Canto for a Gypsy

  Roman climbed into the rear with Dany. She covered her ears.

  He fired two bullets through the rear window, aiming high so that they would pass over the car behind. When he broke through the glass he saw the convertible falling back fast, confused by the shots and presenting a low profile. A mile behind them followed the siren and floating red and yellow lights of a patrol car.

  Aggressively, Reggel swerved the limousine into the path of the convertible, but at the last possible moment the other car took advantage of the bridge ramp and left the highway. The Chrysler met the bridge’s exiting traffic and coasted to the first emergency zone on the side of the road to wait for the police.

  “Ciganyi, ciganyi,” Reggel said as he kissed Roman on the cheeks.

  In the glare of the arc lamp coming through the empty windshield the three people inside the car seemed to be sitting on beds of pink diamonds.

  12

  The holy crown rested in the middle of the sanctuary. When it had been removed from its iron coffer it was merely beautiful. In the colored daylight pouring through the stained-glass windows, the crown came alive.

  From the pews, looking at it against the altar’s gilt canopy and the cobalt blue of the Lady Chapel windows, the crown’s sea-color enamels shimmered, animating Byzantine saints around a ring of green gold. The procession in the ambulatory, viewing the crown against the soft russet of the older clerestory windows, saw primarily a Roman dome of red gold, the bows studded with the fire of garnets and amethysts, stones backed with gold foil to reflect the light. The stand was set into the top of the crown, allowing the gold chains to hang their full length and giving it a sense of levitation magnified by the angle of the small cross balancing on its top.

  Reggel looked down from the gallery. A step behind him, Csonka held a rifle out of view. There was another rifleman in the opposite gallery and two more in the galleries over the nave. The men sitting on the aisles in the front pews were his, and photoelectric beams squared the sanctuary. No one could join the procession without passing more of his squad and a metal detector with the coy trademark “Friskem.” Even so, Reggel’s nerves lay close to the surface.

  The crowd swelled at lunchtime, until Isadore had to send more men to the front of the church to control the flow. Around 2:30, the mass of people had gone and Isadore and Reggel retired to the administration building to get something to eat.

  A sergeant from BOSSI joined them. The fact that BOSSI is not, for public consumption, supposed to exist accounts for the different names it has gone by—Bureau of Special Services and Investigation, Neutrality Squad, Public Relations Squad and Special Investigation Section—but policemen with affectionate directness just as often call it the Red Squad.

  “You’re going to help me?” Reggel responded with an acid smile.

  “We carry out surveillance on all groups, left or right,” the man from BOSSI told him. “We’re just as interested in identifying the men in that car last night as you are. The Central European desk might well have their pictures on file if they were Freedom Fighters.”

  Reggel swabbed a slice of bacon fat on his bread and noticed the large black display case the sergeant carried. Isadore ate a pastrami sandwich with mustard.

  “You think a captain of state security wouldn’t know a Freedom Fighter if he saw one?” Reggel commented.

  “Captain, we run one hundred thousand security checks a year. We manage to keep an eye on you, the American Nazi Party and eighty thousand illegal aliens. I’m hardly going to open our files for you, but you need our help. This is the city you’re dealing with now, not the security arrangements for a small mission.”

  Rebuked, Reggel nodded.

  “The red paint is a strong indicator this was a political act,” the sergeant pointed out.

  “The color of the paint?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sergeant, look up at the ceiling. Tell me, what color are my eyes? If you can, I’ll let you help me.”

  “Why, they’re brown.”

  “No, no, Sergeant. In Hungarian.”

  The sergeant looked down.

  “You’re not serious. You’re not going to refuse my help for a stupid reason like that? So what if I don’t speak Hungarian? I work on the Central European desk. That’s nine different countries.”

  “That’s eight too many. No, thank you, Sergeant.” Reggel wiped his fingers before shaking hands. At the door he said, “By the way, my eyes are barna.”

  Isadore wrapped the remains of his sandwich in a paper bag.

  “You’re loaded with charm, Captain.”

  “Why should I be charming to a spy? Besides, the men in the car could have been anyone. Here, people kill people they’ve never met. A stranger comes into your home and kills you. He meets you on the highway and tries to run you off the road.”

  “If it’s as simple as that, why are you demanding that the priests be searched before they leave the church?”

  “I don’t like priests.”

  As they crossed back to the church, they saw the first full-scale demonstration on Fifth Avenue. The protestors shouted “Freedom for Hungary” in English and Hungarian. For all Reggel’s professed indifference, Isadore caught his eye roaming over the faces at the barricades. After a minute of listening, the two officers went back inside the cathedral.

  With each passing hour the light from the windows shifted around the crown, throwing one gold bow in filigreed relief, sending another into an amber haze. Occasionally, it burst into flame from the flash of a camera smuggled into the congregation, and there would be a slight disturbance as Reggel’s men located the photographer.

  The crowd grew in size again after five, and the pews were full by evening Mass. Ushers locked the transept doors. The red ropes that had directed the procession around the ambulatory were used to reserve the first three rows for special guests. The mayor had left on his vacation, but there were the governor, ambassadors, museum representatives and a papal nuncio. In the rear of the congregation, Dany sat with Roman.

