Gypsy in Amber

by Martin Cruz Smith

They were riding back through the field where Blaze had bolted when Hillary put her hand on Roman’s thigh.

  ‘The song was fine. Really. We can stop here if you like.’

  She’d already reined Brownie to a halt, and he stopped Blaze.

  ‘Don’t worry. You didn’t hurt my feelings.’

  ‘I’d like to, very much. Wouldn’t you?’ she asked.

  She was sincere. Her blue eyes held his frankly. The golden body that rode so lightly would be very real and pleasant under him.

  ‘Yes, I would. But I won’t.’

  He dug his heels into Blaze’s sides, disrupting the kingdom of the grasshoppers, leaving before he changed his mind.

  Chapter Eleven

  The room was in dark except for one flame, a fat verdigris glow that lit only the nostrils, cheeks and brows of the two men so that they looked like nothing more than grotesque levitating masks. The strong stench of rotten eggs permeated the room.

  ‘It all depends on the amount of zinc,’ Roman said. ‘That and whether you use earth pigments or chemical compounds.’

  ‘This is safer than tasting?’ Sloan asked.

  ‘Not as a steady atmosphere. On the other hand, sulfur and lead won’t do your stomach any good.’

  Sloan squinted into the fumes of the flame he held in the teaspoon. Roman turned aside to breathe. They had been burning paints in Sloan’s workshop for two hours. He had to give the man credit: Sloan was a fast learner.

  ‘You can make the pigments also?’ Sloan asked.

  ‘Sure, if you want to take the trouble. Buying it in the store is simpler and cheaper.’

  ‘Naturally, naturally,’ Sloan agreed. ‘But I’m restoring the récamier. I’m not going to be able to buy orpiment in any store, am I?’

  ‘No,’ Roman admitted.

  ‘Well then, how difficult is it to make? I’ll have to have some.’

  ‘Not difficult at all.’

  ‘How?’

  Roman felt one heartbeat pass through his chest like a train in the dark. There was no way to avoid an answer.

  ‘Simple. All you need is sulfur, arsenic and a covered crucible. Heat it and let it cool. The orpiment will gather on the cover.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes. And don’t mix it with lead or copper carbonate because neither will go with a sulfide. And don’t taste it.’

  ‘It’s that powerful?’ Sloan urged.

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to poison anybody with it,’ Roman said lightly. ‘It would be impossible to disguise the taste. Some artists have died, though, without wanting to.’

  Sloan blew the flame out, and the room was black for a moment until Roman put the light on. The dealer was not trying to hide his satisfaction. He’d learned more in one afternoon than he had in a year. The future unfolded as a calendar of profits in his mind. Roman opened the door and stepped into the office. The stink of sulfur had insinuated itself there, too, and he went on to the living room without waiting for his host.

  ‘I suppose you’re hungry,’ Sloan said when he caught up.

  Dinner was a cold salmon. Roman paid more attention to the brandy. He’d had his fill of the gaja household and its diet. What he wanted now was a hot stew bright with paprika with the loud arguing of hungry Romanies, not gelid civility. He withdrew into himself as Hillary tried to gain his attention with her wit. If he had pumped the father and daughter dry, they had pumped him, too. Sloan attempted to draw him into a dispute over the merits of the Reveres and got nothing but grunts. It didn’t matter to Sloan. He would be rid of his guest tomorrow, and he had what he wanted.

  Roman retired early, going to his room and making a bed for himself on the floor. He put an ashtray beside him and smoked one Gauloise after another in the dark. Below he could hear them still carrying on. Sloan wanted to know what she and the Armenian had been doing in the woods for so long. She said he wasn’t Armenian, and who was her father to talk about fooling around? He said he didn’t care what Grey was; he wanted her to stay away from him. They weren’t yelling. From the tone of their voices, a conversational hum, many people wouldn’t have been aware that they were arguing. But it was far hotter than any talk Roman had heard between them before. The strain of living together for even a short time was beginning to split their charade at the seam. The wooden beams of the old house carried their mutual hate like a wire transmitting electricity.

