, Arad—who talked about their findings and the ongoing enquiries. One ex-inspector, in particular, demonstrated with his hands the clues they’d discovered and Darya silently thanked him for making it easier for her.

  The victims had been found several months, if not years, after they’d died, so it was difficult to conduct accurate forensic analysis. A few things became known though: paralytic poisoning was involved, and bones were broken to make the bodies fit into smaller spaces. No material possessions were found on the bodies except for the clothes the victims had been wearing. The bodies had been moved from other locations and it appeared as if the murder scene had been disturbed several times. It begged several questions: why had the victims been killed? Why had they not been buried? And who was visiting them?

  The last portion of the video was dedicated to the journalist’s own inquiries into the deaths. She drew parallels from past incidents in Romania. This was obviously a secret cult of people operating across locations. Since there were no obvious connections between the dead, the cult probably killed as a game and it was not for money/ passion/ revenge. There were similarities in how they killed, even though they had happened miles apart, suggesting there was an unspoken rule book.

  The locations where the bodies had been found seemed to have served a purpose, like an altar. The placement appeared to be part of the ritual, the bodies placed in a particular way, at a specific place, as if to be revisited by the killers again.

  And then came the most interesting part.

  In at least three of the places where a body was discovered, an eye had been drawn on a wall and a phrase written underneath, although few media outlets reported it.

  Darya held her breath.

  A flipbook appeared on the screen. The first page showed a sketch of the beatific Archangel Michael … the pages flipping rapidly … the figure transmogrifying … in the end, to turn to … a foppish, cackling harlequin, the lids of his eyes pulled out and his eyes abnormally large.

  Darya saw now how the two could’ve been seamlessly interchanged over the course of the existence of the group, with the clown replacing the angel, but created in his image.

  … and underneath the clown in black were the words:

  Până ajungi la Dumnezeu, te mănâncă sfinţii

  Darya breathed faster, her pulse pounding.

  Half-a-century ago, there were rumours that have now become urban legends: the boys who had come down for the Christian summer school at Biertan had formed amongst themselves an informal group, to rid of the boredom they felt in those hot and endless days. They were children of rich and influential men, and accustomed to every luxury in the world, before the communists came. The boys, in their late teens, had shifted from being leisure hunters and rebranded themselves as modern-day saints. They were doing God’s work, sending errant souls to hell. They were hunting down weaker men instead of animals, both of whom deserved not to live, in their small minds.

  In a moment of drunken candour, one of them had blabbed to a girlfriend—an outsider—and the story had spread. The locals heard the stories with interest and awe, and never thought to report these boys, most agreeing, like the boys themselves, that they were doing an important service to their country, and to God.

  Thus, no one was ever caught. Rich and influential people were suspected and questioned—ex-students, now adults: ministers, businessmen, merchants—but no concrete evidences were found linking them to the bodies. Each denied the
group’s existence.

  Some of the speculation the journalist had put up in the video had come from her own questioning of the police officers and witnesses involved in the investigations. Darya sat up straight when the video briefly touched upon Draco, with a file shot of the farmhouse.

  Something about the visuals of the farmhouse … a clue was staring right in her face … but what?

  Yes! The roof was flat now, no longer sloped. And instead of stairs, a ramp led upward.

  The journalist had interviewed the son of the shepherd who’d alerted the townsfolk of the words painted on the farmhouse walls. The man claimed his father had seen the devil’s son paint the words. The next shot was a file photo of Zaltan, in black and white, protesting his innocence: the rich were always unfairly targeted, the subtitles said.

  That was the enduring image playing in her mind when she exited the building, summaries scribbled in her notepad, her phone cluttered with blurry photos.

  Week 12: The Present Day

  ‘And what was your conclusion from all of this?’ Ana-Maria asked.

