§ CHAPTER TWO §
It was Octoberfest, though there was nothing to be festive about in Romy’s mind . . . except they were back. The wealthy Gadje couple from off the train a fortnight earlier. They picked their way through refuse toward Romy’s wagon.
The area’s grass had long before been trampled or grazed out by the wagons’ shires. Romy was feeding their own scrawny Gypsy Cob, Rainbow, the few bony scraps leftover from the last meal she had prepared, the day before. Or was it the day before that?
Much of the wealth of a Gypsy family was in the shires they owned and bred. No longer. At least, not in Germany.
And no longer were the Gypsy men robust. No longer were they wild and free. Where in years before the brawny Gypsy men – in loose fitting shirts, wide belts, baggy pants, and knee-high boots – had trained their horses, they now were forced to work at the nearby quarry in garb that better belonged on scarecrows.
And the once swaggering Giorgio was scarecrow thin. At fourteen. she had been betrothed to him. But after that one street raid . . . well, her value as a bride had plummeted in his parents’ eyes.
She straightened from resting against the vardo’s large, iron-clad spoke wheel. She wiped her dirty hands on her once exuberantly colored skirt and tugged close her old purple cardigan. The chunky knit was irreparably snagged and rifted.
“May you be lucky,” she greeted the couple with her wide-tooth grin. A grin that hid her anxiousness about Old Duke. He was inside dying, sure as Salome danced with seven veils.
“I would imagine it is you who are hoping to get lucky off us,” said the man called Gunter, his sharp-eyed gaze sweeping over her frayed and wash-worn clothing and then dismissing her with cutting negligence.
“It was you who came seeking me.” However, like a blacksmith, she forged her lips into an upturned-horseshoe.
She led them up the arc of colorfully painted steps. Never mind that their paint was peeling as badly as the skin on her once bloated stomach had peeled from inside out.
They were already seated before she located her Tarot deck above the wardrobe, along with a finger cymbal she had misplaced. Seating herself at the head of the table, she began shuffling. “What is it you wish to know?”
“We’re here merely for another diverting afternoon,” the blond Adonis said.
Well, Sweet Baby Jesus, she could do that. Divert him. Her imagination and Gypsy cleverness combined, surely, had to have enough clout to equal his obviously high intelligence. His narrow face, long nose, and high forehead gave that away.
She might not be able to read cards, but she could read people. Exposure repeatedly to life-or-death fate determined by others was a powerful teacher.
“Who is first?” she inquired of the two.
He nodded at the woman he had called Irina, and she shook her head. Hers was a classic beauty that was saved from mediocrity by her determined jutting chin. Today, she wore a snow-white coat as protection against October’s brisk but cleansing autumn air and a dollop of a white beret atop her fashionably platinum hair, a la Jean Harlow.
She shrugged out of her woolen coat, as white as purity, and smiled. “Let’s find out if we’ll beat them at their own game.”
Romy’s attention to that information pricked up. She passed the cards to Gunter.
Capping his fedora on the chair’s ear, he shuffled and cut the deck.
Eyeing his expensive watch, a Meisterstück, Romy collected the cards, reshuffled, then laid them out. Absent were the onerous four – the Magician, the High Priestess, the Emperor – and, of course, Death. However, once again the Tower showed up in Gunter’s spread.
Gunter? Was he the famed attorney representing the shagger Third Reich officials in court cases? If so, he was a thief in sheep’s clothing.
He frowned at the Tower card and glanced askance at her.
She lifted her shoulders. “The cards fall as they will. The Tower in this layout warns that disaster is afoot. Evil is roaming.”
His eyes froze her as cold as smoke off hot ice. “As you said, the cards fall as they will, disaster comes or not. But, if so, I am in charge of what I do about it.”
She had noticed his exact articulation, but she also picked up something most people would not. The barest of a Yiddish accent. Was the smooth-talking Gunter trying to go sub rosa with possible Jewish heritage? She raised a brow. “I wouldn’t be so su – ”
At the loud creak of the entrance steps, she glanced from Gunter to the doorway. A huffing train porter staggered to the top stair. “Mr. Wagner, is he – oh, there you are, Mr. Wagner. You said to let you know if anything untoward occurred. Uhh, the – ”
Gunter shot to his well-shod feet, grabbed his fedora, and crossed to the door in two strides. Romy heard something murmured about a valise, but then, of course, her hearing wasn’t that acute. He turned back to her. “Go ahead with Irina’s card reading. I will return shortly.”
