Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  But enough of that. I want to chat about the Lenington kill with you, hypocrite lecteur, because in his murder I was faced with a problem of great delicacy and finesse: how does one get close enough to fog a veteran police officer who is also wary and thoroughly corrupt?

  What difference does the corruption make? Aha, that is what gives him his extraordinary wariness. By being always on the watch for someone watching him, he becomes as difficult to track as a man-eating tiger that out of sheer animal instinct loops back to check its own backtrail.

  I turn to my advantage the fact that I can only observe him from afar, can only, as it were, touch his life as lightly as the most gossamer of spiderwebs. Thus I arouse no slightest fear in him of the hunted for the hunter, because he is unaware of any hunter behind him. Also, this way I am able to see him in the round. The whole man.

  Who is this whole man I see? Someone vicious. Someone sexually corrupt. Someone consumed with money hunger. Someone racially prejudiced. Someone cocky. And angry. Oh, so angry. Why? I soon figure it out. Because life has screwed him. Yes, semblable, frere, he is owed the good life.

  Having penetrated his psychology, I begin my stalk. He aids me by being observed in his meeting with Gounaris. This brings great pressure on him. I myself watch him go to the attorney appointed for him by the Family-he must be thinking, Will they blame me? Should I run and hide? So he is subconsciously attuned to a quick-getaway stake; a stake he would otherwise examine much more carefully from the outset.

  I assume a breathless style of speech with a disarming homosexual cadence when I call him, talk wildly of $5,000, to get which he needs do nothing except listen, then I hang up. This arouses all of his cupidity and only a minimum of his cunning-and by leaving him stew for a few days, I assure that he will come to feel the money is already his. It is owed to him, just as the good life is owed to him!

  See his anger work for me? And then I give him a sudden short deadline to get this money he deems to be rightfully his.

  Ah, the moment of truth. Has the wind shifted, has the tiger caught scent of the hunter sitting up over the staked-out goat? No. He goes to await my call at an open phone near an apocryphal bookie joint on one of San Francisco’s major streets.

  Safety, you see. How can he feel anything but safe there, with no easily apparent ambushes from which he can be stalked? And with the subconscious assurance that an illegal book is operating there with impunity, thus implying like immunity for his own illegal bribe-taking?

  I use a cellular phone so I can walk by him as he takes the $5,000 bait, after I have given him silly instructions of how to get $10,000 more, and perhaps another $10,000, and another…

  Thus I can see how he stands at the phone, can monitor pedestrian traffic up and down the street. And I can do it in total safety, because I am invisible to him.

  Invisible? How can this be when I am made up in the most bizarrely eye-catching charade possible? Because he sees me only as a white man trying to be black-thus, beneath contempt, beneath notice, because black is the last thing this violently prejudiced man would want to be.

  Thus, invisible.

  Each night as I walk by, waiting for that moment when no other pedestrian is about so I can do my delicious deed, the boy at the all-night gas station on Army Street is placing the 11:00 p.m. call to that phone booth, letting it ring, and hanging up, touchingly delighted to get $20 each time he dials. And after Jackie-boy is no more, even more delighted to get the $100 bonus to call Stagnaro and relay my little Raptor message. Of course I get back my note from him and destroy it.

  Why this slightly cumbersome charade? Because this way I leave Stagnaro my Raptor call in a voice he can never connect to me through voiceprints should he ever get one of mine. I doubt he taped the first one, which was me; why would he? At that time it was merely an isolated crank call. Am I not clever?

  In closing I must tell you, since my promise is to be honest with you, that I am surprised by a rather rotten dream the night I kill Jack Lenington. I am Pharaoh’s executioner in ancient Egypt, I have died, and my maat (the orderliness and justice of my life) is being weighed in judgment by Osiris in Dat, the Egyptian underworld. Found just, I will be given eternal life. Found lacking, I will be forever dead.

