32 Cadillacs

Chapter three

Word was: Staley the King was perhaps dying!

Word was: Staley had told his wife, Lulu, that if worse came to worst, he wanted an encampment in Steubenville to choose his successor before he went. Word was: he wanted to be buried in a perfectly restored pink 1958 Cadillac convertible like the one he’d driven to his coronation thirty-four years before...

Today such a vehicle would run you, oh, say, $46,000 and change on the open market. If you could even find one. Of course no Gypsy in the entire history of the world has ever bought anything on the open market.

Buying is for the gadje.

Buying is for when you can get what you want no other way.

Buying, in short, is a sucker’s game. And no rom, ever, believes he is a sucker. For dealing with the straight world, the gadjo world, the non-Gypsy motto is: Gadje gadje, si lai ante Rom san — outsiders are only outsiders, but we are the rom.

In other words, Do them before they do you.

Dan Kearny, at his desk long after office hours, was trying to clear the meager post-quake billing so he could meet payroll at the end of the month. He paused, frowning, at an employment app with the name KEN WARREN on it, then remembered the big guy talked like Donald Duck with a cold — GnYm Kgen Gwarren — and filed the application in the waste-basket.

“Good,” said a rich and oily voice from behind him. “That means you got room on the roster for me.”

Trin Morales moved forward on small, almost delicate feet to plunk down his considerable bulk in the hardback chair beside Kearny’s desk.

“Trin. How’s tricks?”

The chair creaked in protest as Morales stretched to drop one of his business cards on the desk and shake a cigarette from Kearny’s pack. He lit up and blew out the match and dropped it on the floor. Neither man had offered to shake hands.

“Never better.”

“That’s why you’re coming around looking for work.”

Morales shrugged with Latin expressiveness. “Slow month.”

“What I hear,” said Kearny, “is that you got locked out and had your phone jerked for nonpayment.” He turned the business card over with blunt fingers. Trin’s unlisted home phone number was scrawled on the back in pencil. “What I hear is that the Bureau of Collection and Investigative Services up in Sacto might pull your license for unethical conduct.”

“Just like they tried to pull yours a few years back,” sneered Morales, then added defensively, “you ever catch me with my hand in your pocket when I was working for DKA?”

“Catch you? No. You’re a damned good investigator, Morales, I’ll give you that, but you’re trouble. I dumped you for trying to get into that Latina girl’s pants, Maria something, Maria Navarro, that was it. Threatening to have her kids taken away from her if she didn’t put out for you...”

“Aw, hell, Kearny, I was just clowning around—”

“Larry Ballard didn’t think so.” The two field men had come to blows over Maria. Kearny went on, “Put it this way, Trin...” A quick flick of his fingers scaled the card into the wastebasket on top of Ken Warren’s employment app. “Don’t call me — I’ll call you.”

The disgruntled Morales departed in a swirl of Mexican epithets, and Kearny went in search of other game. Such a grand start was too good to pass up. He found Giselle outside under one of the anti-theft spotlights set at strategic intervals around the perimeter of the storage lot, itemizing the personal property in Maybelle Pernod’s Lincoln. Neither thought it strange that the other was there long after office hours.

Hey, wait a minute. In Maybelle’s Lincoln?

The invariable DKA procedure was to remove all the personal property from the repossessed vehicle, right down to an opened box of Kleenex, itemize it, box it, and lock the box in a labeled storage bin. Giselle was leaving it in the Continental.

“Why aren’t you boxing that property?” snapped Kearny.

“Because Maybelle told me she would be redeeming the car in a few days.” Kearny opened his mouth to interrupt, but Giselle held up an imperious palm. She had the same stubborn look on her face that Larry Ballard got when enmeshed personally with some subject’s plight. “Dan, she’s a fat old black woman who’s never had anything remotely resembling this car before. God knows why the dealer put the loan through or the bank approved it in the first place, but—”

“Box that stuff,” he ordered. “Label it. You know damn well she’s never going to come up with fifteen hundred clams to redeem this boat. She’s better off without it, anyway.”

