Fiddle Game

by Richard A. Thompson

  “One of your people was murdered outside my place of business the day before yesterday. I’m trying to find out why.”

  “How do you know he was one of us?”

  “She. Because she was working the ‘old fiddle’ scam.”

  “Anybody could do that. It’s probably been around for longer than fiddles. Used to be the ‘old lyre’ scam. Greeks did it to Persians.”

  “She was using a phony identity. She also had a brother who has a dozen identities that he carries around in a briefcase, and a cop called him a Rom. Now he claims he never heard of her. And she switched the violins, smoother than I can believe.”

  He pulled at his chin and took a deep breath, pondering. “The identity shuffle would fit. The CIA doesn’t have any secrets as well kept as the true, birth name of a Gypsy. But switching the fiddle is all wrong. The whole point of the con is to leave the pigeon with the object he thought he wanted. Otherwise, it’s an egg without salt, if you get my meaning.”

  “It was a variation,” I said. “She had to get the original back, because it really was very valuable. It was an old Amati.”

  Rosie still looked bored and restless, but Joe, if that was really his name here in the House of Aliases, was suddenly looking intensely alert.

  “The Wolf Amati?” he said.

  I’d never heard that name before, but candor didn’t seem to be the order of the night.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Holy Mother of God. Could it really be?” He sat back on his chair and looked at the ceiling. “You wouldn’t be trying to run a scam on me now, would you, Mr. J.?”

  “Hey, I’m not the one whose ancestor stole a nail.” As far as I knew.

  He looked at the black ceiling for another moment, then jerked back forward, stood, and walked briskly away. “Wait here,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Sure,” I said to his empty chair. To Rosie, I said, “Nice fellow.”

  “Believe it or not, he was being nice. His people take great pride in being rude.” But she wasn’t looking at me as she said it. She was now paying attention to the stage, where a new dancer had replaced Miss Blood Loss. This one was taller as well as curvier than the first, and she had short, thick black hair that she wore like a helmet. Prince Valiant’s sister, maybe.

  She did a slow, sinuous routine, and she shed her upper costume almost immediately, showing off the fact that her ample breasts did not need any external support. She kept her cavalier boots, g-string, and pasties, but they didn’t matter much. She had one of those bodies that implies even more nudity than it shows. My Uncle Fred would have said, “She’s got a lot of features, is the thing. And not all of them are shaped quite the way you expected, so you got to stare a lot.”

  So I did. And to my surprise, she stared back, completely ignoring the rest of the audience, which was now hooting and grunting for her attention. She did a series of torso thrusts that started at the ankles and rippled up through her whole body like a wave, all the while holding eye contact, then pulled off the pasties, one at a time. I thought I could hear a tearing sound, like a bandage being ripped off, and I wondered if that was a way of staging a nipple erection. I was going to ask Rosie, but when I looked over at her, she was positively radiating disapproval. Before I could ask her why, the dancer got our attention again by throwing the pasties on our table.

  A drunk at another table yelled, “She wants your bod, guy.”

  “Wrong,” shouted another one. “What she wants is his bankroll.”

  “With her, same thing,” said the first. “Trush me, I know.”

  “Why me?” I said to Rosie. “Why doesn’t she play to the guy who yelled? Or somebody else who doesn’t have a woman with him?”

  The dancer was down on the edge of the apron now, nearly doing the splits on her knees, and thrusting her breasts at me as if I were a gravity well. Rosie picked up a pastie from the table and threw it on the floor, glaring at the stage.

  “She thinks you’re safe, figures I won’t let you attack her. But that’s just the cover reason. What she really wants…”

  Joe was back suddenly, with a piece of paper that he stuck into my shirt pocket without waiting for me to reach for it.

  “Go to that address tomorrow after ten,” he said. “That’s the vista officia, the check-in place for all the Yugoslav Rom. If you say you know where the Wolf Amati is—and don’t tell me if you really do know or not—the rom baro might see you. He’ll know I sent you, but don’t say it. Don’t say my name to him at all. And don’t ask for him, either, just wait for him to appear. Pretend you’re a customer.”

