by Joe Gores
Thud! Crash! Crunch!
Margarete, screaming and wringing work-roughened hands, looked down the escalator to her septuagenarian husband crumpled at its foot. Karl lay in an unnatural position, his only movement the flapping of one hand as each stair passed beneath it. Horrified clerks were dashing about, the manager was coming from his office at a dead run, the floor man was already calling for an ambulance on his cordless phone.
* * *
In San Francisco, her office manager duties being post-move slow, Giselle Marc was on the street. She’d gotten her driver’s license just before the quake—on her 32nd birthday, yet!—and since then had been doing all the field work she could squeeze in. More valuable to DKA at her desk, perhaps, but she loved it out here. And she was good at it.
Well, maybe she didn’t always love it. Maybelle Pernod, fat, black, and 61, should have been home bouncing grandchildren on her knee. Instead, after a week of skip-tracing, Giselle had found her sweating off the pounds over a pressing machine in a dry-cleaning plant on Third Street’s 4600 block. They had to shout to hear each other over the hiss-s-s-swhoosh of the pressers, sweat stippling their faces and running down between their breasts as they faced each other through clouds of steam.
At issue was a 1991 Continental that was two payments down.
“Woman, Ah cain’t give up ma car!”
“You, have to, Maybelle. We’ve got no current residence address on you—”
“Hain’t rightly settled into my new place yet—”
“Maybelle, you don’t have a new place. No res add, casual labor here at the cleaner’s, your third payment comes delinquent the end of the week—”
Maybelle’s dark eyes gleamed stubbornly in her ebony face. She stuck out an ample lower lip. “Hain’t gonna give up ma car.”
Giselle held up the coil wire she had taken from beneath the hood of the Connie before entering the plant.
“That isn’t the question here, Maybelle. I thought maybe you’d want to remove your personal possessions before it goes.”
“But that car… I don’t got that car, I don’t got…”
Big fat tears rolled down Maybelle’s big fat cheeks like rain down a windowpane. Giselle had to stiffen up before she got all soggy, as Larry Ballard sometimes did with hard-luck women.
“Maybelle, the car is history. Do you want your personal property or not?”
Maybelle swiped a catcher’s-mitt hand across her eyes and gave Giselle the keys. “Honey, you jes leave all that stuff in that Connie. Maybelle get her car back, you jes wait an see.”
* * *
Within hours, like concentric rings of wavelets from a stone tossed into a pond, word about Karl Klenhard’s plunge down the escalator began going out from the Midwest to the rom scattered around the country. Officially, Gypsies do not exist in the United States; in reality, as many as two million of them from four “nations” and some sixty different tribes roam the land unrecorded and unchecked by an indifferent bureaucracy.
The King is down, went the word. The King is injured… the King is badly injured… the King (only whisper this) may not recover…
The strongest candidates for his crown were both working out of San Francisco. One was a woman known to the rom as Yana, and to the straight, gadjo, non-Gypsy world as Madame Miseria. The other was Rudolph Marino, who right now looked not like a Gypsy but like a Sicilian who had gotten his MBA from Harvard and had aced the bar exam on his way to Mouthpiece for the Mob.
Marino’s gleaming black razor-cut was thick and lustrous, the planes of his swarthy face piratical. His pearl-grey suit, ghosted out of a Rodeo Drive clothiers in that oldest of gags, a suitcase with a snap-up bottom, was worth $1,200; his maroon silk foulard wore a faux ruby stickpin as big as his thumb.
As he sauntered up to Reception at the venerably luxurious St. Mark Hotel, where California Street starts its swoop from Nob Hill down to the financial district, he covertly sized up the check-in clerk. She wore a name tag that said MARLA and she was tall and blond and businesslike; but he saw the little click in her eyes when they met his. Useful. Perhaps very useful. Already he was fitting her into his plan.
“May I help you, Mr….”
“Grimaldi,” said Marino. He caressed her face with black eyes, limpid yet with cold depths that made gadje girls go weak at the knees. He laid a Goldcard on the desktop. “Angelo Grimaldi from New York. I have a reservation. A suite.”
Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The screen scrolled its reservation arcana. “Here it is, Mr. Grimaldi.” Their eyes met again. She fumbled getting the registration blank on the desktop before him. “I hope you will enjoy your stay with us.”
He let his eyes widen very slightly. He tapped a finger on the face of her telephone to show he had memorized her extension.
“I am sure that I will, cara.”
He stalked away, followed onto the elevator by one of the Mark’s ancient bellmen burdened with Louis Vuitton luggage picked up by a Florida tribe from a Worth Avenue shoppe torched in an insurance scam. To Maria the Check-in Clerk he seemed a leopard on the loose among the flocks of tourists—mostly name-tagged, camera-laden Japanese. She made a small noise in her throat, then jerked herself erect, reddening at her own X-rated thoughts.
In the elevator, Marino was also occupied with his thoughts, and indeed she was part of them. But not as she might have wished. Women, though useful and capable of giving great pleasure, were unclean. Especially gadje women. He would use her, nothing more, during the three weeks before the real Grimaldi returned from the Maine woods to find his Manhattan apartment rifled and his credit cards stolen. Three weeks.
Time enough. Marino’s elaborate scam on the hotel’s management would be his greatest coup to date.
* * *
On the far side of Russian Hill, Larry Ballard and Patrick Michael O’Bannon—O’B to the troops at DKA—were getting into the elevator at the Montana, a high-rise co-op overlooking bowl-shaped Aquatic Park from the foot of Polk Street. The site had been zoned low-rise until certain of the City’s key officials had found their Christmas stockings stuffed with—miracle of miracles!—foreign vacations and new cars and fur coats for their wives. Subsequently—another miracle!—the Montana Development Corporation had been granted the supposedly impossible building code variances it sought.
“Just your typical San Francisco success story,” O’B was explaining to Ballard as they rode up in the elevator.
Larry didn’t answer. He was getting his fierce expression in place for Pietro Uvaldi, a piece of cake who lived the good life at the Montana with his latest poopsie. Unfortunately, Pietro had fallen behind on the payments for his $83,500 Mercedes 500SL sports convertible.
Ballard considered him a piece of cake because Pietro was an interior decorator—nudge, nudge, wink, wink—while Ballard was blatantly hetero and unwittingly macho, eight years a manhunter, a shade under six feet tall, 180 pounds, with sun-bleached blond hair and a hawk nose and killer blue eyes and a hard-won brown belt in karate.
He flipped the coin O’B had handed him. O’B called it in the air. “Tails.”
The coin’s reverse glinted in the elevator’s plush carpet.
“Two out of three,” said Ballard quickly.
O’B merely shook his head and pocketed his coin without revealing that it had tails on both sides. While not Ballard’s physical equal—slight, 50 years old, with a leathery freckled drinker’s face and greying red hair—O’B was wily as a Market Street hustler, fast-talking as a southern tent preacher. Some quarter-century before he had broken in on credit jewelry, the world’s toughest repo work: you can’t pop the ignition on a diamond wedding set and drive it away from the curb.
“Sorry, Larry me lad. I get to drive the Mercedes and you get to make out the condition report and file the police report.”
They left the elevator at the twelfth floor. O’B rang Pietro’s bell and straightened his tie and let his face relax into its world-weary expression; Ballard’s
fierce expression was already in place. But the door was opened by a six-foot-six 240-pound man wearing pink spiked hair and black leather underwear with chrome studs. His biceps were like grapefruit.
Certainly not Pietro the defaulting decorator. Perchance his poopsie? But hey, no sweat: to O’B and Ballard, those stalwart repomen, interior decorators and those who slept with them all ate a lot of quiche.
A voice in the background called, “Freddi, who is it?”
“Two guys to see you.”
“How exciting! Show them in, darling, show them in.”
Ballard and O’B already were filling the antechamber with their collective bulk, mean and world-weary expressions in place. As expected, fearsome Freddi (Freddi?) faded away without challenge. Pietro, small, precise, barefoot, wore a silk smoking of an incredible green paisley and looked as if he might have danced a mean Lambada during its fifteen minutes of fame.
“From the bank,” grated O’B.
“About the Mercedes,” snarled Ballard.
“You… want… to take… my… Mercedes?”
“As in two payments down,” sneered Ballard, flexing.
