The Madonna on the Moon (53 page)

“Margul-Sperber!”

“Exactly! Alfred Margul-Sperber. ‘Hymn to the Party’!” Fritz smiled and then he had to grin. “Be honest, Pavel, weren’t my verses poetic masterpieces compared
to that rhymed nonsense in the schoolbooks?”

“Now look about. Where’er you bend your gaze, / Another party idiot is born, / And our Miss Barbu’s daily drunken daze, / Shall be in progress long before the morn,” I
quoted from memory. I reached for Fritz Hofmann’s cigarettes and lit myself a Marlboro. “By the way, Angela Barbulescu was totally aware of all your rewrites. And of our fantastic
solutions in math, too. She really did think you had talent as a poet, Fritz. Everything was different than we thought. Her death may not have been a suicide. What Julia wrote you isn’t
right. It’s possible that Angela’s death was only rigged to look like a suicide, that she was really hanged by someone else. On the day she was last seen in Baia Luna she was visited by
a certain Albin, a big strong guy with a wart on his cheek. This Albin was a buddy of Stefan Stephanescu’s and your father’s. Fritz, I know Angela Barbulescu’s death had nothing
to do with your dumb scribbling. It had to do with those filthy photos you found in your father’s moving crate.”

“What? What are you saying?”

I got out Angela’s diary and took out of it the lewd photo Fritz had left with me. Fritz started reading without another word. Occasionally he would narrow his eyes as if he couldn’t
believe what was in the green notebook. Not until he got to Angela’s entries about the Christmas Eve party at the apartment of the party boss Koka did Fritz make a comment.

“But what about this photo from my father’s moving crate? Before I left for Germany, you claimed the naked woman was the teacher Barbulescu, but it was her friend Alexa.”

“Right. But when I told you that, I hadn’t read the diary yet. How was I supposed to know that the two women had exchanged dresses?”

“I can’t believe this,” Fritz read aloud from Angela’s farewell letter to Stephanescu: “
The photos that Hofmann made of me with your disgusting friends are
repulsive. They kept my mouth closed for a long time. But no longer. As far as I’m concerned, Hofmann can send those pictures to the village priest. Do whatever you want with them. Hang my
picture on every lamppost. I’m not afraid anymore
.”

Fritz was pale. I showed him the half-burned photo of the young Angela puckering for a kiss. “That’s what she looked like before she took up with the wrong crowd.”

Fritz looked at the woman with the blond ponytail for several minutes, closed his eyes, and balled his fists. Then he took a deep breath. “Pavel, I’m starting to understand what must
have happened. On the day you were supposed to hang up Stephanescu’s portrait in our classroom, the teacher said you had to see the smiling doctor from Kronauburg in the right light. Not
everything that glittered was gold, she said, or something like that. I had no idea what she meant, but I told my father about it because I was so angry. My father was a pig. I can say that today
without hate, but he really was a filthy swine. As he was about to whip me with his belt again, I threatened that the Barbu was going to expose his friend Stephanescu, without really knowing what
there was to expose. I remember just how I grinned at my father and threatened him. ‘If Stephanescu falls, you’re done for. Without the secretary and the party bosses, you’re all
washed up.’ But I didn’t have a clue what I was saying.”

“What about your father? How did he react?”

“For one thing, he didn’t whip me black and blue. He let me be. For another, the next day he had me put a sealed envelope into Father Baptiste’s mailbox.”

I was burning with curiosity. My white-hot excitement made the last thirty-two years shrink to a single yesterday.

“These disgusting photographs of Angela must have been in that envelope!”

“That’s what we have to assume. But how could I have known? Of course, I asked what kind of letter it was, because my old man had never had anything to do with the priest. Now I know
my father lied to me. He said he was going to leave the church. His baptismal and marriage certificates were in there—his parish records. I just thought to myself, This chicken is making me
see to his affairs. But I left the envelope at home because you unexpectedly came over that afternoon to say that your grandfather had gotten a television for his birthday. I didn’t remember
the envelope until we were sitting in the tavern with Johannes Baptiste and the priest was telling those strange stories about Sputnik and the spaceflight project of that Korolev guy. Remember?
Before my idiotic attack on the Eternal Flame I said to you and Buba, the Gypsy girl, I had to take care of something. And I really did. I had to mail the envelope. But in the meantime, my father
had obviously taken it to the rectory himself. I hadn’t the faintest idea that he had taken such evil pictures of Angela Barbulescu. Now I see clearly that my father assumed that those
pictures would be the end of the Barbu in Baia Luna. All that remained was for her to hang herself.”

