GYPSIES, TRAMPS, AND THIEVES

by Parris Afton Bonds

  There was still the Wheel of Fortune, reversed, to be addressed, but, insanely, Romy didn’t think the card applied to ether of those two. Aye, insanely, she felt it applied to her own circumstances. Foul forces out of control. She shivered. Could things be any worse?

  Yes, Old Duke could die.

  She wrapped up the reading with another toothy smile for, first, Irina, then Gunter, who was obviously in charge of the purse strings. “You two will find eternal bliss.” Certainly not together, if at all.

  She held out her palm.

  He rolled his eyes but dug out his wallet and slapped a couple of marks into her open hand.

  After the couple departed – entertained sufficiently by her act, she could only hope – she flung back the faded, threadbare curtain.

  Her grandfather propped himself up on both elbows. His eighty-year-old, bony frame once belonged to a strapping young man who had tamed horses and seduced maidens – both Romany and gadjis. But, at only nine, he had been just as skeletal, when he and his parents had fled the Great Irish Famine for the Continent, for Spain.

  “Will ye look at this, Old Duke!” He had always been old to her – old and weathered and wise. Yet his still strong, craggy features indicated he must have once been irresistibly handsome. “Tis in the money, we are!”

  Only with him did she lapse into Irish brogue. With his refusing to practice anything but his native Irish Gaelic, she had been forced to learn the languages of the various European countries in which they found themselves.

  She fluidly spoke most of the Romance languages – French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and, of course, Romanian. Those had come naturally. Dutch, German, Polish, and Russian had come with a little difficulty, despite her father’s Slavic origins.

  Old Duke closed his blue-veined hand over hers. “Put it away. A penny saved is a –”

  “— is not much.”

  He gripped her bone-thin wrist with surprising strength. His thick thatch of iron-gray coils tumbled over obdurate, rheumy eyes like water rushing over rocks. “Listen, granddaughter. The Irish pipes. I want to – ”

  She sighed. “Old Duke, I dunna hear them.” These days, he so often lived in the past. Seeing and hearing what existed only in his clouded mind.

  His gnarled hand swished the air in a frustrated gesture. “Nay, nay! Not the Irish pipes. I mean listen to me. Tis the Irish pipes I want to hear again. Tis home I want us to go. Home to Ireland.”

  So, did she. Like most Irish Travellers, she wanted to make that trek up the holy mountain of Croagh-Patrick, where Saint Patrick had fasted for forty-four days. She needed most badly to repent her sins, which seemed to be escalating with each passing day.

  Of course, Old Duke foolishly had marriage in mind for her. Her parents might have once contracted her in marriage to Giorgio, but Old Duke had always been set in taking her back to Ireland and the Ballinasloe Horse Fair and Festival, where Irish Travellers hoped to find good husbands for their daughters to carry on Gypsy traditions.

  After all, the Travellers were the world’s most savvy horse dealers, and none would beat them at their game.

  The way Old Duke described it, Ireland sounded like paradise. Especially when contrasted to the scheiss-smelling place they now inhabited. But escaping Marzahn with her grandfather in tow was about as likely to happen as one of Old Duke’s leprechauns arriving with a pot o’ gold, rather than the pot o’ scheiss that was the Gypsies relocation site.

  Besides, how did one ever escape Hell’s hounds, whether those of the Nazis’ or of one’s own guilt?

  § CHAPTER TWO §

  It was Octoberfest, though there was nothing to be festive about in Romy’s mind . . . except they were back. The wealthy Gadje couple from off the train a fortnight earlier. They picked their way through refuse toward Romy’s wagon.

  The area’s grass had long before been trampled or grazed out by the wagons’ shires. Romy was feeding their own scrawny Gypsy Cob, Rainbow, the few bony scraps leftover from the last meal she had prepared, the day before. Or was it the day before that?

  Much of the wealth of a Gypsy family was in the shires they owned and bred. No longer. At least, not in Germany.

  And no longer were the Gypsy men robust. No longer were they wild and free. Where in years before the brawny Gypsy men – in loose fitting shirts, wide belts, baggy pants, and knee-high boots – had trained their horses, they now were forced to work at the nearby quarry in garb that better belonged on scarecrows.