Warily, Romy reshuffled the cards, cascading them back into place, and passed them to Irina to cut. “What is your question?”
Behind the time-worn curtain, Old Duke’s rattled, deathbed wheezing could have served as the medium between two worlds for any Gypsy-staged séance.
The young woman looked uncertainly toward the curtain, then out the vardo’s open doors. She put aside the cigarette she was just about to light, then took up the cards. Her hand trembled as she clumsily cut them into three decks. “My baby, it . . . . “
That one word rankled Romy. Her womb could have ached – if it weren’t a charred lump of coal. Immediately she hated the young woman, who looked to be in her mid-twenties “Ye wish to know about yuir bairn?” Shite, she had let herself lapse into her natural Irish brogue.
Apparently, Irina had not noticed. She nodded, more a jerk of her head. Her eyes were glassy.
Was the infant dead? Something wrong with it? Pondering how to elicit more information, Romy gathered the three piles and glanced at their bottom cards. Her eyes fell immediately on the Empress and Death, both reversed.
Resistance to change for the regal acting young woman?
The third card, the Wheel of Fortune – well, sometimes, when ye resisted, destiny kicked ye in the arse. She hazarded a guess. “Ye miscarried?
Behind Romy, Duke’s death rattle had finally ceased, as most likely had his spirit. What to do? What to do? She laid the cards aside, making to rise.
Irina’s pretty lip’s quivered. “I am . . . it would have been better if I had lost – ”
“Romy!” a woman’s age-raveled voice yelped from the doorway – Romy’s elderly neighbor Marta, her face garishly painted in an effort to cover its warts. “The SS, they’re here! In the camp. Rounding up everybody!”
Pale as death, Irina shot up from the bench seat, then slipped to the floor in an honest-to-God Hollywood faint.
Startled, Romy’s glance leaped from the gracefully sprawled body to two helmeted and armed soldiers in black uniforms stalking toward the vardo across from hers.
“Move your feet!” the hag Marta urged.
“Old Duke,” Romy protested, “I canna leave him. He’s on his deathbed.”
“His spirit has most likely already left, girl. These old feet can’t leave fast enough. I’ll keep the wake with his corpse.”
There was nowhere to run. But it took Romy only a five-count to realize her own destiny presented her with the opportunity for change – a change of places with the unconscious Irina.
Quicker and defter than a card shark could crimp an Ace, Romy stripped off her head scarf and donned Irina’s white beret, carefully pinning and tilting it to the left and exposing the single, pearl earring drop on the right.
After that, it was only a matter of collecting Irina’s white coat draped on the back of the chair, a ruthless removal of her lace-up high heels – no time to loose her fine, silk hosiery from her garter fasteners – and a snatch of her purse, with all its valuable identification.
Lucky Romy!
The heels were a wee bit large, and she wobbled toward the doorway. She almost tripped over a carelessly cast-aside castanet she used when performing with the street music vendors.
As warty faced Marta shuffled toward the vardo’s bunks and Old Duke, she called after Romy, “May luck be with you, Romy!”
Wielding a bayonetted rifle, clearly stockpiled from WWI, an SS soldier met Romy at the wagon’s top step. At once, she pasted on a wide gamine smile. “Nein, nein, wait. I am not one of those thieving gypsies. I am – ”
Who the hell was she? Irina. But Irina Who?
“Halt die Klappe! Hände hoch!“
She didn’t need her left ear to understand perfectly his orders. Shutting her klapper, she shot her hands, white suede purse and all, into the air.
His bayonet nudged her out the door, down the steps, where she joined a line of other Gypsies trudging toward the railroad tracks. Peeking over her shoulder, she saw neither old Marta nor Irina in the herded roundup.
Lucky them.
