Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin

How could he have been so unutterably stupid as to leave the original setup file in the computer when they had been working out the organization of the company? Once deciphered it was absolutely damning, naming names and estimating what each department could be expected to produce, and how much each could launder without the IRS suspecting that offshore millions were being funneled through this legitimately profitable shell.

And how could she have uncovered it and broken their code so easily? Too damned intelligent for her own good, that was her trouble. The elevator came, he stepped aboard. Greeks liked their women smart, but she was too smart to live. He didn’t mean that literally, of course, but tou Theou, he didn’t look forward to the phone call- pay phone call-he would have to make to his spiritual godfather, Gideon Abramson, in Palm Springs.

Gid Abramson was seventy-four years old, a diminutive gnome in loud aloha shirts and $400 plaid slacks and $900 shoes and a Dodgers cap, smoking a stogie the length of his arm, peering benevolently at the world through clear-rim trifocals. He was a grandfather eight times over, slept nine dreamless hours a night, swam ten laps in his pool every morning before his juice, dry toast, and decaf, and played golf or tennis five days a week like a man thirty years his junior. Gid was going to live forever.

This evening he was sitting out the hand as dummy in his foursome at the country club’s bridge night, telling one of his usual infamous jokes.

“So this guy is chewing out the shadchan, see, the marriage broker, for lying to him about this woman he had been planning to marry. The shadchan says, ‘By you, she didn’t graduate from Brandeis? By you, she’s not as beautiful as Julia Roberts? By you, she doesn’t sing like Barbra Streisand? Where did I lie?’

“And the guy says, ‘You told me her father was dead-but she told me he’s been in prison for ten years!’

“‘ Nu,’ says the shadchan, ‘you call that living?’”

Under the dutiful laughter, the club steward whispered in Gid’s ear there was an urgent phone call from his nephew. He left the table feeling smug. He was up nearly $700 for the evening, and Charlie Hansen was looking a little green across the table. Gid had heard his Mercedes agency hadn’t sold a car in two weeks. Good.

Let the bastard sweat a bit before suggesting a loan. Strictly legit interest, of course, because you didn’t shit where you slept-but he would end up owning 51 percent of the agency. Before his retirement he had controlled the rag trade loan-sharking on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and Gid just couldn’t seem to help making money.

When he was in the manager’s office with the door closed, he picked up the private telephone and chirped into it, “So speak to me, bubela!”

“Uncle Gideon, I’m in a lot of trouble!”

Kosta did indeed sound scared over the phone-and it took a great deal to scare Kosta. He’d been the kind of dashing, adventurous kid none of Gid’s own nebbische sons had been. When Gid had run across him in the late fifties, Kosta, just a teenager, was using an Arab dhow with black sails and no outboard to run American cigarettes from Greece into Turkey, and opium out.

Once, drunk on ouzo, he’d told Gid he’d slit a Turk’s throat in Istanbul for the money to buy the boat. Gid had never seen any reason to doubt him, so he bankrolled him through bigger and better boats to his first freighter. Then he’d taken 51 percent of Gounaris Shipping for the Family, finally had recommended Kosta for the presidency of Atlas Entertainment.

And it was this man who now sounded scared. Just to test the waters, Gid said, “You hear the one about the gorilla walked into Goldman’s delicatessen and ordered a pastrami on rye with a pickle to go?”

“Uncle Gideon, there’s no time for-”

“Goldman says, ‘That’ll be six-fifty. And I gotta say, I never expected to have a gorilla in my store ordering a pastrami on rye!’ The gorilla says, ‘At those prices, you never will again!’” He paused. “ Nu. Tell me your story.”

Kosta did. It left Gideon shaking his head at the phone.

“You’re right, Kosta, that was really very stupid of you to leave the file in the computer. If any word of your doing that should get back to Martin Prince…” He paused for a moment, thinking. “I tell him the woman had been snooping around, asking questions, suspecting something, we had to move very quickly…”

“But nothing about me leaving the file in the computer?”

“Our little secret, Kosta,” he said gravely but with a wink in his voice. “Now, there’s one thing I want you to do…”

“I already did, Uncle Gideon. Even before I called you. I erased the file and tomorrow will have a new hard disk installed and all the other files transferred to it individually so this file can’t be brought up later if the feds should ever come snooping around with one of their tame computer geniuses.”

“Good, it sounds as if this woman has not totally addled your wits. In your opinion, has she spoken to anyone else?”

Kosta told him about Moll’s date with her husband the next night, and what he had told her to do about it.

“Very good!” exclaimed Gid with delight. “The perfect way to keep her quiet until we can talk to her.”

“You think she’ll believe what I tell her when-”

“We’ll make her believe it, sonny boy-I think you got nothing to worry about. You just let me handle this.”

Before hanging up he told Kosta just what he should say and do the next evening, and also casually got from him the name of a corrupt Frisco cop, Jack Lenington. He would ask Otto Kreiger to contact Lenington-no use burdening Kosta with any of that. The goyische woman was obviously still leading him around by the schlong.

Tapping out the number of Martin Prince’s safe phone in Las Vegas, Gid Abramson rolled his cigar between his lips and thought with delight, Intrigue! Threats! Danger! These were what kept a man young, made life worth living!

Bella Figura was a lot of glass and stainless steel and designer chairs and elevated prices in the low-number high-rent end of Jackson Street. They put too much garlic in the sauces and you had to fight for your pasta al dente, but their drinks were generous and the service was good. And at Bella Figura, because of the high ambient decibel level, two people could put their heads together and talk without being overheard.

Not that there was any need of that now. Moll would tell Will about it, of course, but it had all become academic. When she’d been getting dressed to come here and meet him, Kosta had burst into the penthouse with his black eyes snapping like firecrackers, tremendously exhilarated.

He’d been in L.A. having it out with those bastards down there, he said, and she was right, Atlas Entertainment was just a fucking Mafia front! Tomorrow, by God, they would go to the FBI with what they knew! Until then, Moll should keep quiet about it, because they knew about Kosta but not about her. She might be in danger if they knew the information had come from her.

Meanwhile, tonight… tonight he’d roughly shoved her forward over the back of the couch, pulled up her Laura Kiran skirt, jerked down her Victoria’s Secret panty hose, and rammed all that excitement into her from behind, the way they both loved it best. She exploded within ninety seconds, but he wasn’t done yet. He tumbled her onto the couch and went down on her, something he’d never done before, not once.

He finished off by crouching over her face and coming in her mouth immediately, without ceremony or tenderness, snorting like a bull. Then he jumped off her as off a horse hard-ridden, zipped up, chuckled, kissed her cheek without love or passion.