Erasing Memory (22 page)

“So what?”

“Sarah, we can do this over the phone and be pleasant to each other, or I can have you picked up and brought downtown and we can be rude to each other. Which would you prefer?”

“Let’s be nice. What do you want to know? Did I fuck his friend? Yes, I fucked his friend.”

“Sarah, I don’t care what you did at the beach house. I want to know what you know about Marcus Johnson, an art student and photographer.”

She fell silent. As MacNeice waited her out, he looked over at Aziz and raised his eyebrows. She in turn raised hers and held up several notebooks and music scores from the backpack, whispering to him, “All music, all the time.”

“He’s not in trouble, is he?”

“Johnson?”

“Yeah. And what’s he told you about me?”

“Nothing, Sarah. We just found out that you knew him and we’d like to know more about him.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because we believe he knows someone who was killed Friday in that very same beach house.”

“Fuck! I wondered about that the minute I heard someone was offed at the lake. It’s all over the TV.”

“Can you tell us about Johnson? We understand he’s a student at the art college, and we’ve seen several of his images that suggest he’s quite talented.”

“He showed you the nudes of me?”

“No, Sarah, none of you.”

“I don’t give a shit if he did, ya know. He’s an artist—maybe a fucked-up artist—but I’m proud of those photos.”

“Why is he fucked up?”

“Oh, shit.… He comes from up north—Wawa. He’s a rough piece of work—oh boy, is he ever—not violent, just … What’s that great phrase I heard on
Oprah
the other day? … Oh, shit.” The line was reduced to static as Sarah tried to remember. “Right—Marcus has no moral compass. Does that mean anything to you?”

“I think so, Sarah—he’s a bit reckless and adrift?”

“Yeah, adrift. A talented fucker who’s adrift—yeah, that’s Marcus. He was beaten as a kid or something, and then his mother left and he was dumped with a grandmother. I grew up about a mile from him. He ran away at fourteen, lived on the streets here and was doing dope and graffiti and stuff when some youth worker from downtown started tracking his tags.”

“That’s his signature, right?”

“Yeah, and he was great. So this guy takes a liking to him and before long Marcus is presenting a portfolio of drawings and photographs—some of me, but not the nudes—at the art college. He gets accepted! Man, we drank ourselves silly that
night. I was training to be a bartender and I mixed up a wicked jug of margaritas.”

“Did he ever mention someone named Ruvola?”

“Well, sure. Ronnie supplies weed to most of the north end. I never met the guy but Marcus is tight with him. You see Marcus, unlike me, was never really heavy into alcohol; he prefers the buzz he gets from weed, says it helps him creatively. Like, each to his own, eh?”

“Did he ever tell you about a girl named Lydia Petrescu?”

“Did he ever! She’s the violinist from uptown, right? He said he was in love with her, that he’d done the best work ever with her.” There was a pause in which MacNeice could almost hear Sarah make the connection. “So it was her at the lake, right?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no fuckin’ way Marcus would have killed her. He’s a lover, not a fighter. I know that firsthand.”

“We don’t believe he killed Lydia, but we are trying to find him. Can you help us?”

“All I know is that big old house he stays in—nice place, with a front room and fireplace.”

“He’s moved out. Do you have a cellphone number for him? We were told he went back to Wawa to be with his dying mother.”

“Ha! That’s rich. Marcus’s mother died about eight years ago, and anyway, he hadn’t seen her in years.”

“I’m not surprised to hear that. And his cellphone?”

“Dead. I tried it yesterday.”

“Sarah, if there’s anything else that occurs to you, anything at all, I’d appreciate a call. Will you promise to do that?”

“Absolutely. What’d you say your name was anyways?”

“MacNeice.” He asked her to write down his cellphone number, and once he was satisfied that she had, he said goodbye. Then he gave Aziz a rundown of the call.

“So was he in on it, do you think?” he wondered. “Why did Ruvola and not Johnson rent the boat? Was Gibbs in on it? How much did he get paid?” MacNeice went to the whiteboard and added Johnson’s name next to Gibbs’s and Ronnie Ruvola’s. Two dead men, MacNeice thought.

“If he paid the doctor, why didn’t he rent the boat?” Aziz looked up at MacNeice, who was drawing a line between Ruvola and Johnson.

