On the table in front of us lay a corpse of an old man. His hands and feet had been amputated by something not very sharp. There were burns on his lower abdomen and genitals, and his chest showed open scars that reminded me of Viking photos of the rivers and craters of Mars.

The Romanian doctor spoke. Fortuna translated. “He say, the Securitate, they play with acid. You know? And here . . .”

The young woman lay on the floor, fully clothed except for the ripped clothing that extended from her breasts to pubic bone. What I first took for another layer of slashed, red rags, I now realized was the redrimmed wall of her opened belly and abdomen. The sevenmonth fetus lay on her lap like a discarded doll. It would have been a boy.

“Here,” commanded Fortuna, stepping through the maze of ankles and gesturing.

The boy must have been about ten. Death and a week or more of freezing cold had expanded and mottled flesh to the texture of bloated, marbled parchment, but the barbed wire around his ankles and wrists was still quite visible. His arms had been tied behind him with such force that the shoulder joints were totally out of their sockets. Flies had been at his eyes, and the layer of eggs there made it look as if the child were wearing white goggles.

Professor Emeritus Paxley made a noise and staggered from the room, almost tripping over the bodies set out for display there. One old man's gnarled hand seemed to tug at the professor's pant leg as he fled.

Father O'Rourke grabbed Fortuna by his coat front and almost lifted the little man from the floor. “Why in the hell are you showing us this?”

Fortuna grinned. “There is more, Father. Come.”

“They called Ceausescu `the vampire,”' said Donna Wexler, who had flown up later to join us.

“And here in Timisoara is where it started,” said Carl Berry, puffing on his pipe and looking around at the gray sky, gray buildings, gray slush on the street, and gray people moving through the dim light.