The Judge and the Gypsy (16 page)

This time it was a car horn behind them that forced them apart. He pulled away, took a deep breath, and released the brake. “I’m sorry about your dress, Savannah, but I’ll get you another one.”

“Don’t worry. At least I have a jacket. I think I can get back into my trailer without anyone knowing.”

“Savannah, you can’t get out of the car without someone knowing. That jacket doesn’t button. It’s much too skimpy, and there’s nothing skimpy about your breasts.”

She tried unsuccessfully to work on the zipper. She couldn’t believe what had happened. What had she been thinking? She’d practically let him make love to her not fifty feet from a party of political contributors! No, that was wrong, it wasn’t a matter of letting
him. In another minute she would have unzipped his trousers, and they might both have been caught in a compromising position.

It wasn’t Rasch she couldn’t trust, it was herself. And it didn’t matter who fit into whose world. When they were together, their world was each other, and nobody else mattered.

“Take me home, Rasch.”

“I can’t, Savannah. I’m tired of playing games. We need to be together, and we can’t be together at the circus, not the way I want to. Come to the condo with me. Please?”

This time he didn’t touch her. He kept both hands tightly on the wheel and waited for her to decide. It was her choice.

He was right. It was all she could do not to leap across the gearshift and fling herself into Rasch’s lap. Going to his apartment meant making love. Was that what she wanted? Yes. Maybe not forever, but for tonight.

“All right, Rasch, I’ll come.”

He drove down Peachtree Street, north of Buckhead, and turned into a high-rise with lighted underground parking. They parked the car and took the elevator.

“This is certainly a much easier way to get to your apartment,” Savannah said quietly.

The elevator stopped at the fourth floor. “How did you get out there that first night, on my balcony?”

“Niko rigged a wire between your apartment and a vacant one across the way. You didn’t notice the wire in the darkness. I walked over and back.”

He unlocked the door and turned on the light. “And the puff of smoke when you disappeared?”

“Circus tricks.”

Rasch looked at Savannah. She stopped trying to hold up the dress top and let it fall.

“An illusion, planned to enslave me.” He touched her hair. “I liked your hair blond, and red. But this is the way I like you best. Free and wild,” he said in a hoarse voice, removing her short jacket in order to get to the zipper. He examined the offending piece of metal. It was caught by a tag of material. The more he worked at it, the tighter it caught.

His arm grazed her breast. Perspiration dripped down his face. He could no longer make his fingers cooperate. Finally, with an oath of exasperation, he gave both sides of the fabric a jerk, and the zipper broke. The dress, loosened from its restraint, slid down around her hips and fell in a pool of spangles around her silver high heels.

Rasch gasped and stepped back.

Savannah was wearing sheer, glittering pantyhose and nothing else. Her long, shapely legs would have made a Las Vegas dancer die of envy.

“Wild and free,” he whispered. “And so very beautiful. God, how I want to make love to you, Gypsy.”

“Then do it, Crusader, before we both incinerate!”

“Uh-oh, what about my promise to your father?”

“Did he ask you not to make love to me?”

“No, that was my idea.”

“Some of your ideas are spectacular, Crusader. Some are not. This one isn’t.”

He nuzzled behind her ear, his hands touching and tormenting every secret place until she could no longer stand.

“Rasch, I’m dying. Love me, please.”

“Always, my Gypsy, always.” The pantyhose were gone, and so were Rasch’s clothes. For the first time, they made love in a house, in a bed, in a blur of sensations that catapulted them with the intensity of a moon blast in a rocket ship into a shattering release.

Afterward, Rasch gathered her in his arms. “Savannah, maybe this isn’t the time, but I want to tell you about Tifton.”

“No. This is our time. I don’t want to talk about him—not now.” She twisted in his arms and pressed her face against his neck.

“Sometimes it’s hard, making the best decision. I always tried to do the right thing, but I made everything black or white. By not allowing any gray, I could make my decision and put it behind me. If I could take it back, change my sentence, I would. I’m so damned sorry I made him my example.”

“It’s all right, Crusader. You never meant his death to happen.”

