Full MoonCity (18 page)

“I’m fine,” Nadia says, rubbing her wet eyes.

“Lots of people weep after rehearsals.”

“Weird people,” she says, trying to make it a joke.

“If you don’t cry, how can you make anyone else cry? Theater is the last place where fools and the mad do better than regular folks… well, I guess music’s a little like that, too.” He shrugs. “But still.”

Posters go up all over town. They show the magician in front of gleaming cages with bears and mermaids and foxes and a cat in a dress.

Nadia’s boyfriend doesn’t like all the time she spends away from home. Now, on Saturday nights, she doesn’t wait by the phone. She pushes her milk crate coffee table and salvaged sofa against the wall and practices her steps over and over until her downstairs neighbor bangs on his ceiling.

One night her boyfriend calls and she doesn’t pick up. She just lets it ring.

She has just realized that the date the musical premieres is the next time she is going to change. All she can do is stare at the little black book and her carefully noted temperatures. The ringing phone is like the ringing in her head.

I am so tired I want to die,
Nadia thinks. Sometimes the thought repeats over and over and she can’t stop thinking it, even though she knows she has no reason to be so tired. She gets enough sleep. She gets more than enough sleep. Some days she can barely drag herself from her bed.

Fighting the change only makes it more painful; she knows from experience.

The change cannot be stopped or reasoned with. It’s inevitable. Inexorable. It is coming for her. But it can be delayed. Once she held on two hours past dusk, her whole body knotted with cramps. Once she held out until the moon was high in the sky and her teeth were clenched so tight she thought they would shatter. She might be able to make it to the end of the show.

It shouldn’t matter to her. Disappointing people is inevitable. She will eventually get tired and angry and hungry. Someone will get hurt. Her boyfriend will run the pad of his fingers over her canines and she will bite down. She will wake up covered in blood and mud by the side of some road and not be sure what she’s done. Then she’ll be on the run again.

Being a werewolf means devouring your past.

Being a werewolf means swallowing your future.

Methodically, Nadia tears her notebook to tiny pieces. She throws the pieces in the toilet and flushes, but the chunks of paper clog the pipes. Water spills over the side and floods her bathroom with the soggy reminder of inevitability.

On the opening night of the
Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue
, the cast huddles together and wish each other luck. They paint their faces. Nadia’s hand shakes as she draws a new red mouth over her own. Her skin itches. She can feel the fur inside of her, can smell her sharp, feral musk.

“Are you okay?” the mermaid asks.

Nadia growls softly. She is holding on, but only barely.

Yves is yelling at everyone. The costumers are pinning and duct-taping dresses that have split. Strap tear. Beads bounce along the floor. One of the chorus is scolding a girl who plays a talking goat. A violinist is pleading with his instrument.

“Tonight you are not going to be
good
,” Marie, the choreographer, says.

Nadia grinds her teeth together. “I’m not good.”

“Good is forgettable.” Marie spits. “Good is common. You are not good. You are not common. You will show everyone what you are made of.”

Under her bear suit, Nadia can feel her arms beginning to ripple with the change. She swallows hard and concentrates on shrinking down into herself. She cannot explain to Marie that she’s afraid of what’s inside of her.

Finally, Nadia’s cue comes and she dances out into a forest of wooden trees on dollies and lets the magician trap her in a gold-glitter-covered cage. Her bear costume hangs heavily on her, stinking of synthetic fur.

Performing is different with an audience. They gasp when there is a surprise. They laugh on cue. They watch her with gleaming, wet eyes. Waiting.

Her boyfriend is there, holding a bouquet of white roses. She’s so surprised to see him that her hand lifts involuntarily-as though to wave. Her fingers look too long, her nails too dark, and she hides them behind her back.

Nadia dances like a bear, like a deceitful princess, and then like a bear again. This time, as the magician sings about how the jaybird will be revenged, Nadia really feels like he’s talking to her. When he lifts his gleaming wand, she shrinks back with real fear.

She loves this. She doesn’t want to give it up. She wants to travel with the show. She wants to stop going to bed early. She won’t wait by the phone. She’s not a fake.

When the jump comes, she leaps as high as she can. Higher than she has at any rehearsal. Higher than in her dreams. She jumps so high that she seems to hang in the air for a moment as her skin cracks and her jaw snaps into a snout.

