Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  It is hard to see how a ten-foot-high dinosaur from the dying days of the Cretaceous could mimic a five-foot-high flightless bird that came into existence 70 million years later, but there you have the casual idiocy of science.

  Dromiceiomimus, running in herds and having a jutting ostrichlike beak, is stirred in my memory by the jutting helmets of the bike riders; as he ran, his head would not have bobbed. My flash of recognition is of a dinosaur I have never met.

  Most apropos, do you not think? I am on my way to kill a man whom I have never met, although I have followed him about for two weeks. Otto Kreiger, who…

  Oh, no. You first want to know about St. John? Goddam your eyes, I want to talk about Kreiger; but two lawyers for the price of one makes me mellow and cooperative. So by all means let us look at the finis of Skeffington St. John, whore to the mob and nasty pedophile to little girls. He parks in the garage under his building, as he starts to get out a Jennings J-22 is placed against the bridge of his nose, crack! Instant lobotomy.

  Where is the fun in that, the challenge, the drama, the mystery for Raptor, that sly and clever assassin? On my own, I probably should not have wished poor fool Sinjin dead, despite what he is, but should I weep? Should I mourn? He is not near my conscience; he did make love to that employment. So sans compunction, I consign him to the other whores of Hades. After all, I am not God, I do not control all things, I only do my job.

  And the Kreiger kill is doing my job excellently. Excellent work, challenging work, more challenging even than Jack Lenington. Jack was more wary, a rogue male with every man a potential enemy, but it took only imagination and cleverness to separate him from his wariness. Then I had him.

  But first I must eyeball Herr Otto, not easy because he has surrounded himself with bodyguards since Madrid’s death. Kreiger takes Woodside Road home each evening; see that car with the flat tire? C’est moi, Raptor. See the florist, in brown uniform and peaked cap and bogus beard, who mis- delivers a dozen pink roses to Kreiger’s personal secretary? Raptor.

  Now I can recognize him, I must figure out how to have him. Herr Otto himself shows me the way, because he cancels his bodyguards and he has two dangerous habits: he likes to walk the city streets of San Francisco; he likes to gloat.

  Several of his walks-with me half a block ahead in what private-eye novels love to call “front-tailing”-take him to an aged apartment house on Sixth Street he is getting condemned so he can build a commercial arcade in its place. He is always getting into intense arguments with one of the few-finally, the only-residents left, Mr. Adam Kreplovski.

  I know that when Kreplovski is finally ousted, Herr Otto must be there to gloat. So I start my campaign of circuitous and baffling phone calls in my persona as corruption-minded Ed Farrow of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. Ed never quite comes out and flatly asks for a bribe to keep from stalling Kreiger’s project, but he obviously has his hand out.

  When Mr. Kreplovski sets himself up on the sidewalk in front of the building, I go to his emptied apartment and make my little arrangements with flint paper and match heads and ruptured gas line. To set the farce in motion, it needs only my gloved hand twisting the gas line stopcock which I had closed before holing the line, then my openly demanding call to Herr Otto so he will go there, irked beyond caution, at the perfect moment.

  Mr. Kreplovski wanted to die in his beloved Sarah’s apartment; but at least he has the pleasure of knowing that Herr Otto died in it in his stead. (One need not laugh at a farce, comprenez-vous?)

  Over Irish coffee at the Buena Vista Cafe near the foot of Hyde Street, I have struck up an acquaintance with an out-of-work actor. He leaps at the chance to earn $100 by reading a few lines over the telephone to an answering machine in the plummy British accent that is his most prized thespian possession.

  There is no way he, or anyone else, can think a Thomas Hardy quotation about pairings refers to the murder of a corrupt lawyer in Los Angeles, and the fake-accident murder of an even more corrupt lawyer in San Francisco. Only Stagnaro will make the connection. By now the joke will be wearing thin for him; but one must have some fun to keep killing from becoming a bore.

  One other thing, mon gar. Because of my pledge to you of truthfulness, I must admit that after the message is delivered to Stagnaro’s answering machine, I have another bad night. A horrible night, in point of fact.

