Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(21)
More than a month had elapsed since last she had played. She preferred a flat pick but used her fingers. Adept as well at banjo and violin, she improvised, starting with the non-traditional Gypsy swing she had learned outside Paris’s Bal-musette music halls that were fused with American jazz. Any fret, any string, as long as it was minor oriented. She settled on a scale, which she knew to the nines, and let her fingers take flight.
For what seemed a timeless passage, she soared above the lapping waves of Portugal’s rugged coast; wandered over the rolling hills of northern Spain’s Basque region, despaired over images of Rome’s beggars, danced naked in the summer sunlight of Finland’s midnight sun; and wept as the Angel of Death moved among the SS’s experimental studies on twins.
Exhausted by feelings her heart was forever reprising, she let her thumb slip from the still quivering string. Slowly, reluctantly, she returned to the present. She opened her eyes to find Arturo’s liquid brown eyes shimmering.
“Usted . . . you play la guitarra,” he whispered, “like . . . like one who ees possessed.”
“Indeed,” she said with a ready smile, “I am, mi amigo.”
§ § §
As he watched the hellion play the guitar with such abandon, Duke’s gut wrenched. Unrefined and undisciplined, she repelled him. He had seen enough of her kind – thieves, cutthroats, and prostitutes – in ports across the world. Calais. Bombay. Shanghai. Tripoli. Liverpool.
He stomped to the rear of the ranch house and plopped on the kitchen stoop’s top stone step, his legs so long, his boot heels nicked the dirt three steps below. He bit off the end of his cigar, nicked a match head, and lit up.
Overhead the glory of the star studded, black velvet sky mocked his measly efforts at making something out of the S&S’s nothing. And he couldn’t blame Romy Sonnenschein for trying to do the same. But to use her flimflammer skills and relentless cheer to manipulate people rubbed him the wrong way.
She reminded him of a past he was determined to put behind him.
He had finished with that vagabond life. Having traveled the world and when off duty read a plethora of books during the interminable stretch of hours at sea, he had acquired an eclectic education worthy of a Rhodes scholar. Furthermore, he was passably conversant in several languages.
Driven away by his pa’s often brutal tirades, he had struck out to drift hither and thither, to the far ends of the earth, returning, at last, with the determination to put down roots.
Now, he wanted a wife and children to make those roots grow into a sheltering tree, of which there were damnably few on the S&S, mostly those banking the Blanco River in the far distance behind the ranch house.
And the nomadic and illiterate Irina or Romy or whatever her name was – the painfully slender girl was definitely below his sights. She might possess a dichotomy of street smarts and unbelievable naivete, but settle, he would not.
Nope, his sights were set on the stars.
§ CHAPTER SIX §
The State of Texas Archives Department, located in the Capitol basement, was a stygian labyrinth of file cabinets and index boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. Worse, the subterranean storage area was mossy damp.
Nevertheless, that first morning on the job was a perfect start for Gideon’s political ambitions in his new homeland, America. A start that had him dragging, what with the exigency of getting out of Germany over the last eight days.
Fortunately, it seemed little was required of his legal expertise, thus far. Mostly, he would be cross indexing old state records. Earlier that morning, a government stenographer demonstrated how to use an addressograph machine.
“Much as a sewing machine,” she had told him with a coy smile.
Therewith, he had proceeded to stamp out envelopes with nearly 72,000 names and addresses. Representative Lyndon B. Johnson would be pleased. As far as Gideon was concerned, that was all that counted. Well, that – and Mrs. Lavinia Spiegel.
Earlier that morning, the synagogue’s Jewish Relief Program Director had stopped by Mimi’s Boarding House, where the rabbi had installed him the day before.
“Now do remember to come by the synagogue at noon, Mr. Goldman. We’ll have available your first month’s rent for the boarding house and additional clothing.” She lowered her voice and inclined her head with its glamourous slouch hat near his, although they were the only two in the boarding house parlor at the moment, “And, hopefully, your new identity documents.”
Lunch hour meant an escape from his scribe-like desk – and an opportunity to revisit with her. Given her faint crow’s feet and marionette lines, Gideon estimated she was likely close to a decade older than he, somewhere in her late thirties or early forties. The lovely Lavinia was everything his parents would have sought to arrange for him in marriage, had they possessed the wherewithal – she was well-bred, wealthy, and Jewish.
That the dark-haired, buxom beauty, a leader in Austin’s Jewish female community, was the widow of a diamond dealer, as she so artfully had woven into their conversation, was even better. That meant money left to her. And best, she apparently hobnobbed with this Texas politician, Johnson. What better avenue to exploit?
The Beth Israel Temple was conveniently catty-cornered to the Capitol. Two-stories high of native limestone, the synagogue was virtually empty at that time of day but for one middle-aged man in a yarmulke, who was practicing on a pipe organ beneath a wall of stained glass windows.