Fiddle Game (12 page)

“Tell me, already.”

“He was warning me. He thinks you’re a cop. Or a decoy.”

“Why would he think that?”

“Because you accessorize your sexy cocktail dress with shoes that have rubber soles and arch supports.”

“That asshole! I’ll kill him.”

“Hey, he’s just giving a tip to another
guy
.”

“If he’d shut up, you might not have noticed.”

“You’re right, I wouldn’t have.” And wouldn’t have cared, if I had.

“I’ll kill him, that’s all.” She drummed her fingers on the table and glowered.

I’ll never understand what some people take seriously. While Rosie fumed, the bartender at the far wall put a couple of drinks on a tray, waved the nervous waitress away, and headed over to our table with them himself. When he got close, he started talking to Rosie’s back.

“Looks like some people just don’t know when they’re well off. That
is
you, isn’t it, Lisa?”

Lisa
? Rosie turned in her chair and said, “Hey, Joe. How’ve you been?” Well, she did tell me she had used a lot of names.

“I’ve been here,” he said. “What else do you have to know? Been down so long, it looks like up to me. Who’s your friend?”

“He’s good people, Joe. He rescued me from a fate worse than death. Joe Patello, this is Howard Jacobson.”

God, it was a compulsion with her. I held out my hand and said I was happy to meet him.

“No offense, Mr. Jacobson, but I don’t shake hands. It’s a hygiene thing. It’s also not a good idea if I look like I’m getting too friendly with the customers. Believe me, you do not want to get thrown out of here.”

“I heard that,” I said, and took my hand back. Joe put the drinks down in front of us, collected another wad of money from me, and sat down next to Rosie. He did not exactly have the attitude of an old friend.

“What brings you back to the No Lost Titties, Lisa? I assume you’re not here to audition.”

“Howard here needs some information about Gypsies, and you’re the only one I know.”

“Does he now? Why? Is he a cop?”

“No,” I said.

“A victim, then. Looking for some payback?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because only cops and victims have any interest in Gypsies. And they have no interest at all in you.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “Maybe I’m a writer. Maybe I’m about to make you rich and famous.”

“If I believed that, which I do not for a minute, it would move you from uninteresting to unwelcome. We may be the only people left in America who don’t want that.”

“Getting rich?”

“Getting famous. Having our culture strip-mined for some half-assed book or movie.”

“I’m not a writer. That was just a ‘maybe.’”

“Maybe you should tell me what you really do for a living, before I get totally pissed.”

“I’m a bail bondsman.”

He sat back for a moment, looking stunned, as if I had just changed the rules and he needed to think up a new game plan.

“I haven’t needed a bondsman for a long time,” he said, “but that could make you very interesting to the
familya
or the
kumpania
. Maybe even the
rom baro
. But I don’t have their ear anymore, so I can’t help you.”

“Ro…I mean Lisa, said you were excommunicated, or something.”

He smiled for the first time, showing a row of teeth that would make my dentist, the one with the ceiling-pictures, proud. “Is that what she called it? It should be so easy. I’m
marime
, is what I am. For your
Gadje
ears, that means unclean.”

“
Gadje
just means us,” said Rosie. “It’s not an insult.”

“Depends on your point of view,” said Joe.

“Maybe I can help you.” I had no idea how, but it seemed like a good thing to say.

“You?” He gave what could have been a laugh or a snort. “That would be like a coal miner offering to clean your linens. Nobody can help me. Our court, the
kris
, has found me
marime
, and there’s no getting rid of that, ever. Are you from a farm background?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” said Rosie. “As far from it as I can get.”

“I’ll tell you a little rural humor. It’s not the sort of thing a good Gypsy would tell, but since I’m unclean anyway, it can’t matter much. You can stick a few bricks together with some mortar, the saying goes, but that doesn’t make you a mason. And you can pound a few nails, but that doesn’t make you a carpenter. But get caught in the barnyard with your pants down just once, and you’re a pig fucker for the rest of your life.”

“That’s very colorful,” I said. “I hadn’t heard that before. Is that what happened to you?”

“Worse than that. The pig I got caught with—and all
Gadje
are pigs—was a man.”

