Gypsy in Amber

  ‘This is what fascinated me. I could kill his girlfriend, and he still didn’t suspect who could have created this mystery all around him. But with you, all I had to do was – what? – cast a shadow in the woods and you knew I was there.’

  ‘That was why Hillary was asking me all the questions, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. That was the first time I got a good look at you. Hillary thought you must be from the police.’ Howie grinned. ‘Of course, after your fast exit on the horse, I told her how silly she was.’

  ‘And you went off to get your devil’s head.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Howie laughed with delight. ‘See how much easier it is for people like us? I met a police sergeant on Friday. He was as far from the truth as Sloan. He will even convict Sloan for murder on circumstantial evidence, and neither of them will ever understand what was done or why, two men operating in the dark and never knowing the rules of the game. While you, in an instant, would know Sloan was innocent. That was why I tried to warn you off. After we read about your connection with the police, we had to get more serious.’

  ‘You knew I’d come alone.’

  ‘Sure. I know you pretty well.’ Hillary and the others watched them come into the camp. The two men walked arm in arm. Gerry had a fire started. Isabelle was rooting through a pair of rucksacks for cans of food. Roman looked around for Rosalind and spotted her beside a tree. Tethered to it was another goat, a black one.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Howie asked with an expansive gesture. ‘This is how we get away from the madding crowd. I haven’t whipped them into a kumpania yet, but it’s a start.’

  ‘It is still in the Tom Sawyer league,’ Roman said. Howie laughed appreciatively.

  Roman caught a look going from Isabelle to Gerry.

  ‘What do we do with him?’ Gerry asked. His hand was frozen in the act of slicing kindling.

  ‘What do we do with him?’ Howie asked back. ‘What kind of question is that to ask for a guest? We invited him, and he came.’ He strode across the clearing in his buckskin with his arms wide.

  ‘We treat him like a guest,’ he said with a touch of humility that was so good even Roman was tempted to believe it. ‘He’s one of us, an outsider. We should all stick together. Do you know how much you owe to the Gypsies? The rhymes, the songs. How many children’s fears have been handed down by them.’ As he looked around, his long hair swung. He put a finger to his nose.

  ‘Take this, for example. “Hickory dickory dock.” You know it. “The mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one and down he run. Hickory dickory dock.” That’s an old Gypsy rhyme that actually went, “Ekkeri akkery an.” It’s a counting ditty. And there are many others, aren’t there?’

  ‘You’re too generous,’ Roman said. ‘Hillary, are you the hostess?’

  ‘I guess so,’ she said without enthusiasm.

  ‘Like before.’

  She paled.

  ‘At your father’s house, I mean.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, yes,’ she said.

  ‘No, not like then,’ Howie said. ‘This is fun. We all know each other now. We’ll have a picnic and then some entertainment. First you entertain us,’ he said to Roman, ‘and then we entertain you.’

  ‘How is he going to entertain us?’ Rosalind asked ingenuously. Roman had reached the opinion she was partly retarded.

  ‘With the best kind of show,’ Howie said. ‘He’s going to try to escape. You don’t think he came here deliberately to get his throat cut, do you?’

  He came up behind Roman and slapped him on the back. Roman was struck again by how handsome Howie was, not only the features seemingly cut from flawless marble but the same cerulean blue eyes of a statue. So when he smiled, the effect was ghoulish, like seeing a statue smile.

  ‘What’s it going to be? A little fortune-telling? Divide and conquer? I wonder if you can tell what we have in store for you?’

  ‘The fortune-telling comes later,’ Roman said. ‘My medium works better on a full stomach.’

  ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Roman, don’t. It’s not funny.’

  Everyone looked at Hillary. A gelid quality glazed Howie’s eyes for a moment. Gerry coughed nervously and mentioned something about food to fill the silence. It snapped Howie back.

  ‘Right, food. I’ve had to do all the work so far. Now I’ve someone who can really help me.’

