Canto for a Gypsy

  “Because I’ve been in Hungary and seen other secret police captains work, sitting in the last aisle and taking down the names of the worshippers or crossing priests off their ‘approved’ list. I know who you are and what you do and I won’t allow the stench of it in this church. If I see one more jacket bulging with a gun on the church floor, the crown will leave the crypt and you can take your chances.”

  The Hungarian didn’t flinch, just weighed his options.

  “Very well, we will follow your orders.”

  Killane went to the door.

  “God bless you,” he said as an afterthought, and left.

  Reggel felt the holster under his arm ruefully, then returned to the ambulatory. A hand on his arm stopped him. Roman had followed him.

  “There’s something else,” Roman said. “Your Dr. Andos gave a very good lecture.”

  “So?”

  “I thought he couldn’t speak English. That was one of the reasons I was chosen.”

  “Not you.” Reggel’s anger leaped to the surface. “Don’t you give me trouble, Gypsy. I’ve had enough from that hypocrite in the cassock. I expect it from him but not from you.”

  “What do you expect from me?”

  “If anything happens, don’t blame me. Blame the priests and traitors who brought the crown here.” The Hungarian’s face was no longer the impassive mask he’d worn so far. He gestured at the sanctuary and the crypt beneath. “I only protect the crown. I did not arrange for this gruesome show.”

  Organ music swelled the air as the doors were opened to the public.

  “We have a poet called Juhasz, Gypsy, whose friend was buried against his wishes in a church like this. Juhasz wrote, ‘Here you lie in this paltry proletarian grave, in this capitalist filth of stone, bronze and granite, this abomination, this raving money-paradise, among dim fathers in marble strung around with white marble roses, their bronze hats and mustaches inclining to the shit that rains down from pigeons.’

  “Here our crown lies in their crypt because there is no place safe in this cardinal’s cathedral and it is surrounded by the expediency of enemies and the selfishness of renegades. Only I stand by the Holy Crown and I will do it any way I can.”

  He broke off and strode through the growing flow of tourists and worshippers. Roman stood where he was for a few more seconds and then took his time about reaching the vestibule where Isadore waited by a door.

  “What was that all about?” the detective asked.

  “Just finding out where we stood.”

  A pair of old women jostled Roman aside as they made their way in.

  “Where do we stand?”

  “We, as an old Hungarian expression puts it, are the fall guys.”

  10

  A summer rainstorm had passed over the city during the evening services, and at the police sawhorses only a solitary man in a raincoat carried a sign that read FREEDOM FOR HUNGARY.

  Reggel and Isadore laid wires to the photoelectric cells taped against the fronts of the choir stalls.

  “You shouldn’t listen to what that Gypsy has to say. When you know them longer you’ll know better than to expect the truth, no?”

  “There are worse things,” Isadore told him.

  “He is what he is.”

  Isadore pushed the three-pronged coupler into the control panel behind the altar.

  Eight dull lights glowed around the sanctuary. Csonka stepped between two of them and a horn blared through the loudspeakers over the pulpit. Isadore pulled the socket out.

  “The people will file along the ambulatory,” Reggel said. “It is unlikely someone would not be seen by us, but in case there is a staged distraction this will warn us anyway.”

  The other cells were tested. Only two had to be readjusted.

  “What do you mean by ‘he is what he is’?”

  Reggel rolled the cord up while Csonka taped the cells more securely.

  “I know you are some sort of expert, Sergeant, but how well do you really know Gypsies?”

  “How well can anyone know them?”

  “We know them,” Reggel said significantly. “Items that a cardinal would not like said in his church.”

  Csonka pointed up to the gallery on the north side of the nave. Two poles held an American flag and another with the miter and keys to the Vatican. A third with the colors of Hungary was being hoisted into place next to them by Reggel’s men. Isadore appreciated the fact that all the flags were outshone by the rose window, its colored glass burning like glowworms from the floodlights outside.