“Am I supposed to blush now? This is almost the end of the twentieth century, already.”

“Not in the
familya
, it isn’t. Probably never will be. Gypsy society has the most traditional, absolute moral code in the world.”

I thought about it for a minute. Rosie was playing with her swizzle stick, looking bored. She had apparently heard it all before, but it was news to me.

“Nothing personal,” I said, “but everybody I talk to says Gypsies are a bunch of…”

“Thieves, liars, con artists and cheats,” he said. “All true. And we’re very good at it. But that’s all.”

“Excuse me?”
Isn’t that enough?

“In all other things, we are the most moral people who ever lived.” I must have looked skeptical, because he went on. “I’ll tell you a story, Mr. non-writer. It goes back to the year zero.”

“As in the Garden of Eden?”

“Not such a nice place, and not that far back. Think ‘Roman calendar.’ Originally, the Gypsies were blacksmiths. One day some Roman soldiers came to a Gypsy blacksmith and ordered him to make four nails, for the crucifixion of Christ the next day. He didn’t know who Christ was, but you can bet he made the nails. You didn’t argue with the Romans back then.” He leaned forward.

“But one of the nails kept glowing, long after it was out of the hot forge. That night, an angel came to the blacksmith and told him that the glowing nail was meant to be driven into the heart of Jesus. That was just too damn much of an atrocity, even for what was supposed to be an atrocity. So she told him to steal the nail and run away, which he did. Later, he was on the road, wondering what to do next, when the angel came to him again. From then on, the angel said, his people would always be nomads, without a land to call their own. But because of his service, they would always be free to steal whatever they wanted. And they would always be lucky at stealing.”

“But in everything else, they were super-moral.”

“Well, sure. I mean, what would you be like if one of your ancestors had worked for an angel?”

I’d probably be shopping for an asylum. “That’s quite a story.”

“It’s our touchstone: who we are and what we do.”

“Do you also do murder?”

“Never. Weren’t you paying attention to what I just said?”

“One of your people was murdered outside my place of business the day before yesterday. I’m trying to find out why.”

“How do you know he was one of us?”

“She. Because she was working the ‘old fiddle’ scam.”

“Anybody could do that. It’s probably been around for longer than fiddles. Used to be the ‘old lyre’ scam. Greeks did it to Persians.”

“She was using a phony identity. She also had a brother who has a dozen identities that he carries around in a briefcase, and a cop called him a Rom. Now he claims he never heard of her. And she switched the violins, smoother than I can believe.”

He pulled at his chin and took a deep breath, pondering. “The identity shuffle would fit. The CIA doesn’t have any secrets as well kept as the true, birth name of a Gypsy. But switching the fiddle is all wrong. The whole point of the con is to leave the pigeon with the object he thought he wanted. Otherwise, it’s an egg without salt, if you get my meaning.”

“It was a variation,” I said. “She had to get the original back, because it really was very valuable. It was an old Amati.”

Rosie still looked bored and restless, but Joe, if that was really his name here in the House of Aliases, was suddenly looking intensely alert.

“The Wolf Amati?” he said.

I’d never heard that name before, but candor didn’t seem to be the order of the night.

“Yes,” I said.

“Holy Mother of God. Could it really be?” He sat back on his chair and looked at the ceiling. “You wouldn’t be trying to run a scam on me now, would you, Mr. J.?”

“Hey, I’m not the one whose ancestor stole a nail.” As far as I knew.

He looked at the black ceiling for another moment, then jerked back forward, stood, and walked briskly away. “Wait here,” he said over his shoulder.

“Sure,” I said to his empty chair. To Rosie, I said, “Nice fellow.”

“Believe it or not, he was being nice. His people take great pride in being rude.” But she wasn’t looking at me as she said it. She was now paying attention to the stage, where a new dancer had replaced Miss Blood Loss. This one was taller as well as curvier than the first, and she had short, thick black hair that she wore like a helmet. Prince Valiant’s sister, maybe.

She did a slow, sinuous routine, and she shed her upper costume almost immediately, showing off the fact that her ample breasts did not need any external support. She kept her cavalier boots, g-string, and pasties, but they didn’t matter much. She had one of those bodies that implies even more nudity than it shows. My Uncle Fred would have said, “She’s got a lot of features, is the thing. And not all of them are shaped quite the way you expected, so you got to stare a lot.”