  ‘Gerry’s pretty good with knives,’ Roman said.

  ‘With still targets. I taught him how to do that,’ Howie said. ‘But hunting with a Gypsy, that’ll be a kick. Of course, we won’t be able to give you anything sharp, you understand.’

  ‘I somehow imagined there was a condition like that.’

  Gerry glared at him anxiously, long enough for Roman to grasp Isabelle’s violent hate.

  ‘Great, then we’ll all go and watch. It’ll be just like Mr Wiz – ’

  ‘Howie, I don’t think I can come,’ Hillary said.

  Howie took a deep breath. ‘You’ll come,’ he said in a voice that was almost different from the one Roman heard before. ‘You’ll all come.’

  The salamanders scurried from the damp moss into the filigree shadows of ferns. A daddy longlegs moved giraffelike down the bark of a beech. Roman and the jongleurs moved in single file past their tiny spectators down to the lake again. Hillary brought up the rear. Howie didn’t mind; he was in good spirits again.

  ‘And Kaliban, there’s another Gypsy who never got his due. Half man and half beast. He only had one talent: he knew how to curse. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘You did spend a lot of time in the library,’ Roman said, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘And here we are, Kaliban. The vast deep, full of sea changes. What are you going to show us?’

  They came out of the woods a little down from the boat. On the faraway bank the mass of kids played at shepherd like Marie Antoinette. In between, a trail shimmered on the water from the sun.

  ‘Fish are usually what you find in water,’ Roman said.

  ‘But the word is matcho,’ Howie said. ‘Matcho, fish. This is a good chance for the rest of you to learn the oldest living language in the world.’ The others spread out over the shore watching, except for Hillary, who squinted at the sun: ‘Without a hook, remember.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  Roman walked along the shore until he found a flat rock jutting over the water. He squatted on it and rolled his sleeves up.

  ‘He’s going to do it with his bare hands,’ Rosalind said excitedly, Gerry told her to be quiet.

  Roman lowered his hands in the water. It was late in the afternoon but still hot. Beads of sweat slid down his cheeks. His hands descended at a rate that could be noticed only if one of those watching looked away and then looked back. It took five minutes in all. An underwater plant caressed the back of his hand. He waited another five minutes as the people on the shore became edgy. Something nibbled at a finger, and he felt the stiff bristles of a sunfish. The sunfish left as something bigger chased it from the shade. Roman hoped the others could keep still long enough. A smooth back grazed his palm. The trick was not to grab too fast or too slow.

  ‘He’s got one,’ Gerry shouted. A bass flipped on the ground, squirming in the dirt. It had lost its dark glow in dust by the time Gerry pushed his knife through the gills and began sawing the head off.

  ‘Howie’s got one, too,’ Rosalind said.

  Roman had been too busy concentrating to see Howie wade into the water. He had his eye on a catch, too. Suddenly his arm was in the water. It came out empty. The knife in his hand was pink, though.

  ‘You missed,’ Gerry said as Howie waded back.

  ‘No, I got him.’

  When they left the lake, the headless fish in Gerry’s sack, none of the jongleurs looked very happy.

  ‘It was a joke,’ Hillary explained.

  ‘That’s right,’ Howie said as he walked with Roman. ‘I don’t want to do any of the work for you,’ he said confidentially. ‘You’ve always heard of a man di
gging his own grave. But a man getting his own last supper, that’s a little different.’

  ‘It shows imagination.’

  ‘Oh, you’re humoring me, you dog you,’ Howie said good-naturedly. ‘I can see how you put Sloan through the hoops. Frankly, I think we have a lot in common. I even wish we could meet in different circumstances.’

  ‘Maybe we will,’ Roman suggested.

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  Roman showed the jongleurs how to reap food from the island as Howie stood by and named almost everything they found. Wild onion, purrum. Watercress, panishey sbok. Pedloer, nuts. Roman agreeably supplied yakori bengeskro for elderberries. All the time, Hillary fell farther and farther back. Once she had to go off by herself and be sick.

