Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“Georgios Stefanatos?”

“Georgie? The only guy on West Pier older than I am-by age, not by longevity on the dock.” He gestured at the nearest houseboat. “You’re almost standing on his deck.”

The boat was some thirty feet long, built over a faded maroon metal hull with a somewhat upswept prow. The out-slanting wooden superstructure had been built on top of that, vertical boards going up to a steeply slanted cedar shake roof with two miniature chimneys. Lines ran down into the water for electricity, gas, water and sewage. Dante expected Popeye to pipe him aboard.

“It’s unusual compared to the rest of ’em-was a real boat before it was converted to a houseboat. Doesn’t look like Georgie’s home right now, but he never goes very far. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you waited on his afterdeck.”

A faded maroon awning covered half the boat’s stern; there was a riot of ivies and ferns and herbs in clay pots or tattered woven baskets. Two of them rested on old wicker chairs. A pair of gulls swam around in the seaweed behind the houseboat; in the gathering darkness, the water was a dirty green.

Dante sat down gingerly in a sag-bottomed old canvas lawn chair, and promptly fell asleep. Georgios Stefanatos woke him up an hour later when he wheeled his ten-speed aboard.

“I was up at the Cafe Trieste in town, you know it? On Bridgeway.” The old man chuckled. He was in his late seventies and had a gray beard and a blue denim Greek fishing hat smashed down on thick gray curly hair. His eyes were shrewd and dark and full of life. “I can bullshit about my seafaring days with the weekend sailors getting their lah-di-dah lattes up there.”

“No Greek coffee?” asked Dante with a grin.

“Sure! But I had to buy it for ’em at a Greek shop in the city an’ show ’em how to do it. Who the hell are you?”

“Dante Stagnaro. Anna Efstathiou and Nikos Xiotras-”

“Anna! Jesus, there’s a woman for you!” Stefanatos clapped his hands together once in delight. “And smart! Marry her, she’d make you rich. And Nikos is good people!”

He leaned his bike against the railing under one of the hanging plants as he unlocked the door.

“I used to go to Anna’s Greek dance class, had to quit when my knees went.” He looked back over his shoulder and winked as he snapped on the lights. “Now I only dance the zembeikiko and only after so much ouzo I don’t feel ’em ’til morning.”

The zembeikiko — the same dance Anna had remembered Gounaris doing at one of the Greek festivals. From Rosa, he knew it usually was danced by men alone, when moved by music to sudden otherwise inexpressible emotion.

Inside, he found the little houseboat beautifully laid out. He said almost wistfully, “Looks like a nice life here.”

“Oh, it is, it is.” Stefanatos jerked his head at a narrow stairway leading down into the hull of the boat. “Got a little bedroom down there, so I got water slapping the hull beside me when I go to sleep.”

Stefanatos went up to the prow, which had a tiny forward- looking bay window framed by black metal racks holding spices. The similar bay windows on each side of the living room held decorative brass ornaments, seashells, netting, things picked up at most of the world’s ports during a lifetime at sea.

He brought back two brandy snifters and a bottle of Metaxas, poured without asking. They sat at a round wooden table beside a black iron potbelly stove. Like the other furnishings, it was miniaturized to studio apartment size. His pipe drifted aromatic smoke through the room. The bookshelves on either side of the kitchen doorway were filled with a seagoing man’s library in Greek and English.

Stefanatos drank Metaxas, swiveled a sudden sharp eye at Dante across the table. “Real close friend of Anna’s, you say.”

“Met her once.”

Dante stopped there; in interrogations, silence usually made the other person come to you. But Georgios Stefanatos merely stretched across the table to clink glasses.

“Yassou.”

They drank. The Metaxas burned its way down into Dante’s empty gut. He’d missed lunch and hadn’t yet had supper. He broke first, finally saying, “Kosta Gounaris.”

“Agio Nikolao sosete mas!” exclaimed a startled Stefanatos. He poured them each another tot, looked at Dante shrewdly. “Anna tell you I got my first blue-water command under Gounaris?”

Dante answered with a question of his own.

“You know he’s now living in San Francisco?”

Stefanatos gestured at the big color TV with a VCR on top of it backed up against the starboard bulkhead. “Hell, son, I’m old, I’m not dead. Uncle Al hasn’t come calling yet.” Uncle Al. Alzheimer’s. “You a real close friend of Kostas’s? Maybe like you’re a close friend of Anna’s?”

Fifteen years a cop counseled caution, but this was not a man who would be a friend, even if he had worked for him, of the Gounaris Dante had built up in his mind. And if Dante’s picture of Gounaris was skewed, now was the time to have it corrected.

“I’m a cop on an investigation. Routine. I’m not accusing him of anything, just-”

“Too bad,” cackled Stefanatos. “There’s a lot you could accuse him of. He slit the throat of a fat Turk for the strongbox under the floor when he was fifteen, you know.”

“I read an unconfirmed Interpol report about it, but-”

“True report! He used to brag about it when he was drunk. That was early days, he had the one freighter then, the Make-donia, he was captain, I was first mate…” He trailed off with a faraway look in his eyes. “Half a lifetime ago, Kostas was twenty-one when he got that freighter.”

“Where’d he get the money? From under the Turk’s floor?”

“Naw, that just got him out of Constantinople, financed the caique he used for his smuggling in and out of Turkey…” He cocked a quick inquisitive birdlike eye at Dante. “You prob’ly heard ’bout that too, didn’t you?”

“Another rumor, yeah.”

Georgie shook his head vigorously. “Also true. But he couldn’t have made the down payment on the Makedonia from that. Once he got his second tramp, he made me captain of the Makedonia and opened an office on a dock in Piraeus. Never went to sea again until years later when he got that yacht of his.”

“You sound like you’ve thought about this some.”

Stefanatos rapped himself vigorously on the temple with fisted knuckles. “Greeks are smart. We talk to everybody and want to know everything. Course I’ve thought about it.”

“So who would finance a freighter for a twenty-one-year-old kid with no history? Even just an old tramp steamer…”

Stefanatos nodded as if he’d made a statement rather than asked a question. “He wasn’t making enough out of the Makedonia to finance it, was he?” He cackled and clapped his hands again. “You could barely trust that old hulk out of sight of land. Hell, you hit the hull with a sledgehammer, anywhere, an inch of scale’d fall off. No holystoning those decks, I can tell you. You’d of gone right through.”

“You know where the money came from, don’t you, Captain?”

Georgios stared at him a long moment, then heaved himself to his feet and went toward the staircase leading below.

“You just pour another tot for each of us,” he said.

Ten minutes later, the old Greek captain slapped a beat-up logbook with a red-bound hard canvas cover down on the table between them with such triumph that it knocked over his snifter. He picked up the logbook, shook it, sending drops of Metaxas flying in every direction, then sat down with it.

“Log of the Makedonia, plenty of booze spilled on it in its day. Took it with me when I left.”

Dante asked the expected question. “Why was that?”