Mulengro, page 22
“If they have your friend,” the Gypsy said, “and they’re not keeping her at their house, they can still lead us to her. We have only to follow them.”
That was if Ola wasn’t already dead, Jeff thought, but he refused to voice that thought and thereby give it more life than it already had in his own mind. “Do you want to go now?” he asked.
“No. I think it would be better if we waited until this evening. By now your Constable Finlay may have my description from the Ottawa Police. If he does, he’ll be looking for both of us.”
“What do the police want with you anyway?”
“What do they ever want with a Gypsy? My house burned down and I didn’t report it. I knew the men who were killed. I gave a pair of plainclothesmen false ID. Take your choice—one or all of the above.”
Jeff nodded. Follow the Gourlays. Tonight. Why wasn’t he looking forward to this?
“I think you’re flipping out,” Jackie said when she got home. She gave Janfri a suspicious look and only nodded when Jeff introduced her to him. “Craig was back just before I left—did you know that he spent a good two hours in the restaurant this afternoon, just watching that car? Well, when he came back he wanted to know if you’d called, where you were. He was being very casual about it, trying not to let on like it was anything important, but I could tell he wanted to know badly.” She looked at Janfri, not bothering to hide her feelings. “Why are you hiding this guy? You don’t know anything about him. He could be a bank robber or a mass murderer for all you know.”
“Listen to me,” Jeff said, “and then decide.”
Jackie did. She was visibly upset, growing more so as the story unfolded. Rather than listening straight through, she kept interrupting with questions or pointing out how flimsily everything hung together.
“Now I know you’re flipping out,” she said when Jeff was done. “You I don’t know,” she told Janfri, “but, Jeff. For God’s sake. Listen to what you’re saying. How can you sit there and pretend that any of it makes sense? Gypsies and witches and ghosts and God knows what else.”
“Jackie—”
“You know what I think? I think you took a good whack on the head and it scrambled up your brains. And you,” she added, turning to Janfri. “I don’t know what you’re planning to get out of this, but you should be ashamed of yourself at egging him on like this.”
“What about the thing I saw at Ola’s?”
Jackie tapped the side of her head. “The thing you saw—I didn’t. And I was right beside you, remember?”
“Well, what about Ola then?”
Jackie sighed and had to ask herself if Jeff’s concern over the black woman was really justified, or whether it was just her own jealousy that was making small of it. She didn’t like the idea of being jealous, but she couldn’t stop the feeling from coloring her thinking. Not now, when there was a possibility of something happening between her and Jeff.
“Okay,” she admitted. “Ola’s just taking off doesn’t make any sense. But that still doesn’t mean that there are mysterious men in black running around trying to kill her—even if she is a Gypsy, which I doubt—nor that the Gourlays have kidnapped her. Right?”
Jeff nodded, willing to agree with that. Praying that it was true. “But what about the things that Janfri’s told us?”
“I don’t know Janfri from Adam,” Jackie said, speaking as though the man wasn’t even present. He bothered her with his dark good looks and that intense light in his eyes. “And even if half of what he says is true, that still doesn’t mean it has any relevance to what we’re talking about. I’ve talked to Ola, too, you know. All that magic mumbo jumbo’s just for the books—I asked her about it once and that’s what she told me. If she’s a witch, Jeff, then I’m Stan Gourlay’s sister.” She paused for a breath and turned to Janfri. “You still haven’t told me what you expect to get out of this,” she said. “In fact you haven’t said two words since we started talking about all of this.”
Jeff sighed. He wished that Jackie wasn’t acting so bitchy—it wasn’t like her at all—but at the same time everything she said made sense as well. Made perfect sense, really, if it wasn’t for what he’d seen and the feeling he had.
Janfri’s fingers stilled their playing with the knotted cloth he held. “It doesn’t really matter what you think, Miss Sim,” he said. “Perhaps what Jeff hasn’t made as clear as he should have is the fact that I’m not exactly comfortable with all this talk of magic and ghosts either. Unfortunately, I have an obligation—to an old woman, to my people—to do what I can. I can go ahead on my own and no longer interfere with your life, if that’s what you wish. I have better things to do myself than go chasing after a woman who might or might not be a Gypsy, who might or might not be able to help me.
