Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (23 page)

‘Why don’t we try it?’ asked Detective Kane. There was a glass ashtray on the desk and he picked it up. ‘I could take this out to the water cooler and run some water in it.’

‘I’d rather you’d wait until I get through talking,’ Captain Campion said. ‘Please don’t interrupt me now.’

He opened the bulkiest of his file folders. ‘So much for the Boyasch,’ he said. ‘Now we come to another breed of cat.’ He took off his spectacles and lit a cigarette and leaned back in the swivel chair. ‘When people talk about gypsies,’ he said, ‘it’s usually the nomad coppersmith gypsies they’re talking about. The great majority of the gypsies that frequent New York City are nomads. In fact, the great majority of the gypsies in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and South America are nomads. There doesn’t seem to be any way to find out when they first started coming to the United States – according to immigration statistics and census reports, there’s no such thing as gypsies – but from what I’ve been able to piece together, I’m pretty sure the biggest migrations took place in the late seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. They came from many parts of Europe, but mostly from Russia and Serbia and the
countries
surrounding Serbia, and it didn’t take them long to get acquainted with the country. Some bands roamed the North, some roamed the South, some roamed the Middle West, a few roamed the West, and some roamed up and down and across and all over. In the early days, in the South and Middle West, the principal occupation of the men was horse trading and horse doctoring, and coppersmith work and tinkering came second. Then the horse business gradually died out, and tinkering came first. It was about the same out West. In the North, in most of the bands, coppersmith work and tinkering always came first. And in all the bands, wherever they roamed, the women told fortunes and swindled and stole. Just about anything they saw lying around loose, if it could be eaten or worn or sold or swapped or pawned or played with, and if nobody was watching it, and if they could lift it and carry it, they’d steal it. Why I say played with, an old gypsy once told me his favorite plaything when he was a little boy was a doctor’s stethoscope his mother had stolen. And while I’m on the subject, you’ll never understand gypsies until you understand how they feel about stealing. It’s simple: they believe they’re born with the right to steal, and the reason they give, they tell the blasphemous story there was a gypsy in the crowd that followed Jesus up the hill, and on the way this gypsy did his best to steal four nails that the Roman soldiers had brought with them to nail Jesus to the Cross – two for His hands, one for His feet, and one that was extra long for His head or His heart, whichever they decided to drive it through – but the gypsy succeeded in stealing only one, and it was the one that was extra long, and when the soldiers got ready to use it and couldn’t find it they suspected the gypsy and beat him bloody trying to make him tell where he had put it, but he wouldn’t, and while Jesus was dying He spoke to the gypsy from the Cross and said that from then on gypsies had the right to wander the earth and steal.’

‘Do they really believe that?’ asked Detective Kane.

