Fiddle Game (19 page)

When my watch rolled up two minutes and fifty seconds, I looked out the back window and saw squad cars converging on both ends of the alley. A large man in a dark coat saw them, too, and headed for the black LTD, running hard. That was as good a diversion as we were likely to get. I ran up the stairs, brushed past a tense-looking Rosie, and went to work on the lock to the roof door. Which didn’t budge.

From the alley below came the tinny, rasping sound of a voice on the speaker from one of the prowl cars, saying, “You there by the dumpster! Stop where you are and put your hands where I can see them! Now!” Since nothing around us looked anything like a dumpster, I assumed the cops were talking to somebody else. Poor fellow. I sprayed some oil in the lock and went back to work.

“I said stop!” said the mechanical voice below.

I said open!
I thought at the lock. But it remained frozen solid. I hadn’t found a single tumbler slot yet. Then I heard the sound I’d been dreading. At the back door downstairs, there was a crash of broken glass and the clicks and clunks of a lockset being hastily jangled open, then the door slamming again. Whoever was down there was inside the building now. And I did not think he was a cop, who just wanted the facts, ma’am.

“Give me a little room,” I said. “And cover our backs.” She went part way down the stairs and pointed her automatic back at the hallway, taking a braced stance against one wall of the stair shaft. I took a half step back from the roof door and cocked my foot for what I hoped was the kick of a lifetime.

“Whatever you’re going to do,” said Rosie, “you’d better do it now. I think he’s coming up the stairs.”

Amen to that
. The first kick merely made my foot hurt. On the second one, though, I got my weight behind it better and kept my foot flat to the panel. The door shrieked, splintered, made a sound like a ruptured oil drum, and then flew outward. We ran through and slammed it behind us.

We both blinked at the return of daylight. Crouching low to avoid being seen above the parapet walls, I scrounged up a scrap of wood from the roof and wedged it into the door jamb, then looked around and took stock of our surroundings. Half a block of low roofs stretched out in both directions, all interconnected but set apart by low, fence-like fire walls of dirty red brick. Between each set of walls was another slope-backed little shed with a door in it, like the one we had just come out of.

“I take it we aren’t going back down in the tunnel,” said Rosie. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

I shook my head. “This is better,” I said. “Lots better.” I could see she wasn’t buying a word of it. “We can get further away than the carpet store before we have to go back out in the open.”

“Like this isn’t out in the open?”

She had a point. “Well, back in plain sight, then. Which direction do you like?”

“You seem to be running on pure luck today. You choose.”

I did at that, didn’t I? I picked the direction away from the end of the block with Mr. Binoculars, and we scuttled off, hunched down like soldiers under fire. The commotion in the flat below got louder, then more remote.

We went over four more buildings without slowing down to try the doors. On the fifth one, at the end of the block, we stopped and I tried the lock. This time, I oiled it up first and took my time, doing it right. I had two tumblers locked in neatly and was reaching for another pick when the door flew open in my face, nearly smashing my hands. Framed in the dark opening was a very short, dark-complected young man with a very large sawed-off shotgun in his hands. If he’d had a pointy hat, he could have been Chico Marx with a vaudeville prop, sly grin included.

“Um,
Ashlen Devlese, Romale
,” I said. Did I mention that I have a good memory, as well as a good ear for dialect?

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Who are you trying to con,
Gadje
?”

But not good enough.

“Anybody I can,” I said.
That alone should make me one of your brothers
. “But maybe we should have this conversation someplace a little less conspicuous?”

“Come,” he said, backing down the steps but keeping the gun trained on us. “Get off the roof before the
jawndari
see you, and we’ll see how much that insult to our language is going to cost you.”

Behind me, I knew, Rosie had her gun held inside her purse. She shut the door behind us and we regrouped in an upstairs hall just like the one we had left down the block.

“Look,” I said, “I didn’t mean any disrespect back there.”

“I think you didn’t mean to be on the roof, either, did you? But you will pay for both.”

“You know Stefan Yonkos?”

“Knew, you mean.”

“Yes,” I said.

“A great tragedy,” said Rosie.

“Women should be silent when the men talk business,” he said. “But she shows more respect than you do.”

So we were talking business, were we? Things were looking up.

“Of course, I knew Stefan,” he said. “Everyone knew Stefan. A great man, a great loss. What do you think that will buy you?”

“The man we are running from is his killer.”

“Is that so? The same one who ran away in the alley?”

“The same.”

“That might buy you something, after all. How do I know it’s true?”