“Maybe because the money he was spending wasn’t his own. Even though this kid’s an art student with no moral compass, he’s smart enough to insist on a division of labour—he rents the beach house and provides the girl and Ruvola rents the boat and handles the logistics.”

He wrote down
Gregori Petrescu
with two happy faces beside the name—the bodyguards—and added a dotted line back to Johnson.

“Lydia would have trusted her boyfriend to take her out on the lake—a romantic conclusion to a wonderful day.”

Behind her, Skype came to life on Aziz’s computer and Bozana appeared in the rectangle on the screen. She was in front of a large window; beyond it was nighttime in Europe. “Dahlink!” she said in a mock Schwarzenegger accent. “What have you gotten me into? Although I must admit your case is a welcome distraction from what we’re doing at the moment, which is mostly legal and human rights issues surrounding the Romany—Gypsies, that is, not Romanians. I want to know where you are with this before I tell you where I am.”

Aziz moved to one side so MacNeice could take centre
frame. “Hello, Bozana. Well, I’ve met the son, Gregori Petrescu—he’s here for his sister’s funeral in the company of two bodyguards.”

“One of whom is nursing a broken nose and tender gonads,” Aziz added.

“Ouch,” said Bozana.

“We’ve also discovered that her boyfriend, who is likely the father of her unborn child, was the one who took her to the cottage, though whether he was involved in her murder or not, we don’t know. The girl’s father dodged a question about his past but left the door open to answer it tomorrow.”

MacNeice watched as Bozana stood up from her desk and disappeared from the frame. Her voice carried on. “Okay, I’m not going to burden you with geopolitics, but there were constant tensions between Romania and Bulgaria during the Soviet era. The Bulgarians were pro-Moscow and the Romanians were testy, barely manageable by the Kremlin. Though they sit across the Danube looking at each other, they have nothing in common and have always been suspicious of one another.” She came back into frame carrying stacks of reports bound in dark covers. “Christ, these are heavy.”

“I want you to know that we deeply appreciate your help with this.” Without thinking, MacNeice had placed his right hand on his heart as he spoke.

“At some point—and thank you for that—we’ll have to get official. There are avenues, protocols and intergovernmental agencies who, if they knew about our little chats, would be very upset.” When she sat down, only her face was visible above the stack. “But for now, and even if this is the last thing I can do, let me give you an overview of what Mr.—or rather Dr.—Petrescu senior was up to under the totalitarian government
of Ceausescu.” Looking up from the pile of paper she said, “You might want to make yourselves comfortable—it’s a bit of a slog.”

MacNeice rolled back to get his notebook and, returning, nudged closer to Aziz to be in camera range. Bozana looked up, smiled and picked up the first of the documents.

“In the 1980s the foreign policy of Romania was opposed to perestroika while the Bulgarians, under Zhivkov, were all for it. Zhivkov, however, was more concerned about what he called chemical pollution of the Danube by Romania. He didn’t know the half of it. Dr. Petrescu was the leading microbiologist in the ministry responsible for chemical plants along the Danube.”

“He wasn’t military?” Aziz asked.

“No, but his wife was a childhood sweetheart of Nicolae Ceausescu. Petrescu was promoted right out of university to a ministerial position, the rumour goes, so that Ceausescu could be closer to his wife. It was also said at the time that the only reason Petrescu left Romania”—she looked up at the camera—“was that Ceausescu had impregnated his wife. The timing of the child’s birth suggests that your victim was Ceausescu’s daughter, not Antonin Petrescu’s.”

“Sweet Jesus,” MacNeice said.

“Exactly. They left in a hurry, and shortly thereafter the Soviet regime crumbled and Ceausescu and his wife were executed. Antonin’s son, Gregori, who was a kid in military school at the time, had been left behind by his fleeing parents and was declared a ward of the state. Over the next two decades he flourished and became a star, in spite of his parents. That’s a testimony to his intelligence and drive.” She looked up from her pages. “MacNeice, this is not a man to be fucked with.”

“I think I have a sense of that already.”

“So leave his gonads, and those of his bodyguards, alone. But more about him later.” Bozana put the first report aside and opened the next. “Historically, the Danube has been a cesspool for a long time, with several countries spewing raw sewage into it. But the worst of the worst by far has been Romania, particularly during the Soviet era. And your man had a brilliant, if diabolical, plan.”