  Indeed, when that rather large piece of Heir Otto almost hits me in the alley, I toss chunks. Fortunately the police buy accident, else they might have ended up trying to DNA-type my vomitus. Farcical indeed-and now you may laugh.

  Enough of that. My terrible night. Not a nightmare this time. Insomnia. And of the worst kind, insomnia laced with the blackest of thoughts about myself. Earlier I mention to you the little man at the hinge of my unconscious-my dwarf, my Rumpelstiltskin. On the right of the split in my personality is me, my conscious mind. On the left, my feminine side and my dark side, my subconscious. I am not always thus, I dare say, but it seems that now I can reach neither except through that ugly little walnut of a creature some part of me has placed on guard.

  Sometimes he allows darkman or imperfect female to swarm across the split and fog me out. My reaction to events is dulled, blunted, so it is as if I playact the emotions other people actually feel.

  At such moments, I am a fist that cannot smash through the barrier no matter how hard I try. The barrier on the other side of which is the other half of me. What can I do except act out of this wound? What can I do except kill?

  Thus, I am only about Death.

  Is there no way I can be about Life?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Life!” exclaimed Will Dalton zestfully. “At last, life is appearing on earth!

  “But it is the lowest, one-cell sort of life, so we often can’t tell whether it is actually alive alive-o or not. Or if it is plant or animal. There is even evidence that some unicellular mites switch back and forth between plant and animal at will-or do so as if they had a will.

  “Let’s hear Genesis on this exquisite moment in the history of planet Earth: ‘And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.’

  “Actually, the Genesis writers, being devoted to a hierarchy, a pyramid of creation with man at the top-made at the end of the sixth day-thought grasses and herbs and fruit trees came before animate life. They had no way of knowing we are 70 percent seawater, and that the sea, the primordial soup, is mother to us all. As desert nomads, they would think life, of necessity, had to have begun on dry land.

  “Even some gradualist evolutionists reject the fits-and-starts, contingency theory of Darwinism: they favor a direct line from most simple to most complex life-forms-in inexorable progression from primordial ooze to freeway gridlock. We’ve already addressed the error (and arrogance) of this while talking about the randomness of evolution, but let’s explain it better.

  “Since the biotic sophistication of life-forms has indeed increased, single-cell life has been around longer than complex, multicellular creatures like ourselves. But countless different kinds of single-cell bacteria still exist. And algae. And yeasts. Indeed, many of the body’s one-celled parasites are degenerated forms of more complex life-forms. So we are not the apex of anything. Just another, and probably quite surprising, step along the road, evolving ourselves even as I speak.”

  Listening from his post against the back wall, Dante kept on being amazed that he was understanding it. Maybe Rosie was right. Maybe he wasn’t a total dummy. But he had to stay alert for Raptor. The assassin’s time to act, unless he intended to wait until after the lecture was over, was growing short.

  “Science sees life beginning a unicellular existence in the sea,” said Will. “Single molecules, slow, careless, inefficient, whose appearance is relatively quick. Not in the creationists’ twenty-four-hour day, but quick by earth science standards.

  “The sun, remember, was born about 5 billion years ago. The earth as a planet we might recogni
ze had shape about 4.6 b.y. ago. The magma ocean ended 4.4 b. y. ago.

  “Many organic particles that form the elemental building blocks of life had been rained down from asteroids and worldlets and dusts and gases during the 400 million years our conditions fluctuated from sun-warmed eons-when the atmosphere was essentially clear of detritus-to freezing periods when impact ejecta obscured the sun. Our primitive planet seems to have been heavily dosed with the stuff of life: chains of carbon hooked to hydrogen, nitrogen, and other essential organic molecules.

  “Anyway, sometime during this seesaw, the spark of life appeared (perhaps once, perhaps several times, perhaps a million times, to be snuffed and spark again), and the flame steadied and grew. Our earliest fossil evidence, sketchy and delicate as it is, suggests that life (or at least the first complex organic molecules) was here by 4 b.y. ago.

