Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (22 page)

‘Another thing I might mention that happened in recent years was an experience we had with a
bajour
woman named Pearsa. Pearsa belongs to two of the biggest gypsy families in North and South America, the Nicholases and the Demetros. Her father was George Nicholas, a Serbian gypsy, and her mother was Sabinka Demetro, a Russian gypsy, and she was born in Buenos Aires in 1907. She was brought to the United States when she was a little girl, and she was married when she was fourteen. She’s married to Steve Bimbo, who’s the oldest son of old man Tene Bimbo, who’s the head of the Bimbo family, which is another big gypsy family. Her main stamping grounds are New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Boston, and the record we have on her dates back to 1926 and shows thirty-two arrests in eleven cities, but that’s not as bad as it sounds. There’s quite a few gypsy women with a hundred or more arrests on their records. Men, too. Old man Tene Bimbo himself, he’s rolled up a hundred and forty arrests for everything from murder in the first degree to stealing an automobile jack. Still and all, you can just imagine how much she’s paid to lawyers and bail bondsmen. Pearsa’s a red-haired gypsy, the only one I’ve ever seen, and she used to be extremely good-looking in a wild and woolly sort of way. She’s been a big money-maker, and other
bajour
women talk about her with the greatest respect, but she’s had thirteen children and her back bothers her and she’s developed sinus trouble and her nerves are all shot and she and Steve fight like cats and dogs and she doesn’t have much patience any more and she’s begun to take chances she wouldn’t’ve dreamed of taking when she was in better command of herself. Well, in February, 1952, with the help of the District Attorney’s office, we managed to plant a certain mechanical device in an
ofisa
that Pearsa was running in a flat above a store on East Broadway, and we listened to her actual words while she worked on a victim during the final stages of a
bajour
. It was the first time we’d ever been able to use such a device on a gypsy, and it was a very educational experience. When did I see you last? It must’ve been around four years ago.’

‘It was around that,’ I said. ‘I ran into you in Grand Central and we went and had some coffee.’

‘I remember,’ Captain Campion said. ‘Then I’ve never had a chance to tell you about the devil’s head. Every so often, all through the years, we’d hear from a
bajour
victim about a little devil’s head that the gypsy used on her to convince her she had cancer, which only the gypsy could cure, but we couldn’t seem to find one. Every time we arrested a
bajour
woman, we’d search her right down to the seams in her skirts, and every time we made a raid on gypsy premises we’d turn everything upside down, and we came across a good many queer things, but a devil’s head just never showed up. Well, in the summer of 1952 we finally found one, and it was a nasty thing. It was carved out of ivory, and it was about the size of a hazelnut, and it was grinning, and it had human hair glued on it – coarse, black gypsy hair. On January 3, 1953, we found another one.’

We reached the back door of Headquarters.

‘What did you do with them?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to see one.’

‘The District Attorney’s office has the last one we found,’ Captain Campion said. ‘It’ll be put in evidence when the gypsy woman who was using it’s case comes up in General Sessions, if it ever does – she jumped bail, and I suspect she went to Mexico City, which is where they generally go when they jump bail. The other one belongs to me – the gypsy we took it from died before
her
case came up; she was burned to death in a tenement fire in Coney Island. I’ve got it home. If you’d really like to see it, I tell you what I’ll do. I was going to talk to the young detectives about gypsies sooner or later, and if you want to come down to the Annex next Sunday night, I’ll devote the entire session to gypsies, and you can sit in on it, and I’ll bring along the devil’s head.’

‘What time should I come?’ I asked.

‘Meet me in the squad office in the Annex a little after eight,’ Captain Campion said.

