32 Cadillacs (25 page)

“Flavor of the month—chocolate!” exclaimed the Athlete, making slurping noises with his mouth. He had styled blond hair and
a striking profile and a high skinny laugh. White shirt under a blue and white sweater, the collar points outside the sweater
in Joe College style.

“In the truck,” said Cowboy Hat.

“In the back—in the
camper
,” amended the third.

He was very wide, weight-lifter shoulders and chest, day’s growth of beard, grimy green gimme cap with a darker green shamrock
on it, a black warm-up sweatshirt with the hood back. Fleshy nose, heavy lips, slitted mean angry eyes.

Maybelle felt herself shrinking, heard her own voice, little, as she’d been when, pigtails sticking straight out from the
sides of her head, she’d been chased into the barn by some white boys…

The little voice said, “Please, don’t… hurt me…”

But by now they were already guffawing and pinching and feeling and poking. Cowboy Hat grabbed her hand, tried to shove it
down the front of his pants. Athlete came up behind her, put his hand up under her tight red split skirt.

“Into the fuckin’ camper,” he ordered.

Maybelle wanted to scream then, because she knew that if she got into that camper they would hurt her real bad ’fore they
let her out again. As if in confirmation, Green Cap suddenly had a big bowie knife in his hand.

“Into the camper, bitch, or I’ll…”

Just as suddenly he was gone. Flying, had to be almost a dreamy sensation. Except a lamppost was coming at him, coming at
him hard,
CRUNCH
! face-first into the curved metal cylinder, fell in a heap on the sidewalk amid his sharded teeth.

Athlete whirled, nimble and quick, reaching into the cab for his baseball bat—but the big mean-looking mother with short-chopped
brown hair slammed the door on his wrist. He started screaming, high and thin like a grammar-school girl finding a snake in
her bed.

The attacker picked up the bowie knife. Cowboy Hat ran, so fast his ten-gallon Stetson flew off and landed in the gutter.
He was bald under it, somehow vulnerable without it.

The big mean-looking dude stood on the hat, ripped it in half with the knife, but let the man go. Maybelle was glad. She couldn’t
take no more people gettin’ hurt, not even bad people.

Totally ignoring the fallen warriors, the man smashed in the windows of the pickup with the baseball bat, slashed all four
tires with the bowie knife—in this part of town, no windows would go up, no police patrols would come.

Finally, he reached in and twitched out the keys to drop them and the knife down the nearest sewer grating. Then he came back
to Maybelle and looked her up and down, thoroughly and unhurriedly, taking in her tight red sequins and too much lipstick
and breast half-exposed by the torn dress.

Only then did he yell at her.

“Gnew awtta nbe hathamed!”

Ken Warren took off his tan corduroy jacket and draped it around her shoulders. Maybelle couldn’t quit crying. She
was
ashamed, and terrified, and knew God had let him see her like this as punishment for what she was doing to keep her big fancy
prideful Continental.

*   *   *

Warren drove the company car in on Post toward the Tenderloin with Maybelle sobbing beside him on the front seat as if her
heart would break. He looked glumly over at her.

“Nthtop nhat!” he finally ordered.

Maybelle seemed to have no difficulty in understanding him. She reduced the crying to sniveling, then stopped altogether.

“Where you be takin’ me?” she asked in a small voice.

His apartment, that’s where, he told her. He’d just moved in last week, had this new good job so he was out all hours, anyway,
looking for people, cars, how’d she think he’d found her? She could sleep there until she got something better.

“Lord, Lord, child, how’m I gonna get somethin’ better?” she asked him, the tears coming again. “Ah cain’t…”

She fell silent. She’d raised her son Jedediah without a man to home, raised him, as he’d always said with laughing eyes,
with the Bible in one hand and the hairbrush in the other. Then God had forsaken her, and killed him. Killed her son. Her
Jeddie gone, and her still here. Lord, Lord, it wasn’t fair.

“Takin people’s cars,” she said finally. “Whut sorta job is that to—”

“Mbesth tI’ve never ntad,” said Warren.

At his apartment over a liquor store he made her some soup, made up the couch for himself while she drank it, then got her
into his bed when she started falling asleep spoon in hand.

