Gypsy in Amber

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Even the confrontations when festival guards had to identify themselves seemed to be just another part of the show. A boy with electrified orange hair had violated a commune’s stew, and a guard on a motor scooter stopped to escort him to the highway. Immediately a ring of a hundred people gathered, most of them with Nikons or Leicas. Some of them sported heavy movie cameras. The boy pulled his shirt on, and the guard tried to comfort him, explaining there were still some things you couldn’t do at a rock festival. The boy got more upset, and finally, when it appeared he would cry, he hauled off and slugged the guard in the face. A thousand people were watching the familiar pantomime by now as the two grappled in the dust. There were some shouts of ‘police brutality,’ but they were halfhearted. A car prodded its way through the spectators, and the boy was slung in the back.

  ‘That wasn’t so bad. Thirty feet of action,’ the man next to Roman said. He was a lean perspiration-soaked individual with a dark crew cut and a wrinkled sports shirt. A film camera was balanced on a shoulder saddle. ‘Hell, they make you pay fifty dollars to bring the camera in, you want to get something in return.’

  He told Roman where the public phones were. Roman had to wait fifteen minutes in a line before he got to the phone, and then it took the operator another five minutes to get a clear line to Boston and another five to find Isadore.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Isadore demanded. ‘What’s with this trip? I’ve been calling your place all day, and Miss Murray just knows you aren’t there.’

  ‘I’d tell you, but I don’t want the local constabulary on my back.’

  ‘Wait for me then.’

  ‘Too late now. It would take you too long to get here. What changed your mind?’

  ‘Who said I changed my mind? We’re still holding Sloan. It’s just that what you said about marks interested me. It reminded me of something else, too. There were scratches all over the dash of Nanoosh’s car. There was only one that looked familiar at all, round scratches that you get from one of those little magnetic saints. Did Nanoosh have one of those?’

  ‘Of course. Wasn’t it in his car?’

  ‘Damn it. It was on the road, and we thought it came from the van. Now that I remember, though, there weren’t any marks like that on the van. Then I saw it again. Roman, are you going to tell me where you are?’

  ‘No, but I assume you’re having the call traced. I’ve been timing it, and it’s been three minutes, and the operator hasn’t interrupted yet.’

  ‘Don’t fool around, Roman. I never was happy about the way that roommate changed her story on Sloan. I think there just may be a connection between that and what happened last night. So if you think you know who those people were at your place, just tell me. At least wait where you are for me to show up.’

  ‘You’re stalling,’ Roman said.

  ‘You’re goddamn right I’m stalling.’

  He placed the phone gently on the receiver and walked back out to the festival ground for a second tour. Isadore didn’t understand, and even if he did, it was too late. He was threatened, Dany was threatened, and even if both of them escaped, that left a killer running loose. He was happy for the first reason because that left himself loose to act. There was another reason, too. In a petty but strong way, it offended him that the gaja dressed their threats in magic. The devil’s head and the bloody doll irritated him instead of cowing him. The gaja world was for combustion engines, bank accounts and profitable rock festivals. The other world, the one of the immaterial, of vampires and ghouls, was the Rom’s unlucky birthright.

  A group of kids shaved and dressed as lamas shuffled by with chants of ‘Om!’

  Isadore needed evidence, he didn’t. One look at Sloan was enough. The collection of antiques and snobbery was a wall against inadequacy. If he’d actually murdered a girl, he simply would have fled, not butchered and shipped her coolly in his own antiques. Isadore didn’t know the evidence when he had it. The rotary saw would have bathed the workshop in blood if it had gone through the neck of a person whose heart was still beating, as the coronor claimed. Instead, the cuts had been made by a weapon without a point. There was only one knife Roman knew of like that, the bhotani, the executioner’s sword.

  The lamas did a slow sort of Mexican hat dance with their feet. They were a pink, soft lot with vacant stares. The excitement in the area came from what appeared to be a circus.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A clown in a startling jacket of patches walked on high stilts juggling large, varicolored balls over the heads of the crowd. His face was painted with red eyebrows and a red mouth. He executed an about-face and strode back to a second performer on stilts. The other one had the same painted face and a court jester’s outfit of a belled cap, curly-toed slippers and checkerboard jacket and leggings.

