32 Cadillacs

by Joe Gores

  “Ah… Ali Akbar Zuhrain, uh, yes, he… is the, uh, underambassador. And he had a meeting scheduled for, ah, three P.M. in the presidential suite…”

  Grimaldi snatched Giselle’s repo key out of the hands of the man who had taken it. He jabbed it at the door of the presidential limo. It wouldn’t even enter the lock.

  “See? Comprehend? It does not fit.” He turned to gesture across the garage. “But if you will look over there…” All heads swiveled. “You will see an identical vehicle.” He handed the key back to the man. “I insist you try this key in the door of that limo.”

  Looking dazed, the man walked away. Giselle hoped to God she had cut the key right to fit Grimaldi’s Fleetwood.

  “That limo was delivered to me yesterday, it is almost an exact replica of this one. My wife is not yet familiar with it, so she went to the wrong vehicle—and you bêtes assaulted her.”

  Weasel was beginning, “I still want to see some I.D.,” when the key turned in the lock and Grimaldi’s limo door opened. There was a release of pent-up breaths, and sheepish voices rose in apology. Giselle felt the steel fall away from her wrists.

  * * *

  Pietro Uvaldi was on his way out, wearing Gianni Versace’s latest overdraped sports fashions. He opened the door to stare at the chest of a very big, scary-rough sort of man with short-chopped brown hair and a quizzical face and a hard, taut, animal body. The man was just pointing a finger at Pietro’s doorbell.

  Oh my God, ring my bell indeed! Somehow Pietro managed to find his normal speaking voice.

  “May… I help you?”

  The delicious hulking brute said, “Gha Merthades.”

  “My Mercedes?”

  “Ah hthnorry, buddy, it’th goin’!”

  “Freddi!“ he cried, realizing what the man was.

  At the same time he almost danced to the coat closet. Didn’t they ever learn? He came around with the shotgun, only to be slapped, very hard, across the face. At the same time the gun was wrenched away as if his fingers were made of Play-Doh.

  “F… Freddi!” he shrieked.

  “Gha gnkees,” snarled the beast, hand extended.

  Keys. Surely that’s what he meant. Keys. God God God! Don’t enrage the animal further. In a moment Freddi would arrive from the back of the apartment to pulverize him…

  The beast took the keys from his shaking fingers, turned to go—and Freddi made his charge, roaring, arms out and head back to deliver a head-slam such as had disabled poor Larry Ballard.

  Timing is everything. At the exquisitely perfect moment of impact, the big man raised the shotgun beside his cheek just as he moved his head slightly to one side. Freddi slammed headfirst into the wooden gunbutt with a crack! like bighorn sheep slamming bosses of horn in ritual battle. Freddi’s feet went up and he lay down four feet off the floor. From whence he crashed down on his back like a dropped side of beef.

  “You killed him!” Pietro shrieked. The big man, turning away, shook his head. Pietro momentarily abandoned his lover to run after him, hugging him from behind, trying to kiss his hand, crying, “Don’t go! I love masterful men!”

  The masterful man said, “Fnuk ohnff!” and was gone.

  Only then did Pietro drop on his knees to minister to the unconscious Freddi. But even as he did, his thoughts were all with that delicious scary brute who had simply dismantled Freddi.

  Even as he was whispering to his fallen defender, “My poor, poor darling…”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  My poor, poor darling!” exclaimed the man who called himself Grimaldi, then started to chuckle. “Giselle, you are very quick, to see what I was doing and play along—”

  “What choice did I have? And how did you know about what’s-his-face? The underambassador? Ali Akbar Zuhrain?”

  “I read the President’s schedule in the Chronicle.”

  “And how come you know my name?” Almost an accusation.

  “Who do you think left the phone message leading you to Theodore Winston White the Third?”

  “Your real name wouldn’t happen to be Rudolph, would it?”

  He shot her a surprised look. Marino was tooling the long sleek black limo out California Street through the tranquil wide-street richness of Pacific Heights.

  “You’re really good, you should be a Gypsy yourself.”

  “Rudolph what?”

  “Look in your crystal ball.” Then he shrugged. “Marino.”

