For the previous eight days the swollen gray clouds had parked themselves above the city like a depressing cumulonimbus Winnebago stuck in an airborne traffic jam.
There hadn’t been much in the way of heavy rain. Mostly, it was precipitation of the endlessly mocking variety, like a drunk heckler in the front row who won’t shut up even after he’s chased the lady comedian off the stage in tears to take up real estate. It was a prolonged weather pattern of the distinctly half-assed sort, where the clouds lazily spit feeble but steady drizzle onto grimy rooftops, determinedly drenching the already sopped and drooping makeshift newspaper umbrellas everybody was holding over their heads as they dashed from their cars to the door of the nearest liquor store.
A week’s crummy weather does nothing to ameliorate the misery of a city where the cab drivers’ middle fingers don’t even take Ramadan off. Picture a couple million restless denizens of the worst dump town you know. Now stick them all in the same huge, poorly-lit car wash for over a week. Then fire continuous, pathetic spurts of dirty water into the windows of the family DeSoto through plastic McDonald’s straws. Everything gets damp, nothing gets clean, and all you get out of the experience is moist dirt, a trailing oil slick, and the kids screaming from the back seat at the exponentially increasing veins popping up on the back of your neck.
As I ducked under the ragged awning in front of the Albanian pizza joint on the corner of Lexington Street and Tender Vittles Boulevard, I was acutely aware of the fact that every damp bastard who hustled by might decide to murder me for the hell of it and blame the weather. But only if I didn’t kill them back first.
The awning was pretty faded, but I could see by the shreds that hung down in front of my nose the faint memory of black, yellow, orange and aquamarine stripes. I had a little time to think -- dancing as I was around the hundreds of raindrops that were finding their way through the many holes in the rotten, old canvas in a concerted effort to dampen both my mood and my trench coat -- and I figured as I sidestepped with the grace of goddamn Gene Kelly that the awning was probably decorated with the colors of the Albanian flag. On the other hand, they might have just been a random collection of clashing Kmart colors since I, like the rest of the human race that isn’t Albanian, don’t give two shits about Albania, Albanians, or the unfurled banner under which their jingoistic Albanian asses march off to war.
“As a pacifist, by which I mean coward, I would not follow this or any other pizza parlor awning into battle,” I confided in my companion who was, like me, riding out the feeble storm beneath the crummy, weather-beaten canopy.
I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer since I had, frankly, thought he was pretty much dead when I first sought out our shared refuge from the rain. This had proved to be an error on my part, as evidenced in the wake of thirty seconds of utter silence by a great, sucking gasp and subsequent coughing spasm that was followed by a chaotically intermittent rising and falling of the copy of the Gazette that was his makeshift blanket. A massive, mucus-launching sneeze shifted the sports section and I realized the bum in question was Wino Ray, a geezer tippler who wasn’t ordinarily known to haunt the alleys and doorways in this part of town.
I, like Wino Ray, whiled away an abundance of inebriated hours in my own lifelong dedication to avoiding doing something meaningful with my meaningless life. According to the old-timers at the gin mill bars over which I regularly slouched, old rummy Ray with his bravura sleep apnea was only in his fifth decade of trying to nap away seven-plus decades of severe liver toxicity. The poor bastard was too chronically loaded to appreciate simple math. To wit: he’d given his liver a two decade head start, and so, arithmetically speaking, there weren’t enough comas in the world for the siestas to ever catch up with the cirrhosis.
The front section of that day’s paper constituted the lower half of Wino Ray’s scandal-sheet blanket, and once I’d determined that there hadn’t been any venomous bodily fluids transferred from pants to print, I swiped the old bum’s improvised bedspread. Wino Ray scarcely noticed the petty theft, rolling his nose over against the wall and wheezing blissful, two-hundred proof gasps against the ancient sandstone, which I was unsure was up to weathering the blistering oral assault.
MASS BLADE ATTACK!
The headline screamed so loudly from the front page that I considered suing the overly enthusiastic typesetter for my budding case of tinnitus.
It turned out the blades in question were of the Kentucky Bluegrass variety. Somebody had entered the grounds of St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral the previous night and vandalized the patch of gated grass which constituted the old, mostly unused church cemetery. Every last blade of grass had been ripped up and the ground was stomped to mud. According to the paper, the cops were trying to question some of the resident ghosts and a recently reanimated zombie deacon, but weren’t having any luck.