  Roman worked his way to the front of the spectators. A chubby girl in a long peasant dress was juggling Indian clubs while two other girls kept time with small cymbals. From time to time one of them danced with streamers, turning herself around like a Maypole. The lamas didn’t have a chance. They muttered an ‘Om’ or two and went on their way, leaving the audience to the circus.

  At the end of the music, the clown let himself fall forward off his stilts, tumbling and landing on his feet artfully. The much smaller jester was content merely to jump down. Before the crowd could break up, the jester explained that what they had seen was a troupe of jongleurs. The jongleur, he said, was an ancient and respected profession. During the Dark Ages, jongleurs not only entertained the nobility of the time but also served as tutors for their children. They were harbingers of news from the outside world and repositories of knowledge. It was the jongleur who kept the lamp of reason burning during the dangerous Middle Ages. Testament to this, he said, was the high number of nobility who left their castles to roam the land as jongleurs themselves. Richard the Lionhearted was the best-known example.

  ‘This is the new Dark Age, a dangerous, ignorant time. So we have chosen to revive the profession of the jongleur as a most honorable and necessary trade. We too roam the land. First as entertainers’ – here there was a rattle of cymbals – ‘and second as seekers of knowledge. Naturally, we are dependent on your generosity for what we eat and drink.’

  It was a charming and informative presentation, and when one of the girls came around with a peaked hat held out for contributions, Roman put in ten dollars.

  ‘Nice dance, Hillary. What else do you do?’

  He thought she was going to run, but she controlled herself.

  ‘Sometimes I sing.’

  ‘I’ll wait around to hear you.’

  Her friends had seen him. They weren’t bolting either. The jester talked some more as the troupe prepared new entertainment for their audience. The clown pulled musical instruments from the front of a Volkswagen microbus that had been spray painted in psychedelic colors. Then he went to the rear of the bus to untether a billy goat that had been lazily chewing grass around the wheels. He led the goat to the center of the ring.

  ‘The traditional pet of the jongleur is the goat. Pan, the symbol of fertility,’ the jester said. The girls struck their tambourines. The goat’s ears perked up, and it stood on its rear legs. It walked awkwardly, its front hooves bouncing off its chest.

  ‘To the superstitious people of the Dark Ages, the horned goat was the manifestation of the devil. You probably remember how in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Esmeralda was arrested for consorting with Satan simply because she danced with her pet goat. For this reason, Gypsies were often tormented by peasants of the time for training goats to dance, although, in fact, the Gypsies were as ignorant of supernatural secrets as their persecutors.’

  The clown jumped in front of the goat. He waved a painted wand, and the goat’s eyes followed it, the horned head bobbing and its rear legs hopping to keep up with the baton. The jester forsook his spiel for a flute, and the girls sang a medieval air. It was pretty and earnest, and Roman could tell the kids watching accepted it as part of th
eir own new world. When the song was over and the goat was being taken back to the microbus, the jester skipped into the ring. The girls roamed through the audience, and Roman was taking his wallet out when he received a jab in the side. It was the crew-cut cameraman who had been at the scuffle.

  ‘Keep your eye on this. They do it every show.’ He pressed his hollow cheek to his eyepiece.

  The big clown brought out a wooden bull’s-eye nine feet across and set it against a tree. He stationed himself with his back to the bull’s-eye, his arms and legs cutting the colored lines into quadrants, looking straight ahead at the jester twenty-five feet away. The kids emptied their pockets so they wouldn’t be searching for change when the action began. The jester made a rambling speech overloaded with quotes. Roman paid no attention to it, fixing his eyes on the narrow fingers that played with a silver fan of knives. The girls returned, and the jester looked indulgently on the money they poured into a chamois sack.

  ‘And now the last member of our troupe as I promised you: death.’ The jester toed a mark and let his weight rest on his back foot. He selected one knife from the rest. Roman could feel the crowd growing from the pressure on his back. With no more fanfare the jester’s arm came forward and the knife appeared three inches from the clown’s belt. The clown didn’t budge. The jester chose another knife, weighted it and threw. It appeared two inches from the other side of the belt. Roman looked at the target’s face. There was no anxiety. A third knife popped up next to his shoulder.

