The woman barked at them again. In a flash they ran away, laughing, and she disappeared inside the open flap of the circus tent with her heavy pail. René followed.
Sawdust, the wheeze from an accordion—he felt immediately sucked in by the intimate draw of the big top. He remembered Saturday afternoons from his childhood, the first time he’d ever seen a grown-up man like him. The man had had a red nose and frizzy yellow hair, and he kept tripping over his big shoes, to the audience’s delight. Terrified, René had hidden behind his mother. Would he end up a clown?
Now, he shivered in fascination. Colored lights masked the seediness, disguised the ratty curtains. He watched a rehearsal in full swing: candelabra-lit ringside violins and accordion players, trapeze artists, acrobats twisting like snakes, fire jugglers, tightrope walkers glistening with sweat, the clacking hooves of the dancing goat—it felt all so familiar, and it took him back to those small-tent Gypsy circuses in the countryside.
“You’re looking for me?” A man in his shirtsleeves, wearing a fedora, rings on every finger, took René’s arm and steered him outside onto the jagged cobbles.
“Radu Constantin?”
He nodded, his dark, unsmiling eyes taking the measure of René. “Auditions ended last week. Who told you to come here?”
Dwarves and circuses again. René’s anger mounted. What did Drina and the old murder of Djanka have to do with Aimée’s father’s death?—that was the real question. Spitting mad now, he’d had enough. He pulled out his Leduc Detective card.
“Let me get to the point, Monsieur Constantin,” he said. “How does your sister Djanka’s murder twenty years ago connect to Drina’s abduction?” He lifted the photo and shoved it in the man’s face. “Nicu dragged my partner, Aimée, into this. Now I want answers.”
Radu Constantin stepped back, startled. Gravel crunched under his feet. “That busybody he brought to the hospital—that gadji—I knew she’d cause trouble.”
Lines of washing whipped in the wind, an eerie echo traveling between the caravans. From inside the big top came the whine of violins. “We perform tonight. I’m busy.”
“Twenty years ago, Aimée’s father investigated Djanka’s murder.” René ad-libbed before Constantin could interrupt him. “After her sister’s death, Drina raised Nicu as her own. But in the hospital yesterday, on her deathbed, she told Nicu about his real mother. Showed him his birth certificate.” René hated lying, but this followed close to the truth. As much as he figured it would.
“How’s this your business? Anybody’s business but ours?” Radu Constantin shouted.
René knew he had to keep going. “Drina said she had a secret to tell Aimée about her father’s murder. Phutt, before she could—she’s abducted.”
“What craziness comes out of your mouth?” Radu’s dark eyes flashed. “My sister Drina is … how you say …” He searched for the word. “Like at the airport, in transit. Her soul’s not at rest. Leave it alone. We take care of things our way.”
“But Drina’s missing, gone, non?” Exasperated, René wanted this man to see reason. “Now, with Nicu’s murder …”
Radu Constantin suddenly put his hands over his face. Rocked back and forth. Then he lifted his hands up to the sky, folded, as though in prayer.
René sighed. “I’m so sorry.”
Radu hadn’t known.
A few seconds later Radu seemed to come back down to earth and looked at René. “He’s not family,” he said dully.
René’s brain stalled. These disparate events Aimée seemed hell-bent on connecting jumped all over the place. Yet if he didn’t press and learn more while Radu Constantin stood towering over him in a black cloud of anger and despair, when would he? “You mean his real mother, Djanka, or Aurélie, wasn’t family? Was Nicu’s father a non-manouche? Pascal?”
“Leave us alone.” Radu Constantin motioned to the middle-aged man René had seen polishing his fender before. The man set his rag down in a pail, lit another cigarette as Radu disappeared back into the tent. Shrugged.
“You heard, let’s go.”
“Is he always like this?” René asked the man, whose cigarette was hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
“I just married into the family,” he said, the reek of alcohol coming from his pores. Glinting blond stubble on his chin and blond hair slicked back, he looked like the odd man out in this group. He stuck a pack of matches in his pocket and walked toward René and motioned him down the alley.
For one who hit the bottle so early in the day, his feet were steady on the cobbles. Still, that didn’t exactly make him a reliable source of information.
“I feel terrible about spilling what happened to Nicu,” said René. “But I don’t understand him. Or his reaction. We only want to help, can’t he see that?”
“Forget getting anything out of them, believe me.” The man was turning into a conversationalist.
“I’m an outsider, eh? They’re not going to talk to me, they’d rather let a poor woman die while they handle it on their own, c’est-?a?”
“Don’t try to figure them out. Not healthy.”
René bristled. “Doesn’t he care that his nephew was murdered this morning?” René knew Radu did care—he’d seen the emotion rocking him. But he wanted details.
The mec chucked his still-burning cigarette into the running gutter. René heard a thupt. “Feuds round here can go back generations.”
René stood at the corner, the sky oyster-grey beyond the mansard windows lining narrow Passage de Clichy. The mec ducked in a doorway to light another cigarette. His gaze darted down the passage. Satisfied no one was on the lookout, he leaned forward.
“Drina’s sister was shunned. Went by Aurélie and slept with a gadjo—a non-manouche.”
“This Pascal, Nicu’s father … Where is he?”