“But the pictures disappeared. They were never made public! Johannes Baptiste was murdered and the rectory turned upside down. After which, that idiot Kora Konstantin spread the rumor that
Angela Barbulescu had slit the pastor’s throat to silence him and then had condemned herself to death for the deed. Most men in Baia Luna, however, assumed that the Securitate had the pastor
on its conscience. They wanted to prevent him from preaching against the kolkhoz. What do you think?”

“I think the perpetrators were looking for the photographs. That’s why they killed the priest. But I can’t believe that my father would have gone that far. He was a mediocre
photographer, a mediocre person, a parasite on the powerful who fantasized about Nietzsche’s Superman. Perhaps he was useful for a while, until he made a mistake in the eyes of some
functionary or other. Johannes Baptiste may have been a senile crank, or maybe a wise man. I can’t judge that. But he was certainly not stupid. Once he held the photos of Angela in his hands,
he must have wondered, Who are the men in these pictures? Who takes such pictures? And why are they putting these shameful objects into my mailbox all of a sudden? I wonder why my father gave the
priest those photos. Did it make sense to ruin a woman who was already at the end of her tether? Dirty pictures don’t just sully the person in them. Most of the dirt remains invisible,
sticking to the person who took the pictures and distributed them. My father would only have used the photos as a threat but would never have really published them. And if you ask me who could have
had an interest in seeing these blackmail pictures disappear again, then I can only think of Stephanescu. If what the diary says is right, he saw to it that Angela never had her child. In the hands
of the priest, those photos could possibly have brought the entire truth about Stephanescu’s machinations to light. And the good doctor wanted to prevent that from happening.”

I confirmed Fritz Hofmann’s suspicion and told him about visiting the photo lab assistant Irina Lupescu, stealing the negative, and my failed attempt to bring down Stephanescu by pasting
the photographs onto the windows of his father Heinrich’s studio.

“And you say my father had the accident one day after the big party spectacular? By the time we got the news in Germany, he’d been dead for a week. My mother and I have never visited
his grave. The Kronauburg regional administration wrote us that Father had gotten caught under a truck on his motorcycle.”

“Without a helmet,” I added. “That’s what it said in the paper.”

Fritz Hofmann bit his lip. “There was nothing about that in the letter we got. But that’s impossible. He always wore his helmet. As a child, I never saw him get onto his motorcycle
without a crash helmet. Never. Now I don’t know what to think. I always thought Father was a swine. But maybe he was just a coward, a little cog in malevolent machine.”

“Maybe they were blackmailing him, too?”

“I don’t know.” Fritz was silent while he studied the photo he had last held in his hand thirty-two years ago. “Who are these horny guys next to Stephanescu the champagne
squirter, our new champion of national salvation?”

“The one nearest Stephanescu must be the doctor, Florin Pauker. He was the go-to guy for unwanted pregnancies. I don’t know the next one, but this one here, the big hulk with the
mustache and the wart, is Albin. He’s the one who was in Baia Luna the afternoon Angela disappeared. And the hand holding the bottle, on the right edge, could be the one they called Koka. The
party was at his place, and he was in a drinking contest with Albin.”

“You didn’t happen to come across a photo of Koka?” Fritz asked.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Pavel, don’t tell me you really didn’t know how potentially explosive these pictures are—or, rather, used to be?”

“Sure, of course. Stephanescu didn’t send the security agent Raducanu to find the darkroom in Baia Luna just for fun.”

“But on whose orders? It may be that even Stephanescu was only a middleman. If the Kronauburg District secretary kowtowed to anyone, it was this Koka from the capital. That’s why he
didn’t say a word when Koka insulted his Angela at the Christmas party. But he doesn’t have to fear the cobbler anymore. The man who peed on the oysters way back then fled in a
helicopter two days ago.”

