Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Forty-nine

Ephrem Poteet’s dying words were, It was my... wife... from... ’Frisco... After a pause, he croaked, Yana, and with his last breath howled out her name: Yana-a-a-a-a... Etty Mae heard him clearly. Cut and dried. But on seeing Yana’s mug shots, she said just as clearly that Yana was not the woman she had seen on those two fateful nights. So far so good. But none of it proved Yana’s innocence.

Giselle had puzzled over this ever since Bart had reported it, but it wasn’t until she was driving to work that she was able to catch the thought that had been tickling at her brain. What if after saying his wife had killed him, Ephrem called out to Yana, not in accusation, but in despair because she was his only true love and he was dying all alone without her there? What if there had been another, bigamous wife?

The Bureau of Vital Statistics was in the ornate newly earthquake-refitted City Hall. Behind the counter of the otherwise-empty office a large indifferent black woman in a print dress was giving someone a cake recipe over the phone.

“You stick a broom straw down into each layer. If it comes out clean, the cake is done.” She gave a booming laugh. “I’m gonna get me more than a piece of that cake, girl!” and hung up.

She looked at Giselle sternly; no cake recipes for her.

“I need a vital statistic,” said Giselle.

The laugh again. “Them we got plenty of.” She shook her head, chuckling, “Yessir, got plenty of them. Whut you need?”

Never confuse a bureaucrat. Giselle literally spelled it out for her. She was looking for a marriage license issued to a Poteet, P-O-T-E-E-T, Ephrem, or to a Mihai, M-I-H-A-I, Punka.

“Ain’t gonna be many, not with no goofy names like those.” There weren’t. On Friday, March 3rd, Punka Mihai had married Nadja Gry in a civil ceremony right here at City Hall.

Giselle went out into the June sunshine to sit on a bench by the reflecting pool and congratulate herself a little and reflect on what she had. She had a start. A bigamous marriage. What she needed now was Nadja Mihai’s current name.

Luminitsa Djurik sprinkled a careful measure of the magic salt Whit Stabler had mentioned to Larry Ballard into the chicken noodle soup and set it down in front of the old man. She used the cheery voice of caregivers worldwide.

“The magic salt will have you all well in no time, Whit!”

He began shakily spooning soup into his mouth. He mumbled valiantly, “I... think I feel stronger today.”

She needed a power of attorney to get at his investments, and the house deed made over to her so she could make a quick sale. Once he signed the papers, the final dose of magic salt...

“You certainly are stronger,” she said, taking the spoon from Whit’s shaky hand. “Let Mama help you. And then maybe tonight you can help Mama by signing the deed to the house.”

Ramon had found a house in Rome on the Via Tor dei Conti near the partially restored ruins of the Foro Romano where the conspirators killed Julius Caesar. Just down the street hulked the Colosseum, haunted by the shades of the countless thousands who died there to entertain the citizenry of Rome.

The hallway was lined with a dozen straight-backed chairs filled with women in obvious pairs. Some had their arms around one another, others rested their heads on the shoulder of their beloveds. They had paid in advance, very dearly, to be here.

The tall door of the salotto swung silently open. A tonsured monk in a simple brown robe stood in the opening.

“Suora Maria Innocente has composed herself sufficiently to receive you,” he said gravely. “It is very difficult for her, as you can imagine. But you may enter.”

The couples trooped into an echoing high-ceilinged room made dim by dusty crimson floor-to-ceiling plush drapes pulled shut across the windows. It smelled musty.

Beside the fireplace sat a slight nun in brown robes. Her bland face was framed by a stiff white headpiece under her black veil. Her slender throat was wrapped in severe white linen. In her arms was an infant. As the women took their places in the semicircle of chairs facing her, the silence was broken only by the scrape of wood on marble, the nervous clearing of a throat.

The pale nun suddenly raised her head to stare at them. Her eyes burned with the starved inner fire of the fanatic. How had they ever thought of her as bland? She spoke. The voice was harsh and cold. It sliced to their very souls.

“You are here today to bear witness to the martyrdom of an innocent woman.”