  Giselle opened her window to let the air blow her blond hair around. She put her silk scarf on the seat, began doing airplanes with her right hand in the slipstream outside, as she used to do on car trips with her folks when she was little. This Marino was just the kind of guy to get her into a lot of trouble. Well—defiantly—maybe a lot of trouble was what she needed.

  Painfully casual, she said, “You ever hear of a mitt-reader calls herself Madame Miseria?”

  “Aha! Little Yana has been whispering in your ear.”

  “Not my ear,” said Giselle bitterly.

  Out of sudden memory and insight, he said, “A tall blond man perhaps? Hawk nose, hawk eyes?”

  Dismayed, she yelped, “How did you—”

  “Gypsies know things.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Dear, sweet little Yana. I bet she said she didn’t know me…”

  “Never even met you.”

  Marino felt a dangerous urge to tell this gadjo woman real truths about himself. He contented himself with facts instead.

  “We grew up together. We were betrothed when she was seven and I was fifteen.”

  “So she’s a liar besides!” Triumphantly.

  “Can you blame her?” His mildness would have surprised Yana. “I want to be King of all the Gypsies, Yana wants to be Queen of all the Gypsies. One of us must fail.”

  Giselle said, “Outstanding,” softly. She was recovering from her dismay. Help him, hurt her. How? There’d be a way.

  He turned downhill on Lyon Street, parked at the long-since-locked Broadway gate of the Presidio. They got out, the pungent cat-box odor of the eucalyptus groves beyond the chain-link fence rolling over them. He leaned in the open rear door as Giselle came around the back. She watched him detach a small radio receiver from some inconspicuous wires going under the backseat.

  “Standard issue for limos this year?”

  “Disarming a bomb.”

  He waited for her to be shocked, but she merely raised her eyebrows for him to continue. A woman worthy of a rom!

  “Inept terrorists were going to try to blow up the President, but fortunately were going to get the wrong limo…”

  “Only I stepped in and tried to repo the President’s limo instead, and screwed up all your plans!”

  “Screwed them up?” Mischief glinted in his eyes as he looked over at her. “Made them better. To the Secret Service I said you were the underambassador’s wife, but to the hotel management I will say you were a blond terrorist…”

  Giselle clapped her hands in the delight of discovery.

  “Blackmail! The hotel management! I was working to your command—”

  He said, a little stiffly, “I am a rom, not a blackmailer.”

  Then, struck by the incongruity of it, they both laughed.

  * * *

  Ken Warren had once spent a couple of weeks as a substitute meter reader for PG&E, and still had a contact or two there. One of them, just this morning, had let him know that a new San Francisco utilities connection had been made by a Sarah Walinski.

  His Sarah Walinski, formerly Heslip’s Sarah Walinski?

  After dropping Uvaldi’s Mercedes 500SL back at the dealer, he cruised the tall narrow streets that overlooked James Lick Freeway from Bernal Heights. Modest row houses built after World War II for returning vets but with price tags no longer modest. Working-class, racially mixed, just the right kind of anonymous rabbit warren in which his Sarah would rent a burrow.

  Heslip said she was big and quick and powerful and without inhibition concerning violence to others, whic
h made Ken wary. You couldn’t hit a woman, not even to defend yourself, but he didn’t want to get axed or coffee-canned, either. Nor did he want her alerted to skip again, so he’d have to start looking for her and her car all over somewhere else. So, cruise the area, talk to a couple of bartenders, the local ma-and-pa…

  But as he started uphill from Jarboe, a Dodge Charger pulled over and stopped on the other side of the street, facing down. Right address. Right year. Right color. Right license.

  Right car!

  In his rearview he saw a woman get out and start up the front steps with a twelve-pack. Right woman, too, from Bart’s description. A fireplug with weight-lifter arms and beautiful taffy hair glinting in the spring sunshine.

  At the top of the hill he parked to consider his givens:

  —She bought the car in Jersey City and skipped.

  —She ran another repoman off with an axe and skipped.

  —She belted Heslip with a can of coffee and skipped.

  —She put her boyfriend in the hospital and skipped.

  Conclusion: he’d only get one shot at Sarah and her car.

