Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  A victory, but bad tactics. Will’s glasses showed him that as soon as Andy had torn off in pursuit of poor old Lefty, Knuckles had sidled up to Shady Lady with his penis erect. She presented, he mounted her, thrust to completion. They uncoupled, turned away from each other as Captain Hook slipped up behind her to take his turn.

  And to be charged by a roaring Andy, newly returned. But the Captain was no Lefty. He stood his ground for several seconds, jumping up and down and screaming insults in turn.

  Long enough for Shady Lady to spot another as yet unseduced male eating figs behind a screen of foliage, and climb up to present. When he mounted her, Will saw that he was Zonkers, whose distinctively short, light hair showed his unusually well muscled physique to good advantage.

  Will called him Zonkers because he was the first chimp crazy enough to take Will at face value when he had connected up with one of the troops in the forest. Zonkers not only tolerated him as a silent watcher, but by his nonchalance at Will’s presence made the scientist at least partially forgettable and thus partially invisible to the other chimps.

  Then Zonkers became as curious about him as he was about them. Zonkers would fake charges, rushing along a limb toward him, slapping the smooth bark with his hands. Will would scratch under his arm and exhibit other nonaggressive behavior, and Zonk would return to his fruit, his sta tus raised among the other males by his daring maneuver. Sometimes, if alone, he would sit in a tree for a half hour just staring at Will fifty yards away, then drop down to disappear into the understory foliage and pant-hoot away into the distance.

  Zonk didn’t have his permanent canines yet, suggesting he was a couple of years from full adulthood-maybe thirteen years old. Since the chimpanzee life span, barring sickness or accident or fatal wounding, could reach around forty, he was a wonderful connection who could be a valuable asset for years to come.

  But he was so much more than just an asset. After those first encounters, Will had seen him often enough that a sort of long-distance relationship had grown up between them. Then one day Zonkers had dropped out of a fig tree a hundred feet ahead and had strolled provocatively-if the chimps’ rolling side to side knuckle-walking could be called strolling-down one of the tunnel-like game trails through the thick underbrush. And Will had followed, crouched and stealthy, praising himself on moving so quietly that Zonkers didn’t even know he was back there.

  After some twenty minutes, during which he never caught another glimpse of the ape, Will paused in a small clearing to stand erect and stretch his stiff back-he had to move through the tunnels bent over because he was so much taller than the chimps.

  A dozen yards ahead was Zonkers, sitting on a tree limb that extended over the trail. He had his elbows on his knees and his chin resting on the backs of his crossed wrists, and was studying Will intently. When he met Will’s eyes, he made a funny grimace that was surely a grin, stood, stretched himself, and melted into the understory foliage without sound or even apparent movement. He obviously had arranged the whole scenario.

  An even more remarkable encounter came a month later, when Will was hurrying back to his hut at dusk, having kept vigil at a huge dawei tree where the chimps were feeding. He had stopped to pick a pocketful of figs to stretch his own din ner, and had no flashlight. Stumbling over a clump of twisted roots on the narrow footpath, he went down on one hand and one knee. When he started to push himself erect, Zonkers was sitting on the path only ten feet away, regarding him intently over one shoulder.

  This was the sort of close encounter he had only dreamed of. Zonkers wrinkled his forehead and briefly scratched his left arm. His fingers sounded like sandpaper on his rough hide. Will immediately sat down and scratched himself vigorously in the same way. Zonkers didn’t move away and didn’t even look nervous, only unsettled. What further was possible?

  Will slowly reached into his pocket for his figs. He had eight of them-which by chance was, observation had taught him, just about what a chimp could stuff into his cheeks at one time. Will held them in his open hand, then very very slowly leaned forward and even more slowly stretched out his hand and with a little flick of the wrist tossed the figs in a compact clump to the path about five feet from Zonk.

  Neither moved for a full minute, although Zonk’s eyes, more calculating than cautious, flitted continually from the figs to Will and back to the figs again. Then, ever so slowly, he leaned toward Will and stretched out one of his long arms, and his long flexible hairy-backed fingers closed around the figs. He only got seven of them, one was left on the trail. He stood erect, stuffing the figs into his mouth.

