Joe Gores: 32 Cadillacs

Steubenville had been settled in the late 1800s by farmers from Trier, Prussia; in those early days, paddlewheel steamers plying the river offered tempting access to markets for their produce. But times change, markets shift, prices rise and fall, and with the Midwest farm crunch Steubenville had become Stupidville to those unfortunate enough to still live there.

Karl did not look stupid, but he did fit right in with the local populace: his Santa Claus smile, great walrus mustache, and gold watch chain glinting across a benevolent expanse of belly all suggested the retired German burgher. As for Margarete, her plump bosom, high color, and twinkly eyes above glowing apple cheeks made her look like a ceramic cookie jar. Only the cigarette smouldering between the first two fingers of her right hand hinted at anything other than classic Hausfrau .

Here’s where chance comes in: as they waited at the light, an elderly Eldorado with those majestic ’50s tailfins stretching out forever behind it rolled by them. Karl leaned jauntily on his ornate gold-headed cane and gave Margarete a nostalgic little pat on the fanny in honor of other tailfins in other times.

“Remember the pink nineteen fifty-eight Caddy convertible we rode to my coronation? Ah, darling, what times we had!”

“Yes, my dumpling,” said Margarete with shining eyes. Then a hint of sadness crossed her face. “We’re getting old, Liebchen . It makes one think of retirement.”

The light had changed. They started slowly across the intersection, two loving old people arm in arm.

“Retirement.” Karl’s voice savored the word, but his eyes had taken on a speculative gleam. “Nineteen fifty-eight.” He smiled a beatific smile. “The year I became King.”

T. S. Eliot once remarked that April is the cruellest month. But on this Tuesday the 17th, six months to the day after the Bay Area’s devastating temblor, April did not seem cruel at all.

Oh, there were the usual traumas: breakdowns on BART, too many homeless on the streets, a tanker grounded in the bay, water rationing in place for this sixth straight drought year despite the miracle March rains. But the IRS beast had gotten its human sacrifice for another season; most of the quake damage had been repaired or swept out of sight; and the a’s — if not the Giants — looked in top early-season form.

And remodeling was finished at 340 Eleventh Street. In the first of two (count ’em, two!) huge open ground-floor offices — each larger than the entire setup had been at 760 Golden Gate — were the skip-tracers and clerical staff. And Dan Kearny himself, strategically placed to slip out the back door if a process server stormed the front.

In the other ground-floor office were the CB, the fax, and the computer. Here also, under Giselle’s watchful eye, were the teenage girls who earned after-school money churning out skip and legal letters on the old but serviceable automatic typewriters.

Upstairs were actual offices for the field agents — with desks and chairs and phones and even typewriters for one-fingering reports.

And out in back was storage for twenty cars.

So, with DANIEL KEARNY ASSOCIATES backward on the glass of the door in fresh paint, DKA was again ready to find people who had defaulted, defrauded, or embezzled, and to wrest away their purloined assets for return to its clients. Clients who, unfortunately, were not the sultry blondes and devious tycoons of fiction. They were, rather, much more mundane banks, bonding companies, financial institutions, and insurance conglomerates.

On this bright spring day, typewriters clacked, phones clamored, exhaust fumes wafted in from the storage yard where someone was gunning a repo. At Jane Goldson’s reception desk a big hard-looking man with a tough jaw and lank, close-trimmed brown hair had written KEN WARREN on an employment application and was trying to add to that. Jane kept rolling the conversational ball at him, which he kept not rolling back.

“How did you say you found us, Mr... urn...”

Warren chewed on his pencil eraser in morose silence.

“If you’ve never done this sort of thing before, actually, it is rather difficult to... er...”

Warren laboriously filled in another line on the app. His scowl could have blistered paint. Sliding back her chair, Jane gave him a brilliant smile and some equally brilliant thigh.

“Perhaps you’d best speak with Mr. Kearny directly...”

Daunted by the application form, Warren was unaware of smile, thigh, or remark. Okay, sure, applying in writing was better than trying to explain himself verbally; but even so, most of what he did best really couldn’t be put down on paper.

Kearny’s left hand was shaking a Marlboro from his pack as Jane came up to his desk; his right continued its creative bookkeeping on the rather thin stack of billing before him. Cash flow, cash flow — relocating had cost a mint, and clients, waiting to see if they’d survive it, had been hesitant. A minor irritant was the cleaning service — it was lousy.

Jane moved her head slightly toward the man scowling over the clipboard at the far end of the office. Kearny raised heavy interrogative brows at her through his first wisp of carcinogens.

“So?”

“Actually, Mr. K, he just wandered in off the street,” Jane said in her tart cockney accent. “But...”

“So what’s the gag?” Even in a slow month they always had room for a good repoman. “Let him fill in the app and—”

“So maybe you’d best hear for yourself, hadn’t you?”

Summoned down the office, the big man looked okay to Kearny. Better than okay, in fact. Hard-faced, moved well... of course in a 3:00 A.M. alley a lot of self-styled tough dudes had tiny balls. Kearny stood up and stuck out his hand. He’d hear what the big guy had to say.

The big guy said, “GnYm Kgen Gwarren.”

Oh.

Those same six months since the San Francisco quake did not seem to have been so kind to Karl Klenhard back there in Stupidville. No longer did his gold watch chain stretch taut across a splendid belly. It sagged. No longer did he stride. He shuffled. No longer did he use his gold-headed cane with a boulevardier flair, but as one dependent upon its support.

Margarete held his free arm protectively as she guided him into the town’s largest department store. He was being loud, querulous, and rambling in a newly acquired old-man’s voice.

“But we gotta get her somethin’ today!” Close to tears. “It’s our own little granddaughter we’re talkin’ about here...”

Margarete said placatingly, “I saw a lovely little pinafore just her size on the lower level, Liebchen ...”

She had to let go of his arm so Karl could grasp the moving handrail of the down escalator at the same time that he stepped on one of its moving stairs. His hand missed, his foot missed. With a loud cry, Karl took a terrifying headlong tumble, arms and legs windmilling, cane flying, falling down... down... down...

Thud! Crash! Crunch!

Margarete, screaming and wringing work-roughened hands, looked down the escalator to her septuagenarian husband crumpled at its foot. Karl lay in an unnatural position, his only movement the flapping of one hand as each stair passed beneath it. Horrified clerks were dashing about, the manager was coming from his office at a dead run, the floor man was already calling for an ambulance on his cordless phone.

In San Francisco, her office manager duties being post-move slow, Giselle Marc was on the street. She’d gotten her driver’s license just before the quake — on her 32nd birthday, yet! — and since then had been doing all the field work she could squeeze in. More valuable to DKA at her desk, perhaps, but she loved it out here. And she was good at it.