Canto for a Gypsy

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  LASSU

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  1

  St. Patrick’s lay below them, sanctuary bounded by ambulatory and communion rail, pews like an endless repetition, faith overwhelmed by stone.

  The priest had viewed the sacristy and all twenty chapels and he was happy to relax in the cool of the high gallery above the business of worship. His tour guide, an usher with enamel American flag in his lapel, uttered judgment.

  “The women are the worst.”

  The priest raised his eyebrows in mock outrage.

  “Sure,” the usher went on. “They come in, sit down behind some other woman who’s praying and switch purses. We have to put chains through the candlesticks or they’d walk off with those.”

  “A regular hotbed of crime, you’d say. But you were telling me about the funeral services for Senator Kennedy.”

  “That’s right. There were Secret Service men where we are and on the other galleries and in the organ loft. They took over our room for their headquarters,” he said with reminiscent irritation. “They knew this place inside out.”

  The priest mused, watching a fish school of Japanese tourists following their guide with cameras and notebooks.

  “Wouldn’t an assassin be able to do that, too?” he wondered. “Get the building plans?”

  “Nooo. To get a copy from the City Building Department you got to have a written letter of permission from the cathedral administrator.”

  “Ah.” The priest straightened up. He was middle-aged but fit and his mustache raised suspicions in the usher that he might have a hippy parish. The priest had earlier remarked that the maintenance men all seemed to be black or Spanish. “Well, thank you for the tour, Mr. Grimm. By the way, did they have handguns or rifles?”

  The usher was taken aback.

  “Up here? Rifles. It was like a military operation.”

  “Of course it was.”

  The priest used a side door to reach the adjacent administration building. The administrator was not in and the ladies at the reception desk told the priest he would need an appointment to see the monsignor when he returned.

  “I just saw him,” the priest said. “He told me to wait in his office.”

  “Really, Father, the monsignor is impossible. What’s the point of having a secretary?”

  “May I?”

  He walked into the administrator’s office.

  The office window was above the eye level of pedestrians on Madison Avenue. In the outer office a typewriter carriage snapped sideways with exasperated force.

  He pulled the desk drawer open and removed stationery, envelopes and a personal note with a good sample of the monsignor’s signature.

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  The first great diaspora of Indian outcasts called Rom began about A.D. 1000. They traveled in wagons, mended metalware, spoke a form of Sanskrit and told fortunes. Some went through Palestine and around the African coast to cross with the Moors into Spain. They became known as Gitanos. The northern migration went through Byzantium to the Balkans. In the region of Moldo-Walachia, now Hungary and Rumania, they were hunted and enslaved, but enough escaped by the fourteenth century to infest Western Europe. Usually they carried fraudulent letters from His Holiness the Pope asking Christian princes to welcome the exotic aliens. They were pilgrims from the Holy Land sentenced to wander, so the letters went, for a lapse of faith. Since the letters claimed their origin to be Egypt, they were known as Egyptians, then ’Gyptians and finally Gypsies.

  In Spain were the Gitanos. In the rest of the continent, Kalderash Gypsies raised the function of goldsmith and armorer to near occult status. The Sinti, named for their origin on the banks of the Sind, spread from the Low Countries to the Black Sea, and a tribe of wild cutthroats called Tshurari moved north to terrorize the Russian highways.

  The Lovari were the last tribe to escape from Hungary, which is why older Gypsy bands in France and Spain continue to call them Hongrois or Hungaros, but it was the Lovari who made the greatest impact. Not only were they smiths, musicians and fortune-tellers, during peace they controlled Europe’s horse markets and during war they formed mercenary armies. Queen Elizabeth ordered their death to a man, but she had better luck ridding her island of the Pope than of its Rom.

  The first Gypsies to cross the Atlantic were Gitanos, camp followers with Cortés and Pizarro. The prouder Lovari arrived as condemned criminals, the French Rom shipped to Biloxi in the Louisiana territories and the English Rom to New England. Sentencing them to the New World was like giving birds the sky, and in time more tribes came voluntarily, some traveling so often between Old World and New that their names became hyphenated, like the Turko-Americans. By 1950, there were an estimated 50,000 Rom in the United States, but as a police captain detailed to them said at the time, he could no more guess how many pigeons were in a single tree.

  As elsewhere, the American Rom added gaja, or non-Gypsy, names: Petulengro, or forgeworker, became Smith and Gry, or horse—for the man who dealt in them—became Grey.

  As the rain passed and the heat returned, a Gypsy named Romano Gry was dispassionately doing away with an antique dealer called Roman Grey. He selected a serrated knife and cut into the heart of a styrofoam block, sawing it neatly in two.

