Full Moon City

Weredog of Bucharest by Ian Watson

Shortly before driving into Bucharest proper, we stopped for a pee in some bushes. Twice en route we’d seen men vomiting into roadside shrubbery, probably on account of drinking bad tap water, so use of bushes seemed normal. A tall sign announced: Parking, Kebab, Sexy Show, Motel, Telefon. We only required the first of those, just for a few minutes. We’d been in Inspector Badelescu’s black BMW (with 120,000 kilometres on the clock) for a little over an hour, but prior to leaving the island in the Danube, we’d had a few beers. Endless maize stretched around our roadside oasis, although a strong odour of pigs hung in the air, which must have been coming from the dilapidated barns nearby.

Slumped on their sides in the dust by the bushes, under some tree shade, were three tatty though sizeable mongrels, fawncoloured with white patches. At our approach, two of the dogs raised their heads and regarded us with utter apathy in their lacklustre eyes. The third remained sprawled as though life was too exhausting, or the temperature too high, to bother moving. Oh, all of a sudden one pooch scrambled up and stood facing us, its ears half-cocked like bat wings, its tail half-lifted.

Badelescu stooped, scooped up a stone, and threw it, not for the mongrel to chase and fetch, but at the dog’s flank. The animal yipped and scuttled away.

“Fucking things,” he said to me amiably. “Don’t worry about rabies, and I have my gun if they show their teeth. Most are too tired and weak with hunger. Welcome to Bucharest from its canine inhabitants.”

“A million stray dogs in the city,” Adriana, my impromptu translator, called after me-whether in warning or simply by way of explanation I couldn’t be sure. Adriana was unconsciously beautiful in the way that so many young Romanian women were-graceful, long-legged, fine sensuous figure in tight jeans and blouse. On the whole, Romanian women didn’t seem to realize they were gorgeous; because so many were, therefore this was normal. Adriana wore her dark silky hair in a very long ponytail, which I had held with great satisfaction in a tent on the island while with my other hand I gave her pleasure as her head tried to toss from side to side, but couldn’t, while she groaned and cries jerked from her.

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.

“I’ll buy a magazine and wait for you in there, okay?”

Accordingly, in went Ovid and I to find the Boys in Blue busy on the ground floor examining an open lift, the floor and walls of which were very bloody. I’d been at two or three actual crime scenes before, yet here it was as if a madman had thrown crimson paint around. The smell, however, wasn’t of paint but of a slaughterhouse. I presumed my presence was explained cursorily by Ovid, since various police nodded at me before, as I supposed, reporting circumstances to him in Romanian.

“So, Mr. Story Writer,” Ovid said after peering assiduously, “what do you notice?”

“Less blood on the floor outside than I’d have expected,” I suggested.

“And that was probably caused by us police and by the ambulance people. It seems there are some bloody tracks and drops on the sixth floor, but again not too much blood is in the corridor up there.”

“So she was attacked inside the lift, with the doors shut.”

“Precisely. And I think I know how.”

Ovid stepped inside the lift fastidiously, crouched, and peered at the paneled rear wall, which was almost unstained. Then he inserted his little finger somewhere amongst the woodwork and pulled. The rear wall split in half, opening as two floor-to-ceiling doors. Behind was a space large enough for a couple of people to stand, or kneel, between the true rear wall and the false wall. And the true rear wall was bloody, as were the insides of the doors.

“Here,” said Ovid, “is where the killer hid, to burst out suddenly between floors. I told you this building was made for the Securitate, but about six thousand special spies spied upon the secret police themselves by such bizarre methods as this. No doubt a microphone would have been hidden inside the elevator, but here’s a back-up, just in case. A man sitting on a stool could look and listen through the tiny hole in the wall.”

The sheer shock of being between floors in an otherwise empty lift when suddenly the wall opened and another person emerged! The victim might faint or even die at once of a heart attack.

Ovid explained in Romanian, and the lesser police looked at him in admiration.

Of course we climbed the white marble stairs to the sixth floor rather than using the lift.

It seemed to me that the tracks up there were rather narrow to be those of shoes or trainers. They became vague after not too many paces.

Adriana pointed through the café window at one of the tall white apartments around the piazza, blue sky showing through ornamental turrets along the edge of the rooftop.

“Sniper watchtowers,” she said. “You could shoot down into any rebellious crowds.”

We were inside for the air-conditioning. So were some bleached-blond youths wearing gold chains, sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads, sons of the new rich.