  A new procession appeared, a train of white led by acolytes casting plumes of incense. There were two cardinal’s miters, Killane and the Primate of Budapest, and behind them in the dress of his order the abbot of the Benedictines, evangelizers of the Magyars. Reggel switched off the photoelectric cells just as the procession passed through the communion rail and up the sanctuary steps.

  From the loft under the rose window, an organist magnified Brahms and a rifleman watched for the smallest suspicious movement from below.

  13

  On the second day of the crown’s display, a young black maintenance worker emerged from the boiler room exit in the wall along the Fifty-first Street sidewalk. He carried a mop and pail to the curb. A patrolman on the corner started toward him for a moment, then saw the green uniform and waved.

  Morton bent between two cars and poured a stream of dirty water from the pail. Still leaning over, he flipped open the headlight cover of the car to his right. Instead of lights, the socket held a gray waterproof plastic bag. He dropped the bag in the pail and shut the cover.

  Inside St. Patrick’s, he refilled the pail with water and added enough soap to turn the water milky; then he carried his pail and mop to the sanctuary. Another maintenance man polished the bronze doors to the crypt while one of the Hungarian guards stood over him.

  He approached them and asked for the keys to the sacristy. The older maintenance man had just finished mopping the sacristy floors, but he was Spanish and he didn’t want to expose his bad English in front of the guard. He gave Morton the keys.

  Morton rolled the sacristy gates open and went directly to the room on the right of the hall. It was the least used of the changing rooms, furnished only with chairs, a prie-dieu and a tall stand-up closet. He opened the closet door and placed the dripping bag inside.

  On the way out, he asked the other
maintenance man why he didn’t say the sacristy was already done. The Hungarian ignored a conversation he didn’t understand anyway and stared at the crown.

  * * *

  At the Commodore, Odrich washed skin bronzer off his fingers before he put on his ecclesiastical collar. He ducked his head forward to the mirror, snapping the collar’s fake button at the back of his neck. The front of his skull was freshly shaven and artificially tanned.

  In the other mirrors the other men changed into their black suits, black dickeys and collars.

  On the way out they exchanged their guns for breviaries.

  CZARDAS

  * * *

  14

  It was still dark on the third day of the crown’s exhibition when Isadore picked up Roman. The detective was red-eyed and irritable.

  “Isn’t it a little early for Mass?”

  “Forget about your Hungarians. This is a bit of the home-town.”

  The sun rose on the East Side, making the tops of the apartment buildings a crisp necropolis against a yet clean sky. The East River Drive passed over shadows on stilts. Roman yawned and stretched as dawn spread over Queens.

  They took the drive up the Harlem River, and the brighter the day became, the dirtier it got. At 178th Street they crossed the Harlem to the Bronx. Signs pointed to the Major Deegan Expressway and Yankee Stadium, but Isadore turned off back to the river. He stopped on a potholed street serving rotting quays underneath the 100-foot arches of an unused bridge.

  “Highbridge Aqueduct,” Isadore said. “Private property of any junky willing to make the climb.”

  A homicide van and two unmarked police cars were on the sidewalk. Two black patrolmen and a black detective stood on the cement collar of an arch that stepped into the river. The detective waved a flashlight at Isadore.

  “You’re back,” he said. The detective’s attitude toward Roman was composed more of lack of sleep than curiosity.

  “How are you doing?”

  “It’s a bummer. We thought it would be easier when day came? That water’s as dark now as it ever was.”

  Children in grease-colored clothes watched from a pier of car chassis as Roman followed the detectives onto the pile’s cement buttress. On the other side of the pile one black and one white detective looked down at the water. Isadore took a wad of gum from his mouth and threw it as far into the river as he could. By now, Roman understood that the sergeant was resuming a watch begun hours before.

  “This was the greatest bridge in America when it was built,” Isadore muttered.

  The stone piers in the middle of the bridge had been replaced by one elongated steel arch. A rope hung down from it a short jump from the abutment. Between the detectives lay a forensic field kit and a green canvas bag.

  New children gathered on the trash heap, and the policemen kept their watch, staring at scum turned a tawny, molten glow by the rising sun. Suddenly the gilt was broken by a surfacing diver in a scuba suit. He crawled up on the abutment dragging what he found by its hand. He spit out his mouthpiece.

  “Roll out the bag.”

  It was the body of a black man. The film covering him made it impossible to tell how old he was, and when the detectives hauled on his jacket sleeve, discolored water spurted between their fingers.

  “We found him,” Isadore yelled up, and for the first time Roman was aware of police on the bridge walkway.

  The face was cleaned enough for Roman to see it was a boy. The black detective swore.

  “It’s Morton, okay.”

  “We have the fingerprints, then,” Isadore said. “Give us a fast cause of death.”

  A pink froth from the nostrils indicated that the boy had died of drowning. The black detective dictated the in situ report with regained professionalism.

  “Laceration on the wrist and forehead.” His finger probed through the boy’s short Afro. “At least one laceration on the left temple.” The jaw pulled open. “The tongue cut, possibly self-inflicted.” There was a pause as he spread the boy’s nostrils wide. “Damn, damn, damn. This foam, it may be junk.”

