The Roma Plot

by Mario Bolduc

  He’d made his decisions for the good of the Roma and to further grow the legend of the Rosca family, but all he’d managed to do was lose his wife and put his children in harm’s way. He could never forgive himself for that.

  A woman walked toward the two boys, a German woman in a heavy winter coat. Christina. She squatted at their level and spoke to them as if she’d always known them. His eldest son glanced back at his father questioningly. Emil smiled. The younger one had already fallen under the charm of the German woman, who had offered him a chocolate.

  Emil turned to Alina. “You’re responsible for your younger brother now. You’ll never be able to have children, but you’ll raise your brother like your own son. Swear to me you’ll never tell him anything. Never tell him about Romania, about his father, about his family.”

  His daughter wanted to know why.

  “To protect him, Alina. To protect us all. Those who hurt you, they’re dangerous, powerful people who can find you anywhere.”

  “And Ioan?”

  “You’ll be separated. You’ll never see him again. To protect all three of you. There’s no other way.” He kissed Alina, trying to hide his tears. “Go now.”

  Alina stood before Emil one last time. Her whole body shook. She turned and ran toward Christina, who asked her to hold her little brother’s hand. The German woman took Ioan by the hand and led all three children toward the edge of the park. Emil and Christina looked at each other. For a moment, he felt like running to her, taking her in her arms, kissing her, feeling her heat one last time, but he didn’t dare put his children’s lives in danger. His children were used to separation by now; they’d be fine. They had already spent two years without him. For them, Christina would be another substitute mother. They would soon forget their father.

  When the group of four reached the end of the street, Emil got up and followed at a distance. Full of obvious affection, Christina bent over to say a few words to the children. Emil watched them go with her toward the country she’d chosen for them. He hadn’t asked where they were going in case someone tried to torture the truth out of him. Emil told himself that at least he’d have done one good thing in his unfortunate life: he’d given his children the possibility of better lives outside Romania, far in distance and time from the horrors Emil himself had suffered through.

  Emil stopped following them. It would be too dangerous to continue. Christina and the children were already crossing a large boulevard, heading toward the train station. His children were moving quickly; Christina had probably promised them ice cream. Leaning against a fence in the park, he saw them disappear among the crowd of travellers.

  “Hey, you fucking Gypsy! Where are your papers?”

  Emil whipped around. Two policemen stood beside him, with a third cop behind them. The three of them shivering. They were probably waiting to return to the station to warm up. Emil was their last identity check before their break. He was trapped by the fence — nowhere to run. Emil took his papers out and handed them to the officer, who backed up a step before taking them, as if afraid of being contaminated.

  The officer understood from the papers that Emil had broken his parole conditions.

  Emil offered no resistance as they dragged him toward a car. They roughed him up a little. It wasn’t mean-spirited; they were merely trying to warm up a little. They drove back to the station, their prey in the back of the car.

  They had to stop a few blocks later as the Belgrade train passed in front of them. Between the two officers, in the back seat, Emil craned his neck to watch it go by. He saw passengers moving from one car to the other. Tourists straightening their jackets or checking on their luggage. Perhaps making their way to the dining car. They were probably all happy to be returning to Belgrade and the relative freedom offered by Marshal Tito. Romanians certainly hadn’t been lucky in the dictatorship lottery. Among the passengers were Christina and his three children, but he didn’t see them.

  The train disappeared, the gate lifted, and the police car started off on the road again. Surprisingly, Emil felt reassured, content. His children would have a fresh start — that was all that mattered. His existence no longer held any importance at all. From here on out, all he needed to do was wait to die, and then he’d finally be free.

  39

  Zutphen, December 22, 2006

  A fire burned in the large hearth. A country holiday, Max thought to himself. All that was missing was some eggnog and a few Christmas songs. And yet the atmosphere was tense. From the kitchen, Max heard glass clinking: Lars Windemuth preparing a few cups of coffee. On the floor, Sacha played with an elaborate set of plastic cubes, seemingly ignoring the presence of adults. He was closed in on himself, seemed lost, confused.