‘They believe it as much as they believe anything,’ Captain Campion said, ‘and they bring their children up to believe it. They like to tell it; you can’t stop them; they seem to feel they’re slapping you in the face with it. I must’ve heard it fifty times. Now,
as
I said, coppersmith work and tinkering always came first in most of the bands that roamed the North, and some of these bands became quite prosperous. They followed fairly regular routes through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. They’d stay a day or two in some places and a week or two in others. The men would repair and re-tin copper utensils and fixtures, mainly for hotels, restaurants, hospitals, bakeries, canneries, laundries, and cloth-dyeing factories, and the women would circulate around and tell fortunes and keep their eyes open. The men picked up jobs that ordinary American metalworkers wouldn’t touch – a dye vat with so many holes eaten in it should’ve been junked, a broken piece of equipment in a contagious-disease hospital, an old restaurant soup kettle so caked with grease they’d have to burn the grease off it with a blowtorch before they could mend it, jobs like that. Then the depression struck, and in a little while there weren’t any jobs that American metalworkers wouldn’t touch. Instead of which, no matter what the job was, they’d fight and scratch each other to get it, let alone leave it to the gypsies. By the end of 1932, in most localities, the money gypsies were able to make from tinkering wasn’t enough to pay for their gasoline, and they began to leave the roads and hole up in tenements in big cities. This demoralized the men, but it didn’t the women. One thing you want to keep in mind about gypsies: it would take ten of the men to make one of the women. The women talked to other women in the tenements about relief, which was just getting going then. After they learned some of the ins and outs of the relief regulations, they took off their good clothes and put on rags, and they hid their gold-coin necklaces, and they told the men to sell the automobiles or stop parking them in the neighborhood, where a relief investigator might see them and notice the licenses on them from other states and put two and two together who they belonged to. Then they went into the relief offices with their children following along behind and broke down and cried and said they were starving to death, and if that didn’t impress the relief officials to the proper extent they screeched and screamed and fell on the floor and fainted and used foul and abusive language and swept papers off desks and
stood
in doors and wouldn’t let people pass and brought everything in general to a standstill. They pretty soon got their families on relief. And after they had that attended to, they began to go shares with each other and rent stores and open fortune-telling joints – what the old ones call
ofisas
and the young ones call locations – and right from the start, even with the overhead, most of them made far more than they ever had out on the road. Any period where people are uneasy is good for fortune-tellers. The depression was good for them, and then came the war and things got even better, and then came the A-bomb and the H-bomb and the possibility the whole world may be blown out like a light any moment now, either that or you’ll die of cancer from smoking cigarettes, and things got even better still, the best yet. Nowadays, in most gypsy families, I think I can safely say the women bring in ninety per cent of the money. A few of the young men in the bands around here work as parkers in parking lots – they’re crazy about automobiles and they’re unusually skillful drivers. And a few have become fender-bangers – they canvass garages and get jobs now and then at cut rates hammering dents out of automobile bodies. And a few of the older men, once in a while the spirit moves them, or some dim memory the way things used to be, and they go out with their hammers and tongs and files and soldering irons and try to pick up jobs mending pots and pans for restaurants. But the majority of the men, young and old, they don’t do anything. If it’s unusually nice and sunny, they may go up to the automobile showrooms around Columbus Circle and spend the whole day lifting hoods and kicking tires and comparing prices, but they just sit around home most of the time and stare at each other and drink tea and spit on the floor and grumble. The main thing they grumble about is the women. They look down on the women, and they beat and bang them around. Of course, some of the women know how to return the compliment. A gypsy woman, the situation she’s in, she’s in between her husband and the police. If she becomes too cautious and lets chances go by, her husband beats her, and if she takes chances and gets arrested, then he really beats her. And as far as gratitude, if she pulls off a
bajour
running into the thousands, the way her husband feels about
it
, it’s only what she should do, the same as she should wash the dishes, but if
he
brings in a few dollars, that’s a different matter; that shows brains. I heard a gypsy talking one day whose wife promises women who come into her
ofisa
it’ll cost them only fifty cents to have their fortunes told and she’s so slick they hardly ever get out without paying her anywhere from a couple of dollars to fifteen or twenty, and she’s made several big
bajours
; she’s made at least one ten-thousand-dollar
bajour
. This gypsy was drunk, and he was bragging, but he wasn’t by any means bragging about his wife, he was bragging about himself. ‘When it comes to stealing,’ he said, ‘I believe in letting the women do it, but if I happen to feel like it, I can go into any grocery store in the United States and stand around and get in the way and ask the price of this and the price of that, and before you know it four or five cans of sardines will jump into my pockets.’

