Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  “They didn’t have an eyeball surveillance on Ucelli. They’ll send somebody out to see if he’s in town, but…”

  “Yeah. If he was here he’ll be back in Jersey by now.”

  Dante spent the day reading the papers they’d found in Spic’s office. Nada. Dinner was with Carman and the homicide cop in charge of the investigation, a thick-bodied German named Heidenreich. Ucelli was in residence in Jersey but could have been away for as long as a week before the Madrid hit. They’d had no eyeball of him during those seven days, hadn’t picked him up on any of the voice-activated surveillance tapes.

  The next day with Heidenreich was fruitless. That night Dante caught the 10:15 Northwest nonstop to SFO. In-flight, in a New York Times the flight attendant brought, he read about the murder he had just been watching being investigated.

  This one would go into the St. Paul Police Department open file. No one would bust his butt on it. Local slaying of local slime, no connection between Madrid and Atlas Enter tainment, the parallels with the Moll Dalton and Jack Lenington hits genuine coincidences. They happened.

  Dante spooned up behind the sleeping Rosa in their double bed and went hard asleep, so it wasn’t until he got up the next morning that he saw the blinking light on the answering machine. He rewound the message without the slightest premonition.

  The voice was obviously Latin, slurring the English words in that liquid south-of-the-border singsong now becoming so familiar to anyone living in California.

  “Hey, senor, thees ees Raptor. I bushwack heem in the arroyo. Cure hees postnasal dreep. Mucho diversion, verdad?”

  PART FOUR

  End of the Permian 245 m.y. ago

  A man can die but once: we owe God a death…let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.

  William Shakespeare, Hemy IV, Part II

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Much diversion indeed!

  But listen; you want to know why I kill, I will tell you.

  It is the summer between my junior and senior years in college, and I am seeing this great nation of ours firsthand in an old red Ford Falcon with one blue fender from a junkyard in Phoenix, Arizona. I work two weeks at a job, any job I can find wherever I am, then I move on: I wash dishes in Salt Lake City, I unload boxcars in Elton, Illinois, I pack corn in Rochester, Minnesota, where the canning factory has a water tower painted like a huge ear of corn, kernels, husks and all.

  The night I leave Rochester I end up in a small, old-fashioned, midwestern bar in Austin, where Hormel has its headquarters. Long and narrow, with dark wood booths along the right wall, the bar along the left, a few tables down the middle, shuffleboard, in the back a golden oldies country-western jukebox-“Good Night Irene,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

  But the evening’s real entertainment is two very drunken Great American Working Men with thick arms and beer bellies out over the tops of their Levi’s (Raptor’s rule: Wealthy American males of a like age have pear-shaped guts up over which they wear tailored slacks). These men don’t have tax consultants, but they do have their Detroit tin, their washer-dryer, their outboard motorboat on a trailer in the backyard.

  Tonight they are drunk in a bar near Hormel’s, heads to gether to chuckle over one another’s dirty stories. Then the one with hair rears back on his stool, almost falling over.

  “You summitch, ya can’t say that to me!”

  “Say anything I wanna say, shitferbrains!”

  They are off their stools, wild-eyed, lump fists faking jabs. Nobody moves to break them up. The Hairy Man’s roundhouse swing at the Smooth Man’s bald pate misses. The force of his own blow whirls him around so he knocks over two stools and lands on his derriere, startle-eyed.

  “Get up’n fight!”

  The Smooth Man shuffles like a trained bear. The Hairy Man rises. The Smooth Man swings at him, misses, spins, falls. Twice more each. They assist each other, ascend their stools.

  “Onliest frien’ I got inna worl’.”

  “Can’t count on nobody but you.”

  They embrace, and weep upon one another’s shoulders. Quaff their beer. Heads together, they chuckle once again.

  “Rotten bassard, can’t say that ’bout my wife!”

  “You summitch, you said it ‘bout my wife firs’!”

  In almost an hour, neither lands a solid blow.

  Sitting beside me through this floor show is a lanky sandy-haired man with large knuckly hands scrubbed red and raw-looking. He thrums like a high-power line as he sprinkles salt in his beer to raise the head, drinks, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His change and cigarettes are in the wet puddle left by his glass.

  “Every fucking Friday night,” he says. He has a low, hoarse voice that makes me want to clear my throat.

  “Better than TV.” I gesture at the bartender for refills of his glass, my own. “Any work at the packing plant?”

  “You don’t want to work there. I’m a plugger and…” I do not know what a plugger is. He starts to roll up his left sleeve. I do not know what he is doing. Stitched up his forearm is an orderly row of white dimples. “Gook AR rounds in ’Nam.”

  I clear my throat, but there is nothing in my throat except the sound of his voice. I wish I had been old enough to go to Vietnam, see who I was, what I had. He nods as if I have spoken.

  “Agent Orange,” he says. I have never heard of Agent Orange. I am nineteen years old. “Why I got me this voice.” He raises the beer I have bought him. “Dead gooks,” he says.

  We drink to dead gooks. He puts his glass down.

