Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Six

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern paused on the Geary Boulevard sidewalk just off Twelfth Avenue to examine a blue sandwich board in front of a yellow-brick apartment house. It bore a yellow outspread hand, palm forward, and the words:

“Follow the yellow-brick hand,” said Rosenkrantz.

They didn’t see the black Cadillac Catera sliding into a parking space across Geary, nor did they see a tall lean man in a grey suit get out. They were too busy reading lettering on a draped-off first-floor window overlooking Geary.

The narrow entrance was arched in a vaguely Moorish way. Two steps up in a small vestibule was an inset door with an OPEN sign hanging on the knob and more lettering on the opaque glass:

“She ain’t exactly hiding out, is she?” mused Guildenstern.

Cut-glass teardrops tinkled softly on the Tiffany lamp’s phony stained glass shade when the two cops entered the tiny waiting room. A young woman reading a magazine started eagerly from her chair, then subsided in obvious disappointment.

“You’re waiting for Madame Miseria?” asked Rosenkrantz.

“Yes.” She shot a quick look at the tiny gold wristwatch just above her white-gloved left hand, and added in a low, well-modulated voice, “I had a three o’clock appointment.”

Golden hair shone under her white tam-o’-shanter, big round glasses gave her small face an almost scholarly cast. She was slender yet full-bosomed under a white sweater and grey flannel jacket. Slim ankles and narrow black shoes peeped out from under a pleated grey mid-calf skirt. A thin attaché case rested on the floor beside her chair. For a fleeting moment, Rosenkrantz wished he had a daughter like her.

“Maybe Madame Miseria is inside,” he suggested gently.

“I used the bell-pull. There was no answer. And the inner door is locked.”

Guildenstern said, “Yeah? Let’s give her another jingle.”

He jerked several times on the silk-tasseled bell-pull. A bell bong-bonged inside. He rattled the door. No response.

“See? She doesn’t answer.” The blonde stood up, almost theatrically. “What if something has... has happened to her?”

“Why would you think that?” snapped Guildenstern.

“One hears...” A vague gesture. “Gypsies...”

“Just why are you seeing her?”

“Consulting her,” she corrected. Her eyes, behind their glasses, were abruptly icy. “And I can’t conceive of any circumstance under which that would be any of your business.”

The cops belatedly hauled out their shield wallets.

“Police officers,” they said in unison.

“I see. I do not wish to embarrass Madame Miseria by being here at such an awkward time,” said the blonde. “So, good day.”

As she picked up her attaché case, the door was opened by a man in a thousand-dollar suit. He bowed gallantly as she swept by him with a distant nod. The door closed behind her. Guildenstern bore in on the chivalrous dude.

“We saw you out in the Mission this morning at a Gyppo hot-TV storefront place.”

“Now we see you here at a Gyppo mitt-reader’s camp,” added Rosenkrantz. “We wanna know why.”

Guildenstern held out his hand. “And we wanna know who.”

The man slapped a business card down on the open palm.

“Angelo Grimaldi, Attorney at Law. My firm represents the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco in—”

Guildenstern said, “What do you call twelve lawyers falling out of an airplane?”

“Skeet,” said Rosenkrantz.

Grimaldi went on smoothly, “. . In certain legal matters. I am trying to serve papers on the woman who, I learned at what you so colorfully call the Gyppo hot-TV storefront, operates here as Madame Miseria. She received a large sum of money from one of the Archbishop’s parishioners under dubious circumstances—”

“Pardon my French,” interrupted Guildenstern, “but why would the Archbishop give a shit whether one of his flock got scammed by a Gyppo fortune-teller? Ain’t going to crystal-gazers against the precepts of Holy Mother Church, like that?”

“Hate the sin but not the sinner,” said Grimaldi. “This Madame Miseria was posing as... well, as a Catholic nun. In habit. At the cathedral. The victim, an elderly parishioner, believed she was contributing to Renew 2000, and even though her money is gone, she still refuses to believe that, um, Madame Miseria was not a genuine nun. As a result, she is rethinking her very considerable generosity to Mother Church.”