She leaped up, thrusting the infant high above her head as if to dash it to the marble floor. Several women gasped. The child gurgled sleepily. Sister Maria Innocente was motionless.

“I am bound by my final vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. I honor them. I am poor. I am chaste. I am a virgin. And I am mother of this child.” She lowered the infant, cradled him to her bosom. “When I was a teenager, God told me my destiny was as a bride of Christ. I embraced that vocation.”

But after she took her final vows, visions started to come. Of a child. She told Mother Superior of her visions. Mother Superior reproached her for the sins of pride and presumption.

One day, as she prayed alone in the motherhouse garden, a voice spoke to her in a strange tongue.

“I do not understand!” Sister Maria Innocente cried out.

“Listen... listen... and repeat...”

After three times she could recite the words perfectly, right down to their inflection — and suddenly she understood them. She never heard the voice again. Then she missed her period. When the morning sickness came, she went to Mother Superior with the whole story. She was ejected from the convent.

“I brought my child to Rome to seek wisdom of holy men and women assembled for the two thousandth birthday of the Church.”

One of these holy men had a housekeeper who, like the women gathered here today, could not abide the thought of a man touching her. But she desperately wanted a child.

“I told her there was nothing I could do. Secretly, I was terrified. What if my visions and my voice had come, not from God, but from Satan? But she pleaded and pleaded...”

They prayed together, and Sister Maria Innocente spoke the words over the housekeeper three times. The woman became pregnant. She told others of the miracle.

Sister Maria Innocente slumped in her chair, exhausted. The monk told the women, “You have come from America, even farther away than Trieste. You have chosen to live your lives without men, yet you desire children. God has given Sister Maria Innocente the gift of immaculate conception. Only during this Millennium year can she perform this miracle for you.”

The nun was on her feet, fatigue gone. The monk accepted the infant from her arms and left. This was women’s work.

“At the moment I speak the sacred words, six of you will be impregnated by the Holy Ghost. There can be no turning back, no changing of minds. Do you wish your donation returned?”

No one spoke. No one moved. The pairs of women knelt on the hard marble floor in front of Sister Maria Innocente. She spread her arms wide and chanted:

She repeated it, then said it a third time in English:

Sister Maria Innocente lowered her arms. “Those of you who have chosen to be mothers are now pregnant,” she said.

The monk escorted them out. That evening, the twelve chairs lining the hallway were once again filled with hopeful women without men, who wanted babies and who were there because of Sister Maria Innocente’s fame, just in case, just in case.

They were yelling, sweat was flying, Midori’s nails were raking his back. One last tremendous thrust took them right off the side of the bed. Even at that ultimate moment, Larry the karate kid spun them in a nifty one-eighty so he was underneath when they hit the floor. The impact made them both come.

They just lay there for a time, holding each other for dear life, laughing with the sheer joy of it, panting, spent, sated. Midori still had an hour before she had to get to work; they untangled and squirmed around to sit side by side with their knees drawn up, their bare backs against the bed.

Midori giggled and panted, “You... very bad... man, Rarry.”

“And you... very bad... girr, Midori,” he panted back.

When he said “bad girl,” dark images of Luminitsa Djurik and the old man she was taking care of sprang to mind. Here were he and Midori, young and crazy in lust — maybe even in love — and there was that poor old geezer, on the way out.

“How’s old Whit doing?”

She shook her head, bottomless dark eyes suddenly somber.

“Midori not know, Luminitsa quit her job, no work no more.”

Larry jumped to his feet. “Jesus Christ!”

“What’s the matter?” Frightened, Midori sprang up also.

He was pulling on his pants. “Whit said she sprinkled magic salt in his soup.”

“Sure, he say it better’n Viagra. But...”

“What’s Whit’s last name?”

Midori paused, pulling on her wispy underwear. “Stabrer.”

Larry grabbed her two-year-old phone book off the bedside table, muttering to himself, “Stabler. Whitney Stabler.” On Portola Drive. He dialed the number. Not in service. She’d had it changed, sure as hell.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get over there!”