by Mario Bolduc
Behind him, Max heard Kevin call his father a bastard. The board of directors knew nothing at all, of course. Another negotiation tactic.
“You’re getting a deal at thirty-eight million.”
“A fire sale, more like.”
“Are you trying to insult me?”
The conversation was moving in a direction Max didn’t like. Discreetly, he ordered Morelli to back off a little. Yes, he absolutely needed to put up a fight, but he shouldn’t be hitting to bruise, only to graze Raymond’s chin.
“So what are you offering?” Morelli asked begrudgingly.
“Half. Nineteen million.”
Kevin swore. Raymond was flexing his muscle. The battle was won, but Kevin wanted to crush his opponent.
“Thirty million,” Morelli replied.
The two men negotiated for a few more minutes, but it was clear both of them had the intention of coming to a deal.
Raymond relented a little. “Okay, twenty-five million.”
Max had hoped for more, but Raymond was a hard bargainer. The operation had been going on for long enough; time to put an end to it. He gave Morelli the order to accept the offer.
A handshake. Negroni wanted to get to the airport as quickly as possible. Raymond left. The meeting had lasted less than an hour.
Max was outwardly calm — if you discounted the sweat rings on his shirt. He whipped around. Kevin was staring at the floor, repeating like a mantra: twenty-five million, twenty-five million, twenty-five million.… All that was left was for Raymond to convince the board, but Kevin couldn’t imagine there would be any resistance.
With reason. Raymond had negotiated behind the board’s back, but to the company’s advantage. At least that was how he presented the offer to his son, who answered with false admiration. The board agreed, their trust in Raymond complete. Asked a few questions, but didn’t press overmuch. At a sharp discount Nordopak would finally get back into the European market. Raymond was over the moon.
Within forty-eight hours, $25 million was deposited into the fictional Carlo Negroni’s bank account in Milan.
The very same day the real Carlo returned from the Bahamas, a communiqué was released announcing the transaction. Of course, the Negroni brothers, Carlo first in line, denied the affair. Confusion, retractions, and a sudden realization. Nordopak found itself on the wrong end of a $25 million bargain, without a single share in Cambiano. Raymond Dandurand and his team alerted the police, who tried to track the fake Carlo Negroni. A lost cause. And the money had already gone through two other bank accounts, both immediately closed once the transactions were completed.
Max had disappeared. His team, as well.
12
Ancient buildings, as elsewhere, but the streets were calmer here. A prosperous residential neighbourhood that seemed to be on a different planet entirely than the streets of Ferentari. The post-Communist nouveau riche who lived here probably paid top dollar for these affluent homes. Beyond the old, tall trees, Herăstrău Park began, the largest in Bucharest. It would be impossible to see Cosmin Micula from here. Max asked the driver to go around the block, but the man’s English was a bit too rudimentary. And so Max simply paid for his fare and got out of the car near the Arcul de Triumf, the “Little Paris” of the Balkans. Max now understood the comparison. The taxi made a U-turn and disappeared into the night.
Suddenly, Max felt very much alone. Shipwrecked after a storm. Gusts of wind made him shiver. He continued toward the park entrance. The night was thick with silence. A feeling of isolation, of extreme solitude, as if he were all alone after the end of the world. Thankfully, the moon was there to cast a kind light over the scene, showing him the way forward.
Micula was late by at least twenty minutes, just like Boerescu was on Max’s first day in Bucharest. Max looked around, trying to imagine couples in love holding hands, walking here in summer along paths flanked by rosebushes. Families, children, idle men and women taking in the greenery. But here and now there was no one. All were warm inside, away from the winter cold. Max was sorry he couldn’t do the same.
“What did I tell you? It’s a nice place, isn’t it?”
Max turned around. A man stood behind him, a silhouette against the light of the moon.
