Gypsy in Amber

by Martin Cruz Smith

  ‘No good,’ he said. ‘Isadore has a suspect, I have someone I’ve never seen, a phantom. He has his evidence and motive. All I can say is that there will be another murder. Do you think that courts admit Gypsies with stories about devils and dark ceremonies? I’ve seen the murder weapon, and so have you. Isadore wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Besides, Isadore could take the killer to a ball game and not know it. If I saw him, I would know him in an instant.’

  ‘Then let the gaja fight their own battles,’ Celie said. ‘If they don’t know how to, that’s their problem. Phew, now you’ve ruined my evening.’

  He’d never seen Celie angry before, and shrugging his shoulders didn’t help.

  ‘Let me tell you another secret, since you’re so interested in them,’ she said. ‘We are in America, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You even go around with an American girl, don’t you?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Do you consider yourself American? Because if you do, I consider you a great fool. How long has this America been around, two hundred years? Well, the Romanies have been around for five thousand years. Longer than any nation. And why? Because we know how to survive. The Aryans tried to kill us, the Persians, the Tatars, the Magyars, the Africans, the Germans, everybody. But we stay together, and we move on, and we keep one thing in mind, to survive, and that is our greatest secret. As soon as you stop thinking of yourself as a Rom and as something else then, Romano, you are already a dead man. And when they come to my door to tell me about your brave death, I will say bater, so be it.’

  Roman looked down at the pin. He forgot whether it was good luck or bad to pick it up. It was after three, and he’d promised to be back long ago, and he was tired. Celie had been battering him for an hour.

  ‘I wouldn’t have told you what you wanted to know if I’d suspected what you wanted to do,’ she said. ‘You are a favorite, so you were able to hide it from me. It wasn’t fair. So I am not going to let you go until you promise that this is the end. Because you have involved me, I can demand this. You will do nothing. You will let the gaja murder themselves and catch themselves. I forbid you to have anything more to do with it.’

  The ageless black eyes looked into his.

  ‘Do you promise?’

  He sighed and put the glass on a counter. The side of the glass was smeared with jam. A tart aroma rose from it, a heady aroma he’d smelled a thousand different times and places before.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered.

  Kore had a new song he wanted Roman to hear when he walked out of the kitchen. Yojo was opening a fresh bottle of brandy. Roman begged off and was about to leave when the newlyweds returned. Laza glowed in response to the awed giggles of her former playmates. Vera spread her arms wide to reveal a bedsheet spangled with bloodstains.

  Roman didn’t get home until after four, and then he found his promise already broken.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The apartment looked as if it had been picked up and shaken in the teeth of a monster. Slashed paintings and broken mirrors lay on the floor amid china shards. Chairs had been denuded of their legs and splats. A torn curtain dragged on the floor, stirring a little from the air wandering in from the broken window. In the haphazard destruction, it took Roman a moment to pick out her arm.

  A memory emerged of a childhood enemy who had one winter unexpectedly pushed him into a deep creek – the same frozen, heavy, helpless shock. He pulled the blanket off her, moving quickly as an antidote to fear, untying the blindfold of his own sock and the scarf around her wrists. Her hands were cold, and one arm was daubed with blood. Something was hanging from the corner of her mouth, and he watched with horror as a whole nylon stocking came out when he pulled.

  It was impossible to tell whether she was breathing and he put his hand between her breasts, and the frozen sensation thawed into sweat when he felt her heart beating shallowly in sleep. The vandals had left a decanter of brandy in the kitchen untouched. Roman lifted Dany’s head to pour a glass into her mouth. She choked, and he sat her up, holding her upright against his shoulder. The nearer she dared come to consciousness, the closer he held her until finally they were rocking together on the sofa in the middle of the shattered room with the night air coming through the paneless windows.

  ‘What a dump,’ Dany said in an imitation of Liz Taylor doing an imitation of Bette Davis. It was an hour later, and she was coming around. They were sitting on the bed, the scene of least damage. The bathroom medicine cabinet had been emptied into the tub, and the contents of the refrigerator had been emptied everywhere. She was eating a reasonably clean breakfast roll for her empty stomach.

