Menaced Assassin (20 page)

I grow as long-winded as Will. You wish only to know why I kill the Mafia underboss the newspapers call the Spic.

What can I tell you? It is mere butchery, anyone could do it, not really my sort of thing at all. I have had no bad dreams about it, so my nightmare after Lenington was naught but
aberration. Perhaps I et a bad oyster—remember that line by a drunken and delicious Kay Kendall in
Les Girls
?

But I digress. Two days after the Spic’s assassination, I chance to read a one-inch piece about it in the
New York Times
, one of those much thinner editions distributed outside the five boroughs. Reading of it after the fact makes me feel strange—no, I am not going to tell you in which city or hamlet I read it. I do not wish you to know where these feats might take me; and tonight, after I end Will Dalton’s miserable existence, it will be, as Stepin Fetchit used to say, Feets, Do Yo Stuff.

Since Spic Madrid is Chicano, an Hispanic voice sings my song of death to Stagnaro’s answering machine. I discover the voice at the mission church five miles down the road. He is happy to read my little note into the telephone. He thinks it harmless fun. He thinks payment inappropriate, so I make a donation which I believe makes him happy. But who knows when dealing with a man of God?

Perhaps Will Dalton, still droning on, is also, as the Latin has it,
dis manibus sacrum
—sacred to the gods of the underworld. I hope so; because soon he will join them.

Do you really believe they will be there to welcome him?

“‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,’” said Will. Looking around the hall, a fleeting pause at Dante.

“Pretty familiar, isn’t it? Genesis, chapter one, verse one. I want to contrast that story, spanning six days, with the same story told by science, spanning 6 billion years. The Bible representing myth, science representing the rational mind, and here is the moment of intersection. Religionists might object to calling the Holy Bible myth; but certainly Genesis is the creation story (remember, myth can be more true than mere fact) best known to our Western minds.

“Myth can tell us
who
we are—science,
what
we are. And here is where the attempt to equate creationism with evolution—to present them both as authoritarian belief systems—is bound to fail. Evolution is science; should it claim to be a belief system, it would make a lousy one. When creationism, a belief system, claims to be scientific, it makes lousy science. Here tonight, we seek not exacerbation, but intersection between the two systems. Is it possible, with science and myth telling two such wildly different stories?

“Or do they? Genesis first: ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’

“What says science of this birth? Science would go back before the making of the heavens and earth, to the making of the universe. Most astronomers today accept the Big Bang
theory: an immense explosion 15 billion years ago that flung energy and pulverized matter out as far as space stretches. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan start the story of our earth 10 billion years later in
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
:

“‘There was once a time before the Sun and Earth existed, a time before there was day or night, long before there was anyone to record the beginning for those who might come after.… An immense cloud of gas and dust is swiftly collapsing under its own weight.’

“Almost ‘in the beginning,’ almost ‘once upon a time’—but not quite. In their version, matter already exists. And they take pains to point out, ‘Nothing lives forever, in Heaven as it is on Earth. Even the stars grow old, decay, and die.’

“In the Bible’s account, only God is eternal. ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.…’

“‘And God divided the light from the darkness… And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.’

“In the beginning, God was already here. The God, the Baltimore Catechism tells us, Who ‘always was, and always will be, and always remains the same.’ In other words, God’s nature is
to exist
It’s what He does, all by Himself. There never was
nothing
, there always was
Something
—God. Self-creating. Self-sustaining.

“Thus Genesis would say, nothing
material
lives forever. Would say, science’s immense clouds of gas and matter weren’t there until God created them, because it was not their nature
to exist
. Would perhaps say that the Big Bang was merely God’s hand-clap to create matter, and would ask, Where else
could
gas and dust come from—
in the beginning
?

“Science is usually silent on beginnings—remember?—and only says this swirling mass of gas and dust, whatever its origin, soon collapsed under its own weight. The chaotic cloud became a thin disk, glowing a dull red in its exact center. During the next 100 million years, the central mass got whiter, more brilliant, until finally, some 5 billion years ago,
it burst into sustained thermonuclear fire. The sun had been born.

“‘Let there be light: and there was light.’

“The two accounts don’t differ much after all, do they?

“Inside that cloud, milling around that central fire, were a million or more small worlds, with a few thousand larger ones that eventually would collide and fuse together. All of this was occurring in a vast sparsely mattered intersteller vacuum within our galaxy, the Milky Way. Which, by the way, is only one of a hundred billion similar galaxies in the universe—where solar systems such as ours are being formed about one hundred a second.

“As the dust settled, a vast array of little worlds made up of those colliding atoms and grains began revolving around our sun in a variety of slightly different orbits. Inevitably, they started ramming into one another. If the meeting was head-on, goodbye, worldlets. If it was a matter of gently intersecting trajectories, however, one larger world could be born from the fusing of two smaller ones.

“Before long in astronomical terms—200 or 300 million years—just a relatively few larger bodies were left in established orbits around the sun, having escaped destructive collisions and having grown as smaller bodies hit them and were absorbed. They had become large enough, indeed, for their own spinning to have smoothed their irregular shapes into rough spheroids. One of them, third from our particular sun, had shaped itself into our earth about 4.5 or 4.6 billion years ago.

“Meanwhile, back in Genesis, God was also busy creating the earth; but we need some rearranging to illuminate the parallels between the two accounts. So let’s for the moment move day four in Genesis ahead of day three.

“‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.…

“‘And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.’

“In science’s story we have already seen the birth of the sun—‘the greater light to rule the day’—and of planet earth, and of those other countless planets and asteroids and small worlds Genesis calls stars. In both accounts we now have sun, earth, and stars all in place. In Genesis, too, the moon: ‘the lesser light to rule the night.’

