Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“If we’d been there we probably wouldn’t have realized it had happened. We would hardly have recognized these first fishlike creatures grubbing sluggishly around on the bottom of the sea as vertebrates at all, since they lacked jaws, they lacked fins, and they had a barely detectable skeleton.

“But they were soon followed by other ‘fish’ that are still around in slightly modified form as sharks. Sharks are so ancient and primitive that, unlike other vertebrates, their skeletons remain cartilage, never turning to real bone at all.

“Descendants of two other early lines of these fishlike creatures have survived: ‘ray-fins’ and ‘lobe-fins.’ The ray-fins developed bony fins, light and strong and ribbed by spines, and had air sacs they could use to regulate buoyancy. About 100 m. y. ago they blossomed into fish as we know them today. Fish are the most numerous of all vertebrates, with thousands of living species and billions of individuals.

“Certainly they have followed God’s exhortation: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas.’

“Instead of light, strong, spine-ribbed finds, the lobe-fins had stumpy knobs of flesh containing numerous little slabs and splints of bone. And their air sacs not only regulated buoyancy, they passed oxygen from the air they swallowed directly into the bloodstream. See where we’re going here? Some branch of the now nearly extinct lobe-fins ventured or was driven up out of the water into the mudflats surrounding it, and could survive.

“In time, they became the first amphibians. Those little slabs and splints of bone in their fins became the amphibians’ four limbs; those air sacs became, in time, primitive lungs. So they slithered about in the mud by bending their bodies from side to side like fish swimming, and by shoving mightily with the stumpy little legs their fins were turning into.

“Lucky for us; without them, we could not have been. But that belongs with the sixth, last, all-important day of actual creation in Genesis, which we will get to in a moment.” Will paused and smiled around the room. “As soon as I come back from the john.”

There was relaxed, almost relieved laughter at the break. Without apology, Dante preceded Will to check out the rest room across the hall. It was at just such a moment that Raptor might choose to strike.

He didn’t. Will whizzed in peace and safety.

For the first time, Dante wondered whether anything would happen at all. Maybe this was not a night for dying.

“So Mendelson is dying,” said Gideon Abramson. “He says to his wife, ‘Call the priest, tell him I want to convert.’ She says, ‘But Max, your whole life you’ve been an Orthodox Jew. Now you want to convert?’ And Max says, ‘Better one of them should die than one of us.’”

Gid laughed heartily at his own joke, as he always did, and Martin Prince laughed with him, politely. Prince understood what he was doing, breaking the ice, smoothing the way.

Kosta Gounaris gave a weak chuckle, but Enzo Garofano’s aged face was like some ancient, pitted ice floe. It had been a rough trip from Jersey all in one day for the old capo, even if done by Prince’s jet to Vegas, then by limo here to…

“Whadda fuck you call this place?” he demanded abruptly. When he was tired, like now, and a bit disoriented, Garofano’s Bronx beginnings would show through his veneer.

“The Furnace Creek Inn,” said Gideon brightly. “First-rate accommodations and a great golf course over at the ranch.”

Gideon and Kosta had rented both of the inn’s $375-a-day luxury suites, with the king-size beds and the built-in Jacuzzis. The two-story, red tile-roofed, Spanish-style hotel of stucco and local travertine stone, built at the mouth of Furnace Creek Canyon by the Pacific Coast Borax Company in the 1920s, gave Death Valley its reputation as a stylish winter resort.

“They close for the summer months,” continued Gideon. He had suggested Death Valley for the meet because it would be difficult for the feds to put the four of them all together here at the same time. “They just opened for the season last week.”

“I think we should get down to business,” said Prince. Gideon may have chosen the spot, but it was Prince’s meeting, Prince’s agenda.

“It is safe to talk here?”

“Swept an hour ago for bugs, Don Enzo.”

The inn faced out across tan open desert toward the Furnace Creek Ranch a mile away, but the wings enclosed an extensive date palm garden with bubbling streams and placid reflecting pools.

“As for the windows, we’ve got a couple of men strolling through those trees. Anybody there trying to listen to us…”

The aged Enzo Garofano sank back into one of the massive leather-seated hardwood chairs. “Let us proceed,” he said.

Prince was on his feet; the others were seated. He started softly, no passion in his voice. Gounaris wasn’t fooled; Gideon had said the don was fuming.

“Over two years ago we made a decision to extend our new acquisition, Atlas Entertainment, from Los Angeles into the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a deliberate decision on my part…”

Prince began pacing between Garofano’s chair and the couch where Gideon and Kosta sat.

“We have never had much influence in San Francisco, apart from that cheese merchant the feds busted a few years ago. The Italians up there are not siciliani. They’re genovesi, piemontesi… hard to deal with, hard to control.”

“North Beach is not Little Italy,” agreed Gideon.

“So we moved Atlas Entertainment in, put one of our own in charge”-he gestured at Gounaris-“and what happened?”

Kosta hadn’t spoken yet except for hello-hello: he had just met the legendary Enzo Garofano, survivor of New York’s great mattress wars of the thirties, and was nervous about him rather than Prince. It was irrational, Prince was the one to watch, the one to fear. To Prince he sent weekly reports by hand-carry messenger. But he not only answered Prince’s rhetorical question, he answered it a little bit smart-ass.

“We’ve shown a profit from the first week of operation.”

The suave, imperturbable Prince suddenly shrieked, veins standing out at his temples, “I am talking here!”

Gounaris felt the blood drain from his face. He had heard of these sudden flashes of rage, like Bugsy Siegel was supposed to have had, but it was the first he had witnessed.

“I am sorry, Don Martin. I was just-”

“No matter.” Prince gave a magnanimous wave of his hand.

The gesture was casual, but those cold eyes were murderous. Speaking up had been a mistake; why had he? Remembering the tough kid he once had been, the glory days when his nuts were big as bowling balls and belonged to him alone? Dammit, those days didn’t have to be over!

“Last February,” Prince continued, “after our meeting in Las Vegas, Spic Madrid was hit in Minneapolis.”

Kosta felt cold again. What the fuck was going on? He was sure Prince himself had ordered the hit on Madrid, for opposing him at the Vegas board meeting.

“And less than four months later, St. John and Otto Kreiger were hit on the same day. Now-”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted Garofano, “I understood the police and fire people were satisfied that Otto’s death was an accident. Now you’re telling me-”

“I’m telling you that he was hit,” snapped Prince. Both of the capos were ignoring the usual protocol now. “Based on the police department lab forensic workup of the gas explosion.”

“Are you suggesting, Don Martin,” said Gideon, “that the same man carried out both hits?”

“I’m suggesting that the same man ordered both hits.”

“I think Kreiger was responsible for St. John,” said Gideon, showing more balls than Kosta would have credited him with. “He voted to have him hit at the board meeting at the Xanadu in February and was overruled. But the killer’s M.O.-”