  Max wondered what Sacha understood of the situation. He’d been torn out of his home for a second time, torn from a usurper father, but the only father he’d ever known. Back in Montreal, Kevin and Caroline would surely seem like strangers to his eyes. He would forever remember his life in Romania, would miss it, probably. Max understood Kevin’s desire to rebuild his family as it was before the tragedy, but did he really understand what he was getting himself into? Nothing would be given freely, nothing would be easy for the parents. And for Sacha it would be harder still.

  And then there were the legal aspects to consider. Officially, Kevin’s son had died in rivière Saqawigan. If he suddenly came back to life, a crime had been committed, kidnapping, fraud, something! The authorities would be forced to crack open the case of Raymond’s death: who knew what would be revealed then?

  Josée sat next to Max. “Kevin stopped in Paris on his way back from Spain, from Granada. He showed me Sacha’s pictures.”

  Kevin had told her his plan: he’d take Sacha away from his kidnapper by himself without recourse to the judicial system.

  “I tried to convince him he shouldn’t,” Josée added. “There’d been a kidnapping. Romania would need to respect the relevant international agreements.”

  But Kevin didn’t believe he’d find recourse in the law.

  How could he possibly win his case? His past legal problems would undermine his credibility. And then Peter Kalanyos could easily just disappear somewhere, taking the child with him, this time for good.

  He had to act now.

  Kevin had asked Josée to help him protect the child. The kidnapping would occur in Romania, but then he would need to take Sacha out of the country quickly and stash him safely somewhere, far from Kalanyos and his men.

  “That wouldn’t solve the legal problems of undoing Sacha’s death,” Max said.

  “The practice where I work has a section dealing with international adoptions. The little boy Kevin would bring back to Montreal wouldn’t be Sacha — officially — but another child, just another Romanian orphan.”

  Why had she agreed to help her half-brother? She’d never been that close to him in the first place. Kevin had revealed to her a face of her father she hadn’t known. She wanted to play a role, a tiny one, to correct the pain he’d caused his son.

  “And so Kevin put me in touch with Frank Woensdag.”

  Things had gone according to plan at first. Kevin succeeded in isolating Kalanyos in a Bucharest café while Laura Costinar took the child out of his house and brought him to Josée. Thanks to the adoption documents prepared by her practice, with their official authorizations forged by Cosmin Micula, the photographer, Josée reached Amsterdam without a hitch, Sacha in tow. She went to Woensdag’s place, as planned, and waited for Kevin and Laura to arrive.

  But they hadn’t been able to leave Romania in time and had fallen into the hands of Kalanyos and his men.

  “Kalanyos still has Kevin,” Max said. “He wants to trade the child for Kevin. I spoke to him in Granada. He’s going to kill Kevin if he doesn’t get Sacha back.”

  Josée sighed. Both she and Woensdag glanced at the child. Max could sense how wor
ried they were, completely at a loss.

  Discreetly, Lars Windemuth placed a tray on the coffee table — hot bowls of café au lait, which everyone ignored.

  One question still hadn’t been answered, one Max had been thinking about since the beginning of this whole affair: why was Sacha so important to Peter Kalanyos? Why had the criminal gone so far, taken so many risks, to get the child back? He’d killed Laura, Micula, and many Roma. Gotten in the crosshairs of Adrian Pavlenco. Hunted Max down.

  Woensdag sighed deeply. He seemed exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept in days. “To understand that answer you’ve got to go back quite a few years and follow the difficult path of a naive Rom, ambitious but generous, as he went from a concentration camp in Poland to a Bucharest suburb terrorized by Ceauşescu, with a stop in Vorkuta, one of the most sinister gulags of Stalin’s reign.”

