by Mark Helprin
“My bloody foot, pig!” Freddy shouted.
“Why did you do that?” Fredericka asked. “What good does it do? We’ve been arrested again.”
“Not if we can get a ride in the next minute,” Freddy said, hitch-hiking with psychiatric intensity.
“If he sees you doing that, it’ll be worse. He might shoot us.”
“For hitch-hiking?”
“He thinks we’re Mexicans.”
Just as the patrolman reached them after doubling back on the other side of the rail, a boat-like white Cadillac squealed to a stop in the triangle. Its passenger door was flung open and a swarthy fat man commanded them to get in. As soon as they did, he pressed the accelerator to the floor and the three of them were pushed back against the red-leather bench seat. With the acceleration, the door slammed shut, and Freddy and Fredericka felt the fluids in their bodies migrating to the rear. This was not unpleasant, and because of its high horsepower the engine seemed only to whisper.
“I think we should warn you,” Freddy told the driver.
“I know. I saw him. That’s why I stopped.”
“He’ll be after us.”
“We’ll get to the state line before he does.”
“What if he radios ahead?”
“I just want the pike for my initial burst. Then I’ll get off onto the back roads.”
“Thank you,” Freddy said, but it was stilted. He was so used to people giving him things, doing things for him, and praising him that he could not express gratitude. It was the same thank-you that he would have managed when receiving a hideous ivory carving from the monarch of a Southeast Asian principality.
“I didn’t do it for you, I did it for me. I know that cop and I don’t like him. He saw me, he knows my car, so now this is between him and me. You don’t have to be grateful: you’re just a prawn.”
During the initial run on the turnpike they were going too fast for the passengers to study the driver or vice versa, but after the initial rocketry, on nearly empty roads between waist-high corn in neatly laid out fields, they looked to see with whom they were riding.
He was a Gypsy, with a fat dark face and shiny hair and moustaches that were as black as Palasimnos and as soft as mink. He had at least two rings on each finger and one on each thumb. They were the gold anchors for shell beds of diamonds and pearls that impressed even the Princess of Wales. So many gold necklaces weighed him down it was surprising that he could breathe, and yet he was as buoyant as a natural politician or an empty bottle—a huge, scheming baby with sparkling, voracious eyes. And he dressed more flamboyantly than even his passengers, in purple, paisley, and a rakish white hat.
They studied him and he studied them. Their hats alone were a wonder, and all the garish colour against the Chinese-red leather looked like an explosion in a paint factory or an accident involving lobster Cantonese.
“Soul brothers,” he said. “I always pick up soul brothers. The pigs really dump on them.”
“Yes, the pigs most certainly do,” Freddy answered, without the slightest effort to conceal either his accent, which was captivating and regal, or his bearing, which was much the same. “It appears,” Freddy went on, “that the pigs and the soul brothers are locked in obsessive conflict.”
Still looking at the road, the Gypsy cocked his right ear the better to judge every puzzling inconsistency.
“As best I can tell,” Freddy said as if he were holding forth to a delighted expert he had summoned to one of his magnificent libraries for tea and conversation, “the object of the pigs is to provoke the soul brothers until they reveal what the pigs believe is their true criminal nature. Thus, in the eyes of the pigs, provocation is merely an investigative technique to overcome barricades of falsity. And the object of the soul brothers is to protect their dignity by gratuitous and provocative defiance, as if that would do so. This must lead to one confrontation after another.”
“Right on,” said the Gypsy. “Are you some sort of radiologist?”
“No.”
“Come on, you’ve got a talk show.”
“What is a talk show?”
“Where they talk on the radio.”
“Is that a question?”
“Is what a question?”
“You said, ‘Where they talk on the radio?’ I don’t know where they talk on the radio, except on the radio.”
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you talk on the radio?”
“On occasion.”
“I thought so.”
“Not as a profession,” Freddy volunteered.
“You’re a guest.”
