32 Cadillacs

Chapter forty

The burly Jew in the skullcap took the tarnished metal object from the black man’s fingers and said to his young bright-eyed assistant in Yiddish, “Vi heyst dos?”

“Vaz.”

“Yo, yo, vaz,” he said impatiently. He moved the vase slightly. “Zilber?” The assistant shrugged. He turned back to the black man. “You want to know if this is a silver vase?”

The black man grinned. “Yo? Good word.” He gestured at the beat-up-looking vase. “How much to get it replated, or whatever you call it?”

The Jew turned the object over with his fingers, looking up with probing eyes. “Old family heirloom, I suppose?”

“Yeah, sure, somethin’ like that. Look, bro, you don’t wanna do it—”

“And you think it is silver.”

“Ain’t it?”

“No.”

“Well, shit, then, whut you be wastin ma time for?”

The black man snatched back the battered vase to swing away through the street crowd on this part of Chicago’s South Drexel Boulevard near the university, where the Jews’ secondhand stalls catered to South Side blacks. He heard something with zilber in it that ended with a laugh and narish schvartz. Zilber had to be silver and he knew schvartz was black man. Narish probably was something like dumb or stupid — which he wasn’t.

So he swung back to say, “African-American, hymie,” then pushed his way on down the street with the worthless vase he had bought at another street stall an hour before.

Was the skull-capped Jew really a Jew, wondered Bart Heslip as he blew on his coffee to cool it, or a Gypsy posing as a Jew? Chicago’s blacks often had tensions with the Jews, but they had no time at all for Gyppos. A skullcap and a few scraps of Yiddish did not make a Jew; and laughing at the dumb black who didn’t know his stolen vase wasn’t silver was more Gyp than Jew.

Meanwhile, he’d been in Chicago for nearly twenty hours with no luck at all in finding the elusive Tsatshimo and his equally elusive four-door 4.5-liter V-8 fuel-injection Fleetwood sedan. Since metalworking and electroplating plants had yielded zero results, in desperation he’d started working the street stalls, looking for people selling gold and silver plates at prices that guaranteed they weren’t gold or silver. So far, also zero.

Bart sighed and gulped his coffee. There still was something about the old Jew that hadn’t rung quite right. Maybe tonight, come back for a second look...

O’B was feeling desperate himself down in the Sunshine State. He’d found out that (a) Florida developers could destroy wetlands with the best of them, and (b) local Florida governments would sell out to them even quicker than their counterparts in California. What he hadn’t found was a Gypsy named Kalia Uwanowich and a new Cadillac Allante hardtop.

And now he’d gotten a call from Giselle telling him to drop everything and hightail it to Iowa for a Gyppo encampment. Hence the desperation, because O’B had his pride. He didn’t want to show up without Kalia Uwanowich’s Allante. What had some far-out Frog writer once said? That genius was not a gift, but the way one invents in desperate situations? Out of his desperation was born his wonderful invention, a new way of looking at his problem.

He’d been acting as if Uwanowich really was a roofing contractor. Acting as if he really would be buying large quantities of roofing materials. Uwanowich was running a Gypsy scam. He wasn’t going to roof anything. He wasn’t going to buy anything. He was going to rip off a subdivision.

So O’B had started to look at existing subdivisions with homeowners’ associations. These associations set up neighborhood Crime Watch programs, told you what color you could paint your house, how often your lawn had to be mowed. Why wouldn’t a homeowners’ association — stick with him here — tell its members that all their houses had to get reroofed at the same time? Why wouldn’t they contract to have it done, collective bargaining being a lot cheaper than individual deals?

It was worth a shot.

And west of Tamarac, on a tract between West Atlantic Boulevard and the Sawgrass Expressway, O’B saw thirty roofs without shingles, without even the tar paper that goes on under shingles. Even better, discarded shingles were lying all over lawns and sidewalks and even out into the streets.

In front of one house a tall fortyish man with reddish hair and a long pink homely face was picking up ripped-off shingles. O’B sauntered up as he dropped the armful on a stack beside his driveway. He straightened up with a hand to the small of his back, then wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

“See you’re getting your roof done,” said O’B.

