32 Cadillacs (3 page)

Certainly not Pietro the defaulting decorator. Perchance his poopsie? But hey, no sweat: to O’B and Ballard, those stalwart
repomen, interior decorators and those who slept with them
all
ate a lot of quiche.

A voice in the background called, “Freddi, who is it?”

“Two guys to see you.”

“How exciting! Show them in, darling, show them in.”

Ballard and O’B already were filling the antechamber with their collective bulk, mean and world-weary expressions in place.
As expected, fearsome Freddi (
Freddi?
) faded away without challenge. Pietro, small, precise, barefoot, wore a silk
smoking
of an incredible green paisley and looked as if he might have danced a mean Lambada during its fifteen minutes of fame.

“From the bank,” grated O’B.

“About the Mercedes,” snarled Ballard.

“You… want… to take… my… Mercedes?”

“As in two payments down,” sneered Ballard, flexing.

“The keys.” O’B held out an inexorable palm.

Pietro got a glazed look in his eyes. His color suddenly matched that of his paisley jacket. He crossed to the coat closet
where his topcoat was hanging, the perspiration of distress etching his bare soles on the polished hardwood floor.

O’B turned to grin at Ballard. The keys would be in the topcoat pocket. An easy repo. The old mouth-breather routine got to
this sort of creampuff every time.

Pietro turned back with a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun he’d taken from behind the topcoat. Ballard’s mouth fell open.
O’B’s riot of freckles was suddenly very prominent against the pallor replacing his ruddy drinker’s complexion.

“Wait a minute,” he said, the extended hand now palm-out like a traffic cop’s.

Pietro broke open the shotgun with a jerk of his stubby square-nailed hands. Clear lacquer glinted on the nails.

Ballard said, “You don’t have to—”

Pietro rammed a double-O shell up the shotgun’s nose. Ballard’s and O’B’s eyes met. The whites showed all the way around,
like those of spooked horses. Each hoped to see the other miraculously transformed into James Bond lounging against the door
frame, silenced 9mm Walther PPK in hand. Neither did.

They began in unison, “We can work something ou—”

Pietro rammed another double-O up the shotgun’s other nostril. He slammed the gun shut with the clap of doom.

Taking the twelve flights to the ground floor, O’B and Ballard didn’t bother with the elevator. They barely used the stairs.

*   *   *

Over in North Beach, last night’s stale beer and cigarettes still fouled the air of the Pink Flesh, a topless bar somehow
surviving Broadway’s Carol Doda days. On a minuscule stage an overage blonde in an underage costume lackadaisically bumped-and-ground
to the canned music. No one, not even herself, paid the slightest heed to her gyrations. Most of the customers were Chinese,
but behind the stick was a tough-faced Italian who sprinkled salt in beer glasses, scrubbed them, sloshed them around in hot
sudsy water, and put them upside down to drain.

Once upon a time, Chinatown and Italian North Beach happily had shunted bilingual insults at each other across Broadway from
Columbus Ave all the way to the Tunnel. In those halcyon days, Broadway was a knife-cut between the racial entities. But the
topless ’70s weakened the strong Italian presence, and the open-armed ’80s brought a vast influx of legal and illegal Hong
Kong FOBs—Fresh off the Boats—into Chinatown. So many Chinese immigrants spilled across Broadway that for a time it looked
as if the Italians would disappear from North Beach.

But everything that goes around comes around, as they say, and in the tight-ass ’90s, legal and illegal
Italian
immigrants began flooding back in, shouldering aside the Chinese, replacing the Italian families that had fled to the suburbs.

Hence the Pink Flesh: Italian ownership, Chinese clientele, suspended between cultures. And, being topless, as anachronistic
as a VW van wearing peace symbols and psychedelic colors.

Among the customers dotting the stick like adolescent acne was one who was neither Italian nor Chinese: a swarthy gent who
that week called himself Ramon Ristik. He might have been a Roosian, a French or Turk or Proosian—but he was in fact a Gypsy.
Brother of that Yana (a.k.a. Madame Miseria) who was in line for possible succession to the damaged King’s throne.

Ristik was trying to read the palm of one Theodore Winston White III, a slender half-drunk blond chap descended from Marin
County’s rarefied heights for a day in the fleshpots.

