32 Cadillacs (32 page)

Her mouth fell open in astonishment, as did her fist. Ken tapped the accelerator, the Charger moved away. In the rearview
Sarah, dumbfounded in the middle of the street, was staring after him. Then her right arm came up, again fisted. But the fist
dissolved. Thick fingers, as of their own accord…
waggled
.

The dragon, transformed to fair maiden by a kiss, was waving Ken Warren and her Charger a bittersweet goodbye.

*   *   *

“If not a terrorist and not a blackmailer, then what?”

They were back in the limo, driving back in toward Nob Hill. Marino used the lighter on both their cigarettes.

“A knight in shining armor to
stop
the terrorists.”

“Who do not exist. You made them up.”

He patted the pocket with the transmitter in it. “Who is to say they are made up? With proof such as this… And a blond terrorist
trying to break into the President’s limo… But you can see my dilemma. Even a white knight must have his great black stallion
on which to ride to the rescue.”

“Only I have a repo order on your stallion.”

“The steed of a man who saved you from arrest, disgrace, torture? Perhaps even from…” He twirled an imaginary mustache, Giselle
laughed, she seemed to laugh a lot with this man. “Something
worse
? But
me
… I can make you an offer—”

“I can’t refuse?”

“Exactly! I will give to you Cadillacs being driven by Yana’s clan—”

“But you got those cars for them in the first place!”

“
Devalesa
gives,
Devalesa
takes away. Yana is betraying
my
clan to your friend with the hawk eyes, yes? So let me finish my business with the hotel while giving your DKA many cars
…”

Giselle stubbed out her cigarette. What could she lose? He wasn’t going to give her the limo, anyway, and she couldn’t take
it away from him. Not now. And if he fed her other Gyppo cars… and helped destroy Yana in the meantime…

“Tell me just one thing, Rudolph. Who is Angelo Grimaldi?”

“Who else could he be but Mouthpiece for the Mob, offering to rub out the terrorists for a fat fee?”

Giselle broke up. It almost would serve the hotel people right if they bit on that one. He was going on.

“We will work out a telephone code, you will be a business woman joining me at my hotel for conferences; I will give you the
time and place to steal many cars.”

“Recover,” she said automatically.

“Whatever.” He paused. “Deal?”

“Deal.”

He reached over and solemnly shook her hand. Ballard had
his
Gyspy informant, she thought defiantly, she’d have hers. A disturbingly attractive Gypsy informant…

Very
disturbingly attractive…

A
fter dropping Giselle at her car, Marino found a payphone and called Gunnarson’s office at the St. Mark. He repitched his
voice to the bogus Arab gutturals of his previous terrorist call and became more and more excited, speaking faster and faster
in a higher and higher register.

“We failed this morning, but we will strike again. You have opposed us and taken one of ours, so now the St. Mark Hotel is
our target! Even if your President escapes our vengeance!”

And hung up. Back at the hotel, he holed up in the Garnet Room while sending word to Gunnarson they had to meet right away.
He made it even money whether the Three Stooges or the feds would show up this time, but hoped Gunnarson and his cohort were
in too deep to cry wolf now.

He had a drink, then a second, rare for him; not, oddly enough, because he was nervous about a possible federal bust, but
because he had been shaken by Giselle Marc.

He
wanted
her. Physically. Usually, with
gadje
women, he just serviced them as part of some con he was running. But Giselle was not only stunning, she was
rom
-smart, smart as Yana. Despite their mutual attraction, she would be using him while he was using her, and he found that intensely
exciting.

Curly, Larry, and Moe paused in the doorway of the lounge to tell the maître d’ to keep other patrons away from around their
table. Marino felt himself relax. No feds.

So, as Grimaldi, he opened with, “Now do you believe me?”

“Believe you about what?” demanded a harried Gunnarson.

Marino realized his fears had been groundless. Call in the feds? These stupid bastards hadn’t even made the necessary connections
to do so—connections transparent as glass to him.

Grimaldi snarled, in his Bronx accent, “Whadda ya think? The terrorists. The blonde in the garage this morning, trying to
get into the President’s car so she could set a C-4
plastique
bomb—and then do a remote detonation by radio signal.”

