Gypsy in Amber Read online

  ‘Thanks.’ He noticed that Vera was her old self now that she had gotten her way.

  ‘Why are you grinning like a fool?’ she asked.

  ‘For the best of reasons,’ Roman answered.

  Chapter Five

  Nanoosh’s burial was at a cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, where New York Gypsies had for years buried their dead. Isadore watched at a distance, but Vera was unable to restrain herself from sinking to her knees in the freshly turned soil and reaching down to her brother’s coffin. The mourners spoke in Romani, and Isadore was able to catch only a few phrases. As the gravediggers began throwing the dirt on the coffin, the Gypsies threw money so that a rich mix of earth and money lay over Nanoosh. The Gypsies got back into their Cadillacs and headed north to New York. Roman walked over to Isadore, who was waiting in his Ford.

  ‘You want a ride back?’ Isadore asked.

  ‘I was hoping for it,’ Roman said. He got into the car. ‘Did you hear anything?’

  ‘You know I can’t speak it that well.’

  They rode up U.S. 1 past Roselle and Hillside on New Jersey’s sprawling checkerboard of suburbs and industrial slums. Isadore’s hat was pushed back to reveal a white untanned line. He drove conscientiously with both hands on the wheel as he discussed his son, whom he was taking to watch the Mets at Shea Stadium on the weekend.

  ‘I want to prove that there’s more to life than protest meetings,’ Isadore said.

  ‘The Mets are really up there, aren’t they?’ Roman asked absentmindedly. ‘They’re ahead of the Jets, right?’

  Isadore’s mouth dropped open in shock. ‘Jets? That’s a football team. Boy, you really aren’t in contact with the real world, are you?’ He glanced at his passenger with a very fast, very safe jerk of his head to see if he was being kidded. ‘You do know that baseball is the national pastime, don’t you?’

  ‘Baseball, football, Jets, Mets . . .’ Roman looked out the window at a large sign going by. It claimed that New Jersey had more paved highway per acre than any other state in the nation. ‘Anything more on the girl?’

  ‘No fingerprints on file, so we have to wait on the dental records. That means we have to find out where she came from. We’ll find out, just like we’ll find out where the car was coming from. Nanoosh had it full of goods from South America. The captain said it didn’t mean anything because there was no report from customs on Nanoosh. I think I’ve finally convinced him that Gypsies have been crossing borders for a long time without going through customs. As soon as we get an answer from our zoologist on the bugs found on the car we’ll know exactly where it’s been. Amazing what those experts can do, find an ant caught in amber that’s been dead, extinct for a million years, and they can tell you all about it. We’ll trace the car and we’ll find the girl.’

  ‘So you still think it was Nanoosh.’

  ‘Damn it, Roman, who else could it be?’

  They drove on for another mile bordered by streams colored by chemicals.

  ‘Which means that I’m the best suspect you have,’ Roman pointed out.

  ‘Something like that.’

  Isadore chewed on his lower lip for want of a cigarette. He was suffering, Roman saw. He had a murder, and he was a good cop, and he should be making an arrest, at least for the record.

  ‘Look at it from my viewpoint, Roman. Antiques and objects of art have to be declared when they enter the country. The United States has agreements with these countries your friends go through, and if you don’t take their stuff out through legal channels, it’s contraband. You’re the head of a contraband ring. Nanoosh is your accomplice, and he kills a girl. Maybe it was an accident, but he chopped her up afterward.’ Isadore glanced at Roman again. ‘Nanoosh was your accomplice, and he butchered her.’

  The Ford looped around a tractor and continued on.

  ‘I can just forget about it, say it’s closed. New York has one unsolved murder a day. Just statistics, one more statistic. But the girl was mutilated. How can I face my son if I do that? Answer me.’

  ‘What would you like me to do?’

  ‘Help me,’ Isadore was almost pleading. ‘I don’t think you knew anything about the girl, but just tell me what you know. I can get you off the contraband rap pretty light. Those bills of sale you have aren’t too bad.’