  ‘I’m guessing some of it,’ Darya said, knowing that was the hardest part—her inferences were logical yet somewhat circumstantial. ‘But here goes. Your grandfather favoured your father not because Mihai was a boy, as your mother had thought, as the whole family had assumed, too; but … because Zaltan saw in Mihai a violent streak, pretty much like he had in himself. Your grandfather was a member of the Arlechin. Of that, I have proof.’ Darya whipped out her phone and scrolled to reach the photo of Zaltan she’d taken from the documentary. Zooming in on the centre, she flashed the screen at Ana-Maria who bent forward and creased her eyes to see better, using her finger to go up the photo to confirm it was indeed Zaltan. ‘Oleg has the same tattoo,’ said Darya. ‘Perhaps so did Mihai.’ Ana-Maria gave no reaction at all, as Darya had expected. Laying her phone back on the table, she continued, ‘Recognising that your father had a proclivity towards it, and could be trained, Zaltan initiated him into it. I don’t think they had anything to do with the gypsy family deaths—the three had simply been unfortunate to drink from the pond—but their deaths and the subsequent shutting of the farmhouse must have given Zaltan an idea. He didn’t need poison—like the rest of the Arlechin—to stun his victims into submission. He already had that festering in his property. He could put it to good use. He chose Draco—a poor gypsy boy, whom no one would miss, save for his mother—to be Mihai and his first hunt, together. Draco’s mother was working for the Popescus and Mihai could easily befriend the little boy.’ She leaned forward, ignoring the hard graze of the table’s edges on her elbows. ‘Draco was last seen with Mihai. The police wouldn’t listen to his mother when she said it over and over again. I read about it in a news article from that time.’ Her heart pounded with the excitement of finally being able to tell it all out aloud. It was a relief, and as she spoke, she knew it made sense, too. The fact that Ana-Maria hardly countered or seemed unsurprised, bolstered her confidence.

  She knows. She already knows.

  And although Darya should’ve been worried about how all this was landing with Ana-Maria, she was secure in the knowledge that Alina knew where Darya was and had her back. She’d made sure Ana-Maria was aware of it too.

  ‘It was like a hunt for them,’ Darya whispered. ‘That was what the Arlechin was all about. The hunt. Leading a victim, they’d carefully select, to his ultimate end. Play God. Watch him die slowly. The longer he took, the more he begged, the more was the power the killers felt.’ The movie she’d watched at the Public County Library had given her more answers than she’d been looking for, but it’d also given her a recurring nightmare: that of Brian dying alone, wedged in the suffocating chimney shaft, crying for help, and with no one to hear him.

  Not all of what Darya knew was circumstantial, though. She was grateful to Helenka for providing her vital clues from the police investigation. The Bucharest lab, in their follow-up forensic evaluation, had concluded that the edema in Brian’s body had been caused by saxitoxin poisoning. This had caused him to suffer from temporary paralysis, making it easier to break his bones and cram his body into the chimney. The police had taken a sample from the pond at the farmhouse and determined the toxin in Brian’s body had come from the blue-green scum-like algae infesting the pond. The algae were the source of deadly cyanotoxins, one of the most powerful natural poisons known to man. Traces of the algae were also detected in a can of Draculina found on the site. It had Brian’s DNA on it. The police surmised the drink was likely offered to Brian by the killer and the colour of the beer obfuscated the signs of the deadly algae.

  ‘But why the chimney?’ Ana-Maria asked.

  ‘A safe place to preserve the bodies without being found. Sheep grazed the lands around. Couples often picnicked in the woods and children picked mushrooms near the grasslands. Any one of them could have ventured into the garden, and, if brave enough, broken the lock and gone into the house. But no one really looks inside a chimney.’ Then, remembering a part of the movie, ‘Also, the Arlechins like rituals. Their first victim was stuffed in a chimney, and so it continued from that,’ she said.

  She also now knew what those words meant, the ones she’d seen on the cross laid over the well in Biertan, and later in the video. It was the Arlechin’s slogan.

  ‘What slogan?’

  Darya dug out the short article she’d gotten printed, the only one she’d found in English on the internet.

  An extract from Bucharest: TipografiaZiarului ‘Universul’.