It happens before she can stop it, and then she doesn’t want it to stop. The change used to be the worst thing she could imagine. No more.

The bear costume sloughs off like her skin. Nadia falls into a crouch, four claws digging into the stage. She throws back her head and howls.

The goat boy nearly topples over. The magician drops his wand. On cue, the mermaid girl begins to sing. The musical goes on.

Roses slip from Nadia’s dentist-boyfriend’s fingers.

In the wings, she can see Marie clapping Yves on the back. Marie looks delighted.

There is a werewolf girl on the stage. It’s Saturday night. The crowd is on their feet. Nadia braces herself for their applause.

S
hortly before driving into Bucharest proper, we stopped for a pee in some bushes. Twice en route we’d seen men vomiting into roadside shrubbery, probably on account of drinking bad tap water, so use of bushes seemed normal. A tall sign announced:
Parking, Kebab, Sexy Show, Motel, Telefon
. We only required the first of those, just for a few minutes. We’d been in Inspector Badelescu’s black BMW (with 120,000 kilometres on the clock) for a little over an hour, but prior to leaving the island in the Danube, we’d had a few beers. Endless maize stretched around our roadside oasis, although a strong odour of pigs hung in the air, which must have been coming from the dilapidated barns nearby.

Slumped on their sides in the dust by the bushes, under some tree shade, were three tatty though sizeable mongrels, fawncoloured with white patches. At our approach, two of the dogs raised their heads and regarded us with utter apathy in their lacklustre eyes. The third remained sprawled as though life was too exhausting, or the temperature too high, to bother moving. Oh, all of a sudden one pooch scrambled up and stood facing us, its ears half-cocked like bat wings, its tail half-lifted.

Badelescu stooped, scooped up a stone, and threw it, not for the mongrel to chase and fetch, but at the dog’s flank. The animal yipped and scuttled away.

“Fucking things,” he said to me amiably. “Don’t worry about rabies, and I have my gun if they show their teeth. Most are too tired and weak with hunger. Welcome to Bucharest from its canine inhabitants.”

“A million stray dogs in the city,” Adriana, my impromptu translator, called after me-whether in warning or simply by way of explanation I couldn’t be sure. Adriana was unconsciously beautiful in the way that so many young Romanian women were-graceful, long-legged, fine sensuous figure in tight jeans and blouse. On the whole, Romanian women didn’t seem to realize they were gorgeous; because so many were, therefore this was normal. Adriana wore her dark silky hair in a very long ponytail, which I had held with great satisfaction in a tent on the island while with my other hand I gave her pleasure as her head tried to toss from side to side, but couldn’t, while she groaned and cries jerked from her.

Adriana was staying to guard the car since she hadn’t drunk so much, and it would have been more complicated for her to pee in bushes, the way we all had on the island.

So I sprayed the gritty soil, along with the Inspector, and Romulus -whose second name I couldn’t remember-and Virgil Gramescu. At times Romanians could sound like the Lost Legion, which in a sense they were. Inspector Badelescu’s first name was Ovid.

Quickly I returned to Adriana, who was smoking.

“Do you know, Paul,” she said to me, “when the Mayor of Bucharest proposed exterminating all the strays, Brigitte Bardot flew here on a mercy mission to dissuade him? According to one version of the story, Brigitte donated a lot of money for a dogs’ home. Consequently, two hundred strays live in luxury, then the extermination went ahead anyway. But it must have failed, or else the survivors bred very fast. The number of dogs on the streets is as high as ever.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“Only in winter, if they form packs. Sometimes a baby or little child gets carried off.”

Brushing back his oiled dark hair, Ovid Badelescu was about to say something when a jangle of bells sounded from within his shirt pocket, so he fished out his mobile.

And frowned, and queried, and queried again and again in Romanian.

He shut the phone and said, “Bad news. A young woman has been torn apart in an elevator in the centre of the city.”

“Torn
apart
?” I exclaimed.

“Not literally limb from limb,” he said. “I mean savaged to death, with terrible injuries. I must go there immediately. Do you want to see?” he asked me. “Or wait in the car, which might be tiresome in this heat? Virgil and Romulus can make their way home from there. Or you might prefer to have lunch with Adriana.”

Have lunch, or visit an appalling murder scene? I was incredulous. “Do you mean see
the body
?”

