Menaced Assassin (37 page)

“Chimps and gorillas have a shared morphology that suggests species closeness; the complexities connected with knuckle-walking are even more compelling. Nobody but chimps and gorillas do it, and both species do it exactly the same. So… a shared common ancestor well after the human line had split off?

“Not so, says DNA-structuring and amino-acid analysis: almost identical human/chimp DNA suggests their split was only about 5.5 m.y. ago, while our single ape fossil from the Samburu Hills suggests the gorilla split off 6 to 9 m.y. ago.

“The basis of chimpanzee society is a male kin-group with one or more alpha males; it is the females who are the strangers. If the band splits up, there is no bond among the females; they disperse until they find new male bands. And they mate with as many of the males in their community as they can so the males, never knowing if they are the father of any given infant, will usually be solicitous of all.

“Chimps live mainly on fruit, so they have to travel in small bands of four to eight because the availability of ripe fruit dictates how often they get together. Separation can be for several weeks, and upon remeeting they have elaborate reunion reactions—hugs, kisses, back-slapping… sound familiar?

“Nobody can see anything much in a rain forest, so basic communication is by the so-called pant-hoots PBS specials have made so familiar to most of us. Every voice is unique—chimps can recognize each other over long distances of for
est. These calls are usually territorial or to announce a major food source.

“Males travel with other males, aggressive to protect against aggression. They view their environment as hostile and patrol the peripheries of their territory in stealth and in numbers, always ready for war.

“So here we are at long last, at the edge of the trees with the chimps and the direct hominid forerunner of Lucy whom many anthropologists picture as a timid plant-eater forced from the trees by bad weather and bad neighbors. Sure, the Pliocene was dry after the wet Miocene, and the forests were shrinking; but anthropologist Owen Lovejoy targets bipedalism as an absolutely enormous anatomical change, one not for the faint-hearted.

“So was it the weak, or the strong, who crept down out of trees into the unknown—and survived? Common sense gives us the answer. For those who don’t believe in common sense, the chimpanzee is here as a prime source about our earlier selves, because he is so close to us, and because he obviously has changed less than we since we shared the edge of the savannah.

“Only a third of a century ago, Robert Ardrey could write with a straight face: ‘Every modern primate, whether gorilla or macaque, chimpanzee or vervet monkeys or gibbon or baboon, is inoffensive, non-aggressive, and strays no further from the vegetarian way than an occasional taste for insects.’

“Ardrey was wrong about the chimps. The chimp, so close genetically to man, is a hunting ape, the
only
hunting ape apart from ourselves. He does it for fun, not necessity; for pleasure, not for profit. He does not need the protein supplement to his diet to survive. So, why hunt?”

Will drank water, and Dante realized with a start that he had been so caught up in the story that he had again forgotten his central function of looking out for danger. Of being constantly alert like a chimp patrolling the perimeter of his territory. This lecture hall, right now, was Dante’s territory. He had better be ready to defend it against Raptor.

“Bloodlust? Dudley Young believes, and I agree, that the
chimp’s hunting is at once something much simpler and much more profound. He hunts for the hell of it. Because it is
fun
, because it wards off boredom. That chimps get bored and hatch convoluted political and domestic plots within the troop is well known. That they are clever is undisputed: given an electronic board in place of their unevolved vocal apparatus, some chimps use large vocabularies, even create simple sentences.

“Is his hunting behavior shocking? Probably, when we consider that he is the brainiest and most affectionate, and the closest to us of all the primates. Certainly his behavior on hunting forays is decidedly at odds with the way he lives the rest of his life—which in my fieldwork I have found to be subtle, complex, even touched with a sort of refinement.

“Yet hunting troops seem to hunt twice a month, usually successfully. ‘Success’ is relative: the killing is inelegant at best. They kill infants often snatched literally from the mothers’ arms. About half the kills are monkeys, the rest infant baboons, baby bushbuck, squealing bushpiglets.

“They bite their victims on the head or neck, they flail them to death on rocks, they stomp them to death, they dismember them, they disembowel them. Eaten first is blood, then brains, if the skull can be cracked open so they can be swabbed out with finger or leaf. Next, viscera, flesh—all is fought over, and there are politics involved. Though male chimps are tremendously more aggressive than females, the females are surprisingly keen and vicious hunters, vociferous in their demands for their fair share of the spoils.

