Cons, Scams, and Grifts

by Joe Gores

  That’s when his towel fell off. Through no conscious agency of his own, honest. But still, revealing the tumescence of long abstinence and the remembered tantalizing glimpse of Midori’s taut ivory haunches and glowing golden thighs all those months ago. She put a hand up over her mouth and giggled.

  “You come as you are, Rarry.”

  Then that exquisite little hand reached out and took hold of Rarry’s distended handle and led him down the hall to mutual ecstasy in her tiny, scrupulously neat apartment.

  ten

  The intercom on Kearny’s desk buzzed. Giselle flicked the switch. Jane Goldson’s clipped British voice came tinnily from the other end of the room. She was speaking in low tones.

  “There’s a Mr. and Mrs. Winslett here to see Mr. Kearny and they have their knickers in a twist.”

  Watching them come down the office toward her, Giselle heard a lot of alarm bells going off.

  Winslett was a big bristling man, six feet and over 240 pounds, with a red lined face and a stubbly brown beard and the wide mouth and glittering blue eyes of a blustering, first-class bully. A not unfamiliar type in the repo trade.

  The woman was petite, big with child, with long straight blond hair and a face that normally would have been very pretty. But she had a split lip and a swollen purplish jaw and a black eye and a feverish look. Her short-sleeved maternity dress was grease-smeared on the left hip. Her left elbow was skinned. Giselle could almost smell the fear coming off her.

  A lot of alarm bells.

  “I wanna see a fucker named Kearny!” yelled Winslett. “Look what he did! My wife is eight months pregnant and—”

  “You’re saying he assaulted her?” Giselle was furious.

  “Punched her out, knocked her down—after he took an axe to my garage door. Then he stole my brother-in-law’s car.” He slapped down a sheaf of Polaroid photos on the desktop. “I got pitchurs. So what’re you gonna do about this?”

  Giselle turned to the almost-cringing blonde.

  “Mrs. Winslett, are you saying our field man did this to you in the course of effecting a totally legal repossession?”

  Her good blue eye—the one not swelled shut—met Giselle’s steely gaze with a sort of panic. She spoke in a half-whisper. “I . . . it happened like my husband says.”

  As Giselle started out of her swivel chair imperiously, Winslett’s ham-size hand came up to push her back down. But his arm was halted in mid-movement by a hand as large as his own. He was staring into Ken Warren’s slate-cold eyes.

  Ellen touched Giselle’s arm, her face pleading. “Please.”

  They looked at each other, woman to woman.

  Giselle said, “Kenny. It’s all right.”

  Warren released the arm, jerked a thumb at the door.

  “Hnowt!” he barked. “Hnah!”

  Winslett wavered, then grabbed his wife’s wrist, yanked her after him so hard she almost cried out. As they went through the back door that led to the street, Ken Warren started after them.

  Giselle called sharply, “No, Kenny, let it lie!”

  “Na’ll knust mnake hsnure hney gnow.”

  Make sure they go. She sat down shakily. She desperately needed a cigarette, but didn’t have one. What in God’s name had Larry done down there in Pacifica? And where was he?

  Larry parked in the fenced lot behind the office. He felt loose and easy and had a foolish grin on his face. Two hours with Midori. He went in to sit down across from Giselle.

  “What did you do down there in Pacifica?” she demanded.

  The look on Giselle’s face got through even his post-Midori euphoria. “Do? The Corvette was there so I took it.”

  “Street-parked?”

  “In the garage. What—”

  “Garage locked?”

  “No. The overhead was down but it wasn’t—”

  “Mrs. Winslett was in the garage with you?”

  “Yeah, she came in with a load of dirty laundry just when I was hooding the Corvette. Why the third degree? Did I forget to genuflect when I came in?”

  “Why did you use Dan’s name?”

  “I gave her one of Dan’s cards ’cause I was out of—”

  “Winslett says you took an axe to the garage door, which was locked, that his wife walked in on you during the repo, and that you beat her up so you could get away with the car.”

  Well, hell, and he had liked the woman, too. “Did she show you any bruises or scrapes or anything?”

