The Iron Angel

by Edward D. Hoch

  Michael nodded. “Of course. Notify those from the nearby tribes who might want to attend and have some of the men begin to erect tents.”

  Peter sat down next to Jennifer while the others made plans. “I’m sorry I grabbed you like that, but I want you to come back with me.”

  “I don’t think so, Peter.”

  “I thought we had a pretty good thing going.”

  “Better for you than for me, I think.”

  “If it’s the junk, I’ll try to lay it off.”

  “You’ve tried before, Peter,” she said with a sigh. “If you really want to kick the habit, you need medical help.”

  He stared off for a few minutes, then shook his head. “At least drive the car back and I’ll ride the motorcycle. I can’t handle both of them.”

  “That’s your problem.” Jennifer said.

  Michael was telling Captain Segar what little they knew about the killing as Segar studied the knife and the bloodstains in the kitchen. Peter, looking dark, got up and went into the bathroom. Jennifer feared he might shoot up while he was in there, but he returned after a minute and sat back down next to her. She sighed. Perhaps she was being unreasonable. She had stolen his motorcycle, after all, and it was her responsibility to help him get it back. After that, she could decide what to do next.

  Finally, she went over to Michael to tell him her decision.

  “Wait a bit,” he said after hearing her out. “Stay for the funeral. Peter can stay, too. You needn't decide anything yet.”

  “When will that be?”

  “The ceremonies will start tomorrow.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Jennifer said, and went back to Peter. She told him what Michael had proposed and he listened in silence.

  “Will you stay?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll have to get the car back. I’ll take the motorcycle and see if I can find a hitch for towing it. There’s probably not much chance of that around here, though.”

  Feeling guilty again, she turned away, wondering what to do next.

  “I want everyone to sit down,” Michael was saying. “I have something I want to tell you about the murder of King Carranza. I wanted to wait until later, but I can see there may be no time to wait.”

  “What is there to say?” Segar wanted to know. “The king himself saved us the trouble and expense of a trial with his throwing knife.”

  “But you see,” Michael said, “of all the people in the village at the time of King Carranza’s death, this German youth, Hans Funken is the one person who could not have murdered him.”

  It was Maria Fetesti who spoke first. “Are you saying that one of us killed him? That is impossible!”

  “Consider the evidence.” Michael said. “It’s plain to see that Hans Funken entered this house to rob Carranza. Perhaps he peered through the window and saw him in a wheelchair and considered him an easy victim. After searching the downstairs, he was in the kitchen near the back door when the king managed to pull out his knife and hurt it at him. Funken was hit in the side but pulled the knife free of the wound and let it drop to the floor. Then what happened?”

  “He went back to the living room and beat Carranza to death with the blacksmith’s hammer,” Ivan Raski said.

  “No,” Michael told him. “Because there’s not a trace of blood on the floor or rug between the kitchen and the living room. I looked very carefully. And once the knife was removed, the wound bled freely. There were drops of blood on the back steps and Steven’s dogs were able to follow the trail all the way through the trees to the road.”

  “All right,” Raski agreed. “Then he must have bludgeoned the king before he received the knife wound.”

  “Equally impossible. The wounds with that hammer would have been fatal almost instantly. Even if King Carranza could have lifted himself from the floor with his dying breath he could hardly have thrown that knife through the hall and into the kitchen with such accuracy. Carranza couldn’t have killed Funken after he was bludgeoned and Funken couldn’t have killed Carranza after he was knifed – the two attacks couldn’t even have happened simultaneously because they were too far away from each other.”

  “Then who did kill my brother?” Theresa asked coming out of her silence.

  “There are two possibilities,” Michael said gently. “One is that someone from the is village entered the house after the robbery and killed the king, assuming it would be blamed on the thief. The other possibility is that two thieves took part in the robbery and Funken’s accomplice killed Carranza after the king threw his knife. Again, let us examine the evidence. Which way did the mortally wounded Funken head after he fled from the house? Toward the road beyond the trees. Certainly that suggests a car was waiting there. But we found no car. Nor did we find most of the gold jewelry and coins you told us were missing from the house.

  “There can be little doubt it was an accomplice who murdered Carranza and then helped the dying Funken through the woods and back to his car. He left the body by the road, took the loot from the robbery, and fled in that car.”

  “Where do we find this accomplice,” Segar asked.

  “Here,” Michael said pointing an accusing finger. “Peter Fry killed our King.”

  Peter made a grab for Jennifer – perhaps to take her with him or to use her as a shield, she was never sure which – but then Steven Fetesti and Ivan Raski were on top of him, pulling him to the floor.

  Michael said, “He knew where the bathroom was. He stepped into a strange house in a foreign land and walked directly to the bathroom without asking anyone where it was, or if one even existed. Only two houses in the entire village have indoor bathrooms. One might argue that a young man from America where indoor plumbing is common might simply assume we all have it too. But for him to approach the bathroom here with such assurance he had to have been in this house before. The door was closed. I’d opened it earlier to check inside and then closed it again.”

  Later, as the clans began to arrive for the funeral of the Gypsy king, Jennifer stood alone in front of Michael’s house. When he came out to join her, she asked, “What will become of me, Michael?”