Captain Campion is fifty-one years old. He is blue-eyed and black-haired, and he has a calm, ruddy, observant, handsome, strong-jawed, Irish face. He is five feet ten, and he weighs around a hundred and fifty. He was born on Fifty-eighth Street between Ninth and Tenth, in Hell’s Kitchen, and he grew up on Twentieth Street between
Second
and Third, in the old Gashouse District. He went through the second year of high school. He was an amateur fighter. He fought in four weights, beginning as a flyweight and ending as a lightweight, and he had fifty-four fights and won forty-nine. He entered the Police Department in January, 1927. It soon became apparent that he was unusually intelligent, and that he had a remarkably accurate memory for faces, names, conversations, and sequences of actions, and that he was deeply curious about human behavior, and after two years as a patrolman he was transferred to the Detective Division and assigned to the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad. He was an exceedingly hard-working detective; he made over two thousand arrests, and was cited for bravery nine times. He is serious by nature, but friendly, and he has a cheerful, youthful smile. People talk to him willingly, and he is a good listener; he is one of those who believe very little of what they hear but always look and act as if they believe every word. He is a self-taught linguist. He can speak rough-and-ready Italian, German, and Yiddish, he can speak a little Romany, the gypsy language, and he is studying Spanish. He keeps a paper-backed Spanish-self-taught manual and a Spanish-English, English-Spanish dictionary in his pockets and studies them on the subway. He is religious, and he often reflects on death. For over ten years he was a member of a committee in the Society of St Vincent de Paul that was composed of detectives and patrolmen and that went to Welfare Island every Sunday and called on terminal patients in the City Home and the old cancer hospital and talked or listened to them, whichever they seemed to want, and brought them cigarettes and magazines and playing cards and flowers. He goes to fights and horse races. He and his wife, Gertrude Campion, live in an apartment in Flushing. They have two sons, one of whom is a graduate of Fordham and both of whom are in the Air Force.

The next Sunday night, I went down to the Annex and took the elevator to the seventh floor, where the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad is quartered. When I stepped off the elevator, I found that Captain Campion was standing in the hall, waiting for me. ‘We won’t be able to use the squad office tonight,’ he said. ‘The ex-girl friend of a confidence man came in just now and
stated
she wanted to give some information concerning him, and a couple of detectives are questioning her in there. She’s telling everything she knows, and enjoying it to the full, and she’ll be hours, so we’re going to use the private office of the commanding officer of the squad. In other words, my old office.’ I followed Captain Campion down the hall and into his old office. I remembered it as being about as plainly furnished as it could be, and I saw that his successor had not made any changes in it. A battered old golden-oak desk stood in the center. In back of the desk was a swivel chair and facing it were three straight chairs. On one wall was one of those maps of the city that can be rolled up and down like a shade. In one corner was a coat tree. There was one window, at which two young men were standing looking out, each with one foot resting on the sill. ‘These are the young detectives I told you about,’ Captain Campion said. ‘I explained to them that the text for tonight is gypsies.’ They came over, and Captain Campion introduced us. One was Detective Joe Kane, and he was thickset and solemn, and the other was Detective Al Gore, and he was thin and solemn. They appeared to be in their middle twenties. Captain Campion’s briefcase was on the desk, and he unbuckled it and took out some file folders. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘let’s be seated.’ He sat in the swivel chair and put on spectacles and opened one of the folders, disclosing a rat’s nest of notes. The young detectives and I sat in the straight chairs.

‘In Pickpocket and Confidence,’ Captain Campion began, peering at us over his spectacles, ‘you run into two breeds of gypsies, the nomad coppersmith gypsies and the Boyasch. The nomads are by far the most numerous. They’re the ones we’re mainly concerned with, and I’ll describe them in detail, but first I want to say a few words about the Boyasch and get them out of the way. The Boyasch are what you might call Serbo-Rumanian gypsies. Serbia was the last country they lived in before they came here, and back before that they lived for many generations in Rumania. Among themselves, they usually speak Rumanian or Hrvatski, which is the Serbo-Croatian language. They claim they can’t speak a word of gypsy, and I guess it is dying out among them, but I’ve heard some of the old ones speaking it a mile a minute. They’re small and dark
and
strange, and if you saw some on the street you’d notice them but it probably wouldn’t occur to you they were gypsies. They’re cleaner and neater than the nomads, and their women don’t dress gypsy style any more, although a few of the real old ones still wear gold-coin necklaces. At the same time, they’re tougher-looking. I guess hard is more the word. They look hard. It’s something in their eyes. They have curious cold, hard eyes, and they watch you every second, and they rarely ever smile. They look like they’ve thought a lot about the way life is, they and their forefathers before them, and they don’t see anything funny in it. That’s how they look to me, but I remember hearing one of the women detectives in the squad describing them, and the way
she
described them, she said they look like they carry knives. I don’t know what Boyasch means. The nomads say it’s just an old gypsy word meaning gold-washer, but I’ve never been able to get a satisfactory explanation out of them what a gold-washer is. The nomads and the Boyasch don’t get along. The nomad women call the Boyasch women the dirty, sneaking Boyaschutza, and make contemptuous remarks about them, such as they say they’ll tell fortunes for a quarter and do both palms, and the Boyaschutza call the nomad women rag-heads. In the East, the Boyasch hang out in New York City and vicinity and Philadelphia and vicinity. In the Middle West, Chicago is their headquarters. They don’t travel anywhere near as much as the nomads; they sometimes stay put for years. The ones here mostly live in tenements in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, out in Brooklyn. The nomads spy on them, and a nomad informer told me recently that there are eighteen families in Brooklyn at present, and two or three in Queens and two in Harlem and six or seven more in Newark and Paterson. The principal Boyasch family names are Ivanovich, Lazarovich, Lucas, Magill, Mitchell, Morgan, Mort, Peterson, Petrovich, Stanley, and Stevens. These are typical American gypsy family names; there are nomad families with the same names.

