On top of the desk in the office lay a red rotary phone and a copy of a book issued by Ceausescu’s Ministry of the Interior in 1968. “Pocket Thieves, Offenders Who Operate In Trains and Burglars,” the title reads.

More bored than curious, with time on his hands, Cojocaru had looked at the index of names in the book. First, he searched for his own surname. He found several Cojocarus, but none apparently connected to him.

That is when he thought of searching for his mother’s surname instead.

“I didn’t know a lot about my grandfather on my mother’s side. The only thing I really knew was that his name was Constantin Simion, and that his mother’s last name was Gavrila,” he told me.

Constantin Simion, he recounted, had divorced his wife, the mother of their child, Florentina, when she was just one year old. Florentina had been raised by her mother’s new husband. “My grandmother didn’t like to talk about him,” he remembers, meaning Constantin.

“Then I found this name, Simion Constantin.”

As it is quite a common name in Romania, Cojocaru thought it a mere coincidence. But the Simion Constantin named in the book, the Ministry of the Interior noted, was also known as “Gavrila”.

Just like Cojocaru’s own grandfather, he had been born in Bucharest, and was older than Michael’s grandmother, Stela. Moreover, he looked remarkably like Michael.

“He was born in Bucharest in 1926 and looks very similar to me; the eyes, the cheekbones,” Cojocaru said, looking at the front and profile photos that Romania’s communist police took of the man described in the register as a “pocket thief” who had been “convicted seven times”.

“He is also quite similar to my mother, and I see the street he lived on was Stanislav Voevod number 37.”

That street no longer exists, but Cojocaru found out that it used to be in the northern Bucharest neighbourhood known as Tei. When he called his cousin, her grandmother, Stela’s sister, confirmed that grandfather Constantin Simion had also lived in Tei.

It was clear. The seven-times convicted pocket thief Constantin Simion was Michael’s mysterious grandfather.