Authors: Joe Gores
The light had changed. They started slowly across the intersection, two loving old people arm in arm.
“Retirement.” Karl’s voice savored the word, but his eyes had taken on a speculative gleam. “Nineteen fifty-eight.” He smiled
a beatific smile. “The year I became King.”
T
. S. Eliot once remarked that April is the cruellest month. But on this Tuesday the 17th, six months to the day after the
Bay Area’s devastating temblor, April did not seem cruel at all.
Oh, there were the usual traumas; breakdowns on BART, too many homeless on the streets, a tanker grounded in the bay, water
rationing in place for this sixth straight drought year despite the miracle March rains. But the IRS beast had gotten its
human sacrifice for another season; most of the quake damage had been repaired or swept out of sight; and the A’s—if not the
Giants—looked in top early-season form.
And remodeling was finished at 340 Eleventh Street. In the first of two (count ’em, two!) huge open ground-floor offices—each
larger than the entire setup had been at 760 Golden Gate—were the skip-tracers and clerical staff. And Dan Kearny himself,
strategically placed to slip out the back door if a process server stormed the front.
In the other ground-floor office were the CB, the fax, and the computer. Here also, under Giselle’s watchful eye, were the
teenage girls who earned after-school money churning out skip and legal letters on the old but serviceable automatic typewriters.
Upstairs were actual
offices
for the field agents—with desks and chairs and phones and even typewriters for one-fingering reports.
And out in back was storage for
twenty
cars.
So, with DANIEL KEARNY ASSOCIATES backward on the glass of the door in fresh paint, DKA was again ready to find people who
had defaulted, defrauded, or embezzled, and to wrest away their purloined assets for return to its clients. Clients who, unfortunately,
were not the sultry blondes and devious tycoons of fiction. They were, rather, much more mundane banks, bonding companies,
financial institutions, and insurance conglomerates.
On this bright spring day, typewriters clacked, phones clamored, exhaust fumes wafted in from the storage yard where someone
was gunning a repo. At Jane Goldson’s reception desk a big hard-looking man with a tough jaw and lank, close-trimmed brown
hair had written
KEN WARREN
on an employment application and was trying to add to that. Jane kept rolling the conversational ball at him, which he kept
not rolling back.
“How did you say you found us, Mr…. um…”
Warren chewed on his pencil eraser in morose silence.
“If you’ve never done this sort of thing before, actually, it is rather difficult to… er…”
Warren laboriously filled in another line on the app. His scowl could have blistered paint. Sliding back her chair, Jane gave
him a brilliant smile and some equally brilliant thigh.
“Perhaps you’d best speak with Mr. Kearny directly…”
Daunted by the application form, Warren was unaware of smile, thigh, or remark. Okay, sure, applying in writing was better
than trying to explain himself verbally; but even so, most of what he did best really couldn’t be put down on paper.
Kearny’s left hand was shaking a Marlboro from his pack as Jane came up to his desk; his right continued its creative bookkeeping
on the rather thin stack of billing before him. Cash flow, cash flow—relocating had cost a mint, and clients, waiting to see
if they’d survive it, had been hesitant. A minor irritant was the cleaning service—it was lousy.
Jane moved her head slightly toward the man scowling over the clipboard at the far end of the office. Kearny raised heavy
interrogative brows at her through his first wisp of carcinogens.
“So?”
“Actually, Mr. K, he just wandered in off the street,” Jane said in her tart cockney accent. “But…”
“So what’s the gag?” Even in a slow month they always had room for a good repoman. “Let him fill in the app and—”
“So maybe you’d best hear for yourself, hadn’t you?”
Summoned down the office, the big man looked okay to Kearny. Better than okay, in fact. Hard-faced, moved well… of course
in a 3:00
A.M.
alley a lot of self-styled tough dudes had tiny balls. Kearny stood up and stuck out his hand. He’d hear what the big guy
had to say.
The big guy said, “GnYm Kgen Gwarren.”
Oh.
* * *
Those same six months since the San Francisco quake did not seem to have been so kind to Karl Klenhard back there in Stupidville.
No longer did his gold watch chain stretch taut across a splendid belly. It sagged. No longer did he stride. He shuffled.
