Hastened to the Grave: The Gypsy Murder Investigation

An Easy Touch

FAY FARON ALWAYS answered her phone with a cheery "Rat Dog Dick!" even though she was well aware that some of her callers would gladly garrote her and feed her to the crabs off Pier 45. When she'd first established her one-woman detective agency, she tried answering in a businesslike contralto to create the impression that she employed a receptionist, but a friend complained that she sounded like a table dancer.

    This morning's caller was Ken Chan, her lawyer and favorite client, asking if she could drop into his office on busy Union Street to discuss an assignment. "No big deal," he added.

    "I'm halfway there," Fay said. You could never tell what Chan meant by "no big deal." On one of his cases she'd ended up chasing rustlers in the Arizona desert, earning a year's supply of flank steak for herself and Beans, her Rastafarian dog and confidant.

ONE GOOD THING about Ken Chan, she reminded herself as she climbed into the rattly old car she called the Frog Prince, he's quick pay, unlike some other lawyers. She was $68 delinquent on her veterinary bill and a week or two behind on less important accounts like electricity and telephone. Some of her clients hadn't paid up in years, but she would rather skate naked across the Union Square ice rink than dun a customer. She considered herself a relaxed and forgiving soul, lighthearted, playful, famous among her friends as an easy touch for men, women, dogs, cats, gerbils, lizards and goldfish. It was one of the reasons she was usually broke.

THE SESSION IN Chan's small third-floor office wasn't five minutes old before she realized that this would be a simple research job -- no tricks, false closets or mirrors. The client was an Anglo-Russian expatriate named Hope Victoria Beesley who believed she was being hustled out of several hundred thousand dollars by an odd-jobs worker whose name abruptly appeared on her property deed as co-owner. Chan said that the elderly widow's house was worth $500,000 and stood out from its Sunset District neighbors by virtue of the sheen on its lustrous green roof. The inside was so lavishly decorated that the place had been featured in Better Homes and Gardens alongside rococo old mansions from Nob Hill and Pacific Heights.

    "What's the guy's name?" Fay asked, pencil poised above the legal-size yellow paper that she customarily used to take notes. She was acutely aware that other investigators utilized minicassette tape recorders resembling Fig Newtons; she planned to buy one when she caught up on her bills or at the turn of the millennium, whichever came first.

    "Teeny," she heard Chan answer. "Danny Teeny. A big guy. The client says he looks like a beached sea elephant. See what you can find on him, will you, Fay?"

    She asked how to spell the name. Despite a high IQ and prodigious verbal acuity, as shown in her weekly newspaper column "Ask Rat Dog" and other published and unpublished writings, Fay had never heard a name she couldn't misspell or mispronounce. "God gave you so much, dear," a teacher had told her in childhood. "He just didn't give you spelling."

    Chan said, "T-E-N-E."

    "Odd name," said the PI. "That'll make things easier. How many T-E-E-N-Es can there be?"

    "Two E's," he reminded her. "T-E-N-E. How much time do you need.

    Fay asked herself, Why are lawyers always in a hurry? She collected her notes, zipped her down vest from Eddie Bauer over her flowered print dress from Laura Ashley, smiled sweetly and said, "Will yesterday be soon enough?"

CHAPTER TWO

Skip Tracer

DRIVING HOME FROM the lawyer's office, Fay felt invigorated. Her carrot-cake-and-baked-oatmeal diet was producing a steady flow of energy, just as she'd hoped. She shook her head as she thought of the money she'd wasted on other people's idea of miracle foods -- sprouts, wheat grass, lecithin, ginseng, various picolinates and chelates, beta-carotene, dried nettles, everything but unicorn horn. She hadn't ingested a shred of "health food" for a month and felt twenty years old again, or about half her age. This very morning she'd biked two miles to the Golden Gate and two miles back, and when she got home she felt like making the trip again, and did. She planned to cycle to Alaska someday. It was only -- what? Three or four thousand miles? She hoped Beans could keep up. He was just the right size to feed a family of grizzlies.

FOR TWO YEARS Fay and her dog had lived in the Marina, a sunstruck part of San Francisco that belied Mark Twain's well-worn quote about the coldest winter he ever spent. Her office-apartment was a five-minute walk from the beach and a bracing stroll from dozens of restaurants where she could replace some of the calories that she burned off on her new rope-jumping regimen, which consisted of nine hundred acrobatic jumps in varying positions, or as many as she could manage before fellow residents started banging on the walls. When the north wind blew off Fisherman's Wharf, a faint iodine scent made her imagine a tourist at Alioto's slurping an oyster or cracking a Dungeness crab. She found this another useful dieting aid.

