Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(11)
Gunter looked affronted but wisely kept quiet. Plainly, Moishe Klein held out the attorney’s only hope for escape.
The dwarf took a swig from his tankard. His face shapeshifting into one of those gargoyles perched on Notre Dame, he grumbled in a lowered voice. “Our contacts have word that the Nazis will soon be implementing a systematic obliteration of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals – and misfits, such as myself. They’re building gas chambers and ovens now. Hell, they even have a gas chamber on wheels in the works.” He pumped his bristly eyebrows. “‘You bring them, we’ll swing them.’ We’ll all be exterminated like termites.”
“Never underestimate the power of termites,” she mumbled, her mouth full.
Gunter groaned low, then dropped his voice and leaned forward. “Look, Polish Resistance said you could smuggle me out.”
“Us. Us out.” Romy said, shooting Gunter the Gypsy’s evil eye. “Yuir pansy arse would still be stuck on that train, afraid to jump, if it weren’t for meself.”
“Operation Texas is set up for Jews only,” Moishe told her in a voice that brooked no interference.
An accordion player had struck up a polka, and Gunter had to raise his voice. “Operation Texas?”
“An undercover project sponsored by a new Texas legislator, Lyndon Johnson,” the dwarf said. “I spent a year there, in Austin, before my papers expired. Operation Texas covertly hides selected Jews under the federal government’s National Youth Association work camps.”
“A work camp?” Gunter asked. “You understand, I am a little leery of work camps.”
So was she. Any kind of camp but a Gypsy camp.
“Set up by the Roosevelt administration. The NYA is designed to teach new trades to America’s out-of-work youth. The problem is getting us from Germany to Texas.”
“Us?” Now it was Gunter’s turn to stare.
Texas? She recalled studying plastered on one lamp post a cinema poster of a cowboy called the Duke, like her grandfather, but instead of a beret like Old Duke, this cinema star Duke wore a kind of peaked hat that stopped her just short of scoffing at its ridiculously huge size. And yet there was something powerful about that Duke’s image that had possessed her imagination.
“Rumors are rife that Nazi storm troopers are coordinating a massive attack on Jews throughout Germany the day after tomorrow,” Moishe said in a lowered voice. “Believe me, thousands are about to die.”
“Which is all the more reason I want out now,” Gunter insisted.
The gargoyle lowered his voice to a mere whisper. “I still have left immigration papers for two – with no names but signed and counter-signed. The congressman, Johnson, has had the Department of State already approve the visas beforehand. Money buys passports that take us via Mexico City to Galveston, Texas. Your papers will cost you five-thousand marks.”
“What?!” Shock shot Gunter’s brows almost into his handsome hairline. “According to Polish Resistance, cash is already supplied by wealthy benefactors to get us undercover to America and jobs and homes there.”
The little man lifted hefty shoulders. “Right now, America is rejecting Jewish refugee ships, right and left. It fears more Jewish immigrants will lengthen unemployment rolls, that Jews will become public charges and bleed away precious resources.” Moishe permitted a grin and another innocent shrug. “Thus, everyone, including Congressman Johnson, is using methods, sometimes legal and sometimes illegal to accomplish its ends. So, I ask myself, why shouldn’t I?”
“I will tell ye why not, ye miserable excuse for oxygen intake,” she heard herself saying, with not a little bit of surprise, “because I, Irina Klockner, am taking that second set of papers.”
Moishe wiped the foam off his thick lips with the back of his arm. “Ahh, but your partner has already disputed your identity. You’re not Jewish. Tough luck.”
“But I am a Gypsy, ranked up there with the Jews, at the top of the Nazi’s personae non gratae.”
The dwarf ignored her. “Last flight out of Berlin for the port of Bremen, where we ship out, is tomorrow morning at six-thirty. We enter the U.S. as residents of Mexico. Are you in, Wagner?”
“The banks are closed,” Gunter pointed out. “I don’t know where I can come up with five-thousand marks by tomorrow morning.”
“Friends?” Moishe asked. Business contacts? Family?”
“They’ve all been arrested.”
Moishe spread thickly padded hands appended to stubby arms. “Not my problem. Be here at five-thirty tomorrow morning with the marks – or don’t bother to come.”
“Charming man,” she said after she and Gunter left the biergarten, when what she was thinking what a rat of a man Moishe was. Someone she had crossed paths with somewhere, sometime, before. But where?
The scar on Gunter’s cheek ticked. Hands tucked beneath his jacket in his pants pockets, he strode off, unmindful of her.
She quickened her steps in Irina’s wobbly heels. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know where I am going. But wherever it is, you are most definitely not going with me.”
She caught up with him and jerked on his jacket sleeve. “Ye belong to one of those gentlemen clubs? Ye know, the kind where they sit around and smoke cigars and read the daily stock quotes?”