  All of my deeds, I argue, were from the noblest of motives. Ordered from on high. But to my terror the scale in which I am being measured tips heavily against me. How can this be?

  Mighty Anubis says sadly, “You are self-righteous, O falcon-man. All of the horrors you perpetrate are for the highest of motives. But these are really the basest of motives. Selfishness, self-aggrandizement through being ‘noble’ at all times. This way you can justify any action, no matter how base. Go to eternal death, O falcon-man.”

  As I fade into nothingness I wake from my dream with sweat standing on my brow. What can this mean? Bah! Humbug! It is only some ploy of my little brown walnut of a man, my gnome, my Rumpelstiltskin who crouches down at the hinge of my subconscious and denies me access to…

  Enough of that nonsense! My fitful sleep since Lenington’s death will pass when I begin plotting the next assassination. The next one. Ah, that will require time, cleverness, dissimulation. I must locate, then plan, then stalk…

  But I am getting ahead of myself again. Behind myself? This playing with time can be so confusing. So can playing God, but-no matter. It is what I do. While there is yet time, let us listen to more sentimentalized drivel about man’s capacity for violence from poor Will-if he would ever get to the bloody point of it all…

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Will Dalton said, “So, in sum, I will be speaking as much from speculation as from observation, as much from surmise as from scientific thesis. I will be radically interpreting many facts already in evidence, which might not be too acceptable to many brilliant and knowledgeable colleagues in the audience; mea culpa in advance, ladies and gentlemen.

  “Ironically, it is science that is starting to bring us back from the edge of the pit it dug for us, trying to return us to an ordered view of our universe and our place in it.

  “Most of us here are ‘historical’ scientists concerned with classification of ancient, already-extinct species, rather than experimentation, thus have never been guilty of misusing Nature or trying to take man outside his rightful place in the universe. Paleontologists try to understand what Nature has already done, not try to change what she is doing currently, So we don’t need power, we need sturdy knees, sharp eyes, nimble fingers, and much more generous grants than we currently get.

  “Recently, theoretical subatomic physics has joined us by shifting ground from materialism to idealism, by hinting we can almost do without this material world, since it is just a by-blow of energy. Quite different from scientism’s ‘matter in motion’ theorem, and surprisingly close to the ancient animism modern materialist man rejected long ago-the ani mism which says everything that exists has the wind of life blowing through it.

  “Wind of Life. Energy. The ancient Greek concept of pneuma. Not really much to choose among them, is there?

  “At the same time, biologists and ecologists are now telling us there are limitations built right into the cosmos concerning how much we can misuse and how badly we can mistreat Nature. Because we are destroying the ecosphere, the shadow of that nonbeing science thought it had banished five centuries ago now looms over us again with empirical evidence to back it up. And the ancient word ‘pollution’ is being used again in its original religious sense by-science.

  “To every primitive culture known, pollution means the same thing: the bad breath of God striking man. Pneuma on a bad day, perhaps. Infection, contagion that requires quarantine, ritual cleansing, purification of anyone exposed to it. Which is what modern science says about our modern pollutions, be they toxic waste, corrupted water supplies, AIDS, or the numerous other infections plaguing mankind with their deadly presence.

  “Can we count on science to handle our modern pollutions? Unfortunately, no. Through no fa
ult of its own, it isn’t up to the job. We cry to science, ‘Author! Author!’ but we are shouting in an empty theater. We demand a lineage, a legitimacy to answer ethical and moral questions about our place in nature. We demand solutions to our problems, but science can’t tell us what to do because it can’t tell us who we are, where we came from, or where we are going. It doesn’t know. It was never designed to know.

  “Leaving us who, exactly, to legitimize our existence? Nature? Science, walking in religion’s footsteps, has demythologized Nature, robbed her of reverence, treated her as a blind whore who will spread her legs for any passerby. The great religions? God, not Nature, is their measure. Science itself? Science’s mosaic shows us as the measure of things, because we are the creature, quite literally, who can measure them.

