Menaced Assassin

CHAPTER TWO

Once upon a time, in the twenty-ninth year of her life and seventh year of her now-failed marriage, Molly Dalton sat at her desk in the Atlas Entertainment corporate offices, staring out across deserted lower California Street at the lighted apartments and raised walkways of San Francisco’s tony Embarcadero Center. She chewed her lower lip, strangely breathless and not a little… probably frightened was not too strong a word.

So. Frightened. What she had accessed in the corporate mainframe had made no sense at first, but being very bright, and with an attorney’s inquisitiveness besides, she’d transferred the data to a 3.5? floppy and taken it to her penthouse apartment and for the past few days had played with it off and on during her free time. And suddenly it had made sense. Too much sense.

It had angered her at first-this was her career, after all-then suddenly it had scared her. So now…

Moll-short for Molly, short for Margaret-was a platinum blonde with very large blue eyes, a tip-tilted nose and small chin, high cheekbones and narrow cheeks, arched, slightly thick brows, and a dazzling smile that just naturally gave men very specific erotic notions. Her hair was a golden halo around this innocent angel face, her full-bosomed body was kept rounded yet taut by fanatic devotion to Nautilus and the stairs (on the chart she could climb the Empire State Building without getting winded).

Naturally, starting with her daddy when she was an infant, almost every man she ever met told her she was beautiful, and she had believed them all. Mirror, mirror on the wall. But that wasn’t quite enough for her, because she was also smart, whiplash smart, and wanted to be told that as well.

One of those proclaiming her beauty had been a rawboned grad student named Willard Dalton. Will was finishing up his Ph. D. in paleoanthropology at Cal-Berkeley while she was finishing her senior year in psych at the same school. They had met in a drama class-inevitable for her, given her background, just fun for him and a place to meet pretty girls, although he showed a fine flair for playacting and an unexpected satiric wit in improv. Perhaps in Will the stage lost a fine actor to science.

He quickly began to tell Molly that she was not only the most beautiful but also the most intelligent woman he had ever met, which was what she had been waiting to hear. So it was Will for Molly; and what Molly wanted, Molly got.

Too bad. Because Moll’s daddy was an entertainment attorney with a plush suite of offices in Century City, and she went to Beverly Hills High with the spawn of movie stars. She was deflowered in a hot tub by her best friend’s older brother-second lead in a sitcom on CBS-at age thirteen. Physical beauty was the only measure any man ever judged her by, so sex became the only coin with which she could confirm her value. By the time her daddy gave her the expected cherry-red high school graduation Ferrari, Moll already was finding a fortnight without a fuck like a year in a convent without a door.

Will, on the other hand, was from Wyoming, the son of a rancher, a childhood dinosaur freak who, before he’d moved from T. rex to H. habilis at Cal, had done a lot of amateur digging. While growing up he’d even unearthed a nest of maiasaur eggs that Jack Horner himself had called “significant.” He was an excellent naturalist, hunter, tracker, used to vast spaces, solitary thoughtfulness, self-reliance, volumi nous reading, and spending all his spare time alone out in the field. Thus he didn’t lose his virginity until his second year at Cal. He quickly became adept as a hunter in those sexual jungles as well, but just never found it any hardship to go without.

Major culture clash in almost every area of their lives. And when he and Moll got married before she started law school the September after her bachelor’s degree, her daddy as a matter of course picked up the tuition. That didn’t set well with Will, who felt paying for his wife’s advanced degree was sort of his responsibility. But he was starting his post-doc work, money was tight, and he was dementedly in love with Moll. If that was what she wanted, that was what she should get.

Will paid her father back by working multiple night jobs, but by then they’d had their first real fight: Moll had gotten pregnant and an abortion without telling Will about either one.

“Will,” she said when the tattletale medical bills came in, “we just don’t have the money. And there’s lots of time.”

“But dammit, we can never have that one again.”

The argument ended in bed, so he never discovered her real reason for the abortion: an almost irrational dread of ruining her figure, reducing her seductiveness to men.

Many men. Her first affair as a married woman followed an international conference in Paris on australopithecine locomotion the second summer after Will’s Ph. D. The conference led to an invitation for three weeks in the field at Hadar, Ethiopia. The Lucy site. Heady stuff for Will, the lowly post-doc, but since her daddy happened to be in Paris on business, Moll elected to stay behind in the City of Light rather than grub around with her husband after old bones out in the arid African bush.