  ‘Are you going to keep up with us?’ Howie asked when she came back.

  ‘I can’t,’ she muttered.

  ‘We can turn back now,’ Roman suggested. It was the last thing he wanted to do.

  The marble lids clicked over the blue eyes once. ‘We’ll go on. It doesn’t make any difference.’

  Roman led the others through the woods, picking up speed gradually as Howie and Hillary followed. The forest changed from lowland woods to pines. The moss stopped and a cover of pine needles began. Above, the sharp green tips tilted to the east. The incline became steeper, and he hurried because he saw ahead of him what he’d been searching for, the top of the island. Gerry and the girls scrambled after him with their sacks, but while he moved effortlessly through the trees, they kept slipping on the needles underfoot. They were relieved to see him stop on a bare knoll. Then they saw Howie with him. Somehow he had outdistanced them all.

  Roman looked around. The whole island was spread out below a ring of pines.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Howie asked sadly.

  ‘Did you ever hear the old story about the man Beng took to the top of a high cliff and offered all the gold in the world?’ The island fell away in stages to the west. Near the west shore were the burned remains of a house. South, a stand of birches like washed-out graves lay between the pines and a swamp.

  ‘That’s not a Gypsy story.’

  ‘Nobody said it was.’ There were no other campfires besides their own. No boats that he could see. East, there was a bare patch past the pines and then the sycamores and dogwoods around their camp.

  ‘I could kill you right here,’ Howie said matter-of-factly.

  ‘You could. I don’t think that’s what you want.’ He inhaled the pine resin deeply.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Gerry asked as he reached them. The girls with their sacks of herbs looked as if they were on a real picnic. Their cheeks glowed with exercise. Howie was about to answer when a cardinal that had waited in the pine beside him until its heart was bursting shot out of the tree. It headed for the swamp, fluttering like a red handkerchief.

  ‘Cherriclo,’ Roman said. He left the knoll for the long slope going west.

  ‘Bird,’ Rosalind said and followed with the others.

  Howie waited for Hillary. She was just reaching the top, her hands against her sides. ‘You’re slowing me down.’

  ‘I can’t go any faster.’

  ‘You’re always slowing me down.’

  Hillary watched him decide what to do. Obviously, he was considering a great number of alternatives.

  The trail Roman set below wound through a maze of pines. V’s of brown needles kicked up over their feet as they followed the stocky agile figure in the lead. They caught up where he waited for them on a rock shelf. The pine forest had precipitously ended, and they looked out over a different, leafy wood.

  ‘I never knew there was so much on such a small island,’ Gerry said.

  ‘Look.’ Roman pointed to a gray shadow. Two ears twitched, and it was a rabbit. ‘That’s kaun-engro, which is cleverly translated as the thing with the big ears.’

  ‘Can we catch him?’ Gerry already had his knife out.

  ‘I doubt it, but we can try.’

  The rabbit bounded to the side, and they followed on the ledge. Roman took the lead as the ledge became hemmed in by pines. A second outcrop of granite rose at its back, and they were forced to move sideways, looking straight down to the twenty-foot drop. Roman thought they’d have to back up when the ledge vanished, but he found it went around a bend in the outcropping.

  ‘This would be a very good time for you to take off, wouldn’t it?’ Isabelle said.

  Roman looked at Gerry, who said nothing. ‘After you,’ he told Isabelle and squeezed himself against the rock enough to let her pass. She went first around the bend.

  Her hand came back and grabbed Roman’s. When she was steady, he went around the bend with her. The rock ended at a seam of dirt and a sinkhole. Isabelle had almost fallen in. ‘There’s a moral here someplace,’ Roman said. They edged their way between the wall at their back and the hole. It was ten feet deep, and the bottom was dotted with animal droppings. In the lower woods was a badly rotted line where a tree had fallen.