  “Since this is hubris so horrific it sets the teeth on edge, we realize we need a very different kind of knowledge from that which science offers us, a knowledge that cannot uncover scientific facts but can uncover their meaning. Because science has a hard time with the beginning of our story. With beginnings in general. With the intersection of the known and the unknown. With the moment of being or of nonbeing.

  “What scares science is the idea that something begins only where nothing ends. Science can’t start its stories with ‘In the beginning’ because, being experimental, it can’t admit to a time when there was nothing material upon which to experiment.

  “But myth’s stories start with ‘Once upon a time.’ Myth needs to know what happened ‘in the beginning,’ because primitive man always needed the gods’ permission to tell our story. And he needed a place to tell it, some particular time and space that had to be consecrated for this purpose. Outside this holy place was chaos in which to wander was to die.

  “It is this, finally, that marks the difference between myth and science, ‘fiction’ and ‘fact.’ Science banished ‘nonbeing’ five hundred years ago and only recently had to reinstate it. We don’t have a pantheon of gods to tell us about nonbeing any more, but we do have ‘fiction’-which concerns itself with the shadow of nonbeing. To think about death is to think about what is there and is not there.

  “Science doesn’t know, doesn’t care, about things that might not be there. Can’t know or care, because science deals only in ‘facts.’ It must fail in this endeavor, because facts can’t tell us how or where to begin or end. Yet having a beginning and an end tells us we are alive. It takes the poet to point that out to us. The philosopher. The mythmaker. The purveyor of fictions.

  “Robert Ardrey, all of the above, used science’s facts to show that by Precambrian times there was life, but there was not death. Not as we know it. Organisms were immortal in the sense that they merely divided. They were alive but they didn’t know they were alive, and life seemed set to go on this way forever.

  “But Nature was also using what Stephen Jay Gould calls contingency, a two-tined fork of accident and chance. Accidents of variation-sometimes the two sides of a newly divided ameba did not exactly mirror one another-and accidents of chance. Meaning, here, mutation. Mutation, that always sudden, always unforeseen, sometimes radical differentiation of an organism from its parent. A change that is inheritable.

  “Sometime during this ongoing process, some mutation by some organism introduced the capacity to reproduce rather than merely divide. With reproduction, the individual became possible. As Ardrey says, the hen no longer needed to split in two, she could lay an egg. An individual egg.

  “With the individual egg came the possibility of variation. Infinite variation. Infinite selection. And… infinite death. By choosing evaluation, life chose death. Only with death came the consciousness that we are alive, and, for man and probably many other animals, the consciousness of death. With that understanding came everything that self-aware beings think of as life. It’s scary, but only death gives life value and meaning.

  “When did all of this happen? The geological demarcation about 570 million years ago between the Precambrian and the Paleozoic eras marks what is called ‘the Cambrian explosion’-the first appearance in the fossil record of multicellular animals with hard as well as soft tissue. The Burgess shales, named after fine-sand fossil beds in western Canada that preserved soft-bodied fossils in exquisite detail, date from about 40 million years after that. Too soon for ‘the relentless motor of extinction,’ as Gould puts it, to have eradicated very many of those new multicellular species.

  “The Burgess shales suddenly make the idea of man as the measure of all things silly indeed. This unparalleled fossil record of soft-bodied sea creatures destroys any illusions we might still cling to that evolution is a stately progression of life from simple to complex structures to that unbelievable apex- Homo sapiens. Chance, not design, rules.

  “This is Gould’s contingency — which borders on the chaos theory of the subatomic physicists. Had the weather been a bit different in the Precambrian… had a certain dragonfly not died in the Mesozoic… The point is that the species which survived the Cambrian’s catastrophic extinction-species without whose survival we could not have occurred-was no more fitted to survive than hundreds of other primitive species that didn’t.

