Gypsy Hearts

by Robert Eversz

  I left his office convinced that the happier and more optimistic he seemed at the beginning, the more it would cost me in the end.

  As I approached my apartment, I heard the phone ringing through the door and, fumbling with the keys, rushed inside to pick up a dead line. I threw down the phone, glanced into the kitchen, and stuck my nose into the bathroom. Monika was not en manse, and I didn’t see any sign that she had returned and left again in my absence. When the phone rang again some minutes later I let it bleat five or six times, not wishing any more unpleasant surprises for the day, but the hope it might be Monika urged me to pluck it from the cradle. The telltale beep of a long distance line identified the caller before his familiar voice bellowed my name. “Father!” I said, bright tones of happy-to-hear-you in my voice. “What a wonderful surprise! I didn’t think you were talking to me anymore.”

  “What the hell is going on out there, son?” he demanded. Father did not sound pleased.

  “Exactly what do you mean?”

  The abrupt silence on the other end was punctuated by a static pop. I imagined Father’s face, beet red, eyes closed as he mouthed the words to digits one through ten. “Shall we begin at the beginning?” he suggested, politeness quivering his voice like a plucked string. “You are unaware, perhaps, that your cousin Richard currently occupies a Czechoslovakian jail cell?”

  “I am not unaware,” I said, crowding the sarcasm from my voice. “Nor have I been altogether lax in my family responsibilities to Cousin Dickie. The Ambassador informed me of Dickie’s legal problems this morning, and since then I’ve discussed the case personally with the local chief of police and engaged the services of a lawyer recommended by the Ambassador herself.”

  “Nix, I’m getting very tired of your lies.”

  “Father, may I remind you that I did not request this phone call, that you called me?”

  “I just got off the phone with Ambassador Black,” he announced.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me that he had secured a personal line to the Ambassador. Father was a significant financial contributor to the California Republican Party. I said, “And she told you I’d spoken with the Vice Consul, who is acting as her agent in this affair.”

  “That’s not the same as speaking with the Ambassador, is it?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s better. He’s a professional diplomat known for his competence and not for once, as a child, having sung ‘The Good Ship Lollipop.’”

  “Ambassador Black is a good Republican,” Father replied, offended. “I order you not to do anything more until John and Buffy arrive.”

  “I have Dickie practically sprung and you order me to stop? Father, I think you’re the one who needs to see the psychiatrist.”

  Father said, “Nix—”

  “You have no idea how things work out here.”

  “Nix—”

  “You can’t expect to wave your American passport and pull Dickie from jail like a bunny from a hat.”

  “Nix—”

  “Uncle John and Aunt Buffy will just screw things up.”

  “That’s enough, Nix.”

  “You don’t live here. You don’t give me orders here.”

  “Please, calm down.”

  “No. You wise up.”

  “Nix, answer me, did you have anything to do with this?”

  I pulled the phone from my ear and stared at it for several long, hard seconds. Very calm, very much in control, I said, “Are you accusing me?”

  “You know you’ve been having problems.”

  “I asked, Are you accusing me?”

  “Richard is not the type to get involved in this sort of thing.”

  “And I am?”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Fuck you for using Dickie against me!” I shouted, and slammed the receiver to its cradle.

  * * *

  Monika returned to find me sitting on a chair in front of the telephone, my face cupped in my hands. The phone rang. The phone had been ringing almost constantly since I’d hung up on Father. Monika flung her purse and coat aside and sat on the couch, watching me watch the phone. It rang fifteen, sixteen times.

  “Well, answer it,” she said.

  I reached behind the base and plucked out the line. The ringing stopped. I lifted the phone from the table, opened first one and then the second window in the double casement, and heaved it into the courtyard two stories below. The plastic gave a satisfying crack when it hit the concrete. I shut both windows and returned to my chair, sitting again with my head in my hands.

