32 Cadillacs

Chapter nine

The black stretch Caddy whispered up Taylor to the blinking yellow light at California. Behind the wheel was Rudolph Marino in another $1,200 suit. Inbound traffic streamed across in front of him as he edged the limo farther up the steep incline. Ignoring a glaring old woman in a cloth coat who shook a fist at him, he violated the pedestrian walk to swing down California Street with his right blinker on.

Thirty-one brand-new Cadillacs — and no way the bank could ever find out who had them or where any of them were! The sheer brilliance of that scheme alone ensured him immortality in the legends of the rom. Plus this audacious hotel scam, another first; nobody could stop him from becoming King of the Gypsies.

But just in case, he would find the thirty-second Cadillac, the pink ragtop, and take it away from Yana to present as his own for the King to be buried in.

Cool shadow swept over the limo on the down-ramp to the St. Mark garage. After parking, he rode the escalator up to the lobby. Beyond the rest rooms and phone bank, he pushed open a door marked HOTEL EMPLOYEES ONLY; thanks to unwitting Marla the Check-in Clerk, he knew which of the four offices to enter and who to ask for.

A very decorative secretary wearing colored contacts and Obsession and a man-tailored blue pinstripe suit with enormous shoulders was putting the plastic cover on her computer when he came through the door. Wearing that perfume to work, she had to be sleeping with her boss.

“Angelo Grimaldi. One of your penthouse suites.” Marino had chosen the end of business hours to heighten drama and tension. He pointed at her intercom, put into his voice the sort of steel his role demanded. “Harley Gunnarson. Now.”

“Sir, I’ll have to call hotel security if you don’t—”

“Ten days ago a terrorist death threat was phoned to this hotel. Do you want that threat carried out?”

Tense minutes later, Gunnarson, the St. Mark manager, opened his door to stand there frowning. He was a heavyweight mid-50s with thinning hair and piercing eyes and a hawk nose; the sort of man who looks soft and then beats you straight sets at handball.

“All right, Grimaldi. Come in and say your piece.”

Marino sauntered past him, hoping that a penthouse suite at $900 a day carried enough weight for Gunnarson to run a check on him before calling the cops. It did: neither the big redheaded guy nor the little shrunken guy wore cop eyes.

Gunnarson gestured brusquely at the redhead, who had chiseled features and stupid blue eyes. His wide blue suit coat was unsuccessfully tailored to hide the gun under his arm.

“Shayne. Hotel Security.”

Another gesture at the shrunken man, whose rounded dome had thinning strands of grey hair combed sideways across it in a vain attempt to hide its geodesic nakedness. For at least 75 of his 80 years he would have carried no hayseed in his pockets.

“Smathers. Corporate attorney. Now what the devil do—”

“Corporate doesn’t cut it with me,” said Marino.

He figured Smathers as the man with the moxie, but he had to be sure. The old man blinked bluejay eyes, bright and amoral and full of surprising mischief behind their rimless specs.

“Too old?” he demanded in a piping, birdlike voice. “No fire in the belly? No starch in the pecker?” His chuckle was bigger than he was. “Sonny, I was a Chicago D.A. busting scumbags like you before you were born.”

“Christ, my mistake,” said Marino with Grimaldi’s tough New York inflection. He gently shook a tiny birdlike hand clawed by arthritis. “Maybe it’s these other two clowns who should drift.”

Smathers’s smile drew a thousand fine creases in his aged face. “Now they’re here, let’s humor ’em and let ’em stay.”

Marino shrugged, hooked a hip over a corner of Gunnar-son’s big messy desk. Yeah, Smathers was the Man.

Shayne rumbled, “We looked you up, wise guy.”

“In the ten minutes since I knocked on Gunnarson’s door?”

“Computers. Fax machines,” snapped Gunnarson. “We found out that back in New York you’re just some two-bit shyster, some sort of glorified corporate sharpshooter—”

“And that I’m on a fishing trip in the Maine woods where I can’t be reached, right?” Marino clasped his hands around his knee in relaxed command, looked from face to face. “I gotta ask, do I look like the kind of guy goes fishing in Maine?”

Shayne said, “Why don’t we just call the San Francisco cops and tell ’em we have the guy phoned in the bomb threat? We—”

“Better yet, call the Secret Service. They’re the men who guard the President, right?”

Marino grinned into their sudden silence. Yeah! They hadn’t reported the original bomb threat! Not to anyone! Report it and watch the Secret Service keep the President from coming anywhere near the St. Mark? Maybe keep him from coming anywhere near San Francisco? No way. A hotel man’s P.R. nightmare.

