Synopsis

Dr. Dan Trix didn’t remember the traffic or the architecture on the ride from the Bucharest airport to his hotel. He did remember machine gun bullets raking the side of the car. Also in the limo were an old friend hired to confer with political opponents of the Prime Minister, and a physician dedicated to fighting corruption in the medical profession in Romania. Was the attack from those intent on maintaining the status quo in the medical industry? Was it someone determined to keep the current political party in power? It was suppose to be a simple job advising prospective buyers how to proceed when acquiring a Romanian winery. But corruption is so imbedded within the business and government culture in Romania such that nothing is simple. Certainly not selling a winery to foreigners.

Chapter 1.

I was thinking, in a world gone crazy, will the crazies think the world is normal?

Something similar happened in India a few decades ago. The U.S. sent shiploads of wheat without providing the equipment required to remove the grain from the docks. We also gave them computers destined for villages that had no electricity.

Bucharest’s Henri Coanda International Airport, also known as Otopeni since the airport lies inside Otopeni city limits, was inaugurated as a base for the German Air Force during WWII. Romania’s primary airport has been constantly upgraded and enlarged over the years, most recently the expanded and sparkling airside concourse that was inaugurated in 2011.

The place is bright and modern.

And the village has no electricity.

There are dozens of self-check-in kiosks but no one thought about technological support. Finding one that works is cause for rapture. There’s an acre of assisted check-in counters but only a few have attendants. Queues are so long they blend into one another and people are not sure which line they’re standing in.

But the place looks great.

I was standing in line at passport control with passengers who had arrived nearly simultaneously on other flights. It was an easy two-hour flight on Lufthansa in business class from Munich to Bucharest. I wouldn’t have flown business class if I were paying. It wasn’t obvious that the wait was going to be any shorter than the flight. The docks and electricity bit again.

Since cell phones aren’t allowed until exiting customs, there were some nervous people milling about. A few would have appreciated the opportunity to phone drivers or relatives, advising them of their status. That’s the nervous minority. The nervous majority was suffering from cell phone withdrawal. They fondled their phones and tapped blank screens and pushed unresponsive buttons and chewed on the corner of their lips, some on the corner of the OtterBoxes. These were desperate people, not easily engaged in conversation.

I was slowly panning the crowd, an idiot’s delusion.

Being raised in a small town where you recognized everyone everywhere, I live with this indelible notion that no matter where I am, no matter how preposterous, I’ll see someone I know. It has happened.

When I was routed by the Department of Defense through Bangkok on my way to Budapest—figure that one out—a lady in my hometown advised me that her son, a schoolmate, was a dentist in Bangkok and I should look him up. That was it. He’s a dentist with the military in Bangkok. Look him up. It was then a city of four million

With a twelve-hour layover, I headed for Patpong. Before the Vietnam war, it was a lazy shopping area on the outskirts of town. Then came the war. GIs on R & R discovered a couple nightclubs in Patpong. Soon after that, the place became a profit center unto itself.

There are a lot of attractions and distractions in Patpong. Various services are offered at competitive prices. I walked the area as a tourist would a museum; only to look, not to touch, not to buy.

I had just exited a bar where the featured attraction was a naked Thai woman and a stack of one-baht coins. Not the sort of thing you see in Nebraska very often.

I was looking over my shoulder and smacked into someone who must have been looking over his shoulder.

That someone was the dentist.

Things like that give you faith in your delusions.

It felt very late summer or early autumn, I wasn’t sure about nature’s climate schedule in Romania. From the look of the crowd it was the dead of a dismal winter; dark, heavy clothing on everyone.

Then again, it could have been a fashion statement.

You can stroll through Romanian history and find that geographic area occasionally conquered and occasionally inhabited by Goths and Huns and Magyars and Tartars. You stir and mix that DNA legacy in a hot cauldron in a cold castle over time and what emerges is a something closer to Amy Weinstein than Lady Gaga. For those who gave up on movies and music when Elvis died, closer to Elizabeth Taylor than Marilyn Monroe.

