Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(13)


“Worried?” Heinz asked Gideon. The lawyer was a member of the SS and in line for commissioner of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto district.

Gideon smiled. “Trusting the hand you’re holding is as slipshod as your memory, Heinz, most certainly not.” In a court case, the two had represented opposing sides; Heinz had failed to recall legal protocol, and the case had been dismissed in favor of Gideon’s client.

“Let us get on with the game, shall we?” asked von Braun. He began divvying up the chips.

As Romy had demonstrated, Gideon gave the deck an undercut and palmed the Jack of Clubs – he hoped. He checked his cards. If any player held a flush – three cards of the same suit – or the Pam, that player won all the tricks and looed the entire table immediately. If more than one player held a flush, precedence was given to the flush with the Pam.

But Gideon held no flush, and the pot wasn’t sweet enough yet to justify playing the Pam he had palmed. With a sickening, knotting gut, he watched Heinz Auerswald swipe with a sneer a hefty portion of Gideon’s proceeds from his pawned Meisterstück.

By the fourth round, he was running out of chips.

Gasquet exchanged his hand for the ‘miss’ pile and frowned. “Merde! Mille pardons, but I must drop out.”

Next, Reinholdt tossed in his hand, as did Von Braun.

Then, Auerswald flourished his Ace-high Clubs flush.

It was now or never. The pot was barely large enough to finance Gideon’s getaway – if he cut out the girl’s portion.

He held the Six and Queen of Spades and the Ten of Diamonds. Could he pull it off? Treacherous sweat pooled at his collarbones. He loosened his tie. The sweat rivuleted down his sternum, past his clenching stomach muscles to pool at his crotch.

Without resort to all the finesse of his eloquence, he was reduced to his physical assets, of which he had few, mainly those recently acquired from the skilled tutelage of the Gypsy girl cum swindle artist.

He drained his remainder of the Regal German Rye Whiskey. With fierce focusing, he swiveled the Jack of Clubs among the cards he held and re-palmed the Ten of Diamonds. Then, he spread onto the table the cards with their Pam. Waiting for one of the other players to call him out, his heart was beating faster than Gene Krupa on the snare drum.

When no outcry ensued, he reached for the pile. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you gentlemen.”

“Just a goddamned minute,” Auerswald said.

Gideon’s gonads shriveled to marbles. His heartbeat stuttered. His hand froze over the loot. Still, he managed to turn a guiltless smile on the balding man. “If you have a complaint, I suggest you lodge it with the Führer. Otherwise, I shall be forced to call you out.”

“And we all know how lethal you are with the rapier, Gideon,” von Braun joked in an attempt to allay the tension.

Gideon shrugged and began mounding the chips. “True, it is a given that I am not the most adroit with the weapon, but I am, nevertheless, able at times to inflict – ”

Auerswald tapped his remaining chip pile with a sausage finger. “Loo etiquette dictates that you should stay to the end of the game and give us a chance to win back our losses.”

“Alas, I was never one for etiquette, was I, Heinz?” As an appeasement, he pitched a much needed 50-mark chip in the direction of Auerswald’s mound as casually as if pitching darts and with a courtly bow made good his get away from the disgruntled players.

Now all he had to do was get away from the female aggravation waiting below. A service elevator and a shortcut through the closed-for-the-night kitchen put him on the receiving dock at the back of the Kempinski – while the girl still awaited him in the lobby.

Without his wristwatch, he could only guess the time – close to four in the morning, most likely. Still dark and cool. He had over an hour to make it to the Joint Center with time to spare.

In the dimly lit third-floor hallway outside the Center’s door, arms and ankles crossed and learning against the wall, Romy Sonnenschein waited for him.

He hid his shock. “Damn it, I was looking all over the Kempinski for you!”

She smiled forlornly. “And here I thought you had forgotten me, what with all the stress of yuir cheating at cards.”

His lids narrowed, but her usually arresting features were as bland as oatmeal. He turned his most appealing expression on her. It worked with juries, before which he pled his clients’ cases. “Listen, Romy, I only won enough at Loo to purchase the papers for myself.”

“There you are!” boomed Moishe’s voice, so unexpected, coming from such a little man. He fished a ring of keys from his woolen jacket pocket and thrust it into the door lock, at his chest level. Shoving wide the door, he stood on tiptoe to tug on the overhead light chain’s extension and waddled past both his desk and the far file cabinet toward the stacked Red Cross cartons.

On his way, he skewered Romy a quick glance. “What’s she doing here?”

“I just came to wish ye two Bon Voyage.”

Gideon groaned inwardly. She had come to plague him. To try her best to wheedle her portion of the Loo winnings from him. When he was the one who had sweated it out and put his credibility on the line.

“Let’s make it quick,” Moishe said. He extracted a Ritz Crackers box from one of the Red Cross donation cartons. “We’ll complete the paper work on the way to the airport.” From the red cardboard box, he fished a sheath of papers and passed them to Gideon. “The five-thousand marks, if you please.”

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