“I know nothing of the sort,” said Giselle acidly.

“Grow up.” Kearny indicated the blankets swirled messily across the backseat of the car. “Can’t you see she’s been sleeping in this thing?”

“Of course she has! Why do you think she needs it back?”

“So we can repo it again, and run up even more charges on her?” He nodded in mock admiration. “Now I get your drift.”

“Dammit, Dan, you know that isn’t...”

But Kearny was gone. He took a final turn through the ground-floor offices, savoring the lingering smell of fresh paint and his delicate filleting of Giselle, then climbed the narrow stairs beyond the partition behind his desk. At the top, a typewriter was clacking unevenly. He went around the counter and through the gate to the unused reception area. Light spilled from two open doorways down the hall.

In the first of the field men’s offices he found Bart Heslip typing reports. The left side of Bart’s lower lip stuck out so far he looked like a bigmouth bass with a hook in its jaw. The left side of his head was shaved and had a bulky white oblong around it. His left eye was narrowed and bloodshot.

“TKO in the first?” suggested Kearny.

Heslip’s lip came out even farther. Then he suddenly broke down and started the high hee-hee-hee laughter that went with his detachable black field hand patois.

“Lawdy Lawdy, Marse Dan’l, when she done bash me wif dat coffee can, Ah thought Ah was goin’ deef, Ah mos surely did.” He dropped the dialect, said darkly, “I went right back out there from the hospital, but she’d cleared out. The front door was standing wide open when I got there. The place was stripped.”

“Put her on the Skip List.”

“Hell no!” exclaimed Heslip. “Nobody’s gonna grab that car by accident! I want this... lady myself!”

The Skip List itemized by license number those subjects who had skipped from their known addresses with their cars. It was distributed to all the field agents weekly, and every now and then somebody searching for a different vehicle actually would get lucky and bust one off it.

Kearny paused in the open doorway. “Put her on the Skip List. And where’s Ballard?”

“Staked out at the Montana waiting for what’s-his-face—”

“Uvaldi.”

“Yeah. Him. Larry’s gonna clean his clock—”

“Why didn’t he do that the first time around?”

“The man had a loaded shotgun, Dan...”

But Kearny, having brought joy into yet another humdrum life, was already on his way out. In the final cubicle at the end of the hall he found flame-haired O’Bannon working on his biweekly expense-account masterpiece. Kearny immediately stabbed an angry forefinger at one of the items.

“What’s that twenty-five bucks for?”

“Driver for that Crowe repo over in North Oakland. That’s misdemeanor-murder land, I wasn’t gonna get out of there if—”

“What’s this twenty-five bucks for?”

“Confidential informant on the Mollenkopf dead skip.”

“Confidential informant my butt! Boozing it up in some ginmill, you mean, and trying to make me pay for—”

“But Great White Father!” O’B was only virtue, his blue eyes innocent of all guile. “If I hadn’t found out he was sleeping with his brother’s wife in Marysville, we’d never—”

“You think I’m gonna pay that thing as is, you’re nuts.”

These skirmishes over the O’Bannon Inflated Expense Account had been going on during all the years since Kearny had broken off from Walter’s Auto Detectives to form DKA.

“Giselle’s crying in her beer over some poor old black washerwoman sleeping in her car—”

“Dan—”

“A ninety-one Continental, no less, but Giselle—”

“Dan’l—”

“Another woman does in Heslip with a can of coffee—”

“Daniel!”

“And you and Ballard let a gay hairdresser weighs ninety-eight pounds kick sand in your faces—”

“MR. KEARNY!”

He paused for breath. “What, dammit?”

“Wanna go get a beer?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Okay. Sure.”