  He gave her twenty minutes to pop a tab and tap the tube, then got out, locking his car and making sure no papers on the seat or over the visor betrayed it as a repoman’s. Unhappy subjects liked to get even by icepicking your tires or sugaring your gas tank before you could get back to pick up your own car.

  Sarah must have stopped for a couple on the way home: car window open, door unlocked, wheels uncurbed so the steering wheel wasn’t even locked. The slightest of turns would lock it, but if he could put the Charger in neutral and let it roll downhill out of sight of the house before he fired it up…

  He eased off the handbrake, let it roll. So far, so good, but since he couldn’t turn the wheel, he couldn’t steer it. By the time it hit the flat intersection it was in the wrong lane. And then it lost momentum. And stopped.

  “Grrrrr!” observed Ken.

  He cast a look up the hill—nothing—and bent down under the steering wheel to get at the ignition lock.

  “You got troubles, pal?”

  Ken came up from under the dash, his fingers still up behind it trying to find the ignition lock ring washer. When he straightened, his shoulder was tight against the steering wheel.

  Click.

  Now it was locked.

  A head was in the window. Guy from a road crew around the corner Ken had noted on the way up, young, beefy, brash, semi-belligerent, looking for something to liven up a cigarette break.

  “Hgnoh!” Ken exclaimed crossly.

  “What was that, pal? You tryna wise off?” Why couldn’t he talk like everyone else? Just this once? He kept silent. The intruder didn’t. “Ignition’s busted, huh, pal?”

  Still silent. Fingers, do your work.

  “Hey, how’d you get it down here in the middle of the intersection without no key to it?”

  Had it! His fingers turning the ring washer as his eyes found the rearview mirror he’d tilted so he could see up the hill. Holy Christ, here she came boiling out of the house!

  “Can’t leave it here in the intersection, y’know, pal.”

  Ignition lock out. He could unfasten the wires, but even if he got it started, with this guy hanging in the window…

  “GODDAM THIEF!”

  The beefy kid turned his head—but kept his elbows firmly in the open window. Ken jerked the wires out of the old lock, started fumbling them around the posts on his own lock.

  “GODDAM THIEF! GODDAM THIEF WITH MY GODDAM CAR!”

  She was running now, downhill, full out, something long and glittering in her right hand. As Ken started to put his key into his now-live substitute ignition lock, the beefy guy grabbed his arm and sent the key flying.

  “Hey, you! Who’s the broad yelling thief?”

  Fumbling around on the floor for the key, got it! stick it into his lock now dangling at the end of the ignition wires.

  “I’m talkin to you, pal!”

  Sarah was coming off the curb a dozen yards away, the huge butcher knife in her right hand raised for stabbing. With desperate calm, Ken tried harder than he’d ever done in his life to articulate well.

  “Hmy whife!” he managed to yell.

  And twisted the key. The engine started.

  But Sarah’s shoulder sent the beefy guy bouncing out of the way like a helium balloon, too late to roll up the window—the knife flashed down at Ken’s unprotected neck. But the car was easing forward so the blade gouged uselessly down the rear window and the knife was knocked from Sarah’s hand by the frame.

  The amazed construction worker, flat on his butt in the street, yelled, “Your wife? Pal, you do got troubles!”

  Sarah was knifeless but still running alongside, clawing at Ken’s hair and face, grabbing the door frame, being dragged several feet before he could stop the car to save her injury.

  Dead stop. Leaving him a sitting duck, helpless against her attack. She pulled back her fist for the knockout blow, her red rage-contorted face filling the open window.

  Ken kissed her on the cheek.

  Her mouth fell open in astonishment, as did her fist. Ken tapped the accelerator, the Charger moved away. In the rearview Sarah, dumbfounded in the middle of the street, was staring after him. Then her right arm came up, again fisted. But the fist dissolved. Thick fingers, as of their own accord… waggled.

  The dragon, transformed to fair maiden by a kiss, was waving Ken Warren and her Charger a bittersweet goodbye.

  * * *

  “If not a terrorist and not a blackmailer, then what?”

