32 Cadillacs Page 31

  Facing him from a foot away was a monstrous dragon, tongue flicking, unwinking eyes staring into his own with cold intensity and contempt. He tried to thrust himself back from the terrible monster, but he was gripped by a giant’s hand that…

  Oh, The seat of the Brougham. Which was parked on a flinty narrow track in the desert, starting to cook in the morning sun. When he had screamed, the three-foot iguana had fled to the far corner of the dash on which he had been sunning himself. He crouched there now, hissing in terror and defiance, long whippy tail lashing his distress.

  Morales groaned, He opened his door and staggered out into the sunlight. To one side were nearly vertical rock faces. He began sending a seemingly endless yellow stream down over the rusted narrow-gauge railroad tracks beneath his feet…

  Railroad trucks?

  Hand-laid on rough-hewn ties, they ran toward the rock face and disappeared into the black mouth of a tunnel with a broken-down miner’s shack beside it. Glassless window, gaping door, sprawling shamelessly in the desert sun like an overused harlot.

  He shook, encased, zipped. Shards and snippets were coming back. The Giggling Marlin. Margaritas. Drunken Gypsy. Upside-down Gypsy. Cadillac. Mexican ready to eat an iguana. Cow looking in through the windshield, cow?

  He remembered getting the keys, going outside, buying the iguana, taking it with him in the car. Driving north through the warm black night toward La Paz, the twisting rising falling blacktop, the lights picking out cattle all over the open-range desert, the road itself… Almost off the road. Cow looking in the windshield, front bumper two inches from its legs. Mooo.

  Morales scrunched his way across the mine tailings to the shack. Legless chair, three-legged table, what once could have been a bench to put a bedroll on. And a Mexican comic book. A romance, shamelessly saccharine. He left it for the next pilgrim, crunched back to the Brougham.

  After the cow, mountains. Terror. Drunk. He’d seen this rocky track off to his left, taken it until he was out of sight of the road, had switched off and passed out. End of story.

  The iguana was on the driver’s seat. Staring at him.

  Good to eat; in Mexico, as often as not they were the chicken in your pollo. Tasted like chicken. They said that about everything from rattlesnake to, he bet, monkey meat. Tasted like chicken.

  Morales had bought the iguana because the Mexican was going to eat it and Morales didn’t want him to. Between him and the lizard was a gut connection, one of the few Morales could remember making with any living thing. He opened the car door.

  “Okay, kid,” he said in English, “beat it.” The iguana stared at him unwinkingly. He made shooing gestures with his hand. “Vamoose, muchacho.”

  The iguana waited a moment longer, then flowed down over the edge of the seat past him, scuttled off a few yards across the rocky terrain of his natural habitat. Stopped, swung head and trunk around to regard Morales from those ageless eyes.

  “Vaya con Dios,” said Morales.

  With a sudden whip of his tail, the iguana was up on his toes and sprinting gracefully off across the rocks with a dry scrabbling sound, out of sight and gone forever.

  Morales got into the Brougham and started the engine and backed out toward the blacktop. He would follow it north to La Paz, and, eventually, nearly a thousand miles north of that, to the U.S. border entry point at San Diego.

  Meanwhile, Trinidad Morales had just done the first good deed of his entire adult life.

  * * *

  Giselle Marc stormed into Larry Ballard’s second-floor cubicle with a heavy green plastic garbage bag over her shoulder. She thudded it to the floor by the corner of his desk, eyes flashing, fingers unconsciously hooked and ready for clawing.

  “What did you do to him?” she demanded.

  “To whom?” asked Ballard casually and grammatically, taking the precaution of getting to his feet for a few quick defensive moves if she started clawing. As in eyes out.

  “You know who—Rudolph! You tricked him out of the pink Cadillac and—”

  “It was Yana’s in the first place.”

  “It actually belongs to a restorer in Palm Springs, so don’t give me that Yana stuff. If you hadn’t taken it, Rudolph never would have gone off without telling me and—”

  “No?” Ballard leaned forward intently. “How do you think I knew I could snatch that pink Cadillac away from him?”