So I did. And to my surprise, she stared back, completely ignoring the rest of the audience, which was now hooting and grunting for her attention. She did a series of torso thrusts that started at the ankles and rippled up through her whole body like a wave, all the while holding eye contact, then pulled off the pasties, one at a time. I thought I could hear a tearing sound, like a bandage being ripped off, and I wondered if that was a way of staging a nipple erection. I was going to ask Rosie, but when I looked over at her, she was positively radiating disapproval. Before I could ask her why, the dancer got our attention again by throwing the pasties on our table.

A drunk at another table yelled, “She wants your bod, guy.”

“Wrong,” shouted another one. “What she wants is his bankroll.”

“With her, same thing,” said the first. “Trush me, I know.”

“Why me?” I said to Rosie. “Why doesn’t she play to the guy who yelled? Or somebody else who doesn’t have a woman with him?”

The dancer was down on the edge of the apron now, nearly doing the splits on her knees, and thrusting her breasts at me as if I were a gravity well. Rosie picked up a pastie from the table and threw it on the floor, glaring at the stage.

“She thinks you’re safe, figures I won’t let you attack her. But that’s just the cover reason. What she really wants…”

Joe was back suddenly, with a piece of paper that he stuck into my shirt pocket without waiting for me to reach for it.

“Go to that address tomorrow after ten,” he said. “That’s the
vista officia
, the check-in place for all the Yugoslav Rom. If you say you know where the Wolf Amati is—and don’t tell me if you really do know or not—the
rom baro
might see you. He’ll know I sent you, but don’t say it. Don’t say my name to him at all. And don’t ask for him, either, just wait for him to appear. Pretend you’re a customer.”

“Do I tell him about the woman who was killed?”

“If he gives you coffee, look to see if the cup is chipped. If it isn’t, then he likes you and he’ll talk to you for a while without any profit. You can tell him about the woman if you want to. If the cup is chipped, you’re wasting your time, no matter what you say. If Lisa goes along, she should wear a long skirt. And she should keep absolutely quiet. If she doesn’t, all you’ll accomplish is dropping some money, which you should figure on doing in any case.”

“I have to pay for information?”

“No, you have to pay for being a
Gadje
. No matter what, you do that. But if you act right, you might get beyond that.”

“Sounds like a sucker game.”

“It is what it is. And that’s as much as I can do for you. I shouldn’t be saying this to a
Gadje
, but Lisa’s an old friend: Good luck to both of you.” I stifled the impulse to shake his hand, and he left as abruptly as he had come.

Up on the stage, the curvaceous Dane was again writhing in our direction, making come-hither gestures at me. Rosie picked up the second pastie and threw it at her, which prompted a look of mock indignation and amusement.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“Okay, but what were…”

“Now.”

The dancer threw a pout at Rosie and a kiss at me. I mouthed a silent “ciao” at her, waved, and followed Rosie back out into the night.

***

Walking back to the car, I said, “You were about to tell me something else about the dancer, when Joe interrupted.”

“Was I? I forget.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I was mad. You don’t want to hear it.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I was going to say she was trying to take you away from me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Believe it. She wanted it bad. As bad as she wanted to spite me.”

“Why would she want that?”

“Because she’s a mean, hateful little bitch.”

“Nuh-uh. Not good enough.”

She slowed her pace, finally, and looked down at her ratted-on, rubber-soled shoes.

“She was telling me I’m not the star anymore, okay? And as lousy as that life was, it still hurts to be told I’m a has-been. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you?”

As a matter of fact, I would.

Chapter Twelve

A Death in the Familyia

“This location is compromised. I can’t take a call here after this one.” I didn’t say hello or my name. I figured Wide Track Wilkie would know nobody else would be answering a pay phone at six in the morning. And by now, he would have taken the trouble to find out that it was a pay phone

“You want I should hang up now?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know that we’re being tapped, but a cop came by the booth last night and looked at the phone.”

“Checking the number against the listed location?”

“That’s the way I figure it. Checking on behalf of a fellow officer in another state, maybe. So I can’t be seen here again. If he doesn’t come back, somebody else will.”

