Menaced Assassin Read online

  Will was on his feet again, all the blood drained from his face. It was a lie, a goddamned lie the fat cop had… Then he saw the look of pain for Will’s pain on the other policeman’s face. Endless infidelities by Moll over the years would explain so many things he’d steadfastly ignored. Ignored because…

  “Is this true?” he asked Dante softly.

  Both cops relaxed slightly. Dante sighed, nodded.

  “So Gounaris was just the last… the worst… of a…” He took in as huge a breath as he could, held it until colored spots danced before his eyes. He let it out softly. “I don’t believe I can answer any more of your questions right now. Perhaps after the funeral…”

  Dante paused to write on the back of one of his business cards, laid it on the edge of the coffee table as he followed his partner toward the foyer.

  “I’ve left you my card, Dr. Dalton. With my home number on the back. If you think of anything… or just want to talk…”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  Going down the old wooden steps to the sidewalk toward their car, Dante asked Tim, “So, what do you think?”

  “A very short fuse as regards his wife.”

  “Which means if he was going to do her…”

  “Yeah,” Flanagan said sadly, seeing the easy solution to the murder slip away, “he wouldn’t wait no friggin’ month.”

  Will sat with the mailer in his hand, almost afraid to open it since Flanagan had taken the lid off his life and let him peer down into the murky depths of his marriage, his wife, their love- love? The images of Moll with Gounaris rolled quickly before his eyes like the picture on a badly adjusted TV set, except the man now was faceless. Could Moll love him and…

  Yet what had changed so much, really? One man or five or fifty or five hundred, what did it matter when the central fact was infidelity? And a woman like Moll, looked at logically, how could his sole love have been enough for her? He knew about the hot-tub deflowering at thirteen, had seen the way her father looked at her, knew how many men had pursued her at Cal…

  But logic had little to do with it. He realized he was damned mad at her-enraged, in fact. He’d loved her-did love her-with such intensity, such single-minded devotion, and she was fucking everybody in town…

  No. He was who he was, Moll had been who she had been. He knew, despite everything, she had loved him as hard and as constantly as she was able. He, with his studies of primates and hominids, knew better than most what cold atavistic winds blow through the human psyche. Pneuma, the ancient Greeks had called it, the great wind of Nature, of the gods, of creation.

  Female chimps in estrus copulated thirty, forty, fifty times a day, with all the males of the troop they could find. And a woman’s genetic code was over 99 percent the same as a chimp’s, but she didn’t have to wait for estrus, could copulate every day with…

  And down below everything, below the massive human brain’s neocortex, was the much more ancient mammalian limbic cortex, and deeper yet, at the very base of the brain stem, was a reptilian core called the R-complex, which programmed basic sex, fear and aggression. The overlap between brains was not seamless; the lizard brain’s ancient neural impulses sometimes bled through to the higher control centers. Perhaps… with Moll… those atavistic urges…

  He blew out a long breath, picking up the packet, and with resolute fingers opened the folded flap she had stapled shut.

  It was four in the morning when Will finally made sense of the data on the disk Moll had sent. So simple yet so profound.

  If she had only seen him the night she had mailed this, when, he knew now, she had been frightened-but also still in thrall to Gounaris. So she’d delayed a night, to ask Gounaris about it, tell him she was going to see Will the next night. And if Will was interpreting the disk’s data correctly, he’d had to act fast. A phone call back east to… what was his name, Popgun Ucelli. Allay Moll’s fears so she would divulge nothing until she could be…

  If Gounaris had ordered Moll’s death, was Will Dalton ready to kill him? Oh, hell, of course not. Maybe it hadn’t been Gounaris at all, just someone he told about the discovery. Or maybe Stagnaro’s insinuations were wrong, maybe the floppy disk had nothing at all to do with her death.

