Ioana Pârvulescu - Life Begins on Friday

She got up and on the nightstand she saw The Lady’s Planet , which in Giurgiu a cross-eyed organ grinder’s parrot had picked from a basket for her. Only now did she read it, putting on her glasses: ‘You like to joke, to spend time with your friends, for which reason many ladies envy you, but your heart belongs only to the man with whom you are married. You will live for eighty years. You will have a good marriage. And you have no reason to be wary of your husband. Your reward will be happiness. Lottery: 13, 21 and 26.’

She would buy a ticket and if she won, she would have money to repair the house, for they needed new wallpaper and above all to modernize their home, which was behind the times.

‘Are you awake? It seems to me that I have done la grasse matinée, ’ said Leon Margulis and with the soles of his feet he felt around for his house slippers. ‘What time is it? I dreamed of Costache. In the end I forgot to ask him: is he or is he not coming to the Christmas dinner?’

Costache carefully pressed the button of the electric doorbell that General Ion Algiu had lately had installed. He heard a buzz and in the same instant a bark. The footfalls of the adjutant and the quadruped reached the door at the same time, as if it were a race, and when the soldier took Costache’s hat, a splendid Borzoi wolfhound leapt up and placed his paws on the trousers of the policeman’s uniform. Costache thrust the dog aside, although it was friendly and had something very aristocratic about it, with its lively, elongated head and ruff of fur. He deposited his walking stick with the silver beak in the vase in the hall and entered the library, as usual during one of his working visits. The general was in mourning for his wife, who had died the previous winter. It would soon be the first anniversary of her death, but his grief was as great as it had been from the very first. His son, who lived in Craiova, wrote to him frequently, his two daughters, both married and with their own households, tried to cheer him up, inviting him to visit them, but he preferred to be all by himself, taking tobacco amid his memories, in the place that was still filled with all her little gestures. In the beginning, he had not been able to bear the presence of any other person, visiting cards went unanswered on the tray in the hall, but now he had gradually begun to look at them and deigned to reply: to a quarter he answered yes , to three quarters Forgive me, but another time . However, Costache’s visit made him feel better. He had liked him ever since the time when, seven or eight years ago, as Prefect of Police and rather put out at the thought of working in an office, he had sought a decent subaltern and instead found a friend. They measured each other with their eyes, the same as the first time, when between them had arisen that empathy that seems only to exist between certain people, and were happy to observe that they were both the same and that the same empathy still existed between them even now.

‘Misfortunes!’ said the policeman by way of a greeting, and the General merely raised his unkempt white eyebrows.

Neither wasted words. Mr Costache accepted a coffee and a brandy and mixed them, pouring a few drops of brandy into the coffee à la manière de Marghiloman . He briefly recounted the two cases that had been causing him trouble and seemed to be going nowhere; with each passing day they were becoming more and more bogged down. In the meantime many gazettes had begun to make a fuss, and that was deleterious. The young Rareș Ochiu-Zănoagă, who had been found shot, and a certain Dan Crețu — no relative of our red-headed apothecary — cases connected by all kinds of coincidences. The General read four or five gazettes daily, and so he was up to date with the affair. More importantly, he was familiar with the account in Universul , which seemed the best informed.

‘Do you think there is any connection between the two?’

‘Both men were found on the same morning, by the same man, Petre Inger, the confectioner’s coachman. Both were unconscious, one wounded, the other not. I do not suspect Petre, he is from a different, unconnected world, and he would not have brought them in had he had anything on his conscience. Besides, I have interrogated him. As for Dan Crețu — if such be his real name, for he has not documents — we would have been able to find out a great deal from his luggage, a safe-type box, but unfortunately it has vanished without trace. The man was held in the cells for an hour, but the other crooks said that he did not speak to them, and nor did he speak to Fane the Ringster, the number one suspect in the disappearance of the box.’

‘But what does your nose tell you?’

‘I am inclined to believe that he is a high-class fraudster, an upper-class forger or a jewel thief of great panache, who has come from far away, perhaps from overseas. But…’

With his eyebrows the General urged him to continue.

‘But it seems to me that his brain is addled, as they say.’

‘Why would the one preclude the other?’

‘What surprises me is that the editor-in-chief of Universul , the one who wrote the article about the other case — I understand you have read it — whom I asked to employ him, so that we could keep an eye on him at all times, told me that he has definitely worked as a journalist before; his experience is obvious.’

‘Why do the three preclude each other?’

‘I don’t know. It seems to me that they preclude each other, not in theory, but from what I have seen of the man. My nose, as you say. And apropos of noses, at a dinner I once saw a Turk with a cardboard nose, placed not over his nose but in its place. A strange sight, I do declare. Unless my nose is made of cardboard too, the man does not resemble an ordinary journalist: when you compare him with Procopiu, for example, you will immediately see why. Nor does he resemble the thieves and fraudsters that you can smell from a mile off. I will not hide from you the fact that for an instant I even thought of Jack the Ripper and I imagined that in his case there might be a razor and a saw. Ultimately, he resembles a normal person, with interludes of mental alienation, but Dr Margulis has assured me that although he speaks rather strangely, as if he had different reference points than the rest of us, he nonetheless speaks rather like the poets. Whatever path I pursue, there appears something that does not fit, I have never experienced the like…’

‘I have a single suggestion, but I do not know how much it will help you. It is a question of things that fit. In Saturday’s Universul three things attracted my attention: the young man who was shot, the so-called Dan Crețu, and a lost wallet for which the reward was entirely unusual. This is what puzzled me the most. What might it contain? Has the wallet been found?’

Mr Costache did not know.

‘You see, Costache? I think that at least two of the three things are connected, and the third is the thing that throws them into confusion. But which of the two things go together is what you will have to find out. Pursue the announcement, if the other leads are dead ends for the time being.’

‘And there is another thing upon which I should like you to meditate, if you will allow me,’ said Costache, standing at the front door, taking his walking stick with the silver beak. ‘The young man uttered a few words before he died, which I wrote down: light, Popescu, light, Holy Mother and another word that was unclear, either dar or sar . If you have any ideas, I am sure you will let me know. I am most glad to have seen you, I missed you, and only now do I realize how much,’ he said, turning back beneath the entrance marquee and making a joking military salute. Ion Algiu watched him depart with a smile well concealed by his moustache. He had missed him too.