Menaced Assassin (33 page)

“Archosauria seemed destined to control the world forever. Why didn’t it? Because of the infamous mass extinction at the K/T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary 65 m.y. ago, often called the Great Dying. The dinosaurs went extinct not through bad genes, but through bad luck. Environmental catastrophe overtook them. Three-fourths of all living species on the earth, in the sea, in the sky, were abruptly terminated.

“The current Megadynasty Four, the Age of Mammals, was about to begin. At first it didn’t look like much. During the dinosaurs’ reign the mammals essentially were limited to two major sorts of what Bakker called little furballs: the rodent and the shrew. These little guys played out their tiny, apparently insignificant destinies down around the dinosaurs’ toenails,
but they bore the marks of the mammal—live birth, warm blood, flexible skeleton.

“Live birth means mammary glands—the young are nursed and receive maternal care.

“Warm blood means hair and fur, a four-chambered heart, two sets of specialized teeth (milk teeth to grow with, permanent teeth to live with) essential for true warm-bloodedness, with variously shaped hard enamel crowns adapted to the animal’s diet.

“Flexible skeletons mean a free lumbar spine, and a unique bone growth pattern called epiphyses whereby the bone grows in the middle, not at the ends. It is this that gives the mammals their tight, flexible, very usable joints.

“Early rodent—let’s call him proto-rat—had
very
big teeth to chew the roots and plants of the day: tree ferns, horsetails, cycads, conifers, sequoias, araucarias (monkey puzzle trees), and the spanking new flowering plants called angiosperms.

“And proto-rat used those sharp teeth on proto-shrew, forcing the little scuttler to become tree shrew by taking to the trees where proto-rat wouldn’t—couldn’t?—follow. Also, since nocturnal proto-rat controlled the night and the ground, tree shrew became diurnal and claimed the day and the trees.

“When the dinosaurs finally galloped and leaped and plodded off in the Great Dying, our little squirrel-like ancestors were waiting in the trees just as proto-rat’s descendants were waiting on the ground. During 30 million years in their arboreal world, the tree shrews had evolved, had begun developing and coordinating our three major features—hand, eye, and brain. They had started to become monkeys.

“In the process, our eyes moved to the front of our heads, giving us the tremendous advantages of binocular and Technicolor vision. Our muzzles shrank as eye became more important than nose, the claws on the digits of our hands and feet became nails, and we developed opposable thumbs and friction skin (fingerprints) on hands and feet to help us grab useful things like tree branches or a piece of fruit.

“All of this new activity was making our brain bigger and
bigger in relation to our size and weight. Which, for some, kept getting bigger also.

“Some of the monkeys got so large and slow, in fact, that they had to confine themselves to lower branches that could support them. As we move to about 28 million years ago, remember that heaviness: it is forcing some of them to develop into… loud movie music here…
apes
…”

A lean, fast-walking man was passing across the windows on the walk outside. Dante quit listening. The man looked in, saw Will behind the podium, and faltered for a moment before going on. Dante waited, tense, until he had gone up the stairs to the Theological Union. It was a while before he settled back against the wall, and then he kept his hand close to his gun, in case that other fast-moving man should appear out of nowhere.

The P.W. appeared out of nowhere on the icy, windblown day after Thanksgiving, materializing out of a swirling snowstorm like a figure on a Polaroid photo gradually taking on definition once it has been pulled from the camera. He was walking as he would always walk, with his arms raised and bent at the elbows, his hands clasped behind his head in the traditional “surrendering prisoner” manner. Thus, P.W.—prisoner of war.

On that first late afternoon, with the light already fading and early snow on the ground, there was nobody to see him but Old Mose. Mose was seventy-eight, with a seamed chocolate face and frizzy hair turned white as the snow he was struggling with. When the Roadhouse had been one, Mose had played some mean blues piano in the lounge; but an irate customer, a made man—Eddie Ucelli (cool on the kill, a creep in his cups)—had taken care of that by repeatedly slamming the keyboard cover on Mose’s hands because Eddie wanted
“O Sole Mio
” instead of “Hellhound on My Trail.”

Mae had kept Mose on as handyman—a misnomer if there ever was one, seeing the state of his hands—so on this snowy afternoon he was outside painfully clearing the front walk, holding the shovel awkwardly in his more or less useless claws.

