The Family Hightower (10 page)

“That's true,” Henry says. “He was here. But he didn't stay long.”

“Any idea where he was going?”

“Nope,” Henry says. In a narrow way, he's not lying.

There's a half minute of silence from the car, and Henry's fear returns. In the headlights, he makes a little show of tightening his grip on the shotgun, like he's ready to point it at the car. The guys he's hired do the same. They're putting on a good act. If the men in the car want to fight, they can, but one of them won't make it off this road. The engine coughs a few times, revs up. Then the car goes down the road in reverse, twenty yards, backs into Henry's neighbor's driveway, turns out, and leaves the way it came. They wait until they can't hear the engine anymore.

“All right,” Henry says. “You can go.”

“You bought us for the night,” one of them says.

“Go home. I don't want my wife to know this happened, understand?”

One of the guys almost looks hurt, but the other two put their guns away, head for their cars. Henry takes the shells out of the shotgun, puts them in his pocket. Goes inside, back to his bedroom, nice and quiet, and puts gun and shells away in the safe. Closes it. Makes sure Holly's still asleep. Then goes to the phone again.

“Sylvie,” he says.

“Yes, Henry?” She's wide awake.

“Muriel's Petey's in some real trouble.”

“Yes?” she says. Her voice is soothing, almost sweet.
She knows already,
Henry thinks.
How does she know?

“It involves Peter, too. He just showed up on my doorstep.”

“I think it would be safest if you send him to me,” Sylvie says.

“I already did.”

“Good.”
She knew that already, too,
Henry thinks.
She wasn't giving me a suggestion; she was giving me her blessing.
Somehow, every time he talks to her, he has to learn all over again that Sylvie is way smarter than he is. Always at least four steps ahead.

“He'll be at the airport in an hour or so,” Henry says.

“I'll have Muriel pick him up. He can spend the night there. Then I'll have her bring him over to me in the morning,” Sylvie says.

“Good.” Still the businessman.
Drop it,
Henry says to himself.
For God's sake, drop the act for once in your sorry life.
A few seconds go by. Sylvie's still on the other end, waiting.

“Sylvie?”

“Yes?”

“What's going on?”

Now it's Sylvie's turn to pause. Henry can hear her let out a long sigh. Then: “I think there's just been some amazing misunderstanding, Henry. But it's okay. I think I know how to fix it.”

“How are you going to do that?” Henry says.

“Well, to begin, we're going to make sure Rufus's Peter doesn't stay in the same place for long.” She doesn't have to say why:
If they catch him, they'll kill him,
Henry thinks. “There's much more to it than that,” she says, “but do you really think you want to know what the rest of it is?”

There were men with guns outside my house tonight, Sylvie, and they weren't police,
Henry wants to say. But he knows what Sylvie's saying. The question's personal, legal, familial, all at once. She's trying to protect him.

“You're right,” he says. “I don't need to know.”

“Good. I might need you, Henry. If I do, I'll call. But there's a chance that, when I've fixed it, you'll just know. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He can hear her smile. “It's good to hear your voice, big brother,” she says.

“You, too, Sylvie.”

“I know you're always looking out for us,” she says.

He doesn't know what to say to that. He wants to say so much, but it won't come out.

“All right,” he says. “Take care of yourself.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

He hangs up the phone, walks to his side of the bed. Strips to his underwear and gets under the covers. His wife turns toward him, puts a hand on his chest. She's snoring. He can't sleep. He's thinking about the place he's from, the people who raised him. The things he knows they did, that he did to get here, to this house. Its exquisite woodwork, in mahogany, cypress, the kind of wood you can't get anymore because we've chopped it all down. When he's at his most brutal and self-lacerating, it's all exploitation to him, people selling out other people, using them up, until there's nothing left of them. His father was so good at it. It's easy for Henry to think sometimes that it was all the man did, the only way he saw other people—how they could be useful to him—and he took everything he could get, body and soul, and threw away the rest. He never seemed to show any remorse for it, either; didn't seem to have the mind Henry has, that makes him feel guilty for his success even though it was all he craved.