  “What went on in the 3.5 billion years from the birth of these first molecules able to make crude blueprints of them selves, to the Cambrian multicellular explosion? Well, half a billion years after the molecules we had prokaryotes, the first unicellular life. By 1.4 b. y. ago, life was seeking complexity. It forced certain molecules to have accessory molecules, either to scour needed building blocks from the surrounding warm seas, or to act like DNA polymerase to midwife genetic instructions for change. These molecules evolved a trap, a sheath, a membrane to prevent other essential molecules from drifting away again. Nucleus-celled eukaryotes had appeared. There was no turning back.

  “We would expect to find evidence of this in the fossil record, and we do. Among the earliest fossils are stromatolites, layered mats of organic sediment, often the size of a watermelon, sometimes the size of a football field. Stromatolites, dramatic proof of individual cells living together in harmony, are still being generated in the warm waters of certain sheltered tropical bays and lagoons by microscopic organisms-in Baja California, western Australia, and the Bahamas. Something modern man with all his technology cannot duplicate.

  “Of course-and this is very important because it tells us something essential about life-even then some free-swimming single-celled microbes, instead of manufacturing food as the photosynthetic stromatolite communities did, ate other microbes. Eating food is less trouble than making it, so this laborsaving idea appeared early in the chain of life, and never disappeared.

  “Six hundred million years after the eukaryotes, we had multicellular sponges and algae; a mere 2.5 m.y. later came the exuberant multicellular ‘Cambrian explosion’ of chordate life, so beautifully recorded in the Burgess shales of 540 m.y. ago.

  “To me that certainly qualifies as God saying, ‘Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.’ I see no destructive friction between Bible and science.

  “Another interesting parallel: Christianity says the one true God created all life on earth; science says that despite its fits and starts, all life on earth sprang from a single line. Proof of a single source for all life does not depend on what either the Bible or the stones and bones tell us; we need only look to biological facts of medicine that work every day to keep us all (and scientists and creationists alike) alive.

  “Basically, all organisms work alike. They’re made alike, they’re made from the same basic stuff, and their genetic blueprints and molecular constructions are extremely close. All species’ DNA has the same essential architecture, all species hold many proteins in common. Everything that lives is kin to everything else.

  “So those species fossilized in the Burgess shales that made it through the post-Cambrian mass extinction sprang from the same hereditary line as those species that didn’t. They were all water-dwellers, and they were all invertebrates-none of them had backbones.

  “‘And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind… And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas.’

  “Whales are mammals, not fish, but the writers of Genesis couldn’t know that. What about the fish that were fish? Well, the first primitive fishlike vertebrates appeared a mere 50 million years after the Burgess shales were laid down.

  “If we’d been there we probably wouldn’t have realized it had happened. We would hardly have recognized these first fishlike creatures grubbing sluggishly around on the bottom of the sea as vertebrates at all, since they lacked jaws, they lacked fins, and they had a barely detectable skeleton.

  “But they were soon followed by other ‘fish’ that are still around in slightly modified form as sharks. Sharks are so ancient and primitive that, unlike other vertebrates, their skeletons remain cartilage, never turning to real bone at all.

  “Descendants of two other early lines of these fishlike creatures have survived: ‘ray-fins’ and ‘lobe-fins.’ The ray-fins developed bony fins, light and strong and ribbed by spines, and had air sacs they could use to regulate buoyancy. About 100 m. y. ago they blossomed into fish as we know them today. Fish are the most numerous of all vertebrates, with thousands of living species and billions of individuals.

  “Certainly they have followed God’s exhortation: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas.’

  “Instead of light, strong, spine-ribbed finds, the lobe-fins had stumpy knobs of flesh containing numerous little slabs and splints of bone. And their air sacs not only regulated buoyancy, they passed oxygen from the air they swallowed directly into the bloodstream. See where we’re going here? Some branch of the now nearly extinct lobe-fins ventured or was driven up out of the water into the mudflats surrounding it, and could survive.

