Joe Gores - Cons, Scams, and Grifts

“It wasn’t her,” said Bart’s voice. “Etta Mae said she was definitely not the same woman.”

Yes! Yana was innocent! Giselle leaped to her feet, trotted twice around her desk, and pounded her fist on the blotter with glee.

When she went to tell Kearny the news, his desk was empty. Jane Goldson saw Giselle and pulled off her lightweight headset phone.

“Mr. K? He left as soon as you told him the Gypsies had done a bunk.” She pointed to a stack of files on the edge of her desk. “He said for you to carry on.”

Giselle called Corinne Jones at the travel agency again.

“Round-trip to Rome, business class, no return res,” Corinne confirmed. “He just picked up his ticket on his way to SFO.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where he’s staying, would you?”

“I found him a place called San Filippo Neri.” Corinne added, chuckling, “A convent. Dan Kearny in a nunnery. They converted the upper floors into accommodations for paying guests. It’s very reasonable and it’s near St. Peter’s where all the action is.”

With his American passport and single modest suitcase, Kearny cleared customs at Fiumicino’s sprawling Leonardo da Vinci International Aeroporto di Roma without breaking stride and was directed to a tall taxi driver with a fair command of English.

“The convent of San Filippo Neri in Prati,” Kearny said. Corinne Jones had written the address in Magic Marker, bold print; he didn’t even have to grope for his glasses.

“Seventy-five thousand lire,” said the driver promptly.

Dan tried to lean back against the seat and relax, but it wasn’t easy. He was just coming off eleven hours in the air, nonstop, and all the way in from the airport the hackie drove one-handed with his cell phone to his ear, talking nonstop. Neither he nor any of the other drivers had any concept of traffic lanes.

Once inside the city limits it was sirens and loudly buzzing motorcycle engines in every direction, inescapable as Muzak. At an intersection a bus, ATTACK written on the side in red letters, stormed through a red light a foot in front of them.

Half a block farther on a little kid wearing baggy jeans and tattered shirt and hightops was hawking watermelon from the sidewalk. Dan’s driver said something into his cell phone, screamed to a stop in the middle of the traffic, and jumped out. He came back to put a watermelon carefully on the seat beside Kearny, and roared away again — never lowering his cell phone from his face.

Finally the taxi turned into a narrow tree-lined street made even narrower by angle-parked hordes of the small European cars Dan had already realized the Italians favored. They slammed to a stop in front of a narrow mid-block mustard-colored building with wide steps up to a formidable door. Dan stepped out stiffly to retrieve his single bag from the back seat.

“One hundred fifty thousand lire,” said the driver. “You said near St. Peter’s. This is very far north of the Vatican.”

Kearny slapped eight 10,000-lira notes into the man’s hand, said, “Keep the change,” and started up the wide stone steps with his bag. At the top he turned to look down at the angry driver.

“You ought to pay me for that ride,” he said.

Ephrem Poteet’s dying words were, It was my... wife... from... ’Frisco... After a pause, he croaked, Yana , and with his last breath howled out her name: Yana-a-a-a-a... Etty Mae heard him clearly. Cut and dried. But on seeing Yana’s mug shots, she said just as clearly that Yana was not the woman she had seen on those two fateful nights. So far so good. But none of it proved Yana’s innocence.

Giselle had puzzled over this ever since Bart had reported it, but it wasn’t until she was driving to work that she was able to catch the thought that had been tickling at her brain. What if after saying his wife had killed him, Ephrem called out to Yana, not in accusation, but in despair because she was his only true love and he was dying all alone without her there? What if there had been another, bigamous wife?

The Bureau of Vital Statistics was in the ornate newly earthquake-refitted City Hall. Behind the counter of the otherwise-empty office a large indifferent black woman in a print dress was giving someone a cake recipe over the phone.

“You stick a broom straw down into each layer. If it comes out clean, the cake is done.” She gave a booming laugh. “I’m gonna get me more than a piece of that cake, girl!” and hung up.

She looked at Giselle sternly; no cake recipes for her.

“I need a vital statistic,” said Giselle.

The laugh again. “Them we got plenty of.” She shook her head, chuckling, “Yessir, got plenty of them. Whut you need?”

Never confuse a bureaucrat. Giselle literally spelled it out for her. She was looking for a marriage license issued to a Poteet, P-O-T-E-E-T, Ephrem, or to a Mihai, M-I-H-A-I, Punka.

“Ain’t gonna be many, not with no goofy names like those.” There weren’t. On Friday, March 3rd, Punka Mihai had married Nadja Gry in a civil ceremony right here at City Hall.

Giselle went out into the June sunshine to sit on a bench by the reflecting pool and congratulate herself a little and reflect on what she had. She had a start. A bigamous marriage. What she needed now was Nadja Mihai’s current name.

Luminitsa Djurik sprinkled a careful measure of the magic salt Whit Stabler had mentioned to Larry Ballard into the chicken noodle soup and set it down in front of the old man. She used the cheery voice of caregivers worldwide.

“The magic salt will have you all well in no time, Whit!”

He began shakily spooning soup into his mouth. He mumbled valiantly, “I... think I feel stronger today.”

She needed a power of attorney to get at his investments, and the house deed made over to her so she could make a quick sale. Once he signed the papers, the final dose of magic salt...

“You certainly are stronger,” she said, taking the spoon from Whit’s shaky hand. “Let Mama help you. And then maybe tonight you can help Mama by signing the deed to the house.”

Ramon had found a house in Rome on the Via Tor dei Conti near the partially restored ruins of the Foro Romano where the conspirators killed Julius Caesar. Just down the street hulked the Colosseum, haunted by the shades of the countless thousands who died there to entertain the citizenry of Rome.

The hallway was lined with a dozen straight-backed chairs filled with women in obvious pairs. Some had their arms around one another, others rested their heads on the shoulder of their beloveds. They had paid in advance, very dearly, to be here.

The tall door of the salotto swung silently open. A tonsured monk in a simple brown robe stood in the opening.

“Suora Maria Innocente has composed herself sufficiently to receive you,” he said gravely. “It is very difficult for her, as you can imagine. But you may enter.”

The couples trooped into an echoing high-ceilinged room made dim by dusty crimson floor-to-ceiling plush drapes pulled shut across the windows. It smelled musty.

Beside the fireplace sat a slight nun in brown robes. Her bland face was framed by a stiff white headpiece under her black veil. Her slender throat was wrapped in severe white linen. In her arms was an infant. As the women took their places in the semicircle of chairs facing her, the silence was broken only by the scrape of wood on marble, the nervous clearing of a throat.

The pale nun suddenly raised her head to stare at them. Her eyes burned with the starved inner fire of the fanatic. How had they ever thought of her as bland? She spoke. The voice was harsh and cold. It sliced to their very souls.