I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. Fritz stayed calm.
“Excellent idea. A photo in an orphanage. I promise you’ll look just as splendid as you did in that portrait of yourself in the window of the Kronauburg photo studio. Heinrich Hofmann took quite decent pictures, didn’t he? At least they served their purpose.”
Stephanescu’s face froze. He distractedly stubbed out the Carpati he had just lit in an ashtray. “You’re not from Time magazine! Who are you? Show me your papers.”
Fritz Hofmann tossed a green passport onto the table. “You’re a German!” Stephanescu opened the passport. “Born Baia Luna. You . . . you’re Heinrich’s son. Fritz Hofmann! What do you want from me?”
“Why did my father Heinrich have to die?”
Stephanescu struggled to control the situation. “You’ve been lying to me the whole time! Pretending to be a journalist. I’ll tell you this much: your father was my friend. But you, you’re a big disappointment to me. You know what? We’ll make this short and sweet. This interview is over. You two get out of here, or I’ll have you arrested by the militia.”
“No, you’re not going to do that.” I spoke up for the first time. “We’re going to speak about the dead now. Why did the Baia Luna priest Johannes Baptiste have to die?”
Stephanescu pushed his cognac glass away. “A pastor had to die? Someone named Johannes Baptiste? Sorry, I don’t know that name.”
“Okay.” Fritz smiled. “If that name means nothing to you, then you’re not going to find out why our nice colleague Angelique wasn’t lying next to you in bed this morning and why you’re not going to be named prime minister this afternoon. It’s all over, Herr Doctor, you just don’t know it yet. But we have faith in your curiosity.”
When Stephanescu coughed and suppressed a nauseated belch, I knew that by now the demon was wide awake. But he wasn’t showing his face yet.
“Who sent you?”
I didn’t need the quick glance from Fritz to know that I was the one to answer that question.
“I come at the behest of a child.”
“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“And I come at the behest of its mother. At the behest of Angela.”
“What do you want from me? What goddamn devil sent you here? I don’t know any Angela!”
“Oh, but you do, Herr Doctor. You knew Angela Barbulescu very well. And you liked her best in her dress with the sunflowers.”
“No, no, no! I swear I don’t know her. I never knew such a person.”
“Then let me help you recall a day more than forty years ago, October seventh, 1947, to be precise. Right here in the Paris of the East.” I took out the first photo. “You see, Herr Doctor, that was Angela Barbulescu. Her supposed friend Heinrich Hofmann took this picture at a birthday party for your buddy Florin Pauker. Go ahead and take a look at Angela.”
“You’re crazy! Psychotic! You belong in Vadului with the loonies!” Stephanescu was working himself into a rage. The door to the suite flew open.
“Everything okay?” asked one of his bodyguards.
“Get out! Out!” bellowed his boss, then he collapsed into his chair. He lit up a Carpati and looked at the photo. The demon was stirring and made Stephanescu grin.
“I see a blond with a ponytail. Quite pretty, I have to admit. Right. I was indeed as a young man at a birthday party for Florin Pauker. And if this woman had crossed my path back then, I think I would have been tempted. But my God, that was four decades ago. I’ll be seventy in three years. How am I supposed to remember a woman I met as a young man?”
“This photo was taken at the moment that Angela Barbulescu was about to give her dear Stefan a kiss.”
Stephanescu stared at me. For a split second, time seemed to stand still, then Stephanescu burst into laughter. He sneered at me from the heights of an illusory superiority. “You’re an idiot. I can see very well that this blond Angela, or whoever she is, is about to kiss somebody. But what makes you think that I’m the man? What’s this stupid snapshot supposed to prove? I see a woman who’s a total stranger to me. What are you trying to do, blackmail me? What a joke! With a picture I’m not even in.” He laughed again. Then he drank.
“But there’s another photo of Angela Barbulescu, one in which you’re clearly recognizable. She’s wearing the sunflower dress and you, Herr Doctor, are spraying champagne between her legs.”
