Shoot the Moon, page 4
The thing was solid. There was nothing hidden inside except more hay. Possibly a needle, however I had neither hope nor desire to find one. There certainly was no convenient hollow interior in which to hide the missing book, which would have made my work infinitely easier. I hadn’t really expected to find one, since my life wouldn’t be the constant joy of an endless Annette Funicello beach party if the world didn’t drop every shit obstacle it could conceive of in my path.
I noted that there was some extra hay spread around the floor beside the bed, but not so much that I could have reassembled it into a complete bale. I checked out the mattress to see if the excess hay had come from there. The musty old gunnysack was stuffed not with missing hay, but with flyers from a very old 1957 swindle advertising a bogus circus that was never coming to town. The program boasted a fifty-percent reduction to two bits for kids who paid for their tickets a week in advance. There was a photograph of a grinning ringmaster in top hat and red tails holding out his arms, merrily beckoning every naïve grammar school patsy in town to his three-ring scam.
“Your king?” I asked, showing the flyer to Victorina Flapchack.
“That is Igor Stradivarius,” she admitted. “But long before he was king.”
It was a much better picture, albeit a younger incarnation of the bastard from the blurry photo Madame Volga had been flapping around my office that morning. I took a good, long gander at the young face on the flyer before I shoved it in my pocket.
There was nothing that I could see in the wagon that might have indicated where or why Stradivarius might have lammed out, or why he had taken the book with him. The pressboard pedestal on which the book had sat in the background of Madame Volga’s photo was stuffed up in a corner of the wagon. A fly fishing hat hung off one corner and a 1987 issue of Great Knobs Almighty!, a long defunct gentlemen’s magazine, was propped up where I figured the Gypsy bible usually sat.
Once I’d finished my careful, highly professional examination of the missing Gypsy king’s ratty digs, I straightened up and offered Victorina Flapchack a shrewd nod.
“Time to get hammered.”
I made a beeline for the door.
“That is it?” Victorina Flapchack demanded, trailing me down the three wobbly steps which, after a productive evening’s drunk at O’Hale’s Bar, I fully expected to be ten times more wobbly than. “You were paid to find the book.”
“I was paid to try to find the book,” I corrected. “There is a distinction with a very large difference. Not to mention that I’ve been on the clock for over an hour already, and it’s clear I’m no good to anyone this disgustingly sober, least of all the many bartenders all around this burg who rely on me to put their kids through college. I’ll pick this up bright and early tomorrow morning, by which I mean afternoon. Possibly evening, depending on how fun tonight goes. Don’t wait up.”
Night had fallen hard while I’d been poking around the Gypsy king’s piles of soiled laundry. Lights shone from small windows in many of the wooden wagons. Power cables snaked from the roofs and attached to poles around the campsite. Trees and wagons shaded most of the immediate area, and leaves sighed in the soft breeze.
Open air fires burned brilliantly, illuminating about a million campground signs that strictly prohibited open air fires.
A young gypsy girl danced around one of the blazes, alternately flipping the hems of her layered dress and clapping a tambourine over her head, probably because she didn’t think the whole scene was overloaded with enough stereotypes already and needed an extra boost to get the hate mail really flowing.
The dull blue glow from a rigged crystal ball issued from out the tent flaps of Madame Volga, and I could see the huge shadows of her arthritic hands gesticulating over the prognosticating orb like swaying winter tree branches. A couple more little old ladies stood in line at her tent awaiting their fortunes, and I wondered if I could penetrate their blue-tinted permanents if I wandered over and tried to explain to them the ironic use of the word “fortune,” and that they would, in fact, be losing precious cat food money on the crooked transaction.
There were more tents set up by some of the other old Gypsy bats, but most of them weren’t the bustling centers of commerce that was Madame Volga’s. I could see inside two of them. In one, an old Gypsy dame was playing solitaire with tarot cards, while the other was watching I Love Lucy on a portable TV. (The original version, not the early 2000s revival, where three-quarters of the cast was reanimated zombie corpses and Fred Mertz was played by Urkel. Goddamn Hollywood.)