Maybe it was all a question of where his father came from, though. Because the factories killed his father's father when the patriarch was a boy, and maybe his father thought he'd be damned if he let them get him, too. Maybe he thought he owed his own father that, to play the game as hard as he could. Like it was a kind of revenge to succeed as he did, and did he ever. But look at the cost. The hidden dead. The people killed inside but still walking. Henry's sure he's doing it to someone out there, somewhere in the world, every time he makes a buck. Every dollar he gets for playing with big numbers in an office in lower Manhattan is a dollar someone in a factory, in a field somewhere didn't get, right? He's selling them out until there's nothing left. Just like I'm taking everyone in this book and selling them out to you, dear reader. Cracking open their heads to show you what's inside. Telling you things about them they would never tell anyone, not their wives, or husbands, or best friends. We'll get as much of them as either of us can stomach, and when we're done with them, we'll just leave behind what remains. I hope you're satisfied.

 

 

Chapter 5

A
few
weeks before Peter catches his night flight to Cleveland, a farmer in Eastern Europe, out already from insomnia, finds Madalina. There's a place on the map where Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova meet, and you might think that would mean something, that there'd be a monument there, like the Four Corners in the southwestern United States. You've seen the pictures, the postcards, of a girl lying spread-eagled across the spot where the borders cross, like she's been cut into quarters, a limb in each state. Her head cut in half. Her brother stands over her with the camera and takes the picture, then looks down at her, frowning.
Okay. My turn.

In that corner of Eastern Europe, there's no monument. Madalina's lying on her back in the mud, five hundred and three meters on the Moldovan side. The mud's thick here, like paste. Where people and livestock churn it, it whips itself into peaks. It's hard to imagine it ever going away, drought or not; it'll stay like that until winter comes and freezes it all in place. It's deep enough to lose shoes in, to cake dirt on your pants up to your knees. The cars that race through here scream their way up the hill, spinning out, swinging side to side, throwing dirt everywhere. Which is why it's a little hard to see Madalina at first. She was thrown from a backseat, landed hard in the mud, so one of her arms up to the shoulder and one of her legs up to the knees are covered. Her head's thrown back and smeared with dirt, so at first it looks like her eyes are just closed and bruised, rather than gone altogether. The gunshot wound, behind her ear, is clogged with mud. But the rough stitching from clavicle to pubic symphysis is impossible to miss. Her clothes are off and the incision line is a rough, swollen ridge, meandering a bit down her body, as if whoever did it was quite skilled, but in a hurry. Since they shot her in the head afterward, why they stitched her up again is a mystery. Maybe it's a mark of professionalism; they're sending a signal to the authorities that this isn't a simple murder or a serial killer; no, Madalina's been involved in an operation. Maybe it's a small nod to her family, a little shred of respect—or a mockery of respect—after the hours of brutality. What her parents were afraid of the most when she left them has happened, and if this were a different kind of story, they might have woken up in their beds at the moment of her death, or the second the stitches were done. Woken up and wandered around the house looking for their daughter, swearing they heard her come in. But this isn't that kind of story. Her parents are just human beings and they sleep through all of it. In just a couple days, though, they'll learn enough to know they'll never see her again. They'll see how her life can be described as a loop, first rising away from the border of Ukraine and Romania, pausing over Germany, then falling again, over Kiev, to come back to earth in Moldova. The farmer who finds her is terrified. He doesn't trust the police, doesn't trust anyone except his brother with what he's found. He runs to his brother's house and wakes him; they get Madalina off the hill before the sun's all the way up, bury her that night in the back of the farmer's own field, with as much dignity as they can give her. He feels terrible for her, for what she must have gotten mixed up in. But he'll never tell anyone what he's done, or where she is.

You need to know a few things now, dear reader, if you don't already, about Romania, just like you needed to know a few things about Ukraine before. You need to know because it's hard for us over here in the United States to see just how chaotic, how desperate sometimes, things get in Eastern Europe just after the Soviet Union collapses. We see them taking apart the Berlin Wall on TV, we see the big protests in the streets. But it's a lot harder to see the lawlessness that comes with it. Harder to see what a few people with money and means and not much in the way of morals can get away with—and how—when the old order falls and the new one takes too long to build. For a while, the cages are open and things run wild. That's what I'm trying to show you. I'm not trying to tell you what it means; I'm just trying to tell you what happened, and I'm trying to do it so you see for yourself, in the end, why you should know.