  She excused herself and left to drive to Boston to see some friends. Sloan said good-night and reminded her that she knew what he’d do if any of her friends showed up around his house. Roman expected Sloan to go to his bedroom soon after that, but instead he moved to his office. The sounds of drawers opening and feet pacing went on for two hours. At last, Sloan slammed the office door shut, locked it, and went upstairs to bed. Roman waited another hour for his host to fall asleep.

  He got up and opened a window that looked out over the back lawn. The stars were very bright, dimming only where they came close to the nearly full moon. Scorpio sprawled up from the trees. Cassiopeia, the Queen of Ethiopia, reigned over duller subjects. Roman’s cigarette imitated a shooting star as it spun out the window to the grass.

  No gardener on a night shift appeared. Roman sat on the sill with his stockinged feet hanging over the two-story drop to the lawn. He let go and came down on the grass on all fours. He had a moment of fear when he lost his breath, but it returned as he moved back into the shadow of the house. The last thing he wanted was to be staggering about blind and gagging outside a locked house. He was in the garden where Sloan had first offered him a glass of wine. The marble bathers held each other for warmth under the moon. He moved around the trellis to the rose garden and past to where the house spread to accommodate Sloan’s workshop and office. Roman stopped in front of the image of himself in Sloan’s office.

  Sloan’s arrogance showed in the precautions he took against theft. There was no electric alarm system, just two impressively heavy bolts on the sides of the window. During the time Roman spent in the office while Sloan sorted out paints and spoons, he’d had ample time to remove the latch screws. The sturdy bolts were shot and secure, but Roman lifted the window easily, the bar carrying the latch with it.

  Roman passed through the office into the workshop. Because Sloan kept his silver there, he’d kept a closer eye on Roman in this room. The paints were still out, and sulfur clung to the air. He picked out the saw with his pocket flashlight. It was a relatively new machine, large enough to split a tree with, no doubt an instrument of pride to its owner. A ring of curling teeth rested in the thin slot. Roman took the saw out of gear and turned the wheel slowly in the light’s beam. There was no sign of blood. The teeth had been cleaned very recently.

  He turned the light onto the floor. The sawdust was new, and there were no stains under it that he could see. He crouched next to the wheel and examined the slot it lay in. The cleaning hadn’t been as thorough here. The back end of the groove was spotted brown. It would take sawing a board dripping with stain to produce them, if it were stain.

  In another half hour there was nothing else to find in the shop besides the metal stamps Sloan did his forging with. A sample read: ‘Mills & Deming, 374 Queen ftreet, two doors above the Friends Meeting, NEW YORK, Makes and fells, all kinds of Cabinet Furniture and Chairs, after the moft modern fafhions and on reafonable terms.’ Mills and Deming had been master cabinetmakers, but they didn’t print their labels with a border that only became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  He went into the office. Through the window he saw how the sky had shifted. It was about 2 a.m. None of the files was locked, and he didn’t bother with them. There wasn’t enough time. Every drawer in the desk was locked. Roman took a ring of thin metal rods from his pants pocket. Working fast, bending a variety of rods of differing lengths, he created a key for each set of tumblers.

  He found the typical gaja idea of valuables. There were papers to the house, stocks and bonds, insurance policies, bills of sale,
loan notes, memberships in clubs, newspaper clippings with the Sloan name, five hundred dollars in cash, checkbooks, deposit slips and a list of Sloan’s customers. There was nothing of recent business that demanded Sloan stay up two nights in a row.

  The letters were in the back of the bottom drawer. They were unlike any of the other papers, written in longhand, the address in a girl’s rounded manner. There was no return address. There were fifteen in all, and he chose the latest one, postmarked a week ago. Roman could hear Hillary now, ‘. . . who are you to talk about fooling around?’

  Dear Hoddinot,

  Today passed as slowly as if it were a year. You joke about life being more enjoyable the slower it goes. It’s not very funny to me. As it is, I spend all my time thinking about us.