No longer did he use his gold-headed cane with a
boulevardier
flair, but as one dependent upon its support.
Margarete held his free arm protectively as she guided him into the town’s largest department store. He was being loud, querulous,
and rambling in a newly acquired old-man’s voice.
“
But we gotta get her somethin’
today!” Close to tears.
“It’s our own little granddaughter we’re talkin’ about here…”
Margarete said placatingly, “I saw a lovely little pinafore just her size on the lower level,
Liebchen
…”
She had to let go of his arm so Karl could grasp the moving handrail of the down escalator at the same time that he stepped
on one of its moving stairs. His hand missed, his foot missed. With a loud cry, Karl took a terrifying headlong tumble, arms
and legs windmilling, cane flying, falling down… down… down…
Thud! Crash! Crunch!
Margarete, screaming and wringing work-roughened hands, looked down the escalator to her septuagenarian husband crumpled at
its foot. Karl lay in an unnatural position, his only movement the flapping of one hand as each stair passed beneath it. Horrified
clerks were dashing about, the manager was coming from his office at a dead run, the floor man was already calling for an
ambulance on his cordless phone.
* * *
In San Francisco, her office manager duties being post-move slow, Giselle Marc was on the street. She’d gotten her driver’s
license just before the quake—on her 32nd birthday, yet!—and since then had been doing all the field work she could squeeze
in. More valuable to DKA at her desk, perhaps, but she
loved
it out here. And she was good at it.
Well, maybe she didn’t
always
love it. Maybelle Pernod, fat, black, and 61, should have been home bouncing grandchildren on her knee. Instead, after a
week of skip-tracing, Giselle had found her sweating off the pounds over a pressing machine in a dry-cleaning plant on Third
Street’s 4600 block. They had to shout to hear each other over the
hiss-s-s-swhoosh
of the pressers, sweat stippling their faces and running down between their breasts as they faced each other through clouds
of steam.
At issue was a 1991 Continental that was two payments down.
“Woman, Ah
cain’t
give up ma car!”
“You,
have
to, Maybelle. We’ve got no current residence address on you—”
“Hain’t rightly settled into my new place yet—”
“Maybelle, you don’t have a new place. No res add, casual labor here at the cleaner’s, your third payment comes delinquent
the end of the week—”
Maybelle’s dark eyes gleamed stubbornly in her ebony face. She stuck out an ample lower lip. “Hain’t gonna give up ma car.”
Giselle held up the coil wire she had taken from beneath the hood of the Connie before entering the plant.
“That isn’t the question here, Maybelle. I thought maybe you’d want to remove your personal possessions before it goes.”
“But that car… I don’t got that car, I don’t got…”
Big fat tears rolled down Maybelle’s big fat cheeks like rain down a windowpane. Giselle had to stiffen up before she got
all soggy, as Larry Ballard sometimes did with hard-luck women.
“Maybelle, the car is history. Do you want your personal property or not?”
Maybelle swiped a catcher’s-mitt hand across her eyes and gave Giselle the keys. “Honey, you jes leave all that stuff in that
Connie. Maybelle get her car back, you jes wait an see.”
* * *
Within hours, like concentric rings of wavelets from a stone tossed into a pond, word about Karl Klenhard’s plunge down the
escalator began going out from the Midwest to the
rom
scattered around the country. Officially, Gypsies do not exist in the United States; in reality, as many as two million of
them from four “nations” and some sixty different tribes roam the land unrecorded and unchecked by an indifferent bureaucracy.
The King is down, went the word. The King is injured… the King is
badly
injured… the King (only whisper this)
may not recover
…
The strongest candidates for his crown were both working out of San Francisco. One was a woman known to the
rom
as Yana, and to the straight,
gadjo
, non-Gypsy world as Madame Miseria. The other was Rudolph Marino, who right now looked not like a Gypsy but like a Sicilian
who had gotten his MBA from Harvard and had aced the bar exam on his way to Mouthpiece for the Mob.
Marino’s gleaming black razor-cut was thick and lustrous, the planes of his swarthy face piratical. His pearl-grey suit, ghosted
out of a Rodeo Drive clothiers in that oldest of gags, a suitcase with a snap-up bottom, was worth $1,200; his maroon silk
foulard wore a
faux
ruby stickpin as big as his thumb.
