Dan Simmons - Children of the Night (with covers)

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Praise For MASTER STORYTELLER DAN SIMMONS!
"Dan Simmons deserves the bestseller status of Stephen King and Dean Koontz." -Denver Post
"A writer who not only makes big promises, but keeps them." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"For those of us whom good writing is everything, the name Dan Simmons bears great weight." -Harlan Ellison
"Simmons is not only good, he's versatile." -Isaac Asimov's Fiction Magazine
"A compelling writer." -F. Paul Wilson, author of The Keep
"A skilled writer par excellence." -Locus
Also by Dan Simmons
SONG OF KALI
PHASES OF GRAVITY
CARRION COMFORT*
HYPERION
THE FALL OF HYPERION
ENTROPY'S BED AT MIDNIGHT
PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONES
SUMMER OF NIGHT*
THE HOLLOW MAN
*Published by WARNER BOOKS
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DAN SIMMONS
CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property
and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has
received any payment for this "stripped book."
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1992 by Dan Simmons All rights reserved.
This Warner Books Edition is published by arrangement with G.P. Putnam's Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New
York, NY 10016.
Warner Books, Inc. 1271 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
A Time Warner Company
Printed in the United States of America
First Warner Books Printing: June, 1993
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the children
Chapter One
We flew to Bucharest almost as soon as the shooting had stopped, landing at Otopeni Airport just-after midnight
on December 29, 1989. As the semiofficial "International Assessment Contingent," the six of us were met at my
Lear jet, escorted through the confused milling that passed for Customs since Romania's revolution, and then
herded aboard' as Office of National Tourism VIP van for the nine-mile drive into town. They had brought a
wheelchair to the bottom of the aircraft ramp for me, but I waved it away and made the walk to the van myself.
It was not easy.
Donna Wexler, our U.S. Embassy liaison, pointed at two bullet holes in the wall near where the van was parked,
but Dr. Aimslea topped that by simply pointing out the window as we drove around the lighted circular drive
connecting the terminal to the highway.
Soviet-style tanks sat along the main thoroughfare where cabs normally would be waiting, their long muzzles
pointed toward the entrance to the airport drive. Sandbagged emplacements lined the highway and airport
rooftops, and the sodium vapor lamps yellowly illuminated the helmets and rifles of soldiers on guard duty
while throwing their faces into deep shadow. Other men, some in regular army uniforms and others in the ragtag
clothing of the revolutionary militia, lay sleeping alongside the tanks. For a second the illusion of sidewalks
littered with the bodies of Romania's dead was perfect and I held my breath, exhaling slowly only when I saw
one of the bodies stir and another light a cigarette.
"They fought off several counterattacks by loyalist troops and Securitate forces last week," whispered Donna
Wexler. Her tone suggested that it was an embarrassing topic, like sex.
Radu Fortuna, the little man who had been hurriedly introduced to us in the terminal as our guide and liaison
with the transitional government, turned in his seat and grinned broadly as if he were not embarrassed by either
sex or politics. "They kill many Securitate," he said loudly, his grin growing ever wider. "Three times
Ceausescu's people tried to take airport . . . three times they get killed."
Wexler nodded and smiled, obviously uncomfortable with the conversation, but Dr. Aimslea leaned into the
aisle. Light from the last of the sodium-vapor lamps illuminated his bald head in the seconds before we entered
the darkness of the empty highway. "So Ceausescu’s regime is really over?" he said to Fortuna.
I could see only the slightest gleam from the Romanian's grin in the sudden darkness. "Ceausescu is over, yes,
yes,'.' he said. "They take him and that bitch-cow of a wife in Tirgoviste, you know . . . have, how you call it . . .
trial. " Radu Fortuna laughed again, a sound which somehow sounded both childish and cruel. I found myself
shivering a bit in the darkness. The bus was not heated.
"They have trial," continued Fortuna, "and prosecutor say, `You both crazy?' You see, if Ceausescu and Mrs.
Ceausescu crazy, then maybe the army just send them away in mental hospital for hundred years, like our
Russian friends do. You know? But Ceausescu say, `What? What? Crazy . . . How dare you! That is obscene
provocation!' And his wife, she say, `How can you say this to the Mother of your nation?' So prosecutor say,
`OK, you neither one crazy. Your own mouth say.' And then the soldiers, they draw straws so many want to be
the ones. Then the lucky ones, they take Ceausescus out in courtyard and shoot them in heads many times."