“What keeps me going is this one question I ask myself: What if it is all real? If it is real and I might have been able to do something about it but didn’t, how could I live with myself? I realize that matters of honor are not so strictly upheld among the Gaje as they are among my people. But I am a Rom and so I will do what a true Rom would do. I will seek this woman because she might be able to help me. And if she is a Gypsy, then she is in danger as well, so I will try to help her. With or without Jeff’s help. Or yours.”
His gaze remained locked on hers the whole time he spoke, the potency of his dark eyes driving each point home. What if it was all true? she asked herself, wanting to laugh, but so long as he held her gaze, finding she couldn’t. And even if it was just Ola being kidnapped by the Gourlays—never mind all the rest of it—shouldn’t she want to help? Was she going to be that small-minded? Would she even want a relationship with someone if his heart belonged to someone else? She was beginning to feel, she realized, as though she was in the middle of a Harlequin Romance.
“So you’re going to go to the Gourlays’ place tonight and just . . . follow them?”
“One must begin somewhere,” Janfri replied.
Jackie sighed. “Craig’s going to have an eye out for your car, Jeff, and he’s already impounded Janfri’s, so I suppose we’ll have to go in mine.”
“You don’t have to come too, Jackie,” Jeff began, but she cut him off with an abrupt shake of her head.
“Maybe I’ve got something invested in this as well,” she said. “I don’t know Ola as well as you—but I still like her. I want to help. And I don’t want to sit around here all night worrying about what’s happening with you. If the Gourlays ever get hold of you out on a dark road somewhere . . .” She frowned, then forced a smile into place. “And besides. Maybe I’ll get a firsthand look at all these magical goings-on.”
“I hope not,” Janfri said seriously.
Jackie nodded. “Yeah. Well, there’s that, isn’t there?”
There was a moment’s silence. Janfri’s fingers moved across the knotted cloth in his hands. Jeff and Jackie avoided each other’s eyes, both wanting to say more than they could with a third person present, but relieved at the same time that they couldn’t. After awhile, Jackie stood up.
“We’d better have something to eat before we go,” she said. “Cheese and cuke sandwiches sound okay?”
The two men nodded. Jeff shifted in his chair, then got up to help her.
“I guess we should start out by checking The Zoo,” he said, “see if their pickup’s parked outside. Or maybe up at MacDonald’s garage. Then we take a spin ‘round their house. . . .”
Jackie nodded, cutting the bread with more force than was necessary to get the knife through the loaf. Janfri said nothing, letting his silence be agreement enough.
twenty-seven
Craig Finlay was a twelve-year veteran on the Perth Police Force. It was a job he liked and though it was limited in excitement, that suited him just fine. The big city could keep its murders and syndicates, its biker gangs, rapists, bank robberies, and just general bad craziness, thank you very much. The worst calls he got were civil disturbances like drunk & disorderly conduct, a few fights, some domestic squabbles. Occasionally he’d get called out to help the Ontario Provincial Police on a particularly messy highway accident, but that was rare. There was also the odd hunting accident, but nothing terminal, thank God, at least not since he’d joined the force back in the summer of ’71.
It was going on six-thirty as he was leaving the police station. He paused by the cruiser. Going to be a nice night. Be even nicer if he hadn’t bothered to take that call from Briggs. Detective-Sergeant Briggs. Let’s keep those titles. Stomach in, shoulders out. Show your rank. Lucy hadn’t been too happy that he’d be late for dinner—but he guessed she was used to it. Didn’t like it—she never would and he didn’t blame her because he didn’t like it himself—but it came with the territory, even in a quiet town like Perth. Impounding Cerinek’s car had been the high point of his day—until he’d talked to Patrick Briggs. He’d heard Briggs out patiently, then put in his own two cents worth. Not that it ever did any good. City Police, the OPP, the RCMP, they all figured small town police needed someone around to help them blow their noses, and all they were good for was doing the gopher work for the “real” cops, with smiles on their faces. But when you wanted something from them, like the time he’d called in to Ottawa to have them pick up Bradley Moulton a couple of months back, all he’d got from their dispatch was, “Shit, you think you’ve got problems?” The “hick” was left unsaid.
