by Joe Gores
He made kissing noises into the phone, and hung up. So did Ballard—a tiny bit carelessly because he was fighting his gag reflex. Giselle caught the sound of the receiver going down.
Ballard! Listening in on her call!
She leaped to her feet, on her way upstairs to rip the sneaky bastard’s ears off, when she saw his extension light up. When it stayed lit, she sat down again and punched into it and carefully and silently lifted the receiver. Love and war…
Larry was speaking when she eased the receiver to her ear.
“… find out about that pink Caddy and about tonight.”
“Of course tonight!” exclaimed a voice that could only be Yana’s. “But the pink Cadillac—I need it before then, the danger has passed, it is perfect to… conclude my business with Teddy White tonight. Let us meet at that little café in North Beach…” Ballard was silent long enough for alarm to enter her voice and for Giselle to think, Maybe Ms. Slut’s clairvoyant after all. “The Eldoradois safe, is it not? It is vital—”
“Ah, sure, sure, it’s fine. But why’s it so important?”
“This afternoon for that, my love. And then tonight…”
She gave a throaty laugh and hung up.
Giselle, gloating, slipped her receiver back on the hooks when she was certain she had a dead line. Ballard and his Gypsy princess were about at the end of the trail. When he couldn’t deliver the pink Cadillac to her this afternoon…
But to make sure, tonight, before going to Rudolph’s bed, she would stake out Teddy, and he would lead her to Yana, and somehow she would mess up Yana’s scam and Yana along with it.
* * *
Ballard hadn’t told Yana he’d lost the pink Cadillac because he didn’t have to: he’d gotten something that morning over the phone from Marla at the St. Mark that he expected would let him teach Rudie-baby how to play hardball.
* * *
Angelo Grimaldi shot his cuffs so his antique gold links could be seen glittering at his wrists, then pushed open the door to Gunnarson’s office. He finally was playing match-point in the ultimate game of hardball he had come to San Francisco to play.
Delia, Gunnarson’s lanky but full-bosomed secretary, looked up at him with smouldering eyes, very different from the eyes with which she had regarded his first demand to see her boss. Obviously, Gunnarson had been pillow-talking to her about Angelo Grimaldi, and her look said she might find sexual congress with a lean dangerous Mafia attorney much more exciting than with a dull overweight hotel manager. Alas. Never to be.
“They’re waiting for you inside, Mr. Grimaldi.”
He nodded, caressed her with his eyes, and went through the inner door she buzzed open. Gunnarson, Shayne, and desiccated little Smathers were drawn up in a row across the room as if to repel a cavalry charge.
Grimaldi grinned at them. This was the moment every conman waited for, the moment of truth. Whichever way it went, the game had been worth it. He threw Shayne’s words back in his face.
“Your meeting, your agenda, gentlemen. But briefly. I have a plane to catch.”
Smathers must have gotten the short straw. He stepped forward almost formally and cleared his throat.
“Mr. Grimaldi, we have carefully considered your… offer to, um, er—”
“Blow the fuckers away,” supplied tough Angie Grimaldi in his Bronx voice, “before they blow up your fancy fucking hotel. But your forty-eight hours have passed, so I’m on my way to—”
“Goddam you, we’re paying!” burst out Shayne in a hoarse voice. “All right? We’re paying!” He stepped closer, his red face ugly. “But we know who you are and where you are, and if you’re fucking us over and the Saladin attack our hotel—”
“When I leave this room, gentlemen,” he said with a totally straight face, although the blood was singing in his veins and his stomach was quaking with suppressed laughter, “to all intents and purposes the Saladin will have ceased to exist. You have my personal guarantee that they will never bother you again.”
Gunnarson put a satchel on the desktop.
“Seventy-five thousand dollars. It’s also gotta guarantee that whatever happens, the hotel’s name won’t be connected—”
“Connected with what? With who? I will never have been here. We will never have had this talk. There will never have been a blonde. It’s what the politicians call deniability.”
Gunnarson opened the satchel, his associates pressed forward to bid a last fond farewell to the banded bundles of greenbacks stacked inside. Not Grimaldi. He merely leaned across the desk to push the intercom button.
