“A man I know named G. B. Feinstein says great violins have dark stories attached to them,” I said. “He also thinks they have souls, and I guess the souls could be dark, too. Stefan Yonkos said this one is evil, a demon, something that destroys people.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t know if I really believe in evil, but I definitely believe in luck. And that stupid fiddle is bad luck, if I’ve ever seen the stuff. Everybody wants the damn thing, everybody who has anything to do with it seems to wind up dead, and everybody, I mean absolutely everybody, thinks I have it.”
Rosie shrugged. “Maybe you do.”
I gave that a moment’s thought. “Maybe I do at that,” I said. “If that were true, it could be the real reason why we are still alive.”
“I’m not sure I like that reason,” she said. “It sounds to me like one that could be canceled at any moment.”
“There is that,” I said. “But somehow, I don’t think this is the moment.”
I went over to the side of a window that faced the street and risked a peek out the edge of a tattered curtain. The window down the block where I had seen the watcher with the binoculars was still dark, unreadable. A quick look out the back window into the alley was just as inconclusive at first, but then something made me do a double take. I didn’t have a good enough view of the loading dock, where we had come in, to see if anybody was hanging around down there. But on the other side of the alley, further down, in deep shadow between two buildings, was something that definitely didn’t belong with the rest of the general clutter. Dark, massive, and almost out of view was the unmistakable front end of a shiny black LTD.
“Time for us to get the hell out of here,” I said.
“A man after my own heart,” said Rosie.
“Quiet and smooth.”
“You forgot ‘quick.’”
“No, I didn’t.” But I took two steps down the stairs and froze. This time there was no question about it. There was somebody standing outside the back door, possibly also working on the lock.
Rosie bumped into me from behind, nearly knocking us both down the rest of the steps. “What happened to the quick part?” she said.
“It got a little more complicated. Go check out the door to the roof.”
She left and I backed slowly up, the way I had come.
“It’s locked,” she said from behind me.
“Does it open onto the alley side or the street side?”
“Damfino. Let’s see, north is where the little dipper points to the big hand on your watch, if there’s any moss on it, and…”
“Will you please cut that out?”
“I’m nervous, okay? Street side, I think. What are you going to do, pick the lock, pop out and drop a water balloon?”
“No, I’m going to go enlist the aid of our spy across the street,” I said. “Stay where you are a minute.”
I went to the front of the flat and deliberately shone my flashlight out the window, ruffling the curtains a bit for good measure. Then I thought, what the hell, why fool around being subtle? and I cracked one of the panes with my elbow, adding a little noise to the bait. Down the street, on the dark second floor, the shiny twin discs of the binoculars flashed as they swung around towards me, then disappeared into the shadows again. The guy was alert for having had such a long, dull wait, I had to give him that. I let him see another bit of flashlight beam, just so he’d know he hadn’t been imagining things, and then I pulled the window shade down, fast. Then I did the same with the other one in the second bedroom. I looked at my fancy new watch. It probably had a stopwatch function, but I didn’t know how to work it yet, so I settled for watching the sweep second hand. If the Skokie cops were any good at all, I figured three minutes, maybe three and a half, tops.
“What are you doing down there, Herman? You’re starting to make me very nervous.”
“Stay put, Rosie. We’re about to set the wolves to devouring each other.” Unless, of course, they are all from the same pack, which would not be good at all.
When my watch rolled up two minutes and fifty seconds, I looked out the back window and saw squad cars converging on both ends of the alley. A large man in a dark coat saw them, too, and headed for the black LTD, running hard. That was as good a diversion as we were likely to get. I ran up the stairs, brushed past a tense-looking Rosie, and went to work on the lock to the roof door. Which didn’t budge.
From the alley below came the tinny, rasping sound of a voice on the speaker from one of the prowl cars, saying, “You there by the dumpster! Stop where you are and put your hands where I can see them! Now!” Since nothing around us looked anything like a dumpster, I assumed the cops were talking to somebody else. Poor fellow. I sprayed some oil in the lock and went back to work.
“I said stop!” said the mechanical voice below.
I said open! I thought at the lock. But it remained frozen solid. I hadn’t found a single tumbler slot yet. Then I heard the sound I’d been dreading. At the back door downstairs, there was a crash of broken glass and the clicks and clunks of a lockset being hastily jangled open, then the door slamming again. Whoever was down there was inside the building now. And I did not think he was a cop, who just wanted the facts, ma’am.
“Give me a little room,” I said. “And cover our backs.” She went part way down the stairs and pointed her automatic back at the hallway, taking a braced stance against one wall of the stair shaft. I took a half step back from the roof door and cocked my foot for what I hoped was the kick of a lifetime.
“Whatever you’re going to do,” said Rosie, “you’d better do it now. I think he’s coming up the stairs.”
Amen to that. The first kick merely made my foot hurt. On the second one, though, I got my weight behind it better and kept my foot flat to the panel. The door shrieked, splintered, made a sound like a ruptured oil drum, and then flew outward. We ran through and slammed it behind us.