  The man’s father was Anton Rosca, a descendant of Luca le Stevosko. Anton’s ancestor had fought alongside Mihail Kogălniceanu to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century. This fight gave his family a reputation respected by all Roma.

  After the First World War, Anton Rosca had tied his fate with that of Carol II, reinforcing his authority on the country’s Romani clans. Romanians and their political leaders in particular didn’t know the Roma well. They couldn’t understand these former slaves, didn’t understand why they travelled constantly. Their culture, their lifestyle, was completely foreign to Romanians despite the fact they’d inhabited the same country for centuries.

  In October 1933, Anton was one of the principal promoters of the first international meeting of Roma thirty-eight years before the London congress. Delegations from across Europe came to Bucharest to try to create a unified Romani front.

  What did Anton want for Romania? Romanestan, where he could be king? No, and Carol II would have never dismembered his own country, something the Russians and Germans would soon do for him, anyway. Anton simply wanted his people to have a role to play in existing political structures.

  Carol II refused. In any case, he had very little authority over his rebellious parliament, his inchoate democracy. Adding the Roma to the mix would have been political suicide. Anyway, Carol’s reign was coming to an end. Unbeknownst to the Romanians, in August 1939, the Russians and Germans had agreed to divide Poland, Romania, and other territories with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

  And so, after the invasion of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina by the Soviet Union the following year, Carol II was forced to abdicate and hand over rule to his young son, Michael. The latter sat on a powerless throne. Romania’s strongman at the time was General Ion Antonescu, who sided with the Germans and imposed right-wing policies across the country.

  Antonescu hunted Jews and Roma, and Anton tried to flee with his family. He was caught in a mass arrest, though he wasn’t identified. Deported to Auschwitz, Anton made sure no one knew his true identity, a Roma specialty. From inside the camp, unknown to all, Anton led the resistance against Antonescu in collaboration with Paul Vaneker, the Dutch gadjo.

  But the Germans soon identified Anton and executed him after he refused to work for them. With Anton dead and his children exterminated, the Nazis felt they had nothing to fear from the Rosca anymore. They could be placed in the same category as the Krieks of Poland, Joseph XIII’s Sinto clan, and all the other great Romani families mowed down by history.

  Woensdag rubbed his eyes nervously, discovered the bowl of coffee in front of him, and took a long sip of it. Max did the same.

  Sacha continued to play, ignoring the adults’ conversation.

  “Anton Rosca had a son who miraculously survived Auschwitz,” Woensdag continued. “The Germans didn’t realize it.”

  “Emil the accordionist.”

  Ioan Costinar and Kevin Dandurand’s biological father. Sacha’s grandfather.

  In 1945, the Russians tossed Emil Rosca into a coal mine, like so many other former detainees. Stalin feared the prisoners who’d spent so much time with the enemy. Many of them went straight from the Nazi camps to the gulags. Emil was one of them.

  At the end of the war the Allies divided Europe among them. The Russians received Eastern Europe after promising the Americans and British they would allow a right to self-determination for these countries. A promise Stalin made causally but never intended to respect.

  In Romania the reversals of alliances and the strength of the resistance led to the creation of a coalition of political parties. Among them was a minority Communist Party trying to rise to power. Moscow interfered in the 1946 elections and manipulated the creation of the new government, ensuring its control over the country. This led to the abdication of Michael, Carol II’s successor.

  “An inevitable abdication,” Woensdag said. “Stalin threatened to execute five thousand students if Michael kept the throne. The king had no choice, so he fled to Great Britain.”

  The rest was a predictable mess: confiscation of private property, nationalization of companies, collectivization of agriculture.

  The peasants fought rabidly against these changes. Armed resistance groups were formed. With the possibility of open civil war burning up the countryside, the Communists sought support wherever they could find it. That was when the little accordion player from Auschwitz came to mind. In 1949 Nicolae Ceauşescu, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s protégé and a rising figure in the regime, found Emil in Vorkuta and brought him back to Bucharest, luring him with the promise of Romanestan, a promise he, too, had no intention of respecting.