  ‘That was here once,’ Roman said. He looked up. There were two large pines directly overhead on the upper rock. ‘The animals have taken over now.’

  ‘Snakes?’ Isabelle asked.

  ‘They prefer rocks, and they don’t leave droppings like that. More like pigeons. It would be a fox or a rabbit. Wait a second.’

  He went past the hole to the rock shelf on the other side. The granite had hundreds of crannies filled with small plants. Roman used them all to get down to the lower woods. Gerry watched anxiously, but Roman didn’t have the cold sweat that warned him of Howie’s presence. He tamely inspected the side of the shelf below them.

  ‘Great, there’s a small opening here. From the prints I’d say we have – ’

  ‘Say it in Gypsy,’ Rosalind urged.

  ‘I’d feel safer if you were more explicit,’ Isabelle said.

  ‘Hedgehog. Those who want the Gypsy version can see me after class.’ He had Gerry toss down a book of matches. ‘I’m going to start a fire with some brush and smoke them out. Use the sacks to catch them. Try not to knock each other into the hole.’

  The operation wasn’t a complete success. They were half-blind from smoke when the hedgehogs finally came out, which was all at once and in all directions. They were lucky to catch two. Gerry was better at dispatching them.

  As they walked through the lower woods to the black timbers Roman had seen from the hill, some change had taken place in the jongleurs. They carried their sacks with enthusiasm. Isabelle had stopped fixing Roman with blank stares. The larger change had been in him. He strode over the grass floor happily. His chin had a blue of stubble, his shirt was dirty and minus a button, and his hair hung in ringlets. He whistled a spirited djili to set the pace. Tiny emerald leaves of ivy crawled over the burned house, and a new sycamore was growing out of the enriched ground.

  A margin of lilacs marked what once was the lawn. Rosalind ran ahead with a yell of excitement, swinging her sack. The rest trotted after her. She stopped before they did, staring up at the house, and then they halted in their tracks.

  Howie stood in front of the black wall, an exclamation point all in white. The wind hardly bothered his hair, although the ivy behind him shuddered delicately.

  ‘The picnic is over,’ he said.

  Roman was the only one to take the last few steps up to him. ‘It’s hardly begun.’

  Howie tilted his head back to the sky. ‘Getting dark. God, they’re long, aren’t they?’

  ‘What’s long?’ Gerry asked.

  ‘The days,’ Roman said. There were, after all, moments when he understood Howie in a way the others couldn’t. The moon had risen in the still bright sky like a ghost. ‘There’s one more thing. Here.’

  He went down into the gutted cellar of the house. The cement floor was an inch deep in water at places. He went to the part hidden under the shell of the first floor. Everything he touched left a blur of soot. He found what he wanted in the darkest, innermost corne
r of cement and beams. He killed it before it woke up.

  They watched him come out of the cellar. Gerry had his knife drawn, but Roman’s hands were together. He drew one away to reveal a crumpled ball of fur, leathery wings and a face that was mostly flaring nostrils. Howie pulled back the lid of its left eye. It was missing.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Gerry said.

  Howie sighed. ‘It means that the man who has it has the power of invisibility.’

  ‘I still see him.’

  Howie’s blue eyes scanned Roman. ‘Now I really see him.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The fire sprawled redly through its border of rocks like lava in the dark. A few of the hardwood skewers had dried out and added to the blaze while bones made irregular shadows in it. A pot, empty of soup and askew, reflected the glow. Roman lit a Gauloise in the flames and blew out a long plume of smoke.

  ‘A last cigarette,’ he said. ‘What a nice tradition.’

  ‘It is about that time,’ Howie agreed.

  ‘You didn’t eat anything. Neither did Hillary.’

  Howie didn’t answer. He looked at his hands, held out in front of him. They were large and strong, but there was nothing brutish about them. They were almost hairless. He lifted his eyes and watched Roman. Everybody else was.

  ‘What is death like for a Gypsy? “Ban, ban, Kaliban? Has a new master, get a new man?” ’