Gypsies Read online

  “Excellent,” Neumann said.

  Cardinal Palestrina dressed hastily and drew a heavy fur coat around himself as he left the room. He stopped in the hotel lobby to buy a coffee in a waxed-cardboard cup—so hot it scalded his lips—and then hailed a taxi from the icy margin of the street.

  2

  Laura could not say just when or how she became separated from her sister.

  It simply should not have been possible. The words repeated in her head like a cracked record: not possible. They had been together… she had been holding Karen’s hand. It was like that time back in Pittsburgh when they followed Tim into what she guessed now was some distant corner of the Novus Ordo. They were like kids, clinging to each other.

  After they arrived here they had moved through the snow to the black iron gates of this ugly building through the long morning shadows across the courtyard. Michael was inside, Karen said. Laura couldn’t feel it but she took her sister at her word. Find him and get out, she thought. Because we can do that: we can step sideways out of here anytime we feel like it.

  It was a reassuring idea.

  But then, if that was true, why hadn’t Michael come home? How had they contrived to hold him?

  But it was an unanswerable question. Just push on, she thought. On down these twining corridors now, corridors like the roots of some immense old tree reaching deep into the earth. The air was stale and smelled like anesthetic, with some cloying scent laid over that, like cloves. Turn and turn and turn in the dim light. It became automatic.

  And then she paused and looked for Karen and Karen wasn’t with her.

  The loss troubled her, but maybe not as much as it should have. She moved on in spite of it… not quite aimlessly, but without any goal she could name. It just happened. It was like sleepwalking. She felt asleep. She felt drugged.

  That was it, Laura told herself: it was like being under the influence of some drug, not a mind drug or a stimulant but some sleepy narcotic, something syrupy and potent, the way she imagined opium must be. She moved down these antiseptic drab tiles thinking, This way to the Emerald City… through the poppy field…

  The corridor narrowed until it was only a little wider than her body.

  A bell was ringing somewhere. An alarm bell, Laura thought. Some sort of emergency in progress. But she ignored it, walking.

  And then the corridor came to an end and there was only a room, a last windowless cul-de-sac revealed dimly through a final archway; and Laura thought, Why, this must be what I want, this is where I meant to go.

  She stepped through the narrow doorway and saw a woman.

  It took her by surprise. The woman looked so utterly ordinary. She was an ordinary middle-aged woman in familiar clothes, Levi’s and a loose blouse, dressed maybe too young for her age. Her hair was graying faintly and the expression on her face was? poignant, Laura thought, a mixture of bewilderment and longing. This woman, she thought, must have lost her way somehow.

  But then Laura took a second step into the room —and so did the woman—and she realized that the far wall was in fact a mirror and that this sad middle-aged person was herself.

  Her knees felt suddenly weak. Not me! she thought. That’s not me, I’m not like that at all! I’m the pretty one, she thought—and, incidentally, what am I doing here, and where is everybody? Where was Karen, where was Michael?

  She wanted to turn away but could not. Instead she took another step forward (and so did that sad bewildered reflection) and she turned and saw—to her horror—that the side walls were mirrored, too, and facing each other at a canted angle, so that there were suddenly more images of herself than she could tolerate, an infinity of them, multiplied down dark mirrored aisles, all of them staring back at her with this same dumbfounded expression. Not me, she thought again, none of them are me, and she raised her hands as if to push them away, as if they were physical bodies crowding in around her. She wanted to leave… but she was, mysteriously, too weak to move; the door was. too far away. They can’t keep us here, she thought, and groped for a secret way out, a route back to San Francisco and the sunlight, a hidden door or private window.

  But there were none. No doors or windows or angles here. Only the mirrors, like wells, drawing her down. She felt a surge of claustrophobic terror and saw the mirror-woman staring back at her wide-eyed, mouth opening in a scream; realizing all at once that she was trapped, that there was no way out and nobody here but herself.

  3

  Cardinal Palestrina joined Carl Neumann in his office in the Defense Research Institute. The room was crowded. There was a man Cardinal Palestrina identified as a Pentagon bureaucrat—Neumann’s superior. There were three of the Institute’s seers, dwarfish creatures in cheap cotton smocks. There were two of the men Neumann called scientists, whom Palestrina preferred to think of as mages: the men who had cast the binding spells.

  The sense of excitement in the room was palpable. It showed, especially, in Neumann. This was his I triumph, the gratification he had deferred for too many decades. His face was flushed; his eyes darted around the room as if he were memorizing it, every detail of this day, the people present, their expressions. He looked at Palestrina and then approached him.

  Palestrina said, “The boy is here already?”

  “We’ve had him in containment for hours.” Neumann grinned. “And the boy seems to have attracted the others. Bees to honey. It’s all coming together.”

  “When can we see him?”

  “Soon. We’re waiting here until everything is in place. We have spells and geases twenty years in the making—and they’re all coming to a peak, right here, right now. God, you can feel it in the air.”

  Cardinal Palestrina imagined he could. The air smelled odd, as if it had been singed in some vast, hot machine.

  Neumann said, “We’re just waiting for word from our seers.”