INSIDE HER THREE-ROOM office-apartment, Fay offered Beans some leftover chicken curry soup, enough to lick but not enough to cause the same unfortunate reaction that a full bowl had caused the last time. He was a two-year-old golden retriever-German shepherd mix that she described as "the world's first canine Rastafarian" for the dreadlocks behind his floppy ears. The dog was clumsy and undisciplined and a profuse shedder of zigzag hairs of the same gauge as speaker wire, but there was no question that he meant well.

    With her best friend at her feet, the private investigator installed herself at her Star Wars control center. This was the part of her work that she enjoyed the most. Admirers were convinced that she could produce the vital statistics, credit records, shoe sizes, blood types and personal histories of anyone from Governor Wilson to Vlad the Impaler, although Vlad might take a while. Of course skip tracers weren't supposed to have access to credit reports and other confidential information, but what were friends for? Fay called her personal network the Friends of the Rat Dog Dick Detective Agency and tried to give as good as she got.

HER DINING ROOM was draped in swags of spaghetti wire and patch cords that climbed like May Day ribbons to a multiple socket in the four-bulb chandelier. Her desk consisted of a heavy oaken door laid across two filing cabinets and spray-painted to resemble the finest Carrara marble. To the left of her workstation was a microfiche reader that she'd bought at a county salvage sale for $25. It served her well as long as she remembered to pull the plug at the first sign of smoke. On utility shelving to her right were a battered black-and-white printer that oozed copies according to its mood and a vintage fax machine that spat tightly curled messages with charred edges. At her fingertips was a crotchety old Everex 286 computer that she called Evie, or sometimes Evil Evie, attached to a Hayes modem that ran at 2400 baud, the slowest rate available from her favorite electronics shop, where her account was too seriously in arrears for an upgrade.

A RED LIGHT winked on the answering machine that she'd picked up at the Goodwill, but she decided to ignore it for the moment. Like the pilot of a transoceanic jet, she sat among her humming machines and blinking lights to launch her journey into the private world of -- what was that name again? She consulted her notes and found "Danny Teeny." She hoped Ken Chan hadn't misspelled it. Then she remembered that it was pronounced "Teeny" but spelled T-E-N-E. Or was it the other way around?

    For a start, she punched "Tene" into a data bank that claimed to hold every listed phone number in the United States. She expected a bare minimum of hits, if any, for such an unusual name, but Tenes turned up in New York, Boston and its suburbs, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego and several smaller cities, plus a few in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    She switched tactics and dialed the online number for the Social Security Master Death Index, a listing of names and Social Security numbers of citizens who'd forfeited their privacy rights by dying. More Tenes appeared: John, Mary, Angelo, Tina, Larry, Tom, Frank, Steve. The name Pete Bimbo Tene popped up and sounded remotely familiar, as did Pete Tene Bimbo, but Fay couldn't remember where she'd heard them. Several Ephrem, and/or Ephraim Tenes turned up; one of the Ephrems also seemed to be named Brian or Bryan. A few listings were so baffling that Fay decided they were simply errors, typographical or otherwise.

    In other handy data banks she discovered that some living members of the clan seemed to have two or three Social Security numbers, some had none, and some were using numbers that belonged to the dead. A few SSNs checked back to the wrong names, and vice versa. In court records, the names of several Tenes and Bimbos and Tene Bimbos appeared on restraining orders. An infant Tene, twenty-three days old, had died under peculiar circumstances. Another Tene had been killed in a parking lot. One had been arrested for picking pockets, and other members of the clan had misdemeanor records. There were also evictions and charges of welfare fraud.

    Fay cruised the information superhighway every day but she'd seldom encountered such mystifying files. How could these Tenes expect old-age benefits if they didn't pay into their own Social Security accounts? What was the point of building up a retirement equity for someone else, or for the dead? She wondered if the Tenes were a Mafia family, running some kind of scam. She called a network friend, a detective who worked organized crime; he told her that the name Tene meant nothing to him.

