18
Gypsy Queen
Indiana Jones was stunned by the striking beauty of the woman who sat, rather forlornly on the hard looking bed of the small cell and turned slowly to face him.
The first thing that struck Jones was the bright, magnetic, fire that seemed to exude from her eyes; eyes of the darkest sepia Jones had ever seen. They were slightly almond shaped with whispered allusions to a trace of the orient in her ancestry. Her eyes were framed by luxuriant, black, arched brows that magnificently complimented her straight, aquiline nose and her complexion of warm, dark, and tawny, olive. Her lips were full, red, and innocently sensuous, while her long, ample, dark hair lay about her shoulders like the mane of some kind of beautiful, mystical cat.
In an instant Jones could see how an ignorant boor like Will the Jailer upstairs would label this woman a 'tart' ...or worse. Women of such striking, natural beauty were often penalized for it by men like Will.
Sometimes the difference was just money and means, Jones mused in his mind. The beautiful woman of wealth and means is....beautiful, while the same beautiful woman born to poverty, on the wrong side of the tracks is... a 'tart'. And to men like Will, or Inspector Davies, to be a gypsy woman is to be the furthest on the wrong side of the tracks as it is possible to be.
"Who are you?" She asked, as she stood up and walked toward him. Her voice was low for a woman. But it was smooth and resonant, with a surprisingly sweet musicality that struck a mysterious chord somewhere within Indiana Jones.
"My name is Indiana Jones, I'm an archaeologist," he answered simply, "who are you?"
She stared at him for a moment. To Jones it felt as if she could see into his very heart and soul.
"Why are you here? What do you want?" She asked. Her English was good, but the accent was heavily eastern European.
"You didn't answer my question," Indy said.
She smiled wistfully, for a brief moment lifting her mask of stoic melancholy, "What does it matter to you who I am?"
Jones looked directly into her lovely eyes, "It matters," he said.
She held his gaze, "My name is Maria Roma."
"That's not what I heard," Jones said, "I heard that your name was Queen Nefertiti."
She turned away from him and walked towards the back of the cell. Indiana Jones' eyes involuntarily assessed the appealing, feminine curves that showed themselves as she walked. From the gentle arch of her back and the firmness of her breasts beneath the chiffon and China silk fabric of her blouse, right down to her well-formed calves, exposed beneath the hem of her knee length dress, she evoked in Indiana Jones' mind visions of the sculpted likenesses of goddesses; Athena, Aphrodite, Isis,...
When she reached the back wall of the cell she spun around quickly, causing strands of dark hair to flash momentarily across her face and causing her dress to flare out, seductively revealing a few inches of smooth, shapely thighs.
Her eyes shot flames of quiet fury as she spoke, "Why did you come here? To taunt me like the rest of these dogs?"
"They said that you speak with the voice of Nefertiti."
"I have a gift Mr. Indiana Jones," she said with firmness.
"What gift?" Jones now held her gaze just as she had held his.
"The Queen of the Ancients, she speaks through me, it is true," she said as she walked slowly forward towards the bars again.
There was a force, a charisma, that seemed to surround the woman, and despite the bars of the cell Jones unconsciously took a slight step back as she advanced toward him.
"Look," he said, "that might be a good trick for a circus sideshow but how did you manage to fool a man like Lord Richard Malboury?"
The quiet fury now grew in intensity, "Sideshow? Sideshow?! How dare you, you, rikona! Get out! Get out of here!"
"Settle down sister!" Indy said sternly.
The woman stopped abruptly and her face fell. She put her hands over her face and began to cry.
Indiana Jones felt a sudden pang of guilt, and he moved closer to the bars speaking softly to her, "Look I'm sorry," he said, and then reached into his pocket to retrieve a clean handkerchief. "Here," he handed it through the bars. She took it and wiped away tears that streamed down her tawny cheeks.
"Look, I don't mean to upset you, and I certainly didn't come here to taunt you, but I want to find out what happened to Richard Malboury."
She looked at him blankly, but with an even more melancholy mask to her pretty face than before. "I don't know what happened to him," she said simply.
"You were working with him weren't you?"
Almost chameleon-like the melancholy left her face and was seamlessly replaced by a look of mystery that shone from her dark eyes, "Richard sometimes had questions; questions for the Ancients."
"And you answered them?"
"Yes," she said.
"With the voice of Nefertiti?" Jones asked.
She didn't answer, but looked away instead.
