Chapter Fourteen
A submarine bobbed in the brackish water. Its batteries had run down, and its crew propellers were still. Radio signals failed. Its skipper, a twelve-year-old boy, looked at it in frustration. He turned the knobs on his transmitter back and forth. With technology a failure, he went off into the park to find a long stick.
‘I suppose you’ve told all Nanoosh’s relatives, the ones you couldn’t find before. They’re pleased,’ Isadore said, gesturing with a hot dog.
‘If I could find them, I’d tell them, and they’d probably be ecstatic. Thanks to you.’
‘Tell them they’re welcome.’
The two men were sitting on a bench beside the boat pond. Behind them rose a treelined edge of Central Park and above that the luxury apartments of the East Side in a skyline like a dingy graph.
‘It makes more sense. One thing always did bother me,’ Isadore said, licking a dab of mustard from a finger. ‘Why in the world would a Gypsy who was racing across the country stop off to commit a murder?’
‘People have told me it’s possible.’
Isadore winced. ‘You know what I mean. Now Sloan makes sense. There’s a reasonable combination of motive and opportunity there. In fact, a lovely one.’
‘Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy kills girl.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Isadore wasn’t sure whether he was being teased or not. He turned with Roman to look at the boy, who was batting the water with a branch that was too short. ‘The Mueller girl was reported missing by her roommate. The roommate knew everything about Miss Mueller’s romance with Sloan except his name. He was some wealthy, older society guy who seduced her and then went back on his proposal. The marriage proposal, that is. The roommate never saw him, just his car when he parked outside and honked. It was a lemon Buick station wagon. She never got the license plate, but she remembered that she saw a scrape on the right rear fender when the Mueller girl left that last night.
‘It didn’t take long to find the car. The scrape came from an accident reported a week before when Sloan’s daughter was driving it. As soon as the Boston police took the roommate around to Sloan’s place, she saw the car. It was the same one.
‘And then everything cracked. The roommate told us Mueller and her boyfriend went off for weekends in New York. We didn’t get anything from the desk clerks, but Sloan was so cheap he used his credit card. That gave us enough to tackle Sloan last night. He denied everything, naturally, until we found the letters in the desk. Then he said it was all a mistake. They were close, but the girl was exaggerating: He made no promises about getting married, and of course, he never killed her.’
The submarine had submerged. The boy was throwing rocks in the water from frustration. The two men moved farther down the bench to avoid getting wet. Isadore wiped his hands with his paper napkin, folded the paper neatly, and put it in his pocket.
‘Did he?’ Roman asked innocently.
‘It’s pretty plain that he did. Nice girl, good reputation, a little bookish, ripe for some character like Sloan. Sooner or later she finds out that she’s been had, and in a last scene she threatens to let the affair out. If she’s not good enough for the society page, she’ll make sure he isn’t either. A man like Sloan, it’s the most important thing in the world. He kills her in a rage, cuts her up in his little workshop and stuffs her in the chest of drawers.’
‘Highboy.’
‘Highboy, lowboy, who cares? Packs her off to the Armory Show in New York in a panic. He figures he can always pull the chest out of his exhibit once it’s at the Armory and dispose of the body. The main thing is to get it out of Massachusetts. Maybe he’ll toss it in the Hudson; he doesn’t know, he’s no professional. Then he hits the jackpot. The insurance company calls him up and says there’s been an accident, his pieces have been badly damaged. By the way, they say, he might be interested in knowing that the accident caught a desperate murderer who was carrying a mutilated body around. The murderer died in the accident.
‘Talk about luck. He was wondering what the hell he was going to do with that body, and the body takes care of itself. What’s better, he’s not sending anyone else to jail because they’re dead already. God is smiling on Hoddinot Sloan. All he has to do is lay low and take the insurance money. He might even make a profit. Isn’t that what Calvinism is all about?’
‘You’re a learned man, Mr Isadore.’
‘I know what makes sense, that’s all, and this makes sense. Murders always do in some crazy way. And murderers are such cocky bastards. The Boston police told me Sloan practically fainted when they told him the roommate decided she’d seen him pick the Mueller girl up that last night when she disappeared,’ Isadore said.
