Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  “A Lieutenant Stagnaro from the San Francisco Police Department, Mr. St. John. He wants to talk with you about-”

  “I don’t recall any appointment. But…”

  But he recalled Stagnaro. That officious phone call that hideous night that his darling Molly… And, more recently, St. John’s letter threatening legal action to make him back off Atlas Entertainment… Better to get it over with now.

  “All right, five minutes, and he’s damned lucky to get it.”

  He expected the sort of bullying bureaucrat who turned timid the moment he was jerked out from behind his official shield. He got Fonzie grown-up with gray in his hair. The epitome of every ballsy Italian stud hanging around a street corner in the Bronx, moving easily, in terrific shape, with a mobile face and alert eyes that St. John was sure missed nothing.

  “Mighty nice of you to give me these five minutes, Mr. St. John,” he said in a voice that wasn’t at all grateful.

  “Say your say and get out, Lieutenant,” said St. John coldly, fighting down his surprise at the man facing him across the desk. “I am an attorney and I know my rights.”

  But Stagnaro merely settled back in a costly designer chair as if for a long stay, hooking one leg over its arm and swinging his foot idly.

  “I just bet you do, pal,” he said. “As for being an attorney-things like that can change.”

  “I take that as a threat, Lieutenant.”

  Stagnaro waved a hospitable arm as if this were his office, not St. John’s. “Take it any way you want.” He got a notebook from his pocket and set it open on his knee, then didn’t refer to it or write in it at all. “I have a few questions.”

  St. John sighed in a long-suffering manner.

  “Go ahead, then, Lieutenant.”

  “You ever molest your daughter?”

  It was exactly as if someone had kicked him in the scrotum. He felt his face get pale and knew his mouth was gaping, but there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it for the moment. Scant minutes ago he had been daydreaming about sweet Molly and himself and Horsy, and here was Stagnaro asking him…

  “How…” He’d almost blurted out How did you know? but his attorney instincts took over. “How dare you-”

  “Seeing as how you pimped for your daughter several times during her marriage to Dr. Dalton, I get the feeling you either didn’t value her enough or valued her way too much.”

  It had to be bitch Gloria’s work, trying to hurt him even more by… but maybe, he thought, seeing a ray of light at the end of this particular horrible tunnel, maybe that abrogated the terms of the agreement under which he was paying her those ghastly alimony payments and she kept herself hard to find. She had put in writing that she would not divulge anything about… about him and Molly. So if she had gone public now, even a quarter century after the event…

  “Such a disgusting accusation does not deserve the dignity of a reply,” he snapped belatedly. Perhaps too belatedly.

  “Exception noted, Counselor-isn’t that what you lawyers like to say? So we’ll stick to the public record: the hard-core porn-film company you set up back in ’72.”

  St. John’s name had appeared nowhere on those incorporation papers, and this hadn’t come from Gloria; she had walked off by then. His association with Mr. Prince had come about because she had walked off-with infant Molly and every dime he owned.

  “Benny the Bullet-you remember Benny, don’t you, Counselor? He was looking at twenty-to-life for one of his little peccadillos, so he decided to fill us in on everything he knew about anything, even when he got toilet-trained. Verbal diarrhea, tell you the truth. Freedom Films came up.”

  St. John rallied again. “If I did give free legal advice to some acquaintances in setting up a small corporation, there was nothing illegal about it. And in the early seventies-”

  “A quarter of a mil and points to set up the fuck-film company is the way I heard it.” Stagnaro winked at him across the desk. “Never declared, Counselor. I haven’t talked with the folks over at the IRS… yet. But I bet they’d love to try to make a net-worth case out of it.”

  He’d owed the shylock a lot of money and that Benny person had come around talking about electric drills and kneecaps. All that bitch Gloria’s fault, she’d stripped him naked and he’d had to borrow from the leg-breakers because nobody else would lend him enough to keep his nascent legal firm afloat…

  “Why… are you here?” he asked hollowly.

  But Stagnaro said, “My five minutes are up, Counselor.” He stood, leaned across the desk. “Atlas Entertainment,” he said. “Kosta Gounaris.” He dropped his voice lower. “Martin Prince.”

