Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“And then had the kid snuffed?”

“Yeah. Insurance agent smelled a rat, came to us, we went after the guy, hard, he split open. I’d like to see the ratfink fucker fry, and he might just. But…” He shrugged, reached for a doughnut. “Fuck ’im. So you can’t connect Madrid in St. Paul with Dalton or our own Jackie-baby?”

“Madrid was in Vegas last week with three, four other mob figures who could be connected with Atlas Entertainment, but…” Dante shrugged in turn. “One was in for a new golf course opening, one to look at horses, one to hear an opera singer, Spic to ogle the showgirls…”

“They all stay at the Xanadu?”

Dante nodded. “And a few days after they leave, Spic gets wasted with Popgun Ucelli’s trademark M.O.-only the feds can’t get Popgun out of Jersey at the time of the hit. I think he knows they’re tapping him.” He stood up, started pacing. “If it’s a power play inside the mob, why Moll Dalton? Why Jack Lenington? If it isn’t mob-related, why the mob-style hits, why Spic Madrid by the same M.O.?”

Flanagan leaned back and put his elbows on the arms of his creaking swivel chair and tented his fingers in front of him.

“Maybe your givens are fucked. Maybe you gotta get some fresh data. See it in a new light. You ever check out that Interpol material on Kosta Gounaris you asked for?”

“Tim, sometimes you aren’t entirely stupid.”

“Yeah, I think you’re a great guy, too.”

Dante’s Organized Crime Task Force office was in a converted storage closet between two jury deliberation rooms on the court floor. To get there, a visitor had to go by the monitored desk from the public corridor to the private back hall connecting the judges’ chambers, and even then had to know precisely how to find him. No windows, but he liked it. It held three desks, four chairs, two three-drawer file cabinets with good locks, and a blackboard with the preliminary findings he didn’t mind being made public drawn neatly on it in red chalk.

In sharp contrast to Tim’s cluttered desk, Dante’s held a computer and screen, a Laserjet IIP printer Rosa had given him two Christmases ago, IN and OUT files squared on different corners, and a family portrait taken by a professional photographer for the church yearbook: Rosa, himself, and the kids when both of them had still been home.

Neither Danny nor his other inspector, Jamie Fraser, was in, so he started methodically through the Interpol response to his request for information on Gounaris.

Born of Greek parents in Istanbul just before World War II (no birth record available). Reputedly a child prostitute at the age of twelve in a brothel run by a Turkish pederast called Mustapha (last name not known). (Probably) disappeared from the brothel and Istanbul at age fifteen, just when Mustapha (maybe) was found in his bedroom with his throat slit (perhaps) and (rumor stated) the floorboards pried up to get at something hidden underneath.

Three years later, a teenager (reputed) to be Gounaris was in Greece, running cigarettes and booze into Turkey, raw opium back out. Was befriended (unconfirmed) by an American businessman (name unknown), who (supposedly) was in Athens to set up the importation of Greek cloth to the United States…

No birth record available… last name not known… probably… maybe… perhaps… rumor stated… reputed… unconfirmed… name unknown… supposedly…

The dossier didn’t become factual until the 1960s, when twenty-one-year-old Kosta Gounaris bought a single rusted old British tramp steamer and began hauling putatively legitimate cargoes in and out of the Levant. After that the file was mostly media coverage as he expanded, buying freighters and tankers, becoming Gounaris Shipping as his fame and wealth increased along with the inevitable Onassis comparison. The file ended with his sale of Gounaris Shipping to a consortium of other Greeks.

The portrait of a tough survivor who dragged himself out of the slums and ended up president of a huge multinational company. The American dream played out in a thousand American ghettos and exported all over the world ever since World War II.

Dammit, something of use had to be there…

Who did he know was Greek might help him out with Gounaris? There was the man’s discarded wife, of course, living in a suburb of Athens called Maroussi; but Dante spoke no Greek, could never get departmental approval to go to Greece and talk with her, and knew it was useless to ask the Greek cops to interview her for him. If he didn’t know the questions he wanted to ask, how could he expect them to?

He needed someone who might have been involved in Greek shipping after the war, might have known Gounaris firsthand, might have heard some rumors about him. There were Greek cops on the San Francisco police force, but he couldn’t go to them; his habitual M.O. and his cop’s paranoia made it essential that his informant be unconnected with the department.

Dante was sort of helping Rosa with the dishes-she washed, he dried what didn’t go into the dishwasher-when he got his idea. He’d already poked into Gounaris’s business life at Atlas Entertainment; maybe he could poke into his private life a little also, in ways that would shake him up without bringing another stinging letter from St. John as head counsel for Atlas.

“You know that Greek movie festival over in Berkeley at the Pacific Film Archives you were talking about? Who goes to something like that?”

Rosa laughed. “Me, for one thing. Maybe you-have you forgotten you said you wanted to-”

“I mean, do a lot of Greeks go?”

“Mostly Greeks.”

“Prominent ones?”

She looked at him shrewdly. “Okay, big boy, what’s going on? When you start treating me like a witness to a murder…”

So they sat on the couch and talked. Through the wall from the bedroom where Tony was supposedly studying came the beat of an album called Rembrandt Pussyhorse by an obscure vile punk band he had chosen to shock his folks with, the Butthole Surfers. The Surfers actually weren’t too bad, but Dante always objected very conscientiously to whatever band Tony chose; he didn’t want to deprive him of the joy of blowing his parents’ minds.

Dante told Rosie about the Interpol reports.

“Gounaris had to get investment capital from somewhere to buy his first freighter, then to expand. He wasn’t going to get it from the World Bank, that’s for damn sure.”

“So if the American cloth buyer was Mafia…”

“I’d have the connection I’m looking for. It’s so thin that if it turns sideways you can’t see it, but it fits the other facts I have right now. If Atlas Entertainment is a mob front, there has to be some earlier point of connection between them and Gounaris-they didn’t pick him off the street.”

“Will he be at the Greek Film Fest? Probably, at least for some films. The Greek community is pretty cohesive, and this is a big event.” She clapped her hands. “Of course! 1922! He’ll have to go to that one. He’s a Greek from Turkey, and 1922 is a film about the extermination of the Greek colony in Smyrna after the Greek Army was withdrawn. Those who didn’t get on the boats were sent on a death march through Asia Minor. Almost all of them died. It’s showing this weekend.”

The theater at the Film Archives was intimate, its banks of seats steeply angled so there was no trouble seeing the screen over the heads of the people in front of you. Also no trouble seeing the people coming in through the curtained doorway to the right of the screen

They sat with Anna Efstathiou, who taught Rosa’s dance class, and Nikos Xiotras, Anna’s lifelong friend and associate in Greek dance instruction. Anna was a tall, quick-moving woman with utterly black hair and huge, beautiful, penetrating eyes in a strong and unforgettable face. She and Nikos were almost constantly waving, calling, laughing, chatting over the recorded bazouki music.