Two flaps down from Madame Volga’s, an antediluvian customer clutched a cloth handbag as she waited her turn with -- according to the sign out front -- Madame Yarmy. With one client waiting, Madame Yarmy was only the third most successful cheat on the block, just after Madame Volga. The real postmenopausal excitement was beyond the five next vacant queues, where a neon sign surrounded by a swarm of mosquitoes buzzed blue on a folding chair: “Madame Danube! Eternal Truths Revealed! Cash Only!”
Wads of folded bills were practically burning holes in the cheap gloves and wrinkled hands of the two dozen ancient, excited hags who were waiting in line at Madame Danube’s tent. I figured this Madame Danube had a reputation as some A-list soothsayer among the last, dying vestiges of the 19th century set. Although, even though hers was the longest line, it didn’t seem to be moving along much. I assumed old fraud Danube was taking the necessary time to really distract her customers good, probably so she could pry out their upper plates, pull the pennies from their penny loafers, and steal the last fuzzy peppermint from the bottom corner of their pocketbooks.
The same blue glow of a crystal ball that shone from Madame Volga’s tent shined out of all the other tents in line, which artificially and collectively illuminated one end of the Gypsy encampment like a mall parking lot at midnight. It was a waste of a whole lot of stolen Triple-A batteries, since on that particular night a fat, waxing blue moon had settled over the Gypsy campground.
The moon didn’t catch me with every step. It dodged in and out from behind the trees as I crossed from Igor Stradivarius’ wagon in the direction of the main road. Still, I was exposed enough that on a bright night such as this I could almost feel the eyes of a million Moon-Man astronomers tracking me.
“I knew the elders were wasting their money going to a private investigator,” Victorina Flapchack announced as she dogged me through the damp grass.
I almost forgot the dame was still there. She was pretty stealthy and seemed to be in love with the shadows, the better to pick an unsuspecting pocket. I checked for my wallet just in case and found it where I’d left it, although for all I knew she had swiped it, found the last wrinkled two bucks I had to my name, took pity on a bigger bum than her, and replaced the cheap billfold to my rumpled coat pocket.
“Yes,” I replied, “but does it technically really count as their money when your elders almost certainly stole it from a coffee can in some old lady’s kitchen in Des Moines? Not that they think they didn’t earn the money they stole to pay me. I’m sure your elders think crooks who pose as American Heart Association nurses doing free checkups to shut-ins or who claim to be checking basement meters for the city water department are earning every cent the swipe. One man’s theft is another man’s nine to five job. I don’t judge, provided the check clears.”
I flashed a disarming smile. Had she actually been armed, I would only have inspired her to shoot the aforesaid grin off my face, so it was aces by me that she hadn’t stolen a gat in her cradle-to-grave Gypsy crime spree.
I was preoccupied being goddamn charming when I should have been looking where I was walking. Our path led us past one of the campfires, and as I passed the crackling pyre a hand flashed out and clamped down hard on my wrist.
“Craaag Baaaanyon!” a quavering voice intoned.
An elderly dame sat on a log beside the fire. One gnarled hand held onto my wrist like a vise while her free hand poked a stick around the crackling coals. I hoped she wasn’t searching for her car keys, because she was evidently blind as the goddamn bats that were swooping around our heads snagging bugs in the evening air.
The craters of the brilliant moon were reflected in the ancient dame’s milky white eyes. As far as vision impairment went, she was clearly possessed of the Cadillac of cataracts, and surpassed even those of Madame Volga in opaque impenetrableness. Her watery eyes were perfect, polished white marbles that stared blankly up at me. An old-age grimace twisting her wrinkled puss.
“Would you mind giving me back the use of my arm, lady?” I asked. “While that’s not the hand I ordinarily drink with, I like to keep it in tiptop shape. I never know when I might lose my primary drinking arm on the subway.”
The bag didn’t get the abiding affection I have for all my limbs, since her fingers tightened to a point -- or, more accurately, five points -- at which I thought the tips of my own fingers would pop like the twisted heads of five over-inflated balloon animals.