“Yep.” He squinted up at the roof along with O’B, and waxed eloquent on his subject. “Ted’s Roofers had a sixty-man crew out here today, rippin’ off shingles from all the houses.”

“I thought roofers usually carted away the old shingles.”

The man chuckled. “At the price we’re gettin’, we gotta stack ’em, then they haul ’em.” He had a Midwest accent. What did they call them here in Florida? Snowbirds? “It’s all part of the contract.”

“Offered you a real good price, huh?”

“The best. He comes in with a big crew, does it, and gets out again in a single day.”

“But he didn’t finish the job today,” O’B pointed out.

“One day to strip ’em, the next day to roof ’em. Homeowners association pays him after the old shingles are already stripped. Ted, he insisted on that, didn’t want nobody to say they paid for something they didn’t get.”

“I bet he insisted,” said O.B. A nice touch, that.

The man looked at him shrewdly. “You’re in the market for a roofer, you can’t beat Ted’s prices.”

“Where do I find him?”

“Secretary of the association, feller named Hank Sawtell, he lives right down the street, twenty-seven sixty-eight, he’ll have all the dope. Has the association books right there in his house. Say, you want some iced tea? The missus...”

O’B begged off, hurried away. The trouble was, the roofs were already off and Ted’s Roofers wouldn’t be back to the subdivision in the morning to replace them. Not then, not ever. He was speeding down the wide curving suburban street, dodging kids’ toys and picking up house numbers off mailboxes, because his only hope was that Ted — surely, Kalia Uwanowich — hadn’t scored and soared yet. Soared a long way from here.

He needn’t have worried; Ballard should have been there to bitch about the luck of the Irish. Parked in front of 2768 was a spanking-new red Allante hardtop with Florida plates.

O’B parked around the next corner out of sight, got out the dealer key and his repo order with the Allante’s I.D. number on it. He confirmed the I.D., got in, fired it up. In the rear-view, just before he passed out of sight around the curve of the suburban street, he saw a swarthy man sprinting down Sawtell’s walk, waving his arms and yelling.

See you in Stupidville, baby.

O’B dropped the paperwork and keys for his rental car into a mailbox, notified the cops of the repossession, checked out of his motel, and headed north and west for Iowa.

Nanoosh Tsatshimo had started out in his 20s with an instant rechroming scam he’d learned from a great-uncle who’d had a wealthy and sympathetic gadjo take him into his home and pay for his education. Such men, called rai by the Gypsies, were considered part father, part fool.

Anyway, the great-uncle had been good at chemistry, and had taught Nanoosh how to dissolve mercury in a weak nitric acid solution and then apply it to something made of copper. The nitric acid ate a little of the copper, which formed an amalgam with the mercury. This gave the piece a shiny surface like chrome or silver plating.

But it was a short con, because the nitric acid goes right on eating away, so after a few hours it destroys the mercury amalgam and the item looks like copper again. As he got older himself, Nanoosh began to search for a long con without those short departures. He found it in gold and silver electroplating.

Soon he was selling “solid silver” flatware; soon after that, lead plates (same approximate weight as solid gold) electroplated with a micrometer-thin layer of real 24-carat yellow Saudi gold. It could be gotten cheaply in Arabia with the right connections, and the plates could be sold as solid gold.

Now he could set up and sell the whole season in one place, having calibrated almost to the day when the microscopic layer of gold or silver would wear through to show the base metal beneath.

Tonight he had an appointment in Lincoln Park with a man who wanted a service for twenty of solid-gold plates and flatware. The mark was a 26-year-old stock futures options player who had just gotten his seat on the Exchange and a condo overlooking Lake Michigan. The mark planned to screw blind the old Jew in the skullcap who ate kosher and kept the holy days — not knowing the old Jew was really Nanoosh, who planned to maybe leave him his pants.

Nanoosh used Lake Shore Drive north to go get him.

Bart Heslip had his window open and the Cubs game on the car radio as he drove south on Lake Shore Drive. The old skull-capped Jew who maybe wasn’t Jewish at all deserved another look.

