Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (21 page)

‘I bet I know where you’ve been,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘Over in the Grotta Azzurra, eating striped bass.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and if it’s all right to ask, what in the world are you doing down here at this hour of the night, and a Sunday night at that? I heard you had left the Department and gone to the Pinkerton Agency.’

‘I was attending to some unfinished business,’ he said. ‘Six months or so before I retired, somebody over at Headquarters spoke to me about two young detectives out in precinct squads who sounded like they might be good material for Pickpocket and Confidence. I had thirty-three detectives in the squad at the time, seventeen men and sixteen women, but two of my best men were about to be transferred to Narcotics because of certain skills they had. So I looked up these two young detectives, and I was impressed by them, and I asked them would they like to work in Pickpocket and Confidence. At first, they weren’t so sure, but after I explained the nature of the squad to them in some detail they came to the conclusion they would. So I put in for their transfer. Well, these things take forever. Months went by. Then I got this offer to work in the private-detective field. I hadn’t intended to retire from the Department for years yet, but this offer appealed to me, and I decided to go ahead and retire. And the way things happen, the very morning of the day I was due to leave, notification came through that the transfer of these two young detectives had been approved. So I got in touch with them and told them the situation – I wouldn’t be able to break them in – but I told them I would call them as soon as I got settled in my new job and would meet them and sit down with them and tell them all I possibly could about pickpockets and confidence-game operators and swindlers, give them the benefit of my experience. I felt I had a moral obligation to do so. I called them the other day and asked if they still wanted me to talk to them, and they said they did, so we agreed to meet in the squad office on Sunday night – it would be quiet then and we’d have it pretty much to ourselves. And that’s what I’ve been doing. I talked about four hours tonight, talked and answered questions, and I hardly got started, so we decided to meet two or three more Sunday nights. And where I’m going now, I
thought
I’d drop in at Headquarters for a minute and say hello to the lieutenant on the main desk and find out what’s new since I retired. Come on, walk me around to the back door.’

We turned in to Centre Market Place, a narrow, ominous, brightly lit, block-long street that runs behind Police Headquarters.

‘What about the gypsies?’ I asked. ‘Do you still see any of them?’

‘I was waiting for you to ask me that,’ Captain Campion said. ‘Sure I do. Only the night before last I drove over to Brooklyn and had a talk with an old
bajour
queen from the West Coast named Paraskiva Miller. She’s a Machvanka – that is, a female member of the Machwaya tribe of Serbian gypsies – and she’s seventy-five. She calls herself Madame Miller. She’s been telling fortunes and pulling off
bajours
since 1898, 1899, or 1900, somewhere around there, mainly in California, and I’m pretty sure she’s one of the richest gypsies in the country. According to gypsy gossip, she believes that money will be worthless before long, something she saw in a dream, and she puts her money in diamonds and keeps them sewed up in her skirts and petticoats; one of these days some gypsy from another tribe is going to strip her down to her bones. I heard about her first in San Francisco in the summer of 1945. The New York Police Department and the police departments in several other cities around the country have an arrangement by which they lend detectives to each other on certain occasions, and I was loaned to San Francisco that summer. An international conference was going on out there, the one at which the United Nations was organized, and the city was crowded, and I was supposed to watch out for criminals from the East. When I had any time to myself, I looked up the local gypsies. Paraskiva and one of her daughters were running an
ofisa
in San Francisco then – a fortune-telling joint in a store – and I tried several times to see her, but her daughter always came out and said Madame Miller wasn’t in, which meant she was sitting behind the curtains and had peeped out at me and didn’t like my looks. I got word here recently that she had come East to visit one of her granddaughters, Sabinka Uwanawich, who runs an
ofisa
on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I know Sabinka quite well; I’ve arrested her I think it’s five times. So I went out to her
ofisa
the other night. When I walked in, Sabinka began to
scream
insults at me, the usual gypsy-woman insults – I was a rat, I was a stinking rat, she’d like to pull my guts out through my ears, all that stuff – but she knew I had left the Police Department and was curious what I wanted, and when I told her I just wanted to ask her grandmother some questions about gypsies on the West Coast in the old days, she quieted down and took me in the back room. Paraskiva turned out to be one of those stout, dark, gold-toothed, big-eyed, Hindu-looking gypsies. She was the bouncy kind. I’ve seen her kind over and over among the Serbian gypsy women; they’re top-heavy – they’re nine-tenths bosom – but they hold themselves erect and they’re quick on their feet and they walk with a strut. As old and stout as she was, she had on high-heeled shoes and lipstick and rouge. She wasn’t well. She had a cough, a persistent cough, and she said she had had t.b. some years ago and was afraid it had come back on her, but she talked to me an hour or more, and I got some odds and ends of information out of her that I couldn’t have got anywhere else. She didn’t tell me a whole lot, but what she told me fitted in with what I already knew.’

