Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

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…

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?