The Inspector laughed. “No, an ambulance is taking it to the morgue. Although you can visit the morgue if you’re really curious. I meant the scene of the crime. I’ve been called there because of a Jack the Raper murder I was involved with last year. Do I mean raper? No, ripper. Rapers don’t often rip. They may strangle or stab, but not do complete ripping. Not usually.”

“A
solved
murder?”

“The murderer might have been a Turk,” he replied. “But he disappeared. Ankara couldn’t trace him, nor Interpol in case he hid among the Turks in Germany.”

I couldn’t help wondering if he said Ankara and Interpol to enhance his importance. And I supposed I must attribute his comparative nonchalance, or what I took as nonchalance, first of all to the requirements of haste, and secondly to whatever other horrors he may have experienced in his job.

We’d been a mixed bunch on that cultural island in the Danube: lots of beautiful Romanian girls, and handsome youths, too, the annual event being sponsored by the Ministry for Youth Development. A Bulgarian kick-boxing champion who gave open-air classes, an astronomer who appealed to science-fiction fans, several musicians and poets, an American from an Institute for Human Development who believed that immortality is within our grasp, an angry German feminist. I could go on.

I would describe my own writings as psychological horror, or perhaps darkness, which illuminates the mundane world, paradoxically heightening our awareness, although I was published as Crime. Consequently, my “real world counterpart” was the Inspector, with his theories about order and disorder, darkness and light within society, and, of course, his wealth of practical experience, which he became intent on demonstrating to me, either for egotistical or for inspirational reasons, or maybe because he genuinely liked me. Hence his driving me back to Bucharest to show me things, which seductive Adriana was also intent on. In her case, maybe with a tentative motive of gaining an author from abroad as a husband, a foreign passport, a different life? Authors are esteemed unduly in some countries. Or maybe Adriana merely wanted some fun and to enjoy herself. When I explained that my surname, Osler, was originally a French name for someone who catches wild birds, Adriana had been highly amused.

I’d been persuaded to pay my own, fairly minimal, airfare from England by fellow crime author Max Rigby, who was moving slowly around Eastern Europe and who had already enjoyed the free hospitality of the island the year before. Currently, Max was renting a flat in Bucharest, where I’d stay for a week. Other habitués of the island were driving Max back to the city.

Max was seeking exotic foreign settings for future novels because, frankly, in my opinion, his most recent book, set in England, had seemed lacklustre and ho-hum. Competently done, to be sure, but lacking the additional frisson of strangeness which distinguishes a competent book from something exceptional. I’d said so myself in no uncertain terms in a review, which I certainly
didn’t
sign with my own name, concocting instead an alias-Martin Fairfax (a reviewer should always seem fair), which, ironically, as I realized later, was the name of a minor character in one of my early books, long out of print. Should I beware of impending Alzheimer’s? Not so long as I continued drinking red wine.

With so many Eastern European countries joining the EU, and so many citizens of those countries settling in Britain for jobs, not least about a million Poles, obviously one should expand one’s repertoire, which was a reason why Max easily persuaded me to visit Romania.

Badelescu, though I suppose I should more familiarly call him Ovid, placed a flasher on the roof of his BMW, and we sirened our way past trolleybuses, trucks, a convoy of giant Turkish lorries, decrepit Dacias, and flashier new cars, along tree-lined avenues, the trunks painted white.

I pointed, and asked Adriana, “Is that so you can see the trees in the dark?”

“Do you know why we’re giving a lift to Virgil?” she replied. “He wouldn’t get to the island otherwise. That’s because his wife crashed their car into the only other car on a huge empty boulevard.” She zigzagged her hands as if steering two vehicles. “From hundreds of metres apart they start trying to avoid each other. Virgil’s wife steers left, the other guy steers right. Then they change their minds and directions a dozen times. Until
crash
. It was incredibly bad luck.”

“And neither of them slowed down?”

“Why do that, on an empty boulevard?”

Presently, the dilapidated city mutated into a Futureville of huge honey-white buildings adorned with balconies. Part-way around a huge piazza, police vehicles clustered, on and off a broad pavement. Ovid kept his siren howling to herald his arrival until we had parked.

Bye-bye to Romulus and Virgil, who sauntered off with their rucksacks.

“Oh, look,” said Adriana, pointing into the distance along a vast boulevard. “Ceaus?escu’s palace, there at the far end.”

