Children of The Night

Chapter Eight

Usually Kate had a cab take her home to her apartment in the dark, but this evening they walked. Kate blinked at the thick evening light painted on the sides of buildings. It was as if she had never seen Bucharest before.

“So you're not staying at one of the hotels?” said the priest.

Kate shook herself out of her reverie. “No, the Foundation rented a small apartment for me on Stirbei Voda.” She gave the address.

“Ah,” said Father O'Rourke, “that's right near Cismigiu. “

“Near what?” said Kate. The last word had sounded much like a sneeze.

“Cismigiu Gardens. One of my favorite places in the city. “

Kate shook her head. “I haven't seen it.” She twitched a smile. “I haven't seen much since I got here. I've had three days off from the hospital, but I slept those away.”

“When did you get here?” he asked. Kate noticed his limp as they hurried across busy Balcescu Boulevard. Here on the side-streets by the university, the shade was deeper, the air cooler.

“Hmmm . . . April four. God.”

“I know,” said Father O'Rourke. “A day seems like a week at the hospital. A week is an eternity.”

They had just reached the large plaza on Calea Victoriei when Kate stopped and frowned. “What's the date today?”

“May fifteenth,” said the priest. “Wednesday.”

Kate rubbed her face and blinked. Her skin felt anaesthetized. “I'd promised CDC that I'd be back by the twentieth. They sent me tickets. I'd sort of forgotten just how close . . .” She shook her head again and looked around at the plaza, still busy with evening traffic. Behind them, Cretulescu Church was a mass of scaffolding, but the bullet holes were still visible on the sooty facade. The Palace of the Republic across the piata had been even more heavily damaged. Long red and white banners hung over the columned entrance, but the doors and shattered windows were boarded up. To their right, the Athenee Palace Hotel was open but with vacant windows and stitcheries of bullet holes like fresh scars on a heroin addict's skin.

“CDC,” said Father O'Rourke. “You're out of Atlanta?”

“Boulder, Colorado,” said Kate. “The big brass still hang out in Atlanta, but it's been the Centers for Disease Control for several years. The Boulder facility's fairly new.”

They crossed Calea Victoriei at the light and headed down Strada Stirbei Voda, but not before three Gypsy beggars in front of the Hotel Bucuresti saw them and came swooping toward them, thrusting babies at them, kissing their own hands, tapping Kate's shoulders, and saying, “Por la bambinu . . . por la bambina . . .”

Kate raised a tired hand but Father O'Rourke dug out change for each of them. The Gypsy women grimaced at the coins, snapped something in dialect, and hurried back to their places in front of the hotel. The bluejeaned and leather-coated money changers in front of the hotel watched impassively.

Stirbei Voda was a narrower street but still busy with cheap Dacias and the moneychangers' Mercedes and BMWs rumbling past over brick and worn asphalt. Kate noticed the priest's slight limp again but decided not to ask him about it. Instead, she said, “Where do you call home base?” She had considered adding the Father, but it did not come naturally to her.

The priest was smiling slightly. “Well, the order I work for is based in Chicago, and on this trip I take my instructions from the Chicago Archdiocese, but it's been awhile since I was there. In recent years I've spent a lot of time in South and Central America. Before that, Africa.”

Kate glanced to her left, recognized the street called 13 Decembrie, and knew that she was just a block or two from her apartment. The avenue seemed different in daylight, and on foot. “So you're sort of a Third World expert,” she said, too tired to concentrate on the conversation but enjoying the sound of English.

“Sort of,” said Father O'Rourke.

“And do you specialize in orphanages around the world?”

“Not really. If I have a specialty, it's children. One just tends to find them in orphanages and hospitals. “

Kate made a noise of agreement. A few chestnut trees along the avenue here caught the last reflected light from the buildings on the east side of the street and seemed to glow with a goldorange corona. The air was thick with the smells of any Eastern European cityundiluted car exhausts, raw sewage, rotting garbagebut there was also a scent of greenery and fresh blooms on the soft evening breeze.

“Has it been this pleasant the whole time I've been here? I seem to remember it being cold and rainy,” Kate said softly.

Father O'Rourke smiled. “It's been like summer since the first of May,” he said. “The trees along the avenues north of here are fantastic.”