Stephanescu went chalk white, as if all the blood had drained from his arteries in a single second. My blood, meanwhile, ran cold. I was staring into his dead eyes. The demon showed its face and betrayed itself. As I placed the photo with the half-naked woman on the table, it was already too late. Stephanescu knew that he would never be able to take back the words “That wasn’t Angela. It was Alexa.” Now the demon had to report for duty in the final struggle. Stephanescu clapped his hands over his mouth to keep himself from vomiting. Then he put all his chips on the last card he held.
“It was the Christmas of 1948. Koka had invited us to an Oh Unholy Night party. I went with Angela and Alexa. The two of them were always together, and they’d exchanged dresses for the party. We’d all been drinking. Koka had tanked up on vodka. Everyone was in a great mood. And then Alexa lay down on the buffet table, spontaneously, on the spur of the moment—one too many liqueurs. My God, was she hot. Florin, Albin, and half the others had already jerked off over her. It was a game. Angela made a scene afterward. She had no idea how to have a good time. I was the one who showed her everything. I even took her to the seaside. First she pretended to be chaste, but then it turned out she was a girl who couldn’t get enough. She wanted to stay in bed all day long. She was really great. But she was also moralistic, insufferable, bourgeois. Always talking about marriage, children, a house. She wanted me all to herself. If I had a little something on the side, she locked herself in her room for days and cried. She got on my nerves. She was just an episode.
“Of course, the high life cost a pile of money in those days. Eating out every night, and only in the best places. Trips to the Black Sea. I needed a car, Heinrich a motorcycle. Angela was really too dumb to get how we paid for everything. Naïve, is what she was. It was Koka’s idea how we could make money. When Koka saw the photos Heinrich had taken of Alexa on Christmas Eve, he got really excited. Of Lenutza, too. Florin Pauker was the only one who almost wet his pants. He said we should burn the pictures then and there. If they got into the wrong hands, it could ruin his career as a doctor. And that’s why he refused to hit on any more girls and recruit them for our art portraits, as we called them. And Albin had such an ugly wart on his cheek he only could make it with the sluts at the bottom of the barrel. So it was my job to haul in more women. Heinrich took the pictures. If the girls didn’t want to cooperate, we put a few drops into their champagne. It was all done in Koka’s apartment. The work was fun for Alexa until the day she announced she was pregnant. Florin had some scruples. He didn’t want to get rid of the child for her, but Koka made it clear to him that if he didn’t, an obscene photo of Florin might accidentally be made public. After that, Florin was our go-to man for workplace accidents. He treated Angela, too. She showed up one day in my office with a big belly and claimed it was my child. It’s likely she really hadn’t slept with anyone else. Maybe it would have been better if we’d let her keep the brat. But Florin had already done the deed, and we had to make sure she kept her mouth shut.
“Later, we moved the business to Kronauburg. Heinrich had hired two or three blonds to work in his studio. One was a photographer by the name of Irina. The security agent Raducanu had his eye on her, and we kept our hands off. But the other one, with the hair of an angel, she was great. You could put her onto any man who still had anything at all left between his legs. She could make it even with the most decrepit old geezers. We usually set up shop in the Golden Star. Heinrich shot the pictures without the subjects’ knowledge. It all ran smoothly until one day things threatened to get out of hand, and just w
hen I was about to leave the business.
“I’d just become party chief and district secretary in Kronauburg when Heinrich said that Barbulescu was planning to expose me. That was her mistake, but she’d always been naïve. We had to silence her for good. But Heinrich was too soft. Too weak. He could quote Nietzsche, but when push came to shove he had scruples. That’s how all the shit started to hit the fan. Heinrich was counting on her killing herself. That’s why he took the dirty photos of Barbulescu to that priest in Baia Luna, ’cause he thought that would put an end to her. And he wasn’t completely off base. In the end she really did string herself up. But how could I be sure she would? I had to see to it that the job got done. Albin was supposed to take care of it. He went to Baia Luna, but he had scruples, too, as he later admitted to Alexa, the idiot. Instead of liquidating Barbulescu, he warned her about us. Of course, he pronounced his own death sentence by betraying us. But that wasn’t the end of it. The real problem was that priest Johannes Baptiste. Until then the Securitate had always avoided crossing swords with the Catholic clergy. Raducanu’s people got a bit overenthusiastic. But they would have left the pastor in peace if he’d just coughed up the photos. Heinrich’s first mistake was to get a priest involved in the affair. His second mistake was when some cretin pasted giant photos of me with Alexa and the champagne bottle onto the windows of his photo shop. The pictures were immediately removed. Someone had obviously broken into Heinrich’s studio. Negatives had disappeared that no one ever should have found. Your father”—for the first time Stephanescu turned directly to Fritz Hofmann—“had become a liability.”