“Yes, I’m a guest.”
“What shows?”
Freddy put his finger in the spaces of his missing teeth, and explored.
“What shows?” the Gypsy asked again.
“Really, I don’t remember.”
“Imus?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Imus?”
“You can do whatever you wish.”
The Gypsy looked at his passengers obliquely, then quickly back at the road. “You haven’t been on Imus?”
“Whatever that means, and I don’t know what it means, I imagine the answer is no.”
“Then what do you do?”
“I’m a dentist,” Freddy answered.
“I see,” said the Gypsy. “Yeah.”
Fredericka was sitting between the two men, and as Freddy conversed with the Gypsy, Freddy’s eyes rolled over her like hands on silk. When the driver said no more and just drove, listening intently to every sound from his right, Freddy found himself looking at his wife in a kind of daze.
“You know,” he said, “you have an enormous proboscis. I never noticed before how immense it is. It’s like a country—a small country, mind you, one of those long islands in the South Atlantic, with shorelines of thousand-foot cliffs on which millions of white seabirds perch. It’s like a runway, a long gallery, a projecting boom, or an architectural ornament in a beautiful palace.”
“Thank you,” said Fredericka, staring ahead with intense concentration as she tried to deduce from Freddy’s comments the meaning of the word proboscis. The Gypsy was also at work.
“It extends at a perfect angle, especially from the side. It’s just so beautiful. When we were white puffballs I couldn’t really see it, and before that, when we were just white, I failed to pay it enough heed. Now that we’re black or gold, or whatever we are, it’s strongly contrasted. It’s as if I hadn’t ever seen it. I would like to kiss it . . . and . . . I would like to. . . .”
Freddy had no more words. Fredericka, though she still did not know what a proboscis was, reddened with pulse and pleasure. “Please, Freddy,” she begged. “We’re hardly alone.”
The Gypsy stared ever more intently at the road, listening with a hair-trigger ear.
“What is a proboscis?” Fredericka asked.
“Elephants have them,” Freddy said.
“They do?”
“Famously.”
“And what do they do,” she asked hesitantly, “with their proboscises?”
“Proboscides.”
“Yes, their proboscides.”
“They roll logs with them, pick things up, spray themselves with water, eat peanuts, that sort of thing.”
“You mean their. . . .”
Before she could finish, he leaned over and kissed her first on the nose and then hard on the lips. Inexplicably, she felt a surge of pleasure throughout her entire body. “A little trick I learnt when I was in Africa with . . .” he said, before she smashed his face and chest with both her fists.
“I don’t want to hear that woman’s name ever again, and don’t do any elephant sex tricks on me!” she said, enraged.
“But Fredericka, it was just affection. You always say you want affection.”
“You don’t know what affection is, you idiot,” she said, seething down. “And I don’t want affection while sitting next to another m
an, a commoner no less.”
“He’s just the driver,” Freddy protested.
“No I’m not,” the Gypsy said. “I own this car. This is a Cadillac El Dorado with red-leather seats. You’re just hitch-hikers. You don’t even have a car.”
“I assure you,” Fredericka said, now a lioness defending the lion she had a moment before mauled, “that he has a great many more cars than you have.”
“I don’t think so,” said the Gypsy.
“Well, I do,” Fredericka told him.
“Yeah? How many cars does he have?”
“Let’s see,” said Freddy. “Do I count my immediate family?”
“Meaning what?”
“My mother and father.”
“Sure. You can throw in all your cousins, too.”
“All my cousins?”
“First cousins.”
“Over a hundred automobiles, more or less,” Freddy said, “of every conceivable type: Rolls, Duesenberg, Aston-Martin, Bugatti, et cetera.”
The Gypsy smiled. “That’s all?”
“And how many do you have?” Freddy asked, assuming that he was riding in most of the inventory.
“Me? Depending on the time of day, anywhere from five-to-seven thousand.”
“Automobiles?”
