The Madonna on the Moon (57 page)

“That means that you and the Conducator were enemies?”

“Frankly, that would be giving myself too much credit.” Stephanescu poured himself a second glass. “To be honest, I knew the Conducator well. Not during the Golden Age, of
course. His delusions of grandeur had caused a break long before that. I met him during my student days. His—how shall I put it?—uncivilized lack of taste had already begun to manifest
itself. His bad character didn’t escape my notice, but it wasn’t that prominent yet. If you ask me, it was his wife Elena who really awakened the evil in him. By the way, here’s
an intimate detail especially for the readers of
Time
magazine: at that time, when the Conducator was just a simple party official, his nickname was Koka. He was literally addicted to
American Coca-Cola. He put it into whatever he was drinking: red wine, bubbly, whatever. An awful person. Basically always was. But I don’t mean to whitewash my part. And to my shame I have
to admit that I went into politics to do good and in the end merely averted the worst. I must say it’s a sense of guilt felt by many of us in my country. And you can quote me on
that.”

“As long as we’re talking about guilt, Dr. Stephanescu, are you a religious man?”

“Oh yes, I believe. Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here. In the depths of our being, our entire people never lost their faith. Even though the Conducator once declared us the first
atheistic nation, we remained believers in our souls. Not everyone, of course. Some had no respect for life. But I invite you to go to Kronauburg. When the recent rebellion spread from Timisoara to
my city, we were prepared for the worst. Ask people how many deaths the Securitate in my district has on its conscience after the rebels stormed the State Security headquarters. Not a single one,
guaranteed. On my orders, no one fired a shot. Here’s another piece of confidential information: you should know that there were forces in the country who wanted to take God from the people,
turn churches into halls of culture with party slogans in place of prayers. When religion dies, the community dies. I always resisted. Let the people have their churches, that was my motto. I wish
I could have prevailed. There was an influential security agent in Kronauburg who had the churches cleared out of their treasuries, icons, statues of saints, Madonnas. I’m no coward, but
I’ll tell you I was always afraid of that man. Please keep this confidential, but his name is General Raducanu, and I don’t know whether at this very hour he’s on the side of the
revolution or its betrayers. My advice is watch out for him. At any rate, Raducanu acquired Western currency by diverting the most valuable antiquities via Polish channels into the capitalist art
market. The stuff that couldn’t be sold is gathering dust in the cellars of the Securitate. It was a mistake to violate the pious soul of the people. But I guarantee that the people will get
back their Madonnas and their saints. And the churches will be full again.”

Fritz and I were silent.

“What else would you like to know? Oh yes, before I forget: let’s handle the interview fee in a different way. If it became public knowledge, people might misunderstand it as a false
signal. I think I’ll donate the remaining fifteen hundred to an orphanage or to widows of the revolution. What do you think, Mr. Hofmann?” When he uttered Fritz’s name,
Stephanescu suddenly stopped short and then started to stammer, “You . . . you . . . could take a picture of me handing over the money . . . What . . . Why aren’t you taking any notes
on the interview? Where’s your tape recorder?”

I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. Fritz stayed calm.

“Excellent idea. A photo in an orphanage. I promise you’ll look just as splendid as you did in that portrait of yourself in the window of the Kronauburg photo studio. Heinrich
Hofmann took quite decent pictures, didn’t he? At least they served their purpose.”

Stephanescu’s face froze. He distractedly stubbed out the Carpati he had just lit in an ashtray. “You’re not from
Time
magazine! Who are you? Show me your
papers.”

Fritz Hofmann tossed a green passport onto the table. “You’re a German!” Stephanescu opened the passport. “Born Baia Luna. You . . . you’re Heinrich’s son.
Fritz Hofmann! What do you want from me?”

“Why did my father Heinrich have to die?”

Stephanescu struggled to control the situation. “You’ve been lying to me the whole time! Pretending to be a journalist. I’ll tell you this much: your father was my friend. But
you, you’re a big disappointment to me. You know what? We’ll make this short and sweet. This interview is over. You two get out of here, or I’ll have you arrested by the
militia.”

“No, you’re not going to do that.” I spoke up for the first time. “We’re going to speak about the dead now. Why did the Baia Luna priest Johannes Baptiste have to
die?”

Stephanescu pushed his cognac glass away. “A pastor had to die? Someone named Johannes Baptiste? Sorry, I don’t know that name.”

“Okay.” Fritz smiled. “If that name means nothing to you, then you’re not going to find out why our nice colleague Angelique wasn’t lying next to you in bed this
morning and why you’re not going to be named prime minister this afternoon. It’s all over, Herr Doctor, you just don’t know it yet. But we have faith in your curiosity.”

When Stephanescu coughed and suppressed a nauseated belch, I knew that by now the demon was wide awake. But he wasn’t showing his face yet.

“Who sent you?”