But Old Duke? If his heart was even still ticking, he wouldn‘t stand a chance. And would Rainbow end up on some hungry person‘s plate? Romy blinked rapidly. Tears never made anything better.
To her dismay, she found herself crammed along with other frantic Gypsies inside one of the train’s cattle cars. In that stifling space where the smell of humanity’s fear was at its worst – if she discounted the cow shite – the musty smell of old hay made the nauseating odors more bearable.
Her vardo’s querulous, scabby neighbor Florika peered at her in disbelief. “Romy?”
“Irina to you,” Romy told her out of the side of her mouth.
The avidly curious crone chastised her with a clucking noise, but Florika was essentially harmless. However, Romy’s ignorance of her new identity was not. She needed to peruse Irina’s purse.
Which presented an obstacle. She and the other gypsies were wedged so tightly shoulder to shoulder that most of the prisoners’ arms were rendered immobile. When the train lurched forward, the Gypsies staggered to keep from falling beneath the feet of their companions.
Narrow slots toward the top of the train car` permitted thin slices of sunlight to tumble on frightened faces. Near her, a bairn’s soiled diapers spilled over it stinking contents. An old man’s reedy voice begged God for help. A child wailed. Others wept. She would bet her last pfennig that Gunter’s train compartment was a far cry from this squalor.
If she hoped to pass herself as a law-abiding German citizen, distinctly separate from her dirty, malnourished clan, then she’d better know something about her body double.
Well, not exactly a body double. Blonde hair of sorts and eyes that might be construed as blue, though Romy’s were an unmistakable pale green. And Irina was slightly taller, with softer, subtler features but a body definitely more muscled and well-fed.
Shoulders scrunched by the press of others, Romy riffled through the I.D. Irina Klockner. Yes! One step closer to a new identity. When she pulled from a small zipper side pocket a clipped and wrinkled Berlin newspaper article, neatly folded, she understood why Irina’s body was so beautifully honed.
Romy might not be able to read proficiently, only picking out one and two-syllable words at best, but she could identify the photo and some words in its subtext. It was Irina Klockner of Poland, two years earlier, standing at the bottom of the three-tiered podium in her short skirt and ice skates, with her bronze medal glinting between her taut breasts. She had won third place in the Olympic women’s figure skating in Bavaria, Germany.
As ucht Dé! Romy could curse in Gaelic as well as any leprechaun. She knew there was no way in hell she could pass herself off as an athlete of that caliber. A preferably barefooted free spirit, she could not even stand balanced in Irina’s high heels much less the young woman’s ice skates.
She was given little time to stress over that issue, as within the half hour, the train car’s doors were unlocked and slid back with a grating squeal. Blinking at the sunlight, she shouldered forward out of the car.
Above the grim building ahead waved a huge flag, a black swastika against a black and red background. And before her, she made out the word inscribed in an iron-lettered arch over the building’s cement block entrance.
Sachsenhausen.
The dreaded concentration camp twenty-two miles north of Berlin.
And below it, even if read imperfectly, she nevertheless knew well from nearly five years before the infamous slogan: Arbeit Macht Frei – ‘Work makes you free.’
Once before, she had escaped the Nazi butchers. Could she escape them once and for all?
The Emerald Isle with its holy mountain Croagh-Patrick for sinners like herself and the comfortable familiarity of her Irish Travelers clan never beckoned her more. With luck, she would pass as Aryan, as occasionally could even light-skinned Roma.
With renowned work diligence, a male kapo, the prisoner assigned supervisory tasks, quickly processed Romy and the other female gypsies into a portion of the prison containing only female inmates and guarded by female SS staff.
Naturally, the other female prisoners were filled with trepidation and communicated sotto voce among themselves. But she was terrified beyond functioning. Because she knew what they did not.
“What is it?” Florika asked. They sat on backless wooden benches. Row after row of benches in a starkly sparse room as large as a warehouse. “You, who are not afraid of Beelzebub himself, tremble.”
Romy only shook her head. A head that had felt the cold metal of scissors and her hair slowly falling along with her tears and human dignity.
One by one, the SS processed its latest internees. Perspiration mottled her temples and clotted the hair beneath her arm pits.