Fortuna chuckled warmly, as if remembering a favorite anecdote. "Yes, regime over," he said to Dr. Aimslea.
"Maybe a few thousand Securitate, they don't know it yet and still shooting peoples, but that will be over soon.
Bigger problem is, what to do with one out of three peoples who spy for old government, heh?"
Fortuna chuckled again, and in the sudden glare from an oncoming army truck, I could see his silhouette as he
shrugged. There was a thin layer of condensation turning to ice on the inside of the windows now. My fingers
were stiff with the cold and I could barely feel my toes in the absurd Bally dress shoes I had put on that
morning. I scraped at some of the ice on my window as we entered the city proper.
"I know that you are all very important peoples from the West," said Radu Fortuna, his breath creating a small
fog that rose toward the roof of the bus like an escaping soul. "I know you are famous Western billionaire, Mr.
Vernor Deacon Trent, who pay for this visit," he said, nodding at me, "but I am afraid I forget some other
names."
Donna Wexler did the introductions. "Doctor Aimslea is with the World Health Organization . . . Father
Michael O'Rourke is here representing both the Chicago Archdiocese and the Save the Children Foundation."
"Ali, good to have priest here," said Fortuna, and I heard something that may have been irony in his voice.
"Doctor Leonard Paxley, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Princeton University," continued Wexler.
"Winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics."
Fortuna bowed toward the old academic. Paxley had not spoken at all during the flight from Frankfurt, and now
he seemed lost in his oversized coat and folds of muffler: an old man in search of a park bench.
"We welcome you," said Fortuna, "even though our country have no economy at present. moment."
"Goddamn, is it always this cold here?" came the voice from deep in the folds of wool. The Nobel
Prize-winning Professor Emeritus stamped his small feet. "This is cold enough to freeze the nuts off a bronze
bulldog."
"And Mr. Carl Berry, representing American Telegraph and Telephone," continued Wexler quickly.
The pudgy businessman next to me puffed his pipe, removed it, nodded in Fortuna's direction, and went back to
smoking the thing as if it were a necessary source of heat. I had a moment's mad vision of the seven of us in the
bus huddled around the glowing embers in Berry's pipe.
"And you say you remember our sponsor, Mr. Trent," finished Wexler.
"Yesss," said Radu Fortuna. His eyes glittered as he looked at me through Berry's pipe smoke and the fog of his
own breath. I could almost see my image in those glistening eyes-one very old man, deep-set eyes sunken even
deeper from the fatigue of the trip, body shriveled and shrunken in my expensive suit and overcoat. I am sure
that I looked older than Paxley, older than Methuselah . . . older than God.
"You have been in Romania before, I believe?" continued Fortuna. I could see the guide's eyes glowing brighter
as we reached the lighted part of the city. I spent time in Germany shortly after the war. The scene out the
window behind Fortuna was like that. There were more tanks in Palace Square, black hulks which one would
have thought deserted heaps of cold metal if the turret of one had not tracked us as our van passed by. There
were the sooty corpses of burned-out autos and at least one armored personnel carrier that was now only a piece
of scorched steel. We turned left and went past the Central University Library; its gold dome and ornate roof
had collapsed between soot-streaked, pockmarked walls.
"Yes," I said. "I have been here before."
Fortuna leaned toward me. "And perhaps this time one of your corporations will open a plant here, yes?"
"Perhaps. "
Fortuna's gaze did not leave me. "We work very cheap here," he whispered so softly that I doubt if anyone else
except Carl Berry could hear him. "Very cheap. Labor is very cheap here. Life is very cheap here."
We had turned left off of the empty Calea Victoriei, right again on Bulevardul Nicolae Balcescu, and now the
van screeched to a halt in front of the tallest building in the city, the twenty-two-story Intercontinental Hotel.
"In the morning, gentlemens," said Fortuna, rising, gesturing the way toward the lighted foyer, "we will see the
new Romania. I wish you dreamless sleeps."
