GYPSIES, TRAMPS, AND THIEVES

by Parris Afton Bonds

  She smiled wryly. “In Texas, cooking and keeping house for another Duke. Duke McClellan.”

  He blew a long helix of smoke before remarking with eyes narrowed, “The way you say his name, he, too, is special to you?”

  She shrugged and said, “Do ye plan to stay here long? In Rotterdam.” Zelda set a chipped cup of weak tea in front of her, and she murmured her thanks.

  He rolled shoulders tense with the toxins of living on the edge. “Without passports, we’ve reached as far as we can flee – the sea.”

  At that instant, she realized just how fortunate she was to have her traveling papers. “What will ye do now?”

  He took a puff from the cigarette. “Turn my back on the sea and fight. What else can we do?”

  He lowered his voice, although with the rain pitter-pattering on the vardo’s tin roof the likelihood of someone outside hearing was negligible. “In the last few weeks – since the strafing of Poland – the Dutch Underground has ramped up its Resistance.”

  “Resistance?” Against the Panzer tank that was emblematic of the Nazis’ ruthless control? “Like what?”

  His free hand ticked off his reply on brown-stained fingertips. “The group forges ration cards and counterfeit money, collects intelligence, publishes underground newspaper, and, whenever possible, sabotages German agents’ phone lines and automobiles.”

  “And yuirself?” she prodded. “Are ye caught up with this Dutch Underground?”

  He spread wide his arms in a boasting gesture. “Who knows better the byroads and backroads of Europe than a Gypsy?”

  Discovery by the Germans of involvement in the Resistance meant an immediate death sentence. “I . . . I must say tis impressed I am, Giorgio.”

  When, in actuality, she was deflated. She saw how meaningless her life was. She had not made wise choices, and she had only herself to blame . . . for those choices and for her character flaws and shortcomings and foibles.

  “What are your plans?” he asked.

  Among those character flaws, her biggest had to be that of a fool, because she answered with a whanker grin, “Why, I am heading back where ye came from. Back to Berlin.”

  With the promise of Ireland’s beautiful green countryside so close and the freedom afforded with her roving Irish Traveller clan so palpable, she was a fool to change her destination; besides, her grandfather was most likely six feet under, her brother she hadn’t seen in five years and didn’t know if he was even alive, and Irina was a gadje, no less!

  But these were debts that need to be honored, debts her soul owed.

  If ever there was a dumb ass, it had to be she. Aye, she was, indeed, the Tarot’s Fool. Ireland was within her reach. And the Death Card in the other direction.

  § § §

  Patience was most likely the only virtue to which Duke could lay claim. Fishing on the Blanco or hunting in the South Texas chaparral had schooled him well, as had the myriad duties of running a ranch as a kid trying to fill his absentee father’s shoes – or, for that matter, battening down the hatches in rough weather all those seafaring years.

  If nothing else, he had learned Mother Nature had her own timing. And one didn’t buck Mother Nature.

  The U.S. Military had its own timing, and, seated in the bomber bay, looking out over the .30 caliber machine gun at the blue-gray ocean below, he swore under his breath. If the U.S. was aiming to join in the war, it needed to mount up and apply its spurs soon.

  The last thing Duke wanted was war, but if armament was required, he carried his own. The Remington double-barrel Derringer .41 caliber pistol tucked inside the pocket of his old rawhide jacket was comforting.

  And the next to the last thing Duke wanted was leaving Texas soil, leaving the S&S, leaving all he had worked for since a boy in knee pants. And for what? An irrepressible Gypsy girl hell bent on following her lark’s song.

  As much as he disliked admitting it, he needed the multi-lingual Goldman. Despite Duke’s years in foreign ports-o’-call, he knew only a smattering of French, Arabic, and Mandarin. Of course, he was fluent in South Texas Spanish, but that would hardly serve him in Rotterdam.

  With mostly surplus goods left from The Great War, transportation pickings were few, and securing authorization for himself and Goldman had taken Harold two interminable days, days of anxious waiting, but, at last, he and Goldman were on their way in a 1934 Douglas DC-2 transport bound for France’s Villeneuve-Orly Airfield.

