Gypsies Read online

  Walker believed—although he seldom allowed the thought to become explicit—that he had lost something long ago, and that bringing Karen White’s son Michael back to the DRI would return it to him. What was this lost thing? Well, he didn’t know. Maybe something as ethereal as a scent, a memory, a feeling; or maybe something tangible, a reward. Something he had owned once; something which had slipped away. Walker often had dreams in which he lost his wallet or his hat, and he would wake up groping the bedsheets frantically—it was here, I know it was here somewhere.

  But he never permitted himself to dwell on this. If he thought about it too much when he was alone—and he was almost always alone—his eyes would tear, his fists would clench. The DRI surgeons had cauterized most of his capacity for emotion, but the emotions he did feel were capricious and sometimes scalding. He tried diligently to suppress them.

  But he wanted that lost thing back.

  After dinner in the commissary Walker went to see Tim.

  Neumann had given Tim a luxurious room on the third floor, high enough to afford him a view of the city, which was dark now, dark clouds rivering above it. Tim was at the window peering out. Walker, who was not stupid, and who understood the nature of the spells that had been cast over the years, was careful to stand erect, to fix a smile on his face, to assume an air of authority.

  Doing so, he caught sight of his own reflection in the window and thought, How old I seem! Of course, he was old. He had lost track of his precise age but he was certainly old enough to be Tim’s father—that was in the nature of things. And Tim was a grown-up man. Not a middle-aged man but not a young man, either. Walker was vigorous but he knew that age and time were pressing him and he hoped he would not die before he recovered the precious thing he had lost.

  He said, “You like the city?”

  Tim turned to face him.

  Timothy Fauve had changed a great deal over the last six months. Now his eyes were clear, his clothes and countenance were clean, he looked healthy. His dark hair was down to his shoulders but it was not matted. He had shaved. His hands were steady.

  Tim said, “Hello, Walker.” Added, “I don’t think it’s the kind of place you really like. Let’s say I appreciate it.”

  Walker broadened his smile slightly. “You’ve come a long way.”

  “About as far as you can go. All kinds of ways.” “We won’t be here much longer. Are you ready?” “I think so.”

  This was more tentative than Walker liked. He frowned and saw Tim react with a wince. “You understand how hard we’ve worked to get to this stage.”

  Tim nodded vigorously.

  “You know what we’ve done for you.”

  “Sure I do. Of course.”

  “And what’s at stake.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re certain you’re ready to finish it?” “Absolutely,” Tim said.

  “Good.” Walker relaxed. “How about a game of chess?”

  He gave away odds of a vizier and a rook. Walker was a good chess player. Swift, methodical, and clean —he wielded the chess pieces like a surgeon wielding a knife.

  Part Three

  HOMELAND

  Chapter Fifteen

  1

  They made it back to the California border three days out of Pennsylvania. Laura translated them in and out of a dry, hot world in which the roads were broad, traffic was light, and the horizon seemed always a little nearer. They stopped once at a roadside diner, but the menu posted over the counter was in a cursive script that looked more Persian than English—which implied, among other things, that their money wouldn’t be any good. So Laura took them back onto an interstate and they pulled over at a Stuckey’s outside Kingman, Arizona.

  Karen said, “I didn’t know you could do all this.” Her sister shrugged. “Neither did I.” “I was thinking,” Karen said, “it might attract attention.”

  “I don’t guess that matters now. There’s attention on us already.”

  “It’s a question of time,” Karen said. “Do you get that feeling?”

  “I think we should be in a hurry. Yes.”

  Karen ordered a club sandwich and a Coke. Michael asked for a hamburger and Laura ordered the salad. Waiting, Karen spread out her hands on the yellowed marble counter. “Things feel different now.”

  Laura said, “I know what you mean. I can do things I couldn’t do before.”

  “Because it’s more urgent. That’s what I feel—the urgency.”

  The waitress brought lunch. Karen looked at Michael, who looked at his hamburger. Tides of sunlight bore down through the big green-tinted windows. Everything was still; the air-conditioned air was still. Poised, Karen thought.

  “Eat up,” Laura urged. “We ought to get moving.”

  It was Karen’s first trip to San Francisco.

  Gavin had been here a few times on business. He always said it was a beautiful city. And it was, Karen thought—from a distance. She liked the hills and the old white scalloped buildings; she liked the low clouds racing in from the ocean. But once you got into it, it was a city like any other city, same crowded sidewalks and diesel buses and neighborhoods you had to avoid.

  They checked into a Ramada Inn on Market Street. The clerk accepted Karen’s Visa card, but she wondered how much longer she could get away with that. It was an account she had shared with Gavin; now that she was gone, he would probably cut her off.

  But there were more immediate things to worry about.

  Each of them carried one of the three big suitcases up a carpeted flight of stairs to the second floor. The room was big and smelled faintly musty, but the sheets were crisp and the towels were clean. The bathroom was a temple walled with mirrors.

  Laura unpacked the postcard Jeanne had given her. “We could go there tonight. It’s not that far.”