I wasn’t surprised. Zombies are notoriously tightlipped -- at least the ones whose lips haven’t fallen off -- and they’ve got shit for brains. (They also have, given the principal ingredient of their diet, brains for shit.) Zombies are worthless under cross-examination. When I was a cop I never once saw a zombie who didn’t fall apart in a witness box, and by Friday afternoon every week the janitors at the Harry Anderson Central Court Building downtown are invariably using push brooms to stuff a pile of arms, legs and torsos in the Dumpster out back that prove it. Goddamn living dead.
Ghosts are almost as bad. Either they’re rattling chains in your face and making all the furniture bounce, or they’re moaning about lost loves. It takes finesse to be able to question a ghost, and when I read who the cop was who’d been charged with the awesome task of solving the great mystery of the St. Regent’s cemetery grass caper, I knew all hope of getting to the root of the missing lawn was lost.
“‘Detective Daniel Jenkins has vowed to leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of the church vandals,’” I read aloud to my unconscious alcoholic companion. “God has forsaken St. Regent’s, Wino Ray, if its only hope for justice is a cop who as a rookie accidentally dropped his gun in the back seat of an eighty year old woman’s Rambler during a routine traffic stop and then arrested her for illegal possession of a firearm. That’s a true story, Wino Ray, which never made the front page of the Gazette, possibly to avoid the mass panic and societal collapse that would assuredly ensue if the populace were to discover the truth about the thin blue line of morons who splash around in the deep end of that tar pit of stupidity and incompetence that is our greater metropolitan police force.”
The St. Regent’s cemetery story was continued on page seven. I didn’t follow it to what I was certain was a thrilling conclusion.
I was a little annoyed that the archbishop hadn’t called me in for the job. I picked up work from the diocese from time to time, mostly retrieving powerful religious relics from local apocalyptic cults attempting to bring about the End of Days. You know the kind of scut work. Boring as hell, yeah, but it pays the bills. I figured the church had decided to go the taxpayer-funded route this time around, since a missing lawn wouldn’t bring on the liability issues that would rain down on the bishop’s mitre if one of St. Jerome’s toe knuckles that he’d failed to keep under lock and key successfully brought on Judgment Day. And, truth be told, I probably wouldn’t have taken the case. There were some jobs too low even for me, and crawling around in my Sears slacks in some Agent Oranged graveyard digging for clues on missing turf was high on that low list.
In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, I’m a P.I. Don’t worry if you didn’t guess. You probably aren’t possessed with my astounding powers of deduction.
There wasn’t much else of interest in the paper. Somebody had swiped Snappy’s Diner, a greasy spoon with the greasiest spoons, forks and knives in the tri-city area. The grubby little restaurant was a local ptomaine institution, and someone had hooked up the old converted train car and driven away with the joint, rotten hamburger, moldy American cheese, warm knockoff generic cola machines, and all. According to the Gazette the owner, Waldo “Snappy” Schmidt, was heartbroken, which seemed fitting given all the work Snappy’s had thrown to local cardiologists over the years.
The drizzle that had been tapping a damp finger against the awning over my head suddenly decided to drift off and pester some poor, hitherto dry sap who was slouching up the other side of the street, and I took the brief moment between storms to bid malodorous Wino Ray a fond adieu. I kept the old rumpot’s paper as a memento of our brief time together and hustled up the sidewalk.
Three blocks down the street, a bus exploded.
It was a pretty terrific blast, even from a distance. A great orange plume capped by a rising black dome of soot rose above the buildings. Windows in adjacent office buildings shattered, and flaming metal bus parts rained down all over Lexington.
You could always spot the tourists these days. They were the ones running in panic or excitedly taking pictures of the burning wreckage as the bus rolled to a slow stop and gently bent the traffic light pole on the corner of Pico. We residents of the city were currently and for the foreseeable future inured to the occasional odd bus explosion.
Some maniac had wired up all the buses in town to blow up if they dropped below 55 miles per hour, all for some crazy ransom demand. The daily detonations had made the papers early on, but had slowly been crowded off the front page by more vitally important stories, like the annual flower show announcement at the Mafia Trade Center or missing cemetery grass tragedies.
