THE MYSTERIOUS Mr. Ru Ru and his entourage sat in a gloomy hotel restaurant in the foothills of the Transylvanian mountains. There was Mr. Ru Ru, his hulking personal bodyguard, his slight financial adviser, and his two attractive private secretaries, eating lunch at a table next to mine.
A tiny man, Mr. Ru Ru was wrapped up in a silver fur coat. He slipped it off to reveal a custom-made Italian suit, with a gold tie and a silk scarf and a gold silk handkerchief. Everything about him was immaculate. I later learnt that he and Idi Amin share a hairdresser.
Mr. Ru Ru looked part Chinese, and he spoke in English with an Eastern European accent—from what I could overhear.
My lunch companion, Eugene, a lawyer with the Romanian government, was entranced by Mr. Ru Ru’s private secretaries.
“They could be Playboy models,” he sighed. “Romanian Playboy models.”
“Who is he?” I said.
“Mr. Ru Ru,” said Eugene, “is a very important man. A VIP. He is a millionaire businessman.”
“What’s his business?”
Eugene shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “You don’t ask questions. Perhaps Mr. Ru Ru isn’t even his real name. Of course it is normal for businessmen not to give their real names.”
By now, Eugene and I had stopped looking at each other. While we talked we stared at Mr. Ru Ru and his people.
“He is a very mysterious man,” said Eugene. “He is an enigma.”
“From what I can overhear,” I said, “I think he’s talking about Nicolae Ceauşescu’s feet.”
“NICOLAE CEAUŞESCU HAD tiny little feet,” said Mr. Ru Ru to one of his private secretaries. “Little feet like mine. My feet fit his shoes.” He sipped his liquor. “I like his shoes. Very fine shoes. Historical shoes. Very good.”
I knew how Mr. Ru Ru knew about this. Just before lunch, I had watched Mr. Ru Ru as he sidled over to a pair of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s shoes and slipped them on.
THIS WAS NOVEMBER 1999. Ceauşescu’s shoes, like everything else that he and his wife, Elena, had owned, were seized by the government during the days following their executions a decade earlier. Now the shoes were piled up next door, in a lounge next to the restaurant, along with many other Ceauşescu possessions.
These lots were to be auctioned by the government. The Romanian economy was in desperate crisis, and the auction was part of the emergency measures to raise cash. Around thirty entrepreneurs, from Europe and North America, had converged upon Sinaia, in the Transylvanian foothills, this weekend. They sat at different tables in the restaurant, nodding distantly to one another from time to time, here for a common purpose, but nobody approached anybody else to say hello.
I HAD COME to Romania because I imagined that an auction of Ceauşescus belongings was a fitting microcosm of what I believed went on inside Bilderberg meetings.
There are hardly any references to Bilderberg in any published history of the twentieth century. Indeed David Icke had told me that he was forever standing in bookshops fruitlessly searching indexes for mentions of the word. I nodded in agreement because I had done much fruitless searching in bookshops too. But once in a while I discovered the tiniest sliver of a mention within some memoir of an early Bilderberger.
The picture I pieced together was that the group was created in 1954 by a band of influential postwar internationalists who believed that global capitalism would be the best way to thwart future Hitlers. The memoirs said that the Bilderberg agenda was to “build bridges” and “strengthen links” between the business and political communities of Western Europe and North America (the “global” in global capitalism being, needless to say, these two places).
The central tenet was, presumably, that international businessmen were not afflicted with crazy political belief systems. They were not ideologues. In fact the comforting thing about them was that they cared about nothing at all except for profits.
So Bilderberg would be a place where up-and-coming politicians who were supportive of a global market could mix with powerful internationalists; Jack Heinz of the baked beans empire, for instance, or David Rockefeller, or the president of Philips, the electrical firm.
Friendships would be forged, contacts made, words of wisdom passed from established internationalist to young politician. The politicians would rise, often to the office of president or prime minister (the talent spotting was quite brilliant: Almost every British and North American premier since the 1950s attended a Bilderberg meeting early on in their career). And, once in power, the sensible, liberal-leaning globalist attitude they learned at Bilderberg might filter through into policy.