  “That was a mature thing to do,” Monika remarked. I didn’t bother to reply. She clanked about the kitchen, devouring anything edible and leaving the dishes piled in the sink for me to do later. The last thing I needed was a bumbling visit from Uncle John and Aunt Buffy. Prague abruptly seemed not distant enough. What was the use of moving halfway around the world if a ten-hour plane ride could yank me back to the dross of a life I had so desperately sought to escape? Monika tromped from kitchen to bathroom, slamming the door behind her. As the dutiful nephew I’d be required to meet them at the airport, carry their bags to the hotel, take them to visit Dickie, listening every step of the way to Aunt Buffy’s inane commentary on how shabby everything seemed, not at all like Newport Beach. Uncle John would stare wordlessly out the nearest window, pretending a stoicism all those who knew him better understood as stupidity. And if they had listened to Father, they would secretly suspect I had something to do with landing their innocent son in jail. Hadn’t Dickie already hinted they were upset with me over the Cavity of Dr. Caligari incident?

  “I want to go to sleep now,” Monika announced, emerging from the bathroom.

  I lifted my head from my hands to stare down her audacity. “I’m in obvious crisis here, and all you have to say to me is you want to go to sleep?”

  “It’s not my fault the apartment is so small,” she said.

  Not a word of sympathy or even simple curiosity. I gestured vaguely toward the bed. “I promise to suffer wordlessly, so not to disturb you.”

  Without making it clear what she wanted—did she expect me to volunteer to sleep again in the bathtub?—but by pouting demeanor making it clear she wanted something, she flicked off the light and under the safety of blanket and bedspread stripped off her skirt and stockings. In my experience, that style of disrobing is hardly an invitation, but the sight of her carefully folding her garments and laying them by the bed aroused me with her indifference. I stripped to my briefs and slid into bed. Before I had approached closer than a foot, she said, “Good night, Nix.”

  I curled up against her back and allowed my hand a wandering caress. She abruptly shifted positions, elbowed me in the ribs, and complained, “You’re suffocating me.” I ground my teeth together and stared at the ceiling. The polite thing to do was to let her sleep. My good intentions didn’t last more than thirty seconds. I sat up, asked, “Where were you today?”

  “Out,” she answered.

  “And yesterday?”

  She rolled to the side of the bed, shook a cigarette from the pack she kept on the floor—never during all the time we lived together did I see her more than five feet distant from a cigarette—and lit it. She said, “Yesterday? Let me remember. Oh, yes. Yesterday I was out too.”

  “Where do you go when you go out?”

  “I go out when I go out.”

  “Anyplace in particular?”

  “Sure. When I go out, I go outside.”

  She stepped out of bed and smoked by the window, moonlight silvering her honeyed thighs. I debated telling her everything: my debacle with Dickie’s passport, the visit from Inspector Zima, the disaster of a conversation with Father, the works. As I watched her gaze out the window, outlined in smoke and moonlight, my chest constricted so sharply I gasped, as though I had been plunged steaming into an ice-cold bath. I had fallen in love with her before I had the slightest notion who she was, and now that I realized how truly monstr
ous she could be, my desire for her controlled me completely. I decided to tell her almost nothing. “Anybody follow you when you go out?” I asked.

  “Why would anybody want to follow me?”

  “I don’t know why. I just asked.”

  “Do you think somebody is following me?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Sure you have an idea, or you wouldn’t have asked.”

  “I just think it’s smart to be aware, considering.”

  Monika stabbed out her cigarette and slid the ashtray across the floor. “Are you suggesting we have a police problem?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Sven and I never had any problems with the police.”

  “Neither do we. I just think it’s best to be careful. Because I love you and don’t want to see anything happen to split us up.”

  She walked to the bed and looked down at me. I struggled against the urge to trace the course of a vein up the skin of her thigh. The electrochemical reactions sparking in her eyes were inscrutable. I gave her my most winsome smile. With a graceful crossover motion of her arms she stripped off her pullover and sat next to me on the bed.

  “You’re sweet and I’m being horrible,” she said.