  The chubby hands gripping the wheel were turning white. Ahead of them Newark was rising mirage-like on heat waves. The glass slab of an insurance company towered over a ghetto. The dull cube of a brewery floated in a yeasty fragrance in the center of the city. The Ford followed the stream of cars toward the tunnels for Manhattan.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Roman said. ‘Get on the turnpike for the Palisades and we’ll try to see what happened.’

  Isadore thought it over. Taking the Gypsy in would please Frank, and it might even ease his own conscience. He was still telling himself he was considering it when he got on the turnpike at Kearny. The turnpike led through the steel bubbles of oil refineries to Fort Lee and the Palisades Parkway. A stench of oil that was like the stench of a decaying animal made them shut the windows of the car. Roman lit a Gauloise to kill the smell. Isadore refused one.

  The Palisades Parkway was tidy and landscaped in comparison to the turnpike. The George Washington Bridge made a neat paperweight at its southern end. White on green notices urged drivers to park and enjoy the view of the Hudson. Isadore made a U-turn through a gap in the median strip marked ‘For Official Use Only’ and pulled up on the side of the road.

  ‘What do you expect to find?’ Isadore asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They got out and walked along the gravel skirt, moving in slow motion against the lane of cars at their side. Isadore pointed to white scrapes in the concrete. In a direct line across the river was the medieval arcade of the Cloisters.

  ‘That’s where the van turned over. You’d see some blood around here, but the state cleans up after highway accidents now. I can show you photos if you want to see what the stains and the cars looked like.’

  Roman kicked the gravel around with the toe of his shoe. At once, he realized how silly it was to think he would find something in the stones that the police had missed. Riders took mildly curious stares at him as the cars continued to roll by a few feet away toward the bridge. He wandered off onto the grass bank. If there were something the cops had missed, it would be gone by now. The grass was freshly mown. He rubbed his hand over his chin. Stubble was already growing back from the morning shave. Some people couldn’t keep as freshly mown.

  Isadore walked back to the car. He didn’t mind watching someone discover how hard it was to play a real detective, but he didn’t want to embarrass a friend. He came back with a manila envelope closed with twine.

  ‘These are the pictures, Roman. They’ll help you.’ He opened the envelope and took out twenty eight-by-ten glossies.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The first shots had been taken from the top of the police tow truck, and they showed a hundred yards of road. The van was nearest, on its side. The Cadillac was sprawled about twenty yards beyond it, upside down. Instead of bodies, X’s marked where they had been picked up. Far down the road and on either side were pieces of furniture and plates, and ropes and padding. Roman remembered that it had been a sunny day. The gold plates shone. Among them were other X’s marking where different parts of the girl’s body had been found.

  Most of the other photos were close-ups of the cars and of the bodies with blankets drawn back as they rested in useless ambulances. Worst were the pictures of the anonymous girl, each part of her in its plastic bag on a separate picture complete with six-inch celluloid markers so that the mind couldn’t help guessing – as if it were a game – which part was which. Roman looked from the photos to the road. A sports car without a muffler was racing over the spot where her head was picked up.

  ‘See,’ Isadore’s finger pointed to the first photo of the road. ‘Plates, bits of statue, the girl. All in the same area.’

&nb
sp; ‘And the antiques.’

  ‘And one big difference between the way you operate and the way Hoddinor Sloan operates. His antiques were going to his stall at the Armory Show. An agent from his insurance company got in the van in Nyack to check the whole shipment inside and out. That’s why the van was using the Palisades instead of staying on the Merritt. The agent even followed the van on the parkway for a few miles, and we have witnesses in other cars who happened to see him all the way to the accident. It’s too bad nobody checks you out.’

  Isadore waited in the car while Roman policed the side of the road with the photos. Finally, the Gypsy gave up and joined him.

  ‘Well, what’s your answer?’ Isadore asked. ‘Are you going to help?’

  ‘This Sloan,’ Roman said. He seemed surprisingly undiscouraged as he knocked another cigarette out of his pack. ‘Has he picked up his antiques?’

  Isadore rolled his fingertips on the wheel once and turned the car into the traffic. ‘No. Why should he sweat it? He probably made a profit off the insurance, and his antiques are a mess. Besides, there’s some question of who can release them. We have it in town, but New Jersey is still carrying it on paper. Typical foul-up.’