So if Bilderberg’s philosophy is, as they see it, to exchange irrational nationalism for rational internationalism, an auction of Ceauşescu memorabilia seemed to me to be their dream in essence, in micro form. Who could have been more irrationally nationalistic than Nicolae Ceauşescu? These were the actual belongings of a tyrannical isolationist, right down to his socks and shoes, being sold at auction (and what is more capitalistic than an auction?) to bidders from Europe and North America, for whatever moneymaking schemes they had planned for them.
This was one belief system absolutely supplanting another: Ceauşescu’s shoes, seized right from his feet, put in storage for a decade, taken out of storage, and slipped onto the feet of Mr. Ru Ru.
Mr. Ru Ru, Eugene said, intended to buy everything he could, and money was no object, although there would be stiff competition from other international businesspeople. There was a man from Dusseldorf who said he was interested only in the ten beige peaked caps being auctioned—not Ceauşescu’s fedoras nor his woolen hats. Just his peaked caps. He declined to divulge what exactly he intended to do with them, what his cap-related scheme might be.
Then there was the owner of a chain of theme pubs from Dublin. He traveled the world, he said, themeing bars—Irish bars, Dracula bars, whatever anyone wanted. He said that bars with a communist-dictator theme were the way of the future, they were going to be big, internationally, and so he was buying up Ceauşescu’s relics to decorate these bars when the market was ready.
But, of all the international buyers, Mr. Ru Ru was the most mysterious. Some said he was a surgeon. Others said he was in oil. He was from Russia, or China, or Japan, or America, or Romania, or Saudi Arabia. Mr. Ru Ru was the chief topic of conversation this weekend. We spoke about Mr. Ru Ru even more than we spoke about Nicolae Ceauşescu.
“Look at that!” said the Dublin buyer earlier to me, as we stood in the viewing room and watched him from afar. “He’s actually trying on Ceauşescu’s shoes.”
“He’s doing a little dance,” I said.
“That’s weird,” said the Dublin man.
“That’s just not right,” said his wife. “It’s creepy.”
MR. RU RU finished his lunch and he stood up to return to the viewing room. His entourage stood up too. He slipped his silver fur coat back on. I stood up and strolled over with the intention of introducing myself to him. His bodyguard, noticing me, instinctively reached inside his pocket for a weapon of some sort. Mr. Ru Ru stretched out his arms, shooting the bodyguard a barely noticeable glance—the meaning of which I presumed was something along the lines of “Don’t kill him. He seems OK.”
“Hello,” I said.
“Give me a hug!” roared Mr. Ru Ru, embracing me, enveloping my face in his fur. “You are a very handsome man. You have good eyes. Hasn’t he got beautiful eyes?”
“Of course,” said Gabrielle, one of his two private secretaries.
“Yes,” he said. “You are very handsome and wise. I can see that immediately.”
There was a small and slightly awkward silence.
“You are handsome and wise too,” I said.
“Ah!” he said. “You flatter me.”
“I’m Jon,” I said, extending my hand.
“And I,” he said, “am Mr. Ru Ru.”
“May I join you,” I asked Mr. Ru Ru, “while you inspect the lots?”
“Of course,” he said. “Of course.”
We wandered next door.
“You have a good eye,” he said. “Maybe you come and work for me? I will double your pay! Ha ha!”
THERE WERE CEAUŞESCU’S shoes, his hats and coats, Elena’s furs, their chess sets and cutlery and hunting knives. Their photograph albums were there also, along with some vases and statuettes. There were ugly paintings of Nicolae Ceauşescu standing victoriously before the corpses of bears. There were backgammon sets and dusty, factory-built tea sets that had never been used—gifts from Yasser Arafat and Kim II Sung and Mikhail Gorbachev.
The truth was, Mr. Ru Ru and I concluded, the stuff being auctioned was tatty and disappointing. It would be worth almost nothing if it wasn’t for the Ceauşescu connections. It looked like a Ceauşescu garage sale rather than the spread of overwhelming riches I had envisaged as I drove up here from Bucharest.