  ‘Not bad,’ the cameraman commented. ‘Not professional but not bad.’ A boy next to them frowned for quiet. The cameraman gave him an obscene gesture and went on. ‘Of course, the knives are coming out from the back of the bull’s-eye and the little guy is palming the ones he pretends to throw. An illusion, you know what I mean.’

  Roman had picked a spot halfway between the jester and the clown where there was a solid background of dark leaves. For an instant that was practically invisible he caught the flutter of a metallic bird. A new knife perched beside the clown’s throat.

  ‘You know these kids pretty well,’ Roman said.

  ‘Hell, I see right through them,’ the cameraman muttered.

  The jester raised his empty hands. The clown stepped away from the bull’s-eye and did the same, if possible even more calmly than the jester. ‘They’re so hopped up on drugs they couldn’t . . .’ He described what they couldn’t do, in detail.

  ‘Thank you, gentlefolk,’ the jester said, ‘for your good vibrations and even more for your money.’ The cameraman spluttered an expletive of agreement. ‘See you tomorrow, and may hallucinations of sugarplums dance through your heads.’

  The girls drifted into the applauding crowd for a last donation. ‘See what I mean about drugs?’ the cameraman said. He let his heavy machine slide off his shoulder and hang by a scrawny arm. His short-sleeved shirt had turned completely gray with perspiration. ‘Say, how’d you like to join me in a few drinks back in Sandwich. We could scare up some action, some groupies. The boys are all queer, but some of the girls aren’t so bad.’

  ‘I see you’re a married man,’ Roman said, looking at the ring on the man’s hand. ‘It must be fun having something in common with your kids.’ He turned back and watched the clown pull the knives from the bull’s-eye. The cameraman was flushed, but he couldn’t read anything hostile in Roman’s dark face because Roman had erased him from his mind.

  ‘You know the trouble with you jigs,’ he said at last. ‘Nobody’s good enough for you.’ When he didn’t get a reply, he slapped a cap over the lens furiously and left, pushing his way through the departing crowd.

  Hillary deliberately collected from the far side. The chubby girl was near Roman. She had a timid smile and a heavy application of makeup. He put a fifty-dollar bill in her tambourine.

  ‘Wow, thanks!’

  The crowd had almost dispersed, and she waved the bill at the jester to get his attention. She blushed immediately, regretfully, but the jester had seen her and came over. He had one of the knives in his hand. He was thin, and his dark eyes moved over Roman speculatively.

  ‘I thought you might want to contribute something,’ he said as menacingly as he could.

  Roman smiled, although he was anything but happy. For a short while he hoped he was wrong and that the jester was the one he was looking for. The first threatening overtone destroyed that wishful thought.

  ‘Oh, no,’ the clown said. He’d eased his way through the last of the crowd without Roman’s noticing. He stood, taller than any of them, with his arms out in a gesture of friendship. Roman saw evenly planed, handsome features through the red-and-white greasepaint. The clown pulled his belled cap off, and a mane of blond hair fell to his shoulders. He smiled as broadly as Roman, the red mouth curling in satisfaction. ‘Don’t you know the correct greeting is sarisban?’

  Roman put on his own mask of delighted surprise. The clown motioned Hillary to join them.

  ‘You’re a friend of Hillary’s. She told me about you,’ the clown told him.

  ‘No,’ Hillary said. She tried warning Roman away with her eyes. ‘We met only once.’ The clown glanced at the jester and the plump girl, enough for them to leave and start gathering the props spread over the ground.

  ‘Imagine, a real live Gypsy,’ the clown said. The first cloud of the day passed overhead, casting a shadow over the small circus. His blue eyes glowed in the sudden dark.

  ‘And very superstitious,’ Roman added. He took in the ironic hilarity on the clown’s face. He could imagine him without any difficulty slipping soundlessly into a second-story window. ‘Somehow I feel we’ve met before too.’

  ‘Don’t you have to go back to New York now, Mr Grey?’ Hillary asked pointedly.

  Roman ignored the question. ‘I’ve never seen a rock festival before.’

  ‘You’ll miss it,’ Hillary said. ‘It’s not until tomorrow. Now we have to pack up.’