‘He denied it?’
‘No. By that time he was screaming for his lawyer. And when his lawyer got there and Sloan discovered he could only handle codicils, he screamed for another one. I’m taking the train up this afternoon. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to be the one who tells him about the blood on the saw. It’s the Mueller girl’s type. I just wanted to let you know what happened before I went because I gave you sort of a rough time. It’s okay?’
‘Sure,’ Roman said. Isadore really did care whether they were still friends.
‘Besides, you gave us a lead with that chest, you know. Made me look at it a second time. How come you didn’t tell me about it?’
Roman shrugged. ‘I found it; but I didn’t know what to do about it, and I didn’t even know what I’d found. I’m no detective like you.’ He paused. ‘Sloan’s the man, huh?’
Isadore tried to read something in the Gypsy’s black eyes and gave up. ‘Right. Anyway, I’m happy about the way things worked out. Don’t tell me you’re not?’
Roman laughed. ‘It’s in your hands now, Sergeant.’
‘Hey, I’ve got to go. My train leaves in an hour, and Number One Son is driving me to the station. I’ve got to give him plenty of time.’
Roman watched Isadore’s slouched figure move away down the border of the pond and up the stairs that led to Seventy-second Street. In the water, the boy was wading toward his ship with hands out as if he were walking on a tightrope.
Roman walked away from the park toward his apartment to get ready for a party. Vera’s kumpania would not only be celebrating the clearing of Nanoosh’s name but also the marriage of her daughter Laza to a boy from a kumpania in Queens.
Dany was in a pout when he got home. She had been insinuating herself more and more into his life, waking him in the morning with a phone call, rushing off to a model’s call, visiting his shop at lunch, rushing off for another shooting, coming back to cook supper and make love. If she wasn’t any closer to getting married, she was making him feel very guilty.
‘I don’t think they’d be so upset because of one gaji,’ she said. ‘How am I ever going to meet your friends, anyway? I mean, I know some of the men, but I’ve never met any of the women.’
Roman painted his face with lather. It was impossible trying to tell her that he was separating her from the Gypsy women for her own good. A gaji who married a Rom was treated as a slave by every Gypsy woman. She would have to fulfill every Gypsy duty and custom, from changing from Givenchy’s to crude petticoats to learning the exacting, sometimes humiliating business of duikkerin fortunes. Not that he needed the money, but the women would demand it. He and Dany were better off as they were. He only wished he could find something to change the subject. As he started to shave, a thin red line appeared along his scar.
‘Damn it, Dany, you shaved your legs with my razor again. I gave you your own.’
‘It was dull.’
‘Then change it.’ He slipped a fresh blade into his razor. She was hovering right outside the bathroom door; he could sense it. Usually, he had no trouble handling her moods, turning her anger into a joke they could both laugh at. There were times, though, when he seemed to be paralyzed, and her obvious, even childish manipulations would drive him mad. ‘It’s not just a party,’ he told
her between strokes. ‘No strangers are allowed at weddings. Not even priests. Another time would be better. You want to like them, right?’
He looked up and saw her in the mirror. She was biting her false fingernails, a bad sign. He hid by ducking into the sink basin and washing off the lather. When he was dry, he slipped a fresh shirt on and went into the living room. On the table were the bottle of anisette and felt bag weighted with gold eagles for Laza’s new gonya he would take with him.
‘So, you are going to the party and just leaving me here,’ Dany crowed triumphantly. She sat with her arms crossed beside the door.
‘Come on, Dany, be fair. I called you and told you about this, and you said it was fine because some speechwriter had asked you out.’
‘The one who said he wanted to improve my mind?’ she snorted.
‘That’s right, the one who wanted to improve your mind.’
‘Very funny,’ she said with the recurring air of triumph.
He let his arms sag, unequally because one of them held the heavy bag. The only gaji in the world that had the power to confuse him was this obstinate, intriguing, practically unread (not including Vogue), soap-operatic, almost skinny, silky, passionate, damp-eyed model.
‘There are a hundred parties in town that you could go to tonight if you wanted to,’ he said.