But the moment had changed. And it was Rasch who was tense, not Savannah. Suddenly she understood how it must have been for Rasch, growing up without people around him to help cushion life’s blows. As a child he’d had to grow up the best way he could, but underneath he wasn’t sure. He had fear like everyone else, he just didn’t show it.

“Rasch, it’s all right. I understand. We’ve both been sailing along, set on a course that allowed little change of direction. We’d drawn very detailed maps. You’d right the world’s wrongs, and I’d make my family’s world right. Neither of us knew how to take any of the little side trips that make the trip worthwhile.”

She felt him start to relax. His fingertips began to make tiny circles on the skin of her back, tiny warm circles that expanded as she talked.

“But Tifton wasn’t just anybody, Gypsy. He was your brother, part of your plan.”

“Yes, maybe he was. And it took him to bring us together.”

“But—”

“Crusader …” She lifted her face and cut off his protest with a kiss. “Crusader, maybe Tifton never had a map. He spent all his time on the side roads. A map is good just as long as it can be revised when the occasion warrants.”

This time when Rasch kissed Savannah, it was such a sharing that she felt the last of his reserve melt away, and she learned that some side trips are very, very worthwhile.

After they made love again, they talked, not about serious things, but about cartoons, about the Beatles, and about libraries.

Rasch learned that under a special program a library would order and send books to people who couldn’t come in.

Savannah learned that street gangs and peer pressure were as real as they were reported to be, that Rasch, too small to defend himself, had spent his childhood in the libraries she couldn’t visit.

Correspondence courses offered the same opportunities to a circus performer that night school offered to a short-order cook determined to study law. One way or another, they’d both been thirsty for knowledge. From the beginning they’d traveled parallel paths that never should have intersected. And Savannah
solved her last doubt by believing that only Gypsy magic could account for their being in each other’s arms.

Long after midnight, in the middle of November under a harvest moon, they pulled the bedclothes out on the balcony and made love beneath the stars. Later Savannah slept in Rasch’s arms, content and happy. Tonight was for loving, not regrets, and neither thought about tomorrow.

The next morning they made love again before Rasch left the apartment and made a quick trip to Lenox Square. There, he bought a plaid gathered skirt, a matching cotton sweater, and a pair of flat-heeled shoes.

“You didn’t buy underwear,” Savannah said as she unwrapped the packages.

“Sorry.” He grinned. “An oversight.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Only if you bet with me and the wager is agreeable,” he said as he kissed her again.

“Rasch, if you don’t stop kissing me, I’m going to have lips as big as mayonnaise-jar lids.”

“Perfect match for some of my body parts, I’d say. Why don’t you take those clothes off and come back to bed?”

“Judge Webber, is that the proper way to conduct a courtship?”

“Courtship! My gosh. Your father is going to have my hide. I’d better get you home.”

“I don’t think he has a shotgun, Rasch, but he has a whip. At least he used to,” she teased.

“Good, a whipping I won’t even notice.”

The scars on his back. Savannah had noticed them before, that night at the campfire. Instantly she regretted her joke. “What happened, Rasch?”

“Oh, one of my mother’s boyfriends was pretty quick with a belt.”

“Your mother’s boyfriend beat you?”

“Among other things.”

Savannah was shocked. There were so many traumas in his past, so much that had kindled the determination he’d had to succeed. “Oh, Rasch, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine a mother allowing something like that to happen.”

“Mothers do what they have to, I suppose. Mine did.”

Savannah thought of her own mother and the pain she suffered. She remembered how hard Isabel worked to get better, and how the realization gradually came to her that she’d never be without pain anymore, that she’d never again fly through the air and land in her husband’s arms.

“I guess mine did too. I was too young to understand how she could leave Tifton and me.”

“Perhaps she left you because she couldn’t bear to let you see her suffer. At least she knew what she was doing.”

“Not at the end. There were so many drugs, she didn’t know what she was doing. I’m sure she didn’t know.”

“Bad things kill even the innocent. And they kill a little part of those that live with the innocent too.”

All the way back to the circus Savannah thought about what he’d said. Her mother had died from an
overdose of drugs, and his mother had died from drugs too. Maybe her death was no accident either. She and Rasch had both lost a little part of themselves. Now maybe that little part was being replaced.

