Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Forty-six

Staley’s whole kumpania, all fifty of them, was shoehorned cheek by jowl into the spacious front room of Rudolph’s purloined Point Richmond house. The janitor from the Masquers Theatre down in the flats arrived with a truckload of folding chairs liberated from the playhouse. Kids with brown faces and shoe-button eyes ran from room to room, in and out between the adults’ legs, loud and noisy and joyous underfoot. The Gypsy flag was on one wall to make them feel proud of the occasion. At its center was a red sixteen-spoke chakra; the flag was halved horizontally, the blue above representing the sky, the green below representing the earth.

Staley was in fine form. Tonight he would distribute the tickets and tomorrow groups would begin to depart for Milan, then on to Rome. And he had a surprise visitor for his people that made his mustaches bristle and his eyes shine.

Voices rose and fell in English and Romani and several Eastern European tongues; there were laughter, jokes, and snatches of song. Musicians were setting up their tombouritsa, their bosh and bugaija, their prim and their tamboura. Three of them, dressed in bright colors, played Gypsy music at an Andalusian restaurant in the Sunset District. Others, who could have been Latino or gadje, day laborers or salesmen, had brought their own instruments and would drop in and out during the night.

Josef Adamo, just returned from a night in jail for intoxication, stepped into their midst to toast them with a tall glass of ouzo. The musicians struck up the lively Grastoro, and Adamo, keeping time to the music with his glass, sang in a fine comic vein:

The aroma from Lulu’s sastra dominated the kitchen. Six rabbits (snared by Nanoosh Tsatshimo and his sons atop Mount Bruno), carrots, onions, potatoes, and field herbs simmered on the back burner of Rudolph’s stove in the big iron pot. Thank the God-Bearer, the heavy sastra didn’t need to be suspended on a tripod over a wood fire this festive night.

Immaculata Bimbai, looking more Gypsy than countess tonight, carved holes out of the centers of half-baked potatoes and passed them on to her brother. Lazlo filled the holes with jam and replugged them, with as much attention as he had given to playing Donny, the computer nerd, in the jewelry-store scam.

Immaculata leaned close to Bessie Adamo and asked in a low voice, “Would you recognize the guest of honor?”

“The nephew of the King?” Bessie checked the oatmeal spread out to dry on the table to see if it was dry yet. “No, I never met him. But it’s still early, he wouldn’t be here yet.”

“I think he’s actually Lulu’s kin,” said Immaculata.

In the front room, Adamo concluded his song with the head-tossing whinny of a horse. Bessie laughed delightedly, as she did at her husband’s jokes, while mixing the dried oatmeal with honey, pounded nuts, and butter. She began forming the little buni-manricli cakes to pan-roast on top of the stove.

“It’s easier than doing them over a fire at the side of the road,” she said. “But there’s always something missing somehow.”

“Yeah, they don’t get burned this way,” said Pearsa the quick-tongued teenager in passing.

Lil Tomeshti was stuffing chestnuts and herbs into the four possums caught by her husband, Wasso, in Golden Gate Park over the weekend. He came in, bent over her to make sure justice was being done to the game he had brought. Lil and Lulu sent him packing. The two women carefully rolled the possums into clay cylinders, sealed them, and put them into the larger of the two ovens in Rudolph’s kitchen. Lulu bustled away to other tasks.

“In Europe I always made my hotchi-witchi with hedgehogs,” said Lil dubiously.

“You’ll like possum even better than kanzavouri,” Dina Tsatshimo assured her. Then she confided, “I met the Queen’s nephew many years ago in the south of Spain. He is from Holland, not one of us by blood. His wife is Muchwaya, of course.”

“What does he look like?” asked Lil breathlessly.

“A Dutchman!” laughed Dina. She slipped a tall-sided pan of cornbread into an equally tall pot of boiling water. “Big square head. Big shoulders. Very strong. I would never forget such a man!”

“Did you put yeast in that bread?” demanded Lulu, appearing at her elbow.

“Of course not,” said Dina a bit flatly.

She knew the Queen had not bustled up to ask about yeast in the cornbread. There was none. Traditionally, Gypsies made no bread that had to rise, because yeasted breads needed an oven in which to bake, not an open fire. No, Lulu had heard them gossiping about her nephew. She could not stop them from speculating, but she could make her formidable presence felt.

