Cons, Scams, and Grifts

by Joe Gores

  “That college roomie of yours, Sofia Ciccone, who works in Records at the Hall of Justice, has to get me a mug shot of Yana from the time she was booked for running a bogus mitt-camp.”

  “Who lit your fire?” demanded Giselle. Bart flopped in the chair across the desk from her.

  “I’ve never had a picture of Yana to show to Etty Mae down in L.A. It’s ridiculous!”

  Giselle deliberated. If she was wrong about Yana, she would be in serious trouble for what she’d done. She sighed.

  “I’ll call Sofia,” she said.

  “I can’t steal mug shots for you, Giselle!”

  “Why not? Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are flashing her pic all over town, why can’t we?”

  “They’re cops, for God sake. I’m a cop. They got the right to show it around and you . . .” She paused, sighed. “Oh, okay. But next Sunday we go up to the wine country in your little red car for the entire day. Just you and me, with the top down. Chasing after any foxy guys we see.”

  Brother Bonaventura emerged from a rose-colored building on Vicolo della Cinque in Rome’s Trastevere quarter, contemplating the fact that sin was not new in this world. For at least two thousand years, pickpockets and fingersmiths had dwelled in this short street close to the River Tiber. Pilgrims’ purses from distant Anglia, porte-monnaies from Gaul, oversized fine Moroccan leather wallets, all had been emptied here, then thrown into the blond river to float down to the sea. The street’s name, cinque, referred to the five fingers of a pickpocket’s hand.

  There wasn’t time to stroll along the Lungotevere to the Basilica of St. Peter, so he cut across Piazza San Egidio past the large entablatured windows of Vicolo del Cedro, judiciously cross-barred with heavy iron grillwork not even a two-year-old could penetrate. The young Brother swung along at a thoughtful, contemplative pace, his summer robe flapping happily around his sandals, his tonsure, surrounded by black curly hair, growing warm in the sunshine.

  After dropping Bart at the airport limo to SFO and his flight to Burbank, Corinne Jones drove against the grain of rush-hour traffic up into Marin. She crossed the San Rafael–Richmond Bridge to Point Richmond, soon was drinking coffee with Johanna Knudsen in the triangle park across from Johanna’s office.

  “I knew he was too good-looking and well-mannered to be true,” Johanna lamented. “Alberto Angelini, Angelo Grimaldi, those names are close—and he fits your Rudolph Marino description to a T. I put his people on Alitalia’s daily flights to Milan, spread over four days, ongoing to Rome.”

  “They probably went on phony passports and stolen credit cards,” Corinne warned. Johanna shrugged.

  “The bank and the feds and the airline can fight that one out. I’ve gotten my commission and I’m hanging on to it!”

  Bart Heslip parked his rental car in front of Etty Mae Walston’s white frame house on Marathon Street in L.A. Someone new was living in Ephrem Poteet’s place next door; one of the fancy lightweight silver kid’s scooters called Razors was lying abandoned on the porch beside the front door. He wondered if the tenants knew that a man had been murdered in their bedroom.

  Etty Mae’s front room curtains stirred, the door opened before he could lay his finger on the buzzer. She dragged him into the sitting room for iced tea, then was disappointed when he took out the envelope that held Yana’s mug shots.

  “Aren’t you supposed to show me a bunch of other women’s pictures at the same time so I can pick her out by myself?”

  “I’m not a cop and this isn’t a formal identification.” They were going through the glossies of Yana’s full-face and profile together. Yana glowed with beauty. “They’re police mug shots, which should be pretty good for identifi—”

  “This isn’t her.”

  “What?” Bart was stunned. “Now take your time, Miz Walston. It was night, it was dark—”

  “I don’t need any time. Remember, I saw that woman two nights under a streetlight with my binoculars. She’s got more of a hawk nose, different-shaped forehead, fuller mouth, rounder face. She’s not this woman. I’ll swear to it in court any day.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” said Bart Heslip.

  “Have some iced tea instead,” suggested Etty Mae Walston.

