32 Cadillacs

Chapter twenty-eight

Ramon Ristik met Teddy at the door. “Do you have the egg?”

Teddy held up the old battered yellow gym bag as if it carried the Hope diamond. “Still in my Reebok. Just the way Madame Miseria told me. And the money, all I could raise.”

Ristik nodded and stepped aside to let him by. It was all part of the mumbo jumbo, but also Yana had not been quite ready for the night’s charade. They had been arguing, truth be told. About the tall blond gadjo with whom Yana had a relationship Ristik really didn’t understand. And didn’t trust at all.

But Ristik had dropped it: after all, who knew what powers Yana might really possess? Ramon always had secretly believed that his sister had been born with “a veil over her forehead” as the gift of second sight often is described by the rom.

She appeared at the head of the stairs when Teddy had limped halfway up — the snake down his flank was severe. Yana was back in her bright filmy Gypsy clothes, but tonight it was without anything under them so her beautiful figure was outlined mistily by the light behind her.

Ristik approved of the tantalizing display, it kept Teddy off balance. But he couldn’t approve of the blond gadjo. How did Yana know him so well? From when? From where? She almost acted as if they once had been... lovers. But rom, gadjo...

“You have come,” said Yana in that eerily deep voice she could assume at will.

“Ye-e-es,” quavered Teddy.

“To learn whether evil had hatched out or not.”

Yana was as beautiful as ever, but Teddy noted there were shadows under her eyes — skillfully applied, which he didn’t notice — and her skin was pale, almost translucent. He didn’t realize, either, that she had dusted pale powder on beforehand and that her parrot-bright silks were to heighten the effect.

She said, “All day I have been feeling... a presence...”

Teddy was led to the boojo room. Flickering candles made shadow demons dance in the corners. They sat down across from one another at the table. No crystal ball tonight; instead, a single small bone-white ceramic bowl like that in which his money had bled. Ristik had disappeared. Yana gripped both of Teddy’s hands hard in hers.

“Let us pray now to Jesus Christ the Savior,” she said.

Teddy panicked — he hadn’t prayed in years, so he could think of nothing except “Now I lay me down to sleep...” Yana started a Hail Mary, but suddenly stopped and released his hands.

“It is no good!” she exclaimed harshly. “The emanations are too strong...” She transfixed him with her sudden fierce gaze. “You brought all the cash you could raise?”

“Yes,” said a terrified Teddy. He didn’t say he had cheated, that it was all he could raise without starting to cash in the investments his stepfather had left for him. “Over five thousand dollars. But...”

“But! Do you wish to die?”

“No, but—”

“Die horribly?”

Teddy slumped in his chair. “No.” His limbs twitched. Sweat poured down his face. Yana softened.

“Perhaps it will not come down to the money.”

As if on cue, Ristik appeared, pale. “The omens are bad! You must not do this!” But she waved him away.

“I must. Leave us. Be ready if I cry out.”

He seemed to struggle against her, but finally disappeared silently through the curtains again.

Yana turned back to Teddy. “Put the egg on the table.”

He opened his old yellow gym bag and took out the Reebok. If he had felt silly putting the egg in the shoe, he didn’t i now. Now he felt disoriented, terrified, feverish. Out of the shoe he carefully took the sweatsock in which he had rolled the egg. He put the egg carefully beside the bowl.

“If the demon has not hatched, the egg will be pure. If it has...” Her voice trailed off, fraught with horrors.

“How... will we... know?”

“We will know.”

“And if it... if it is in the egg, what happens?”

She only whispered it. “It will pass from the egg to me.”

She took up the egg and rolled it gently between the palms of her flattened hands. When she did, she began to tremble. Suddenly, with one convulsive jerk of her wrist, she cracked the egg against the rim of the bowl. She bent forward.

As did Teddy. He looked into the bowl. He screamed.

Staring up at him was a tiny bilious green devil’s head with black exclamation-point eyebrows, a black goatee, and gleaming minuscule horns. Tiny evil eyes burned redly up into his through the mucous mess at the bottom of the bowl.

