Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(84)
Hefting Goldman’s inert body, Duke bridged the few feet of pitching water to the dock and the waiting wheelchair. “I’m right sorry, ma’am,” he told the stunned and watery-eyed young woman.
Romy’s brother, stripped of his prison uniform’s shirt and, its trousers rolled above his knees in what would hopefully pass as casual swimwear, joined Romy and Irina. Whether it was due to the years in prison, the torture, or the surgical experiments, whatever, he did possess a softer, maybe a more effeminate look, so that he and Romy could have almost passed for identical twins. Almost.
“We had best get out of here, Sis,” he warned her. “No time to waste.”
Then this was it.
Irina, Luca, and Romy were on their own. Duke had done what he had set out to do. Since Romy stubbornly wanted to remain in Germany, he, at least, had helped bust her brother out of prison.
She had been the problem child – both his headache and his heartache. And this filled him with unfamiliar horror. Caring meant feeling, and in his logs no feeling at all was better than suffering.
Overhead, the seagulls’ shrieking ‘haa-haa-haa’ sounded to him like mocking laughter.
“Then let’s get underway,” he told Giorgio. “We have a lot of miles still between us and Rotterdam.”
Giorgio stuck his thumbs in his trouser pockets and, with a hang-dog expression, stared down at the gray, weather-worn dock planking. His brogan, its stitching loose at the sole of one toe, played with the piling’s rope. “This is the end of the road for me, my man.”
Romy’s teary-eyed attention bounded from Goldman’s slack body to Giorgio. “What? Ye’re na guiding Duke back to Rotterdam?”
Sheepishly, he shrugged and shot an imploring glance at Irina, who was already releasing the wheelchair’s brake.
Fretfully, she gaped back. If one could look grief-stricken, confused, and exalted at once, Irina did. “You are sure this is what you want, my love?”
“But yuir clan, Giorgio,” Romy protested, fists on hips, “yuir wife and wee bairn are back there. In Rotterdam.”
“Not to quibble with ye, Romy, but sometimes the calling of love is greater than the calling of the clan. Besides,” he defended, “Zelda has her clan there to care for her and the babe – not even sure it’s mine, for that matter.”
“Come on, then,” Luca said, nudging forward Romy with a hand at the back of her waist. “Precious time is passing.”
Well, Duke had been in ports all over the world. He could certainly navigate the barge to the confluence of the Havel with the Elbe. He didn’t need Giorgio. And from there, it would be afoot to Rotterdam. A mere 350 miles give or take, as the crow flied. He hunkered to loose the rope’s knot.
But Romy wasn’t propelled forward so easily. She whirled on Luca. “The stupid gadje doesn’t even speak German,” and Duke could hear in her voice not only mere disgust for Giorgio but self-disgust. “Someone has to help him get there.”
“And I guess that that would be yuirself?” Luca charged.
As she looked from her brother to Duke and back to Luca again, her warring emotions were shooting stars that flared out in her eyes. “Aye, I guess that would be meself.”
“Are ye barmy?” Luca shouted, his hoarse voice, however, but a rasp after his years of internment.
With a fateful shrug of her narrow shoulders, she sighed heavily. “Aye. Barmy, I be.”
§ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE §
As it turned out, the barge did not even make it down the Havel as far as the Elbe.
At the pilot wheel, Duke knew it wouldn’t be long before the SS patrols boats were running the river in both directions, stopping every similar barge. In addition, a ferocious storm was brewing on the western horizon.
He was powerfully aware of Romy, scrunched in the deck chair against the chilly wind coming off the water and already asleep. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her by moving her to the deckhouse, so he had draped his heavy suede jacket over her, huddled as she was in her too thin, bloodied lab coat.
Occasionally, he heard her whimper. For the loss of Goldman? For the clan left behind? For the dangerous journey ahead?
Toward noon, he anchored off an isolated and tree-sheltered cove in the bend of the Havel not far from the village of Babelsberg. His plans were to hide out, catch maybe a couple of hours’ sleep, then, if weather permitted, travel at nightfall, which came early with late autumn. While darkness meant less risk of being caught, it also meant higher risk of running afoul of sandbars, drifting debris, and snags.
He slid an arm beneath her shoulders and under her knees, cradling her against his rib cage. Her eyes opened, and from beneath damp lashes she peered up at him questioningly. He grimaced and shifted his gaze ahead, careful to step over the coils of rope and duck the deck house’s lintel.
Smelling of mildew and diesel, the deckhouse was banked on both sides by dust-coated windows and, under them, benches wide enough to snooze. The cabin contained a dimly-glowing, pot-bellied stove and, beneath the forward’s bank of windows, a central counter with storage units for provisions.
He lowered her small, shivering body onto one of the bench’s frayed cushions and tucked his jacket flaps around the curves of her small shoulders. Gently, he removed her clubbed heels. Then, he knelt to stoke the stove’s fire. Not that much wood remained.