"You knew what Malboury was looking for," Jones stated.
She continued to be silent.
"You know about the Sun Tablets of Akhenaton and ....Nefertiti," he said.
"As I told you Mr. Indiana Jones, Richard had questions and sometimes the answers came through me, across the ages, from the time of the Pharaoh Akhenaton and his Queen."
"But you know nothing about what has happened to Lord Richard Malboury?"
"No," she answered without hesitation.
Jones knew that she was not going to tell him anything more about Lord Malboury's disappearance, and in fact he wondered if she did indeed know nothing, just as she said.
"When they arrested you, there was a woman with you, an old woman?"
The melancholy returned to her lovely countenance, and a lone tear left her eye and rolled down her smooth cheek, "Magda... they killed her," she said in a grieving monotone. "Inspector Davies said she died of heart failure," Jones said.
"Well, they may as well have killed her," she said.
"Who was Magda?" he asked.
"She was...my friend, my guardian...she looked out for me...but now....." she let her sentence trail off.
Jones looked down at the floor of the cell block, "I'm sorry about Magda," he said.
The beautiful gypsy woman turned to look up at Jones' face again through the bars. She studied him for a few moments, as if reading some kind of invisible script written upon his rugged countenance.
After a few moments she spoke, "You are a good man Indiana Jones."
Then it was Jones' turn to study her face and try to 'read' her heart, if he could. What he saw was a beautiful but complex woman who was dealing with some complicated problems.
"Look Maria, the facts are...."
"Wait!" She cut him off before he could finish, "My name is not Maria."
Jones paused for a moment, "OK, then what is your name?"
"It is Vadoma ...Vadoma Maniskelko. Maria Roma is the name that I use with outsiders. It is the name that I use in...your world."
"My world?" Jones looked at her, "then what is your world ...Vadoma?"
"I am Romani; or as those in your world call me, a Gypsy."
"I know that, but you came here to England from Germany." Jones stated.
"My people are from all over Europe, and the world."
"But you're a German national."
She looked away again, "My kumpania ...my clan, have lived for centuries within the borders of Germany, Austria, Poland, and other places Indiana Jones."
Jones looked hard at her, "They found a Nazi code book in your possession, and a wireless transmitting set in the place where you lived here in England. You were working for the Nazis."
She gazed down at the hard stone floor of the cell, "You know nothing Indiana Jones."
"Listen Vadoma, I ...I'd like to help you if I could. Something doesn't quite add up here. I know a thing or two about Nazis, and Nazi Germany; and you just don't seem to fit the bill. I know too that the Gypsies are persecuted in Germany, just as badly as the Jews. So why would you be a Nazi agent? ...What gives sister?"
Vadoma covered her face again and broke into tears. Once again Indiana Jones felt like a cad.
"What did I say?" Jones asked, confused by the woman's reactions.
"Please don't call me ...sister, again Indiana Jones."
Jones looked at her curiously, "Alright, I'm sorry. I didn't know, is that a bad thing to call a Gypsy...er, Romani woman?" He asked with genuine curiosity.
"No, it is not," she answered him.
Indiana Jones stood for a moment with his mouth open, uncomprehending, and then shook his head, "Look maybe I should just go," he said.
"When you say 'sister', it makes me think of my own sister," Vadoma looked up at Indiana Jones' face, studying it again as if to re-read the invisible script that she had read before; in order to make sure she'd been correct the first time.
"...My sister in Germany," she said, and then began to cry again.
Indy gave her a few moments to cry before speaking again, "Tell me Vadoma," he said to her in a soft voice, "Tell me the truth...maybe I...can do something, maybe I can help you."
She looked up at him through eyes that were beginning to redden from crying. Indiana Jones put his hand through the bars and wiped away the tears from her face with the back of his hand.
"Pease tell me about your sister."
Vadoma swallowed hard, and then spoke, "Pesha," she said, "she is only sixteen, still just a child." Vadoma sobbed once, sniffed, and then went on, "The Gestapo, they have her." Suddenly a clear picture was beginning to present itself to Jones.
"I hate them! I hate them all! I hated to have to do what I did here! But what could I do?" Vadoma's eyes burned with fury again. "I hated to have to work for the Nazis Indiana Jones. They are filthy, murdering beasts! But what could I do? They took my beloved sister Pesha. They said they would kill her if I did not do what they wanted."
"Where is Pesha now?" Indy asked.
