“Vlad Tepes buried there,” said Fortuna, still watching me. He pronounced the last name as “Tsepesh.”

I nodded. Fortuna went back to reading one of our Time magazines in the dim light, although how someone could read or concentrate during that wild ride, I will never know. A minute later Carl Berry leaned forward from the seat behind me and whispered, “Who the hell is Vlad Tepes? Someone who died in the fighting?”

The cabin was so dark now that I could barely make out Berry's face inches from my own. “Dracula,” I said to the AT&T executive.

Berry let out a discouraged sigh and leaned back in his seat, tightening his belt as we began to pitch and bounce in earnest.

“Vlad the Impaler,” I whispered to no one at all.

The electricity had failed, so the morgue was cooled by the simple expediency of opening all of the tall windows. The light was still very thin, as if watered down by the dark green walls and grimy panes of glass and constant low clouds, but was adequate to illuminate the rows of corpses across the tabletops and filling almost every inch of the tiled floors. We had to walk a circuitous path, stepping carefully between bare legs and white faces and bulging bellies, just to join Fortuna and the Romanian doctor in the center of the room. There were at least three or four hundred bodies in the long room . . . not counting ourselves.

“Why haven't these people been buried?” demanded Father O'Rourke, his scarf raised to his face. His voice was angry. “It's been at least a week since the murders, correct?”

Fortuna translated for the Timisoaran doctor, who shrugged. Fortuna shrugged. “Eleven days since the Securitate, they do this,” he said. “Funerals soon. The . . . how do you say . . . the authorities here, they want to show the Western reporters and such very important peoples as yourself. Look, look. “ Fortuna opened his arms to the room in a gesture that was almost proud, a chef showing off the banquet he had prepared.