“Got you. Can you take down a number?”

“Shoot.”

He gave me a number, and I wrote it on the piece of paper that Joe the Gypsy had stuffed in my pocket. “If you wind up ending this call in a hell of a hurry,” he said, “I’ll wait for you to call me there in ten minutes.”

“Good.” I tried to remember my underworld protocol for talk on open phone lines. “Ten minutes” either meant one hour, since it had a one and a zero, or it meant ten o’clock, for the same reason, or it meant the same time, one day from then. Maybe it meant all three. Hell, maybe it even meant ten minutes. Shit. I was out of practice at this fugitive stuff. And I had already violated the first rule: Never make contact with your old life.

I looked over the parking lot. The two semis were still parked where they had been the night before, their windshields glistening with heavy dew in the predawn light. Down by the other end of the mall, an old junker Toyota had the same covering, marking it for somebody’s humble go-to-work vehicle that decided it had gone enough, thank you. In the center of the shopping strip, a step van was unloading something into the Kinko’s, where the computer had found no new email for me that day. If my phone booth really was blown, Agnes didn’t know it yet. At least, the receiver didn’t have a bug in it, though. I checked, as well as I knew how. And the parking lot looked serene enough.

“What have you got for me?” I said.

“First off, I know you told me to strictly work on the woman, but you ought to know we could shift to her little brother now.”

“You said you couldn’t do PI work.” Openly, anyway.

“Don’t have to. He’s a skip now.”

“How can he be? His case won’t come up for weeks yet.”

“Yeah, and he won’t be there for it. He’s busy being dead. At least, if he’s the same guy who was impersonating the detective, he is. Has a nice stainless steel drawer, right next to the sister he claims he never heard of.”

“You saw him?”

“In the flesh. Which was not in very good shape, I might add. He’s a John Doe at the moment. I didn’t offer to identify him, figured the CIC will match his prints pretty soon.”

“How the hell did you get into the morgue?”

“I pretended to be dead, okay?”

“Must have been a hell of an act.”

“Hey, I don’t ask about your trade secrets. You want to hear about the guy or not?”

“Yes.” Did I ever.

“He’s a hit-and-run victim, just like the woman. And just like her, he had his neck broken by somebody who was definitely not a motor vehicle. Your real cop/phony cop pair were telling you the truth about that, it turns out.”

“That’s what the ME’s people say?”

“Official and final. It’s two homicides now.”

“Holy shit. I don’t suppose you found out what time they came to that conclusion about her?”

“Why do we care?”

“Because Evans told me about the broken neck when he ‘fronted me in Lefty’s. If that was before the examiners knew, that would mean he saw it happen.”

“Aha. Or did it himself.”

“There’s that distinct possibility,” I said.

“That’s too bad.”

“Why is that too bad?”

“Because I didn’t find that out.”

“Can’t you do it now?”

“Hey, how many times you think I can play dead? People get suspicious, you do it twice.”

“You’re right: that’s too bad.”

The semi closest to me suddenly fired up its huge diesel, its twin stacks sending up black flumes that could probably be seen from the Sears Tower. The ground shook, and the plastic glazing in my phone booth rattled.

“So, what did you find out about the woman?” I said.

“What?”

I said it again, shouting this time, and Wilkie started to recite a list of aliases as long as that of little Jimmy-cum-Stroud. I couldn’t hear them well enough to write them down, and I didn’t see that it would help me any if I had. Eventually, he moved from aliases to a list of possible former addresses, none of which rang any bells for me.

As Wilkie talked, the semi driver decided he had played to an empty house for long enough, and he proceeded to put his show on the road. Either the engine was still pretty cold, or he had a hell of a load, because he pulled out really slowly, keeping it in super-low gear. I watched the pattern of the wheels with fascination. Four sets of four and one set of two, for a total of eighteen wheels, five of them facing towards me, all turning in perfect unison. I looked under the trailer frame and watched the outboard wheels, in deepest shadow, turning to the same rhythm, and beyond them, the dawn-lit wheels of the second truck, not turning at all. It all had a certain mechanical poetry to it. Until my eyes stopped on the farther wheels. There were too damn many wheels behind the moving truck. And four of them belonged to a low-slung, heavy car.