  “H… how?” Giselle felt her face getting tight and hot.

  “Maria, the check-in clerk, he was banging before—”

  “That’s a lie!”

  Ballard caught her wrists before her nails could bite his face. “Yeah. Cheap shot. Sorry.” She stopped raging and he released her. “Anyway, she told me he’d settled his bill the night before and was leaving by midmorning yesterday. I bribed a car-parker for a uniform and brought the car up for him.” Smugness entered Ballard’s voice. “Only I drove off in it myself. I rubbed his nose in it!”

  Giselle upended her plastic garbage bag over his desk. Out cascaded great heaps of small-denomination greenbacks, some banded, some loose, spilling out and eddying down to the floor. Clods of dirt fell out also as she glared defiantly at him.

  “The Teddy White score—I took it away from your precious Yana and rubbed her nose in it!”

  Ballard’s brows were terrible to behold. He looked like a berserker from Norse mythology. They were face-to-face, inches apart, quivering with anger and hurt, their voices crescendos.

  “You drove her away from me!”

  “She didn’t need me to leave you!” she yelled. “She was on her way out of town with her brother—their truck was packed to the roof with all their cheap gimcracky Gyppo crap.”

  Ballard grabbed up Marino’s satchel from behind the desk. Clicked open the top. “Yeah? Well, look at this!”

  The satchel was stacked to the mouth with orderly banded packets of greenbacks. Giselle stared with stricken face.

  “Rudolph spent three weeks—”

  Dan Kearny’s voice crashed down on them from the doorway like a huge breaker on hapless swimmers.

  “QUIT ACTING LIKE GODDAM TEENAGERS THE PAIR OF YOU!”

  “He—”

  “She—”

  “Cry on your own time.” But advancing into the room, he stopped to stare openmouthed at the money on Ballard’s desk. He faltered, “What in heaven’s name… is going on in here?”

  They talked over one another like siblings vying for a parent’s attention, Kearny listening with darkened face.

  “What pink Cadillac?” he asked finally in ominous calm.

  “The pink Cadillac the dying King wants to be buried in.”

  Giselle added, “Rudolph wants to be King—”

  “And Yana wants to be Queen,” finished Ballard.

  “Dying King, huh?” said Kearny, a sudden gleam in his eye too brief for either of them to catch. “Pink Cadillac. Yana. Rudolph.” He looked from one to the other of them. “What the hell else don’t I know?”

  “Nothing,” they chorused too quickly, not meeting his eyes, then told him they didn’t even know where the King was dying.

  “Steubenville, Iowa.” This riveted their attention: where the King was dying, there would be Rudolph and Yana. He suddenly thundered at them, “Put that goddamned money in the safe until I figure out what to do with it! Get hold of O’B in Florida and Bart in Chicago and tell them to meet us in Steubenville. Counting the one in Baja last night, we’ve only repo’d eleven, leaving us twenty to go—twenty-one if we add that pink Cadillac. Most of them ought to be at Steubenville.”

  They started moving, reaching for the satchel and stuffing loose greenbacks back into the green plastic garbage bag.

  “You two ought to fit right in there.” He smiled like a fat-smeared bear trap smiling in ambush under the dry leaves. “The locals call it Stupidville.”

  * * *

  Under the bluffs a mile downriver from Stupidville, on the wide rolling field of a fanner who’d needed the money, the G
ypsy encampment was swelling. Trailers and RVs and pickups with camper beds on the back, vans and trucks and dozens of new and beat and battered Cadillacs, fifty other cars of assorted makes and ages. Even a dozen horses and three or four old-fashioned Gypsy caravans. They had been brought out to honor the dying King born in the early days of the century when creaking canvas-covered horse-drawn wagons were the Gypsies’ only transportation.

  Hundreds of rom, more arriving by the hour, in every conceivable sort of dress. Underfoot and assaulting the ears, countless dogs and cats and children, even chickens. Overhead, a pall of sweet-scented applewood smoke from their cook fires.

  In town, the encampment’s presence already was being felt. Christ Himself, remember, had given the Gypsy a dispensation to steal from the gadjo; so Stupidville’s original pleasure to have so many new spenders in town was being hourly reduced to dismay.

