“But the people are starving,” I said softly. Wexler and Father O'Rourke were asleep in the seat in front of us. The bearded priest mumbled slightly, as if battling a bad dream.

Paxley waved away my comment. “When German reunification comes, do you know how much the West Germans are going to have to invest just to retool the infrastructure in the East?” Not waiting for my reply, he went on. “A hundred billion Deutschmarks . . . and that's just to prime the pump. With Romania, the infrastructure is so pitiful that there's little to tear down. Just junk the industrial madness that Ceausescu was so proud of, use the cheap labor . . . my God, man, they're almost serfs . . . and build whatever industrial infrastructure you want. The South Korean model, Mexico . . . it's wide open for the Western corporation that's willing to take the chance.”

I pretended to doze off again, and eventually the Professor Emeritus moved down the aisle to find someone else to explain the economic facts of life to. The villages passed in the darkness as we moved deeper into the Transylvanian mountains.

We arrived in Sebes before dawn and there was some minor official there to take us to the orphanage.

No, orphanage is too kind a word. It was a warehouse, heated no better than the other meat lockers we had been in so far, undecorated except for grimy tile floors and flaking walls painted a vomitous green to eye height and a leprous gray above that. The main hall was at least a hundred meters across.

It was filled with cribs.

Again, the word is too generous. Not cribs, but low metal cages with no tops to them. In the cages were children. Children ranging in age from newborns to tenyearolds. None seemed capable of walking. All were naked or dressed in filthcaked rags. Many were screaming or weeping silently, and the fog of their breath rose in the cold air. Sternfaced women in complicated nurse's caps stood smoking cigarettes on the periphery of this giant human stockyard, occasionally moving among the cages to brusquely hand a bottle to a child . . . sometimes a seven or eightyearold child . . . or more frequently to slap one into silence.