  The Devil and his demons were once angels of God. The Devil, however, tried to rebel, and, in response, God opened up the heavens so that he might fall to the earth. Fearing that Heaven might be voided, the Archangel Michael re-sealed it, thus freezing the demons that had not yet fallen to hell in place. This is related to the concept of soul customs, where every soul is intercepted on its way to heaven by these demons, who force it into hell. It has also given rise to the Romanian saying:

  Până ajungi la Dumnezeu, te mănâncă sfinţii

  Before you reach God, the saints will eat you.

  Ana-Maria was still reading when Darya mentioned quietly, ‘You don’t have any remains from your past in this house. Yet, you kept the painting.’ Darya motioned to the landscape behind her on the wall.

  Ana-Maria turned.

  ‘That is Biertan’s setting, isn’t it?’ Darya said. ‘I saw the original mosaic in the church. The caretakers told me the summer school students used to get this painting as replicas.’ Darya paused. ‘Why do you have it?’

  ‘My father gifted it to me when I was young.’ She seemed to mull over the fact as she spoke the words, as if only now understanding what it meant. ‘So, what you’re saying is … my father and my grandfather before him … belonged to a secret, powerful cult, went to summer school in Biertan …’

  ‘… that I know of,’ Darya interrupted. ‘There may have been other such schools across Romania and abroad.’

  ‘And together they killed Draco?’ A mocking smile appeared on Ana-Maria’s lips. Darya had known she wasn’t going to concede easily, and until she did, the game had to go on. ‘But why would he take mamă to the old farmhouse if he knew Draco was there? If he had been part of the hunt and had helped kill him, as you claim?’

  ‘It had been Andrea’s idea to go there,’ Darya said. She had wondered this too until Smaranda cleared it for her, Alina filling in the rest. ‘Your father never refused your mother. They’d been forbidden to go inside the old farmhouse and Mihai didn’t think Andrea would disrespect Zaltan, who she feared and revered as much as he did. But unfortunately, they’d had a fight the day of the picnic, and as an act of rebellion, she did go. Later, when Mihai painted the words on the walls of the farmhouse, it was a declaration of what he was capable of, not a question.’

  ‘My father didn’t paint those words!’

  ‘Oh, yes, he did.’

  ‘Darya,’ Ana-Maria interjected, ‘You do realise, much of wha
t you’re saying is guesswork. You have little proof. Also … this is not what I asked you to do. Are you expecting to be compensated for the time you spent on …’ she struggled for the words, ‘… coming up with this pile of rubbish?’

  Darya stayed silent, staring back.

  Ana-Maria looked offended. ‘You can well imagine my shock. You claim both my father and grandfather were part of a secret, powerful group of rich killers. They killed Brian. They killed others before him. All the three dead bodies found in our farmhouse chimney was their handiwork. It sounds … truly fantastic!’

  Darya shrugged. ‘Mihai is dead. I’ve no power to do anything in Sibiu. So, it’s all up to you, what you want to do, with what I’m telling you,’ she said. ‘But what I said is true. A hunt … it ... it’s like a drug. Once you have the addiction, that’s it, you have it, and it’s hard to get rid of it. It haunts you, keeps you awake day and night. It becomes the very purpose for your living, the craving for the hit, waiting for it. Arlechin had been disbanded, but the yen in your father’s heart hadn’t disappeared. On his own, in Sibiu, your father was carrying on the tradition of the hunt. It was difficult for him when Andrea was around, and later, with his failing faculties, it got even harder. He went to Biertan to get Irina. I was led to believe you were the one who hired Irina, but it was actually Mihai who’d sought her out. She was someone who’d been part of it before, the Biertan bishop’s grandniece.’ She let that sink in. ‘I think you know what I’m talking about.’

  Ana-Maria did not react.

  ‘Then came Oleg. His father is moneyed and influential. Perhaps he had been a part of the Arlechins, too. Oleg had been caught vandalising the church at Biertan when younger, accused of having drawn a motif of the Arlechin on the polyptych, along with his friends. He was, or at least, desperately wanted to be, a part of the group.’ She leaned back in her seat. ‘Mihai enlisted him to do his work, in exchange for money or for the thrill of the hunt, I cannot be sure. Oleg must have been more than willing, though.’