“Yeah.”
“How is that?”
“I’m in the wholesale car business. I supply South America with used American cars. Every day we load a ship. Sometimes, on holidays when the stream backs up, or in a storm, we have ten-to-fifteen thousand cars in the yards, and if a car is in the yard, I own it. It’s a big business, with a lot of cash flow.”
“Where do you get all the cars?” Freddy asked.
“Everywhere. I’ve got more than a thousand people working for me, and not a single one on the books. Lots’a soul brothers.”
“I’ve always wondered what the mechanism was for placing all those older American vehicles in poorer countries around the world,” Freddy said.
“Now you know.”
Vindicated and relieved, the Gypsy pulled onto an entrance ramp of the Maryland Turnpike, where the afternoon traffic was light. The three of them stared straight ahead into the glare. Freddy was embarrassed both because Fredericka had hit him and because the Gypsy had many more cars than even the royal family. Fredericka was embarrassed that he had been so forward in such an inappropriate venue, and because her gambit to defend him had failed. And though the Gypsy wasn’t embarrassed, he did wonder about his passengers. They were American types that he hadn’t encountered before. Everyone was silent until the Susquehanna, but after they had driven over it, marvelling at a Georgian mansion that overlooked it and at the ongoing breadth of the river as it forged inland, they all had the urge to talk. Perhaps it was because, having crossed the Susquehanna, they were now in the gravitational field of Washington.
“Did you see that house?” the Gypsy said. “I could buy that house.”
“So could I,” Freddy said. Fredericka kicked him.
“No you couldn’t. That house would be in the millions,” the Gypsy told him. “You couldn’t even dream of that. And I’ll bet it’s filled with art.”
“Already I miss the presence of great paintings,” Freddy stated before Fredericka kicked him again. “I do.”
“You have to put certain things out of your mind,” she insisted.
“That’s all very well for you to say, but one gets used to a specific standard, and then when it vanishes the world seems impoverished. It seems especially impoverished when buildings have flat roofs and undivided windows wider than they are high, and when I can see as if with X-ray vision that behind a wall of tawdry-board is a bunch of glass wool insulation and a lot of plastic. The heart, Fredericka, can sense itself beating off stone, and the solidity of stone is one of the heart’s great comforts. But when the heart hears the flimsy echo of claptrap, it is much aggrieved.”
“He talks like that?” the Gypsy asked.
“No, Freddy, it isn’t walls that speak to the heart,” Fredericka stated, ignoring the Gypsy. “You have, as you frequently tell me, embraced a lie.”
“I take it you were happy when you lived in that wretched little flat in Brompton Road, and drove that wretched little automobile?”
“I was.”
“But you jumped like a trout at the chance to marry me, didn’t you.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“I come with palaces.”
“That’s not why I married you,” said Fredericka, and anyone in the world who might have been listening would have known that it was true—anyone, that is, but Freddy.
“How do you know?”
“You spoke about the heart?”
“Then why do you make perpetual trouble?”
“Because,” Fredericka said, almost knocking her green turban against Freddy’s giant ballooning hat, “the queen treats me like a dog. No, she’s kind to dogs. It’s so unfair. She’s the queen. What can I do? To whom can I appeal? She’s older, she’s your mother, and she’s the queen, but she is wrong, and she is cold, and I am right.”
“What do you want of her?”
“I want her to treat me with benevolence and respect. I will someday bear your children. How can she not embrace me like a daughter? Something’s wrong. It doesn’t make sense. It’s unfair to me, to the children not yet born, to the way things should be. Freddy, it’s so gratuitous. That’s why I make trouble.”
“Fredericka, you tried to rush the royal way, but the royal way cannot be rushed. Currents run subtly beneath the surface, and rather than wait until you were able to apprehend them, you roiled the waters so that apprehending them is now impossible. The duke and the queen have a very high standard. They need not be patient. They need not compromise. They need not extend themselves to anyone.”