We both blinked at the return of daylight. Crouching low to avoid being seen above the parapet walls, I scrounged up a scrap of wood from the roof and wedged it into the door jamb, then looked around and took stock of our surroundings. Half a block of low roofs stretched out in both directions, all interconnected but set apart by low, fence-like fire walls of dirty red brick. Between each set of walls was another slope-backed little shed with a door in it, like the one we had just come out of.
“I take it we aren’t going back down in the tunnel,” said Rosie. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
I shook my head. “This is better,” I said. “Lots better.” I could see she wasn’t buying a word of it. “We can get further away than the carpet store before we have to go back out in the open.”
“Like this isn’t out in the open?”
She had a point. “Well, back in plain sight, then. Which direction do you like?”
“You seem to be running on pure luck today. You choose.”
I did at that, didn’t I? I picked the direction away from the end of the block with Mr. Binoculars, and we scuttled off, hunched down like soldiers under fire. The commotion in the flat below got louder, then more remote.
We went over four more buildings without slowing down to try the doors. On the fifth one, at the end of the block, we stopped and I tried the lock. This time, I oiled it up first and took my time, doing it right. I had two tumblers locked in neatly and was reaching for another pick when the door flew open in my face, nearly smashing my hands. Framed in the dark opening was a very short, dark-complected young man with a very large sawed-off shotgun in his hands. If he’d had a pointy hat, he could have been Chico Marx with a vaudeville prop, sly grin included.
“Um, Ashlen Devlese, Romale,” I said. Did I mention that I have a good memory, as well as a good ear for dialect?
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Who are you trying to con, Gadje?”
But not good enough.
“Anybody I can,” I said. That alone
should make me one of your brothers. “But maybe we should have this conversation someplace a little less conspicuous?”
“Come,” he said, backing down the steps but keeping the gun trained on us. “Get off the roof before the jawndari see you, and we’ll see how much that insult to our language is going to cost you.”
Behind me, I knew, Rosie had her gun held inside her purse. She shut the door behind us and we regrouped in an upstairs hall just like the one we had left down the block.
“Look,” I said, “I didn’t mean any disrespect back there.”
“I think you didn’t mean to be on the roof, either, did you? But you will pay for both.”
“You know Stefan Yonkos?”
“Knew, you mean.”
“Yes,” I said.
“A great tragedy,” said Rosie.
“Women should be silent when the men talk business,” he said. “But she shows more respect than you do.”
So we were talking business, were we? Things were looking up.
“Of course, I knew Stefan,” he said. “Everyone knew Stefan. A great man, a great loss. What do you think that will buy you?”
“The man we are running from is his killer.”
“Is that so? The same one who ran away in the alley?”
“The same.”
“That might buy you something, after all. How do I know it’s true?”
Good question. I wasn’t even sure how I knew it was true, apart from having seen the black LTD again.
“My name is Herman Jackson,” I said. “I had an understanding with Stefan Yonkos. He was going to help me find a killer and clear my name with the police, and I was going to deliver a violin called the Wolf Amati to him.” That wasn’t quite the deal, of course, but I figured if I got caught in the lie I could always feign confusion. There was damn sure plenty of the stuff to go around.
“That’s a good story, Mr. Jackson. But now he is dead.”
“Now he is dead.” I nodded gravely. “But as far as I’m concerned, it was a good deal when I made it and it still is. And somehow, I’m inclined to believe there’s at least one other Rom who still thinks so, too.”
“Mmm. You could be right. Let’s get someplace further away from the jawndari and find out.”
“How about putting away the gun?”
“The woman, first,” he said. Damn, he didn’t miss a trick.
Rosie took her hand out of her purse, the young Rom made the shotgun miraculously vanish under his coat, and I suddenly knew what it felt like to walk away from the brink of Armageddon. We went down the stairs and around a corner, to a back room, where our new guide touched a button on the wall.
“Oh shit, no!” said Rosie. “Not another damn tunnel.”
Chapter Eighteen
Revelations
Rosie dozed on the seat beside me while I snacked on beef jerky and salted cashews and watched the dashed white centerline of Illinois Fourteen feed into my headlight beams. In the cracked rearview mirror, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, and then Arlington Heights suggested themselves one last time and then faded into dim memory. Past Palatine, the countryside opened up into featureless dark prairie, which was fine by me. It looked like a blank slate. Or maybe a threshold.
The battered pickup wasn’t as nice as the Pontiac, to say the least, but the engine ran okay, if a bit feebly. The brakes and lights worked, and the steering only wandered if there was a wind from the side. I decided not to take it on the freeway. At anything over sixty miles an hour, the question was not whether a wheel would fall off, but how many of them would stay on. But it would do for the one trip it had to make. If somewhere else, not too far away, there was a black LTD on the Interstate racing us back to the fair city of St. Paul and winning, that was all right, too. In fact, that was better than all right. That would work.