Maybelle’s last thought before going down, down into sleep between those clean, cool sheets, was that she knew, deep inside
her secret heart, that Kenny’d been sent by God because Jesus was giving her one more chance to repent.

Then she was snoring, out cold, not even any REM going on behind her eyelids. Ken Warren shut the bedroom door quietly, tiptoed
out of the apartment, and drove back out to the Fillmore to repossess her Lincoln Continental for the bank.

No more of that streetwalking shit for Jedediah’s mother, even though his buddy was eighteen, no, nineteen long years dead
in the jungles of Vietnam.

T
he aging rock musician bore the stylized stigmata of his tribe: a Gibson slung down his back on a worn leather strap; a bright
felt-covered baseball-style cap loaded with glittery beads bill-backward on his shoulder-length hair; leather vest with more
beads, big brass belt buckle of crossed miniature wheel lock pistols, faded jeans with the knees out, black scuffed combat
boots. Obligatory shades.

“You see that there big ape?” he demanded of a little girl at the King Kong exhibit. “My daddy caught him for me.”

The little girl’s eyes got very big. She had blond hair and a gap in front where two teeth should have been. She lisped in
wonder, “For
you?
”

He pulled the guitar around and strummed a simple chord progression and sang in a flat Bob Dylan sort of voice:

“
Big ole ape, apin’ on a vine,

My daddy caught him, made ’im mine.

Swingin’ away in his jungle gym,

What you gonna feed ’im—

ANYTHING HE WANTS!
”

The mother, who thought he was part of the entertainment, laughed at his shouted last line as he lost his balance and steadied
himself against her and lifted her wallet. The long drought was over. The Rock Musician, one of Poteet’s most potent personae,
was scoring like the Golden State Warriors.

But when he was about to put the wallet back into her purse, some old grey-haired geek with a big jaw wanted to take their
picture in front of the ape.

“Hey, sure, that’s great, man,” he mumbled, thinking, Get outta my face, geek, or I’ll knee-drop you for sure.

But, ever alert, he used the photo opportunity to slip the wallet back into the woman’s handbag—minus a couple of twenties,
of course. The grey-haired guy ended up sitting next to him on the bus, real talkative and a real bug with that camera,
click, click, click,
all the damned time.

“My grandchildren are coming out from back east next week.” The old geek’s smile lit up a rather hard and heavy face. “So
many things to do while they’re here, my wife sent me out on a little recon mission so we don’t miss anything.”

“Recon … that like a scoutin’ trip, Dad?”

“Very like,” agreed the grey-haired man solemnly.

He took so many pictures of everything and everybody that pretty soon Poteet sort of forgot he was there.

Click, click, click!

*   *   *

Up in the Bay Area, Eli Nicholas hauled the backseat out of the brand-new Fleetwood limo. Unlike Poteet, Nicholas absolutely
would have known what a recon was, and actually did play the guitar professionally: on the weekends he strummed wild Gypsy
tunes for a group of
gadje
amateur flamenco dancers in a neighborhood bar on El Cerrito’s San Pablo Avenue. He was a slight swarthy man with a lined
joyful face and strong fingers callused by three decades on the strings.

During Vietnam those hands had learned another trade, one that led him to now have both back doors of the Fleetwood limo open
and the backseat out on the concrete. Midday of a midweek workday, most of the parking slots under his Richmond apartment
building were empty. The deserted area, backed by a high wooden fence, was well-hidden from the street. The afternoon was
balmy, so both men, in work pants and shirt sleeves, were sweating lightly from pulling out the seat.

“Why under the backseat?” asked Rudolph Marino.

“It’s under where
he
would sit,” said Nicholas patiently.

Fact was, Marino was shook-up, nervous, a state of mind so foreign to him it was like a fever in his brain making it not work
right. His biggest score, sure—but he only wanted to con some people, he didn’t want to blow them up.

From a cardboard box with a construction company’s logo on it, Nicholas was taking a foot-square sheet of whitish putty-like
substance a quarter inch thick and backed with adhesive strips.

Marino asked almost shrilly, “What’s that?”

“Sheet C-4.” Nicholas said it casually as he was peeling away the protective layer from the adhesive.