“…really did teach violin, in a little hole-in-the-wall studio over in the Macalister Groveland neighborhood, but she never played in the Chamber Orchestra, under any name, or…”

Wide Track went on with his recitation, but I wasn’t listening. Why the hell does a car park between two semis, when there’s four hundred open spaces in the rest of the lot? Sleeping off an all-nighter, maybe, someplace where he wouldn’t be too conspicuous? Or getting set to stake out a phone booth, where there wasn’t supposed to be anybody for another two hours? As inconspicuous a place as you could get, for that.

The front bumper of the car jerked upward slightly, from the torque of the motor starting up, and that decided it for me. A hung over party animal would not immediately move his car when the cover moved or got noisy. He’d just roll over and give God and the universe a piece of his blurry mind. I dropped the receiver without hanging up and headed for the bagel shop, before my cover, also, was gone.

The front door wasn’t open yet, so I ran around the side, to the back service drive. The rented Pontiac was back at the hotel with Rosie, so I had exactly two options: go in the back door of the bagel shop, cover my face with flour and pretend to be the Pillsbury Doughboy, or go over the hill and into the area where Rosie and I had driven the night before. The big semi was rolling pretty good now, shifting up a gear, and I had no idea if he had screened the view of me for long enough. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t have left the phone receiver dangling, but it was too late to go back and take care of it now. Over the roar of the diesel, I thought I could hear the chirp of smaller tires peeling off on the blacktop. I ran through the opening in the brush and didn’t look back. Over the hill, as they say.

It had seemed smaller from behind the windshield, just a nice little berm that would make a good visual screen. It had grown since then, into one of the foothills of the Himalayas, and I scrambled frantically for the ridge, frequently stumbling on large rocks. A lot of rocks on that damn hill. I decided I would not look at the undercarriage of the rented Pontiac, assuming I ever got to see it again at all.

I finally made it over the crest, gasping for air and vowing to think again about that exercise program that I used to think about, I forget when. Or maybe not. The hill was probably just steeper and longer than I had remembered. What the hell, the Pontiac had needed 200 horsepower to get over it, and even with that, it wasn’t happy about it. I stopped just over the crest, dove into a mass of low, tangly brush, and chanced a look back.

Below me, a big, dark gray Chevy was cruising around the corner of the strip mall, slowly. I couldn’t see the driver’s face, but the car damn sure looked familiar. I had almost taken the last ride of my life in a car just like that, and unlike the Proph, I did not believe in coincidence. The car stopped just around the corner, and I hunkered down lower, hoping the driver hadn’t seen me. The sun was rising almost behind me now, so the odds were in my favor. I felt like Josey Wales with the rising sun behind me, about to waste the
Comancheros
, single-handed.
“Yup, it’s always nice to have an edge.”
I needed some tobacco juice to spit.

Behind the strip mall, one of the jolly bagel bakers, a young man of about my build, had just tossed a big plastic trash bag into a dented green dumpster and stopped to have a smoke, looking around furtively first, taking no apparent notice of the Chevy. He turned his back to the wind, to shelter his lighter, also turning away from the corner of the mall. Behind him, the car spun its wheels on the gravel, and its heavily muffled engine made a noise like a turbine winding up. Good God, he was going to run the kid down!
Déja vu
, all over again.

I stood up and yelled. The kid didn’t seem to hear me, so I cupped my hands and did it again, as loud as I could.

“Get the hell out of there!
Anywhere!
Run!”

He wasn’t back by the door to the bagel factory anymore, but he looked up in time to see the speeding car and to jump into the recess at a back door from some other shop. The car tore past him, sideswiping the wall and leaving paint on the concrete block. Then it swerved back away from the building, did a clumsy high speed U-turn, and stopped again. The driver’s window wound slowly down.

Nice work, Jackson
.
You’re still standing up, idiot
.

“Oh, shit,” I said aloud. The face in the car window, even from that distance and with a hand up to screen his eyes from the sun, was unmistakable: Evans. And there was no doubt that he had seen me.