Even as he glimpsed it, Madame Miseria sprang to her feet, whirled around three times, and fell to the carpet where she rolled to and fro, shrieking, gnashing her teeth. Ristik leaped into the room and grabbed her shoulders, trying to hold her down.

“Help me!” he cried. “The demon has passed from the egg into her! Goddam you, help me!”

The terrified Teddy threw himself on her, but she was tremendously strong. Her shiny teeth snapped at his face like a dog’s, narrowly missing his nose. Ristik was chanting in rom. The squirmings and spasms of her body beneath Teddy’s were like obscene lovemaking. He felt disgust for himself: even as she fought for his life, he wanted to possess her sexually!

Her convulsions began to lessen. Finally, the thrashing ceased. Ristik, panting, stood up to lean against the table, looking down at them. He crossed himself.

“It... it has... gone.”

Yana sat up, a dazed look on her face. She was wringing wet. She whispered hoarsely, her vocal cords strained by her battle with the forces of evil, “The... demon is very strong.”

She struggled to her feet. Teddy did the same, couldn’t help looking into the bowl again. The devil’s head was gone!

“Yes,” Yana nodded. “From the egg to me. It nearly took me, but now it has passed from me back whence it came.”

Teddy knew where that was. He knew what had to be done.

“So my money is—”

“Cursed. Indeed, it is cursed.”

The demon’s whirlwind passage had knocked the gym bag off the table; the paper bag’s money was spewed out across the floor.

As Teddy stared at it, mesmerized, Madame Miseria whispered, “It is the only way. Only then will the curse depart.”

Ristik had brought forward a thirty-gallon metal trash barrel and a poker and a box of decorative wooden fireplace matches about a foot long. Yana picked up the money, folded the top of the paper bag down over the thick sheaf of bills. She slipped the package into her bosom, crossed her arms over it.

“You have the strength to do what must be done?”

Teddy squared his shoulders. “Yes.”

She hesitated, then took the tightly folded package from her bodice and handed it to him. Ristik jerked involuntarily, made a strangled sound. Yana ignored him to light a long match and hand it to Teddy. Her eyes glowed, her voice deepened.

“Theodore Winston White the Third... burn the curséd money!”

Trembling as if with the ague, Teddy put the flame to a corner of the package. It began to wisp smoke.

“Drop it in the pail.”

He did. With a WHOOSH! the crumpled newspaper in the barrel, soaked in lighter fluid, shot flames two feet above the rim, driving them both back. Ristik stepped in with the poker and stirred the contents vigorously as Yana chanted in her strong, almost guttural voice, “Te avis yertime mandartay te yertil o Dei, te avis yertime mandartay te yertil o Dei...”

The flames died. The money was gone. She embraced Teddy.

“You have been very strong,” she said. “Very brave.”

“And the curse... what of that?”

She shrugged in the Gypsy manner. “We shall see if this money was enough. Go home. Feel if the snake in your body withers away — perhaps you will have no more need of me.”

“I will always need you!” cried Teddy despairingly. He could not face the uncertainty of life without her help.

But she had melted away through the curtains and was gone. Teddy found himself being firmly herded by Ristik from the ofica and down the stairs to slanting Romolo Place.

Ristik returned to be waltzed around the room by his manic sister at the success of the “burn-up” — so called because no evidence of the con is left, supposedly it has all been burned up. By the dimming light of the candles their shadows capered like those of cavorting goblins.

“I was the best I’ve ever been...”

“When you handed him the phony package to burn—”

“Did you see the switch? The smoothest...”

“If he had looked inside—”

“I had stage money in the prepared package...”

Yana took Teddy’s $5,000 package from the pocket inside the bosom of her blouse, and put it on the boojo table. Next to it Ristik laid the tiny hand-carved devil’s head he had scooped from the bowl just before Teddy had stood up. Just as he had flipped the gym bag to the floor so the money would spill out.

Yana gestured at it. “Half is yours.”

Ristik protested, rather weakly, “You did all the work...”

“Equal partners, brother of mine.” She embraced him again, and laughed at him. “Go! To your poker or dice game...”