Chapter Two
Our group spent the next day meeting with "officials" in the interim government, mostly members of the
recently cobbled-together 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 people-most, it looked, office workers
leaving the stone hives of the downtown for the day-beat 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, gap-toothed 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 AK-47, 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, old-man 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 the-bearded 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 bitch-cow 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.
Chapter Three
We flew to Timisoara, a city of about 300,000 in western Transylvania, suffering the flight in an old recycled
Tupolev turboprop now belonging to Tarom, the state airline. The authorities would not allow my Lear to fly
from city to city in the country. We were lucky; the daily flight was delayed only an hour and a half. We flew
through cloud for most of the way, and there were no interior lights on the plane, but that did not matter because
there were neither flight attendants nor the interruption of a meal or snack. Dr. Paxley grumbled most of the
way, but the scream of the turboprops and the groaning of metal as we bounced and bucked our way through
updrafts and storm clouds muffled most of his complaints.
Just as we took off, seconds before entering the clouds, Fortuna leaned across the aisle and pointed out the
window to a snow-covered island on a lake that must have been about twenty miles north of Bucharest.
"Snagov," he said, watching my face.
I glanced down, caught a glimpse of a dark church on the island before the clouds obliterated the view, and
looked back at Fortuna. "Yes?"
"Vlad Tepes buried there," said Fortuna, still watching me. He pronounced the last name as "Tsepesh."
I nodded. Fortuna went back to reading one of our Time magazines in the dim light, although how someone
could read or concentrate during that wild ride, I will never know. A minute later Carl Berry leaned forward
from the seat behind me and whispered, "Who the hell is Vlad Tepes? Someone who died in the fighting?"
The cabin was so dark now that I could barely make out Berry's face inches from my own. "Dracula," I said to
the AT&T executive.
Berry let out a discouraged sigh and leaned back in his seat, tightening his belt as we began to pitch and bounce
in earnest.
"Vlad the Impaler," I whispered to no one at all.
The electricity had failed, so the morgue was cooled by the simple expediency of opening all of the tall
windows. The light was still very thin, as if watered down by the dark green walls and grimy panes of glass and
constant low clouds, but was adequate to illuminate the rows of corpses across the tabletops and filling almost
every inch of the tiled floors. We had to walk a circuitous path, stepping carefully between bare legs and white
faces and bulging bellies, just to join Fortuna and the Romanian doctor in the center of the room. There were at
least three or four hundred bodies in the long room . . . not counting ourselves.
"Why haven't these people been buried?" demanded Father O'Rourke, his scarf raised to his face. His voice was
angry. "It's been at least a week since the murders, correct?"
Fortuna translated for the Timisoaran doctor, who shrugged. Fortuna shrugged. "Eleven days since the
Securitate, they do this," he said. "Funerals soon. The . . . how do you say . . . the authorities here, they want to
show the Western reporters and such very important peoples as yourself. Look, look. " Fortuna opened his arms
to the room in a gesture that was almost proud, a chef showing off the banquet he had prepared.
On the table in front of us lay a corpse of an old man. His hands and feet had been amputated by something not
very sharp. There were burns on his lower abdomen and genitals, and his chest showed open scars that
reminded me of Viking photos of the rivers and craters of Mars.
The Romanian doctor spoke. Fortuna translated. "He say, the Securitate, they play with acid. You know? And
here . . ."
The young woman lay on the floor, fully clothed except for the ripped clothing that extended from her breasts to
pubic bone. What I first took for another layer of slashed, red rags, I now realized was the red-rimmed wall of
her opened belly and abdomen. The seven-month fetus lay on her lap like a discarded doll. It would have been a
boy.
"Here," commanded Fortuna, stepping through the maze of ankles and gesturing.
The boy must have been about ten. Death and a week or more of freezing cold had expanded and mottled flesh
to the texture of bloated, marbled parchment, but the barbed wire around his ankles and wrists was still quite
visible. His arms had been tied behind him with such force that the shoulder joints were totally out of their
sockets. Flies had been at his eyes, and the layer of eggs there made it look as if the child were wearing white
goggles.
Professor Emeritus Paxley made a noise and staggered from the room, almost tripping over the bodies set out
for display there. One old man's gnarled hand seemed to tug at the professor's pant leg as he fled.