  “You will go back to Bucharest after the funeral. I’ve already arranged for Captain Segar take you. He will get you a flight back home. Peter Fry will be staying here for a long time.”

  “You can keep the motorcycle. I won’t need it now.”

  “Neither will Peter. Segar found the jewelry and coins hidden in his car. Or I should say, Funken’s car. Segar confirmed that it had German license plates. Peter must have encountered Segar’s official car on the road after the murder and decided it would be less suspicious to stop and ask about you. When Segar brought him along, he probably didn’t realize until too late that he was returning to the murder scene. I suppose the two of them were searching for you, following your trail, when they happened upon this village and decided on a robbery for drug money.”

  “I brought all this on you and your people,” Jennifer said.

  “King Carranza lived a long life,” Michael told the lost girl as a cheer went up. Another Gypsy clan had arrived for the funeral.

  GYPSY AT SEA

  The letter arrived in a plain white envelope addressed to Michael Vlado, Gravita, Romania. No other address was needed because everyone in Gravita knew Michael. Since the death of their Gypsy king, Michael had been elevated to the title, though still a relatively young man in his early forties. The news had reached the outside world somehow, picked up by some of the larger metropolitan papers as a filler on an inside page. One such paper had been in Athens, and the first thing Michael saw upon opening the envelope was a clipping with half remembered Greek letters headlined: NEW GYPSY KING FOR REMOTE VILLAGE.

  It was the first time he had read Greek in years, and it brought back memories of the period in his youth, a quarter century ago, when he had traveled with a band of Gypsies one summer, harvesting crops up and down the coasts of Greece. That was where he’d met a stunning nine
teen-year-old girl named Nita Delvado, a Spanish Gypsy with the pure features of a goddess.

  The letter in the plain white envelope was from Nita Delvado.

  “What is so important there?” Michael’s wife Rosanna asked, watching as he read the letter.

  “It’s from a woman I knew long ago in Greece.” He read on a bit. “She wants to see me. She wants me to come to Athens.”

  “Were you lovers?”

  “No. She was a year older than I and there were enough older men in the tribe to keep her interested. We were good friends, though. Close friends.”

  “You’re not going, are you?”

  “I think I must.”

  “Why, Michael?”

  “Nita drowned in the Aegean Sea twenty-five years ago. I identified her body.”

  Had it not been for the eternal vision of the Parthenon looking down from the Acropolis in the middle of the city, Michael might have had difficulty in connecting this modern Athens with the place of his youth. Office buildings sprawled in every direction, and the air was grey with chemical pollution. Now, waiting for the next harvest season, the city’s Gypsies lived in old army platoon tents erected in vacant lots. Michael went there first when he arrived.

  One of the older Gypsy men recognized him at once. “Michael Vlado! You’ve come back to us!”

  Michael studied the deep brown eyes beneath the fringe of graying hair and then he remembered. “Hello, Sasha. How have you been?”

  “Fine. Michael. You’ve changed little.”

  “As have you, my friend,” Michael lied. He barely recognized the weathered face before him. A quarter century of harvesting crops beneath the Grecian sun had taken its toll. “How are the others?”

  “The ones you knew? Dead, mostly, or wandering again. I have settled down with a wife and children. Three fine boys.”

  Michael slapped his old friend on the back. He was remembering a day when they were both eighteen, and Sasha had told him his name meant Alexander, the conqueror. And Sasha had wanted to be a conqueror in those days. He had apparently settled for something less.

  “Are you married, too, Michael?”

  “Yes. My wife Rosanna is back in Romania.”

  “But no children?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What brings you to Athens, old friend?”

  Sasha would probably not have seen the newspaper account of his election as king of the tribe, and Michael saw no point in mentioning it. “I heard recently that Nita Delvado is still alive. Do you remember her?”

  “Who could forget her?”

  “We thought she’d drowned.”

  “It was a case of mistaken identity, old friend.”

  “I saw the body myself, Sasha.”

  The greying man shrugged. “It’s best not to ask questions.”

  “Have you seen her since her return among the living?”

  Sasha glanced away. “Yes, once.”

  “And?”

  “And I asked no questions.”

  Michael patted his shoulder. “Thank you, Sasha. I’ll see you again before I leave Athens.”

  “Where are you going now? To see her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful, Michael.”

  As he moved away from the little village of tents, Michael was aware that a Gypsy youth wearing a red scarf was following him. He followed for some time before Michael finally lost him in the city’s traffic.

  The address on Nita Delvado’s letter was a walk-up apartment in an old building in the Vathi section of the city, a few blocks from the Archeological Museum. Michael rang the bell and a woman’s voice came through the speaking tube. “Who’s there?”

  “Michael Vlado. Is this Nita?”

  “Michael! You’re here, in Athens?”

  “Right downstairs.”

  “Come up. It will be good to see your face.”

  The door on the third floor was unlocked, and he found Nita waiting for him. “I thought you were dead,” he told her.