I had needed to give the Rom council, or whatever it was they called the surviving bunch of kumpania leaders, something besides my good word and winning smile to get them to reinstate Yonkos’ deal, and the rented car was the logical choice. We debated and postured and traded lies for a long time, doing what Yonkos had called “respecting the rhythm of the game,” but we all knew where we were going in the end. The junker that they traded me for the Pontiac probably had a thousand miles left in it, max, but that would be enough. The trade was a damned high price to pay for the mere one-time use of an emergency exit, of course, but I had a fairly limited selection and no time to shop.
The other deal, the bigger one, with the promise of the violin, was another matter. I could have done without that, quite possibly didn’t even need the help of the Rom anymore. But part of the game wasn’t played out yet, and part of me said that wouldn’t do. The game had started with Amy Cox, and the Rom were definitely her people. It had to end with them, too. They would never be my allies, but if I left them as happy customers, that would work, too.
Someplace in the middle of Illinois, a state trooper tailed me for a while, but when I didn’t break the speed limit, he lost interest and peeled off on a side road. The Gypsies had told me the plates on the pickup were good, not forged or stolen, and that seemed to be the acid test. I thought again about Stefan Yonkos and what he had said about names being so important to those of us who have only one. Good license plates are a sort of face-value proof of identity. Names and labels, Stefan. Too damn right. Names and labels and identities are everything. That’s what this whole chaotic business has been about from the get-go, but I couldn’t see it before. First, I needed to get in a junker pickup that even Pud and Ditto, from New Salem, wouldn’t be caught dead driving. I chuckled at the thought of the two hayseeds, and Rosie stirred, sat up, and looked over the dash with one bleary eye.
“Where are we?” she said.
“In the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s a good place.”
“The best.”
“For a while, I thought we weren’t going to make it.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“If we ever get to the middle of somewhere, wake me up, will you?”
“That’s a promise.”
She curled back up, popped a chocolate cherry in her mouth, and chewed it with her eyes closed. The clunker steadily chewed up the miles.
***
The sun was well up by the time we rendezvoused with Wide Track Wilkie at a truck stop about twenty miles south of St. Paul on old Highway 55. Rosie and I had anemic-looking fruit plates with yogurt and bran muffins, while Wilkie worked on maintaining his monolithic figure by ordering one item each from the breakfast, dinner, and dessert menus. He was obviously a little embarrassed about it, though. Funny how I had never noticed that in him before: he really didn’t function well at all in the presence of a pretty woman. For a while, we sipped black coffee and soaked up the smell of fresh toast and orange juice, and made small talk. I didn’t know if Rosie was really interested or just being friendly, but she asked Wilkie a lot about his trade.
“So you’re a bounty hunter?” she said. “That’s what you do?”
“Sometimes. I do other stuff, too. Whatever comes up that lets me still be my own man. I’m a pretty decent pool hustler. Maybe Herman told you that?”
“No,” I said.
“Thanks a lot.”
“Tell me about the other thing,” said Rosie. “You like it?”
“It’s nice, I guess. No health plan or vacation, you know, but no time clock, either. Lots of action, which I personally like, and nobody’s ass to kiss. And the work is as steady as you want. There’s never any shortage of assholes who think they can run away from their own stupidity. No offense, Herman.”
“None taken,” I said.
“What do you need?” said Rosie. “To be a bounty hunter.”
“You mean like license and bond and that kind of stuff?”
“Well, and…”
“Clean criminal record?”
“Yeah, that one,” she said.
; “None of that’s a problem. Mostly, you just have to be a mean motherfucker and look like it. Um, I mean…”
“I’ve heard the expression once or twice before,” said Rosie. “Is it something I could do?”
“You? Get serious. I mean, you seem like, well…”
“Only seem like? If you mean a woman, Mr. Wilkie, I definitely am. Tell him, Herman.”
“I’ve never known her otherwise,” I said. She squeezed my knee under the table.
“It’s not that, exactly,” said Wilkie. “I once knew a bounty hunter who was a midget, no less, but he gave off menace like a pit bull with rabies. Looked like he’d bite off your kneecap just for arguing with him. So nobody did. You seem too nice. That won’t get you very far in the bounty business. If you’re nice, you might wind up having to be deadly, too.”
“Maybe I am. Herman, tell him…”
“Maybe it’s time we did some work,” I said. Or anything else that changed the subject. I turned to Wilkie and said, “What have you got for me, Wide?”
He looked relieved. What he had was the full file on one Corporal Gerald Cox, US Army, and it was interesting reading, even in bastardized military non-English.
“Looks like our boy missed all the fun of V-E Day,” I said.
“Yeah, they shipped him home just before then, certified him not-quite-sane-but-what-the-hell, or something like that.”
“‘Battle fatigue with indeterminate prognosis,’” I quoted.
“What I said.”
“Where was home?” said Rosie.
“Short Straw, Texas, or some such shithole, but when you muster out, the Army will send you damn near wherever you want to go, if you’ve got a good reason. Especially back then. They did everything for the vets after that war.”
“Not after your war, I take it?”
Fiddle Game Page 21