32 Cadillacs

Chapter forty-five

It was dusk and nearing the end of visiting hours when the nephew of the sick man in the next bed arrived for a visit. A tall blond man with strong features, he plumped his uncle’s pillows while telling all about his trip from Nebraska.

“I drove straight through so I could see you tonight. My partners already had left for California with the merchandise.”

“Terrif!” exclaimed the sick man. His voice was remarkably strong for one operated on that afternoon.

Meanwhile, Staley was about ready to depart for the encampment. He held out a shaky hand to his wife. “My love, can you find a gurney for them to...”

“HIM!” yelled a Gypsy just coming into the room. All eyes turned to him, but he was pointing at the nephew of the sick man in the other bed. “He’s THE CAR THIEF WHAT TOOK MY CADILLAC!”

Tucon Yonkovich never got to finish. Larry Ballard hit the doorway running, bursting through the gathered Gypsies like flood stage through a dam. Half a hundred Gypsies took out after him, shrieking their wrath. Even Staley, forgetting the iron-haired, iron-faced man in the other bed, hit the floor running to go see the fun.

“Staley!” yelled Lulu in warning.

He turned to stagger back to bed, but it was much too late.

“Remarkable recovery,” said Dan Kearny with a hard-faced grin. “Almost miraculous.”

Staley gave a little shrug — what could he do? He’d just forgotten himself after all those weeks in that goddamned bed.

“You too,” he said.

Kearny nodded. “How you gonna keep the Gyppos from finding out you’ve been scamming them from the beginning?”

He was at the closet taking out his clothes. Staley made a gesture and Lulu went out, closing the door behind her.

“How indeed?” said Staley tentatively.

Larry Ballard was running for his life on the floor below, a corridor full of Gypsies in hot pursuit. He kept trying to slow them down by throwing anything he could find into their path — a waiting room lamp, an abandoned gurney, an unused Murphy stand without any plastic IV bottles, an empty laundry hamper.

But whoever he took out of the chase, there were fifty still in it. Seeking the emergency stairs, he skittered into a cross-corridor under the nose of a nurse wheeling an old gentleman in a wheelchair with a blanket across his knees. He’d hit full stride before he realized he’d turned the wrong direction. The stairs were the other way.

Rooms right and left, worse traps than the hallway, linen closet, ditto, rest rooms, ditto, the shouting throng was closing in on him, the dead-end wall loomed ahead.

With an open window. Ballard started to yell when he was ten feet from it, hit his stride like a hurdler, leaped out feet-first, ready to tuck and roll when he hit the ground below. Instead, with a bone-jarring impact, he landed right in the backseat of an open convertible tucked away behind the hospital.

“OOOF!”

The car leaped forward. Ballard could hear the diminishing yells of the Gyppos hanging out of the window behind him, even as he felt himself over for anything broken. The driver jerked around to stare wide-eyed over his shoulder at whatever had landed in his car. The driver was Rudolph Marino! The car was the pink Caddy! Recognition widened the eyes of both men.

“Bastard!” Marino yelped.

“Son of a bitch!” Ballard croaked.

Neither man got physical. Marino was too busy not using his lights while dodging hardwoods with nothing more than a dirt track to follow. Ballard was too breathless. The Eldorado went into a controlled skid, righted itself, CRASHED across a curb, squealed its tires in another skid, and was driving sedately along a back street of Stupidville.

“You stole my money and this car from me!”

“Yana’s car. The hotel’s money.”

“My car now — I’ve just stolen it back again.”

“Until I take it away again.”

By the illumination of passing streetlights, Marino found Ballard’s face in the rearview mirror.

“They’ll tear you apart if they find you.”

“I’ll get by.”

“No you won’t. I’ll have to disguise you to save your worthless butt, gadjo, until I am King and can protect you.”

Why the hell not him as Gypsy King, come to think of it? Yana as Queen would be inaccessible, but if Rudolph were King...

“Maybe I can help you with that King thing,” said Ballard.

The Elks Lodge was a big bare echoing room with stuffed deer heads on bare wooden walls, hardwood floors scarred and stained by countless years of Saturday night smokers, as well as the occasional holiday special events when the Elks could bring their Does to dance polkas.

At tonight’s Town Meeting no one was dancing, or even drinking. Mix alcohol with emotion, Mayor Strohbach, presiding, said sententiously, and you could have vigilantism.

“Maybe we need a little vigilantism,” said Himmler, the former nosetackle.

“They’re corrupting our youth,” asserted Mary Lonquist.

“They steal babies,” said Noreen Degenhart, kindergarten teacher. “When I was a child—”

“We must be Christian men and women,” said Reverend Tidmarsh. “There has been a great deal of stealing, but no one has been assaulted—”

“Look what they did at the hospital today!” burst out Himmler, neck veins swelling dangerously. “I say, throw them out before they wreck the town!”

