The black man grinned. “Yo? Good word.” He gestured at the beat-up-looking vase. “How much to get it replated, or whatever you call it?”
The Jew turned the object over with his fingers, looking up with probing eyes. “Old family heirloom, I suppose?”
“Yeah, sure, somethin’ like that. Look, bro, you don’t wanna do it—”
“And you think it is silver.”
“Ain’t it?”
“No.”
“Well, shit, then, whut you be wastin ma time for?”
The black man snatched back the battered vase to swing away through the street crowd on this part of Chicago’s South Drexel Boulevard near the university, where the Jews’ secondhand stalls catered to South Side blacks. He heard something with zilber in it that ended with a laugh and narish schvartz. Zilber had to be silver and he knew schvartz was black man. Narish probably was something like dumb or stupid — which he wasn’t.
So he swung back to say, “African-American, hymie,” then pushed his way on down the street with the worthless vase he had bought at another street stall an hour before.
Was the skull-capped Jew really a Jew, wondered Bart Heslip as he blew on his coffee to cool it, or a Gypsy posing as a Jew? Chicago’s blacks often had tensions with the Jews, but they had no time at all for Gyppos. A skullcap and a few scraps of Yiddish did not make a Jew; and laughing at the dumb black who didn’t know his stolen vase wasn’t silver was more Gyp than Jew.
Meanwhile, he’d been in Chicago for nearly twenty hours with no luck at all in finding the elusive Tsatshimo and his equally elusive four-door 4.5-liter V-8 fuel-injection Fleetwood sedan. Since metalworking and electroplating plants had yielded zero results, in desperation he’d started working the street stalls, looking for people selling gold and silver plates at prices that guaranteed they weren’t gold or silver. So far, also zero.
Bart sighed and gulped his coffee. There still was something about the old Jew that hadn’t rung quite right. Maybe tonight, come back for a second look...
O’B was feeling desperate himself down in the Sunshine State. He’d found out that (a) Florida developers could destroy wetlands with the best of them, and (b) local Florida governments would sell out to them even quicker than their counterparts in California. What he hadn’t found was a Gypsy named Kalia Uwanowich and a new Cadillac Allante hardtop.
And now he’d gotten a call from Giselle telling him to drop everything and hightail it to Iowa for a Gyppo encampment. Hence the desperation, because O’B had his pride. He didn’t want to show up without Kalia Uwanowich’s Allante. What had some far-out Frog writer once said? That genius was not a gift, but the way one invents in desperate situations? Out of his desperation was born his wonderful invention, a new way of looking at his problem.
He’d been acting as if Uwanowich really was a roofing contractor. Acting as if he really would be buying large quantities of roofing materials. Uwanowich was running a Gypsy scam. He wasn’t going to roof anything. He wasn’t going to buy anything. He was going to rip off a subdivision.
So O’B had started to look at existing subdivisions with homeowners’ associations. These associations set up neighborhood Crime Watch programs, told you what color you could paint your house, how often your lawn had to be mowed. Why wouldn’t a homeowners’ association — stick with him here — tell its members that all their houses had to get reroofed at the same time? Why wouldn’t they contract to have it done, collective bargaining being a lot cheaper than individual deals?
It was worth a shot.
And west of Tamarac, on a tract between West Atlantic Boulevard and the Sawgrass Expressway, O’B saw thirty roofs without shingles, without even the tar paper that goes on under shingles. Even better, discarded shingles were lying all over lawns and sidewalks and even out into the streets.
In front of one house a tall fortyish man with reddish hair and a long pink homely face was picking up ripped-off shingles. O’B sauntered up as he dropped the armful on a stack beside his driveway. He straightened up with a hand to the small of his back, then wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.
“See you’re getting your roof done,” said O’B.
“Yep.” He squinted up at the roof along with O’B, and waxed eloquent on his subject. “Ted’s Roofers had a sixty-man crew out here today, rippin’ off shingles from all the houses.”
“I thought roofers usually carted away the old shingles.”
The man chuckled. “At the price we’re gettin’, we gotta stack ’em, then they haul ’em.” He had a Midwest accent. What did they call them here in Florida? Snowbirds? “It’s all part of the contract.”
“Offered you a real good price, huh?”
“The best. He comes in with a big crew, does it, and gets out again in a single day.”
“But he didn’t finish the job today,” O’B pointed out.
“One day to strip ’em, the next day to roof ’em. Homeowners association pays him after the old shingles are already stripped. Ted, he insisted on that, didn’t want nobody to say they paid for something they didn’t get.”
“I bet he insisted,” said O.B. A nice touch, that.
The man looked at him shrewdly. “You’re in the market for a roofer, you can’t beat Ted’s prices.”
“Where do I find him?”
“Secretary of the association, feller named Hank Sawtell, he lives right down the street, twenty-seven sixty-eight, he’ll have all the dope. Has the association books right there in his house. Say, you want some iced tea? The missus...”
O’B begged off, hurried away. The trouble was, the roofs were already off and Ted’s Roofers wouldn’t be back to the subdivision in the morning to replace them. Not then, not ever. He was speeding down the wide curving suburban street, dodging kids’ toys and picking up house numbers off mailboxes, because his only hope was that Ted — surely, Kalia Uwanowich — hadn’t scored and soared yet. Soared a long way from here.
He needn’t have worried; Ballard should have been there to bitch about the luck of the Irish. Parked in front of 2768 was a spanking-new red Allante hardtop with Florida plates.
O’B parked around the next corner out of sight, got out the dealer key and his repo order with the Allante’s I.D. number on it. He confirmed the I.D., got in, fired it up. In the rear-view, just before he passed out of sight around the curve of the suburban street, he saw a swarthy man sprinting down Sawtell’s walk, waving his arms and yelling.
See you in Stupidville, baby.
O’B dropped the paperwork and keys for his rental car into a mailbox, notified the cops of the repossession, checked out of his motel, and headed north and west for Iowa.
Nanoosh Tsatshimo had started out in his 20s with an instant rechroming scam he’d learned from a great-uncle who’d had a wealthy and sympathetic gadjo take him into his home and pay for his education. Such men, called rai by the Gypsies, were considered part father, part fool.
Anyway, the great-uncle had been good at chemistry, and had taught Nanoosh how to dissolve mercury in a weak nitric acid solution and then apply it to something made of copper. The nitric acid ate a little of the copper, which formed an amalgam with the mercury. This gave the piece a shiny surface like chrome or silver plating.
But it was a short con, because the nitric acid goes right on eating away, so after a few hours it destroys the mercury amalgam and the item looks like copper again. As he got older himself, Nanoosh began to search for a long con without those short departures. He found it in gold and silver electroplating.