"I'll keep my promise to him
THE MORNING Star over Genoa was dimmed by the lightening east when Rinaldo
Pazzi's old Alfa purred down to the dock. A chilly wind riffled the harbor. On
a freighter at an outer mooring someone was welding, orange sparks showering
into the black water.
Romula stayed in the car out of the wind with the baby in her lap. Esmeralda
was scrunched in the small backseat of the berlinetta coupe with her legs
sideways. She had not spoken again since she refused to touch Shaitan.
They had thick black coffee in paper cups and pasticcini.
Rinaldo Pazzi went into the shipping office. By the time he came out again the
sun was well risen, glowing orange on the rust-streaked hull of the freighter
Astra Philogenes, completing its loading at dockside. He beckoned to the women
in the car.
The Astra Philogenes, twenty-seven thousand tons, Greek registry, could
legally carry twelve passengers without a ship's doctor on its route to Rio.
There, Pazzi explained to Romula, they would transship to Sydney, Australia,
the transshipment supervised by the Astra purser. Passage was fully paid and
emphatically nonrefundable. In Italy, Australia is considered an attractive
alternative where jobs can be found, and it has a large Gypsy population.
Pazzi had promised Romula two million lire, about twelve hundred and fifty
dollars at the current rate of exchange, and he gave it to her in a fat
envelope.
The Gypsies' baggage amounted to very little, a small valise and Romula's
wooden arm packed in a French horn case.
The Gypsies would be at sea and incommunicado for most of the next month.
Gnocco is coming, Pazzi told Romula for the tenth time, but he could not come
today. Gnocco would leave word for them general delivery at the Sydney main
post office. "I'll keep my promise to him, just as I did to you," he told them
as they stood together at the foot of the gangway, the early sun sending their
long shadows down the rough surface of the dock.
At the moment of parting, with Romula and the baby already climbing the
gangway, the old woman spoke for the second and last time in Pazzi's
experience.
With eyes as black as Kalamata olives she looked into his face. "You gave
Gnocco to Shaitan," she said quietly. "Gnocco is dead."
Bending stiffly, as she would bend to a chicken on the block, Esmeralda spit
carefully on Pazzi's shadow, and hurried up the gangway after Romula and the
child.