  St. John jerked back as if Stagnaro were a viral infection. “What…”

  “Maybe you have the impression that I’m a homicide cop, Counselor. I’m not. I head up the SFPD’s Organized Crime Task Force. Anything organized, not just the mob; but the thought of dropping on somebody like Martin Prince gets me so excited I have to go buff my nails. And you’re gonna help with my impossible dream, pal, ’cause you got short eyes.”

  “Short… eyes?”

  “Old penitentiary term for your kind of pervert. You like to do it with little kids-short people. But the big people you’re dealing with, they don’t like pedophiles.”

  He turned back at the door, spoke quietly, almost sadly.

  “Your daughter is dead, St. John, murdered, and you just don’t seem to give a fuck who did it. But I do. And when push comes to shove…” He made his hand into a pistol with the thumb cocked, the forefinger a gun barrel pointing at St. John. “I push you for information and I get it, or…” His cocked thumb fell onto the firing pin of flesh at the base of his forefinger, and the finger shot St. John dead. “They shove you right off the edge of the world.”

  Then he laughed, a chilling laugh that hung in the temperature-controlled air long after he was gone.

  St. John sent Angelle home early, poured himself a brimming snifter of Paradis, sat back down behind his desk with the bottle. The $350-a-liter cognac tasted like wormwood.

  He knew these men were hard, he knew they could even be brutal, but not… not Molly! Kosta had even come to her funeral, the others had sent flowers and cards…

  Kosta. Gid. Martin-yes, he was one of those permitted to call Mr. Prince “Martin” to his face. They knew how proud he was of Molly. He had boldly demanded she be made junior corporate counsel overseeing the San Francisco operation as a condition of his setting up the complicated deal on Atlas Entertainment. They had said yes, and he had told them how to take over the shell of the existent entertainment corporation for their own purposes.

  They would never order Molly’s death. Kosta himself was in love with her, for God’s sake. Had been shattered by her death. Had felt it had been one of those tragic senseless killings where Molly had died because she was there, and for no other reason.

  He felt salt tears on his cheeks. Sweet Molly…

  The policeman had made it up to shake him up, that was it.

  Through the tears his eyes moved around the office. All of this was because in those lean years after bitch Gloria had taken sweet little Molly away from him, he couldn’t meet the vig on their loan to him, and they’d become his silent partners. They’d kept him alive with their referrals. If the businesses were a little… well, grungy, those early contacts had led to bigger and better work. Now he had seven attorneys under him, none of whom knew anything about his… affiliation with Mr. Prince.

  He shivered slightly as he finished his cognac. It tasted better going down by now. He seemed finally able to let his mind think the unthinkable. And in that instant he knew- knew — that Mr. Prince had ordered sweet little Molly’s death; and if Kosta hadn’t been in on it, at least he’d known or suspected it might happen.

  Then why hadn’t he himself suspected it? These were ruthless men, he’d always known that. And he’d always known, in his secret soul, that he’d been valuable to them because of, well, his breeding, his manners
, his appearance of impeccable class. He’d even had the sense, occasionally, that Mr. Prince coveted those qualities himself, qualities mere money couldn’t buy. He had always been flattered by Mr. Prince’s attention.

  But now, thought of that attention made his long tapered hands tremble. What if Mr. Prince had his office bugged? What if they knew Stagnaro had been there, were listening to a tape of their conversation right now? Would they…

  For one pitiless moment he saw himself as they must have seen him all through those years: his Anglo-Saxon good looks empty, vain, a straw man for Mr. Prince, the real power behind his law firm. A soft man, not as sharp as they. A man who got along with everyone because he feared to offend anyone. A man who loved little children…

  He was almost scrabbling for the phone, calling Charriti HHope, whose talent agency he had used for many years.

  “Charriti? I need a blond female, about four foot six…”

  Charriti HHope’s voice said, with a trace of asperity, “Short notice.” He almost heard a sigh over the phone. “How young does she have to be, sweetie?”

