Menaced Assassin (36 page)

The message was a quite creditable impression of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in
On the Waterfront
.

“I could’ve had class,” said Brando’s voice. “I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody. It was you, Eddie. You was my brother. You should’ve looked out for me a little bit…” A heavy, thuggish laugh. “I looked out for him tonight, Dante.” That laugh again. “Like I looked out for good old Gid in Death Valley…”

Hymie the Handler said it was yet another new voice.

Mid-Pleistocene

200,000-50,000 years ago

Whosoever you be, death will overtake you, although you be in lofty towers
.

The Sacred Koran

To start, I know only Popgun Ucelli’s name and that he resides in New Jersey. I spend a day in a Jersey City library, checking the state’s phone books. No Ucelli listed, thus, no way to get him at home. I can hire a private investigator to check his driving and auto registration licenses through the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles, but then there will be a record of my search. Not acceptable.

But I also know he is a purveyor of wholesale meats. Yes. Ucelli Meats, with an address in Orange. Now I face the same problem as with Herr Otto: how to identify Eddie Ucelli himself?

Très simple
. I check the company parking lot for the space with his name stenciled on the wall in front of it. He drives a new Cadillac Eldorado. I observe from afar. A squat, wide, hairy man. I follow, also from afar, only part of his route home each day so I will not be observed, until ultimately I watch him go up the drive of his upper-middle-class house.

A wife. A Puerto Rican housekeeper. Sometimes surly sons come visiting, looking like made men themselves. Not good. But at irregular intervals, Ucelli goes to an old-fashioned roadhouse some twenty miles away, with girls upstairs, called Mae’s Place. Sometimes he goes with his wife, sometimes alone. When alone, he stays several hours. A liaison, then. But with whom?

For several months my hair and beard have been flourish
ing; they are easily made unkempt. A surplus store provides the rest of the P.W.’s ex-military persona, especially the gloves he is never without. No fingerprints will be left behind.

The approach, the entry, the acceptance by Old Mose… and the waiting. The listening. Waiting for another of the sexual couplings between Popgun and, as I have learned, Mae, empress of the establishment. Finally, he comes alone. And dies.

This death has made me decide, straight out, to tell you why I kill. I know, I say that before; but no games this time.

Following my senior year in college I go backpacking in Spain for a summer and find myself in Madrid. This beautiful old city has the Prado, one of the greatest of all art museums, available for a few pesetas admission. I plan to haunt its galleries, to spend countless hours with Goya, Velázquez, Bosch, Murillo, El Greco, the Breughels (father and son), Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Dürer, Rubens… the list is essentially endless.

But on my first day there, as I am studying Goya’s twin masterpieces,
The Naked Maja
and
The Maja Clothed
, a female voice says to me in English, “Which do you prefer? Naked or clothed?”

She is an American about my age, barely into her twenties, breathtakingly beautiful in a fragile way, gleaming black hair in a smooth waterfall halfway down her back, a heart-shaped face, huge dark eyes with long lashes and unknown hurts lingering in the corners of her glances. Willowy and warm, with an appealing inner dignity.

“Naked,” I say, “because her face is more demure.”

She claps her hands. “What a wonderful answer! When she is naked, a woman to survive must be more demure, not less!”

I tell her I am hitchhiking across Europe, she tells me she is a touring art history major with a month each in some of the great gallery cities: Madrid, Rome, Paris. It is the first high adventure of her young life. Despite her tiny budget, she already has one American, in Madrid studying the guitar,
sleeping on her couch. If I need a floor to throw a sleeping bag on…

I assure her I am here just a few days, and have a room.

If she cannot give me accommodations, at least she can begin my art education. And she does. With, oddly—because I am a sunny chap in those days—the museum’s darker, more brooding works. El Greco’s
San Sebastian
with the murderers’ arrows buried deep in the naked saint’s flesh; Bosch’s grotesque
Lust
; Pieter Breughel’s macabre and frenzied
Triumph of Death
… What does she see in me, even then, that I do not see in myself?