  And the once swaggering Giorgio was scarecrow thin. At fourteen. she had been betrothed to him. But after that one street raid . . . well, her value as a bride had plummeted in his parents’ eyes.

  She straightened from resting against the vardo’s large, iron-clad spoke wheel. She wiped her dirty hands on her once exuberantly colored skirt and tugged close her old purple cardigan. The chunky knit was irreparably snagged and rifted.

  “May you be lucky,” she greeted the couple with her wide-tooth grin. A grin that hid her anxiousness about Old Duke. He was inside dying, sure as Salome danced with seven veils.

  “I would imagine it is you who are hoping to get lucky off us,” said the man called Gunter, his sharp-eyed gaze sweeping over her frayed and wash-worn clothing and then dismissing her with cutting negligence.

  “It was you who came seeking me.” However, like a blacksmith, she forged her lips into an upturned-horseshoe.

  She led them up the arc of colorfully painted steps. Never mind that their paint was peeling as badly as the skin on her once bloated stomach had peeled from inside out.

  They were already seated before she located her Tarot deck above the wardrobe, along with a finger cymbal she had misplaced. Seating herself at the head of the table, she began shuffling. “What is it you wish to know?”

  “We’re here merely for another diverting afternoon,” the blond Adonis said.

  Well, Sweet Baby Jesus, she could do that. Divert him. Her imagination and Gypsy cleverness combined, surely, had to have enough clout to equal his obviously high intelligence. His narrow face, long nose, and high forehead gave that away.

  She might not be able to read cards, but she could read people. Exposure repeatedly to life-or-death fate determined by others was a powerful teacher.

  “Who is first?” she inquired of the two.

  He nodded at the woman he had called Irina, and she shook her head. Hers was a classic beauty that was saved from mediocrity by her determined jutting chin. Today, she wore a snow-white coat as protection against October’s brisk but cleansing autumn air and a dollop of a white beret atop her fashionably platinum hair, a la Jean Harlow.

  She shrugged out of her woolen coat, as white as purity, and smiled. “Let’s find out if we’ll beat them at their own game.”

  Romy’s attention to that information pricked up. She passed the cards to Gunter.

  Capping his fedora on the chair’s ear, he shuffled and cut the deck.

  Eyeing his expensive watch, a Meisterstück, Romy collected the cards, reshuffled, then laid them out. Absent were the onerous four – the Magician, the High Priestess, the Emperor – and, of course, Death. However, once again the Tower showed up in Gunter’s spread.

  Gunter? Was he the famed attorney representing the shagger Third Reich officials in court cases? If so, he was a thief in sheep’s clothing.

  He frowned at the Tower card and glanced askance at her.

  She lifted her shoulders. “The cards fall as they will. The Tower in this layout warns that disaster is afoot. Evil is roaming.”

  His eyes froze her as cold as smoke off hot ice. “As you said, the cards fall as they will, disaster comes or not. But, if so, I am in charge of what I do about it.”

  She had noticed his exact articulation, but she also picked up something most people would not. The barest of a Yiddish accent. Was the smooth-talking Gunter trying to go sub rosa with possible Jewish heritage? She raised a brow. “I wouldn’t be so su – ”

  At the loud creak
of the entrance steps, she glanced from Gunter to the doorway. A huffing train porter staggered to the top stair. “Mr. Wagner, is he – oh, there you are, Mr. Wagner. You said to let you know if anything untoward occurred. Uhh, the – ”

  Gunter shot to his well-shod feet, grabbed his fedora, and crossed to the door in two strides. Romy heard something murmured about a valise, but then, of course, her hearing wasn’t that acute. He turned back to her. “Go ahead with Irina’s card reading. I will return shortly.”

  Warily, Romy reshuffled the cards, cascading them back into place, and passed them to Irina to cut. “What is your question?”

  Behind the time-worn curtain, Old Duke’s rattled, deathbed wheezing could have served as the medium between two worlds for any Gypsy-staged séance.

