Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (3 page)

“My poor sweet James,” Yevgena said, all of her sixty-four years echoing in her voice. John knew she meant the father, not the son, for both had been surrogate sons to her, though she was officially Jamie’s godmother.

Yevgena Vasiliovich had been ‘marked for reduction’ some twenty-two years earlier in the Csillag internment camp and had been saved only by chance, the end of the war and the fleeing of the Nazis. The Csillag had merely been a way station for Auschwitz. Jewish by birth, gypsy by marriage she was doubly cursed under Hitler’s regime. She and her family, a husband, three adolescent daughters and a pair of rosy brown twin boys had been rounded up and forced to march the fifty miles to the camp. Within a month, both her husband and daughters were dead of typhus and the boys had been transported to Auschwitz. She was never able to determine what happened to them, though the monstrous stories of Josef Mengele’s private labs and his intense fascination with twins had never ceased to haunt her sleeping and waking hours. She herself had been transported to Auschwitz a month after the boys and had been due to go to the ovens when liberation occurred. She’d been too weak to walk out of the camp on her own accord and had thought to merely huddle in a corner and die, but as fate would have it, an Irish diplomat, there on a fact-finding mission for the UN, discovered her and carried her out. She spent several weeks in a British field hospital, her resurrector coming to see her as often as he could.

When she’d been released from hospital she’d nowhere to go, no family left, no home, no life. It was then that James Kirkpatrick the First, Jamie’s grandfather, had offered her a job as a personal assistant. The title came to mean many things over the years and she had become an integral part of the Kirkpatrick family while not really meaning to. She was secretary, counsel, confidante, hostess and friend to her rescuer and after seeing how lonely a young man the second James Kirkpatrick was, she’d become a mother figure to him. Jamie, her Jemmy, had barely been more than a toddler at the time and she’d taken him to her heart with a fierceness that shocked and frightened her. Today she’d not actually been late for the funeral she just hadn’t seen how she could bear to watch one son bury the other.

“He has been drinking?” she asked, looking directly at Jessica, knowing that John’s views on drinking were somewhat more slanted.

“Yes,” Jessica drew the word out reluctantly, “but only for the day and night before.”

“We will let him have his way tonight but after that,
pffft,
” Yevgena’s long red fingernails sliced the air across her throat, “he is broke off.”

“Cut off,” John said on the rise of a yawn, “and who may I ask is going to wean him away from the bottle?”

“I have a plan, not to worry,” Yevgena said in a tone that inspired alarm in her listeners. “Now let us join Jamie outside, is not good for him to brood about in this room, his father is too much here.”

The sight that greeted them outside was rather startling to the Anglo-Saxon sensibilities of how a funeral day was to be spent. Fires were lit in pits, food was being cooked and distributed, spices skirled and scented the unseasonably warm air, children barefoot and laughing were running about and torches lit the night like great pulsating stars.

“Are you certain this is wise?” John asked, watching Jamie make a crown of ivy and crocus for a particularly grubby little girl.

“He will have his whole life to mourn his father, tonight though is a dangerous time, tonight and for the next while. Jamie needs to look after someone, otherwise,” Yevgena looked soberly through the thickening twilight, “he will be devoured by the pain. I saw it happen to his father, I won’t allow it to happen to him.”

“You could have brought him a puppy, three hundred gypsies is a little excessive even by your standards.”

“Puppies he has,” Yevgena retorted smoothly, “it is something else entirely that he needs.”

John, feeling that to enquire further would be to implicate himself in later crimes, wandered off to better acquaint himself with Gypsy custom and drink.

Yevgena, followed by Jessica, made her way over to Jamie, stopping here and there to pat a baby, enquire as to the health of various people and to drop in her wake beads and baubles of such color and quantity as to cause a great squealing and delight amongst the children.

She stooped over Jamie, kissing him gently on the top of his head as he knelt in the grass surrounded by a group of giggling girls, pulling coins out of their ears and making a variety of accessories from the supplies in his garden.

“You need a haircut,” she chided gently, pushing back the golden hair that hung in his eyes. “You also need a woman to look after you,” she smiled at Jessica, “why don’t you make an honest man of this boy?”

“When he makes a dishonest woman of me I’ll be more than happy to,” Jessica replied, only half in jest.

