Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(14)



Gideon sighed, dug out his wallet, and doled out onto the desk the hard-won marks. Remaining, he still had seventy-five. He stuffed the papers into his jacket’s inside pocket, but, feeling remorse – after all, the Gypsy swindler had enabled him to win the card game – he tossed her a wad of precious fifty marks.

Her mouth curling in contempt, she thumbed through them. “Oh, swell. Fifty marks out of more than five thousand.”

Moishe flicked her a scornful glance. “Beggars can’t – ”

“ – look wealthy,” she said, stashing the fifty in her white purse, Irina’s purse. “But the likes of me will take whatever I can get.” She gave Gideon a hug that jerked at his integrity, or lack thereof. Her eyes moistened. “May ye be lucky, Gunter.”

Heading for the door, she paused and turned to blow him a kiss.

He should feel even more remorseful. Whether as Gypsy Romy Sonnenschein or Jewess Irina Klockner, she was headed not only for the door but for annihilation.

Ten minutes later, his overwhelming sense of remorse immediately vanished in the taxi cab, careening around curves on its dash to the airport. He groped into his suit jacket for the requisite paperwork to be filled out, then glanced at a frowning Moishe. “The papers, the visas – they’re gone!”





§ CHAPTER FOUR §



Nothing had prepared Romy, either for America – or for her National Youth Association sponsor. Not even all the Western moving pictures she had watched avidly.

In truth, her entire trip was like one of those moving pictures – an alternate reality. Flying above clouds in that soaring airplane – like a canary freed of is cage; and next, peering from the ocean liner Europa’s deck out onto an infinity of water, sparkling with buttery sunlight and silvery moonlight.

And at each stop – the Berlin airport, the port of Bremen, and then Veracruz, she expected her ruse to be revealed, that she would be turned away, sent back to Germany to be confined in one of its political concentration camps until her time came to be turned into a soap bar.

That morning, leaving the Port of Galveston’s holding room for the medical examiner’s office, where she could still have been found unfit and sent back – if for no reason than she was illiterate – she was cleared.

Half dizzy with relief, she tottered on Irina’s high heels – well, on one heel, the other had broken off – with the rest of the crowd making its way through a maze of roped aisles to exit into a larger area. Apprehensively, she scanned the mob waiting in the stifling warehouse to greet the arriving passengers.

A short, elderly man, his black skullcap contrasting with white hair springing from beneath it, hailed her. With him stood a tall, rawboned man in a gray pinstripe suit and cowboy hat and boots, no less.

Aye, she was really in Texas. She was tempted to pinch herself. For once, tis not the wretched luck of the Irish.

“Rabbi Harold Hickman of Temple B'nai Israel,” the man in the yarmulke said, an open smile parting his short, white beard. “So glad you made it, Miss Klockner. Although our Bremen contacts alerted us regarding your arrival, I almost did not recognize you. You do not look at all like your newspaper photos.”

She brightened a struggling smile. “Uh, it has been a long and uncertain trip.”

She did not need a mirror to know how bedraggled she looked. A portion of her red-and-maroon skirt’s seam had come unstitched at the bottom flounce. Irina’s expensive white coat was a filthy gray. Her white beret looked like a dollop of dirty snow. And her soiled purse, with its previous nappy white suede, had lost its natural fuzzy appearance.

“Well, you are safe now, young lady” said the homely man in cowboy boots. He had a stentorian boisterousness that nigh vibrated the warehouse walls. White cowboy hat in his left hand, he thrust out his other and shook hers heartily, all the while eying her up and down. Did he suspect her charade? “Representative Lyndon Johnson. My Operation Texas has arranged to place you in a work camp here.”

“A ranch, really,” the rabbi said. “But we go too fast. Only yesterday, your fiancé and his companion arrived on the S.S. Carousel.”

She could feel her eyebrows shoot up. Just in time, she suppressed her brogue. “My fiancé?”

“Why, yes. When they missed the Berlin flight, they drove to Warsaw and caught the next flight out. See, here they come now,” he nodded over his shoulder.

Gunter’s facial scar was red with fury. And Moishe’s glower clearly indicated he was going to gut her at the first opportunity.

Her mind riffled through her predicament as rapidly as her fingers did her cards. Aye, the attorney Gunter Wagner had reason to hold a grudge for the caper she had pulled – pinching the remaining two sets of traveling papers when she had given him that farewell hug.

So, from where had he and Moishe Klein nabbed additional sets? And so quickly? But then Klein’s kind was like a cat, always landing on all fours.

Cat?

Nay, dogs!

Now, she remembered where she had seen the dwarf. With Klauffen, the first time – the day the SS officer had spotted her and Luca at the Berlin street fair. Only then Klauffen had been in possession of both his eyes.

She and her brother had been harmlessly singing and playing the guitars – not yet engaged in their more lucrative activities – when the black clad Klauffen had ordered their arrest. Flee though they did, he had set his dogs to follow their scent, like sharks followed blood, and corner them.

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