  The seers—the three dwarfish beings, who from the knotted closeness of their features must have been homunculi—sat staring into space. There was one for each of the three, Neumann said, Karen and Laura and Michael, each one linked in tandem to its subject. One of the creatures yawned and stretched as Cardinal Palestrina watched, and the gesture was so animalistic—so simian—that Palestrina suppressed a shudder.

  The homunculus grinned at him from across the room, an animal grin.

  Palestrina said to Neumann, “But can you hold them?”

  “We’re certain of it. This building is a cage—it’s been designed that way. Since that original escape we’ve contemplated the problem and designed what we believe is an impenetrable barrier. You understand, not a physical barrier.”

  “Prison magic,” Palestrina said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Can you calculate that so precisely?” “We believe so.”

  “It’s been said—please don’t take this the wrong way—the Americans have a genius for the profane sciences.”

  Neumann was in a generous mood. “But it’s true,” he said. “Look around.”

  Cardinal Palestrina drew a second cup of coffee from the urn in the corner. Too much would aggravate his stomach, but he felt he needed the alertness. So much was happening here.

  Good things, presumably. After all, Palestrina thought, Neumann’s arguments were hard to dismiss. His amorality was unmistakable, but the American understood the significance of events in the Middle East. A weapon is a weapon, after all. Death, deceit, ravaged innocence: wasn’t that what warfare meant? Cardinal Palestrina had been dispatched by the Vatican to evaluate Neumann’s secret weapon and its utility in war. Also its position in the moral order… but maybe that was finally irrelevant, a luxury the West could ill afford. Is a sword more humane than a bullet, a bullet more godly than a bomb? The news from Sicily was very bad; bad enough, perhaps, to overrule a delicacy concerning means.

  But it was impossible to look at these grinning homunculi and white-coated mages without at least a shiver of disquiet.

  He found Neumann and said, “Assuming
you keep these people… can you guarantee their utility?”

  Neumann seemed to resent the distraction. “They can be revised into utility.”

  These words, Palestrina thought. These cool, blank, terrifying words. Revised! “You mean surgery.”

  “It’s delicate, obviously, but we’re more sophisticated than we were when we intervened with Walker. This is a faculty of the imagination we’re trying to capture. It’s like some fabulous rare butterfly. The trick is to contain it without killing or crippling it. Fortunately there are certain neural functions that can be localized, at least generally. With the right scalpel in the right place you can sever the will from the imagination, cauterize the one without destroying the other. We can make them work for us.”

  “But it’s the boy you need… not the others.”

  Neumann looked at his watch. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  Palestrina was surprised by the tenor of authority in his own voice.

  Neumann said, “This is not a confessional.”

  “You’ll operate on them—you’ll fine-tune your surgical procedures.” (He thought, I know these words, too.) “You’ll mutilate them and then use them or kill them, as it suits you.”

  Neumann said, “This tone of yours—look, I don’t appreciate—” He stopped and recovered his composure. Cardinal Palestrina felt something of his own power here: legate from Rome, the ancient Imperium, Old Europe and all that implied. Neumann took a breath and began again: “These are moot questions, Your Eminence, or ought to be. In this kind of enterprise a certain amount of cruelty is built in. We all know that.”

  Cruelty and guilt, Palestrina thought. It amounted to Neumann saying, Here is your share.

  The door opened then; Walker entered. Cardinal Palestrina flinched away from the man. Walker wore his customary gray clothing and gray slouch hat and was looking at Neumann now with a strange intensity of expectation, as if Neumann had promised him something, a gift, the answer to a question.

  Neumann, consulting his seers, turned to the room and smiled. “It’s almost done now… just a few more minutes.”

  The homunculi grinned among themselves.

  4

  Karen was not aware that she had lost her sister, or at least the awareness was not enough to make her hesitate. Her mind was fixed on Michael.

  She had seen him.

  It happened not very long after they entered this building. The silence of these long stony corridors had been oppressive and she was reluctant to break it; there was only the sound of her footsteps against the ugly green tile… and Laura’s, until those faded. She moved steadily and purposefully, although she had never been here before, as if she possessed an instinct of direction, a cellular map. Michael was here somewhere. She knew it; his presence pervaded the building; the air was full of him. Somewhere very near now.

  And then she saw him. She saw him at the end of this corridor, where it branched in an unequal Y to the right and to the left. Seeing him, she gasped and faltered. He looked oddly far away, an image through the wrong end of a telescope. But it was Michael. There was no mistaking his lanky figure, his untucked shirt and his baseball cap. He looked toward her but seemed not to recognize her; and then—agonizingly —he was gone again, retreating to the left.

  Karen stumbled, then picked herself up and began to run.

  She remembered the story she had told her sister, the old woman wheeling Michael away in his stroller and how she had chased after her. It should have been the same, she thought, this running now, but somehow it was not; there was no pleasure or relief in it; only a grim and breathless determination.

  The corridor twisted again and she followed it in a long downward spiral. She could not estimate how far she had come or how far she might yet have to travel. There was only the image of Michael in her mind.