“So the Archbishop brought you into the picture to help maintain the cash flow?” Rosenkrantz guffawed. “Sounds like a clear case of assault and barratry to me.”

Grimaldi gave him an icy look. “Since Madame Miseria is obviously not here, I bid you gentlemen good day.”

When he was gone, Guildenstern said, “Why don’t flies buzz Italian lawyers?”

“Even flies got some pride.” Rosenkrantz frowned. “You think maybe that guy’s a little slick for the holy-water crowd?”

“We’ll soon find out.” Guildenstern punched out a number on his cell phone. “And since this Yana Poteet is our number one suspect for scragging her husband, at the same time we’ll get us a search warrant all proper-like to enter the premises.”

Before a uniform arrived with the warrant, they learned that the Archdiocese had never heard of anyone named Grimaldi. When the landlord opened the apartment, they found an expensive crystal ball glowing with an eerie blue light in the duikkerin room. On the kitchen stove they found a frying pan full of incense smoldering on low heat. Guildenstern turned it off. In the bedroom, Rosenkrantz opened the closet door with his fingertips. A diaphanous dress in brilliant red, yellow, and purple hung from a rod facing the room. He held it up in front of him on its hanger.

“Is it me?” he asked.

Guildenstern, dragging a chair under the old-fashioned light fixture in the middle of the ceiling, snorted in disgust.

“Get useful. Gimme a hand here.”

Rosenkrantz steadied the chair. Guildenstern studied the fixture at close range. He grunted. “Dust, not dollars.”

Only dust in the other light fixtures, too. They took turns washing their grimy hands at the kitchen sink. They did not find either Madame Miseria or Yana Poteet.

“That blonde rubbed me the wrong way,” said Guildenstern.

“I liked her. The daughter I never had.”

Belated alarm scrunched up Guildenstern’s features.

“No back door to this dump, we’re comin’ in the front, and this blonde is sittin’ in the waiting room.” He suddenly snarled, “The daughter you never had! Between us, forty-five freakin’ years on the force an’ we watch our suspect waltz right past us out the door in a blond wig. Now I’m pissed.”

Rosenkrantz nodded. “What do you call two policemen buried up to their necks in sand?”

“Not enough sand,” said Guildenstern hollowly.

Yana rode a 38 Geary/Fort Miley Muni bus away from her invaded ofica. It stopped to let an old woman off where the great onion-shaped spire of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin glinted gold in the sunshine. A little priest with a black habit and a bobbed grey ponytail used a big carton of candles to push open one of the twelve-foot-high gilded doors.

Three wise-eyed recent-émigré Russian teenagers got on the bus. They would have been baiting Madame Miseria in an instant; Yana, in her business suit, glasses, blond wig, and attaché case, drew only indifference. They were foreigners, but they had one another. She had nothing. She could no longer be Madame Miseria. She could no longer be Yana Poteet. Since she had been ejected from the Muchwaya, she could no longer even be a Gypsy. At times like this, yearning for the kumpania was like a lingering terminal illness. She had made a fateful decision when she learned to read. It had been a skill like any other, something that would enable her to go somewhere in life, win a place of honor in the tribe, and some of the advantages of the gadjo world. Instead, the gadjo knowledge had put a barrier between her and the Muchwaya. They had become uncomfortable with the change in her, and called it ambition. Whatever it was, she could see herself how far it had removed her from tribal wisdom and racial cunning. They had been gozever to ban her.

Now Ephrem was dead, his poor, sad silly cache above the light fixture rifled. And she had no nation, no tribe, no clan, no kumpania. Her brother, Ramon, would help her if she asked him, not because she was his sister but because he feared her powers. At heart he would always be a loyal Rom. Why endanger his standing with the tribe? It was up to her to make the final break from them or be swept under.

But she was so weary. The words of the dying Gypsy came back to her. “Bury me standing — I’ve been on my knees all my life.”