As they pulled into the parking lot, they were met by a crowd of cars and people.

“Judge Webber, what do you have to say about these charges?”

“Is she the one?”

“Ms. Ramey, how long have you been a member of a sex club? Who else belongs?”

Savannah and Rasch looked at the reporters and back at each other.

“What are you talking about?” Rasch asked a man he recognized from the press.

“Why, this.” He held up a copy of
Party Time
. Covering practically the entire front of the tabloid was the picture of Savannah with her dress drooping across her breasts, her hair hanging in wisps around her face, and Rasch scowling angrily. They looked as if they’d been discovered in a compromising position and were hurrying to get away.

“Oh, no!” Savannah looked at the picture and the three-inch headlines. P
ROMINENT JUDGE CAUGHT IN SECRET SEX TRYST WITH
G
YPSY MADAM
.

She didn’t even want to read the article. What was said inside the paper didn’t matter. The cover did enough damage. Judge Horatio Webber’s career was ruined. He’d likely lose his seat on the bench, and the governorship was out of the question. And it was all her fault.

“Go inside, Savannah. I’ll handle this.” He opened the door and helped her out. The crowd of reporters
swarmed around them, separating them in the confusion.

“What do you have to say, Ms. Ramey?”

She had to do something. These people weren’t going to listen to reason. They were out for a story, and she was afraid that what they didn’t learn, they’d make up—just like that awful man back at the wall. She couldn’t let Rasch suffer on her account, not after he’d rescued her so many times.

At that moment she heard the mad cry of a crazed elephant as Nell thundered across the compound.

“Look out, there’s an elephant.”

“It’s coming right over us.”

“Move!” Niko charged Nell straight toward Savannah. Nell reached out and lifted Savannah with her big trunk, then trotted back the way she’d come.

“No, Niko. Stop her. I have to say something. Stop!”

Niko brought Nell to a halt. Savannah took Niko’s hand and climbed up Nell’s trunk to her big head, where she straddled the lovable old creature.

“May I have your attention, please,” she said in a loud, clear voice.

The crowd hushed.

“I thank you for coming. The story you have is a lie. I’d like you to know the truth about the man who will be your next governor. Judge Webber cared enough to befriend the grieving sister of a man he had to pass sentence on. The judge is a fair and honest man who never did anything wrong. He’s just a compassionate human being.”

“You mean you aren’t a madam?”

Savannah laughed easily. “I’m a member of the Flying Gypsies trapeze act. And I invite each of you to
stop by my office and pick up some free tickets. Take pictures, talk to the workers if you like.”

“How do you explain this article?”

“By telling you what happened. I was at a party, and my zipper broke. You all know Judge Webber’s integrity. He was just trying to save me the embarrassment of having to face a house full of people.” With an upraised hand she forestalled further questions.

“Perhaps you’d like to verify my story with the judge’s campaign manager, Jake Dalton, before you spoil Judge Webber’s chance at being the first real governor of the people.”

An affirmative rumble began in the crowd. “Yeah. Super Judge is a good man.”

“Maybe we’ll check with Jake.”

Savannah scanned the throng. She couldn’t see Rasch. They’d been separated, and he’d been swallowed up by the crowd. Nell began to walk backward, moving away from the reporters, waving her trunk back and forth, warning them not to follow too closely. Finally, when they reached the elephant yard, Savannah slid down and fled into her trailer.

She’d known from the start that Rasch’s world was a thousand miles from the circus, but she’d allowed her emotions to convince her that she and her crusader had a chance at a real relationship.

She ignored the first knock on the door. She ignored Rasch’s plea that she let him in. She ignored her father’s knock and closed out the pain she felt when he sent Rasch away.

Her plan to cast a love spell over the judge had worked too well. Never before had Savannah taken Zeena’s words seriously. There was no such thing as
Gypsy magic; there couldn’t be. But nothing else could explain what had happened. She’d become as enchanted as Rasch. Now she’d ruined his career, and her own life as well. Savannah fell across her bed, and for the first time since her mother’s death, she cried herself to sleep.