Dearest Kate and Little Joshua:
The summer progresses in Bucharest, the markets are much emptier than when you were here, the terrible heat is here, and so am I. There will be no residency in America; at least not this autumn. My uncle and his family cannot afford to make the loan to me, my father has much fame as a poet but no money (of course! he is a poet!), and no U.S. University has offered to sponsor me despite your eloquent (if true) letter of recommendation praising me as the most exciting discovery since Jonas Salk.
Ah, well, enough of my troubles. I will spend another funfilled winter in beautiful Bucharest and then begin the application process again in the spring.
And how is my favorite hematologist and her new son? I trust this finds you both well. I would be concerned for Joshua's condition if I did not have unlimited faith in your medical abilities, Kate, as well as in the almost miraculous resources, medically speaking, in the U.S. of A.
By the way, did I ever tell you the joke about the time our late, unlamented Supreme Leader and his wife went into a district hospital to have their hemorrhoids tended to by a nonParty physician?
I did? Odd, I don't remember telling that one.
Katesomething strange and a little disturbing happened last week.
You remember that I was earning money this summer as a teaching assistant in Dr. Popescu's advanced anatomy class? Well, it has been boring, but it allowed me to take out some of my frustrations by wielding a scalpel. Anyway, one of my less enjoyable tasks is to go early to the city morgue and sort through the unclaimed bodies there and choose the best cadavers for the new students. (This is where five years of training and my family's fortune has brought me.)
Last Friday I was going through the coldstorage lockers in the morgue, trying to make my selection from the usual assortment of deceased drug addicts and unclaimed accident victims and peasants who died from malnutrition, when I found a bizarre case. The corpse had been brought in a few weeks earlier, was still unclaimed, and had been marked for cremation the day after my visit. The official cause of death was “multiple lacerations due to accident,” but it only took one look to know that this man had not died from any accident.
The corpse had been drained of blood. Not of most of its blood, but all blood. Kate, you know how difficult this would be in an accident. The body was that of a man in his mid or late fifties. There had been more than a dozen premortem incisions made into his torso, legs, wrists, and neck. All cuts were cleanalmost as if administered by scalpelsand all were near major arteries. There was one atypical wound, very messy, running from his left ankle, splintering the lower tibia and fibula, and then repeated on the right leg and ankle. Around the smaller wounds, there were strange secondary lividity patterns. Strange, that is, until I suddenly realized the method of death.
This man had been lifted upside down and impaled on something much like a slaughterhouse hook which had been passed through the major bones of his lower legs. While he was hanging there, still alive from all evidence, one or several people had administered these expert slashes along major arteries. The amount of blood lost in a short time must have been amazing.
But even more amazingand disturbingwas the cause of the indentations and lividity networks around these wounds. They were teethmarks. Not bites, but more like extreme hickeys where more than half a dozen mouths had simultaneously fastened around these wounds and held lips and tongues in place during the ingestion of this man's blood. How much blood did they teach us is in the human body, Kate? About six quarts, I think.
But there is more to this delightful Romanian tale. The man's face was battered and disfigured, but still recognizable. It was our missing Deputy Minister whom the papers had theorized had fled to the West with several thousand dollars in baksheeshed American money. It was your Mr. Stancu, Katethe helpful bureaucrat with the dead novelist's name. The man who expedited your and Baby Joshua's visa in such unprecedented time.
Well, Mr. Stancu will be expediting nothing anymore. I told no one of this grisly bit of business. Mr. Stancu was cremated in the paupers' ovens the next day.
Why am I bothering you about this terrible thing on what I am sure is a beautiful, sunny Colorado day?
I'm not sure. But be careful, Kate. Watch over yourself and our tiny friend. This is a bad place, and sometimes there are things happening here which not even I can joke about.
With love from Bucharest,
And Lucian had drawn a cartoon of a large smiley face under a raincloud.
For several minutes Kate sat holding the letter and staring out the window at the darkness where the porch lights did not teach. Then she rose, walked past where Tom was bent over his gear spread out on the study floor, went down the hall to the bedroom, slid open the nightstand drawer, and took out the loaded Browning. She was still sitting there on the edge of the bed, holding the pistol, when Tom came in half an hour later.
Chapter Seventeen
The summer of 1991 was as wet and rainy as anyone in Boulder could remember, but still, by late August, the foothills below CDC were brown, the meadow beyond Kate's. house was dustdry and browning, and lawns in town needed daily watering. Just as the local children were heading back to school on the week before Labor Daya schedule which Kate, born and raised in Massachusetts, found appallingly prematurethe stormy weather disappeared and the forecast changed to a regular schedule of hot, dry, summerlike days.
Kate hardly noticed. The world outside her office and the CDC labs seemed more and more unreal. Rising before sunrise, at work by seven A.M., rarely home before ten or eleven at night, it might as well have been midwinter for all the sunlight and fine weather she had appreciated.
She remembered a few nonresearch events of the month. Tom had lost his temper when she had shown him Lucian's letter, wondering just what that “ghoulish son of a bitch” was trying to do, scare her to death?
Tom had gone on his Canyonlands trek in August, but had called her whenever he could. After returning he spent a few days at the house but then moved his stuff to an apartment in Boulder, no more than ten minutes away. He still stopped by most eveningsat first to talk to Kate, and then, as her hours in the lab grew longer and longer, to check on Julie and Joshua before he drove home.
There had been a few calls and visits from Lieutenant Peterson or the older sergeant, each time to report no progress. After a while she instructed her secretary not to interrupt her when the police called unless there were something new to report. There never was.
Kate did remember the phone call she received at home near the end of the summer.
“Neuman? Is that you?”
It was almost midnight, she had just come indog tired but buzzing with excitement as usualhad checked on Josh, poured herself some iced tea, and was nuking a microwave dinner. The ring of the phone had startled her. The voice on the other end seemed vaguely familiar to her tired mind, but she could not quite place it.
“Neuman? I'm sorry to bother you this late, but your babysitter said that you wouldn't be home until after eleven. “
“O'Rourke!” she said, suddenly identifying the soft Midwestern accent. “How are you? Are you calling from Bucharest?”
“No, from that other drab secondworld city . . . Chicago. I've rotated back to the World for a while.”
“Wonderful.” Kate sat on a kitchen stool and set her iced tea on the counter. She was surprised at how happy she was to hear the priest's voice. “When did you get back from Romania?”
“Last week. I've been doing my dog and pony show at parishes around the country, trying to raise money for the ongoing relief program. It's not so easy now that Romania has been out of the news for so long. It's been a busy summer . . . newswise. “