“Yeah,” she said at last, allowing the anger to emerge as a verbal sneer. “Show me.”

Without another word, Father O'Rourke rose from the bench and led her out of the park and into the dark city.

Chapter Nine

Pitesti was a wall of flame in the night. A solid wall of refinery towers, tanks, cooling towers, and silhouetted scaffoldings spread for miles across the northeastern horizon, flame rising from a thousand valves, dark domes, and black buildings. It was a refinery town, Kate knew, but it looked like Hell to her as they approached.

O'Rourke had stopped by his room in the UNICEF building on Stirbei Voda Street and changed into what he'd called his mutant ninja priest suit: black shirt, black coat, black trousers, Roman collar. He had led Kate to the small Dacia sedan parked behind the gothic building and they had rattled across bricks and cobblestones to the Hotel Lido on Magheru Boulevard. Instead of stopping, O'Rourke had turned down Strada C. A. Rosetti and driven around the block, slowing each time he passed the darkened hotel.

“What are we“ began Kate the third time they inched past the hotel.

“Wait . . . there,” O'Rourke had said and pointed. A couple dressed in Western clothes had come out of the hotel, chatted with a tall man in a leather coat, and then all three got in the rear seat of a Mercedes waiting in the noparking zone at the curb. O'Rourke had pulled the Dacia into the darkness under the trees on Strada Franklin and turned the lights out. A moment later, when the Mercedes pulled out into the thinning traffic, he followed.

“Friends of yours?” asked Kate, a little put off by this cloakanddagger nonsense.

O'Rourke's teeth looked very white between the dark lines of his wellgroomed beard. “Americans, of course. I knew they were meeting this guy about now.”

“Adoption?”

“Sure.”

“Are you involved in it?”

O'Rourke glanced at her. “Not yet.”

They had followed the Mercedes down Bulevardul Magheru until the street became Bulevardul Nicolae Balcescu, swung west behind the Mercedes at the traffic circle in Plaza Universitatii, and followed it until the broad avenue of Bulevardul Republicii became Gheorghe GheorghiuDej. Once across the cementtrenched canal that once had been the Dimbovila River, they drove west through a section of Stalinist apartment buildings and electronics factories. The streets here were wide, littered with deep potholes, and largely empty except for clots of darkgarbed pedestrians, the occasional rushing taxi, and rattling trollies. The posted speed limit was fifty kilometers per hour, but the Mercedes soon accelerated to a hundred and O'Rourke flogged the Dacia to keep up.

“You're going to get stopped by a traffic cop,” said Kate.

The priest nodded toward the glove compartment. “Four cartons of Kents in there if I do,” he said, swerving to avoid a group of pedestrians standing in the middle of the boulevard. The avenue was illuminated by the sick yellow glow of occasional sodiumvapor lamps that were very far apart.

Suddenly the ghastly apartment complexes grew fewer, then disappeared altogether, and they were suddenly out in the country, accelerating even faster to keep up with the Mercedes' taillights. Kate saw a road sign flash by: A1, AUTOSTRADA BUCURESTIPITESTI, PITESTI, 113 KM.

The ride took a little more than an hour, and she and the priest spoke very little during it: Kate because she was so exhausted that she found it hard to form words, O'Rourke apparently because of a preoccupation with his own thoughts. The road was a shoulderless, potholed version of an American Interstate, although the countryside passing on either side was much darker than farmland Kate remembered in the States. Only the occasional village was visible in the distance from the highway, and even those glowed feebly, as if from a few kerosene lamps rather than electricity.

Pitesti was that much more of a shock with its wall of flame rising into the night.

The Mercedes took the first exit off the main highway into Pitesti and O'Rourke followed, accelerating now to close the distance. The access road soon took them to a dim avenue, then to a narrower street without streetlights. The apartment complexes here seemed grimmer than those in Bucharest; it was not yet ten P.m. but only a few lights glowed through curtains. The rawcement buildings were back-lighted by the pulsing orange glow reflected from low clouds. Kate and O'Rourke had rolled up the Dacia's windows, but acrid fumes from the refineries still entered the car and made their eyes water and throats bum. Kate thought again of Hell.

The Mercedes pulled down an even narrower street and stopped. O'Rourke pulled the Dacia to the curb just beyond an intersection.

“What now?” said Kate.

“You can stay here or come into the building with me,” said O'Rourke.

Kate got out of the car and followed him around the comer, across the street to the hulk of the apartment complex. The sound of a few radios or televisions came from the darkened upper stories. The spring air was chilly here, despite the hellish glow above them. The elevator inside was out of order; they heard footsteps echoing on the stairs above them. The priest gestured for her to hurry and Kate followed him up the steps in a halfjog. They could hear the heavy scrape of four people above them, but O'Rourke's footfalls were almost inaudible. She noticed that he had kept his Reeboks on and she smiled a bit even as she began to pant with the exertion.

They paused on the sixth floor, what would have been the seventh floor in America. O'Rourke opened the door from the stairway and they were assaulted by old cooking smells almost as abrasive as the chemical stink outside. Voices echoed down the narrow corridor.

O'Rourke held up one hand, motioning her to stay in the pool of darkness by the stairway, and then he moved silently down the hall. Kate thought that “mutant ninja priest suit” was about right; the tall man blended into the shadows between the dim lights.

Despite his command to stay behindor perhaps because of itKate followed him down the hallway, staying near the walls where it was darkest. She had a premonition of the scene she would see when she reached the open apartment door, and she was not disappointed.

Two Romanian men in leather jackets were standing with the American couple, translating and arguing with the man and woman who lived in the apartment. Three young children clung to their mother's legs, and there was the cry of a baby from an open bedroom door. The apartment was small, cluttered, and dirty, with a threadbare carpet littered with pots and pans, as if toddlers had been playing with them on the floor a moment before. The air was thick with the odor of fried food and dirty diapers.

Kate glanced around the edge of the door again. O'Rourke actually stood in the shadows just inside the apartment, as yet unnoticed by the arguing adults in the lighted room. The two Romanian men who had brought the Americans here were the usual mafioso, moneychanger type: greasy hair, one with a bandido mustache, the other with a threeday stubble, dressed in designer jeans and silk shirts under their leather jackets, both with a bullying, condescending attitude that Kate had seen on three continents.

The Romanian couple whose apartment it was were shorter, sallower, the wife holloweyed and frantic looking, the husband chattering away, his frequent smile little more than a facial tic. Amidst all of this, the American coupleyoung, blond, pinkcheeked and dressed in Lands' End casual clotheslooked overwhelmed. The American woman kept crouching to hug or smile at the toddlers, none of whom were very clean, but the children kept slipping behind their parents or sliding away into the dark bedroom.

“How much for this one?” asked the American ' man, reaching out to tousle the hair of the three or fouryearold clinging to his mother's skirt. The boy pulled back quickly. The taller of the Romanian guides snapped a question, then cut the Romanian father off in mid babble.