Good question
. I wasn’t even sure how
I
knew it was true, apart from having seen the black LTD again.

“My name is Herman Jackson,” I said. “I had an understanding with Stefan Yonkos. He was going to help me find a killer and clear my name with the police, and I was going to deliver a violin called the Wolf Amati to him.” That wasn’t quite the deal, of course, but I figured if I got caught in the lie I could always feign confusion. There was damn sure plenty of the stuff to go around.

“That’s a good story, Mr. Jackson. But now he is dead.”

“Now he is dead.” I nodded gravely. “But as far as I’m concerned, it was a good deal when I made it and it still is. And somehow, I’m inclined to believe there’s at least one other Rom who still thinks so, too.”

“Mmm. You could be right. Let’s get someplace further away from the
jawndari
and find out.”

“How about putting away the gun?”

“The woman, first,” he said. Damn, he didn’t miss a trick.

Rosie took her hand out of her purse, the young Rom made the shotgun miraculously vanish under his coat, and I suddenly knew what it felt like to walk away from the brink of Armageddon. We went down the stairs and around a corner, to a back room, where our new guide touched a button on the wall.

“Oh shit, no!” said Rosie. “Not another damn tunnel.”

Chapter Eighteen

Revelations

Rosie dozed on the seat beside me while I snacked on beef jerky and salted cashews and watched the dashed white centerline of Illinois Fourteen feed into my headlight beams. In the cracked rearview mirror, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, and then Arlington Heights suggested themselves one last time and then faded into dim memory. Past Palatine, the countryside opened up into featureless dark prairie, which was fine by me. It looked like a blank slate. Or maybe a threshold.

The battered pickup wasn’t as nice as the Pontiac, to say the least, but the engine ran okay, if a bit feebly. The brakes and lights worked, and the steering only wandered if there was a wind from the side. I decided not to take it on the freeway. At anything over sixty miles an hour, the question was not whether a wheel would fall off, but how many of them would stay on. But it would do for the one trip it had to make. If somewhere else, not too far away, there was a black LTD on the Interstate racing us back to the fair city of St. Paul and winning, that was all right, too. In fact, that was better than all right. That would work.

I had needed to give the Rom council, or whatever it was they called the surviving bunch of
kumpania
leaders, something besides my good word and winning smile to get them to reinstate Yonkos’ deal, and the rented car was the logical choice. We debated and postured and traded lies for a long time, doing what Yonkos had called “respecting the rhythm of the game,” but we all knew where we were going in the end. The junker that they traded me for the Pontiac probably had a thousand miles left in it, max, but that would be enough. The trade was a damned high price to pay for the mere one-time use of an emergency exit, of course, but I had a fairly limited selection and no time to shop.

The other deal, the bigger one, with the promise of the violin, was another matter. I could have done without that, quite possibly didn’t even need the help of the Rom anymore. But part of the game wasn’t played out yet, and part of me said that wouldn’t do. The game had started with Amy Cox, and the Rom were definitely her people. It had to end with them, too. They would never be my allies, but if I left them as happy customers, that would work, too.

Someplace in the middle of Illinois, a state trooper tailed me for a while, but when I didn’t break the speed limit, he lost interest and peeled off on a side road. The Gypsies had told me the plates on the pickup were good, not forged or stolen, and that seemed to be the acid test. I thought again about Stefan Yonkos and what he had said about names being so important to those of us who have only one. Good license plates are a sort of face-value proof of identity.
Names and labels, Stefan. Too damn right. Names and labels and identities are everything. That’s what this whole chaotic business has been about from the get-go, but I couldn’t see it before. First, I needed to get in a junker pickup that even Pud and Ditto, from New Salem, wouldn’t be caught dead driving
. I chuckled at the thought of the two hayseeds, and Rosie stirred, sat up, and looked over the dash with one bleary eye.

“Where are we?” she said.

“In the middle of nowhere.”

“That’s a good place.”

“The best.”

“For a while, I thought we weren’t going to make it.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“If we ever get to the middle of somewhere, wake me up, will you?”

“That’s a promise.”

She curled back up, popped a chocolate cherry in her mouth, and chewed it with her eyes closed. The clunker steadily chewed up the miles.

***

The sun was well up by the time we rendezvoused with Wide Track Wilkie at a truck stop about twenty miles south of St. Paul on old Highway 55. Rosie and I had anemic-looking fruit plates with yogurt and bran muffins, while Wilkie worked on maintaining his monolithic figure by ordering one item each from the breakfast, dinner, and dessert menus. He was obviously a little embarrassed about it, though. Funny how I had never noticed that in him before: he really didn’t function well at all in the presence of a pretty woman. For a while, we sipped black coffee and soaked up the smell of fresh toast and orange juice, and made small talk. I didn’t know if Rosie was really interested or just being friendly, but she asked Wilkie a lot about his trade.