“What sort of fools do you take us for?” demanded hulking redheaded Shayne. “The underambassador of Kuwait’s wife tries to
open the wrong limo, and you try to make her a terrorist?”

“The underambassador from Kuwait, a devout Moslem, has a blond American for a wife?” countered Marino witheringly.

Shayne blustered, “The Secret Service agents—”

“Are stupid.” Not that he really thought so; it was just that he had been running cons since he was three years old, and fortunately
these particular agents, hustled, had bitten. “That was not Ali Akbar Zuhrain who took the blonde away from them.”

Little desiccated Smathers bubbled, “But… but… the key fit the underambassador’s limo, they drove away together…”

Grimaldi casually laid on the table a perfectly harmless penlight that looked like an engorged ballpoint pen, and then proceeded
to ignore it. Which assured the others couldn’t keep their eyes off it.

“Yeah,” he said sarcastically, “sure. You got it. The underambassador and the terrorist drove away together.”

“You’re trying to tell us,” sneered Gunnarson, “that
another
terrorist walked in there and rescued her and drove her off in his limo? Just like that?”

“No. I’m telling you that
I
walked in there and drove her off in
my
limo—just like that.”

Shayne chuckled, “And took her where?”

“Out,” said Grimaldi bleakly.

Smathers suddenly had to take off his eyeglasses and start to polish them with his display handkerchief. The quaver was back
in his voice, which was almost a whisper. “There…
was
another phone call… saying… we had taken one of theirs…”

Shayne couldn’t let go of it. His voice was low, intense, furious. “You’re claiming you knocked off this blond bimbo?”

Grimaldi ignored him, spoke instead to Smathers.

“I’ve learned their usual M.O. is to threaten the involved institution directly when they lose one of their people…”

“Well-l-l… yes, the call did… threaten us, but…”

Grimaldi drummed his fingers on the table, frowned, sent bleak eyes around to each of them in turn.

“You don’t have a lot of time, gents.”

Gunnarson demanded abruptly, “Do you have any proof the blonde was a terrorist? Any proof the phone call was real? Any proof
that you…” he stumbled over the word, “
removed
her?”

“What is proof? I imagine the real Ali Akbar Zuhrain has had his meeting with the President by now, am I correct?”

“Yes, but—”

“And has left the hotel, since he is not staying here?”

“I believe so, yes, but…”

“Zuhrain didn’t have a limo, you can check that out. I do. It’s parked down in the garage with the blond bitch’s scarf lying
on the front seat, if you want to go look. Here are my keys.” Grimaldi dumped them on the table in front of Shayne. Shayne
made no move to pick them up. His ruddy countenance had paled slightly. Grimaldi pointed at the harmless penlight. “I took
this off her body…”—he dropped his transmitter beside the penlight—“and this from her attaché case.”

“What… are they?” quavered Smathers, his calendar age at last. Grimaldi flicked the penlight with a contemptuous finger.

“Pen-bomb. Inside are a miniature receiver, detonator—”

They started back, blanching. “A
bomb?
Are you—”

“I removed the C-4 from it. It’s harmless.” Grimaldi tapped the transmitter. “Transmitter, present to the same frequency as
the receiver in the pen-bomb. Once the President was in the car, all she had to do was—”

“My God!” Gunnarson looked as if he were about to faint. “And now they are threatening the hotel itself…”

A subdued Shayne began, “What if the Secret Service or the FBI or the police find out… find the blonde…”

“She went swimming about thirty miles out,” said Grimaldi. “Got tangled up in some scrap iron and dove out of a small plane
that happened to be wave-hopping under the Coast Guard radar.”

“Did you—”

“Personally. One of my people dumped the body, of course.” He said it offhandedly and stood up, pocketing harmless penlight
and transmitter. “She’s a freebie, but it’s seventy-five K in forty-eight hours for the rest of them. After the forty-eight
there’s nothing I can do for you. My principals are tired of your delays, and I need an answer for them.”

Gunnarson was wiping sweat from his forehead with one of the cloth napkins. “You’re talking about…
killing
people! You can’t expect us to just—”

“They plan to kill you,” said Grimaldi reasonably.

