by Joe Gores
“This was tangled up in the barbed wire on top of the perimeter fence at the rear of the facility, sir.”
Grim-faced, R.K. auto-buzzed Security Control.“Faded Rose Petal to Rose Bush. We believe the defenses at the back of Xanadu have been breached.”
Rose Bush’s voice said, “Perimeter fence power is knocked out, sir, but all other scanners and alarms are condition green.”
“Roger that. Keep me informed.”
The three DKA men were crowded into the janitor’s closet inside Xanadu’s front entrance. When O’B stuck an eye around the edge of the door frame, the surveillance camera was just swinging its baleful eye away from the closet.
“Now!” he said.
Larry Ballard thrust a can of shaving cream out and up to send a thick stream splatting against the lens of the camera. He and Bart burst from the janitor’s closet and raced down the hall with their stuff-bags over their shoulders. At the corner, Larry stuck his can of shaving cream around the edge. PHHHHHT!
Bart raced by him and up the stairs two at a time to just below the first landing. He stepped around the corner. PHHHHHT! Larry was already running by him to race up the next flight.
R.K. was heartened by the attackers’ slackening fire. None of his men had been hit. The invaders were lousy shots. He sprang to his feet to finally lead a concerted charge down the sloping lawn to the front gate—and his cell phone buzzed.
“Rose Bush to Faded Rose Petal. Scanners one and two are disabled, sir. And scanner three. And scanner four, sir.”
R.K. cupped his hands to shout at his men.
“All personnel fall in on me. Internal security of Xanadu has been compromised. Repeat. Xanadu security compromised!”
O’B walked along the first-floor hallway past the disabled overhead scanners, breaking the invisible infrared light beams crisscrossing the open doorways by throwing handfuls of steel ball bearings into each room that he passed.
“Rose Bush to Faded Rose Petal! Door light beams and floor pressure plates have been activated in Art Gallery A . . . Art Gallery B . . . There goes Computer Room One, and now, yes, Computer Room Two! The entire ground floor has been taken over by hostile personnel, sir!”
R.K. told his troopers, “They’ve occupied the entire ground floor, men. We gotta flush ’em out room by room!”
The second-floor hallway’s single scanning camera stared only at the locked-down steel door of the Security Control Center. On the floor in front of the Observation Room, Larry and Bart laid out the ten dental mirrors in two rows, each with a blob of adhesive putty on the handle. Larry sprinkled talcum powder generously on his palm, blew it into the open doorway.
The invisible light beams became thin red visible lines. Bart positioned himself by one side of the door frame with a dental mirror. Larry did the same thing on the other side.
“One . . . two . . . three!”
In unison, they moved their mirrors down to exactly face one of two paired photoelectric cells. The light emitted by that cell was reflected back into itself. No alarms sounded.
They pressed the adhesive putty against the doorjamb to hold the mirrors in place. O’B came down the hallway behind them and rummaged in his stuff-bag for the crossbow as they disabled the next set of sensors. O’B cranked the bow down, arming it.
R.K. Robinson stood tensely off to the side of Art Gallery A so as not to be hit by possible fire coming from the room. He spoke into his cell phone in low, guarded tones.
“Rose Bush, cut the security for Art Gallery A. Then cut the first-floor hallway lights.”
When the hallway lights went off, R.K. spun off the wall and into the doorway, Colt .45 in his right hand, flashlight in his left. The light gave him a quick glimpse of figures massed in the darkness. He emptied the .45’s clip at them.
Oh Jesus! He heard the sound of smashing terra-cotta over the slam of the .45. Taking his lead, the other men were firing.
“CEASE FIRE!” he bellowed. “Hold your fire, goddammit!”
The gallery was deserted except for the maimed art. He realized, all too late, that the enemy merely recced the room and moved on—no place to hide in here. No, they would be in the computer rooms where the machines would give them cover.
They converged on Computer Room One. R.K. gave the signal. Yelling, they charged in. And went into wild tarantellas as their feet came down on the ball bearings strewn across the floor. They crashed down like bowling pins. A perfect strike.