And, of course, she shows me Goya’s “black paintings.” I cannot tear myself away from
Saturn Devouring His Children
: an aged, naked, demented figure with mad and terrified eyes, a flying mane of white hair, cramped, twisted limbs, screaming even as he bites the head off his own nude daughter.

“Saturn is the symbol of time,” she tells me. “He devours his children—us—because he is our fate, our melancholy.”

I find this, from this untouched and lonely girl, almost unbearably poignant. In Buen Retiro Park a short distance from the museum we share a half-bottle of red I supply, a carefully wrapped ham sandwich she brings from her handbag. The park has tall plane trees lining footpaths where nurses push rich people’s babies in prams, and old men who probably fought in
la guerra civil
rake up the leaves to put into wheeled receptacles. Around this little oasis the traffic grumbles and honks.

This becomes our pattern: we meet each morning in front of that day’s painting to be analyzed, lunch each day in Buen Retiro on wine and that inevitable ham sandwich. Her presence makes of Madrid a pure and wondrous adventure. I am half in love without ever having touched her or even knowing where she lives.

On the Friday I become aware of a man standing very close behind me. I turn quickly; in Spain are many Gypsy pickpockets.

“She is not coming,” he says.

I know him instantly, though she has never described him: the student of the guitar who sleeps on her sofa. He is as tall as I but bulkier, with brown and curly hair, a fleshy chin, a strong, almost hooked nose. His face is round. Without the chilly blue eyes he would be the Pillsbury Doughboy.

So sure of him am I that I ask, “Flamenco or classical?”

He looks surprised for a moment, then sneers, “Oh. Pillow talk. Classical. I am the next Andrés Segovia.”

“I doubt that. Why is she not coming?”

“I told her you’d found someone else to fuck. I knew she was dicking someone so I followed her, saw you two together.” His fleshy face darkens. His heavy brows draw down. His skin flushes. “Dicking you and she won’t even give me stink-finger.”

What says Cyrano?

Oh, my friend, I seemed to see

Over some flower a great snail crawling!

“Every night she makes the next day’s fucking ham sandwich. I got up early this morning and opened up her sandwich and jerked off into it and wrapped it up again.” He gives a sneering laugh. “Now that’s what I call mayonnaise! She’s probably eating it right now. Eating
me
right now. Maybe I should have waited until after you’d had lunch with her to tell you about it so—”

I knock him down. Had I been Raptor at that time, I would have slain him where he stood. A woman is running for the guard, her shoes echoing on the marble floor. I stand over him.

“If you return to her apartment, even to pick up your guitar, I will kill you. Do you believe me?” I know in that moment that I am speaking true matters, and I can see the belief in his face also.

I walk away, out of the Prado and out of Madrid and out of her life forever. I wait long enough to see him leave the museum and entrain for Barcelona. Perhaps there he will buy a new guitar. Now my path to her is clear, you say; but to
what end? In truth, I cannot bring myself to see her without telling her how he has violated her; but to be told it will destroy something within her it is essential I preserve.

In a world where such horrors occur, as Raptor I find in myself a violence to equal them. Need more to be convinced? I have more—
la vérité toujours la vérité,
remember? It can be found in Colin Wilson’s
A Criminal History of Mankind
, the chapter titled “The Psychology of Human Violence”:

They found them [the habitual violent criminal] amazingly skillful at self-justification
—
suppressing any material that might lose them sympathy
—
but the real problem lay in the criminal character. They lied as automatically as breathing… . Most criminals have developed a psychological “shut-off mechanism” to push inconvenient thoughts out of consciousness.… This meant that responsibility, too, could be shut off.…

It seems to eerily echo my own dark nature, but surely, I tell myself, this is not me! These men are true psychopaths. But then I have a terrifying thought: is it possible that I also have no capacity to understand what truth is? Is this why I constantly seek the origins of things—especially in myself? If I know it from the beginning, must it not be true? So I always compulsively demand, Why did this happen? To whom did it happen? What are the consequences?

But in the last analysis, does it matter? You see, he has jerked off into her sandwich and she has eaten it. Telling her about it will not change it, only destroy her. And now I know that Raptor, not yet named or acknowledged, lurks within me.