  “Do I tell him about the woman who was killed?”

  “If he gives you coffee, look to see if the cup is chipped. If it isn’t, then he likes you and he’ll talk to you for a while without any profit. You can tell him about the woman if you want to. If the cup is chipped, you’re wasting your time, no matter what you say. If Lisa goes along, she should wear a long skirt. And she should keep absolutely quiet. If she doesn’t, all you’ll accomplish is dropping some money, which you should figure on doing in any case.”

  “I have to pay for information?”

  “No, you have to pay for being a Gadje. No matter what, you do that. But if you act right, you might get beyond that.”

  “Sounds like a sucker game.”

  “It is what it is. And that’s as much as I can do for you. I shouldn’t be saying this to a Gadje, but Lisa’s an old friend: Good luck to both of you.” I stifled the impulse to shake his hand, and he left as abruptly as he had come.

  Up on the stage, the curvaceous Dane was again writhing in our direction, making come-hither gestures at me. Rosie picked up the second pastie and threw it at her, which prompted a look of mock indignation and amusement.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  “Okay, but what were…”

  “Now.”

  The dancer threw a pout at Rosie and a kiss at me. I mouthed a silent “ciao” at her, waved, and followed Rosie back out into the night.

  ***

  Walking back to the car, I said, “You were about to tell me something else about the dancer, when Joe interrupted.”

  “Was I? I forget.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I was mad. You don’t want to hear it.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I was going to say she was trying to take you away from me.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Believe it. She wanted it bad. As bad as she wanted to spite me.”

  “Why would she want that?”

  “Because she’s a mean, hateful little bitch.”

  “Nuh-uh. Not good enough.”

  She slowed her pace, finally, and looked down at her ratted-on, rubber-soled shoes.

  “She was telling me I’m not the star anymore, okay? And as lousy as that life was, it still hurts to be told I’m a has-been. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you?”

  As a matter of fact, I would.

  Chapter Twelve

  A Death in the Familyia

  “This location is compromised. I can’t take a call here after this one.” I didn’t say hello or my name. I figured Wide Track Wilkie would know nobody else would be answering a pay phone at six in the morning. And by now, he would have taken the trouble to find out that it was a pay phone

  “You want I should hang up now?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know that we’re being tapped, but a cop came by the booth last night and looked at the phone.”

  “Checking the number against the listed location?”

  “That’s the way I figure it. Checking on behalf of a fellow officer in another state, maybe. So I can’t be seen here again. If he doesn’t come back, somebody else will.”

  “Got you. Can you take down a number?”

  “Shoot.”

  He gave me a number, and I wrote it on the piece of paper that Joe the G
ypsy had stuffed in my pocket. “If you wind up ending this call in a hell of a hurry,” he said, “I’ll wait for you to call me there in ten minutes.”

  “Good.” I tried to remember my underworld protocol for talk on open phone lines. “Ten minutes” either meant one hour, since it had a one and a zero, or it meant ten o’clock, for the same reason, or it meant the same time, one day from then. Maybe it meant all three. Hell, maybe it even meant ten minutes. Shit. I was out of practice at this fugitive stuff. And I had already violated the first rule: Never make contact with your old life.

  I looked over the parking lot. The two semis were still parked where they had been the night before, their windshields glistening with heavy dew in the predawn light. Down by the other end of the mall, an old junker Toyota had the same covering, marking it for somebody’s humble go-to-work vehicle that decided it had gone enough, thank you. In the center of the shopping strip, a step van was unloading something into the Kinko’s, where the computer had found no new email for me that day. If my phone booth really was blown, Agnes didn’t know it yet. At least, the receiver didn’t have a bug in it, though. I checked, as well as I knew how. And the parking lot looked serene enough.

  “What have you got for me?” I said.

