Menaced Assassin

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dread naught, devoted fans, it is I, Peregrine Raptor, Esq., that extraordinary assassin, that bird of prey, that sardonic quipper of quips, who made strawberry yogurt of the Lenington brainpan and arranged the call to Stagnaro about it afterwards. Why does that silly policeman have so much trouble accepting me? Well, it is early days yet. Perhaps he has not had time to fully appreciate what a grand killing machine I really am.

But enough of that. I want to chat about the Lenington kill with you, hypocrite lecteur, because in his murder I was faced with a problem of great delicacy and finesse: how does one get close enough to fog a veteran police officer who is also wary and thoroughly corrupt?

What difference does the corruption make? Aha, that is what gives him his extraordinary wariness. By being always on the watch for someone watching him, he becomes as difficult to track as a man-eating tiger that out of sheer animal instinct loops back to check its own backtrail.

I turn to my advantage the fact that I can only observe him from afar, can only, as it were, touch his life as lightly as the most gossamer of spiderwebs. Thus I arouse no slightest fear in him of the hunted for the hunter, because he is unaware of any hunter behind him. Also, this way I am able to see him in the round. The whole man.

Who is this whole man I see? Someone vicious. Someone sexually corrupt. Someone consumed with money hunger. Someone racially prejudiced. Someone cocky. And angry. Oh, so angry. Why? I soon figure it out. Because life has screwed him. Yes, semblable, frere, he is owed the good life.

Having penetrated his psychology, I begin my stalk. He aids me by being observed in his meeting with Gounaris. This brings great pressure on him. I myself watch him go to the attorney appointed for him by the Family-he must be thinking, Will they blame me? Should I run and hide? So he is subconsciously attuned to a quick-getaway stake; a stake he would otherwise examine much more carefully from the outset.

I assume a breathless style of speech with a disarming homosexual cadence when I call him, talk wildly of $5,000, to get which he needs do nothing except listen, then I hang up. This arouses all of his cupidity and only a minimum of his cunning-and by leaving him stew for a few days, I assure that he will come to feel the money is already his. It is owed to him, just as the good life is owed to him!

See his anger work for me? And then I give him a sudden short deadline to get this money he deems to be rightfully his.

Ah, the moment of truth. Has the wind shifted, has the tiger caught scent of the hunter sitting up over the staked-out goat? No. He goes to await my call at an open phone near an apocryphal bookie joint on one of San Francisco’s major streets.

Safety, you see. How can he feel anything but safe there, with no easily apparent ambushes from which he can be stalked? And with the subconscious assurance that an illegal book is operating there with impunity, thus implying like immunity for his own illegal bribe-taking?

I use a cellular phone so I can walk by him as he takes the $5,000 bait, after I have given him silly instructions of how to get $10,000 more, and perhaps another $10,000, and another…

Thus I can see how he stands at the phone, can monitor pedestrian traffic up and down the street. And I can do it in total safety, because I am invisible to him.

Invisible? How can this be when I am made up in the most bizarrely eye-catching charade possible? Because he sees me only as a white man trying to be black-thus, beneath contempt, beneath notice, because black is the last thing this violently prejudiced man would want to be.

Thus, invisible.

Each night as I walk by, waiting for that moment when no other pedestrian is about so I can do my delicious deed, the boy at the all-night gas station on Army Street is placing the 11:00 p.m. call to that phone booth, letting it ring, and hanging up, touchingly delighted to get $20 each time he dials. And after Jackie-boy is no more, even more delighted to get the $100 bonus to call Stagnaro and relay my little Raptor message. Of course I get back my note from him and destroy it.

Why this slightly cumbersome charade? Because this way I leave Stagnaro my Raptor call in a voice he can never connect to me through voiceprints should he ever get one of mine. I doubt he taped the first one, which was me; why would he? At that time it was merely an isolated crank call. Am I not clever?

In closing I must tell you, since my promise is to be honest with you, that I am surprised by a rather rotten dream the night I kill Jack Lenington. I am Pharaoh’s executioner in ancient Egypt, I have died, and my maat (the orderliness and justice of my life) is being weighed in judgment by Osiris in Dat, the Egyptian underworld. Found just, I will be given eternal life. Found lacking, I will be forever dead.

All of my deeds, I argue, were from the noblest of motives. Ordered from on high. But to my terror the scale in which I am being measured tips heavily against me. How can this be?

Mighty Anubis says sadly, “You are self-righteous, O falcon-man. All of the horrors you perpetrate are for the highest of motives. But these are really the basest of motives. Selfishness, self-aggrandizement through being ‘noble’ at all times. This way you can justify any action, no matter how base. Go to eternal death, O falcon-man.”

As I fade into nothingness I wake from my dream with sweat standing on my brow. What can this mean? Bah! Humbug! It is only some ploy of my little brown walnut of a man, my gnome, my Rumpelstiltskin who crouches down at the hinge of my subconscious and denies me access to…

Enough of that nonsense! My fitful sleep since Lenington’s death will pass when I begin plotting the next assassination. The next one. Ah, that will require time, cleverness, dissimulation. I must locate, then plan, then stalk…

But I am getting ahead of myself again. Behind myself? This playing with time can be so confusing. So can playing God, but-no matter. It is what I do. While there is yet time, let us listen to more sentimentalized drivel about man’s capacity for violence from poor Will-if he would ever get to the bloody point of it all…