Charles de Lint - Mulengro

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MULENGRO

A ROMANY TALE

by Charles de Lint

for

Charles R. Saunders who got the ball rolling

Andrew J. Offutt who pushed it a little further

and for those folks

who bounced it back and forth

a few times:

Barry Blair

Roger Camm

John Charette

Larry Dickison

Ronald Grossey

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MULENGRO

Loay Hall

Richard Hall

Gordon Linzner

“Far and near as fool’s fire,

they come glittering through the gloom.

Their tongues as strong and nimble,

as would bind the looms of luck…”

—from “The Road the Gypsies Go”

by Robin Williamson

“The boshom engro kils, he kils,

The tawnie juva gils, she gils

A puro Romano gillie,

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Now shoon the Romano gillie.”

—traditional Lowara

Romany refrain

[The fellow with the fiddle plays, he plays,

The little lassie sings, she sings

An ancient Gypsy ditty,

Now hear the Gypsy ditty.]

PART ONE

PATTERAN

With every light another color.

—Romany description of themselves

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Wagon, tent, or trailer born.

last month, last year, in far-off days;

born here or a thousand miles away,

there’s always men nearby who’ll say:

You better get born in someplace else,

So move along, get along, move along, get along!

Go! Move! Shift!

—from

“The Moving-On Song”

by Ewan MacColl

Janfri Yayal watched his house burn down without expression.

The two-story, wood-frame structure was beyond rescue. Flames leapt half its height into the night skies.

Smoke erupted from windows and eaves, roiling upward like a ghost escaping the doomed flesh of its

host body. A gasp came from the watching crowd as a section of roof collapsed in a shower of sparks.

The firemen pulled back, all too aware of how ineffectual their efforts were at this point. Janfri’s only

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response was a nerve that twitched in his cheek.

The red light of the flames and the glare of the rotating beacons on the police cars and fire trucks

flickered across his dark skin, highlighting the strong features set in their mask of indifference. He was

oblivious to the growing crowd of thrill-seekers who jostled for position against the hastily-erected

barricades that the police had set up. He watched the home he’d known for three years burning and

remembered other fires. Not the cook and camp fires of his childhood, nor the pleasant crack and spit of

seasoned wood burning in a stone hearth. Instead his mind thrust up memories of a man set afire and the

crowd around him, jeering and laying wagers as to how long he would live. Of the wagons of his parents

and grandparents and others of their kumpania burning in the night. Of the men who wore the four-

armed symbol of the swastika and set countries alight with the same single-minded purpose with which

they burned Gypsy wagons.

But there were no swastikas here. It was another symbol that had erased the expression from Janfri’s

features. He had seen it on the wall of his home before the flames and smoke took it from his sight—a

scrawl of black paint that was meaningless to the Gaje, the non-Gypsies, but that he understood with a

bleak emptiness. It meant marhime. Ceremonially defiled. Unclean. It was a message from another Rom

to him that there was no welcome among the Gypsies for a Rom who had become too Gaje. And yet,

though he understood, he could not believe that one of his people could have done such a thing. Such a

display of violence was not the way of the Rom. One who was marhime was not tolerated in the

company ophral, the true Rom. He was ostracized from every facet of Rom society, but he was not

treated with violence. Or fire.

And yet… He had seen the symbol, the black paint with the excess liquid dripping from its lines like

drops of blood; and who else but a Rom knew that he was one of their own? Who else but a Rom would

know the secret patrin and defile the wall of his home with it?

“Jesus, John,” a voice said in hushed tones at his side. “You’ve lost everything.”

Janfri’s companion knew him as John Owczarek—one of Janfri’s Gaje names. Like all Gypsies, Janfri

used and discarded names as a Gajo might a suit of clothes. Only the other Rom of his kumpania knew

him as Janfri la Yayal—Janfri son of Yayal—and they were most likely to call him by his nickname, o

Boshbaro, “the Big Fiddle,” for his skill on the instrument that was at this moment tucked under his arm,

forgotten. To Rom who didn’t know him as well he was simply Boshengro, “the fellow who plays the

fiddle.”

“I sure as hell hope you’ve got enough insurance to cover it,” Tom Shaw added. He glanced at Janfri’s

face, puzzled by his friend’s lack of emotion. It had to be shock, he decided, because the stiff lack of

response he saw in Janfri’s features simply didn’t jibe with the man Tom knew him to be. The John

Owczarek that Tom knew was expansive in his moods, apt to gigantic joys and sorrows.

Tom stood a half head taller than his friend. He was a burly six-two, barrel-chested and meaty. Amongst

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the Gypsies, his size would label him as an important man, for they judged importance by size as well as

other attributes. He was forty-seven this summer, which made him Janfri’s elder by two years.

“John…” he tried again, touching his friend’s arm. The wiry muscles were stiff under the light cloth of

Janfri’s coat.

The Gypsy turned slowly to regard him. “Yekka buliasa nashti beshes pe done grastende,” he said

softly. Forgetting himself, he spoke Romany. With one behind you cannot sit on two horses. He saw the

puzzlement rise in Tom’s eyes, but made no attempt to explain. Let Tom think he spoke Hungarian. But

the old saying rang all too true in his own mind. One was either Rom or Gajo. There was no in between.