“The threat was telephoned in by the Saladin,” he said. “Iraqi fanatics whose name will appear on no Mideast terrorist flowchart but who have unlimited funding and a plan. Since the threat was for the future and wasn’t repeated, you didn’t report it to the feds. You could have. You should have. Now it’s too late.” He held up a hand. “No, I don’t know the Saladin’s plan, because nobody’s paid me to know it. But if—”

“If?” Smathers’s bluejay eyes gleamed. The smart ones were the easiest to fool; they conned themselves.

“If the hotel hires us, I’ll learn it, and then my people will deal with the Saladin. And protect the hotel’s name.”

Gunnarson sneered, “Just who the hell are your people?”

This was the moment he was there for. He spoke mainly to Smathers and the little old man’s wicked sense of conspiracy.

“Why, the Organization, of course. The Gangsters. The Mob. The Bad Guys. The Outfit. I’m Mouthpiece for the Mafia, get it?” Now he was all the Bronx. “We find these guys an’ we smoke ’em for you — all for only seventy-five large.”

Gunnarson, aghast, began, “We couldn’t possibly—”

But Marino, with a wink at Smathers, was already leaving. Of course they’d need more persuading; but why have a stretch limo custom-made to the exact specifications of the President’s own if not for a little extra persuading at the right time?

Yana, dressed in jeans and a pastel turtleneck, was getting ready for Teddy White’s second candle reading. The first had been a great success; because of the strength of the curse, she’d had to use eighteen candles at $50 each. Tonight she would be burning another eighteen candles — this time at $100 each.

For her, preparing to cast out demons did not, as it did for a Catholic priest, involve confession and absolution, nor spiritual exercise to strengthen the soul and cleanse impurities from the psyche. Yana, before getting into her low-cut silver gown that shimmered like fish scales, merely reviewed again what Ramon had gleaned from Teddy’s wallet and garbage.

Theodore Winston White III hadn’t heard that Yuppiedom, that phenomenon of the ’80s that had put Sharper Image on America’s corporate map, was now considered déclassé. He still thought the one with the most toys wins.

So he drove an Alfa-Romeo Quadrifoglio Spider. He drove a Lexus LS400. When up in the snow, he drove a Toyota 4Runner equipped with mud and snow tires, all the luxury option packages, a ski rack, and a side pocket full of lift tickets for Squaw and Incline and the Village — even though he didn’t know how to ski.

Receipts and prescriptions in the garbage, along with ads, Godiva chocolate wrappers, throwaways, coffee grounds (whole-bean fresh-ground French Roast/Guatemalan, of course), showed that:

Teddy worked out three days a week with a personal trainer, Linda Perry, at the World Gym in Kentfield, while wearing sweats with the legend Live Well, Eat Right, Die Anyway on them.

When not at the gym, Teddy wore Armani suits, Versace sportswear, custom-made dress shirts, Valentino ties, Dior underwear, Bally shoes.

Teddy belonged to the Mount Tarn Racket Club and the Pacific Union Club and, through his late adoptive father, the Bohemian Club.

Teddy had credit cards from I Magnin’s and Neiman Marcus, the American Express Goldcard, Gold MasterCard, and Visa Gold (three different lending institutions each), Tire Systems, Discover Card, the Pacific Bell phone card, the AT&T phone card, the Sprint phone card, and the MCI phone card.

Teddy had travel pass cards from Travel Access and Western Airlines (Travel Pass II) and American Airlines and Alaska Airlines and United Airlines. Hertz, Avis, and Budget, of course.

Not that he ever used any of them.

Teddy subscribed to The New York Times and Time and Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal and National Review and Playboy and Penthouse and Skin Diver and Esquire and GQ and Spy.

Not that he ever read any of them.

Teddy had check guarantee cards from seven different banks.

Not that any of them were much good. Between his monthly trust checks from the bank, he pretty much ran on empty.

Teddy also looked pale and was losing weight, and, most promising, had begun getting acupuncture treatments for a mild sciatica attack from a Chinese woman doctor named Wu.

And Teddy even now was on his way in for his second candle reading. Showing that Teddy, despite all the sophisticated trappings of his Yuppiedom, was a fool.

“He is here,” said Ramon in low tones from the doorway.

“I’ll get dressed. Keep him waiting in the hall.”

Even that was carefully calculated. The hallway was dim, the incense overpowering. An opened window behind the plush drapes made it clammy and stirred the old-fashioned crystal lampshades into an incessant tinkling contrived to unnerve. Teddy was indeed unnerved: sitting in the half-dark, shivering and squeezing his hands, he jumped and twitched like a galvanized frog when Ristik suddenly appeared before him.

“Yana is now prepared to receive you.”

The boojo room was stifling with incense and the waxy smoke of eighteen candles, as if hell itself breathed out contagions.

“You have come,” said Yana in a deep voice almost not her own. Her eyes gleamed ferally. Tonight her lips were very red, overripe — slightly obscene fruit ready to be bitten.

