Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(74)
His grimace gave way to his old swaggering smile, and he flicked away his cigarette. He took her hand, drawing her along with him toward one of the dilapidated vardos. “But naturally she found pleasure with the tumble in the hay I gave her. We are married, and I am a proud papa now.”
The information so easily shared brought Romy low. Not because of jealousy. She had gotten over her first love, Giorgio, at the first sight of Duke. Nay, she was feeling low because Giorgio’s marriage and fatherhood emphasized how barren her own life was.
But then, so was her womb.
Yet again, she saw herself on the outside, without family. Alone, once more.
“And what ill luck brings you to our zigeuner?”
“Oh, nay – not ill luck but good luck. Tis on me way to Ireland, I am.”
The vardo reeked of stale sweat, soiled diapers, and briny fish. The carcasses of violins – and their scrolls, strings, and bows – littered the place. Giorgio’s family had long traded in violins and made and repaired them.
Zelda was not the wife she would have expected someone like Giorgio to marry. Quiet, heavy jowled, and haggard, she had a big-boned frame that still carried the extra weight of pregnancy in her breasts and stomach. At the introduction, she nodded in greeting.
Wrapped in a maroon shawl, she remained standing as Giorgio indicated Romy was to sit in one of the vardo’s twin hard-back chairs while he took the other and lit another cigarette. He sat sidewise to the table, with one arm propped on its top.
“And this is Nuri, our daughter,” he said, sweeping with his cigarette toward the infant, cradled in what looked to be a dresser drawer. “She was born on our way here – at Hannover, where Zelda and I both married and baptized Nuri – before traveling on. And you, where have you been hiding yourself since that Nazi raid?”
She smiled wryly. “In Texas, cooking and keeping house for another Duke. Duke McClellan.”
He blew a long helix of smoke before remarking with eyes narrowed, “The way you say his name, he, too, is special to you?”
She shrugged and said, “Do ye plan to stay here long? In Rotterdam.” Zelda set a chipped cup of weak tea in front of her, and she murmured her thanks.
He rolled shoulders tense with the toxins of living on the edge. “Without passports, we’ve reached as far as we can flee – the sea.”
At that instant, she realized just how fortunate she was to have her traveling papers. “What will ye do now?”
He took a puff from the cigarette. “Turn my back on the sea and fight. What else can we do?”
He lowered his voice, although with the rain pitter-pattering on the vardo’s tin roof the likelihood of someone outside hearing was negligible. “In the last few weeks – since the strafing of Poland – the Dutch Underground has ramped up its Resistance.”
“Resistance?” Against the Panzer tank that was emblematic of the Nazis’ ruthless control? “Like what?”
His free hand ticked off his reply on brown-stained fingertips. “The group forges ration cards and counterfeit money, collects intelligence, publishes underground newspaper, and, whenever possible, sabotages German agents’ phone lines and automobiles.”
“And yuirself?” she prodded. “Are ye caught up with this Dutch Underground?”
He spread wide his arms in a boasting gesture. “Who knows better the byroads and backroads of Europe than a Gypsy?”
Discovery by the Germans of involvement in the Resistance meant an immediate death sentence. “I . . . I must say tis impressed I am, Giorgio.”
When, in actuality, she was deflated. She saw how meaningless her life was. She had not made wise choices, and she had only herself to blame . . . for those choices and for her character flaws and shortcomings and foibles.
“What are your plans?” he asked.
Among those character flaws, her biggest had to be that of a fool, because she answered with a whanker grin, “Why, I am heading back where ye came from. Back to Berlin.”
With the promise of Ireland’s beautiful green countryside so close and the freedom afforded with her roving Irish Traveller clan so palpable, she was a fool to change her destination; besides, her grandfather was most likely six feet under, her brother she hadn’t seen in five years and didn’t know if he was even alive, and Irina was a gadje, no less!
But these were debts that need to be honored, debts her soul owed.
If ever there was a dumb ass, it had to be she. Aye, she was, indeed, the Tarot’s Fool. Ireland was within her reach. And the Death Card in the other direction.
§ § §
Patience was most likely the only virtue to which Duke could lay claim. Fishing on the Blanco or hunting in the South Texas chaparral had schooled him well, as had the myriad duties of running a ranch as a kid trying to fill his absentee father’s shoes – or, for that matter, battening down the hatches in rough weather all those seafaring years.
If nothing else, he had learned Mother Nature had her own timing. And one didn’t buck Mother Nature.
The U.S. Military had its own timing, and, seated in the bomber bay, looking out over the .30 caliber machine gun at the blue-gray ocean below, he swore under his breath. If the U.S. was aiming to join in the war, it needed to mount up and apply its spurs soon.
The last thing Duke wanted was war, but if armament was required, he carried his own. The Remington double-barrel Derringer .41 caliber pistol tucked inside the pocket of his old rawhide jacket was comforting.