An hour and a half later, the name of Irina Klockner was called.
Romy could have led the SS guard to the final processing room, where prisoners were assigned to barracks and given coarse, striped clothing and wooden-sole shoes, so familiar was she with the routine – but she would have been in error.
Instead, the strapping female kapo shuttled her along a different tunnel-like hallway that connected with another building. She wasn’t being processed for internment!
Her spirits soared. As the Brits would say, she had hit a homerun out of the ball park. Clearly, the Nazi authorities realized their mistake. An Olympic gold medal winner didn’t belong in a prison. Now she had only to carry off her charade as that Olympic figure skater, Irina Klockner.
Romy had performed at carnivals and fairs and street venues. Now was the time for her grand performance. And if she failed . . . how long before the German Reich’s meticulous record keeping revealed she was the much-desired other half to the results of their experimentation five years earlier?
The kapo shooed her into a small office occupied by two soldiers at attention and an officer, scribbling behind a metal desk. Not a calendar or clock on the wall. Not a colorful world map. Not a photo on the desk.
Her lusty spirit cringed at the bland, barren room. A strip of lavender paint bordering where the wall met the ceiling would be nice. Mayhap some pale pink fluffy clouds on the ceiling or a rainbow arcing two of the walls . . .
Well, it was show time.
The presence of a high-ranking officer most likely meant that Irina’s athletic achievements commanded respectful attention. Wrong. When the officer looked up from the papers he studied, Romy instantly knew the Tower Card had been a warning for her, not the smooth-talking Gunter.
Blinding, intense fear electrified her.
Five years had not changed Colonel Klauffen. Hauptmann – captain – he had been then. If Dr. Pfister was the Angel of Death, Colonel Klauffen was the Angel of the Apocalypse. He still had the same lean ascetic look of a Spanish Inquisitioner. Narrow face, narrow nose, narrow eyes. Or rather narrow eye. The other was covered by a black eyepatch.
“Have a seat, Fraulein Klockner. I have just a few questions for you.”
Then he did not remember her – remember setting loose his dogs to chase down her and Luca at the street fair. From somewhere behind the desk, came a low, canine growl. Did that mean one of his favored dogs recognized her scent – even after all this time?
With every scrap of will power she could summon against cowering, she sat prim and proper, as she would imagine Irina would and with a slightly haughty tilt to her chin. Her hands with their unkempt nails she kept clutched around Irina’s immaculately white suede purse, out of Klauffen’s scrutinizing sight.
She mimicked the language of her betters. Well, at least, they thought so. “Ya, Herr Colonel – and I have a few questions, as well, myself. Most importantly, how could your goons possibly have mistaken me for one of those filthy gypsies? I was merely in their camp having my fortune – ”
“Fraulein Klockner!” Klauffen leaned forward, his skeletal hands locked, that cycloptic eye fixed on her. “I am more interested, not in what you were doing in the gypsy relocation camp, but what you were doing at the German Embassy in Warsaw the same day that our legation councilor was assassinated? And, more importantly, as you put it – and as a Jewess – just how deeply are you involved in the Resistance attack?”
Scheiss!
“I might warn you, Fraulein Klockner, that your fiancé – ”
“My fiancé?”
“Do not try to pretend ignorance or innocence with us. The lawyer, Gunter Wagner. He has also been apprehended. He may have quite brilliantly represented certain members of the Reich’s military and ministry in court, but he is still suspect as far as I am concerned. Your versions of your Warsaw itinerary had better match minute by minute.”
Irina Klockner, a Jewess? By Aryan standards, the only thing worse than a Gypsy was a Jew. Romy gulped. The Tarot’s Fool card had gone from the frying pan into the fire.
Lucky Irina.
§ § §
The situation was not only bleak but, also, Kafkaesque. Strongly surreal was Gideon Goldman’s predicament, with the cigarette smoke floating ethereally between him and the evil power sitting across the desk from him.
Nevertheless, Gideon presented the unflappable image of Gunter Wagner, Esquire, as he lounged on the hard, wooden-back chair, one arm hooked over the top railing. His cigarette dangled from between elegant fingers that swept the air in a negligible gesture. Still, his dueling scar tingled with the rush of adrenaline. How in the hell had he let Irina finagle him into helping the Resistance?