“Listen, John,” Tom said. “If you want a place to stay… ?”

Janfri shook his head. His dark features were pained now. A fire smoldered in the depths of his eyes that

were such a dark brown they were almost black.

“There is no John Owczarek,” he said. He turned and, before Tom could stop him, disappeared into the

crowd.

For a long moment Tom stood in shock. The noise of the crowd seemed to grow louder. The roar of the

flames and the pushing, jostling bodies around him combined to throw off his sense of the here and now.

The night was abruptly surreal, filled with strangeness and menace. A chill traveled up his spine. He

stared into the crowd, trying to see what had become of his friend.

“John!” he cried. “John!”

But the night had swallowed up the man he knew as John Owczarek as completely as though he had

never existed.

The body lay at the back of the alley and, looking at it, Detective-Sergeant Patrick Briggs of the Ottawa

Police Force bit down hard on the well-chewed stem of his unlit briar. He thought he might be sick.

Under the bright glare of the police photographer’s lights, there was no avoiding the gruesome sight.

The body lay in a sprawl. The head, half severed from the neck, was on its side, facing Briggs, its glazed

eyes holding his gaze with a vacant stare. A gory trail of abruptly disjoined muscle, esophagus, trachea,

spinal cord, jugular veins and carotid arteries trailed from below the jaw. It looked, Briggs thought, as

though something had chewed right through the neck.

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The body itself had sustained wounds as well. The right hand and forearm had been opened to the bone

—defense wounds caused by the victim’s unsuccessful attempt to fend off his attacker. The flesh and

muscle hung in ribbons from the arm. The left shoulder was no prettier. The cloth of the man’s jacket

hung in tatters, matted with blood, and clung wetly to the corpse and the ground around it. Briggs looked

away, hoping his stomach would settle down.

He was a veteran of twenty-four years on the Force—the last fifteen of them in General Assignment. To

some extent he was inured to the inevitable results of violence that his work brought him into contact

with—more so than a civilian confronted with the same situation might be. But at the same time, that

familiarity, the sheer volume of man’s brutality against his fellow man that he was forced to be witness

to, fueled an anger in him that sometimes frightened him with its intensity. This… thing lying in the

alley had once been a man. Someone had worked real hard to make it look like he’d been torn apart by

some kind of animal, but Briggs wasn’t buying it.

“Paddy?”

Briggs looked up at his partner’s call. Will Sandier was a tall, sharp-featured black man who went

through life in a constant state of suppressed tension. It showed in the taut pull of the skin at his temples,

around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, in the birdlike darting of his gaze. He contrasted sharply

with the unimposing figure that Briggs cut—five-eight with a perpetual slouch that made him appear

shorter, dark hair that was prematurely gray at the temples, sorrowful eyes. His suit was rumpled, tie

loose, shoes scuffed. Will, on the other hand, always looked like he’d just left his tailor’s. But the two

men made an effective pair for their strengths augmented each other’s weak points. Briggs was a slow

mover, a deliberate collector of details with little imagination, while Will’s mind moved in intuitive

lunges. Since they’d been paired, their success on cases had reached a departmental high of sixty-seven

percent.

Briggs removed his pipe and thrust it into the breast pocket of his suit coat, stem down, as he moved

closer to his partner. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t a mugging. There was over fifty bucks in his wallet.”

“Animal or man?” Briggs asked, wanting his own feelings confirmed.

Will shook his head. “A doberman might leave a mess like that… but I don’t know. We’re going to have

to wait to see what Cooper comes up with once he’s done the autopsy. Thing is,” he nodded to the

ground, “there’s enough dirt here to hold a track, but Alec didn’t come up with anything we could even

pretend was an animal’s.” Alec MacDonald was with forensics and was standing at the mouth of the

alley waiting for the body to be removed so that he could finish up. “I think we’ve got us a psycho on

our hands. That, or a case of spontaneous mutilation.” Will glanced at his partner, but Briggs didn’t

smile. “Bad juju, Paddy,” he added softly. “All the way.”

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Briggs nodded and studied the body again.

“Hodgins wants to know if we’re finished with it,” Will said.

Briggs glanced to where Al Hodgins waited with the medics. A pale green body-bag lay on the stretcher.

Briggs imagined them moving the body and the head coming loose, bouncing down the alleyway with a

wet sound… He grimaced.

“Stan got all the shots we need?” he asked.

Will nodded.

“What about that?” Briggs pointed to a symbol that had been scratched into the dirt near the victim’s

head. It was a circular shape, cut with three slashing lines. Two of them were so close together that the

topmost line ran into the one below it.

Will called the photographer over. “Did you get a shot of that, Stan?”

Stan Miller nodded. “A nice close-up,” he said. He was chewing on a pencil stub and talked around it

rather than removing it.

“What the hell’s it supposed to mean?” Will muttered.

