Joe Gores - Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Geraldine Tantillo nursed her glass of white wine in Sappho’s Knickers. One week ago, at this very table, strange, exotic Yasmine Vlanko told her to quit her job and promised to show up tonight at ten and change Geraldine’s life forever. Geraldine had quit the job, the hour had arrived — but no Yasmine. Geraldine sighed. Ariane all over again.

“Hello, Geraldine,” said the deep, rich, contralto voice.

Dark, beautiful, mysterious Yasmine, sexy in her skintight black leather, was sitting across the table from her.

“How did you... I... I thought you weren’t...”

“I said I would be here.”

Geraldine tamped down her hopeless passion: Yasmine had to remain celibate if her strange powers were to be effective.

“What... what happens now?” Geraldine asked timidly.

Yasmine leaned toward her. Her perfume was more like an incense than a scent. “Now I help you,” she said. “As I promised. Then you will not see me again.”

“No!” Geraldine was aghast. “You can’t just—”

“If I am here for you to lean on, you will never develop fully as a woman. You will never find another lover who will nourish you.” She sang in a low, liquid voice:

“Predzia, csirik leja,

Te ná tráda m’re píranes.”

She then sang the translation:

“Fly my bird — fly, I say,

Do not chase my love away.”

“I... I don’t understand.”

“It refers not to a real bird, but to a cloud in the east on Whitsunday — which would mean you would find no lover that year. Should I stay, I would be that cloud in the east for you.”

She slid a sheet of paper across the table.

“That is the address of JeanneMarie Broussard et cie, a beauty salon on Spruce Street in Laurel Heights. They will expect you there at nine on Monday morning to start work at ten.”

Geraldine cried, “I know this place! I tried to apply for work there, they wouldn’t even talk to me. How did you—”

She looked up from the paper, sudden dread constricting her throat. Rightly so. Yasmine Vlanko had vanished.

Yana Poteet sank back in her seat on the almost empty downtown Market Street streetcar. A light raincoat hid the tight fuck-me black leather. Her slumped position and the scarf swirled around her head added fifteen years to her age. But inside she was jubilant. She’d pulled it off! She had an honest job in the gadjo world and a safe place to live in that same world.

Deciding she should work at a mortuary, following Geraldine from work, scoping out which of Geraldine’s buttons to push. Conning Meryl Blanchett into getting Geraldine a job at JeanneMarie Broussard et cie. Easing Geraldine out of the job she hated and into the new one with JeanneMarie. Geraldine might even find the new life Yana had promised her. Who could know?

She pulled the cord, left the streetcar at the transit transfer point on Seventh and Market so as to not walk too directly to Columbine Residence for Women on Breen Place above the old Main Library. Single women only, no men above first-floor administration, and you had to check in before midnight, no matter what your age.

White-haired, stern-faced Mrs. Newman was already behind the check-in table set four-square across the entryway.

“Good evening, Mrs. Newman,” said Yana gravely.

“Good evening to you, Miss Thatcher,” Newman said, beaming at the taffy-haired Yana. Such a wholesome girl.

Working in a mortuary was unclean employment for any Rom , but the women’s residence was spic and span. No cop, no Gypsy, no husband in L.A., if still alive, would ever think of looking for her at either place. In many ways she was more comfortable right now as a hillbilly lady named Miss Becky Thatcher from Arkansas’s Ouachitas Mountains than she would be as a Muchwaya Romni .

In her room, she removed her raincoat and saw Yasmine Vlanko in the mirror. She felt anger. She could thank Ephrem Poteet for putting her through the last two weeks. He was causing her even more trouble dead than alive.

By an effort of will she calmed herself. Za Develesa , Ephrem, she whispered. Go with God.

Stroll south from the Ferry Building on the once-proud Embarcadero, and you will run into a new, gentrified water-front of high-price condos and inset-tile walkways and lampposts with wrought-iron scrollwork. Stroll north, and you will run into the almost-desperate carnival-house gaiety of Pier 39, and, beyond that, Fisherman’s Wharf crowded not with the crab and salmon fishermen of yesteryear, but with tourists.

Midway between these two extremes, shoehorned in between two empty piers abandoned as the shipping moved away to other ports, is a tiny, forgotten waterfront bar called the Marlin Spike, where it is always 1947. You drink straight shots with longneck beer chasers, you eat steak sandwiches on crusty French rolls with a side of fries, and nobody has ever heard of cholesterol. Above the bar is a faded ten-foot-long photo of thirty naughty bare-butted women wearing only sailors’ caps and middy blouses, winking bawdily over their shoulders at the camera.

It was nearly midnight when Nanoosh Tsatshimo slid into the high-backed booth in a corner overlooked by no windows. This con, as this city, was new to him: he usually worked silver-plating schemes in Chicago’s teeming South Side where the Jewish working-class ghetto rubbed elbows with the black working-class ghetto. He took a long, grateful gulp of the proffered icy beer.

“You have chosen well,” he said.

Immaculata Bimbai was in her foreign countess mode tonight.

“We can speak freely here. The bartender is one of us.”

In Immaculata’s jewelry-store cons, youthful Lazlo, her little brother, usually carried luggage as a bellboy, or carted around empty boxes from upscale shops. Immaculata had made him a major player for the first time; he could no more contain his excitement than a puppy can contain its wriggling.

“How did it go?” he demanded eagerly.

Immaculata said to him sharply, “Show respect, Lazlo. This is an important man in our kumpania — an elder.”

Lazlo muttered his abashed apology; Nanoosh merely grinned.

“My children, let me tell you. First, I was never any closer to L.A. than Rudolph’s house in Point Richmond.”

Lazlo said, “How did you make the jewelry-store guy think you were there?”

“Rudolph did it with his computer. He says e-mail responses on the Internet can seem to originate from wherever you say they originate.”

“So he sent the guy an e-mail that was supposed to come from that Los Angeles Gemstone Mart you made up?”

“Exactly, Immaculata. He was kuriaio — he was greedy, he wanted to make all his money at once. I told him I wanted seventy-five thousand dollars for the emerald, and he offered only thirty-seven-five. Then...”

And with exquisite timing, Nanoosh fell silent.

“Don’t do that to us, Nanoosh!” pleaded Immaculata. Her life was jewelry-store cons; if this one came off as hoped, she foresaw great things in it for her and Lazlo.

Nanoosh, milking his moment, said, “Then I took his check.”

“His check?” exclaimed Immaculata, appalled. “No! Cash!”

Was this how he conned ’em back there in Chicago? If so...

“Certified,” said Nanoosh.

And started to laugh as his thick fingers upended his crumpled Safeway shopping bag. Thick sheafs of banded green-backs spilled out on the tabletop.

“How much?” Lazlo asked. He looked even younger than he had while playing Donny, the nerd from Silicon Valley.

“Fifty thousand,” said Nanoosh in phony indifference.

“Take out my twenty-five thousand seed money, and that’s twenty-five net,” breathed Immaculata. She was still as beautiful as she had been while playing May, the putative bride; but with her own character back in her face and eyes, she looked closer to her real 32 than to May’s 22. “That’s eight thousand two hundred and fifty for the Muchwaya—”