“You say the tracks of blood were narrow.” She shuddered and crossed herself. “I think a werewolf killed that woman in the elevator. Probably the Inspector thinks so, too, but he wouldn’t tell you that.”

“Werewolves aren’t real,” I protested.

“In Romania they are. And weredogs, priccoltish. With a million dogs on the streets it can’t be surprising if at least one is a weredog. It’s the perfect place to hide. Unless,” she added with what seemed at first a wonderful lack of logical connection, “Badelescu thinks a Turk did it. Maybe he hopes that’s the answer.”

“Why blame a Turk?”

“They ruled us for three hundred years; consequently, many Romanians don’t like them much. Better a Turk than a werewolf. I’ll see if there are any news reports yet.”

Flipping open her phone, amazingly she googled.

“How can you do that?”

“You can do it anywhere in the city center.”

I thought of old women draped in black guarding a single cow or a few geese by the roadside out in the country. Truly, the last shall be first technologically.

“No, nothing yet.” Rather too soon for news.

“Will you take me to Max? And maybe I can see you tomorrow?” In fact, I felt a bit tired, but also I wanted to make notes about the murder scene.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know. I’ll phone. Yes, probably.” She wasn’t going to seem overeager, but she wanted me to feel eager.

Max’s place proved not to be far, just beyond the boundary where Ceaus?escu’s architectural master plan had erased a vast area of the old city-houses, churches, whatever was in the way-to make space for ostentatious modernity.

The flat was on the top floor of a modest block. To the front, the outlook was upon a line of trees, then some open grass, then low houses with red roofs suddenly abutting a towering wall of vast white apartments. Directly below was a very modest old cottage to which were attached a clutter of small corrugated-roofed sheds, surrounded by rows of vegetables and bean poles-I even spotted some geese and hens-all within a green-painted picket fence.

Incongruously next to this relic of the past was a sizeable ultra-posh house in Art Deco style, gleamingly white.

“Probably an old lady died there and her heirs accepted an offer they couldn’t refuse,” said Max. Max was short and burly and wore an assertively black moustache, although his hair had lightened and receded a long way. I didn’t know if he dyed the moustache.

“So the old woman directly below hasn’t died yet?”

“I’ve never seen her.”

My room contained a double bed, a large wardrobe, and a bench press that seemed to have strayed from some gym. Frills were lacking, yet the furnishings sufficed for sport that I anticipated with Adriana. On the bed, I mean, not on the bench press.

“Chap called Silviu may be coming round to take us somewhere,” Max told me. “Couple of days before I went to the island, Silviu told me the sad story of how his mother’s son by a previous marriage had suddenly died from premature kidney failure. He begged me to lend him three hundred dollars for the funeral because his mother couldn’t afford it. So I did. Very next day, I bump into Silviu and he proudly shows me this expensive new camera he just bought. You know, innocently shows me the camera because he’s so excited and happy. I ought to have got mad at him. But it was my own fault. You don’t lend money to people here unless you’re willing to regard it as a gift. Some day they’ll do something for you, perhaps. Well, Silviu phoned an hour ago and I said, ‘Come and drive us somewhere tonight, right?’ ”

“Somewhere?”

“Educational. In your honour. Writers in the crime line need to research sleaze.” So saying, Max cast himself upon a sofa and reached for an elegant, glossy English-language magazine, published for expats no doubt, its cover a stylish photo of giant terracotta garden urns. Thumbing to the back, he intoned: “Royal Orchid Male Sacred Spot Massage. A gentle digital technique for contacting these subtle places. In the internal way a lubricated finger will be inserted into the anus, and then it will gently massage around the chestnut-sized and -shaped prostate. This feels better when you are somewhat erect and excited and if it’s done during the intimate massage (don’t worry, the girls will take care of that). It will produce a very thrilling orgasm.”

“You’re making that up.”

“I’m not. This is Bucharest. Take a look.”

I looked, and it was true.

“I thought that mag was the local Homes and Gardens.”

“And casinos and escorts.”

“Um, I don’t want a finger stuck up my bum, Max.”

My writerly colleague grinned. “Do you have piles? Don’t worry, we aren’t doing any such thing. Tonight will only cost a few dollars for drinks. It’s purely educational. Background research. Anyway, what kept you?”

“Ovid Badelescu got called to a murder site.”

“Do tell!”

I proceeded to, but didn’t inform Max about the concealed doors at the back of the lift-I might want to use that detail some day myself. I also excluded Adriana’s notion that a werewolf was responsible. Or a weredog, hiding out among the multitude of anonymous mongrels.

