GYPSIES, TRAMPS, AND THIEVES

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Shouldering his Mauser’s rifle strap, he swung down from the van. He figured he had fifteen minutes at the most before the van Giorgio had hotwired would go missing from the mortuary in town.

  Romy’s outlandish grin and brazenly sassy responses had bedazzled the whey faced guard at Sachsenhausen’s main gatehouse, Guard Tower A. Flummoxed and about to go off duty, he had airily waved on past the van, purportedly there to recover the remains of a dissected corpse and transfer it to the town mortuary, where it would be incinerated.

  At the experiment lab, a camp doctor, Doktor Pfister, per the badge on his white lab coat, looked startled. Middle-aged with the face of a fair-haired angel, his Aryan-blue eyes hooded. “We did not schedule a pickup for this morning. Afternoons only.”

  “Hmm.” Gideon rubbed the back of his neck. “It seems there has been a mistake.”

  Back in the van, he said, “One obstacle down, Romy, five-thousand seven-hundred-and-twenty-three more to overcome.”

  Dawn’s feeble autumn light was just breaking, and fog off the river spread cold tentacles across the thousand-acre concentration camp. Romy shifted into forward gear, jolting the van’s chassis, and rattled off in fits and starts toward the large Appellplatz, the roll call area at the base of Sachsenhausen’s triangular shape.

  Here, over eight-thousand prisoners were lined up in rows of ten. Most of them, his people. How much intellectual power, linguistic brilliance, and human diversity was being lost through the Nazi’s racial, biological refinement? A volcanic rage erupted in himself – and was directed at himself for his egocentricity in turning a blind eye and a deafened ear.

  If it did not threaten him then it did not have to do with him.

  Under control of the SS guards, the kapos were counting the prisoners and barking orders. A mistake during the counting meant everything must start again and, according to Romy, could occasionally take hours. There could be no miscounting this morning.

  He climbed down from the van, his hand loath to release its hold on the open door. The van, idling within sight of the Appellplatz, would be a target for inquiry.

  But, then, so would he be, as he insinuated himself among the guards, assembling to march eight-hundred or so of Sachsenhausen’s prisoners to the Klinkerswerks docks and its brick foundry in the next three minutes – if everything played out as timed.

  “Look, Romy, you can still drive on, drive out of Sachsenhausen and ditch the truck. I can handle the –”

  “This truck is going nowhere without yuirself and Luca.”

  He could only nod. His sweaty hand went to close the door, and she called in that soft brogue of hers, “May ye be lucky, Gideon Goldman.”

  Per Irina’s intelligence, Luca was to be found somewhere between the fifty-third and sixty-fifth row of prisoners bound for the brick foundry. However, the ubiquitous striped uniforms made identification exceedingly difficult.

  “Look for meself,” Romy had told him with that gap-toothed grin that used to drive him nuts and that now he found ridiculously enchanting. “Only, me twin’s hair is shorter and his body taller.”

  Torturously searching among the eleven designated rows, Gideon noted, first the black triangular armband that identified Luca as a professional criminal, with the Z, denoting a Romani, a Gypsy.

  Actually, Luca’s body was not only taller but, also, thinner. Skeletal thin. And with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes. However, he had Romy’s distinctly fey features. Harsher features, maybe, but her fire and vitality was steamrolled in his by hardship and suffering,

  Beyond the camp, McClellan, along with Giorgio now, was standing a barge down river a mile, not far from other barges readying to unload stones at the docks. Familiar with boats as McClellan claimed to be, after studying the map, he insisted that the best escape route was via the Havel – that there was less traffic on the river and less chance of being stopped between the docks and the Berlin suburb of Spandau.

  Gideon knew fully well Romy’s heart was bound in some inextricable way with a man so unlike her and, yet, perhaps, the key to her lock and the missing piece to her puzzle.

  However, Gideon had never been a man to give up. Even if this present deed of courtly chivalry was one of epic stupidity on his part. In his life’s short experience, love either prevailed or it withered. He meant to prevail.

  The tightly coordinated effort was underway, although Romy’s brother had no forewarning that either freedom or death awaited him in the next twelve three or so minutes.

  Now that roll call had finished, Gideon joined with the dozens of other SS soldiers, assembling to escort the segregated prisoners from the concentration camp to the docks. One guard was assigned for every ten prisoners on that shift, meaning, if plans went awry, approximately eighty guards would be shooting at him and Luca.

  Romy’s brother was the second from the end of a line of emaciated prisoners moving past Gideon with dragging steps. Sidling up to the line, he sotto-voiced, “Romy sent me.”

  Luca’s head swiveled toward him. Clearly, the use of his twin’s name catapulted him from the physiological and psychological stupor that possessed the assembled prisoners. Next to him, the first man at that end of the line was in too deep a fugue to even take note.

  Gideon kept his eyes straight ahead, but his peripheral gaze was acutely aware of everything, every single trampled blade in the Appellplatz, the glint of the soldier’s Mauser off to his right, the dullness of the prisoner’s face immediately to his left. “When I tell you, Luca, make a run for the main gate.”

