LIFE IS FEELINGS.
“All right,” Nora said. “We’ll think about it.”
LIFE IS MATE. SHARING.
“We promise to think about it and then discuss it with you some more,” Travis said. “Now it’s getting late.”
Einstein quickly made one more message.
BABY MICKEY?
“Absolutely not!” Nora said.
That night, in bed, after she and Travis made love, Nora said, “I’ll bet he is lonely.”
“Jim Keene?”
“Well, yes, I bet he’s lonely, too. He’s such a nice man, and he’d make someone a great husband. But women are just as choosy about looks as men are, don’t you think? They don’t go for husbands with hound-dog faces. They marry the good-looking ones who half the time treat them like dirt. But I didn’t mean Jim. I meant Einstein. He must get lonely now and then.”
“We’re with him all the time.”
“No, we’re really not. I paint, and you do things in which poor Einstein doesn’t get included. And if you do go back to real estate eventually, there’ll be a lot of time when Einstein’s without anyone.”
“He has his books. He loves books.”
“Maybe books aren’t enough,” she said.
They were silent for so long that she thought Travis had fallen asleep. Then he said, “If Einstein mated and produced puppies, what would they be like?”
“You mean-would they be as smart as he is?”
“I wonder… Seems to me there’s three possibilities. First, his intelligence isn’t inheritable, so his puppies would just be ordinary puppies. Second, it is inheritable, but the genes of his mate would dilute the intelligence, so the puppies would be smart but not as smart as their father; and each succeeding generation would get dimmer, duller, until eventually his great-great-greatgrandpups would just be ordinary dogs.”
“What’s the third possibility?”
“Intelligence, being a survival trait, might be genetically dominant, very dominant.”
“In which case his puppies would be as smart as he is.”
“And their puppies after them, on and on, until in time you’d have a colony of intelligent golden retrievers, thousands of them all over the world.”
They were silent again.
Finally she said, “Wow.”
Travis said, “He’s right.”
“What?”
“It is something worth thinking about.”
4
Vince Nasco had never anticipated, back in November, that he would need a full month to get a whack at Ramon Velazquez, the guy in Oakland who was a thorn in the side of Don Mario Tetragna. Until he wasted Velazquez, Vince would not be given the names of people in San Francisco who dealt in false ID and who might help him track down Travis Cornell, the woman, and the dog. So he had an urgent need to reduce Velazquez to a hunk of putrefying meat.
But Velazquez was a goddamn shadow. The man did not make a step without two bodyguards at his side, which should have made him more rather than less conspicuous. However, he conducted his gambling and drug enterprises-infringing on the Tetragna franchise in Oakland-with all the stealth of Howard Hughes. He slipped and slithered on his errands, using a fleet of different cars, never taking the same route two days in a row, never meeting in the same place, using the street as an office, never staying anywhere long enough to be made, marked, and wiped out. He was a hopeless paranoid who believed everyone was out to get him. Vince couldn’t keep the man in sight long enough to match him with the photograph that the Tetragnas had supplied. Ramon Velazquez was smoke.
Vince didn’t get him until Christmas Day, and it was a hell of a mess when it went down. Ramon was at home with a lot of relatives. Vince came at the Velazquez property from the house behind it, over the high brick wall between one big lot and the other. Coming down on the other side, he saw Velazquez and some people at a barbecue on the patio near the pool, where they were roasting an enormous turkey-did people barbecue turkeys anywhere but in
California?-and they all spotted him immediately though he was half an acre away. He saw the bodyguards reaching for weapons in their shoulder holsters, so he had no choice but to fire indiscriminately with his Uzi, spraying the entire patio area, taking out Velazquez, both bodyguards, a middle-aged woman who must have been somebody’s wife, and an old dame who had to be somebody’s grandmother.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Everyone else, inside and outside of the house, was screaming and diving for cover. Vince had to climb the wall back into the yard of the house next door-where nobody was home, thank God-and as he was hauling his ass over the top, a bunch of Latino types at the Velazquez place opened fire on him. He barely got away with his hide intact.
The day after Christmas, when he showed up at a San Francisco restaurant owned by Don Tetragna, to meet with Frank Dicenziano, a trusted Family capo who answered only to the don himself, Vince was worried. The fratellanza had a code about assassinations. Hell, they had a code about everything-probably even bowel movements-and they took their codes seriously, but the code of assassination was maybe taken a little more seriously than others. The first rule of that code was: You don’t hit a man in the company of his family unless he’s gone to ground and you just can’t reach him any other way. Vince felt fairly safe on that score. But another rule was that you never shot a man’s wife or kids or his grandmother in order to get at him. Any hit man who did such a thing would probably wind up dead himself, wasted by the very people who had hired him. Vince hoped to convince Frank Dicenziano that Velazquez was a special case-no other target had ever eluded Vince for a month-and that what had happened in Oakland on Christmas Day was regrettable but unavoidable.
Just in case Dicenziano-and by extension, the don-was too furious to listen to reason, Vince went prepared with more than a gun. He knew that, if they wanted him dead, they would crowd him and take the gun away from him before he could use it, as soon as he walked into the restaurant and before he knew the score. So he wired himself with plastic explosives and was prepared to detonate them, wiping out the entire restaurant, if they tried to fit him for a coffin.
Vince was not sure if he would survive the explosion. He had absorbed the life energies of so many people recently that he thought he must be getting close to the immortality he had been seeking-or was already there-but he could not know how strong he was until he put himself to the test. If his choice was standing at the heart of an explosion… or letting a couple of Wiseguys pump a hundred rounds into him and encase him in concrete for a dunk in the bay… he decided the former was more appealing and, perhaps, offered him a marginally better chance of survival.
To his surprise, Dicenziano-who resembled a squirrel with meatballs in his cheeks-was delighted with how the Velazquez contract had been fulfilled. He said the don had the highest praise for Vince. No one searched Vince when he entered the restaurant. At a corner booth, as the first men in the room, he and Frank were served a special lunch of dishes not on the menu. They drank three-hundred-dollar Cabernet Sauvignon, a gift from Mario Tetragna.
When Vince cautiously raised the issue of the dead wife and grandmother, Dicenziano said, “Listen, my friend, we knew this was going to be a hard hit, a demanding job, and that rules might have to be broken. Besides, these people were not our kind of people. They were just a bunch of wetback spics. They don’t belong in this business. If they try to force their way into it, they can’t expect us to play by the rules.”