  Stagnaro had said there was almost no mob activity in San Francisco; but he had also said, two bullets in the gun. If Will had been there with her, would he now be dead, too? Then why hadn’t they done it since? Because it was too soon after Moll had been killed? Both at once, okay, but serially it would look suspicious. Eventually, when the case had gone into the open file-which meant closed, he’d read somewhere-a hit-and-run… a fall down the steps… a random mugging…

  For the first time since it had happened, Will had something to think about besides his loss. The loss of himself. He was no hero, he didn’t want to die. He would give the disk to Stagnaro, tell him it had come from Moll, that its data was meaningless to him, but since it had been mailed on the night before her death he’d wanted to turn it in.

  Stagnaro already suspected a professional hit, so give him the disk, let him do the rest. He knew his job, Will was sure, would be good at it. Just as Will was good at his, studying wild apes. Until Moll’s death, he had planned two years in Uganda with the forest chimpanzees, even had his grant; so why not now? Going to the rain forest would give him a sense of purpose. The time to stick around would have been when Moll was still alive; now it was just an empty gesture.

  On the other hand, give the tape to Stagnaro and eventually everyone in the SFPD would know about it. That’s just the way bureaucracies worked. Since the tape had told him about a crooked cop on the force, Will might very well find himself worse off than he was now no matter how well Stagnaro did his job.

  There was the smart thing to do and the professional thing to do. The obviously heroic thing to do and the perhaps cowardly thing to do. Through the long night they merged and separated and paired up again in unlikely combinations in his mind. He wrestled with them until dawn was lightening the room through the lace curtains, but he finally made a tentative peace with his options and with himself.

  Dante went to Moll Dalton’s funeral, Tim Flanagan didn’t. Tim had no interest in an innocent Will, and he didn’t share Dante’s belief that Will had been slated as a second target for the hitman. Even if true, they’d be nuts to hit him this soon.

  There was a tense moment when Gounaris showed up at the closed-casket service in the mortuary chapel. Will sat stony-faced in his pew staring straight ahead. He did the same when Moll’s father entered. Interesting, thought Dante. Even more interesting, Moll’s mother wasn’t there. Most interesting of all, neither were Will’s parents.

  Afterward Dante went up to offer condolences as the others filed out for the cortege to the cemetery.

  “You thought any more about what I told you, Dr. Dalton? About the possibility that you were a target yourself?”

  “A great deal,” said Will. He was different today, lower-key, subdued. “Is there anything I can do to help with the investigation?”

  “Yes.” Dante was a bit surprised, but seized his chance. “There was a padded mailer on top of the other letters you brought in from the hall the other day. From Atlas, looked sort of like your wife’s handwriting. If she sent you something before her death…”

  The two men stared at one another; something electric passed between them, though neither would acknowledge it.

  “Tell me one thing candidly, Lieutenant. Is there any real hope you’ll catch whoever did this-assuming you’re right and it wasn’t just some nut?”

  “Possibly, if you help me out.”

  “Possibly? I don’t hear a lot of conviction in that. Even you don’t believe you’ll get them. No, I have nothing to tell you.” Will gave a slight shrug. “I’m grateful for your concern about me, but I’m leaving shortly on a two-year grant to study a troop of wild chimpanzees in an East African rain forest, where I’ll be out of the way of any possible danger.”

  Dante r
ealized he had been outmaneuvered. He hadn’t known how much he’d counted on learning the contents of that mailer until he found out he wasn’t going to.

  “I can’t stop you, of course. But before you go, please have the courtesy to stop playing goddam games with…”

  He paused. They were the last ones left in the room, but the professional pallbearers who would take the casket to the cemetery had entered, and his voice had been rising.

  “I have no games to play, but I do have professional obligations that don’t depend on your approval.” Will added, in a parody of his western background, “Anyway, Lieutenant, I reckon the danger’ll still be here when I get back.”

  That evening, the first of the series of phone calls Dante would receive from the man called Raptor was waiting on his answering machine when he got home from the funeral. The voice was heavy, guttural, a parody of Arte Johnson’s Laugh-In Nazi.