  Rosca and Ceauşescu became good friends, a friendship that fell apart in the 1970s. Increasingly paranoid, exercising power over the country as a disease ravages the body, Ceauşescu threw Rosca to the Securitate, his secret police.

  However, Emil had time to send his daughter and two sons to safety. In 1989, after the revolution, the eldest son returned from Great Britain under the last name of Costinar, accompanied by Victor Marineci. In London, where he’d studied, Emil’s son had collaborated with the World Romani Congress as the titular head of the Romanian Romani community in exile — supported by Marineci.

  Members of the new democratic government discovered the political power represented by the Roma. A power that had to be seduced, cajoled, wheedled, just like that of any other stakeholder. With Marineci’s help, Ioan Costinar picked up where his famous father had left off. Within a few years, he became the spokesman that his father and grandfather had been before him. An educated, credible, convincing representative oriented toward the future.

  Ioan’s only problem: he and Laura hadn’t managed to have a child, though they’d tried for years. Discreetly, they’d consulted with doctors in Great Britain, but to no avail.

  Among the Roma, a child was the foundation of the family. Without children a Rom couldn’t expect to lead other Roma.

  “That’s when things turned sour,” Woensdag said. “For years I thought Ioan was a good man, beyond reproach …”

  Max couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re saying he’s the one behind all this?”

  Woensdag shrugged. “That’s what Kevin believes.”

  According to Kevin, Raymond, looking anywhere to save his company, reached Woodlands, Manitoba, with the intention of asking Ioan Costinar for help. The businessman knew Ioan had access to the considerable funds Christina Landermann had taken from her husband’s company. Christina had helped Dandurand once already when Raymond had agreed to adopt Kevin and wed Alina, who became Roxanne. Dandurand was going for broke.

  Costinar learned that his brother, Kevin, had a son …

  “Couldn’t Laura and he adopt any child?” Max asked. “Why Sacha instead of another?”

  “Before dying, in order to ensure that the money taken from Aspekt-Ziegler would always remain in the hands of the Rosca family and be managed by them, Christina arranged with her account’s administrators in Zurich for a very particular deal. To h
ave access to the money, in addition to the regular conditions, whoever wielded the account would have to undergo a DNA test to prove he or she was a member of the Rosca clan.

  By secretly “adopting” Sacha, Ioan Costinar would gain the respect of all Roma. Sacha would become the king-in-waiting who would one day take over his adopt­ive father’s business. After Ioan’s death, Sacha would continue to have access to Christina Landermann’s money, and so would be able to continue his father’s good work.

  In exchange for the child, Costinar promised Dandurand enough money to save his business.

  Not long after, however, through circumstances Woensdag didn’t know, Peter Kalanyos inserted himself into the deal.

  “He and Costinar knew each other?” Max asked Woensdag.

  “No, not at all. But, according to Kevin, Kalanyos got wind of the deal and understood Sacha was a gold mine. There was money in the boy.”

  Shortly after Ioan Costinar’s murder on his way to Winnipeg’s airport, Raymond Dandurand fell into the waters of rivière Saqawigan, and Sacha was off to Romania. Thanks to Sacha, Peter Kalanyos inherited the Rosca fortune.

  No one knew the importance of the child, and so no one worried about another son in the Kalanyos family — his children didn’t go to school in the first place. Among the Roma, the composition of families was always rather complicated, at least in the eyes of gadjo authorities.

  The only thing that mattered was that the Zurich bank considered Kalanyos Sacha’s legitimate guardian. The Hungarian Rom had the fake papers to back it up.

  A perfect plan. Almost.

  Kalanyos soon learned that the child wasn’t the only inheritor to the Rosca name.

  Max looked up at Woensdag. “But wasn’t that the case? Ioan killed. Kevin and Gabrielle didn’t know their origins. Alina died a long time before. Only Sacha was left.”