§ CHAPTER TWENTY §
The B’nai Israel Temple, an ornate white synagogue, was famed throughout Galveston for its imposing Victorian architecture. However, Rabbi Hickman’s office on the third floor was not much larger than a janitor’s closet. The room smelled of carnations.
Receiver in one hand, the Rabbi spoke to one contact after another while he scribbled notes on his desktop calendar pad. “Yes. When? Nothing else? All right. Thank you.” And then he would put through another call.
Duke sat in front of the modest desk. The austere room felt cramped, what with the bookshelves and the desk. He needed more space to stretch out his stovepipe legs. Between them, he held his straw Stetson, his fingers twirling its scruffy brim impatiently.
Next to him, Goldman, one knee draped over the other, puffed agitatedly on a Lucky Strike. Every so often, he would flick an ash into his trouser cuff.
Duke could have used a cheroot – or, better, a whiskey.
At last, the rabbi replaced the receiver, glanced at his notes, and then slowly looked from Duke to Goldman and back to Duke. “Well, neither a Romy Sonnenschein, nor a Romy Sunshine, is on any passenger list – ocean liners or airplanes – bound for the British Isles for the next two weeks.”
He paused, and Duke didn’t like the grim look of Harold’s expression. With gnarled knuckles, the rabbi drummed a riff on his desktop. Then, in a hushed voice, he said, “However, a source reports the county morgue picked up in the red-light district a body of one of our sponsored Jewish refugees.”
Duke’s stomach cratered and his heart stonewalled. With utter desolation, he heard the finality of Harold’s statement and simply stared dry-eyed at his now crushed Stetson. “Is it . . . ” His tongue couldn’t get out her name.
Goldman’s cigarette had dropped onto the hardwood floor. “ . . . Romy?”
Hickman fingered his gray beard. “My source did not know. Let me put in a call to the morgue.”
While the rabbi rang through yet another call, Goldman collected his cigarette to puff relentlessly again, and Duke spun his Stetson, straightening its dented brim with each revolution. Both men were inordinately preoccupied with mundane tasks. But for Duke, this was no mundane moment that seemed to stretch eternally. His heart felt as heavy as an iceberg.
“Wendell, this is Rabbi Hickman. Can you provide the identity of the victim’s body collected at the Oleander this morning?” Once more, while waiting, he tattooed his gnarled knuckles on his desktop. “Umm-hmm. Right.”
When he finished the call, he placed his palms on his desk and, with a sighed exhalation said, “The victim is Moishe Klein– or Morris Keller, if you will.”
Duke’s and Goldman’s simultaneous exhalations were much more audible, more like out-of-control gorilla grunts.
Immediately, Goldman jumped ahead and asked, “Do we know if the room was in Romy’s name?”
The pious rabbi’s response was a wry smile. “We’re talking a racketeers’ paradise. Names are never asked for. Only money.”
“If Romy murdered him, then she is on the run,” Goldman said. “But I cannot see her running back into the fray.”
“She would snag the first boat out,” Duke muttered, thinking rapidly, “bound for as close as she could get to Ireland.” His youthful years aboard the tramp steamer were unwillingly recalled. He had thought life with his old man had been punishing. “Tankers? Barges? Cargo ships? Unlikely, maybe, but could you try them, Harold?”
The rabbi tugged at his short beard, giving it some thought. “I’ll put in a call to a friend at the Port Authorities.” A few minutes later, he replaced the receiver and said, “Bingo. You were right, Duke. She shipped out this morning on a freighter bound for Rotterdam.”
“But, of course.” Goldman said, nodding, as if it all made sense. “Across the channel from the British Isles.”
Harold propped his elbows on the desktop and stared over his interlocked hands with a reassuring smile. “Our Romy Sonnenschein appears to be one of those blessed souls who are resourceful and resilient. I think our concerns about her are needless.” He eyed Duke. “Unless, you feel differently, son.”
Son. All his childhood, Duke had yearned to hear those words spoken with that warm resonance from his father. But, at least, he was hearing it from the rabbi. Duke leaned forward. “Can you wrangle a flight to Rotterdam for me, Harold – at a bedrock fare?”
“Count me in,” Goldman said.
The rabbi smiled benevolently. “Well, now, flying free beats bedrock for you two, I would say – and I do have contacts at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston.”
Duke wondered if he would ever get shed of the smooth and smarmy Germany attorney. Hell, Goldman by right of time might lay claim to Romy’s affections, but, by God, Duke laid claim to her passion. And he knew he was the better man.
