Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

Then Gounaris was there, moving easily through the entering throng, shaking hands and flashing white teeth in his dark face in a practiced smile. Dante, seated on the aisle, stood up abruptly.

“Be right back,” he said to Rosa.

He angled his way through the patrons coming up the stairs, and was right in front of Gounaris as the tall Greek was about to move down a row of seats.

“Mr. Gounaris! Pleasant surprise,” Dante said in a totally unsurprised voice.

Gounaris started back, a startled look on his face. He had been scanning the crowd for faces he knew before taking a seat.

“Our attorney sent you a letter about harassment-”

“This is just social.” Dante winked at him. “Hope you took my advice about those porn houses in the Tenderloin.”

He went back up to his seat, Gounaris’s stony eyes on him for a long moment before the Greek turned away to find a seat the others in his party were holding for him. Rosa was regarding Dante with shrewd disapproval.

“Gounaris, I take it.”

Dante grinned, pleased with himself. “In the flesh.”

“You had to do it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Handsome devil,” she said, and gave her little giggle.

The houselights went down and the film started before he could respond. It was powerful and wrenching, leaving the audience drained. Greek memories of Turkish atrocities were long, their lists of dead relatives longer still. At the end of the film, Dante looked for Gounaris, but he had slipped away during the film. Ruined your evening, thought Dante exultantly.

Afterward the four of them strolled across the avenue to Henry’s in the Hotel Durant for ice cream sundaes and coffee. The talk drifted to Greece. Almost every year Anna leased a yacht to take a group of Americans on a guided tour of the Greek islands.

“Usually the Aegean is very kind to us, very smooth, the food marvelous, the weather great, the people wonderful, the yacht terrific.” Her voice was soft with memory, but then her black eyes snapped like firecrackers. Her mother had fled Smyrna by boat just before the withdrawal, so the film had aroused a lot of memories for her. “But one year we stopped in Smyrna. We went into a Greek barbershop, and the man made us speak to him only in English. He said if the Turks knew we were Greek, we could get into a lot of trouble.”

“Even though you were American citizens?” asked Rosa.

Anna spooned more hot fudge over her ice cream. “Just speaking Greek would be enough.”

“The Armenians were killed first,” said Nikos. “Then the Greeks. Men, women, children-you were killed or you were marched out. Kill the men, rape the women, then kill them too.”

Nikos was a short, strong-looking man with a mustache and curly gray hair; like Anna, he was American-born but Greek-speaking. He had been in the American Navy during World War II, and American, Greek, and world history were his meat and drink. His blue eyes were filled with passionate outrage.

“When you think of all the gifts and talents destroyed! Doctors, lawyers, teachers-who knows, maybe one of them would have cured cancer or found the key to world peace!”

Rosa asked, “Are there many Anatolian Greeks in the Bay Area?”

“Certainly! A lot of them were in the audience tonight.”

“Ari Onassis was from Smyrna,” said Anna. “And Kosta Gounaris was from Constantinople.”

“He was at the film tonight,” said Nikos. “He left before the end of 1922. Dante seemed to know him.” There was little that Nikos’s quick eyes missed. Dante waved a dismissive hand.

“Interviewed him as a witness in a case a while back.”

“I didn’t see him,” said Anna in an almost offended voice, as if anyone prominent in the Greek community who didn’t greet her was not to be tolerated. Then she added, eyes gleaming with speculation, “I wonder why he would leave early?”

I could tell you, Dante thought; but he knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to involve them, even peripherally, in his case. And not just for him; for their sakes, too.

“A good-looking man!” said Anna with relish. “I remember him dancing the zembeikiko during the festival at our church in Castro Valley. He dances it like a Greek.”

“He’d drop to the floor, then leap into the air like an eagle,” said Nikos. “And he has to be over fifty years old!”

“Remember Georgios Stefanatos, used to come to dance class until his knees gave out?” asked Anna. “Didn’t he captain a Gounaris freighter at one time?”

“Haven’t seen him in years,” mused Nikos. “I wonder if he’s still living over in Marin?”

Anna laughed. “Do you remember the time he…”

Rosa joined in; Dante could tune out their reminiscences without being rude. Damn, he loved being a detective! There was a rhythm to it: he’d needed a window into Gounaris’s early life; but not being able to find one, he’d settled for coming to the Greek Film Festival in hopes Gounaris would see him there and be jarred into doing something ill-considered.

Gounaris had left before the end of the film, so his departure was noted. But there was more. Because Dante was here tonight, he had a chance to maybe get what he’d needed from the beginning. And he hadn’t had to abuse Rosa’s friendship with Anna and Nikos to do it. It had just dropped into his lap. He wondered if there was some Greek god he could thank for this bounty-he’d have to ask Rosa.

Because now he had that needed window into Kosta Gounaris’s life, if he was skillful enough to open it.

Georgios Stefanatos.

No phone, listed or otherwise, and Georgios Stefanatos did not show up on the Marin voter registration or property tax rolls. No car registered in his name, no driver’s license. No wants or warrants. But when Dante checked public utilities, there he was: single-party utilities, water, and sewage hookups at the Kappas Marina on Waldo Point Harbor in Sausalito.

When it had been big with the bootleggers in the 1920s, Sausalito had been a sleepy little Italian/Portuguese fishing village facing Belvedere Island across Richardson Bay just north of the Golden Gate. Then, reachable only by ferry. The Golden Gate Bridge had changed all that, bringing auto traffic to Marin. Dante’s fond Sausalito memories were from the seventies, when it had been a tourist town on the weekends but still wonderful midweek. Now it was jammed all the time, parking a permanent nightmare.

But Waldo Point was off Gate Six Road, the last stoplight on Bridgeway before the U.S. 101 North freeway entrance, thus outside the feeding-frenzy area. The sun was just setting behind dusk-purpled Mount Tam when Dante pulled onto the narrow blacktop behind the Marina Center, a sprawling gray two-story commercial complex. Fat wooden posts with loops of heavy chain slung between them separated the roadway from the stagnant little arm of Richardson Bay where the houseboats were moored.

He went through a gate in the fence and up a walkway of slanting planks to a locked and heavily barred metal gate. Yellow light shone down on twin banks of aluminum mailboxes, twenty-five to a side, with name slots on their fronts. No Stefanatos.

Beyond the locked gate, the pier stretched away like the railroad tracks in an art-lesson perspective drawing. From far down the dock a man was approaching. Up close he was lean and balding and black, with a round face and gentle eyes and wearing a black and silver Raiders windbreaker.

When he opened the gate to come out, Dante slid through.

“I’m looking for a houseboat owner, but he’s not listed.”

“I’ve been here sixteen years, I know just about everyone on the pier. I guess I’m about the oldest one around.” He chuckled; he had a deep bass voice and basso profundo laugh. “ Both ways, probably, it comes to that. If he’s got a boat here, I’ll know him.”