Joe Gores - Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Meryl began, “You are sure this will...”

“Nothing is ever sure in this world. Well, I have one other potion that never fails, but it is dangerous...”

“Oh please! I want it! Anything!” Meryl quickly, anxiously, released the money as if it had suddenly become hot beneath her fingers. “I’m sorry if I seemed to doubt you...”

“My grandmother taught me the spells to chant while making it.” Yana touched the dimmer switch under the rug with the toe of her narrow black boot. The crystal ball began to glow with a cerulean tinge apparent in its depths. “Those who practice the black arts use their version of this potion to destroy—”

“It mustn’t hurt Theodore!” Panic in Meryl’s voice.

“Then you must use it exactly as I instruct you.” She touched the switch again. The crystal began to fade. Her voice faded with it. “If I give you this potion, then on next St. John’s feast day I must go to Golden Gate Park and catch a green frog to put, alive, in an earthen pot pierced with small holes.”

“So it can breathe?” Meryl was a gentle soul who belonged to Best Friends, PETA, IDOA, Wild Care, HFA, and ALDF.

“So when I bury it in an anthill they can get in through the holes and eat it alive down to its skeleton.”

Meryl shuddered at the deliberate brutality of the image. Pinpoints of light cleverly directed through the nearly dark crystal ball made Yana’s eyes glow with an unearthly fire.

“This skeleton I will grind to powder, and mix this with the blood of a bat and dried, ground-up bluebottle flies...”

Actually, Yana concocted the potion from a paste of black bean powder, toasted tofu, and water. Her toe moved. The crystal began to pulse rose-pink. Yana put her hands on the table, fingers spread and touching each other, then suddenly drew them back and up and opened her arms wide, materializing a tiny dark and misshapen loaf like a breakfast sausage link.

“This will tie Theodore to you for life. For life. Use this and there will be no extinguishing his love for you. Wrap it in your handkerchief and take it home — if you dare.”

Resolve tightened Meryl’s usually indecisive features as she gingerly picked up the little sausage with her handkerchief.

“I... I dare anything for Theodore’s love.”

“So be it. At your supper for him, serve split pea soup, very hot, then slip this loaf into his bowl so it will dissolve.”

“I... I don’t have enough cash to...”

“A check will be acceptable. Five thousand dollars.”

This was the carefully weighed escalation, the moment of truth. But Meryl asked, almost timidly, “To Madame Miseria?”

“To my birth name, Yasmine Vlanko.” Meryl started writing the $5,000 check. Yana said, “One more thing. You must give him the blade of grass and the potion on the night of the new moon.”

Leaving just enough time to open a Yasmine Vlanko account and close it when the check had cleared; in case of trouble, there would be nothing to link Yana to the mythical Yasmine.

She walked Meryl out through the miniature anteroom she had fashioned for possible waiting clients, dimly lit by a faux Tiffany lamp with cut-crystal rectangles dangling from the shade to tinkle with the slight wind of their passage. Here the incense was only a shadow on the moving air.

Yana was closing the recessed street door behind Meryl when she saw two bulky men getting out of a plain sedan three doors down toward Eleventh. They put no money in the meter. The sedan was too plain. The men were too bulky.

The check between her teeth, she made six silken moves to be free of her voluminous parrot-bright soothsayer’s gown.

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern paused on the Geary Boulevard sidewalk just off Twelfth Avenue to examine a blue sandwich board in front of a yellow-brick apartment house. It bore a yellow outspread hand, palm forward, and the words:

“Follow the yellow-brick hand,” said Rosenkrantz.

They didn’t see the black Cadillac Catera sliding into a parking space across Geary, nor did they see a tall lean man in a grey suit get out. They were too busy reading lettering on a draped-off first-floor window overlooking Geary.

The narrow entrance was arched in a vaguely Moorish way. Two steps up in a small vestibule was an inset door with an OPEN sign hanging on the knob and more lettering on the opaque glass:

“She ain’t exactly hiding out, is she?” mused Guildenstern.

Cut-glass teardrops tinkled softly on the Tiffany lamp’s phony stained glass shade when the two cops entered the tiny waiting room. A young woman reading a magazine started eagerly from her chair, then subsided in obvious disappointment.

“You’re waiting for Madame Miseria?” asked Rosenkrantz.

“Yes.” She shot a quick look at the tiny gold wristwatch just above her white-gloved left hand, and added in a low, well-modulated voice, “I had a three o’clock appointment.”

Golden hair shone under her white tam-o’-shanter, big round glasses gave her small face an almost scholarly cast. She was slender yet full-bosomed under a white sweater and grey flannel jacket. Slim ankles and narrow black shoes peeped out from under a pleated grey mid-calf skirt. A thin attaché case rested on the floor beside her chair. For a fleeting moment, Rosenkrantz wished he had a daughter like her.

“Maybe Madame Miseria is inside,” he suggested gently.

“I used the bell-pull. There was no answer. And the inner door is locked.”

Guildenstern said, “Yeah? Let’s give her another jingle.”

He jerked several times on the silk-tasseled bell-pull. A bell bong-bonged inside. He rattled the door. No response.

“See? She doesn’t answer.” The blonde stood up, almost theatrically. “What if something has... has happened to her?”

“Why would you think that?” snapped Guildenstern.

“One hears...” A vague gesture. “Gypsies...”

“Just why are you seeing her?”

“Consulting her,” she corrected. Her eyes, behind their glasses, were abruptly icy. “And I can’t conceive of any circumstance under which that would be any of your business.”

The cops belatedly hauled out their shield wallets.

“Police officers,” they said in unison.

“I see. I do not wish to embarrass Madame Miseria by being here at such an awkward time,” said the blonde. “So, good day.”

As she picked up her attaché case, the door was opened by a man in a thousand-dollar suit. He bowed gallantly as she swept by him with a distant nod. The door closed behind her. Guildenstern bore in on the chivalrous dude.

“We saw you out in the Mission this morning at a Gyppo hot-TV storefront place.”

“Now we see you here at a Gyppo mitt-reader’s camp,” added Rosenkrantz. “We wanna know why.”

Guildenstern held out his hand. “And we wanna know who.”

The man slapped a business card down on the open palm.

“Angelo Grimaldi, Attorney at Law. My firm represents the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco in—”

Guildenstern said, “What do you call twelve lawyers falling out of an airplane?”

“Skeet,” said Rosenkrantz.

Grimaldi went on smoothly, “. . In certain legal matters. I am trying to serve papers on the woman who, I learned at what you so colorfully call the Gyppo hot-TV storefront, operates here as Madame Miseria. She received a large sum of money from one of the Archbishop’s parishioners under dubious circumstances—”