Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

Grimaldi extended a $20 bill also. “For the flunkie who takes down the luggage and brings up the car.”

Hesitantly, she took satchel and bill and departed. Grimaldi spoke to the three hotel officials as if there had been no interruption.

“You know who and where I am — but I also know who and where you are. So I don’t have to count the money, do I?” There was a chorus of assent to his negative. He nodded in a courtly way. “Then, the best goodbyes are the shortest, gentlemen.”

And was gone, drawing the door shut behind him as if on a wake, fighting laughter out past Delia’s unattended desk. But she was entering as he left, brushing up hard against him, and he grabbed her wrist, spun her around, pushed her against the door frame to grind her pelvis against his own as he kissed her with hard contempt on the mouth.

He finally released her. “A pity, cara, ” he said. Then he went out the door quickly and down the hall to the front desk.

He had been rough with her because she was not Giselle — and because he would never see Giselle again. Inescapable, but... for just this once, if he could have not been a Gypsy...

But he was. Not just a Gypsy, but soon to be King of the Gypsies! Going out the heavy ornate doors to the traffic circle in front of the hotel, he blew a kiss to Marla. She gave no acknowledgment, which he found interesting and at the same time unsettling. But what matter now? It was finished. He had won!

At the curb, he gestured to the doorman.

“The pink Cadillac, my good man.”

It was his first sight of it, now all his own. Gleaming and exciting in the bright San Francisco sunshine, the top down so its thoroughbred lines showed to best advantage. Worth, literally, a King’s Ransom, and looking it.

The tall well-built car-parker, his face shadowed by his uniform hat, brought the Caddy almost ceremoniously up to the entrance. Rudolph came around it to the driver’s side.

But the car-parker didn’t get out. Instead he tipped his hat to the back of his head to look up at Rudolph. Blond hair. Hawk features. Hawk eyes that drilled into Rudolph’s. Whose mouth fell open in sudden recognition and surprise as Ballard waved the $20 bill languidly under his outraged nose.

“Thanks for the tip, Rudie-baby. See you around.”

And tromped on it. The Caddy shot away from the hotel and zipped across Powell Street under the nose of a startled cable car, to disappear down the California hill. Marino ran a few paces after it, fists clenched, face congested, eyes ablaze. Stung! Totally! By a gadjo, yet. With the help of another gadjo, the casually dismissed check-in clerk, Marla.

Then Rudolph stopped. Took a couple of deep breaths. Chuckled. Ballard was besotten, wasn’t he? So he’d deliver the car to Yana, wouldn’t he? Yana would drive it to Stupidville.

Where Rudolph Marino would take it away from her.

His $75,000, so superbly scammed out of the St. Mark Hotel executives? Gone also. But if Rudolph knew his Yana, eventually most of that money would find its way into her hot little Gypsy hands. And Rudolph was a master at taking things away from Yana.

Meanwhile, no other rom need know he’d lost it, right? So his scam would stand among the best in the great legends of the Gypsy oral tradition — and help him get his Kingship.

With a rueful grin, Rudolph turned back to the uniformed doorman to whistle him up a cab for the airport.

Larry Ballard figured Rudolph’s $20 tip was the easiest money he’d ever made. Of course he’d had to give one of the St. Mark’s car-parkers $50 for a blind eye and the use of his uniform — but that was DKa’s money, not his.

After he removed and itemized the personal property in the car, he would return it to Yana. Who need never know he had temporarily lost sight of it, right?

So she would come to him willingly in the night.

This night.

Yana’s thoughts of the coming night, au contraire, were hard-edged. In a couple of hours, she would meet Larry to get back the pink Cadillac; she had given it to him for safekeeping after getting word that Rudolph had pinpointed its hiding place. Now its safety didn’t matter: tonight, after her ultimate coupling with Teddy’s bank account, it would be on the road.

Because she had him hooked so hard, Teddy himself had come clamoring for his own destruction the day before yesterday. His phone call caught her still in bed not long after six o’clock on Saturday morning: the bed Ballard had left not an hour earlier, sneaking down the stairs shoes-in-hand so Ramon would not know of their frenzied lovemaking.

“Madame... Madame Miseria? This is—”

“Theodore Winston White the Third.”

“You knew it was me?”

“I always know it is you.” Her voice hummed like a stroked harp. She knew her man as she knew the contours of her beloved crystal ball. In the warm afterglow of sexual satiation, she was perfectly pitched to exploit him. “I receive certain emanations from you when I pick up the receiver.”

Actually, Teddy’s voice was unmistakable, thin and reedy and hesitant and unsure of itself, much like Teddy. She took a chance — not much of a one at 6:00 A.M., not with Teddy.

“You are calling me from your bedroom, you are barely able to get up, the snake has crawled deeper into your body.”

“Yes!” The eagerness of the hypochondriac expatiating his illness quickened his voice. “It... it’s like a red-hot cable down the back of my leg. I want... I need...”

“It is as I feared,” she said. “When the demon entered my body from the egg, my terrible battle to expel him told me that the evil is very strong indeed.”

She was sitting up in bed now, smelling rich strong black coffee, Gypsy coffee boiled in a big old enameled pot with the grounds and an eggshell. Perhaps Ramon himself was a mind reader; or perhaps he had heard her on the phone, taking care of business on a 6:00 A.M. Saturday. It might even be his way of making amends for his intransigence about her love life.

Even so, she was glad he hadn’t seen Larry sneaking down the stairs. Meanwhile, Teddy was still whining on the phone.

“You know what you must do,” she said in ringing, apocalyptic tones. “And quickly. Midnight Monday.”

“Midnight? Monday?” Alarm squirmed in his voice.

“It is your stepfather you have offended,” she reminded him inexorably. “It is the only way.”

“Oh God!” moaned Teddy softly.

This was it, the culmination, the final sting: after that, he would never see her again. She said, “Tarn Junction. Midnight Monday. The fruit stand where Tennessee Valley Road leaves the Shoreline Highway. Alone.”

His voice shivered. “How... how much do I have to—”

“Seventy-five,” she had said abruptly, and had hung up.

Monday was the earliest he could assemble the cash money she was asking for, so for the rest of the weekend, to avoid possible backsliding, she had not answered her phone.

Now it was Monday and tonight Teddy would bring her $75,000 — if he came at all. Naming a particular sum was a calculated risk, because if that sum stripped his estate, lawyers and bankers would start asking questions. Seventy-five thousand would be by far and away the biggest score Yana had ever made.

And afterward, that’s where she would be — far and away. Out of the state, out of the jurisdiction. Her kind of fraud was not federal, so if California ever came after her for it they’d have to identify her first, find her second, and extradite her third. Which, given that she was a beautiful Gypsy boojo woman in a time of criminal rights, would be very difficult indeed.