  With any kind of luck, from there he and Goldman could grab a puddle jumper for Rotterdam, getting them to its port a good three days before Romy’s freighter was due to arrive.

  Luck, however, was not favoring their fortunes. At Orly Airfield, he and Goldman were detained another two days, awaiting French/Dutch clearance, the dense fog to lift, and, most importantly, adequate air transport. Units of the famed French Air Force were disorganized, with numerous obsolescent aircraft and their operations crushed under their strategic indecisiveness.

  At last, on the same morning Romy’s freighter was due to arrive in Rotterdam, they were cleared to board a four-seater Villiers 26, a seaplane used for escort and patrol duties.

  Duke didn’t know quite what he was feeling as the seaplane swooped down over the North Sea into the Port of Rotterdam, where the French pilot seemed relieved to be discharged of his assignment.

  Like stout, death-wish coffee, adrenaline spiked through Duke with any challenge, but Romy was not just any challenge. She was like nothing he had ever encountered. A rare desert rose specimen, from frigid Germany, no less. And nothing in common with hm. But if he and she weren’t on the same page, it was battery acid in his stomach.

  Just what page he was on was not even clear to him. Naturally, he had grown to care about her. As he did the rest of his ranch hands.

  Mentally, he gave himself an ass kicking. What a screwball self-deception that was. He had not bedded any of his other ranch hands. She was burrowed deep under his skin, festering like a cactus spine he couldn’t pry deep enough to remove.

  Hell, yes, he wanted her back working at the ranch – and gracing his bed, underneath him, straddling him, it mattered not. As long as he could hear her wondrous brogue and watch her freckles dance and her lips smile, giving him a glorious glimpse of those gaping teeth.

  But how to convince her that desolate West Texas sand was better than the lush green of Ireland? Goldman was better equipped at persuasion, while he himself stingily dribbled out his words like precious well water.

  “The Rotterdam ferries serve only three English ports,” Goldman relayed, turning from the officious Port Clerk to Duke, “and the last one out for the day sailed at ten this morning,”.

  Hell’s bells! Once again, they must have just missed her. “Check for her name on those three passenger lists. Find out for which port she is bound.”

  Goldman turned back to confer with the clerk, and then with some surprise told Duke her name was not on any of the lists.

  He removed his Stetson, sluiced the rain from its brim, and ran a hand through his overly-long damp hair. “Then she’s still here. But where?”

  Rotterdam was vast, with one of the tallest office buildings in Europe and a multitude of hotels that still housed refugees from The Great War two decades before.

  Goldman’s all-knowing grin hiked the scar on his cheek. “With her people. She’s with the Gypsies.”

  With only one Gypsy caravan site in the area, finding Romy should not be that difficult. Nearing twilight, the rain had ceased but the Gypsy encampment was a pig sty. Teeming with refuse, mangy mutts, nags, and filthy children, it had to contain at least a thousand or more Gypsies.

  A medium tall Gypsy, smacking of arrogance, confronted them. “I hear you are asking around for Romy Sonnenschein.”

  Duke shifted his weight to his back foot, his hands tucked into his jacket pockets. One hand caressed the derringer. “You know where she is?” he drawled, wary of the swaggering man.

  The Gypsy eyed first Goldman, then hi
m, from his scuffed cowboy boots to his battered Stetson. “You are Duke McClellan,” he said with definite accent to his English. “I am Giorgio.”

  Giorgio the Gypsy. This had to be the man to whom she had been betrothed at fourteen. Duke told himself he did not feel jealous. More like resentful. That this Giorgio had known the unguarded girl Romy must have been before the Nazis had swept her off the street.

  Odd, how both he himself and Romy had both been set loose on the earth at a too-young fourteen years of age – and yet unaccountably linked up, crossing half the globe that separated them to come face to face, at last.

  “I asked you, where is she?”

  “I could refuse to tell you.”

  “And I could kill you.”

  To his right, Goldman stiffened at the impending confrontation.

  The Gypsy’s grin showed uneven, smoke-stained teeth. He swept a hand at the camp, indicating unseen eyes watching. “But at a steep price – your life and your friend’s here.” He spread his palms and said with gusto, “Still, you are friends of Romy’s. Come, let us talk inside my vardo.”