  ‘How’s the arm feel?’

  ‘Fine. I don’t even notice it. It’ll heal in a couple of days. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know why they did it.’

  She inspected the herringbone pattern of razor cuts on the inside of her forearm. Roman had painted them with iodine, a ritual that reassured her.

  ‘The main thing as I see it,’ she said, ‘is that we’re going to have to walk around here in shoes for a while until all the glass is picked up.’

  Roman shook his head in amazement. It had taken her thirty minutes to stop crying enough to talk at first. Now she was handling it as if it were a slip on the pavement. It was a show, and he appreciated it all the more.

  ‘You know, I wouldn’t have even noticed the hair that was pulled out,’ she said and rubbed her head. ‘I thought it was just part of the overall headache. Does that make me a poor victim?’

  ‘Lousy.’ He watched the smile on her face disappear. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The reason they didn’t do anything to me. Except scare me to death. They wanted you, to kill you.’

  ‘Well, they missed and got you, and it’s my fault. I’m not going to leave you alone like that again. I swear. There’s a police sergeant who owes me a favor. He and I will find out who these . . . people were.’

  ‘No.’ Dany grabbed his arm. ‘They won’t come back. Forget about them. I’ll look through the peephole and won’t open the door without the chain on from now on. Please. If you want to do something for me, don’t do anything. You don’t know how much it scares me when you talk like that.’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’ He patted her knee. ‘I’ll let the cop do his job. How’s that?’

  Dany was relieved. He’d never given in to her before. She threw her arms around him and kissed him.

  ‘Wait, wait a second. You have to tell me what to tell my friend.’ He thought the ordeal might be too upsetting to relive, but Dany had no qualms about talking, like a child who’s only afraid of the dark when he’s alone.

  ‘I can’t remember exactly what they said. I was too scared,’ she admitted. ‘All I know is that I think there were five of them, and I think two were men and three were women. I can’t say how big or little.’

  She spoke for a long time without adding much in the way of facts. She’d been blind and terrified and usually dead to the world. One thing she felt was an impression that they had come for one thing, to get Roman, and without him they were vaguely at a loss. The destruction had been vicious and general, although there was something about china that she couldn’t remember. And the safe, they hadn’t been able to get into the safe.

  When her eyelids drooped, Roman brushed the crumbs off the bed and laid her head down on the slashed pillow. He turned the lights out, and as he walked back to the bed, he dropped his clothes on the floor. This was one time when they wouldn’t make a difference. When he got into bed next to her, Dany moved her head from the pillow to his shoulder.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said sleepily. ‘Just goes to prove how dumb I am. When I woke up the first time after he held my nose, I kept thinking how hot they were in their ski masks, and how nice it would be for us to go skiing. You’ll have to take me to the White Mountains.’

  She was asleep by the end of the sentence. Her hair brush-bed over Roman’s mouth. He had never be
en more awake.

  He hadn’t told her what he found as he searched the apartment. The blood and hair had not been taken for no reason at all. They were necessary for the image, the little broken warning that he looked for as soon as he saw what they’d done to her. It wasn’t hard to find. In the wreckage, the untouched case stood out like any lone survivor. It was a small custom-designed chest about a foot high, made in Philadelphia about 1750 for the various eyeglasses of a wealthy buyer. Franklin’s bifocals were not popular yet, and the case had drawers enough for six pairs. The drawers and chest were made of cherry wood, and the inside was lined with velvet.

  In the first drawer he pulled open was a tiny pink leg. He recognized it as coming from a porcelain Victorian doll in his collection. The leg had been ripped from the hinge. It was wrapped in one of Dany’s hairs and smeared with her blood. He took the other leg from the second drawer, the torso from the third, the right arm from the fourth and the left arm from the fifth. The head was in the top drawer. Each of them had been similarly tied and painted.

  The callers had left another memento, probably less intentionally. The scarf they had tied Dany up with was an unusual one. It was a long, thin braid of black silk, and one end was tied around a gold four ducat with the placid profile of Franz Josef. He was not surprised that it had cut off her circulation.

