“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.