  Romy’s twin eyed him with both terror and disbelief. Everyone knew the guards taunted the prisoners to attempt escape. Rewards such as extra leave were offered to guards who successfully shot and killed any prisoner who foolishly tried.

  “You have to trust me,” Gideon hissed. “When I fire at you, fall – as though dead.”

  Another SS guard was eyeing Gideon, surely curious about the interaction between the prisoner and guard.

  Gideon nodded up and told the guard, “The guy’s one of the fucking gays. Made a pass at me, would you believe? I say I pump his fucking ass full of lead.” And beneath his breath, “Run, Luca!”

  So much hinged on this one pivotal moment. Would Luca run? And could Gideon forestall the guards in the immediate vicinity from taking a pot shot at the escaping prisoner?

  Autumn’s rising sun suddenly crested the gray ghostly barracks and momentarily blinded all with its renewing beauty of hope.

  Apparently, the sound of his given name again compelled Romy’s brother. He took off, although a senior citizen could have beaten him to a finish line.

  But Gideon was not going to give him the chance to reach it. At once, he jerked his semi-automatic to his shoulder – “The gay’s mine!” – and fired.

  Twenty yards away, Luca’s body was flung forward.

  Fervently hoping no other karabiner cartridge had hit its intended mark, Gideon loped over to the body. Hailing the waiting mortuary van, he cuffed the uniform’s coarse collar and began to drag the body’s dead weight to meet the approaching vehicle.

  Behind him, he could hear the guards’ hoots and cheers. He shoved Luca’s body into the back and, before his actions could be questioned, hastily boarded the passenger seat.

  Even as Romy shifted rapidly, and grindingly, through second into third gear, she was glancing over her shoulder into the darkened rear. “Luca?!” Her voice was a battered heart’s scream.

  As she began to drive along the road at a lung-stopping sedate pace, toward the main guard gate, a spectral voice from the back said dryly, “Aye, Sis. Tis one hell of a family reunion ye just pulled off.” Another deeply drawn breath, and, “Pick up Pfister at the lab, and t’will be like old times.”

  Her head whirled toward the back and her brother, and with alarm Gideon watched as she overcorrected from steering off the asphalt, the van whipping dangerously from one side to the other. “Pfister’s here?!”

  “Still performing his gory work from wha
t I am told.” Her brother drew another rasping breath. “Though I have managed to stay out of the way of . . . of his more recent medical experim – ”

  Abruptly, she whirled the steering wheel like a roulette wheel, like the wheel of fortune. The truck skidded to an about-face, then shot like a bullet, hurtling back toward the lab’s dock.

  “Romy!” Gideon hissed, realizing what she was about. “We don’t have time!” A panicky glance at his pocket watch revealed, at the most, three minutes ticking down to disaster in the form of the SS Death Squad.

  Without pausing to back up, she screeched the truck to a halt before the infirmary bay and slung open her door. He thought he was fast, but she was quicker. She sprinted up the nearby concrete steps with him on her heels and flung opening the lab door.

  Startled, Doktor Pfister looked over his shoulder from the second of five, white tile-covered tables, where he was now performing an autopsy on a fresh corpse. ”What the fu – ”

  Things next seemed to happen in slow motion to Gideon. Romy leveled the double-barreled derringer on Pfister. “Götterdämmerung,” she said, smiling grimly.

  Now was not the time to bring up a conversational review of Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods”, supposedly played at some of Germany’s concentration camps.

  She must have thought likewise. She fired a single bullet between those Aryan-blue eyes of the Angel of Death. Pfister lurched sidewise then forward. Immediately blood began to pool with that of the cadaver’s in the table’s white tiled tray edge.

  She wheeled toward the door. “Let’s go, Gideon!”

  Less than two minutes later, she pulled once more alongside the guardhouse.

  His heart was still beating a rapid tattoo – and there still remained the Guard Tower A’s 8 mm machine gun to evade.

  She rolled down the window. A guard stepped up to the truck, not the same one as earlier, who must have gone off duty with the daybreak shift change.

  Verdammt! Going on-duty, this bastard would likely be more alert and vigilant – and his bull-dog looking face was not reassuring.

  “Oranienburg Mortuary,” she brightly bluffed, but Gideon detected her shaky voice, “Picking up a body from the lab.”

  Suspicious of her discomposure, the mongrel’s mouth grilled downward. His unblinking eyes scanned both her and Gideon. Then he stalked around to the rear of the truck.

  In horror, Gideon looked over the back of his seat. Luca might be playing possum, but dressed as he was in black-and-white stripes, he was certainly not a naked corpse upon which experiments had been recently performed.

  “What is this?” the guard barked, prodding viciously with his rifle barrel the deadweight Luca.

  How Romy’s brother refrained from groaning in pain Gideon could not imagine, but he quickly responded, “A suicide. When the prisoner learned the doc planned to implant dirt into a leg they were going to amputate, he hanged himself. What a Feigling!”