Briggs motioned to the medics that they could collect the body and watched his partner. He could see the

cogs turning under Will’s short Afro, but his face mirrored the bewilderment Briggs knew was on his

own. He and Will moved aside as the medics took the body away. All that remained now were the chalk

outlines of where it had lain and the thickening pools of blood. It never failed to shock Briggs as to how

much blood there was in one human being. There were only about ten pints in a full-grown man, but

when you saw it all spilled out in some alleyway like this, it looked like about ten gallons.

“Hey! Is one of you Briggs?”

Both men turned to see a patrolman standing at the mouth of the alley.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve found you a witness.”

The man’s name was Ralph Cleary and he was a wino. He was in bad shape tonight, hands shaking like

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he had palsy, shuffling his feet, staring at the detectives with scared rheumy eyes. He wore a baggy suit

that even the Sally Ann wouldn’t have accepted on a bet. It hung from his sloped shoulders and slender

frame in loose, oversized folds. His face was flushed with alcohol poisoning, blue veins prominent.

“Where’d you find him?” Briggs asked the patrolman.

“Down the street in the park. He was sitting on a bench, just shaking and talking to himself. When I

asked if he’d seen anything, he just started telling me that he ‘didn’t hurt no one.’”

Briggs nodded. “Okay. Thanks. Stick around, would you? I want to talk to you after we’ve had a word

with him.”

“He’s all yours,” the patrolman said, turning Cleary over to them with obvious relief.

Briggs led the frightened man to the unmarked car that he and Will had arrived in. He helped him into

the back seat, then climbed in beside him. Will got into the front and leaned over the seat to look at

them.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Cleary mumbled.

“No one said you did,” Briggs explained gently. “We just want to ask you what you saw tonight, that’s

all. Think you can do that, Ralph?”

The wino nodded. “They call me Red-eye on the street,” he offered, “on account of the way my eyes get,

you know?”

“Would you prefer to be called that?”

“No. I like being called Ralph better.” He shot a quick glance at Will, then returned his watery gaze to

Briggs. “I used to be a midshipman, you know—out of Halifax. I wasn’t always… you know. Like this.”

Briggs nodded sympathetically. “Times are getting tough again,” he said. “All we can do is just hang in

there the best we can.”

“Yeah. We just gotta hang in there…” His voice trailed off. Briggs let the silence hang for a few

moments before he spoke again.

“So what did you see, Ralph?”

Cleary shrugged. “I was just minding my own business, you know, sitting on the stoop over there,

resting my feet.” He nodded to the front of the indoor parking lot across the street from the mouth of the

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alleyway. “I was just sitting there, when this guy comes by. I thought I might hit him up for some

change, but when he got into the light and I could see him better, I saw he didn’t look a whole lot better

off than me. I thought maybe I’d call him over, offer him a swig, you know, just to be sociable. I had

about a third of a bottle left and I. was feeling pretty good, but then…”

He’d been looking at what he could see of his feet between his legs while he spoke. As his voice trailed

off for a second time, his gaze flicked to Briggs’ face, then back to his shoes.

“What happened then, Ralph?” Briggs prompted him. For a long moment Cleary didn’t say anything.

When he finally spoke, his voice was strained. Scared.

“Did you ever stand in a harbor and… and watch the way the fog comes rolling in?” he asked. “The way

it licks up the streets at first, you know, hanging real low?”

“Yeah, sure.” Briggs wasn’t sure what Cleary was on about, but he wanted to keep him talking.

“Well, that’s what it was like… like a little patch of fog that came rolling up the street, only there was

this guy in the middle of it and the fog just sort of hung around his feet like it was… I don’t know…

following him. The first guy, he stopped in front of the alley when the guy with the fog called out to

him, and then he just sort of faded back into the alley, like he was scared of him, maybe. The other guy

followed and the fog… it…” He looked up at Briggs. “You’re going to say I was drunk, and maybe I

was, but there was something in that fog, mister. It was up to the guy’s knees now, maybe, and there

was… things moving in it. It didn’t look like no fog I ever saw and I’ve seen a lot. I used to be a

midshipman, you know—out of Halifax. I worked hard, real hard, but old Redeye likes his bottle, you

know, and I guess they just had to let me go…”

“Then what happened, Ralph?”

Cleary looked back at his shoes. “Then the other guy—the first guy—screamed… But it wasn’t loud or

anything, you know? It was this long whispering… wet sound. Well, I just took off, mister. I dropped

my bottle and I ran, but I just didn’t get too far. I made it to the park and I just sort of couldn’t go no

more. I sat down on a bench and I been there ever since.

“I saw you boys all pulling up with your lights flashing and I knew I should tell you what I saw, but I

couldn’t get up. And I thought… maybe… you’d think I done it, you know? Whatever happened to that

guy in the alley… I thought you’d think it was me that done it. But I never hurt no one, mister.” His gaze

fastened onto Briggs, searching for confirmation, needing to know that the detective believed him.

“No one thinks you did,” Briggs assured him.

“That first guy… he’s dead, isn’t he?”

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Charles de Lint - Mulengro

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