“Where is that wife of yours anyhow?” Yevgena asked sharply, bantering stripped from her words like blistered paint.

Jamie finished wrapping a length of cream and green ivy around a dark-eyed cherub’s neck before answering.

“Yevgena you know full well where Colleen is and that she is not my wife anymore.”

“Isn’t she? Have you divorced yet? No, I didn’t think so, her place is here not stuck up there in that home for dried up—”

“Yevgena,” Jamie’s voice was harsh, “don’t.”

“Alright, alright,” Yevgena spread her fingers in pure Russian placation, “I only thought that—”

“Yevgena,” the tone was icy.

Yevgena rolled her eyes and left him to his flowersmithing, pulling Jessica neatly to her side and leading her towards the cobbled stone paths that ran through the formal rose gardens.

“Are there any women for Jamie?”

Jessica, feeling rather harassed, answered diplomatically, “Not that I know of.”

“He needs to move on with his life,” Yevgena said firmly.

“He has done rather well all things considered.” Jessica, bending down, feigned great interest in a freshly budding rose, trying to avoid the rather intent way Yevgena was considering her.

“He needs a woman; it’s not healthy for him to pine after that half-dead girl who’s shut herself off from the world.”

“He’s accepted Colleen’s decision.”

“How many times have you been married Jessitchka?” Yevgena was all sweetness.

“Four,” said Jessica.  As you well know you old harridan, thought Jessica.

“So,” the word was as sibilant as the serpent, “four times it does not work, four times you think you are in love and then
pffft,
he turns out to be a swine. Sometimes,” her voice lowered confidentially, “it is better to marry a friend and let the rest come and go as it will.” She turned Jessica sharply around a corner, landing them on a small knoll where the festivities below were in plain view. “Jamie is very easy, as you Westerners say, to look upon is he not?”

It was true, Jessica thought, and there wasn’t a woman alive who needed it pointed out to her. Even the sun seemed to bestow him with its last kiss of light, leaving him glittering while others moved about in darkness. Gold hair, merciless green eyes, lean and lithe as a cat, with a mind that could cut razors and occasionally did.

“I’d never want to lose him as a friend,” Jessica said softly, barely realizing she’d spoken aloud. “Besides he’s a dreadful tendency to match me up with his friends.”

“Ah yes the Vietnamese photographer,” Yevgena said.

“Canadian,” Jessica amended politely, “he takes pictures in Vietnam.”

“Well, war can be a very seductive mistress,” Yevgena said, in what, Jessica thought, was intended to be comfort.

“Yevitsa,” Jamie’s voice rang out reprovingly from over a rosebush, “you’re not telling her about your affair with Khrushchev are you?”

Yevgena made a face, “Mind your manners young man, that’s Comrade Khrushchev to you.”

“And darling Nikki to you,” Jamie said with a grin.

Night had descended fully and the skies above bloomed with stars: gold and silver, yellow, blue and red, hot and scorching to the naked eye. The torches threw out long blazes of light, lending pools to the grass here and there, in and out of which small brown feet danced and shimmered. Someone took up a violin and the night air began to furl around the sad, bleeding notes of the mad Hungarian Liszt.

Yevgena, fondly stroking the hair of a man at least thirty years her junior had settled herself in a low slung garden chair, Jamie and Jessica to either side of her. She regaled them with tales of espionage and derring-do in the world of high politics that she claimed to merely dabble in.

“How did you fare at the conference?” Jamie asked, deflecting her attention from the potent liquid with which he was refilling his glass.

Yevgena sighed and ceased petting the man at her knee. She’d recently represented her people at a human rights conference held by Eastern Bloc countries, a group not notoriously famous for their interest in human rights in the first place.

“Could have been worse, I suppose,” she said in that blackly prosaic Russian way of hers. “I have enough problems within the gypsy camp itself, the Hungarians think they are the only real gypsies as do the Romanians, though neither can clearly define for me what that actually means.”

“But Yevitsa,” Jamie chided gently, “you’re Hungarian yourself.”