  They were back in the limo, driving back in toward Nob Hill. Marino used the lighter on both their cigarettes.

  “A knight in shining armor to stop the terrorists.”

  “Who do not exist. You made them up.”

  He patted the pocket with the transmitter in it. “Who is to say they are made up? With proof such as this… And a blond terrorist trying to break into the President’s limo… But you can see my dilemma. Even a white knight must have his great black stallion on which to ride to the rescue.”

  “Only I have a repo order on your stallion.”

  “The steed of a man who saved you from arrest, disgrace, torture? Perhaps even from…” He twirled an imaginary mustache, Giselle laughed, she seemed to laugh a lot with this man. “Something worse? But me… I can make you an offer—”

  “I can’t refuse?”

  “Exactly! I will give to you Cadillacs being driven by Yana’s clan—”

  “But you got those cars for them in the first place!”

  “Devalesa gives, Devalesa takes away. Yana is betraying my clan to your friend with the hawk eyes, yes? So let me finish my business with the hotel while giving your DKA many cars …”

  Giselle stubbed out her cigarette. What could she lose? He wasn’t going to give her the limo, anyway, and she couldn’t take it away from him. Not now. And if he fed her other Gyppo cars… and helped destroy Yana in the meantime…

  “Tell me just one thing, Rudolph. Who is Angelo Grimaldi?”

  “Who else could he be but Mouthpiece for the Mob, offering to rub out the terrorists for a fat fee?”

  Giselle broke up. It almost would serve the hotel people right if they bit on that one. He was going on.

  “We will work out a telephone code, you will be a business woman joining me at my hotel for conferences; I will give you the time and place to steal many cars.”

  “Recover,” she said automatically.

  “Whatever.” He paused. “Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  He reached over and solemnly shook her hand. Ballard had his Gyspy informant, she thought defiantly, she’d have hers. A disturbingly attractive Gypsy informant…

  Very disturbingly attractive…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  After dropping Giselle at her car, Marino found a payphone and called Gunnarson’s office at the St. Mark. He repitched his voice to the bogus Arab gutturals of
his previous terrorist call and became more and more excited, speaking faster and faster in a higher and higher register.

  “We failed this morning, but we will strike again. You have opposed us and taken one of ours, so now the St. Mark Hotel is our target! Even if your President escapes our vengeance!”

  And hung up. Back at the hotel, he holed up in the Garnet Room while sending word to Gunnarson they had to meet right away. He made it even money whether the Three Stooges or the feds would show up this time, but hoped Gunnarson and his cohort were in too deep to cry wolf now.

  He had a drink, then a second, rare for him; not, oddly enough, because he was nervous about a possible federal bust, but because he had been shaken by Giselle Marc.

  He wanted her. Physically. Usually, with gadje women, he just serviced them as part of some con he was running. But Giselle was not only stunning, she was rom-smart, smart as Yana. Despite their mutual attraction, she would be using him while he was using her, and he found that intensely exciting.

  Curly, Larry, and Moe paused in the doorway of the lounge to tell the maître d’ to keep other patrons away from around their table. Marino felt himself relax. No feds.

  So, as Grimaldi, he opened with, “Now do you believe me?”

  “Believe you about what?” demanded a harried Gunnarson.

  Marino realized his fears had been groundless. Call in the feds? These stupid bastards hadn’t even made the necessary connections to do so—connections transparent as glass to him.

  Grimaldi snarled, in his Bronx accent, “Whadda ya think? The terrorists. The blonde in the garage this morning, trying to get into the President’s car so she could set a C-4 plastique bomb—and then do a remote detonation by radio signal.”

  “What sort of fools do you take us for?” demanded hulking redheaded Shayne. “The underambassador of Kuwait’s wife tries to open the wrong limo, and you try to make her a terrorist?”

  “The underambassador from Kuwait, a devout Moslem, has a blond American for a wife?” countered Marino witheringly.

  Shayne blustered, “The Secret Service agents—”

  “Are stupid.” Not that he really thought so; it was just that he had been running cons since he was three years old, and fortunately these particular agents, hustled, had bitten. “That was not Ali Akbar Zuhrain who took the blonde away from them.”