“So you’re a bounty hunter?” she said. “That’s what you do?”

“Sometimes. I do other stuff, too. Whatever comes up that lets me still be my own man. I’m a pretty decent pool hustler. Maybe Herman told you that?”

“No,” I said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Tell me about the other thing,” said Rosie. “You like it?”

“It’s nice, I guess. No health plan or vacation, you know, but no time clock, either. Lots of action, which I personally like, and nobody’s ass to kiss. And the work is as steady as you want. There’s never any shortage of assholes who think they can run away from their own stupidity. No offense, Herman.”

“None taken,” I said.

“What do you need?” said Rosie. “To be a bounty hunter.”

“You mean like license and bond and that kind of stuff?”

“Well, and…”

“Clean criminal record?”

“Yeah, that one,” she said.

“None of that’s a problem. Mostly, you just have to be a mean motherfucker and look like it. Um, I mean…”

“I’ve heard the expression once or twice before,” said Rosie. “Is it something I could do?”

“You? Get serious. I mean, you seem like, well…”

“Only seem like? If you mean a woman, Mr. Wilkie, I definitely am. Tell him, Herman.”

“I’ve never known her otherwise,” I said. She squeezed my knee under the table.

“It’s not that, exactly,” said Wilkie. “I once knew a bounty hunter who was a midget, no less, but he gave off menace like a pit bull with rabies. Looked like he’d bite off your kneecap just for arguing with him. So nobody did. You seem too nice. That won’t get you very far in the bounty business. If you’re nice, you might wind up having to be deadly, too.”

“Maybe I am. Herman, tell him…”

“Maybe it’s time we did some work,” I said. Or anything else that changed the subject. I turned to Wilkie and said, “What have you got for me, Wide?”

He looked relieved. What he had was the full file on one Corporal Gerald Cox, US Army, and it was interesting reading, even in bastardized military non-English.

“Looks like our boy missed all the fun of V-E Day,” I said.

“Yeah, they shipped him home just before then, certified him not-quite-sane-but-what-the-hell, or something like that.”

“‘Battle fatigue with indeterminate prognosis,’” I quoted.

“What I said.”

“Where was home?” said Rosie.

“Short Straw, Texas, or some such shithole, but when you muster out, the Army will send you damn near wherever you want to go, if you’ve got a good reason. Especially back then. They did everything for the vets after that war.”

“Not after your war, I take it?”

“Don’t get me started, hey?”

“So where did our damaged corporal decide to go?”

“He told them he wanted to go to Chicago, where there was a better VA hospital.”

“Or a better something,” said Rosie.

“The Gypsy Promised Land,” I said. “Did they give him a pension, to boot?”

“Just a little one, ’cause he was only a little crazy. Three hundred bucks and change, every month.”

“That was a lot of money back then. He was maybe crazier than we think. Does he still collect it?”

“Would you believe he does? Never did get sane, I guess. Also never died. Or never admitted to it.”

“Probably never will, either. Want me to guess where the pension gets sent to?”

“General Delivery, Skokie, Illinois.”

“Bingo,” said Rosie.

“More bingo than you know,” said Wilkie. “That’s also where the money for the eighteen hundred dollar check from Amy Cox came from. First Bank of Skokie, Illinois.”

“Did we get his mustering-out medicals?” I said.

“I already told you, he was absolutely sort of crazy is all. Everything else was just your normal used-soldier stuff.”

“Let’s see.”

Wilkie pulled the appropriate part of the file, and I looked at the grainy faxes of the even grainier old mimeo forms and found the section headed “Distinguishing Scars or Marks.”

“Seems our man Cox had a nasty scar from a burn on his left forearm,” I said. “And fairly new, back then.”

“This is important?”

“This is the clincher,” said Rosie, and I nodded in agreement.

Wilkie gave us a perplexed look and I gave him a short version of the story about the Ardennes Forest. “He had to burn himself to cover the tattoo from the concentration camp,” I said. “I thought at the time Yonkos told me the story, he was lying about something, but I couldn’t tell what. All that poetic stuff about not knowing where the story came from originally? Hell, he
was
the story.”

“Well, part of it,” said Rosie.

“Exactly half,” I said. “Now the question is…”

“Who was the German?” said Wilkie.