  “Wild, wonderful species such as opabinia, anomalocaris, aysheaia, waptia, and hallucigenea died out, and their fossils were persistently misclassified as early versions of phyla that did make it through: trilobites, brachiopod crustaceans, sea cucumbers, polychaete worms, jellyfish. Because no one, not even scientists, wanted to admit we came into being only by chance.

  “What does this leave us with? Despair? To find meaning, must we shut down our minds and posit some sexist patriarch in a long white beard who created all of this in six twenty-four-hour days, then kicked back with a burger and brewski on the seventh?

  “Gould regards the whole process of contingency with breathless wonder at its beauty. He feels the same moral responsibilities he would if he believed that God or a pantheon of gods and goddesses had planned it all. Here we are, after all, all sensibilities intact, even if by blind chance.

  “Probably no one in this room believes that evolution, or creation, or both, occurred just to place us at the center of the universe. The fact that we have lived on an insignificant piece of dust circling a minor star in an inconsequential solar system for not even a single tick of the clock of life is not our central concern. But we are here, we are somebody, we mean something, and who we have been is important at least to us.

  “I have gotten ahead of myself with the Burgess shales, but they do set the stage for a short review of life’s earliest beginnings, before the carnage starts in this room…”

  Carnage in this room. Jesus, thought Dante’s policeman’s mind, he did come back to the States knowing a hitman was waiting for him! Dante had to…

  Then he almost blushed. Dalton’s carnage was the ex pected rejection of the audience to many of his theories of man’s origins and nature, not a fear that a hitman named Raptor was going to whip out a big pistol and start blazing away at someone unexpected.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Skeffington St. John was nursing a massive depression in his posh Century City office-temperature-controlled, furnished with antiques-careless shoes up on one corner of the hand-polished mahogany desk. Two hundred coats of the thinnest of oils, each hand-rubbed into the wood until it glowed like distant fires reflected in still water.

  Outside, L.A. was being washed away by the pineapple express. This particular sort of storm system is created when a strong winter low born in the Gulf of Alaska dervish-swirls off the coast of Washington State to drag warm, waterlogged clouds up from the tropical Pacific. It explodes over Southern California, the L.A. storm drains overflow, electric power shorts out, and million-dollar houses slide off their hillside stilts to end up as kindling on the canyon floors below.

  But here, high in his ark above the raging waters, St. John suffered at a perfect 72 degrees F. He looked more like a film idol than a film attorney, with his piercing blue eyes, beautifully coi
ffed and gleaming gray hair, impeccable clothing. Now a touch of sadness on his stern, angular, clean-cut features as he daydreamed of his lost daughter, Molly St. John-he would never think of her as Moll Dalton, not ever, never.

  Oh Molly! Molly! You beautiful child who at age five would have put Shirley Temple to shame! On the particular afternoon he was remembering, Daddy had just bathed little Molly and somehow had gotten so splashed in the process himself that he had stripped to towel off also…

  Thus was born Horsy, the little secret game between just the two of them. St. John naked on his back on the big round bed made popular by Playboy centerfold shoots of those days, tiny naked Molly astride his bucking-bronco hips, riding the horsy, hanging on for dear life, shrieking with delight. Gripping horsy’s pommel with her little hands as it got bigger and bigger and stiffer and stiffer, the bucking bronco bucking harder and harder and faster and faster, little Molly hanging on tighter and tighter with both little hands as she shrieked with laughter…

  What an explosion, on that first dim afternoon with the shades drawn against the searing LaLa Land light! Shrieks and tears, of course-totally unexpected hot and wet and sticky stuff all over her little hands and Daddy’s lean belly…

  But a week later, Daddy volunteered another half-day home from the office just to take care of adorable little Molly. Bath, splashing, naked, toweling off, big dim bedroom… This time it didn’t surprise little Molly when Daddy’s big stiff pommel suddenly spurted all white and sticky. By now it was just part of the game of Horsy…

  The intercom buzzed. St. John got his feet on the floor, his mind back inside his head, and answered. “Yes, Angelle.”