  Then he gave a sudden yelp, leaped toward the last fig-and incidentally, Will-scooped it up, and in a second bound was gone into the undergrowth. Will blundered home wet and muddy and insect-stung long after dark, finding the hut more by accident than skill, but happier and more excited than he had been at any time since Molly had died.

  And now here was Zonk again, getting laid, if dog style-chimp style? — could be called by that term. Will marked the time in his notebook-twenty-seven seconds. World-class for a chimp. But when he reapplied the binocs to his eyes, Shady Lady already was having it off with another, Old Blue. Six seconds.

  So much for true love. Will busied himself with his notes, but he was feeling something… wrong about the observing. As if he didn’t have the right. As if it violated something in his one-sided bond with the animals. So the next hour of Shady Lady’s sexual activities came to him almost as tableux, when he would look up from his notes and raise the binoculars to his eyes for the quick observation the scientist in him made de rigueur no matter what his personal feelings.

  At first, Randy Andy was successful in his possessive mating strategy. For nearly half an hour he was making it with Lady about every ten minutes. None exceeded fourteen seconds in duration.

  Finally Randy was all through-he couldn’t get it up any more. He returned to his figs. Shady Lady was of sterner stuff; she was insistent. He moved away, she followed; Will’s binocs were tight on his face at that moment, and he could have sworn he saw alarm there. He was sure of it when Shady Lady began tweaking Andy’s flaccid penis in hopes of getting a little action. Andy-Randy no more-fled, shrieking.

  Will lowered his glasses, lowered his head, scribbled furiously in his notebook. He felt strange, had a choking sensation in his throat, a burning in his eyes.

  When he looked up again, the other eight male chimps were lined up to take turns on the complaisant, indeed demanding, Lady in what scientists liked to call opportunistic mating. Will suddenly remembered a book by an apostate Hell’s Angel he had read years before. The man had turned state’s evidence against his former associates concerning a couple of cold-blooded murders, and had gone into the witness relocation program.

  His book had been full of raunchy anecdotes about Angel activities in the swinging sixties, including that feature of every encampment, Angels lining up for a gang bang on some complaisant, indeed demanding, Mama. They called it pulling a train-because at the head of the line, on her back in some thicket, was the Mama taking them all on one after the other, puffing and chuffing like a locomotive.

  Will was too far away from Shady Lady in her thicket of mucuso leaves to know if she was grunting like a locomotive pulling a train or not, but there were the males lined up with very little time between mountings, each taking ten to fifteen seconds for the act, then moving to the end of the line for another turn.

  Will knew he was observing an extreme end of the chimp spectrum of sexual behavior in the wild; at the other end, as with humans, was pair-bonding. And unlike Shady Lady this time, most female chimps in heat would have a nursing infant doing his shrieking, biting, hair-pulling best to interrupt his mother’s couplings-a new baby would take her attention from him, thus reduce his chances for survival.

  Finally all were through-worn-out. Exhausted. Not Shady Lady. She put a move on the closest ape, Captain Hook, but he gave a shriek of alarm and fled at her approach. She stood lookin
g after him, one hand between her legs in momentary, absentminded masturbation, then spotted Old Gray higher in the tree and took off after him.

  Damn! Raindrops were hitting the pages of Will’s notebook. Then he realized they were tears, not raindrops, and belatedly knew what the tightness in his throat and burning in his eyes had been.

  For the second time in his adult life, Will Dalton was crying, silently at first, then sobbing aloud, shoulders hunched.

  Moll. He had been seeing Moll there through his field glasses, Moll with a line of eager, raunchy men waiting their turn at her, Moll puffing and grunting and pulling her sexual train while he stood aside and watched, Moll whom he wanted and needed… Where was the difference?

  And what difference did it make? He loved her, wanted her, craved her, lusted after her, needed her, no matter who she was or what she had done. And she was gone. Unfairly, undeservedly dead and gone and buried and he was still here.