"The pigs still have her...I hope," Vadoma dropped her head into her hands again and began to sob. She shook her head, "I don't know...I don't know. What will they do to her now?" Then she looked back up at him, "I think they will kill me too."
"You think the Nazis will try to kill you here? In England?"
"They have their ways Indiana Jones. I am not safe here. And the policeman told me that maybe they will deport me back to Germany. They will surely kill me then."
"Then why haven't you cooperated with Scotland Yard?"
"If I talk to the police, the Nazis, they will find out, and they will kill my beloved Pesha."
Indiana Jones could now clearly see the woman's dilemma and the circumstances of her relationship with archaeologist Lord Richard Malboury.
"So the Nazis took your sister, threatened to harm her if you didn't cooperate, and sent you over here to...get close to Malboury and find out about his research?"
"Yes," she answered.
"But why you?" Jones asked her.
She looked down at the cell floor and then back up again, "As I told you before Indiana Jones, I have a gift."
"Do you really believe that Queen Nefertiti speaks through you?"
"Do you believe that she does not?" Vadoma answered his question cryptically. Then she looked him directly in the eyes, "I have other gifts also."
Jones studied her for a moment and then said, "So I can see."
She smiled mysteriously, though her face still betrayed her sadness, "Do you find me beautiful Indiana Jones?" Then before he could answer she said, "You know that beauty can be a curse as well as a blessing. And any blessing can be a curse." As Jones tried to unravel that conundrum he said to her, "You must have been coached, I mean about the archaeology. Do you know a man named Fritz Von Steudl?"
She nodded, and now the picture was becoming clearer still.
The door to the stairwell above was suddenly opened and Will the jailer began walking down, "Sorry mate, they told me give you five minutes and no more, and your time is up," he said as he jangled his key ring.
Vadoma Maniskelko reached her hand slowly out through the bars of the cell. Jones looked down at the delicate outstretched fingers and took the hand in his own. She squeezed hard.
"Help me Indiana Jones."
The archaeologist gazed into her pretty, dark eyes and nodded his head, "I'll see what I can do."
She let go his hand and Jones turned and walked back down the cell corridor. He ignored some more of Will's boorish babbling and walked past him and up the stairs as the jailer re-locked the door to the cell block.
Gypsy Queen
Indiana Jones was stunned by the striking beauty of the woman who sat, rather forlornly on the hard looking bed of the small cell and turned slowly to face him.
The first thing that struck Jones was the bright, magnetic, fire that seemed to exude from her eyes; eyes of the darkest sepia Jones had ever seen. They were slightly almond shaped with whispered allusions to a trace of the orient in her ancestry. Her eyes were framed by luxuriant, black, arched brows that magnificently complimented her straight, aquiline nose and her complexion of warm, dark, and tawny, olive. Her lips were full, red, and innocently sensuous, while her long, ample, dark hair lay about her shoulders like the mane of some kind of beautiful, mystical cat.
In an instant Jones could see how an ignorant boor like Will the Jailer upstairs would label this woman a 'tart' ...or worse. Women of such striking, natural beauty were often penalized for it by men like Will.
Sometimes the difference was just money and means, Jones mused in his mind. The beautiful woman of wealth and means is....beautiful, while the same beautiful woman born to poverty, on the wrong side of the tracks is... a 'tart'. And to men like Will, or Inspector Davies, to be a gypsy woman is to be the furthest on the wrong side of the tracks as it is possible to be.
"Who are you?" She asked, as she stood up and walked toward him. Her voice was low for a woman. But it was smooth and resonant, with a surprisingly sweet musicality that struck a mysterious chord somewhere within Indiana Jones.
"My name is Indiana Jones, I'm an archaeologist," he answered simply, "who are you?"
She stared at him for a moment. To Jones it felt as if she could see into his very heart and soul.
"Why are you here? What do you want?" She asked. Her English was good, but the accent was heavily eastern European.
"You didn't answer my question," Indy said.
She smiled wistfully, for a brief moment lifting her mask of stoic melancholy, "What does it matter to you who I am?"
Jones looked directly into her lovely eyes, "It matters," he said.
She held his gaze, "My name is Maria Roma."
"That's not what I heard," Jones said, "I heard that your name was Queen Nefertiti."