“True, Herr Colonel, I was in Warsaw at the time of the shooting, but my fiancée and I – ”
“Irina Klockner?”
“Ya. We were enjoying a little romantic getaway.” He winked with a smile of bonhomie. “Spent mostly in bed.”
Almost certainly Irina had been caught in the SS roundup of the Gypsies. He knew he could count on her to keep a zippered lip when she was interrogated. And interrogated she assuredly would be.
“Gunter Wagner,” the eye-patched officer murmured as he perused the papers before him. “It would seem you are well known in Berlin’s social and political circles for your linguistic brilliance in your defense strategies.”
He struck a modest pose. “All in the course of an attorney’s day.”
“What is not well known,” the Colonel went on in his monotone, “in fact, what is little known, is that you are a Jew.”
Gideon never missed a beat. “Correction, Colonel Klauffen. A Mischling of 2nd degree, personally reviewed and reclassified as Aryanized by Chancellor Hitler himself.”
Actually, Gideon had been re-classified as "Aryan" after paying an undisclosed fortune to the Nazi party, but he banked on the use of the Führer’s name to spring him out of Sachsenhausen before the Colonel could investigate any further. The moment Gideon had spotted the Gestapo going through his luggage in his train compartment, he had known he was going to need the skills of his silver tongue more than ever.
“So, I would suggest, Herr Colonel, that you arrange for my immediate release – or else you arrange for your transfer to the SS’s work detail. Because you’ll be either heaving a shovel or heaving your last breath.”
The officer flexed his knuckles, as if to keep from slamming flat Gideon’s aristocratic nose. But the Colonel spoke in a quietly controlled manner. “Of course, Herr Wagner. Yours and Fraulein Klockner’s release will be arranged at once. Our mistake.”
No mistake. What’s more, the Gestapo would be dogging like a pack of wolves his and Irina’s every step until the exact moment it had enough documented information to assure they either never saw daylight again or their ashes rained down from incinerator chimneys on Germany’s good Aryan citizens.
The game was ended. Gideon had only one thought as he made his way toward the Main Gate Tower, with its 8 mm machine gun – and that was to dodge the SS tails by ditching the train back to Marzahn at the Berlin stop, midway between, and from there sprinting posthaste for temporary asylum at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Center.
Well, that wasn’t the only thought. Another thought, that of strangulation, flexed his own knuckles at what he spotted just beyond the guard house – the emaciated Gypsy girl. She was wearing Irina’s white woolen coat, beret, and lace-up heels.
What in God’s good name had the Gypsy and her thieving cutthroats done with Irina?
Coming abreast of the girl, he gripped her elbow. “Don’t tell me,” he snarled, out of earshot of the guards. “You are my dearly beloved Irina.”
“Oh, ye are psychic, too?”
An Irish brogue as thick as butter replacing her German speech – what was this? Tugging his hat brim low, he hustled her along the pavement that paralleled the side track to the waiting train. Its steam hissed like his every gritted word. “I want a straight answer, or you will find yourself back inside Sachsenhausen. Now, where is Irina?”
A pearl drop earring wagged with her shaking head. “I have no idea.”
He stopped and spun her to face him. “I mean it. There is nothing I find redeeming about you – you, whoever you are – and I would be most delighted to turn you over to the SS as an imposter.”
“Romy’s me name. Romy Sonnenschein.”
Her smirk infuriated him. “Well, aren’t you a little ray of sunshine.” He was losing precious time. Without appearing to be in a hurry, he propelled the execrable piece of humanity toward the nearest coach.
At the flash of the prison passes, the conductor waved them aboard. The Nazis, Gideon ruminated ruefully, could have been courteous enough to have returned his fine leather valise. That ostentation of affluence, like his Meisterstück, had cost him more meals than he could afford to go without.
He shoved the girl onto a bench seat and slid in next to her. Grabbing her hand, he gripped its short fingers hard enough to snap them. “Do you need a memory refresher? Where is Irina?”