“I... yes, I... tonight you... you...”

“Sit.”

Teddy sat down across the little table from her. The room was dim; there was no crystal ball. Yana took his hands; already there was familiarity in this action, the shared intimacy of trysting lovers, an implied security that made her necessary.

She shut her eyes. Her silver gown shimmered as her body began a sinuous, unnerving, snakelike undulation by candlelight. Sweat rolled down between her half-bared breasts. The incense made Teddy’s head ache, made him want to lick away those rivulets of sweat, made him, for God sake, start to get an erection!

But then Yana cried out, “Chi mai diklem ande viatsa!” in a voice now definitely not her own. A voice deep, thick, guttural, almost male. “Chuda. Che chorobia.”

Terror made him bold. He had to know. “What does it mean?” he demanded. “What are you saying to me?”

She was silent. Her body had stopped writhing. She seemed not even to breathe. Her eyes were open again. In the dim light the pupils subsumed the irises, leaving only obsidian buttons that stared at him without blinking, not even once.

“I see a snake. In your buttocks. Down the back of your leg. Beware. A yellow woman touches you.” Her voice was male, throaty, threatening. Her face worked. “Needles. Beware.”

“My sciatica,” breathed Teddy. There was no way she could have known. She was indeed psychic. “My acupuncturist—”

“The yellow woman has made you sick.”

Teddy’d had the flu twice since he had started with Madam Wu. He’d gotten prescriptions for it.

“She has caused you to be... no! The snake inside your body is not from her! But... the snake grows...”

There it was again. The snake. Her words terrified him. A snake. Inside him. Growing. “You mean cane...” He had difficulty with the word. “Cancer?”

“The same snake killed your mother.”

He leaned forward, his fingers tight about her wrists. “My real mother died of cancer?”

“It is you who speaks of cancer. I speak of the snake.” Obsidian eyes, reptile eyes, the eyes of a snake. Flat, black, unwinking, without pupils. “From beyond the grave your mother warns you.” Her face, her eyes softened. “May she sleep well.”

Teddy had always known, in his heart of hearts, that his real mother was dead. Now Madame Miseria had confirmed it.

“I am but a conduit. The spirit speaks through me. She says you have much money... that is not really yours.”

“My mother’s spirit? My real mother says that I...”

But Yana’s head had fallen on her chest. Her fingers were lax in his. Her mouth had fallen open as if in profound sleep, but she was breathing rapidly, shallowly, like a person in great pain. She suddenly sprang straight up from her chair.

“Mene!” she cried, words she had memorized from the Old Testament she had loved when learning to read. “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin!”

She was staring over his head, her eyes wider than eyes could possibly be, popping out of a face now so congested it was almost purple. Teddy, no Bible scholar, whirled in dread expectation of seeing, not the words that Yahweh’s moving finger had writ on Belshazzar’s wall, but demons hulking behind him.

Nothing. No one. Just an empty room. He turned back. Yana had fallen back into her chair. She sprawled like a rag doll. She looked exhausted. Her voice was slow, dragging.

“The curse is in your body... the snake is growing there... because... when you were small... you wanted your foster parents dead... you created the snake... out of cursed money...”

“No!” cried Teddy. “I... I loved them, I...”

He went dumb. When they told him he was adopted, for a fleeting moment he’d wished them dead, to unsay the terrible knowledge of his real parents’ rejection. Or had that death wish been so that he would be left their money? Could that insidious thought have lain in ambush within his mind down the years, exactly like a snake, finally growing into... cancer?

He began thickly, “How did you know that I—”

“Give me a dollar.” She was brusque, almost cold. She snapped her fingers. “Quickly! We must test whether your money is cursed. If the snake in your body indeed comes from your money, then perhaps there is a way... one way... to save you...”

“How? Save? How can? You? You must save—”

“The dollar.”

As if mesmerized, he took out a dollar bill, started to hand it to Yana. She shook her head and pointed at the table.

“My touch would affect the power, make the curse more potent.” Another gesture, this one to a point beyond him. “Through the curtain. Water. A bowl. Quickly.”

Teddy tossed his dollar down and jumped from his chair, feeling the thick horrible ropelike snake in his buttocks and down his left leg as he ran limping across the room. Behind the curtain was a tiny alcove with a sink and a stack of ceramic bowls. He filled one from the tap, carried it back to Yana.

“Put it on the table. Put your dollar bill in it.”

He picked up the dollar from the table and dropped it in the water. They sat on either side of the bowl, watching it. The water began to discolor. But not green from the dye in the money — which was supposed to be waterproof anyway. No. It was getting pink. Then red. Getting redder. Blood-red. His mother’s blood. His own blood. In his money.

“Cursed,” Yana said in a flat voice devoid of hope or pity; and Teddy knew he was going to be sick.