Or, at least, Charlotte did. The sweet image of her, peering at him over her eyeglasses, nettled him, and he knew the day was coming when he would have to stop straddling the fence. Other tried and true men were waiting in line to ply their suit.
Well, first things first.
§ § §
Quaint Dutch streets beneath Vermeer-like skies.
Rotterdam had not changed that much since those months, years before, when Romy and Old Duke had encamped there with other Romani. Nestled in a lovely riverside setting with a lively cultural life, the city was Europe’s largest port, known as the Gateway to the World.
Not only was it the Gateway to the World, it was also the world’s largest spy center because of its Dutch neutrality and its strategic location, situated as it was with Great-Britain and Germany on either side of it. German secret agents operating from Rotterdam competed with Britain’s M16, which had established its main European office on Rotterdam’s de Boompjes.
For her, the Netherlands might mean the netherworld. Nazi scientists would dearly love to have access to her Gypsy genetics in order to complete their medical experimentations with her and her twin, but she felt safe enough if she stayed this side of the Grebbe Line, the latest of the Dutch Water Lines built to inundate the borders against attack by the Netherland’s Nazi neighbor.
She had debarked too late to catch the morning’s Rotterdam ferry to England’s Port of Harwich, giving her yet another day to while away. It was Sunday, and the Mauritshuis Museum would be closed. It had been at the art museum, a twenty-minute train ride to The Hague, that she had seen Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring.”
A few questions, and Romy got directions to the nearest zigeuner, a gypsy caravan site only a few miles out of town, and within walking distance. Mayhap, with a thimble of luck, she could find a Romani’s spare straw mattress upon which to spend the night.
The day was overcast and misty with occasional sprinkles. By the time she reached the encampment, the rain was falling steadily. And she, crikey, without an umbrella!
She should not have been surprised to find the place overrun with Gypsy refugees from Poland and Germany, but she was surprised to find someone from her past among them.
At the sound of her name yelled out, she turned from the main path through the muddy encampment to watch Giorgio slosh in the muck toward her. He wore raggedy trousers and a dirty, voluminous-sleeved shirt with no other protection against the chilly rain.
Her former betrothed was thinner than she remembered and had the harrowed look of one facing an executioner’s block, but his swarthy face was still handsome despite its gauntness. His raven’s hair fell lankly upon bony shoulders. He yanked out the hand-rolled brown cigarette that drooped from the corner of his mouth, bracketed by crater-deep lines. “I can’t believe it’s you, Romy!”
She threw her arms around him. “Giorgio!” He was not as tall as Duke, but then few were. “What devilry brings ye to Rotterdam?”
He stepped away. “The filthy Nazis, but, of course. After the SS raided our camp at Marzahn, I stayed just one step ahead of them, always on the run – until I met Zelda. In her family’s barn, where I was hiding.”
His grimace gave way to his old swaggering smile, and he flicked away his cigarette. He took her hand, drawing her along with him toward one of the dilapidated vardos. “But naturally she found pleasure with the tumble in the hay I gave her. We are married, and I am a proud papa now.”
The information so easily shared brought Romy low. Not because of jealousy. She had gotten over her first love, Giorgio, at the first sight of Duke. Nay, she was feeling low because Giorgio’s marriage and fatherhood emphasized how barren her own life was.
But then, so was her womb.
Yet again, she saw herself on the outside, without family. Alone, once more.
“And what ill luck brings you to our zigeuner?”
“Oh, nay – not ill luck but good luck. Tis on me way to Ireland, I am.”
The vardo reeked of stale sweat, soiled diapers, and briny fish. The carcasses of violins – and their scrolls, strings, and bows – littered the place. Giorgio’s family had long traded in violins and made and repaired them.
Zelda was not the wife she would have expected someone like Giorgio to marry. Quiet, heavy jowled, and haggard, she had a big-boned frame that still carried the extra weight of pregnancy in her breasts and stomach. At the introduction, she nodded in greeting.
Wrapped in a maroon shawl, she remained standing as Giorgio indicated Romy was to sit in one of the vardo’s twin hard-back chairs while he took the other and lit another cigarette. He sat sidewise to the table, with one arm propped on its top.
“And this is Nuri, our daughter,” he said, sweeping with his cigarette toward the infant, cradled in what looked to be a dresser drawer. “She was born on our way here – at Hannover, where Zelda and I both married and baptized Nuri – before traveling on. And you, where have you been hiding yourself since that Nazi raid?”
She smiled wryly. “In Texas, cooking and keeping house for another Duke. Duke McClellan.”