The possums baked in the top oven, the potatoes below. The sastra bubbled and the horta and other vegetables rested on the range in their pans, ready to be transferred to the serving platters. But the guest of honor still had not arrived.

Lulu, seeking to make work while they waited, demanded, “Is the tea and coffee prepared?”

“The nettles are steeping for the tea right now,” said Pearsa cheerfully.

“And I am brewing the dandelion roots for the coffee,” said Sonia Lovari. Dandelion coffee was made, not from the flowers, but from the roots, sun-dried, chopped, pan-roasted, and pounded into particles, then brewed like coffee.

The teenage girls were laying out the sweets they had made at home for the occasion: loukomi flavored with mastic, and rich spherical cookies made with butter and chopped nuts and rolled in powdered sugar, each topped with a currant.

“You’d better move the desserts to the sideboard in the dining room,” said Lulu.

Yula Marks, only twelve years old and eager to be useful, lifted a tray and wheeled out of the kitchen, moving gracefully as if to some inner music.

“Careful!” yelled Pearsa.

In one lightning movement, Yula balanced the tray on her right hand while using her left to snatch up her skirt. She just avoided contact with Kore Kronitos, who was seated just beyond the open doorway to the living room. If even the hem of Yula’s skirt had brushed him, Kore would have been made unclean, requiring ritual purification before he could rejoin his comrades.

In the front room, the band was taking its third break. In the kitchen, the women had brought out their own wine from underneath the sink, and were joking salaciously and dancing suggestively as they moved around the crowded kitchen in time to Latino music from the radio. Lulu deliberated. What was delaying her nephew? They would have so little time with him before he flew home. But she would have to serve the feast.

Staley appeared in the doorway, caught her eye, and nodded. He had obviously come to the same conclusion. He disappeared, Lulu and Lil put the possums on platters and carefully broke open their clay cylinders. The fur and skin came off with the baked clay, leaving only the stuffed, steaming meat. Tureens and platters were carried out into the front room where Staley was seated in the middle of the head table, more sober than he had been earlier but still in a jovial mood.

With a few minor pecking-order spats between children and adults alike, everyone was gradually seated and ready to feast on rabbit stew and baked possum and innumerable vegetables and boiled cornbread.

Staley, in the seat of power at this last supper of the Muchwaya in the Bay Area, was watchful, his eye on the door. The seat of honor on his right was still empty. Everyone was just about to start feasting when the front door banged open to bounce loudly off the wall beside it. Every eye leaped to the monocled intruder in some sort of guard’s uniform who strode into their midst, clicked his heels with Prussian precision, and glared at them. Dina jumped in surprise.

“That’s not the Dutchman!” she whispered to Lil.

“Shhhh!” said Lil. “There’s two of them!”

At the same time the interloper roared at them, “A fine gang of thieves!”

Ramon Ristik leaped to his feet and snatched up the huge carving knife from the hotchi-witchi platter. But before he could move from his place, a hulking figure of sheer power, the second one that Lil had marked, sent a shock wave around the room by bounding by the first man. He too was dressed in a guard’s outfit. He stopped and surveyed the astounded Romi, then made his way to the empty chair of honor at Staley’s side, and sat down.

“He’s not...” Lil stammered. “That’s not... not...”

But the Prussian was mussing his own carefully thinned hair, was removing his muttonchop whiskers, and dropping them with his monocle on the floor. Suddenly he was Lulu’s strapping nephew from Europe, known to many of them in the room.

“I said I would never forget such a man!” exclaimed Dina.

“Welcome, kinsman!” shouted Staley.

The erstwhile Baron gestured grandly with his left arm.

“I am proud to introduce you to my magnificent friend, Freddie, who was lost and now is found.”

“Sit, sit!” went up the cry. Freddie was already being accepted by the company, responding to their almost mystical connections to animals. Chairs were shifted, and the Baron found space next to the orangutan.

“We cannot stay long,” he said. “There still is danger to Freddie. This very night we fly from Oakland in a private jet arranged by certain highly placed friends.”

“But you must eat something, and Freddie...” Lulu trailed off as she stared at the ape sitting next to her husband.

“There is always time for hab-naske,” agreed the Baron. “As for Freddie, he is easy, my aunt. Some fruit — an apple, an orange, a banana. Some nuts, some seeds...”