“Where are you dudes from?” the Gypsy asked.
“Why?”
“I can’t make you out. What’s your name?”
Freddy extended his hand across Fredericka and the Gypsy shook it. “Desi Moffat, and this is my wife, Popeel.”
“What are you? Are you soul brothers?”
Freddy pulled out a little piece of paper that he unfolded many times. Reading it so close to his eye that he seemed to be using a loupe, he said, “Yo.”
“But you’re gold.”
“Our grandmother was Jewish,” Fredericka told him.
“You’re entertainers. You gotta be entertainers.”
“We told you,” Fredericka said, “we’re dentists.”
“You too?”
“I really don’t know. It didn’t say. Perhaps I’m a dental hygienist.”
“What didn’t say?”
“The instructions.”
“What instructions?”
“We work from instructions,” Fredericka said, “according to a sort of plan that just happened and that we don’t quite understand, so we follow the instructions and we sleep in the woods, on the ground.”
“Don’t you have any money?”
“We have sterling,” Freddy said, “but no one knows what it is.”
“I do, and I’ll give you one point four nine five.”
“You will? Now?”
“When I get to my desk, but you can do better than that, a lot better, if you listen to my proposition.”
For perhaps the first time in his life, Freddy needed to hustle. “What proposition?”
They hurtled along. Something about the road south of the Susquehanna accelerates cars toward Baltimore in an almost supernatural sense. Perhaps the wide Susquehanna rolling toward the sea and seen only briefly gets the blood up and puts the accelerator down. Perhaps the jewel-like qualities of American cities accelerate travellers on the road like a celestial slingshot. Certainly the Gypsy, despite what, in his idiom (and Shakespeare’s), he was about to “lay on them,” and even Freddy and Fredericka, who did not know what was ahead, wanted to see a glass city sparkling and bronzed in the dusk. Lights
there would flash amber-coloured by the million, and the sun would track across the mirrored towers in clockwork motion, deeper and deeper in colour as distant traffic rolled upon high viaducts tracing a path around the orrery. On hot summer evenings as the streets released their heat, the cities seemed to burn in muted chestnut-coloured phosphorus.
“How much sterling have you got?” the Gypsy asked.
“Nine thousand pounds,” Freddy told him, thinking he would be impressed.
“Too small.”
“Thirteen thousand dollars is too small?” Fredericka asked. After all, that was the price of a sun dress.
“Thirteen thousand, four hundred, and fifty-five,” the Gypsy said. “But for small, uneven lots, you can’t get the rate I quoted you. That was the rate on a million-dollar contract. If I did the trade, and I’m not saying I would, I’d give you one point three six, which would be twelve thousand, two hundred, and forty dollars.”
“You calculate rapidly,” Freddy said.
“I’m a businessman.”
“How could you have assumed that we were carrying a million-pound lot of sterling?”
“I didn’t. In fact, I figured that you had less than a thousand. I quoted you the best rate because the lot was unspecified. That’s what you do. Look, I sell seven thousand cars a day. Do you know how much money is involved in that?”
“Millions, I imagine.”
“Ten, fifteen million a day. You know how heavy I am into foreign exchange? We’re not always paid in dollars. I have my own trading desk.”
“Are you an arm of General Motors?” Freddy asked.
“I’m nobody’s arm. The IRS doesn’t even know I exist.”
“Is that so?” Freddy asked, beginning to doubt his veracity. “Who are you, that the Inland Revenue knows you not?”
“You had no idea,” the Gypsy said, “but you’re sitting next to a king.”
“What kind of king?” Fredericka asked.
“An A-one, top-of-the-line, hot-shot king. I’m the only king you’ll ever meet, the only king in America with real royal blood in his veins. And you’re sitting next to me, riding in my car.”
“You’re the king of the wholesale car market, if that is, indeed, true,” Freddy ventured.
“I may be. I am. But I’m also the king of the Gypsies.”