Canto for a Gypsy

  * * *

  “You should have told me about the cardinal right away. I’m very proud.”

  “Good. I hope I didn’t lose you any jobs you could have had this week.”

  “The photographers are getting disgusted with me. Too sexy for the Henri Bendel spread, they said. But how old can you be and still wear Mary Janes?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Half the apartment’s furniture was in storage and there was nothing left in the bedroom but the bed he was on and the vanity bureau Dany sat at. She was naked, brushing her freshly washed hair before the mirror.

  “Would you like it if I had a beauty mark?” she asked. “Do chis have beauty marks?”

  Roman sat up and watched, admiring the live curves of her body half hidden by the long fall of brown hair. Each stroke took forever.

  He got off the bed and walked to the table, standing behind Dany.

  “You want a beauty mark?”

  “If you think I should.”

  He looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her face had broadened and become more beautiful in the time he’d known her, the childish model he first met nearly disappeared. One or two strands of hair hung over her breasts and she brushed the hair out of the way.

  “Chis don’t have beauty marks. If you want to, you can put blue dots on the inside and outside of each eye. That’s to keep away the Evil Eye.”

  She leaned toward the mirror and considered it. Her pupils were blue and brown, mixed like shards of glass.

  “The dots would bring out the blue in them,” she said. “What do Roms wear to avoid the Evil Eye?”

  “They wear one earring.”

  “You don’t.”

  “My father didn’t either. Maybe he should have.”

  “Tell me about your father. You never say anything about him.”

  She put the brush down and looked up at him in the ­mirror.

  “I’ll tell you one thing. He used to brush my mother’s hair. I used to sit in a corner of the wagon and watch them and listen to them talk.” He picked up the brush. “She had long black hair and it shined.”

  He put the brush on the side of her head and pulled it down, sweeping it through Dany’s hair. She sat very still, feeling the soft, deliberate tug of the bristles.

  “I’ll tell you something else about my father,” Roman went on. “Something that happened before the last trip to Rumania. We were in England and it happened to be a bad time. Our kumpania had lost some wagons in a snowstorm, and we couldn’t stop to rest because the police kept moving us from one council ground to another.

  “There was too much snow on the ground for any gaja to come have their fortunes told. We had no money and no food, so my father and I went into the woods to shoot something. The police were waiting, of course, and as soon as we set foot in the forest they stopped us and took my father’s rifle away. That was so we couldn’t poach any of the game the landlord wanted for his shooting season.”

  Dany watched as he spoke and continued rhythmically to brush her hair. There was something ridiculous about the way his muscles strained to brush as gently as possible, but she didn’t say anything because she was afraid of breaking the spell.

  “I was angry enough to cry. We needed food to eat and they were saving it for the landlord’s sport. But my father handed his rifle over and we turned away as if it didn’t ­matter.

  “It started to snow again. Heavily. My father ripped his kerchief in two and we stuffed it into the bottom of my shoes. We trudged on through the woods, and I knew that we weren’t returning to camp until we had something to bring. The snow came up to my knees and my father asked if I wanted to go back. I said no, and we went on.”

  Dany could picture the five-year-old Roman refusing. The brush hissed through her hair.

  “Finally, we came to a meadow. The snow was high and very bright. My father went first, and I followed in his trail as well as I could. When we were far out in the meadow, we stopped and sat down. My father sat down first so I could sit in his lap.

  “We must have been there an hour without talking, just watching the snow fall, before we saw the rabbit. It had its white coat on and sometimes you couldn’t see it when it wasn’t moving. At least I couldn’t. I’m sure my father could.

  “ ‘Kamas shooshi?’ he asked me.

  “ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I like rabbit.’

  “We stood up, and so did the rabbit when he saw us, freezing the way they do before they run. The three of us stayed like that, waiting for the other to move, and my father began to whistle. It was a simple czardas, and he whistled it over and over again. Sometimes I thought the rabbit had run away when I couldn’t see him through the snow, but he was still there. My father took off his jacket very slowly and held it out to the rabbit. Then he put it on the snow. He walked away, still whistling, and the rabbit, instead of running away, stayed where he was and watched the jacket. My father walked around in a great circle, and never once did the rabbit look away from the whistling jacket. He was still watching it when my father grabbed him from behind and killed him.

  “We had a very nice supper.”

  The brush, which had stopped, began moving through her hair again.

  “Did your father ever teach you how to do it?”

  “The Nazis killed him in the spring,” Roman reported matter-of-factly.

  “I suppose it wouldn’t do you much good in a city ­anyway.”

  Roman didn’t answer until he was satisfied with his work and he put the brush on the table.

  “Maybe it helps. Have you ever heard a crown whistle?”

  Dany shook her head. “Is that another Romany trick?”

  “Not Romany. I don’t know what it is.”

  Dany wanted to ask him about his mother but she knew he wouldn’t reveal anything more about his parents tonight. She stood up, moving to him and putting her arms around his back.

  “I love you.”

  “Mande cam tute.”

  With that, they went to bed.

