32 Cadillacs

Chapter two

Margarete Klenhard sat beside the Emergency Room Admitting Desk in Steubenville General Hospital, answering questions. Two of her answers were even true — the man calling himself Karl had indeed been born, and he was indeed her husband. He had, in fact, paid a $500 bride price for her over half a century before, back in the days when a dollar had meant something.

Hovering over her chair like a parent at a first recital was a large man with an extra chin and bullet eyes and a fringe of greying hair around a bald pate. Manager of the largest department store in Stupidville, he hoped that by paying Karl’s medical bills he could avert a lawsuit for negligence in the matter of the escalator — and thus avoid skyrocketing his liability rates through the roof.

“Name of patient?”

“Karl Klenhard.” Margarete’s accent was heavy as a Black Forest cake. Her hands mauled the cheap handbag in her lap.

The nurse typed. “Date of birth?”

“My Karl is in Prussia born on the twenty-eighth of June, nineteen hundred and fourteen — the very day that the Archduke Ferdinand is in Sarajevo assassinated to start the Great War.”

“Yes, I see,” said the nurse, typing. She had a round red face and didn’t see at all: she was of that age which thought Desert Storm had been the Great War. “U.S. citizen?”

“Ja. Naturalized. On the boat in nineteen twenty-five to New York City he comes. To the Statue of Liberty.”

“Religion?”

“We are Lutheran, of course,” said a scandalized Margarete.

“Emergency notification?”

“Me. Margarete Klenhard.” Her real name was Lulu Zlachi, as Karl’s was Staley Zlachi, but what’s in a name? She laid a hand on her heart. “For more than fifty years I am his wife.”

“Insurance?”

“We have none. We are poor folk. We—”

“No insurance.” Typing. “That’s going to be a prob—”

The department store manager cut in hurriedly, “Ah, the store will be... ah... handling monetary matters in, um...”

On the floor above, Staley was being rolled into the X-ray room on a blanket-covered gurney. Two husky orderlies in green gowns carefully took hold of the ends of the sheet on which he lay and slid Staley onto the cold metal table. The X-ray machine hulked over him like some obscene metal vulture. At the move, he cried out.

The hovering nurse made a distressed sound in her throat.

“We have to turn him on his side.” To Staley she said, unwillingly, “Sir, can you—”

Staley only groaned. The orderlies gingerly began to turn him. He shrieked with the pain and fainted just as Lulu burst through the door. The nurse grabbed her to keep her from throwing herself upon her husband’s silent form like a dishonored Roman upon his sword. Lulu could only stand there, weeping copious tears and mauling her purse, as the vulture lowered its electronically charged beak to Staley’s ashen flesh.

In San Francisco, Bart Heslip got out of his DKA company car because Sarah Walinski had just pulled her year-old Dodge Charger up across the sidewalk on the other side of the narrow Richmond District street. Sarah had beautiful taffy hair but was built like a bridge piling and had a face like a firedoor, with rivets for eyes. Since she was a skip out of New Jersey with the Charger, and had skipped again after running a previous repoman off with an axe, Heslip had a REPO ON SIGHT order for her car.

He was not afraid of playing hatchet-tag with Sarah: he’d won thirty-nine out of forty pro fights before deciding ten years before, then age 24, that he would never be middleweight champeen a de woild. At least not without having his brains scrambled into instant Alzheimer’s.

So he’d traded his boxing gloves for a set of repo tools. Man-hunting for DKA gave him the same exhilaration and challenge he’d formerly gotten in the ring: out in the field it was still one-on-one, you against him. Or her. May the best person win.

One sack of groceries was out of the backseat and Sarah was reaching for the second to take into her rented half of the pastel stucco duplex row house when Heslip spoke cheerily to her back. “Sarah, I’m sorry but I have to take your car.”

She whirled to glare at him. “How the goddam hell’d you find me, you goddam bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep nigger?”

