When I emerged from my bedroom relatively early, Max was through in the tiny kitchen drinking coffee boiled in a steel pot on a gas ring. His own bedroom door stood open. No evidence of any prostitute.

“Has she gone already?”

“I changed my mind. The girls ask less after midnight when they get worried they won’t earn, but I couldn’t be bothered to wait.” If that was true-if he hadn’t just wanted to have an effect upon me. “So what of the second atrocity?”

“Atrocities involve lots of people, not just one.”

“Two now. Could be a cumulative atrocity? How many does it take? Actually, a single act of brutality qualifies as an atrocity.”

I ignored this casuistry, even if he was right.

Dogs howled and yodeled, and a few moments later the building shuddered briefly.

“Minor earthquake, don’t worry. There’s glacial moraine under Bucharest. Some land moves horizontally, some vertically, some is mixed. That’s why it’s very expensive to build here… The atrocity,” he pressed me.

So I described the brutal scene, though I did not mention my image of paintings by Soutine.

Max took me for a walk around his neighbourhood, which was distinctly run-down, although parts were being poshed up by new money, seemingly at random. In the middle of a potholed back street, asphalt burned and bubbled blackly.

Max laughed. “Some builder needs hot tar for a job, so he set fire to it. Obviously the middle of the street is safer than the sides.” He laughed. “Romanians don’t think of consequences. They’ll run you over in the street because they don’t think of prison as the result. I’m not kidding. They will not stop. Oops,” and he caught my arm and dragged me well to one side because a battered pick-up truck was indeed heading our way, and to avoid the fire, the driver mounted the pavement. Max had hurt my arm with his grip, though for a perfectly good reason, so I tried not to show pain.

We must have seen a score of skinny, roaming dogs already, variously marked, although all of the same general build.

“Ha,” said Max. “That crime scene reminds me of a joke. Which I’ve already used, by the way,” he emphasized. “A forgetful man visits a shortsighted gypsy fortune-teller. She looks at his palm and exclaims, ‘I see men with knives coming for you-and blood!’ He starts sweating with fear. She examines his palm even more closely and finally says, ‘You forgot to take off your pigskin glove.’ ”

“Ha-ha,” I said. A perverse urge tempted me to add: “I’m glad you already used it.”

“As for drivers and future consequences,” he went on, as though I’d said nothing at all, “Romanian people choose to be suspended in eternity. It’s still difficult for them to get over the dictatorship. Safer not to take responsibility.”

“‘Suspended in eternity’ is quite a phrase. I suppose you’ll be using that, too.”

He nodded, appeased or otherwise I couldn’t decide. Time was melting again, like the runny hot asphalt. Already it was afternoon. So Max led me circuitously to a café he favoured, for some beer.

Halfway through the second can of Ursus, Adriana phoned me.

“Are you free this afternoon?” I asked her. “What are we doing this afternoon?” I asked Max almost simultaneously.

“I need to buy a camera card,” was Max’s reply. “You can come or not.”

I was, of course, eager for Adriana to visit me privately on my own, although not entirely for the obvious reason of possible sex. Max out of the way would suit me very well, doubly so.

Max had already buzzed off, and I didn’t know when he’d be back. Given the vagaries of Bucharest, maybe hours as yet.

I kissed Adriana enthusiastically. “Lovely to see you! Look, do you think we could pop over the road for a few minutes? I’m very curious about the old woman in that cottage. If it’s halfway possible, I’m dying to see inside and see her close to. Could we pretend that I want to buy some eggs?”

“I suppose so. She might sell some eggs.”

“Oh, and don’t tell Max, will you not?”

Adriana grinned. “How mysterious you crime writers are. Men of mystery are exciting.”

The crone’s door was intricately carved, and worn, as though it preceded the city or had been transported here from a farm in the country, perhaps one of the tens of thousands bulldozed under Ceaus?escu for a dam or for socialist rationalisation.

The owner’s face was rutted, like carved and varnished wood itself, though her brown eyes were alert. Blackness scarfed her and draped her. After Adriana explained in Romanian, the woman uttered a brief reply or a cackle.

“Tell her,” I suggested, “that I’m a writer and, in addition to eggs, I’m very interested in her life here surrounded by modern city. I’ll pay her for her time, twenty dollars, no make that thirty.”

“Twenty,” said Adriana, and complied.

Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, the crone-Madame Florescu now, to be polite-admitted us into a gloomy room and stuck out a hand dark with dirt or the resin of age, into which I counted four five-dollar bills, which she sniffed before promptly disappearing them within her neckline as though she was some much younger entertainer who used her cleavage for tips.

I took in the items of rustic home-made furniture, the blackened pots and pans and jars of herbs and other stuff. Rather a lot of green candles stood around in old brass candlesticks, understandable if Madame Florescu had no mains power, as seemed likely. A faint sickly odour emanated from vases of marigolds and ox-eyed daisies which were red rather than white, and, strangely, from lilies-of-the-valley, which surely should be past their season, unless the Romanian variety was different or else the crone had patronised a florist’s shop for blooms flown from far away.

Coincidentally, Adriana was translating, “A present from my son,” when she herself really noticed those flowers and gasped and crossed herself.

“My son visits me once a week of an evening after he finishes working hard, a good boy,” Adriana continued dutifully interpreting despite whatever had shocked her.

“You would like him. He also can tell you remarkable things-in your own English. He’s clever.” And can do with some dollars himself, I thought. “You sleep only over the street. If you see a red Dacia outside here, probably on Thursday, come and knock. A red Dacia which says taxi, but my son is more than taxi-driver.”

Thursday was the day after next. If only Max would leave me alone that evening.

Mrs. Florescu discoursed about geese and her water butt and her man who had been killed by the Securitate. Apparently her man was a black marketeer. After a reasonable time she dried up and looked expectant. My twenty dollars had run out as though all the while a taxi metre had been running in her head. I said that I’d love to hear more from herself and her son on Thursday. I was becoming hungry for Adriana before Max would return. Besides, rather than hearing more domestic details, I wanted to know what had visibly shocked Adriana.

I departed with three eggs clutched in my hand. Once we had recrossed the road, yet another dog wandered close. My body hiding what I was doing, in case Madame Florescu was looking out, I dropped the eggs to make raw omelette. The pooch sidled swiftly towards this in a flinching manner, sniffed, then lapped, crunchy eggshells included.

“Oh, Paul! Butterfingers. Isn’t that what you say?”

Of course I didn’t want Max to have a clue as to what I’d been up to, by leaving eggs in his fridge.

“The dog’s need is greater than mine,” I assured her. “To tell the truth, I don’t like eggs much in any form.”

“Yes, it was those flowers,” Adriana confirmed once we were in the flat. “Those ones are used in the countryside to attract werewolves. Because of the smell.”