32 Cadillacs

Chapter one

T. S. Eliot once remarked that April is the cruellest month. But on this Tuesday the 17th, six months to the day after the Bay Area’s devastating temblor, April did not seem cruel at all.

Oh, there were the usual traumas: breakdowns on BART, too many homeless on the streets, a tanker grounded in the bay, water rationing in place for this sixth straight drought year despite the miracle March rains. But the IRS beast had gotten its human sacrifice for another season; most of the quake damage had been repaired or swept out of sight; and the a’s — if not the Giants — looked in top early-season form.

And remodeling was finished at 340 Eleventh Street. In the first of two (count ’em, two!) huge open ground-floor offices — each larger than the entire setup had been at 760 Golden Gate — were the skip-tracers and clerical staff. And Dan Kearny himself, strategically placed to slip out the back door if a process server stormed the front.

In the other ground-floor office were the CB, the fax, and the computer. Here also, under Giselle’s watchful eye, were the teenage girls who earned after-school money churning out skip and legal letters on the old but serviceable automatic typewriters.

Upstairs were actual offices for the field agents — with desks and chairs and phones and even typewriters for one-fingering reports.

And out in back was storage for twenty cars.

So, with DANIEL KEARNY ASSOCIATES backward on the glass of the door in fresh paint, DKA was again ready to find people who had defaulted, defrauded, or embezzled, and to wrest away their purloined assets for return to its clients. Clients who, unfortunately, were not the sultry blondes and devious tycoons of fiction. They were, rather, much more mundane banks, bonding companies, financial institutions, and insurance conglomerates.

On this bright spring day, typewriters clacked, phones clamored, exhaust fumes wafted in from the storage yard where someone was gunning a repo. At Jane Goldson’s reception desk a big hard-looking man with a tough jaw and lank, close-trimmed brown hair had written KEN WARREN on an employment application and was trying to add to that. Jane kept rolling the conversational ball at him, which he kept not rolling back.

“How did you say you found us, Mr... urn...”

Warren chewed on his pencil eraser in morose silence.

“If you’ve never done this sort of thing before, actually, it is rather difficult to... er...”

Warren laboriously filled in another line on the app. His scowl could have blistered paint. Sliding back her chair, Jane gave him a brilliant smile and some equally brilliant thigh.

“Perhaps you’d best speak with Mr. Kearny directly...”

Daunted by the application form, Warren was unaware of smile, thigh, or remark. Okay, sure, applying in writing was better than trying to explain himself verbally; but even so, most of what he did best really couldn’t be put down on paper.

Kearny’s left hand was shaking a Marlboro from his pack as Jane came up to his desk; his right continued its creative bookkeeping on the rather thin stack of billing before him. Cash flow, cash flow — relocating had cost a mint, and clients, waiting to see if they’d survive it, had been hesitant. A minor irritant was the cleaning service — it was lousy.

Jane moved her head slightly toward the man scowling over the clipboard at the far end of the office. Kearny raised heavy interrogative brows at her through his first wisp of carcinogens.

“So?”

“Actually, Mr. K, he just wandered in off the street,” Jane said in her tart cockney accent. “But...”

“So what’s the gag?” Even in a slow month they always had room for a good repoman. “Let him fill in the app and—”

“So maybe you’d best hear for yourself, hadn’t you?”

Summoned down the office, the big man looked okay to Kearny. Better than okay, in fact. Hard-faced, moved well... of course in a 3:00 A.M. alley a lot of self-styled tough dudes had tiny balls. Kearny stood up and stuck out his hand. He’d hear what the big guy had to say.

The big guy said, “GnYm Kgen Gwarren.”

Oh.

Those same six months since the San Francisco quake did not seem to have been so kind to Karl Klenhard back there in Stupidville. No longer did his gold watch chain stretch taut across a splendid belly. It sagged. No longer did he stride. He shuffled. No longer did he use his gold-headed cane with a boulevardier flair, but as one dependent upon its support.

Margarete held his free arm protectively as she guided him into the town’s largest department store. He was being loud, querulous, and rambling in a newly acquired old-man’s voice.

“But we gotta get her somethin’ today!” Close to tears. “It’s our own little granddaughter we’re talkin’ about here...”

Margarete said placatingly, “I saw a lovely little pinafore just her size on the lower level, Liebchen...”

She had to let go of his arm so Karl could grasp the moving handrail of the down escalator at the same time that he stepped on one of its moving stairs. His hand missed, his foot missed. With a loud cry, Karl took a terrifying headlong tumble, arms and legs windmilling, cane flying, falling down... down... down...

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 Marla 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.