by Barry, Mike
Wulff leaned into the saddle, put his hand on the cold mane of the horse and held on as they edged their way through a difficult rock formation, a fault line of some sort, struggling and slipping for purchase in the difficult ground.
Ahead of him suddenly something, either a horse or a man, screamed coldly in the darkness. As he reacted by grabbing onto the horse, flattening himself down against the mane, gripping the hairs which stuck to his sweating palms, there was a second scream in a different tone, then a crack of light flooding the horizon. And in that light he saw the guide’s horse stumble, the form of the guide flung free. And then the light came up, there was a second crack, and Wulff was rolling on the cold deadly stones of the Andes.
XV
Where was Walker? He hadn’t been able to get hold of Walker, either at home or at any of the contact points for three days, and now David Williams knew that the man was dead. That was a cop’s assurance for you—you couldn’t tell about life but you always knew death—and he knew that Walker was gone. And now this man Calabrese was on the phone, seeming to know everything about Williams, everything there was except for the one crucial fact which Williams could not impress upon him—that he had no idea of Wulff’s whereabouts.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” He had no formal idea of who this so-called Calabrese was, but he could make a pretty good guess. In fact, Williams guessed that he could make a hell of a guess but he simply would not. It didn’t pay. Better to let it go. He assumed that Calabrese meant Wulff no good, but even so, if he had known he might have told him. Because he wanted to dig Wulff up too, just to tell him a few things, and Calabrese sounded like exactly the man to do it. He certainly did. There was no doubt of that at all.
“I don’t know,” he said to the voice yet again, curling his fingers, motioning his wife to get out of the room, to leave him be. Ever since the accident he had been unable to get away from her at all, unable to shut himself off. Not that this wasn’t understandable. She was terrified. Still, she had to respect his autonomy, now more than ever, if he was going to pull himself out of this. “If I knew I’d tell you,” he said truthfully, “because I’m looking for him myself. But I just don’t. I simply don’t.”
“I don’t believe you,” the voice said in tones of such quiet and controlled menace that, even knowing everything he did, Williams could feel himself beginning to shake, hundreds of miles from the source. It was just too much to deal with, a voice like that. It held qualities he had never before intuited in this kind of person. Was this what Wulff was dealing with? It was incredible that he had had any success against people like that. “You’ve had good contact with him throughout. That would continue.”
“I’ve been sick. I’ve been in the hospital. I’ve had no contact with him at all.”
“I don’t believe that, either.”
“He’s out of the country,” Williams said, surprised at himself. He had not meant to say even this much. But there was a feeling that he could not hold back, not with a voice like this. His wife was staring at him intensely now, her mouth beginning to open in an 0 of concern. The concern would begin slowly to move toward rage and then she would snatch the phone from him, hear everything. Even worse, the caller would know that he had a wife. Somehow it was important to Williams to prevent this knowledge if possible, let alone the knowledge that she was pregnant as well.
“Yes,” the voice said, “we know he’s out of the country. We’re quite aware of that, Mr. Williams. The point is: what are you going to do about that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about again.”
“The man, your friend, is out of the country. But what are your plans?”
“I have no plans,” Williams said angrily. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” and now his wife indeed was striding toward the telephone. “I can’t talk,” he said, “I have nothing to say.”
“I would advise you when he gets in touch with you to find out his whereabouts,” the voice said, “and at some subsequent time when we contact you, you can pass this information on to us. That would be extremely useful not only to you but to your highly pregnant wife,” the voice said and broke the connection, dumping the line into a clear blank singing space where Williams could only gather the sound of his breath coming back at him irregularly. He put the phone hurriedly back on the receiver.
“I quit,” he said to his wife. “I’m getting out of the business.”
“Let’s not discuss it now.”
“I don’t want any part of it,” Williams said, “I can’t put up with this; I cannot take it any more. None of this is my fault, and I refuse to be involved any more.”
“Quiet,” she said. “Quiet.” She reached forward, touched him lightly on the shoulder. He leaned forward, partly out of the line of that touch, and said, “I nearly got my guts taken out. Wasn’t that enough for them? No, it wasn’t. Nothing’s enough for them.”
“David—”
“They want everything,” he said. “Bag and baggage. The system wants your guts and the organization wants your soul and in the middle somewhere is my black ass. I thought that I could go with Wulff but that’s crazy too. They’re out to get him. He doesn’t have a prayer.”
“All right,” she said. She moved away from him, her face haughty and blank now in a way he had seen it only a long time ago. She was a poised and gentle girl. “If you can’t stand it then get out. I won’t fight with you. But where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his hand still resting on his stomach. He could not escape the feeling somehow that it would come open at any time and that what would come out of himself would be himself, not only his guts but his blood and hope mingling on the floor. “There’s no way out of it at all. Anywhere you turn it’s the same fucking thing. Maybe we’ll become a third-world couple,” he said, trying to smile. “We’ll plan to emigrate to the Congo or one of those exciting republics that have a full vote in the United Nations. There are about fifty of them now, aren’t there? Maybe Lincoln was right in the first place; before he got around to freeing the slaves he thought that it would be a hell of a good idea to send all of them back to Africa. Go back to Africa,” Williams said bitterly, “that’s all; I don’t give a fuck anymore. There’s no way out of it.”
“All right,” she said.
“Do you understand? I thought that there was a way out but I was wrong. You’re stuck, fucked up, trapped inside no matter what you do.”
“Well, that means,” she said, straightening something against the wall, “that if you can’t get out, you might as well stay, right? Isn’t that what you’re saying. You’ve got no choice at all.”
He thought about that for a time. He looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, let his glance pass through the window where he could see his neighbor’s hedges across the street in peaceful, vacant St. Albans. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe that’s right.”