Thus, when the current need arises, I become him. Ah, what relief! As Raptor, I can let the discarded shards of myself pierce the barrier. And afterwards… Well, afterwards, I need only activate my shut-off mechanism to be pleased at the cleverness with which I have slaughtered, is it not so?
Rather than suffer any afterthoughts, bad dreams, sleepless nights?

Aha, say you, but Raptor has such insomnias, regrets, nightmares. What if you have rent the temple veil from top to bottom, have left the fabric of your life tattered around you? What then, murderer?

But that is nonsense. I
am
my profession. To prove it, I go now to kill again. After that will be time to stop.

If I can.

“If I can,” said Will, “I want to stay with the great apes. The first one known, thirty-pound
Aegyptopithecus
(28 m.y. ago), once was believed to be ancestral to all living monkeys and apes. But we now know the hominoid line began about the same time he did, rather than descended from him: some twenty-two pithecoid species, scattered over Africa, Europe, and Asia, now are known. Yet only the line of
Dryopithecus
(12 m.y. ago) survived—by devising a whole new way of getting around.

“Brachiation.

“Brachiation means swinging beneath the branches by the arms, rather than running around on top of them on all fours. Evolutionists call brachiation ‘utterly adaptive’—which means that if you were an ape, you learned to brachiate or you died. In a world of shrinking forests, brachiation gave us new function and anatomy to go with our innate primate playfulness.

“Function: developing amazing gymnastic skills to swing through the trees, to hang by an arm while reaching out to the tips of branches for ripe fruit. This required
judgment
—how far away is that next limb—and
concentration
. Lose your concentration, misjudge, you miss your grip and fall. And die.

“Anatomy: the torso is straightened, the arms and upper body are strengthened, the hands and wrists become fluid,
the pelvis begins its adaptation for eventual upright walking. The ape could retain his bulk while expanding his brain and remaining in the trees where, for the time being, all the fun was.

“This is most important: there is the same joy in an ape’s swift flight through the forest as there is in a bird’s soaring flight over it; and it was this sense of fun, of adventure, that helped certain hominoids walk out into that unknown veldt.

“Between those Miocene pithecoids we have been talking about and the modern apes we want to talk about, the fossils showing homin
oids
becoming homin
ids
are, as William Howells says, ‘no more than mutterings in the dark—a piece of jaw here, a piece of arm bone there.’ We hear not even mutterings about the ancestors of gorillas and chimps, except a single bone from the Samburu Hills in Kenya some 6 to 9 m.y. ago.

“The gibbons and siamangs are the most joyful, perhaps the brainiest of the surviving great apes. But by one of those double whammies of which Nature is so fond, they ‘chose’ a life of wondrous dexterity and delight in the tops of the trees—thereby removing themselves from this discussion.

“The orangutan’s direct affinity to us is tenuous: he packed his bags for Borneo about the time
Proconsul
(22 m.y. ago) appeared in Africa. But he is a hominoid, and when we talk about our direct ancestors we find some of his ways suggestive.

“The basic orang social unit is blood-related females who stay together in a single area. Once a young male is driven away from the band, he rapes any female he runs across. It is true rape, by the way—she is not ready to receive him.

“When he is full grown, he seeks females who
are
receptive, mates with them, and
then
leaves. He is solitary and his relationship with all other males is antagonistic: meeting, they invariably fight until somebody backs down or is seriously hurt.

“Gorillas, in their mountain habitats in Central Africa, are different: they travel in fairly stable social groups of females and infants led by a dominant ‘silverback’ male. Most imam
ture males, as they mature, are driven off as the young male orang is. The young gorilla loner also will grab any females he can find, but his intent is very different. He keeps them to form his own harem—thus establishing a new basic social group.

“Big daddy silverback defends
his
harem against such seducers with violent displays in over 75 percent of the encounters, with actual physical battle 50 percent of the time. He must, because a low-ranking female often will run off with one of these traveling salesmen: in his new harem she will have the status she lacked in the old.