  “First off, I know you told me to strictly work on the woman, but you ought to know we could shift to her little brother now.”

  “You said you couldn’t do PI work.” Openly, anyway.

  “Don’t have to. He’s a skip now.”

  “How can he be? His case won’t come up for weeks yet.”

  “Yeah, and he won’t be there for it. He’s busy being dead. At least, if he’s the same guy who was impersonating the detective, he is. Has a nice stainless steel drawer, right next to the sister he claims he never heard of.”

  “You saw him?”

  “In the flesh. Which was not in very good shape, I might add. He’s a John Doe at the moment. I didn’t offer to identify him, figured the CIC will match his prints pretty soon.”

  “How the hell did you get into the morgue?”

  “I pretended to be dead, okay?”

  “Must have been a hell of an act.”

  “Hey, I don’t ask about your trade secrets. You want to hear about the guy or not?”

  “Yes.” Did I ever.

  “He’s a hit-and-run victim, just like the woman. And just like her, he had his neck broken by somebody who was definitely not a motor vehicle. Your real cop/phony cop pair were telling you the truth about that, it turns out.”

  “That’s what the ME’s people say?”

  “Official and final. It’s two homicides now.”

  “Holy shit. I don’t suppose you found out what time they came to that conclusion about her?”

  “Why do we care?”

  “Because Evans told me about the broken neck when he ‘fronted me in Lefty’s. If that was before the examiners knew, that would mean he saw it happen.”

  “Aha. Or did it himself.”

  “There’s that distinct possibility,” I said.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Why is that too bad?”

  “Because I didn’t find that out.”

  “Can’t you do it now?”

  “Hey, how many times you think I can play dead? People get suspicious, you do it twice.”

  “You’re right: that’s too bad.”

  The semi closest to me suddenly fired up its huge diesel, its twin stacks sending up black flumes that could probably be seen from the Sears Tower. The ground shook, and the plastic glazing in my phone booth rattled.

  “So, what did you find out about the woman?” I said.

  “What?”

  I said it again, shouting this time, and Wilkie started to recite a list of aliases as long as that of little Jimmy-cum-Stroud. I couldn’t hear them well enough to write them down, and I didn’t see that it would help me any if I had. Eventually, he moved from aliases to a list of possible former addresses, none of which rang any bells for me.

  As Wilkie talked, the semi driver decided he had played to an empty house for long enough, and he proceeded to put his show on the road. Either the engine was still pretty cold, or he had a hell of a load, because he pulled out really slowly, keeping it in super-low gear. I watched the pattern of the wheels with fascination. Four sets of four and one set of two, for a total of eighteen wheels, five of them facing towards me, all turning in perfect unison. I looked under the trailer frame and watched the outboard wheels, in deepest shadow, turning to the same rhythm, and beyond them, the dawn-lit wheels of the second truck, not turning at all. It all had a certain mechanical poetry to it. Until my eyes stopped on the farther wheels. There were too damn many wheels behind the moving truck. And four of them belonged to a low-slung, heavy car.

  “…really did teach violin, in a little hole-in-the-wall studio over in the Macalister Groveland neighborhood, but she never played in the Chamber Orchestra, under any name, or…”

  Wide Track went on with his recitation, but I wasn’t listening. Why the hell does a car park between two semis, when there’s four hundred open spaces in the rest of the lot? Sleeping off an all-nighter, maybe, someplace where he wouldn’t be too conspicuous? Or getting set to stake out a phone booth, where there wasn’t supposed to be anybody for another two hours? As inconspicuous a place as you could get, for that.

  The front bumper of the car jerked upward slightly, from the torque of the motor starting up, and that decided it for me. A hung over party animal would not immediately move his car when the cover moved or got noisy. He’d just roll over and give God and the universe a piece of his blurry mind. I dropped the receiver without hanging up and headed for the bagel shop, before my cover, also, was gone.