  In the tangled clothing and cramped confines of our previous couplings I had not noticed that on her left breast, directly over the approximate location of her heart, two tattooed snakes consumed each other’s tails. The similarity with the entwined snakes ornamenting the ring I had bought for her in Budapest was extraordinary. When I asked her about the tattoo, she cupped her breast and turned it toward the window, so the moonlight might better illuminate the design, but the symbolism of its placement on the canvas of her skin she left unexplained. I took her frank nudity as encouragement and reached for the join between her legs. She deflected my hand and with gentle insistence pushed me onto my back.

  “You can’t touch me,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. Whining was undignified. I thought it humiliating to beg. Neither stopped me from doing both.

  “Shhhh,” she said, and putting a finger to my lips, let her hand drift to a pink tumescence as tender and hard as an Achilles heel. “You can’t touch me because it’s wrong to touch me,” she said, and when I began to protest she shushed me again. “You can’t touch me but I can touch you, baby. Does baby want me to touch him?” She switched to Danish, and though I couldn’t understand the specific meaning of her words, the high-pitched singsong in her voice made me feel as though I were a child being addressed by another child. No woman had ever talked to me like a child before, and at first I thought it sexy but contrived, like the breathiness of Marilyn Monroe or any other little girl sexpot, and frankly, her employed style of stimulation was less appealing than its three more comely rivals, but the slightest touch from Monika thrilled me more than circus sex with any other woman. As I began to cry out with pleasure I heard her voice echo mine, and again I suspected it a gesture of contrived eroticism, but her ecstatically clenched face convinced me she felt a genuine if perverse passion, touching herself as she spoke in Danish, lost in the language of her memories and the memories of her desire.

  23

  The sound of a running tap in the bathroom awakened me to the watery light of early morning. I nipped out of bed, dressed, and slipped back under the covers, feigning sleep until I heard the front door click open and shut. Monika glanced over her shoulder as she crossed the street outside our apartment, forcing me to follow at too prudent a distance, but I felt I could track her blindfolded, guided by an essence as identifiable to me as scent to a bloodhound. I followed not from any specific suspicion but out of curiosity—her every action seemed a mystery, sometimes horrifying and sometimes wondrous but always fascinating—and if that meant spying out an intrigue, I was perfectly willing to benefit by my inquisitiveness. She could have lost me easily at the distance I followed, but after the first few cursory glances she threaded a straightforward route though Staré Město to Václavské náměstí, where she entered a former Art Nouveau jewel transformed to socialist bauble, the Ambassador Hotel.

  Screened by the lettering on the front glass, I watched her loitering near the reception desk, absorbed by a sudden and unexplained interest in an adjacent newspaper rack. Several guests dropped keys, checked messages, or checked out. After the arrival of a single woman whose business required no more than a minute, Monika turned from the newspaper rack and strode past the front desk. I selected a copy of the Herald Tribune and glanced about the lobby. After a few minutes of observation, I strolled in the direction of her disappearance, which led to a large room with tables and breakfast buffet. She sat alone at a table by the far window, enjoying a considerable repast. I couldn’t risk more than a cursory glance and retreated to the lobby, where, loitering near the reception desk, I overheard a Scotsman repeatedly identify himself by name and room number to a clerk confused by his brogue.

  I never would have used information gleaned at the front desk, like Monika, to cadge a free breakfast. The risk was disproportionate to the reward. Monika didn’t understand the risk-to-reward ratio. Not paying was a principle. I had never seen her pay for anything. Somebody always paid for her, or she figured out a scam to get what she wanted for free. Despite her refusal to pay for anything, she was as liberated from greed as anyone I had ever met. Hadn’t her refusal to take a share of Zdeněk’s money proven that?