  “Are you a squeamish man, Sergeant?”

  “Not very.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Have you ever heard of the Siebengebirge?”

  Isadore bristled. “It’s a mountain range in Germany.”

  “No. This one is a mountain range between the People’s Republic of Hungary and the People’s Republic of Rumania. I think most people here know it better as Transylvania. The Siebengebirge is home for a tribe of Gypsies called the Netotsi. Tell me, what is your opinion of cannibalism and people who practice it? This is an interesting custom, don’t you agree?”

  A bright spotlight was turned onto the bay from the gallery.

  “Perhaps there was a reason.”

  “You give me a reason why they prefer carrion instead of freshly killed food. Did you know that in Hungary we have to pour carbolic acid on the carcasses we throw into the carrion pits so that the Gypsies won’t dig them up? Or why when the Gypsy goes to the trouble of buying a chicken instead of stealing it, he asks the farmer to let it rot in the sun for three days?”

  Isadore felt a prickly buzz on his spine. The words were too familiar to those he’d heard about another group.

  “Pay no attention to him. A Gypsy is born with a lie in his mouth. This one is no different. Anyway, we’re finished here,” Reggel concluded. “Now we celebrate.”

  Isadore left first. His departure was noted by the lone picket across Fifth Avenue. A gray microbus with diplomatic plates arrived outside a transept door. A squad of Hungarian secret police entered the church, and shortly afterwards Reggel and four other men came out. Because of the church’s illumination, Odrich saw him clearly.

  Reggel was a little taller and much heavier, filled out from the lanky athlete Odrich remembered. The hair was the same wheat gold, in contrast to an almost Asian face. There was brusque command and physical strength instead of adolescent bravado, but the adolescent Odrich recalled was from a war thirty years old. No doubt the Hungarians had chosen the right man.

  The microbus doors slammed and it started out for Madison Avenue.

  Five Hungarians inside, seventeen patrolmen and plain-clothesmen outside and surveillance cars. Odrich already knew that Reggel had chosen to do without the night shift of ushers and maintenance men.

  Odrich discarded his picket sign and raincoat in a service alley and walked up Fifth. He passed Killane returning from the Hungarian reception without noticing, because he was intent on the art gallery windows. To him they were a chronicle of the decline of art, starting with the substitution of tempera for oil, a technological breakthrough that freed the Impressionists and sentenced everyone else to a future of spray paint and plastic. It was no wonder New York was the new center of the art world; it had been said, he remembered, that the best example of form following function was the ashtray. And would families eating fried chicken from cardboard containers be able to drive by junkyards piled high with rusting Calders?

  On Seventy-fifth Street he turned off Fifth and headed for the inverted ziggurat of the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue. Midway up the block the Volkswagen bus was parked in front of the faintly decrepit town house Hungary rented for its mission. Sounds of celebration leaked from it.

  Odrich stopped at the Whitney next to a parked Lincoln convertible. Karl was at the wheel with another
of the men from the Commodore.

  “If he walks across the street, run him down,” Odrich said casually as he studied the architecture of the museum. “Then throw the paint at the mission. I don’t really care how political this looks as long as Reggel is dead. You’ll find that’s the only kind of politics that’s understood.”

  * * *

  Second Avenue from Seventy-seventh Street to Eighty-eighth is Central Europe on a straight line, running from Czechoslovakian restaurants to German Brauhäuser and from goulash to potato pancakes. Roman and Dany stopped in between at a Hungarian restaurant that offered “Real Gypsy Violinists” with a sign of sequins and black velvet.

  “I thought you hated these places,” Dany commented as they went in.

  “Just slumming.”

  An emaciated maître d’ in a tuxedo as stiff as a shell led them to a front table, but Roman chose one in the rear. They followed a yellowing wall-length mural of Budapest and the Danube to their new seats. It, like the wood trim and the bar, was painted a malevolent green. Dany felt the stares of the other patrons as she sat down and accepted a menu.

