His voice ran down: he had gone too far and knew it. For a moment, her face looked like scraped bone; he felt a stab of superstitious dread. Then she relaxed and shrugged.
“If Ephrem can make money betraying the rom to the gadje, he will — but he gets no information from me. I don’t know where he is and I don’t want to know. Whether somebody is on to us or not, we have to tell the kumpanias two cars are lost. And I want to know for sure about the repo agency.”
“Not too hard to find that out,” Marino said.
At the same time, Ristik said: “Why tell the kumpanias yet? Most of our people are already gone from here—”
“Then find out,” she told Marino, then told Ristik, “because if a repo agency knows about us, they’ll try to follow us all over the country from here. Also, I can’t leave yet—”
“Theodore Winston White the Third,” smirked Marino.
She shot him a venomous glance.
“If you spent more time on your St. Mark Hotel scam and less on having your clansmen follow us around, hoping to take that fifty-eight pink convertible away from us, maybe you—”
“What do you know about the St. Mark?” demanded Marino in a furious voice. She laughed aloud, and whirled toward him so her full skirt flared out around her beautiful legs.
“What do I know? What I know.”
“If you interfere with that—”
“Stay away from Teddy White.”
There was a long pause. Finally, Marino nodded and stood up from the kitchen table, where he and Ristik had been sitting.
“Agreed.”
She softened slightly. “I only need a few more days...”
“Also.”
They stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then both of them burst out laughing at the same time.
“Want to be lady-in-waiting to my King after Zlachi dies?”
“Want to be court jester to my Queen?”
But clattering down the stairs a few minutes later, with no need to keep up a front, Marino was unsmiling.
Was there a detective agency good enough to tag them as the ones who had hit the bank for the Caddies? Couldn’t be. No agency was that good. Yet as Yana had said, two cars in one weekend out of the fourteen still in the Bay Area were too many.
And meanwhile, time was tight and his people were having no luck at all in finding the pink 1958 Eldorado convertible. If she turned out to be right about the repo outfit, he’d use it to smoke out the ragtop. Not that he thought she was right.
As he started down the Romolo steps, a tall blond man with a hawk nose and cold blue eyes passed him coming up. Their eyes locked for a moment, like those of adversary eagles; then the man was gone. On a sudden impulse, Marino turned to look back up the street after him. Yes. Turning in at Madame Miseria’s ofica just as Marino somehow had expected.
Theodore Winston White III? No. The man who fell for candle readings, and money that bled after a special-dye-soaked bill had been substituted for his, and probably a poisoned egg, and maybe even a cemetery dig, had never viewed the world through such bleakly realistic blue eyes. More likely, a cop.
Maybe she was in trouble. Good! He hoped she was.
Yana was saying, “We have to find out who repo’d those Cadillacs, and we don’t have the contacts in the cop shop that Rudolph does. If someone in our kumpania could pose as—”
Ristik stopped her with a characteristic Gypsy shrug, the sort that involves eyebrows, hands, wrists, forearms, shoulders, and a tilt of the head to one side.
“I still ask, why bother?”
“Rudolph will use them to panic us into moving the pink Cadillac. He thinks then he can take it away from us and present it to the King as his own.”
Ristik’s eyes flashed. He shook a rigid forefinger at the ceiling. “He will not take it! Not while there is life in—”
Yana giggled.
“Thank you, Cornel Wilde. Or maybe Victor Mature?”
Ristik looked sheepish. “Okay. But if he thinks—”
The street buzzer sounded.
Ristik opened the door to stare up at the blond man who said, “I want to see Madame Miseria.”
Ristik was glad that through habit he had centered himself in the doorway when he opened it. This guy looked like a cop. Yana didn’t need any cops sucking around with their hands out or their backs up, not with Teddy White responding so great. So Ristik’s usually bright snapping eyes went dull with stupidity, his gutturals became thick as engine grease.
“Madame Miseria is not here.”
He tried to shut the door, but the blond man’s shoe was in it. Ristik raised his voice for the benefit of Yana waiting behind the curtain at the head of the stairs.
“You need a warrant to —”
“I’m no cop.”
No cop. That made it easy. He tried to shut the door again. The foot had not moved. He put on his best threatening look. The tall blond man put contempt in his voice.
“You Yana’s husband?”
Ristik was surprised; few gadje knew his sister’s rom name.
“I know of no one by the name of Yana.”
“Then lemme see your license for this mitt-camp.” *
“You said you were not police.”
“I lied.”
“Let me see your badge.”
That’s when Yana called from the head of the stairs, “Ramon. It is all right. Let him come up.”
Ballard hadn’t been sure he’d played it right, but here he was trudging up the stairs after the Gyp who had answered the door. And there at the head of the stairs staring down at him was Yana, more beautiful than ever. Beautiful, even with her face closed and unreadable.
She said, as he came up level with her in the hallway, “Ramon is my brother and he watches out for me.”
She started down the hall toward the duikkerin room with the velvet drapes and crystal ball, talking over her shoulder to Ballard as she went, a bewildered Ristik trailing along behind.
“How did you—”
“Your mother-in-law.”
In the room she turned to face him, took both his hands in hers, and started laughing. “How much did you have to pay her?”
“Enough.”
“Too much, perhaps?” Her voice was teasing.
He said softly, “Never too much to see you again.”
Ristik was looking from one to the other as if watching the U.S. Open. Yana was treating this gadjo like an old friend! He opened his mouth to speak, then felt the chill of Yana’s piercing eyes. He shut his mouth, then opened it again, meekly.
“I’ll make some tea,” he said.
She nodded like a queen as she and Ballard sat down facing each other across the boojo table. They spoke in unison.
“So why did you—”
“So how have you—”
Both stopped. Both laughed. She took his hands across the table, as she had done with Teddy White, as she did with all the gadje marks. But wasn’t this different? Surely very different?
“So why did you seek me out in Santa Rosa?”
“Old times?” asked Ballard.
She merely shook her head. He nodded. Gestured around the room with its long concealing drapes.
“Could we maybe go out somewhere to—”
“No.”
He nodded again, going slow, letting her set the tone. She was all he had, but more than that, she was even more dazzling now than three years ago. And he’d been booted out by Beverly...
“Maybe later? Another time?”
Yana felt herself weakening, felt herself short of breath the way she had been last time. But she had been a girl then, rebelling against the dread return of her husband. She was a woman now, she must not give in to her attraction to this tall blond gadjo.