One side of Centre Market Place is lined with red brick tenements whose street floors are occupied by gunsmiths, police tailors, and police-equipment stores. An old, black, and obese cat was sitting in the show window of one of the police-equipment stores, in the middle of a display of cartridge belts. ‘She’s the biggest store cat in the neighborhood,’ Captain Campion said. ‘I’ve stopped and watched her many a night on my way past here. One night I saw her catch and eat a rat.’ We paused and stood in front of the show window. While Captain Campion continued to talk, he and I watched the cat, and the cat stared fixedly at us and slowly waved her tail.

‘You remember I used to say the more I studied gypsies the less I knew about them,’ Captain Campion said. ‘Well, I’ve changed my tune. After all these years, I really believe I’ve got to the bottom of a good many gypsy matters. To tell you the truth, I found out more about some aspects of gypsy life the last few years than I did in all the years that went before. For one thing, there was an unusual amount of informing going on. During 1951, ’52, and ’53, the
bajour
women in three or four of the bands that hang out in
the
city had a run of luck pulling off
bajours
on mental cases. A high percentage of the women who go to gypsies for advice are off balance to some degree, and the gypsies would starve to death if they weren’t, but what I’m talking about now are serious mental cases, advanced mental cases – women who should be in institutions or they already have been and shouldn’t have been let out. As a rule, gypsies are leery of such cases. When women are that far gone, they’re a good deal harder to swindle than you might think. Some of them are much more suspicious than normal people, they suspect everything and everybody, and some of them their minds are off in space and they don’t retain and the gypsy can work on one of them a week and still be right where she started, and some of them are so shaky they’re liable to throw a leaping, scratching, screaming hysterical fit at any moment and create a disturbance and attract the whole neighborhood into the
ofisa
. And the very best of them, when the gypsy tries to worm the facts out of them concerning do they have any money put away and they let drop they do have, it may be true and it may be a complete delusion. All the same, around 1951 the
bajour
women in the bands I’m speaking of got to be very good at handling serious mental cases and began concentrating on them. They learned how to detect which ones were safe enough to work on, and how to see things their way, and how to calm them down and reason with them and plant ideas in their minds.

‘One of their victims was an Italian woman of fifty-four, a widow. She had been a widow around two years, and she and a son-in-law ran a bakery that her husband had left her, a small bakery in an Italian neighborhood on the lower East Side. She hadn’t been herself since she lost her husband – she would stay in her room for days at a time and lie in there with the bedclothes pulled up over her and refuse to speak, and about the only time she went out in the streets was to go to church. A pair of
bajour
women opened an
ofisa
in an old store in the neighborhood, and one day this Italian woman was passing by on her way to church and they stopped her and talked to her and said they could see something was bothering her, why didn’t she come in and visit them, maybe they could help her. She visited them several times,
and
they wormed out of her that she had a total of seventeen thousand six hundred dollars in two savings banks, and then they planted the idea in her mind this money had a curse on it and that was what was making her feel bad. So she went to the banks one morning and drew it out, every cent of it, and carried it to the
ofisa
and asked the gypsies to take the curse off it. They said to leave it with them and they would work over it all night and do their best. She returned to the
ofisa
the following morning and naturally the
ofisa
was empty and the gypsies were gone, and her reaction was she went on home and didn’t say a word. This was in the latter part of October. Four months went by, and then one day early in March the son-in-law was filling out her income-tax return and she was lying in bed that day refusing to speak and he got her bankbooks out of her bureau drawer to see how much interest he should report, and both books had
‘CANCELLED’
cut in them, perforated in them, the way savings banks do when an account is closed, and he was shocked, and he dragged her out of bed and forced her to explain to him and the rest of the family what in the name of God had happened. And when she finally did so, he took her to the police station in the neighborhood, and the detectives there sent them to the Annex to see me, and I did the usual thing – I got out the file of photographs of
bajour
women and started showing them to her. She just kind of glanced at the first one I showed her and saw it was a gypsy, and then she bent over and put her head in her hands and wouldn’t look at any more. She wouldn’t reply to questions or make any further response. I asked the son-in-law to step out in the hall with me, and I urged him to take her to a psychiatrist, which he said he would. And some days later he phoned me that the psychiatrist said she was suffering from involutional melancholia in an advanced state.