“
C-4? Plastique?
”

“Yeah.
Plastique
. Ninety percent RDX, the most powerful chemical-composition explosive known, ten percent inert binders so it can be pressed
into sheets like this here.”

He got into the back of the limo with the square of stolen explosive and, with the flat of one hand, began pounding the square
casually down into place on the contoured metal floor where the seat would fit back in.

“
Careful!
” yelped Marino.

Nicholas ignored him to finish, then got back out of the car to squint at him through habitual cigarette smoke.

“Before we put the seat back in, I’ll push an electrical blasting cap down into the C-4. We’ll use a radio transmitter to
detonate. When you want it to go off, you just attach a radio receiver preset to a certain band to the cap’s wires. You’ll
have a pocket radio transmitter with you, so you just—”

“What if somebody else has a transmitter set to that band?”

“They won’t, but anyway, you connect the receiver to the blasting cap at the last second—in the garage. Then get behind a
pillar and turn on your transmitter and …” He suddenly threw his arms wide with a joyful laugh, “POOF!”

*   *   *

PLOP!

The broken egg had slid down the curved side of the mixing bowl just a split second before something small and dark and gleaming
and hunched dropped in after it.

“No,” said Ramon Ristick, “too slow. Way too slow.”

Yana fished the little dark gleaming pellet-like object out and palmed it. When she destroyed the next egg, the black object
fell so smoothly that it landed in the bowl to glisten evilly up through the yolk as if it had preceded it.

“Perfect,” pronounced Ramon.

Yana broke another egg. “It has to be perfect
every
time.”

Ristik, watching her practice in glum silence, suddenly said, “I didn’t like what happened to Sonia’s Allante.”

“That was Rudolph’s fault. I had to give Sonia to the
gadjo
after Rudolph threatened us …”

PLOP! Perfect yet again.

“He’ll know it was you told the
gadjo
where to look.”

“Maybe he’ll blame Ephrem again,” she said indifferently.

After two more, they scrambled and ate the eggs she had been practicing with, discussing when and with what trappings of the
occult—and speculating for how much—they would work the poisoned-egg effect on Theodore Winston White. The Third.

*   *   *

Even from the outside, Theodore Winston White III’s house looked to Giselle like something out of Hammett’s “The Gutting of
Couffignal,” Part stone, part wood, probably twenty-five to thirty rooms, three stories on grounds that were a wilderness
of native California trees and shrubs able to thrive despite the now-broken drought.

Giselle had driven up a winding drive to the top of a Tiburon hill and climbed the broad stone stairway to the hardwood door.
She banged the iron gargoyle-face knocker and turned away to look at the City, rising from the far side of the sparkling bay
like a misplaced Camelot: distance lent it a bogus charm absent in close-up.

When the door was opened by a slender blond chap in his 30s, a big tiger-stripe tomcat scooted out between his legs and bounded
off down the steps.

“It’s okay,” he said quickly, “he does it all the time.”

There was a moment of silence. Once the office-work crunch had eased, Giselle had been in a great hurry to follow up on her
anonymous phone caller’s lead. So she had gotten White’s address from the tax assessor’s office at the Marin Civic Center,
and had driven directly here without even phoning ahead. She had not even formulated a plan of attack or worked out her cover
story.

So she cleared her throat and said, “Ah … I’m looking for Theodore Winston White the Third.”

“That’s me. Teddy White.”

“This might sound a little strange, but do you perchance know any Gypsies?”

His slightly too close-set eyes lit up. “Madame Miseria’s incredible, you know. She’s changing my life.”

It all fell into place. Madame Miseria. Ballard’s Yana, the Gypsy fortune-teller. Giselle’s anonymous caller obviously was
some Gyppo opposed to Yana. Giselle smiled. Brilliantly. The kind of smile men felt all the way down to their toes.

“Mr. White, I’d love to drive you down into town and buy you an espresso,” she said.

*   *   *

Drinking muddy Turkish coffee in the office, Wasso Tomeshti could see his sister and mother and two cousins feeding the shopping
frenzy surrounding his purloined color TVs. He’d priced the sets for quick cash sales, so was also collecting and pocketing
the 7.25% sales tax to help offset the bargain prices.