Fritz Hofmann had stopped listening long before. He had seen and photographed—and endured—the filth of the world. But not the words coming from the mouth of Stefan Stephanescu. The man without his mask, holding back nothing, awakened neither fury nor hatred in Fritz. Nor any need for revenge. Stephanescu didn’t matter to him. Fritz had lowered his eyelids and was looking into himself. He saw himself as a fifteen-year-old, standing on a chair in a church and blowing out a small red light. Fritz never prayed. But now, in the Presidential Suite of the Athenee Palace, he asked God for forgiveness, while the only words I could produce from the depths of my dismay were “You are a devil.”
“How would you know? You know nothing! How many years of your life have been wasted by the history of this country? How much dead time do you owe to the Conducator? Tell me. How many days, months, years? I, I would have given them to you. You don’t realize that only I could have saved this country. I and I alone! I knew about the key to power. And if Heinrich Hofmann hadn’t given that key away, no foolish Titan would have plunged this country into the realm of shadows. Terror, extortion, fear—those were the Conducator’s tools. Only I had the courage to turn those weapons against him. What does the life of an old priest matter? A lunatic ignored by his own fellow priests. When Lupu’s men brought him to Kronauburg for disposal, his own clergy had dug him a grave in the cathedral graveyard with a fake name. What’s the life of a man worth when even his own church doesn’t stand behind him? What’s it worth compared to the prospect of leading an entire people into a truly Golden Age? That was always the difference between me and Heinrich Hofmann. He was never inspired by the will to power. He had no burning ambition. He was even afraid of a drunken village schoolteacher, a human wreck, a meaningless nothing. Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken those photos, the key to the doors of power, into a rectory. I had to find the pictures of Angela that we made in Florin Pauker’s office, no matter what the cost. Not because of Angela Barbulescu. It could have been any of the girls. The pictures were irreplaceable because Koka was in them. Don’t you see? Koka, naked, in an obscene, perverse setting. That’s why I needed the photos. They would have ruined Koka. He was a devil, but he would have been powerless. With those photographs in my hands he never would have been able to rise to become a caricature of a president. I was the better of the two of us. The course of history would have been different with me. And this would have been a better country. And now it will be better. In a few hours I’m going to become the prime minister. And you’re not going to stop me. I’ve sold you the truth as truth, but it won’t do you any good. You’ll only be able to peddle it as falsehood. No one will believe you. The people are tired of insanity. You have no witnesses, no proof. And if I give my people an order, you won’t even be able to prove that you were sitting at this table this morning with Stefan Stephanescu.”
He picked up the photo of himself with the champagne bottle, took his lighter, and set it on fire. We didn’t try to stop him. Black ash drifted through the Presidential Suite and settled onto the carpet like black snow in which Stephanescu’s shoes left tracks on their way from his chair to the bar. He opened a cabinet door.
“But I’ll give you one more chance, your last chance to beat me. I bet fifteen hundred dollars you won’t take advantage of it.” Stephanescu took a pistol from the cabinet and put it down on the table. “Go ahead. You can kill me. But you won’t. You’re too weak. What’s your morality worth? I’ll tell you. You can’t even kill a devil. Shoot, Hofmann! Shoot me. But I say you can’t do it. You’re like your father. He could bring filthy pictures to an old priest, but that’s as far as his courage went. You’re just like him.”