Shortly before Silviu arrived, a long cry and a chorus of yapping from outside drew me to the window. The cry was like that of a muezzin calling worshippers to prayer. A middle-aged woman wearing a baggy multicoloured dress and headscarf was driving her horse and cart loaded with scrap metal and other rubbish that might be worth something. Her cry had excited the dogs. As I watched, she halted beside the humble cottage, dismounted, and rattled the picket gate with a stick. And waited.

Presently, a black-clad shape emerged from the cottage, cradling what I identified as a broken old clock of some bulk. With a surprisingly sprightly step, the old cottager bustled to her gate and handed over the relic, to receive in return, after humming and hawing, some scrap of paper, which might have been a banknote-if so, here in Romania it would have been thin plastic that looked like paper.

As the horse and cart and the scrap-woman’s outcry proceeded onward, the strangest thing happened. Half a dozen strays sidled from different directions toward that garden gate. The black-garbed cottager glanced about, as though to ensure that no one was observing her-she wouldn’t spot me at the window high up-then she offered her hand over the gate. Was she about to feed the strays with scraps? But she was holding nothing that I could see.

One by one those desolate dogs proceeded to lick, or slobber on, her palm-I was put in mind of nothing so much as movies of Italian gangsters kissing the hand of their Mafia godfather! This done, the cottager withdrew her hand, and then herself quickly back into her home.

Travelers in unfamiliar countries often misinterpret things and leap to the wrong conclusions, but I’ve always had a strong sense of intuition, a belief in quasi-magical linkages that others call coincidences. In my novels, such is the way that a dark crime is often solved. There’s a logical sequence of circumstances, yet this is only revealed-illuminated, if you like-by illogical means, by an illogical route. That Ovid should have driven me directly to that blood-stained lift in the former Securitate building, then that I should come to Max’s and overlook that cottage, cast adrift while time and town planning advanced, and that I should glimpse the owner, queen of canines, whom Max had never seen… this spoke to me inwardly, compellingly.

Silviu proved to be a tall, wispy person, wearing a somewhat soiled lightweight cream suit. His eyes seemed to me very blue, and his English was quite good. What an honour to be meeting a famous colleague of famous Max.

We descended to the street, to climb into an elderly white Dacia that had suffered bumps and scrapes through the years. Although it was early evening by now, the air was still sultry and cloying. I felt a strange mixture of reinvigoration due to my sighting of the crone of the cottage, and languor, as though I was surrendering to whatever the night might contain.

First, we went to an open-air restaurant to drink beer called Ursus and eat rolls of minced meat and salad, and spend, or rather, squander, some time. Time seemed to have a way of melting in this city. Apparently we were to meet a mad genius. But after an hour the man phoned, depressed-his father had a sudden brain tumour. Maybe an excuse, maybe true or half-true. And that was the last I heard of the genius. Silviu went off and brought back a newspaper, and the murder did feature. Silviu translated the story, but already I knew more than the reporter had discovered.

Then Ovid phoned my mobile.

“Paul, where are you?”

I consulted with Max, who took the phone and said, “We’re at the meech”-I think-“place on,” and he named a street. “But we’re going to Herastrau afterwards.”

They talked for a while, then Max ended the call and handed my phone back.

“He’ll try and join us.” Then, surveying our surroundings, he remarked that under Communism people went to restaurants for show, not for the food-to be seen in such a place, rich enough to buy a meal, of which they would then eat every morsel, instinctively, even if it burst them. Silviu listened politely and nodded. He had cleaned his plate, and I guessed that Max would be footing the bill, unless he and I shared it. I wondered if the crone of the cottage had ever been near a restaurant during her entire life. I thought of an appetite so voracious that a person would ravage a body bloody in a lift.

***

Herastrau proved to be a sizeable lake within a park. By now evening had arrived. We halted on a tree-lined roadway inside the park, behind a line of cars far more luxurious and up-to-date than Silviu’s. Silviu seemed edgy. Dogs lay round in the gloom like mounds of earth. On a bench a shaven-headed man, dressed in a leather jacket, was lounging.

“It’s all right, Silviu,” said Max. “I’ll give him a little money. Car insurance,” he told me. “Even though Silviu’s car is an old wreck, best to be on the safe side.”

Evidently Max knew how much, or how little, to give. I felt a double sense of mild menace at Max’s casual determination to show me how au fait he was with life here, and at the implications of my not knowing the ropes. My host, full of bonhomie, was also my rival. Which would explain, in retrospect, this particular outing tonight.