That was when the P.W. appeared between the eastern
white pines, crunching through the snow from the road that had once been a highway. He took the shovel from Mose’s twisted fingers with his strong gloved hands, and started shoveling vigorously.

“Hey, mister, ain’t no call for you to…”

The P.W. paused to lay a gloved finger to his lips, then returned to his shoveling. Mose didn’t have to shovel again as long as the P.W. was there. He didn’t have to tend the furnace, either, or the water heater, or carry in cases of booze or crates of frozen steaks from Ucelli’s meat wholesale company, or perform any of his other heavier tasks. The P.W., in the same plodding manner he did everything, took care of all of them.

It was hard to tell how tall or how heavy the P.W. was, or even how old. His scraggly hair was mostly hidden by a Navy watch cap he seemed to wear both day and night. He had a matted beard he never cut, wore God knew how many layers of clothes underneath an Army camouflage jacket and baggy camouflage combat pants. The soles of his battered Army boots were sadly run over on the outside edge. He never removed his gloves.

Old Mose told the girls in a self-important voice that the P.W. had confided he’d been tortured repeatedly by the V.C., and his hands were not something anyone would ever see again. How much of this was real and how much Mose had dreamed up because it seemed that’s the way it
must
have been, nobody ever knew, since the P.W. talked to Mose damned little and to anyone else not at all. But anyway, it made a nice story. And it made old Mose feel he had a coeval in the hands department.

The P.W. carried his head thrust forward on his neck like a lily on a stalk, walking with a stooped shuffle that neither slowed nor speeded nor turned aside. It seemed that if he had needed to walk through the building, he simply would have done so like a tank, trailing broken lengths of lath and uprooted wiring and odds and ends of plasterboard with him.

Nobody ever tested the impression, because Mose made sure on that first night that he got some of the half-eaten
meals that otherwise would have gone into the garbage, and found a place in the basement by the furnace for him to lay out his grimy sleeping bag. The P.W. rigged a length of hose to fit over the overflow valve on the water heater, and thus could give himself a rudimentary shower—not that anyone ever saw him take one.

Mae didn’t even become aware of him until the third morning after his arrival, when she saw him carrying in cases of booze from the Acme Liquors truck—an Organization firm, of course.

“Mose, just who the hell is that?” she demanded.

“He jes’ show up t’other night, Miss Mae.”

“But who the hell
is
he?”

“He jes’ show up, Miss Mae,” repeated Mose vaguely.

Delia Ann, a short sturdy black girl much in demand because she had a big butt but was very supple and inventive, said, “The girls have started calling him the P.W.—for prisoner of war.”

“Why do you…” Then Mae saw him walking around to the back of the building to get another load, his arms in their invariable “I surrender” position, and she understood the name. So she changed what she had started to say, to, “I don’t care what the hell you call him, just so long as you call him gone.”

Old Mose said dolefully, “He be a pow’ful he’p to me roun’ de place, Miss Mae.”

“Be a sport, Mae,” said tall, stately, redheaded Clarisse. She was also very popular with the clientele because she could get up on a tabletop, squat naked over a long-necked beer bottle, and pick it up without a laying on of hands. “Let him stay. He’s harmless and a real gentleman.”

“How can you tell?” asked Mae.

“He never ogles any of us no matter what we have on—or don’t have on. He’s like a horse with blinders.”

So the P.W. stayed. His only idiosyncrasy occurred the first time he saw each of the girls, and never again with any of them. He would stop in front of her and peer intently into
her face for a moment with his shocked, faded blue eyes behind a pair of women’s lightly tinted sunglasses.

“Soo Li?” he would ask in a hoarse mumbling voice that sounded as if he either had vocal cord damage or didn’t use his voice much any more.

Whatever the girl answered, and many of them never got a chance to answer at all, he would immediately put his finger to his lips in a shushing motion as he had done to Mose that first evening. Then he would shake his head and turn dolefully away, never to speak to her again.

Within a week he had gone through them all except Mae, who never let him get that close to her because he gave her what she called “the willies.” Even so, he soon became as much of a fixture around the establishment as Mose or Dietrich, the massive and savage Rottweiler who guarded Mae’s Place after hours.