* * *
O’B heard the first far faint whup-whup-whup he’d been half-listening for. They would have maybe three minutes. He fitted the quarrel with the expanding-bolt head into the cranked-down crossbow. Fastened to a ring behind the fletching of the arrow was a coil of light, strong nylon rope. He raised the bow, sighted, pulled the trigger. SPRONG!
The arrow buried its heavy steel head deep in the center of the ceiling. The flanges popped open to anchor it securely. The thin nylon rope angled down from it to the coil in the hallway.
Ballard grabbed the end of the rope and swung, legs out straight ahead of him like Tarzan going through the jungle, his butt clearing the floor by inches. At the far end of his swing, he jammed his feet down on the floor just in front of the observation window where there were no pressure plates. He grabbed the sill to keep from stepping back and causing the alarm to sound. Seconds were precious.
He faded the mirroring, tapped on the glass. In the next room, Freddie swung himself off his cot. The Baron had assured them that the orangutan knew this trick from Hong Kong. Ballard very slowly spelled out the unfamiliar signs for USE STICK TO GET KEY.
Freddie signed something, Larry didn’t know what, picked up his play stick and thrust it through the bars toward the ring of keys hanging on the wall flanking the cage.
R.K. got gingerly to his feet and held several ball bearings in one hand while rubbing his hip with the other. It had all been a feint! He hurled the ball bearings across the room and yelled into his cell phone.
“Check the ape.”
Rose Bush brought up Freddie’s room on the monitor. He gaped in astonishment. “The ape is gone!”
Rose Bush leaped to his feet, ripping off his headpiece. When he did, he heard the unmistakable whup-whup-whup of helicopter blades! He dithered for a moment, flung open the door and rushed into Freddie’s room. The empty cage’s door gaped.
Freddie waddled out from his hiding place behind the opened Security Center door and beneath the scanning camera. He shoved. The duty officer stumbled forward. Freddie, playing the game as he played it so often in Hong Kong, slammed the cage door shut.
On the floor below, in Computer Room One, R.K. yelled into his cell phone, “Rose Bush, Rose Bush, this is Faded Rose Petal. Come in, Rose Bush.” No response. “Come in, goddam you!”
Still no response. He hurled the cell phone to the floor, jerked out his .45 and rushed from the room.
Freddie lumbered into the Security Control Center to stare at the glowing lights, pushed the black button. The panel slid back, Kearny and Knottnerus-Meyer came clattering down the stairs from the third-floor barracks as Ballard, Heslip, and O’B burst in from the Observation Room. Freddie grabbed the Baron’s hand.
“Everybody here?” demanded Kearny.
“We haven’t seen Trin since he took out the gate.”
“Ve can’t vait,” said the Baron. “Ve must get Freddie to der roof and into der chopper.”
The hall door burst open and R.K. Robinson came through in a headfirst dive. He tucked and rolled, came up to his feet with the only gun in the room in his right hand.
“Hold it right there, wiseguys!” he yelled.“Dis exercise iss finished,” said the Baron frostily.
R.K.’s .45 didn’t waver. And then Freddie punched him in the chops. His eyes went vague, his legs went rubbery, his gun sagged. They all ran for the stairs as R.K.’s troopers came charging up the hall, too late as usual.
* * *
The DKA men were already in the big chopper. Knottn
erus-Meyer shoehorned Freddie into one of the rear seats and got in beside him. Everyone was excited and talking at once.
“Take it up, Jacques. Vunce around der meadow, den ve bring Herr Freddie back home again safe and sound.”
The rotors roared as the chopper lifted off. Xanadu fell away below them. The open meadow below was a pale blue by soft moonlight, pretty and peaceful. But then the pilot tapped the instrument panel, switched on his glaring landing lights, and started down.
“Vut iss der matter?” shouted the Baron.
The pilot yelled back over his shoulder, “Oil gauge acting up. I’ll have to do a manual check.”
He set it down just at the far edge of the meadow, opened his door, and yelled over the diminished noise of the rotors.
“Everybody out except the ape.”
They trotted well away from the chopper in that peculiar bent-over primate stance almost everyone adopts even though it is seldom necessary. Knottnerus-Meyer was last out. None of them noticed him turn around and climb back in after the pilot.
