Thinner(43)

'Me? You ask an old wop like me if I'm superstitious? Growing up in a family where my mother and grandmother and all my aunts went around hail-Marying and praying to every saint you ever heard of and another bunch you didn't ever hear of and covering up the mirrors when someone died and poking the sign of the evil eye at crows and black cats that crossed their path? Me? You ask me a question like that?'

'Yeah,' Billy said, smiling a little in spite of himself. 'I ask you a question like that.'

Richard Ginelli's voice came back, flat, hard, and totally devoid of humor. 'I believe in only two things, William. Guns and money, that's what I believe in. And you can quote me. Superstitious? Not me, paisan. You are thinking of some other dago.'

'That's good,' Billy said, and his own smile widened. It was the first real smile to sit on his face in almost a month, and it felt good - it felt damned good.

That evening, just after Heidi had come in, Penschley called.

'Your Gypsies have led us a merry chase,' he said. 'You've piled up damn near ten thousand dollars in charges already, Bill. Time to drop it?'

'Tell me what you've got first,' Billy said. His hands were sweating.

Penschley began to speak in his dry elder-statesman voice.

The Gypsy band had first gone to Greeno, a Connecticut city about thirty miles north of Milford. A week after they had been rousted from Greeno, they turned up in Pawtucket, near Providence, Rhode Island. After Pawtucket, Attleboro, Massachusetts. In Attleboro, one of them had been arrested for disturbing the peace and then had jumped his piddling bail.

'What seems to have happened is this,' Penschley said. 'There was a town fellow, sort of a bully, who lost ten bucks playing quarters on the wheel of chance. Told the operator it was rigged and that he would get even. Two days later he spotted the Gypsy coming out of a Nite Owl store. There were words between them, and then there was a fight in the parking lot. There were a couple of witnesses from out of town who say the town fellow provoked the fight. There were a couple more from in town who claim the Gypsy started it. Anyway, it was the Gypsy who got arrested. When he jumped bail, the local cops were delighted. Saved them the cost of a court case and got the Gypsies out of town.'

'That's usually how it works, isn't it?' Billy asked. His face was suddenly hot and burning. lie was somehow quite sure that the man who had been arrested in Attleboro was the same young man who had been juggling the bowling pins on the Fairview town common.

'Yes, pretty much,' Penschley agreed. 'The Gypsies know the scoop; once the fellow is gone, the local cops are happy. There's no APB, no manhunt. It's like getting a fleck of dirt in your eye. That fleck of dirt is all one can think about. Then the eye waters and washes it out. And once its gone and the pain stops, one doesn't care where that fleck of dirt went, does one?'

'A fleck of dirt,' Billy said. 'Is that what he was?'

'To the Attleboro police, that's exactly what he was. Do you want the rest of this now, Bill, or shall we moralize on the plight of various minority groups for a bit first?'

'Give me the rest, please.'

'The Gypsies stopped again in Lincoln, Mass. They lasted just about three days before getting the boot.'

'The same group every time? You're sure?'

'Yes. Always the same vehicles. There's a list here., with registrations - mostly Texas and Delaware tags. You want the list?'

'Eventually. Not now. Go on.'

There wasn't much more. The Gypsies had shown up in Revere, just north of Boston, had stayed ten days, and moved on of their own accord. Four days in Portsmouth, New Hampshire ... and then they had simply dropped out of sight.

'We can pick up their scent again, if you want,' Penschley said. 'We're less than a week behind now. There are three first-class investigators from Barton Detective Services on this, and they think the Gypsies are almost certainly somewhere in Maine by now. They've paralleled 1-95 all the way up the coast from Connecticut - hell, all the way up the coast from at least the Carolinas, from what the Greeley men were able to find of their back-trail. It's almost like a circus tour. They'll probably work the southern Maine tourist areas like Ogunquit and Kennebunkport, work their way up to Boothbay Harbor, and finish in Bar Harbor. Then, when the tourist season starts to run out, they'll head back down to Florida or the Texas gulf coast for the winter.'

'Is there an old man with them?' Billy asked. He was gripping the phone very tightly. 'About eighty? With a horrible nose condition - sore, cancer, something like that?'

A sound of riffling papers that seemed to go on forever. Then:

'Taduz Lemke,' Penschley said calmly. 'The father of the woman you struck with your car. Yes, he's with them.'

'Father?' Halleck barked. 'That's impossible, Kirk! The woman was old, around seventy, seventy-five

'Taduz Lemke is a hundred and six.'

For several moments Billy found it impossible to speak at all. His lips moved, but that was all. He looked like a man kissing a ghost. Then he managed to repeat: 'That's impossible.'

'An age we all could certainly envy,' Kirk Penschley said, 'but not at all impossible. There are records on all of these people, you know - they're not wandering around eastern Europe in caravans anymore, although I imagine some of the older ones, like this fellow Lemke, wish they were. I've got pix for you ... Social Security numbers . . . fingerprints, if you want them. Lemke has variously claimed his age to be a hundred and six, a hundred and eight, and a hundred and twenty. I choose to believe a hundred and six, because it jibes with the Social Security information that Barton operatives were able to obtain. Susanna Lemke was his daughter, all right, no doubt at all about that. And, for whatever it's worth, he's listed as "president of the Taduz Company" on the various gaming permits they've had to obtain ... which means he's the head of the tribe, or the band, or whatever they call themselves.'