  And then the corridor straightened and she saw him again—heartbreakingly, even farther away. “Michael!” She called out his name, and her own voice sounded strange to her, as shocking, in this dim door-less hallway, as a gunshot. “Michael—!”

  But he was running… running away from her.

  She gasped and began to sprint. She felt a kind of submerged panic, something that would be panic if only she could think more clearly. The important thing—the only thing that mattered now—was to keep him in sight.

  She ran as long as she could run. Periodically Michael would stop, look back, and he was too far away for Karen to see the expression on his face, but she was afraid that it was a kind of taunting smile, a way of beckoning her on. It was cruel and she could not understand it. Why would he act like this? What was he thinking?

  But there was nothing to do but follow.

  When she could not run any longer she careened up against a stone wall. The wall was cold against her shoulder but she couldn’t move, could only huddle against the pain of her struggling lungs. She looked up finally and saw Michael again, closer now, his face unreadable; she staggered forward and saw him sidestep through an archway. It was the only door Karen had seen in this labyrinth and she approached it warily. She understood now that something was wrong, things had gone wrong in a fundamental way, a way she had not foreseen. But here was Michael again —she saw him clearly through the empty doorway— alone in a small room watching her impassively, waiting for her. Karen made a small noise in her throat and stepped inside, reaching out for him.

  But it wasn’t Michael after all.

  She blinked at the image, which would not focus. Suddenly this was not Michael but, horrifyingly, a thing the size of Michael, but smooth poreless plastic, and she recognized it: it was Baby, it was the doll the Gray Man had given her all those years ago, grotesquely inflated and staring at her through painted china-blue eyes.

  Karen bit the heel of her hand and took a step backward.

  And then Baby was gone, too, and there was the final image—a fleeting impression—of some wrinkled, shrunken creature grinning madly at her… and then the space was simply empty, vision dispersed like smoke, and she was alone in the room.

  She turned to leave. But she was tired. She was as tired as she had ever been in her life, and her feet wouldn’t do what she meant them to do, and so she sat on the cold stone floor and folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes—just for a minute.

  5

  “It’s done,” Neumann said.

  Cardinal Palestrina listened to the cheering.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  1

  Karen wasn’t certain how much time passed.

  She woke and slept and woke again, but the waking was partial and transitory. When she came fully to herself at last, she was in a room larger than the one she remembered; and there were old-fashioned-looking wooden chairs, and a single door—and she was not alone.

  Laura was here, too, blinking at the light. And Michael. She felt a rush of gratitude. They were together. That, at least.

  Tim was there, too.

  She sat up—she had been lying on the cold floor— and made her way to one of the chairs. Michael, doing the same, gave her a look, a sort of “I’m all right,” and that was good. Laura struggled to her feet.

  Tim, who was standing already, and whose expression was calm and endlessly patient, said, “You’ll feel better soon.”

  Karen could not at first understand what he meant. It was like a message from another planet, a foreign language. Feel better soon? Was he insane?

  Laura said, “You knew… you were a part of this.”

  Tim did not deny it. Karen looked at him with her mouth open. Well, maybe he was capable of that. It was possible.

  He said, “Tell me if there’s anything you need. If you’re hungry or you’re thirsty. You don’t have to suffer here, you know.”

  Laura shot him an outraged look. Karen expected some kind of outburst from her. But all she said was “Go away,” and her voice was flat and distant.

  “I’ll be back,” Tim said, “later.” He left
through the room’s single door. And Karen understood, without having to think about it, that she would not be able to follow, that the doorway was barred to her, that this was a prison and that none of them would be allowed to leave.

  They had not been beaten or intimidated or tortured; only confined. Karen tried to explain the trick that had been played on her, the false image of Michael; but Michael began to look shamefaced and she stopped, because he wasn’t responsible and she didn’t want him to think he was. He was apologetic: “I only meant to find out what we were getting into. I came here because I wanted to save Laura the trouble.”

  Laura said, “If you hadn’t gone they would have used me. A lure.” She added, “Michael, I appreciate what you did. It took courage.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “Not in any way we could predict. Anyway, what we have to think about now is getting out of here.” Michael said, “We can’t.” “You don’t know that.”

  His eyes were empty, cynical. “You must be able to feel it. There are more than four walls in this room. I guess some sort of magic. We could walk out of any ordinary cage… so they had to build a special one.”

  Laura opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. What he said was true and even Karen could feel it, a dulling, a suppression. Nowhere to look but up, down, left, right. It was ironic, in a way: all those years she had wanted to feel this, this utter ordinariness, to be anchored this firmly in one time and place. Well, here she was. But it was not an anchor; it was a leash; it was a chain.

  She retreated to a corner and thought about Tim.

  They had trusted him because he was family. But she guessed family had never meant that much to him. Maybe there was no reason it should. Family was Willis, with his flattop Marine haircut and his big fists. Family was Jeanne, taking him into her lap and laying an ice bag over his bruises. Those moments—Timmy bruised and curled in Mama’s lap—were the only tender moments Karen could remember between Timmy and Mama, and she guessed there might be some connection there, a clue to Tim’s willful meanness. I have been bad and beaten for it: now this is my reward.