  He went to the boy’s arm and examined the inside of the elbow.

  “Shit, he went back. Overdose. Have the lab look for morphine in the bile.”

  The detective let the thin black arm drop. “Tell me this doesn’t make sense.”

  Isadore kneeled beside the boy. The diver sat with his flippers dangling over the water, smoking a cigarette.

  “Look at this.” Isadore pulled the boy’s head to the side, exposing the neck. There was a barely discernible puncture in it.

  “A hot shot,” the black detective said. “Some bastard surprised him with a hot shot of junk.”

  “Then they gave him the shot in the arm.” Isadore nodded. He pushed himself up with both hands and stood beside Roman. “Oh, boy. Let’s get out of here.”

  By climbing vandalized steps, Isadore and Roman were able to work their way to the top of the old bridge. Each end of the walkway was blocked by particularly ugly barricades of corrugated metal and barbed wire. Along the Harlem, the other bridges and highways were already filled with morning traffic.

  “God, you can’t get a breath of fresh air in this town.” Isadore rubbed eyes that were bloodshot and dry. “Did you ever see that kid before, Roman?”

  “Never.”

  “Name was Frederick Morton. He grew up on a dozen different streets but he was a Boy Scout. Merit badges, the works. A smart kid. Sergeant Jack knew him from a youth center, then Morton got into drugs and car theft. When Morton got off Rikers Island, Jack found him a job lifeguarding at a swimming pool. The kid vanished two weeks ago. Just disappeared. Nothing unusual in that, is there?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Things like that don’t happen to Gypsies.”

  The bitterness was strange in Isadore. Across the walkway, a pair of detectives searched for bloodstains with paper and benzidine. If the paper turned green or blue they scraped up the spot.

  “Someone who knew Morton saw him get out of a car last night and run away from three white men. That was on the Manhattan side of the bridge, where the swimming pool is. It’s deserted at night, except for junkies. Morton probably had the hot shot in the neck and the other in the arm when he started running. It’s amazing he got so far. He had to climb over the barbed wire blocking that end of the bridge, beat the others across the bridge and scramble over this barricade. I suppose he went down to the river by then because he wasn’t able to run uphill anymore.”

  One of the men on the abutment pulled the hanging rope in and began cutting stained threads from it.

  “They could have just let him hang from that until he dropped, but I bet they didn’t,” Isadore said.

  “Didn’t his family miss him?”

  “His sister’s too busy working and his brother dropped off this bridge a year ago. There are no Hungarian fairy-tale castles around here.”

  The small body was zippered into the bag and started its trip to the van. Isadore rocked back and forth against the rail chewing his lip until he dug a fresh stick of gum from his pocket.

  “You know, I have this funny reputation for reading.”

  The sound of excited children interrupted Isadore as they swarmed around the police loading the van.

  “Reading about Gypsies instead of arresting them, for example,” he went on. “So when the commissioner stuck me with the crown, thanks to you, I went to the library to read up on it. Only, the Army archives I found there had the interesting pages cut out.”

  He took an envelope from the inside of his jacket. As he sifted through the papers inside, Roman saw neatly written notes about photography. The detective found what he wanted, pages torn from a book, and held them out by the corners for Roman to read.

  “Report of the 7th Army Interrogation Center: On May 7, 1945
, an ancient box was delivered to Major K. of the 7th Army Intelligence Center by Hungarian Army Col. P. and twelve guards of the Hungarian Army. Col. P. said the box contained the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen. P. added that he must remain with the crown as he was the official custodian and guardian. P. stated that the keys were originally distributed to three people and that they were all now with Prime Minister Szollosi. A search for the keys was initiated. On July 24, Lt. G. of Intelligence arrived with the keys and the box was opened. It was empty.”

  Isadore turned the page over.

  “P. was brought to the center and interrogated. P. explained that the crown, scepter and orb had been removed and buried. He then volunteered to go after the crown with Lt. A. of Intelligence. Maj. K. refused this request until permission could come from Intelligence HQ. However, on the following day, Col. P. and Lt. A. returned to Maj. K. and reported that they had fetched the crown during the night. An old, mud-covered gasoline drum was brought in and Col. P. chiseled the top open. Three very muddy and deteriorated leather boxes were removed. The boxes were falling apart. The crown, scepter and orb were carried to the bathroom, where the dirt was washed off by Col. P. and Maj. K. They placed them on the floor to dry and then put them back in their original chest. On Aug. 3, the box was reopened and the objects packed in bath towels. They were then replaced in the chest and the chest sealed with wax bearing the imprint of the dog tags of an American lieutenant who was present. Maj. K. states that he has never been able to discover where the crown was buried when it was in the gasoline drum.”

  Roman put his hand out for the rest of the envelope. Isadore shrugged and gave it to him.

  “That was from the book I read. Boyle found all this stuff scattered around the bridge. We already did a ninhydrin test on the paper, so we know the fingerprints check with Morton’s. Now, why was a seventeen-year-old kid from Harlem ripping up books about the crown? And why was he killed?”