  So he cried, cried as if he would never stop, cried out of his grief and rage and loss and anger, cried there in his little crushed nest of ginger and ferns, cried at last for Molly as he had been unable to cry at her funeral. As he had begun to cry for her at his home until the two cops had arrived with their good-guy bad-guy routine to disabuse him forever of his naive delusions of their love together…

  He realized that for some time a consoling arm had been draped across his shoulders, long fingers had been gently patting his upper arm. Will turned his head, slowly, unbelievingly. Zonkers was sitting beside him, his long arm around Will’s quaking shoulders, offering silent comfort for his vocal grief. When, in his shock and amazement, he stopped wailing, Zonkers suddenly was gone, leaving only swaying branches behind him.

  Will stood up also, almost overwhelmed by a great uprush of emotion. Chimps couldn’t cry, couldn’t possibly feel sorrow. Not as a human being did. Only Zonkers had. Had known those sounds Will Dalton was making were sounds of desolation, and had known, somehow, what desolation meant. And had offered comfort.

  Will thought feverishly, he would stay here forever. His supplies were all but exhausted. So what? He would live as the chimpanzees did.

  Better than that, he would make Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fantasy creation of Tarzan a reality. He would join the troop. Live on fruit, maybe the occasional monkey or small antelope the chimps and him, hunting in unison, could catch. He would lead them through the forest, learn from them, teach them to avoid poacher’s snares, would cut the snares that couldn’t be avoided off their arms and legs before the limb could drop off from lack of circulation…

  Meanwhile, his notebook was bulging with new observations that would have to be rerecorded and systematized, but Zonk comforting him would never be passed on to his colleagues. Few would believe it, but beyond that, it would be a betrayal of whatever had reached across 5 million years to bind them together in mutual distress and comfort.

  So it was Will Dalton, ethologist, who dazedly gathered up rucksack, notebook, pen, binoculars, moving on automatic. This was crazy stuff, this was total emotional breakdown. Yet the bursting forth of his desolation and loss, and the ape’s genetic understanding of it, had told him he had to complete his work. He had been wavering, vacillating; now he knew he had made the right choice. It was as Ardrey had said: our hearts were indeed pledged to the animal world’s subtle, antique ways.

  Meanwhile, he was down to a quarter kilo of coarse-ground white corn flour that he could cook with water to make posho, that standard of East African field cuisine. For now, it was time to leave.

  He checked the mucuso one last time. It teemed with the two local monkey species, sooty mangabeys and redtails, gobbling the ripe figs left by the apes. The twenty-pound mangabeys wore their correct charcoal business suits, but the redtails, half their size, were dressed like clowns: long burnished coppery tails, white bellies and black backs, with a white spot on the end of their noses like clown makeup. Everyone chittered and called and scolded.

  The chimps might never have been. So for now it was goodbye, Shady Lady and Randy Andy, Captain Hook and Brandy and Knuckles and Lefty. The vagaries of rain forest life, especially the poachers, meant any or all could be dead when he returned.

  Robinson Jeffers’s line from “Hurt Hawks” leaped into his mind: I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk… Or a chimp.

  The chimpanzees were his godparents, his uncles and aunts, his cousins, his nieces and nephews, and he loved them.

  Especially Zonkers. Twin. Brother.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Hey, brother, can you spare an apartment? Only kidding. The bothersome old man with the canary soon would be gone.

  For some twenty hours he’d been defending what he’d called his “turf”-sitting on the sidewalk in front of Otto Kreiger’s building on Sixth Street south of Market. On paper, of course, the building belonged to the bottom drawer of a file cabinet in a Cayman Islands real estate office.

  Really quite a comical old man, resting his canary cage on one thigh and his butcher knife on the other. Runover shoes and a three-piece suit, a tattered Persian mg under his rocking chair, both chair and rug from the apartment he had refused to quit until he’d been carried down to the sidewalk in his rocker. There, smelling bad, he’d stayed, courtesy of a temporary restraining order on his behalf by Legal Aid. But the TRO had expired an hour before without being translated into a preliminary injunction.