IN THE EVENING, she took her sidekick on his regular evening frisk to Marina Green, then decided to file the Tene mystery in a far corner of her mind and go to bed. She'd studied creative writing at Arizona State, authored A Private Eye's Guide to Collecting a Bad Debt, and regularly critiqued detective novels in a column called "The Gumshoe Letters" in the San Francisco Review of Books. On this cool winter night she decided to lull herself to sleep by plotting out still another project: a novel about a skip tracer. She got as far as the title -- Lily Kills Her Client -- when her concentration began to slip.

    Then Beans licked her face, a pigeon cooed on her balcony, and the steam heat system hissed and knocked, a triad of events announcing the arrival of dawn. Her clock said five-fifty. Darn, she said to herself, I gotta stop sleeping so late.

CHAPTER THREE

Tracking a Tene

SHE STARTED HER new day by rearranging her document files so they wouldn't come crashing down while she showered. She kept most of her papers in crates along the wall of her art deco bathroom, where they rose six sinuous feet like Oriental acrobats. The W to Z folders stayed damp from bathtub runoff, but A to V were dry. A shorter stack of wanted posters, legal documents and back copies of dog-lover magazines perched atop the water closet at a slight angle.

    At 9:00 a.m., after a bracing ride to Seat Rocks with Beans gallomping behind her bike, Fay called the Department of Motor Vehicles to request the driving history of Hope Victoria Beesley's friend Danny Tene. She learned that a Dan Tene had been involved in minor traffic matters but otherwise seemed clean. He was the registered owner of a metallic-gold Corvette. Fay reversed the license number through the system and this time the owner came back as Sal Lamance. Same address, same car. She wondered why Danny Tene needed two names. It was perfectly legal under California law, but ... odd. Maybe this job wouldn't be as simple as she'd thought.

* * *

SHE DROVE HER 1982 Tercel to the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office and learned that a photocopy of the police report involving the dead Tene infant would cost $25, an offer she was obliged to decline. She perused City Hall records and found that a Dan Tene resided in a nondescript neighborhood, stood six-three, weighed two-eighty, and had been born in New Jersey in 1957 or 1962 -- the printing was faint -- which made him thirty or thirty-five.

    After a hasty carrot cake brunch with iced damiana cappuccino, she dropped by Ken Chan's office. "I've been trying to connect Tene with Mrs. Beesley," she said after reporting her preliminary findings. "So far -- no connection. What do we know about her?"

    The lawyer described his client as an irascible eighty-two-year-old eccentric who alternated between spinning fascinating tales about her past and cussing him out. "Most of the time I really enjoy her, but she can be hard to take. Hates lawyers, doctors, politicians, bureaucrats, Americans. She calls Russians "Bolsheviks." Has an opinion on everything, usually negative. You name it, she hates it. Except the English. She was born Russian, but she's proud of holding U.S. and English passports. She looks down on Asians and lends them money at eighteen, nineteen percent. She's got about a half million dollars on the street. Sometimes a debtor skips to China and she gets stiffed. That's where I come in. It's tough work, and she's never satisfied."

    Chan said the old woman had offered several explanations of how the opportunistic Danny Tene came to be listed as co-owner of her luxurious home with its stained glass windows and objets d'art in jade and ivory and precious metals. The bare home, minus contents, had been appraised by the city at $373,000, but it was worth more on the open market.

    "She doesn't remember how she met Danny," the lawyer continued, "but it might have been when she was taking a walk. He offered to help her out -- housework, gardening, handyman. Told her he enjoyed helping old people and did the same things for his mother. After a while he asked if he could rent her empty garage -- "

    "For his gold Corvette," Fay interrupted. "California license 1PLL244."

    Chan ignored her display of expertise. "One night Danny mentioned that he needed a place to stay and since Mrs. Beesley had five empty bedrooms, why couldn't he just move in? Next thing she knew he was a permanent guest."

    "Was there any -- uh ... you know?"

    "Not likely. She's under five feet, weighs ninety pounds. He's huge. And he's fifty years younger. But..." He shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe you can find out."

    Fay said that sexual profiling wasn't one of her specialities.

    Chan smiled. "After a few months Tene got her to sign a joint tenancy deed. Said it would legalize their living arrangement. She didn't suspect anything. She'd taught English, and he was her tenant, wasn't he? Simple enough. She also speaks Russian, French and German, and she can get by in Mandarin and Cantonese and some Chinese dialects I've never heard. Learned 'em in Hong Kong."