Kate stopped. “Number five,” she said. “This is my apartment complex.” She extended her hand. “Well, thanks for the walk and the conversation . . . uh, Father.”

The priest looked at her without shaking her hand. His expression seemed a bit quizzical, not directed at her but almost as if he were debating something with himself. Kate noticed for the first time how strikingly clear his gray eyes were.

“The park is right there,” said Father O'Rourke, pointing down Stirbei Voda. “Less than a block away. The entrance is sort of hard to notice if you're not aware of it already. I know you're exhausted, but . . .”

Kate was exhausted and in a lousy mood and not the least bit tempted by this celibate cleric in Reeboks, despite his startlingly beautiful eyes. Still, this was the first nonmedical conversation she'd had in weeks and she was surprised to find herself reluctant to end it. “Sure,” she said. “Show me.”

Cismigiu Gardens reminded Kate of what she had imagined New York's Central Park to have been like decades ago, before it surrendered its nights to violence and its days to noise: Cismigiu was a true urban oasis, a hidden vale of trees and water and leaf shade and flowers.

They entered through a narrow gate in a high fence that Kate had never noticed, descended stairs between tall boulders, and emerged into a maze of paved paths and stone walkways. The park was large, but all of its vistas were intimate: a waterway here threading its way under an arched stone bridge to widen into a shaded lagoon there, a long meadowunkempt and seemingly untouched by a gardener's blade or shearsbut strewn with a riot of wild flowers, a playground abuzz with children still dressed for the winter just past, long benches filled with grandparents watching the children play, stone tables and benches where huddles of men watched other men play chess, an island restaurant bedecked with colored lights, the sound of laughter across water.

“It's wonderful,” said Kate. They had strolled around the east side of the lagoon past the noise of the playground, crossed a bridge made of cement logs and twigs, and paused to watch couples rowing in the connecting waterway below.

Father O'Rourke nodded and leaned on the railing. “It's always too easy to see just one side of a place. Bucharest can be a difficult city to love, but it has its attractions.”

Kate watched a young couple pass below, the young man wrestling with the heavy oars while trying to make it seem easy, his young lady reclining languorouslyor what she thought was languorouslyin the bow. The rowboat seemed to be the size of one of the QE2's lifeboats, and appeared to be just about as easy to handle. The couple rowed out of sight around the bend in the channel, the young man sweating and swearing as he leaned on the oars to avoid a paddleboat coming the other way.

“The Ceausescus and the revolution seem very far away, don't they?” said Kate. “It's hard to imagine that these people had to live for so many years under one of the planet's worst dictators.”

The priest nodded. “Have you seen the new presidential palace and his Victory of Socialism Boulevard?”

Kate tried to force her tired mind into gear. “I don't think so,” she said.

“You should see it before you go,” said Father O'Rourke. His gray eyes seemed absorbed with some inner dialogue.

“That's the new section of Bucharest he had built?”

The priest nodded again. “It reminds me of architectural models Albert Speer had made up for Hitler,” he said, his voice very soft. “Berlin the way it was supposed to look after the ultimate triumph of the Third Reich. The presidential palace may be the largest inhabited structure on earth . . . only it's not inhabited now. The new regime doesn't know what the hell to do with it. And the Boulevard is a mass of gleaming white office and apartment complexespart Third Reich, part Korean Gothic, part Roman Imperial. They march across what used to be the most beautiful section of the city like so many Martian war machines. The old neighborhoods are gone forever . . . as dead as Ceausescu.” He rubbed his cheek. “Do you mind if we sit down a moment?”

Kate walked with him to a bench. The sunset had faded in all but the highest clouds, but the twilight was the slow, warm melting of a late spring evening. A few gas lamps were coming on down the long curve of path. “Your leg's bothering you,” she said.

Father O'Rourke smiled. “This leg can't bother me,” he said, lifting his left pant leg above the athletic sock. He rapped the pink plastic of a prosthesis. “Just to the knee,” he added. “Above that, it can hurt like hell.”

Kate chewed her lip. “Automobile accident?”