  A rather bland, stout woman made way for them inside the caravan’s dim and crowded interior then clumped back to hover near a curtain that probably separated the sleeping quarters and a fussing, restive infant.

  Giorgio offered them the only two chairs, but Duke said, “We don’t have time to palaver. Where is she? Where is Romy?”

  Shaking rain droplets from his hair like a wet dog did its pelt, Giorgio sprawled in one chair. “On her way to Berlin.”

  “Verdammt!” Goldman said. “Why?”

  “Because she has a twin brother imprisoned there,” Duke said. He should have known the feisty Romy wouldn’t roll over and play dead for long. She was a scrapper, after all. “At some prison in – “

  “Sachsenhausen,” Goldman supplied.

  “That’s it. How long ago?” he demanded of the Gypsy. “How long ago did she leave?”

  “A couple of hours or so. One of our Dutch underground resistors is giving her a lift.”

  Duke huffed a snort of exasperation. Once again, they had just missed her. The evasive, elusive, and illusive Romy Sonnenschein. Shit!

  “But for a few American dollars, my friends, I myself will take you to her.”

  § CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE §

  The small, beat-to-shit lorry rattled through the late-night hours over the dusty, rutted road running between Arnhem in the Netherlands and Munster, Germany. In the bed of the Resistant guide’s blue truck bounced crates of mushrooms, cauliflower, and leeks.

  “You understand, once we get to Berlin,” the red-veined and bulbous nosed man told Romy, “I can drop you off at the Gartenstadtweg flats – but anywhere near Sachsenhausen, nein.” Marko’s grungy brown cap was tugged low, and his unkempt woolen jacket collar turned up. “That is not what I signed on for.”

  “The apartments will do.”

  “I will return to the Gartenstadtweg flats the day after tomorrow. Thirty-six hours from now. If you’re not there – ”

  “I know – ye will leave without meself.”

  Giorgio had arranged the expedition within minutes of her foolhardy declaration to return to Berlin. The entire trip her heart had been beating faster with each mile that took her closer to Berlin and Sachsenhausen. Flight in the opposite direction her body screamed for.

  Opposing that was the strong pull of herself in another’s body, that of Luca’s. Somewhere in Sachsenhausen her twin suffered and endured. How could she endure the rest of her life, when a part of herself suffered?

  Drawing closer to Berlin, she could only wonder what had happened to the rest of her clan, to querulous Florika, and old warty Marta, who had stubbornly remained with Old Duke’s body.

  And Romy could only feel a cringing shame at her cowardice in fleeing Marzahn, in leaving behind precious others.

  When late that afternoon she saw the Gartenstadtweg’s Easter egg-colored, fashionable units, she had to wonder why Irina Klockner would pick a place so ostentatious out of which to run a resistance group.

  “The best place to hide something is in plain sight,” Irina said with an inscrutable smile that did not quite conceal her vigilance. The Polish woman, Gideon’s half-sister, was wearing a soft wool crepe dress that emphasized her wasp waist. Her gaze landed on the shabby suitcase and the purse, her purse, tucked under Romy’s arm.

  “Brought yuir purse back for ye, I did.” Well sort of.

  Irina’s smile was a less guarded one. “So, what Marko says is true? You want to spring your brother from Sachsenhausen?

  Romy nodded. “Insanity, aye?”

  Irina linked her arm with Romy’s. Let’s catch up over tea.”

  Trying to get her bearings, she took an indicated chair at the small aluminum dinette table in the equally small and cramped kitchen with its high ceiling. Watching Irina heat up the brew, she was beset by questions. The most important one first.

  “Then, ye hold no grudge against me, making off with yuir purse and identity and coat and things?”

  The other woman’s classic features softened. “I may have you to thank that I am still alive. Had they taken me, I may not have escaped. You are quite the skilled illusionist, Romy.”

  She accepted the porcelain cup Irina handed her. “And yet ye chose to stay rather than flee, when ye had the chance. Ye chose to continue to fight the Nazis?”

  Irina slid into a chair diagonally from hers. “After that raid on your camp, I seriously do not know if I would have had the courage to continue. It was such a close call for me. But Giorgio made all the difference. I do what I do. Because of him.”