  “About ten-if you have one who is… convincing.”

  Charriti gave a throaty chuckle. “Pretty soon you’ll be telling me you want ’em for diaper commercials.”

  St. John hung up, sat there unconsciously rubbing his hand forward and backward over the surface of his hand-rubbed antique desk. Contemplating the little girls wearing jumpers that rode up off their naked chubby thighs as they clung to his pommel playing Horsy. And how at the ultimate moment, just as he had planned to teach his beloved little five-year-old Molly to do on that magical afternoon bitch Gloria had ruined all those many years ago, they lowered their sweet little heads to…

  What had become of them now?

  He knew, only too well. When a bit shopworn, they were graduated to porn flicks, then were passed on for stable work in Miami or Vegas and, as their bloom faded, ended their useful days under fat, sluggishly thrusting government officials in one of the less appetizing hot countries to the south…

  And Molly, Molly was dead. Oh God. Nothing in his life was going to work for him ever again. And if he wasn’t very, very careful, he might soon be dead himself.

  Unless…

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Martin Prince, like so many great football players in the NFL, had come out of one of the small, desperately poor steel-puddling towns of western Pennsylvania. He had been an Honorable Mention All-American in college, but had been too smart to go into the pros even if he had been heavy enough.

  Now in his mid-fifties, Martin Prince was dynamic, corrupt, kept fit by massages, saunas, and heroic avoidance of the richly sauced pastas he loved. He had a wedge-shaped head, heavy jaws, and a chin that one could imagine jutting out over the thousands in Piazza Venezia. Prince’s rise had not been so meteoric as II Duce’s-but for the past five years, he had reigned supreme in Las Vegas.

  It was to Martin Prince that the other capos came when they needed a neutral city in which to iron out their differences. They trusted him because he was quicker of mind, more decisive and more ruthless than they. Today he was cautious.

  “Gideon, my good friend,” he said into the scrambler phone five minutes after he had hung up from Otto Kreiger, “how would you like a weekend in Vegas? We are opening our new golf course here at Xanadu and it would not be right if you didn’t hit the first ball down the fairway. Otto will also be here-I believe he wants to try to sell you one of those racehorses of his.”

  “The man can always try,” Gideon chirped, then added before Prince could hang up, “You’ll like this one, Mr. Prince. This sexy young woman comes to a dinner party with this rich, ugly old man. She’s wearing this huge diamond, and the woman sitting next to her says it’s the most beautiful diamond she’s ever seen. So the sexy young woman says, ‘Yes, but this is the Plotnick diamond. It comes with a curse.’ The other woman says, ‘What’s the curse?’ and the sexy one looks over at her ugly companion and whispers, ‘Plotnick.’”

  They shared a chuckle and hung up with mutual assurances of regard. Martin Prince was well pleased. He found Gideon, unlike the BB-eyed Nazi Kreiger, always Old Worldly and full of respect even if a bit boring.

  As it should be. Respect. He beckoned, they came. Good men, strong men in their own right-but men who recognized him as the capo di tutti i capi — not that anyone believed in that Mustache Pete stuff anymore. Not in his organization. Though he had come up through the ranks in the traditional way, he had abandoned as many of the trappings of the Mafia as he could.

  But he had never forgotten where he had come from and where his interests, talents, and allegiances lay. His old man had been a waiter in a wop restaurant, sweating and scrimping and saving for countless hours to send his kid first to parochial school and then to college; Prince had shown his appreciation for his education by murdering his first man for profit the night after he had thrown a winning touchdown pass against Penn State-who would suspect last night’s hero?

  He had killed twice more, but only to show he had coglioni, quello! — big enough balls for the Pittsburgh underworld. After those three, he had never personally killed again, which meant his brains were as big as his balls. Martin Prince had never spent a night in jail, and had made a solemn vow to himself that he never would.

  That was why he was phoning certain specific invitations for purposes having nothing to do with the mini crime summit he had decided St. John’s phone call demanded. Should the FBI be somehow listening this fine day, they would get nothing useful.

