Chapter Two
Our group spent the next day meeting with “officials” in the interim government, mostly members of the recently cobbledtogether National Salvation Front. The day was so dark that the automatic streetlights came on along the broad Bulevardul N. Balcescu and Bulevardul Republicii. The buildings were not heated . . . or at least not perceptibly . . . and the men and women we spoke with looked all but identical in their oversized, drab wool coats. By the end of the day we had spoken to a Giurescu, two Tismaneanus, one Borosoiu, who turned out not to be a spokesman for the new government after all . . . he was arrested moments after we left him . . . several generals including Popascu, Lupoi, and Diurgiu, and finally the real leaders, which included Petre Roman, prime minister in the transitional government, and Ion Iliescu and Dumitru Mazilu, who had been President and Vice President in the Ceausescu regime.
Their message was the same: we had the run of the nation and any recommendations we could make to our various constituencies for help would be eternally appreciated. The officials treated me with the most deference because they knew my name and because of how much money I represented, but even that polite attention was tinged with a distracted air. They were like men sleepwalking amidst chaos.
Returning to the Intercontinental that evening, we watched as a crowd of peoplemost, it looked, office workers leaving the stone hives of the downtown for the daybeat and pummeled three men and a woman. Radu Fortuna smiled and pointed to the broad plaza in front of the hotel where the crowd was growing larger. “There . . . in University Square last week . . . when peoples come to demonstrate with singing, you know? Army tanks roll over persons, shoot more. Those probably be Securitate informers.”
Before the van stopped in front of the hotel, we caught a glimpse of uniformed soldiers leading away the probable informers, encouraging them with the butts of their automatic weapons while the crowd continued to spit and strike them.
“Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs,” muttered our Professor Emeritus, while Father O'Rourke glared at him and Radu Fortuna chuckled appreciatively.
“You'd think Ceausescu would have been better prepared for a siege,” Dr. Aimslea said after dinner that evening. We had stayed in the dining room because it seemed warmer than our own rooms. Waiters and a few military men moved aimlessly through the large space. The reporters had finished their dinner quickly, with a maximum of noise, and left soon after to wherever reporters go to drink and be cynical.
Radu Fortuna had joined us for coffee, and now he showed his patented, gaptoothed grin. “You want to see how prepared, Ceausescu, he was?”
Aimslea, Father O'Rourke, and I agreed that we would like to see. Carl Berry decided to go to his room to get a call through to the States, and Dr. Paxley followed him, grumbling about getting to bed early. Fortuna led the three of us out into the cold and down shadowed streets to the soot-blackened shell of the presidential palace. A militiaman stepped out of the shadows, raised an AK47, and barked a challenge, but Fortuna spoke quietly and we were allowed to pass.
There were no lights in the palace except for occasional fires in barrels where militiamen and regular soldiers slept or huddled to keep warm. Furniture was tossed everywhere, drapes had been ripped from twenty-foot-tall windows, papers littered the floor, and the formal tiles were smeared with dark streaks. Fortuna led us down a narrow hall, through a series of what appeared to be private residential rooms, and stopped at what seemed to be an unmarked closet. Inside the four-foot-square closet there was nothing but three lanterns on a shelf. Fortuna lighted the lanterns, handed one to Aimslea and one to me, and then touched the molding above the back wall. A sliding panel opened to a stone staircase.
“Mr. Trent,” began Fortuna, frowning at my walking stick and shaking, oldman arms. The lantern light tossed unsteady shadows on the walls. He held out his hand for the lantern. “There are many stairs. Perhaps . . .”
“I can make it,” I said through tensed jaws. I kept the lantern.
Radu Fortuna shrugged and led us down.
The next half hour was dreamlike, almost hallucinatory. The stairway led down to echoing chambers from which a maze of stone tunnels and other stairways branched. Fortuna led us deep into this maze, our lights reflecting off the curved ceilings and slick stones.
“My God,” muttered Dr. Aimslea after ten minutes of this, “these go for miles.”
“Yes, yes,” smiled Radu Fortuna. “Many miles.”
There were storerooms with automatic weapons on shelves, gas masks hanging from hooks; there were command centers with radios and television monitors sitting there in the dark, some destroyed as if madmen with axes had vented their wrath on them, some still covered with clear plash and waiting only for their operators to turn them on; there were barracks with bunks and stoves and kerosene heating units which we eyed with envy. Some of the barracks looked untouched, others obviously had been the site of panicked evacuation or equally panicked firefights. There was blood on the walls and floors of one of these chambers, the streaks more black than red in the light of our hissing lanterns.
There were still bodies in the farther reaches of the tunnels, some lying in pools of water dripping from overhead hatches, others tumbled behind hastily erected barricades at the junction of the underground avenues. The stone vaults smelled like a meat locker.
“Securitate,” said Fortuna and spat on one of the brown-shirted men lying facedown in a frozen pool. “They fled like rats down here and we finished them like rats. You know?”
Father O'Rourke crouched next to one of the corpses for a long moment, head bowed. Then he crossed himself and rose. There was no shock or disgust on his face. I remember someone having said that thebearded priest had been in Vietnam.
Dr. Aimslea said, “But Ceausescu did not retreat to this . . . redoubt?”
“No.” Fortuna smiled.
The doctor looked around in the hissing white light. “For God's sake, why not? If he'd marshaled an organized resistance down here, he could have held out for months. “
Fortuna shrugged. “Instead, the monster, he fled by helicopter. He flied . . . no? Flew, yes . . . he flew to Tirgoviste, seventy kilometers from here, you know? There other peoples see him and his bitchcow wife get in car. They catch.”
Dr. Aimslea held his lantern at the entrance to another tunnel from which a terrible stench now blew. The doctor quickly pulled back the light. “But I wonder why . . .”
Fortuna stepped closer and the harsh light illuminated an old scar on his neck that I had not noticed before. “They say his . . . advisor . . . the Dark Advisor . . . told him not to come here.” He smiled.
Father O'Rourke stared at the Romanian. “The Dark Advisor. It sounds as if his counselor was the devil.”
Radu Fortuna nodded.
Dr. Aimslea grunted. “Did this devil escape? Or was he one of those poor buggers we saw back there?”
Our guide did not answer but entered one of the four tunnels branching off there. A stone stairway led upward. “To the National Theater,” he said softly, waving us ahead of him. “It was damaged but not destroyed. Your hotel is next door. “
The priest, the doctor, and I started up, lantern light throwing our shadows fifteen feet high on the curved stone walls above. Father O'Rourke stopped and looked down at Fortuna. “Aren't you coming?”
The little guide smiled and shook his head. “Tomorrow, we take you where it all began. Tomorrow we go to Transylvania. “
Dr. Aimslea gave the priest and me a smile. .”Transylvania,” he repeated. “Shades of Bela Lugosi.” He turned back to say something to Fortuna but the little man was gone. Not even the echo of footfalls or shimmer of lantern light showed which tunnel he had taken.