I didn’t need the quick glance from Fritz to know that I was the one to answer that question.

“I come at the behest of a child.”

“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“And I come at the behest of its mother. At the behest of Angela.”

“What do you want from me? What goddamn devil sent you here? I don’t know any Angela!”

“Oh, but you do, Herr Doctor. You knew Angela Barbulescu very well. And you liked her best in her dress with the sunflowers.”

“No, no, no! I swear I don’t know her. I never knew such a person.”

“Then let me help you recall a day more than forty years ago, October seventh, 1947, to be precise. Right here in the Paris of the East.” I took out the first photo. “You see,
Herr Doctor, that was Angela Barbulescu. Her supposed friend Heinrich Hofmann took this picture at a birthday party for your buddy Florin Pauker. Go ahead and take a look at Angela.”

“You’re crazy! Psychotic! You belong in Vadului with the loonies!” Stephanescu was working himself into a rage. The door to the suite flew open.

“Everything okay?” asked one of his bodyguards.

“Get out! Out!” bellowed his boss, then he collapsed into his chair. He lit up a Carpati and looked at the photo. The demon was stirring and made Stephanescu grin.

“I see a blond with a ponytail. Quite pretty, I have to admit. Right. I was indeed as a young man at a birthday party for Florin Pauker. And if this woman had crossed my path back then, I
think I would have been tempted. But my God, that was four decades ago. I’ll be seventy in three years. How am I supposed to remember a woman I met as a young man?”

“This photo was taken at the moment that Angela Barbulescu was about to give her dear Stefan a kiss.”

Stephanescu stared at me. For a split second, time seemed to stand still, then Stephanescu burst into laughter. He sneered at me from the heights of an illusory superiority. “You’re
an idiot. I can see very well that this blond Angela, or whoever she is, is about to kiss somebody. But what makes you think that I’m the man? What’s this stupid snapshot supposed to
prove? I see a woman who’s a total stranger to me. What are you trying to do, blackmail me? What a joke! With a picture I’m not even in.” He laughed again. Then he drank.

“But there’s another photo of Angela Barbulescu, one in which you’re clearly recognizable. She’s wearing the sunflower dress and you, Herr Doctor, are spraying champagne
between her legs.”

Stephanescu went chalk white, as if all the blood had drained from his arteries in a single second. My blood, meanwhile, ran cold. I was staring into his dead eyes. The demon showed its face and
betrayed itself. As I placed the photo with the half-naked woman on the table, it was already too late. Stephanescu knew that he would never be able to take back the words “That wasn’t
Angela. It was Alexa.” Now the demon had to report for duty in the final struggle. Stephanescu clapped his hands over his mouth to keep himself from vomiting. Then he put all his chips on the
last card he held.

“It was the Christmas of 1948. Koka had invited us to an Oh Unholy Night party. I went with Angela and Alexa. The two of them were always together, and they’d exchanged dresses for
the party. We’d all been drinking. Koka had tanked up on vodka. Everyone was in a great mood. And then Alexa lay down on the buffet table, spontaneously, on the spur of the moment—one
too many liqueurs. My God, was she hot. Florin, Albin, and half the others had already jerked off over her. It was a game. Angela made a scene afterward. She had no idea how to have a good time. I
was the one who showed her everything. I even took her to the seaside. First she pretended to be chaste, but then it turned out she was a girl who couldn’t get enough. She wanted to stay in
bed all day long. She was really great. But she was also moralistic, insufferable, bourgeois. Always talking about marriage, children, a house. She wanted me all to herself. If I had a little
something on the side, she locked herself in her room for days and cried. She got on my nerves. She was just an episode.

“Of course, the high life cost a pile of money in those days. Eating out every night, and only in the best places. Trips to the Black Sea. I needed a car, Heinrich a motorcycle. Angela was
really too dumb to get how we paid for everything. Naïve, is what she was. It was Koka’s idea how we could make money. When Koka saw the photos Heinrich had taken of Alexa on Christmas
Eve, he got really excited. Of Lenutza, too. Florin Pauker was the only one who almost wet his pants. He said we should burn the pictures then and there. If they got into the wrong hands, it could
ruin his career as a doctor. And that’s why he refused to hit on any more girls and recruit them for our art portraits, as we called them. And Albin had such an ugly wart on his cheek he only
could make it with the sluts at the bottom of the barrel. So it was my job to haul in more women. Heinrich took the pictures. If the girls didn’t want to cooperate, we put a few drops into
their champagne. It was all done in Koka’s apartment. The work was fun for Alexa until the day she announced she was pregnant. Florin had some scruples. He didn’t want to get rid of the
child for her, but Koka made it clear to him that if he didn’t, an obscene photo of Florin might accidentally be made public. After that, Florin was our go-to man for workplace accidents. He
treated Angela, too. She showed up one day in my office with a big belly and claimed it was my child. It’s likely she really hadn’t slept with anyone else. Maybe it would have been
better if we’d let her keep the brat. But Florin had already done the deed, and we had to make sure she kept her mouth shut.