“You don’t understand,” Teddy said, rescuing his hand from Ristik with drunken gravity. “There is nothing you can tell me.
Nothing.
Never knew my mother, never knew my father…”

“Yezz, yezz, I know,” buzzed Ristik in uninterested gutturals, reaching again for the hand. “Izz most difficult.”

Teddy again pulled it away. “I was adopted right after I was born. Never knew ’em. My parents. But I’ve always felt… there
was something hanging over me…”

“Fate,” said Ristik. “Yezz. Izz bad. Izz very bad. That izz why I must…”

He finally succeeded in snaring Teddy’s hand. He turned it palm-up on the bartop. He stared at it. Teddy didn’t want to be
interested, but the very intensity of Ristik’s attention was like a focused burning glass. Ristik emitted a low moan.

Teddy demanded, despite himself, “What is it? What…”

But Ristik had dropped Teddy’s hand as if it were the monkey’s severed paw, capable of scuttling off around the bartop all
by itself. His buzzing sibilants were gone.

“My God, man! You’re too heavy for me, I can’t handle it!”

“What do you see? What—”

“This is a job requires my sister!” Ristik exclaimed hoarsely. “She’s the only one strong enough to deal with this!”

“Deal with
what?
” Teddy looked about to burst into tears.

Ristik leaped to his feet, clasped Teddy briefly and fiercely to his bosom, sorrow and terror in his face.

“The curse!” he hissed. “You’ve been
cursed!
”

Then he rushed out, thrusting aside the threadbare plush curtain over the open doorway and letting in a stream of dusty sunlight
to impale Teddy’s hand palm-up on the bar. Teddy jerked the hand away, scattered paper money across the stick, and ran out,
yelling, after Ristik.

M
argarete Klenhard sat beside the Emergency Room Admitting Desk in Steubenville General Hospital, answering questions. Two
of her answers were even true—the man calling himself Karl had indeed been born, and he was indeed her husband. He had, in
fact, paid a $500 bride price for her over half a century before, back in the days when a dollar had meant something.

Hovering over her chair like a parent at a first recital was a large man with an extra chin and bullet eyes and a fringe of
greying hair around a bald pate. Manager of the largest department store in Stupidville, he hoped that by paying Kail’s medical
bills he could avert a lawsuit for negligence in the matter of the escalator—and thus avoid skyrocketing his liability rates
through the roof.

“Name of patient?”

“Karl Klenhard.” Margarete’s accent was heavy as a Black Forest cake. Her hands mauled the cheap handbag in her lap.

The nurse typed. “Date of birth?”

“My Karl is in Prussia born on the twenty-eighth of June, nineteen hundred and fourteen—the very day that the Archduke Ferdinand
is in Sarajevo assassinated to start the Great War.”

“Yes, I see,” said the nurse, typing. She had a round red face and didn’t see at all: she was of that age which thought Desert
Storm had been the Great War. “U.S. citizen?”

“
Ja.
Naturalized. On the boat in nineteen twenty-five to New York City he comes. To the Statue of Liberty.”

“Religion?”

“We are Lutheran, of course,” said a scandalized Margarete.

“Emergency notification?”

“Me. Margarete Klenhard.” Her real name was Lulu Zlachi, as Karl’s was Staley Zlachi, but what’s in a name? She laid a hand
on her heart. “For more than fifty years I am his wife.”

“Insurance?”

“We have none. We are poor folk. We—”

“No insurance.” Typing. “That’s going to be a prob—”

The department store manager cut in hurriedly, “Ah, the store will be… ah… handling monetary matters in, um…”

On the floor above, Staley was being rolled into the X-ray room on a blanket-covered gurney. Two husky orderlies in green
gowns carefully took hold of the ends of the sheet on which he lay and slid Staley onto the cold metal table. The X-ray machine
hulked over him like some obscene metal vulture. At the move, he cried out.

The hovering nurse made a distressed sound in her throat.

“We have to turn him on his side.” To Staley she said, unwillingly, “Sir, can you—”

Staley only groaned. The orderlies gingerly began to turn him. He shrieked with the pain and fainted just as Lulu burst through
the door. The nurse grabbed her to keep her from throwing herself upon her husbands silent form like a dishonored Roman upon
his sword. Lulu could only stand there, weeping copious tears and mauling her purse, as the vulture lowered its electronically
charged beak to Staley’s ashen flesh.

