Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

Bart sighed and gulped his coffee. There still was something about the old Jew that hadn’t rung quite right. Maybe tonight, come back for a second look...

O’B was feeling desperate himself down in the Sunshine State. He’d found out that (a) Florida developers could destroy wetlands with the best of them, and (b) local Florida governments would sell out to them even quicker than their counterparts in California. What he hadn’t found was a Gypsy named Kalia Uwanowich and a new Cadillac Allante hardtop.

And now he’d gotten a call from Giselle telling him to drop everything and hightail it to Iowa for a Gyppo encampment. Hence the desperation, because O’B had his pride. He didn’t want to show up without Kalia Uwanowich’s Allante. What had some far-out Frog writer once said? That genius was not a gift, but the way one invents in desperate situations? Out of his desperation was born his wonderful invention, a new way of looking at his problem.

He’d been acting as if Uwanowich really was a roofing contractor. Acting as if he really would be buying large quantities of roofing materials. Uwanowich was running a Gypsy scam. He wasn’t going to roof anything. He wasn’t going to buy anything. He was going to rip off a subdivision.

So O’B had started to look at existing subdivisions with homeowners’ associations. These associations set up neighborhood Crime Watch programs, told you what color you could paint your house, how often your lawn had to be mowed. Why wouldn’t a homeowners’ association — stick with him here — tell its members that all their houses had to get reroofed at the same time? Why wouldn’t they contract to have it done, collective bargaining being a lot cheaper than individual deals?

It was worth a shot.

And west of Tamarac, on a tract between West Atlantic Boulevard and the Sawgrass Expressway, O’B saw thirty roofs without shingles, without even the tar paper that goes on under shingles. Even better, discarded shingles were lying all over lawns and sidewalks and even out into the streets.

In front of one house a tall fortyish man with reddish hair and a long pink homely face was picking up ripped-off shingles. O’B sauntered up as he dropped the armful on a stack beside his driveway. He straightened up with a hand to the small of his back, then wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

“See you’re getting your roof done,” said O’B.

“Yep.” He squinted up at the roof along with O’B, and waxed eloquent on his subject. “Ted’s Roofers had a sixty-man crew out here today, rippin’ off shingles from all the houses.”

“I thought roofers usually carted away the old shingles.”

The man chuckled. “At the price we’re gettin’, we gotta stack ’em, then they haul ’em.” He had a Midwest accent. What did they call them here in Florida? Snowbirds? “It’s all part of the contract.”

“Offered you a real good price, huh?”

“The best. He comes in with a big crew, does it, and gets out again in a single day.”

“But he didn’t finish the job today,” O’B pointed out.

“One day to strip ’em, the next day to roof ’em. Homeowners association pays him after the old shingles are already stripped. Ted, he insisted on that, didn’t want nobody to say they paid for something they didn’t get.”

“I bet he insisted,” said O.B. A nice touch, that.

The man looked at him shrewdly. “You’re in the market for a roofer, you can’t beat Ted’s prices.”

“Where do I find him?”

“Secretary of the association, feller named Hank Sawtell, he lives right down the street, twenty-seven sixty-eight, he’ll have all the dope. Has the association books right there in his house. Say, you want some iced tea? The missus...”

O’B begged off, hurried away. The trouble was, the roofs were already off and Ted’s Roofers wouldn’t be back to the subdivision in the morning to replace them. Not then, not ever. He was speeding down the wide curving suburban street, dodging kids’ toys and picking up house numbers off mailboxes, because his only hope was that Ted — surely, Kalia Uwanowich — hadn’t scored and soared yet. Soared a long way from here.

He needn’t have worried; Ballard should have been there to bitch about the luck of the Irish. Parked in front of 2768 was a spanking-new red Allante hardtop with Florida plates.

O’B parked around the next corner out of sight, got out the dealer key and his repo order with the Allante’s I.D. number on it. He confirmed the I.D., got in, fired it up. In the rear-view, just before he passed out of sight around the curve of the suburban street, he saw a swarthy man sprinting down Sawtell’s walk, waving his arms and yelling.

See you in Stupidville, baby.

O’B dropped the paperwork and keys for his rental car into a mailbox, notified the cops of the repossession, checked out of his motel, and headed north and west for Iowa.

Nanoosh Tsatshimo had started out in his 20s with an instant rechroming scam he’d learned from a great-uncle who’d had a wealthy and sympathetic gadjo take him into his home and pay for his education. Such men, called rai by the Gypsies, were considered part father, part fool.

Anyway, the great-uncle had been good at chemistry, and had taught Nanoosh how to dissolve mercury in a weak nitric acid solution and then apply it to something made of copper. The nitric acid ate a little of the copper, which formed an amalgam with the mercury. This gave the piece a shiny surface like chrome or silver plating.

But it was a short con, because the nitric acid goes right on eating away, so after a few hours it destroys the mercury amalgam and the item looks like copper again. As he got older himself, Nanoosh began to search for a long con without those short departures. He found it in gold and silver electroplating.

Soon he was selling “solid silver” flatware; soon after that, lead plates (same approximate weight as solid gold) electroplated with a micrometer-thin layer of real 24-carat yellow Saudi gold. It could be gotten cheaply in Arabia with the right connections, and the plates could be sold as solid gold.

Now he could set up and sell the whole season in one place, having calibrated almost to the day when the microscopic layer of gold or silver would wear through to show the base metal beneath.

Tonight he had an appointment in Lincoln Park with a man who wanted a service for twenty of solid-gold plates and flatware. The mark was a 26-year-old stock futures options player who had just gotten his seat on the Exchange and a condo overlooking Lake Michigan. The mark planned to screw blind the old Jew in the skullcap who ate kosher and kept the holy days — not knowing the old Jew was really Nanoosh, who planned to maybe leave him his pants.

Nanoosh used Lake Shore Drive north to go get him.

Bart Heslip had his window open and the Cubs game on the car radio as he drove south on Lake Shore Drive. The old skull-capped Jew who maybe wasn’t Jewish at all deserved another look.

As always as he drove, his eyes were busy on cars passing in the other direction, some unconscious computer in his skull ticking them off, ready to register only if one of the big, dark, bulky cars he was passing was the Nanoosh Tsatshimo Fleetwood.

Lincoln Continental... Acura Legend sedan LS... Mercedes-Benz 300... Buick Riviera... Chrysler Imperial... Lexus LS400... Infiniti Q45... BMW 750iL... Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special...

His old skull-capped Jew behind the wheel! Bart was in the fast lane: even as his mind registered car and driver, he was spinning the wheel and slamming the brakes to put the Seville into a controlled skid. Bounce! thunder! crash! across the grassy center-divider, goose it, hit pavement, tires shrieking, he had it, back on the highway but in the northbound lane.