  But Karen shook her head firmly. “It’s late already. I’m tired.”

  “Well—food and a night’s sleep sure wouldn’t hurt. There’s a coffee shop in the lobby—will that do?”

  “I want to shower and turn in early,” Karen said. “You two go, all right?”

  Laura hesitated at the door. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. I just need some privacy.”

  Michael ordered yet another burger. Laura said, “You’ll kill yourself with that stuff, you know. They shoot the cattle full of hormones. It’s disgusting.”

  Michael smiled. “All of a sudden you’re a vegetarian?”

  “I just think, if you’re going to eat meat, you should really do it. Big thick steaks from big fat cows. There used to be a restaurant not too far from here that would cook you a steak for a reasonable price. I mean real meat, not gristle and TVP.”

  “You used to live around here?”

  “ Berkeley. But that was a long time ago.”

  “The sixties,” Michael said.

  Laura smiled to herself. It always sounded odd when people said “the sixties” like that—like the name of a place, an address. “Yes,” she said, “the sixties.”

  Michael took a big bite out of his burger. “You were a hippie?”

  “That’s really a dumb word, Michael. I always thought so. It’s a Time magazine kind of word.”

  “Well,” he said, “you know.”

  She nodded reluctantly. “I guess you could say that’s what I was. A Berkeley hippie, anyhow. I came down to the Haight sometimes. I danced at the Fillmore—I guess that qualifies.”

  Michael said, “There was a thing about it on TV a couple of years ago. The Summer of Love.”

  Laura’s smile receded. “The Summer of Love was nothing but hype. It was the end of everything. Ten thousand people trying to live in the Panhandle. You know what Haight Street was by the end of the so-called Summer of Love? It was where a lot of homeless teenagers went to get hepatitis. Or VD. Or raped, or pregnant. It was a disaster … everybody was talking about going away.”

  Michael said soberly, “Like you did.”

  “Yes.”


  “You went to Turquoise Beach.”

  “Well, that’s where I ended up.”

  “Is that what it was like here—I mean when it was good? Was the Haight like Turquoise Beach?”

  Laura shook her head emphatically. “The Haight was unique. It was full of all these crazy idealists, poets and saints—there’s no way I can sit here and tell you what it was like. It was like holding the world in your hand. Turquoise Beach is good, you know; it’s the best I could find. But it’s slower there. There isn’t the passion. There isn’t—”

  But she found herself faltering.

  Michael said, “I didn’t mean to get you upset.”

  He sat across the table from her, her sister’s child, very eighties in a slash haircut and tight T-shirt. Strange to think that he had not existed in 1967. She thought suddenly, He could be mine, I could have had a child like this one, I could have raised him. Instead I moved away to Never-Never Land… where you can be young forever. Or almost forever. Or until you wake up one day, gray-haired and menopausal.

  “I know what it’s like,” Michael said, and he was talking softly now, almost to himself. “Looking for a better world—I can understand that.”

  Laura put down her fork. “Do it,” she said. Her appetite was gone. Her voice had hardened. “Do it, Michael. But look hard, all right? Don’t give up too soon.”

  Karen showered and then stretched out on one of the big twin hotel beds. The mattress was hard—she had gotten used to the old plush beds back home—but that was all right. She had intended to order something up from room service, but she discovered she didn’t feel like eating. She had opened the horizontal blinds, but there was only the blankness of the parking lot outside.

  She looked at the telephone.

  She picked up the receiver, thinking she might call room service after all. But when the hotel operator answered Karen found herself asking for a line out, and maybe this was what she had meant to do all along; maybe this was why she had sent Michael and Laura out on their own.

  She called Toronto.

  It was the number Gavin had left her all those months ago. She thought, If the woman answers I’ll hang up. But maybe Gavin would be there. Three hours difference, she thought. Back home it was dinnertime. Maybe Gavin was having dinner in his girlfriend’s apartment overlooking the lake. Maybe it was snowing. Maybe the drapes were open and they could see the snow coming down in the darkness over the lake.

  She waited through the fourth ring and then the fifth and then her impulse was to put down the receiver, drop it right now, but there was a faraway click and then Gavin’s voice saying, “Hello?”

  “Hi,” she said breathlessly. “It’s me.”

  Gavin said, “Christ, Karen—where are you?”

  “Pretty far away.” But that sounded silly. “In the States,” she added. She didn’t want him to know exactly.

  “What the hell are you doing down there?”

  “We had to get away.”

  “Michael is with you?”

  “Sure he’s with me … of course he is.”

  “You know you left a righteous mess up here, don’t you? I filed a report with the police. I had to let them into the house. It was strange. All those Mayflower boxes stacked up. It was like the Mary Celeste. And the school’s been calling me about Michael. Have you got him in school, at least?”

  “Michael’s all right,” she said defensively.

  “Do you have a rational explanation for any of this?”

  None that you would understand, Karen thought. “Not really.”

  “You had some kind of breakdown, is that it? You took Michael and you left town? Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” she said.

  “You understand this looks very bad. This could weigh against you when it comes to custody.”