  At that, Bull Dog grunted, slammed shut the door and waved the van on. Gideon was not surprised to find his ‘borrowed’ gray wool field cap saturated with sweat. He expected any second to hear either the gunfire from the camp’s SS Panzer pursuit squad or the siren sound of Oranienburg’s Grüne Polizei.

  Less than a kilometer down the highway, Romy swerved abruptly onto a dirt road used primarily by local fisherman. Dust spiraled as she roared along the road, walled by trees leafed with autumn’s brilliant oranges and blood-reds. At last, the broad blue of the Havel River shimmered welcomingly before them.

  A small barge, a rusted-out steel-bottom scow, floated fifty meters off shore. It was heavily laden with what appeared to be bags of stones, destined clearly for the Klinkerwerk docks.

  Romy braked the transport to a neck whiplashing halt.

  The single transport from shore to barge awaiting at the Havel’s bank was a two-man pedal boat, purloined by Irina from Spandau’s Bürgerablage bathing beach. All had worried how the pedalboat would accommodate a third person. But time and resources had not been plentiful.

  As he sprang from the truck, along with Romy and Luca, the sound of automatic guns firing from behind concerned him more.

  However, he was caught up with their flight’s exhilaration -- the sight of Canadian geese, winging overhead in a v-formation for victory, and the Havel’s crystal water below, soaking his uniform’s gabardine trousers, and then by crimson foam polluting the tide’s splashing, clear water.

  § § §

  North of Berlin’s ritzy Spandau district, Duke, dressed in a fisherman’s red ribbed sweater, brought about the transformed barge. Its bags of stones had been hastily dumped overboard by Giorgio and replaced by a pair of folding deck chairs. An anxious, pacing Luca refused to recline in one of them, but in another slumped Goldman.

  With his bullet-riddled body splayed across the small pedal boat’s casing and bullets zinging the water, it had been all Luca and Romy had been able to do to pedal the small float to the barge.

  Frantically, she labored now over Goldman. He needed immediate medical help. More than the futile staunching of her lab coat on his wounds could accomplish. “If only I hadn’t returned to the lab . . . ” she was weeping. “We might have escaped without ye getting – ”

  Goldman stared up at her through glazed eyes. “Glad you . . . killed Doc.” A wry grin parted lips dappled with bloody spittle. “Not the Seven Dwarf one. The evil one.”

  “Well,” she choked out, “a good lawyer like yuirself, Gideon, knows that justice must be served.”

  “As good a lawyer . . . as I am,” he wheezed, “I don’t think I’ll be around to get you off this case.”

  “Of course, ye will. Just ye wait and see, in no time we’ll . . . .”

  A thin, copper line dribbled from one corner of Goldman’s mouth. Then came the sound of a dying breath.

  As Duke watched, her body stiffened. She dropped to her knees, face in her hands, and shuddered violently. Not a weeping now but a keening, howling noise, he heard. She was a terrifying banshee of Ireland. A fairy woman.

  And he knew, knew that the Jewish attorney had expired.

  Goldman had been a damned good man. Duke fought down the gut-sickening feeling of helplessness. He lamented that he had not steered the barge closer to the shoreline; that might have given the three fugitives the edge; that might have saved Goldman. But then there had been the danger of beaching the barge on a hidden shoal.

  And he lamented even more that he was unable to assuage Romy’s sorrow. If something needed to be done, he could do it or would find a way to get it done, but he did not know shit about how to heal a female’s hurting. As a kid, he had tried but failed miserably to make right his mom’s suffering.

  Hell, what was he doing in a foreign country anyway, where he stuck out like a sore thumb, when he should be back at the S&S, haying or making repairs to the antediluvian ranch equipment or stringing barbed wire? He should be chopping winter firewood or weaning the calves. He should be anywhere but here, helping the misfit moppet Romy Sunshine.

  Yet, if he truly thought her life would be better with him, he would brand her as belonging to him. But such was not the case. Nevertheless, he had sworn to get her through this safely – to her la querencia, if she was to be believed.

  He heard her throwing up over the side of the barge and forced his gaze back to the Bürgerablage bathing beach. A large, circular main restaurant, a pier with a café on it and a marina, were catering to the hoard of visitors, regardless of the late season.

  Near the beach’s thatched pavilions, a sign forbidding Jews access to the year-round public baths took prominent display. He was to put in on the lido’s south side to rendezvous with Irina. According to plan, she was keeping watch with binoculars from the closed-roof colonnade.

  At the marina pier, Giorgio leaped from the barge to secure its rope around a piling. By that time, Irina, in a khaki jumpsuit with cargo pockets, was rolling over the sand-packed beach a wheel chair. Originally, it had been intended for L
uca, since, at the time of hammering out the rescue, his physical condition had been uncertain.

  Once on the dock, her eyes widened at the sight of her half-brother. She paused, swayed. Only her hands on the empty wheelchair handles, it seemed, kept her from collapsing. With an expedience mandated by time, she pulled herself together and hustled to the roped-off barge.

  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.