Free Gypsy by J. Robert Janes Page B

way. ‘A female. Last seen in Tours, Thursday the fourteenth, but also a regular of the Santé or the Petite Roquette or the cells here and over on the ave’ Foch if her conductor feels she needs a change of air.’
    The SS or the Gestapo … The lark-eyed gaze flew evasively over the warren. ‘I know nothing of this.’
    â€˜We didn’t think you would,’ came the soft response, ‘but of course when one has been seen buying sugar and white flour from the green beans to flog it to the butter-eggs-and-cheese boys, one must be careful, isn’t that so?’
    The German soldiers in their grey-green uniforms, the black marketeers …
    St-Cyr the cuckold. St-Cyr the friend of the Resistance who had mistakenly put him on their hit lists but had blown up his wife and son instead.
    â€˜Start talking, Émile, or what I have to tell those same people you are thinking of will include the denunciations of old enemies.’
    â€˜You bastard …’
    â€˜Just give us what we want. It will save us all time.’
    The drum was spun, the card turned up and accidentally ripped from its wheel of fortune to be then spat upon in fury and thrust at them.
    â€˜ Une roulure rumaine. Une fille de la duperie, la superchérie et escroquerie !’
    A Rumanian slut. A daughter of deception, trickery and swindling.
    â€˜Now leave us,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Go back to your weeping.’
    â€˜The end’s coming, Émile,’ breathed Kohler, giving him a parting shot. ‘You had better prepare yourself for the worst by sealing your lips. Hey, maybe if you behave, Louis could fix it so that you’ll get the Médaille Militaire and Croix de Guerre with palms.’
    â€˜Up against the post,’ muttered St-Cyr under his breath.
    â€˜Not until we’ve had breakfast.’
    The file card Turcotte had torn from the drum was replete with entries which went right back to when the Gestapo’s mouton had been ten years old. A charge of stealing two chickens and a round of goat’s cheese had been compounded by the laying on of curses. Sentenced to six months in Bucharest, she had escaped in less than two weeks. A guard was found to have been fooling around with her. Even then she had known how to convince men she was ripe for plucking only to deceive them.
    The name on the card, which had been updated in August 1941, was Lucie-Marie Doucette but St-Cyr knew that such a name could well have meant nothing to the gypsies. A mere formality the Gaje authorities insisted on to control border crossings, entry visas and issue identity papers and passports.
    She was, as Turcotte had so viciously stated, of Rumanian descent – at least, it would have been thought by those in authority that she had been born there. She’d have let them think what they wanted, knowing only that she had again fooled them.
    Her real name was Tshaya. She was dark-haired, strongly featured and quite striking, but in the expression she had last given the police camera, there was deceitfulness, wilfulness, hatred … ah! so many things, and a depth of sadness which went well beyond her years.
    The hair was parted in the middle, blue-black, long and glossy. Loosened strands trailed provocatively across the forehead, enhancing allure and all but hiding the ears which would have held gold rings or coins, though these must have been taken from her.
    The eyes were large and dark beneath strong brows. The nose was full and prominent, the lips not parted. The face was what one would call a medium oval, the chin not pointed but determined, the throat full.
    They had put her age at twenty-eight in August 1941. She would not have argued. Again such Gaje things meant little. For the gypsies, life was of the present, not of the past or of the future, alas.
    Someone – her conductor perhaps – had tersely written in: Of the Lowara tribe. Daughter of the horse trader, Tshurkina la Marako, deported