As they all feasted, the Baron and Staley took turns describing the people and events that had shaped their plan of grand Gypsy tricks, called bengipe. And they told how gradually it had grown into the most audacious Gypsy con game ever played on the gadje by any tribe in the long history of the Romanipe. The children especially listened with rapt attention, intelligence moving like wild animals in their black Gypsy eyes as they absorbed every detail, delighted in every triumph over the gadje.

“Why do you have need of him?” asked Dina’s little son. He had been stroking Freddie’s massive forearm and hand-feeding him bits of cornbread.

The Baron quickly spooned the last of the cornbread onto his own empty plate.

“Because Freddie is not an ordinary ape, oh no,” he said. “He is master of many tricks, he can even use a computer. The man who taught him in Hong Kong will soon join us to continue his education...”

Tucon, twelve years old, twinkling of eyes, already a trainer of racehorses at Golden Gate Field, broke in.

“And the gadje of DKA? What of them?”

“The last I saw of them — from the air, mind you — they were standing on the rooftop of the world twenty miles from the nearest town!”

Then it was achsòv devlèsa to the Baron and Freddie. The Baron embraced many of them, both he and Freddie shook hands all around, then were out the door with cries of lacshès kusmètsi ringing in their ears.

Later that same holiday morning, Victor Marr helicoptered into Xanadu with his pilot, Carmody, at the controls, and his bodyguard, Marko, carried on the books for tax purposes as his personal assistant, at his side. Marr was boiling but was so disciplined he would never show his rage to a pair of mere employees. Freddie, the totally unique possession unmatched anywhere in the world, had been his. And was now another man’s.

“There never was any Baron Knottnerus-Meyer,” he told Marko. “This morning I spoke with the head of the firm in Berlin. They never had such an employee. He is probably the agent of the man who bought the beast in the first place — sent to retrieve him. Whoever he was, he went into Xanadu, cased the place, then conned Cal-Cit Bank into hiring a gang of repomen to steal my ape!”

“So first we go after the repomen, then—”

He stilled Marko with a gesture. “Until the very last moment, they thought they were testing Xanadu’s defenses. When they realized what was going on, it was too late.”

“I’ll leave for Europe tomorrow,” said Marko. “After I kill this man and get Freddie back—”

“We... don’t know who he is.” Marr sounded uncomfortable. Money and power had always worked for him before; but now he was faced with a slyness he could not comprehend. No organization he had ever dealt with had moved so swiftly and so secretly. “There is no record of him leaving California with Freddie, no record of him arriving with him at any major airport in Europe.”

Marko audibly ground his teeth. Marr was reminded of the Dobermans at Xanadu. Marko said, “I’ll fly to Hong Kong—”

“I talked with Kahawa this morning,” said Marr. “Brantley has disappeared. Again, no record of his departure.”

“Five minutes,” said Carmody over the intercom.

Once on the ground, Marr started for the perimeter fence with R.K. at his elbow.

“A con game,” said Marr thoughtfully. It all had been a con game. Hitting Xanadu. Grabbing Freddie. Disappearing Brantley from Hong Kong. Smoke and mirrors. He had never faced anything like it before.

They stopped at the fence. “Firecrackers,” he said, shaking his head. “An old trick.”

“In the dark, we could only figure we were taking fire.”

“And they kept you occupied downstairs with a few ball bearings tossed on the floor, while the helicopter...” He got his rising voice under control. “The helicopter was landing on the roof to take away Freddie. Where was the duty officer?”

“He was, ah, locked up in the ape’s cage.”

“By the ape, no doubt,” said Marr in dry sarcasm.

“Ah — as a matter of fact, yeah.”

Marr found himself nodding approval of the mirrors affixed to the light beams on the Observation Room door frame. He stared up at the crossbow-driven arrow with the expanding head in the ceiling of the Observation Room.

“And the white powder scattered on the floor?”

“Just seems to be talcum. I can’t figure out why they—”

“To make the light beams visible,” sighed Marr.

He looked over at the glowering R.K.

“You’ve got one hour to be out of Xanadu,” he said. What else could he do? If R.K. was not an incompetent, then Victor Marr himself was at fault. Victor Marr was never at fault. “I will see you never hold any sort of security job again.”

“That isn’t fair! And the Jeep’s gone. I got no way—”

“Walk,” said Marko.

R.K. walked. Vowing, with every step of those twenty miles down off the mountain, vengeance against Dan Kearny some day.