  FRISS

  * * *

  8

  A Gothic cathedral is designed to miniaturize the body and elevate the soul. The effect on Isadore as he came through the doors of St. Patrick’s was one of dizziness. He’d been in small churches on police business before, but he’d never been in a full cathedral and nothing in the world like St. Patrick’s. He was no carping critic, and he was stunned.

  A synagogue had straight, logical lines, and God was content to remain an Omnipotent One. Here the vaults soared, slender ribs spreading and intersecting like the lines of a curved universe. In between stone columns, God divided and subdivided into a merry-go-round of martyrs and saints. The air itself was animated with colors from stained glass. Fifth Avenue was farther away than the distance of a door. He seized on the sight of the commissioner and two detectives standing in the sanctuary.

  Commissioner Jack Lynch waited grimly. He was Black Irish, short and aggressive, thirty years a cop and only five months head of the New York Police Department. The day after his appointment reporters asked if he was going to clean up the city, and he said that was like trying to stop venereal disease by changing the sheets. Since then the mayor had kept him on a tight rein.

  “Sir, I’d like to make a protest” were Isadore’s first words. “I have two cases coming up in court.”

  “Sergeant, I have two hundred thousand cases in court. I have a thousand murders, ten thousand rapes, ten times that many violent crimes. Do I have time to worry about your problems?”

  “It’s just that I don’t think I’m the right man.”

  Lynch paced the gray and green terrazzo.

  “Of course, you’re not. No one said you were. But thanks to your files, we picked out an expert with a record and the expert says he won’t do the job unless you handle our end. Don’t you know it’s e
asier to switch detectives than it is experts?”

  Isadore said nothing. Neither yes nor no seemed quite right.

  “Today I had to pull a very good cop, Lieutenant Donnelly, a Knight of Columbus, and put you in his place. Which means that with a city seething in crime I have to come here and talk to the cardinal about some crown I don’t give a—” He tapped his foot and let the thought drop. “I told the mayor you were a competent man.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why? What else could I say? That I put the department mystery man in charge of this political circus? That you may still be a sergeant at forty-nine but you deliver a lovely lecture on Gypsies at City College?”

  “Nothing so strange about that,” Isadore muttered.

  The commissioner gave him another glare as he paced by.

  “I don’t want any Kosygin incidents with these Freedom Fighters. BOSSI will give you a rundown on their organizations. Don’t worry about the transfer from the airport. Donnelly will take care of that. You just handle the church. I’m giving you ten men. St. Patrick’s holds five thousand. Think you’ll be able to screen them? Don’t start shaking your head until I’m finished talking, please. The Hungarian captain brings in ten men, too.”

  Isadore had a thought. “Maybe the Hungarian won’t like the idea of me coming in this late.”

  “Why not? Before, he had to share the command with a lieutenant; now he can order a sergeant around. Anything wrong with that?”

  “No,” Isadore heard himself saying.

  “Good. I suppose you’ll know how to get along with him. Cooperative but not obsequious.” Lynch looked at Isadore sadly. “Call me personally if anything happens. Good luck.”

  Isadore thought the commissioner was going to shake his hand, but Lynch turned to the altar, crossed himself and walked off.

  Isadore knew the two detectives who had kept silent up to this point. One was president of the Emerald Society, an association composed of the forty percent of the police force who were Irish. The other was chief of detectives and president of Shinrom, the department’s Jewish society.

  “You really did it this time, Harry,” the latter said. “I guess we should just be happy the Jewish Defense League isn’t involved in this.”

  “Al,” Isadore began, but the man was already leaving to join the commissioner.

  The other man patted Isadore’s shoulder.

  “Don’t take it so hard, Sergeant. You know Chief Meyer, always in a sweat about something. And Jack . . . well, you know it’s even tougher for a good cop to be commissioner. I’ll calm them down and if any cop on the squad gives you trouble, you just tell them you’re okay with Captain Gleason. Right?”

  “I appreciate that, Captain.”

  After the two men shook hands the lieutenant crossed himself and went down the sanctuary steps. At the communion rail he stopped.

  “But, Jesus,” he winced. “A Gypsy and a Jew guarding St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

  Reggel watched Isadore from above on the triforium gallery. The round sergeant would present no difficulties, he felt. The man was intelligent but definitely not shrewd. To begin with, the sergeant trusted Grey.

  As for the cardinal, he had too many other problems to concern himself with how the crown was guarded. The archdiocese had a $2,000,000 deficit just for its schools, and Killane would be busy trying to raise it from the Rockefellers and the Tishmans. Reggel had done his reading.

  While Isadore went off to find an usher, the captain completed his inspection of the gallery. There were four galleries in all. The two flanking the sanctuary were about fifty feet long and five feet wide, with three bays facing the high altar and its canopy. Two air blowers sat close to the bays and against the wall were winches for the chandeliers that hung from in front of the clerestory windows down to the sanctuary. It was here the Americans had posted their men during the Kennedy services, here and at the other galleries. Reggel approved.

  He could be wrong; there might be no danger. Every day he read European papers for news of Odrich. Knowing how Odrich liked to live in style, he’d examined the guest list of every luxury hotel since the crown’s return was announced. The only advantage he could be sure of was that he would know the church and Odrich wouldn’t. There were only two sources for copies of the cathedral plans, the city and Columbia University, and for the next ten days they were the exclusive property of the Hungarian mission.