He laughed almost sheepishly as he took $500. “Keep the rest for me, Yana. Otherwise I will just gamble it away.”

“We will get much more than that with the cemetery dig.”

“You truly believe that he will go along with that? What if his sciatica clears up?”

“He will still think it is there.” She extended a foot like a ballet dancer on pointe. “He would lick this shoe if I asked him.” Her laugh was not pretty. “He is mine. I own him.”

After she had gotten rid of Ramon, she smiled a secret smile and went to put on perfume. She had another fortune to tell tonight. She knew Ramon’s ingrained rom disapproval, but Ballard was necessary to save the pink Cadillac so she would be Queen of the Gypsies. She merely had to get him to...

The trouble was, conning Teddy had her in a state of sexual arousal. Seeing Larry would heighten and focus that arousal.

From her vantage point in the recessed doorway of a small grocery store at the head of Romolo Place, Giselle had seen Teddy White enter the ofica. She hadn’t tried to dissuade him previously in Tiburon over caffe latte: there was one born every minute, and what Yana did to him interested her not at all.

Unfortunately, what Yana did with Larry interested her a great deal — to her eternal shame. Oh God, acting like a jealous teenager! Over Larry, always only a friend. If he knew how she felt, he’d laugh at her. Yet here she was, consumed.

She watched the dazed Teddy eventually go back down Romolo toward Broadway with the limping, shambling gait of a drunk. Minus, she was sure, that silly damned egg wrapped in a sweatsock and stuck in the toe of his running shoe. Minus, also, whatever money he’d crammed into the gym bag with it. Poor fool.

She sighed. A wasted stakeout, what had she accomplished? What had she learned? Who was the bigger fool?

But still she stayed.

The door emitted a swaggering Ramon Ristik. The brother, off to celebrate a successful con in a bar or poker game.

And still she stayed. Waiting for what now? What other shoe was there to drop?

Larry Ballard climbed the steep side of Telegraph Hill to Madame Miseria’s door, was admitted.

Of course. That was why she had waited. For the final humiliation at the hands of Yana. Oh, the bitch!

“You have come.”

“To get my fortune told?” Ballard made it a question.

Yana drew him up the stairs, her hand hot in his. Wearing the same sort of flowing silks as that first time in Santa Rosa. He found it so erotic he got a strong erection just walking hand in hand with her down the dim narrow curtained hallway.

He finally broke the silence. “Did you have... a séance here tonight?”

“A reading. Theodore Winston White the Third.”

There was an electricity in the air, a tension so palpable it was almost unpleasant. Also a tremendous excitement in her — as if she had just made love. He told himself it had been just another con, nothing physical, but he felt a stab of jealousy.

He tried to keep his voice neutral. “Successful, I hope.”

“Very.”

“For him or for you?”

The ofica was dim, he could smell snuffed candles; now the only illumination was the glowing crystal ball back on the table, beautiful and cool and disturbing. She stopped and turned so abruptly that he collided with her. The length of her body pressed against his. Her eyes gathered light like a cat’s.

“For me,” she said in a low intense voice. She was speaking almost into his mouth. “It was a poisoned egg. It is a cruel deception, but he is only a gadjo.”

Ballard’s arms had come up around her. She was naked under the thin silk, her body almost feverish to the touch. She made a small despairing sound in her throat. She must not. She was rom, Ballard was gadjo. But she felt the same wild excitement as the first time with him. She belonged to no man, no concept: only to herself. Therefore she could give herself to any man she desired, rom or gadjo, couldn’t she? Yes!

Their mouths met, their tongues sought. Their bodies began to move together in that most ancient rhythm of life even as they were sinking to the floor, even as his hands went up under the silk garments to open her waiting flesh, even as her hands almost magically freed his stiffened member so it could enter her.

Above them, the crystal ball faded slowly to darkness.

When the dim light was gone from the front room, Giselle left her stakeout, feeling humiliation almost as vindication. No wonder Dan Kearny kept DKA out of domestic investigations: they were degrading. No more of this for Giselle Marc, not ever.