  Incense thickened the air inside St. Peter’s ornate Basilica. Great spiraled pillars supported the domed tentlike canopy over the main altar, which had been covered with red and white linens. Ramon Ristik, mating Gypsy adroitness with the respect his tonsured scalp and clerical garb demanded, had passed with many other pilgrims through the immense crowd to the end of the pew closest to the wide central aisle. Tears came to his eyes when the wail of a bosh—the Gypsy violin— rose to the vaulted dome. A soulful Spanish guitar accompanied the choir’s traditional Latin chanting. The Pope wore unusually colorful vestments: fiery red, yellow, and orange that looked like flames.

  During the processional the Papal entourage of bishops and cardinals in red robes and tall mitres walked right past Ramon. He was so awed he didn’t even think of picking anyone’s pockets.

  Outside in St. Peter’s Square, big as a couple of football fields laid out side by side with a huge fountain in the middle, was a different story. It was jammed with forty thousand people, which meant at least eighty thousand pockets. The sun was glaring now. Ramon wiped sweat from his tonsure with a handkerchief. In bringing his hand down, he jostled a fat balding tourist wearing plaid shorts and a T-shirt reading LIONS TEN— CHRISTIANS ZERO.

  “Scusi, Signore,” said the bogus Brother Bonaventura, using a tenth of his entire Italian vocabulary with those two words.

  His handkerchief-shielded hand dropped the tourist’s wallet into the long pocket of his soutain to join the dozen-odd other wallets already there. The pig deserved it, wearing an irreverent T-shirt like that to St. Peter’s.

  A long red banner unfurled from one of the top windows of the Papal apartment overlooking the square and the Pope’s frail white-clad figure appeared in the open window.

  “Viva il Papa!” thundered forth, and again, “Viva il Papa!”

  The Pontiff, voice amplified by speakers hidden among the carved biblical figures topping the pillared walls, announced the canonization of the first Gypsy saint in the church’s history. In 1936, Ceferino Jiminez Malla was arrested by Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War for defending a priest. When he wouldn’t renounce his faith, he was executed.

  “Ceferino Malla brought to all of us his heart, rich with faith. It is time to take up his journey, on which we are announcers and witnesses.”

  While the Pope spoke, Gypsies wearing bright bandannas worked the crowd. A score of them were selling Jiminez Malla’s finger and toe bones. A dozen more were explaining that the fifth nail—the one meant for Christ’s breast, which had been stolen by a Gypsy at the foot of the cross—had come down to the new saint in Spain and here was that very nail, right here, which the owner must now sell to be cured of his maladies.

  All this activity made Ramon nervous. With so much going on, someone was going to get arrested, and he didn’t want it to be he, unable to talk himself out of trouble because he couldn’t speak the language. He drifted silently away to slip between the ranks of tour buses parked behind the square in Piazza Leonina. Someone grabbed his arm. He spun around, ready to run—but it was a nun in the brown and black ankle-length habit of the Franciscans. She put out her arms as if to embrace him. He stepped back, shocked and disoriented.

  “Brother of mine, aren’t you glad to see me?” she said.

  “Yana! But . . . the San Francisco police—”

  “This is Rome.” She was leading him past the buses and away from St. Peter’s Square. “You must find me a boojo room—and a Romni who does not know that I am marime to lend me her infant for a few weeks. For a small cut of the take, of course.” She slipped her arm through his. “In the meantime, what’s this pretty story about the American Muchwaya?’

  He was confused, then beamed. “Oh Yana, wait till I tell you!”

&
nbsp; Giselle buzzed Dan Kearny with the news from Corinne Jones that the Gypsies had decamped for Rome, and for some reason he didn’t seem surprised. Two hours later, her private phone rang. She picked up.

  “It wasn’t her,” said Bart’s voice. “Etta Mae said she was definitely not the same woman.”

  Yes! Yana was innocent! Giselle leaped to her feet, trotted twice around her desk, and pounded her fist on the blotter with glee.

  When she went to tell Kearny the news, his desk was empty. Jane Goldson saw Giselle and pulled off her lightweight headset phone.

  “Mr. K? He left as soon as you told him the Gypsies had done a bunk.” She pointed to a stack of files on the edge of her desk. “He said for you to carry on.”