  After speaking with Salvador Madrid, whom he had opposed for the council but had been overridden, his last call was to Enzo Garofano, one of the old-timers whose advice he valued and who still ran his own quadrant of the nation at the age of eighty-two. A little frail, perhaps, but only of body, not of mind or will.

  Enzo’s passion was Italian opera, so Prince said, “Don Enzo, vi aspetta una cosa favolosa nel Showcase Lounge del casino, Abbiamo una nuova cantatrice.”

  “Martin, io le cantatrici le sento ogni giorno.”

  “Non come questa, vi assicuro. E meglio di Callas.”

  “Meglio di Callas non c’e.”

  But Martin Prince knew he had the old Mustache Pete in his pocket. Just in case the girl in the Showcase Lounge was as good a singer as Maria Callas the fiery Greek had been, Don Enzo would not be able to keep himself from coming to Vegas. Prince switched to English.

  “That is why I implore you, Don Enzo, come and hear her for yourself. I insist on sending my jet to pick you up.”

  Enzo agreed. Prince hung up and went to the window and looked out at his city. His city. Bugsy Siegel might have built it, but Martin Prince ran it-and would have called Bugsy “Bugsy” to his face if the stronzo had been around today.

  Prince’s name had once carried extra syllables; after his father had somehow scraped up enough money to send little Marcantonio Princetti to St. Paddy’s across the river, rhymes with spaghetti had been the schoolyard taunt of the predominantly Irish lads at the school.

  Sweeney.

  Kiley.

  O’Malley.

  He’d never forgotten these ringleaders of the taunts during his formative years, so just about the time the extra syllables had been dropped to make Marcantonio Martin, faith an’ be jaysus, and those poor Irish boyos each had a wee drap o’ bad luck.

  Martin Prince had never called to gloat. He’d never had to. They knew. At least Sweeney and Kiley did. O’Malley didn’t know much of anything anymore except how to piss down his pant leg. None of them could ever do anything about their misfortunes, but they would know.

  Respect. Enzo Garofano still held his important meetings in the back room of an Italian restaurant, but he got respect. Martin Prince demanded it too. But on a much grander scale and with great personal pride in the safety measures that were his secret passion. He believed in careful evaluation and planning, and had a great deal invested in Atlas Entertainment; the company’s continued profitabi
lity depended on its connection with the Mafia remaining secret.

  He met the four undercapos in the executive boardroom on the top floor of his Xanadu Enterprises hotel, casino, sports and entertainment complex. The three who were associated in greater or lesser degrees in the Atlas Entertainment affair, and the fourth, Spic Madrid, who was not involved but would serve as protective coloration should the feds belatedly realize these men were in Vegas for more than pleasure. Others might meet in a drafty warehouse or upstairs over a pizza joint; Martin Prince had flown in an interior decorator from Via del Babvino to furnish the suite with exquisite appurtenances from declining Roman estates and a lighting system developed in Cine Citta.

  Prince had imported San Francisco’s most famous private detective to oversee the security arrangements. The place was swept twice daily for bugs, and waves of electronic vibrations washed inaudibly across the surfaces of the windows during meetings, so the latest laser mikes couldn’t pick up voice-shimmers off the glass and turn them back into human speech through a complicated electronic process.

  “Enzo, mio caro amico. La cantatrice e brava, no?”

  The old man nodded his seamed and shrunken head. Even in Las Vegas he wore a wool suit, vest, tie, polished shoes.

  “Maria Callas- mai! But a good opera singer…” He shrugged and made a gesture of approval with the fingers of his hand pinched together at the tips. “You should encourage her.”

  “Perhaps, Don Enzo, you would like to tell her personally how much you enjoyed her singing…”

  By the look on Don Enzo’s face, he knew he had made the perfect suggestion. He would make a couple of suggestions to the cantatrice, too. What the hell, he owned her contract.

  He turned to Salvador “Spic” Madrid, who controlled street drug sales in four upper Midwest states and had recently been elevated to the board after winning a rather messy internecine war on his own cold northern turf.

  “Salvador-you find the floor shows pleasing?”