“Indeed, these hunts cause a veritable contagion of aggression—biting, screaming, crapping, mounting, groveling, embracing… Young likens it to the Dionysian frenzy. As if the chimps know they are doing something
forbidden
, almost shameful. Schizophrenic, Dr. Jekyll one minute, Mr. Hyde the next. Their brains, biologists tell us, are neither large enough nor complex enough to hold such concepts; yet anyone who has ever loved a dog knows that dogs understand all about shame and forbidden acts—with a brain a lot smaller than a chimp’s.

“While there is violence in the other primates’ lives, it is genetically ordained and ritually contained; in the chimp during his hunting forays it is not. Why is the chimp so different? Why is his violent behavior so out of control?

“Because he has no genetic or ritual guides to curb his hunting behavior, and, like us, is not physically designed for it. No claws, canines not a whole lot better than ours, and, most importantly, he is not
au fond
a predator like lions, leopards, wild dogs or hyenas. So he carries no genetic imprint of how to do it.

“Predators hunt for a living. There is certainly enjoyment in a good stalk; there is no anger at a failed one. Disappointment, perhaps, but not rage. It is their profession, after all. Chimps gather fruit for a living. It is an orderly and ordered activity without loss of control, though there might be a scuffle or two over some choice fig or banana.

“But when the chimp hunts, it all changes, because he is not ‘tooled up’ for predation. Though he uses behavior adapted from his range of daily domestic aggression—charging displays, shrieking, baring the fangs, occasionally biting or striking—he goes outside the limits of his genetic triggers. In the hunt he does not stop, he goes on, he maims, he kills.

“For the unarmed, fear and rage accompany the act of killing. The nonpredator cannot be moved to violence without these emotions. The chimp is not afraid of the baby monkey, this tiny mite cannot harm him; but fear there is. Of what?

“I believe it is fear
of the act of killing itself
The chimp knows he is out of control—but that is precisely why he seeks the state. To experience the unknown, to know the nasty pleasures of the forbidden. Do we see Adam and Eve foreshadowed here, eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge?”

Armand “Red” Grant swung the cream-colored Lexus off Marina del Rey’s Via Dolce into Tahiti Way where
Tosca
was docked in Marina B.
Tosca
was a seventy-eight foot all-weather motor yacht custom-built for Mr. Prince by Hattaras for a million-two; RADAR, SONAR, a thousand-mile cruising range, slept a dozen people in luxury.

Red parked between a BMW and a Mercedes in the designated lot, went down the dock toward the locked gate protecting the moored yachts from vandalism, robbery, or casual rubberneckers. He was dressed in white topsiders and an aloha shirt with short sleeves that showed his massive arms. Above him gulls keened and swooped, around him bright blue water sparkled in the California sun. He breathed salt brine deeply into his nostrils.

Vegas was the vein of gold that never ran out, but Red dreamed of Mr. Prince moving his center of operations to L.A. He was sick of twenty-four-hour neon, casinos without clocks, people who never slept, the constant ringing bells and cascading coins of the jackpots, the faces, gray with shock as they hocked their watches to get back home, of the losers without jackpots.

Vegas, Death Valley, Palm Springs—maybe it was the depleted ozone and global warming and the greenhouse effect, but there seemed to be a hell of a lot more deserts around than anything else these days. Except oceans. Ah, oceans.
Now you were talking! That’s why he loved the holiday season each year, he got to
cruise
ahead of Mr. Prince down to Baja on
Tosca
.

Red often thought he had the soul of a poet. Flying fish flashing across the waves in the mornings, whales blowing white spouts on the horizon. Once a whole school of orcas, the so-called killer whales, had raced
Tosca
for over a mile like sportive dolphins. He’d never forgotten it. He’d also killed two men, one with his .45 and one with his bare hands, but that had been in the way of business for Mr. Prince.

He used his key on the heavy, boxlike steel lock and went through the thickly barred gate, whistling. His shoes made hollow
thunks!
on the boards of the dock; he was a big guy, six-six, weighed 250. Last night he’d attended a postmodernist opening at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. He’d enjoyed every minute of it, much more than he’d enjoyed the
pro forma
sex afterward with the pretentious blonde who’d accompanied him.