  All the tools had disappeared from Klinger’s Garage.

  Ben Franklin Five and Dime was seeing its shelves cleared as if by goods-eating locusts.

  The Deli Ice Cream Shoppe (“I’ll Be Dipped!”) had been forced to remove all their sugar cones from the front display case, and were considering locks on their freezers.

  All the summer dresses—along with their mannequins—had disappeared overnight from Sylvia’s Dresse Shoppe’s front windows. Sylvia had checked her insurance, closed her doors, and gone visiting her sister in Dubuque.

  Himmler Clothing (“Boys’ Wear to Outwear the Boy”) avoided similar problems only because Doug Himmler had played nose-tackle for the Ohio State Buckeyes and would break bones if anyone messed with him. Gypsies were partial to their bones.

  Kay Wenzel’s Jewelers (“It’s Okay to Owe Kay”) had a sophisticated alarm system and put all of their stock in the safe at night, so they were so far untroubled by missing jewelry. Of course Immaculata Bimbai had not yet hit town.

  Also untroubled were Steubenville General Hospital, the adjacent Hansel and Gretel Park (“Has Public Water Access”), and the block-long marina (“The Boat Float”) the hospital overlooked.

  But there were reasons for that. To have Barney Hawkins realize Staley was a Gypsy—King of the Gypsies, no less!—would be fatal. Until Democrat National coughed up money for Karl Klenhard’s terrible tumble down the escalator stairs, Lulu had to keep the rom away from the hospital.

  * * *

  The tableau was familiar: Staley lying on his back with his eyes shut; Margarete in her chair beside the bed, bird-bright eyes fixed on the pudgy Hawkins; Hawkins pacing up and down the tiny free area in the middle of the room.

  “All right, I got a little… upset last time,” he said. “But goddammit…” He got control of his voice. “But I have to get this thing settled.” He turned to Lulu. “Mrs. Klenhard, you have to see my position—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars,” said Staley in sepulchral tones. Lulu kept silent.

  “That just isn’t reasonable, Mr. Klenhard. Now, the offer I made last time, twenty-five thou—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars,” said Staley.

  “Okay, because I gotta close this one out, thirty—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars,” said Staley.

  Hawkins’s veins and eyes were beginning to bulge again. He had stopped, squarely facing Staley on the bed. Even though Staley’s eyes were closed, it was mano a mano. Lulu was out of the loop and glad of it. Staley had never lost mano a mano in his long life.

  “Thirty-five—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “Forty, and that’s the last—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “Goddam you, fifty, and if you think—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “Fifty-five—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  Hawkins was red as a turkey wattle. “Sixty—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “Son of a bitch bastard, sixty-five—”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  Hawkins threw up his hands in defeat. He’d like to choke the scrawny old bastard to death, but the wife would probably kill him and his company would have to pay for his burial.

  “All right!” he yelped. “All right all right all right! You win! Seventy-five…”

  Staley at last opened his eyes. Was that a twinkle deep in their opaque depths? “Acceptable,” he said.

  Barney Hawkins left the hospital within seven minutes of his humiliating capitulation. As he drove south out of town along the river, he sneered at all the bums and drunks and hoboes and homeless who were congregated in some hick farmer’s field back under the bluff… Except, Christ, he might soon be one of them. He had made a $75,000 settlement when the home office was expecting $15,000! Beaten by some 77-year-old fart you had to move from place to place with a shovel!

  Which old fart at that very moment was polkaing his lady in a breathtaking whirl around his hospital room to oompah music from the radio, both of them giggling like teenagers, until the sound of Dr. Crichton’s footsteps in the hall sent them scurrying to hit their respective marks in their little domestic farce, his the bed, hers the chair.

  Seventy-five thousand dollars.

  Yes!

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The burly Jew in the skullcap took the tarnished metal object from the black man’s fingers and said to his young bright-eyed assistant in Yiddish, “Vi heyst dos?”

  “Vaz.”

  “Yo, yo, vaz,” he said impatiently. He moved the vase slightly. “Zilber?” The assistant shrugged. He turned back to the black man. “You want to know if this is a silver vase?”