Heslip was indeed black; plum black, in fact, with kinky hair and a thin mustache and the trained fighter’s wide bunchy shoulders and natural physical arrogance. He’d been called all the bleep-bleep words before, by men who’d subsequently taken nourishment through a straw; but you couldn’t bust a woman’s chops, not even if she outweighed you by fifty pounds.

He said only, “You know how it is with us darkies, Sarah. We always out dere on dat street jivin’ away, yessiree ma’am.”

Jiving indeed. He’d already won, because he’d slipped into the driver’s seat while she’d been bleeping away. Thus — unlike his timid-souled predecessor — he had control of the situation before it got out of hand. The keys were in the ignition and the engine was running. This would be the easiest grab of the month.

“Oh, take the goddam thing! Just lemme get the rest of my goddam groceries outta the goddam backseat...”

A charmer. Heslip drummed the steering wheel with patient fingers, then finally started to twist around in the seat.

“Sarah, if you need help with—”

The three-pound can of coffee, slammed lustily against the side of his head like a hurled rock, split his scalp as if it were a ripe apple. The blow knocked him right out of the car. Through double vision and dripping blood (drip grind, he thought confusedly), he saw 200-pound Sarah slither into the front seat like a sea lion going into the water off Seal Rock. He thought he heard shrieking tires, dreamed he smelled burning rubber...

They were taking the twelfth stitch in Bart Heslip’s scalp before he woke up again, fiat on his back at SF General.

Lying naked on his back in the sex-rumpled bed, watching Marla the Check-in Clerk dress by the soft light from the bathroom, Rudolph Marino congratulated himself. His questions, apparently casual but as skillful as his lovemaking, had obliquely confirmed that his plan for the hotel would work.

Marla caught his eyes and gave him a slow, sensual smile as she squirmed into her pantyhose.

“That New York jet-lag didn’t slow you down any, Angie...”

He pursed his lips in a little kissing motion. “Who could be anything but tireless with such beauty to spur him on?”

He had called her at the reception desk directly after checking into his suite. She had met him in the Garnet Room for a drink on her meal break, and that had led to this. He hadn’t known whether she would be useful or not. She had been.

“From the moment I saw you, cara, I had to possess you.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, kissed him again, long and passionately. It was she who finally came up for air.

“I knew I was going to regret getting dressed so fast.”

“There are other times, cara,” he said.

Cara. Darling. One of the dozen words he knew in Italian.

He let her kiss him once more, was out of bed as the door closed behind her, calling Housekeeping for a maid to bring fresh sheets, flushing the condom, jumping into the shower for a needle spray first hot as a chili pepper, then cold as a kidney stone.

Gadje women were unclean.

But useful.

He got dressed in front of the 5:00 P.M. news, becoming alert at the item about the President’s forthcoming visit to San Francisco. That visit was why Marino was here, checked into this particular hotel. Yes! He went out to find a payphone from which to make his phony bomb threat in the phony Arab gutturals.

He returned to word of their fallen King.

Meanwhile, the smell of hot grease was, like Banquo’s ghost, following Trinidad Morales up the trash-cluttered stairs over a 24th Street taqueria in the Mission District. Morales was 35, heavy-set, with small precise hands and feet and sly brown eyes and broad white teeth, a front one glinting with gold when he undamped his thick lips from around his habitual cheap cigar.

Trin had quit DKA almost six years ago — “quit” was his euphemism for getting his butt booted into the street by Dan Kearny — had gotten himself his own P.I. license, and had opened an office down here off Mission in the Spanish-speaking end of town. On the door he had put:

No more skip-tracing and repos for Trin Morales. Divorce work. Insurance frauds. Electronic snooping. Betrayed wives ready to get even for their husbands’ infidelities by clocking a little motel time of their own with the investigator who’d wised ’em up to them cheatin’ hearts. People who had said too much on a bugged phone willing to cross a brown palm with silver for discreet silences. The meaty stuff with the perks on the side.

