Menaced Assassin

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Remembered being royally pissed off because Salvador Madrid was dead in Minnesota, unconnected to Moll Dalton’s death in any way Dante could imagine, yet Raptor had found another voice in which to send his third mocking message, four months after the first one last October. None of it made any sense. But he was still bugging Hymie about this latest tape.

“Got my voiceprint yet, Hymie?”

Hymie gave him a pained expression. “Sound spectrogram,” he corrected. “Yeah, I’ve got it-for what it’s worth.”

“Hell, Hymie, if they’re as individual as fingerprints-”

“A gross oversimplification.” Hymie opened his folder of printouts to jab a hairy-backed finger at the squiggles that looked like seismograph readings of earth movements. “This is a record of the frequency and strength of the voice signal through time. If the spikes and patterns don’t match, that means they contain frequencies not present in the target spectrograms.”

“And these don’t match?”

“Even you can see they don’t, even with the shitty samples you got me.”

“Shitty? They’re the originals right off my machine.”

“I need at least ten common words of exceptional clarity from each tape for a visual comparison of spectrographs. What have you given me?” He made a disdainful gesture. ‘“Raptor’ and a mittful of conjunctions.”

“Despite all the bitching, they’re two different people.”

“Two different people.”

“Any way to tell nationality or racial stock?”

“Just the obvious stuff-one sounds like an African-American, one sounds like a Latino.”

“Thanks, Hymie. Just hang on to them for me, will you?”

On the way to his office he stopped at Homicide to pick a fight with Tim Flanagan. He caught Tim behind the littered desk in his comer of the office, near a window looking out on the cold, gray, rainy day; the cars in the under-the-free-way parking lot gleamed like the arched backs of sounding dolphins.

Tim shoved a pink cardboard box of doughnuts toward Dante. “So I suppose now you want me to investigate that homicide back in Minneapolis for you.” He chuckled. “When I was a kid, I used to think it was Many-apples, Many-soda.”

Dante slid low in his chair, braced one knee against the edge of the desk and said in a disgruntled voice, “St. Paul.”

Without changing tone, Tim said, “So I suppose now you want me to investigate that homicide back in St. Paul for you.”

“I’d settle for you investigating my two homicides right here in your jurisdiction.”

“You think all I got to do is chase around after your nutty theories? I got too much stuff to handle as it is-”

“Yeah. Doughnuts. Pizzas. Week-old Chinese take-out.”

“Fuck you, chief.” Tim leaned forward across the desk, the weight on his elbows, bunching his open-collared dress shirt around his meaty armpits. “Remember that Chinese kid they found shot in Golden Gate Park?”

“Sure. You figured it for being gambling- related.”

“I figured wrong. The mother ran a Chinese gambling house, right enough, but her boyfriend, unbeknownst, as they say, to her, took out a big life insurance policy on the kid. With himself as beneficiary. Anybody can do that, you know.”

“And then had the kid snuffed?”

“Yeah. Insurance agent smelled a rat, came to us, we went after the guy, hard, he split open. I’d like to see the ratfink fucker fry, and he might just. But…” He shrugged, reached for a doughnut. “Fuck ’im. So you can’t connect Madrid in St. Paul with Dalton or our own Jackie-baby?”

“Madrid was in Vegas last week with three, four other mob figures who could be connected with Atlas Entertainment, but…” Dante shrugged in turn. “One was in for a new golf course opening, one to look at horses, one to hear an opera singer, Spic to ogle the showgirls…”

“They all stay at the Xanadu?”

Dante nodded. “And a few days after they leave, Spic gets wasted with Popgun Ucelli’s trademark M.O.-only the feds can’t get Popgun out of Jersey at the time of the hit. I think he knows they’re tapping him.” He stood up, started pacing. “If it’s a power play inside the mob, why Moll Dalton? Why Jack Lenington? If it isn’t mob-related, why the mob-style hits, why Spic Madrid by the same M.O.?”

Flanagan leaned back and put his elbows on the arms of his creaking swivel chair and tented his fingers in front of him.

“Maybe your givens are fucked. Maybe you gotta get some fresh data. See it in a new light. You ever check out that Interpol material on Kosta Gounaris you asked for?”

“Tim, sometimes you aren’t entirely stupid.”

“Yeah, I think you’re a great guy, too.”

Dante’s Organized Crime Task Force office was in a converted storage closet between two jury deliberation rooms on the court floor. To get there, a visitor had to go by the monitored desk from the public corridor to the private back hall connecting the judges’ chambers, and even then had to know precisely how to find him. No windows, but he liked it. It held three desks, four chairs, two three-drawer file cabinets with good locks, and a blackboard with the preliminary findings he didn’t mind being made public drawn neatly on it in red chalk.

In sharp contrast to Tim’s cluttered desk, Dante’s held a computer and screen, a Laserjet IIP printer Rosa had given him two Christmases ago, IN and OUT files squared on different corners, and a family portrait taken by a professional photographer for the church yearbook: Rosa, himself, and the kids when both of them had still been home.