‘The Boyasch men work. Some are automobile mechanics, and some work in factories that make tents and awnings and hammocks; they used to travel with circuses and carnivals and take care of the tents. The men don’t give us much trouble, it’s the women. When they’re young, the Boyaschutza stay home and keep house
like
ordinary women, but as they grow older the gypsy in them seems to grow stronger and stronger, and when they reach middle age some of them become fortune-tellers and swindlers. They don’t run fortune-telling joints. Instead of sitting and waiting for victims, they go out and hunt for them. They usually work in pairs. They lug around shopping bags containing a stock of dead and dried-up specimens of a peculiar kind of plant called the resurrection plant, and they go from house to house in working-class, home-owning neighborhoods out in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, and over in Jersey, and up in the Bronx and Westchester, and ring doorbells and try to sell these plants to housewives. “If your husband doesn’t show as much interest in you as he used to,” they tell the housewives, “buy one of these plants and sit it in a saucer of water and put it under your bed, if you and your husband sleep in the same bed, and if you don’t, put it under his bed, and leave it there, and you’ll soon notice a change for the better.” They’re terrifying fast-talkers, and after they get inside a house and demonstrate how to sit the plant in water, they offer to tell the woman’s fortune. Usually, that’s as far as they go, but now and then they hit a woman who responds to their superstitious talk and who they can feel in their bones has some money hid away in the house, and they go to work on her and swindle her. They use a swindle called the
bajour
, the same as the nomad women. I’ll explain this swindle, or confidence game, in a few minutes. The resurrection plant is just a means of getting the door open, and they’ve been using it for this purpose in and around the city for twenty years, to my knowledge. They know what they’re doing – when they hold one up in front of a woman, no matter how bright she is, or suspicious, she usually takes a good look at it and starts asking questions. A couple of months before I left the Department, we apprehended a pair of Boyaschutza who were wanted for a
bajour
, and they had a hundred and sixty resurrection plants in their possession. After the case was disposed of, I took some of the plants home, and I brought one along tonight for you to see. If you stay in the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, it won’t be the last one you’ll see.’

Captain Campion reached into his briefcase and brought out a paper bag. He held the bag over the desk and shook it, and out
dropped
a dead plant whose stems and leaves were tightly curled into a dusty, mossy, lopsided ball. In size and shape, it roughly resembled a woman’s clenched hand. From it hung a tuft of hairy roots.

‘It’s a weed that grows down in the lower parts of Texas, and over in Mexico,’ Captain Campion said. ‘It’s also called Mary’s hand, Our Lady’s rose, and bird’s-nest moss, and it belongs to the genus
Selaginella
. The reason I know, some years ago I took one out to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and had it identified. According to the nomads, the Boyasch learned about the resurrection plant back in the days they used to travel with circuses and they have some connection down in Texas that keeps them supplied. In dry weather, the resurrection plant tightens up into a ball the same as you see here. If it gets damp, if some dew falls on it, or a little sprinkle of rain, it opens up. Even if it’s dead, it opens up. This one here is as dead as a brickbat, but if you sit it in a saucer of water the roots will absorb the water and the stems will turn from gray to green and slowly uncurl and expand and stiffen up and straighten out.’