Father O'Rourke grabbed Fortuna by his coat front and almost lifted the little man from the floor. "Why in the
hell are you showing us this?"
Fortuna grinned. "There is more, Father. Come."
"They called Ceausescu `the vampire,"' said Donna Wexler, who had flown up later to join us.
"And here in Timisoara is where it started," said Carl Berry, puffing on his pipe and looking around at the gray
sky, gray buildings, gray slush on the street, and gray people moving through the dim light.
"Here in Timisoara is where the final explosion began," said Wexler. "The younger generation has been, getting
more and more restless for some time. In a real sense, Ceausescu signed his own death warrant by creating that
generation. "
"Creating that generation," repeated Father O'Rourke, frowning. "Explain. "
Wexler explained. In the mid-1960s Ceausescu had outlawed abortion, discontinued the import of oral
contraceptives and IUDs, and announced that it was a woman's obligation to the state to have many children.
More importantly, his government had offered birth premiums and reduced taxes to those families who obeyed
the government's call for increased births. Couples who had fewer than five children were actually fined as well
as heavily taxed. Between 1966 and 1976, said Wexler, there had been a forty percent increase in babies born,
along with a huge rise in infant mortality.
"It was this surplus of young people in their twenties by the late 1980s who provided the core of the revolution,"
said Donna Wexler. "They had no jobs, no chance for a college education . . . not even a chance for decent
housing. They were the ones who began the protests in Timisoara and elsewhere. "
Father O'Rourke nodded. "Ironic . . . but appropriate."
"Of course," said Wexler, pausing near the train station, "most of the peasant families could not afford to raise
the extra children . . . " She stopped with that diplomat's tic of embarrassment.
"So what happened to those children?" I asked. It was only early afternoon, but the light had faded to a wintry
twilight. There were no streetlights along this section of Timisoara's main boulevard. Somewhere far. down the
tracks, a locomotive screamed.
The embassy woman shook her head, but Radu Fortuna stepped closer. "We take train tonight to Sebes, Sibiu,
Copsa Mica, and Sighisoara," the smiling Romanian said. "You see where babies go."
Winter evening became winter night beyond the windows of our train. The train passed through mountains as
jagged as rotten teeth-whether they were the Fagaras Range or the lower Bucegi Carpathians, I could not
remember right then and the dismal sight of huddled villages and sagging farms faded to blackness broken only
by the occasional glow of oil lamps through distant windows. For a second the illusion was perfect and I
thought I was traveling through these mountains in the fifteenth century, traveling by coach to the castle on the
Arges, hurrying through these mountain passes in a race against enemies who would . . .
I realized with a start that I had almost dozed off. It was New Year's Eve, the last night of 1989, and the dawn
would bring what was popularly thought of as the last decade of the millennium. But the sight out the window
remained a glimpse of the fifteenth century. The only intrusion of the modern age visible in the evening
departure from Timisoara had been the occasional military vehicle glimpsed on snow-packed roads and the rare
electric cables snaking above the trees. Then those slim talismans had disappeared and there were only the
villages, the oil lamps, the cold, and an occasional rubber-wheeled cart, pulled by horses who seemed more
bone than flesh, guided by men hidden in dark wool. Then even the village streets were empty as the train
rushed through, stopping nowhere. I realized that some of the villages were totally dark, even though it was not
yet ten P.m., and leaning closer, wiping frost from the glass, I saw that the village we were passing now was
dead-buildings bulldozed, stone walls demolished, farm homes tumbled down.
"Systematization," whispered Radu Fortuna, who had appeared silently next to me in the aisle. He was chewing
on an onion.
I did not ask for clarification, but our guide and liaison smiled and provided it. "Ceausescu wanted to destroy
the old. He break down villages, move thousands of peoples to city places like Victory of Socialism Boulevard
in Bucharest . . . kilometers and kilometers of tall apartment buildings. Only buildings, they not finished when
he tear down and move peoples there. No heat. No water. No electricity . . . he sell electricity to other countries,
you see. So village peoples, they have little house out here, be in family three, maybe four hundreds of years,
but now live on ninth floor of bad brick building in strange city . . . no windows, cold wind blow in. Have to
carry water a mile, then carry up nine flights of stairs."