Although the covers in women’s magazines would lead you to conclude that the majority of women in the country are sandy blondes, that conclusion is not verified in the airports. The look is shaved anthracite and sun-blanched olive oil. Combine that with black leather jackets and black boots with lots of buckles, and four-inch heels and silver rivets on large purses that compliment silver loops and necklaces and maybe it’s not autumn; maybe it is a fashion statement.

I panned the crowd as slowly and thoroughly as David Lean had the Arabian Desert when the guy ahead of me stooped to set his briefcase on the floor. I only saw his profile. That was enough.

“Garry,” I said.

He turned, slightly confused and surprised.

“Company F-2 leads by example,” I said.

“Trix, what the hell are you doin’ here?” We shook and hugged.

“Waiting for the tide to roll,” I said.

“Ain’t we all,” he said in that deceptive ah-shucks Kansas-culture dialect. That’s the one where the lower jaw is frozen in place and the tongue does all the work.

“I’m here on a consulting project,” I said.

“Well, we ain’t in the same pod but looks like we’re both peas,” he said. He wore a light wool navy-blue-and-white herringbone topcoat, the kind common to gentlemen who emerge from Savile Row tailor shops. Though I am not a frugal man, I’d guessed the cost of his charcoal suit with dark blue pinstripes might equal the cost of my sport coat collection, including the Brooks Brothers I was wearing at the moment. The thread count in his periwinkle blue shirt surely exceeded mine by a factor of two. Top button open, his tie was probably in his rust-colored leather Tumi briefcase with the shoulder strap.

“Who are you consulting?” I asked as we inched forward. Inched was literal not figurative.

“Hell, I don’t know. I open the envelope, call a limo, drop the check off at the bank, get on the airplane and hope to hell there’s someone at the other end to tell me what I’m doing there.” He slapped my back and chuckled. “When people pay me a shitload of money to hear what I have to say, they listen. Doesn’t seem to make much difference if I know what I’m talkin’ about.”

Garrison McKenzey III was my Recondo buddy in OCS, Officers Candidate School. Recondo is a few days of sleeping wet and cold, constantly hungry, getting lost, stumbling around groggy and exhausted, and learning that even when you’re wet and cold and hungry and lost and groggy and exhausted, you had damn well better find something inside you that allows you to rise above all that because a lousy decision doesn’t lead to a stubbed toe, it leads to a kid without a dad, a woman without a husband. Garrison had found it.

“What are you going to be telling these people that you don’t know anything about? Did you understand that?”

Garry nudged his briefcase forward with his foot. I kept my leather backpack on my shoulder and tugged my carryon forward.

“Sure did. That’s the way I talk all the time. Long-term economic growth,” he said.

“A retired lieutenant colonel lecturing on long-term economic growth?”

“I sit on twenty-five boards, work in fifteen different countries. I listen. I look around. Amazing how much you can learn when your eyes are open and your mouth ain’t. Get down to it though, I got a good booker, like having a good pulling guard; he opens the hole, I run through. I got the easy part. What brings you to this part of the world, Trix?”

“Wine,” I said.

“Drinkin’, sellin’, buyin’?”

About that time a chiseled guy in a dark uniform with chevrons on his sleeves and gold braid on shoulders said, “Excuse me. General McKenzey?”

“Thanks for the promotion. I’m McKenzey,” Garry said not as ah-shucks Garry, but as Lt. Col. McKenzey, Retired.

“If you would come with me, sir,” he said and motioned to an unattended kiosk with no line.

“Dr. Trix is with me,” he said.

We followed the guy. After we had passed the counter and were alone, he said, “If I may, sir?”

He collected our passports and quickly stepped into the kiosk. We heard a muted thunk as both were stamped. He emerged and returned our passports. Total time from our hands to his and back: twenty seconds, tops.