Scarcely had Max returned from paying Leather Jacket to keep an eye on the car than Ovid drew up behind us in his BMW. Getting out, Ovid waved casually at Leather Jacket, but Ovid certainly didn’t bother to cross the road to say anything to the man. So probably Max had wasted his money, seeing that we were now associated with an Inspector of police. It struck me as only mildly sinister that Ovid should turn up immediately after us, almost as though we were back in Securitate times when everyone’s exact whereabouts were monitored.

A short walk brought us to a big, though modestly lit, building on the shore of the lake. Two suited bouncers stood outside, smoking.

Inside, a few men sat at tables with beautiful girls, and a little crowd of likewise lovely tall girls were shuffling round in a slow dance to the background music. A trio of the Bleached Boys sporting gold looked like pimps in this setting.

“The girls aren’t in their underwear here,” Max pointed out. “They can wear casual clothes, so there’s no pole dancing, if you’re disappointed. This is classy sleaze.”

We sat and ordered beers, the cheapest option.

“Anything new about the lift murder?” I asked Ovid.

“Autopsy,” he said. “Terrible claw-like injuries and animal-like bites. The Turk may have worn specially adapted gauntlets and not had his own teeth anymore but special false fanged ones. If he needs false teeth, maybe he’s fifty or sixty years old, though very strong.” After saying which, he winked at me. Was he teasing me? Or satirizing himself? And avoiding confiding whatever the police now knew?

When our beers arrived, girls came to sit with us. One plumped herself on my lap and wiggled about.

“You can talk free for ten minutes,” whispered Max, “then she’ll ask you to buy her a drink. That’s only about ten dollars, so you decide.”

“What’s your name?” I asked my sexy burden, whose face was unusually broad, her eyes wide-spaced, though her figure was impeccable.

“Luciana. And what do they call you?”

Quite soon I said, “Where did you learn such good English?”

“In school, of course. I also speak German and Italian. A lot of Italians live in Romania, and Germans visit.”

“So, Luciana, do you like working in this place?”

“It’s better than my hometown. But I’d like a real job sometime.”

“What do you mean by a real job?”

“Oh, a shop assistant, for instance.”

“My God, speaking four languages you could at least be an interpreter or an air hostess.”

Max whispered, “If you ask a schoolgirl in the countryside what she wants to be, she’ll say a prostitute, so she can meet foreign men.”

Ovid and Silviu were talking in Romanian all this time, ignoring the girls on either side of them, who reacted by chattering behind their backs, displaying nail varnish.

“Will you buy me a drink?” asked Luciana. “Or else I can’t stay with you.”

I decided to do so, as did Max for his own blonde companion.

“If you want to take yours to the flat,” mentioned my host, “it’s best you both arrange to meet outside, then the club doesn’t get commission.”

“Doesn’t the club object?”

“No, it’s understood. So long as you don’t actually leave the premises along with her.”

Prompted, Luciana squirmed and said, “I love sex. Will you take me home tonight for a hundred dollars?”

“Offer her two thousand lei.”

“Oh no, that is much too little,” protested Luciana. “Fifty dollars.”

“But I already have Adriana,” I told Max.

“Maybe you ought to have variety. In case you overvalue Adriana.”

Evidently Max had my best interests at heart!

Just then Ovid’s mobile jangled and his side of the conversation certainly intrigued Silviu and all of the girls.

Ovid looked across at me. “There’s been another killing. Same MO. Modus operandi,” he added. “I must go.” He threw an arm around his neglected girl and hugged her. “Don’t worry, the arm of the law will protect you.” She giggled.

“May I come with you?” I asked.

“Yes. No. Yes. Why not? Taxi for you afterwards.” He threw down some money.

“How much do I owe for the drinks?” I asked Max.

“We’ll sort it out tomorrow. You’ll need a key.” He fished in his pocket. “Oh, do you mind if I take a girl home with me?”

“Of course not.”

How could I possibly mind? Yet I did. Not for any moral reason, but because this seemed a bit, shall we say, oppressive, as regards myself rather than the girl. However, I was about to walk out on my host.

