Gypsy in Amber

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Roman raised his eyebrows with wonder.

  ‘It is presumptuous, I agree,’ Sloan said. ‘But apparently the man who ran into the van was hiding a dead girl in his car. If it hadn’t been for the accident, he probably would have gotten away with the crime.’

  ‘Didn’t the police tell you anything more?’

  ‘No.’ Sloan sighed. ‘An affair of passion most likely. That’s what these cases usually are. Emotional things.’

  Sloan opened his desk and took out four loose-leaf folders. The pages were full of notes and snapshots. He gave them to Roman to carry as they moved to his workshop. A sharp blend of turpentine and sawdust permeated the room. Dowels of varying thicknesses stood in an ascending line like the pipes of an organ. A large rotary saw stood on one side. On the walls were the dismantled trophies Roman had seen through the window: cabriole and reeded legs with hall-and-claw, hair paw, pad and spade feet. A bright fluorescent light in the shape of a halo hung from the ceiling.

  Roman put the notebooks down and took out his own notebook and pen. Sloan dragged a dropcloth off a small serving table. It was New England Sheraton rather than Philadelphian, from about 1800. At any auction it would draw a very good price and Roman had to admit it was museum class.

  ‘I purchased this for, let’s say five thousand. I’ll sell it for much more,’ Sloan told him. ‘Can you tell me how I was able to buy it for so little? Also, can you tell me where you have seen work by the same artist here?’

  Sloan was insatiable. A mania for tests was in the best of gaja, and it was something that Roman could never comprehend, an ‘it’s how you perform today that counts’ attitude that explained their frustration with sex. Served them right. Roman ran his hand along the fine carving of the legs and the glossy mahogany of the drawer fronts. He didn’t have the patience to keep Sloan in suspense.

  ‘Samuel McIntire did the carving, and you can see the design is basically the same as the mantel in your living room. I admired it the first day I was here. That puts us in Salem. McIntire didn’t do the lid on this top, however; that’s the trademark of William Hood. They collaborated on this piece. How did you get the bargain?’

  He opened the drawers. Except for lathing on the bottom of the sides to correct a droop, they were the originals.

  ‘The back. The back was broken in,’ Roman said.

  Sloan’s mouth dropped as far as it decently could.

  ‘How did you know that? You haven’t even pulled that table away from the wall to see the back.’

  If it had been yesterday when he needed to impress Sloan, Roman would have answered with some dramatics. Today he was a bored magician.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s all it could have been. Obviously everything else is in perfect condition. Besides, a few of the old traditions persisted in Salem into the nineteenth century. The witchcraft trials, you know, and some of the old fears. It wasn’t rare for a descendant of one of the accused ladies to have his house and all his furniture broken in some way after he died. It was supposed to ruin any hiding place that his spirit might try to reside in. Being thrifty New Englanders, they usually chose to do the damage someplace where it wouldn’t show. They must have been a strange people.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Sloan agreed. He pulled the table out. A new pine panel covered the back. ‘To think that a ghost would hide away in a table.’

  ‘A highboy would be more comfortable, wouldn’t it?’

  Confusion clouded Sloan’s face and then passed.

  ‘Oh, yes. I see what you mean. Much more comfortable.’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, as you no doubt suspect, I’ll stain the pine to match the rest of the table.’

  ‘You’ll use handwrought nails.’

  ‘Naturally. Look, they’re in. Tight as a coffin.’

  The serving table filled the first page of Roman’s notebook. There were others to come from Sloan’s collection, and both men had worked up an appetite by lunchtime.

  Chapter Ten

  Lunch was a salade niçoise and a bottle of Tavel. The delicate fare was starting to make Roman’s stomach growl in disdain. Sloan directed the conversation to the fictitious collectors whom Roman advised.

  ‘Without naming names, of course,’ Sloan said. ‘I understand the discretion involved. Even with nouveau riche. You use only New York dealers?’

  Roman said that wasn’t necessarily true. It was enough encouragement to keep Sloan talking until Roman’s salad bowl was empty.