  ‘He hasn’t looked at his antiques himself?’

  ‘We sent him some photos through the Massachusetts police. He identified them and said they were total losses, which you don’t have to be an expert to see. I spoke to him on the phone, and frankly, he’s a bastard. Didn’t even ask how the driver was.’

  ‘What about the driver?’

  Isadore sighed. He tapped a paper bag that hung under the police radio. Up to now Roman had thought it was a litter bag. It was Isadore’s file. Inside were business envelopes stuffed with notes.

  ‘That’s the one,’ Isadore said.

  ‘Locher’ was written in longhand on the envelope Roman held. He opened it and took out sheets of paper held together by a paper clip. In six pages Isadore had a concise record of Harold ‘Buddy’ Locher from birth to death at twenty-nine. There were medical, psychological and vocational descriptions, most of them concerning his life in the Army. He’d mustered out as a corporal ten days before at Fort Hood, Texas.

  On the back of the last page Isadore’s longhand made its second appearance. ‘Locher left the service to avoid a third tour of Vietnam. He claims (see Psych.) to be a mechanic, not an infantryman. Arrival in Boston one day before accident looking for friend who was out of town. Got job driving where friend worked on friend’s route because short of drivers. In Boston one night sleeping at friend’s place. Witnesses verify he was alone. Picks up loaded van in Boston, van checked in Nyack, N. Y., see all the way to bridge exit and acc. No motive or opportunity.’

  Roman looked through the middle pages before stuffing the notes back into the envelope. ‘Very thorough. No motive, no opportunity.’

  ‘Right. You’re beginning to learn I don’t just sit on my ass and harass Gypsies. Locher was a little nutty, if that’s what you can call being afraid of dying. Even if he was a homicidal maniac, though, he didn’t have a chance to prove it.’

  They coasted off the George Washington Bridge and curled onto the Henry Hudson Driveway. There was an envelope on himself, Roman knew. Skimpy on the background but heavy on suspicion. Suspect for being a Gypsy but not acting like one, which was a different kind of double jeopardy. Would Isadore be amused that for a long time he had worked at piecing his own past together?

  Everyone knew about the Jews killed by the Nazis. No one knew or cared about the five hundred thousand Gypsies slaughtered in camps because ‘for reasons of public health and particularly because the Gypsies have manifestly a heavily tainted heredity, and because they are inveterate criminals who constitute parasites in the bosom of our people, it is fitting to prevent them from reproducing themselves and to subject them to the obligation of forced labor in the labor camps. We must pursue this program fearlessly and unreservedly, keeping in mind that sterilization is but a half-measure. It is in conformity with the principles of a state with morals on a high level and particularly the Third Reich.’

  The letter from the Gauleiter of Steiermark to the Reichsminister was one Roman remembered well. It created the high-sounding paper trap that caught his parents and killed them either in a camp or some cattle car rolling from Romania with other Rassenverfolgte, racial undesirables. His father and mother had been foolish, of course. They were English Gypsies, and they thought they could ignore the war and take to the road for the wedding of a friend outside Constanta. It was the time of the Phony War and Gypsies always ignored gaja affairs. They were in the middle of the celebration toasts when the Sicherheitsdienst threw a ring of truck lights on them and divided them into men and women and children and loaded them up for the short drive to the railroad junction.

  There was no very good reason for his escape. The truck he was in was at the end of the line, and the security police didn’t see any need yet for the rear guard of motorcycles they would use later when those rounded up knew where they were going. Because the truck was so crowded, the five-year-old boy sat with the driver and guard in front. Halfway to the station, the truck slowed down and the guard pushed him out onto a grassy bank. Then it sped up to rejoin the dark caravan, and that was the last time he ever saw his parents. Yojo and Mara Gry didn’t exist anymore.