  Roman smiled and watched the other performers gathering the colorful litter of props. The bright balls reminded Roman for some reason of the broken shells of a giant bird and the jongleurs of hatched, ungainly young. Hillary and the clown would be the beautiful ones, of course, the violent aristocracy. The rest were merely a chorus for whatever tragedy those two would make of themselves.

  ‘It’s not every day we get to talk to a man like Mr Grey, Hillary,’ the clown commented.

  ‘It’s not every day I see such educational entertainment either,’ Roman said.

  Hillary bit her lip. The clown laughed and winked at Roman as if they were in a male conspiracy. The force of personality came off him like a hum off a tuning fork.

  ‘Hillary never mentioned that she was part of a traveling troupe.’

  ‘She’s very shy.’

  ‘I suppose so. She hasn’t even introduced us.’

  The two men waited until she said, ‘Howie, this is Roman Grey.’

  They shook hands. The clown’s grip was as strong as Kore’s. ‘No last name?’ Roman asked.

  ‘No,’ the clown said lightly. ‘No addresses or credit cards. Isn’t that like Gypsies?’

  ‘But we have made names. For ourselves and for other people.’

  ‘Secrets! I love secrets,’ Howie said enthusiastically. ‘Maybe you can teach us some.’

  ‘Mr Grey was going, weren’t you,’ Hillary said. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Impossible. He came to see the festival, and he’s a friend. He can stay with us tonight. Can you imagine it. Secrets!’ The way he said it made the word sound itself like a secret.

  ‘He wants to get home.’

  ‘He wants to see a real rock festival,’ the clown argued persuasively. His arm went around Hillary, out of sight.

  Roman watched her pupils dilate with pain. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  ‘It would be interesting,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Great, it’s settled then. Just give me a chance to get this paint off, and we’ll be going.’

  ‘Where?’
Roman asked. ‘You never said.’

  ‘There,’ Howie said. He pointed to the lake. Roman saw a small, thickly wooded island in its center. Its reflection in the water gave it the shape of an amused mouth, and if it had been red, it would have been a perfect copy of Howie’s. Roman really would have preferred his enemy to be the knife thrower, not the man who amiably waited for the knives without flinching.

  Chapter Twenty

  Close up, the summer afternoon gave the island an inviting haze. An oar scraped rock, and Howie jumped in the water. It splashed around his knees as he easily pulled the boat onto the beach over a hiss of rocks.

  ‘Ararat,’ Howie said. He stood on the beach, the rope held lightly in one hand, his weight on one leg, and he reminded Roman of nothing so much as Michelangelo’s David with perhaps the curl of the lips a trifle more pronounced, the shoulders Americanized and broadened. He was dressed completely in pure white buckskin that reflected the sun.

  The rest got out. Without his costume and paint, the jester was a thin boy with the large head of a prodigy. His name was Gerry, and he dressed in a flower shirt and bell-bottoms belied by his accountant-close haircut. The plump girl wore a waistless peasant’s dress and a bow in her hair. Her name was Rosalind. Isabelle kicked at the water spitefully. She had an angular, heavy-cheekboned face, and her black eyes had the warmth of dead coals when she looked at Roman. Hillary stared back at the festival, the breeze towing at her gold hair.

  ‘I’m so glad you came,’ Howie said earnestly as he took Roman by the arm. ‘The others didn’t think you’d show up, Hillary most of all. I said, if anybody would, you would. The girl wasn’t too hurt, was she?’

  ‘More frightened,’ Roman said. The others were hurrying to the camp deeper on the island. He and Howie followed slowly, like lifelong friends.

  ‘Good. You don’t know how much I admire you. You’re what, ten years older than I am, but I related immediately to you. I am something of a student of Gypsies, and this is a real treat for me.’ The way to the camp was padded with moss. Bright orange salamanders watched them fearfully. ‘That’s where I first saw Sloan and the girl together, you know, at the library. She kept a whole list of the new mysteries especially for him. That struck me as one of the twists, by the way, creating a mystery around a man who was such a devotee of them. Anyway, I saw him there’ – Howie cocked his head at the memory – ‘and he saw me, too, but he didn’t recognize me. Isn’t that odd? I’d brought antiques to his place two or three times. That’s how I met Hillary. But, see, he didn’t recognize me because to him all people who looked like hippies were the same. He couldn’t be bothered to separate them into individuals.