Menaced Assassin (15 page)

“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.

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 coiffed 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.”

“A Lieutenant Stagnaro from the San Francisco Police Department, Mr. St. John. He wants to talk with you about—”

“I don’t recall any appointment. But…”

But he recalled Stagnaro. That officious phone call that hideous night that his darling Molly… And, more recently, St. John’s letter threatening legal action to make him back off Atlas Entertainment… Better to get it over with now.

“All right, five minutes, and he’s damned lucky to get it.”

He expected the sort of bullying bureaucrat who turned timid the moment he was jerked out from behind his official
shield. He got Fonzie grown-up with gray in his hair. The epitome of every ballsy Italian stud hanging around a street corner in the Bronx, moving easily, in terrific shape, with a mobile face and alert eyes that St. John was sure missed nothing.

“Mighty nice of you to give me these five minutes, Mr. St. John,” he said in a voice that wasn’t at all grateful.

“Say your say and get out, Lieutenant,” said St. John coldly, fighting down his surprise at the man facing him across the desk. “I am an attorney and I know my rights.”

But Stagnaro merely settled back in a costly designer chair as if for a long stay, hooking one leg over its arm and swinging his foot idly.

“I just bet you do, pal,” he said. “As for being an attorney—things like that can change.”

“I take that as a threat, Lieutenant.”

Stagnaro waved a hospitable arm as if this were his office, not St. John’s. “Take it any way you want.” He got a notebook from his pocket and set it open on his knee, then didn’t refer to it or write in it at all. “I have a few questions.”

St. John sighed in a long-suffering manner.

“Go ahead, then, Lieutenant.”

“You ever molest your daughter?”

It was exactly as if someone had kicked him in the scrotum. He felt his face get pale and knew his mouth was gaping, but there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it for the moment. Scant minutes ago he had been daydreaming about sweet Molly and himself and Horsy, and here was Stagnaro asking him…

“How…” He’d almost blurted out
How did you know?
but his attorney instincts took over. “How dare you—”

“Seeing as how you pimped for your daughter several times during her marriage to Dr. Dalton, I get the feeling you either didn’t value her enough or valued her way too much.”

It had to be bitch Gloria’s work, trying to hurt him even more by… but maybe, he thought, seeing a ray of light at the end of this particular horrible tunnel, maybe that abrogated the terms of the agreement under which he was paying
her those ghastly alimony payments and she kept herself hard to find. She had put in writing that she would not divulge anything about… about him and Molly. So if she had gone public now, even a quarter century after the event…

“Such a disgusting accusation does not deserve the dignity of a reply,” he snapped belatedly. Perhaps too belatedly.

“Exception noted, Counselor—isn’t that what you lawyers like to say? So we’ll stick to the public record: the hard-core porn-film company you set up back in ’72.”

St. John’s name had appeared nowhere on those incorporation papers, and this hadn’t come from Gloria; she had walked off by then. His association with Mr. Prince had come about
because
she had walked off—with infant Molly and every dime he owned.

“Benny the Bullet—you remember Benny, don’t you, Counselor? He was looking at twenty-to-life for one of his little peccadillos, so he decided to fill us in on everything he knew about anything, even when he got toilet-trained. Verbal diarrhea, tell you the truth. Freedom Films came up.”

St. John rallied again. “If I did give free legal advice to some acquaintances in setting up a small corporation, there was nothing illegal about it. And in the early seventies—”

“A quarter of a mil and points to set up the fuck-film company is the way I heard it.” Stagnaro winked at him across the desk. “Never declared, Counselor. I haven’t talked with the folks over at the IRS… yet. But I bet they’d love to try to make a net-worth case out of it.”

He’d owed the shylock a lot of money and that Benny person had come around talking about electric drills and kneecaps. All that bitch Gloria’s fault, she’d stripped him naked and he’d had to borrow from the leg-breakers because nobody else would lend him enough to keep his nascent legal firm afloat…

“Why… are you here?” he asked hollowly.

But Stagnaro said, “My five minutes are up, Counselor.” He stood, leaned across the desk. “Atlas Entertainment,” he said. “Kosta Gounaris.” He dropped his voice lower. “Martin Prince.”

St. John jerked back as if Stagnaro were a viral infection. “What…”

“Maybe you have the impression that I’m a homicide cop, Counselor. I’m not. I head up the SFPD’s Organized Crime Task Force. Anything organized, not just the mob; but the thought of dropping on somebody like Martin Prince gets me so excited I have to go buff my nails. And you’re gonna help with my impossible dream, pal, ’cause you got short eyes.”