For a time, way back before the buses became the object of his incendiary affection, the bomber was blowing up hearses, but that turned out not to garner all that much attention since that was fifty-percent pointless. He’d moved on to cabs, but there’s nobody who lives in a city who doesn’t want that herd to be thinned, especially at rush hour. The buses had finally caught the city’s attention, and an irate populace with sore feet and lazy asses had demanded the cops do something. Amazingly, the boys in blue managed to track down the bastard behind the bombings. Unfortunately, when they went to pick him up they had to do so with police department-issued tweezers.
According to forensics, the bomber had mistaken a cake of C-4 for a stick of butter and his Monte Cristo sandwich had taken out half the neighborhood.
The buses were rigged with some kind of switch that only the dead guy understood, and so they were all evacuated, put on robot autopilot, and left to cruise around town until their fuel ran out. Since most of them were recently purchased atomic super-buses from Japan, the power was expected to run down in about ten thousand years.
I generally take public transportation, but it’s impossible to catch a bus that doesn’t drop below 55 while wearing a pair of shopworn Florsheims. Plus I already have it planned that my last seat on this mortal plane will be a bar stool from which my future, elderly ass will happily keel over, and not an exploding slab of hard plastic decorated on the underside with a hundred Bazooka Joe stalactites.
I have a car, but I usually misplace it, most often when I really need it. Also, I’d deliberately lost the keys down a storm drain several months ago in order to teach it a lesson for not keeping enough gas in its tank.
Trains are good but they only get you so far, which was why I was stuck hoofing it to work, dodging raindrops and the occasional detonating city bus.
The towering edifice which housed the world headquarters of Banyon Investigations, Inc. was cleverly disguised to the outside world as a shitty little office building on the bad side of the moderately unsavory section of town.
The downstairs fish market was open for business but, since there were no actual customers, there was no actual business being conducted on the premises. The front door was open wide for the nonexistent flood of patrons, but with no ingress taking place it was ajar solely to facilitated the egress of the stink of a thousand rotting flounder into a neighborhood that was already under no illusions that it would ever play host to the Tournament of Roses Parade. I cut a wide swath around the dead breath of the finned damned and shook the rain from my trench coat as I entered the downstairs hallway.
I could see through the little window that my mailbox was empty, which meant that my insubordinate office staff had cracked under the strain and harvested the stack of bills that had been bulging for a week therein. I had given strict orders to leave the mail untouched, as I was testing a postal theory wherein subject A., in this case my mailman, would finally realize the futility of his repeated attempts to get subject B. (me) to accept it as my own and would eventually reclaim my unpaid bills, thereupon subject A. would distribute them equitably to individuals who might give a rat’s ass about paying them.
I did my best to strengthen my resolve on the elevator ride upstairs.
My lack of resolve is legendary, which is why I’ve never resolved to quit boozing, gambling or living a generally dissolute and, hopefully, short-ish life. Still, I figured I had to make an appearance at my office at least once every few months for staff morale and to make sure it was still where I left it, and I’d resolved today was the day.
As soon as the elevator doors closed, I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to keep my index finger, which was clearly smarter than the rest of me, from pressing the ground floor button. The whole way up to my third floor offices, I had to fight like hell to not ride back down to the first floor and, like Wino Ray whose paper I was still hauling around under my arm, find a nice cozy alley on the other side of town where I could curl up for a few blissful weeks of inebriated R & R.
Instead of letting my finger make my decisions for me, I made the terrible mistake of trusting my untrustworthy brain, and so I found myself moments later trudging off the elevator and down to the door marked “Banyon Investigations, Inc.”
In the outer office was an elf working at a small desk piled high with stale mail. The goddamn nerve center of my impressive P.I. organization.
“Good morning, Mr. Crag!” enthused Mannix, my trusted assistant who was the precise polar-opposite, all-around good guy that I absolutely was not.
“Hey, Mannix. You took up the mail.”
The elf clicked his tongue against his pointed teeth and offered a look that was simultaneously both guilty and stubborn.