Neither Danny nor his other inspector, Jamie Fraser, was in, so he started methodically through the Interpol response to his request for information on Gounaris.

Born of Greek parents in Istanbul just before World War II (no birth record available). Reputedly a child prostitute at the age of twelve in a brothel run by a Turkish pederast called Mustapha (last name not known). (Probably) disappeared from the brothel and Istanbul at age fifteen, just when Mustapha (maybe) was found in his bedroom with his throat slit (perhaps) and (rumor stated) the floorboards pried up to get at something hidden underneath.

Three years later, a teenager (reputed) to be Gounaris was in Greece, running cigarettes and booze into Turkey, raw opium back out. Was befriended (unconfirmed) by an American businessman (name unknown), who (supposedly) was in Athens to set up the importation of Greek cloth to the United States…

No birth record available… last name not known… probably… maybe… perhaps… rumor stated… reputed… unconfirmed… name unknown… supposedly…

The dossier didn’t become factual until the 1960s, when twenty-one-year-old Kosta Gounaris bought a single rusted old British tramp steamer and began hauling putatively legitimate cargoes in and out of the Levant. After that the file was mostly media coverage as he expanded, buying freighters and tankers, becoming Gounaris Shipping as his fame and wealth increased along with the inevitable Onassis comparison. The file ended with his sale of Gounaris Shipping to a consortium of other Greeks.

The portrait of a tough survivor who dragged himself out of the slums and ended up president of a huge multinational company. The American dream played out in a thousand American ghettos and exported all over the world ever since World War II.

Dammit, something of use had to be there…

Who did he know was Greek might help him out with Gounaris? There was the man’s discarded wife, of course, living in a suburb of Athens called Maroussi; but Dante spoke no Greek, could never get departmental approval to go to Greece and talk with her, and knew it was useless to ask the Greek cops to interview her for him. If he didn’t know the questions he wanted to ask, how could he expect them to?

He needed someone who might have been involved in Greek shipping after the war, might have known Gounaris firsthand, might have heard some rumors about him. There were Greek cops on the San Francisco police force, but he couldn’t go to them; his habitual M.O. and his cop’s paranoia made it essential that his informant be unconnected with the department.

Dante was sort of helping Rosa with the dishes-she washed, he dried what didn’t go into the dishwasher-when he got his idea. He’d already poked into Gounaris’s business life at Atlas Entertainment; maybe he could poke into his private life a little also, in ways that would shake him up without bringing another stinging letter from St. John as head counsel for Atlas.

“You know that Greek movie festival over in Berkeley at the Pacific Film Archives you were talking about? Who goes to something like that?”

Rosa laughed. “Me, for one thing. Maybe you-have you forgotten you said you wanted to-”

“I mean, do a lot of Greeks go?”

“Mostly Greeks.”

“Prominent ones?”

She looked at him shrewdly. “Okay, big boy, what’s going on? When you start treating me like a witness to a murder…”

So they sat on the couch and talked. Through the wall from the bedroom where Tony was supposedly studying came the beat of an album called Rembrandt Pussyhorse by an obscure vile punk band he had chosen to shock his folks with, the Butthole Surfers. The Surfers actually weren’t too bad, but Dante always objected very conscientiously to whatever band Tony chose; he didn’t want to deprive him of the joy of blowing his parents’ minds.

Dante told Rosie about the Interpol reports.

“Gounaris had to get investment capital from somewhere to buy his first freighter, then to expand. He wasn’t going to get it from the World Bank, that’s for damn sure.”

“So if the American cloth buyer was Mafia…”

“I’d have the connection I’m looking for. It’s so thin that if it turns sideways you can’t see it, but it fits the other facts I have right now. If Atlas Entertainment is a mob front, there has to be some earlier point of connection between them and Gounaris-they didn’t pick him off the street.”

“Will he be at the Greek Film Fest? Probably, at least for some films. The Greek community is pretty cohesive, and this is a big event.” She clapped her hands. “Of course! 1922! He’ll have to go to that one. He’s a Greek from Turkey, and 1922 is a film about the extermination of the Greek colony in Smyrna after the Greek Army was withdrawn. Those who didn’t get on the boats were sent on a death march through Asia Minor. Almost all of them died. It’s showing this weekend.”

The theater at the Film Archives was intimate, its banks of seats steeply angled so there was no trouble seeing the screen over the heads of the people in front of you. Also no trouble seeing the people coming in through the curtained doorway to the right of the screen

They sat with Anna Efstathiou, who taught Rosa’s dance class, and Nikos Xiotras, Anna’s lifelong friend and associate in Greek dance instruction. Anna was a tall, quick-moving woman with utterly black hair and huge, beautiful, penetrating eyes in a strong and unforgettable face. She and Nikos were almost constantly waving, calling, laughing, chatting over the recorded bazouki music.

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.