“Delia, please come in here. Leave your steno pad.”
As he released the switch and snapped the satchel shut, Shayne began, surprised, “But don’t you want to count…”
Delia entered, looking puzzled because it had been Grimaldi’s voice on her intercom. He handed her the satchel.
“Tell Marla at the front desk to have this sent down to the garage and stowed in the trunk of my Cadillac with the rest of my luggage. And have the car brought around to the front entrance.”
Delia looked at Gunnarson, who nodded slightly.
“Ye… yes, sir, Mr. Grimaldi.”
Grimaldi extended a $20 bill also. “For the flunkie who takes down the luggage and brings up the car.”
Hesitantly, she took satchel and bill and departed. Grimaldi spoke to the three hotel officials as if there had been no interruption.
“You know who and where I am—but I also know who and where you are. So I don’t have to count the money, do I?” There was a chorus of assent to his negative. He nodded in a courtly way. “Then, the best goodbyes are the shortest, gentlemen.”
And was gone, drawing the door shut behind him as if on a wake, fighting laughter out past Delia’s unattended desk. But she was entering as he left, brushing up hard against him, and he grabbed her wrist, spun her around, pushed her against the door frame to grind her pelvis against his own as he kissed her with hard contempt on the mouth.
He finally released her. “A pity, cara,” he said. Then he went out the door quickly and down the hall to the front desk.
He had been rough with her because she was not Giselle—and because he would never see Giselle again. Inescapable, but… for just this once, if he could have not been a Gypsy…
But he was. Not just a Gypsy, but soon to be King of the Gypsies! Going out the heavy ornate doors to the traffic circle in front of the hotel, he blew a kiss to Marla. She gave no acknowledgment, which he found interesting and at the same time unsettling. But what matter now? It was finished. He had won!
At the curb, he gestured to the doorman.
“The pink Cadillac, my good man.”
It was his first sight of it, now all his own. Gleaming and exciting in the bright San Francisco sunshine, the top down so its thoroughbred lines showed to best advantage. Worth, literally, a King’s Ransom, and looking it.
The tall well-built car-parker, his face shadowed by his uniform hat, brought the Caddy almost ceremoniously up to the entrance. Rudolph came around it to the driver’s side.
But the car-parker didn’t get out. Instead he tipped his hat to the back of his head to look up at Rudolph. Blond hair. Hawk features. Hawk eyes that drilled into Rudolph’s. Whose mouth fell open in sudden recognition and surprise as Ballard waved the $20 bill languidly under his outraged nose.
“Thanks for the tip, Rudie-baby. See you around.”
And tromped on it. The Caddy shot away from the hotel and zipped across Powell Street under the nose of a startled cable car, to disappear down the California hill. Marino ran a few paces after it, fists clenched, face congested, eyes ablaze. Stung! Totally! By a gadjo, yet. With the help of another gadjo, the casually dismissed check-in clerk, Marla.
Then Rudolph stopped. Took a couple of deep breaths. Chuckled. Ballard was besotten, wasn’t he? So he’d deliver the car to Yana, wouldn’t he? Yana would drive it to Stupidville.
Where Rudolph Marino would take it away
from her.
His $75,000, so superbly scammed out of the St. Mark Hotel executives? Gone also. But if Rudolph knew his Yana, eventually most of that money would find its way into her hot little Gypsy hands. And Rudolph was a master at taking things away from Yana.
Meanwhile, no other rom need know he’d lost it, right? So his scam would stand among the best in the great legends of the Gypsy oral tradition—and help him get his Kingship.
With a rueful grin, Rudolph turned back to the uniformed doorman to whistle him up a cab for the airport.
* * *
Larry Ballard figured Rudolph’s $20 tip was the easiest money he’d ever made. Of course he’d had to give one of the St. Mark’s car-parkers $50 for a blind eye and the use of his uniform—but that was DKA’s money, not his.
After he removed and itemized the personal property in the car, he would return it to Yana. Who need never know he had temporarily lost sight of it, right?
So she would come to him willingly in the night.