  She gulped so quickly the weak tea burned her throat. “Giorgio? “

  “Yes, he found me – I suspect he had come to the vardo to rescue you – but he hustled me off to safety.” Irina lowered her lids, staring into the cup her graceful hands enfolded. “And he reminded me there was life after the world had spun me around and broken me down. Giorgio built me back up into who I am now.”

  At a loss for words, she took another sip of coffee. She knew she shouldn’t ask. “Ye and Giorgio were – ”

  “Are lovers. Yes, I know he is married. And I know he has a child. But Giorgio helped me find my child before he left.” Irina nodded over her shoulder toward an adjoining room. “Adrian is taking his afternoon nap.”

  She picked up a cigarette package on the table next to her and shook out a cigarette, lighting it. The brand was a German one, Roth-Händle, and Romy figured if the Germans could smoke that cardboard, they were indeed the master race.

  Irina exhaled a plume of smoke that made Romy’s stomach roil. Nerves, surely. All these surprises, one after the other, were unsettling her. “You were right, Romy, when you told my fortune, back there at the Gypsy camp. When you said I would be happier than I have ever been.”

  Romy recalled her card layout for Irina – and a child in the shadows. She had tried to postulate some meaning out of the spread that she could turn to her advantage. “Where was your son? Adrian?”

  “Adrian was taken from my breast, even as I nursed him. As part of the Lebenstraum policy.” Her pretty lips thinned. “The project’s aim is to acquire and Germanize Polish children with Aryan-Nordic traits. Giorgio tracked Adrian for me to a German foster home and staged a phenomenal kidnapping.” She shrugged her shoulders. “After that, how could I not fall in love with such an epic hero?”

  “Well, he is quite. . . eye fetching,” she conceded.

  “But, alas, as you well know, Gypsies do not marry outside their tribe. We stay in touch, through the Resistance.” Irina allowed a wry smile to lighten her composed expression. “We count on the distance of four-hundred miles to short-circuit the magnetism coursing between us.”

  Would life’s wonders never cease? She could only hope the same held true for her and Duke. Surely, fifty-five hundred miles could dilute their combustible chemistry.

  From there the subject turned to rescuing Luca, w
ith Romy sharing the latest information, from Moe, little though it was. “Moishe Klein is a collaborator of the Nazi’s. Until I killed him, that is.”

  A delicate eyebrow arched. “You killed him?”

  “Aye,” she said with a small, rueful smile. “With the help of your purse here. Flung it at him I did, as he was about to blow me brains to bits and pieces. After that, it was a tussle as to who fired the next shot.”

  Irina nodded approvingly. “The Resistance could surely use your pluck.”

  “Crazy, is it not? Me, wanting back inside Germany, when everyone with any common sense is wanting out.”

  Irina stubbed her cigarette in the coffee cup’s saucer and, going to a small counter drawer, rummaged through it. She returned with pencil and paper. Reseating herself, she said, “Can you draw from memory the interior of Sachsenhausen?”

  She considered. “I know but a wee part of what I saw the two times I was interned there, but every brick of those parts is tattooed on me brain and shows up in me dreams.”

  She took the pencil from Irina. “This is the layout of Sachsenhausen. Now here is the intake room,” she said, sketching quickly a rectangle within the larger triangle that was Sachsenhausen.

  “Beside the wooden barracks, constructed for us inmates, there are several bricks buildings built for the SS, as well as, a kitchen and laundry room. And, oh, aye, the infirmary, here.” She jabbed the pencil point at the southern portion of the triangle. “Also, Moe – Moishe – mentioned my brother was working during the day in the brick factory at Klinkerwerk.”

  “Yes, from what we know, the prisoners are marched to and from the works each day, nearly three kilometers away, to build docks on the Havel River.”

  Romy pointed her pencil at the base of the triangle. “Radiating from the main gate, I would guess there are seven or eight watchtowers and machine guns positioned around the camp.” She sketched this out, adding, “From what I remember, the barrack huts are in back of a roll call area directly behind the entrance gate. I could see the gallows from there, and the extermination banks, where some of the prisoners were occasionally shot.”