She turned away from him and walked towards the back of the cell. Indiana Jones' eyes involuntarily assessed the appealing, feminine curves that showed themselves as she walked. From the gentle arch of her back and the firmness of her breasts beneath the chiffon and China silk fabric of her blouse, right down to her well-formed calves, exposed beneath the hem of her knee length dress, she evoked in Indiana Jones' mind visions of the sculpted likenesses of goddesses; Athena, Aphrodite, Isis,...
When she reached the back wall of the cell she spun around quickly, causing strands of dark hair to flash momentarily across her face and causing her dress to flare out, seductively revealing a few inches of smooth, shapely thighs.
Her eyes shot flames of quiet fury as she spoke, "Why did you come here? To taunt me like the rest of these dogs?"
"They said that you speak with the voice of Nefertiti."
"I have a gift Mr. Indiana Jones," she said with firmness.
"What gift?" Jones now held her gaze just as she had held his.
"The Queen of the Ancients, she speaks through me, it is true," she said as she walked slowly forward towards the bars again.
There was a force, a charisma, that seemed to surround the woman, and despite the bars of the cell Jones unconsciously took a slight step back as she advanced toward him.
"Look," he said, "that might be a good trick for a circus sideshow but how did you manage to fool a man like Lord Richard Malboury?"
The quiet fury now grew in intensity, "Sideshow? Sideshow?! How dare you, you, rikona! Get out! Get out of here!"
"Settle down sister!" Indy said sternly.
The woman stopped abruptly and her face fell. She put her hands over her face and began to cry.
Indiana Jones felt a sudden pang of guilt, and he moved closer to the bars speaking softly to her, "Look I'm sorry," he said, and then reached into his pocket to retrieve a clean handkerchief. "Here," he handed it through the bars. She took it and wiped away tears that streamed down her tawny cheeks.
"Look, I don't mean to upset you, and I certainly didn't come here to taunt you, but I want to find out what happened to Richard Malboury."
She looked at him blankly, but with an even more melancholy mask to her pretty face than before. "I don't know what happened to him," she said simply.
"You were working with him weren't you?"
Almost chameleon-like the melancholy left her face and was seamlessly replaced by a look of mystery that shone from her dark eyes, "Richard sometimes had questions; questions for the Ancients."
"And you answered them?"
"Yes," she said.
"With the voice of Nefertiti?" Jones asked.
She didn't answer, but looked away instead.
"You knew what Malboury was looking for," Jones stated.
She continued to be silent.
"You know about the Sun Tablets of Akhenaton and ....Nefertiti," he said.
"As I told you Mr. Indiana Jones, Richard had questions and sometimes the answers came through me, across the ages, from the time of the Pharaoh Akhenaton and his Queen."
"But you know nothing about what has happened to Lord Richard Malboury?"
"No," she answered without hesitation.
Jones knew that she was not going to tell him anything more about Lord Malboury's disappearance, and in fact he wondered if she did indeed know nothing, just as she said.
"When they arrested you, there was a woman with you, an old woman?"
The melancholy returned to her lovely countenance, and a lone tear left her eye and rolled down her smooth cheek, "Magda... they killed her," she said in a grieving monotone. "Inspector Davies said she died of heart failure," Jones said.
"Well, they may as well have killed her," she said.
"Who was Magda?" he asked.
"She was...my friend, my guardian...she looked out for me...but now....." she let her sentence trail off.
Jones looked down at the floor of the cell block, "I'm sorry about Magda," he said.
The beautiful gypsy woman turned to look up at Jones' face again through the bars. She studied him for a few moments, as if reading some kind of invisible script written upon his rugged countenance.
After a few moments she spoke, "You are a good man Indiana Jones."
Then it was Jones' turn to study her face and try to 'read' her heart, if he could. What he saw was a beautiful but complex woman who was dealing with some complicated problems.
"Look Maria, the facts are...."
"Wait!" She cut him off before he could finish, "My name is not Maria."
Jones paused for a moment, "OK, then what is your name?"
"It is Vadoma ...Vadoma Maniskelko. Maria Roma is the name that I use with outsiders. It is the name that I use in...your world."
"My world?" Jones looked at her, "then what is your world ...Vadoma?"
"I am Romani; or as those in your world call me, a Gypsy."
"I know that, but you came here to England from Germany." Jones stated.
"My people are from all over Europe, and the world."
"But you're a German national."
She looked away again, "My kumpania ...my clan, have lived for centuries within the borders of Germany, Austria, Poland, and other places Indiana Jones."
Jones looked hard at her, "They found a Nazi code book in your possession, and a wireless transmitting set in the place where you lived here in England. You were working for the Nazis."