The man walked forward and said, “It has been forever a favourite of lovers. Even back when it was called Stalin Park. I tell them, I say: ‘Perhaps somewhere more original, somewhere as beautiful as here,’ but they say this park and not any other. It’s now a superstition of sorts, you understand? The rosebushes of Herăstrău. A guarantee of a happy family, prosperous and full of love.” He offered his hand. “Cosmin Micula, the photographer.”
He wore a beard, his hair wild, and probably looked much the same now as he had when he was a young man thirty-five years ago, albeit with some grey in the hair and a bit of a paunch betraying a fondness for beer. His shirt seemed more like a straitjacket around his generous belly.
“You weren’t followed, I hope?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Micula took him by the arm. “Come, we shouldn’t just stand here in the open. My car is over there.”
As they made their way to the parking lot, Micula spoke of himself. Of a career launched by a spectacular and shocking photo report. He’d accompanied a Romanian regiment to the north of the country, showing the solitude of young men sent to garrison the border with the Soviet Union. Micula, one of the regime’s golden sons, had been invited to take pictures of the Ceauşescu couple. For months he’d followed both of them, immortalizing even their smallest gestures for posterity.
“Did you know they lived right near here? In a street barred to mere mortals and under permanent watch by the police and the dictator’s personal guard.”
Max certainly hadn’t crossed half the city in the middle of the night to be told the life story of a jaded photographer. But Micula continued his tale, which now turned to vinegar. During the 1970s, Ceauşescu became acutely megalomaniacal, along with developing an irrational fear of germs. Nicolae and Elena constantly washed their hands with rubbing alcohol to avoid potential contamination. Paranoia became a constant in their lives. The young court photographer, celebrated for his courage and sensitivity, was thrown out of the palace along with drivers, cooks, bodyguards, and various other servants. The Securitate became interested in Micula, who could no longer practise his job as a photojournalist for the regime, since the regime no longer wanted him. And so, after 1980, he began to take pictures of weddings and christenings. He landed in prison, anyway, after a jealous colleague denounced him as a counter-revolutionary since — according to Micula at least — the man couldn’t compete with his talent and vision.
Max cut him off. “Fine. Where’s Kevin? What’s going on?”
“Follow me. You’ll see.” When Max reached the passenger door of the man’s old Dacia, Micula turned to him. “You really need to give the handle a good tug or it won’t open.”
The photographer systematically avoided all major boulevards, as if wary of a potential tail. Around them the capital was plunged in darkness.
They drove in silence for a long time. Finally, Micula turned right into a dark alley. Max was beginning to worry. He glanced at the driver, but the man didn’t seem to be paying attention to him anymore. Another right turn and the Dacia stopped in a narrow driveway between two buildings. From the other side of the block of houses, Max could hear the sound of an occasional car or two in the night.
Another moment of tense silence. Max expected the photographer to get out of the car, but instead he leaned over and took an envelope out of the glovebox.
“Kevin is in Bucharest helping someone get out of the country. The other day he had a meeting with one of his contacts on Zăbrăuţi Street. Things didn’t go as planned.”
“What happened exactly?”
“He fell into a trap. That’s why he’s hid
ing. And why he needs a messenger.”
A messenger? Max was completely lost.
Micula turned the interior light on and emptied the envelope out onto his knees. A Canadian passport. A stolen passport, most likely. The photographer held it up proudly. “Oh, how our friendly tourist will remember her stay in Romania!”
Micula handed it over, and Max examined it. The photo was of a woman, approximately thirty-five years old. Laura Stelea. Born in Tecuci in eastern Romania, a naturalized Canadian citizen since 1998.
“The colours are the hardest part,” Micula apologized.
Excellent work, nevertheless. That was clear despite the weak light. The photographer watched him, waiting for a compliment.
“Good job.”
Micula smiled, then added, “She’s actually called Laura Costinar. Wife of Ioan Costinar, the former leader of the Romanian Gypsy community. During the revolution, in 1989, he returned to the country in order to mobilize his people, after being asked to do so by the International Romani Union.”
“With Victor Marineci, the Romani MP?”
“Yes. They were a team.”