    "Hong Kong?" Fay was a busy traveler herself, a compulsion that had begun when she'd said to herself "I'd rather be anyplace but here" while enduring 120-degree heat in the playground of Royal Palm Elementary School in Phoenix. Since then she'd been to fifty states and four continents and had enjoyed every trip except the midwinter freight train ride from Mount Shasta to Seattle.

    "Mrs. Beesley was in Hong Kong in World War Two," the lawyer explained. "She spent three years in a Japanese concentration camp."

    Chan said that Danny Tene had promised the old woman $75,000 in return for her signature on the joint tenancy agreement. Chronically worried about money, she'd accompanied her roomer to City Hall and signed in front of a notary. After the document was recorded, the handyman dropped out of her life. "That was two or three years ago, and she hasn't seen him since. She's hurt, but what can she do? She had no idea what he was up to, and she had other things on her mind -- opera, philanthropies, costume parties, entertaining. She likes to dress in her Russian costumes and play piano in charity wards with a group called the Half-Notes. Shakes her tambourine and does dances she learned in Russia. A very busy old lady."

    Fay said, "Hope Victoria Beesley doesn't sound like a Russian name."

    "She was born Nadia Malysheff. Married an Englishman named Beesley and renamed herself after the Hope diamond and the queen. She says she came from a family of aristocrats -- doctors, teachers."

    "What makes her think she's being scammed?"

    "A year after she signed the joint tenancy agreement, the Assessor's Office raised her taxes. She sent a note to Danny saying something like, This thing that you recorded, whatever it is, you gotta unrecord it because it's costing me money. Danny ignored her. He had what he wanted. The joint tenancy agreement makes him co-owner of her house. When she dies, he'll own it outright."

    Fay nodded. She'd heard of a few similar cases. Big-money scams had been based on the fact that the phrase "joint tenancy" actually meant "joint ownership" under the law. She wondered when California politicians would learn basic English.

    "After another year or two," Chan continued, "the midnight calls started. Someone would ask if she was still alive. She got six or eight hang-ups a night. She was sure it was Danny or his relatives. Then she broke her hip and was bedridden and scared to death in that big empty house. As soon as she could walk, she took a cab straight to my office, told me she wanted Danny off her deed. I filed a recision action. He's fighting it. That's why I called you."

    "I was surprised to find so many Tenes in the data banks," Fay said. "And so many interchangeable names and Social Security numbers."

    The lawyer frowned. "Oh, that's not unusual for Gypsies," he said.

    "Gypsies?"

    "Yeah. Didn't I tell you?"

   She [Fay] remembered seeing a TV documentary in which European Gypsies flogged dancing bears and jerked them around by chains attached to nose-rings. She'd never viewed evil as an absolute -- malum in se, as lawyer friends like Ken Chan called it -- nor did she believe that evildoing was racial or hereditary in nature. She wondered if some of the harsh Gypsy ways might have been passed down from generation to generation, not by genes but by some kind of warped tradition, or as a reaction to their own mistreatment, harshness begetting harshness. She wondered how they'd managed to endure as an identifiable race without a flag, a homeland or even a written language. Gypsies were different; they had to be. If she understood them, she might be able to save some lives. Who were they? Where did they come from? And why did some of them seem to be living off the elderly?

   She drove to the downtown library and emerged with an armload of books. Back home, she shared a Hungry Man chicken pie with Beans, switched off her phone, stacked the books alongside her bed, and dug in. Within a few minutes she'd discovered that many of the oldest cliches about Gypsy history, including some believed by their own historians, were fanciful. This short, swart race hadn't originated in Atlantis or Babel, as some Gypsies claimed with a straight face, or even in Egypt, as Fay and many others believed. Nor were they directly descended from Cain or any Biblical figure. Originally they were a Caucasoid caste of nomadic musicians, drumbeaters, dancers and craftsmen whose exodus from the Punjab region of their native India started around 1000 A.D. or maybe a half-millennium earlier. No scholar seemed sure. As she turned the pages, Fay soon realized that there were no certainties about Gypsies, not in their history, their culture, their sociology, or even in their names. Gypsiology was one of the least scientific of the anthropological disciplines.