Madalina is born in Negostina, just outside of Siret, near the border with Ukraine. It's
1970
. Siret's down in the valley of a small river, a little pocket of the country far from the capital, but on some days it can feel like a snapshot of all Romania: the houses with chipping plaster walls, the crowded little market in a tight intersection. An old woman trying to sweep the sidewalk in front of her house, while the wind blows the dirt all around her. Then there's the weight of the past. Siret has two Jewish cemeteries. One of them's centuries old and looks it: It's on a craggy hill so steep that some of the graves are almost horizontal. It's all walled off. The house next to it raises chickens. The newer cemetery is bigger, a little tidier. The neighbor will give you a little tour, for a small fee, if you ask. She'll show you the oldest graves, from a couple hundred years ago, the newest ones from a half century ago. The monument for the Holocaust at the gate; underneath it, they buried some of the soap they found in the camps when the war was over. You don't always think of Romania and the Holocaust, but the Antonescu regime, which sided with Hitler during World War II until a coup took it out, killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. And that means that, in some towns—like Siret—there isn't a single Jew left. The last ones died or left in the mid-
1950
s, though in the center of town, the synagogue is still there, chained shut for decades, to remind everyone else what happened.

You climb out of the valley and up to the plain to get to Negostina, and even though Siret's a little closer to the border, it's out of the valley where you start to see Ukraine coming. It's not just the signage in both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. It's the land itself. The hills flatten out, the wind picks up. The sky gets bigger. It's a little glimpse of the vast steppe that covers almost half of Ukraine, the land the Soviets wanted, that Hitler was willing to kill everyone there—not just the Jews, but everyone—to get. The place that could feed Europe, and where millions starved. Negostina's huddled down against all that vastness. It's been there for a long time, though it feels almost temporary, a concession to the borderlands, the waves of history. The town is just a few roads, some of them not so much roads as a set of dirt tracks that wind through the town, the paths where everyone's agreed it's all right to drive a car. The houses there are tidy, cozy, though even a tourist can almost tell the Romanian and Ukrainian houses apart. The Romanian houses are a little breezier, the Ukrainian ones more like compounds, as if the Romanians are living for the summer while the Ukrainians are getting ready for the winter. Things are easy between them, though. There's a bust of Taras Shevchenko, orphan and serf, political dissident and conscripted soldier, exile and blasphemer, writer and artist—the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, the voice of Ukraine's written language; part of the blood, now, of the Ukrainian nation, though if you've lost your Ukrainian, you'd never know it.

So Madalina—a Romanian finding herself a minority among Ukrainians—learns both languages. Her Romanian is perfect; her Ukrainian's only a little off, but you'd only notice after an hour of talking to her, a slight hesitation sometimes to look for a word she has in one language but not the other. She's very bright, and from a very early age, everyone knows it. But she's born under Nicolae Ceausescu, like the rest of Romania, and though we in the West have heard some of the stories—a little Stalin, a little Mao, a little Kim Il Sung—maybe we're still not paying enough attention. Not enough for Ceausescu to spook the West the way other Communists did during the Cold War. The Conducator puts some space between himself and the Soviet Union, recognizes West Germany. Richard Nixon visits him in
1969
; you can find the picture of them standing together in front of a bank of microphones, waving at what might be a crowd. Nixon's got his arm around Ceausescu's shoulder. In
1983
, when the first George Bush is vice president, he calls Ceausescu one of Europe's good Communists.

But if you're living under him in Romania, it's probably hard for you to agree. There's the development of a massive, paranoid cult of personality, pretty much at the same speed that the personality itself loses touch with reality. There's the repression, the terror, prosecuted through a huge secret security apparatus. The willful ruination of his people, making them go hungry to pay the country's debts. The building of gargantuan projects—herding farmers off their land into apartment complexes with forty-watt bulbs and terrible heating—for no useful reason, except maybe control. Ceausescu turns life in Romania into a knock-down, drag-out struggle to survive; infant mortality gets bad enough that they stop counting babies until they're a month old. Meanwhile Ceausescu goes hunting for bears. He makes hundreds of men go up into the hills and drive the bears down into a valley by hollering and firing into the air with semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. He himself sits in a treehouse with a pair of Holland & Holland .
375
s someone else loads for him. By the time the bears are in the valley, they're almost shoulder to shoulder. Ceausescu can't miss, and doesn't. He kills twenty-four bears at once and has them dragged back to a hunting lodge to be laid out so he can be photographed with them. The forest rangers still remember it years later. They call it a massacre.