“The keys.” O’B held out an inexorable palm.
Pietro got a glazed look in his eyes. His color suddenly matched that of his paisley jacket. He crossed to the coat closet where his topcoat was hanging, the perspiration of distress etching his bare soles on the polished hardwood floor.
O’B turned to grin at Ballard. The keys would be in the topcoat pocket. An easy repo. The old mouth-breather routine got to this sort of creampuff every time.
Pietro turned back with a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun he’d taken from behind the topcoat. Ballard’s mouth fell open. O’B’s riot of freckles was suddenly very prominent against the pallor replacing his ruddy drinker’s complexion.
“Wait a minute,” he said, the extended hand now palm-out like a traffic cop’s.
Pietro broke open the shotgun with a jerk of his stubby square-nailed hands. Clear lacquer glinted on the nails.
Ballard said, “You don’t have to—”
Pietro rammed a double-O shell up the shotgun’s nose. Ballard’s and O’B’s eyes met. The whites showed all the way around, like those of spooked horses. Each hoped to see the other miraculously transformed into James Bond lounging against the door frame, silenced 9mm Walther PPK in hand. Neither did.
They began in unison, “We can work something ou—”
Pietro rammed another double-O up the shotgun’s other nostril. He slammed the gun shut with the clap of doom.
Taking the twelve flights to the ground floor, O’B and Ballard didn’t bother with the elevator. They barely used the stairs.
* * *
Over in North Beach, last night’s stale beer and cigarettes still fouled the air of the Pink Flesh, a topless bar somehow surviving Broadway’s Carol Doda days. On a minuscule stage an overage blonde in an underage costume lackadaisically bumped-and-ground to the canned music. No one, not even herself, paid the slightest heed to her gyrations. Most of the customers were Chinese, but behind the stick was a tough-faced Italian who sprinkled salt in beer glasses, scrubbed them, sloshed them around in hot sudsy water, and put them upside down to drain.
Once upon a time, Chinatown and Italian North Beach happily had shunted bilingual insults at each other across Broadway from Columbus Ave all the way to the Tunnel. In those halcyon days, Broadway was a knife-cut between the racial entities. But the topless ’70s weakened the strong Italian presence, and the open-armed ’80s brought a vast influx of legal and illegal Hong Kong FOBs—Fresh off the Boats—into Chinatown. So many Chinese immigrants spilled across Broadway that for a time it looked as if the Italians would disappear from North Beach.
But everything that goes around comes around, as they say, and in the tight-ass ’90s, legal and illegal Italian immigrants began flooding back in, shouldering aside the Chinese, replacing the Italian families that had fled to the suburbs.
Hence the Pink Flesh: Italian ownership, Chinese clientele, suspended between cultures. And, being topless, as anachronistic as a VW van wearing peace symbols and psychedelic colors.
Among the customers dotting the stick like adolescent acne was one who was neither Italian nor Chinese: a swarthy gent who that week called himself Ramon Ristik. He might have been a Roosian, a French or Turk or Proosian—but he was in fact a Gypsy. Brother of that Yana (a.k.a. Madame Miseria) who was in line for possible succession to the damaged King’s throne.
Ristik was trying to read the palm of one Theodore Winston White III, a slender half-drunk blond chap descended from Marin County’s rarefied heights for a day in the fleshpots.
“You don’t understand,” Teddy said, rescuing his hand from Ristik with drunken gravity. “There is nothing you can tell me. Nothing. Never knew my mother, never knew my father…”
“Yezz, yezz, I know,” buzzed Ristik in uninterested gutturals, reaching again for the hand. “Izz most difficult.”
Teddy again pulled it away. “I was adopted right after I was born. Never knew ’em. My parents. But I’ve always felt… there was something hanging over me…”
“Fate,” said Ristik. “Yezz. Izz bad. Izz very bad. That izz why I must…”
He finally succeeded in snaring Teddy’s hand. He turned it palm-up on the bartop. He stared at it. Teddy didn’t want to be interested, but the very intensity of Ristik’s attention was like a focused burning glass. Ristik emitted a low moan.