‘Another victim was a forty-two-year-old blonde, a member of a prominent family in Brooklyn. She’s had three husbands, all well-to-do, and three divorces, and she has a daughter by her first husband that the husband has the full custody of; she isn’t even allowed to visit her. She has a small income of some kind, and she lives alone. She hits the bottle and she picks up men who beat her up, but what’s really wrong with her, she’s a schizo and
she’s
subject to auditory hallucinations. She’ll be all right for a year, a year and a half, sometimes longer, and then she’ll start hearing voices and she’ll wander in the streets and scream and moan and run right in front of cars, trying to get away from the voices, and she’ll wind up in the psychopathic division at Kings County Hospital; it’s happened over and over. She spent three or four evenings in an
ofisa
in a store on Flatbush Avenue Extension, telling her troubles to the gypsies, and the gypsies sympathized with her from the bottom of their hearts and took twelve thousand dollars from her – twelve thousand three hundred and fifty, to be exact. It was part of the settlement from one of her divorces, and for some reason of her own she had been keeping it in cash in a safe-deposit box.

‘They made several touches almost as big as these, and touches amounting to a couple of thousand, a thousand, five hundred, two hundred and fifty, and the like of that were just routine. The men in these bands began driving big brand-new cars instead of used cars and drinking whiskey instead of wine, and they began throwing their weight around at gypsy parties and talking out of turn and showing entirely too much interest in the women in the other bands. The men in the other bands got sick and tired of this, and certain ones of them decided to do some informing, and instead of just getting on the phone and refusing to give their names and jabbering a minute or two and hanging up, the way gypsy informers usually do, they came right into my office and sat down and put their hats on their laps and talked and talked, and much to my surprise about twenty per cent of what they told turned out to be true. In addition to straightening me out on who did various
bajours
, they gave me a lot of incidental information on gypsy customs.’

The obese cat stirred herself and jumped clumsily out of the show window and waddled into the darkness in the rear of the store. Captain Campion and I resumed our walk.

‘Another good source of information on gypsy customs I had in recent years,’ he said, ‘was an investigator in the Department of Welfare named Harry Brunner. In April, 1951, the Department of Welfare put all the gypsy relief cases in the entire city into
one
center, the Non-Residence Welfare Center, and started weeding them out. They had had trouble with gypsy families who were using several sets of names and several addresses and getting relief from several centers at the same time, and they shouldn’t have been on relief in the first place. Such as a family that owned a new Buick Roadmaster with about a thousand dollars’ worth of accessories and extra equipment on it – it was practically a rolling auto-supplies store – and they were getting relief from a center in Queens and a center in the Bronx, and were also on relief over in Newark. Brunner was assigned to the Non-Residence Center, and he got in behind the gypsies. He’s a big, quiet, gloomy-looking fellow from Brooklyn. He’s six feet two, and he’s absolutely fearless and absolutely honest. His mother taught in public schools in Brooklyn for thirty-five years. She taught ungraded children – children with psychological problems – and Brunner must’ve learned from her how to get along with people. In a short while, he threw dozens upon dozens of gypsy families off relief, but for some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, instead of hating him, the gypsies liked him and respected him. They called him Bruno, and invited him to parties and weddings and funerals. He ate gypsy goulash with them and drank gypsy tea with them, and sat up all night talking with them, and they told him things right off the bat that it took me years to learn. Gypsies ordinarily don’t like it a bit when people try to find out what’s the gypsy word for this, what’s the gypsy word for that, but all Brunner had to do was ask; they gave him hundreds of words. I had hopes that he would become a real gypsy scholar, which is something we need in this country – when I read about American professors studying strange tribes of people in the far corners of the earth, it burns me up; you’d think at least one of them would study a strange tribe that’s right under their noses. However, he disappointed me. He was a college man – he had a B.S. in psychology from Long Island University – but he wanted to work with his hands. In August, 1952, right out of a clear sky, he quit the Department of Welfare and went down to Fort Worth, Texas – he was married to a Texas girl – and the next thing I knew, I had a postcard from him saying he had become a structural steelworker.