This night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Yana’s thoughts of the coming night, au contraire, were hard-edged. In a couple of hours, she would meet Larry to get back the pink Cadillac; she had given it to him for safekeeping after getting word that Rudolph had pinpointed its hiding place. Now its safety didn’t matter: tonight, after her ultimate coupling with Teddy’s bank account, it would be on the road.
Because she had him hooked so hard, Teddy himself had come clamoring for his own destruction the day before yesterday. His phone call caught her still in bed not long after six o’clock on Saturday morning: the bed Ballard had left not an hour earlier, sneaking down the stairs shoes-in-hand so Ramon would not know of their frenzied lovemaking.
“Madame… Madame Miseria? This is—”
“Theodore Winston White the Third.”
“You knew it was me?”
“I always know it is you.” Her voice hummed like a stroked harp. She knew her man as she knew the contours of her beloved crystal ball. In the warm afterglow of sexual satiation, she was perfectly pitched to exploit him. “I receive certain emanations from you when I pick up the receiver.”
Actually, Teddy’s voice was unmistakable, thin and reedy and hesitant and unsure of itself, much like Teddy. She took a chance— not much of a one at 6:00 A.M., not with Teddy.
“You are calling me from your bedroom, you are barely able to get up, the snake has crawled deeper into your body.”
“Yes!” The eagerness of the hypochondriac expatiating his illness quickened his voice. “It… it’s like a red-hot cable down the back of my leg. I want… I need…”
“It is as I feared,” she said. “When the demon entered my body from the egg, my terrible battle to expel him told me that the evil is very strong indeed.”
She was sitting up in bed now, smelling rich strong black coffee, Gypsy coffee boiled in a big old enameled pot with the grounds and an eggshell. Perhaps Ramon himself was a mind reader; or perhaps he had heard her on the phone, taking care of business on a 6:00 A.M. Saturday. It might even be his way of making amends for his intransigence about her love life.
Even so, she was glad he hadn’t seen Larry sneaking down the stairs. Meanwhile, Teddy was still whining on the phone.
“You know what you must do,” she said in ringing, apocalyptic tones. “And quickly. Midnight Monday.”
“Midnight? Monday?” Alarm squirmed in his voice.
“It is your stepfather you have offended,” she reminded him inexorably. “It is the only way.”
“Oh God!” moaned Teddy softly.
This was it, the culmination, the final sting: after that, he would never see her again. She said, “Tam Junction. Midnight Monday. The fruit stand where Tennessee Valley Road leaves the Shoreline Highway. Alone.”
His voice shivered. “How… how much do I have to—”
“Seventy-five,” she had said abruptly, and had hung up.
Monday was the earliest he could assemble the cash money she was asking for, so for the rest of the weekend, to avoid possible backsliding, she had not answered her phone.
* * *
Now it was Monday and tonight Teddy would bring her $75,000—if he came at all. Naming a particular sum was a calculated risk, because if that sum stripped his estate, lawyers and bankers would start asking questions. Seventy-five thousand would be by far and away the biggest score Yana had ever made.
And afterward, that’s where she would be—far and away. Out of the state, out of the jurisdiction, Her kind of fraud was not federal, so if California ever came after her for it they’d have to identify her first, find her second, and extradite her third. Which, given that she was a beautiful Gypsy boojo woman in a time of criminal rights, would be very difficult indeed.
She would drive the pink Cadillac Larry would bring her this afternoon, and Ramon would drive their sturdy three-year-old Jeep Cherokee that served the same function the Gypsy caravan wagon served their rom forebears a century earlier. They would rendezvous in Sacramento at dawn, to travel together over the Sierra and east across the Great Plains to Stupidville.
They systematically stripped the ofica of all its Gypsy paraphernalia, packing it carefully to be set up at some new location elsewhere after the funeral of the dying King. Although it looked exotic and richly furnished by the dim boojo lighting, it was all an illusion created by the heavy drapes, a couple of antique chairs, the specially constructed crystal-ball table, the highly portable ornaments and props. Holy pictures, tinkly lamps, books of divination and necromancy, charts, figurines…
As a matter of honor they were leaving with three months’ unpaid rent: it was the Gypsy way.