Until the P.W. arrived, nobody was able to touch Dietrich, and only Mose even dared get near enough to throw raw meat in his direction once a day. He was a huge, silent, morose, and savage attack waiting to happen, let out to roam only at night after all the clients had departed, otherwise kept locked away in a cage under the cellar steps to which he was lured each morning by a slab of bloody beafsteak left in his food dish courtesy of Mose.

The P.W. had laid out his sleeping bag that first night after Dietrich had been released to roam. When the huge dog returned to the basement, it immediately rushed him, roaring and snapping, sharp fangs gleaming. The P.W. dropped to one knee as Dietrich sailed at him, somehow swayed aside, getting a gloved hand behind Dietrich’s passing cocked front leg, and using the dog’s own momentum, smashed his 180-pound body nose-first into the concrete-block basement wall.

After this happened three more times, Dietrich stood panting in the middle of the floor, nose bleeding and a little spraddle-legged, staring at the P.W. with puzzled eyes…

Then he
whined
. The stub of what would have been his tail if they had left him one started, very slowly, very tentatively, as if he had used it no more than the P.W. had used
his vocal cords, to wiggle back and forth. Had it been whole, it would have been
wagging
.

The P.W. finished laying out his sleeping bag and got into it, totally ignoring the dog. After a long time, Dietrich shuffled over and lay down beside him with a huge sigh of what sounded almost like relief. Sometime through the night, in his sleep, the P.W. draped one arm over the dog’s massive body.

After that, the P.W. always fed Dietrich, and together they patrolled the building and the grounds after hours, two silent primordial ghosts drifting in tandem through the icy darkness of the New Jersey night.

During the month before the P.W. arrived in Jersey, in San Francisco Dante’s bone-deep rage and resolution at the almost scornful blowing away of Gideon Abramson in Death Valley had made him fess up to Tim about the Raptor phone calls. To do it, he took Tim out to dinner at the Salonika on Polk near Green.

Since the film festival, Dante had been accompanying Rosa to festivals sponsored by various Greek Orthodox churches around the Bay Area. He’d gotten to like the food, and knew it would appeal to Tim’s gargantuan tastes. So he ordered a tray of
mezethes
—literally “starters”—to begin the meal. Sure enough, Tim was first enchanted with the
dolmathakia
, stuffed vine leaves, usually grape, and ate the whole plate of them himself.

“Delicious! What’s in ’em?”

“Long-grain rice, pine nuts, onions, dill, mint, parsley, lemon, pepper… Rosie makes them, but she adds ground lamb, too. Hers are better.”

So it went through the
melitzanosalata
—eggplant and feta cheese and a lot of herbs—the
soutzoukakia
of lamb and beef sausage served with pita bread, and a dynamite
tzatziki
of cucumber and yogurt that Dante fought him for.

“I know all this ain’t out of the goodness of your heart, chief,” said Tim, waving a greasy-fingered hand, “since we
been eating forty-five minutes and haven’t gotten to our dinners yet. So c’mon—talk to Daddy.”

Talk Dante did, over
kefthes
, fried meatballs that released tantalizing aromas from the kitchen as they were cooked, and the
horiatiki salates
of tomatoes and cucumbers and black olives and onions and feta cheese topped with dried oregano, known to most people just as “Greek salads.”

“So this guy has called five times—”

“I think it was him after Moll Dalton,” said Dante, forking flaky-crusted
spanakopita
—spinach pie—into his mouth and talking around it, “but I didn’t save the tape. By Hymie’s voiceprints, all the others are different people. Raptor used Gideon Abramson’s own voice as
his
message. Telling a Jewish joke.”

“Recorded him off the phone, I bet,” mused Tim.

Main courses were
kotopoulu fournou
for Tim, roast chicken with potatoes, and baked lamb with pasta,
giouvetsi
, for Dante. Over impossibly sweet
baklava
served with thimble-size cups of thick Greek coffee, Dante told about the note pinned to his shirt while he slept in the Death Valley dunes. Tim started to guffaw.

“That’s one I would have liked to see, chief,” he chortled. “It’s only because of that note that I’m buyin’ into the calls. Otherwise I’d be laughin’ in your face while I’m readin’ these.” He was shuffling through the transcripts of the calls like a hand of cards. “None of them really say, bang, bang, I did it, do they? Uh-uh. But that note pinned to your shirt…”