by Mario Bolduc
And then there were the jobs. Once the holiday season had come to a close, Kevin worked part-time as a personal trainer at the Manhattan Sheraton’s gym. Max found him better employment with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Kevin was none the wiser.
Max didn’t get anything in return for his generosity. Kevin and Caroline weren’t marks he was fattening for the kill. He had no intention of fleecing them at some point after winning their trust. No, that wasn’t it at all. He was investing not in some grift, but in their happiness. He was always looking for ways to make them happy, to make their lives richer, fuller, to protect them from anything that might come their way. An impossible task, Max would come to realize. Fat and happy but in a cage is no happiness at all.
3
“Did you know Nicolae Ceauşescu loved Christmas trees? Each one of his forty villas was decorated with them. Isn’t it ironic? There wasn’t a single other Christmas tree in the country.”
Max O’Brien whipped around, furious at being caught daydreaming. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t the man before him. Tiny, bent over, Toma Boerescu looked eighty years old on a good day. He was precariously balanced upright by a walker even older than he was. Could barely breathe, it seemed. And his breath stank of palinca, a moonshine expertly distilled in the slop buckets of Transylvanian farmers. On the lapel of what had to be at least a thirty-year-old pea jacket, he had a star — probably some sort of military decoration.
Before Max could answer, Boerescu added in approximate English, “Ceauşescu prohibited any Romanian from cutting down fir trees for Christmas. Environmental protection was the reason. Oh, how the Conducător was ahead of his time!” A twinkle in his eye, the man burst out laughing. “Robert Cheskin?”
Max shook his hand.
“Toma Boerescu. But you can call me Tom. I know you Americans love abbreviations. Tom Boerescu. Now that’s not too bad a name, right? Sounds like a hockey player!”
The old man pointed down Brătianu Boulevard. “Let us walk, if you don’t mind.”
Boerescu continued to chatter idly about Nicolae Ceauşescu and his immoderate love of Christmas trees, which he had imported straight from Moldavia every November. “The army delivered the trees a few weeks before Christmas.”
Ceauşescu didn’t have many occasions to admire them, unfortunately. It was impossible for him to be simultaneously in every one of his forty villas. He could only visit them one after the other, according to a schedule kept entirely secret, established by his wife, Elena. For security reasons, of course. Despite his extensive powers, Ceauşescu wasn’t gifted with ubiquity.
“One day he thought someone was trying to poison him. According to him, the branches of his trees were covered with some sort of substance that gave off a lethal gas of some kind.”
Boerescu burst out laughing. “Because, you see, the trees came from the north! The Romanian gulags were there, where he’d sent many of his political enemies.” He hesitated. “Not without reason, if you ask me.”
He pointed to the small red star on his lapel, a decoration given to him by Ceauşescu, most likely. “Romanians realized too late they punished an exceptional man.”
An old Communist! Just his luck.
A few tourists passed them on the sidewalk, hurrying toward their tour buses. Farther off, mothers with their strollers made their way between skateboard-riding teenagers and tiny dogs.
Boerescu hesitatingly gestured toward a bench a couple of lovers had just vacated. He dropped onto it heavily, inviting Max to join him. Pulling out a handkerchief from his pocket, the old man told Max in a muted voice how for more than thirty years he’d been a loyal servant of the Romanian police. Oh, those were the good old days! Thanks to their hard work, there was barely any crime. And when they did catch someone, you could be sure the culprit wouldn’t commit the same crime twice. No, criminals were repentant: Romania’s prisons had a way of knocking sense into even the hardest heads. These days, well, things had changed. In any case, Boerescu still knew a few people at the General Directorate for Criminal Investigations.
Max imagined the mocking smiles behind the back of this old shipwreck of a man as he struggled his way into the directorate straight from another time, coming for his annual inspection of his old stomping ground from all the way behind the Iron Curtain.
“You’d be surprised at what you can learn around a coffee machine,” Boerescu offered, eyes twinkling.