Ramon Ristik, bottle of beer in hand, called the meeting to order. A dozen rom crowded the room where, a few hours before, the education of Theodore Winston White III had begun. This was not quite a kris — that council of elders who act almost as judges or a governing body for the rom on important occasions — but it was a serious meeting of the leaders of two kumpanias. So no children ran through the room, pulling food off plates and trying to drink from wine or beer glasses.

The heavy drapes were gone, so the room was half again as large, open all the way to the four walls. The trap underneath the crystal table for the complicated special effects (such as the tiny halogen bulb that bounced light through the crystal ball into Yana’s eyes to make them glow during readings) now was covered with a tattered rag rug.

The table itself, like the others in the room, was heaped with food: meat-stuffed cabbage, pancakes called boliki, sesame-flavored yogurt with cucumber rounds and tomato wedges to dip, eggplant cubes to be eaten with black pufe bread. There were bananas and oranges and plums and grapes — and also candy bars and potato chips and Hostess Ho-Hos and Twinkies. Six-packs of beer, soft drinks, jugs of red wine. Since the telephone call about the King, Yana had been scheming, and generosity, even calculated generosity, got high marks among the Gypsies.

Ristik opened their gathering with the traditional “By your leave, Romale assembled men of consequence, we must discuss the news which has come to us.” His dark eyes roved the assemblage. “The King has beckoned. We must respond.”

In the old country, or even in the old days in America, such discussions would have been limited to men only, and would have gone for hours, each speaker orating in abstract, proverbial, and convoluted ways rather than convey a direct statement directly. But times had changed.

“Going back to Iowa now will be very expensive,” said Josef Adamo bluntly. He was an excessively fat Gypsy whose specialty was posing as a road-paving contractor. “The season is just beginning here in the West...”

Immaculata Bimbai, an expert at fainting in jewelry stores, said, “But necessary. From this room will come our new King.”

All eyes swiveled to Rudolph Marino. The mob lawyer look was gone. Now he was totally rom, his razor-cut mussed and swirled into curls that gleamed in the overhead light. He ate a chicken drumstick with greasy hands he kept wiping on the tails of his flamingo-pink silk shirt. He nodded and smiled acceptance of their assumption that he would be the new King.

“Yes,” he said, “a new King will surely be chosen.”

But Wasso Tomeshti, whose scam was TV wholesaling, spoke in heavy gutturals from the other side of the room. “Or Queen.”

All eyes swiveled again. To Yana this time. She looked as she had when fleecing Teddy White of his fifty bucks: like every gadjo’s idea of what a Gypsy fortune-teller looked like. She also smiled. At Rudolph. It was a smile on which to sharpen razor blades.

“Yes,” she said softly, “or Queen.”

“It is for the King to decide who will succeed him,” snapped Marino.

“Which he can do without someone trying to seduce his judgment.”

“That is a woman’s trick.”

Somehow, Marino invested “woman” with all the nightsweat qualities of succubus. And somehow, though they had been on opposite sides of the room, he and Yana were now in the center, almost chest-to-chest, glaring at one another.

“Or of a woman-man.”

Marino raised a hand as if to strike her; then the tension went out of him and he laughed and stepped back.

“We know who wants to wear the biggest balls in this room.”

“And we know who doesn’t wear them,” she said sweetly.

There was a small wave of indrawn breaths, shuffling feet; traditionally, no Gypsy woman would talk to a man that way. But Yana was not traditional, even though she honored the old values: she had been careful to pass in front of no man getting to the center of the room, for instance, and had made sure the hem of her skirt had touched no male hand in passing. Such taboo acts would have forced a ritual cleansing of the man involved, and could have gotten Yana ostracized from her Gypsy society.

On the other hand, in the last few years, against all advice, she had learned how to read and write. Here, beyond the standard Gypsy paranoia about opening the closed rom society, the taboos were only monetary — a child in school studying could not be out scrounging money from the gadje.

Ristik, meanwhile, had grabbed back control of the meeting.