“The bills have to get paid, Mr. Crag,” the elf insisted. Judging by the pile of torn-open envelopes spilling out of the trash can and the stack of neat envelopes on the desk before him, the topmost of which bore my return address label, it was clear he and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on a more recherché level than our appreciable height disparity.
“That’s only because you’ve chosen to play the game according to the arbitrary fiduciary rules society has imposed upon you, Mannix,” I informed him. “For a change of pace, let your hair down and tear up the water bill. It’ll set you free.”
“It’s already been paid,” Mannix slowly replied, as if he was talking to a bank robber who was threatening to execute the hostages if his demands for a limo and a private jet weren’t met. His little arm ever-so-carefully snaked around to guard the pile of bills he’d already stamped in preparation for posting.
I shrugged. “I tried to be your William Wilberforce,” I said. “Where’s Doris?”
My secretary wasn’t in her customary chair, which was more the custom than her uncustomarily parking her curvaceous ass in said customary chair.
“She was in this morning, Mr. Crag,” Mannix assured me, his arm still wrapped around my mail like a prison inmate protecting his tray of creamed chipped beef on toast. “She started screaming and crying after about five minutes. I tried to ask what was wrong, but I couldn’t understand her. I offered to go with her to the hospital, but she just kept sobbing and shaking all over like somebody died. And then she just left.” He gave a concerned roll of his rounded little shoulders. “She wasn’t bleeding or anything. I tried calling her house, but no one answered. I thought her mother might be at home.”
“Doris’ mother has to return to her coffin every morning by dawn or she’ll dissolve into dust, and the old battleaxe never sprung for phone service inside the box,” I explained as I took a cursory glance around my secretary’s desk.
I discovered the source of Doris’ emotional outburst on what was ostensibly her desk, even though she visited it so infrequently that twice in the past year she had accidentally parked her keister behind a desk in the carpet cleaning company downstairs.
The object looked like a garishly painted Frito with a little diamond bell hanging off the end. It was, in fact, one of Doris’ ludicrous fingernail extensions, which she bought with the money I didn’t pay her on the weekly salary she didn’t earn. The cover on her typewriter was half-off, so I assumed she’d snagged the little plastic nail halfway through the one function she performed at what she laughably referred to as work, and then ran blubbing from the room to arrange an emergency fingernail appointment.
I showed the press-on source of Doris’ outburst to Mannix before I dropped the phony nail in the trash.
“I think we can safely say that this trauma will put Doris out of commission for a good, solid three days,” I informed Mannix. “I know this only because recovery time for an actual busted fingernail four years ago was a week. I think we can cut that in half for the Elmer’s glue variety. Of course, I’m not aware of the cost of fingernail glue, plastic fingernails and silver glitter, all variables that could add weeks to her pain, suffering and inability to get her ass in here to work. If you need me, I’ll be in my office contemplating taking a swan dive off the fire escape.”
I was making a beeline for my office door when Mannix announced the only thing that could darken the gloom of an already mildly miserable morning.
“You have a client meeting this morning,” the elf chirped with delighted enthusiasm. “I scheduled it for ten o’clock.”
I glanced at the clock on the wall. Four minutes to doomsday. I momentarily contemplated escape, but then my slumping shoulders and I all resigned ourselves to the fact that hanging out a P.I. shingle meant occasionally having to deal with the consumer side of the capitalist business equation. Thank you, goddamn Adam Smith.
“Is it the archbishop?” I wearily queried.
Out of respect for the esteemed religious figure in question, Mannix straightened up in his tiny little chair. “No, sir, Mr. Crag,” he announced, shooting a worried glance at the telephone, which I could see he suddenly thought was not polished enough for such an important call. “She didn’t say who she was. Do you expect the archbishop to call?”
I took the paper I’d swiped from Wino Ray out from under my armpit and glanced at the top story of the missing St. Regent’s cemetery lawn one last time.
“No,” I said, with a little disappointment.
“Maybe,” I amended, with not a shred of optimism.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, which will be the epitaph carved into my headstone at the aforementioned church boneyard.
I used my heel to shove the newspaper deep in the trash, stuffing it down amongst the empty envelopes Mannix had spent the morning feeding into the basket.
I hung my trench coat and fedora on the rack in the corner and trudged into my office. A morose and steady rain splattered the window at my back, sliding molasses-slow rivulets of dirt from the unwashed panes in the direction of the fire escape.