“Later, we moved the business to Kronauburg. Heinrich had hired two or three blonds to work in his studio. One was a photographer by the name of Irina. The security agent Raducanu had his
eye on her, and we kept our hands off. But the other one, with the hair of an angel, she was great. You could put her onto any man who still had anything at all left between his legs. She could
make it even with the most decrepit old geezers. We usually set up shop in the Golden Star. Heinrich shot the pictures without the subjects’ knowledge. It all ran smoothly until one day
things threatened to get out of hand, and just when I was about to leave the business.

“I’d just become party chief and district secretary in Kronauburg when Heinrich said that Barbulescu was planning to expose me. That was her mistake, but she’d always been
naïve. We had to silence her for good. But Heinrich was too soft. Too weak. He could quote Nietzsche, but when push came to shove he had scruples. That’s how all the shit started to hit
the fan. Heinrich was counting on her killing herself. That’s why he took the dirty photos of Barbulescu to that priest in Baia Luna, ’cause he thought that would put an end to her. And
he wasn’t completely off base. In the end she really did string herself up. But how could I be sure she would? I had to see to it that the job got done. Albin was supposed to take care of it.
He went to Baia Luna, but he had scruples, too, as he later admitted to Alexa, the idiot. Instead of liquidating Barbulescu, he warned her about us. Of course, he pronounced his own death sentence
by betraying us. But that wasn’t the end of it. The real problem was that priest Johannes Baptiste. Until then the Securitate had always avoided crossing swords with the Catholic clergy.
Raducanu’s people got a bit overenthusiastic. But they would have left the pastor in peace if he’d just coughed up the photos. Heinrich’s first mistake was to get a priest
involved in the affair. His second mistake was when some cretin pasted giant photos of me with Alexa and the champagne bottle onto the windows of his photo shop. The pictures were immediately
removed. Someone had obviously broken into Heinrich’s studio. Negatives had disappeared that no one ever should have found. Your father”—for the first time Stephanescu turned
directly to Fritz Hofmann—“had become a liability.”

Fritz Hofmann had stopped listening long before. He had seen and photographed—and endured—the filth of the world. But not the words coming from the mouth of Stefan Stephanescu. The
man without his mask, holding back nothing, awakened neither fury nor hatred in Fritz. Nor any need for revenge. Stephanescu didn’t matter to him. Fritz had lowered his eyelids and was
looking into himself. He saw himself as a fifteen-year-old, standing on a chair in a church and blowing out a small red light. Fritz never prayed. But now, in the Presidential Suite of the Athenee
Palace, he asked God for forgiveness, while the only words I could produce from the depths of my dismay were “You are a devil.”

“How would you know? You know nothing! How many years of your life have been wasted by the history of this country? How much dead time do you owe to the Conducator? Tell me. How many days,
months, years? I, I would have given them to you. You don’t realize that only I could have saved this country. I and I alone! I knew about the key to power. And if Heinrich Hofmann
hadn’t given that key away, no foolish Titan would have plunged this country into the realm of shadows. Terror, extortion, fear—those were the Conducator’s tools. Only I had the
courage to turn those weapons against him. What does the life of an old priest matter? A lunatic ignored by his own fellow priests. When Lupu’s men brought him to Kronauburg for disposal, his
own clergy had dug him a grave in the cathedral graveyard with a fake name. What’s the life of a man worth when even his own church doesn’t stand behind him? What’s it worth
compared to the prospect of leading an entire people into a truly Golden Age? That was always the difference between me and Heinrich Hofmann. He was never inspired by the will to power. He had no
burning ambition. He was even afraid of a drunken village schoolteacher, a human wreck, a meaningless nothing. Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken those photos, the key to the doors of power,
into a rectory. I had to find the pictures of Angela that we made in Florin Pauker’s office, no matter what the cost. Not because of Angela Barbulescu. It could have been any of the girls.
The pictures were irreplaceable because Koka was in them. Don’t you see? Koka, naked, in an obscene, perverse setting. That’s why I needed the photos. They would have ruined Koka. He
was a devil, but he would have been powerless. With those photographs in my hands he never would have been able to rise to become a caricature of a president. I was the better of the two of us. The
course of history would have been different with me. And this would have been a better country. And now it will be better. In a few hours I’m going to become the prime minister. And
you’re not going to stop me. I’ve sold you the truth as truth, but it won’t do you any good. You’ll only be able to peddle it as falsehood. No one will believe you. The
people are tired of insanity. You have no witnesses, no proof. And if I give my people an order, you won’t even be able to prove that you were sitting at this table this morning with Stefan
Stephanescu.”