  “We pack hogs. Cut their throats and hang them upside down on a conveyor. The bristles don’t get used for brushes any more, so we take ’em off with acid. Whole hog except the head gets dipped in the vat.”

  He waits as the bartender brings us our beers. He is nodding to himself and drumming on the bar with the fingers of both hands the whole while. He drinks beer.

  “If the acid gets under the skin, it’ll ruin the meat.”

  “But if the head doesn’t go in, how could the acid get-”

  “The other end does.”

  I sit for a long moment with him, then, as I assimilate what he is telling me, I drain my beer just as he drained his.

  “Yeah,” he says. “For eight fucking hours a day I shove corks up the assholes of dead pigs.”

  Late as it is and drunk as I get before the 1:00 a.m. bar-close, I drive on out of Austin. I pull off the road somewhere on the way to Albert Lea, throw up the night’s beer into a clump of willows, and sleep in my sleeping bag beside the car.

  I do not know if his story is true, but in the casual hour of our acquaintance he does not strike me as a fanciful man. A proud man, with nothing in his life to be proud of-back then, Vietnam vets are denied their public due-but not fanciful.

  So you see, I kill for existential reasons-if you can intuit the deductive validity of my argument.

  I grow as long-winded as Will. You wish only to know why I kill the Mafia underboss the newspapers call the Spic.

  What can I tell you? It is mere butchery, anyone could do it, not really my sort of thing at all. I have had no bad dreams about it, so my nightmare after Lenington was naught but aberration. Perhaps I et a bad oyster-remember that line by a drunken and delicious Kay Kendall in Les Girls?

  But I digress. Two days after the Spic’s assassination, I chance to read a one-inch piece about it in the New York Times, one of those much thinner editions distributed outside the five boroughs. Reading of it after the fact makes me feel strange-no, I am not going to tell you in which city or hamlet I read it. I do not wish you to know where these feats might take me; and tonight, after I end Will Dalton’s miserable existence, it will be, as Stepin Fetchit used to say, Feets, Do Yo Stuff.

  Since Spic Madrid is Chicano, an Hispanic voice sings my song of death to Stagnaro’s answering machine. I discover the voice at the mission church five miles down the road. He is happy to read my little note into the telepho
ne. He thinks it harmless fun. He thinks payment inappropriate, so I make a donation which I believe makes him happy. But who knows when dealing with a man of God?

  Perhaps Will Dalton, still droning on, is also, as the Latin has it, dis manibus sacrum — sacred to the gods of the underworld. I hope so; because soon he will join them.

  Do you really believe they will be there to welcome him?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,’” said Will. Looking around the hall, a fleeting pause at Dante.

  “Pretty familiar, isn’t it? Genesis, chapter one, verse one. I want to contrast that story, spanning six days, with the same story told by science, spanning 6 billion years. The Bible representing myth, science representing the rational mind, and here is the moment of intersection. Religionists might object to calling the Holy Bible myth; but certainly Genesis is the creation story (remember, myth can be more true than mere fact) best known to our Western minds.

  “Myth can tell us who we are-science, what we are. And here is where the attempt to equate creationism with evolution-to present them both as authoritarian belief systems-is bound to fail. Evolution is science; should it claim to be a belief system, it would make a lousy one. When creationism, a belief system, claims to be scientific, it makes lousy science. Here tonight, we seek not exacerbation, but intersection between the two systems. Is it possible, with science and myth telling two such wildly different stories?

  “Or do they? Genesis first: ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’

  “What says science of this birth? Science would go back before the making of the heavens and earth, to the making of the universe. Most astronomers today accept the Big Bang theory: an immense explosion 15 billion years ago that flung energy and pulverized matter out as far as space stretches. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan start the story of our earth 10 billion years later in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors:

  “‘There was once a time before the Sun and Earth existed, a time before there was day or night, long before there was anyone to record the beginning for those who might come after… An immense cloud of gas and dust is swiftly collapsing under its own weight.’

  “Almost ‘in the beginning,’ almost ‘once upon a time’-but not quite. In their version, matter already exists. And they take pains to point out, ‘Nothing lives forever, in Heaven as it is on Earth. Even the stars grow old, decay, and die.’

  “In the Bible’s account, only God is eternal. ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light…’

  “‘And God divided the light from the darkness… And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.’

  “In the beginning, God was already here. The God, the Baltimore Catechism tells us, Who ‘always was, and always will be, and always remains the same.’ In other words, God’s nature is to exist It’s what He does, all by Himself. There never was nothing, there always was Something — God. Self-creating. Self-sustaining.

  “Thus Genesis would say, nothing material lives forever. Would say, science’s immense clouds of gas and matter weren’t there until God created them, because it was not their nature to exist. Would perhaps say that the Big Bang was merely God’s hand-clap to create matter, and would ask, Where else could gas and dust come from- in the beginning?

  “Science is usually silent on beginnings-remember? — and only says this swirling mass of gas and dust, whatever its origin, soon collapsed under its own weight. The chaotic cloud became a thin disk, glowing a dull red in its exact center. During the next 100 million years, the central mass got whiter, more brilliant, until finally, some 5 billion years ago, it burst into sustained thermonuclear fire. The sun had been born.