  The young woman looked uncertainly toward the curtain, then out the vardo’s open doors. She put aside the cigarette she was just about to light, then took up the cards. Her hand trembled as she clumsily cut them into three decks. “My baby, it . . . . “

  That one word rankled Romy. Her womb could have ached – if it weren’t a charred lump of coal. Immediately she hated the young woman, who looked to be in her mid-twenties “Ye wish to know about yuir bairn?” Shite, she had let herself lapse into her natural Irish brogue.

  Apparently, Irina had not noticed. She nodded, more a jerk of her head. Her eyes were glassy.

  Was the infant dead? Something wrong with it? Pondering how to elicit more information, Romy gathered the three piles and glanced at their bottom cards. Her eyes fell immediately on the Empress and Death, both reversed.

  Resistance to change for the regal acting young woman?

  The third card, the Wheel of Fortune – well, sometimes, when ye resisted, destiny kicked ye in the arse. She hazarded a guess. “Ye miscarried?

  Behind Romy, Duke’s death rattle had finally ceased, as most likely had his spirit. What to do? What to do? She laid the cards aside, making to rise.

  Irina’s pretty lip’s quivered. “I am . . . it would have been better if I had lost – ”

  “Romy!” a woman’s age-raveled voice yelped from the doorway – Romy’s elderly neighbor Marta, her face garishly painted in an effort to cover its warts. “The SS, they’re here! In the camp. Rounding up everybody!”

  Pale as death, Irina shot up from the bench seat, then slipped to the floor in an honest-to-God Hollywood faint.

  Startled, Romy’s glance leaped from the gracefully sprawled body to two helmeted and armed soldiers in black uniforms stalking toward the vardo across from hers.

  “Move your feet!” the hag Marta urged.

  “Old Duke,” Romy protested, “I canna leave him. He’s on his deathbed.”

  “His spirit has most likely already left, girl. These old feet can’t leave fast enough. I’ll keep the wake with his corpse.”

  There was nowhere to run. But it took Romy only a five-count to realize her own destiny presented her with the opportunity for change – a change of places with the unconscious Irina.

  Quicker and defter than a card shark could crimp an Ace, Romy stripped off her head scarf and donned Irina’s white beret, carefully pinning and tilting it to the left and exposing the single, pearl earring drop on the right.

  After that, it was only a matter of collecting Irina’s white coat draped on the back of the chair, a ruthless removal of her lace-up high heels – no time to loose her fine, silk hosiery from her garter fasteners – and a snatch of her purse, with all its valuable identification.

  Lucky Romy!

  The heels were a wee bit large, and she wobbled toward the doorway. She almost tripped over a carelessly cast-aside castanet she used when performing with the street music vendors.

  As warty faced Marta shuffled toward the vardo’s bunks and Old Duke, she called after Romy, “May luck be with you, Romy!”

  Wielding a bayonetted rifle, clearly stockpiled from WWI, an SS soldier met Romy at the wagon’s top step. At once, she pasted on a wide gamine smile. “Nein, nein, wait. I am not one of those thieving gypsies. I am – ”

  Who the hell was she? Irina. But Irina Who?

  “Halt die Klappe! Hände hoch!“

  She didn’t need her left ear to understand perfectly his orders. Shutting her klapper, she shot her hands, white suede purse and all, into the air.

  His bayonet nudged her out the door, down the steps, where she joined a line of other Gypsies trudging toward the railroad tracks. Peeking over her shoulder, she saw neither old Marta nor Irina in the herded roundup.

  Lucky them.

  But Old Duke? If his heart was even still ticking, he wouldn‘t stand a chance. And would Rainbow end up on some hungry person‘s plate? Romy blinked rapidly. Tears never made anything better.

  To her dismay, she found herself crammed along with other frantic Gypsies inside one of the train’s cattle cars. In that stifling space where the smell of humanity’s fear was at its worst – if she discounted the cow shite – the musty smell of old hay made the nauseating odors more bearable.

  Her vardo’s querulous, scabby neighbor Florika peered at her in disbelief. “Romy?”

  “Irina to you,” Romy told her out of the side of her mouth.

  The avidly curious crone chastised her with a clucking noise, but Florika was essentially harmless. However, Romy’s ignorance of her new identity was not. She needed to peruse Irina’s purse.

  Which presented an obstacle. She and the other gypsies were wedged so tightly shoulder to shoulder that most of the prisoners’ arms were rendered immobile. When the train lurched forward, the Gypsies staggered to keep from falling beneath the feet of their companions.