There were many stories of Elena Ceauşescu’s extravagance and hoarding of expensive items. On the Ceauşescu state visit to Detroit, for instance, Elena got word that they intended to offer her the key to the city.
“No!” she snapped to her aide. “That is not what I want. I want something in gold. Earrings. Bracelets. That sort of thing. Make sure they do it. Find out how much it weighs.”
But if these stories were true, the hoarded valuables were nowhere to be seen this weekend.
Mr. Ru Ru and I stopped at Lot 32, a silver-plated factory-made statuette, a gift from the firemen of Romania to Nicolae Ceauşescu on the occasion of his sixty-third birthday. Gabrielle, Mr. Ru Ru’s Romanian secretary, translated for us the engraved inscription.
It’s your birthday, a very delightful holiday for our entire people. The firemen wish you—the Builder of the Outstanding Stage in the Millennia-old Existence of the Romanian People, Oak Tree of the Carpathians, Creator of the Epoch of Unprecedented Renewal, Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma, Source of Our Light—the warmest and most respectful healthy wishes from the bottom of our hearts. Long and wealthy life to lead the destiny of Romania to the golden future of humanity. Communism!
“Goodness,” I murmured, “this used to be a strange country.”
“Dictatorship,” he said, “very bad. Capitalism good! Very good. See that!” Mr. Ru Ru pointed at a small wooden statue of a shepherd. “That was a gift from Yasser Arafat to Nicolae Ceauşescu. Maybe I will buy it and then it will be a gift from me to you. And isn’t it a strange and wonderful world where this sort of thing can happen?”
“This is the democratization of tyranny,” I said. “That’s what this auction is all about. Turning dictatorship into capitalism.”
While I spoke with Mr. Ru Ru, his bodyguard stood a little way off, along with one of the beautiful private secretaries. The bodyguard pulled out his knife, as if in a quick-draw in a Western, twirled it effortlessly around his fingers, and slipped it back in his pocket, to the delight of the secretary.
“The normalization of dictatorship,” nodded Mr. Ru Ru. “This is why I buy. You come to my house for dinner, we eat with Ceauşescu’s knives and forks! Yes? The food tastes better!”
“The normalization of dictatorship,” I repeated.
But I wasn’t certain of this. I couldn’t imagine how dinner with Mr. Ru Ru, eating with Ceauşescu’s cutlery, could possibly be a normal experience.
“IDI AMIN,” SAID Mr. Ru Ru, “is my friend!”
“Really?”
“Really! It is true!”
“How do you know him?”
“He is my neighbor. I have a house in Jeddah. Also in Florida and Bucharest. He lives near me in Jeddah. He’s crazy!” He laughed. “He’s crazy but he’s history! Last time I saw Idi Amin he was in a barbershop. I entered. He was in the chair. When he saw me he jumped out of the chair! Ran over to me. He still had his towels around him. And he gave me a big hug! He’s my friend, really! He’s become so fat that I cannot hug him anymore. I cannot get my arms around him. He’s fat now, but very poor. He has nothing.”
“I read that Idi Amin eats twenty oranges a day because he thinks it will cure his impotence,” I said, “and that his nickname has become Colonel Jaffa.”
“I do not know if that is true,” said Mr. Ru Ru. “Perhaps the next time I see him I will ask to see his penis! Ha ha! His little floppy willy!”
“What sort of conversations do you have with him?” I asked.
“One time,” he said, “he walked towards me and he was surrounded by many big men. I am small so I do not like big men.”
“Ceauşescu didn’t like big men either,” I said.
“That is true,” said Mr. Ru Ru.
“Anyway,” I said, “carry on.”
“So, standing next to Idi Amin was a very beautiful woman,” said Mr. Ru Ru. “Idi said, ‘You like this lady?’ What do I say? I have to please him. If I say yes, is he offended? If I say no, is he offended? So I don’t say anything. What he did then was he opened her dress. She was naked underneath. Completely naked. He said, ‘You don’t like this body?’ This happened. This happened”
“And did you ever meet Nicolae Ceauşescu?” I asked.
“Shhh!” said Mr. Ru Ru urgently. He looked around him.