  Writing again. The head librarian came by to make sure I was filing. She’s jealous because starting Monday, I have a week’s vacation and she doesn’t want to do the work herself.

  Back again. She’s finally gone to lunch. At last I can get down to it. I’m sorry it takes so long to work up to things, I’d meant to make it short and sweet. The fact is I meant what I said on the telephone. This is the end. It took a long while to sink in, but now I finally realize that we aren’t getting anywhere. Or, I should say, I’m not getting anywhere.

  As a matter of fact, I’m just beginning to figure out what a fool I’ve been. Never being seen with you in public. Sneaking into New York to some sordid hotel and never telling my friends where I’m going and who this fascinating older man is who’s going to marry me. Calling you late at night so the servants won’t catch on. And why? Because society isn’t ready for me yet. I have to be introduced properly to become an eligible wife for Hoddinot Sloan. As if meeting you for weekends in New York was helping me get introduced in Boston! I guess I’m just sick of hearing you say that we just haven’t set the date.

  This isn’t easy. Ever since you came into the library that day I’ve been in love with you. Maybe you’re in love with me. All I know is that Monday I leave for the Virgin Islands, and when I come back, I have an interview to become a stewardess. I’m good-looking and fairly smart, and they say I shouldn’t have any trouble. I know how you feel about stewardesses, but let’s admit it, thanks to you I’m no virgin anymore.

  So I finally agree with you. I’m too young, too lower-class, too gauche to ever fit into your society. Let’s just call it quits and part friends. Don’t worry about me; all your secrets are safe.

  Love,

  Judy

  Roman turned to the first page. The letterhead had an embossed script reading: ‘Judy Mueller.’ He folded the letter neatly and put it back with the others. Scorpio was searching the middle of the sky as Roman climbed up the trellis to the second floor.

  Roman’s eyes adjusted to the more complete darkness of his bedroom. There was a subtle change in it. The hundred and twenty-five million optical rods that marked man as a night animal reflected faint patterns of light and shadow. The four thin posts of his bed were partially broken, snapped where they rose from the frame and joined over the center of the bed to form a pyramid. Something was moving, though Roman was sure nobody else was in the room.

  He turned the flashlight on toward the top of the pyramid. A string hung from it, and the light followed it down to within a foot of the bed, where, slowly describing circles with the open cone, was the frozen ivory grin and matted hair of a devil’s head.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was afternoon by the time he got back to New York. Nobody had seen him off at the Sloans’; he’d left before they rose. Because it was Sunday, there were few cars on the streets, and Manhattan’s sky was relatively clear. The sidewalks seemed populated entirely by young couples in leather pants and psychedelic shirts walking Afghans and Great Danes. Their parents no doubt had all locked themselves in their apartments with their air conditioners.

  When he unlocked the door to his apartment, Dany was there, lying on the sofa, eating unionized grapes, and leafing through fashion magazines. Roman kicked his suitcase under a side chair and threw his jacket and tie over it.

  ‘Hi. I thought you were going to do some shooting on the island this weekend.’

  ‘We got it done in one day. The rest of the gang stayed up there, but I decided to come back. In case you did.’ She held up a center spread hosiery ad. ‘Don’t you think I have better legs?’

  ‘Models are insane.’

  Dany frowned. He always said that when she asked for his opinion. She had the feeling that he meant it.

  He stole a grape from her and ate it. She did have better legs, but he refused to encourage the vanity that served as a soul for a professional model. She was in nothing but an old happy jacket of his, her tan limbs and tilt of the head inviting a phantom photographer with a motorized Nikon to pop up from the other side of the sofa.

  ‘Find what you wanted?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ He scratched the stubble that was taking over his chin. Even in a tuxedo on the steps of the opera, he’d look as if he had come to hold the place up.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A family. The all-American family.’

  He went to the bathroom to shower off the sweat of the ride and shave. He picked up a roll of adhesive tape and came back into the living room in a towel.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Dany said. A grape stopped an inch from her lips. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

  He raised his arms. ‘Tape me up, will you?’ Last night’s activities had irritated the tear. During the shower he’d kept his eyes away from the bruise that ran from his shoulder to his navel. Now that he saw it it hurt.