“Owww!” She tugged loose her hand. “I told ye. I dunna know where she is. The last time I saw yuir Irina, she was sprawled in a dead faint on the floor of our vardo.”
“Oh, yes, that ghastly painted wagon.”
She started to sputter, but his focus was diverted just beyond her shoulder. Out the window on the steam-fogged platform, two men were sprinting toward the train. Their suit jacket’s flapped back to reveal their suspenders and their holstered handguns. Oy vey!
He directed his attention back to the gypsy. “How opportunistic of you to swipe the very clothes Irina wore – and her identity.”
“Opportunistic?!”
“You know, cunning. The kind that takes advantage of other people. The kind that prey on their weaknesses. Thieves.” The coach lurched into motion as the train chugged away from the platform.
“Cunning?!” the harpy screeched.
All right, maybe not a harpy, exactly. Her features were fairly pleasant. In fact, she reminded him of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, The Gypsy. It captured this bohemian girl’s capriciousness and vibrancy. But a thief, most assuredly.
“Thieves?!” she demanded, her eyes a livid green. “Ye, a shyster lawyer, who defends those scum of the earth Nazis sympathizers, dare to call me cunning and a thief – ye, ye piss stain!”
He raised an imperious brow. “My obligation as a representative of the accused is to defend them impartially and unbiasedly. And while we are tossing around accusations, I might remind you that you are an imposter, posing as my – ”
“Imposter?” Her nose wrinkled the freckles sprinkled across it. “I would wager yuir name isn’t even Gunter, ye slimebucket.”
He winced as if she had actually struck a blow. Perhaps she was psychic. Not that he lent credit to gypsies’ nefarious schemes to part the gullible from their money.
Granted, as a rag merchant’s son, he was ambitious. He had worked alongside his father, plus a second job, to put himself through Humboldt University’s law school, had mastered French and English to perfect his delivery, and had studied the mannerisms and dress of the wealthy.
But when the Nazis required on ID cards, which all Germans carried, the special identifying mark of those who were Jewish – the stamped red “J” – Gideon deduced the time was not far off before the rest of his rights would gradually be stripped away.
When the Minister of the Interior decreed the prohibition on sexual relations or marriage between people who could produce "racially suspect" offspring – meaning Germans with Jews, Germans with Gypsies, or Germans with the deformed – Gideon started making back up plans.
And when the right to practice law was denied Jews, he knew it was time to go underground as Gunter Wagner. After he had done so, his Nazi clientele escalated in astounding proportion to the legal cases his analyzing powers continued to win.
The Nazi vision of a new Germany placed Aryans at the top of the hierarchy of races and ranked Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Negroes as racial inferiors. Well, inferior was a relegation for which he would never settle.
The train would not reach the Berlin stop for another nineteen minutes, but he meant to transfer long before then. Like now. Before the German Reich’s hired thugs could install themselves in his coach.
He stood and executed a swift bow. “Your acquaintance has been an exceedingly diverting one, Romy Sonnenschein – and, praises to Yahweh, a short one.”
Her sloe eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. “Where are ye going?”
He ignored her and steadied his gait toward the back of their vibrating passenger car. The train had picked up speed. Outside, on the vestibule’s coupling platform, he balanced his weight, and with his fingers forcibly pried open the doors. The wind roared around him.
The forest flashing past was not reassuring. Many an Alpine skier had lost their lives when careening into an embankment of trees. Was an instant death better than prolonged torture?
He swallowed hard. Which was the greater risk? With life, there was always hope, marginal though it seemed at times.
The train’s amplified rattling muted the approach of the person behind him. At the yank on his tweed jacket sleeve, he whirled.
That wrath of a woman with a Cheshire grin demanded his attention. “Circus tumblers!” she yelled above the train’s deafening, clacking noise.
“What?”
“Duck yuir chin. Roll. Feet and knees together.”
“You are aware,” he shouted, “that one shouldn’t change horses in mid– ”
“ – change horses until they stop running,” she yelled back. “But what the hell!”
She nudged him aside, and his jaw dropped as, without another wasted second, she tumbled her elfin body into eternal space.