“You both gotta agree, this is a decision for the King. We got two rom nationalities here, of equal standing because one is Kalderasha, the King’s nation, and the other Muchwaya, the nation of his wife, Lulu.” The two other true rom nations, Tsurana and Lowara, were not represented in the room. “Fighting each other will not help. Whoever becomes the new Baro Rom — Big Guy — it is to our advantage that it be someone from these kumpanias.”

“Yes, one of us,” echoed Sonia Lovari, who, though past 30, still passed as a Native American teenager soliciting donations for American Indian causes.

“So we must go back in style—”

“We must make the most impressive gifts to the King—”

“Which means,” said Yana, “a nineteen fifty-eight pink Cadillac convertible for him to be buried in.”

“Yes!” thundered hulking, barrel-chested Nanoosh Tsatshimo (bogus gold and silver electroplating). “If we can find one—”

“I will find it,” said Yana.

So, Marino thought, she obviously knows where to find it. He obviously didn’t. Since whoever brought back such a cherry ’58 pink ragtop as a gift to the dying King would have the inside track to be his successor, let Yana get the car — and then let her try to keep it until she could give it to the King...

“Meanwhile,” he said, “I have the plan that will let us all go back to Iowa in the proper style. Yana will not share her knowledge of the pink convertible with me, but I will share my idea with her.” He swept a bow to her side of the room. “With all of you...”

Two hours later the Gypsies, laughing with delight at his plan, went their various ways, some to con, others to drink, more to gamble — a standard Gypsy downfall — and Ristik over to Tiburon to paw through Teddy White’s garbage for personal clues his sister might use in the upcoming candle reading.

Alone with Yana, Marino slowly paced the room, gesturing with another half-eaten chicken leg. Yana sat at the table, placid at last, not turning her head, following him only with her eyes as he walked and talked.

“Remember when we were children, Yana...”

“Always fighting.”

“But always together.”

Her eyes softened for a moment. “Yes,” she said softly, “always together.”

He stopped behind her chair. He put his hands on her shoulders. He leaned down so his face was touching her hair. He breathed in her heady scent. “Betrothed to each other by our families when you were seven and I was fifteen—”

“But then you screwed it up.”

“Perhaps. Anyway, now we would be unbeatable together.”

The softness disappeared. She drew stiffly away. Stood. Began pacing herself.

“You know that I am married.”

“To Ephrem Poteet, a man who beats you when he is with you but who has been away for over two years.”

She shrugged. “I hope in prison, may he rot there. But anyway, Ramon is all I need to run my business.”

“Ramon is your brother.” He tried to put his arms around her. “Can a brother take the place of a strong man in your bed?”

She pulled away angrily. Her voice was scornful.

“Since we are children this is who you are! Always trying to control me! With sex! With your games! Always scheming! Always planning! Always wanting to be Baro Rom —”

“Me?” He raised his shoulders and spread his hands in a pained shrug. “Who is planning to take the Cadillac back for the King to get into his good graces?”

“Who knows where to find such a Cadillac?”

He nodded, conceding the point. His own face hardened. He spoke in Romany to her for the first time that night.

“All right. We will talk of this again, when you have more sense to speak.” He started for the door, paused. Now he spoke again in English. “I have a scam running and I need a few more days to bring it off.”

She was silent for a moment; then she too smiled. Many men would kill to have such a smile bestowed on them; quite a few gadje men had died financially because of it. Before they hit the road back to Iowa, she intended Theodore Winston White III to be another.

“All right, Rudolph. I too have an... operation running that needs more time. But... we begin now...”

“Good!” he exclaimed, laughing. “I will start opening the bank accounts and finding the offices for the phone rooms...”

She didn’t say that ripping off a certain 1958 pink Eldorado convertible from the gadjo who had it was another strong reason she wanted a delay in returning to the Midwest. He didn’t say that ripping off the same convertible from her was his strongest reason for agreeing to such a delay.