“Listen,” he’d told Briggs. “Gypsies sort of left this area around the same time the automobile became popular, you know what I mean?”
“Cute. Real cute. Then how come you called in an abandoned car that was last seen driven by a Gypsy?”
“Hey, I called it in, right?”
“All I’m asking you to do is check up on any Gypsies in your area.”
“Gypsies. Mendicants. Beggars. We kinda ran out of them all, Briggs. Mind you, we do get the odd hobo.”
“So you’ve got nothing?”
“Zip.” But then Craig remembered the two men who’d left Tinkers with Jeff Owen earlier in the afternoon. The guy with the walrus—hadn’t he seen him around town over the summer? He closed his eyes, trying to remember.
“Yeah,” Briggs said. “Well, thanks for your help. If things start to get messy down there in the next day or so, just remember I gave you fair warning.”
“Sure. I’ll keep you posted.”
“You do that.”
Briggs hung up with an abrupt click on his end and Craig slowly lowered the receiver into its cradle. Shit, he thought. Trailer camp on Highway 4. That’s where he’d seen the guy before. He wasn’t going to swear the old fellow was a Gypsy, but he had to go check it out, just in case. He picked up the phone again and dialed his home number.
“Lucy? Look, hon, I’m going to be a little late tonight. Yeah, I know, but . . .”
Craig eased the police cruiser up the rutted road that led to Jeff Owen’s cabin. He parked in front of the two-story structure and got out, stretching his back muscles before walking up to the front door. He’d decided to check out a couple of things before he drove up to the trailer park. Calling in on Jackie had been the first thing, to see if she’d heard from Jeff. He’d done that as soon as he’d left the station. Now as he walked behind the cabin and saw the riot of vegetation that passed for Jeff’s backyard, be began to get an uneasy feeling.
He liked Jeff. He was a decent guy. So what the hell was he doing getting himself involved with these guys? He was sure now that the clean-shaven one had been this Cerinek aka John something-or-other that the boys up in Ottawa were looking for, and it was plain from what he could see of the land behind Jeff’s cabin that no one had been clearing out the bush here for a long, long time.
He headed for his car and drove back towards Perth. The light was steadily leaking from the sky, coming up hard on evening by the time he reached the turnoff to the trailer park. He wasn’t really expecting to find either Cerinek, Jeff or the mustached man here, so he was somewhat surprised to find the latter sitting on the steps of a trailer, watching the cruiser’s approach with expressionless eyes. Craig pulled up on the far side of the van and parked. Taking his cap from the seat beside him, he put it on and stepped outside.
“Nice evening, Mr. . . .?”
“Fields,” Tibo said. “William Fields. Call me Bill.”
Craig smiled, nodded to the woman who was standing by a Cole-man stove, smoking a pipe. Call him “Bill.” Sure. Back at the restaurant his name had been Pat. “Saw you in Tinkers today,” he said to Tibo. “Remember?”
Tibo nodded.
“How’s that bush-clearing going?”
Tibo shrugged. “One day Jeff calls us in to work, the next day he changes his mind.” He spat in the dirt beside the steps. “Wasted the whole day waiting for him to make up his mind.”
Craig leaned against the hood of the cruiser, pushed his cap back from his forehead. “Comes from his being a writer,” he said. “Never knew one that could make up his mind. Say, what happened to that friend of yours—what was his name again?”
“John Wood. He drove back up to Fallbrook. You just missed him.”
“Yeah? Too bad. Some people were looking for him.”
There was a moment’s silence, then Tibo smiled. “That John. People are always looking for him. He’s too handsome by half, I tell you! Was it a husband or someone he owes money to?”
“Neither. It was the police in Ottawa.”