  He patted Dany’s sleeping, content head. It wasn’t so dumb of her to wake up thinking about skiing in the White Mountains. After all, that’s where Hillary Sloan and her friends were heading, according to the brown spotted piece of map he found next to the doll’s head. He didn’t have to accept the invitation, the doll said, but then Dany would take his place.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Roman entered New Hampshire on the F. E. Everett Turnpike outside Lowell. He felt respectable just using a road with a name like that.

  ‘You should be happy. You don’t sound happy at all,’ Isadore had said on the phone from Boston. ‘The agent admits he didn’t look in the chest. The girl’s blood matches the type on the chest and the saw in Sloan’s workshop. Sloan has no, repeat, no alibi.’ He was upset when Roman told him about the visit to his apartment. ‘I’ll get onto it as soon as I get back. As for the murder, though, the only possibility is that they saw your name in the paper. Captain Frank gave everything but his mother’s maiden name to the press. You and Lippincoot were called consultants. Didn’t you see the papers?’ Roman let Isadore in on the fact that he didn’t read the papers. ‘Well, the kids do,’ Isadore said, ‘and you know how it is. One weird case like this sets off a whole army of kooks. It’s not revenge, I’ll tell you that. Sloan didn’t have a friend in the world. Would you believe this guy turned out to be a forger?’ Roman said he was shocked. ‘I’ll bet. Sloan is almost as upset about that as the murder.’ Roman asked whether Isadore could drop everything he was doing and join him on a trip. ‘You’re crazy. You don’t know what you’re asking. I know you’re upset about last night, and I’ll do everything I can. No, I can’t spare any men either. This isn’t my jurisdiction up here, and New York is still up in the air over politics. Just wait until I get back. Look, Sloan’s new lawyer just ran in looking like his coat’s on fire. I’ll call you back.’ Roman accepted Isadore’s excuses but remarked that, as a consultant to the police, he’d suggest that the sergeant look at the rings left on wood by a rotary saw. The same saw would leave anything but clean cuts on flesh. He also suggested that Isadore go to the library branch where the Mueller girl had worked and look up the records on readers who had taken out an unusual number of books on Gypsies and Indian mythology recently. ‘Leave the crimes to me and I’ll leave the fortune-telling to you,’ Isadore suggested. Roman could hear two other men talking to the sergeant at the same time. One of them was Sloan’s lawyer, and apparently he’d shown the Boston papers to Sloan, and Sloan did read the papers. ‘Hold it, hold it, Roman,’ Isadore shouted. ‘You didn’t tell me you were at Sloan’s house.’ That was when Roman hung up.

  He felt better than he had in a week. He was free of promises and cooperation. A motorcycle passed as he gladly made room for it. The kids had been passing him all morning on cycles and cars. Many flashed the peace sign at him, and he returned it. Past Concord, he slowed down for a roadblock. State troopers were checking every bike and car. One with sunglasses motioned Roman to drive off the road; but when he started to, the trooper motioned him impatiently to get moving, and he saw through the rearview mirror that the center of interest was a large cycle. The troopers made the riders get off and stand for a frisk. They were looking for drugs.

  The land changed to mountain country. A month later an older generation would tour it for the foliage. No troopers would wave them down as instant suspects. Sloan’s lemon station wagon would have been undisturbed; now that sort of life was ended for him no matter what happened.

  The traffic slowed down again. There was no roadblock, just too many cars for the two-lane road. It was fifteen miles to Moultonboro, a small town on an isolated plain in the Ossipee Mountains. The rock festival started the next day on the plain between Moultonboro and the smaller town of Sandwich. The road was full of kids, driving and walking. A couple with a little boy and girl on their shoulders were moving particularly slowly, and he pulled over to give them a lift.

  ‘Fantastic. Thanks,’ the guy said. The girl was in the back with the children and silent. It didn’t make Roman nervous, but the young man shot inquiring glances backward.

  ‘It’s the car, not you,’ he whispered to Roman. ‘Pollution. She wouldn’t have got in, but the babies were tired.’

