Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

Eight cars behind the Fleetwood. One car back by the 31st Street intersection. Crowding its tail where Lake Shore splits at Cermak. Ran it off the road not far from the aquarium.

Nanoosh, his nephew, and two young Gypsy bucks in the backseat came boiling out of the Fleetwood even as Bart slammed the Seville to a stop behind it.

Nanoosh bellowed, “WHADDA HELL YOU T’INK—”

Bart roared, “I’M FROM THE BANK AND FM TAKING THAT CAR!”

“The bank? The California bank?”

“Cal-Cit, you bet.” Bart was flying on an adrenaline rush. It was the right car! “Take out your personal crap—”

That’s when the nephew of Nanoosh made a bad mistake. He threw a punch at Bart. Bart slipped it, snapped his head back three quick times with three left jabs, breaking his nose on the second, then came up with a good right cross to put him away.

Nanoosh stayed out of it, leaned placidly against the fender to watch his young Gypsies take Bart apart. But they were bloody and reeling, Bart had only a skinned cheek and a fat lip when the cops arrived, a salt-and-pepper team of suits who came up with only nightsticks because it seemed that kind of beef.

Nanoosh quickly put his skullcap back on. “We are on our way to temple, the black man runs me off the road, tries to steal my car. My sons they defend me...”

That’s when Nanoosh’s nephew made another terrible mistake. Still half-blinded by tears from his broken nose, ashamed of the tears, he swung at the black cop because he thought the cop was Bart. Black is black, right?

Wrong. Thwock!

Nightstick on skull. He folded.

“Peaceful repossession,” panted Bart. “They’re Gyppos.”

The black cop started to laugh as he put the cuffs on the recumbent nephew. “ Peaceful repossession?” He laughed again. “That’s a damned nice right cross you got there.”

“Used to scuffle for a living,” said Heslip.

“We’ll take the lot of them in,” said the white cop.

Bart talked the black cop into not charging the nephew with anything worse than disturbing the peace, then spent a half hour side by side with Nanoosh on a hard wooden bench at the cophouse.

“You’re the one from this afternoon,” said Nanoosh finally.

“Yep,” said Bart.

“How’d you know to look for me in Chicago?”

Bart just shrugged and looked wise.

“It was them fucking Lovellis, wasn’t it?”

Bart looked even wiser.

“I knew it! Son of a bitch bastards! Well, let me tell you something about them ...”

Bart stayed silent, looking as wise as Solomon, which he proved to be — Nanoosh told him all about the Lovellis.

Finally, the cops admitted that Bart was Bart, that the Fleetwood was a Fleetwood, that Cal-Cit Bank was a bank, and that Bart was indeed their legal representative.

“I want to thank you guys a lot for your help,” he said. “I’ll just take my cars and—”

“What about the writ?” asked the white cop.

Not being a Chicago boy himself, Bart said, “What writ?”

“The writ, the writ, the long green writ! ”

Maybe not Chicago born, but no hayseed. Fifty each to the salt-and-pepper team, then from his expense roll Bart started dealing twenties like a hand of cards, one to every cop in the station house. Ten cops, ten twenties. Pick a card, any card.

Back at his motel just across the river from the Loop on South Canal, he found Larry Ballard’s message about Stupidville. He left Larry a more urgent message of his own, got the number of the Jersey motel where Ken Warren would be staying, and finally looked up truck rental outfits to call in the morning.

Bart Heslip had a PLAN.

Ken Warren had been born in Jersey City, within a mile of Journal Square; his father had worked for Colgate. So he had few illusions about the place. Before returning Sarah Walinski’s Dodge Charger to Andy Anhut’s A-One Autos on Kennedy Boulevard, he put something bulky in his topcoat pocket and called a taxi. He gave the cabby an address near Anhut’s, and enough money to keep him waiting there. Ken himself waited across the street from the lot until the two burly salesmen — they looked more like made men — had gone |to lunch. Only then did he drive in.

At the back of the lot he went up three wooden steps and into a little frame office strung with dismal glittery tinsel. Inside was a scarred wooden desk bearing a telephone, a heap of curly black hair the size of a Norway rat, and the shoes of a man reading a skin magazine. Looking at him, Ken remembered a Sunday school phrase about Jacob’s brother Esau: He was an hairy man.

In almost every respect, Andy Anhut was an hairy man. It sprouted above his eyes, it tufted from his nostrils and ears, it matted the backs of his simian fingers and wrists, it curled exuberantly in the open V of his sport shirt and made a nest for the gold medallion on his chest.

Almost every respect. He was bald as a billiard ball. A squashed-down billiard ball with a cigar screwed into the middle of it. He sprang to his feet and clapped the Norway rat to his head when Ken’s shadow fell across his magazine.

“Whadda fuck ya doin’ sneakin’ up?” he yelped.

Ken sent the DKA invoice spinning across the desk with a flick of his wrist, and leaned forward. He was taller, broader, meaner than Anhut; no man can look tough adjusting his toupee.

“Ngcahsh,” expelled Ken.

“Cash? Wadda fuck ya mean?” That seemed to be Anhut’s favorite phrase. He was out from behind the desk with the invoice, heading for the door. “Lemme see the fuckin’ unit.”

Ken waited. Outside, Anhut was snapping and nipping at the Charger’s heels like a terrier driving a cow at sunset. He came back shaking his rat-nest head.

“Naw, naw, naw, fuckin’ car’s in terrible shape, I’ll give ya fifty bucks for your trouble an’—”

Ken stepped away from the desk and put his hand in his topcoat pocket. The hand looked larger in there than a hand should look unless fisted around some bulky object. Anhut, caught up short, stared at him, measuring him. Then he shook his cue ball again.

“Nah,” he muttered to himself. He bared his teeth in a death-rictus grin. “My boys come back from lunch, they’ll—”

Ken jerked his hand from his pocket with something in it. Anhut went back an involuntary step. Ken’s hand put on the edge of the scarred wooden desk... a red ripe tomato.

Anhut blanched as if someone had dipped him in boiling water and peeled him like... well, like a ripe tomato. To the mob, a Jersey tomato was dynamite — literally. A juicy red stick of overage, unstable dynamite. The tomato sitting on the edge of his desk was a statement that DKA, though a west coast firm, was connected on the east coast.

Statement or bluff? Well, Ken was heading for the door.

“Wait!”

Anhut cursed and brought out a huge roll of cash money, counted off enough hundreds, threw them on the desk. Ken didn’t ask for a receipt. He rode the cab back to his motel to pack, but there was a message from DKA. According to Ephrem Poteet, a Gyppo woman named Pearso Stokes was working the midtown Manhattan banks out of a silver Eldorado with M.D. plates on it.

Warren paid another night on his room, because Jersey prices beat New York prices, then rented a little red Toyota and headed for Manhattan. He’d just blown off a Jersey City used-car dealer with hardly a word being spoken and no overt physical threats made! It had to be a first. And now he was chasing Gyppos just like the rest of the gang!

Just about when Ken was paying the Holland Tunnel toll-taker on the west bank of the Hudson, Giselle was parking her company car on Teddy White’s hilltop in Tiburon. She had his $75,000 in a plastic suitcase, but left it locked in the car until she could ease Teddy into her revelations about Madame Miseria.