“Romania.”
He pointed to the Google box on my toolbar. “Type in the person’s name and then Romania. And then something like royalty or royal family.”
I typed in Violeta Bell, Romania, royal family. “Now what?”
He sighed at my ignorance. “Click on the Google Search box.”
I clicked. My computer screen blinked just once and told me it had found 14,600 websites for me to check out. I was amazed. And a little annoyed. Eric always made the research projects I gave him seem like a major chore requiring almost metaphysical skill. “That’s it? I could have James do this for me!” Then I started scrolling down. Clicking on the websites. Reading. Finding absolutely nothing useful. “This could take all day,” I grouched.
Eric forced a handful of M amp;Ms into his mouth. “Let’s refine it a bit.”
“How do I do that?”
“You need something more specific.”
I stole a few M amp;Ms from his bag. Popped them in my mouth one by one while I thought out loud. “I doubt that Romania has had a king or queen for a long time. So if there are any living royals, they’re hanging out there like forgotten socks on a clothesline. How about we try pretenders to the throne? ”
He nodded his approval. I typed it in and clicked the Google Search box again. My computer screen presented me with a whole new collection of websites-430,000 of them in fact. But my dismay was short-lived. The very first site gave me exactly what I was looking for. It listed the modern-day pretenders to the throne for every country in the world. Including Romania.
The would-be king of Romania was, in fact, the former king of Romania, eighty-five-year-old Michael I.
The website also contained a ton of historical background on the Romanian monarchy. I was in seventh heaven. Eric was bored silly. He slid down in his chair and fished a bundle of comic books out of the enormous cargo pocket in his shorts. “Who are you-Captain Kangaroo?” I asked.
“Captain who?”
I keep forgetting how old I’m getting, that even someone in their early thirties like Eric would have no childhood memory of the avuncular Saturday morning television star pulling carrots out of his big pockets for Bunny Rabbit. “Never mind, Comic Book Boy,” I hissed. “You just go ahead and fritter your life away with that crap while I make America safe for little old ladies.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said. He buried his nose in an X-men adventure. I started mining the website for answers.
It was hard for me to believe, but Romania had only been an independent nation since the 1860s. That’s when it pried itself loose from the old Ottoman Empire. In 1881, the Romanian parliament imported a German prince named Charles and crowned him as the nation’s first constitutional king-Carol I.
Carol I had no living heirs. So when he died in 1914, his nephew, Ferdinand, became king.
King Ferdinand died in 1927. But his son, named Carol after his great uncle, was more interested in running around Europe with his mistress than running the country. So Carol’s five-year old son, Michael, became king. That’s right, he was five. Talk about dumping more on your children than they can handle. Anyway, little Michael’s reign lasted just three years. In 1930, his playboy father had a change of heart. He booted the boy off the throne and had himself crowned Carol II.
European dictators were in vogue in those years, and so Carol II dissolved the parliament and ruled as an absolute monarch. Which was absolutely a mistake. He was forced to abdicate in 1940, and Michael, now nineteen, was put back on the throne.
Michael reigned until 1947, when the Communists forced him to abdicate. He settled down in England with his new wife, a French princess named Anne, and went to work as a commercial airline pilot.
Romania suffered under a succession of Communist rulers. The last one, Nicolae Ceausescu, was the worst of the lot. A popular uprising drove him from power in 1989. He and his equally hated wife, Elena, were arrested, tried in a makeshift courtroom, and executed just outside the door.
Today, Romania has an elected president and parliament. It also has a small gaggle of royalists who want to bring the monarchy back. They want a British-style king or queen who presumably would clank around in a turnip- shaped carriage and wave at the people. The website, however, reported that Michael I had little interest in getting his old job back.
My scroll bar had reached the bottom of the page. I slapped my computer on the side of the head. “Don’t stop there you lazy son-of-a-bee!”
My screeching brought Eric back to the real world. And he wasn’t happy about it. “What is your problem?”
“This damn website only lists one pretender,” I said. “You’d think there’d be oodles.”
“Well, Maddy, there are oodles of other websites.”
“I can’t spend all day playing with this thing, Eric. I have a cabbage waiting for me at home.”
Eric dog-eared his comic book. “See all these underlined words in blue sprinkled throughout the text? Those are called links. When you click on a link, another site with more information on the topic comes up.”
I clicked on Michael I. Another site appeared. “Well, look at that!”
He told me to “enjoy” and went back to his superheroes. I started scrolling and reading, and taking notes on the back of a corporate missive outlining the most recent changes in our medical coverage: Michael and his wife had four daughters. None of them were named Violeta. None of them were within twenty years of being old enough to be Violeta.
That website was a dud. But it did have a very useful link to the genealogy of the Romanian royal family. It listed every king, queen, prince, princess, count, and countess going back to the first Romanian king, Carol I. And among them was a Violeta!
My giddiness was short-lived. “Wouldn’t you know it,” I grumbled. “This Violeta was born in 1873. Which would make her fifty years too old to be our Violeta. And unless she was one of those vampires from Transylvania, much too dead to be our Violeta.”
I took notes on her nonetheless: Her full name was Violeta Dragomir. She was the daughter of a Romanian cavalry officer of low nobility, and not from the principality of Transylvania, but Moldavia. When she was seventeen, she married Prince Anthony, the twenty-one-year-old son of King Carol I. Prince Anthony died when he was twenty- three and Princess Violeta slipped into oblivion.
I asked Eric how I could find out if Violeta was a common name in Romania. He looked at me like I was a Ph. D. candidate in English who’d forgotten how to spell cat. “Duh-Google female Romanian names.”
I typed it in. Several websites agreed that Violeta was a rather common name in Romania. Next, I Googled her last name. Bell didn’t sound very Romanian to me, but you never know. Again I got several websites with long lists of Romanian surnames. Bell wasn’t on any of them. Neither was Bellescu, or Belleanu, or Bellici, or any other names that might be Americanized to Bell. “You do any of that research on Violeta yet?” I asked Eric, with a pretty good notion of what the answer would be.
“It’s only been four days, Maddy.”
“I was just wondering if she was ever married.”
“Didn’t Gabriella’s story say?”
“Violeta told her no,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I tell people no sometimes, too.”
I went back to the Romanian genealogy website. I scrolled up and down through the dozens of royals listed, both the living and the dead, in the hope of finding something to justify the late Sunday dinner Ike was going to get.
Then there it was. A very curious adjective. In the comments next to King Carol II. You remember him, don’t you? The one who let his five-year-old son be king? So he could cavort with his mistress? Anyway, it said this: “When Carol renounced his right to be king, his recognized heir, Michael, was crowned instead.” The curious adjective, of course, was the word recognized. Did that mean there was an unrecognized heir or two?
I started clicking links like a madwoman. And I found the website of a man who claimed to be the great- grandson of King Carol I, and therefore the rightful heir to the Romanian throne. “Well, would you look at this, Mr. Chen! Pretender number two!”
Eric didn’t answer. And that’s because he was no longer sitting next to me reading comic books. I scanned the newsroom. Some time during the last half hour or so he’d wandered off to play with the boys in the sports