“Many times,” he whispered. “But be quiet. Please. The people here they don’t like Ceauşescu. If they know that I knew him, they will not like me!”
NICOLAE CEAUŞESCU HAD a summer palace a little way up the hill. Armed guards still patrolled it, and only VIPs were allowed near the place. Nothing had changed in this regard. Those few people who had been granted a tour said that it was the most luxurious private house they had ever seen. Mr. Ru Ru—who hadn’t yet seen it—told me that he wanted to buy it.
“What will you do with it?” I asked.
“A hotel!” he said. “A Ceauşescu hotel. People sleep in Ceauşescu’s own bed. Wow! Imagine that. What will they dream of when they sleep in Ceauşescu’s bed?”
There was a pause.
“What will they dream of?” I asked.
“They will dream of Elena!” said Mr. Ru Ru. “Ha ha!”
“Is this why you’re buying up the items in the auction?” I said. “To decorate your Ceauşescu hotel?”
“You are very wise,” said Mr. Ru Ru. “Very astute and correct.”
“Do you think there are tourists out there who would want to pay to sleep in Ceauşescu’s bed?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“You are friends with Idi Amin, and you were friends with Nicolae Ceauşescu,” I said. “You seem to have a disproportionately large number of dictator friends, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“I am also friends with Kim II Sung,” he said. “Ha ha! These people are history. It doesn’t matter if they are good history or bad history. I, myself, am not history. So I make friends with people who are.”
THE NEXT MORNING, at eight o’clock, the telephone rang in my hotel room. It was Eugene, the Romanian government lawyer.
“Get dressed quickly,” he said. “Mr. Ru Ru is visiting Ceauşescu’s palace. He has had special permission as a VIP and you are invited too.”
The party was Mr. Ru Ru, his entourage, Eugene, and me. We wandered up the hill towards a sentry post hidden among some trees. We handed our passports to the teenage armed guard, and we walked further, past ponds and fountains and winter blossoms, into the oak-lined hallway of Ceauşescu’s summer home.
And we had a look around. The indoor swimming pool was lined with intricate mosaics of bear-hunting scenes. There were gold-leaf pillars and stained-glass windows. The water was still heated. The private cinema was furnished with a dozen armchairs, and handwoven golden curtains, which concealed the screen between viewings. There was a health spa, with massage tables and hydrotherapy treatment rooms and a gymnasium. The vast marble meeting hall, big enough to greet a thousand, was where Ceauşescu entertained Gerald Ford. There was a ballroom, and a second ballroom. The marble balcony, as large as some people’s homes, overlooked a formal garden of lakes and statues.
On normal guided tours of lavish homes the visitors are kept away from the toilets. When does one get to see a stately home’s stately toilet? But we saw Ceauşescu’s toilet. It was onyx green. The bathroom was huge. Freshly fluffed towels still hung from the towel rails. Mr. Ru Ru felt the fabric of the towel between his fingers.
It was immaculate, unchanged, a Marie Celeste, as if the Ceauşescus had just slipped outside and would come back any moment, furious to discover a bunch of strangers poking around their home, touching everything. Teams of cleaners still cleaned it every day.
Elena Ceauşescu used to slip hairpins under carpets and into corners to monitor the thoroughness with which the servants cleaned the place. It was spotless today, as if her ghost still hovered.
MR. RU RU remained silent for most of the tour. He tapped vases with his fingernail, and they rang out a little. He stroked impressionist paintings. He made little noises of admiration. Each room brought a new gasp of approval from the non-Romanians, and gasps of outrage from the others—who had been forced to endure decades of hardship under the regime of the owner of this ridiculous place. At enormous expense, the Ceauşescus had added a fifteen-room wing to the palace, an office and bedroom complex, but it was never used because Elena did not like the smell of the paint.
“I do not cry now,” murmured Eugene, as we felt the warm water in the indoor swimming pool. “But there was a time, during winters, when there was no heating and I would sleep in a coat and boots. That was the worst thing. No. There was something worse than that. The fear to talk with friends. I would be scared to talk with my own friends. Would they report me? It was sick.”
Eugene paused, and then he added, “I myself participated in the Revolution in 1989.”