“In a manner of speaking. Sort of a national auto accident. Vietnam. “

Kate was surprised. She had still been in high school during the war, and she assumed that the priest was her age or younger. Now she looked carefully at his face above the dark beard, seeing the web-work of laugh lines around the eyes, really seeing the man for the first time, and realized that he was probably a few years older than she, perhaps in his early forties. “I'm sorry about your leg,” she said.

“Me too,” laughed the priest.

“Was it a land mine?” Kate had interned with a brilliant doctor who had specialized in VA cases.

“Not exactly,” said Father O'Rourke. His voice was free of the selfconsciousness and hesitance she had heard from some Vietnam veterans. Whatever demons the war and the wound brought him, she thought, he's free of them now. “I was a tunnel rat,” he said. “Found an NVA down there that was more booby trap than corpse.”

Kate was not sure what a tunnel rat was, but she did not ask.

“You're doing wonderful things with the children at the hospital,” said the priest. “The survival rate on the hepatitis cases has doubled since your arrival.”

“It's still not good enough,” snapped Kate. She heard the edge in her tone and took a breath. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “How long have you been in Romania ...uh...”

He scratched his beard. “Why don't you call me Mike?”

Kate started to speak, then hesitated. “Father” was wrong; “Mike” didn't seem quite right.

The priest grinned at her. “Okay, how about 'O'Rourke'? It worked fine in the army.”

“All rightO'Rourke,” said Kate. She extended her hand. “I'm Neuman.”

His handshake was firm but Kate perceived a great gentleness behind it. “Well, Neuman,” he said, “to answer your question . . . I've been in and out of Romania for quite a bit of the last year and a half.”

Kate was surprised. “Working with the children ail that time?”

“Mostly.” He leaned forward, idly rubbing his knee. Another rowboat passed by. Rock music, the lyrics indecipherable, drifted across the lagoon from the island restaurant. “The first year or so . . . well, you know about the conditions of the state orphanages. The first task was to get the sickest children transferred to hospitals.”

Kate touched her tired eyelids. Amazingly, the sickfeeling fatigue was retreating a bit, allowing a simple tiredness to fill her. “The hospitals aren't much better,” she said.

Father O'Rourke did not look at her. “The hospitals for the Party elite are better. Have you seen them?”

“No.

“They're not on the official Ministry of Health list. They don't have signs out front. But the medical care and equipment is lightyears ahead of the district hospitals you've been working in.”

Kate turned her head to watch a couple strolling by hand in hand. The sky was darkening between the branches above the walkway. “But there are no children in these Partyelite hospitals, are there, O'Rourke?”

“No abandoned children. Just a few wellfed kids in for tonsillectomies. “

The couple had strolled out of sight around the curved path, but Kate continued to stare in that direction. The pleasing park sounds seemed to fade into the distance. “God damn,” she whispered softly. “What are we going to do? Six hundred-some of these state institutions . . . two hundred thousand or more kids we know of out there . . . fifty percent of those exposed to hepatitis B . . . almost as many testing positive for HIV in some of those hellholes. What are we going to do, O'Rourke?”

The priest was looking at her in the fading light. “The money and attention from the West has helped some.”

Kate made a rude sound.

“It has,” said Father O'Rourke. “The children aren't penned up in cages the way they were when I first arrived on the tour Vernor Deacon Trent arranged.”

“No,” agreed Kate. “Now they're left to rock and grow retarded in clean iron cribs.”

“And there's always hope for the adoption process . . . “ began the priest.

Kate rounded on him. “Are you part of that fucking circus? Do you round up healthy Romanian kids for these beeffed bornagain American yahoos to buy? Is that your role in all this?”

Father O'Rourke sat silently in the face of her anger. His face showed no retreat. His voice was soft. “Do you want to see my role in all this, Neuman?”

Kate hesitated only a second. She felt the fury rising in her again like heated bile. Children were suffering and dying by the thousands . . . by the tens of thousands . . . and this Romancollared anachronism was part of the Great Baby Bazaar, the strictlyforprofit sideshow being run by the thugs and former informers that were the greasy Mafia of this country.

“Yeah,” she said at last, allowing the anger to emerge as a verbal sneer. “Show me.”

Without another word, Father O'Rourke rose from the bench and led her out of the park and into the dark city.