“About Kevin Dandurand, for example?” Max suggested.
“Came in from Montreal by way of Zurich a week ago. He claimed to a customs agent he’d be staying at the Helvetia. Never checked in.”
“His movements around town?”
“No idea. No one saw him, no one spoke to him. They couldn’t even find the cab driver who brought him into the city.”
“So someone might have picked him up.”
“Maybe.”
“Who’s in charge of the case?”
“Inspector Adrian Pavlenco.”
Boerescu explained that Pavlenco was conscientious and professional, an ambitious young guy impressed by American methods. He’d been confined to investigating criminal fires for the longest time, and hated it. He spent his days in rubber boots trudging through wrecked homes and smelling smoke. He did have a cordial relationship with the media, though, despite the lingering stench on him.
Boerescu made a face. Back in his day, the media had been nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Romanian police. Puppets, really, used to make the work of inspectors easier. Things had changed, unfortunately. The press gave itself licence to criticize. Asked questions. Demanded answers. Cloaked itself in irreproachable morals. Freedom of the press? Bullshit! The press had all the freedom, more like! Freedom to cause mayhem, which only helped the bad guys!
The old man blew his nose loudly. Then, with a tired gesture, he pulled a folded newspaper out of his jacket pocket, and showed it to Max. “Twenty-three Roma burned alive in a building on Zăbrăuţi Street. For once a story about Gypsies makes the front page.… Usually they’re somewhere in the middle, between soccer scores and lottery results.”
“Maybe because the cops already have a suspect to throw to the press?”
“Maybe. But you know who the real criminals are? The city authorities, they’re the ones who allowed the neighbourhood to go to hell.”
Ferentari, the Bronx of Bucharest. Streets lined with boarded-up buildings filled far beyond capacity by Roma under the sway of local mafia types.
Kevin was a convenient patsy. Doubly so because Bucharest was currently hosting the Conference of European Cities, Boerescu explained. An organization dedicated to social and urban planning, dynamic management of human resources, alternative solutions to drinking-water supplies. Soporific subjects each and all, but this year the organizers were lucky. On the menu: the Romani “problem,” which affected most European countries. And now this criminal fire everyone was talking about. Max now understood why, at the Intercontinental, he’d had to fight his way through a thick crowd. They’d been a harried bunch, computer bags over their shoulders, eyes tired after long flights. Handshakes and hugs, friendly pats on the back and laughter. Periodic reunions, probably. Paris one time, Rome or Venice the other. This year Bucharest and its damn Roma.
Pariahs who haunted the cityscape, an underclass to be wary of. Where were they from, exactly?
Northern India. Around the year 1000 they left their country for an unknown reason — perhaps chased off by an invader, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, it was sometimes claimed — and made their way west through Afghanistan, Turkey, then Greece, where they were first mentioned in the thirteenth century. The Greeks gave them the name atzigani — still used to refer to Hungarian Roma, or tziganes — a reference to a heretic sect that practised palmistry. Today they preferred Rom or Roma, meaning “man” in Romani, their most frequently spoken languag
e.
After Greece, waves of migrants moved to Wallachia and Moldavia. They were enslaved, not to be freed until 1856. In the fifteenth century, other groups entered Europe, coming from the east through Bohemia. They’d been offered safe passage by the king. From then on they became known as Bohemians, or Egyptians, because they were believed to be from “Little Egypt,” a part of Greece. The Egyptians mentioned in Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid? That was them. In English, Egyptians became Gypsies. In Spanish, Gitanos. In Spain they were divided into two groups: those living in Catalonia in the north, and those in Andalusia in the south.
Over the centuries, Roma travelled across Europe, living from one end of the continent to the other. More often sedentary than not these days, they now lived all over the globe.