“I was wrong,” said Fritz quietly. “I thought it would be a pleasure to experience your downfall. But it isn’t.” Then Fritz spoke in a clear voice: “Yes, I’m like my father. I’m bringing filthy pictures to an old man, too.” He opened his camera bag and took out a brown envelope. “For you, Herr Doctor, a memento of last night. And greetings from Angelique, Angie, and Angela. Sorry about your portrait on the cover of Time magazine—it’s not going to happen. You’ll have to be satisfied with the Voice of Truth, page one of tomorrow’s edition.”
As the door to the Presidential Suite closed behind us, Stefan Stephanescu ripped open the envelope and held a black-and-white photograph in his hand. He saw himself. Naked. Then he started throwing up and couldn’t stop.
Out in the streets new skirmishes were erupting. To judge from the rifle fire and detonations from the direction of the university library, they were more serious than they’d been in the last few days. Roaring tanks made the asphalt shake as they rolled south past the Athenee Palace. Sharpshooters were holed up on the rooftops, and no one had any idea who they were aiming at. Although Studio Four had broadcast a video of the execution of the head of state and his wife, there was no assurance that the tape was not a fake. The fear that the Conducator and his henchmen could reemerge from the shadows still hung in the air, despite scenes of rejoicing and fraternal reconciliation. And the dictator’s most loyal minions, who had to fear that his downfall would suck them into its vortex and take them down as well, were still counting on the power of their weapons to turn back the tide of history. The revolution was not yet certain of its victory.
Dozens of taxi drivers in their rattletrap Dacias were waiting in front of the Athenee Palace, but no one wanted to be chauffeured through the city in these hours of uncertainty. I approached a few drivers, but when I said we were going to Titan II, they all shook their heads and demurred. The fifth or sixth one I asked said he would rather drive through the cross fire than into the quarter where the Blacks lived.
Fritz Hofmann was just about to solve the transportation problem with a generous contribution when three jeeps suddenly roared up and squealed to a stop in front of the hotel. A dozen men with submachine guns jumped out and pulled black ski masks over their heads. Some of them secured the entrance while the others stormed into the Palace. As a first brief burst of firing rattled in the lobby, the taxi driver cried, “Hop in!” Then he put the pedal to the floor and brought Fritz and me to within a quarter mile of where the Gypsies lived.
As I entered that other world on the outskirts of the capital, I thought the settlement was the saddest place I had ever seen, an impression that I would revise by the following day. The houses the Conducator had once promised o
ur Gypsy compatriots turned out to be dreary shells, high-rise buildings without heat or electricity that looked like stacked-up, burned-out caves. They had no doors, and the windows were dead black eyes from which all one saw was the dead eyes in the dirty gray façades across the way. Garbage was piled in the unpaved streets. Only the freeze of the last days of December kept foul bubbles from rising out of the sewers. Men with caps pulled down over their eyes warmed their hands on the street corners, huddled around oil drums whose fires they fed with plastic trash that smoldered rather than burned. Children, half naked and barefoot, were jumping up and down on a tattered mattress. The acrid fumes made them cough from unhealthy lungs. Fritz had to suppress his nausea at the sight of some teenagers using dull knives to cut hunks of meat from a cadaver that was once either a horse or a cow—it was impossible to tell which.
When the arrival of us gaje was noticed, it stirred up half the neighborhood. The children ran up, frolicking and laughing. Fritz was their main object of interest, not me. They yelled, “Photo! Photo! America! America!” and Fritz made the mistake of fishing a pack of gum out of his jacket pocket. In an instant there was a horde of kids around him, its size doubling every few seconds. The upshot was that the ones who got no “gummas” cried bitter tears. Their initial joy turned into a wild, howling clamor, supplemented by their mothers yelling rude insults from the windows. The men had to knock some heads together to get the children to back off enough so we could ask where the Gypsy Dimitru Carolea Gabor lived.
At first the men just shrugged, but then someone asked, “You looking for Papa Dimi?” and Fritz and I were overwhelmed with directions and explanations and people pointing in all directions.
The Madonna on the Moon Page 44