The forty-eight-hour deadline was genuine—that was as far as he could stretch the Grimaldi persona, then the real Grimaldi
was due back to New York from his Maine fishing trip. When he found his apartment rifled and his credit cards gone, he would
hit the street yelling and his cards would hit the stolen-card hotline a few hours after that.

Forty-eight hours for $75,000. Or zero.

Same with Giselle Marc. Tomorrow she would come to the hotel and he would feed her some leads to a few of the Cadillacs being
driven by Yana’s people. And afterward… perhaps…

*   *   *

It was nearly midnight when Dan Kearny let himself into the office. He had driven directly there after his flight from LAX,
rather than home, because he’d had his fun in the field and suddenly, dog-tired as he was, had to touch DKA again. Truth to
tell, what was worrying him most was what he and Giselle could do about the mountains of wastepaper and layers of dust accumulating
since he’d foolishly dumped the janitorial service…

He stopped dead just inside the front door, keys forgotten in his hand. All the lights were on in the middle of the night,
and the whole place was spotless. Almost in time to the gospel music from the back room, he swiped a hand across a desktop—no
dust. Giselle must have found a dynamite new service that…

Gospel music?
From the back room was coming gospel music!

He went hurriedly back between the deserted desks and through the open doorway. At Giselle’s desk was a fat black woman of
about 60 whom he’d never seen before. She wore black stretch pants and a scarlet sweater and her head was wrapped in a bright-hued
bandana to keep the dust away. In one hand was a poorboy, in the other a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Her eyes were shut, she
was rocking her head from side to side in time with the music, crooning along with it in a rich dark contralto.

This
was the new cleaning service?

“Ma’am, pardon me… ma’am…
ma’am
—”

She shrieked and jumped up, arms and legs going every which way, eyes popping wide in a caricature of black surprise.

“It’s okay,” said Kearny soothingly, making little palm-down shushing movements with his hands. “I just wondered if—”

But she was in motion, hitting the stop button on the boombox and dropping her sandwich into a paper bag and draining her
coffee and dropping the cup into a big trash bucket that stood upright on a two-wheeled cart beside the desk, with brooms
and mops sticking out of it. Meanwhile, she kept up a running barrage of chatter as she sped about.

“Scairt me half to death, you must be Mr. Kearny, yessir, all finished up in here, jus on my way out, yessir, finishin up
my snack an Ah be outta here, yessir, everything done jus apple-pie nice, didn’t mean to set at no desk, neither, nossir…”

And, pushing the big metal trash bucket on its two-wheeled frame, she was through the back door and gone. Kearny blinked after
her as if he’d just seen a UFO, then shook his head and went back out to the front office and down to his desk.

He stood there idly leafing through the teetery mountains of billing, subconsciously hearing voices coming down from the second
floor through the narrow stairwell behind his desk. Somebody working late. Dozens of files. Looked like the place ran better
without him… than… with… him…

The top file on the stack was
PERNOD
,
MAYBELLE
.

Maybelle Pernod, fat, black, and 61, streetwalking to keep her impossibly expensive Continental. Giselle had fallen for her
hard-luck story like a ton of bricks…

New cleaning lady, fat, black, probably 61…

And it was Giselle’s voice he was hearing from upstairs, along with a male rumble out of which he could pick no words. No
she didn’t! Giselle didn’t get away with
this
crap!

Kearny took the stairs two at a time, went along the hall to a cubicle where Ken Warren was typing, a thick stack of finished
reports beside the machine. Giselle was sitting on the edge of the desk, swinging her feet and talking.

“… and he’s been running this elaborate scam on—”

She broke off abruptly when Kearny appeared.

“No,” he snarled.

“No to what?” She stood slightly taller than he, and so slid off the desk to look down at him as she always did when they
were about to go at it.

“Maybelle Pernod. No way she’s going to—”

“Hnyeth thnee ith! Hnit wasth hmy indea!”

Kearny was frozen in openmouthed astonishment. Warren, having had his say, began doggedly hitting the keys again.

“Ken repossessed her Continental as ordered,” said Giselle, talking fast. “She’s living at a friend’s apartment until she
gets enough for first and last and security deposit on her own.”