  “You don’t understand Hungarian, too, do you?” Roman asked, aware of her reaction to the diners, for the most part men dressed seriously in dark suits with shirts buttoned at the neck without a tie.

  “No, thank God. Now I know why we never come here. But he wanted us to sit up front. Why?”

  “That’s a long story. Our maître d’ is hovering. Would you like something to drink?”

  They ordered apéritifs.

  “He reminds me of someone. What was Bela Lugosi?”

  “Please, let’s not be prejudiced in return. But, since you ask, Hungarian. What else?”

  The maître d’ returned with a bottle of wine instead of the apéritifs. He spoke to Roman in Hungarian and poured enough wine to cover the bottom of his glass. Roman tasted the wine and nodded. A man at a nearby table raised his glass and toasted the Gypsy. Dany felt the tension ease.

  “What did I miss?” she asked when the maître d’ left, a more human smile on his face.

  “He asked if I wouldn’t prefer a Hungarian wine more, and I said the one he brought us was as sweet and bountiful as the district he was born in. They speak with a twang in Badacsony. His friend appreciated that. In other words, I wormed my way into their good graces.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “A Hungarian twang.”

  Dany tasted the wine herself. It was white and strong. She looked around again. Roman had brought about the desired effect; what had seemed sinister was now cozily foreign. The restaurant proprietor and the maître d’ bowed from the bar.

  “They’re not so bad.” She looked at her menu. “I’m ­starving.”

  “Now there’s a progression of thought.”

  When Roman tried to order a dinner, the maître d’ was dogmatic about his own suggestion. It sounded like a four-course meal to Dany, and when Roman accepted the maître d’ left with an air of personal satisfaction.

  “You’re right, there is a twang,” she said.

  “And the more you drink, the stronger it gets.”

  A man with the shape and some of the coloring of an avocado came out through the kitchen doors. He wore little dagger mustaches under his nose, an embroidered felt vest, a red silk sash at his belly, and he carried a violin. After one look at Roman he vanished back in the kitchen and reappeared without his instrument.

  “Romano, what are you doing here?” he demanded as soon as he slipped into a chair at their table. Up close, Dany saw the musician appeared less ridiculous and his eyes were darting and intelligent. He was also uncomfortable. Roman called for another glass. “Romano, are you trying to make a fool of me, seeing me like this?”

  “Tomo is a great musician,” Roman told Dany in En­glish. She understood; she wasn’t supposed to know Romany at all in front of the indignant Gypsy. What mattered was Roman’s confidence that she would.

  Tomo Tomeshti forced his round face into a polite smile. He’d heard about Roman’s gaji. At the moment, though, he was as furious as a man caught wearing a tutu.

  “The problem with being a great musician like Tomo is that he doesn’t want friends hearing him play ‘restaurant music.’ If Tomo played here the way he could, no one would eat and he would lose his job. He wants you to understand this.”

  “The point is I look like an idiot in this outfit. Why are you here?” Tomo repeated in Romany.

  “About a horse,” Roman answered in kind.

  Tomo blinked and took a first sip of wine.

  “Your brother is still at Belmont, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Tomo said.

  “I need a gentle horse with some years left in him. Naturally, I thought of the Tomeshtis. Not everyone can be trusted these days.”

  “True.” Tomo’s wrath subsided. A horse was an entirely different matter. Tomo had to dress in Gypsy clothes and play in restaurants in order to follow the races. Unfortunately, his knowledge was better than his luck. He asked for a cigarette. “I’m glad you explained this. Otherwise, Romano—”

  “Of course,” Roman said meekly.

  The tables close by carried on their conversations with half an ear to the two Gypsies. Tomo’s mahogany face gleamed in the serene contemplation of horses.

  “You understand that Thoroughbreds are not cheap.”

  “No,” Roman corrected, “a gentle horse. None of those crazy Thoroughbreds. Good-looking, gentle, something a boy can ride and be proud of.”