  She didn’t understand at first. Custody of what? Then it dawned on her. “Gavin, that’s crazy!”

  “Obviously it’s not something I anticipated. I mean, I was the one who left. I admit that. But I talked to Diane and it seems to us that Michael might need a more stable home environment.”

  “Stable?”

  “Rather than being taken out of school and hauled all over the country.” Petulantly: “I haven’t seen him for months, you know. Maybe you think that’s not important to me. But I’m his father, for God’s sake.”

  Karen felt cold. She wondered why she had called at all. It had occurred to her that Gavin might be worried. She had wanted to reassure him.

  He said, “Tell me where you are. Better yet, tell me when you’re coming home.”

  “You can’t just do that,” Karen said. “You can’t just give orders.”

  “That’s not the issue, is it? Michael is the issue.”

  “You can’t have him.”

  “I mean his welfare. His school. His health. I’ll have to tell the police you called.” “Michael is fine!”

  But it felt like a lie when she said it. Gavin said, “It’s not me you’re letting down, you know. It’s him.” “He’s fine.”

  “All I want is an address. Even a phone number. Is Michael there? Let me talk to him. I—”

  But she slammed down the receiver in its cradle.

  After dinner Laura and Michael walked a couple of blocks down Market Street. It was late and this was not the greatest neighborhood, but the street was busy with people. A middle-aged man with a Salvador Dali mustache panhandled them for change; Laura gave him a quarter. “God bless,” he said happily. It made her think again of the Haight, of her Berkeley days. Of how much she had lost since then—slowly, without noticing.

  Karen was asleep when they let themselves back into the hotel room. “You wash up,” Laura told her nephew. “I’ll take the last shift.”

  Ten minutes later the bathroom was hers. She took a long, deliberate shower, the water hot as she could stand it; she washed her hair and toweled herself dry as the steam faded from the mirrors.

  The bathroom light was a merciless cool fluorescence and the mirrors were everywhere.

  Old, Laura thought.

  Look at that woman in the mirror, she thought. That woman thinks she’s young. She moves the way she moved when she was twenty. She thinks she’s young and she thinks she’s pretty.

  But she’s kidding herself on both counts.

  Shit, Laura thought. It’s just depression and road-weariness and being scared. Hey, she thought, all you have to do is squint your eyes and blur away the wrinkles.

  The wrinkles, the sags, the crow’s-feet. Too late, she thought. Too late, too late, too late… you’re old now.

  The fairest in the land. Hardly.

  Too late for love and too late for children. She had played too long before bedtime and now all the good TV shows were over and the lights were about to go off.

  Maudlin, she thought. You should be ashamed of yourself.

  Well, she was.

  Bed, she told herself. Sleep. A person needs her beauty sleep.

  She moved across the faded plush hotel carpet slowly, hearing the creak of her own frail bones in the silent darkness.

  2

  In the morning they checked the phone book, but there was no Timothy Fauve listed anywhere in the Bay Area.

  “Means nothing,” Laura said. “He could be using another name. Anything.”

  But, Karen thought, it wasn’t a good omen.

  After breakfast they drove to the address on the postcard Tim had mailed home.

  It was a hotel in the Mission District. It was a boarding hotel, not the kind of hotel Karen was accustomed to; a derelict hotel, and there were homeless men squatting on the pavement outside. It was called the Gravenhurst, the name printed on an ancient rust-flecked sign. Karen gazed up at it with dismay. It was not the kind of place she could imagine going into.

  But she followed Laura up the three chipped concrete steps to the door, Michael close behind her.

  The lobby was dark and smelled faintly of mildew and sour hops. T
here was a barroom off to the right, a desk to the left. Laura stood at the desk and asked about Timothy Fauve. The man behind the desk was hugely overweight and seemed never to blink. He peered up at Laura and said he’d never heard the name. Laura said, “He was here at Christmas last year.”

  “People come through here a lot.” “Maybe you could look it up?”

  The man just stared at her.

  Laura opened her purse and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “Please,” she said.

  Karen was impressed. She couldn’t have done anything like that. It just wouldn’t have occurred to her.

  The man sighed and paged back through a huge, old-fashioned ledger. Finally he said, “Fauve, Room 215. But he checked out months ago.”

  Laura said, “You remember him?”

  “What’s to remember? He was quiet. He came and went.”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “I don’t talk.”

  Laura seemed to hesitate. “Is the room empty now?”

  “Currently,” the man said, “that room is not occupied.”

  “Can we look at it?”

  “It looks like any other room. It’s been empty since May. We had a water pipe break.”

  “Just for a few minutes?” She took another ten out of her purse.

  The man put it in his breast pocket. “If you so desire,” he said, and passed her the key.

  But he was right, Karen thought. There was nothing to see. Just this long, dank stucco corridor; a wooden door with a lock and a handle; an empty room.

  It was a cubicle. It was the size of a walk-in cupboard. There was a toilet stall behind a cracked door, a washstand but no shower. The walls were covered with gray plaster. The broken pipe had flooded the rug and mold was eating its way toward the door.