“I cannot understand,” I said, “how Ceauşescu could have deluded himself into thinking everything was OK. How could he blind himself to what was happening outside? Did he never look around his home and think to himself, All this is crazy?”
“He couldn’t see outside,” said Eugene. “When he was in residence his people closed off all the roads, any road that could be seen from the windows. He saw only the trees.”
Eugene looked out of the stained-glass window that overlooked the marble conservatory next to the swimming pool.
“Romania,” said Eugene, “was twenty million people living inside the imagination of a madman.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Ru Ru, turning a corner. “Here it is! Ceauşescu’s bedroom!”
He sat on the bed and tested the springs. He giggled.
“Nicolae and Elena were naked here,” he said. “Mmm? They were naked here!”
He grabbed one of his secretaries around the waist and attempted to drag her onto the bed. She laughed and struggled away.
He turned to me and fixed me with a stare.
“They were naked here,” he said, and his words were taut with meaning—although I wasn’t entirely sure how to interpret them. “They were naked.”
EVEN THOUGH MR. Ru Ru had confided to me that the lots in the auction were of a low quality and were historically uninteresting, it didn’t stop him from buying almost everything. He paid extravagant prices. Mr. Ru Ru was not a fool, but he seemed to be spending his money foolishly. He bought tapestries and shoes and socks and scarves and ties and little sculptures.
From time to time the other entrepreneurs, irritated and resigned to failure, would bid him up just for the hell of it. But it didn’t seem to matter. Ru Ru just laughed and shrugged his shoulders and went right on bidding. Sometimes his bodyguard, or his financial adviser, or his two private secretaries would glance around at the other bidders and chuckle amiably as Mr. Ru Ru secured yet another lot.
Mr. Ru Ru bought the paintings and photographs of Ceauşescu standing victoriously before the piled-up corpses of dead bears. These paintings were illusions. Ceauşescu loved to shoot bears, but his people used to drug the bears first to make them sluggish and easier to shoot. Sometimes he would even pose next to bears that had been shot by others.
Later that evening, the government organized a banquet for their guests of honor at a nearby hunting lodge. There were some local journalists there, reporting on the auction for a variety of Romanian newspapers and magazines. Eugene stood up and announced that the government would award a cash prize—the Romanian equivalent of $400—to whichever journalist wrote the nicest article. The journalists applauded gratefully and uncritically—$400 was, for some of them, six months’ earnings.
Then Eugene toasted the bidders, and we raised our glasses, Salut, among the stuffed bears and the violin trio playing in the corner, with the snow outside.
“You are wonderful people,” said Eugene. “I wish you long life and happiness, and excellent business prospects, and enjoy!”
Salut!
Then Mr. Ru Ru banged his fork on the table. He stood up. The room fell silent.
“I am responding to your kind words,” he announced, “on behalf of all the buyers.”
The Dublin theme-pub entrepreneur, who was sitting to my left, chuckled darkly.
“I love Romania,” said Mr. Ru Ru, “with all of my heart and all of my soul. I come here with an open heart, an open mind, and an open pocket! Ha ha!”
The other businesspeople rolled their eyes sardonically and grumbled into their cocktails.
“You speak fine words,” responded Eugene. “We particularly respect your open pocket! Ha ha!”
“I love Romania,” said Mr. Ru Ru. “Your women are beautiful. Yes? Ha ha. You are a proud and wise nation. Hopefully I will soon meet your president, so I can tell him of my love for Romania. But I am disappointed in the lots being auctioned today. They are very . . . normal. But I buy them all. Why? Because I want everybody to be happy!”
Mr. Ru Ru stretched out his arms, as if to hug the whole room.
“Nicolae loved only Elena . . .” he announced. “But Ru Ru loves all of Romania!”
There was a startled silence. This lofty final statement hung uncomfortably in the air. Eugene’s eyes narrowed. There was no doubt about it. Mr. Ru Ru had over-egged the pudding in a dramatic and inappropriate manner. Mr. Ru Ru faltered for the briefest moment. He steadied himself. He unstretched his arms.
“What’s wrong?” he said.