A lanky brown-haired man was hosing down the dock just beyond
Tosca’s
proudly curved prow. He was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and Nike Airs; his hair was cut so close to his head it looked like a boot camp Marine’s. Red was instantly alert; Mr. Prince had enemies and this guy was only a few feet from Mr. Prince’s boat and looked like he could make things happen.

When Red approached, the guy gestured at the wet planks.

“Can you believe? Some idiot left fish guts and scales all over the dock, somebody could slip and break their neck.”

Red could see the washed-away offal floating in the water below the dock. He asked, “You have a boat here on the pier?”

The guy waved a vague arm down the line of moored yachts. “I’ve been staying on a friend’s ketch, I quit my job to paint.” He stopped, frowning at Red in a quizzical way. “I know you.”

“No. I’m not from around here.” Red spoke curtly.

“The art opening last night! It’s your height. Well, just your overall size, and the red hair. You’re hard to miss even
in a crowd, and the blond lady with you looked like a movie star.”

“Not a lady, not a movie star, not a real blonde.” Just for a moment, Red envied this guy: on a boat, alone, quiet hours just painting, doing art instead of blondes with I.Q.’s to match their bust size. “What’d you think of the opening?”

“Superb work, superbly mounted.” He gestured at
Tosca
, said wistfully, “Talk about superb… yours?”

Red chuckled. Here he was envying this guy, and the guy was envying him. What a strange world!

“I just get to ride on it. Just a hired hand.”

“Must be nice. No responsibility. Looks all ready to go.”

“Tomorrow, down to La Paz to wait for the boss.”

The lanky guy spread his arms wide. “The Jade Sea,” he said. “Three years ago, we drove down to the bay where the whales go. You can go out among them… Once in a lifetime.”

He gave a small almost sad shrug, a smile similarly sad, with a wave of his hand went away down the pier.

Red thought he’d sort of like to see some of the guy’s paintings. But, leaving tomorrow. Maybe he’ll take some art classes in Vegas after they got back. Fine art, not commercial; like the lanky guy who’d been at last night’s opening.

A week had passed since Ucelli’s death. Driving to Mae’s Place from the Newark airport, with a stop in South Orange to get a motel room right along 510, Dante Stagnaro was feeling guilty about Rosie. Here he was, on his own money and leave time he could have spent with her, poking around in the Ucelli hit, leaving the burden of Christmas preparations on her shoulders.

At least he hadn’t left his two Organized Crime Task Force inspectors in the lurch. Yesterday they’d broken a ring of Asian car boosters who had been plaguing the malls during the last-minute Christmas rush. The Asians stole Christmas presents from parked cars and returned them to the stores where they had been purchased to get cash refunds. If
the store refused to refund, they kept and later fenced the goods.

A cruising Danny Banner saw two of them crowbar an auto trunk at the Stonestown mall, was behind them when they were refused cash for their plunder and went to store the stuff. He called Dante, baby-sat the drop house until Dante got there with the warrant.

When they went in, they got five of the ring, with more to come as the busted ones started to sing. A major coup for his task force, and after getting back from the raid, Dante had been up to his ears in processing paperwork until just before his mad dash to SFO for the eleven-thirty red-eye to Newark.

Now he was turning up the snow-covered drive to Mae’s Place, yawning with fatigue but driven by the same obsession that had sent him to Minneapolis after Spic Madrid had been killed. His tires spun briefly on the ice-slick surface; the coating of new snow over everything was kind to the joint, but it still looked tawdry in the bright cold December sunshine.

The local police had long ago come and gone, the feds had come and gone; none of them had found a damn thing giving them any lead to the identity of the man whom Mae’s girls had dubbed the P.W. Dante was there only on sufferance, because of a phone call to the local feds from Rudy Mattaliano, his convention-buddy federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

Mae turned out to be a blowsy overblown perfume-drenched broad with glittering fingers, glittering eyes, and a chest you could eat lunch off of. Dante was talking to her in the bar of her roadhouse, a funky ornate intimate room with red plush on the walls and lushly painted nudes of surprising quality above the bar. She was so hostile he knew it had to spring from fear; he could see it glinting in the depths of those glittering eyes.