  “A boy? Romano, when we were boys we raced stallions bareback. What kind of boy?”

  “A chal that never rode before.”

  Tomo grimaced. In New York it was possible. He struggled to bring his imagination to a lower plane.

  “I suppose it can be done. My brother is very good at arranging these things. Still, it won’t be cheap. Shipping the horse, providing some feed, one thing and another.”

  “Certainly. I leave that all up to you. And when it’s going to arrive, let me know. Just so some scoundrel doesn’t try to ruin your good name by livening up a nag with a plug of ginger.”

  “Understood. And I will bring a banker to look at your money and a doctor to check your sex.”

  Dany caught enough to understand that they had negotiated with an eloquent bluntness. When they reached agreement, they drank on it.

  The meal arrived. Rather than the four-course dinner Dany expected, it was one dish prepared especially by the chef: ciganypecsenye hideg koritessel, pork with cold vegetables, Gypsy-style. Tomo went off to the kitchen and reentered with his violin on a dramatic chord.

  A gray microbus pulled up in front of a hydrant outside the restaurant. The driver got out and helped Dr. Andos emerge from the back, while more men got out on the street side. Reggel parked behind it alone in an old Chrysler limousine.

  Between streetlights a block down, a third car parked.

  The maître d’ flourished a clean tablecloth and set a service for the new party. There were bottles on the table before the silver and the Hungarians toasted each other. Andos could barely keep his head up. Tomo tucked the violin under his chin and played louder. Reggel stomped his foot and kept time with the cigarette in his hand.

  Roman and Dany were almost finished, and Roman called for the check. Instead, the maître d’ bent over the Hungarian’s table and pointed to the rear of the restaurant.

  “Ciganyi!”

  Reggel stood up. He waved for Roman to join the larger table. When Roman shook off the invitation, Reggel weaved his way through the tables toward them.

  “If the Gypsy won’t go to the Magyar, the Magyar will go to the Gypsy,” he said as he took a chair and put down the bottle he’d brought.

  Dany took her cue from Roman, who returned Reggel’s smile. For a moment she thought Reggel was going to say so
mething vulgar about her being with Roman. Suddenly, he filled their glasses from his bottle.

  “This is Tokay Eszencia. Five hundred dollars a bottle. Wine that is so sweet and ripe it doesn’t need to be pressed, it runs from the grape. As beauty and grace flow from you,” he told Dany sincerely. “I knew our expert had the best of taste.”

  Reggel’s high cheeks were flushed with drinking and his movements had an awkward formality. The Eszencia was very sweet. Dany was shocked; she could tell from Roman’s glance that Reggel hadn’t lied about the cost. The Hungarian filled her glass again, generously.

  “Very good,” she said.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he promised.

  “The reception is over?” Roman asked.

  “Ended. All the weaklings have passed out, so we came here to carry on. This is not a night when a Hungarian should be asleep.”

  “Aren’t you afraid to come here?” Dany wanted to know.

  “Because we are Communists?” Reggel grinned. “We are Hungarians. No true Hungarian can hold it against us for retrieving the Holy Crown. Besides, what would be more perfect than to spend this glorious evening in the company of my Gypsy and his lovely lady? This is no night to hold grudges.”

  Reggel possessed an animal energy that was near Gypsy. He described how Eszencia regularly revived kings on the brink of death. What intrigued Dany more was his intimacy with Roman. All his efforts were designed to seduce Roman’s friendship more than hers. Even his insults had a fierce amiability. When one of his friends asked Reggel to return to the front of the restaurant, the captain sent him back with a sharp word.

  “You see, the Gypsy and I go back a long, long time,” he told Dany, his eyebrows raised.

  Tomo’s eyes were closed, but he moved through the tables without brushing a chair. Already, he had abandoned the usual restaurant repertoire, and the patrons were listening with their forks and knives untouched beside their plates. His bow drew slowly over the bass string.