   In ancient Persia, she learned, Gypsies had been called "Dom." Later, in Armenia, they were known as "Lom," and as their travels broadened, they became "Rom," "Roma," "Romani" as well as the misnomer, "Gypsies." The latest demographic guesswork put their population at eight to twelve million, spread across forty countries. Proud Gypsy spokesmen claimed that their number included politicians in Spain, nuclear scientists in Rumania, poets and writers in Yugoslavia, academics and at least one commercial airline pilot in the United States, but some leaders were dubious. "We don't even have a Gypsy baker," John Tene of Boston was quoted in Fay's reading matter. "Not even a Gypsy janitor. We look at the plane in the sky and we say, How does it stay up there? We look at buildings and we say, How does the cement hold it together?"

   Fay was surprised to learn that there were upwards of two million American Gypsies, most of them barely illiterate both by choice and tradition. No one knew the exact count, least of all the census-takers. The U. S. Rom were divided into sixty tribes and four vitsas or nations: Kalderasha, Machwaya, Lowara and Churara. They spoke Romany, the unwritten language of wanderers, an Indo-Aryan dialect of Sanskrit that had been salted through the centuries by words from the Arabic, Slavic, Greek, Farsi, Germanic and Latin, picked up on their travels.

   The more Fay read, the more it became clear that if segments of the Gypsy population were anti-social and opportunistic, there was plenty of reason. As a race, they'd been shunned and abused by non-Gypsies for centuries and all but forced into illicit means of making a living. The predations of Mary Tene Steiner and her brood appeared to be escalations of a history of mutual contempt and misunderstanding that dated at least to 1100 A.D., when a Georgian monk described the Roma as "wizards, famous rogues, adept in animal poisoning," neglecting to mention that they were also expert at animal healing. In the Balkans in the 1300s, Gypsies were enslaved for minor offenses or for no offense at all. In Greece, footloose Romani families had to pass themselves off as pilgrims while dodging the authorities and eking out a living as fortune tellers, ventriloquists, magicians and snake charmers. To keep from being put to death for heresy and witchcraft, Gypsies of the late middle ages declared themselves Muslims, Catholics, Zoroastrians, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Protestants, even unbelievers. They were pleased to be mistaken for Moors, Tartars, Egyptians, Saracens or just about any race as long as it ensured their survival. At the time of Columbus, Rom leaders convinced gullible Italians that they were on a secret mission for the Pope, then left town to confront the next racist challenge to their existence. The anti-Gypsy prejudice was pan-European and unrelenting. Around 1530 A.D., Henry VI referred to "outlandysshe People callynge themselfes Egyptians" and banished them from his kingdom. A French politician complained that Gypsy visitors "emptied the purses of all into their own," leading the Bishop of Paris to order the excommunication of anyone doing business with palm readers. At the time of the Inquisition, the Roma were falsely accused of spreading the bubonic plague, thus placing them one order below the true carriers, which were rats.

   By the seventeenth century, bands of English Gypsies were scratching out marginal livings as tinkers, pot-menders, horse traders, clothespin peddlers and musicians, but they were still considered sub-human. Shakespeare assigned the name "Caliban" (from the Romany for blackness) to a sinister character in The Tempest. Such creatures of the lower depths made easy targets. In the eighteenth century, two dozen Gypsies were tortured to death for cannibalizing a group of Hungarians who were later found alive and healthy. European countries deported thousands of Rom to America, and colonial newspapers soon began referring to "the Gypsy problem." Between 1801 and 1803, Napoleon exiled whole shiploads of Gitanes to death by fever in the Louisiana swamps. Fin-de- siecle racists spread word that Gypsies stole babies from cradles and drank their blood, a convenient racial libel that still circulated among the ignorant a century later.

   Fay let one of the books slip from her fingers and thought, What a long, sad, pathetic history. Of course they distrust us; how could it be otherwise? She wondered how much of the prejudice was the Gypsies' own fault, or how fault could even be determined in such a sordid historical tableau. Did centuries of oppression justify the exploitation of doddering old San Franciscans who didn't even know the meaning of the word Romani? Maybe so, in Gypsy eyes. And maybe not. Assigning original blame was an impossible job.