I turned and ran down the back side of the berm, going straight across the road at the bottom, down through a small ditch, and up again, onto the black rock ballast of a railroad embankment. Behind me, I heard the blurbling turbine-like noise again and then the sound of the engine screaming, revving out of control. Off to my right, a freight train was highballing toward me, maybe a quarter of a mile away, and the engineer blew his horn. Maybe he saw me, or maybe he just liked to blow his horn. In any case, I relieved him of the awesome responsibility of running me down.

I crossed the tracks, went down another narrow ditch and up another embankment to more tracks. There was a train coming here, too, from my left, but not as fast and not as close. I could beat it, easily. Its engines were laboring hard, belching diesel smoke, hauling their load up a long grade. If the engineer saw me, he didn’t bother to say so by blowing his horn. Behind me, the uncontrolled revving of the Chevy engine got louder, and I wondered if the car had rolled over.

I went back the way I had come, to where I could just see over the first tracks. Evans’ car was hung up on the ridge of the berm, both wheels on the driver’s side completely off the ground. He spun his wheels wildly for a bit longer, then threw open the door and piled out, breaking into a jerky, half-stumbling run, his loose coat flapping behind him. At the bottom of the slope, he stopped, looked around, then pulled out his sidearm. Good grief, was he seriously planning on shooting me? Hell, I was only “wanted for questioning in connection with.” And we hadn’t finished playing out the fiddle scam yet. And even if he was having a moment of pure lunacy, could he hit anything at this range and with the sun in his eyes? I hardly thought so.

Wrong. All wrong. He spotted me watching him, took a one-handed target stance, so he could use the other hand to shade his eyes, and methodically emptied his magazine. He walked the shots up the embankment like a machine-gunner finding his range, and just before the fast freight flashed in front of me, some rounds hit the rocks behind me and the rails off to either side. This guy was an obscenely good shot. I hunched down to look between the passing train wheels and saw him calmly eject the magazine and insert another, as he walked forward, closing the range. Time to move.

The second freight had caught up with me by then, and I was stuck in the space between the two trains. I tried to remember what I had heard about jumping a freight, from an old time hobo who had needed a bond for a breaking and entering charge once. “Take a ladder at the front of a car, not the back, so if you miss your handhold and fall off, the next set of wheels ain’t so close to you.” Maybe. Or maybe it was, “Take the one at the back end of a car, so…”

Oh, to hell with it
. I picked a flatcar full of packaged lumber on the slower train, ran alongside until I was almost up to his speed, found a rung and a handhold, and pulled myself up, even as more bullets ricocheted off steel wheels and machinery. My grip held, and I became one with the rattling freight. The distance to the other train closed down rapidly, the space between them getting noisy and claustrophobic.

At some level, my mind knew that the two trains wouldn’t actually hit each other, but my instincts didn’t believe it. I worked my way across a machinery platform, to the opposite side of the car. Then I swung myself around to the side of a lumber cube and looked back. By the time the fast freight had quit blocking my view, the shopping center, Evans, and his bullets were long gone. Once again, I had fled into another world. I wondered how many times I could keep doing that.

***

The train snaked its way through the industrial backyard of greater Chicago, passing new and abandoned factories, slums, switchyards, and grown-over land that looked as if the city had simply forgotten it. Far off to my right, in the east, I could see glimpses of the famous skyline, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the back-alley world I was moving through. We never picked up very much speed, but sometimes we passed other trains that were going even slower. At one of them, I decided to make a change. I read a newspaper article once about a young man who wanted to try his luck at being a hobo and wound up getting crushed to death by a shifting load of lumber, on the first freight he ever hopped. So the next time we slowed for a long grade with another train alongside us, I jumped down and changed to an empty flatcar. It was just behind a boxcar with the five-pointed star of anarchy spray-painted on it, along with “
RACINE IS A MEAN CHICKENSHIT JERKWATER TOWN
,” in big, three-colored shadow letters. Wow. A lot of paint in that statement. It must have carried some heavy passion. Since that was pretty much what I thought of Racine, too, I took it as an invitation. The flatcar was fairly clean and had a big center frame for securing some kind of freight. I leaned up against it, made a pillow out of my rolled-up jacket, and settled down for a long haul to I knew not where.