As always as he drove, his eyes were busy on cars passing in the other direction, some unconscious computer in his skull ticking them off, ready to register only if one of the big, dark, bulky cars he was passing was the Nanoosh Tsatshimo Fleetwood.

Lincoln Continental... Acura Legend sedan LS... Mercedes-Benz 300... Buick Riviera... Chrysler Imperial... Lexus LS400... Infiniti Q45... BMW 750iL... Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special...

His old skull-capped Jew behind the wheel! Bart was in the fast lane: even as his mind registered car and driver, he was spinning the wheel and slamming the brakes to put the Seville into a controlled skid. Bounce! thunder! crash! across the grassy center-divider, goose it, hit pavement, tires shrieking, he had it, back on the highway but in the northbound lane.

Eight cars behind the Fleetwood. One car back by the 31st Street intersection. Crowding its tail where Lake Shore splits at Cermak. Ran it off the road not far from the aquarium.

Nanoosh, his nephew, and two young Gypsy bucks in the backseat came boiling out of the Fleetwood even as Bart slammed the Seville to a stop behind it.

Nanoosh bellowed, “WHADDA HELL YOU T’INK—”

Bart roared, “I’M FROM THE BANK AND FM TAKING THAT CAR!”

“The bank? The California bank?”

“Cal-Cit, you bet.” Bart was flying on an adrenaline rush. It was the right car! “Take out your personal crap—”

That’s when the nephew of Nanoosh made a bad mistake. He threw a punch at Bart. Bart slipped it, snapped his head back three quick times with three left jabs, breaking his nose on the second, then came up with a good right cross to put him away.

Nanoosh stayed out of it, leaned placidly against the fender to watch his young Gypsies take Bart apart. But they were bloody and reeling, Bart had only a skinned cheek and a fat lip when the cops arrived, a salt-and-pepper team of suits who came up with only nightsticks because it seemed that kind of beef.

Nanoosh quickly put his skullcap back on. “We are on our way to temple, the black man runs me off the road, tries to steal my car. My sons they defend me...”

That’s when Nanoosh’s nephew made another terrible mistake. Still half-blinded by tears from his broken nose, ashamed of the tears, he swung at the black cop because he thought the cop was Bart. Black is black, right?

Wrong. Thwock!

Nightstick on skull. He folded.

“Peaceful repossession,” panted Bart. “They’re Gyppos.”

The black cop started to laugh as he put the cuffs on the recumbent nephew. “Peaceful repossession?” He laughed again. “That’s a damned nice right cross you got there.”

“Used to scuffle for a living,” said Heslip.

“We’ll take the lot of them in,” said the white cop.

Bart talked the black cop into not charging the nephew with anything worse than disturbing the peace, then spent a half hour side by side with Nanoosh on a hard wooden bench at the cophouse.

“You’re the one from this afternoon,” said Nanoosh finally.

“Yep,” said Bart.

“How’d you know to look for me in Chicago?”

Bart just shrugged and looked wise.

“It was them fucking Lovellis, wasn’t it?”

Bart looked even wiser.

“I knew it! Son of a bitch bastards! Well, let me tell you something about them...”

Bart stayed silent, looking as wise as Solomon, which he proved to be — Nanoosh told him all about the Lovellis.

Finally, the cops admitted that Bart was Bart, that the Fleetwood was a Fleetwood, that Cal-Cit Bank was a bank, and that Bart was indeed their legal representative.

“I want to thank you guys a lot for your help,” he said. “I’ll just take my cars and—”

“What about the writ?” asked the white cop.

Not being a Chicago boy himself, Bart said, “What writ?”

“The writ, the writ, the long green writ!”

Maybe not Chicago born, but no hayseed. Fifty each to the salt-and-pepper team, then from his expense roll Bart started dealing twenties like a hand of cards, one to every cop in the station house. Ten cops, ten twenties. Pick a card, any card.

Back at his motel just across the river from the Loop on South Canal, he found Larry Ballard’s message about Stupidville. He left Larry a more urgent message of his own, got the number of the Jersey motel where Ken Warren would be staying, and finally looked up truck rental outfits to call in the morning.

Bart Heslip had a PLAN.