“They’ve already done that—”

“As Christians we can’t condone—”

“I don’t care, my children’s safety—”

Mayor Strohbach pounded the table with a makeshift gavel, but no one listened. The Town Meeting was getting away from him.

Giselle had never known anything like it. The encampment suddenly was every Gypsy movie she had ever seen. Fires filled the night with the rich smell of roasting meat and fowl. The women were in traditional dress: long silks and bright scarves, great glittering golden hoop earrings swaying as they danced. Children and pets were everywhere, scooting underfoot, leaping over the campfires. Violins, tambourines, balalaikas.

Firelight across brown faces, strong bodies. Someone with a splendid sob in her alto voice was singing an old Romany song whose meaning Giselle could only guess at.

But nowhere did she see Rudolph. The word was that the King had had some sort of miraculous recovery; when he arrived, surely Rudolph would also appear.

She cut through some bushes toward another part of the encampment, gnawing on a turkey leg, when there in front of her, gleaming like a polished rocket, was the pink Eldorado convertible! Top down, whitewalls glowing in the semi-dark...

If she could spirit away the car, she would control the succession for the dying King’s crown! Her head whirled: was she repowoman, or a woman with a rom lover? Would she—

“HER!” shrieked a hate-filled voice. “THAt’s HER!” Giselle whirled to be impaled by flashlight beams. Sonia Lovari! No longer Miwok Indian, now only rom. “She’s no newswoman, she’s the repo bitch who stole my car in San Francisco!”

“Repo bitch! Repo bitch!”

“Get her!”

Nonviolent Gypsies? Giselle fled through the woods, half a hundred screaming rom women after her. She leaped a campfire, ran down a row of trailers and campers, darted between them...

And came face-to-face with that same most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Yana!

“You!” they exclaimed together.

There was a frozen moment; then something passed between them. Something unspoken, some measurement of worth, some understanding between women who’d had to cut their own deals in a man’s world on man’s terms — and had survived. And prospered.

“Quickly, come, or they will tear you apart!”

Yana threw open the door of the nearest trailer and shoved her inside, tumbled in behind her. She pulled the door silently closed as the clamor of pursuit passed by outside.

“I must hide you, keep you alive until I am Queen.”

Well, why not? thought Giselle. A Rudolph who was King would be totally inaccessible. But if Yana were Queen...

“I know where the pink Cadillac is,” she said.

“Hidden behind the hospital.”

“No.”

An almost imperceptible pause, then: “I will disguise you so you can show me.”

Staley Zlachi stood on an impromptu platform in the middle of the encampment, in the midst of his people, tears in his eyes. His loyal subjects! Still roaring with laughter from his tale of his complicated scam to take the insurance man for $75,000.

“Assembled people of Romany, you know of my recovery this day at the hospital—”

A mighty roar from five hundred throats.

“But though cured, I must ask if perhaps it is time to step aside for younger blood. But how to choose?” No shouts now — the throng was not taking the question as rhetorical. They wanted to know. “Well, what is the Gypsy way? How can the contenders show they are better steeped in our Gypsy traditions than any other?”

He looked around the assembled throng. Oh, he had them in the palm of his hand!

“Since Christ our Savior hung on the shameful cross, it has been our way to steal from the gadje — who through the centuries have stolen from us our place in the sun, our very lives.”

A great shout went up. Yes! To be a rom was to rip off the gadje! The one who did it best deserved to lead the rom!

“WHO CLAIMS MY THRONE?” yelled Staley.

Springing up on either side of him were Yana and Rudolph. Each in finest Gypsy dress. Across Staley’s portly figure they exchanged looks, each triumphant. Staley took a hand of each.

“Now, my children, how do you honor your King?”

Almost in unison, they exclaimed, “With a pink nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible like that in which you drove to your coronation.”

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Staley, beaming upon them. “The kind of car I sought to be buried in.” He looked from one to the other. “Which of you has brought me such a car?”

Each cried out in ringing tones, “I have!”

Again almost in unison, they both turned and gestured out into the crowd. Which parted. And the massive pink Cadillac rolled majestically forward into the cleared space in front of the platform.

But behind the wheel was no minion of either! Staley’s wife, Lulu, was driving it!

Staley looked from one to the other in apparent amazement.

“You each claim this car as your gift, yet it is my wife who drives it?”

Yana and Rudolph looked at one another in confusion; both were sure they had secured the car and had subverted their own particular DKA lackey to bring it here on their signal.

Lulu stepped out with Queenly grace, letting all see the interior beauty of the car before shutting the door.

“Who claims it now?” thundered Staley.

There was silence.