  Narrow slots toward the top of the train car` permitted thin slices of sunlight to tumble on frightened faces. Near her, a bairn’s soiled diapers spilled over it stinking contents. An old man’s reedy voice begged God for help. A child wailed. Others wept. She would bet her last pfennig that Gunter’s train compartment was a far cry from this squalor.

  If she hoped to pass herself as a law-abiding German citizen, distinctly separate from her dirty, malnourished clan, then she’d better know something about her body double.

  Well, not exactly a body double. Blonde hair of sorts and eyes that might be construed as blue, though Romy’s were an unmistakable pale green. And Irina was slightly taller, with softer, subtler features but a body definitely more muscled and well-fed.

  Shoulders scrunched by the press of others, Romy riffled through the I.D. Irina Klockner. Yes! One step closer to a new identity. When she pulled from a small zipper side pocket a clipped and wrinkled Berlin newspaper article, neatly folded, she understood why Irina’s body was so beautifully honed.

  Romy might not be able to read proficiently, only picking out one and two-syllable words at best, but she could identify the photo and some words in its subtext. It was Irina Klockner of Poland, two years earlier, standing at the bottom of the three-tiered podium in her short skirt and ice skates, with her bronze medal glinting between her taut breasts. She had won third place in the Olympic women’s figure skating in Bavaria, Germany.

  As ucht Dé! Romy could curse in Gaelic as well as any leprechaun. She knew there was no way in hell she could pass herself off as an athlete of that caliber. A preferably barefooted free spirit, she could not even stand balanced in Irina’s high heels much less the young woman’s ice skates.

  She was given little time to stress over that issue, as within the half hour, the train car’s doors were unlocked and slid back with a grating squeal. Blinking at the sunlight, she shouldered forward out of the car.

  Above the grim building ahead waved a huge flag, a black swastika against a black and red background. And before her, she made out the word inscribed in an iron-lettered arch over the building’s cement block entrance.

  Sachsenhausen.

  The dreaded concentration camp twenty-two miles north of Berlin.

  And below it, even if read imperfectly, she nevertheless knew well from nearly five years be
fore the infamous slogan: Arbeit Macht Frei – ‘Work makes you free.’

  Once before, she had escaped the Nazi butchers. Could she escape them once and for all?

  The Emerald Isle with its holy mountain Croagh-Patrick for sinners like herself and the comfortable familiarity of her Irish Travelers clan never beckoned her more. With luck, she would pass as Aryan, as occasionally could even light-skinned Roma.

  With renowned work diligence, a male kapo, the prisoner assigned supervisory tasks, quickly processed Romy and the other female gypsies into a portion of the prison containing only female inmates and guarded by female SS staff.

  Naturally, the other female prisoners were filled with trepidation and communicated sotto voce among themselves. But she was terrified beyond functioning. Because she knew what they did not.

  “What is it?” Florika asked. They sat on backless wooden benches. Row after row of benches in a starkly sparse room as large as a warehouse. “You, who are not afraid of Beelzebub himself, tremble.”

  Romy only shook her head. A head that had felt the cold metal of scissors and her hair slowly falling along with her tears and human dignity.

  One by one, the SS processed its latest internees. Perspiration mottled her temples and clotted the hair beneath her arm pits.

  An hour and a half later, the name of Irina Klockner was called.

  Romy could have led the SS guard to the final processing room, where prisoners were assigned to barracks and given coarse, striped clothing and wooden-sole shoes, so familiar was she with the routine – but she would have been in error.

  Instead, the strapping female kapo shuttled her along a different tunnel-like hallway that connected with another building. She wasn’t being processed for internment!

  Her spirits soared. As the Brits would say, she had hit a homerun out of the ball park. Clearly, the Nazi authorities realized their mistake. An Olympic gold medal winner didn’t belong in a prison. Now she had only to carry off her charade as that Olympic figure skater, Irina Klockner.

  Romy had performed at carnivals and fairs and street venues. Now was the time for her grand performance. And if she failed . . . how long before the German Reich’s meticulous record keeping revealed she was the much-desired other half to the results of their experimentation five years earlier?