*   *   *

In San Francisco, Bart Heslip got out of his DKA company car because Sarah Walinski had just pulled her year-old Dodge Charger
up across the sidewalk on the other side of the narrow Richmond District street. Sarah had beautiful taffy hair but was built
like a bridge piling and had a face like a firedoor, with rivets for eyes. Since she was a skip out of New Jersey with the
Charger, and had skipped again after running a previous repoman off with an axe, Heslip had a REPO ON SIGHT order for her
car.

He was not afraid of playing hatchet-tag with Sarah: he’d won thirty-nine out of forty pro fights before deciding ten years
before, then age 24, that he would never be middleweight champeen a de woild. At least not without having his brains scrambled
into instant Alzheimer’s.

So he’d traded his boxing gloves for a set of repo tools. Man-hunting for DKA gave him the same exhilaration and challenge
he’d formerly gotten in the ring: out in the field it was still one-on-one, you against him. Or her. May the best person win.

One sack of groceries was out of the backseat and Sarah was reaching for the second to take into her rented half of the pastel
stucco duplex row house when Heslip spoke cheerily to her back. “Sarah, I’m sorry but I have to take your car.”

She whirled to glare at him. “How the goddam hell’d you find me, you goddam bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep nigger?”

Heslip was indeed black; plum black, in fact, with kinky hair and a thin mustache and the trained fighter’s wide bunchy shoulders
and natural physical arrogance. He’d been called all the bleep-bleep words before, by men who’d subsequently taken nourishment
through a straw; but you couldn’t bust a woman’s chops, not even if she outweighed you by fifty pounds.

He said only, “You know how it is with us darkies, Sarah. We always out dere on dat street jivin’ away, yessiree ma’am.”

Jiving indeed. He’d already won, because he’d slipped into the driver’s seat while she’d been bleeping away. Thus—unlike his
timid-souled predecessor—he had control of the situation
before
it got out of hand. The keys were in the ignition and the engine was running. This would be the easiest grab of the month.

“Oh, take the goddam thing! Just lemme get the rest of my goddam groceries outta the goddam backseat…”

A charmer. Heslip drummed the steering wheel with patient fingers, then finally started to twist around in the seat.

“Sarah, if you need help with—”

The three-pound can of coffee, slammed lustily against the side of his head like a hurled rock, split his scalp as if it were
a ripe apple. The blow knocked him right out of the car. Through double vision and dripping blood (
drip
grind, he thought confusedly), he saw 200-pound Sarah slither into the front seat like a sea lion going into the water off
Seal Rock. He thought he heard shrieking tires, dreamed he smelled burning rubber…

They were taking the twelfth stitch in Bart Heslip’s scalp before he woke up again, flat on his back at SF General.

*   *   *

Lying naked on his back in the sex-rumpled bed, watching Maria the Check-in Clerk dress by the soft light from the bathroom,
Rudolph Marino congratulated himself. His questions, apparently casual but as skillful as his lovemaking, had obliquely confirmed
that his plan for the hotel would work.

Maria caught his eyes and gave him a slow, sensual smile as she squirmed into her pantyhose.

“That New York jet-lag didn’t slow you down any, Angie…”

He pursed his lips in a little kissing motion. “Who could be anything but tireless with such beauty to spur him on?”

He had called her at the reception desk directly after checking into his suite. She had met him in the Garnet Room for a drink
on her meal break, and that had led to this. He hadn’t known whether she would be useful or not. She had been.

“From the moment I saw you,
cara
, I had to possess you.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, kissed him again, long and passionately. It was she who finally came up for air.

“I
knew
I was going to regret getting dressed so fast.”

“There are other times,
cara
,” he said.

Cara
. Darling. One of the dozen words he knew in Italian.

He let her kiss him once more, was out of bed as the door closed behind her, calling Housekeeping for a maid to bring fresh
sheets, flushing the condom, jumping into the shower for a needle spray first hot as a chili pepper, then cold as a kidney
stone.

Gadje
women were unclean.

But useful.

He got dressed in front of the 5:00
P.M.
news, becoming alert at the item about the President’s forthcoming visit to San Francisco. That visit was why Marino was
here, checked into this particular hotel. Yes! He went out to find a payphone from which to make his phony bomb threat in
the phony Arab gutturals.