“That’s the question, all right.”

“I don’t think even the Prophet can run that one down for us.”

“He doesn’t have to. The man will come to us.”

“Yeah, I’m so damn sure he wants to,” said Wilkie.

“He will?” said Rosie.

“You bet. In a shiny black LTD with a bag of money in it. We’re going to accept the last offer from Mr. G. Cox.”

“I don’t trust him,” said Rosie.

“I don’t trust him twice as much,” said Wilkie. “And when I don’t trust people, that’s not a good thing. Especially for them.”

“Hold onto that thought, both of you,” I said. “Hold it really well.”

***

Wide Track went back to my office to send the email to Cox accepting his offer, and to wait for a reply. Rosie and I took the limping pickup into town and to the Amtrak depot, to pick up my BMW. It had evolved into a much nicer machine in my absence. Or maybe it just profited by comparison with the 1968 International Harvester pickup. Rosie went inside the terminal to get a schedule, so I would know what train to claim I had come back to town on. I wiped down the pickup, checked it one last time, and left it with the keys in the ignition. It was a sort of feeble, blind payback gesture. The naive but sincere young woman who had rented me the Pontiac might or might not get in trouble when I didn’t bring it back. Not a damn thing I could do about that. But some poor bastard fresh off a freight train from North Bumjungle might just get a shot of unexpected good fortune by finding the clunker. It wouldn’t really balance the cosmic scales, but it was the best I could do.

Rosie brought me a printed schedule that showed a train arriving from Seattle in about an hour, which meant any time in the next half day, and I made a mental note to come back and hassle the ticket clerk again at the appropriate time. If I had time, that is. But first, we got in the BMW and went to see my friendly pawnbroker.

***

Nickel Pete was sitting on his regular perch and, as usual, took his hands from under the counter and smiled when he saw me.

“Herman, my friend! And with a brand new blonde, too. Is this maybe a new feature of the bonding business I didn’t know about? I renew my offer to partner with you.”

Rosie gave me a raised eyebrow and I told her the last time I had been there was with Amy Cox.

“I hope that time didn’t set a precedent,” said Rosie.

“Don’t give it a thought, young lady.” Pete waved a hand dismissively. “Nobody will ever do that to me again, I promise you. But I still got good instruments to show, if you want.”

Rosie looked more puzzled than ever at that, with a look that asked, “do
what
to him?” I didn’t bother to explain for Pete. He was a big boy; he could extract his own foot from his mouth. Or choke on it. I took the pawn ticket for the Amati out of my wallet and laid it on the counter. “Let’s have a look at this one,” I said.

“Ah, Herman, what can I say?” He put his hands against the sides of his head, as if it needed to be kept from exploding. “Forget about paying off the ticket. Forget about the vig, even. I owe you way more than that for my stupidity. I don’t know how I’m ever going to make it up to you.” Apparently simply paying for the lost violin never occurred to him.

“Let’s just see it, first,” I said.

He went in the back room and returned with the battered black case, which he put down on the counter and opened. I couldn’t remember the original one Amy Cox had shown me all that well, but this seemed like a plausible likeness.

“Have you looked at it since we talked on the phone?” I said.

“Why would I do that? To remind myself what a dope I was? This I do not need. I’d be happy if nobody ever looked at it again.”

Once again, I had a tiny flash of insight into why some con games work so well. Once the mark decides something is a disaster or a triumph, he never looks at it again.

“It looks old, anyway,” I said.

“Sure it looks old. You think I’m going to get taken in by a shiny new plastic one? The broad was slick, Herman. The slickest. She must have made the switch right after she asked if she could kiss her old violin, just for sentimental reasons.”

“She did? I didn’t see that.”

“You were busy scribbling numbers on your little pad or something. It was just so damned corny that I thought I’d be polite and ignore it. And it was a really short time, anyway. Ten seconds, tops. Well, maybe fifteen. But I swear, she never had both cases within easy reach at the same time.”

“But she held the Amati up to her face for a little while, with the bottom towards you, hiding what she was doing?”

“Well that would be how you’d kiss the stupid thing, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe. But in this case, I think it was how she changed the label.”

“You’re a nice guy, Herman, but you’re nuts.”

“That’s a different topic. You got a dentist’s mirror and a little flashlight? A long tweezers with a kink or two in the prongs would be good, too. I had a professional lecture about violin labels a while back. I want to see if it was true.”

“You mean like, ‘labels come and labels go’?”

“Mostly, they accumulate, is what I was told. Get the stuff, will you?”