The crime scene, as I reckoned when a summoned taxi finally returned me, was only about three kilometres from Max’s flat, in a big apartment block not completely fitted out inside, and consequently only semi-occupied. Not a lift, this time, but a coin-operated mini-laundry in the basement. The victim was another young woman. The discoverer was her boyfriend, when she failed to return to their flat; although he had been taken back upstairs for questioning, and the body was about to be zipped up by the time Ovid and I walked in. I glimpsed something from a butcher’s shop, or abattoire, like paintings by Soutine of carcasses of beef. Flayed, was my impression. A torn, blood-soaked skirt and blouse, and other scattered garments, lay as if really needing the services of the half-full washing machine which yawned open.

I thought of Luciana and so many others like her, innocently vulnerable in the city, yet eager for money. In fact this murder had nothing to do with prostitutes, but my writerly brain was at work.

When I emerged from my bedroom relatively early, Max was through in the tiny kitchen drinking coffee boiled in a steel pot on a gas ring. His own bedroom door stood open. No evidence of any prostitute.

“Has she gone already?”

“I changed my mind. The girls ask less after midnight when they get worried they won’t earn, but I couldn’t be bothered to wait.” If that was true-if he hadn’t just wanted to have an effect upon me. “So what of the second atrocity?”

“Atrocities involve lots of people, not just one.”

“Two now. Could be a cumulative atrocity? How many does it take? Actually, a single act of brutality qualifies as an atrocity.”

I ignored this casuistry, even if he was right.

Dogs howled and yodeled, and a few moments later the building shuddered briefly.

“Minor earthquake, don’t worry. There’s glacial moraine under Bucharest. Some land moves horizontally, some vertically, some is mixed. That’s why it’s very expensive to build here… The atrocity,” he pressed me.

So I described the brutal scene, though I did not mention my image of paintings by Soutine.

Max took me for a walk around his neighbourhood, which was distinctly run-down, although parts were being poshed up by new money, seemingly at random. In the middle of a potholed back street, asphalt burned and bubbled blackly.

Max laughed. “Some builder needs hot tar for a job, so he set fire to it. Obviously the middle of the street is safer than the sides.” He laughed. “Romanians don’t think of consequences. They’ll run you over in the street because they don’t think of prison as the result. I’m not kidding. They will not stop. Oops,” and he caught my arm and dragged me well to one side because a battered pick-up truck was indeed heading our way, and to avoid the fire, the driver mounted the pavement. Max had hurt my arm with his grip, though for a perfectly good reason, so I tried not to show pain.

We must have seen a score of skinny, roaming dogs already, variously marked, although all of the same general build.

“Ha,” said Max. “That crime scene reminds me of a joke. Which I’ve already used, by the way,” he emphasized. “A forgetful man visits a shortsighted gypsy fortune-teller. She looks at his palm and exclaims, ‘I see men with knives coming for you-and blood!’ He starts sweating with fear. She examines his palm even more closely and finally says, ‘You forgot to take off your pigskin glove.’ ”

“Ha-ha,” I said. A perverse urge tempted me to add: “I’m glad you already used it.”

“As for drivers and future consequences,” he went on, as though I’d said nothing at all, “Romanian people choose to be suspended in eternity. It’s still difficult for them to get over the dictatorship. Safer not to take responsibility.”

“‘Suspended in eternity’ is quite a phrase. I suppose you’ll be using that, too.”

He nodded, appeased or otherwise I couldn’t decide. Time was melting again, like the runny hot asphalt. Already it was afternoon. So Max led me circuitously to a café he favoured, for some beer.

Halfway through the second can of Ursus, Adriana phoned me.

“Are you free this afternoon?” I asked her. “What are we doing this afternoon?” I asked Max almost simultaneously.

“I need to buy a camera card,” was Max’s reply. “You can come or not.”

I was, of course, eager for Adriana to visit me privately on my own, although not entirely for the obvious reason of possible sex. Max out of the way would suit me very well, doubly so.

Max had already buzzed off, and I didn’t know when he’d be back. Given the vagaries of Bucharest, maybe hours as yet.

I kissed Adriana enthusiastically. “Lovely to see you! Look, do you think we could pop over the road for a few minutes? I’m very curious about the old woman in that cottage. If it’s halfway possible, I’m dying to see inside and see her close to. Could we pretend that I want to buy some eggs?”

“I suppose so. She might sell some eggs.”

“Oh, and don’t tell Max, will you not?”

Adriana grinned. “How mysterious you crime writers are. Men of mystery are exciting.”

The crone’s door was intricately carved, and worn, as though it preceded the city or had been transported here from a farm in the country, perhaps one of the tens of thousands bulldozed under Ceaus?escu for a dam or for socialist rationalisation.