The International Romani Union, Micula explained, was an organization that had represented all Romani people across the globe since the early 1970s. The organization’s mandate was the promotion of Romani culture, but also the creation of political entities for the Roma. Without land, divided by clan, living under different laws according to the countries they resided in, it was hard for the Roma to organize. But things were changing. In 2004 Marineci was elected an MP in the Romanian Parliament. In subsequent elections, other Roma followed. In great part thanks to Costinar, the Roma now had a war chest to lean on to fund their political activities.
“Money collected from the Romani Diaspora all over the world,” the photographer added.
Ioan Costinar was inspired by Golda Meir’s fundraising among American Jews to help finance the Israeli State, and he worked to mobilize the Romani Diaspora to fund the well-being of Eastern European Roma.
Micula shook his head. “But you can’t compare them to Jews. That would be a mistake. Yes, they both suffered terribly under the Nazis. But there’s a better comparison. African Americans. In the 1920s, in the United States, before they were organized, before they fought collectively for civil rights.”
“Ioan Costinar is a sort of Martin Luther King then?”
“Both murdered in cold blood. Costinar was shot in the head in Canada.”
Micula stretched toward the glovebox once again and took out a flask of palinca. He offered some to Max, who accepted. Boerescu’s favourite drink. Max almost choked on it. He passed Micula the flask, and the photographer took a long swallow.
“Romani people have lived near Winnipeg since 1963. They’re rich, too. In 2000 Costinar travelled there, after a stint in Chicago and New York, to raise funds for literacy programs, as well as other, more political work. And that bothered some people. In 2007, when Romania joins the European Union, the Roma will become the largest minority on the continent. And yet, do you see how they live?”
“Ferentari.”
“It’s the same all over Romania. To varying degrees, of course. Marineci, and Costinar before him, they told the Roma: ‘Stop being victims, rise up and fight to change your lives.’”
“So what’s the relationship with Laura?”
“Kevin said that she knows who her husband’s killers are. But she’s sure she won’t get a fair trial in Romania. Killing Roma here is almost legal! That’s why she’s trying to get out of the country.”
“With a fake passport? Why not use her own?”
“As I say to you, Costinar’s political activities made him many enemies.”
“In government?”
Micula fell silent. He seemed to regret having said too much already.
“So what’s your role in all this?”
“Kevin needed someone to make fake papers for him. He recruited me.” Micula hesitated for a moment, then turned and looked straight at Max. “And we’re practically cousins, he and I. His mother was from Romania, did you know?”
13
Auschwitz-Birkenau, November 5, 1943
Emil Rosca and Christina Müller were wound together amid the half-empty luggage and countless children’s shoes, abandoning themselves to their passions without an ounce of guilt. Without any qualms, they held and caressed each other among forgotten clothes smelling of sweat and pain. Emil had never loved before, and love seemed, all of a sudden, the most unjust thing in the world. When he was alone in the barracks, he sometimes thought that it simply wasn’t possible to love in a place like this. And yet every time they had an opportunity, Christina and Emil threw themselves against each other without worry, without regret, a wave against a cliff. Love had erased any trace of compassion. The suffering of others no longer touched them. Egoists, they only thought of their unexpected fortune, their unexpected happiness that put both of them in deathly danger.
Thanks to her good relations with SS-Obersturm-bannführer Rudolf Höss, Christina had managed to get Emil assigned to laundry duty for the Stammlager’s guards, whose back door gave on a warehouse in which stolen objects were stored. The place was a cavernous mess, devoid of life, where the lovers could steal a moment when the laundry room guards went off on a break. After making love, Emil closed his eyes and could hear nearby the Kraków-Berlin express. And every time, that same emotion: the strangeness that life went on as usual outside Auschwitz, beyond the crematoriums spitting human ash into the sky, beyond a stolen moment of love between a German and a Rom.