“Only by marriage, though to be a Russian Jew is just as complicated and without definition these days. The conference wasn’t going too badly once I got the Polish contingent off the booze,” she looked pointedly at Jamie’s half-drunk tumbler. “But then there was that terrible incident where four Roma were killed by a gas bomb. Someone had booby-trapped a sign that said ‘Gypsies go home.’ Which is difficult to do considering how hell-bent everyone is on ridding their countries of gypsies. After the news came in about the bomb it was a little hard to get everyone at the table to talk.” She took a breath and then let it out all at once. “Germany was willing to pay reparation money from the war but it was to go towards building settlements. Try to explain that settlement and concentration camp are not so far apart in the gypsy mind and those grim Teutonic types go deaf. Besides Germany and the rest of the world would just as soon forget the gypsies that were exterminated, what are eighty thousand homeless riffraff compared to six million Jews.” She drank broodingly from her glass, “Understand that I say this as a Jew. Jewish memory,” she tapped her head, “is very long, maybe too long, I think sometimes. But gypsies,” she gestured broadly towards the encampment, “gypsies act as if there is no memory at all. The world has forgotten too, there is no mention of us in the records and rarely in the history books that seem to be springing up like mushrooms. Perhaps it is our nature to forget though, all our tradition is oral and moving from place to place we shed our stories, change them, kaleidoscope them in and out to suit our purposes. Of course,” the prosaic Russian was back, “illiteracy does not help.”

She sighed and shifted her position, hair gleaming like polished obsidian in the firelight, strands of it falling and catching in the folds of her crimson scarf. Courtesan, queen and mother were tired.

“Perhaps is best what is easiest, to forget. Remembering only honors the dead; it does not bring them back. And so, you have more babies,” she watched a pretty pair of boys scamper past, “and you build a future for them. Ah, Jemmy,” she sat up abruptly and clapped her hands together, “I am too silly being sad, I am forgetting your present.”

Jamie groaned. “Yevitsa, I would think after last time you’d give up on the gift giving.”

Yevgena shrugged her shoulders expressively, “You give a man a camel one time and he never lets you forget it.”

“You didn’t really—” Jessica said, beginning to laugh.

“She did,” Jamie said exasperatedly, “for my thirtieth birthday. Bertha the Camel, she of two humps and great spitting ability.”

“Ah, but she came in very useful did she not?” Yevgena waved an index finger in his direction. She turned to Jessica. “He gave her to an Arab minister of trade in exchange for being allowed to export that poisonous Kilkenny Fog he makes.”

John, looking very relaxed and happy, slid bonelessly onto the edges of their small group. “Talking about Bertha are you?” He grinned, “Dear God, don’t tell me you’ve brought him another gift, Yevgena!”

“But of course I have,” she leaned forward and pinched Jamie’s cheek affectionately. “Would your Yevitsa forget your birthday?”

“I rather wish you would sometimes,” Jamie said dryly.

“Well then what is it this time?” John rubbed his hands with relish.

Yevgena smiled slowly, gleefully, mischief abounding on Levantine shores now.

“I’ve brought you a girl,” she said.

“In the old days,” Yevgena said to the shocked faces around her, “there was a group of rather lovely young men of diverse talents, who, in return for food and gifts, would go about dispensing poetry, music and,” her voice tilted towards a lower register, “love.”

“The Pilgrims of Love,” John said, amusement beginning to overtake shock.

“For lack of a better term,” Jamie interjected acidly.

“Nevertheless,” Yevgena continued undeterred, “history is there for us to improve and expand upon, so I’ve found a female pilgrim.”

“Rings on her fingers and the requisite bells on her toes, I presume,” Jamie said sarcasm liberally lacing his words.

“Quite a lovely set of each, actually,” Yevgena said mildly. “I think perhaps it’s time for you to quit hiding behind that glass and just finish off the bottle.” Inky eyebrows arched and verdantly green eyes refused the challenge.

“One supposes you will have your own way regardless,” Jamie said, the bite rather missing from his words, the bottle in hand.

“One supposes correctly,” Yevgena’s words, unlike Jamie’s, had teeth.

A clap of hands, a word or two and a sudden hush like dropping snow covered the crowd. Then, like a Siberian rose rising from winter’s blasted ground, rare and surprising, a girl emerged walking into the circle of fire. Smooth, slender, ivory-skinned and fine-boned with hair tumbling like bruise-black silk down bare and blameless skin, she was enough fuel to bank the smallest of flames. Exotic eastern winds, freshly sprung, tinkled the bells strung silver and delicate around her ankles.