  Sweat dampened the cigarette in his lips and blue smoke softened the sharp features of his face. Exchanging the long knife for a short, two-edged stiletto, he hollowed out each half of the block. When he was done he had molds that fit loosely around a pair of ormolu candlesticks, leaving enough room for the chamois sacks that protected their gold-and-mercury skin, the Or Moulu. It was tedious work, but he didn’t know how long his trip would take and the storage crates would have to be moved again if the police tried to impound them. He was taping the blocks back together when the front door opened and he heard his gaja name called.

  Roman tapped the knife on his palm impatiently. The customer couldn’t see him from the front room, and he would just wait until the man went away.

  Up front, the customer surveyed a shop that looked like a museum turned flea market. Regency armchairs hung from the walls beside heliotrope rolls of Persian carpets. Meissen and Mennecy china appeared haphazardly in cases between silk prints and tapestries, any of which would have been displayed separately with dramatic lighting in another East Side shop. The only sign of life was a cat that ascended from an ­ottoman to a commode to the top of a partially restored Chippendale highboy. The customer took the cat’s place on the ottoman with satisfaction. His pleasure was complete when he saw he was no longer alone.

  The man who came from the back room was tall for a Gypsy and seemed larger because he was built along broad lines. Perspiration curled his black hair and gave a nimbus to the brown skin of a face that was more interesting than handsome. Roman had struck more than one visitor less as an antique dealer than a browsing barbarian. If this was the customer’s reverie, one glance from the dealer’s thoroughly realistic eyes told him to end it.

  “You must be Mr. Grey.”

  “For another week. What can I do for you?”

  “My name is John Killigan.” He looked at the knife in Roman’s hand. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “Excuse me.”

  Roman laid the stiletto down and returned to scrutinize his
visitor. John Killigan appeared to be in his middle sixties, a narrow, elegant man with white hair combed tightly back. The suit was expensive and, except for his shirt, he wore black from his shoes to the hat held in his long fingers.

  “Do you mind if I sit?” Killigan asked after he’d settled back on the ottoman.

  “I should tell you now, if there’s anything special you want to order, I won’t be able to help. I’m closing down the shop in a day or two.”

  Killigan was not dismayed.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just traveling or a business excursion?”

  Roman almost smiled in spite of himself. The old man had nerve.

  “That must be wonderful,” Killigan went on without waiting for an answer. “Just picking up and traveling, not even knowing when you’ll come back. I’m sixty-six, you know, and I’ve never just gone off by myself for fun. I suppose it’s the effect of working for an institution. Your life’s not your own that way.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Roman was mildly curious because Killigan didn’t seem a man whose trade was small talk. The Gypsy pulled up a chair and sat down. When he pulled a pack of Gauloise from his pocket, Killigan accepted one—another surprise.

  “It strikes you as strange not leading one’s own life,” Killigan suggested. “You have to remember that you are the exception.”

  “You know,” Roman replied, “the last person to say that to me was a very understanding detective. I’m afraid I didn’t catch the name of your institution.”

  “There’s far more I do not understand about you, Mr. Grey, but we’ll get to know each other. You are an expert on all sorts of antiques, I understand. Articles of goldsmith work, for instance.”

  When Roman waited for further explanation, Killigan changed the subject.

  “Have you ever been in Hungary?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you speak Hungarian?”

  Roman nodded.

  Killigan asked in Hungarian, “Have you ever been baptized a Catholic?”

  “That and a few others,” Roman answered in the same language, then switched to English. “What has this got to do with gold work? I’m not offended, but is it possible you’re the executor of a will that stipulates only Hungarian-speaking Catholics can appraise the estate?”

  “No, no,” Killigan laughed. “Some pieces are coming into my possession, though. I’d need an estimate and someone to look after them for a week or two.”

  “It sounds like an auction house display. Parke-Bernet can handle that better than I can.” He gestured around the shop. “If I tried to display something here, I’d never find it again.”

  “I have the display facilities.”

  “Your institution’s facilities?”

  “Yes.”

  Roman leaned forward.

  “But you don’t want to tell me the name of this mysterious institution. Maybe you could say who recommended me, or just what pieces these are, or who made them?” He let time for an answer go by. “Mr. Killigan, this is not the most persuasive offer I’ve ever had.”

  “The remuneration would not be very high, either.”

  “You see what I mean? At any rate, I’m not going to be here, and there are at least fifty jewelers in the city who specialize in the auction trade.”

  “These jewels are different.”

  “Mr. Killigan, do you mind if I ask how much you know about jewelry?”

  “Not very much. That’s why I’m here.”

  “The great mass of jewelry in private hands is junk. The interesting pieces, Byzantine or Indian or Celtic, are almost all in museums. Even if I weren’t going anywhere I wouldn’t be interested in handling auction fodder.”

  “This is hardly fodder.”

  “I’m amazed.” Roman shook his head. “You’re still asking me to do it. I didn’t think even private bankers had that much confidence.”

  Killigan’s amused blue eyes contrasted with his funereal suit.

  “I can see you have your principles, Mr. Grey.” As he stood to go, the cat stirred and caught his eye. “By the way, I see you’re restoring this highboy. Just hypothetically, how would one go about making a fake of an antique like this?”