He blew a long helix of smoke before remarking with eyes narrowed, “The way you say his name, he, too, is special to you?”
She shrugged and said, “Do ye plan to stay here long? In Rotterdam.” Zelda set a chipped cup of weak tea in front of her, and she murmured her thanks.
He rolled shoulders tense with the toxins of living on the edge. “Without passports, we’ve reached as far as we can flee – the sea.”
At that instant, she realized just how fortunate she was to have her traveling papers. “What will ye do now?”
He took a puff from the cigarette. “Turn my back on the sea and fight. What else can we do?”
He lowered his voice, although with the rain pitter-pattering on the vardo’s tin roof the likelihood of someone outside hearing was negligible. “In the last few weeks – since the strafing of Poland – the Dutch Underground has ramped up its Resistance.”
“Resistance?” Against the Panzer tank that was emblematic of the Nazis’ ruthless control? “Like what?”
His free hand ticked off his reply on brown-stained fingertips. “The group forges ration cards and counterfeit money, collects intelligence, publishes underground newspaper, and, whenever possible, sabotages German agents’ phone lines and automobiles.”
“And yuirself?” she prodded. “Are ye caught up with this Dutch Underground?”
He spread wide his arms in a boasting gesture. “Who knows better the byroads and backroads of Europe than a Gypsy?”
Discovery by the Germans of involvement in the Resistance meant an immediate death sentence. “I . . . I must say tis impressed I am, Giorgio.”
When, in actuality, she was deflated. She saw how meaningless her life was. She had not made wise choices, and she had only herself to blame . . . for those choices and for her character flaws and shortcomings and foibles.
“What are your plans?” he asked.
Among those character flaws, her biggest had to be that of a fool, because she answered with a whanker grin, “Why, I am heading back where ye came from. Back to Berlin.”
With the promise of Ireland’s beautiful green countryside so close and the freedom afforded with her roving Irish Traveller clan so palpable, she was a fool to change her destination; besides, her grandfather was most likely six feet under, her brother she hadn’t seen in five years and didn’t know if he was even alive, and Irina was a gadje, no less!
But these were debts that need to be honored, debts her soul owed.
If ever there was a dumb ass, it had to be she. Aye, she was, indeed, the Tarot’s Fool. Ireland was within her reach. And the Death Card in the other direction.
§ § §
Patience was most likely the only virtue to which Duke could lay claim. Fishing on the Blanco or hunting in the South Texas chaparral had schooled him well, as had the myriad duties of running a ranch as a kid trying to fill his absentee father’s shoes – or, for that matter, battening down the hatches in rough weather all those seafaring years.
If nothing else, he had learned Mother Nature had her own timing. And one didn’t buck Mother Nature.
The U.S. Military had its own timing, and, seated in the bomber bay, looking out over the .30 caliber machine gun at the blue-gray ocean below, he swore under his breath. If the U.S. was aiming to join in the war, it needed to mount up and apply its spurs soon.
The last thing Duke wanted was war, but if armament was required, he carried his own. The Remington double-barrel Derringer .41 caliber pistol tucked inside the pocket of his old rawhide jacket was comforting.
And the next to the last thing Duke wanted was leaving Texas soil, leaving the S&S, leaving all he had worked for since a boy in knee pants. And for what? An irrepressible Gypsy girl hell bent on following her lark’s song.
As much as he disliked admitting it, he needed the multi-lingual Goldman. Despite Duke’s years in foreign ports-o’-call, he knew only a smattering of French, Arabic, and Mandarin. Of course, he was fluent in South Texas Spanish, but that would hardly serve him in Rotterdam.
With mostly surplus goods left from The Great War, transportation pickings were few, and securing authorization for himself and Goldman had taken Harold two interminable days, days of anxious waiting, but, at last, he and Goldman were on their way in a 1934 Douglas DC-2 transport bound for France’s Villeneuve-Orly Airfield.
With any kind of luck, from there he and Goldman could grab a puddle jumper for Rotterdam, getting them to its port a good three days before Romy’s freighter was due to arrive.
Luck, however, was not favoring their fortunes. At Orly Airfield, he and Goldman were detained another two days, awaiting French/Dutch clearance, the dense fog to lift, and, most importantly, adequate air transport. Units of the famed French Air Force were disorganized, with numerous obsolescent aircraft and their operations crushed under their strategic indecisiveness.
At last, on the same morning Romy’s freighter was due to arrive in Rotterdam, they were cleared to board a four-seater Villiers 26, a used for escort and patrol duties.