She was an older, uglier version of Madame Volga, which were themselves a couple of records worthy of inclusion in the next updated edition from the folks at Guinness. She looked like a wax figure that had been set next to the fire to melt.
Her hair was an insane white tangle trying to escape from beneath her babushka; a coif of terrified albino cats fleeing a burlap sack. The last tooth jammed into her black gums was a lost cause that Myron Wasserbaum, my crooked dentist neighbor, could have knocked out with just a few angry words about failure to floss.
The crazy old lady with a grip like a bear trap stared into my ill-prepared soul with those otherworldly white eyes.
“Baaaanyon,” the ancient old bat warned. “Beware the moooooooooon!”
She jammed more O’s into the word than a can of Franco-American.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” I said, as I attempted to peel her fingers off my wrist. “I’ll be sure not to let it fall on me when I’m staggering home tonight.”
“You should listen,” Victorina Flapchack whispered. The younger dame had seemed pretty on the ball until that point, but the flickering firelight revealed a beautiful face suddenly frightened, although that might have been the realization that genetics and about sixty years as a Gypsy would bestow on her an identical homely mug.
“Yes! Yes! Heed the words of Madame Danube!” The fireside pile of soiled laundry, which was apparently Madame Danube, rocked back and forth. Since we were still conjoined by an obdurate thumb and index finger, I rocked too.
“I’m not paying for this,” I informed Madame Danube.
The old hag instantly released my arm. “Look, I’ve got to talk to you,” Madame Danube said. The haunted house voice was gone in a flash and she was suddenly all business. “It’s about the king, that son of a bitch bastard Stradivarius. I know a thing or two.” She waved her hands mysteriously but perfunctorily in that practiced Gypsy tic used on all the tourists. “But you took your own goddamn sweet time poking around his house, so now you gotta park it here for a minute.” She patted the rotted log on which she squatted. “Madame Danube’s gotta use the port-a-john.”
The old lady stood up. At least I figured she did. Sitting or standing, her height didn’t change an inch.
Madame Danube scooped up a can of Lysol disinfectant that had miraculously not exploded in close proximity to the fire. Can in hand, the tiny little hideous midget dame walked in a stoop on swift, shuffling feet, guided not by sight but by stench, in the direction of the plastic outdoor toilets which the campground cheerfully provided and evidently rarely mucked out.
“Is she on the level,” I asked Victorina Flapchack, “or is she making me wait just so she can try to con me out of my last two bucks?”
“Madame Danube is blind, yet still sees much that others do not,” Victorina Flapchack informed me, taking a seat on a log beneath an overgrown maple tree.
“She swiped my watch,” I replied, dropping to my ass next to the dame.
The moon was somewhere to our backs, obscured completely by the dense woods, yet still illuminating much of the activity before us in the Gypsy encampment.
The younger women Victorina Flapchack’s age were occupied serving the lazy bum men of all ages, who looked like they spent most of the evening hours sucking cigarettes down to the butts in single drags. The night belonged to the old hags like Madames Volga and Danube, although there didn’t seem to be a lot of movement going on in the lines over at the fortune telling tents. Madame Danube’s elderly customers were growing impatient with having to wait to piss away their money while the old crook toddled off to take her coffee break in the port-a-crapper.
“It doesn’t appear as if the men do a whole hell of a lot around here at night,” I commented to Victorina Flapchack.
She snorted. “At night or during the day. They say it is tradition. It is very convenient tradition that forces Gypsy women to either live under a patriarchy or be exiled from the tribe. To them, every day is Bernie Madoff’s Birthday.”
I knew the plight of dames in her tribe must have been pretty important to her if she was invoking the patron saint of scammers. Even outsider infidels like me knew that Madoff’s Birthday was the most holy holiday in their year, when Gypsies exchanged the gifts they’d stolen from under our Christmas trees.
I offered her a solemn nod.
“If I cared about suffragette movements, lady, I’d visit the ghost of Susan B. Anthony they’ve got trapped in that haunted harpsichord at the Smithsonian. Burn your underwear on your own time, I’m just waiting to swipe my watch back.”