  “Larry, she’d been beaten up, believe me. Really bad. A black eye and a split lip, bruised jaw, skinned elbow . . .” Giselle was thinking like the office manager of a hard-nosed repo agency again instead of an empathetic woman. “We’re in trouble. They’ve got our card, they’ve got photos of the axed garage door, I bet they’ve got photos of her all banged up . . .”

  “I’ll go down and talk to the neighbors tonight. Somebody’ll have seen him chopping at that door himself—”

  “You’ll not go near that place, Larry Ballard! You’ll not go near Pacifica. And you’re off the classic cars right now.”

  “Hell, I don’t want to back off those classics, I—”“She’s Wiley’s wife’s sister, for God sake! You stay away from that house and those cars!”

  In the early years of the last century, word of something like Ephrem Poteet’s murder, probably at Yana’s hands, would have traveled up and down the highways and byways in the old Gypsy patteran (leaf) or trail language.

  Are the campfire ashes still warm? Has rain partially obliterated footprints and wagon ruts? Drop a handful of grass at a crossroads. Draw a cross with chalk or look for one made with two sticks (always check which arm is longer). A notched stick, a woven pattern of twigs in a low bush, feathers stuck on a tree, hairs from a horse’s tail, a strip of bark, a rag . . .

  Nobody used patteran anymore, not in the States, but the phone was the Gypsies’ new trail language. Most still defiantly could not read or write, but all of them could talk. Devèl, how they could talk! And the talk was of nothing except Ephrem Poteet’s death at the hands of his wife, Yana. Then word went out that a pomana would be held for Ephrem in Point Richmond.

  He died in L.A., they had no body to bury, and since his meager possessions had been impounded as evidence, they could not be burned or smashed in the traditional Romi way. But still they would have their ritual feast of fruits and grains in his honor even without a body to lie in state with gold pieces on its eyelids.

  Just at dusk before the streetlights came on, they drifted up the hill to Rudolph Marino’s dark-shingled house in Point Richmond across the Bay from San Francisco. They were relatively few in number, maybe a dozen, with no small children; the event was solemn and few of the kumpania had known Ephrem personally.

  Rudolph was living in Point Richmond because most of the permanent Muchwaya residents of the Bay Area lived in Richmond, and because his Florida hotel scam collapsed and he had to get out of Palm Beach quick. He was wary of leaving his footprints across the plush carpets of upscale hostelries for a while.

  Point Richmond, once called East Yard, was the oldest part of that East Bay city. In the 1970s, its houses, stores, restaurants, and churches were repainted, restored, and revived. It was sandwiched between the San Rafael–Richmond 580 skyway— beyond which lay the Chevron oil refinery—the railway yards, and the slowly awakening Richmond harbor.

  In matters of ritual, nobody was more exacting than Lulu. It was she who had organized the pomana. But Staley wanted to use the occasion for his own purposes after his conference with Willem. What he planned was for the good of the kumpania; but like any monarch, he knew that his subjects needn’t always know everything he was doing on their behalf. This was the ideal time to unveil the plan. The most influential members of the tribe were here.

  Yana was a major if covert topic of gossip among the Romni preparing the traditional meal.

  In the modern appliance-filled kitchen a willowy teenage girl named Pearsa Demetro began to lay out the Ta
rot cards, softly chanting an old Gypsy incantation from Tuscany in a clear high voice:

  “Venti cinque carte siete!

  Venti cinque diavoli diventerete . . .”

  Lulu shushed her, and to the accompanying giggles of the other teenagers added sternly, “Yana’s husband is dead, so a song about cursing your husband is close to marime.”

  But as soon as Lulu turned away to tend the stove, Pearsa laid out another card, studied it, then started another stanza.

  “Diventerete, anderete

  Nel corpo, nel sangue nell anima.”

  “No more!” exclaimed Lulu, really angry this time. “You don’t know how powerful that is!”

  “But Mami ”—she used the honorary term for grandmother—“I don’t have a husband. I’m just practicing.”

  Like Yana, Pearsa had been born with a caul over her head, which gave her many powers—the second sight among them. So Lulu could not bring herself to object when the girl chanted the final stanza.