The engine roared, the rotors screamed, the chopper leaped into the air as if shot from a cannon. The four DKA men turned and ran after it instinctively. There was a very long, astounded, chagrined silence.
Dan Kearny started for the top of the road down the mountain without a word, too enraged to speak to anyone.
“Twenty miles down to Sycamore Flats,” said O’B hollowly.
“Ve haff vays uff making you valk,” said Larry.
“Vehicle coming,” warned Bart.
Headlights were rushing toward them along the uneven dirt track. The driver was pushing it hard; the vehicle was leaping into the air and crashing down, its lights jumping around crazily. They stood there, dispirited, as R.K. Robinson’s open Jeep skidded to a stop in their midst.
Beaming out at them from behind the windshield was the round moon face of Trin Morales.
“Need a lift, gents?” he asked.
forty-six
Staley’s whole kumpania, all fifty of them, was shoehorned cheek by jowl into the spacious front room of Rudolph’s purloined Point Richmond house. The janitor from the Masquers Theatre down in the flats arrived with a truckload of folding chairs liberated from the playhouse. Kids with brown faces and shoe-button eyes ran from room to room, in and out between the adults’ legs, loud and noisy and joyous underfoot. The Gypsy flag was on one wall to make them feel proud of the occasion. At its center was a red sixteen-spoke chakra; the flag was halved horizontally, the blue above representing the sky, the green below representing the earth.
Staley was in fine form. Tonight he would distribute the tickets and tomorrow groups would begin to depart for Milan, then on to Rome. And he had a surprise visitor for his people that made his mustaches bristle and his eyes shine.
Voices rose and fell in English and Romani and several Eastern European tongues; there were laughter, jokes, and snatches of song. Musicians were setting up their tombouritsa, their bosh and bugaija, their prim and their tamboura. Three of them, dressed in bright colors, played Gypsy music at an Andalusian restaurant in the Sunset District. Others, who could have been Latino or gadje, day laborers or salesmen, had brought their own instruments and would drop in and out during the night.
Josef Adamo, just returned from a night in jail for intoxication, stepped into their midst to toast them with a tall glass of ouzo. The musicians struck up the lively Grastoro, and Adamo, keeping time to the music with his glass, sang in a fine comic vein:
“My little white horse, you saved my head!
You brought me home from the jail in the village,
My little grey horse!”
The aroma from Lulu’s sastra dominated the kitchen. Six rabbits (snared by Nanoosh Tsatshimo and his sons atop Mount Bruno), carrots, onions, potatoes, and field herbs simmered on the back burner of Rudolph’s stove in the big iron pot. Thank the God-Bearer, the heavy sastra didn’t need to be suspended on a tripod over a wood fire this festive night.
Immaculata Bimbai, looking more Gypsy than countess tonight, carved holes out of the centers of half-baked potatoes and passed them on to her brother. Lazlo filled the holes with jam and replugged them, with as much attention as he had given to playing Donny, the computer nerd, in the jewelry-store scam.
Immaculata leaned close to Bessie Adamo and asked in a low voice, “Would you recognize the guest of honor?”
“The nephew of the King?” Bessie checked the oatmeal spread out to dry on the table to see if it was dry yet. “No, I never met him. But it’s still early, he wouldn’t be here yet.”
“I think he’s actually Lulu’s kin,” said Immaculata.
In the front room, Adamo concluded his song with the head-tossing whinny of a horse. Bessie laughed delightedly, as she did at her husband’s jokes, while mixing the dried oatmeal with honey, pounded nuts, and butter. She began forming the little buni-manricli cakes to pan-roast on top of the stove.
“It’s easier than doing them over a fire at the side of the road,” she said. “But there’s always something missing somehow.”
“Yeah, they don’t get burned this way,” said Pearsa the quick-tongued teenager in passing.
Lil Tomeshti was stuffing chestnuts and herbs into the four possums caught by her husband, Wasso, in Golden Gate Park over the weekend. He came in, bent over her to make sure justice was being done to the game he had brought. Lil and Lulu sent him packing. The two women carefully rolled the possums into clay cylinders, sealed them, and put them into the larger of the two ovens in Rudolph’s kitchen. Lulu bustled away to other tasks.