  And if something did happen, that was why he had Grey.

  Confident of that much, Reggel left the gallery by a winding staircase to find the wandering Jew.

  * * *

  Roman pursued survival on Staten Island. From the ferry slip he took a taxi through anachronistic small towns and woods on a road called Victory Boulevard.

  He got out in the center of the island in a neighborhood made up of small factories and empty lots edged with linden trees. In the corner of a lot close by a park was a hunched aluminum trailer of the style popular twenty years before.

  Roman entered without knocking, because only police or strangers knocked. Pulika Wells sat at a table. Except for a hat and a bright red kerchief around his neck he was naked to the waist, and his skin folded like worn leather over his stomach. A boy sat in a corner of the trailer mending a bellows.

  “Sarishan.”

  “Sarishan, Romano,” Pulika said. “Sit down. I’ve been wondering when you would come around.” He turned to the boy. “Tea for the Rom.”

  The boy put a kettle onto a hot plate and stood by it. Roman guessed he was no more than seven years old. He had black hair and blue eyes, a trait of the Wells clan left by their namesake, a bastard son of Charles II.

  “My great-grandson,” Pulika told Roman.

  “He’s handsome.”

  “He is an artist. It won’t be easy for him being handsome and an artist. I’ll keep him outside the city as long as I can.”

  Roman knew that Pulika’s sons wanted their father to move into the city with them. His wife was dead and the boy’s parents had been killed in an accident on the road. As it was, the boy went into the city only when Staten Island schools tried to find him and then just for the day. Like some of the old Rom, Pulika never passed a night inside a house voluntarily, and the boy lived with Pulika.

  The chal served glasses of tea on an intricately etched copper tray.

  “He made this,” the old man told Roman with more pride than he hoped showed. “He will be better when his hands are stronger. If we had a horse he could ride, his hands would be stronger. It would have to be a gentle horse, but how many Rom here know horses?”

  “Maybe he will get one.” The boy’s blue eyes burned with excitement. Roman toasted him. “Aukko tu gry, prala. To your horse, brother.”

  After a rite of elliptical conversation, Roman laid his empty glass sideways, signifying that he wanted no more tea.

  “You mentioned something about the Magyars to me once, uncle. I have some questions.”

  “I know. Come with me and you can ask while I work.”

  In back of the trailer was a shelter made of corrugated iron, its roof curved on the order of the “bender” wagons used by American Rom before they had cars. A tall, bony dog ran out of it and circled Pulika joyously. It was a “long dog,” a breed of greyhound mongrel that could only be found in a Gypsy camp.

  “Don’t let the American Kennel Club get hold of you,” Roman told the dog as he scratched its head.

  Pulika’s small, portable anvil was already set up under the shelter, its sharp base driven into the ground. The boy tended the forge, which was no more than a hole in the ground. He fed charcoal into the embers and fanned them with his mended bellows, a goatskin turned inside out with a slit for the air to enter and a pipe through one of the legs to allow a jet of air to exit. When the fire was going well, Pulika and Roman lowered a copper vat into the hole. In a matter o
f minutes the vat began turning to a deep purple. Pulika pulled an iron tube from a work chest, his old muscles standing like cords under his dark skin. He dropped it beside the vat and drew an S shape in the dirt with his finger.

  “For a brewery. They can wait a month for a factory to do it or they can come to the Kalderash.” He shrugged. “It’s not the sort of fine work I used to do, but they will pay. I don’t have any woman to tell fortunes for me anymore.”

  The boy sat cross-legged by the fire. Now that it was going well, he could work the bellows with his feet and play with the dog at the same time. The two men squatted down, and Roman shared his cigarettes.

  “I heard you were involved with a piece of sonakey Magyar.” Pulika squinted through the smoke.

  “The piece of Magyar gold. Saint Stephen’s Crown. I need to know what you know.”

  “Why not, Romano? Maybe the boy can learn something, too.”

  Pulika’s voice lost his huskiness as it slipped into the rhythm of the storyteller. The dog lay down under the boy’s hand. The vat changed from purple to red.

  Pulika said he was a sonakeyengro, a goldsmith, when the war began. He was a young man, no more than forty, with his own camp. Things were not so bad at first because the Magyars were on the Germans’ side and he could travel as long as he had what the authorities called an Ausweis, a special permit from a Kommandant, which was a German guero.

  “But you pollute a stream and even the fastest fish die. Sometime around the fifth year of the war we were stopped by gueri in black uniforms. They said we were no longer considered Aryans, whatever that meant. Whatever we were, if we weren’t Aryans, it was a crime. So we were caught and taken to a camp ringed with barbed wire at Hopfgarten, which is near Salzburg in Austria. It was especially for Rom, a Zigeunersammelplatze, a Gypsy camping ground, they called it. You see, for a time they had killed us along with the Jews, but the Jews complained. They faced death with wails. We sang. After all, death is unavoidable. Fearing it wastes time. So, people face death in different ways and who can say which way is better? But how typical it was of our killers to respect this one complaint and no others. I could use another cigarette.”