Menaced Assassin (14 page)

“Will Dalton here,” he said into the phone in the British manner. There was a very long silence on the other end. Then Dante Stagnaro’s unmistakable voice came bouncing down from a communications satellite a thousand miles above.

“Dr. Dalton, this is Dante Stagnaro in San Francisco. You’ve just struck Tim Flanagan dumb.”

“You got him!” exclaimed Will in a voice full of reprieve.

“The… Oh. No.” Genuine regret came over the wire. “I’m sorry. We… There’s been another murder…”

“Gounaris?” demanded Will in a hopeful voice.

“No. A policeman named—”

In a flash of insight, Will interrupted, “And you thought I wouldn’t be here. You thought—”

“Did you know a San Francisco vice cop named Jack Lenington?” Flanagan’s voice had the hollowness of tone peculiar to cheap speakerphones.

“No.” His voice was angry now. “What does this have to do with… with my loss?”

“Nothin’,” said Flanagan bluntly. “Not in my book.”

Will stood there in the cool dim museum by the reception desk, dressed in safari gear, a pained look on his face, trying to decide what he wanted to say. He finally burst out, “Goddam you people, I’m leaving for Fort Portal in the morning, I’m trying to get beyond…”

He slammed down the phone, stood beside Mirinda’s desk, breathing deeply, almost panting, as if he had been running. She started to raise a hand to touch his arm, then let it
drop to her desk again. He found a small smile and a wry shrug for her.

“All the way from San Francisco,” he said.

“Where little cable cars reach halfway to the stars,” she said in her lilting voice, as if anxious to help him from his black mood. “Is there anything I can…”

“No, thank you. Just… policemen having silly ideas.”

“Policemen usually do,” she said precisely.

He shook hands with her formally in the British way and went out of the museum. Mirinda stared after him with brown wounded eyes full of unprofessional thoughts about the rugged, handsome widower. Since she had never met Mrs. Dalton, she had felt no urge to grieve when she learned of her death.

Outside, Will unlocked his beat-up old Land-Rover on the museum tarmac parking lot, hoping that phone call was the end of it. Maybe now they would let him get to Fort Portal, then off into the rain forest, and would forget all about him so he could get to work in earnest. All he wanted was to do his work.

And start forgetting. Maybe then the nightmares would start to ease up. He didn’t really believe they would, but all he could do was immerse himself in his work and… hope.

It would be so good to sleep without bad dreams…

“Got all the egg off your face, Tim?” Dante asked in an overly solicitous voice.

“Get the fuck outta here, lemme work.”

“Maybe I can find a map of East Africa around here somewhere, you can look up Fort Portal, find out what country it’s in. Maybe they’ll have a store there or something along the road that has a telephone, you can call them up and ask them to have somebody stand in the doorway with the phone in his hand for the next few days, see if Dalton happens by—”

“Okay, okay, go fuck yourself, chief.”

He began ostentatiously burrowing into the paperwork that
littered his desk. Dante dropped a final comment on his way out.

“I think you owe me another beer on bowling night.”

It was the measure of Flanagan’s demoralization that he didn’t even argue the point. But back in his own office on the court floor of the Hall, Dante stewed and stewed, and then, realizing he should have done it earlier, spent the rest of the day calling all airlines for the name of Will Dalton on any passenger list in or out of Nairobi during the past week.

Nothing. The name was on no manifest. So, finally, he could let Dalton go out into the rain forests with his chimps for good, and start trying to make sense of the Lenington hit.

Which actually made almost too much sense.

Lenington is all but seen conferring with Gounaris and is hauled up to I.A. at Dante’s instigation. Dante tells Gounaris about it—and almost immediately, Lenington is whacked.

What didn’t make any sense at all was the obscure game being played by the man who called himself Raptor, and what he could possibly have had to do with the two killings.

Late Devonian

362 m.y. ago

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.

Ambrose Bierce

Dread naught, devoted fans, it is I, Peregrine Raptor, Esq., that extraordinary assassin, that bird of prey, that sardonic quipper of quips, who made strawberry yogurt of the Lenington brainpan and arranged the call to Stagnaro about it afterwards. Why does that silly policeman have so much trouble accepting me? Well, it is early days yet. Perhaps he has not had time to fully appreciate what a grand killing machine I really am.

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,
frère
,
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…

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 fault 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.