Joe Gores: 32 Cadillacs

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.

Margarete 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 Karl’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.