  Giselle called Corinne Jones at the travel agency again. “Round-trip to Rome, business class, no return res,” Corinne confirmed. “He just picked up his ticket on his way to SFO.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where he’s staying, would you?”

  “I found him a place called San Filippo Neri.” Corinne added, chuckling, “A convent. Dan Kearny in a nunnery. They converted the upper floors into accommodations for paying guests. It’s very reasonable and it’s near St. Peter’s where all the action is.”

  With his American passport and single modest suitcase, Kearny cleared customs at Fiumicino’s sprawling Leonardo da Vinci International Aeroporto di Roma without breaking stride and was directed to a tall taxi driver with a fair command of English.

  “The convent of San Filippo Neri in Prati,” Kearny said. Corinne Jones had written the address in Magic Marker, bold print; he didn’t even have to grope for his glasses.

  “Seventy-five thousand lire,” said the driver promptly.

  Dan tried to lean back against the seat and relax, but it wasn’t easy. He was just coming off eleven hours in the air, nonstop, and all the way in from the airport the hackie drove one-handed with his cell phone to his ear, talking nonstop. Neither he nor any of the other drivers had any concept of traffic lanes.

  Once inside the city limits it was sirens and loudly buzzing motorcycle engines in every direction, inescapable as Muzak. At an intersection a bus, ATTACK written on the side in red letters, stormed through a red light a foot in front of them.

  Half a block farther on a little kid wearing baggy jeans and tattered shirt and hightops was hawking watermelon from the sidewalk. Dan’s driver said something into his cell phone, screamed to a stop in the middle of the traffic, and jumped out. He came back to put a watermelon carefully on the seat beside Kearny, and roared away again—never lowering his cell phone from his face.

  Finally the taxi turned into a narrow tree-lined street made even narrower by angle-parked hordes of the small European cars Dan had already realized the Italians favored. They slammed to a stop in front of a narrow mid-block mustard-colored building with wide steps up to a formidable door. Dan stepped out stiffly to retrieve his single bag from the back seat.

  “One hundred fifty thousand lire,” said the driver. “You said near St. Peter’s. This is very far north of the Vatican.”

  Kearny slapped eight 10,000-lira notes into the man’s hand, said, “Keep the change,” and started up the wide stone steps with his bag. At the top he turned to look down at the angry driver.

  “You ought to pay me for that ride,” he said.

  forty-nine

  Ephrem Poteet’s dying words were, It was my . . . wife . . . from . . . ’Frisco . . . After a pause, he croaked, Yana, and with his last breath howled out her name: Yana-a-a-a-a . . . Etty Mae heard him clearly. Cut and dried. But on seeing Yana’s mug shots, she said just as clearly that Yana was not the woman she had seen on those two fateful nights. So far so good. But none of it proved Yana’s innocence.

  Giselle had puzzled over this ever since Bart had reported it, but it wasn’t until she was driving to work that she was able to catch the thought that had been tickling at her brain. What if after saying his wife had killed him, Ephrem called out to Yana, not in accusation, but in despair because she was his only true love and he was dying all alone without her there? What if there had been another, bigamous wife?

  The Bureau of Vital Statistics was in the ornate newly earthquake-refitted City Hall. Behind the counter of the otherwise-empty office a large indifferent black woman in a print dress was giving someone a cake recipe over the phone.

  “You stick a broom straw down into each layer. If it comes out clean, the cake is done.” She gave a booming laugh. “I’m gonna get me more than a piece of that cake, girl!” and hung up.

  She looked at Giselle sternly; no cake recipes for her.

  “I need a vital statistic,” said Giselle.

  The laugh again. “Them we got plenty of.” She shook her head, chuckling, “Yessir, got plenty of them. Whut you need?”

  Never confuse a bureaucrat. Giselle literally spelled it out for her. She was looking for a marriage license issued to a Poteet, P-O-T-E-E-T, Ephrem, or to a Mihai, M-I-H-A-I, Punka.

  “Ain’t gonna be many, not with no goofy names like those.” There weren’t. On Friday, March 3rd, Punka Mihai had married Nadja Gry in a civil ceremony right here at City Hall.

  Giselle went out into the June sunshine to sit on a bench by the reflecting pool and congratulate herself a little and reflect on what she had. She had a start. A bigamous marriage. What she needed now was Nadja Mihai’s current name.