She gazed down at the hard stone floor of the cell, "You know nothing Indiana Jones."
"Listen Vadoma, I ...I'd like to help you if I could. Something doesn't quite add up here. I know a thing or two about Nazis, and Nazi Germany; and you just don't seem to fit the bill. I know too that the Gypsies are persecuted in Germany, just as badly as the Jews. So why would you be a Nazi agent? ...What gives sister?"
Vadoma covered her face again and broke into tears. Once again Indiana Jones felt like a cad.
"What did I say?" Jones asked, confused by the woman's reactions.
"Please don't call me ...sister, again Indiana Jones."
Jones looked at her curiously, "Alright, I'm sorry. I didn't know, is that a bad thing to call a Gypsy...er, Romani woman?" He asked with genuine curiosity.
"No, it is not," she answered him.
Indiana Jones stood for a moment with his mouth open, uncomprehending, and then shook his head, "Look maybe I should just go," he said.
"When you say 'sister', it makes me think of my own sister," Vadoma looked up at Indiana Jones' face, studying it again as if to re-read the invisible script that she had read before; in order to make sure she'd been correct the first time.
"...My sister in Germany," she said, and then began to cry again.
Indy gave her a few moments to cry before speaking again, "Tell me Vadoma," he said to her in a soft voice, "Tell me the truth...maybe I...can do something, maybe I can help you."
She looked up at him through eyes that were beginning to redden from crying. Indiana Jones put his hand through the bars and wiped away the tears from her face with the back of his hand.
"Pease tell me about your sister."
Vadoma swallowed hard, and then spoke, "Pesha," she said, "she is only sixteen, still just a child." Vadoma sobbed once, sniffed, and then went on, "The Gestapo, they have her." Suddenly a clear picture was beginning to present itself to Jones.
"I hate them! I hate them all! I hated to have to do what I did here! But what could I do?" Vadoma's eyes burned with fury again. "I hated to have to work for the Nazis Indiana Jones. They are filthy, murdering beasts! But what could I do? They took my beloved sister Pesha. They said they would kill her if I did not do what they wanted."
"Where is Pesha now?" Indy asked.
"The pigs still have her...I hope," Vadoma dropped her head into her hands again and began to sob. She shook her head, "I don't know...I don't know. What will they do to her now?" Then she looked back up at him, "I think they will kill me too."
"You think the Nazis will try to kill you here? In England?"
"They have their ways Indiana Jones. I am not safe here. And the policeman told me that maybe they will deport me back to Germany. They will surely kill me then."
"Then why haven't you cooperated with Scotland Yard?"
"If I talk to the police, the Nazis, they will find out, and they will kill my beloved Pesha."
Indiana Jones could now clearly see the woman's dilemma and the circumstances of her relationship with archaeologist Lord Richard Malboury.
"So the Nazis took your sister, threatened to harm her if you didn't cooperate, and sent you over here to...get close to Malboury and find out about his research?"
"Yes," she answered.
"But why you?" Jones asked her.
She looked down at the cell floor and then back up again, "As I told you before Indiana Jones, I have a gift."
"Do you really believe that Queen Nefertiti speaks through you?"
"Do you believe that she does not?" Vadoma answered his question cryptically. Then she looked him directly in the eyes, "I have other gifts also."
Jones studied her for a moment and then said, "So I can see."
She smiled mysteriously, though her face still betrayed her sadness, "Do you find me beautiful Indiana Jones?" Then before he could answer she said, "You know that beauty can be a curse as well as a blessing. And any blessing can be a curse." As Jones tried to unravel that conundrum he said to her, "You must have been coached, I mean about the archaeology. Do you know a man named Fritz Von Steudl?"
She nodded, and now the picture was becoming clearer still.
The door to the stairwell above was suddenly opened and Will the jailer began walking down, "Sorry mate, they told me give you five minutes and no more, and your time is up," he said as he jangled his key ring.
Vadoma Maniskelko reached her hand slowly out through the bars of the cell. Jones looked down at the delicate outstretched fingers and took the hand in his own. She squeezed hard.
"Help me Indiana Jones."
The archaeologist gazed into her pretty, dark eyes and nodded his head, "I'll see what I can do."
She let go his hand and Jones turned and walked back down the cell corridor. He ignored some more of Will's boorish babbling and walked past him and up the stairs as the jailer re-locked the door to the cell block.