people, if you prefer. According to some historians, the word comes from Mahmud of Ghazni, the sultan responsible for their exile from India.”
And other times, they all carried identical names, as in the Nazi concentration camps. Everyone was called the same thing to confuse the SS. Roma were absolute experts at fake papers: from forged passes given by King Sigismund of Bohemia in the fifteenth century to Guatemalan passports the Roma used to flee the Netherlands during the German Occupation …
“A wily bunch, let me tell you,” Boerescu said.
Max felt kinship with the Roma. Fake papers, multiple identities …
Two world wars, forty years of totalitarianism. In Romania the Roma were only now beginning to recover from a century of atrocities. What would one more fire, one more tragedy change? And yet, since the fall of Ceauşescu, the situation of the Romani people had gotten worse, Boerescu explained. As if Romanians had been holding back from settling a few scores. Harassment, fights, even pogroms. Romanians were venting their historical misfortunes on the most unfortunate of them all, it seemed. Not a week went by without a new altercation between Roma and Romanians. Extreme right wingers, neo-Nazis, drunks, and lunatics. And this collective madness had migrated to other countries. The number of aggressions against the Roma in Eastern Europe was impossible to count. Since 1989 the Roma had taken advantage of the opening up of borders to migrate westward. In Germany outbreaks of violence had forced Berlin to react. An agreement with the Romanian government had been forged: Romania would take the migrants back as long as Germany paid for their return flights and gave a remittance to Bucharest. Same thing in France. The minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, chartered a few planes to repatriate these “undesirables” who squatted near Paris. A solution that truly wasn’t one, according to Victor Marineci.
“And who’s that?” Max asked.
A Romani MP. A star in Parliament, really, Boerescu explained. The Roma had been looking for a strong political leader for a long time now, after years of chaos among their ranks. They accepted no authority, according to Boerescu, though they would make you believe they did. Hence the proliferation of one-acre kings over the centuries.
Marineci, however, was cut from different cloth. A member of the International Romani Union representing all European Roma, he’d risen above the buffoonery. Elected to Parliament under the banner of the Vurma Party, he dedicated his life to the defence of the Romani people. He was the party’s founder, actually. Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu’s government took him seriously. Marineci was one of the most eloquent — and efficient — members of the opposition.
“Nomadic Roma are only a minority now,” Boerescu continued. “Ten, maybe fifteen percent. The others are parked in shantytowns. Today the kumpaníya is in ruins. Awful, absolutely awful.”
Marineci was positioning himself as a standard-bearer for these unfortunate souls, with some success, Boerescu explained. “He passed hate-crime legislation in Romania, making punishments for anti-Roma crimes more severe.”
Anti-Roma crimes like the fire on Zăbrăuţi Street where twenty-three Roma had perished …
4
As the taxi trundled down the long boulevard, a memory overtook Max O’Brien. Another city, another time, but a long drive nonetheless, in New York instead of Bucharest. Kevin was being held in a police station in Astoria. Or so he’d told Max over the phone.
Max’s ringing cellphone had woken him up. He was sitting on the side of his bed. Behind him, Susan, sleeping deeply. She was a young insurance broker who worked out of an office on Wall Street. He’d been seeing her for six months now in preparation for a grift.
“I need you to bail me out,” Kevin repeated.
Caroline had no idea, of course. Kevin was calling his friend to pull him out of this rough spot before his wife was any the wiser. Max hung up and hurried to find some clothes, still holding the cellphone.
“Who was it?” Susan asked sleepily.
“My owner. Water damage in my kitchen. I’ve got to go down there.”
Max leaned over the woman and slid his hand along her side. Her body was warm, heavy in the folds of sleep. He didn’t want to leave the bed.
“You’re insured, I hope …” she murmured.
Max smiled. Even half-asleep, her job came first.
Max had raced through Manhattan in his new Saab, which he’d purchased to demonstrate his rapid ascension in the world of finance to Susan. He reached Astoria and made his way to the police station. A typical scene: officers warming their hands with paper coffee cups. A waiting room sparsely populated by friends and family come to rescue someone from themself. People, like Max, who’d been woken up in the middle of the night to be told that their cousin, their son, their brother had been up to no good.
Kevin Dandurand had appeared, haggard but relieved. He’d been implicated in a series of warehouse robberies, monthly rentals along the East River. Kevin had joined up with a gang of amateur thieves who hung out in a coffee shop near the gym where he trained. His accomplices all had criminal records, but not Kevin; he would be getting off with a fine and community service. Hours spent teaching young delinquents how to run the ten thousand metres, for example.
A heavy silence in the car. Max had felt as if he were driving home a teenage son caught destroying the flower beds in front of his high school. He didn’t know what to say: he’d never been a good shoulder to cry on. No, encouraging words had never been his strong suit.
“They’re going to take my green card away,” Kevin finally said.
There was the crux of the problem. Sure, he could lie and keep his community service hidden from Caroline, but how could he possibly explain why he could never work in the United States again?
“They might even force me to leave the country.”
It was a possibility, and a dark one at that, especially since things were finally beginning to line up for Caroline. Serious periodicals were knocking at her door, some even ordering pieces from her.
If she went back to Canada now, it would be all over.
Not to mention Kevin’s athletic career. It was time for the young man to look at reality as it was and accept that his best performances were behind him. His private trainers were only exploiting his unrealistic dreams, his hopes. No one had the courage to tell him the truth: “Listen, Kevin, you’ve got to move on.” In a way, he was paying these people to convince him to the contrary; if Richard Voight and others were interested in Kevin’s career, surely it was because they believed in his abilities, in his future as an athlete. But he was slowly realizing it was just a pipe dream.
Kevin sighed.
“Your father could take you back,” Max suggested. “You could work in the factory, maybe. You could ask him.”
“Packaging?” he replied scornfully.
“I’m sure you could keep training in Montreal, right?” Max didn’t dare look at himself in the rearview mirror. He, the con man, giving a speech worthy of a priest.
“I’ll never go back.”
Kevin was never one to speak of his troubled relationship with his father.