  ‘A truck run over you?’

  ‘A tree, believe it or not.’

  She circled him until a wide white band covered part of his chest.

  ‘Looks like a bruised plum,’ she said, running her finger down the discoloration. ‘I’m sorry. That wasn’t much of a welcome, was it?’

  She kissed him, first on the cheek and then on the mouth. Roman’s arms found themselves inside the cotton happy jacket. The pain was subsiding.

  ‘Speaking of bruised plums,’ he said.

  ‘Stop that. You’re tickling me.’

  Hillary’s come-on in the field had left its residue of desire. The happy jacket dropped to the floor beside the towel. He pressed Dany into him, conscious as always of the contrast in colors, a contrast that became more marked as contact became more intimate.

  ‘You’ve gained some weight,’ he told her. ‘You’ll lose your job, but I like it.’

  ‘And what will you do when I lose my job?’

  ‘Get you a crystal ball and teach you how to tell fortunes.’

  ‘I’d never be able to tell fortunes. I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing a minute from now.’

  He grinned broadly.

  ‘Well, that, of course,’ she said.

  ‘Then why fight fate any longer?’

  It was four thirty when Roman woke up. The room was in what shade they could get by closing the drapes on an afternoon. Dany, asleep and content, rested her head on his bruised arm. The sheet was down at the foot of the bed so that the air could blow over their bodies. Her breasts sagged slightly to the sides over her rib cage. They were supposed to be a bit too big for her business. What was it that made Americans demand large breasts in their fantasies and flat breasts on their models? To a Romany a woman’s breasts were not a sex object. They were out in the open too much, suckling children in a room full of friends or before anyone’s eyes on the public road. On Dany, he had to admit, they were sex objects. If she ever succeeded at what she hinted, if they ever did marry, would she suckle her children in front of her friends from Long Island?

  Painstakingly he slid his arm out from under her and rolled off the bed. He went into the living room and closed the bedroom door. When he’d put the towel back around his waist, he sat by the telephone with the phone book and opened a fresh pack of cigarettes. He called Pan American first. A recording st
alled him for a minute, and then a girl came on the line.

  ‘Hello,’ Roman said. ‘This is the First National Bank travel bureau, Mr Baldwin calling. We would like to check on a reservation made for a Miss Mueller. M-u-e-l-l-e-r. Judy Mueller, for last Monday to the Virgin Islands.’

  ‘That would be St Thomas?’ the girl asked.

  ‘That’s right. She was supposed to join a tour down there, part of the travel package that we handle. She never did join it. That isn’t really that unusual. Often younger clients prefer to disappear on their vacations. But the tour director has just called me to say that her flight is about to leave for the States and Miss Mueller still hasn’t shown up. I wonder if you could check your records and tell me whether she made her flight down to the islands.’

  ‘Could you tell me the number of her flight?’

  ‘I’m afraid that part of the office is closed on Sundays.’

  The girl was obviously pondering the request on the other end.

  ‘This is very irregular.’

  ‘I understand. But the tour director is very concerned, and so am I. We feel some obligation to our customers to make sure of their well-being.’

  There was another wait.

  ‘Could I have your name, please, miss?’ Roman said. ‘I’d like to know it the next time I see your supervisor.’

  ‘Wait a moment while I ask the computer,’ she retorted crisply.

  Roman was putting out a cigarette when the girl came back.

  ‘We have no Miss Mueller on any flights for St Thomas last week. What’s this all about?’

  He hung up.

  That was a blank. Pan Am was the only airline he knew of that flew to the Virgin Islands; it was the one Dany had taken the year before. She was tight with her money, though; she would have shopped around. He went back into the bedroom.

  ‘Hey, Dany. Come on. Let’s go.’

  She struggled up on her elbows. ‘You don’t have to lift my eyelid. You know that wakes me up.’ She rubbed her face. ‘God.’