  Roman stepped out to the piece in question. Absent-mindedly, he stroked the cat.

  “There is no way.”

  “But people do, I’ve read. Don’t they choose some old worm-eaten wood and work with that?”

  “They try,” Roman told him. “But as soon as they take the old finish off, they find the wood gets more worm-eaten and rotted. You can’t put a new face on something that’s rotting on the inside no matter how clever you are.”

  Killigan paused in thought.

  “You won’t take this estate for me?”

  “I’ll be gone.”

  “That’s in the hands of God.”

  “Then that would be a change,” Roman remarked as they shook hands.

  Before he left, Killigan reached up to give the cat a long stroke down its black back.

  “A beautiful animal. What’s his name?”

  “Beng.”

  “Beng?” Killigan put his hat on as Roman opened the door. “The devil’s name, isn’t it?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I don’t get around much for pleasure but I have traveled, in the line of business. Good-bye.”

  He left, and Roman watched him walk down the street, a tall, thin figure in black moving past the row of town houses in long, jaunty strides.

  Alone again, Roman worked until five crates of candlesticks, services and clocks lined the back room. He was tying up the first of the rugs when Kore arrived.

  Lovari like Roman, Kore was a giant with curly red hair that sprouted from under a stained fedora. All Kore’s clothes suffered a similar fate: the height of fashion when bought, wrinkled the day after and worn until they fell apart. It was an expensive habit but it made sense on long trips, and with the seashell amulet he wore around his neck it lent Kore a primitive panache. For the past week he’d moved Roman’s crates to a warehouse in Queens, so he poured himself a glass of steaming tea and sat in a groaning sidechair without asking.

  “Aukko tu pios adrey Romanes,” he toasted Roman, lifting the strong tea to his lips.

  Roman, a rope between his teeth, straddled a rolled-up rug. It was a Broussa, heavy silk interwoven with copper threads and a little more pliable than a floorboard. Kore removed a glossy foldout advertisement from his jacket and read: “ ‘For the man of distinction the final step up.’ Huh! I had my first Cadillac when I was fifteen.”

  He opened the flyer to its fullest width and looked at an artist’s conception of an Eldorado set among the gentry of a yacht marina.

  “I think I want one with a bar. How do you think those Spanish Gypsies will like it when we drive into Barcelona in a car with a bar? Those Gitanos will slit their throats. We can choose any girls we want. You take a singer and I’ll take a dancer and they can pay our way for the rest of the trip. What do you think of my idea, Romano?”

  Roman manhandled the rug into a tighter roll. Globules of perspiration joined each other on his face and neck.

  “Persian.” Kore looked at the rug authoritatively.

  “Turkish,” Roman grunted through the rope.

  Kore sniffed. He scooped some strawberry jam into his tea and mixed it with his finger, ignoring the heat.

  “You don’t like my idea about the Spanish girls? You insist on taking that gaja girl with you?”

  Roman grunted again. The rug was tight as a cylinder. He reached around it for the rope in his mouth.

  “Going to teach her how to tell fortunes? How to pick pockets, eh? Make her into a real Romani chi? I bet!” Kore’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, what a R
om you used to be. That was before you became a rug merchant, of course. Now look at you, so weak you can’t even roll a carpet.”

  Roman’s hand missed and the rope fell to the floor. Kore got out of the chair and walked around Roman, observing his one-handed efforts to retrieve the rope with disinterest.

  “I can see you five years from now. No more traveling with the Rom. You’ll be selling televisions then, a weak little gajo with no color to his skin. My God, you are having trouble with that rug, aren’t you, little brother?”

  “Would you like to help?” Roman asked evenly.

  “Just give it to me.”

  Kore took his time finding a place to set his glass down before putting out his massive hands to take the carpet. Roman waited until Kore had a good grip, then let go. The heavy rug flew open with the strength of a copper coil, knocking Kore’s hat off. A yard of brilliant carpet undulated in the air as Kore staggered around the room like Laocoön, trying to keep more from unraveling. Roman leaned on a crate and sipped from Kore’s half-finished glass of tea.

  “Go on, you ignorant thief of parked cars, what were you saying?”

  “Help me, for God’s sake!”

  “Quite a weave, isn’t it? Those six hundred knots to the square inch and the copper give it a certain integrity. But why am I telling an expert like you?”

  “Avata acai!”

  “I don’t think you need any help. You’re strangling it very nicely.” He put the empty glass down. “Good luck. This rug merchant has other things to do.”

  “Romano, where are you going?” Kore called. “Romano, as Develesky!”

  Roman wandered into the front room, checking what else Kore could take with him to the warehouse. But his mind was half out of the shop and the city, on a road where the country passed slowly, the air was suffused with rose paprika and the only camps were those of friends.

  The trouble was that Kore was right. This time Dany made it different.

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