  ‘Starving, aren’t you?’ Hillary asked.

  Sloan’s face turned red. ‘Get those animals out of here. I’ve told you a million times about those horses. The gardener hasn’t got time to clean up after them.’

  Hillary looked down and smiled. She was seated on a bay Morgan, and she held the reins of a second horse in her free hand. She was a good enough horsewoman to have crept up silently with the two. It was when she was arrogant that she was most her father’s daughter, and then both of them seemed to be set in clear plastic.

  ‘I’ll get them off the lawn on one condition. Mr Grey comes with me. He could use some exercise after being cooped up all morning with old chairs and tables.’

  ‘Mr Grey has a job to do. There are a number of things, porcelain, glass, that he has yet to see.’

  Hillary slouched in her saddle. ‘I can wait.’

  Sloan’s hand, the one with the signet ring, ran through his silver hair. He looked back and forth from his daughter to Roman, who assumed a pose of complete impartiality.

  ‘You don’t want him to see too much, do you, Father? He might get tired. Some riding in the open air might freshen him up.’

  Sloan lost some color in his cheeks.

  ‘Well, how about it?’ he asked Roman with the little grace he could muster.

  ‘I think you’ll have a surplus of fertilizer unless I do.’ Roman laughed. He approached his horse, a handsome bay with a star, and patted his neck. He always liked the hot sheen the coat of a good horse had.

  ‘Okay.’ Sloan gave in. ‘A short ride. I’ll expect you back in an hour.’

  ‘By the way,’ Roman said, ‘if you feel like it, you might want to set up some paints. We can discuss different methods of analysis when I return.’

  Hillary led the way off the lawn on her horse while Roman walked his. When he felt they were out of sight, he swung onto the horse’s back. They waited until a truck went by on the highway and crossed. A dirt road led to a stable and corral. They took another one into the woods.

  ‘What are you here for?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. What do you want? Why are you getting so friendly with my father?’

  She ducked under a branch as if it were an insult hardly worth noticing.

  ‘I’m making a list of antiques. Collectors who cooperate find me full of charm.’

  She looked at him shrewdly through golden lashes. ‘You claim to be a psychologist then.’

  ‘No. You learn how to deal with people in my profession.’

  ‘Oh, come on. I’m not as dumb as my father. I’d say if a man like you didn’t want something really badly from my father, you’d just blow him and his whole house down. I see you more around nightclubs or lions than a collection of antiques.’

  They came through a copse of trees to a meadow. The high grass steamed with insects in the afternoon sun. A thrush moved over the field in short dashes. Roman’s knees clamped the sides of the horse comfortably, though he would have preferred to do without the saddle.

  ‘It’s true I get violent over antimacassars,’ Roman confessed, slapping his horse’s neck. ‘What’s his name?’

  Hillary tilted her head to look at him. ‘You’re changing the subject.’ After a minute of silent riding, a genuine smile edged onto her lips. ‘His name’s Blaze. Not very original, is it?’

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘Brownie. They’re good horses all the same,’ she said proudly. The grasshoppers wildly evacuated their path as she scrutinized her riding partner. ‘Questi
ons now, Mr Grey? Something innocent first and then lead up to the biggies? But I can’t ask you questions, like what brings you into the bosom of the nation’s dullest family?’

  ‘I give up.’ Roman sighed. ‘I came for the secret of your scrod with mock cream sauce. If I can’t get that, I’ll settle for the salade niçoise made with Velveeta.’

  ‘Seriously. I can’t get it out of my mind why someone like you is interested in my father. Has he got himself involved in something?’

  Roman looked around. The girl’s questions were almost lost in the din of the insects. It wasn’t the noise that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up but the feeling that they weren’t alone.

  ‘You think your father’s done something wrong?’

  ‘Another question is not an answer.’ Tiny beads of sweat appeared at her hairline. The sun had lacquered Roman copper. ‘I happen to know you’re from the police.’ She paused. ‘Or the Mafia.’