The owner’s face was rutted, like carved and varnished wood itself, though her brown eyes were alert. Blackness scarfed her and draped her. After Adriana explained in Romanian, the woman uttered a brief reply or a cackle.

“Tell her,” I suggested, “that I’m a writer and, in addition to eggs, I’m very interested in her life here surrounded by modern city. I’ll pay her for her time, twenty dollars, no make that thirty.”

“Twenty,” said Adriana, and complied.

Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, the crone-Madame Florescu now, to be polite-admitted us into a gloomy room and stuck out a hand dark with dirt or the resin of age, into which I counted four five-dollar bills, which she sniffed before promptly disappearing them within her neckline as though she was some much younger entertainer who used her cleavage for tips.

I took in the items of rustic home-made furniture, the blackened pots and pans and jars of herbs and other stuff. Rather a lot of green candles stood around in old brass candlesticks, understandable if Madame Florescu had no mains power, as seemed likely. A faint sickly odour emanated from vases of marigolds and ox-eyed daisies which were red rather than white, and, strangely, from lilies-of-the-valley, which surely should be past their season, unless the Romanian variety was different or else the crone had patronised a florist’s shop for blooms flown from far away.

Coincidentally, Adriana was translating, “A present from my son,” when she herself really noticed those flowers and gasped and crossed herself.

“My son visits me once a week of an evening after he finishes working hard, a good boy,” Adriana continued dutifully interpreting despite whatever had shocked her.

“You would like him. He also can tell you remarkable things-in your own English. He’s clever.” And can do with some dollars himself, I thought. “You sleep only over the street. If you see a red Dacia outside here, probably on Thursday, come and knock. A red Dacia which says taxi, but my son is more than taxi-driver.”

Thursday was the day after next. If only Max would leave me alone that evening.

Mrs. Florescu discoursed about geese and her water butt and her man who had been killed by the Securitate. Apparently her man was a black marketeer. After a reasonable time she dried up and looked expectant. My twenty dollars had run out as though all the while a taxi metre had been running in her head. I said that I’d love to hear more from herself and her son on Thursday. I was becoming hungry for Adriana before Max would return. Besides, rather than hearing more domestic details, I wanted to know what had visibly shocked Adriana.

I departed with three eggs clutched in my hand. Once we had recrossed the road, yet another dog wandered close. My body hiding what I was doing, in case Madame Florescu was looking out, I dropped the eggs to make raw omelette. The pooch sidled swiftly towards this in a flinching manner, sniffed, then lapped, crunchy eggshells included.

“Oh, Paul! Butterfingers. Isn’t that what you say?”

Of course I didn’t want Max to have a clue as to what I’d been up to, by leaving eggs in his fridge.

“The dog’s need is greater than mine,” I assured her. “To tell the truth, I don’t like eggs much in any form.”

“Yes, it was those flowers,” Adriana confirmed once we were in the flat. “Those ones are used in the countryside to attract werewolves. Because of the smell.”

“To attract werewolves?”

“Maybe to control, or to cause. My own mother warned me never to wear the, um, the little white bells.”

I felt quite pleased with myself.

I felt even more pleased when Adriana amiably consented to test my double bed. The bench press was useful to dump our clothes on. Afterwards, she fell asleep, and looked very innocent, as though orgasm had drained away all cares.

The next day Max and I visited his Romanian publisher at home for lunch, by taxi. Only one of my books was published locally as yet-which was enough for me to be famous on the island-and I nursed hopes for more translations. Cezar, yet another displaced ancient Roman, was jolly and hospitable with beer, coffee, nuts, and nibbles. We sat, Romanian style, in a dingy courtyard, or patio-alley, running from front to back of his house. Inside, the house’s bare floorboards were dirty and the place was full of tat, as I found when I visited the toilet.

A coil of incense set on bricks burned under the plastic patio table. Sometimes the air smelled of patchouli, sometimes of sewage. A guard dog was on a long chain secured to the inside of its kennel. A white cat with a fluffy tail ambled around. A sizeable though twisted tree arose through the concrete of the patio without any evidence of how rain could possibly reach its roots; maybe those had broken through to the sewer for sustenance.

Apparently the crime market was flooded; thus, a publisher had to be careful, but if I posted my best books to Cezar he would see. More time dissolved, until the ubiquitous Silviu turned up with his car. And the same camera as, presumably, I’d heard about from Max. Cezar duly admired the camera. Then Max handed Silviu a memory card in its little plastic box. Silviu proceeded to install the memory card and take photos of me and Max and Cezar. This made no sense to me at all. If Max resented lending, or rather, giving, the three hundred dollars to Silviu, why then present him with a memory card? Was that in exchange for today’s use of petrol? As lanky Silviu focused, he looked like a tall, thin photographic tripod. Or bi-pod, I suppose.

