A World I Never Made (30 page)

“You will become a gypsy,” the old man said. “With me you will never be found:”

“Where would we live?”

“In Paris:”

“I will be hunted:”

“I am wealthy and respected in my tribe. If I order it, you will be guarded day and night by people you will never see. A hundred eyes will watch over you. The curse of the dead, the
mulo,
would be visited on any gypsy who disobeyed me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“What is your name?”

“Megan Nolan. And you are ... ?”

“My name is François Duval:”

Megan stared again at the line approaching the customs agents.

“There is no baksheesh today,” she said.

“No, but I know these agents well. I have made them rich in the past ten years. And of course I have certain evidence that I can use against them if I wished to. It is the secret to success in my trade. You must have a man’s testicles in your pocket before you can trust him.”

Megan smiled again despite herself.“Do you want money?” she asked.

“No. I just want to look at you as I lay dying. What is the name on your passport?”

“I don’t know.”

“Show it to me and we will get in line:”

Abdel al-Lahani lay on the plush custom-made sofa in his Casablanca penthouse. The corner of his left eye was ticking about once every five seconds, down substantially from the ten-times-per-second flutter of an hour ago, as if a hummingbird had landed on his eyelid. Sitting across from him were Mohammed and Ismael Saboori, an Iranian neurologist on the staff at the King Hassan University Medical School. Saboori held his small black leather physician’s bag on his lap, his untouched tea on a table beside him. Lalla, who had induced vomiting and then cleaned and dressed Lahani before calling Mohammed, could be heard in the kitchen.It was Mohammed who had called Saboori. The blood sample that the doctor had taken from Lahani’s arm lay in its ampule on the coffee table between them, next to an envelope that contained one thousand American dollars in new hundred-dollar bills.

“And there is no antidote?” Lahani asked. The back of his left hand lay across his forehead, inside of which his brain seemed to be expanding and contracting in slow, exquisitely painful waves.

“No,” Saboori replied, “just flushing, which has been done. The ticking and the headache should subside in a few hours. You apparently swallowed very little:”

“And if they don’t?”

“I will prescribe something, but they should:”

“And the numbness?”

“It should subside as well. The Amazon Indians use curare to kill their enemies. One milligram on the end of a dart is lethal. Orally it takes more. You will be fine:”

Lahani nodded in dismissal. Saboori rose and picked up the envelope. “The blood should be tested soon,” he said.

“We’ll do it,” Mohammed said. With a nod, Saboori turned and left.

“I will leave for home tomorrow,” Lahani said to Mohammed when the doctor was gone.“You will stay here to see if she turns up:”

“She may have left the country. She has money and could get papers. If that is the case, we will not easily find her.”

“I will call Uncle al-Siddiq. He will put her on a watch list. She will appear. When she does we will go and kill her.”

“It could be America:”

“Wherever she turns up, we will go and kill her. I don’t care if it’s the White House or the vacant pit where the trade centers used to be. We will go and kill her. Do you understand?”

“Yes, emir,” said Mohammed.“I understand:”

~30~

PARIS, DECEMBER 16, 2003

On the day of François Duval’s funeral in mid-December, Megan was awoken from a deep sleep by the sound of a mournful violin. By raising herself on one elbow, she could see down into the street. Her pregnant belly spread out on the bed. She could feel its weight and the baby kicking to start his day. For the past week, dozens of gypsy men of all shapes, sizes, and ages had gathered around a barrel fire in the cul-de-sac below, drinking whiskey, talking in whispers, and going off occasionally to pee in the weeds or berate their women. Standing alone by the barrel now was one of these men in a long dirty duster and wool cap playing the violin. He was leaning into the fire as he played. The low flames seemed to be dancing in response to his long piercing notes. The day was breaking warm and sunny, one of the beautiful late fall days that sometimes extend deep into a Paris winter. The music was both shrill and sweet, a metaphor for the gypsies themselves, Megan thought, reflecting on the last seven months of her life. An outcast among outcasts, she had been protected by the unchallenged and seemingly unchallengeable authority of the wily and feared Francois Duval. François had kept his word, and so had Megan. When the old man had died last night at midnight, she had been by his side.

The old gypsy, bantering in perfect Arabic, had slipped the head customs agent in Tangier the key to a storage locker at the pier’s passenger depot and they were let on the ferry with zero fuss. Megan changed into her Western clothes on the boat and, at Duval’s polite urging, used her own passport to enter Spain, applying for and being routinely issued a three-month visitor’s visa. She returned with him to Montmartre, to the fourth-floor flat of a small apartment building he owned on a weed-covered cul-de-sac. Gypsies lived in all four apartments. The men hung out in the street-level coffee shop all day while the women went out to hustle, looking for
gadgo
widows or old men to con out of their life savings, or simply steal from if they could gain access to their homes. The kids, about ten or twelve of them, played all day in the street or the littered lot behind the building.