“What? The Conducator? But what does the head of state have to do with Koka in Angela’s diary?”

“Man, Pavel! I thought you knew. They’re one and the same. Koka is the Conducator.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s obvious. Besides, everything’s there in the diary. At Christmastime in ’48, Stephanescu made fun of the uneducated shoemaker in the party, but he put his tail
between his legs when Koka called Angela a cheap Catholic cu—Well, you know what he called her.”

“But the Conducator met with the most powerful men in the world! He was no shoemaker!”

“Yes, he was. Koka was an early nickname. His onetime buddies called him that before they learned to fear him. Everyone in other countries knew that the Conducator insisted on mixing his
drinks with American Coca-Cola, even at state receptions. You wouldn’t believe how many jokes people made about it. The best Bordeaux and Coca-Cola! Champagne with Coke! All the big-shot
politicians would drop their jaws at state banquets. Of course, no statesman made jokes about it in public. But we journalists did. The Conducator is a total laughingstock, and so is his wife.
Angela wrote in her diary that he married somebody called Lenutza, the hot number who swallowed down the pissy oysters on Christmas Eve. Her maiden name was Petrescu. Lenutza was a real slut.
Later, they made her out to be a revolutionary heroine of the working class. As the woman at the side of the Conducator, of course, she couldn’t be called Lenutza anymore, and Lenny was too
cutesy for her. After the wedding she adopted the name Elena, probably to divert attention from her background. With only three years of elementary school, you’re not likely to be a chemist
with multiple Ph.D.’s, the state’s leading scientist, and the most powerful woman in the country—except maybe in this particular country.”

“It’s unbelievable. In Baia Luna we didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in the rest of the country.”

“Angela’s friend Alexa,” Fritz continued, “told her that Koka had loaned my father the money to buy a motorcycle and had given him the use of his apartment for those
special photo sessions. Apparently, some of the pictures were taken without the subjects’ knowledge. That can only mean that my father, Stephanescu, and Koka were in it together, until my
father made a mistake and showed the pictures of Barbu to Johannes Baptiste.”

I recalled the warning of the wiry-haired police commissioner:
Keep your flame turned down, or you’ll have a fire on your hands that will burn you badly
.

“So you figure that Stephanescu and your father were only the Conducator’s accomplices?”

“I have no idea, but it’s possible. They all profited, at least financially. My father gained access to the highest social circles even though he could hardly make a decent wedding
portrait. It doesn’t matter. But in any event, Stephanescu must have had a huge stake in keeping the champagne photo under lock and key. The picture couldn’t do any damage to Koka,
since he wasn’t in the picture. By now it’s all ancient history and doesn’t matter anymore. At this point, the Conducator and his Lenutza won’t have a shot at a normal
trial. If I read the situation right, they’ve only got a few hours left to live. And I’ll bet that as soon as that threat is gone, our party secretary from Kronauburg is going to be the
man of the hour.”

“What? That scumbag?”

“Sure. At the moment, Stephanescu is still holding back, but his people are already constructing a legend about him. They’ll say he was always a man of the people and an opponent of
the Conducator. Of course no one noticed anything of the kind. It’s known as ‘inner opposition.’ Besides, Dr. Stephanescu is supposed to have been pulling the strings that brought
down the Conducator. That’s how they’re clearing the path for his political future.”

“It’s . . . it’s not right” were the only words I could get out. Without thinking, I opened Angela Barbulescu’s diary: “‘
His hour will come when
he’s reached the top
.’ What does this mean, Fritz? Angela has been dead for more than thirty years.”

“It’s very mysterious. Oh, by the way, there’s someone else who’s displaying a remarkable interest in our Dr. Stephanescu, a woman to be exact. It was yesterday at the
press conference, as they were introducing the Front for National Salvation. There was a woman sitting among the journalists, and when all my other colleagues were holding up their microphones and
taking notes, she just sat there without moving. And she reminded me of Buba Gabor.”

“Buba? How come? What did she look like?”

“She looked good. I mean very good for her age. But not like people around here, and not like a Gypsy either. She was dressed in Western clothes, from southern Europe, I’d say. She
looked like a Spanish woman, or an Italian.”