I was slumped behind my desk when, three minutes later, Mannix ushered in a crush of clients so excited about retaining my services that they didn’t have the decency to repress their enthusiasm and not show up sixty goddamn seconds early.
Let me say right off the bat that I’ve got nothing against Gypsies. Banyon Investigations is a fragile enough corporate entity as it is without an army of P.C.-driven anti-defamation lawyers kicking in my front door and pawing through my desk drawers. (Lawyers always know where to ferret out the booze.) Still, despite my aforementioned love of Gypsies as wonderful human beings, I did take a quick inventory of my fingers to make sure that if they wanted to shake hands I got the full set back.
The group consisted of five men and one ancient dame. The men were dressed in very old Old World suits that consisted of vests and three-quarter length short pants. The suits were three sizes too small and a hundred years out of date. The fabric was some kind of velour dyed in dark maroons and blues, but the shirts were starched white and adorned with black buttons, and the high collars were wrapped in those huge, droopy, Euro-swish bowties which as a bold fashion statement shouted: I am an asshole.
The men doffed their black hats to demonstrate their deep respect for someone they needed something from. The hats looked like they’d mugged them off some naive Amish carpenters which, being Gypsies, they probably had.
The one dame in their midst wore a babushka, a ridiculous layered peasant skirt, and a multicolored blouse with sleeves so poufy she could have hidden eight decks of cards -- all aces -- up them, along with two stolen chickens and half the silverware in my office if I didn’t keep an eye on her. (Also, if I owned any silverware, which I don’t.)
“Mr. Crag Banyon!” the dame, who was their spokesman, announced.
She gave me the Barbara Bush bug-eyes that lent urgency to every syllable, and intoned the sepulchral shit out of my, frankly, boring-as-hell name. She waved her arms in the air to stress the importance of this meeting. Thirty cheap tin bracelets clattered from her bony wrists and negotiated a straight path up her even bonier forearms to her boniest-of-all elbows.
“First off, I don’t need my driveway resealed,” I informed the clutch of horse thieves. “Second off, tell your colleagues to return the merchandise they are currently swiping while they think my attention is diverted by your ugly mug.”
The old Gypsy crone snapped something under her breath to the five men, who in the twenty seconds they’d been in my office had managed to pilfer pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down on the other side of the room.
Caught red-handed, the men did not display so much as a microsecond of guilt as they proceeded to redecorate my office with all the photos, ashtrays, books, mugs, sofa cushions, files, spare shoes and radiator they’d somehow managed to stuff in, up and around their tight-fitting, old-fashioned Gypsy monkey suits.
“Madame Volga apologizes for her people,” said the old bag who, I presumed, was the third-person dame in question. “We are poor and often misunderstood, and are forced by a society that shuns us to survive in whatever way we can.”
“It sounds to me like you’re knocking all that stuff, sister,” I warned her. “I take offense. Toss in a cheap suit and a monumental tab at O’Hale’s Bar and what you just described is my choice of lifestyle.”
It was hard to imagine that Madame Volga hadn’t heard me, given that neither her giant knot of graying black hair nor the kerchief wrapped around it were sufficient to prevent her Dumbo ears from sticking out of the sides of her head like radar dishes. Or maybe her ears only seemed so big because she had attached a pair of hubcap-sized hoop earrings to lobes that were straining to reach the floor by Gypsy New Year. Whatever was the case, the dame did a spectacular job ignoring me as she produced an old cloth bag that reeked of garlic. She dropped it on my unsuspecting desk.
“We are in need of your assistance, Mr. Banyon,” Madame Volga mysteriously informed me as she rummaged up to her homely elbows inside the depths of her bag.
She produced two crystal balls, an Arby’s coupon book and, finally, a photograph. This final item she slapped triumphantly down before me.
It was black and white, it was a photo of a man, and judging by his attire it looked to have been taken at least a hundred years ago. Then I looked up at the collection of fashion anachronisms who were currently stealing the contents of my corner water cooler by pouring it in their pockets and I realized it could have been taken last week.
“See, here’s the thing, lady. I’m at a point in my life where it’s a massive strain on my few remaining brain cells to pretend to be interested in anything that doesn’t get me loaded, so let’s cut to the chase. Who?” I asked. “And while we’re at it, why?”