They’d always been choice victims for human cruelty. During the Second World War, they were exterminated in death camps alongside Jews. A tragic story that continued to this day. Second-class citizens in most countries. Foreigners in every land, characterized only with faults: chronic begging, knavery, black magic …
“Here, I want to offer you a gift.” Boerescu held up a pin in the shape of a small candy cane. Max had noticed everyone in Bucharest was wearing similar pins, even tourists.
Max fixed the pin to his coat.
“Do you have time for a drink?” Boerescu asked.
“Another time.”
The two men agreed to meet the next day after Max’s meeting with Adrian Pavlenco. Max flagged down a cab and offered Boerescu a lift. A Dacia, the Romanian copy of the Renault 12. Max opened the door for his fixer, then folded up the walker and placed it in the trunk. “Intercontinental Hotel. But first …”
“Victoriei Avenue,” Boerescu said.
Max hadn’t been in Bucharest since 1989, in the last days of the Ceauşescu regime. He’d been on a job, promising to line the pockets of a bureaucrat responsible for IT procurement in the dictator’s government if he chose Max’s client instead of an Australian competitor. The city then had been dreary, whatever new construction there was in a state of almost immediate disrepair. He’d seen a tourist or two, at most. Eaten in awful restaurants. Stayed in cavernous hotels.
Today Bucharest was unrecognizable. Max had been expecting a sleepy city, still licking its wounds from the previous century. Instead, he discovered an animated capital, its sidewalks teeming with young people, teenagers who’d never known the Ceauşescu era, for whom the revolution of 1989 was already ancient history.
At a red light a group of Roma pestered tourists. Children were pulling on the clothes of passersby.
Boerescu turned toward Max. “They’ve got another trick. They saunter into a butcher’s, right, and start feeling up the meat in the displays, waiting for the owner to notice them. When he does, he gives them the tainted meat just to get rid of the bastards.”
He burst out laughing. “The Lovari, they used to be horse traders a long time ago. Well, now, they’ve become used car salesmen. Once upon a time, they applied wax on old nags to make them look younger. Today they tamper with odometers!”
Boerescu told him about other tricks of the Romani trade. Names, for example. They changed theirs depending on the country they were travelling through. Multiple identities to confuse the gadje.
“Gadje?”
“Non-Romani people, if you prefer. According to some historians, the word comes from Mahmud of Ghazni, the sultan responsible for their exile from India.”
And other times, they all carried identical names, as in the Nazi concentration camps. Everyone was called the same thing to confuse the SS. Roma were absolute experts at fake papers: from forged passes given by King Sigismund of Bohemia in the fifteenth century to Guatemalan passports the Roma used to flee the Netherlands during the German Occupation …
“A wily bunch, let me tell you,” Boerescu said.
Max felt kinship with the Roma. Fake papers, multiple identities …
Two world wars, forty years of totalitarianism. In Romania the Roma were only now beginning to recover from a century of atrocities. What would one more fire, one more tragedy change? And yet, since the fall of Ceauşescu, the situation of the Romani people had gotten worse, Boerescu explained. As if Romanians had been holding back from settling a few scores. Harassment, fights, even pogroms. Romanians were venting their historical misfortunes on the most unfortunate of them all, it seemed. Not a week went by without a new altercation between Roma and Romanians. Extreme right wingers, neo-Nazis, drunks, and lunatics. And this collective madness had migrated to other countries. The number of aggressions against the Roma in Eastern Europe was impossible to count. Since 1989 the Roma had taken advantage of the opening up of borders to migrate westward. In Germany outbreaks of violence had forced Berlin to react. An agreement with the Romanian government had been forged: Romania would take the migrants back as long as Germany paid for their return flights and gave a remittance to Bucharest. Same thing in France. The minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, chartered a few planes to repatriate these “undesirables” who squatted near Paris. A solution that truly wasn’t one, according to Victor Marineci.
“And who’s that?” Max asked.
A Romani MP. A star in Parliament, really, Boerescu explained. The Roma had been looking for a strong political leader for a long time now, after years of chaos among their ranks. They accepted no authority, according to Boerescu, though they would make you believe they did. Hence the proliferation of one-acre kings over the centuries.