On the other side of the rails, another section of land had been confiscated by the camp authorities to lodge officers and their families. That was where Oskar Müller and his wife lived. Christina smuggled food out of her house for Emil to eat or trade, though he was rather skittish at the idea of joining the black market. His situation was delicate, and he didn’t want to take undue risks and compromise it. But the black market went full steam ahead in the Stammlager, as well as in Birkenau. A market in which the Roma were particularly active, thanks to their privileged status. Martin Hofbauer, for example, the Sinto who’d had his eye on Emil’s accordion, dominated the pharmaceutical market, selling drugs to fight the typhus epidemic that devastated the barracks.
One day Emil asked Christina, “Tell me what happened to my father.”
Two months earlier Christina and Oskar Müller had gone straight from their honeymoon in France to Auschwitz. Müller had been an officer at the camp since Rudolf Höss’s nomination as camp commander. Höss and Müller had met at Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen near Berlin, and the camp commander had brought him to Auschwitz.
Christina had hated the camp from the very first day. While still in Berlin, before the honeymoon, Oskar had described the place in detail, but no description could have prepared her for what she saw. The ovens, the gas chambers. Organized, planned, bureaucratized death. But what revolted her most of all was the attitude of the officers and their families — including Oskar, her husband — who behaved in Auschwitz as they would in any other garrison. Gossip, lies, power games. She was now part of this procession of monsters. Every day the smoke coming from the cremation ovens made her nauseous, sometimes to the point of vomiting.
And yet Christina still hated Jews. Parasites, bloodsuckers. They specialized in plots and ruses with the ultimate goal of dominating the world. She kept The Protocols of the Elders of Zion at her bedside. She was the only and adored daughter of a long-time Nazi supporter, a personal friend of Adolf Hitler. Christina had always admired her father, and she had never doubted the truth of his ideas. The world was a filthy place that Jews and Communists, their offspring, dirtied more every day. Hitler and his disciples, including her father, had endowed themselves with the mission to clean up this imperfect planet. Who could oppose such a project? Auschwitz and its horrors opened her eyes. Helpless b
efore so much cruelty, realizing the extent to which her life to this point had been marked by so many lies and such duplicity, Christina locked herself into guilty silence.
And then, one night, everything had changed. At the Kommandantur there was a spark in the air, an excited energy that preceded great events. Heinrich Himmler, the second-in-command of the regime, minister of the interior, and head of the Gestapo, was passing through Auschwitz for a series of meetings with the camp’s directors. Himmler, the man who built or destroyed careers. The one in front of whom the whole garrison trembled — Oskar Müller first in line. In 1941 the Nazi leader had designated Auschwitz as the main location for the extermination of Jews. Since the opening of Birkenau and the utilization of Zyklon B, the pace of exterminations had increased at a phenomenal rate. The cremation ovens worked day and night. There was no doubt: Himmler was proud of Auschwitz, proud of his work.
The head of the Gestapo was on his third visit. The first one, in March 1941, was to announce the construction of nearby Birkenau, which would house one hundred thousand prisoners. And the construction of Monowitz a little later. In July 1942, Himmler came back in the middle of an epidemic of typhoid fever, during which the Nazi commander witnessed the gassing of Jews.
And now this visit in September 1943.
Christina knew the Nazi leader personally. When her father had been alive, Himmler was among the guests who’d stayed at the family residence in Charlottenburg. She remembered, as a girl, being seated on his knees, playing with his round glasses while the adults talked among themselves.
In the great room of the former Polish Tobacco Monopoly where the SS were lodged, mired in protocol, his attention demanded by everyone, Himmler didn’t immediately recognize her. Dr. Hans Leibrecht, the accountant Matthias Kluge, and the others fluttered around the minister of the interior like fraülein at their first summer ball. SS-Standortarzt Eduard Wirths had shadowed Himmler since he’d first arrived in the camp, trying to convince him of the “enormous” problem that was Joseph Mengele. Fearing a new typhoid fever epidemic, the doctor wished to gas all Gypsy prisoners as a preventive measure, just as he’d done the previous spring with deportees from Bialystok and Austria. The minister of the interior was to give him an answer before leaving.