“Who?” Madame Volga cried, feigning deep insult. “You ask who?”
“If I take it back, will you get the hell out and we can all forget this unfortunate encounter ever occurred, including the part where your friend over there just stuffed an entire stack of Dixie cups up his sleeve?”
But Madame Volga wasn’t having any. She raised her bugging-out eyes to the yellowed ceiling tiles. “That is our king!” she cried. “The king of the Gypsies!”
She waved her scrawny arms in the air and managed to elicit some forced awe from her five companions with the damp trousers.
“I can see this means a great deal to you,” I told both the woman who was faking it like a hooker orgasm and her five male pals who were eyeballing what to steal from my office next and didn’t give two apathetic shits about their king. “In ten words or less, I need you to get across to me why it should mean something to me.”
“Let me first ask this trusted council of elders if they will permit their lowly female spokesperson to speak to you alone,” the old crone said.
Madame Volga consulted with her five male companions. They didn’t seem to want to let her go it alone, and I got the impression that they’d given her the gig as their mouthpiece with great reluctance. She was sharper than any of them, easily shrewder. You could see it in her eyes that were bright with cunning despite the cataracts, and you could see they were a pack of morons from the dim looks on their faces, the Poland Springs patches on their trousers, and the giant square bulges my sofa cushions were currently making up the jacket backs of three out of five of them.
Madame Volga might have held a lowlier position in the Gypsy caste system than five old buzzards -- or, indeed, anybody from her tribe with a male chromosomal advantage -- but she was possessed of a persuasive tongue. She got the elders to reassemble my couch and managed to get all five of them to file from my office, the various components of which seemed more or less in the order they had been in when the thieving Gypsy bastards first filed in.
“Mannix, keep an eye on every paperclip,” I hollered out to my elf assistant. “If, however, our light-fingered guests feel like looting the Maybelline cosmetics counter that is Doris’ desk, they have my blessing, provided they’ve brought along a couple of stolen back belts and a wheelbarrow, since they’d probably bust a vertebra lifting that much mascara and lipstick, and I’m not looking for another lawsuit.”
“Put that back! Stealing is very naughty!” I heard Mannix’s disembodied voice shouting as the last of the men to leave my office pulled the door shut behind him, which wasn’t easy since he’d stolen the knob.
Madame Volga and I were alone. She refocused her unnerving Marty Feldman eyeballs on yours truly and flashed a tight smile that consisted of no warmth and a whole bunch of half-rotten incisors. I spoke before she could get out a crooked word.
“Just a friendly suggestion, lady. If you’re not through just yet with your latest crime wave (and being Gypsies I assume it’s an ongoing adventure), you should steal yourselves a dentist. You can swipe the one down the hallway. His name is Myron Wasserbaum, D.D.S., and as luck would have it he’s an utter incompetent, so nobody but a few TV lawyers with outstanding settlements would miss him.”
I was pretty much convinced that Madame Volga had selective hearing, since she ignored me yet again and tapped a long, crooked finger at the photograph on my desk.
“Our king has vanished -- poof! -- Mr. Banyon,” she said, opening palms that had been pressed together in prayer to demonstrate her crooked sovereign’s disappearing act. “One evening he was in our camp, the next morning he was gone.”
“I’m not a big fan of missing person cases,” I said. “A lot of people who are missing want to remain that way, and will do anything to maintain their missing-ness, including blowing the heads off nosy private eyes. As kings go, at least according to this blurry crap picture you’re suddenly waving in front of my nose (and, please, stop that), he looks like the kind I’d foment a revolution to overthrow and then assassinate in exile. If you want him back, and I don’t know or care why, I suggest you go to the cops.”
The gray sheets of her sagging jowls tightened. “That cannot be. We Gypsies are not popular with the police.”
“I think what you actually mean is that you’re too popular,” said I. “When I was a cop, you were popular in the same way rats are popular with exterminators.”
Her wrinkled lips puckered, and for a terrified instant I thought she was going to level some Gypsy curse at me or, worse, blow me a kiss. Instead, she curled her mouth up to one side and considered deeply.
