Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(80)
Marta cackled. “Easier you get the Führer out of Krasberg Castle’s bunkers.”
“Can I see me grandfather,” Romy interrupted.
“Back there, girl,” she said, nodding over her shoulder at a rear room. “Meanwhile, tea leaf readings for you two gadjé?”
“I’d prefer just the tea,” Duke said, his mustache quirking at the absurdity of their situation, “and without the reading.”
“I’d prefer a sniffer of smooth brandy,” Gideon said, “but I have the feeling that will not be readily forthcoming.”
Romy found her grandfather in a wheelchair, facing a window that overlooked the drawbridge. At her approach, his head of grizzly Einsteinian curls swiveled in her direction. “Romy!” he breathed.
She crossed the room in three strides to kneel alongside his wheelchair and turned her face up to his shocked one. “Old Duke,” she joked, to keep from crying, “I thought for sure your carcass was fodder for the wolves.”
His veined hand trembled as he ruffled her hair. “Ye . . . ye came back, child.”
“For ye scurvy hide.” Her voice was thick with tears. “Come with me, will ye? Out of Germany. To the place of yuir heart’s desire. To la querencia, to Ireland.”
He laid his trembling hand over hers. “Me happiness is here. With Marta. Come what may. Ye got to find yuir own happiness, child.”
§ § §
Romy bounced Irina’s fifteen-month-old Adrian on her knee. His diaper was squishy with an odor that made her nauseous, and his mouth was drooling oatmeal on her blouse. And she was captivated. The bairn she would never have. The family she would never have.
And heartsick, too, because of her decision she would be delivering that morning to everyone.
Irina, still in a silk wrapper, her hair coiled in end papers with bobby pins, returned from the bedroom’s pram with a fresh linen diaper. “Thank you for helping me out. In the mornings, what with nursing Adrian, I invariably seem to run late.”
While Romy washed the tot off in the sink, Irina began loosening her pin curls. Looking under her upraised arm, she asked, “You have made your decision? Ireland or Texas? Either way, tickets are waiting at the Rotterdam Ferry Terminal. Once in Kent, at All Hallows Air Force Base – well, from there, it is up to you. Luca, I imagine, will make his own choice, as well.”
They both made no comment on the unspoken . . . that first they all would have to succeed in getting Luca out of Sachsenhausen.
“So?” Irina asked. “What is it to be? Your decision?”
Adrian was squirming in the water and chortling, but Romy went stone still. When Death seemed to follow in her footsteps, what choice was there but the blazingly obvious? Then, too, time would heal her heart, with or without the wretched luck of the Irish, and Gideon and Duke would be only shimmering memories.
“Tis neither Ireland nor Texas.” Her smile was strained. “Tis right here – in the midst of mayhem.”
A half an hour later, Duke, hands on hips in that familiar stance, weight planted on his back leg, looked her up and down. With everyone watching, he growled, “So that’s what you want then, Sunshine?”
Her shoulders hunched about her ears. That invariable card layout with that damnable Ace of Spades leapt to the backs of her eyes. She looked from the ever dapper Gideon, arms folded and leaning against the kitchen doorframe as he eyed her skeptically, to the amused Giorgio, the love of her Gypsy youth, and back to Duke, badly in need of a shave.
By damn, she would yet outwit that Ace of Spades.
She would go it alone. Let whatever be, fall on her shoulders only. She would take whatever consequence may come for all her frivolous prior actions. “Me clan’s here,” she said simply.
Duke tugged his Stetson low and said with a finality, “Then let’s get on with it. Let’s bust your brother out of Sachsenhausen.”
“You’ll have to get rid of that cowboy hat,” Irina interjected. “There would be no way you could pass yourself off as one of us.”
He looked decimated, and Romy made a tsking sound. Nevertheless, she watched with something akin to pity as he parted with his beloved Stetson, spinning it onto the sofa.
He drew a small pistol from his rawhide jacket and held it out to her. “For guarding yourself through this – and once your brother is free, well, then I’ll be done with my long-suffering affliction.”
§ CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO §
Nearly forty-eight hours later, at six-forty-five in the semi-dark morning, Gideon, dressed as a SS schütze, or rifleman, in gray service dress with black shoulderboards, sat on high alert in the passenger seat of a mortuary transport van.
Romy, posing as a mortuary technician, backed up the cumbersome van with a grinding of gears to the spotlit infirmary bay of Sachsenhausen’s pathology lab.
“Easy on the stick shift,” Gideon said nervously.
She wrinkled her nose. “Vans versus pickups are like mustangs versus thoroughbreds. I’m doing me best, Gideon.”
And her best, as the sprite had told the group yesterday, would be right here, serving with the Resistance. Feh! Not if he or McClellan had any say about it. In her lab coat pocket resided the pistol that the rancher had insisted she carry. As if it would be invincible when faced off against the watchtowers’ 8 mm machine guns.