  Luminitsa Djurik sprinkled a careful measure of the magic salt Whit Stabler had mentioned to Larry Ballard into the chicken noodle soup and set it down in front of the old man. She used the cheery voice of caregivers worldwide.

  “The magic salt will have you all well in no time, Whit!”

  He began shakily spooning soup into his mouth. He mumbled valiantly, “I . . . think I feel stronger today.”

  She needed a power of attorney to get at his investments, and the house deed made over to her so she could make a quick sale. Once he signed the papers, the final dose of magic salt . . .

  “You certainly are stronger,” she said, taking the spoon from Whit’s shaky hand. “Let Mama help you. And then maybe tonight you can help Mama by signing the deed to the house.”

  Ramon had found a house in Rome on the Via Tor dei Conti near the partially restored ruins of the Foro Romano where the conspirators killed Julius Caesar. Just down the street hulked the Colosseum, haunted by the shades of the countless thousands who died there to entertain the citizenry of Rome.

  The hallway was lined with a dozen straight-backed chairs filled with women in obvious pairs. Some had their arms around one another, others rested their heads on the shoulder of their beloveds. They had paid in advance, very dearly, to be here.

  The tall door of the salotto swung silently open. A tonsured monk in a simple brown robe stood in the opening.

  “Suora Maria Innocente has composed herself sufficiently to receive you,” he said gravely. “It is very difficult for her, as you can imagine. But you may enter.”

  The couples trooped into an echoing high-ceilinged room made dim by dusty crimson floor-to-ceiling plush drapes pulled shut across the windows. It smelled musty.

  Beside the fireplace sat a slight nun in brown robes. Her bland face was framed by a stiff white headpiece under her black veil. Her slender throat was wrapped in severe white linen. In her arms was an infant. As the women took their places in the semicircle of chairs facing her, the silence was broken only by the scrape of wood on marble, the nervous clearing of a throat.

  The pale nun suddenly raised her head to stare at them. Her eyes burned with the starved inner fire of the fanatic. How had they ever thought of her as bland? She spoke. The voice was harsh and cold. It sliced to their very souls.

  “You are here today to bear witness to the martyrdom of an innocent woman.”

  She leaped up, thrusting the infant high above her head as if to dash it to the marble floor. Several women gasped. The child gurgled sleepily. Sister Maria Innocente was motionless.

  “I am
bound by my final vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. I honor them. I am poor. I am chaste. I am a virgin. And I am mother of this child.” She lowered the infant, cradled him to her bosom. “When I was a teenager, God told me my destiny was as a bride of Christ. I embraced that vocation.”

  But after she took her final vows, visions started to come. Of a child. She told Mother Superior of her visions. Mother Superior reproached her for the sins of pride and presumption.

  One day, as she prayed alone in the motherhouse garden, a voice spoke to her in a strange tongue.

  “I do not understand!” Sister Maria Innocente cried out. “Listen . . . listen . . . and repeat . . .”

  After three times she could recite the words perfectly, right down to their inflection—and suddenly she understood them. She never heard the voice again. Then she missed her period. When the morning sickness came, she went to Mother Superior with the whole story. She was ejected from the convent.

  “I brought my child to Rome to seek wisdom of holy men and women assembled for the two thousandth birthday of the Church.”

  One of these holy men had a housekeeper who, like the women gathered here today, could not abide the thought of a man touching her. But she desperately wanted a child.

  “I told her there was nothing I could do. Secretly, I was terrified. What if my visions and my voice had come, not from God, but from Satan? But she pleaded and pleaded . . .”

  They prayed together, and Sister Maria Innocente spoke the words over the housekeeper three times. The woman became pregnant. She told others of the miracle.

  Sister Maria Innocente slumped in her chair, exhausted. The monk told the women, “You have come from America, even farther away than Trieste. You have chosen to live your lives without men, yet you desire children. God has given Sister Maria Innocente the gift of immaculate conception. Only during this Millennium year can she perform this miracle for you.”

  The nun was on her feet, fatigue gone. The monk accepted the infant from her arms and left. This was women’s work.