  Roman slapped his hand over his face. She flushed and rode on with her jaw set firmly. He took his hand off his face to wipe the tears away, and she saw her suspicions were correct. He had been laughing. ‘God, I can’t wait until I see Isadore,’ he said. ‘The Mafia, what’ll be next?’

  ‘Very funny,’ Hillary agreed grimly. ‘So you’re just a poor man interested in antiques and mixing with the upper crust. You must ride pretty well then.’

  He was still wiping his eyes when Hillary stopped Brownie beside a raspberry bush and fed him some of the berries. Blaze nuzzled her hand until she gave some to him as well. They’d gone on another ten yards when Blaze’s ears perked up. He reared, stamping his two rear legs. The horse twisted the reins out of Roman’s hands and looked back, the pink sides of his eyes showing. The stirrups swung into his legs like ballpeen hammers. Roman caught one blurred look at Hillary’s satisfied beam before the horse bolted.

  Blaze was a strong young Morgan sixteen hands high, and he was going at top speed when he crashed into the woods. Roman simply tried to stay on. It was impossible to see through the branches that tried to pull him off. Suddenly the horse stumbled. Roman slid to one side just as the horse ended his fall against a tree, crushing his rider between himself and the trunk. Blaze regained his footing and plunged forward. Both of Roman’s hands were tangled in the Morgan’s mane. He was still on, but his chest refused to expand. There was a dark edge to his vision of the approaching trees. He batted his eyes trying to clear them. He felt the horse starting down an incline before he saw it.

  The underbrush became sparser as Blaze slid down the incline regaining velocity, and the black ring closed in on Roman’s sight. He could make out a stone fence at the bottom of the bank. The horse would never make the jump with him hanging on like a sack of cement. A shriek that wasn’t his own reverberated in his ears. Blaze’s flanks bunched in response to his training as they reached the end of the bank and the fence. There was no edge of Roman’s vision now, just total darkness.

  As Blaze coiled, Roman rose on his knees. There was little point in hesitating. He turned his heels in, squeezed them hard, and rolled all his weight forward onto the horse’s withers. He called ‘Jump,’ blindly and Blaze answered, throwing his sixteen hundred pounds into the air. The surge carried Roman weightlessly up, and he heard two sharp clicks, the sounds of Blaze’s front hooves grazing the edge of the wall.

  Roman flattened himself against the horse’s powerful muscles as it landed and came to a halt. When he straightened up, the knot that had been around his throat was off. He could make out lights and shadows. While the jumper stood and shook with fright, Roman spoke to him and smoothed the febrile trembling in his neck.

  Roman turned at the sound of a second horse coming down the bank. He could clearly see Hillary bringing Brownie expertly over the fence. She rode up looking very scared. Blaze shied when she joined them.

  ‘Oh, Mr Grey, I – ’

  ‘I know,’ Roman said. He slid off the horse to his feet and approached Blaze’s head, patting him all the way. One dark hand rubbed Blaze’s star, and the other delicately searched his nostrils until he brought out a tiny sprig. He sniffed it. ‘Rosemary, right? It would pep up the dullest horse, let alone a healthy one.’

  He took the horse by the reins and walked him to let him cool. Hillary got off Brownie and walked by his side. Her lips were tight, and he could almost hear her trying to think of something to say. He didn’t know what he wanted to say. She seemed authentically frightened now, but there was a point in the woods when she could have caught up and helped. He didn’t even hear her until he was going down the bank.

  ‘I just wanted to scare you.’

  ‘Weren’t you afraid I’d sic my mob on you?’ he asked sardonically.

  ‘I guess I made a mistake.’

  ‘I’d call it a tantrum. And now I’m throwing a tantrum.’ A noise of disgust came out of his throat. ‘Maybe this will teach me not to go riding with flirts on horses named Blaze.’

  He sat down where he was under a tree.

  Roman struggled to stifle a painful laugh of rue. Hillary sat down with him and stared. The horses wandered deeper into the shade of the tree, a large old oak.

  ‘I almost get you killed and you think it’s funny. You are the strangest person I’ve ever met,’ she said.