“Our man meaning Petrescu senior?” Aziz asked.

“Yes. It was in commercial fertilizers that he had his real breakthrough. Then he looked at the steel and paper mills and cranked up the release of effluent—seriously toxic shit. The effluent was supposed to be an industrial spill—a major spill, but in the grand scheme of things, forgivable. The fact was, it was a cover.”

“You’re beginning to scare the hell out of me, Bo. This guy works in an antique shop. He trades in old papers and fine furniture. He gardens and grows the most beautiful flowers.”

“Fair enough.” Bozana stood up and reached across her desk for yet another file. “Is this the guy?” She held up to the camera a grainy colour print of a man in a white lab coat, hands in his pockets, standing beside a row of stainless steel vats. The strong cheekbones and the hair, though dark in the photo, were unmistakable—it was Antonin Petrescu. “The caption below identifies him as Minister of the Environment Antonin Petrescu.”

“Okay, so keep going.” Aziz glanced over to MacNeice, who nodded.

“The fertilizer he’d developed to increase the yield of any type of crop was too lethal for commercial application. He dumped it along with the effluent so that no one detected it.
Petrescu senior had ratcheted up the toxicity of the original effluent so that what travelled downstream—and ended up on beaches all the way to the delta and the Black Sea—was the meanest and most dangerous of pollutants, undetectable to anyone who might be fishing, walking their dog, working on their tan or building sandcastles on the beach. Within a year or so, an extraordinary number of cases of cancer and morbidity showed up—with tumours similar to these.”

She held up a book so they could see a girl with a huge growth on the side of her face, then turned the page to reveal a man whose bare chest had lesions that looked as if he’d been swarmed by leeches. “Imagine this occurring on the Danube, and along all the tributaries associated with it and east into the Black Sea. Now imagine the possibility of its getting into the Bosporus, where you’re on the doorstep of the Mediterranean. As evil goes, it was pretty impressive stuff.”

“Why wasn’t he charged when the Romanian government fell?” MacNeice asked.

“He was. He had anticipated it and hired a lawyer from Germany—where the headwaters of the Danube are—who pleaded his case in Bucharest. Petrescu was smart; he knew that once he fled, Ceausescu would try to blame him for the damage, and if Ceausescu didn’t survive—which he didn’t—those who came after him would as well. He took all the documents that proved he was acting on Ceausescu’s orders—his explicit orders—to increase the toxicity of the effluent going into the Danube in order to deal with what his wife’s lover saw as increasing Muslim and Soviet threats. Petrescu had a letter proving that he had protested, and attached to it, the response from Ceausescu—a man never open to resistance—who told him in a handwritten note that if he didn’t do it, he would have
him and his entire family erased. The last bit was underlined and followed by his signature.”

“But what was in this for Romania?” MacNeice asked. “Surely the first to suffer would be Romanians downstream from the plants.”

“Wrong question, Detective. Imagine a dog or a rat or a leopard caught in a leg trap. What do they do? They eat their leg off to escape the trap. So what would pressure this regime into such a dangerous game? They were surrounded by Soviet satellites and, on the other side of the Black Sea, Mother Russia herself. They saw Islamist states downstream that were becoming more and more fundamentalist; Turkey ruled the entire southern coast of the Black Sea. This kind of struggle had been going on for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Ceausescu was cornered. He didn’t care if every form of life on the Danube disappeared, and if that cost a few thousand Romanian lives? Well, he was a self-professed ‘great lover’—he would make the supreme sacrifice of impregnating every woman of childbearing age left in the country, if necessary.” Bozana leaned back in her chair.

“You’re making that up, Bo.” Aziz waved at her dismissively.

“Well, maybe the last bit. But the essence of it is true.”

“Why didn’t this become an international issue?” MacNeice asked.

“Because the Romanians and even the Bulgarians wanted to keep it quiet. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lot of things got swept under the carpet. This was just one of them. Remember what a happy time it was. Almost a year before Ceausescu was assassinated, Petrescu was accepted into Germany as a refugee who risked being killed if he returned to
Romania. He had the letter to prove it.” Bozana removed the remaining pile of documents and sat forward with her hands crossed.

“Are we certain that he actually did release the toxins into the Danube?” Aziz asked.