  “ Ich bin Raptor, Herr Policeman. I haff taken care uff de voman. Who iss next? You vill be hearink from me again, nein?”

  Raptor. Wasn’t that some predatory bird, an eagle, a hawk, something like that? And “Ucelli” meant bird-an odd name for the superstitious Sicilian mafiosi to trust their hits to, wasn’t it? Birds sang, after all.

  This Raptor was singing now, but not telling him anything. Trying to make Dante think he was Ucelli?

  Maybe something like this had spooked Will Dalton; he’d have to ask. Probably just a kook; but even though he didn’t, take it too seriously, he was just as glad Rosie was at her Greek dance class and fourteen-year-old Antonio was out in the kitchen scarfing down the pasta Dante had made for their supper. In the organized crime squad, he dealt only with the scum of the earth; he didn’t like it coming into his house, touching his family in any way.

  He erased the tape and went out to the kitchen to eat pasta and garlic bread and talk basketball with his son.

  PART TWO

  End of the Ordovician 439 m.y. ago

  About two weeks after you die, your phone calls start tapering off.

  Johnny Carson in monologue

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Here is Raptor, all those deaths later. My revels now are ended-or will be in a few hours. Looking back, I can only think of how succinctly Willy the Shake once put it:

  O proud death,

  What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,

  That thou so many princes at a shot

  So bloodily hast struck?

  Enough erudition. Let us consider the humble gene: a chloroplast will make a symbiotic attachment to a cell, and the cell will not eat it. How altruistic, we think. But no. The cell does not deny itself a tasty meal because it holds warm feelings toward chloroplasts. It refrains because in the history of unicellular life, cells that ate their chloroplasts died out while those that nurtured their chloroplasts survived.

  You see? Even at this submicroscopic level, altruism is only long-term selfishness. Self-interest is the norm for all life on earth. To wit: inside your body at this instant, legions of white corpuscles are rushing through your veins to slaughter in their tens of millions some army of invading bacteria which, unchecked, would kill you.

  What is life but the prelude to death? Nothing animate can live without killing something else. Did I say animate? Among plants, the competition for nutrients, underground water, and sunlight is equally fierce. Darwin found that on a two-by-three-foot plot of ground, 295 out of 357 sprouted seedlings were destroyed before they could mature.

  The creosote bush poisons the ground for fifty feet around it, so no other bush can live near and steal moisture precious for its existence. Pine forests lay down hardpan so undergrowth cannot crowd in below them and share their nutrients. Overstory trees keep sun and rain from the lesser trees beneath so even if they do not wither and die they will be stunted. Colorado aspens drop a poison on their own offspring around their boles to kill off eventual competition.

  The carnivore plants are even more ruthless. Venus flytraps et al. tempt insects into their brightly colored abdomens, slam their jaws shut, and digest the hapless insects alive without remorse for the prey’s slow agony as it turns to aspic.

  Now, I know that despite what the rest of Nature does, it is no small matter for us to take from another human being the one thing irreducibly his or her own. But is the killing of another person a difference in kind-or in mere degree-from taking the life of a wolf who I mistakenly believe has been killing my stock? Of a rabbit whom I wish to have for supper? From swatting a fly that is trying to lay its eggs in my food?

  Enfin, these others participate in life as fully as we, is it not so? And even as you and I, are they not just trying to live out their allotted span in whatever joy, sorrow, delight, and pain is given them? Do you know that perhaps as high as 50 percent of all human beings start out as twins, and that the twin who lives does so by subsuming and absorbing its own sibling in the womb, much like the Venus flytrap digests the insect?

  Ma foi, we humans do often abide killing our own kind through self-delusion. Every day women who speak words of nurture to their plants murder the unborn children in their wombs, on the scientifically unsound and morally specious argument that these little tailed people are not yet human be ings. How convenient! But do they not enjoy life at least as much as the philodendron enjoys Bach?