‘I’ll stay here if you don’t mind. I think I’ll read in bed.’ She saw that that was going down pretty hard, so she added, ‘And maybe there’s something on television.’
‘Whatever you want.’
When he left and while he was waiting for the elevator, Dany opened the door again and slammed it.
Why was he feeling like Hoddinot Sloan?
Chapter Fifteen
Vera was happy because Laza would not have been able to marry for some time if Nanoosh’s name had not been cleared. Roman explained to her on the phone that Sergeant Isadore solved the crime, but as far as she and her kumpania were concerned, they had asked Roman to save Nanoosh’s mulo from limbo, and in a week that was what happened. Their low opinion of the police accepted no other interpretation. Now they could celebrate.
All the curtains inside the ofisa were pulled aside so that the party covered the entire floor from the back to the front of the building. Folding tables were placed together and decorated with colorful cloths. On them were plates of cold cuts, barbecued chickens, meat-stuffed pancakes called bokoli, pink beef with a sharp scent of rosemary, pork roast with liquorice aniseed, a holiday goose redolent of sage and marjoram, more chickens, and from somewhere an enormous glistening suckling pig. Surrounding these, as if the point of honor was to leave no inch of the table bare, were smaller bowls of yogurt with sesame or lettuce or cucumbers or tomatoes. Women shoved these together to make room for slippery white beans in vinegar, chick-peas in sesame paste and green beans in sour cream. The men spiced their thirsts with lentils and cheese and small, salty ripe olives. Children reached for honeyed pastries, meat balls rolled in nutmeg and chilly squares of eggplant that ringed fragile mountains of fresh black bread. At one end of the long line of tables a brother of the groom pumped beer from the kegs around him like a happy madman trying to explode a cache of dynamite lost in the profusion.
‘It is a very good match,’ Vera announced into Roman’s ear. ‘Dodo came to me the other day about his boy as if he had a present. Him with those two apes of brothers with the chicken in their hands.’ She pointed with a hunk of pork. ‘They offered only five hundred dollars, if you can believe it.’
Roman shook his head with simulated wonder. What did make him wonder was how Vera was able to speak above the din of spontaneous singing, dancing, bragging and two competing record players, one with the rhapsodies of Balogh Istvan and the other with the flamencos of Manitas de Plata.
‘Romano, I ask you. Five hundred dollars for a sweet girl like Laza! Sweet-tempered, hardworking, beautiful like a plum, knows how to duiker like a grandmother, can go into J. C. Penney’s and come out with an electric stove and nobody sees her. For a boy like Kalia. Dumb, bad-mannered, ugly. I pity his mother. All he thinks about is cars, and he gets caught stealing those. As a favor, just so as not to dishonor Dodo in front of his own brothers, I ask four thousand dollars. It’s the least I can do for Laza.’
One of his friends gave Roman a fresh beer and tried to take him away by the arm, but Vera hung on.
‘So we sat down and discussed it,’ she shouted. ‘Perhaps Kalia wasn’t such a bad boy after all. Remember how he made that car out of nothing but stolen parts, and for just being sixteen he seems to be pretty lucky at the racetrack. Laza, even I’ll admit, has a taste for expensive things, and sometimes she has to pay for them. I mean, it wasn’t all black and white. Dodo offered a thousand, and I came down a little to thirty-five hundred for courtesy.’
‘For courtesy.’
‘Yes. Then it was mentioned that Dodo’s kumpania was one of the oldest and most respected in the country and had really a very good lawyer that they would lend us since we would be related and offered fifteen hundred. Someone also mentioned Laza couldn’t cook old shoes, which I denied, but Dodo and his family have been guests of mine before and I came down to two thousand seven hundred and fifty.’
‘Very wise,’ Roman said. It was easier to talk now since they were being crushed together by people clearing a circle for dancing.
‘Then, naturally, there was the human aspect,’ Vera said with a tragic, tolerant sigh that shamed the fact that her feet were barely touching the floor from the squeeze. ‘It seems that Laza and Kalia do feel some affection for each other and wanted to marry. So, for twenty-five hundred dollars, I gave in.’