It hadn’t quite worked out that way. Puffing his way to the top of the stairs, Morales found his landlord, an Anglo with a face like a toothache, installing a new lock on his office door. A lock for which Trin would not have a key.

“Hey, what the hell you think you’re doin’, man?”

“I don’t think, I know, beaner.”

Trin started after him, then stopped abruptly with his hands surrendering their fists for placating palms: the landlord’s heavy screwdriver was not being held the way screwdrivers are held to drive screws. Trin’s gold filling glinted in a wide disarming grin as genuine as junk bonds.

“Whoa, man, there’s some mistake here.”

“An’ you made it.” The toothache put the screwdriver in its toolbox, clanked it shut, strutted past Trin. “You can get your stuff back when you come up with the back rent — beaner.”

Trin bounced rapid-fire Spanish curses off the landlord’s heedless back, then sighed and got out his picks and started working on the new lock. Might as well clean out the office; he wouldn’t be back. And since he’d just lost an argument with Pac Bell over their cut-off service, he might as well rip off their rental phone and sell that while he was at it.

And then maybe swallow his pride and ask that chingada Dan Kearny for his old job back as a DKA field agent. He could use Kearny’s phone and company car and gasoline charge to work his own cases on the side. If he could get any cases on his own. If Kearny’d have him back.

A panting Theodore Winston White HI caught up with Ramon Ristik outside the street door of Madame Miseria’s palm-reading emporium on Romolo Place, one of the narrow one-block alleys leading up the side of Telegraph Hill from Broadway. It was so steep the sidewalk had stairs cut into it. The door had a seamed human palm in gilt paint facing out from inside the glass.

Teddy puffed, “I saw you... turning the corner down... on Broadway...”

Ristik, who’d made a point to be seen, paused for a moment, then shrugged as if submitting to fate and briefly and almost formally clasped Teddy to his bosom again, as in the bar. He stepped back.

“I cannot handle the weight of whatever future Madame Miseria might uncover,” he said in a low voice, “so I must leave you alone with her. You will not have to tell her why you have come... she will feel the emanations...”

The fog had rolled in, the air was raw; it was starting to sober Teddy up, refocusing his paranoia, making him remember fanciful tales about Gypsy fortune-tellers.

“Listen, maybe I’d better come back tomor—”

But Ristik was already herding him up narrow, ill-lit interior stairs toward Yana’s ofica. Teddy covertly and belatedly checked that his wallet with his money and I.D. was still in his suit coat pocket. It was. Ristik indeed had lifted it when he had embraced Teddy in the bar, and had telephoned Yana a précis of its contents; but then he had returned it intact during their second brief embrace just moments before.

Incense, a mere thought at the street door, became heavier, thicker, almost palpable as they ascended. When they were four steps from the second-floor landing, the heavy drapes were swept aside, squealing on their runners, to disclose a dramatically backlit woman in bright clothes staring down at them.

“Quickly,” she said. “There is not much time to move through the aperture to infinity my brother opened when he looked at your palm.”

“Listen, I don’t think I want to...”

But she already was drawing him through the curtain, the rounded swell of her breast momentarily firm against his arm, her thigh fleetingly hot against his through the filmy layers of floor-length parrot-colored silk. Raven hair, a truly beautiful oval face somehow stern despite small, full-lipped mouth and short nose. Liquid black eyes seemed to look right through him. Not yet 30, she had all the wisdom of the ages in her face.

“Do not talk, please.”

“But—”

“Please.”

She led him down a narrow drape-lined hallway lit by lamps with dangling crystal shades that tinkled with their passage, around two or three corners, abruptly into a room where blood-red plush drapes masked the four walls and soaked up sound. The only light seemed to come from the glowing cantaloupe-size crystal ball waiting for Yana’s duikkerin on a three-foot-square table covered all the way to the floor with black plush.