Waiting for old people to finish in the toilet is like watching that Ken Burns baseball documentary: it goes on forever and even when you finally reach the closing credits you find out it’s not over for another twelve weeks.
I hadn’t planned on giving the crazy old bag more than five minutes to cough up my watch and to produce any leads on Stradivarius she might have before I took off for O’Hale’s. I also hadn’t planned that she’d be murdered in under three.
I was cooling my heels by the fire when I suddenly heard a loud, hollow thump, like somebody beating on a fifty-gallon Rubbermaid trash barrel with a two-by-four.
An old lady’s scream was strangled by another sound.
A bestial, primal grunt issued from out the night. The terrifying animal sound plucked a shivering chord in my spine that hadn’t been twanged since the last time my wallet and I were forced to sit at a mediation table opposite my barracuda ex-wife and her disreputable reptile shyster-at-law.
“What is that?” Victorina Flapchack hissed.
The Gypsy dame was talking to dead air, since I was on my feet and running like hell before Madame Danube’s scream died in her wattled throat.
Beats me why I didn’t run in the opposite direction. My brain was already halfway down the road and attempting to hail a cab, but my legs had decided to go all heroic. Before I could stop them, they were racing for the commode commotion.
Too bad for Madame Danube -- who was at that very moment in the process of becoming the late Madame Danube -- that she had swiped my shoelaces along with my watch before she’d toddled off to heed her last call of nature.
I snagged my heel on a rock, my right Florsheim promptly flopped off, and I crashed face-first into the dry dirt next to the fire. As I fell, my left shoe, not to be outdone by its sole mate, also came off. I barely caught a glimpse of it running off into the night like the coward that it was.
I scrambled onto my ass and quickly shoved my right shoe back on, but I hadn’t even managed to crawl back to my half-shod feet when the first panicked Gypsy came stampeding from the direction of the port-a-johns.
He was one of the old buzzard elders who’d brought Madame Volga to my office. I heard the nails he’d swiped out of my walls jangling in his pocket as he raced past me at the best speed his elderly ass could manage with his short dress pants down around his ankles and his feet able only to manage a desperate, double-time shuffle.
“Someone is attacking Madame Danube!” the scrawny old man cried, white as a ghost, as he shuffled crazily toward the picnic tables.
Several others came running from the direction of the outhouses in various states of semi-dress, and I briefly became a hurdle for them to clear as they made the point A to point B run to safety. Dancing in the camp ceased. Tambourines and cigarettes dropped as men and women fled the open air fires. The old ladies in line over at the fortune telling tents might have had no sense when it came to money, but they had buckets of it when it came to self-preservation. The gaggle of elderly marks took off like octogenarian lightning for the parking lot down the road.
Doors on wagons flew open and kerchiefed heads stuck out, turning giant, dangling earrings to the sounds of commotion to, I assumed, see if there was a chance to make a dishonest buck off it.
Down at the front lines, the last Gypsy had cleared me like Robot Jesse Owens and I was finally able to scramble to my hands and knees. By sheer dumb luck I dropped my hand on my lost Florsheim, and I quickly shoved it on my left foot. I managed to stand, albeit looking like a kid playing around in his old man’s shoes.
Victorina Flapchack was on her feet and looking terrified as she stared through the flames to the darkened shapes of the distant plastic outdoor crappers.
“I see somethi--” She gasped. “He has gone into the woods.”
“Stay put,” I advised. “Or run like hell. Let your Gypsy conscience, if such a rara avis exists, be your guide.”
I slipped my gat from the holster under my armpit and took off in the direction of the public dumpers.
It’s hard enough when you’re an instinctive coward to run into the gaping maw of death, but having to do so in a pair of shoes that are flopping around like a circus clown’s reduces an unbelievably courageous act to slow-motion slapstick. By the time I reached the portable toilets, whoever had attacked Madame Danube was long gone. So, too, in the mortal coil sense, was Madame Danube.