Teddy demanded, despite himself, “What is it? What…”
But Ristik had dropped Teddy’s hand as if it were the monkey’s severed paw, capable of scuttling off around the bartop all by itself. His buzzing sibilants were gone.
“My God, man! You’re too heavy for me, I can’t handle it!”
“What do you see? What—”
“This is a job requires my sister!” Ristik exclaimed hoarsely. “She’s the only one strong enough to deal with this!”
“Deal with what?” Teddy looked about to burst into tears.
Ristik leaped to his feet, clasped Teddy briefly and fiercely to his bosom, sorrow and terror in his face.
“The curse!” he hissed. “You’ve been cursed!”
Then he rushed out, thrusting aside the threadbare plush curtain over the open doorway and letting in a stream of dusty sunlight to impale Teddy’s hand palm-up on the bar. Teddy jerked the hand away, scattered paper money across the stick, and ran out, yelling, after Ristik.
CHAPTER TWO
Margarete Klenhard sat beside the Emergency Room Admitting Desk in Steubenville General Hospital, answering questions. Two of her answers were even true—the man calling himself Karl had indeed been born, and he was indeed her husband. He had, in fact, paid a $500 bride price for her over half a century before, back in the days when a dollar had meant something.
Hovering over her chair like a parent at a first recital was a large man with an extra chin and bullet eyes and a fringe of greying hair around a bald pate. Manager of the largest department store in Stupidville, he hoped that by paying Kail’s medical bills he could avert a lawsuit for negligence in the matter of the escalator—and thus avoid skyrocketing his liability rates through the roof.
“Name of patient?”
“Karl Klenhard.” Margarete’s accent was heavy as a Black Forest cake. Her hands mauled the cheap handbag in her lap.
The nurse typed. “Date of birth?”
“My Karl is in Prussia born on the twenty-eighth of June, nineteen hundred and fourteen—the very day that the Archduke Ferdinand is in Sarajevo assassinated to start the Great War.”
“Yes, I see,” said the nurse, typing. She had a round red face and didn’t see at all: she was of that age which thought Desert Storm had been the Great War. “U.S. citizen?”
“Ja. Naturalized. On the boat in nineteen twenty-five to New York City he comes. To the Statue of Liberty.”
“Religion?”
“We are Lutheran, of course,” said a scanda
lized Margarete.
“Emergency notification?”
“Me. Margarete Klenhard.” Her real name was Lulu Zlachi, as Karl’s was Staley Zlachi, but what’s in a name? She laid a hand on her heart. “For more than fifty years I am his wife.”
“Insurance?”
“We have none. We are poor folk. We—”
“No insurance.” Typing. “That’s going to be a prob—”
The department store manager cut in hurriedly, “Ah, the store will be… ah… handling monetary matters in, um…”
On the floor above, Staley was being rolled into the X-ray room on a blanket-covered gurney. Two husky orderlies in green gowns carefully took hold of the ends of the sheet on which he lay and slid Staley onto the cold metal table. The X-ray machine hulked over him like some obscene metal vulture. At the move, he cried out.
The hovering nurse made a distressed sound in her throat.
“We have to turn him on his side.” To Staley she said, unwillingly, “Sir, can you—”
Staley only groaned. The orderlies gingerly began to turn him. He shrieked with the pain and fainted just as Lulu burst through the door. The nurse grabbed her to keep her from throwing herself upon her husbands silent form like a dishonored Roman upon his sword. Lulu could only stand there, weeping copious tears and mauling her purse, as the vulture lowered its electronically charged beak to Staley’s ashen flesh.
* * *
In San Francisco, Bart Heslip got out of his DKA company car because Sarah Walinski had just pulled her year-old Dodge Charger up across the sidewalk on the other side of the narrow Richmond District street. Sarah had beautiful taffy hair but was built like a bridge piling and had a face like a firedoor, with rivets for eyes. Since she was a skip out of New Jersey with the Charger, and had skipped again after running a previous repoman off with an axe, Heslip had a REPO ON SIGHT order for her car.
He was not afraid of playing hatchet-tag with Sarah: he’d won thirty-nine out of forty pro fights before deciding ten years before, then age 24, that he would never be middleweight champeen a de woild. At least not without having his brains scrambled into instant Alzheimer’s.