Will agreed, never dreaming she’d be fucking the brains out of a French film director before his plane left the ground at Orly International. Her daddy, who had mean feelings about Will, had made the introduction with malice aforethought: he’d been most unhappy when she’d gone and mar ried a real-life replacement for him, and a strong man to boot. Au fond, he wanted her always to be Daddy’s little girl.

At Hadar, Will found nothing of significance in the ground. But when the focus of their endless campfire discussions became the visionary Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, with his heretical notions of moral evolution in man, Will found himself faced with conundrums he’d never had to bother about before. He’d always considered himself a scientist concerned only with phenomena rather than meaning, but these people were asking, Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

On one level it was easy; since primitive beliefs had been thrown out long ago as fairy tales, legends or myths, there were only two games in town. Religionists said we were some variant of your basic fallen angel, come from Eden by way of Adam and Eve, due for heaven or hell when our span was done. Darwinists said we were your basic risen ape, come from African-savannah primates by way of the hominids like A. afarensis — Lucy-through H. habilis to H. erectus to us, H. sapiens sapiens, destined for dust and dust alone when we fell off the twig.

Lying on his back in the moonlight on those ancient eroded sun-baked hills, staring up into the same star-choked African night that Lucy, old A. afarensis, had stared at 3.5 million years before, Will had to ask himself, Was there really so much to choose between the two? Either way there was a sort of fall from primitive grace into culture; and who had Adam and Eve been, anyway, and what the hell had they really looked like?

Besides, it seemed to him that something basic was being ignored. The latest studies showed that only about 5 million years separated Lucy from the gorilla, and a mere 1 to 1.5 m.y. from the human/chimp common ancestor. Now Jane Goodall had taken a good look at chimps, and Dian Fossey had taken a good look at gorillas. But neither had undertaken her empirical field studies from Will’s specific viewpoint: was it possible that where we came from wasn’t as important as what the great apes had passed on to us through those so-recent common forerunners?

Then and there, he realized he would have to remain a paleoanthropologist while giving himself impeccable credentials as an ethologist (one who observes and analyzes animals in their natural environment), through an intensive study of the great apes. Just as Darwin had given himself impeccable credentials as a naturalist through his intensive study of barnacles.

Thus when he started publishing the conclusions he hadn’t yet formed about what mankind had brought with it from its primate base stock, no one would be able to challenge his basic data. His conclusions, perhaps, but not his data.

But of course his studies couldn’t start right away. First he had to return to Paris, to be met by a laughing, loving, rowdy Moll, who had missed him terribly and fucked his brains out in their Paris hotel room before their return to America. He never thought of the possibility of French movie directors. He was, after all, crazy in love with Moll, and as a son of the Old West actually believed all that sweet outmoded stuff he’d got from his folks about love, honor, and obey, ’til death do us part, amen.

Moll, in turn, loved him in her fashion, because she knew he loved her, really loved her, all of her, not just her beauty of body but her beauty of mind also. And Moll, with her multiplying neuroses not even her psychiatrist could charge enough to keep in check, really needed that rock to cling to.

Ancient history now. Moll squared her mental shoulders and punched SPKR on the phone and autodialed Will’s office number over in Berkeley. In this moment of crisis and indecision she called the husband from whom she was estranged rather than the daddy who had always doted on her; something about inner strengths, perhaps?

“Yep, Will Dalton,” said the phone in Will’s voice.

“Honey, when are you ever, ever going to learn to answer your phone as a full professor should?”

“Short clipped vowels? British accent?”

Probably only Moll could have discerned the lingering hurt and bewilderment in his voice. It had been extremely gross. Not only what he walked in on, but what she had done and said then.

“How… are you, Will?”

“Busy.” But then he immediately added, “The Institute is getting up a fund-raising exhibit covering their new directions, and it’s using up all my free time.” He stopped, said abruptly, “Moll-why?”

“My analyst says-”

“ Fuck your analyst!” Will burst out, then quickly recovered himself. “Listen, Moll, I just… can’t…”

The trouble was, when she had finished law school and passed the bar, through her daddy’s connections she had gotten this tremendous position as corporate counsel with the San Francisco arm of the newest L.A. conglomerate, Atlas Entertainment. It had a lot of money said to be Common Market, and was wildly grabbing small independents in a whole slew of areas-features, syndication, cable movies, a sound studio, special effects, a record company, a couple of comedy clubs, interactive-just about the whole entertainment package. They boasted they’d be challenging the majors within three years.