Shortly after we left, to drive seemingly aimlessly around the city, rain began to fall heavily. Mighty fountains pluming skyward in vast piazzas fought back against the downpour. We stopped at a café, then when the storm stopped and the sky cleared towards the end of the afternoon, Max said, “Show you something.” On foot we turned a few corners into a big boulevard, farther along which towered, as Max pointed out, the Intercontinental Hotel.

Spaced along the steaming pavement were prostitutes in miniskirts, who proved assertive. One delicious girl, who looked no more than fifteen, already wore the scar of a Cesarean above her bared navel pierced with a gold ring. She smooched right up to me and placed her hand on my groin, brazenly massaging, and jerking her head towards a dark, deserted arcade. Max stood eyeing me, to see how I would extricate myself, which I did by backing away while wagging a reproving finger, even though I confess I’d become excited.

As we returned to the car, I said, “There’s something predatory about them.”

“Predatory, yes,” agreed Max. “Le mot juste. They’re Gypsies, hoping to prey on foreign businessmen from the Intercontinental. To the Gypsies we’re just sheep to be fleeced. In fact, security on the hotel door could send out for better from his catalog.”

Soaked dogs were lapping water.

The murders featured on TV by now, although the set in the flat was crap, even if we could have understood. Max brought out a litre bottle of sweet, strong, seductive, almondy Disaronno, and put on a CD of a Bulgarian pop starlet, then we proceeded to get quite drunk. I realized there was a need to match Max glass for glass. At the same time I didn’t want a hangover, nor did I want to stay up half the night.

So when had Max been in Bulgaria? This led to anecdotes about bribing police and much else, a mixture of funny and disconcerting. Then we talked about personalities on the island, or rather Max did most of the talking since he’d previously known many of those present. Idly I wondered whether he had slept with Adriana the year before. Max’s recounting became almost a non-stop monologue, which can be intimidating. He was talking at me, rather than with me. At some point sandwiches manifested themselves out of bread, ham, and mustard in the fridge. Finally I managed to finish the last of the bottle. Fingers and toes crossed for the following evening!

Fortunately, on Thursday Max didn’t take me to experience more sleaze. Instead we went to tour Ceaus?escu’s palace, about which much could be said, but I shan’t. Wonderfully, Max would be absent in the evening. Of course I could accompany him, but I pleaded a queasy stomach and headache. All that Disaronno.

At seven thirty I looked and saw a red Dacia parked outside the cottage. So I sallied forth.

Mihail Florescu, the dutiful son, looked to be in his late fifties, in cheap checked shirt and trousers, grey-haired and with a beer gut. Muscular, though. He welcomed me with delight, as did his mother, who bustled to provide some cubes of cheese and peanuts, while Mihail urged on me a big glass of orange juice. A plastic bucket chair for me. This time I’d brought a notebook. An oil lamp had been lighting the room, but now Mrs. Florescu proceeded to light the green candles as well, which produced blue flames.

“How can we help you to write?” asked Mihail, beaming. He meant “as a writer.”

“Thank you for giving me your time,” I replied. “Please accept a little compensation.” Thirty dollars. I drank juice while he disappeared the money, then began, “I’m curious about those flowers, particularly the little white bells. I hear that in this country they are associated with werewolves.”

Mihail looked blank, so I said, “Excuse me,” then mimed a transformation, which must have been successful because he rattled away to his mother, and she to him.

“Yes,” he said, “to keep away such things. My mother, all the dogs frighten her. Last winter, dog killed chicken.”

My throat and tongue felt dry, so I emptied my glass, and realised that the orange juice must have been mixed with some strong spirit, maybe home-made, for all of a sudden I came over queer.

I must have passed out briefly, for mother and son were standing over me, regarding me attentively, and Mrs. Florescu was rubbing a smelly ointment onto my brow and cheeks. God, how parched I was. I croaked for a drink, although I was also feeling a mounting urge to pee. Probably Mrs. Florescu’s toilet was a dark hole, and I could hardly excuse myself to use her garden, not with her vegetables there. I tried to clench myself tight, but my body felt incoherent. Suddenly I thought of the young Gypsy prostitute with such hunger for her flesh-oh, to be able to taste her, drink her juices. Which juices exactly? To my shame, spurts of pee began to pulse into my pants uncontrollably. A restless anxiety mounted. I was quivering-and then I found myself sliding out of the plastic seat, and glad to be nearer the floor on my hands and knees. Four limbs could support me better.

