Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(75)
And the next to the last thing Duke wanted was leaving Texas soil, leaving the S&S, leaving all he had worked for since a boy in knee pants. And for what? An irrepressible Gypsy girl hell bent on following her lark’s song.
As much as he disliked admitting it, he needed the multi-lingual Goldman. Despite Duke’s years in foreign ports-o’-call, he knew only a smattering of French, Arabic, and Mandarin. Of course, he was fluent in South Texas Spanish, but that would hardly serve him in Rotterdam.
With mostly surplus goods left from The Great War, transportation pickings were few, and securing authorization for himself and Goldman had taken Harold two interminable days, days of anxious waiting, but, at last, he and Goldman were on their way in a 1934 Douglas DC-2 transport bound for France’s Villeneuve-Orly Airfield.
With any kind of luck, from there he and Goldman could grab a puddle jumper for Rotterdam, getting them to its port a good three days before Romy’s freighter was due to arrive.
Luck, however, was not favoring their fortunes. At Orly Airfield, he and Goldman were detained another two days, awaiting French/Dutch clearance, the dense fog to lift, and, most importantly, adequate air transport. Units of the famed French Air Force were disorganized, with numerous obsolescent aircraft and their operations crushed under their strategic indecisiveness.
At last, on the same morning Romy’s freighter was due to arrive in Rotterdam, they were cleared to board a four-seater Villiers 26, a seaplane used for escort and patrol duties.
Duke didn’t know quite what he was feeling as the seaplane swooped down over the North Sea into the Port of Rotterdam, where the French pilot seemed relieved to be discharged of his assignment.
Like stout, death-wish coffee, adrenaline spiked through Duke with any challenge, but Romy was not just any challenge. She was like nothing he had ever encountered. A rare desert rose specimen, from frigid Germany, no less. And nothing in common with hm. But if he and she weren’t on the same page, it was battery acid in his stomach.
Just what page he was on was not even clear to him. Naturally, he had grown to care about her. As he did the rest of his ranch hands.
Mentally, he gave himself an ass kicking. What a screwball self-deception that was. He had not bedded any of his other ranch hands. She was burrowed deep under his skin, festering like a cactus spine he couldn’t pry deep enough to remove.
Hell, yes, he wanted her back working at the ranch – and gracing his bed, underneath him, straddling him, it mattered not. As long as he could hear her wondrous brogue and watch her freckles dance and her lips smile, giving him a glorious glimpse of those gaping teeth.
But how to convince her that desolate West Texas sand was better than the lush green of Ireland? Goldman was better equipped at persuasion, while he himself stingily dribbled out his words like precious well water.
“The Rotterdam ferries serve only three English ports,” Goldman relayed, turning from the officious Port Clerk to Duke, “and the last one out for the day sailed at ten this morning,”.
Hell’s bells! Once again, they must have just missed her. “Check for her name on those three passenger lists. Find out for which port she is bound.”
Goldman turned back to confer with the clerk, and then with some surprise told Duke her name was not on any of the lists.
He removed his Stetson, sluiced the rain from its brim, and ran a hand through his overly-long damp hair. “Then she’s still here. But where?”
Rotterdam was vast, with one of the tallest office buildings in Europe and a multitude of hotels that still housed refugees from The Great War two decades before.
Goldman’s all-knowing grin hiked the scar on his cheek. “With her people. She’s with the Gypsies.”
With only one Gypsy caravan site in the area, finding Romy should not be that difficult. Nearing twilight, the rain had ceased but the Gypsy encampment was a pig sty. Teeming with refuse, mangy mutts, nags, and filthy children, it had to contain at least a thousand or more Gypsies.
A medium tall Gypsy, smacking of arrogance, confronted them. “I hear you are asking around for Romy Sonnenschein.”
Duke shifted his weight to his back foot, his hands tucked into his jacket pockets. One hand caressed the derringer. “You know where she is?” he drawled, wary of the swaggering man.
The Gypsy eyed first Goldman, then him, from his scuffed cowboy boots to his battered Stetson. “You are Duke McClellan,” he said with definite accent to his English. “I am Giorgio.”
Giorgio the Gypsy. This had to be the man to whom she had been betrothed at fourteen. Duke told himself he did not feel jealous. More like resentful. That this Giorgio had known the unguarded girl Romy must have been before the Nazis had swept her off the street.
Odd, how both he himself and Romy had both been set loose on the earth at a too-young fourteen years of age – and yet unaccountably linked up, crossing half the globe that separated them to come face to face, at last.
“I asked you, where is she?”
“I could refuse to tell you.”
“And I could kill you.”
To his right, Goldman stiffened at the impending confrontation.
The Gypsy’s grin showed uneven, smoke-stained teeth. He swept a hand at the camp, indicating unseen eyes watching. “But at a steep price – your life and your friend’s here.” He spread his palms and said with gusto, “Still, you are friends of Romy’s. Come, let us talk inside my vardo.”