Moll had ridden that pony and ridden it hard. She was smart, tough, hard-driving, soon indispensable. More and more, while Will the dreamer was off checking out apes and monkeys in places where they had just invented the wheel last week, she was doing hard, focused work in the corporate boardroom, wanting both husband and daddy to be proud of her, wanting to show everyone she was more than just a beautiful face and an available body.

On the phone, Will was saying, “So, Moll, if you just called to say hello, ah, Hello. But if-”

“Not just that,” she said quickly. “I want to see you.”

There was a long silence. Will finally said, in tones of a coldness and finality that were chilling, “I don’t think that’d be a very good idea right now, Moll.”

“I need to see you.”

More silence. Stretching out, attenuating itself like spun glass at the end of the blower’s tube.

She had only herself to blame. Moll had discovered that what she needed more than anything else in this world was to fuck power. It was her ultimate aphrodisiac. And while Will was in western Sumatra for six months observing orangs, she had developed an almost hysterical passion for Kosta Gounaris.

Gounaris was tall and dynamic, had created a Greek shipping line that had made him rich, and was now president of Atlas Entertainment-hence, nominally Moll’s employer. A beak-nosed, muscular, well-conditioned fifty-five, Kosta had a great deal of black body hair that really turned Moll on, and all that power that turned her on even more.

Will’s life changed forever when the monsoon arrived early and he came home from Sumatra a week ahead of time, without telling Moll because he wanted to surprise her. Surprise her he did, and himself besides, by walking into her San Francisco penthouse to become that universal figure of fun, the cuckolded husband.

Will found Moll in the bed where he’d been planning they should make long and tender love, half-lying between Kosta Gounaris’s wide-spread hairy legs, sucking his cock.

They both heard the door open, Gounaris turning to look lazily over his shoulder, Moll able to see past him to Will’s shocked and astounded face. Gounaris turned back to Moll.

“Here it comes, baby,” he told her with sudden urgency, “a real gusher,” and came in her mouth.

And Moll, even though horrified for Will to see her this way, was at that moment totally, completely in thrall to Kosta Gounaris and his power. So she paused only long enough to raise her head and wink at her husband and say, “Welcome home, honey,” before returning to her work.

Gounaris threw back his head and roared with delight at such pungent wit, as Will was staggering from the apartment and across the hall into the still-waiting elevator, his skin red and mottled, his face full of nausea, his chest heaving as if he were having a heart attack. Those horrific visual images had burned away all thought of defending his manhood or his marital bed.

Half an hour later he was sufficiently recovered to return, deadly of purpose, but by then the apartment was deserted. And by the next day he had convinced himself he wasn’t a true son of the Old West after all, where blood was the ransom of betrayed manhood, but rather was just another civilized modern urban wimp.

Moll hadn’t seen her husband since that night, and he hadn’t been returning any phone calls. A month ago, an eon ago, for both of them. Tonight she’d caught him, but Will’s silence had become positively thunderous.

“Need to see me,” he finally repeated in a flat voice.

“ Need to,” Moll affirmed.

At least he hadn’t hung up. Oh God, she thought, if only she hadn’t hurt him so. If only she’d just… just clung to his strengths, asked him to stay home with her. He would have. He was the only man who had ever truly loved her. Now…

Now she said in a rush, “Please, please, meet me, Will. I need to talk… to ask…”

“When?”

“Tonigh-” She checked herself. “Tomorrow night, seven o’clock? That Italian place on Jackson where we used to…”

He sighed. “All right, Moll. Tomorrow at seven. But I could be there tonight in thirty min-”

“Tomorrow,” she said quickly, almost sharply.

She hung up almost ashamed of herself, because she knew why she hadn’t made it tonight, right now, as he had offered, as she had intended when she had called him. In twenty minutes she wanted to be at the penthouse with Kosta’s cock buried in her up to the hilt. Needed to be at the penthouse.

And maybe Kosta would have an explanation. Maybe… maybe she was misinterpreting the data she had run across by accident in the computer. Maybe…

No. She was too smart to kid herself that much. She had found what she had found, and even though she would ask Kosta about it, she still had to tell Will about it too. At the last minute she put the disk she’d made into a mailer, addressed it, and dropped it down the mail chute in the hallway beside the elevator on her way to the penthouse and Kosta.