  ‘Stop whispering!’ the girl shrieked. ‘That’s what I mean by male chauvinism.’

  ‘You whisper with your friends,’ he said meekly.

  ‘It’s the traditional right of slaves to whisper,’ she said. ‘Every time I think your sensitivity is heightened you go off getting palsy with some strange man.’

  ‘He’s giving us a ride, Honey.’ He leaned over the seat to talk to her. It was as if Roman weren’t there to hear them.

  ‘Honey! My name isn’t Honey, buster.’

  ‘The kids.’

  She told him what he could do about the kids. The rest of the ride to Moultonboro the car was as silent as a tomb. When he left his riders off outside town, the guy stuck his head in the window.

  ‘Guilt is a terrible thing,’ he said.

  Everyone who was coming to the festival seemed to have already arrived. The plain north of Moultonboro was crowded with tents and, from what Roman could see from the makeshift parking lot, the heads of people weaving their way through the tents searching for their own square foot to spend the night. Far away the band platform was being assembled. Half built, it looked like a gallows. An attendant rushed up to take ten of Roman’s dollars. The producers of the festival said they were expecting more than two hundred thousand spectators. It didn’t look as if they were going to lose any money.

  An encampment of Romany blended in with its setting. This camp overwhelmed it. He could see kids everywhere. A ripple from the fifties’ baby boom rose like a multicolored bathtub ring on Ossipee. The ground was beaten grassless and dusty. It was not only another nation but another world, one without shirts, with scarves, without combs, with leather armbands, a high distaste for the money system and more expensive 35mm cameras than he’d ever seen in his life. They were appealing more to him all the time. The fact that they were beating the ecology of the plain to death with their bare feet would have gladdened the heart of the blackest cynic. The flaunting of naked bodies was against every custom he grew up with. A Rom would never even indicate to his family that he was going to the bathroom, sexual lines were so strict. But there was an exuberance to these children struggling to break away from their gaja lifestyle that had to be sympathized with.

  Breughel would have enjoyed painting the scene of self-proclaimed peasants in their bell-bottom pants, leather vests, headbands and beads. The kids were a show in themselves, and they enjoyed the show, gawk
ing and commenting at warpaint on faces and surrounding the hundreds of impromptu blanket bands. A disjointed music covered the field from guitars, Jew’s harps, sitars, harmonicas, drums and sticks. The only thing like it Roman had ever seen was the great market at Marrakech and just as in Marrakech, hawkers moved through the crowd loudly vending their selections of hash.

  A girl bare to the waist stared at Roman, and he realized something was wrong. He stuffed his tie into a back pocket and threw his jacket over his shoulder. The crowd spilled over onto Route 25, and there the kids were racing underneath kites. Most of them were of the plastic variety. Some were impressive Chinese kites of battleship dimensions with brilliant scalloped tails curling behind.

  The number of naked kids increased as he ventured closer to Squam Lake. The physiques of the girls were tributes to American nutrition. The boys, on the other hand, were in distressingly poor shape, and they resented Roman’s presence more.

  I had been happy if the general camp,

  Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body.

  Roman turned to face a thin, heavily made-up girl in a purple robe. On her shoulders was a brace that balanced in front a large tome of Shakespeare’s complete works and in back a poster reading ‘Peace.’ Altogether, she bore a strong similarity to some of the kites he’d seen.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ she asked. Her eyes were lost in a welter of mascara. He confessed he didn’t.

  ‘Othello,’ she said. ‘You look like Othello to me.’

  ‘But I don’t feel like Othello.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to try?’ she asked.

  When he looked back at her a few minutes later, he saw he was more right than he thought. A gust of wind had caught the poster and was driving her toward the lake. She was trying to get out of the brace, but it was plain she wasn’t going to make it. Roman had the manners to look the other way and walk on.

  Afghans, St Bernards and Irish setters provided a homey atmosphere as they nosed around kids stoned on pot. A monkey passed Roman at his own level before Roman saw that it was standing on the head of a dwarf.