Lucian was bending over her, his youthful face illuminated by the small oil lamp he carried.
“It's time to go to the Arab Student Union,” he whispered. Then he set the lamp down and left her small room.
Kate sat up, feeling tiredness pull at her even as the physical echoes of her dream grew fainter and fled. She could not quite remember . . . something about Tom? Or had it been O'Rourke or Lucian? The cold air in the dark room made her shiver.
Memory pressed on her like a cold and unwelcome suitor. Tom. Julie. Joshua! She felt the pain of her left arm and the sir was suddenly rank with the smell of smoke and ashes. Sorrow threatened to push her into the cold darkness that surrounded her. The memories of the past few weeks were not discrete images, but a single, inseparable mass with a terrible weight which she kept at bay only by concentrating on the next thing that had to be done.
The Arab Student Union.
As full consciousness returned, Kate remembered that it was not her first night in Bucharest, despite the strangeness of the basement room she was sleeping in, but her third. It was raining. Pellets of sleet pounded against the small window set high on the wall. She remembered now that it had been raining for each of the three days and nights she had been back in Bucharest.
She looked down and realized that she had fallen asleep that afternoon in her corduroy pants and dark sweater. There was a small frameless piece of mirrored glass propped on the battered dresser near the door and Kate used it to pull a brush through her hair until she finally gave up. She slung a purse over her shoulder and went to join Lucian in the other room.
The medical student had found Kate and O'Rourke a basement apartment on a narrow street in an old section west of Cismigiu Gardens. The apartment consisted of Kate's tiny bedroom and the roughwalled “sitting room” where O'Rourke slept on a couch during the few hours he was there. The toilet upstairs was “private” in the sense that no one lived on the ground floor or first floor because of “renovations,” although Kate had seen no workers or signs of recent work on the gutted rooms up there. The massive metal radiators in the basement were as cold and dead as steel sculptures; the only heat came from a small coalburning fireplace in Kate's bedroom. Lucian had brought a heavy sack of coal along with a warning that the burning of it was still illegal, and Kate tried to restrict her need for warmth to one lump in the morning while getting dressed and to a tiny fire in the evening.
It was very cold.
Kate was still shivering as Lucian led her out to the Dacia.
“Where's O'Rourke?” she asked. The priest had left shortly after breakfast that morning without saying where he was going.
Lucian shrugged. “Probably still hunting for Popescu.”
Kate nodded. The inaction during the past three days had driven her close to madness. She had not been sure what they would find upon returning to Bucharesta clue perhaps, some sign of Joshua's forced returnbut in the absence of any immediate clue she had done little but huddle in the basement rooms while O'Rourke made forays into the city. It made sense on the face of it; neither of them had visas, the assumption was that the authorities were on the lookout for her, and they could not go to the American Embassy, UNICEF, the WHO, or any other familiar organizations for help.
But O'Rourke could use the few local Catholic churches and the Bucharest headquarters for the single Franciscan order in Romania to make contacts. And their first goal had been to find Mr. Popescu, the administrator of the hospital where Kate had worked and discovered Joshua. There was no compelling reason to believe that the greasy little administrator was part of the plot to kidnap her adopted child, but finding Popescu was a place to start.
But O'Rourke had not found himqueries from priest friends at the hospital had resulted only in the information that Popescu was on leaveand the frustration after three days was driving Kate out of hiding, if not ,actually to the brink of insanity.
The Dacia started after much fiddling with the choke and they bounced out onto the bricks of Bulevardul Schitu Magureanu along the west side of Cismigiu Gardens. Despite the fact that it was only the second week in October, most of the trees bordering the street were bare of leaves. The icy rain pelted against the windshield and only the wiper on the driver's side worked, squeegeeing back and forth with a screech of a single, long fingernail against a blackboard.
“Tell me again about the Arab Student Union,” said Kate.
Lucian glanced at her. His face was mottled with shadowstreaks from the occasional streetlight shining through the rainsplattered windshield. There were few functional streetlights in Bucharest this autumn, but the Dacia had come onto the wide Bulevardul Gheorghe GheorghiuDej and there was some light here. The avenue was all but empty.
“The Arabs attend the university on full scholarship,” said Lucian, “but almost none of them go to classes. They spend their years here changing money and being brokers in the black market. The Arab Student Union is the center for much of this.”
Kate tried to peer out at the street, but the windshield in front of her was a shifting mass of icy rain. She glanced at the dark canal on her right as they turned onto the even broader avenue of Splaiul Independenlei. The incredible mass of the unfinished presidential palace was just visible across nibbled fields and behind tall fences. There were one or two lights on in the huge structure, but these only served to accentuate the hopeless and inhuman scale of the place. Kate shivered. “And the guy we're seeing might know something about Joshua?”
Lucian shrugged. “My contacts say that Amaddi keeps tabs on the Nomenclature. He certainly serves their needs when they deal with the black market. It may be worth our time talking to him . . .” Lucian glanced at her. “It's foolish for you to come along though, Kate. I can“
“I want to talk to him,” said Kate. Her tone left no room for debate.
Lucian shrugged again. He pointed out the University Medical School as they drove past it and they turned north again, past a row of dilapidated dormitories, then down a long alley lined with dark and decaying Stalinist apartment blocks. Ragged curtains blew from shattered windows, and there were holes in the masonry large enough for a person to step through. The rain had let up a bit and Kate could see large rats fleeing from the beam of the headlights. The entrance to the building they stopped in front of had a torn steel mesh dangling from the doorway.
“These are empty, aren't they?” asked Kate.
Lucian shook his head. “No, these are the Arab dormitories. “
Kate cranked down her window and could make out a feeble glow of what might be lantern light behind some of the tattered curtains.
Lucian pointed toward a lower building with no windows, its walls and single doorway spraypainted with graffiti. “That's the Student Union. Amaddi said that he would meet us there.” .
There were no lights in the foyer or outside corridor. Lucian flicked on a lighter and Kate could make out chipped and filthy tile and an inner hallway almost filled with cardboard boxes and crates. Following Lucian as he squeezed past the crates, she realized that the boxes were marked PANASONIC and NIKE and SONY and LEVI'S. At the end of the corridor was a closed metal door. Lucian rapped twice, waited a second, and then rapped once. The door squeaked open and Lucian clicked the lighter shut and stepped aside to let Kate go first.
The room was large, at least twenty meters square, and the perimeter was stacked with more cartons and boxes. Dining tables and plastic chairs lay tossed in a heap to one side, and only a single table with a lantern on it was set out near the far end of the room. The dark and bearded man who had opened the door for them gestured toward the table and stepped back into the shadows.