Or maybe he was being too naive. Maybe the doctors knew exactly what they were doing.
But steroids weren’t evil. He’d known guys who took them back in the nineties. Amateur bodybuilders trying to get ahead. An almost pro wrestler hoping to get the “look” so he could land a job with WCW, back in the day. Not evil guys.
Did they help? He couldn’t even say. But it didn’t seem to hurt. He didn’t buy the “ ’roid rage” hysteria.
Maybe he just didn’t have the right information. And maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg compared to what they were doing here, as Breanna had implied.
But could Stoner have survived the crash? Not from what he saw. No way.
Danny went back outside. Walking through the grounds, he could tell without even referring to the
The remarkable thing, he thought, was the lack of vandalism. Granted, the population in the surrounding area was small, but there must be kids somewhere, and he’d have thought at least the windows would have been tempting targets on a boring Saturday afternoon. He was tempted to put a rock through one himself, right now, just for the hell of it.
Going to his car, he caught a glint of light, a reflection of the sun sinking toward the nearby hills. Once again he had the sensation of being followed. But it was distant, and even MY-PID couldn’t detect anything. He stared for nearly ten minutes; unable to detect any movement, he got into the Renault and headed back for the main road.
Danny followed the road south to a slightly larger village about two miles away, driving through a bucolic countryside of rolling hills and farm fields. Small corners of the fields were cultivated, here and there. The idle land was a sign of the country’s current economic woes, where farmers couldn’t afford the money for seeds and new tractors, but from the distance, driving by, they only made the place more beautiful.
This area had been used by the rebels during Romania’s troubles. A good portion of the people here were ethnic Romanians, and in the wake of the Soviet collapse, there had been active attempts toward unifying the country with its neighbor. The Romanian rebels, however, were aligned with the Russians, who were at odds with the Moldovan government as well as the Romanians.
The politics were complicated, tangled in family relationships and issues that stretched back hundreds if not thousands of years. An American had no hope of untangling them, not even with MY-PID’s help, and Danny treaded lightly when he stopped at the police station and asked if he could speak to the police chief.
The woman at the desk didn’t speak English, and his pronunciation of the words MY-PID had given him was off far enough that he had to repeat them several times before she realized what he was saying. Even then she didn’t completely understand — the chief came out of the back room in a rush, thinking he was reporting a stolen car.
“Auto?” said the chief, who spoke a smattering of English.
“I’m here to look for a grave,” said Danny. “A friend of mine died here fifteen years ago. I think he was buried here.”
“Your car stolen?”
“No, my car isn’t stolen.”
“A friend took your car?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Danny took out the MY-PID, telling the chief it was a translating computer. He struggled with the words at first, but the more he spoke, the easier the pronunciation became.
When the chief finally understood what he was saying, he laughed. There hadn’t been a real crime in town in over a decade, he said, and he had worried not only for the town’s reputation, but his job.
That confusion cleared, the chief invited Danny to dinner with him. Danny wanted to see the cemetery before nightfall, and with the sun on the horizon, tried to pass.
“Not far,” said the chief, grabbing his hat.
“But—”
“We talk and we eat. Then, there is grave, we see.”
“I—”
“Come, come. Not far.”
The man’s hospitality was too generous to resist, and finally Danny agreed.
It wasn’t far at all. The chief, his wife, and their teenage son lived in a four-room cottage next door to the police station. The boy’s English was considerably better than his father’s, and he acted as translator through the meal. Danny explained why he had come — a friend of his had died in a helicopter crash some fifteen years before. He didn’t mention that he’d been working with the Romanian army, or even that he was an American, not knowing how those facts might be received.
“I remember the crash well,” said the chief, taking down a bottle of vodka from one of the kitchen cabinets. “That was during the guerrilla problems. Your friend was in the Romanian army?”
“He was an American,” said Danny. “He was an advisor. Helping them.”
“We are very close to Romania,” said the chief. “But separate countries, no? Like brothers.”
“Like brothers.”
“And brothers with America.”
“I hope so, yes.”
“Allies, dad,” said the boy. “Friends.”
“Allies, brothers — whatever words.”
The chief took out three glasses. He filled two to the brim; the third, for his son, contained just a sip of the liquor.
“Drink!” translated his son as the glasses were handed around. “To your health!”
The chief smiled. The vodka was raw and very strong. Danny couldn’t finish the entire shot in one gulp. This amused the chief, who refilled his glass.
“I was a young officer then,” he told Danny, leading him over to a pair of overstuffed chairs in the living room. His son came, too, standing by his father’s side and translating. “Fresh on the force. The state police. We were arranged differently — my supervisor was from another region. I came to the crash. It was a bog. Two miles from here.”
“I see.”
“A terrible tragedy. Many soldiers.”
“Was the aircraft on fire?” asked Danny.
“On fire? No. By that time, any fire would have been out. This was in the afternoon — it had crashed earlier in the day. The morning.”
“I see.”
“I don’t think there were any survivors.”
“Would you know where they were taken?”
“The bodies? Buried.”
“They didn’t take them back to Romania? A few months later?”
“One was. But the others stayed.”
“Why?” asked Danny.
The chief shook his head. Danny knew from the records MY-PID had found that three Romanian soldiers’ bodies had been repatriated within months of the end of the coup. But a combination of politics, ancestry — at least one of the soldiers’ families had come from this part of Moldova during the 1960s — and the difficulty of working with distant relatives had prevented all from being repatriated. The records were vague, but there were at least two soldiers still buried in Moldova.
“I’d like to visit the crash site as well as the cemetery,” said Danny. “Could you give me directions?”
“I’ll take you myself!” said the chief. He looked over at his wife, who was signaling that dinner was ready. “Here, we will have another vodka before eating.”