  He walked back down the road to the deserted campsite because he didn’t know where else to go. Roman sat in the middle of a scene that looked like an abandoned circus, the painted vans and tents and hungry, tethered horses and even a trained bear sprawling over the meadow in bewilderment, waiting for Gypsies. The only ones to come were an old couple of Turco-Americans who were late. They understood immediately what had happened and they stayed only long enough to stuff Roman in the back of their ancient car. Lazlo and Yula Kronitos had returned from the United States with the money they’d made on bozur so that they could roam through Anatolia comfortably. Instead, they headed through North Africa and then to Portugal, paying their way with the infinite gold coins of Yula’s heavy necklaces, taking the boy with them. From Lisbon they sailed to New York, where they gave Roman to their son, and when the ship left to return to Europe, the old couple was on it. The boy had been a ‘heavenly obligation’ in Yula’s eyes, and they had discharged it.

  It was not difficult to gain American papers for Roman. He retained his father’s gaja name, Grey, because it fitted well. He spoke English. Besides, the authorities had long given up the battle of keeping birth certificates for Gypsy children born on the road. When the police did question his false papers of baptism, the Gypsies turned to another defense. Roman became the court ward of a downstate New York professor. It was a traditional ploy for a Gypsy family to seek the protection of a sympathetic and wealthy gaja. To be one of these was to be a rai. ‘Part sucker and part father’ was the way James Oliver described the title he had gained. Oliver was a Poughkeepsie judge who’d left the bench to study Sanskrit. His interest in Gypsies began when he discovered the closeness between Romani and the lost language, and he was a regular godfather at Gypsy baptisms. It was not difficult to infiltrate a Gypsy boy into his large empty house along the Hudson.

  ‘What are you?’ Oliver would muse aloud to the olive-colored boy who sat across from him at the dinner table. ‘East Indian? English? Not Turkish, I would guess despite your friends. Rom, naturally, but Lovari or another tribe? The English Grys are famous for being dark and clever, so I suppose that fits. Then Rom, let’s settle for that. But when you leave, do you think you might be part gajo, too?’ And Roman would shake his head vigorously.

  Oliver took a poorly hidden delight in tutoring the bright boy in the things he considered important. His tenure in the court had given him a distaste for politics and the law. What he appreciated decorated his house, thousands of books in a dozen languages and a priceless collection of antiques. ‘It’s not so horrible that you’ve broken something,’ he told Roman as they stood amid the bright remains of a crystal goblet, ‘as the
fact that you don’t know what it is you’ve broken.’ Roman learned, mainly because what he broke he had to put back together under the careful direction of the professor.

  Roman was nine when he ran away for the first time. He’d spent weeks out before with Gypsies coming through the Hudson Valley, but this time he was away for a year, wandering with a family of Kalderash as far as Mexico City. When he returned, he found a place set for him at the table. ‘Take the apologetic look off your face,’ Oliver said. ‘I wouldn’t expect a vadni ratsa to stay in a pen.’ Roman picked up a piece of bread and smiled with relief. A gajo who understood ‘the wild goose’ was a rai indeed.

  The table was always set for him no matter how far or long he traveled, and when he was searching for the grave of his parents, out of concern for their mule, there were long absences. It was after walking over a field in Bavaria where the grass was growing again over the lime pits that he found a letter waiting at Munich General Delivery. Professor James Hancock Oliver had died of tuberculosis. Efforts to reach Roman by mail or through American consulates had been in vain. Would he return on receipt of this letter? He was the main beneficiary of Mr Oliver’s will. It was only rereading the letter a hundredth time – he was sitting beside the warm, dull Danube and cursing the gaja mails; if it had been a Rom who died, he would have known about it in a day no matter where he was – that he realized he’d wasted another father while he was looking for his first. He was twenty years old, and he was rich in exactly those things he didn’t want. Otherwise, he had nothing.

  ‘I’m going down to department headquarters, Roman,’ Isadore said. ‘Are you coming in with me or not?’

  ‘Sure, Sergeant. I’d like to take a look at the Sloan antiques.’

  ‘Why? Sloan didn’t.’

  Roman laughed. ‘I guess that’s why.’

  Chapter Six

  The department warehouse was so crowded with crates of liquor, televisions, transistor radios and all the other criminal evidence of an affluent society that the guards in charge had long ceased trying to maintain order. The Sloan antiques made a small pile that was roped off from a tower of dusty clothes on one side and an unsteady stack of typewriter cases on the other.