  The silver-haired and red-scarfed figure who strode arm in arm with her through the lobby a few minutes later was a dapper if elderly gent whose face, despite dissipated character lines, retained something of its original handsomeness. They raced through the lobby and out the revolving door before I could fold my newspaper to transport size, and after several failed attempts to get the creases to match I tossed the thing aside and scurried to the window, where I witnessed their approach to a cab at the bottom of the square. When the car pulled away I sprinted to the nearest waiting taxi, snapping open the passenger door to a stringy-haired fellow in tight jeans who touted an advertisement for a local bordello on his dashboard.

  “Follow that cab!” I shouted, pointing in the direction of the departing car.

  The driver stubbed out his cigarette, reached forward to turn off his radio, and stared at me blankly.

  “That cab! Follow it! Follow that car!” I shouted, trying to find a variation that would spark him to action.

  He half turned to see what I was pointing at, and by the time it took him to cite a 500-crown fare, the car in which Monika had fled was beyond pursuit.

  “Have you considered taking a vacation?” Havran asked in a carefully coded tone of voice. “Personally, I prefer to travel in early summer, before the crowds of August.” He watched me over steepled fingers as I fidgeted in the leather armchair before his desk, half fantasizing vulgar episodes involving Monika and a figure old enough to be her father. “It’s so much more pleasant to visit a city when one’s every step isn’t dogged by the touristic masses, don’t you think?”

  “I wish I had the time,” I replied, uninterested in small talk.

  “Perhaps you could combine business with pleasure. Research a location in another country. Vienna, Paris, Rome—such beautiful cities this time of year!”

  I prepared a brusque reiteration of the fact that I was a busy man, but behind the cheery sparkle in Havran’s eyes I noticed a darker glint of warning and shut my mouth to reconsider. “Of course, a writer can work anywhere,” I said.

  He nodded with vigorous approval. “How I envy you, Mr. Miller! A foreigner, no permanent ties to this country, nothing at all to prevent you from packing your things into a bag and going wherever you please.”

  “I was planning a trip to Warsaw next month, when the weather warms a bit,” I suggested.

  “Why wait at all? I’ve discussed your travel plans with a few key people, who would like to be considered your friends, and all promise that you will enjoy unrestricted travel out of the country. I hasten to add that these fr
iends have urged me to suggest this vacation.”

  “My situation, then, is grave?”

  “I’ve made a number of inquiries, and what I’ve heard is not good. Not good at all.”

  “But I’ve done nothing!” I protested.

  “There is, I believe, a young lady staying in your apartment?”

  I didn’t confirm or deny, though a reading on any galvanometer would have spiked through the glass. Someone had been watching the apartment. Any connection proved between Monika and me would have a number of disastrous consequences. My cousin’s passport found outside the burgled premises of my girlfriend’s date that evening—not even I could explain my way out of that circumstance.

  “Traveling together can be so much more rewarding than traveling alone,” Havran continued, gazing wistfully at the ceiling. “Particularly with such a beautiful woman. How I envy your youth and vigor! She would certainly like to accompany you on your vacation, don’t you think?”

  I stumbled to my feet, said, “Yesterday, you seemed to think it wasn’t so serious.”

  Havran was at my side before I knew it, nimbly maneuvering his bulk around the desk to clasp my elbow and guide me back into the chair. “Goodness, you’re white as a sheet!” he exclaimed. “Would you like a glass of water, or perhaps a whisky?”

  I nodded to the whisky and bolted it when he poured a shot from a bottle of Jameson’s.

  “Your cousin’s situation is even more difficult. In this country, it is no easy thing to get out of jail once in. The bureaucracy is imposing—there are simply far too many people to please and regulations to fulfill. Any influence our friends might have is spread too thin to have any real effect.”

  The shot of whisky and the second to follow steadied me. If Dickie remained in jail, they suspected he acted as my accomplice and would pursue confessional evidence. The longer they tried to pump water from that dry well, the better it would be for me. “Just as well. My father,” I said, savoring the bitter taste of that word in my mouth, “has expressed his desire to handle my cousin’s case personally. I will pass your name along, of course, though I can’t promise he’ll be wise enough to heed your counsel.”