“In Europe I always made my hotchi-witchi with hedgehogs,” said Lil dubiously.
“You’ll like possum even better than kanzavouri,” Dina Tsatshimo assured her. Then she confided, “I met the Queen’s nephew many years ago in the south of Spain. He is from Holland, not one of us by blood. His wife is Muchwaya, of course.”
“What does he look like?” asked Lil breathlessly.
“A Dutchman!” laughed Dina. She slipped a tall-sided pan of cornbread into an equally tall pot of boiling water. “Big square head. Big shoulders. Very strong. I would never forget such a man!”
“Did you put yeast in that bread?” demanded Lulu, appearing at her elbow.
“Of course not,” said Dina a bit flatly.
She knew the Queen had not bustled up to ask about yeast in the cornbread. There was none. Traditionally, Gypsies made no bread that had to rise, because yeasted breads needed an oven in which to bake, not an open fire. No, Lulu had heard them gossiping about her nephew. She could not stop them from speculating, but she could make her formidable presence felt.
The possums baked in the top oven, the potatoes below. The sastra bubbled and the horta and other vegetables rested on the range in their pans, ready to be transferred to the serving platters. But the guest of honor still had not arrived.
Lulu, seeking to make work while they waited, demanded, “Is the tea and coffee prepared?”
“The nettles are steeping for the tea right now,” said Pearsa cheerfully.
“And I am brewing the dandelion roots for the coffee,” said Sonia Lovari. Dandelion coffee was made, not from the flowers, but from the roots, sun-dried, chopped, pan-roasted, and pounded into particles, then brewed like coffee.
The teenage girls were laying out the sweets they had made at home for the occasion: loukomi flavored with mastic, and rich spherical cookies made with butter and chopped nuts and rolled in powdered sugar, each topped with a currant.
“You’d better move the desserts to the sideboard in the dining room,” said Lulu.
Yula Marks, only twelve years old and eager to be useful, lifted a tray and wheeled out of the kitchen, moving gracefully as if to some inner music.
“Careful!” yelled Pearsa.
In one lightning movement, Yula balanced the tray on her right hand while using her left to snatch up her skirt. She just avoided contact with Kore Kronitos, who was seated just beyond the open
doorway to the living room. If even the hem of Yula’s skirt had brushed him, Kore would have been made unclean, requiring ritual purification before he could rejoin his comrades.
In the front room, the band was taking its third break. In the kitchen, the women had brought out their own wine from underneath the sink, and were joking salaciously and dancing suggestively as they moved around the crowded kitchen in time to Latino music from the radio. Lulu deliberated. What was delaying her nephew? They would have so little time with him before he flew home. But she would have to serve the feast.
Staley appeared in the doorway, caught her eye, and nodded. He had obviously come to the same conclusion. He disappeared, Lulu and Lil put the possums on platters and carefully broke open their clay cylinders. The fur and skin came off with the baked clay, leaving only the stuffed, steaming meat. Tureens and platters were carried out into the front room where Staley was seated in the middle of the head table, more sober than he had been earlier but still in a jovial mood.
With a few minor pecking-order spats between children and adults alike, everyone was gradually seated and ready to feast on rabbit stew and baked possum and innumerable vegetables and boiled cornbread.
Staley, in the seat of power at this last supper of the Much-waya in the Bay Area, was watchful, his eye on the door. The seat of honor on his right was still empty. Everyone was just about to start feasting when the front door banged open to bounce loudly off the wall beside it. Every eye leaped to the monocled intruder in some sort of guard’s uniform who strode into their midst, clicked his heels with Prussian precision, and glared at them. Dina jumped in surprise.
“That’s not the Dutchman!” she whispered to Lil.
“Shhhh!” said Lil. “There’s two of them!”
At the same time the interloper roared at them, “A fine gang of thieves!”
Ramon Ristik leaped to his feet and snatched up the huge carving knife from the hotchi-witchi platter. But before he could move from his place, a hulking figure of sheer power, the second one that Lil had marked, sent a shock wave around the room by bounding by the first man. He too was dressed in a guard’s outfit. He stopped and surveyed the astounded Romi, then made his way to the empty chair of honor at Staley’s side, and sat down.