‘The fundamental thing that identifies the nomad gypsies is the way the women dress. They wear head scarves, and loose, low-cut blouses, and long, full, flashy skirts. That’s their basic outfit, and if one of them took it in her head to dress some other way, she’d soon regret it. The other women would call her a
kurwa
, a whore, and spit at her; I’ve known it to happen. That is, of course, unless she was doing it temporarily to evade the police or confuse a victim. They buy the brightest pieces of cloth they can find for their head scarves; these scarves are what the Boyaschutza are referring to when they call the nomad women rag-heads. They take a lot of pride in their skirts. They make them themselves, and they sometimes use very expensive material, and they wear old ones underneath new ones for petticoats. When they’re dressed up, nine out of ten wear Spanish shawls, or that’s what they were called when I was young and they were quite the style – the kind with big red roses all over them, red or yellow, and a row of tassels on each end. There must be a factory somewhere that turns them out especially for gypsies. They generally wear cheap fur coats. They seldom wear stockings. They wear the highest-heeled shoes they can find, and I’ve seen them many a time knocking around the streets in broad daylight in old scuffed-up gold or silver evening slippers. When it comes to jewelry, jewelry is their be-all and
end-all
, the breath of life, and I’ve seen everything on them from dime-store junk to a stolen diamond lavaliere worth fifteen thousand dollars, but what they like best is gypsy jewelry – gold coins rigged to gold chains and worn as necklaces and bracelets and earrings. When I first started working on gypsies, the women wore quite a few foreign coins, some old, some new, and I’d see certain coins over and over, such as an Austrian four-ducat with Emperor Franz Josef’s head on it that many of them used for earrings – it’s a big coin but unusually thin and light. However, what I mostly saw were United States gold coins. For necklaces, they used eagles and double eagles – that is, ten- and twenty-dollar gold pieces. For bracelets and earrings, they used quarter eagles and half eagles – that is, two-fifty and five-dollar gold pieces. Then, in 1933, the government ordered everybody to exchange their domestic gold money for silver or paper, and what I think happened, I think the gypsies found some way to swap the bulk of their United States gold coins for Mexican gold coins, because ever since then that’s mainly what I’ve seen the women wearing. They wear them and they hoard them. It isn’t a bit unusual for women detectives or police matrons searching gypsy women to find dozens of Mexican gold coins sewed up in tucks running around the insides of their skirts. Every gypsy woman in the country, if she’s got anything at all, she’s got a few, and if she’s a smart old woman who’s made some big
bajours
in her time, she’s liable to have a trunkful. There’s no law against owning them, and the gold in them is purer even than the gold in United States gold coins, and you can pawn them anywhere or take them to a money dealer and get a good price. They come in several denominations, and the most popular among the gypsies is the fifty pesos. It’s thick and heavy – it’s worth sixty dollars in New York City at present – and it’s just right for necklaces. I looked in on a gypsy wedding in a hall on the lower East Side one night last summer – Beethoven Hall, on East Fifth Street – and I observed a woman who was wearing three necklaces of fifty-pesos coins. She had nineteen on the top necklace, and twenty-one on the middle one, and twenty-three on the bottom one, and they overlapped on her bosom. She was a big, stout woman and she had some wine in her and it was hot in the hall and she was
breathing
heavily, and every time her bosom rose and fell the gold coins shifted their positions and glinted and gleamed.’

Captain Campion got to his feet. ‘Before I go any further,’ he said, ‘there’s something I’ll just have to explain, or try to, and that’s the divisions and subdivisions among these gypsies.’ He took a rolled-up paper from his briefcase and unrolled it and smoothed it out on the desk. It was a piece of wrapping paper about a yard long, and it was wrinkled and dog-eared and coffee-spotted, and drawn on it in ink was a chart consisting of lists of names enclosed in boxes. The boxes varied in size, and were arranged in groups, and lines linked some boxes to others. It was an untidy chart; scores of interlinear corrections had been made in the lists of names, and a number of corrections had been pasted on. In one place, a pasted-on correction had been crossed out and an arrow ran from it to a new correction, on the margin. Captain Campion studied the chart for several minutes, refreshing his memory. ‘This is the third one of these things I’ve drawn up,’ he remarked. ‘I wore out the others, correcting them and adding new information. Sometimes I wish I’d never heard the word gypsy.’ He sat back down.

‘To continue,’ he said, ‘the nomad coppersmith gypsies are pretty much alike in appearance, they speak the same dialect of the gypsy language, and they have the same general customs and beliefs, but during the years they’ve been in the United States they’ve gradually divided themselves into tribes. The principal tribes, and they’re all represented here in the city, are the Russians, the Serbians, the Kalderash, the Argentines, the Argentinos, the Mexicans, the Machwaya, and the Greeks. Don’t take some of these names at face value. As I told you, the nomads came mostly from Russia and Serbia. The Argentines are Serbians that roamed in Spain and South America before coming here. The Argentinos are also Serbians. After they left Serbia, and they’ll give you twenty dates when that was, they went to Brazil and then came to the United States and then went to Argentina and then came back to the United States. The Mexicans are Russians and Serbians that go back and forth between Mexico and the United States. Their stamping grounds are Mexico City, three or four Texas cities,
Philadelphia
, New York City, and Boston. Like the Argentines and the Argentinos, they not only speak gypsy and English and a little Serbian and a little Russian but they also speak Spanish, and up around here, in recent years, they’ve specialized in skinning Puerto Ricans. The Kalderash are Russians and Serbians – in gypsy a
kalderash
is a coppersmith. The Machwaya are Serbians. They take their name from a region in West Serbia named Machva, where they roamed for generations upon generations before coming here. The Greeks are Russians who came here via Greece.