Foster Street was lined with parked cars as Jackie steered her Honda slowly down it. Jeff was beside her in the passenger’s seat, while Janfri sat in the back. Jackie wasn’t sure she liked having him behind her, but at the same time she didn’t want him in the front with her either. She kept glancing in the rearview mirror to find his gaze meeting hers each time before she quickly slid hers away. They cruised the neighboring streets, right on Gore, left on Herriot and past the park, up north on Wilson. There was no sign of the Gourlays’ pickup.
“Now what?” Jackie asked. She tried to keep the nervous quiver out of her voice, but couldn’t stop gripping the steering wheel with tight fingers.
“Guess we’ll have to try their house,” Jeff said. “We can check out MacDonald’s garage on the way.”
Obediently, Jackie brought them back onto Gore Street and headed out of town.
As the shadows grew deeper, Mulengro drew strength from the thickening dark. His mule arose from the ground like low mists and trailed around his feet as he walked tirelessly along the highway. There was a humming in the scarred man’s mind, a sense of urgency drawing him on. Twice more he’d mentally attacked the drabarni he sought, but she was prepared for him now and each attack was deflected. He would need physical contact with her now to defeat her. But then . . . what strength her muli would give him in his work. From the past he shaped a new future for the Rom and every strength was needed. He took what was marhime and cleansed it, using it to further his goal.
The doctors had told him that he embraced the past, rather than let it go, and it was for this reason that his condition did not improve. He clung too fiercely to the past and that was why he did not forget. But they were Gaje and what did they know? He had a destiny to fulfill and it was important that he did not forget the lessons that the past had taught him. God had given him work to do. The mule were his judgments and his executioners—the harbingers of doom to those who were marhime, as the mule themselves had been before they were cleansed in God’s bright light. How could the doctors understand that?
The Nazis had called his people Rassenverfolgle—racially undesirable—and he could almost love them for the truth that they had inadvertently shown him, for all that they were Gaje. The Rom had become marhime in the eyes of God. That was why they suffered. That was the reason for their poverty, the reason they had first left their homeland to wander the world, the reason for their persecution. And that was the reason he must cleanse them in the eyes of God.
It was for him to prepare them for Romanestan—the land that God would surely give them for their own when they proved worthy of it. Mulengro cared nothing for Gaje. They could writhe in their own dirt for as long as they wished. They were not his people. But the Rom . . . oh, the Rom must learn. Even if they must die to learn. They might curse him now, but in the years to come, they would speak reverently of him and the thankless work he had done. The swatura told around the campfires would tell of his sacrifices. He would be remembered in all the years to come.
He walked on, his boot heels clicking against the asphalt, his mule misting about his feet. There were Rom near. Not many. Their souls called to him, but not with the same flare of power as did the soul of the drabarni he sought. His thin lips shaped what passed for a smile. She would serve him well. But first he would seek the measure of those Rom who, while not as powerful as her, were that much nearer.
Bob Gourlay sat on the front porch of the old farmhouse. He finished the remains of a sardine sandwich and washed it down with the last of his beer. Beside him lay Stan’s rifle and his own .12-gauge, as well as a couple of boxes of spare shells. He crushed the beer can and tossed it into the weed jungle in the front yard. He’d woken with a headache behind his eyes and it hadn’t gotten any better. It wouldn’t get any better, he knew, not until they set some things to right.
“Say-hey, brother Bob. Sure wish I had a brew.”
Bob started, turned slowly to find the thing that his brother had become sitting on the steps beside him. The sandwich and beer stirred uneasily in his stomach as he looked at the ruin of his brother’s face. An odor of graveyard decay settled heavily on the air.
“I. . . I could get you one . . .Stan . . . “
The thing sighed wetly. “Can’t drink, brother Bob. Can’t do much of anythin’, maybe, ‘cept hurt.”
“I cleaned your rifle.”
Flaps of skin moved on the creature’s face, shaping a rough parody of a grin. “Now that was right kind of you, little brother, but a gun won’t be of much use to me, nossir.” The thing stood up. “Come along now, brother Bob. We got business to attend to.”