He took a deep bite of the onion and nodded as if satisfied. "Systematization." He moved on down the smoky
aisle.
The mountains passed in the night. I began to doze again . . . I had slept little the night before, dreamlessly or
otherwise, and I had not slept on the plane the night before that . . . but awoke with a start to find that the
Professor Emeritus had taken the seat next to me.
"No goddamn heat," he whispered, tugging his muffler tighter. "You'd think with all these goddamn peasant
bodies and goats and chickens and what have you in this so-called first-class car, that they'd generate some body
heat in here, but it's as cold as Madame Ceausescu’s dear dead tit."
I blinked at the simile.
"Actually," said Dr. Paxley in a conspiratorial whisper, "it's not as bad as they say."
"The cold?" I said.
"No, no. The economy. Ceausescu may be the only national leader in this century who actually paid off his
country's foreign debt. Of course, he had to divert food, electricity, and consumer goods to other countries to do
it, but Romania has no foreign debt at all now. None."
"Mmmm," I said, trying to remember the fragments of the dream I'd had in my few moments of sleep.
Something about blood and iron.
"A one-point-seven-billion-dollar trade surplus," muttered Paxley, leaning close enough that I could tell that
he'd also had onion for dinner. "And they owe the West nothing and the Russians nothing. Incredible."
"But the people are starving," I said softly. Wexler and Father O'Rourke were asleep in the seat in front of us.
The bearded priest mumbled slightly, as if battling a bad dream.
Paxley waved away my comment. "When German reunification comes, do you know how much the West
Germans are going to have to invest just to retool the infrastructure in the East?" Not waiting for my reply, he
went on. "A hundred billion Deutschmarks . . . and that's just to prime the pump. With Romania, the
infrastructure is so pitiful that there's little to tear down. Just junk the industrial madness that Ceausescu was so
proud of, use the cheap labor . . . my God, man, they're almost serfs . . . and build whatever industrial
infrastructure you want. The South Korean model, Mexico . . . it's wide open for the Western corporation that's
willing to take the chance."
I pretended to doze off again, and eventually the Professor Emeritus moved down the aisle to find someone else
to explain the economic facts of life to. The villages passed in the darkness as we moved deeper into the
Transylvanian mountains.
We arrived in Sebes before dawn and there was some minor official there to take us to the orphanage.
No, orphanage is too kind a word. It was a warehouse, heated no better than the other meat lockers we had been
in so far, undecorated except for grimy tile floors and flaking walls painted a vomitous green to eye height and a
leprous gray above that. The main hall was at least a hundred meters across.
It was filled with cribs.
Again, the word is too generous. Not cribs, but low metal cages with no tops to them. In the cages were
children. Children ranging in age from newborns to ten-year-olds. None seemed capable of walking. All were
naked or dressed in filth-caked rags. Many were screaming or weeping silently, and the fog of their breath rose
in the cold air. Stern-faced women in complicated nurse's caps stood smoking cigarettes on the periphery of this
giant human stockyard, occasionally moving among the cages to brusquely hand a bottle to a child . . .
sometimes a seven- or eight-year-old child . . . or more frequently to slap one into silence.
The official and the chain-smoking administrator of the "orphanage" snapped a tirade at us which Fortuna did
not deign to translate, and then they walked us through the room and slammed open tall doors.
Another room, a larger room, opened into the cold-shrouded distance. Thin morning light fell in shafts onto the
cages and faces there. There must have been at least a thousand children in this room, none of them more than
two years old. Some were crying, their infant wails echoing in the tiled space, but most seemed too weak and
lethargic even to cry as they lay on the thin, excrement-smeared rags. Some lay in the foetal grip of near
starvation. Some looked dead.
Radu Fortuna turned and folded his arms. He was smiling. "You see where the babies go, yes?"
Chapter Four
In Sibiu we found the hidden children. There were four orphanages in this central Transylvanian city of
170,000, and each orphanage was larger and sadder than the one in Sebes. Dr. Aimslea demanded, through
Fortuna, that we be allowed to see the AIDS children.