  “In time, they became the first amphibians. Those little slabs and splints of bone in their fins became the amphibians’ four limbs; those air sacs became, in time, primitive lungs. So they slithered about in the mud by bending their bodies from side to side like fish swimming, and by shoving mightily with the stumpy little legs their fins were turning into.

  “Lucky for us; without them, we could not have been. But that belongs with the sixth, last, all-important day of actual creation in Genesis, which we will get to in a moment.” Will paused and smiled around the room. “As soon as I come back from the john.”

  There was relaxed, almost relieved laughter at the break. Without apology, Dante preceded Will to check out the rest room across the hall. It was at just such a moment that Raptor might choose to strike.

  He didn’t. Will whizzed in peace and safety.

  For the first time, Dante wondered whether anything would happen at all. Maybe this was not a night for dying.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “So Mendelson is dying,” said Gideon Abramson. “He says to his wife, ‘Call the priest, tell him I want to convert.’ She says, ‘But Max, your whole life you’ve been an Orthodox Jew. Now you want to convert?’ And Max says, ‘Better one of them should die than one of us.’”

  Gid laughed heartily at his own joke, as he always did, and Martin Prince laughed with him, politely. Prince understood what he was doing, breaking the ice, smoothing the way.

  Kosta Gounaris gave a weak chuckle, but Enzo Garofano’s aged face was like some ancient, pitted ice floe. It had been a rough trip from Jersey all in one day for the old capo, even if done by Prince’s jet to Vegas, then by limo here to…

  “Whadda fuck you call this place?” he demanded abruptly. When he was tired, like now, and a bit disoriented, Garofano’s Bronx beginnings would show through his veneer.

  “The Furnace Creek Inn,” said Gideon brightly. “First-rate accommodations and a great golf course over at the ranch.”

  Gideon and Kosta had rented both of the inn’s $375-a-day luxury suites, with the king-size beds and the built-in Jacuzzis. The two-story, red tile-roofed, Spanish-style hotel of stucco and local travertine stone, built at the mouth of Furnace Creek Canyon by the Pacific Coast Borax Company in the 1920s, gave Death Valley its reputation as a stylish winter resort.

  “They close for the summer months,” continued G
ideon. He had suggested Death Valley for the meet because it would be difficult for the feds to put the four of them all together here at the same time. “They just opened for the season last week.”

  “I think we should get down to business,” said Prince. Gideon may have chosen the spot, but it was Prince’s meeting, Prince’s agenda.

  “It is safe to talk here?”

  “Swept an hour ago for bugs, Don Enzo.”

  The inn faced out across tan open desert toward the Furnace Creek Ranch a mile away, but the wings enclosed an extensive date palm garden with bubbling streams and placid reflecting pools.

  “As for the windows, we’ve got a couple of men strolling through those trees. Anybody there trying to listen to us…”

  The aged Enzo Garofano sank back into one of the massive leather-seated hardwood chairs. “Let us proceed,” he said.

  Prince was on his feet; the others were seated. He started softly, no passion in his voice. Gounaris wasn’t fooled; Gideon had said the don was fuming.

  “Over two years ago we made a decision to extend our new acquisition, Atlas Entertainment, from Los Angeles into the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a deliberate decision on my part…”

  Prince began pacing between Garofano’s chair and the couch where Gideon and Kosta sat.

  “We have never had much influence in San Francisco, apart from that cheese merchant the feds busted a few years ago. The Italians up there are not siciliani. They’re genovesi, piemontesi… hard to deal with, hard to control.”

  “North Beach is not Little Italy,” agreed Gideon.

  “So we moved Atlas Entertainment in, put one of our own in charge”-he gestured at Gounaris-“and what happened?”

  Kosta hadn’t spoken yet except for hello-hello: he had just met the legendary Enzo Garofano, survivor of New York’s great mattress wars of the thirties, and was nervous about him rather than Prince. It was irrational, Prince was the one to watch, the one to fear. To Prince he sent weekly reports by hand-carry messenger. But he not only answered Prince’s rhetorical question, he answered it a little bit smart-ass.