   She resumed her reading and learned that most Gypsies, unlike most Jews and other oppressed peoples, stubbornly resisted acculturation or even interracial friendship, refusing to send their children to school lest their romanipe or Gypsiness be contaminated by outside ways or their children bullied and mugged. Such clannish ways, justified or not, had often fueled distrust. In the late 1930s, the mad geneticist Adolf Hitler classified the Rom as rassenverfolgte, racially undesirable, and ordered "Z" (for "Zigeuner") tattooed on their arms. In the Gypsy Holocaust or porajmos that followed, Nazi assassins killed as many as a half-million Romani with gas, medical torture and bullets. The able-bodied were worked to death. Angry survivors discarded their animosity toward the non-Gypsy world long enough to guide Allied spies and POWs along their old smuggling routes and to pass secret messages in a tongue that only other Gypsies could translate.

   Despite their wartime service and sacrifices, the benumbed Rom entered the second half of the 20th century as the same old pariah population. In the standard encyclopedias, they were described as "having the mental image of a child of ten," "quarrelsome, quick to anger or laughter, unthinkingly cruel," "deceitful," "fickle," "superstitious." The English publication The Independent quoted a typical attitude: "A bullet in the head is what they need. . . . If I were dying of cancer I'd buy a shotgun and take out six of them."

   Even in modern times, Fay learned, the worldwide repression continued. France required Gitanes to carry carnets de circulation that were regularly checked by officials to keep familias from lingering too long in an area. The Swiss and Italian governments sanctioned forcible adoption of Rom children. By the late 1990s, Gypsy caravans were still being sacked on the back roads of Europe, encampments bulldozed in France, Romani women sterilized in Czechoslovakia, clans restricted to government reservations in England, and thousands deported from Germany. (Everyone hates the Gypsies, blared a recent headline in the influential newsmagazine Der Spiegel.)

   Now Fay began to see why almost all of the Rom continued to revile outsiders, refused to drink from the same containers, put deadly curses on non-Gypsies, and rationalized stealing from their oppressors. They even had a derogatory name for non-Gypsies: gaje, literally translated as "peasant" or "serf" but closer in tone to the Yiddish "goy" and the Hispanic "gringo." Sometimes the word was written as "gaje" or "gadze," but in any form it was no compliment. The American public seemed to reciprocate the resentment. A New York Times survey rated Gypsies the least trustworthy of all ethnic groups, even below the "Whisians," a non-existent group inserted in the poll as a test.

   The more Fay read, the more she realized that the racial animosities seemed to be self-perpetuating. An old saying about blacks came to mind: "They break our legs and blame us for being lame." Gypsies told tales about Auschwitz and Mauthausen and rehearsed their children in dolorous anthems of hurt: "Some evenings, like some other evenings, I find myself envying the respect you give your dog . . . " "The whole world hates us. We're chased, we're cursed, condemned to wandering throughout life . . . . We survive as hounded thieves, but barely a nail have we stolen."

   But that single nail, according to a hardy Romani legend, was the gold spike intended for the sacred heart of Jesus. Before dying, a grateful Christ on the Cross had given Gypsies a heavenly license to steal from the gaje. Cynics argued that the Gypsies told the story backwards; Romani blacksmiths had forged the three spikes impaling Christ, and in his last gasp, Jesus had banished them to wander the earth forever.

   Legends and counter-legends were fueled, as always, by the toxic combination of ignorance and prejudice. "When God came down to earth," said a villager in the movie Time of the Gypsies, "he took one look at the Gypsies and took the next flight back." Another myth held that the once-powerful Rom nation had lost its standing when God parted the Red Sea for the Jews but chose to drown their pursuers. Gypsy children were taught that these stories could be verified in the Bible. Few of them doublechecked because few of them learned to read.

   Fay found herself agreeing with the balanced reasoning in the French author Jean Clebert's study, The Gypsies, and realized that it went a long way toward explaining the anti-gaje bitterness of clans like the Tene Bimbos:

Above all else, Gypsies are feared: if the truth were known, they are not liked. When they are not held openly in contempt, the Gypsies, men and women, receive the benefit of that recurring little dose of racism which one day puts the blame for something on flashy South American adventurers, and the next on North African coloured people. So it is that the Gypsies, and they alone, are held to be vagabonds, beggars, thieves and weavers of spells.

   Fay put aside her homework and stared at the curtain that glowed and darkened with the traffic below her apartment. She fell asleep wishing she'd studied ethics and morals instead of English and journalism.

©1998 Jack Olsen All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-312-18362-3