  She kissed him sweetly on the cheek, as a sister might. In her forties, she was still a lovely woman, and it wasn’t until she turned from him that he glimpsed the jagged red scar across her left cheek. “Not dead, no. That was a mistake.” She laughed harshly. “Sometimes I think my entire life has been a mistake.” A faint scent of perfume clung to her, like the past.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I didn’t mean to involve you, Michael. When I read of your good fortune – the king of your own tribe at such a young age – I had to write.”

  “I’m happy you did, though your letter was a shock. Who was it that died that day? Whose body did I identify as yours?”

  “Remember Mosha, the Greek girl who worked on the boat with her brother? I’d gone out that day with some others who’d chartered her brother’s boat. We were heading for one of the islands for a few days stay – the island of Kea, not far from the mainland. On the way back, the boat ran into a sudden storm and was wrecked. All five aboard were drowned. After a battering in the sea, Mosha’s body was taken for mine. Her brother died too, so there was no one alive to correct the mistake.”

  “Except you.”

  “Except me,” she agreed. “I’d stayed behind on Kea.”

  “Alone?”

  “I’d met a man staying at the hotel there. We were having a good time and he persuaded me to remain on the island with him for a few extra days. Then the boat went down and I was reported dead. He said that was perfect for his plans. He was in a line of work where a beautiful woman without a past could earn a great deal of money.”

  “As a prostitute?” Michael asked cynically.

  “No, as a spy.”

  “Nita, you must be kidding me.”

  “It seems like a bad joke now, but I was nineteen years old at the time, remember. I had little education and all I had to look forward to was a lifetime of traveling the harvest circuit with the others, in beat-up trucks, living in those awful tents you still see around the city.”

  “But a spy? For whom?”

  She shrugged. “Let me get you a drink.”

  He asked for some ouzo, remembering the pleasing anise flavor from his youth. Her apartment was modestly decorated, and while she busied herself in the kitchen he allowed his eyes to wander about. If spying had been a profitable trade for Nita, there was little sign of it here. Even the television set was a dozen years old. He’d seen newer ones in the villages back home.

  When she returned with the drinks, Michael asked, “How long have you lived here?”

  “I’ve been back about four months. Ever since this.” She touched the scar on her face.

  “How did it happen?”

  “A Gypsy cut me. He said I’d betrayed my people.”

  “Had you?”

  “Not in the way he meant. I suppose I’ve betrayed a great many groups in the past twenty-five years, but I never consciously hurt or betrayed a Gypsy. If you mean did I turn my back on my own people and try to make a life for myself away from them, I suppose I betrayed them in that way. But I was dead after that boat went down. Nita Delvado, the beautiful Gypsy girl, no longer existed. I was a new person.”

  “Who did you work for?” he asked again.

  “Only one person – Alec Grimsby, the man who recruited me.”

  Michael’s eyebrows went up. “British?”

  “A British citizen, yes. He hasn’t been home in twenty years. He runs a free-lance intelligence network in the Middle East. When I met him on Kea he was working for Israel. Now much of his work is for the other side, the Palestinians.”

  “And you’ve devoted your life to this sort of foolhardiness?” Michael couldn’t believe it. “It’s a wonder you haven’t been killed.”

  “I’m out of it now,” she said. “That Gypsy’s knife ended my career.”

  “Surely you can have plastic surgery.”

  “I will have it, but it means several operations and skin grafts over a period of three years. I’m forty-four now
. In three years Alec will have replaced me with someone younger.”

  “Has he given you money?”

  She nodded. “Enough for a modest living. And he promises to pay for the operations.”

  “You could write a book about your experiences. It might bring big money.”

  “I have never written anything longer than a letter.”

  “A publisher could arrange for a collaborator.”

  “It would mean exposing Alec. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Is he your lover?”

  “He was, for all those years.”

  Michael finished his drink in anger. “He used you, Nita, and now he’s throwing you aside.”

  “Maybe I wanted to be used. I was nineteen and without a friend.”

  “I was always your friend,” Michael said softly.

  She glanced at her watch. “Thank you for saying that, Michael. Now you must go. I have an appointment soon and I must change for it.”

  “You asked me to come all this way to see you Nita, to welcome you back among the living.”

  She smiled sadly. “I should never have written you. I was better off in your memory.”

  “No,” he protested, but she had gotten to her feet and was moving toward the door.

  “Goodbye, Michael. We will not see each other again.”

  He paused at the door. “The Gypsy who cut you – he must have recognized you from the past.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was he?”

  “An old friend of both of us. Remember Sasha?”

  After he left the apartment, Michael circled the block and returned to wait in a doorway across the street, curious to see who Nita’s visitor might be.

  Within twenty minutes, a French made limousine pulled up to the curb and a tall white-haired man got out. He appeared to be in his fifties, and when he told the driver to wait for him he spoke in English. Michael had little doubt it was Alec Grimsby.

  He waited in the doorway, but after a half hour passed he grew tired of it. Whatever they were doing up there was none of his business. He walked back through the narrow streets to the little hotel where he was staying. It had been an afternoon of conjuring up memories of other days, of feeling emotions he didn’t fully understand. There was Nita, whom he might have loved years ago, and Sasha, a friend from the same past. But what was their relationship to each other, and what had caused Sasha to cut her face like that?