  I kill, but I do not kill indiscriminately. I kill those marked down to die, those who merit death, those who must be excised, like a brain tumor bent upon your destruction.

  That comic cop, Stagnaro, did not believe me or my comic German accent right after Moll Dalton died. But he soon did…

  And now, before the night is out, I will have my terminal bit of business with that dead woman’s living husband. La ronde. A wonderful circularity. Closure, in current argot. A grapefruit in the puss to you, Stagnaro! Top o’ the world, Ma!

  Dalton had fled me down the labyrinthian ways, but now one of us must die. I have promised you that he shall be allowed to strut at least some of his little hour upon the stage before I give him quietus: you and I are in for a long boring evening, aren’t we, as we listen to the speech that will be the final act of his meaningless little commedia.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “‘Not in innocence and not in Asia was mankind born. Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle, antique ways our hearts are yet pledged…’”

  Will Dalton looked almost challengingly around the conference hall. His gaze fell on Dante, leaning against the back wall, held his for a long, ironic moment.

  “That is the opening of Robert Ardrey’s seminal work, African Genesis, which caught the popular imagination, discomfited the scientific world, and in the years since 1961 has been dismembered and disemboweled by the pacific-minded with a ferocity that does more to support Ardrey’s beliefs about innate violence in man than anything he ever wrote.

  “Until I read African Genesis as a high school senior, I was going to be a paleontologist and solve once and for all the riddle of the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago at the K-T boundary. Ardrey fired me with a new purpose, because he set us squarely in the natural world and then said we are a ‘bad-weather animal’-implying that we forge ourselves in the crucible of disaster, that whatever man has become occurred after a changing environment drove him from the trees out into the savannah. Even then I had a sort of instinctual disagreement with Ardrey on that point-why driven out by bad weather or other animals? Why not adventuring out-because it was a fun and exciting thing to do?

  “But even so, Ardrey stole my heart from the dinosaurs and gave it to man. I would become a paleo anthropologist and find the moment our line parted from that of the great apes. It was as a budding paleoanthropologist that I was first invited to Hadar nine years ago, after a hominid conference in Paris.

  “One night during dinner-corned beef hash mixed with rice, washed down with Lemon Squash laced with a capful of rum, many here know the gourmet delights of living in the field-a gamin — faced French fe
llow post-doc introduced me to the vision of a renegade Jesuit named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. She lent me a book in French of his writings; it was heady reading by lantern light in a white nylon tent on the site where our Institute’s Don Johanson and his team had discovered those multiple Australopithecus afarensis remains they dubbed Lucy and the First Family.

  “Heady reading indeed! ‘Everything is the sum of the past,’ Chardin wrote. ‘Nothing is comprehensible except through its history.’ He claimed that man was spiritually as well as mentally evolving. Science couldn’t ask why — it could only ask how. Chardin was asking why; myth and story asked why; suddenly I was suffused with a need to do the same.

  “Lucy and the First Family were left to tell the tale, but what tale? Questions concerning their understanding of life would not even be a legitimate scientific inquiry. Only storytellers, artists, and mythmakers could consider such unscientific questions. But I was a scientist.

  “From the time of scientism in the nineteenth century, science had been preaching that nothing is real that is not palpable. Well, after all of this concern with the real, with matter, what did we, divorced from our animal nature and at war with our planet, have to show for it?

  “We had the facts. Did we have the truth?

  “By chance, on our way back from Paris we took a two-day stopover in Boston. At the Museum of Fine Arts I saw the original Gauguin Tahitian painting he called, D’ou venons nous? que sommes nous? ou allon nous?

  “All the way back here to San Francisco, I couldn’t get that painting and its title out of my mind.

  “‘Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’

  “Science alone couldn’t even ask these questions, let alone answer them. Yet modern man’s nature was bound up inextricably not only with our genetic heritage and the strange twisting ways of extinction and evolution from much earlier times, but also with the myth and ritual of our early Homo sapiens years.