That was my first view of the dead dictator’s megalomaniac structure, supposedly the second largest building in the world. Even dwarfed by distance it
loomed
. And the great bright apartment building where the murder had happened was in direct line of sight.

Ovid informed me, “This place was built for the Securitate, but it was only finished after the Revolution. Come on!”

The Securitate: Ceaus?escu’s secret police, whose surveillance of Romania’s citizens was very exhaustive indeed, and whose network of informers, many of those against their will or wishes, may have comprised a significant percentage of the population.

“I don’t want blood on my shoes,” said Adriana.

If she went home, how was I going to find Max’s flat? The Inspector might become too busy to drive me there, and I felt dubious about trusting myself to a taxi driver in an unknown city when I only knew a few phrases of Romanian that Adriana and others had taught me on the island. Ah, Max could come and fetch me, because my mobile now had a Romanian simcard. However, Adriana spied a café. Yellow Bergenbier umbrellas-cum-sunshades outside sheltered tables and chairs. Half a dozen large mongrels lay nearby.

“I’ll buy a magazine and wait for you in there, okay?”

Accordingly, in went Ovid and I to find the Boys in Blue busy on the ground floor examining an open lift, the floor and walls of which were very bloody. I’d been at two or three actual crime scenes before, yet here it was as if a madman had thrown crimson paint around. The smell, however, wasn’t of paint but of a slaughterhouse. I presumed my presence was explained cursorily by Ovid, since various police nodded at me before, as I supposed, reporting circumstances to him in Romanian.

“So, Mr. Story Writer,” Ovid said after peering assiduously, “what do you notice?”

“Less blood on the floor outside than I’d have expected,” I suggested.

“And that was probably caused by us police and by the ambulance people. It seems there are some bloody tracks and drops on the sixth floor, but again not too much blood is in the corridor up there.”

“So she was attacked inside the lift, with the doors shut.”

“Precisely. And I think I know how.”

Ovid stepped inside the lift fastidiously, crouched, and peered at the paneled rear wall, which was almost unstained. Then he inserted his little finger somewhere amongst the woodwork and pulled. The rear wall split in half, opening as two floor-to-ceiling doors. Behind was a space large enough for a couple of people to stand, or kneel, between the true rear wall and the false wall. And the true rear wall was bloody, as were the insides of the doors.

“Here,” said Ovid, “is where the killer hid, to burst out suddenly between floors. I told you this building was made for the Securitate, but about six thousand special spies spied upon the secret police themselves by such bizarre methods as this. No doubt a microphone would have been hidden inside the elevator, but here’s a back-up, just in case. A man sitting on a stool could look and listen through the tiny hole in the wall.”

The sheer shock of being between floors in an otherwise empty lift when suddenly the wall opened and another person emerged! The victim might faint or even die at once of a heart attack.

Ovid explained in Romanian, and the lesser police looked at him in admiration.

Of course we climbed the white marble stairs to the sixth floor rather than using the lift.

It seemed to me that the tracks up there were rather narrow to be those of shoes or trainers. They became vague after not too many paces.

Adriana pointed through the café window at one of the tall white apartments around the piazza, blue sky showing through ornamental turrets along the edge of the rooftop.

“Sniper watchtowers,” she said. “You could shoot down into any rebellious crowds.”

We were inside for the air-conditioning. So were some bleached-blond youths wearing gold chains, sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads, sons of the new rich.

“You say the tracks of blood were narrow.” She shuddered and crossed herself. “I think a werewolf killed that woman in the elevator. Probably the Inspector thinks so, too, but he wouldn’t tell you that.”

“Werewolves aren’t real,” I protested.

“In Romania they are. And weredogs,
priccoltish
. With a million dogs on the streets it can’t be surprising if at least one is a weredog. It’s the perfect place to hide. Unless,” she added with what seemed at first a wonderful lack of logical connection, “Badelescu thinks a Turk did it. Maybe he hopes that’s the answer.”

“Why blame a Turk?”

“They ruled us for three hundred years; consequently, many Romanians don’t like them much. Better a Turk than a werewolf. I’ll see if there are any news reports yet.”

Flipping open her phone, amazingly she googled.

“How can you do that?”

“You can do it anywhere in the city center.”

I thought of old women draped in black guarding a single cow or a few geese by the roadside out in the country. Truly, the last shall be first technologically.