Duke didn’t know quite what he was feeling as the seaplane swooped down over the North Sea into the Port of Rotterdam, where the French pilot seemed relieved to be discharged of his assignment.
Like stout, death-wish coffee, adrenaline spiked through Duke with any challenge, but Romy was not just any challenge. She was like nothing he had ever encountered. A rare desert rose specimen, from frigid Germany, no less. And nothing in common with hm. But if he and she weren’t on the same page, it was battery acid in his stomach.
Just what page he was on was not even clear to him. Naturally, he had grown to care about her. As he did the rest of his ranch hands.
Mentally, he gave himself an ass kicking. What a screwball self-deception that was. He had not bedded any of his other ranch hands. She was burrowed deep under his skin, festering like a cactus spine he couldn’t pry deep enough to remove.
Hell, yes, he wanted her back working at the ranch – and gracing his bed, underneath him, straddling him, it mattered not. As long as he could hear her wondrous brogue and watch her freckles dance and her lips smile, giving him a glorious glimpse of those gaping teeth.
But how to convince her that desolate West Texas sand was better than the lush green of Ireland? Goldman was better equipped at persuasion, while he himself stingily dribbled out his words like precious well water.
“The Rotterdam ferries serve only three English ports,” Goldman relayed, turning from the officious Port Clerk to Duke, “and the last one out for the day sailed at ten this morning,”.
Hell’s bells! Once again, they must have just missed her. “Check for her name on those three passenger lists. Find out for which port she is bound.”
Goldman turned back to confer with the clerk, and then with some surprise told Duke her name was not on any of the lists.
He removed his Stetson, sluiced the rain from its brim, and ran a hand through his overly-long damp hair. “Then she’s still here. But where?”
Rotterdam was vast, with one of the tallest office buildings in Europe and a multitude of hotels that still housed refugees from The Great War two decades before.
Goldman’s all-knowing grin hiked the scar on his cheek. “With her people. She’s with the Gypsies.”
With only one Gypsy caravan site in the area, finding Romy should not be that difficult. Nearing twilight, the rain had ceased but the Gypsy encampment was a pig sty. Teeming with refuse, mangy mutts, nags, and filthy children, it had to contain at least a thousand or more Gypsies.
A medium tall Gypsy, smacking of arrogance, confronted them. “I hear you are asking around for Romy Sonnenschein.”
Duke shifted his weight to his back foot, his hands tucked into his jacket pockets. One hand caressed the derringer. “You know where she is?” he drawled, wary of the swaggering man.
The Gypsy eyed first Goldman, then him, from his scuffed cowboy boots to his battered Stetson. “You are Duke McClellan,” he said with definite accent to his English. “I am Giorgio.”
Giorgio the Gypsy. This had to be the man to whom she had been betrothed at fourteen. Duke told himself he did not feel jealous. More like resentful. That this Giorgio had known the unguarded girl Romy must have been before the Nazis had swept her off the street.
Odd, how both he himself and Romy had both been set loose on the earth at a too-young fourteen years of age – and yet unaccountably linked up, crossing half the globe that separated them to come face to face, at last.
“I asked you, where is she?”
“I could refuse to tell you.”
“And I could kill you.”
To his right, Goldman stiffened at the impending confrontation.
The Gypsy’s grin showed uneven, smoke-stained teeth. He swept a hand at the camp, indicating unseen eyes watching. “But at a steep price – your life and your friend’s here.” He spread his palms and said with gusto, “Still, you are friends of Romy’s. Come, let us talk inside my vardo.”
A rather bland, stout woman made way for them inside the caravan’s dim and crowded interior then clumped back to hover near a curtain that probably separated the sleeping quarters and a fussing, restive infant.
Giorgio offered them the only two chairs, but Duke said, “We don’t have time to palaver. Where is she? Where is Romy?”
Shaking rain droplets from his hair like a wet dog did its pelt, Giorgio sprawled in one chair. “On her way to Berlin.”
“Verdammt!” Goldman said. “Why?”
“Because she has a twin brother imprisoned there,” Duke said. He should have known the feisty Romy wouldn’t roll over and play dead for long. She was a scrapper, after all. “At some prison in – “
“Sachsenhausen,” Goldman supplied.
“That’s it. How long ago?” he demanded of the Gypsy. “How long ago did she leave?”
“A couple of hours or so. One of our Dutch underground resistors is giving her a lift.”
Duke huffed a snort of exasperation. Once again, they had just missed her. The evasive, elusive, and illusive Romy Sonnenschein. Shit!
“But for a few American dollars, my friends, I myself will take you to her.”