Joe Gores: 32 Cadillacs

Well, maybe she didn’t always love it. Maybelle Pernod, fat, black, and 61, should have been home bouncing grandchildren on her knee. Instead, after a week of skip-tracing, Giselle had found her sweating off the pounds over a pressing machine in a dry-cleaning plant on Third Street’s 4600 block. They had to shout to hear each other over the hiss-s-s-swhoosh of the pressers, sweat stippling their faces and running down between their breasts as they faced each other through clouds of steam.

At issue was a 1991 Continental that was two payments down.

“Woman, Ah cain’t give up ma car!”

“You have to, Maybelle. We’ve got no current residence address on you—”

“Hain’t rightly settled into my new place yet—”

“Maybelle, you don’t have a new place. No res add, casual labor here at the cleaner’s, your third payment comes delinquent the end of the week—”

Maybelle’s dark eyes gleamed stubbornly in her ebony face. She stuck out an ample lower lip. “Hain’t gonna give up ma car.”

Giselle held up the coil wire she had taken from beneath the hood of the Connie before entering the plant.

“That isn’t the question here, Maybelle. I thought maybe you’d want to remove your personal possessions before it goes.”

“But that car... I don’t got that car, I don’t got...”

Big fat tears rolled down Maybelle’s big fat cheeks like rain down a windowpane. Giselle had to stiffen up before she got all soggy, as Larry Ballard sometimes did with hard-luck women.

“Maybelle, the car is history. Do you want your personal property or not?”

Maybelle swiped a catcher’s-mitt hand across her eyes and gave Giselle the keys. “Honey, you jes leave all that stuff in that Connie. Maybelle get her car back, you jes wait an see.”

Within hours, like concentric rings of wavelets from a stone tossed into a pond, word about Karl Klenhard’s plunge down the escalator began going out from the Midwest to the rom scattered around the country. Officially, Gypsies do not exist in the United States; in reality, as many as two million of them from four “nations” and some sixty different tribes roam the land unrecorded and unchecked by an indifferent bureaucracy.

The King is down, went the word. The King is injured... the King is badly injured... the King (only whisper this) may not recover ...

The strongest candidates for his crown were both working out of San Francisco. One was a woman known to the rom as Yana, and to the straight, gadjo, non-Gypsy world as Madame Miseria. The other was Rudolph Marino, who right now looked not like a Gypsy but like a Sicilian who had gotten his MBA from Harvard and had aced the bar exam on his way to Mouthpiece for the Mob.

Marino’s gleaming black razor-cut was thick and lustrous, the planes of his swarthy face piratical. His pearl-grey suit, ghosted out of a Rodeo Drive clothiers in that oldest of gags, a suitcase with a snap-up bottom, was worth $1,200; his maroon silk foulard wore a faux ruby stickpin as big as his thumb.

As he sauntered up to Reception at the venerably luxurious St. Mark Hotel, where California Street starts its swoop from Nob Hill down to the financial district, he covertly sized up the check-in clerk. She wore a name tag that said MARLA and she was tall and blond and businesslike; but he saw the little click in her eyes when they met his. Useful. Perhaps very useful. Already he was fitting her into his plan.

“May I help you, Mr...”

“Grimaldi,” said Marino. He caressed her face with black eyes, limpid yet with cold depths that made gadje girls go weak at the knees. He laid a Goldcard on the desktop. “Angelo Grimaldi from New York. I have a reservation. A suite.”

Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The screen scrolled its reservation arcana. “Here it is, Mr. Grimaldi.” Their eyes met again. She fumbled getting the registration blank on the desktop before him. “I hope you will enjoy your stay with us.”

He let his eyes widen very slightly. He tapped a finger on the face of her telephone to show he had memorized her extension.

“I am sure that I will, cara .”

He stalked away, followed onto the elevator by one of the Mark’s ancient bellmen burdened with Louis Vuitton luggage picked up by a Florida tribe from a Worth Avenue shoppe torched in an insurance scam. To Marla the Check-in Clerk he seemed a leopard on the loose among the flocks of tourists — mostly name-tagged, camera-laden Japanese. She made a small noise in her throat, then jerked herself erect, reddening at her own X-rated thoughts.

In the elevator, Marino was also occupied with his thoughts, and indeed she was part of them. But not as she might have wished. Women, though useful and capable of giving great pleasure, were unclean. Especially gadje women. He would use her, nothing more, during the three weeks before the real Grimaldi returned from the Maine woods to find his Manhattan apartment rifled and his credit cards stolen. Three weeks.

Time enough. Marino’s elaborate scam on the hotel’s management would be his greatest coup to date.

On the far side of Russian Hill, Larry Ballard and Patrick Michael O’Bannon — O’B to the troops at DKA — were getting into the elevator at the Montana, a high-rise co-op overlooking bowl-shaped Aquatic Park from the foot of Polk Street. The site had been zoned low-rise until certain of the City’s key officials had found their Christmas stockings stuffed with — miracle of miracles! — foreign vacations and new cars and fur coats for their wives. Subsequently — another miracle! — the Montana Development Corporation had been granted the supposedly impossible building code variances it sought.

“Just your typical San Francisco success story,” O’B was explaining to Ballard as they rode up in the elevator.

Larry didn’t answer. He was getting his fierce expression in place for Pietro Uvaldi, a piece of cake who lived the good life at the Montana with his latest poopsie. Unfortunately, Pietro had fallen behind on the payments for his $83,500 Mercedes 500SL sports convertible.

Ballard considered him a piece of cake because Pietro was an interior decorator — nudge, nudge, wink, wink — while Ballard was blatantly hetero and unwittingly macho, eight years a manhunter, a shade under six feet tall, 180 pounds, with sun-bleached blond hair and a hawk nose and killer blue eyes and a hard-won brown belt in karate.

He flipped the coin O’B had handed him. O’B called it in the air. “Tails.”

The coin’s reverse glinted in the elevator’s plush carpet.

“Two out of three,” said Ballard quickly.

O’B merely shook his head and pocketed his coin without revealing that it had tails on both sides. While not Ballard’s physical equal — slight, 50 years old, with a leathery freckled drinker’s face and greying red hair — O’B was wily as a Market Street hustler, fast-talking as a southern tent preacher. Some quarter-century before he had broken in on credit jewelry, the world’s toughest repo work: you can’t pop the ignition on a diamond wedding set and drive it away from the curb.

“Sorry, Larry me lad. I get to drive the Mercedes and you get to make out the condition report and file the police report.”

They left the elevator at the twelfth floor. O’B rang Pietro’s bell and straightened his tie and let his face relax into its world-weary expression; Ballard’s fierce expression was already in place. But the door was opened by a six-foot-six 240-pound man wearing pink spiked hair and black leather underwear with chrome studs. His biceps were like grapefruit.

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.