“Be careful of the crystal,” Yana said as Ramon added the priceless globe to one of the huge sacks of his gonya, a heavy leather strap with a bag at each end.
“Do you think I am a fool like your gadjo lover?”
“He is no concern of yours,” she snapped.
When the bags were filled to about equal weight, he put the strap across his shoulders and came erect. His body was tensed and lumped with the strain of supporting the weight of the loaded gonya. He met her eyes steadily.
“I know he slept with you Friday night.”
She drew herself up to her full height, eyes flashing.
“And if he did?”
“Yana… he is gadjo, and you… you—”
“Will be Queen of the Gypsies because of him, don’t forget that,” she snapped. “Besides, it is ended now.”
No auto traffic was allowed on Romolo Place; but as the street had to be available to fire trucks, three posts sunk in concrete at the foot of the street could be removed in an emergency. Somehow they had been set aside for yellow warning flashers; the Cherokee was parked right in front of the ofica.
As Ramon grunted his way down the stairs under his laden gonya, Yana thought, Yes, Larry is a gadjo, but he is also the only man who has ever clutched my heart in his two hands.
No more. Their meeting this afternoon, then she would never see him again. She knuckled her eyes in a little-girl gesture, then snapped at Ramon when he appeared, panting, at the head of the stairs.
“We must hurry, there are still the arrangements to be made over in Marin.”
* * *
Over in Marin, Teddy White was busy about his arrangements, all of which were financial, all of which were cash transactions. Closing out this brokerage account, cashing in these stocks and bonds, pillaging that bank balance, realizing the value on those government bonds, everywhere facing the same sort of financial advisor questions and comments.
“In this financial climate is this is a prudent move?”
“In another month, the capital gains allowances, even though reduced, would give you a tax advantage that…”
“On Friday I wanted you to roll these over. Now…”
“I must strongly advise against taking all this cash…”
“If I knew what this is for, I could better…”
To each he gave the response Yana suggested: a once-in-a-life-time investment opportunity. She had also told him to take less than $10,000 in twenties, fifties, and a few hundreds from each of eight different accounts. Teddy was secretly appalled at the amount she named, secretly pleased it was not more, secretly guilty at being pleased it was only some fifteen percent of his net worth.
How could he be so petty, so mercenary? Hadn’t Yana already endangered her life just so he could survive to this moment? Couldn’t she very well be endangering it again tonight?
* * *
Giselle, staked out on the street below his house with binoculars, picked Teddy up when he came home with the money. At least, when he took from the backseat a dark green plastic garbage bag bulging with its contents, she assumed it was money.
So much money?
She waited, first thinking of revenge on Yana, then drifting into thoughts of later silken hours in Rudolph’s bed…
* * *
Over coffee Yana had been withdrawn, edgy, even a little sad, but she probably was preparing for the Teddy White scam that night. So Larry Ballard was also thinking of the night to come, when she would be finished with Theodore Winston White III and waiting in her bed for him…
Where would it end? What was going to happen? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to think beyond this coming night with her. He was well and truly hooked.
* * *
Meanwhile, on Florida’s Gold Coast, O’B was looking for Kalia Uwanowich, supposedly running a large-scale roofing scam in one of the bulging suburban areas near Fort Lauderdale, Broward County’s financial and commercial hub shoehorned in between Miami to the south and Palm Beach to the north.
But which suburban area? O’B was doing what O’B did best—driving around, looking, talking, stopping in bars and lounges, having a drink with the good old boys. Soaking up information— and booze—like a sponge.
* * *
In Baja, in Cabo, Trin Morales already had spent several hours nosing around the fancy tourist hotels perched high up on the rocks overlooking the Pacific, or strung out along the white sandy beaches on the Sea of Cortéz side. Then he’d parked the ancient rattling yellow VW Bug he’d rented at the airport on Cabo’s main street, and had just walked and talked. Up and down narrow potholed dirt streets, chatting with people in shanties of beaten-flat tin nailed to scraps of wood.