  The front door wasn’t open yet, so I ran around the side, to the back service drive. The rented Pontiac was back at the hotel with Rosie, so I had exactly two options: go in the back door of the bagel shop, cover my face with flour and pretend to be the Pillsbury Doughboy, or go over the hill and into the area where Rosie and I had driven the night before. The big semi was rolling pretty good now, shifting up a gear, and I had no idea if he had screened the view of me for long enough. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t have left the phone receiver dangling, but it was too late to go back and take care of it now. Over the roar of the diesel, I thought I could hear the chirp of smaller tires peeling off on the blacktop. I ran through the opening in the brush and didn’t look back. Over the hill, as they say.

  It had seemed smaller from behind the windshield, just a nice little berm that would make a good visual screen. It had grown since then, into one of the foothills of the Himalayas, and I scrambled frantically for the ridge, frequently stumbling on large rocks. A lot of rocks on that damn hill. I decided I would not look at the undercarriage of the rented Pontiac, assuming I ever got to see it again at all.

  I finally made it over the crest, gasping for air and vowing to think again about that exercise program that I used to think about, I forget when. Or maybe not. The hill was probably just steeper and longer than I had remembered. What the hell, the Pontiac had needed 200 horsepower to get over it, and even with that, it wasn’t happy about it. I stopped just over the crest, dove into a mass of low, tangly brush, and chanced a look back.

  Below me, a big, dark gray Chevy was cruising around the corner of the strip mall, slowly. I couldn’t see the driver’s face, but the car damn sure looked familiar. I had almost taken the last ride of my life in a car just like that, and unlike the Proph, I did not believe in coincidence. The car stopped just around the corner, and I hunkered down lower, hoping the driver hadn’t seen me. The sun was rising almost behind me now, so the odds were in my favor. I felt like Josey Wales with the rising sun behind me, about to waste the Comancheros, single-handed. “Yup, it’s always nice to have an edge.” I needed some tobacco juice to spit.

  Behind the strip mall, one of the jolly bagel bakers, a young man of about my bu
ild, had just tossed a big plastic trash bag into a dented green dumpster and stopped to have a smoke, looking around furtively first, taking no apparent notice of the Chevy. He turned his back to the wind, to shelter his lighter, also turning away from the corner of the mall. Behind him, the car spun its wheels on the gravel, and its heavily muffled engine made a noise like a turbine winding up. Good God, he was going to run the kid down! Déja vu, all over again.

  I stood up and yelled. The kid didn’t seem to hear me, so I cupped my hands and did it again, as loud as I could.

  “Get the hell out of there! Anywhere! Run!”

  He wasn’t back by the door to the bagel factory anymore, but he looked up in time to see the speeding car and to jump into the recess at a back door from some other shop. The car tore past him, sideswiping the wall and leaving paint on the concrete block. Then it swerved back away from the building, did a clumsy high speed U-turn, and stopped again. The driver’s window wound slowly down.

  Nice work, Jackson. You’re still standing up, idiot.

  “Oh, shit,” I said aloud. The face in the car window, even from that distance and with a hand up to screen his eyes from the sun, was unmistakable: Evans. And there was no doubt that he had seen me.

  I turned and ran down the back side of the berm, going straight across the road at the bottom, down through a small ditch, and up again, onto the black rock ballast of a railroad embankment. Behind me, I heard the blurbling turbine-like noise again and then the sound of the engine screaming, revving out of control. Off to my right, a freight train was highballing toward me, maybe a quarter of a mile away, and the engineer blew his horn. Maybe he saw me, or maybe he just liked to blow his horn. In any case, I relieved him of the awesome responsibility of running me down.

  I crossed the tracks, went down another narrow ditch and up another embankment to more tracks. There was a train coming here, too, from my left, but not as fast and not as close. I could beat it, easily. Its engines were laboring hard, belching diesel smoke, hauling their load up a long grade. If the engineer saw me, he didn’t bother to say so by blowing his horn. Behind me, the uncontrolled revving of the Chevy engine got louder, and I wondered if the car had rolled over.