Ascension by Steven Galloway Read Free Book Online Page B

tables. The coffee was still warm. In the corner, a lit cigarette lay on the floor, its wispy smoke wafting upwards. The people who had been there had clearly left very recently, and they had left in a hurry. It suddenly dawned on Salvo where the mob had been heading. His chest clenched, and he turned and ran as fast as he could in the direction of his house.
    Miksa Ursari had gone into the house as soon as Salvo left. Azira was in the back room assembling clothing and other necessities, and Miksa began to collect his tools. He put them into a brightly coloured trunk, its corners battered and caved in by rough travel. Azira came into the front room and looked at him questioningly. As quickly as he could, he explained to her the church and the steeple and the cross falling on the priest. She did not interrupt him even once, and when he was finished she placed one hand lightly on her stomach and pointed at the door with the other.
    “Go warn the others,” she said.
    “There is no time.”
    “Yes. These
gadje
will go for any Roma who are left.”
    Miksa swallowed. She was right. Their anger was about more than a dead priest.
    “Go. You must. I will do what must be done here.”
    Miksa nodded in agreement. “Salvo has gone to find András. He should be back soon.” He stood and ducked through the narrow doorway into the blinding light.
    The first place Miksa ran to was the Romany café. There were about ten men there, and he told them what had happened and advised them to leave this town until things settled down. No one needed to be told twice; this was not the first time such a thing had happened.
    Avoiding the main street, Miksa ran to the road where Salvo had first gone. There was no time to go to each house, so he went up and down the road yelling as loud as he could, “The
gadje
are out for blood. Everyone should go away from here.” There was no way to tell how many people heard him, but some did. They came into the street and saw that it was him, and they went back inside their houses to gather their things.
    He did this again on his own street, where there were fewer people. He was at the point where the side road met the main road when he heard the approaching mob. They were moving fast, and Miksa was tired from his recent exertions in the heat. He forced his legs into a run and sprinted for the house.
    Salvo reached the top of the road just as the mob spotted Miksa darting into the house. Such was Salvo’s haste that he nearly caught up with the crowd and stumbled into them; only their preoccupation with his father saved him from detection. As the mob rushed his house, Salvo slipped behind a cart that lay abandoned in the tall grass outside a house belonging to a Rom who was imprisoned in a Romanian army camp up the road. No one knew quite why the man was being held, but his house had gone untouched since his incarceration four months ago.
    Salvo peered over the top of the cart and watched as the mob swarmed around his home. Someone tried to open the door, butit had been barred from the inside, and the window was too small to crawl into. Besides, someone else speculated, this Rom was dangerous and could not be trusted to submit to punishment without violence.
    That Miksa Ursari had no intention of surrendering himself was true, but he also had no intention of fighting the mob. He looked at Azira and the baby crouched in the corner of the front room, and he knew that the situation was dire. He began to assess his options. If he were to go outside, the crowd would, at the very least, throw him into some jail for a deathly long time, but he thought it more likely that they would kill him. He remembered being somewhere in Germany and seeing a crowd rip apart a man accused of raping a girl. They had torn his limbs right off and flayed the skin from his bones and ripped out his eyes in a matter of minutes. He shuddered to remember the sight. No, he thought, it’s no good to go out there.
    So he would stay in the