  “Nei’ sentimenti del corpo

  Del mio marito . . .”

  eleven

  After the ritual fruits and grains, the pomana grew boisterous, as wine loosened tongues and limbs and sharpened memories of the deceased. The zengin saz played, weaving a long road of melody back to a time and place only the oldest of them remembered, but where they, and Ephrem Poteet, had nevertheless been together. The men danced their souls, heavily, but with grace. Women set down their dishes and reached for their daires and tambourines. Staley, sensitive to the moment, signaled the musicians, who called to the dancers with a Bibke bibke bibke romke udt!, bringing them together to the strains of naçti uçava. He cannot get up. Ephrem had fallen on the Longo Drom, but they were people of the road. If they listened, they could hear his darbuka made of clay playing now.

  Staley, Baro Rom of the Muchwaya, nodded the band to silence, and began to speak a ritual opening in Romani.

  “By your leave, Romale, assembled men of consequence, heed my words. A journey lies before us. In my hand I hold an invitation from the Holy Father himself. This year marks the two thousandth birthday of Holy Mother Church. We were in Rome before the Church was born. We were among those who built it. And now our tabor shall be there for the canonization of one of our own, Ceferino Jiminez Malla!”

  He had used the word tabor—a large group of related Gypsies traveling together in horse-drawn wagons—deliberately, and was gratified that many responded to the dream. There was a buzz of astonishment in the room. Few of them knew the saint-to-be, but none would admit it. The first ghost of a challenge was raised by Josef Adamo, who scammed the gadje as a paving contractor. He had an important stomach and greying ringlets and black eyes that missed nothing.

  “We should have been planning this a year ago. Nearly five months of Millennium year have passed. We should be there now.”

  Sly Lulu had asked him to raise the question to forestall other challengers. By arrangement, Rudolph Marino answered for Staley. Being the heir apparent, he was listened to as closely as the King himself.

  “We will be there next month, believe me. With six months to carry out our plans. There is the promise of a very quick and very large score.”

  “Promised by who?” Adamo asked bluntly.

  Staley smote himself on the chest with a clenched fist.

  “By your King.”

  There was a smattering of appreciative laughter. Nobody was better than Staley at finding ways for the Muchwaya to score.

  “I am satisfied,” Adamo said formally, and sat down.

  But then Wasso Tomeshti said, “We must go in style as befits American Gypsies returning to the homeland.”

  When not working, he was the most traditional-looking of Gypsies: a day’s beard, twirling mustachios, a red bandanna around his thick neck. When working, he shaved and wore suits and bought electronic appliances with checks that bounced, then sold them with phony service warranties at cutthroat prices out of storefronts rented by the week in big-city low-income areas. The government never saw the sales taxes he collected.

  “To this end, I can offer all of my brothers the very best deals on cell phones, beepers, pocket calculators, travel clocks, earphone radios . . .”

  Staley waited for someone to question him about the myriad details attendant upon such a move, details he might have forgotten himself, which was not so uncommon these days. Again it was Adamo who obliged him.

  “How do we finance such a journey?”

  Before anyone else could speak, a female voice asked, “And what will we do once we are there?”

  At this last, silence fell over them. Pearsa Demetro, who had sung the incantation over Lulu’s objections, had so far forgotten herself as to speak out in a formal kris.

  “GO!” Staley roared at her. “Go, wash the dishes!” He waved a peremptory arm. “All of you cshays, go!”

  The four teenage girls fled into the kitchen in frightened silence. Staley turned back to the adults.

  “The voyage will pay for itself once we are there. But . . . to get there . . .” He paused dramatically. “I have a plan. It is based on the trust the Muchwaya have for their King.”

  “I will hear my King!” declared Nanoosh Tsatshimo.

  His specialty was bogus electroplating. He operated in Jewish neighborhoods and indeed, looked more Semitic than Rom. It was he, backed by Sonia Lovari, whose scam was as a Native American, who first called for a formal kris to declare Yana Poteet marime. His reasons, unlike Sonia’s, were traditional.

  Staley let his eyes flash with delight, patted his paunch.

  “Good! Then I will tell you what will be necessary if we are to succeed. Each Muchwaya clan—Johns, Millers, Costellos, Ristiks, and Steves—must contribute one-third of all the money they make to our common travel fund for the next month.”