In hindsight, his death seems almost a foregone conclusion; by the end, it's obvious to everyone in Romania but him. A protest over the eviction of a pastor in December
1989
turns into a demonstration against Nicolae, who leaves the country to visit Iran while his security forces fire on the protesters. His power in Romania has been almost absolute since the late
1960
s.
This little uprising,
he must think,
it's not such a big deal.
On December
21
, Ceausescu stages a rally, a speech. It all seems to be going so well. He speaks; people chant and clap. And then, from out of nowhere, a scream rises and won't stop. It's the sound of a predator coming for Nicolae, the sound of a regime dying, though even then, the dictator doesn't understand what's happening. His voice falters. His hand rises, feeble, shaking a little. On the balcony he's speaking from, there's confusion.
Someone's shooting,
his wife Elena says.
Earthquake? Stay calm! What's wrong with you?
It's unclear who she's talking to. Then Nicolae himself:
Alo! Alo! Alo! Sit down and stay where you are!
They don't. On Christmas, Nicolae and Elena Ceaucescu are executed in Targoviste, a hour from Bucharest, sentenced to death after a fifty-five-minute show trial and five minutes of what can't be called deliberation. Against the wall, their hands tied behind their backs, Elena screams at her executioners while Nicolae sings from “The Internationale.” There's no order to start shooting. Fifty rounds later, there's an order to stop. The whole thing, except for the very beginning of the shooting, the moment of death itself, is videotaped and released to the Western news; in Romania, it's played on national television over and over, even as pro-Ceausescu forces keep shooting more people before giving up. It looks at first like the natural end of a popular uprising. There's that humming sense in the media that for Romania, the hell is over. But later it seems clear that it's not that simple. Maybe under the robe of the revolt was just another coup, a chance for someone who wanted power for themselves to put a bullet in Ceausescu's head and say it was what the people wanted. And maybe the people did want it, this tyrant's death; though it's hard to be sure that what comes afterward was what they had in mind to replace him. The crime. The instability. The long, hard road of recovery.

Madalina's twenty when they put the old regime in the ground. In December
1990
, she leaves Negostina looking for work in journalism. Her father doesn't understand why.
The same people who controlled the papers under Ceausescu control them now,
he says.
Why would you want to work for them?
She shakes her head.
Things will change soon,
she says to him.
Don't count on it,
he answers, but sees there's no talking her out of it. He gives her money, a long hug at the door.
Good luck, my best girl. Be safe.

She has a room in Cluj for a year, a small place near a stretch of apartment blocks. Every morning, a man with a shopping cart rattles by, filling it with cardboard. At the market that stretches along the train tracks that run into town, they're selling scraps of wood, scraps of metal, shoe leather, salvaged pieces of fabric, the kind of stuff we'd throw away; but there, people will use them to patch their jackets, seal up a loose seam, prop up the walls in the buildings that were built in the
1980
s and are already starting to crumble. Every night, Cluj's stray dogs stage gang wars outside her window. It becomes a joke she has with the neighbors, that they're living in a battle zone even though the revolution's been over for years. One day, two men slaughter and butcher a pig on the sidewalk; they take what they can use and leave a huge smear of blood and offal on the ground. The dogs take sides around the carnage before nighttime, and the fighting draws the neighbors to their windows to watch. Some of them make bets, on bottles of beer, a plastic bucket. A ride to the next town, because someone knows someone who can borrow his cousin's car, and favors are owed. They look at Madalina.
What are you doing here?
they say.

Things are better in Iasi; she finds work in a used bookstore that runs a kiosk on Pietonalul Lapusneanu, a narrow tree-lined street that runs downhill from Bulevardu Independentei to Strada Arcu. It's late April
1992
, and the weather is pleasant; people are starting to get out again. Madalina's outside all day. In the morning, two men dig a ditch down the middle of the street, lay in a drainage pipe, fill it with gravel, then cover it over with cement and leave it to dry. Seven minutes later, two American visitors on the other side of the street spy her kiosk open and cross. One of them steps right in the wet cement;
son of a . . .
the tourist says. Constantin Radalescu, sitting on a bench near Madalina's kiosk, tries not to laugh, decides not to hold it in. He's still smirking when the Americans are within earshot.