In the first of the field men’s offices he found Bart Heslip typing reports. The left side of Bart’s lower lip stuck out so far he looked like a bigmouth bass with a hook in its jaw. The left side of his head was shaved and had a bulky white oblong around it. His left eye was narrowed and bloodshot.
“TKO in the first?” suggested Kearny.
Heslip’s lip came out even farther. Then he suddenly broke down and started the high hee-hee-hee laughter that went with his detachable black field hand patois.
“Lawdy Lawdy, Marse Dan’l, when she done bash me wif dat coffee can, Ah thought Ah was goin’ deef, Ah mos surely did.” He dropped the dialect, said darkly, “I went right back out there from the hospital, but she’d cleared out. The front door was standing wide open when I got there. The place was stripped.”
“Put her on the Skip List.”
“Hell no!” exclaimed Heslip. “Nobody’s gonna grab that car by accident! I want this... lady myself!”
The Skip List itemized by license number those subjects who had skipped from their known addresses with their cars. It was distributed to all the field agents weekly, and every now and then somebody searching for a different vehicle actually would get lucky and bust one off it.
Kearny paused in the open doorway. “Put her on the Skip List. And where’s Ballard?”
“Staked out at the Montana waiting for what’s-his-face—”
“Uvaldi.”
“Yeah. Him. Larry’s gonna clean his clock—”
“Why didn’t he do that the first time around?”
“The man had a loaded shotgun, Dan...”
But Kearny, having brought joy into yet another humdrum life, was already on his way out. In the final cubicle at the end of the hall he found flame-haired O’Bannon working on his biweekly expense-account masterpiece. Kearny immediately stabbed an angry forefinger at one of the items.
“What’s that twenty-five bucks for?”
“Driver for that Crowe repo over in North Oakland. That’s misdemeanor-murder land, I wasn’t gonna get out of there if—”
“What’s this twenty-five bucks for?”
“Confidential informant on the Mollenkopf dead skip.”
“Confidential informant my butt! Boozing it up in some ginmill, you mean, and trying to make me pay for—”
“But Great White Father!” O’B was only virtue, his blue eyes innocent of all guile. “If I hadn’t found out he was sleeping with his brother’s wife in Marysville, we’d never—”
“You think I’m gonna pay that thing as is, you’re nuts.”
These skirmishes over the O’Bannon Inflated Expense Account had been going on during all the years since Kearny had broken off from Walter’s Auto Detectives to form DKA.
“Giselle’s crying in her beer over some poor old black washerwoman sleeping in her car—”
“Dan—”
“A ninety-one Continental, no less, but Giselle—”
“Dan’l—”
“Another woman does in Heslip with a can of coffee—”
“Daniel!”
“And you and Ballard let a gay hairdresser weighs ninety-eight pounds kick sand in your faces—”
“MR. KEARNY!”
He paused for breath. “What, dammit?”
“Wanna go get a beer?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Okay. Sure.”
Ramon Ristik, bottle of beer in hand, called the meeting to order. A dozen rom crowded the room where, a few hours before, the education of Theodore Winston White III had begun. This was not quite a kris — that council of elders who act almost as judges or a governing body for the rom on important occasions — but it was a serious meeting of the leaders of two kumpanias. So no children ran through the room, pulling food off plates and trying to drink from wine or beer glasses.
The heavy drapes were gone, so the room was half again as large, open all the way to the four walls. The trap underneath the crystal table for the complicated special effects (such as the tiny halogen bulb that bounced light through the crystal ball into Yana’s eyes to make them glow during readings) now was covered with a tattered rag rug.
The table itself, like the others in the room, was heaped with food: meat-stuffed cabbage, pancakes called boliki, sesame-flavored yogurt with cucumber rounds and tomato wedges to dip, eggplant cubes to be eaten with black pufe bread. There were bananas and oranges and plums and grapes — and also candy bars and potato chips and Hostess Ho-Hos and Twinkies. Six-packs of beer, soft drinks, jugs of red wine. Since the telephone call about the King, Yana had been scheming, and generosity, even calculated generosity, got high marks among the Gypsies.
Ristik opened their gathering with the traditional “By your leave, Romale assembled men of consequence, we must discuss the news which has come to us.” His dark eyes roved the assemblage. “The King has beckoned. We must respond.”
In the old country, or even in the old days in America, such discussions would have been limited to men only, and would have gone for hours, each speaker orating in abstract, proverbial, and convoluted ways rather than convey a direct statement directly. But times had changed.
“Going back to Iowa now will be very expensive,” said Josef Adamo bluntly. He was an excessively fat Gypsy whose specialty was posing as a road-paving contractor. “The season is just beginning here in the West...”
Immaculata Bimbai, an expert at fainting in jewelry stores, said, “But necessary. From this room will come our new King.”
All eyes swiveled to Rudolph Marino. The mob lawyer look was gone. Now he was totally rom, his razor-cut mussed and swirled into curls that gleamed in the overhead light. He ate a chicken drumstick with greasy hands he kept wiping on the tails of his flamingo-pink silk shirt. He nodded and smiled acceptance of their assumption that he would be the new King.
“Yes,” he said, “a new King will surely be chosen.”
But Wasso Tomeshti, whose scam was TV wholesaling, spoke in heavy gutturals from the other side of the room. “Or Queen.”
All eyes swiveled again. To Yana this time. She looked as she had when fleecing Teddy White of his fifty bucks: like every gadjo’s idea of what a Gypsy fortune-teller looked like. She also smiled. At Rudolph. It was a smile on which to sharpen razor blades.
“Yes,” she said softly, “or Queen.”
“It is for the King to decide who will succeed him,” snapped Marino.
“Which he can do without someone trying to seduce his judgment.”
“That is a woman’s trick.”
Somehow, Marino invested “woman” with all the nightsweat qualities of succubus. And somehow, though they had been on opposite sides of the room, he and Yana were now in the center, almost chest-to-chest, glaring at one another.
“Or of a woman-man.”
Marino raised a hand as if to strike her; then the tension went out of him and he laughed and stepped back.
“We know who wants to wear the biggest balls in this room.”
“And we know who doesn’t wear them,” she said sweetly.
There was a small wave of indrawn breaths, shuffling feet; traditionally, no Gypsy woman would talk to a man that way. But Yana was not traditional, even though she honored the old values: she had been careful to pass in front of no man getting to the center of the room, for instance, and had made sure the hem of her skirt had touched no male hand in passing. Such taboo acts would have forced a ritual cleansing of the man involved, and could have gotten Yana ostracized from her Gypsy society.