  ‘You lead a sheltered life.’ He stuck a blade of grass in his mouth. His jacket was torn, but it was plain he wasn’t losing any blood.

  ‘Now I know you’re not here just to look at Daddy’s antiques.’

  Roman frowned. ‘Daddy? I thought it was something more formal, like Father or Pater.’

  ‘In moments of stress I revert,’ she confessed. ‘Not often, I guarantee you.’

  ‘I’ll take your word.’ He rejected the blade and chose another. ‘You’ve got him on the run with that threat about me seeing too much. What is it, phony labels?’

  Hillary picked a blade of grass for herself.

  ‘I saw the paper through the window this morning,’ Roman went on, ‘and I saw the ink when I went into the workshop with your father.’

  She took the blade from her mouth and tossed it like a tiny green spear. ‘Isn’t he the phony? Christ! If he’d been on Blaze, he would have fainted. And if he’d caught me afterward, he would have killed me.’

  ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘What about your mother?’ He thought she might react with her police suspicions. She simply shook her head.

  ‘No mother, not even a picture anymore. She had “bad blood,” according to my father, who is the one person in the twentieth century who still uses that phrase. The truth is she was coming home from a charity ball one night and she drove the car into the Charles River, taking her lover with her. Now, when I come home at four in the morning, which is usual whenever I’m at home, my father tells me that I have “bad blood.” I haven’t got a generation gap with him, I’ve got a historical gap.’

  She drew the pack of Gauloises from his shirt pocket and lit one for each of them. As Roman accepted the cigarette in his mouth, his eyes half shut, she studied him. The bridge of his nose was sharp enough for a knife, and his skin looked as if it had been patiently oiled by a tanner. Instead of being trim, his waist was a solid continuation of his barrel chest, and yet, in all, there was something uniquely appealing about the combination.

  ‘The language you were speaking to Blaze when I came up. It was Gypsy, wasn’t it?’ she said softly.

  Roman was surprised. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘A teacher introduced me to some once in Switzerland. So your name isn’t really Grey, is it?’

  ‘Yes. Not the color gray; there isn’t such a color to Gypsies. The closest translation would be “horse,” actually.’

  ‘Oh,’ Hillary said in a chastened voice. ‘Many famous Gypsy jockeys?’

  ‘ “Jockey” is a Gypsy word.’

  They nodded at each other, compressing smiles on their lips.

  ‘Give me s
ome other words,’ she said. ‘I’m interested.’

  ‘Okay.’ He looked up at the underbellies of the leaves. ‘Since you seek enlightenment, a camo djili:

  Paownie birks

  My men-engri shall be;

  Yackors my dudes

  Like ruppeny shine:

  Atch meery chi,

  Majal away,

  Perhaps I may not dick tute

  Kek komi.’

  His voice was husky, conversational, but there was an energy in it she hadn’t heard before. Hillary was suddenly aware that the strange language he was speaking was his first tongue, the one he thought in.

  ‘I liked it. What was it?’ she asked.

  ‘A love song. It goes, in a slightly bowdlerized version:

  I’d choose as pillows for my head

  Those snow-white breasts of thine.

  I’d use as lamps to light my bed

  Those eyes of silver shine.

  O lovely maid, disdain me not,

  Nor leave me in my pain,

  Perhaps ’twill never be my lot

  To see thy face again.’

  Hillary was more affected than he’d expected. She turned away and stubbed her cigarette out on the ground.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s pretty trite stuff,’ she said brutally.

  ‘Gypsies are pretty simple people,’ Roman said, taken aback. ‘You’re a modern, sophisticated girl. A Gypsy isn’t. A friend of mine has been telling me all about primitive insects found in amber. That’s what Gypsies are. Anachronisms, throwbacks. Living fossils and they don’t know. Appreciate them while you can.’ He didn’t like lecturing; but he liked her now, and he wanted to get through.

  ‘Now you’re being trite. Come on, my father is waiting for you.’

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. Blaze whinnied amiably as they approached. At least someone had a sentimental soul, Roman told himself. Hillary looked in every direction but his.