Menaced Assassin (27 page)

“Only in your diseased brain, chief.”

Dante had already admitted to himself that Tim was right, but he couldn’t give up that easy. Raptor rode his shoulder like a hooded falcon waiting to swoop on its prey.

“Kreiger was in Vegas along with Gideon Abramson a week before Spic Madrid was hit. Abramson was in Greece in the fifties and staked Gounaris to his first freighter—”

“So what? If the Abramson connection was vital, it’d be his brains on the car seat, not St. John’s. Drink your fuckin’ decaf and go home to Mama, little fella’s had a long day.”

Which, in the end, Dante meekly did.

There was just nothing to tie the two deaths together. But he would take a good long look at Kreiger anyway. See if he was connected with any of the other principals besides the dead Lenington in ways Dante hadn’t uncovered yet. But who were the other principals? He kept going around in circles, learning who was important only after their deaths made them so.

When he got home, there was a message from Raptor waiting. The voice was airy, British comedy stuff, actorish—perhaps even an American doing British.

“This is Raptor, old bean. Remember the line from that dreadful Thomas Hardy poem, ‘The Dynasts’? ‘One pairing is as good as another’? Fits quite nicely, don’t you think? Cheers, tallyho, and all that rot.”

Late Triassic

208 m. y. ago

I am the family face;

Flesh perishes, I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time and times anon,

And leaping from place to place

Over oblivion
…

The eternal thing in man,

That heeds no call to die.

Thomas Hardy
“Heredity”

It is 6:30
a.m.
and my car has paused at a Bay Area pedestrian crosswalk, because in California the pedestrian crosswalk is more sacred than the Trinity. So even though I am on my way to San Francisco to kill Otto Kreiger, I honor it.

I am startled by a sudden passage on my right: a jutting beak of white smooth-capped half-oval helmet which in profile extends several inches horizontally above the brows and nose of a passing cyclist. He is followed by a cluster of others on similar lanky many-speeded racing bikes, all in black midthigh racing tights and jerseys of varied bright colors, moving very fast in a bunch, in a silent breath, no jerkiness like walkers or runners because there is no stride, only turning wheels.

A herd of animals in motion, but what animal moves in such fashion? From my childhood comes a memory, almost a shock of recognition. Like most American children, at about six I become besotted with dinosaurs. What now flashes through my mind from those long-ago years is one of the coelurosaurs, the ostrich dinosaurs, named
Dromi-ceiomimus brevertertius. Dromiceiomimus
, if I remember my Latin correctly, means “emu-mimic”—the emu being an ostrichlike ratite bird of the Australian grasslands.

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?

“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 recognize 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.