As the end drew near, most of François’s relatives and friends had shown up, some from Paris, others from Hungary and the Czech Republic. One family of ten claimed to be from Russia. Their banged up, cannibalized cars and trucks, which doubled as sleeping quarters for many of them, lined the dead-end street. One day, François asked to be carried down to the coffee shop. The move exhausted him. He weighed about ninety pounds and had trouble breathing after any kind of exertion, even lifting his head to sip some water. He slept for an hour, and when he woke he refused the morphine that Megan had been giving him at increasingly shorter intervals. Megan watched as perhaps a hundred gypsies entered the coffee shop over the next three days to speak to the dying man. A fierce-looking crone named Ya Ya, once apparently Duval’s lover but now his head house-keeper, told her that this was not simply to say good-bye. A gypsy must not be allowed to go to his grave bearing resentment or envy or ill feelings toward any other gypsy. If he did, his
mulo
—his ghost, basically—would return to haunt the person who had caused this state of affairs. Any doubt as to any lingering ill will, going back as far as childhood, had to be resolved face-to-face before the old man died.It was the fear of
marime,
contamination by the dead, Ya Ya said, that had brought these people to the old man’s deathbed.

By ten AM, the entire group, perhaps a hundred and fifty men, women, and children had gathered in the street to watch as François’s coffin was lifted onto the back of a rusted-out pickup truck. One of the pallbearers was François Duval Jr., paunchy and balding but with his father’s sly eyes and careful, calculated movements. Another was a large muscular man, perhaps fifty, with a head of wild black hair, an eye patch, and a prominent gold tooth. Doro, the handsome, too-solemn teenaged grandson of Annabella Jeritza was the third. The last was a young man of perhaps twenty-five, with silky black hair, dark burning eyes, and fine, feminine features, including a cruel but beautiful slash of a mouth. Corozzo’s son. No gypsy would touch a dead body, and so Megan had washed and done her best to groom old François after he died, and then she and Ya Ya had sat with the body until a local undertaker, familiar with the odd ways of the
roma,
had arrived to prepare it properly for interment. While they were waiting, the man with the eye patch had entered the candlelit coffee shop. He had first glanced at Ya Ya, who immediately left, and then had taken her vacated chair across from Megan.

Megan, dressing slowly in her room, getting ready to join the crowd gathering below, recalled their conversation:

“I am Corozzo. François was my uncle, my father’s brother. As a young man I ran off and married one of his daughters without his permission. In the gypsy world, daughters are worth only the money they can bring when they are married off. François did not kill me because my father intervened. But I owe him a large debt. With you I will repay it.”

“How?”

“I will take you into my clan. You will be under my protection.”

“How do I know you can protect me?”

This question had stopped Corozzo cold. Gypsy men were not used to being questioned by women. But Megan didn’t care. She had to assert some control, some independence, lest she be totally enslaved by the large beast of a man before her. She had met Corozzo’s harsh stare with one of her own.

“Because if I don’t,” Corozzo said, “François’s mulo will enter my home, my clan. I will become an outcast myself.”

“Where will we go?”

“The Czech Republic at first. We will leave tomorrow, after the old man is buried.”

“No.”

“No?”

“My baby is due in a few days. François promised me it would be born here, in France. I have a midwife who I have been seeing. You have to wait.”

“The French police want to talk to me,” Corozzo said. “About a murder.” The light from a nearby candle bathed his face, softening his harsh features, but not the sharp, feral look in his good eye.

“One more thing,” Megan went on, ignoring this statement and his scowl, “no sex. But if you need money, I will give it to you.”

Now the one-eyed man smiled, his gold tooth gleaming in the candlelight. “François did not mention money,” he said, “but you will be expensive, and there is the question of your keep. As to sex, we will see. You might change your mind. I am charming and very brave.”

“I doubt it. But I will pay my way, and my baby’s. I don’t know how long I’ll be with you. It may be a while. As much as a year. Did François tell you why I am in hiding?”

“A mad lover.”

“Yes, quite mad. And dangerous.”

Corozzo rose. He towered over Megan. His smell—liquor and leather and sweat—filled the small windowless room. François Duval’s body, his wispy white hair neatly combed, his face clean-shaven, lay in his ornate brass bed a few feet away. A candle on a nightstand illuminated his face. Megan had looked over at him while waiting for Corozzo’s answer.

“I will wait,” Corozzo said. “I will want a thousand euros for every month you are with me. If I am arrested you will lose your protection.”

“And you will lose a thousand euros a month.”

Corozzo shrugged his large shoulders, then abruptly turned and left.

At the cemetery, the grave was already dug. A mound of red earth was heaped next to it with two coiled canvas straps resting on top. Gypsies lower the caskets of their dead themselves and fill in the grave. Megan, who had made the arrangements on François’s and Ya Ya”s instructions, was relieved to see that they had been followed. As the mourners neared the gravesite, the women began to wail, at first one or two and then it seemed like all of them. The violinist had arrived early and was playing as they approached. Several old women were propping up Ya Ya, whose wailing grew louder, as if she were in competition with the others. Everyone had the same clothes on as they had on at seven in the morning. Jogging suits, patched skirts, kerchiefs of every color on the women’s heads, trousers fifty years old on the men, the teenagers in jeans and worn-out running shoes. An Eastern Orthodox priest said some words that Megan could not hear over the din of the wailing and the violin. The younger kids were scampering around the knees of the adults and a few had ran to jump over nearby headstones. These were chased down and cuffed by their mothers. The same pallbearers lowered the heavy bronze casket into the grave, pulling the straps up after it. Everyone shoveled or kicked in the red dirt. Those who had been carrying flowers—most of them plastic—threw them in. When the grave was covered, two battered trumpets were produced and the clan filed out to their trucks and cars to a tune that seemed to put a wild melody to the women’s wailing. Megan, feeling what she thought might be the first twinge of a contraction, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.