All of Vera’s kumpania of more than forty Romanies and Dodo’s kumpania of fifty and a hundred or more guests were jostling in as many different directions in the crowded ofisa. Men who had not seen each other for days and others who had just come back from years of wandering through Europe were seizing old friends and inventing toasts. Their wives were just as forceful shaping huddled atolls of gossip. The shavs, small boys and girls, wended their way through legs to the tables to fill themselves with sweet pastries. A large hand came through the mass and snatched Roman away from Vera like a card in a magician’s hand.
‘Romano! Romano! So this is our detective!’
Kore Tshatshimo, a giant with ringlets hanging over a genially misshapen face, slapped Roman on both shoulders and then smothered him in an embrace that took his breath away. Roman squeezed him back until he could feel Kore’s ribs shifting. Kore howled with pleasure.
‘The same,’ he said. ‘All this talk about you going soft. I said that the day Romano Gry becomes a gajo is the day I put on a skirt. Ha, remember that time we were in Rio and the soldiers tried to make us show identification cards. Ah? Yes?’
‘I can’t forget.’ How could he? That was the time Kore kicked a patrol car into the Atlantic.
‘And you and Nanoosh took their uniforms and put them on and went and arrested those girls,’ Kore said before remembering that Nanoosh was dead. To cover any sacrilege, he offered a toast. ‘To Nanoosh.’
They drank, and Kore brightened up.
‘You know, it’s a good thing you got that killer. Laza’s been trying to run away with Kalia for the last month, I hear. Vera couldn’t get her married off soon enough. Besides, I think it’s a good thing, a marriage now. Everyone has been very unhappy about Nanoosh. This will take their minds off it.’
‘A toast to happiness,’ Roman said, knowing a cue when he heard it. A procession of mugs passed through his hand along with the toasts. Since he was a hero, everyone wanted a drink with him, and Kore wanted to match everyone’s toast. All the men had contributed liquor, so a blend of cognac, carbonated wine, anisette, vodka, brandy and beer rolled through his stomach and up to his head. On a table that had been stripped of its food, the guests were depositing their gifts in columns of gold coins and dishevelled wads of paper money, the start of Laza and Kalia’s sumadjii, a portable heirloom a
nd treasure.
Dodo and Kore sat Roman on a chair for a patshiv to be sung in his honor by one of Kalia’s brothers. He was a lean boy with a Spanish guitar. A grizzled old man stood behind him with a violin, waiting for the boy to begin. The boy waited with his eyes closed until the crowd in the ofisa had become silent, and then he sang.
It started as a high, emotional keening, the boy’s head thrown back in sorrow as he told of the shock of Nanoosh’s death. The Romani tongue, a dark Indian opalescent stone lacquered with singing for the Persians, slaving for the Magyars, and dying in every corner of the earth, filled the room and their hearts. Guttural but light as a bird swooping through the night, traditional and unpredictable, something that delighted in melody and then ignored it for a stronger impulse made the ring of men and women and the children sitting on the floor all hold their breath. This was their story, their history coming from the young boy and the old man, and when the patshivaki djili came to its exploding, victorious close with the identification of the murderous gajo, two hundred people were clapping and crying.
One song was not enough. It was the old man’s turn with a djili centuries older than himself that came out in practically a whisper. With a show of extreme reluctance, an elder with a white mustache that came down to his collar allowed himself to be pushed into the middle of the circle. His hands lifted over his head, he began to dance, at first awkwardly, and then, as the spirits coursed through him like new blood, with a recall of vigor and grace that drew shouts of appreciation from his grandchildren. When he tired, another ancient took his place. When all the elders had danced, the shavs took over, slapping their hands together and shouting, inspired by the admiration of the girls who watched.
‘All this is really for you, Romano,’ Kore said with great solemnity but a little unsteadily. By now even his bulk had been saturated with alcohol. ‘Imagine, trying to say a Lovari would kill a girl. That is a gaja vice. A Rom might hit a woman, but kill her? Never! Unless, of course, he was Gitano.’ Kore, like most Kalderash and Lovari, had a great distrust for the Spanish Gypsies.