“Look, Banyon, can I level with you?” Madame Volga said. “Those assholes out there don’t have the savvy to talk to a guy like you. Oh, little old ladies that they’re bilking for a few ten spots, sure, but the king did most of their talking to the few people out there who aren’t rubes, and it looks like you might be savvy. You know, they didn’t want to give me this job. I’m a dame, after all.”
“Technically, yes, but barely,” I pointed out.
“Hah-hah, fine, whatever,” Madame Volga said. “You’re a real laugh riot. You should take the act to Vegas. In the meantime, the tribe doesn’t give a fat Gypsy shit if we ever see the old skunk again. He’s only king because he won the title in a rigged card game. What we want is what he took with him when he disappeared. Namely, that.”
She dropped the photograph back to a desk blotter which I was unaware I owned and which Mannix must have picked up for me at Staples. The old crone jabbed her finger back down hard on the picture.
Behind the half-blurred Gypsy king was a cheap pressboard Woolworth’s stand on which rested what looked like an ancient leather-bound book.
“Looks expensive,” I said. “You steal it from a museum, a library or a private collection?”
“That is our bible, Mr. Banyon,” Madame Volga intoned. “It is the most sacred book in the Gypsy world.” She bugged her eyes with such reverence I was afraid they’d pop juice all over my desk.
I took out my magnifying glass from my top desk drawer to get a better gander at the tome in question.
“The Big Book of Gypsy Scams,” I said, reading the gilded words embossed in the wrinkled, black leather. I glanced up at the dame sitting across from me. “The title really gives away the whole plot, doesn’t it?”
“It contains all of our guiding principles,” the old crone said. “I have never read it, of course.” She closed her gray eyelids and wiggled in front of them arthritic fingers adorned with a multitude of cheap rings to demonstrate her unworthiness to read her tribe’s holy book. “We who are not royalty are not permitted to so much as glance at the sacred text. And since our royalty can only be men, it is meant only for the eyes of the king.”
“And you don’t have any idea where his royal eyes are right now?” I asked.
Her face fell, which was a pretty impressive feat since I didn’t think that mass of hideously dangling flesh could droop any further.
“No,” she said. “We need that book more than we need him, Mr. Banyon. Tradition dictates that the king fill us in on the scams and we go out and pull them on the straights. That is the very book from which originated the sacred driveway resurfacing con. Without the book, all we got are the scams we already got, and pretty much everybody under eight-five is already onto us. We need fresh swindles.”
I was used to catering to lowlifes. Ethics is a four letter word for any down-on-his-luck P.I., and any P.I. who tells you he isn’t down on his luck needs to hold a seminar at the airport Marriott for the rest of us because we’re all doing it wrong. But crooked Gypsy kings and their stolen how-to scam books were on the other side of the ethical red line I’d drawn down the middle of my brain. On the other hand, there wasn’t exactly a horde of clients beating down my front door lately.
“Cash,” I wasn’t terribly happy to hear myself say. “Up front,” I added, which went a considerable distance towards cheering me up.
The old crone fished around under her layers of peasant skirt and produced a fat wad of greenbacks, which was no doubt earned the old-fashioned Gypsy way of doing a crummy job resealing the driveways of gullible old coots and then hightailing it out of town before the watered-down sealant washed away in the first drizzle.
Speaking of drizzle, at the very moment Madame Volga dumped the cash out on my desk the swollen gray clouds parted for the first time in over a week and several sharp shards of brilliant yellow sunlight poked through the gloom, illuminating damp rooftops and reflecting off of upper story windows all around my dump of a neighborhood. A single shaft of light poured through my grimy office window and stopped over the Bethlehem stable that was the pile of ill-gotten Gypsy lucre.
“I’ll take that as a sign that, while God might not be smiling down on this venture, the ruler of the universe has at least decided to turn his attention in a direction less morally ambiguous,” I informed the ugly old bat. “We’re in business until that point where you betray and/or attempt to rip me off which, being Gypsies, shouldn’t take more than a day and a half. In the meantime, pay the elf outside.”
I checked with my conscience to see if it was giving me the all-clear on the deal, and since all was quiet I figured it was okay. Either that or the Gypsies had stolen my sense of ethics when I wasn’t looking which, I reasoned, was probably unlikely since what the hell would a bunch of goddamn Gypsies do with it?