Dog rejoiced ragingly to be let out. Dog loped over empty wasteland. Moonlit. Twitching nose, taunted and teased. So thirsty. Dogturds pungent. Potholed roadway. Lapped stale rain. Wrong liquid! Howled.

In every man: a dog. Turn man inside out, hairs bristle out all over. Dog fell over, scrambled up. Fellow dogs lay curled, muzzles resting on bums. Reek of bitch in heat far away?

The thirst! Not for dog blood. Human!

In moonlit street.

Big stick or long gun. Hairless head shone. Hairs crowded wide and black under nose, above mouth. Dried sweat, and cologne, and a fart.

Hunting for dog.

Dog hid amongst dogs. Other dogs shifted listlessly.

Dog cowered. Whimpers escaped. Dog buried muzzle in bum. Familiar fragrance of inside-oneself, comforting.

Human came.

Attack, rip with claws, grip throat with teeth so sharp! No! Dog feared bang-bang. Dog cringed among dogs. Lone eye watched.

Rattle of laughter.

Human noise: “So how do you feel now, Mr. Martin Fairfax? How does it feel?”

A camera flashed blindingly.

Head throbbing, I woke to daylight naked on that double bed beside the bench press. What a vile, terrible nightmare.

Then I saw my strewn soiled clothes, and discovered the state of my aching body.

I heard the crow of a cock. Was Max waiting patiently next door, drinking coffee?

At first I could hardly stand, weak as a decrepit old man.

Propelled by fear, I recovered some strength. Blessedly Rigby-I couldn’t bear to think of him any longer as Max-was absent.

I fled before even worse happened, wheeling my suitcase behind me to the nearest boulevard, flagging a taxi and saying, “Otopeni, v? rog,” the name of Bucharest ’s airport, plus please. Of course the driver swindled me, though not grossly. And he wasn’t Madame Florescu’s son, even though paranoia whispered otherwise.

Rigby had set the trap cunningly.

Admittedly, his plan depended on such a crone as Madame Florescu living opposite his flat in such a home as she did. Although how exactly had Rigby located that particular flat? With Silviu’s help, in line with what special requirements? Rigby’s own research requirements, of which I knew nothing, yet which I’d let lure me like a bee to pollen!

Rigby must have paid the crone and her son quite a few more dollars than I did. And Silviu procured the hallucinogens, whatever those might have been? A cocktail of mandrake, henbane, LSD? Maybe some deadly nightshade and hemlock and mind-altering mushrooms thrown in?

No, how could Silviu, or Rigby, have known what to concoct? The crone must have known.

It couldn’t be, could it, that I had truly been transformed? That the crone had thought I wanted to be transformed because of my miming? I’m quite light and short-even so, how heavy a weredog would I have become?

Fortuitous, indeed, that the bloody murders took place!

I would probably have been beguiled by the crone’s cottage, even so.

What was Adriana’s part in the conspiracy, gasping and crossing herself in timely fashion?

Bitch! I thought.

Bitch seemed entirely the wrong term of abuse. Or maybe entirely the right one.

So how do you feel now, Mr. Martin Fairfax? Such vindictiveness on account of a bad review. Rigby must have leaned on the editor of the mag, or maybe he’d read that early book of mine and the character’s name stuck in his mind.

So I departed Romania with my tail, as it were, between my legs.

After I got back home and had recovered myself, I googled using automatic translation and discovered that a man had been arrested for the murders in Bucharest. The presumed perpetrator was a Turko-German drug smuggler, Günther Bey, sporting tattoos featuring samurai sword fights. Red dye used for sprays and pools of blood, I suppose.

It seemed to me that if the Turko-German’s skin bore so much pictorial blood, it was unlikely that he felt a craving to replicate this upon the skins of unfortunate women. If he emulated Japanese gangsters, those people had a code of honour, only killing rivals and enemies within the fraternity.

Ovid had found half-a-Turk to fix up for the killings. It wouldn’t do for a werewolf or weredog to be responsible. Romania was a modern country now, a member of the European Union.

So did those murders result from a crone applying a potion and a salve? Maybe her own good son, Mihail, was transformed? No, that was absurd.

Judging from the news, no more such murders happened. If I related my experiences as a short story, this should reflect badly on Rigby, though obviously I’d need to disguise his name.