Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(10)

The electric tram churning overhead drowned out whatever his retort might have been. Not that she cared.

As if seeking to make himself disappear, he slunk his shoulders beneath his expensive but scruffed and turf-dirtied tweed jacket, turned up at its collar, and jammed his scratched hands in his jacket pockets. With his last-minute leap from the moving train, his fedora was long gone. Gone, too, was the snow white of Irina’s coat, smudged as it was here and there with dirt and grass stains.

Trying to keep abreast of Gunter, Romy trudged past a kosher market, a synagogue, and a jeweler’s shop. The familiar aroma of boiled cabbage, baked bagels, and roasted chicken tantalized her starved-hungry, rumbling stomach.

After zigzagging into a cleft between buildings, Gunter emerged from the alley to stop abruptly before a four-story-high, baroque building that might have once been stately. “This is it.”

“What is it?”

He swung open the heavy door. “My one hope for escape.”

Dodging an exiting, portly businessman, she dogged him inside. The dim vestibule smelled of dust and mustiness and apathy. “What about meself?”

Gunter shot her a look of intense displeasure and emitted a huff. “What about your poor, ailing grandfather?” Without waiting for her answer, he headed for the lift that looked like a wrought-iron birdcage.

She cringed with remorse but shot back, “If the SS troopers had anything to say about it, me grandfather is toes up by now.” She wedged inside the confining lift beside Gunter. It jerked upwards, and she gulped.

When camped with the Gypsies near Paris, she had experienced her first and only elevator ride at nine. On a cuttingly cold winter day, her grandfather had smuggled her into the Louvre – also, a first of many European museums she would explore those winters, when the need to keep warm became imperative. She had viewed a world of diverse beauty she had not known existed, until the Louvre’s museum guards had kicked them out.

After that exposure to Enlightenment, she had snuck into cinema houses across Europe, as well. Those had afforded fanciful escapes from everyday drudgery to watch newsreels and cartoons – and Westerns. She was enthralled with them. Her first Western had been Tom Mix’s romantic “Riders of the Purple Sage.”

Her lips curling in disdain, she shot Gunter a blistering look. “Forget me grandfather. What about yuir fiancée?”

“As far as the SS knows, you are Irina. Meanwhile, thanks to your moral turpitude, she is now safe. And she is not my fiancée.”

Crikey, what was ‘turpitude’? “Well, then what is Irina to ye?”

His eyes were bleak. “My half-sister.”

On the third floor, he paused before a door’s frosted pane. She nodded at its etched words. “Where are we?”

“You cannot read?” he asked, dismay evident in his refined elocution. “American Jewish Joint Distribution Center. A volunteer organization.”

He knocked on the pane and, at the “Ya?”, opened the door to a view of a mountain of cardboard boxes stamped with the Red Cross and stacked against the back wall. An assembly table and file cabinet occupied one side wall.

Behind a hand-me-down desk fronting the other wall, presided a dwarf. The desk plaque read, “Moishe Klein,” although below the name, whatever his title was, she could not decipher.

But she recognized him. She just could not remember from where. From one of the circuses that crisscrossed Europe’s map? Montmartre? Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm?

He hopped down from the chair and waddled to meet them. With large brown eyes and tufty brown hair, he had a jovial smile that made him as huggable as a carnival teddy bear. “Welcome to the Joint. How can I help?”

Gunter returned the smile. “Gunter Wagner. We are seeking the Holy Grail, of course.”

Her head snapped up towards his. Holy Grail?

“Ahhh, the Holy Grail, it is?” The dwarf nodded, as if he had the secret to a rigged carnival game. “So is the Führer,” he said genially. “If his SS Ancestral Heritage unit of archeologists and scientists doesn’t find proof of it first, we at the Center are here to lend a hand.

“And speaking of that,” the dwarf stuck up his fleshy hand, “I am Moishe Klein. It’s late. Why don’t I close up shop? We can hit one of the biergartens and discuss magic and myth and the occult.”

Within minutes, he locked the office. Once they were in the lift, he was curiously silent. As was Gunter. Dodging cars, they crossed several streets, leaving the Jewish quarter to find an empty outdoor table beneath a popular biergarten’s chestnut trees.

It wasn’t until lagers and a board of hot aromatic bread and a triangle of yellow cheese had been set before them that Moishe leaned forward, short arms crossed, and began to talk.

Like a sommelier, she inhaled the bread’s yeasty aroma. She immediately yanked a hank of hard crust from the loaf. The pillowy bread was the best food she had ever tasted. Cheeks bulging, she listened intently.

“The office walls have ears,” Moishe Klein explained. “I take it you and your companion want to immigrate immediately?”

“Not my companion,” Gunter said. “She is not a Jew. Just a gypsy.”

Just at Gypsy?! She almost gagged on the bread.

Moishe shrugged. “Jew. Gypsy. All the same in the Führer’s book.”