“So let’s hear science on the creation of the moon.

“Despite it being now pretty much a sphere, earth was still colliding with smaller earths. Craters were gouged, debris flung up, ice became steam, and vapor shrouded our spinning world. The vapor trapped the heat from these continuing collisions, until the earth’s surface became a sea of molten lava.

“From one such collision, a huge one, a sizable hunk of this molten magma was sent juddering off into space. Earth’s gravitational pull was so strong that this drifting chunk couldn’t escape, but began circling the earth in its own orbit.

“When it cooled down it was the moon. In its circling, in turn, its gravity set up tides of molten magma on the earth’s surface and in its molten core, slowing its spinning and lengthening earth’s day from a few hours to something nearer the current twenty-four.”

Will paused, took a drink of water. Dante came off the wall with a start and looked guiltily around, realizing that for the past few minutes he had been standing there literally openmouthed, the threat of Raptor’s attack forgotten. Hearing things he’d never heard before, totally absorbed, caught up.
Seeing
it all as if it were an animated reconstruction of the birth of the world on
Nova
or something. He heard it with a sense of wonder, something always in short supply in a cop’s life.

And Will was going on. “So now we have the sun. We have the moon and the stars. We have the earth. We have the Bible’s years and seasons (says science, our orbit around the sun), and days (says science, our rotation on our axis).

“Back to Genesis: ‘And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so. And God called the dry land
Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.’

“Science says that by this time our galaxy had been pretty well swept free of gas and dust and debris and rogue worldlets running around smashing into everybody. The explosions of collision were disappearing, with them the vapor that held their heat in, and the earth was starting to cool down. For a time, indeed, it literally froze—after its ocean of surface magma had solidified but before the bombardments had quite ceased—because the dust kept sunlight from reaching the surface.

“But as the sun got through we warmed up, and had several million years of rain—yes, H
₂
O as we know it today. With the dissipation of the dust atmosphere, a secondary atmosphere of outgassed water vapor was squeezed up from the earth’s interior. The sun shone fitfully through this new atmosphere, making more water by vapor condensation, water that trickled down to fill the lowlands of the no-longer-quite-frozen surface.

“With this warming, history’s biggest hailstones, huge boulders of ice that had formed in the earth’s atmosphere, came raining back down to vaporize on contact. With them came many millions of years of torrential rain to form vast oceans.

“Bringing us, in both versions of earth’s creation, to that vital moment when there suddenly was…
life.
”

Life
. The word brought Dante out of his trance again. Life and death. And he remembered.

Remembered being royally pissed off because Salvador Madrid was dead in Minnesota, unconnected to Moll Dalton’s death in any way Dante could imagine, yet Raptor had found another voice in which to send his third mocking message, four months after the first one last October. None of it made any sense. But he was still bugging Hymie about this latest tape.

“Got my voiceprint yet, Hymie?”

Hymie gave him a pained expression. “Sound spectrogram,” he corrected. “Yeah, I’ve got it—for what it’s worth.”

“Hell, Hymie, if they’re as individual as fingerprints—”

“A gross oversimplification.” Hymie opened his folder of printouts to jab a hairy-backed finger at the squiggles that looked like seismograph readings of earth movements. “This is a record of the frequency and strength of the voice signal through time. If the spikes and patterns don’t match, that means they contain frequencies not present in the target spectrograms.”

“And these don’t match?”

“Even you can see they don’t, even with the shitty samples you got me.”

“Shitty? They’re the originals right off my machine.”

“I need at least ten common words of exceptional clarity from each tape for a visual comparison of spectrographs.
What have you given me?” He made a disdainful gesture. ‘“Raptor’ and a mittful of conjunctions.”

“Despite all the bitching, they’re two different people.”

“Two different people.”

“Any way to tell nationality or racial stock?”

“Just the obvious stuff—one
sounds
like an African-American, one
sounds
like a Latino.”

“Thanks, Hymie. Just hang on to them for me, will you?”

On the way to his office he stopped at Homicide to pick a fight with Tim Flanagan. He caught Tim behind the littered desk in his comer of the office, near a window looking out on the cold, gray, rainy day; the cars in the under-the-free-way parking lot gleamed like the arched backs of sounding dolphins.

Tim shoved a pink cardboard box of doughnuts toward Dante. “So I suppose now you want me to investigate that homicide back in Minneapolis for you.” He chuckled. “When I was a kid, I used to think it was Many-apples, Many-soda.”

Dante slid low in his chair, braced one knee against the edge of the desk and said in a disgruntled voice, “St. Paul.”

Without changing tone, Tim said, “So I suppose now you want me to investigate that homicide back in St. Paul for you.”

“I’d settle for you investigating my two homicides right here in your jurisdiction.”

“You think all I got to do is chase around after your nutty theories? I got too much stuff to handle as it is—”

“Yeah. Doughnuts. Pizzas. Week-old Chinese take-out.”

“Fuck you, chief.” Tim leaned forward across the desk, the weight on his elbows, bunching his open-collared dress shirt around his meaty armpits. “Remember that Chinese kid they found shot in Golden Gate Park?”

“Sure. You figured it for being gambling- related.”

“I figured wrong. The mother ran a Chinese gambling house, right enough, but her boyfriend, unbeknownst, as they say, to her, took out a big life insurance policy on the kid.
With himself as beneficiary. Anybody can do that, you know.”

“And then had the kid snuffed?”

“Yeah. Insurance agent smelled a rat, came to us, we went after the guy, hard, he split open. I’d like to see the ratfink fucker fry, and he might just. But…” He shrugged, reached for a doughnut. “Fuck ’im. So you can’t connect Madrid in St. Paul with Dalton or our own Jackie-baby?”