32 Cadillacs

Six months before

At 5:04:09 P.M. on a Tuesday, October 17, Daniel Kearny Associates’ narrow high-shouldered old charcoal Victorian at 760 Golden Gate Avenue... fell over.

Seven-point-two on the Richter scale. That’s all it took.

In the Gay ’90s the old building had been a high-class bawdy house for San Francisco’s movers and shakers, and Dan Kearny had just gotten Landmark status for it by shaming the City into honoring these fallen women among its other heroes — madmen, tarnished athletes, dishonest cops, corrupt politicians.

But what the State of California had been unable to do in ten years of trying, the San Andreas fault, after gulping downtown Santa Cruz a hundred miles south, accomplished with a discreet belch. Only because DKA had closed early for the World Series was no one hurt during those seventeen violent seconds in which 760 was gone, gone to dust, its memories with it.

Which left the DKA Head Office (Branch Offices in All Major California Cities) abruptly located Nowhere. Yet Giselle Marc, DKa’s office manager, when surveying the tipsy splintered remains the next morning, sighed as much for the ghosts of scented ladies and boar-eyed power brokers as for DKa’s current plight.

“The damnedest finest ruins,” she murmured, echoing San Francisco’s epitaph after the Big One in ’06.

Giselle, who combined an M.A. in history with her own P.I. license, was an exquisite racehorse blonde with bedroom eyes that masked boardroom brains. Brains discovered to their sorrow by many of DKa’s cockier adversaries just moments before the hammer fell on them.

“I wish Richter had gotten flattened himself, before he invented the damn scale,” Dan Kearny growled.

Kearny was a flint-faced 52, with icy grey eyes and a cement-mixer jaw, his thinning curly hair getting frosty around the edges. His nose obviously once had met an object harder than itself moving very rapidly in the opposite direction.

“What good would that have done, Dan’l? Somebody else just would have come up with a measurement for seismic activity.”

“Seven-point-two on the Smith scale?” He chuckled for the first time in two days. “Well, what the hell, the place had gotten too small for us, anyway.”

Which was true. The upstairs clerical offices had been a rabbit warren of tiny rooms crowded with too many people and too much equipment, and Kearny and the field men had been crammed into mouseholes in an under-the-building garage with room left over for only a repo or two. For over a decade DKA had leased storage lots all over town for the cars it had repossessed.

“I wonder if the phones still work?” Kearny muttered.

They didn’t. But those down at 340 Eleventh Street did. Years before, when the state first started trying to get the old Victorian condemned for a Social Services parking lot, Kearny had bought a disused laundry South of Market as a backup site, and had been desultorily remodeling it a weekend at a time ever since. Now, suddenly, that old laundry was the New Jerusalem.

As Kearny and Giselle talked, by honest, genuine, sheer chance, a man calling himself Karl Klenhard and his wife of over fifty years, calling herself Margarete, were waiting for the light at a corner in Steubenville (“Where the Tall Corn Grows”), Iowa. Steubenville — not to be confused with the much more nifty Steubenville in Ohio — was county seat for 9,581 souls and several hundred square miles of rich alluvial flatland below the bluffs of the Mighty Mississippi.

Steubenville had been settled in the late 1800s by farmers from Trier, Prussia; in those early days, paddlewheel steamers plying the river offered tempting access to markets for their produce. But times change, markets shift, prices rise and fall, and with the Midwest farm crunch Steubenville had become Stupidville to those unfortunate enough to still live there.

Karl did not look stupid, but he did fit right in with the local populace: his Santa Claus smile, great walrus mustache, and gold watch chain glinting across a benevolent expanse of belly all suggested the retired German burgher. As for Margarete, her plump bosom, high color, and twinkly eyes above glowing apple cheeks made her look like a ceramic cookie jar. Only the cigarette smouldering between the first two fingers of her right hand hinted at anything other than classic Hausfrau.

Here’s where chance comes in: as they waited at the light, an elderly Eldorado with those majestic ’50s tailfins stretching out forever behind it rolled by them. Karl leaned jauntily on his ornate gold-headed cane and gave Margarete a nostalgic little pat on the fanny in honor of other tailfins in other times.

“Remember the pink nineteen fifty-eight Caddy convertible we rode to my coronation? Ah, darling, what times we had!”

“Yes, my dumpling,” said Margarete with shining eyes. Then a hint of sadness crossed her face. “We’re getting old, Liebchen. It makes one think of retirement.”

The light had changed. They started slowly across the intersection, two loving old people arm in arm.

“Retirement.” Karl’s voice savored the word, but his eyes had taken on a speculative gleam. “Nineteen fifty-eight.” He smiled a beatific smile. “The year I became King.”