Joe Gores: 32 Cadillacs

“Hey, what the hell you think you’re doin’, man?”

“I don’t think, I know , beaner.”

Trin started after him, then stopped abruptly with his hands surrendering their fists for placating palms: the landlord’s heavy screwdriver was not being held the way screwdrivers are held to drive screws. Trin’s gold filling glinted in a wide disarming grin as genuine as junk bonds.

“Whoa, man, there’s some mistake here.”

“An’ you made it.” The toothache put the screwdriver in its toolbox, clanked it shut, strutted past Trin. “You can get your stuff back when you come up with the back rent — beaner.”

Trin bounced rapid-fire Spanish curses off the landlord’s heedless back, then sighed and got out his picks and started working on the new lock. Might as well clean out the office; he wouldn’t be back. And since he’d just lost an argument with Pac Bell over their cut-off service, he might as well rip off their rental phone and sell that while he was at it.

And then maybe swallow his pride and ask that chingada Dan Kearny for his old job back as a DKA field agent. He could use Kearny’s phone and company car and gasoline charge to work his own cases on the side. If he could get any cases on his own. If Kearny’d have him back.

A panting Theodore Winston White HI caught up with Ramon Ristik outside the street door of Madame Miseria’s palm-reading emporium on Romolo Place, one of the narrow one-block alleys leading up the side of Telegraph Hill from Broadway. It was so steep the sidewalk had stairs cut into it. The door had a seamed human palm in gilt paint facing out from inside the glass.

Teddy puffed, “I saw you... turning the corner down... on Broadway...”

Ristik, who’d made a point to be seen, paused for a moment, then shrugged as if submitting to fate and briefly and almost formally clasped Teddy to his bosom again, as in the bar. He stepped back.

“I cannot handle the weight of whatever future Madame Miseria might uncover,” he said in a low voice, “so I must leave you alone with her. You will not have to tell her why you have come... she will feel the emanations...”

The fog had rolled in, the air was raw; it was starting to sober Teddy up, refocusing his paranoia, making him remember fanciful tales about Gypsy fortune-tellers.

“Listen, maybe I’d better come back tomor—”

But Ristik was already herding him up narrow, ill-lit interior stairs toward Yana’s ofica . Teddy covertly and belatedly checked that his wallet with his money and I.D. was still in his suit coat pocket. It was. Ristik indeed had lifted it when he had embraced Teddy in the bar, and had telephoned Yana a précis of its contents; but then he had returned it intact during their second brief embrace just moments before.

Incense, a mere thought at the street door, became heavier, thicker, almost palpable as they ascended. When they were four steps from the second-floor landing, the heavy drapes were swept aside, squealing on their runners, to disclose a dramatically backlit woman in bright clothes staring down at them.

“Quickly,” she said. “There is not much time to move through the aperture to infinity my brother opened when he looked at your palm.”

“Listen, I don’t think I want to...”

But she already was drawing him through the curtain, the rounded swell of her breast momentarily firm against his arm, her thigh fleetingly hot against his through the filmy layers of floor-length parrot-colored silk. Raven hair, a truly beautiful oval face somehow stern despite small, full-lipped mouth and short nose. Liquid black eyes seemed to look right through him. Not yet 30, she had all the wisdom of the ages in her face.

“Do not talk, please.”

“But—”

“Please.”

She led him down a narrow drape-lined hallway lit by lamps with dangling crystal shades that tinkled with their passage, around two or three corners, abruptly into a room where blood-red plush drapes masked the four walls and soaked up sound. The only light seemed to come from the glowing cantaloupe-size crystal ball waiting for Yana’s duikkerin on a three-foot-square table covered all the way to the floor with black plush.

On other tables pushed back against the draperies were museum-quality Greek Orthodox icons next to ceramic figures won at carnival midways. Bottles of holy water and glowing colored votive candles enshrined a faded phrenologist’s chart. Draped around the neck of a cheap fat grinning Chinatown Buddha was a Catholic rosary, with amber beads exquisitely hand-carved in Poland and a heavy amber crucifix backed with antique silver. The unseen incense was making Teddy giddy.

“Please to sit,” said Madame Miseria. Teddy sat. She sat down opposite him, the crystal ball between them. “Your hands. On the table. Palms up.”

She put soft hands in his, gripped him tightly. Her underlit, slightly lowered head seemed suddenly suspended in midair, severed from her body. As she stared into the crystal, points of light began to glow in her eyes, grew, as if from apertures in the pupils themselves.

The eyes widened in shock. A low moan escaped her, exactly like Ristik’s in the bar. She began to thrash. Alarmed, Teddy tried to pull away; but now those soft hands were steel clamps around his wrists. Her head whipped from side to side, spittle flying from her lips. She let go of him, leaped to her feet: her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell straight backward to land on the thick floral carpet with a thud.

Teddy started around the table toward her. One of the curtains was thrown aside. Ristik stormed in. They dropped to their knees on either side of her.

“What did you do to her? What have you done?”

“I didn’t do anyth—”

Ristik leaned across her to grab the lapels of Teddy’s jacket and begin shaking him hysterically.

“What have you done to her? She has never before—”

Her eyelids fluttered; her eyes opened, became sentient.

“Ramon — it is all right. He did nothing. It was just the... the power of... the vision that... I have seen...”

They got her back into her chair. She gestured weakly.

“Sit down. We will go on.”

Ristik said, “No, I don’t want you to—”

“We must go on. Leave us.” Despite her weakness, when speaking to her brother her manner was somehow imperious.

“But if the vision should again overwhelm—”

“Leave us.”

Ristik hesitated, then left. Teddy shifted uneasily in his seat. His dread and foreboding were back a hundredfold.

“In the crystal I have seen many things, confusing things, frightening things, Theodore Winston White.”

“The Third,” added Teddy automatically, then blurted out, “How did you know my name?”

“The crystal.”

This was no Gypsy trick! He hadn’t given Ristik his name at the bar! But she had taken his hands again, her palms were warm, moist; her touch, her eyes burning into his across the table, her words, all had a muted sexual fervor.

“You are in grave danger.”

“Danger?”

“From the past.”

“But I don’t know anything about my past! Not my real past. My parents—”

“Put you up for adoption the day you were born. The Whites made you their legal heir. Yes. I know. But your blood parents still live inside you. Their fate is your fate unless...” She sprang up. Her eyes were fearful. “ No! I cannot go on. Not without the protection of the candles.”

“But you have to tell me—”