Joe Gores - Cons, Scams, and Grifts

“Pardon my French,” interrupted Guildenstern, “but why would the Archbishop give a shit whether one of his flock got scammed by a Gyppo fortune-teller? Ain’t going to crystal-gazers against the precepts of Holy Mother Church, like that?”

“Hate the sin but not the sinner,” said Grimaldi. “This Madame Miseria was posing as... well, as a Catholic nun. In habit. At the cathedral. The victim, an elderly parishioner, believed she was contributing to Renew 2000, and even though her money is gone, she still refuses to believe that, um, Madame Miseria was not a genuine nun. As a result, she is rethinking her very considerable generosity to Mother Church.”

“So the Archbishop brought you into the picture to help maintain the cash flow?” Rosenkrantz guffawed. “Sounds like a clear case of assault and barratry to me.”

Grimaldi gave him an icy look. “Since Madame Miseria is obviously not here, I bid you gentlemen good day.”

When he was gone, Guildenstern said, “Why don’t flies buzz Italian lawyers?”

“Even flies got some pride.” Rosenkrantz frowned. “You think maybe that guy’s a little slick for the holy-water crowd?”

“We’ll soon find out.” Guildenstern punched out a number on his cell phone. “And since this Yana Poteet is our number one suspect for scragging her husband, at the same time we’ll get us a search warrant all proper-like to enter the premises.”

Before a uniform arrived with the warrant, they learned that the Archdiocese had never heard of anyone named Grimaldi. When the landlord opened the apartment, they found an expensive crystal ball glowing with an eerie blue light in the duikkerin room. On the kitchen stove they found a frying pan full of incense smoldering on low heat. Guildenstern turned it off. In the bedroom, Rosenkrantz opened the closet door with his fingertips. A diaphanous dress in brilliant red, yellow, and purple hung from a rod facing the room. He held it up in front of him on its hanger.

“Is it me?” he asked.

Guildenstern, dragging a chair under the old-fashioned light fixture in the middle of the ceiling, snorted in disgust.

“Get useful. Gimme a hand here.”

Rosenkrantz steadied the chair. Guildenstern studied the fixture at close range. He grunted. “Dust, not dollars.”

Only dust in the other light fixtures, too. They took turns washing their grimy hands at the kitchen sink. They did not find either Madame Miseria or Yana Poteet.

“That blonde rubbed me the wrong way,” said Guildenstern.

“I liked her. The daughter I never had.”

Belated alarm scrunched up Guildenstern’s features.

“No back door to this dump, we’re comin’ in the front, and this blonde is sittin’ in the waiting room.” He suddenly snarled, “The daughter you never had! Between us, forty-five freakin’ years on the force an’ we watch our suspect waltz right past us out the door in a blond wig. Now I’m pissed.”

Rosenkrantz nodded. “What do you call two policemen buried up to their necks in sand?”

“Not enough sand,” said Guildenstern hollowly.

Yana rode a 38 Geary/Fort Miley Muni bus away from her invaded ofica . It stopped to let an old woman off where the great onion-shaped spire of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin glinted gold in the sunshine. A little priest with a black habit and a bobbed grey ponytail used a big carton of candles to push open one of the twelve-foot-high gilded doors.

Three wise-eyed recent-émigré Russian teenagers got on the bus. They would have been baiting Madame Miseria in an instant; Yana, in her business suit, glasses, blond wig, and attaché case, drew only indifference. They were foreigners, but they had one another. She had nothing. She could no longer be Madame Miseria. She could no longer be Yana Poteet. Since she had been ejected from the Muchwaya, she could no longer even be a Gypsy. At times like this, yearning for the kumpania was like a lingering terminal illness. She had made a fateful decision when she learned to read. It had been a skill like any other, something that would enable her to go somewhere in life, win a place of honor in the tribe, and some of the advantages of the gadjo world. Instead, the gadjo knowledge had put a barrier between her and the Muchwaya. They had become uncomfortable with the change in her, and called it ambition. Whatever it was, she could see herself how far it had removed her from tribal wisdom and racial cunning. They had been gozever to ban her.

Now Ephrem was dead, his poor, sad silly cache above the light fixture rifled. And she had no nation, no tribe, no clan, no kumpania . Her brother, Ramon, would help her if she asked him, not because she was his sister but because he feared her powers. At heart he would always be a loyal Rom . Why endanger his standing with the tribe? It was up to her to make the final break from them or be swept under.

But she was so weary. The words of the dying Gypsy came back to her. “Bury me standing — I’ve been on my knees all my life.”

It was dawn. Trinidad Morales, barefoot, nude, carefully pulled aside dusty cream drapes with little roses on them to look out into Florida Street. Madre de Dios! He never really expected it, but there was someone sitting in a car outside...

One of them? He swiped a hand down his smooth brown face. Until the beating, a well-fed, round face with a gleaming gold tooth and hard little eyes that missed nothing. The tooth still gleamed, the eyes still missed nothing: but were they hard?

Down inside, where it mattered, he was no longer hard.

And without that, what was he? A conejo , a scared little rabbit. Even, perhaps, a cobarde — a coward. He’d always heard that a really tough professional-type beating took away something that you never got back, but he’d never believed it. Now he did.

The four of them had jumped him outside this apartment. He remembered the husky Latino opening the car door in front of him... The terrible blows to the kidneys... Dimly, the kicking boots, the wash of blood on the concrete...

And the face, brown like his own, so close to his as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk. Whispering the words...

You touch my sister, man, ever again, you with the dead.

Might as well be. With the dead. He hadn’t touched any woman since then, because she might be the woman. Who had she been? Junior high school girl? Wetback chica ? Neighborhood kid? Taquería waitress? Any of them, no matter how vulnerable to a man like Morales, might have a tough, fanatic, vindictive brother with a posse of his own.

It was not knowing which way to look that unmanned him.

That and the brown, whispering face so close to his.

With the dead, man.

He went into the bathroom, shivering in the morning chill, to reach around the plastic shower curtain and turn on the hot water so the stall would get good and steamy.

He’d told Kearny after they’d hit the auto dealership that he had to go home because he didn’t feel good. That had been a lie. Physically, he’d never felt better. The lost weight, the convalescent’s diet, the months of rehab...

But deep down inside, he was scared. Before the beating he would have looped back on his own backtrail, followed them until he had identified them, then dealt with them, one by one; for each, a beating for a beating. In fact, when the medics thought he was going to die, hatred of a face and a name — Esteban — pulled him through. But later hatred turned to fear. Coming back here late from repo work some night, would he find them outside this apartment waiting for him in the darkness?