  “How can we do that?” Voso Makri asked softly. He was a startlingly handsome blue-eyed Greek Gypsy with a great shock of golden hair, recently arrived from Thessaloniki. Not yet well known in the kumpania, he was said to have computer skills equal to those of Rudolph himself. “The Bay Area is Kalderasha territory. We can barely eke out a living here, let alone contribute a third of our meager gleanings to the tabor.”

  Perhaps encouraged by his objection, Sonia Lovari spoke up. She wore buckskin and a long plait of black hair down her back because her con was as the last living member of Ishi’s tribe.

  “I can go on my own much cheaper than to share with—” She stopped abruptly, then finished up almost lamely, “With some who do not carry their own weight.”

  “But Sonia,” said Staley, “who are we individually, you and I, without our kumpania, without our tabor ?”

  Rudolph said bluntly, “I am already working on our travel plans. We will all go together, as the nation of Muchwaya.”

  Staley reminded them of the millions of pilgrims already in Rome for the year-long Catholic celebration of the Church’s 2,000th birthday. The Holy City overflowing with celebrants from every nation on earth, many of them deeply religious, more of them country bumpkins, most of them ignorant of credit cards and even traveler’s checks. There they all were with money in their pockets—and with their arms upraised in praise of God.

  Immaculata Bimbai, who was blond and looked like a countess, spoke up. She was 32 and looked 22, and her scam was fainting in jewelry stores.

  “Baro Rom, what of the Italian Romi? We are American Gypsies, will they not resent us?”

  Staley spoke sagely.

  “Are we not pilgrims like any others? For fifteen hundred years the Romi have been going to Rome for pilgrimages and canonizations. Our people were the Papal envoys across the face of Europe during the Middle Ages.”

  Posing as Papal envoys, thought Rudolph as Staley pontificated in English, but why put too fine a point on it?

  “That is another reason we gotta raise a lot of money quick—so we don’t work no hardship on our European brethren. I have many plans, plans which will astound you. But first—do we
have agreement? If so, you all gotta see Lasso here to get passports, and you gotta pay for them yourselves.”

  Lasso looked pleased. The Gypsies glanced at one another. They hated to pay for anything, but their imaginations were fired. Were they not all in accord? All but Sonia Lovari, on her feet once again.

  “Baro Rom, we cannot leave this city until the soul of our dead brother, Ephrem Poteet, has been consoled. What are we going to do about his wife, Yana Poteet—the woman who murdered him? I spit upon her shadow, I would curse her progeny except the syphilitic whore will never be able to bear children.”

  Everyone knew that Sonia hated Yana for telling a gadjo repossessor where to find the Cadillac Sonia was driving. Letting her initiate a witch-hunt would only interfere with their search for Yana on the sly. Lulu rose to speak in council for the first time that night.

  “Yana Poteet is a disgrace as a Romni and no longer a member of this kumpania. We have already in solemn kris declared her marime, so leave her to the gadje justice. Murder is a blasphemy that breaks even their teeth. They will avenge our dead brother for us.”

  Staley had them in the palm of his hand. He spread his arms wide in benediction, every inch the King.

  “Now go, my children, to bring glory upon this tribe!”

  The three of them were at last alone in Rudolph’s kitchen. By candlelight, Lulu looked old and worn.

  “Best way to go to Rome to bring this glory on our tribe is find Yana and get back for the kumpania the money she stole from Ephrem’s body,” she said.

  “Or for ourselves.” Rudolph made a deprecatory gesture. “We shall not forget Yana.”

  “We don’t know the gadjo world well enough to find her in it,” Lulu said.

  “Since we can’t find her ourselves,” said Staley, “we have to get someone to look for her who does know the gadjo world.”

  “Who?” demanded Rudolph with surprise in his voice. “The repossessors with whom we dealt in the matter of the thirty-two Cadillacs. Daniel Kearny Associates.”

  Rudolph started to chuckle; it grew into open-throated laughter as he savored the irony. Lulu, lost in her fears of retribution should they break the marime curse laid on Yana, hadn’t yet caught on. She finished the last of the memorial mixture of wheatberry, cinnamon, honey, and sultanas before objecting.