“Your luggage claim checks, sir?” Garry fished in his pocket and handed them to the guy. I pointed at my carryon.

“You travel with just carryon? How do you do that?” Garry asked.

“No operas, no galas,” I said.

“Gentlemen. Follow me please.”

Garrison McKenzey had a career that was easy to follow. As a hot-damn first lieutenant in Desert Storm, he caught the eye of a one-star general who made him his aide-de-camp. His next assignment was the Pentagon, where he was known as being both outspoken and well informed, a rare combination in that building. As a major, a three-star requisitioned him to his staff during the invasion of Iraq. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel below the zone, i.e., a year before he was normally eligible. He said thank you and promptly resigned. He was pissed at the way the U.S. was handling the post-invasion transition and rather than stuff a sock in his mouth and obey orders, he fled to the civilian sector.

He was hired by General Dynamics, which does something like twenty-four billion plus change annually in defense contracting with the government. He moved up the ladder like an eager fireman.

About then the good folks in Kansas thought he’d make a fine representative, and he did, serving in the House every bit as outspoken and well informed as he was in the Pentagon. He found divisive politics odious, declined running for a second term, hired that great booker and became a celebrity consultant and a news item.

When Fox, or Joe and Mika on Morning Joe needed a quote or an interview on progress in Helmand province, the logistics of supporting Benghazi, or the composition of the army needed to fight the wars of the next decade, he was the guy. His public persona was that of an apolitical honest broker who thought a handshake and a man’s word were still the way to do business, that cooperation and moderation were required for political stability and economic growth. That made him a valuable unofficial spokesman for political potentates who couldn’t afford to take an honest position on a contentious social or economic issue.

Off camera, get in his face, and he’d stick a chopstick in your eye while chewing on a wheat stem. I’d seen him bite the head off a snake and rip the heart out of a live rabbit. The man was in touch with his atavistic side.

We’d stayed connected over the years, a Christmas card, a dinner here, a burger there, a phone call expressing condolences; my divorce, his sister killed in a car wreck. Every time we met, we imagined what happened the night we graduated from OCS; we got catatonically drunk and with no camera phone, or known witnesses, the facts remain elusive.

As we walked through the doors into the reception hall, referring to that night Garry said, “I was on a Ferris wheel with Julia Roberts. I’m sure it was. Difficult yes; but I am nothin’ if not athletic.”

“Was the circus in town?”

“I’ll have one of my guys check on that. I think we’re onto somethin’.”

As we emerged into the reception hall, three shaved anthracite and olive oil guys moved quickly forward. Two had probably made the Olympic trials for the wrestling team. One was lean and wore glasses with thick transitional lenses. He’s the one who introduced himself. “Mr. McKenzey, I am Bela. I am your driver.” By the time we had finished shaking hands, two more guys arrived.

“These are my guys,” Garry said as he stepped forward and shook their hands. More dark suits and ties. One was Chuck and the other one Charles, which was confusing because Chuck looked like an accountant and Charles the social chairman for a fraternity. In fact, Charles was the booker who arrived two days in advance to plan the meetings, and Chuck was on the staff in the U.S. Embassy.

“Where you stayin’, Trix?” Garry asked.

“Carol Parc Hotel.”

“I know it,” Bela said from the side. He had a skinny tie, sunken cheeks and deferred dental care.

“We’ll give you a lift. Any problem, Charles?”

“Sir, we need to wait for Dr. Georgescu. I was hoping Chuck could brief you on your meeting with the ambassador,” Charles the booker said.

“I know what that meetin’s gonna be. Who’s corrupt, who can we trust, and the train’s on the track but how do you get the damn thing movin’,” Garry said.

“Well, yes, sir, that is the essence.”

“Essence is wheat, the rest is chaff. I’m briefed. In one car it’s Trix and me and Bela and who’s that doctor?”

“Cristina Georgescu,” she said from behind. “I have seen you on TV, Mr. McKenzey. You are even more presentable in person.” She held out her hand to Garry.

