Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“What about love affairs with gadje ?” asked the reporter in an oddly nervous voice.

“Sure, some of us have ’em — but they never last,” said a young girl who looked like a heavily made-up disco queen. “I had a gadjo lover once, but I was too lonely.”

“Join the group,” said Merman.

Everybody laughed.

A girl recently married, alone with her, said, “I gotta get pregnant quick as I can. Right now I live with my husband’s parents, and it’s killing me. I’m just a servant to them.”

It was the old women, however, who were most vocal — and most opinionated. One who called herself Aunt Bessie invited Merman into her trailer for tea. She waved a vile cigar while explaining why the Gypsies stayed apart from the mainstream.

“We send our kids to your schools, what happens? They get beat up! Or they get raped by black men! I’d be crucified like Jesus before I’d let my granddaughter go to school.”

Scribbling madly in her reporter’s narrow fat notebook in shorthand learned as a part-time after-school girl working at DKA, Giselle found herself wishing she really were a journalist. Some of the stuff she was getting was really good.

Well, she wasn’t a journalist. She was a detective.

And a woman, too. A woman not getting what she so desperately desired, a glimpse of Rudolph Marino.

Or even a glimpse of the pink Cadillac; because wherever that car was, Rudolph would not be far away.

It was dusk and nearing the end of visiting hours when the nephew of the sick man in the next bed arrived for a visit. A tall blond man with strong features, he plumped his uncle’s pillows while telling all about his trip from Nebraska.

“I drove straight through so I could see you tonight. My partners already had left for California with the merchandise.”

“Terrif!” exclaimed the sick man. His voice was remarkably strong for one operated on that afternoon.

Meanwhile, Staley was about ready to depart for the encampment. He held out a shaky hand to his wife. “My love, can you find a gurney for them to...”

“HIM!” yelled a Gypsy just coming into the room. All eyes turned to him, but he was pointing at the nephew of the sick man in the other bed. “He’s THE CAR THIEF WHAT TOOK MY CADILLAC!”

Tucon Yonkovich never got to finish. Larry Ballard hit the doorway running, bursting through the gathered Gypsies like flood stage through a dam. Half a hundred Gypsies took out after him, shrieking their wrath. Even Staley, forgetting the iron-haired, iron-faced man in the other bed, hit the floor running to go see the fun.

“Staley!” yelled Lulu in warning.

He turned to stagger back to bed, but it was much too late.

“Remarkable recovery,” said Dan Kearny with a hard-faced grin. “Almost miraculous.”

Staley gave a little shrug — what could he do? He’d just forgotten himself after all those weeks in that goddamned bed.

“You too,” he said.

Kearny nodded. “How you gonna keep the Gyppos from finding out you’ve been scamming them from the beginning?”

He was at the closet taking out his clothes. Staley made a gesture and Lulu went out, closing the door behind her.

“How indeed?” said Staley tentatively.

Larry Ballard was running for his life on the floor below, a corridor full of Gypsies in hot pursuit. He kept trying to slow them down by throwing anything he could find into their path — a waiting room lamp, an abandoned gurney, an unused Murphy stand without any plastic IV bottles, an empty laundry hamper.

But whoever he took out of the chase, there were fifty still in it. Seeking the emergency stairs, he skittered into a cross-corridor under the nose of a nurse wheeling an old gentleman in a wheelchair with a blanket across his knees. He’d hit full stride before he realized he’d turned the wrong direction. The stairs were the other way.

Rooms right and left, worse traps than the hallway, linen closet, ditto, rest rooms, ditto, the shouting throng was closing in on him, the dead-end wall loomed ahead.

With an open window. Ballard started to yell when he was ten feet from it, hit his stride like a hurdler, leaped out feet-first, ready to tuck and roll when he hit the ground below. Instead, with a bone-jarring impact, he landed right in the backseat of an open convertible tucked away behind the hospital.

“OOOF!”

The car leaped forward. Ballard could hear the diminishing yells of the Gyppos hanging out of the window behind him, even as he felt himself over for anything broken. The driver jerked around to stare wide-eyed over his shoulder at whatever had landed in his car. The driver was Rudolph Marino! The car was the pink Caddy! Recognition widened the eyes of both men.

“Bastard!” Marino yelped.

“Son of a bitch!” Ballard croaked.

Neither man got physical. Marino was too busy not using his lights while dodging hardwoods with nothing more than a dirt track to follow. Ballard was too breathless. The Eldorado went into a controlled skid, righted itself, CRASHED across a curb, squealed its tires in another skid, and was driving sedately along a back street of Stupidville.

“You stole my money and this car from me!”

“Yana’s car. The hotel’s money.”

“My car now — I’ve just stolen it back again.”

“Until I take it away again.”

By the illumination of passing streetlights, Marino found Ballard’s face in the rearview mirror.

“They’ll tear you apart if they find you.”

“I’ll get by.”

“No you won’t. I’ll have to disguise you to save your worthless butt, gadjo, until I am King and can protect you.”

Why the hell not him as Gypsy King, come to think of it? Yana as Queen would be inaccessible, but if Rudolph were King...

“Maybe I can help you with that King thing,” said Ballard.

The Elks Lodge was a big bare echoing room with stuffed deer heads on bare wooden walls, hardwood floors scarred and stained by countless years of Saturday night smokers, as well as the occasional holiday special events when the Elks could bring their Does to dance polkas.

At tonight’s Town Meeting no one was dancing, or even drinking. Mix alcohol with emotion, Mayor Strohbach, presiding, said sententiously, and you could have vigilantism.

“Maybe we need a little vigilantism,” said Himmler, the former nosetackle.

“They’re corrupting our youth,” asserted Mary Lonquist.

“They steal babies,” said Noreen Degenhart, kindergarten teacher. “When I was a child—”

“We must be Christian men and women,” said Reverend Tidmarsh. “There has been a great deal of stealing, but no one has been assaulted—”

“Look what they did at the hospital today!” burst out Himmler, neck veins swelling dangerously. “I say, throw them out before they wreck the town!”

“They’ve already done that—”

“As Christians we can’t condone—”

“I don’t care, my children’s safety—”

Mayor Strohbach pounded the table with a makeshift gavel, but no one listened. The Town Meeting was getting away from him.

Giselle had never known anything like it. The encampment suddenly was every Gypsy movie she had ever seen. Fires filled the night with the rich smell of roasting meat and fowl. The women were in traditional dress: long silks and bright scarves, great glittering golden hoop earrings swaying as they danced. Children and pets were everywhere, scooting underfoot, leaping over the campfires. Violins, tambourines, balalaikas.

Firelight across brown faces, strong bodies. Someone with a splendid sob in her alto voice was singing an old Romany song whose meaning Giselle could only guess at.