  The slightly rotund but pretty-faced black woman cop was being a hell of a lot gentler than Kreiger would have been, probably because TV news cameras were recording the event even though it was only eight-thirty in the morning. Kreiger was just there, one of the crowd.

  “Mr. Kreplovski,” the cop said, “won’t you give me the knife? You don’t want anyone to get hurt, do you, sir?”

  Kreplovski just sat there looking bewildered. Kreiger hoped he would take a slash at the black broad, put himself in the wrong. But just then the morning sun touched the cage and the canary started singing joyously. The old man looked at the bird with his mad blue eyes, then handed over the blade.

  “Thank you, Mr. Kreplovski.”

  Kreiger, standing in the crowd, said, “I bet she’s from hostage negotiations. Smart move to bring her in.”

  “This fucking town,” said the man next to him.

  The woman cop was saying, in the same reasonable tone of voice, “You know we’re going to have to remove you now, don’t you, Mr. Kreplovski?”

  “I know my Sarah died in that apartment. I know I want to die there, too.”

  “In a few days there won’t be any apartment,” she said brightly. Two burly uniforms were moving up on either side of her. Somebody jeered at them, but the presence of a black woman, though herself a cop, tended to dampen the crowd’s hostility.

  “Why can’t they just let me die with the building?”

  “Who would take care of your canary?” she asked in a reasonable voice.

  That seemed to clinch it for the old man. The two burly blues crouched, got hold of the bottom of the chair and came erect with it, and Mr. Kreplovski, and the canary. They carried all three across the sidewalk toward the waiting ambulance.

  “Clever,” said Kreiger to the man next to him. “Ambulance instead of a paddy wagon. Good public relations.”

  “This fucking town,” said the man, shaking his head.

  Old Kreplovski turned to look up at the vacated apartment building as they put him and his canary into the ambulance. Tears were running down his cheeks from his startling blue eyes. The crowd started to cheer, then to applaud him.

  Kreiger sighed, “Progress.”

  “You fucking asshole,” the man next to him said, and stalked off.

  Kreiger toyed with the idea of calling up someone to teach him a lesson; but walking back up to his office on Sutter Street, he forgot about the fool. He had won. Kreplovski had been the last tenant of the run-down old apartment building. Now it could be torn down to make way for the offices and arcade Kreiger already
had gotten the permits for from the city. He’d had to pay a few people off, but it was just part of doing business in a candy-ass town prizing environmental awareness.

  Whether it made money or not was largely immaterial anyway: he would be washing large sums from the newly reviving heroin trade through it during demolition and after construction.

  It had been three and a half months since the hit on Spic Madrid, and today, finally, Otto Kreiger was making his move. At first, truth be told, he had been terrified. Unlike the FBI and the St. Paul police, he had no doubts at all about who had ordered the killing, and no doubts at all about why.

  He stopped for the light on the corner of Third and Mission; across the intersection was the Rochester Big and Tall that had been there as long as he could remember. In the early days he’d bought his own suits there, 50 long.

  Obviously, Martin Prince had seen in Spic’s muted opposition at the meeting of capos a direct challenge to his own authority. Kreiger had shown the same muted opposition. Spic had voted to have the baby-raper down in Los Angeles hit; so had Kreiger. They had been overridden, three to two, in the show of hands. Normally, that would have been the end of it.

  But in this case, the end hadn’t come until a week later, when Spic had been gunned down in his St. Paul headquarters.

  Otto Kreiger hadn’t been gunned down. Yet.

  “Yet” was why, the day after Martin Prince had called with sadness in his voice to tell him of Spic’s sudden end, he had gone to a private security firm and had hired around-the-clock personal protection for himself and his family.

  It was degrading, but getting dead was even more degrading.

  Two days after he had hired them, his wife came striding into his study straight from her stables, still in riding boots and jodhpurs, anger in her wide-set blue eyes, slapping her riding crop in her gloved left hand.

  “Otto, that new stablehand you hired has to go!”