Joe Gores: Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Meanwhile here was bulky Rosenkrantz: round unremarkable face, shirt unpressed as usual, herringbone jacket, dark slacks. A tie, askew, like spaghetti in tomato sauce dropped on the floor. A 9mm Glock 17 bulging his jacket over his right hip.

“I got a joke,” he said.

“You always do,” Beverly replied sadly. “Always awful.”

She was slightly above five feet, size four and triumphantly blond, with sparkling blue eyes that could turn sensuous when Danny was around, a tiny waist, beautiful dancer’s legs, and a bosom too full for the ballerina she had once aspired to be.

“These two whales are swimming along when they see a sailing ship. The first whale says, ‘That ship killed my father! Let’s swim under it, blow as hard as we can, and turn it over.’ The second whale nods his head okay.”

Beverly put the sandwich down in front of him, and started to make another one just like it.

“The whales swim under the ship and blow as hard as they can, and the ship turns over. The sailors are in the water, floundering around, yelling. The first whale says, ‘That’s not enough revenge. Let’s go eat up all of those sailors.’ The second whale shakes his head, saying—”

“ ‘I was willing to give you a blow job,’ ” smoothly inserted the big, bulky, unremarkable man coming through the door, “ ‘but you didn’t say anything about swallowing the seamen.’ ”

Guildenstern had a full head of sandy hair and an unpressed shirt; his tie, also askew, was like an anchovy pizza dropped on the floor. His herringbone jacket had leather elbow patches. When he took the stool adjacent to his partner’s, his 9mm Glock 17 bulged his jacket over his left hip. Beverly slid the second sandwich across the stick to him with a couple of paper napkins.

“Salami and swiss? Lettuce? Mayo? Pickles? Hold —”

“Hold the mustard,” agreed Beverly.

Guildenstern was surprised. “Yeah. Hey, what do you tell a blonde with two black eyes?”

“Nothing,” said Rosenkrantz. “You’ve already told her twice.”

An assistant D.A. who was into community theater — he always played Felix, the neat one, in The Odd Couple — had first called them Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Now, new SFPD men didn’t know their real names; some whispered their wives didn’t, either, but they had the highest case-closure record in the Homicide Squad.

“We got a call from Harry Bosch, the Hollywood Homicide cop,” said Guildenstern around his sandwich. Rosenkrantz blew on his coffee and nodded to go on. “Seems a guy got knifed down in LaLa and died in the arms of the snoopy old broad from next door. His dying words were that it was his wife did the nasty to him.”

“Heavens! A wife killing her husband? I’m astounded.”

“Harry said both the vic and the perp were from up here. Ephrem and Yana Poteet. Even had a local address where we can start.” He turned to Beverly as if she had asked a question. “Victim and perpetrator — guy who got did, guy who done it.”

“In this case, broad who done it,” said Rosenkrantz.

Both big men pulled ten-dollar bills from their pockets and laid them on the bar. Beverly started to shove one of them back, but Rosenkrantz made such an evil face at her that she stopped. Guildenstern finished his sandwich in one big gulp.

“How can you tell when an auto mechanic’s just had sex?”

Covering her ears, Beverly said, “I don’t want to know.”

“One of his fingers is clean,” said Rosenkrantz inexorably.

After they left, she picked up their tens, dropped their plates and cups and silver into the double sink’s hot soapy water, then burst out laughing. They would have to do something much more heinous than tell dirty jokes to make themselves unwelcome here. A few months ago, Danny disappeared; she got him back damaged but repairable only because Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern had galloped to the rescue, jokes flying.

She started cutting French rolls for the lunch trade. Yana and Ephrem Poteet. The names rang faint bells. Something Larry Ballard had been involved in a year or two ago. Gypsies, maybe?

Yes indeed, Gypsies. During the 1,500 years since they were booted out of their native India, the Gypsies have existed in other lands by doing the things those societies’ citizens can’t or won’t do. In Western Europe and the Balkan countries and Russia, unless exterminated, they have been forced to abandon their nomadic ways to live in slums at the edge of big cities.

But in America, land of the free and home of the brave, they still wander at will, these days usually by Cadillac rather than the horse-drawn vardo , and work the welfare and benefit systems for all they’re worth. Ironically, in an age where computers and Internets and electronic snooping diminish all freedom, these last free people on earth still bind themselves by traditions and taboos as strict as those of Orthodox Judaism.

There are at least two million Gypsies in this country, of at least four recognized nations: Kalderasha, Muchwaya, Tsurana, and Lowara. But they keep so far outside the population mainstream that they are missed by the census-takers and anyone else who might try to curtail their way of life.

Gypsies don’t mingle with gadje , they don’t look back, they live only for today, and one thing is certain: they cause all sorts of mischief. Because Christ Himself, dying on the cross, gave them dispensation to con, scam, and grift from the gadjo — the outsider, the non-Gypsy — with perfect moral impunity.

Ramon Ristik, a swarthy, bright-eyed man of about thirty, was a member of the Muchwaya nation and much given to the con, the scam, and the grift. His last time in San Francisco he worked North Beach, where topless was born when Carol Doda removed her bra while dancing atop a piano at the long-gone Condor.

Because the ofica of his sister Yana (professionally, Madame Miseria) was around the corner and up a steep narrow alley known as Romolo Place, Ramon favored the Columbus/Grant/ Broadway intersection for his work. After convincing the marks of great impending evil in their lives, he steered them to Madame Miseria, who stripped them clean. He impartially conned gullible tourists, local warm-blooded Italians, and superstitious Chinese.

During Ramon’s subsequent wanderings elsewhere, Madame Miseria went out to the Richmond District’s cold fog-blown Avenues. Here Ramon, upon his return, found gullible Chinese, but few warm Italians; few hayseed tourists, but many recently immigrated Russians. Russians could be tough .

The Troika on Clement had a silver samovar in the window; guttural Slavic tongues vied with English at a crowded bar thick with forbidden cigarette smoke. Ramon slipped onto a stool just as the manicured hand of a short tousle-haired bespectacled man slapped a rare $500 bill down on the bar.

Catching Ramon’s surreptitious glance at the bill, the Russian demanded, “You — something?”

“I have been rude, forgive me,” said Ramon. Then he turned over the unresisting hand to see its palm. “Back in Mother Russia...” He paused diffidently. “I had a certain facility with... seeing things...”

“Reading palms?”

“Among other... abilities. As you know, your left hand suggests what your road through life might be. Your right hand shows what road you have actually taken. Perhaps I might...”

The Russian said silkily, “What does this service cost me?”

“There is no charge,” Ramon replied with offended dignity.

Light glinted off the Russian’s glasses as he opened his right hand under the strong cylindrical back-bar lights. “Then tell me all, my friend.”

Something in the man’s demeanor made Ramon uneasy, but after all, bogus palmistry was his basic profession. So he began tracing the central line that cut across the muscular palm.