“Presentable? I’m not sure I rightly know what that means,” ah-shucks Garry said.

“I thought it too forward of me to say handsome. There are protocols,” she said.

“Any time a striking woman thinks I’m handsome, I’m pleased as punch.”

“Striking?” she said.

“There are protocols,” he said.

She smiled. She was at the other end of the dental care spectrum from Bela. “Pleased as punch?”

“I been sayin’ that since I was a kid and it never did make any sense. These are my guys, Charles and Chuck. This is my old buddy Dan Trix, Dr. Dan Trix.”

She shook with each of us; long delicate fingers, a gold watch, diamond ring on her left hand. She wore a black and dark-green flecked suit that made me think her tailor enjoyed the fittings. She had cute knees.

“What is your specialty, Dr. Trix?” she asked as she nudged oversized lenses in a cinnamon frame up a ruler-straight nose.

“Management.”

“A PhD”, she said.

“The lowest of the castes,” I said.

“Which accounts for your humility,” she said.

“We can jabber in the car. Who goes where?” Garry asked as we walked to the street. The cars were parked next to a couple red signs that undoubtedly meant no parking; one was a recent vintage black Mercedes with smoked glass windows, the other a Range Rover of similar vintage, color and windows.

Garry pointed at the Range Rover. “Trix, the doctor and me in the Rover. I like to see the guy that hits us. I’ll get in front. Don’t get to ride up there much anymore.”

Either Chuck or Charles, I already had them confused, opened and closed doors for each of us, except for Bela, the driver.

If you only looked at the buildings while driving into the city from the airport, you would conclude that the conventional wisdom regarding Bucharest in particular, and Romania in general was correct: a poor country, one in which Sherwin-Williams had not made inroads. It’s a low-slung gray city with ornate public buildings and stodgy commercial and apartment buildings. When Ceausescu built the twelve-story Palace of the Parliament, originally named the House of the Republic, it was one of the tallest buildings in Bucharest. Excluding the new hotels and financial buildings, it still is.

Look carefully and you can see a crack in the crust of that conventional wisdom: the black-smoke-belching two-cylinder Dacias from the communist era have been replaced by hybrid Mercedes and BMWs.

“There’s a lot I should probably know but I don’t. One of those things is what you’re doin’ here, Doctor,” Garry said.

“As a woman raised under communist ideology, I learned that to acknowledge an insult can be fatal.” There was a lot of room in the back seat of that Rover. She crossed legs just as cute as the knees.

“As a kid in Kansas, I learned to apologize even when I didn’t know what the hell I did to require an apology,” Garry said.

“As a kid in Nebraska,” I joined in.

“You learned how to unzip your trousers with either hand. Not much more, far as I can tell,” Garry said.

“I’m scheduled in meetings with you, the ambassador and Mr. Zeklos from the Ministry of Health. Given the critical nature of these meetings and how they impact my work and the future of this country, I would expect you to be prepared.”

There was no emotion in her voice. She wasn’t rallying the peasants to arms; she was ordering the torpedo into the tube.

“If you start now, maybe I will be by the time we get to wherever you’re goin’. You tell Bela where you’re goin’?”

“I did. I’m here at the request of a society of medical doctors,” she emphasized the word “medical”, “who are committed to rooting out corruption in the health care system,” she said.

“Sounds noble. What qualifies you to stick your nose in? As a man whose sole source of income comes from stickin’ his nose in, I’m often asked that question,” Garry said.

“I am a physician. I have an MD/MBA from Boston University. I am Romanian. My mother died on a steel slab in a hospital while the doctor waited for my father to arrive with the bribe money. I hate corruption as much as I hate the communist mentality,” she said.

Open starboard torpedo tube.

“That reads well in Brussels, but from what I know about folks here …”

I didn’t see them. None of us did.

I thought it strange that sledgehammers would be pounding on the windows. It wasn’t sledgehammers.

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