LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Maybe. But you know who the real criminals are? The city authorities, they’re the ones who allowed the neighbourhood to go to hell.”

      Ferentari, the Bronx of Bucharest. Streets lined with boarded-up buildings filled far beyond capacity by Roma under the sway of local mafia types.

      Kevin was a convenient patsy. Doubly so because Bucharest was currently hosting the Conference of European Cities, Boerescu explained. An organization dedicated to social and urban planning, dynamic management of human resources, alternative solutions to drinking-water supplies. Soporific subjects each and all, but this year the organizers were lucky. On the menu: the Romani “problem,” which affected most European countries. And now this criminal fire everyone was talking about. Max now understood why, at the Intercontinental, he’d had to fight his way through a thick crowd. They’d been a harried bunch, computer bags over their shoulders, eyes tired after long flights. Handshakes and hugs, friendly pats on the back and laughter. Periodic reunions, probably. Paris one time, Rome or Venice the other. This year Bucharest and its damn Roma.

      Pariahs who haunted the cityscape, an underclass to be wary of. Where were they from, exactly?

      Northern India. Around the year 1000 they left their country for an unknown reason — perhaps chased off by an invader, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, it was sometimes claimed — and made their way west through Afghanistan, Turkey, then Greece, where they were first mentioned in the thirteenth century. The Greeks gave them the name atzigani — still used to refer to Hungarian Roma, or tziganes — a reference to a heretic sect that practised palmistry. Today they preferred Rom or Roma, meaning “man” in Romani, their most frequently spoken language.

      After Greece, waves of migrants moved to Wallachia and Moldavia. They were enslaved, not to be freed until 1856. In the fifteenth century, other groups entered Europe, coming from the east through Bohemia. They’d been offered safe passage by the king. From then on they became known as Bohemians, or Egyptians, because they were believed to be from “Little Egypt,” a part of Greece. The Egyptians mentioned in Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid? That was them. In English, Egyptians became Gypsies. In Spanish, Gitanos. In Spain they were divided into two groups: those living in Catalonia in the north, and those in Andalusia in the south.

      Over the centuries, Roma travelled across Europe, living from one end of the continent to the other. More often sedentary than not these days, they now lived all over the globe.

      They’d always been choice victims for human cruelty. During the Second World War, they were exterminated in death camps alongside Jews. A tragic story that continued to this day. Second-class citizens in most countries. Foreigners in every land, characterized only with faults: chronic begging, knavery, black magic …

      “Here, I want to offer you a gift.” Boerescu held up a pin in the shape of a small candy cane. Max had noticed everyone in Bucharest was wearing similar pins, even tourists.

      Max fixed the pin to his coat.

      “Do you have time for a drink?” Boerescu asked.

      “Another time.”

      The two men agreed to meet the next day after Max’s meeting with Adrian Pavlenco. Max flagged down a cab and offered Boerescu a lift. A Dacia, the Romanian copy of the Renault 12. Max opened the door for his fixer, then folded up the walker and placed it in the trunk. “Intercontinental Hotel. But first …”

      “Victoriei Avenue,” Boerescu said.

      Max hadn’t been in Bucharest since 1989, in the last days of the Ceauşescu regime. He’d been on a job, promising to line the pockets of a bureaucrat responsible for IT procurement in the dictator’s government if he chose Max’s client instead of an Australian competitor. The city then had been dreary, whatever new construction there was in a state of almost immediate disrepair. He’d seen a tourist or two, at most. Eaten in awful restaurants. Stayed in cavernous hotels.

      Today Bucharest was unrecognizable. Max had been expecting a sleepy city, still licking its wounds from the previous century. Instead, he discovered an animated capital, its sidewalks teeming with young people, teenagers who’d never known the Ceauşescu era, for whom the revolution of 1989 was already ancient history.

      At a red light a group of Roma pestered tourists. Children were pulling on the clothes of passersby.

      Boerescu turned toward Max. “They’ve got another trick. They saunter into a butcher’s, right, and start feeling up the meat in the displays, waiting for the owner to notice them. When he does, he gives them the tainted meat just to get rid of the bastards.”

      He burst out laughing. “The Lovari, they used to be horse traders a long time ago. Well, now, they’ve become used car salesmen. Once upon a time, they applied wax on old nags to make them look younger. Today they tamper with odometers!”

      Boerescu told him about other tricks of the Romani trade. Names, for example. They changed theirs depending on the country they were travelling through. Multiple identities to confuse the gadje.

      “Gadje?”

      “Non-Romani 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

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