Lucian's blue Dacia was waiting at the boardedup church on the west side of town, just where he said he would be. There was enough light to see the young man's grin as he saw Kate.
O'Rourke paid the Gypsies while Kate was engulfed in Lucian's hug. Then he shook the priest's hand vigorously and hugged Kate again.
“Hey, cool, you really did it. You got in with the Gypsy smugglers. Outstanding.”
Kate leaned against the Dacia and watched the Land Rovers bounce back into the wooded countryside. She caught a final glimpse of Voivoda Cioaba's gold grin. Then she looked at Lucian. The young medical student's haircutwas more severe, almost punk, and he was wearing an Oakland Raiders baseball jacket.
“Did you have a good trip?” asked Lucian.
Kate crawled into the backseat of the Dacia as Lucian dropped into the driver's seat and O'Rourke tossed the luggage in the rear.
“I'm going to sleep until we get to Bucharest,” she said, laying her head on the cracked vinyl of the seat. “You drive. “
Chapter Twenty-four
Kate was on the Orient Express again, but she could not remember how she got there or why. The compartment was even smaller than the one they had ridden in from Budapest to Lokoshaza, and this one did not even have a window. She and O'Rourke were squeezed together even more tightly than before, their legs all but interlocked as he sat across from her on the low shelf. The bunk she sat on was larger, however, and it was made up with the gold duvet cover and oversized pillows that she and Tom had bought in Santa Fe years ago. And the compartment was warmer than before, much warmer.
She and O'Rourke said nothing as the motion of the train rocked them back and forth and from side to side. With each motion, their legs touched more fullyfirst their knees, then the inside of their knees, and finally their thighsnot rubbing against one another of their own volition, but making contact passively, inexorably, insistently, through the gentle rocking of the train.
Kate was very warm. She was wearing not the wool trousers she had actually traveled in, but a light tan skirt she had treasured in high school. The skirt had ridden up as their legs rubbed. She realized that each time she rocked forward her knee lightly brushed Father O'Rourke's groin, and each time the rhythm of the train rocked him forward, his denimclad leg brushed gently up her inner thigh until his knee almost touched her there as well. His eyes were closed although she knew that he was not asleep.
“It's warm,” she said and took off the blouse her mother had made for her when she entered junior high at a private Boston academy.
There was a rap at the carved wooden door and the conductor came in to collect their tickets. Kate was not embarrassed that she was wearing only a bra and that her skirt was hiked up to her hipsafter all, it was their cramped and overheated compartmentbut she was a bit surprised to notice that the conductor was Voivoda Cioaba. The Gypsy punched their tickets, winked at her, and showed his gold teeth. Kate heard the lock click shut when he left.
Father O'Rourke had not opened his eyes while the Gypsy conductor was in the room, and Kate was sure that the priest was praying. Then Mike O'Rourke did open his eyes and she was sure that he had not been praying.
There was no upper bunk, merely the queensized lower berth. Kate sank back into the pillows as O'Rourke stood, leaned forward, and laid his body half atop hers. His eyes were very gray and very intense. She wondered what her own eyes were revealing as O'Rourke rolled her skirt the final few inches to her waist and deftly slid her underpants down her thighs, past her knees, off her ankles. She did not remember him undressing, but now realized that he was wearing only Jockey shorts.
Kate set her fingers in O'Rourke's hair and pulled his face closer to hers. “Are priests allowed to kiss?” she whispered, suddenly fearful that she would get him in trouble with his bishop, who was riding in the next compartment.
“It's all right,” he whispered back, his breath sweet on her cheek. “It's Friday.”
Kate loved feeling his mouth on hers. She let her tongue slide between his teeth at the same instant she felt him grow hard against her thigh. Still kissing him, she lowered both hands to his sides, slid fingers beneath the elastic of his shorts, and tugged out and down with a movement so smooth that it was as if both had rehearsed it for years.
She did not have to guide him. There was the slightest second of hesitation and then the slow, warm moment of his entering and her encircling him. Kate ran her hand down his muscled back and spread her palm on the warm crease of his buttocks, pulling him closer even when he could come no closer.
The train continued to rock them so that neither had to move, merely surrender to the gentle swinging of their bed in the car on the clacking rails as the rocking grew quicker, the moist warmth more insistent, the gentle friction more urgent.
Kate had just opened her mouth to whisper Mike O'Rourke's name when the door slid open with a crack of the broken lock and Voivoda Cioaba stepped in with his golden grin. Behind him were four of the night men dressed in black hoods.
Someone was shaking her by the arm.
Kate awoke slowly, each sense responding sluggishly, sense impressions arriving separately like tourists with watches tuned to different time zones. For a moment she was awake and technically aware but also totally disoriented, her mind stranded in that egoless void which the mind allows for only scant seconds upon awakening from the deepest of sleeps.
Lucian was bending over her, his youthful face illuminated by the small oil lamp he carried.
“It's time to go to the Arab Student Union,” he whispered. Then he set the lamp down and left her small room.
Kate sat up, feeling tiredness pull at her even as the physical echoes of her dream grew fainter and fled. She could not quite remember . . . something about Tom? Or had it been O'Rourke or Lucian? The cold air in the dark room made her shiver.
Memory pressed on her like a cold and unwelcome suitor. Tom. Julie. Joshua! She felt the pain of her left arm and the sir was suddenly rank with the smell of smoke and ashes. Sorrow threatened to push her into the cold darkness that surrounded her. The memories of the past few weeks were not discrete images, but a single, inseparable mass with a terrible weight which she kept at bay only by concentrating on the next thing that had to be done.
The Arab Student Union.
As full consciousness returned, Kate remembered that it was not her first night in Bucharest, despite the strangeness of the basement room she was sleeping in, but her third. It was raining. Pellets of sleet pounded against the small window set high on the wall. She remembered now that it had been raining for each of the three days and nights she had been back in Bucharest.
She looked down and realized that she had fallen asleep that afternoon in her corduroy pants and dark sweater. There was a small frameless piece of mirrored glass propped on the battered dresser near the door and Kate used it to pull a brush through her hair until she finally gave up. She slung a purse over her shoulder and went to join Lucian in the other room.
The medical student had found Kate and O'Rourke a basement apartment on a narrow street in an old section west of Cismigiu Gardens. The apartment consisted of Kate's tiny bedroom and the roughwalled “sitting room” where O'Rourke slept on a couch during the few hours he was there. The toilet upstairs was “private” in the sense that no one lived on the ground floor or first floor because of “renovations,” although Kate had seen no workers or signs of recent work on the gutted rooms up there. The massive metal radiators in the basement were as cold and dead as steel sculptures; the only heat came from a small coalburning fireplace in Kate's bedroom. Lucian had brought a heavy sack of coal along with a warning that the burning of it was still illegal, and Kate tried to restrict her need for warmth to one lump in the morning while getting dressed and to a tiny fire in the evening.