  The black man grinned. “Yo? Good word.” He gestured at the beat-up-looking vase. “How much to get it replated, or whatever you call it?”

  The Jew turned the object over with his fingers, looking up with probing eyes. “Old family heirloom, I suppose?”

  “Yeah, sure, somethin’ like that. Look, bro, you don’t wanna do it—”

  “And you think it is silver.”

  “Ain’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, shit, then, whut you be wastin ma time for?”

  The black man snatched back the battered vase to swing away through the street crowd on this part of Chicago’s South Drexel Boulevard near the university, where the Jews’ secondhand stalls catered to South Side blacks. He heard something with zilber in it that ended with a laugh and narish schvartz. Zilber had to be silver and he knew schvartz was black man. Narish probably was something like dumb or stupid—which he wasn’t.

  So he swung back to say, “African-American, hymie,” then pushed his way on down the street with the worthless vase he had bought at another street stall an hour before.

  * * *

  Was the skull-capped Jew really a Jew, wondered Bart Heslip as he blew on his coffee to cool it, or a Gypsy posing as a Jew? Chicago’s blacks often had tensions with the Jews, but they had no time at all for Gyppos. A skullcap and a few scraps of Yiddish did not make a Jew; and laughing at the dumb black who didn’t know his stolen vase wasn’t silver was more Gyp than Jew.

  Meanwhile, he’d been in Chicago for nearly twenty hours with no luck at all in finding the elusive Tsatshimo and his equally elusive four-door 4.5-liter V-8 fuel-injection Fleerwood sedan. Since metalworking and electroplating plants had yielded zero results, in desperation he’d started working the street stalls, looking for people selling gold and silver plates at prices that guaranteed they weren’t gold or silver. So far, also zero.

  Bart sighed and gulped his coffee. There still was something about the old Jew that hadn’t rung quite right. Maybe tonight, come back for a second look…

  * * *

  O’B was feeling desperate himself down in the Sunshine State. He’d found out that (a) Florida developers could destroy wetlands with the best of them, and (b) local Florida governments would sell out to them even quicker than their counterparts in California. What h
e hadn’t found was a Gypsy named Kalia Uwanowich and a new Cadillac Allante hardtop.

  And now he’d gotten a call from Giselle telling him to drop everything and hightail it to Iowa for a Gyppo encampment. Hence the desperation, because O’B had his pride. He didn’t want to show up without Kalia Uwanowich’s Allante. What had some far-out Frog writer once said? That genius was not a gift, but the way one invents in desperate situations? Out of his desperation was born his wonderful invention, a new way of looking at his problem.

  He’d been acting as if Uwanowich really was a roofing contractor. Acting as if he really would be buying large quantities of roofing materials. Uwanowich was running a Gypsy scam. He wasn’t going to roof anything. He wasn’t going to buy anything. He was going to rip off a subdivision.

  So O’B had started to look at existing subdivisions with homeowners’ associations. These associations set up neighborhood Crime-Watch programs, told you what color you could paint your house, how often your lawn had to be mowed. Why wouldn’t a homeowners’ association—stick with him here—tell its members that all their houses had to get reroofed at the same time? Why wouldn’t they contract to have it done, collective bargaining being a lot cheaper than individual deals?

  It was worth a shot.

  And west of Tamarac, on a tract between West Atlantic Boulevard and the Sawgrass Expressway, O’B saw thirty roofs without shingles, without even the tar paper that goes on under shingles. Even better, discarded shingles were lying all over lawns and sidewalks and even out into the streets.

  In front of one house a tall fortyish man with reddish hair and a long pink homely face was picking up ripped-off shingles. O’B sauntered up as he dropped the armful on a stack beside his driveway. He straightened up with a hand to the small of his back, then wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

  “See you’re getting your roof done,” said O’B.

  “Yep.” He squinted up at the roof along with O’B, and waxed eloquent on his subject. “Ted’s Roofers had a sixty-man crew out here today, rippin’ off shingles from all the houses.”

  “I thought roofers usually carted away the old shingles.”