As he sauntered up to Reception at the venerably luxurious St. Mark Hotel, where California Street starts its swoop from Nob
Hill down to the financial district, he covertly sized up the check-in clerk. She wore a name tag that said
MARLA
and she was tall and blond and businesslike; but he saw the little click in her eyes when they met his. Useful. Perhaps very
useful. Already he was fitting her into his plan.
“May I help you, Mr….”
“Grimaldi,” said Marino. He caressed her face with black eyes, limpid yet with cold depths that made
gadje
girls go weak at the knees. He laid a Goldcard on the desktop. “Angelo Grimaldi from New York. I have a reservation. A suite.”
Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The screen scrolled its reservation arcana. “Here it is, Mr. Grimaldi.” Their eyes met
again. She fumbled getting the registration blank on the desktop before him. “I hope you will enjoy your stay with us.”
He let his eyes widen very slightly. He tapped a finger on the face of her telephone to show he had memorized her extension.
“I am sure that I will,
cara
.”
He stalked away, followed onto the elevator by one of the Mark’s ancient bellmen burdened with Louis Vuitton luggage picked
up by a Florida tribe from a Worth Avenue shoppe torched in an insurance scam. To Maria the Check-in Clerk he seemed a leopard
on the loose among the flocks of tourists—mostly name-tagged, camera-laden Japanese. She made a small noise in her throat,
then jerked herself erect, reddening at her own X-rated thoughts.
In the elevator, Marino was also occupied with his thoughts, and indeed she was part of them. But not as she might have wished.
Women, though useful and capable of giving great pleasure, were unclean. Especially
gadje
women. He would use her, nothing more, during the three weeks before the real Grimaldi returned from the Maine woods to find
his Manhattan apartment rifled and his credit cards stolen. Three weeks.
Time enough. Marino’s elaborate scam on the hotel’s management would be his greatest coup to date.
* * *
On the far side of Russian Hill, Larry Ballard and Patrick Michael O’Bannon—O’B to the troops at DKA—were getting into the
elevator at the Montana, a high-rise co-op overlooking bowl-shaped Aquatic Park from the foot of Polk Street. The site had
been zoned low-rise until certain of the City’s key officials had found their Christmas stockings stuffed with—miracle of
miracles!—foreign vacations and new cars and fur coats for their wives. Subsequently—another miracle!—the Montana Development
Corporation had been granted the supposedly impossible building code variances it sought.
“Just your typical San Francisco success story,” O’B was explaining to Ballard as they rode up in the elevator.
Larry didn’t answer. He was getting his fierce expression in place for Pietro Uvaldi, a piece of cake who lived the good life
at the Montana with his latest poopsie. Unfortunately, Pietro had fallen behind on the payments for his $83,500 Mercedes 500SL
sports convertible.
Ballard considered him a piece of cake because Pietro was an interior decorator—nudge, nudge, wink, wink—while Ballard was
blatantly hetero and unwittingly macho, eight years a manhunter, a shade under six feet tall, 180 pounds, with sun-bleached
blond hair and a hawk nose and killer blue eyes and a hard-won brown belt in karate.
He flipped the coin O’B had handed him. O’B called it in the air. “Tails.”
The coin’s reverse glinted in the elevator’s plush carpet.
“Two out of three,” said Ballard quickly.
O’B merely shook his head and pocketed his coin without revealing that it had tails on both sides. While not Ballard’s physical
equal—slight, 50 years old, with a leathery freckled drinker’s face and greying red hair—O’B was wily as a Market Street hustler,
fast-talking as a southern tent preacher. Some quarter-century before he had broken in on credit jewelry, the world’s toughest
repo work: you can’t pop the ignition on a diamond wedding set and drive it away from the curb.
“Sorry, Larry me lad.
I
get to drive the Mercedes and
you
get to make out the condition report and file the police report.”
They left the elevator at the twelfth floor. O’B rang Pietro’s bell and straightened his tie and let his face relax into its
world-weary expression; Ballard’s fierce expression was already in place. But the door was opened by a six-foot-six 240-pound
man wearing pink spiked hair and black leather underwear with chrome studs. His biceps were like grapefruit.