  “‘Let there be light: and there was light.’

  “The two accounts don’t differ much after all, do they?

  “Inside that cloud, milling around that central fire, were a million or more small worlds, with a few thousand larger ones that eventually would collide and fuse together. All of this was occurring in a vast sparsely mattered intersteller vacuum within our galaxy, the Milky Way. Which, by the way, is only one of a hundred billion similar galaxies in the universe-where solar systems such as ours are being formed about one hundred a second.

  “As the dust settled, a vast array of little worlds made up of those colliding atoms and grains began revolving around our sun in a variety of slightly different orbits. Inevitably, they started ramming into one another. If the meeting was head-on, goodbye, worldlets. If it was a matter of gently intersecting trajectories, however, one larger world could be born from the fusing of two smaller ones.

  “Before long in astronomical terms-200 or 300 million years-just a relatively few larger bodies were left in established orbits around the sun, having escaped destructive collisions and having grown as smaller bodies hit them and were absorbed. They had become large enough, indeed, for their own spinning to have smoothed their irregular shapes into rough spheroids. One of them, third from our particular sun, had shaped itself into our earth about 4.5 or 4.6 billion years ago.

  “Meanwhile, back in Genesis, God was also busy creating the earth; but we need some rearranging to illuminate the parallels between the two accounts. So let’s for the moment move day four in Genesis ahead of day three.

  “‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years…

  “‘And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.’

  “In science’s story we have already seen the birth of the sun-‘the greater light to rule the day’-and of planet earth, and of those other countless planets and asteroids and small worlds Genesis calls stars. In both accounts we now have sun, earth, and stars all in place. In Genesis, too, the moon: ‘the lesser light to rule the night.’

  “So let’s hear science on the creation of the moon.

  “Despite it being now pretty much a sphere, earth was still colliding with smaller earths. Craters were gouged, debris flung up, ice became steam, and vapor shrouded our spinning world. The vapor trapped the heat from these continuing collisions, until the earth’s surface became a sea of molten lava.

  “From one such collision, a huge one, a sizable hunk of this molten magma was sent juddering off into space. Earth’s gravitational pull was so strong that this drifting chunk couldn’t escape, but began circling the earth in its own orbit.

  “When it cooled down it was the moon. In its circling, in turn, its gravity set up tides of molten magma on the earth’s surface and in its molten core, slowing its spinning and lengthening earth’s day from a few hours to something nearer the current twenty-four.”

  Will paused, took a drink of water. Dante came off the wall with a start and looked guiltily around, realizing that for the past few minutes he had been standing there literally openmouthed, the threat of Raptor’s attack forgotten. Hearing things he’d never heard before, totally absorbed, caught up. Seeing it all as if it were an animated reconstruction of the birth of the world on Nova or something. He heard it with a sense of wonder, something always in short supply in a cop’s life.

  And Will was going on. “So now we have the sun. We have the moon and the stars. We have the earth. We have the Bible’s years and seasons (says science, our orbit around the sun), and days (says science, our rotation on our axis).

  “Back to Genesis: ‘And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.’

  “Science says that by this time our galaxy had been pretty well swept free of gas and dust and debris and rogue worldlets running around smashing into everybody. The explosions of collision were disappearing,
with them the vapor that held their heat in, and the earth was starting to cool down. For a time, indeed, it literally froze-after its ocean of surface magma had solidified but before the bombardments had quite ceased-because the dust kept sunlight from reaching the surface.

  “But as the sun got through we warmed up, and had several million years of rain-yes, H 2 O as we know it today. With the dissipation of the dust atmosphere, a secondary atmosphere of outgassed water vapor was squeezed up from the earth’s interior. The sun shone fitfully through this new atmosphere, making more water by vapor condensation, water that trickled down to fill the lowlands of the no-longer-quite-frozen surface.

  “With this warming, history’s biggest hailstones, huge boulders of ice that had formed in the earth’s atmosphere, came raining back down to vaporize on contact. With them came many millions of years of torrential rain to form vast oceans.

  “Bringing us, in both versions of earth’s creation, to that vital moment when there suddenly was… life. ”

  Life. The word brought Dante out of his trance again. Life and death. And he remembered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Remembered being royally pissed off because Salvador Madrid was dead in Minnesota, unconnected to Moll Dalton’s death in any way Dante could imagine, yet Raptor had found another voice in which to send his third mocking message, four months after the first one last October. None of it made any sense. But he was still bugging Hymie about this latest tape.

  “Got my voiceprint yet, Hymie?”

  Hymie gave him a pained expression. “Sound spectrogram,” he corrected. “Yeah, I’ve got it-for what it’s worth.”

  “Hell, Hymie, if they’re as individual as fingerprints-”

  “A gross oversimplification.” Hymie opened his folder of printouts to jab a hairy-backed finger at the squiggles that looked like seismograph readings of earth movements. “This is a record of the frequency and strength of the voice signal through time. If the spikes and patterns don’t match, that means they contain frequencies not present in the target spectrograms.”