Marineci, however, was cut from different cloth. A member of the International Romani Union representing all European Roma, he’d risen above the buffoonery. Elected to Parliament under the banner of the Vurma Party, he dedicated his life to the defence of the Romani people. He was the party’s founder, actually. Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu’s government took him seriously. Marineci was one of the most eloquent — and efficient — members of the opposition.
“Nomadic Roma are only a minority now,” Boerescu continued. “Ten, maybe fifteen percent. The others are parked in shantytowns. Today the kumpaníya is in ruins. Awful, absolutely awful.”
Marineci was positioning himself as a standard-bearer for these unfortunate souls, with some success, Boerescu explained. “He passed hate-crime legislation in Romania, making punishments for anti-Roma crimes more severe.”
Anti-Roma crimes like the fire on Zăbrăuţi Street where twenty-three Roma had perished …
4
As the taxi trundled down the long boulevard, a memory overtook Max O’Brien. Another city, another time, but a long drive nonetheless, in New York instead of Bucharest. Kevin was being held in a police station in Astoria. Or so he’d told Max over the phone.
Max’s ringing cellphone had woken him up. He was sitting on the side of his bed. Behind him, Susan, sleeping deeply. She was a young insurance broker who worked out of an office on Wall Street. He’d been seeing her for six months now in preparation for a grift.
“I need you to bail me out,” Kevin repeated.
Caroline had no idea, of course. Kevin was calling his friend to pull him out of this rough spot before his wife was any the wiser. Max hung up and hurried to find some clothes, still holding the cellphone.
“Who was it?” Susan asked sleepily.
“My owner. Water damage in my kitchen. I’ve got to go down there.”
Max leaned over the woman and slid his hand along her side. Her body was warm, heavy in the folds of sleep. He didn’t want to leave the bed.
“You’re insured, I hope …” she murmured.
Max smiled. Even half-asleep, her job came first.
Max had raced through Manhattan in his new Saab, which he’d purchased to demonstrate his rapid ascension in the world of finance to Susan. He reached Astoria and made his way to the police station. A typical scene: officers warming their hands with paper coffee cups. A waiting room sparsely populated by
friends and family come to rescue someone from themself. People, like Max, who’d been woken up in the middle of the night to be told that their cousin, their son, their brother had been up to no good.
Kevin Dandurand had appeared, haggard but relieved. He’d been implicated in a series of warehouse robberies, monthly rentals along the East River. Kevin had joined up with a gang of amateur thieves who hung out in a coffee shop near the gym where he trained. His accomplices all had criminal records, but not Kevin; he would be getting off with a fine and community service. Hours spent teaching young delinquents how to run the ten thousand metres, for example.
A heavy silence in the car. Max had felt as if he were driving home a teenage son caught destroying the flower beds in front of his high school. He didn’t know what to say: he’d never been a good shoulder to cry on. No, encouraging words had never been his strong suit.
“They’re going to take my green card away,” Kevin finally said.
There was the crux of the problem. Sure, he could lie and keep his community service hidden from Caroline, but how could he possibly explain why he could never work in the United States again?
“They might even force me to leave the country.”
It was a possibility, and a dark one at that, especially since things were finally beginning to line up for Caroline. Serious periodicals were knocking at her door, some even ordering pieces from her.
If she went back to Canada now, it would be all over.
Not to mention Kevin’s athletic career. It was time for the young man to look at reality as it was and accept that his best performances were behind him. His private trainers were only exploiting his unrealistic dreams, his hopes. No one had the courage to tell him the truth: “Listen, Kevin, you’ve got to move on.” In a way, he was paying these people to convince him to the contrary; if Richard Voight and others were interested in Kevin’s career, surely it was because they believed in his abilities, in his future as an athlete. But he was slowly realizing it was just a pipe dream.