On other tables pushed back against the draperies were museum-quality Greek Orthodox icons next to ceramic figures won at carnival midways. Bottles of holy water and glowing colored votive candles enshrined a faded phrenologist’s chart. Draped around the neck of a cheap fat grinning Chinatown Buddha was a Catholic rosary, with amber beads exquisitely hand-carved in Poland and a heavy amber crucifix backed with antique silver. The unseen incense was making Teddy giddy.

“Please to sit,” said Madame Miseria. Teddy sat. She sat down opposite him, the crystal ball between them. “Your hands. On the table. Palms up.”

She put soft hands in his, gripped him tightly. Her underlit, slightly lowered head seemed suddenly suspended in midair, severed from her body. As she stared into the crystal, points of light began to glow in her eyes, grew, as if from apertures in the pupils themselves.

The eyes widened in shock. A low moan escaped her, exactly like Ristik’s in the bar. She began to thrash. Alarmed, Teddy tried to pull away; but now those soft hands were steel clamps around his wrists. Her head whipped from side to side, spittle flying from her lips. She let go of him, leaped to her feet: her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell straight backward to land on the thick floral carpet with a thud.

Teddy started around the table toward her. One of the curtains was thrown aside. Ristik stormed in. They dropped to their knees on either side of her.

“What did you do to her? What have you done?”

“I didn’t do anyth—”

Ristik leaned across her to grab the lapels of Teddy’s jacket and begin shaking him hysterically.

“What have you done to her? She has never before—”

Her eyelids fluttered; her eyes opened, became sentient.

“Ramon — it is all right. He did nothing. It was just the... the power of... the vision that... I have seen...”

They got her back into her chair. She gestured weakly.

“Sit down. We will go on.”

Ristik said, “No, I don’t want you to—”

“We must go on. Leave us.” Despite her weakness, when speaking to her brother her manner was somehow imperious.

“But if the vision should again overwhelm—”

“Leave us.”

Ristik hesitated, then left. Teddy shifted uneasily in his seat. His dread and foreboding were back a hundredfold.

“In the crystal I have seen many things, confusing things, frightening things, Theodore Winston White.”

“The Third,” added Teddy automatically, then blurted out, “How did you know my name?”

“The crystal.”

This was no Gypsy trick! He hadn’t given Ristik his name at the bar! But she had taken his hands again, her palms were warm, moist; her touch, her eyes burning into his across the table, her words, all had a muted sexual fervor.

“You are in grave danger.”

“Danger?”

“From the past.”

“But I don’t know anything about my past! Not my real past. My parents—”

“Put you up for adoption the day you were born. The Whites made you their legal heir. Yes. I know. But your blood parents still live inside you. Their fate is your fate unless...” She sprang up. Her eyes were fearful. “No! I cannot go on. Not without the protection of the candles.”

“But you have to tell me—”

“No. It is too dangerous.” She sank back down as if exhausted. “It is fifty dollars for the reading. You can pay my brother. If you insist upon a candle reading, it can be done... but it is dangerous for both of us...” Her eyes were dull with dread. “I hope that you do not return for it. Some things are best not known. Good night.”

“No, wait! Madame Miseria, please! I... I must know...”

But she was gone through one of the plush walls.

When the downstairs door closed behind the reluctant Teddy, Ristik found his sister at the kitchen stove, switching off the gas flame under the frying pan full of smouldering incense that had filled the ofica with its heavy cloying odor. He gave her half the $50, pocketed the rest.

“You should have hooked him hard, tonight, Yana! We could have gotten a couple of hundred bucks—”

“He will be back. We will take him through a candle reading... no, two... a poisoned egg... a cemetery dig...”

“How do you know he’ll be back? How do you know he has that kind of dough? Like I told you on the phone, I just cut into him in the Pink Flesh, I thought—”

“You said on the phone that he lives in Marin County. You said that all his credit cards were Goldcards. And a poor man would not reflexively insist on being called Theodore Winston White the Third.” She tapped him on the arm. “Go over to Tiburon tonight, Ramon, learn what you can. He will be back.”

Just then the phone rang. With word about their fallen King.