Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

Adriana was staying to guard the car since she hadn’t drunk so much, and it would have been more complicated for her to pee in bushes, the way we all had on the island.

So I sprayed the gritty soil, along with the Inspector, and Romulus -whose second name I couldn’t remember-and Virgil Gramescu. At times Romanians could sound like the Lost Legion, which in a sense they were. Inspector Badelescu’s first name was Ovid.

Quickly I returned to Adriana, who was smoking.

“Do you know, Paul,” she said to me, “when the Mayor of Bucharest proposed exterminating all the strays, Brigitte Bardot flew here on a mercy mission to dissuade him? According to one version of the story, Brigitte donated a lot of money for a dogs’ home. Consequently, two hundred strays live in luxury, then the extermination went ahead anyway. But it must have failed, or else the survivors bred very fast. The number of dogs on the streets is as high as ever.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“Only in winter, if they form packs. Sometimes a baby or little child gets carried off.”

Brushing back his oiled dark hair, Ovid Badelescu was about to say something when a jangle of bells sounded from within his shirt pocket, so he fished out his mobile.

And frowned, and queried, and queried again and again in Romanian.

He shut the phone and said, “Bad news. A young woman has been torn apart in an elevator in the centre of the city.”

“Torn apart ?” I exclaimed.

“Not literally limb from limb,” he said. “I mean savaged to death, with terrible injuries. I must go there immediately. Do you want to see?” he asked me. “Or wait in the car, which might be tiresome in this heat? Virgil and Romulus can make their way home from there. Or you might prefer to have lunch with Adriana.”

Have lunch, or visit an appalling murder scene? I was incredulous. “Do you mean see the body ?”

The Inspector laughed. “No, an ambulance is taking it to the morgue. Although you can visit the morgue if you’re really curious. I meant the scene of the crime. I’ve been called there because of a Jack the Raper murder I was involved with last year. Do I mean raper? No, ripper. Rapers don’t often rip. They may strangle or stab, but not do complete ripping. Not usually.”

“A solved murder?”

“The murderer might have been a Turk,” he replied. “But he disappeared. Ankara couldn’t trace him, nor Interpol in case he hid among the Turks in Germany.”

I couldn’t help wondering if he said Ankara and Interpol to enhance his importance. And I supposed I must attribute his comparative nonchalance, or what I took as nonchalance, first of all to the requirements of haste, and secondly to whatever other horrors he may have experienced in his job.

We’d been a mixed bunch on that cultural island in the Danube: lots of beautiful Romanian girls, and handsome youths, too, the annual event being sponsored by the Ministry for Youth Development. A Bulgarian kick-boxing champion who gave open-air classes, an astronomer who appealed to science-fiction fans, several musicians and poets, an American from an Institute for Human Development who believed that immortality is within our grasp, an angry German feminist. I could go on.

I would describe my own writings as psychological horror, or perhaps darkness, which illuminates the mundane world, paradoxically heightening our awareness, although I was published as Crime. Consequently, my “real world counterpart” was the Inspector, with his theories about order and disorder, darkness and light within society, and, of course, his wealth of practical experience, which he became intent on demonstrating to me, either for egotistical or for inspirational reasons, or maybe because he genuinely liked me. Hence his driving me back to Bucharest to show me things, which seductive Adriana was also intent on. In her case, maybe with a tentative motive of gaining an author from abroad as a husband, a foreign passport, a different life? Authors are esteemed unduly in some countries. Or maybe Adriana merely wanted some fun and to enjoy herself. When I explained that my surname, Osler, was originally a French name for someone who catches wild birds, Adriana had been highly amused.

I’d been persuaded to pay my own, fairly minimal, airfare from England by fellow crime author Max Rigby, who was moving slowly around Eastern Europe and who had already enjoyed the free hospitality of the island the year before. Currently, Max was renting a flat in Bucharest, where I’d stay for a week. Other habitués of the island were driving Max back to the city.

Max was seeking exotic foreign settings for future novels because, frankly, in my opinion, his most recent book, set in England, had seemed lacklustre and ho-hum. Competently done, to be sure, but lacking the additional frisson of strangeness which distinguishes a competent book from something exceptional. I’d said so myself in no uncertain terms in a review, which I certainly didn’t sign with my own name, concocting instead an alias-Martin Fairfax (a reviewer should always seem fair), which, ironically, as I realized later, was the name of a minor character in one of my early books, long out of print. Should I beware of impending Alzheimer’s? Not so long as I continued drinking red wine.

With so many Eastern European countries joining the EU, and so many citizens of those countries settling in Britain for jobs, not least about a million Poles, obviously one should expand one’s repertoire, which was a reason why Max easily persuaded me to visit Romania.

Badelescu, though I suppose I should more familiarly call him Ovid, placed a flasher on the roof of his BMW, and we sirened our way past trolleybuses, trucks, a convoy of giant Turkish lorries, decrepit Dacias, and flashier new cars, along tree-lined avenues, the trunks painted white.

I pointed, and asked Adriana, “Is that so you can see the trees in the dark?”

“Do you know why we’re giving a lift to Virgil?” she replied. “He wouldn’t get to the island otherwise. That’s because his wife crashed their car into the only other car on a huge empty boulevard.” She zigzagged her hands as if steering two vehicles. “From hundreds of metres apart they start trying to avoid each other. Virgil’s wife steers left, the other guy steers right. Then they change their minds and directions a dozen times. Until crash . It was incredibly bad luck.”

“And neither of them slowed down?”

“Why do that, on an empty boulevard?”

Presently, the dilapidated city mutated into a Futureville of huge honey-white buildings adorned with balconies. Part-way around a huge piazza, police vehicles clustered, on and off a broad pavement. Ovid kept his siren howling to herald his arrival until we had parked.

Bye-bye to Romulus and Virgil, who sauntered off with their rucksacks.

“Oh, look,” said Adriana, pointing into the distance along a vast boulevard. “Ceaus?escu’s palace, there at the far end.”

That was my first view of the dead dictator’s megalomaniac structure, supposedly the second largest building in the world. Even dwarfed by distance it loomed . And the great bright apartment building where the murder had happened was in direct line of sight.

Ovid informed me, “This place was built for the Securitate, but it was only finished after the Revolution. Come on!”

The Securitate: Ceaus?escu’s secret police, whose surveillance of Romania’s citizens was very exhaustive indeed, and whose network of informers, many of those against their will or wishes, may have comprised a significant percentage of the population.

“I don’t want blood on my shoes,” said Adriana.

If she went home, how was I going to find Max’s flat? The Inspector might become too busy to drive me there, and I felt dubious about trusting myself to a taxi driver in an unknown city when I only knew a few phrases of Romanian that Adriana and others had taught me on the island. Ah, Max could come and fetch me, because my mobile now had a Romanian simcard. However, Adriana spied a café. Yellow Bergenbier umbrellas-cum-sunshades outside sheltered tables and chairs. Half a dozen large mongrels lay nearby.