Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

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 realized 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.

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?