Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin

“I need to see you.”

More silence. Stretching out, attenuating itself like spun glass at the end of the blower’s tube.

She had only herself to blame. Moll had discovered that what she needed more than anything else in this world was to fuck power. It was her ultimate aphrodisiac. And while Will was in western Sumatra for six months observing orangs, she had developed an almost hysterical passion for Kosta Gounaris.

Gounaris was tall and dynamic, had created a Greek shipping line that had made him rich, and was now president of Atlas Entertainment-hence, nominally Moll’s employer. A beak-nosed, muscular, well-conditioned fifty-five, Kosta had a great deal of black body hair that really turned Moll on, and all that power that turned her on even more.

Will’s life changed forever when the monsoon arrived early and he came home from Sumatra a week ahead of time, without telling Moll because he wanted to surprise her. Surprise her he did, and himself besides, by walking into her San Francisco penthouse to become that universal figure of fun, the cuckolded husband.

Will found Moll in the bed where he’d been planning they should make long and tender love, half-lying between Kosta Gounaris’s wide-spread hairy legs, sucking his cock.

They both heard the door open, Gounaris turning to look lazily over his shoulder, Moll able to see past him to Will’s shocked and astounded face. Gounaris turned back to Moll.

“Here it comes, baby,” he told her with sudden urgency, “a real gusher,” and came in her mouth.

And Moll, even though horrified for Will to see her this way, was at that moment totally, completely in thrall to Kosta Gounaris and his power. So she paused only long enough to raise her head and wink at her husband and say, “Welcome home, honey,” before returning to her work.

Gounaris threw back his head and roared with delight at such pungent wit, as Will was staggering from the apartment and across the hall into the still-waiting elevator, his skin red and mottled, his face full of nausea, his chest heaving as if he were having a heart attack. Those horrific visual images had burned away all thought of defending his manhood or his marital bed.

Half an hour later he was sufficiently recovered to return, deadly of purpose, but by then the apartment was deserted. And by the next day he had convinced himself he wasn’t a true son of the Old West after all, where blood was the ransom of betrayed manhood, but rather was just another civilized modern urban wimp.

Moll hadn’t seen her husband since that night, and he hadn’t been returning any phone calls. A month ago, an eon ago, for both of them. Tonight she’d caught him, but Will’s silence had become positively thunderous.

“Need to see me,” he finally repeated in a flat voice.

“ Need to,” Moll affirmed.

At least he hadn’t hung up. Oh God, she thought, if only she hadn’t hurt him so. If only she’d just… just clung to his strengths, asked him to stay home with her. He would have. He was the only man who had ever truly loved her. Now…

Now she said in a rush, “Please, please, meet me, Will. I need to talk… to ask…”

“When?”

“Tonigh-” She checked herself. “Tomorrow night, seven o’clock? That Italian place on Jackson where we used to…”

He sighed. “All right, Moll. Tomorrow at seven. But I could be there tonight in thirty min-”

“Tomorrow,” she said quickly, almost sharply.

She hung up almost ashamed of herself, because she knew why she hadn’t made it tonight, right now, as he had offered, as she had intended when she had called him. In twenty minutes she wanted to be at the penthouse with Kosta’s cock buried in her up to the hilt. Needed to be at the penthouse.

And maybe Kosta would have an explanation. Maybe… maybe she was misinterpreting the data she had run across by accident in the computer. Maybe…

No. She was too smart to kid herself that much. She had found what she had found, and even though she would ask Kosta about it, she still had to tell Will about it too. At the last minute she put the disk she’d made into a mailer, addressed it, and dropped it down the mail chute in the hallway beside the elevator on her way to the penthouse and Kosta.

In the penthouse, Kosta had mounted Moll from the rear in the dog style that was an unconscious preference from his early years as a koritsopoulo, a girl-boy in a Turkish brothel, thrusting into her with long slow almost lazy strokes. Over forty years before this night, his ticket out of that Istanbul slum had been the aging Turkish pederast who ran the brothel and kept his strongbox under the floor. Kosta had waited his chance.

After they were finished, lying side by side on the bed, Moll panted out something about a “thing” in the computer she didn’t understand.

Kosta asked, in an amused voice, “You sure it isn’t my thing in you-or did the mouse get off the pad and into the hard disk?”

“No, in the data there was a… a sort of chart… A breakdown of percentages… names and figures… banks… all in a sort of code… I found it by accident, got intrigued, started playing around with it on my own time…”

“What do you think it means?” he asked as if fascinated instead of feeling sick to his stomach. “You know I am an idiot with that demented little electronic jack-in-the-box.”

“I think it means that the money behind Atlas Entertainment comes from organized crime, not the Common Market.”

“What?” he cried, sitting bolt upright on the bed. “My God, what are you telling me?”

“Finally, that was the only way I could interpret the entries.” She was delighted with his reaction; if Kosta had been involved himself, had started making excuses…

He swung around to face her, took her hands in his.

“I sold Gounaris Shipping, my Molly, because I was tired of being a playboy. I didn’t take your father’s offer to head Atlas Entertainment to become a pawn of the… what should I say, the mob.” He was off the bed, pulling on his clothes with manic energy. “I’m going to start finding out about this right now. If there is dirty money in Atlas Entertainment, they will have my resignation on their desks immediately.” He paused in zipping up his pants, frowning. “You haven’t told anyone else about…”

“Of course not, not until I had a chance to talk with you.”

“Good, good,” he said. “To be fair, I don’t think either of us should mention it until we’re sure that’s what the file really means.”

Moll felt terrible. She had made that call to Will… Her voice stopped him as Kosta pulled on his shirt.

“Sweetheart… I… made a date with Will for tomorrow night at Bella Figura. I was going to… talk with him about it, but now I’ll cancel it-”

“No no no, my love.” He gestured expansively. “I will be back from Los Angeles with all the facts before then. If it is true, we will shout their perfidy from the rooftops. If I find there is a reasonable explanation…” He shrugged and finished buttoning his shirt and smiled. “Then you will just have a pleasant evening with another man.” He leaned down to take her chin in a lean brown hand and gently kiss her on the lips. “But no fooling around with your husband, you understand? Kosta Gounaris is a jealous lover.”

After he was gone she remembered she’d mailed off the disk, but it didn’t matter since Kosta was not implicated.

Outside in the corridor, he leaned against the wall beside the express penthouse elevator, weak as a baby, in much the same state as Will a month before but for very different rea sons. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. Being a ruthless and powerful man himself, he knew the almost unspeakable ruthlessness and power of those to whom he had sold himself so many years before.