The administrator of Strada Cetatii State Orphanage 319, a windowless old structure in the shadow of the
sixteenth-century city walls, absolutely refused to acknowledge that there were any AIDS babies. He refused to
acknowledge our right to enter the orphanage. He refused, at one point, to acknowledge that he was the
administrator of Strada Cetatii State Orphanage 319, despite the stenciling on his office door and the plaque on
his desk.
Fortuna showed him our travel papers and authorization forms, cosigned with a personal plea for cooperation
from interim Prime Minister Roman, President Iliescu, and Vice President Mazilu.
The administrator sneered, took a drag on his short cigarette, shook his head, and said something dismissive.
"My orders come from the Ministry of Health," Radu Fortuna translated.
It took almost an hour to get through to the capital, but Fortuna finally completed a call to the Prime Minister's
office, who called the Ministry of Health, who promised to call Strada Cetatii State Orphanage 319
immediately. A little over two hours later, the call came, the administrator snarled something at Fortuna, tossed
his cigarette butt on dirty tiles littered with them, snapped something at an orderly, and handed a huge ring of
keys to Fortuna.
The AIDS ward was behind four sets of locked doors. There were no nurses there, no doctors . . . no adults of
any kind. Neither were there cribs; the infants and small children sat on the tile floor or competed to find space
on one of half a dozen bare and excrement-stained mattresses thrown against the far wall. They were naked and
their heads had been shaved. The windowless room was illuminated by a few naked 40-watt bulbs set thirty or
forty feet apart. Some children congregated there in the pools of murky light, raising swollen eyes to them as if
to the sun, but most lay in the deep shadows. Older children scuttled on all fours to escape the light as we
opened the steel doors.
It was obvious that the floors were hosed down every few days-there were rivulets and streaks along the cracked
tiles-and it was just as obvious that no other hygienic efforts had been made. Donna Wexler, Dr. Paxley, and
Mr. Berry turned and fled from the stench. Dr. Aimslea cursed and pounded his fist against a stone wall. Father
O'Rourke first stared, his Irish face mottling with rage, and then moved from infant to infant, touching their
heads, whispering softly to them in a language they did not understand, lifting them. I had the distinct
impression as I watched that most of these children had never been held, perhaps never been touched.
Radu Fortuna followed us into the room. He was not smiling. "Comrade Ceausescu told us that AIDS is a
capitalist disease," he whispered. "Romania has no official cases of AIDS. None."
"My God, my God," Dr. Aimslea was muttering as he moved from child to child. "Most of these are in
advanced stages of AIDS-related complexes. And suffering from malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies." He
looked up and there were tears gleaming behind his glasses. "How long have they been here?"
Fortuna shrugged. "Most maybe since little babies. Parents put here. Babies not go out of this room, that why so
few know to walk. No one to hold them up when they try."
Dr. Aimslea unleashed a series of curses that seemed to smoke in the chill air. Fortuna nodded.
"But hasn't anyone documented these . . . this . . . tragedy?" said Dr. Aimslea in a constricted voice.
Now Fortuna smiled. "Oh, yes, yes. Doctor Patrascu from Stefan S. Nicolau Institute of Virology, he say this
happening three . . . maybe four years ago. First child he test, was infected. I think six out of next fourteen also
sick from AIDS. All cities, all state homes he went to, many, many sick childrens. "
Dr. Aimslea rose from shining his penlight in a comatose infant's eyes. Aimslea grabbed Fortuna by the coat,
and for a second I was sure that he was going to strike the little guide in the face. "For Christ's sake, man, didn't
he tell anyone?"
Fortuna stared impassively at the doctor. "Oh, yes. Doctor Patrascu, he tell Ministry of Health. They say for him
to stop immediately. They cancel AIDS seminar Doctor schedule . . . then they burn his minutes and . . . how do
you say it? Like little guides for meeting . . . programs. They confiscate printed programs and burn them."
Father O'Rourke set down a child. The two-year-olds thin arms strained toward the priest as she made vague,
imploring noises-a plea to be lifted again. He lifted her, laying her bald and scabrous head tight against his
cheek. "Goddamn them," whispered the priest in a tone of benediction. "Goddamn the Ministry. Goddamn that
sonofabitch downstairs Goddamn Ceausescu forever. May they all burn in Hell."
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