“Maybe it is.” She stood, unmoving, confronting him. “Maybe it is.”
“It bears thinking,” he said then. “It certainly bears thinking, doesn’t it?” and he gestured toward her; she came toward him slowly, the bleakness falling away from her face in stages as she moved toward him and then she was against him, the two of them blending slowly in a way that they had not for a very long time.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Williams said as he slipped inside his wife for the first time in many weeks discovering that it was the same as it always had been and that there were, at least, certain constants. “I’ll be double-damned,” he said, but that was not until much later.
XVI
His own horse, squalling, stumbled free when Wulff had been thrown and galloped off into a chasm; there was the sound of bone cracking as hooves hit rock and then a scream of pure terror, almost human except that Wulff knew it was no man, but his horse which had fallen into the abyss. The second, duller sound came what seemed to be minutes later at the end of a series of shrieks f
rom the animal, the dull sound as blood and bone collided with rock, and now he heard nothing whatsoever. He lay as if embedded in rock, gripping onto the sack with both hands, stifling the sound of breathing against his palms, waiting for the assassin to reveal himself.
He had no idea how many there were. If he knew Calabrese’s tactics, if he deduced the very sense of this attack there were not many at all: perhaps two, perhaps even one, no more than three in any event. But two was a fair bet, one an excellent one. One man who knew these mountains could go out himself with a good chance of success. Somewhere ahead of him in the darkness, the guide and horse were lying trapped by rock themselves; they had not fallen only because of some accident of geology, some parapet lofted against their fall so that dead horse and rider had hung on the shelf of rock rather than collapsing beneath it. Wulff was sure that guide and horse were gone; there was not even the necessity for calculation on this part. It was only him, him and one pistol taken from the man in the Buick, versus the assassin. He held to his position and waited.
The dark was total, enveloping. His guide had made a little light with a flare, casting back illumination through which Wulff had tracked, but the flare of course was gone, and that was for the best because that flare had killed the guard—would have killed Wulff if it had stayed alive. Now the darkness came like a blanket around him, swaddling, choking, taking him in all of its spaces. At the end of this darkness, hours from now, there was the dawn and with that dawn a kind of mutual discovery; but he did not think that this would go on until dawn. Whatever happened was going to happen quickly, now. For the enemy knew the darkness. All of his advantages would disappear in the light; at that point he would be on equal terms with Wulff and this would be what he wanted to avoid. The enemy was cunning, but then again he was only doing what Wulff had done, would have done in a similar situation. He was protecting his advantages.
Wulff crouched, smothered his breath against his palms. He thought he heard something but it might only have been his blood circulating rapidly, moving through all the spaces of his body, carrying all of its deadly, incomprehensible messages; he put that apart from him, attuning himself only to the external, fixating upon what was happening. Ledged against a shelf of rock, the stone pressing against his cheek, coldness against his knees, that coldness circulating upward through his limbs, he felt himself to be in a position of either vulnerability or attack; it all depended upon from what direction the assassin was stalking him. If the man came from above Wulff was doomed. On the other hand, if he came from the sides Wulff was in a position, shifting his attention between those two poles, to lash back at him. It all depended. Everything depended.
Everything depended. It was a hell of a journey from the streets of Manhattan, haggling with informants in the bars of Lenox Avenue to this position in the mindless and unimaginable Andes; but if only looked at in an objective way, if only truly understood, the journey was inevitable. If you were going to trace that vein through which the poison was injected, move your way back to the source, then you were going to come, would yourself have come, into a situation like this. The drugs began in the open spaces, then moved their way through the clotted veins into the places of compression, the cities, but it was as logical to find yourself here in that quest as in anywhere else. This was the reality: the mountains, the blankness, the presence of the assassin. It could be said that of the two, Harlem was the one that was the dream; this the reality.
Wulff crouched, held his gun closer to him. From the left there was a subtle sound, a couple of stones clinking in the darkness, the sound of pebbles displaced as if a form was carefully working its way toward him. He fixated upon that sound, concentrating his attention into a small, thin tube which moved out from himself no more than twenty to thirty feet, a tenth of the distance of a football field, that was all. And somewhere within that line of attention the assassin was stalking him. He knew this. He felt that certainty beginning to flood him. The man was closing in, using the darkness, the darkness which manufactured haste because once it lifted advantage would be evaporated … and even as he thought this, Wulff thought that he saw a flare in that darkness, a sudden explosion of light to his left. Turning toward it he saw a man suddenly framed within that light, a man sparkling and dancing on the ledge. Then the man who was holding a gun had screamed, had lurched on that precipice and was hurling himself toward Wulff. “Bastard!” the man was screaming, “bastard, you dirty son of a bitch!” and Wulff understood, he understood everything: stalking him carefully the man had lit a flare which was supposed to be contained only to a limited area; operating on a short fuse, a short wick, the flare was supposed to kindle and die … but it was a dud. The equipment was a failure. The flare had worked too well and in exposing Wulff’s position, now the man had exposed his own.
Wulff had his pistol out and was firing even before this set of inferences had reached consciousness. The light had come and gone, showing the man dancing on the mountaintop and Wulff fired into the center of the space where the light had been, concentrating his fire. The gun that he had appropriated from the man in the Buick was certainly a more responsive piece of equipment than what Stavros had given him. But then again it was unfamiliar—he did not know if he had been able to adjust to the different feel of it—and as if confirming this a second shot came through, this one from the assassin, splintering rock behind him. Wulff felt the rock shower into and against the orifices of the body, little shards lodging in ears and neck, pellets of the fragmentation worming their way into him and the pain was intense. It was just like flak, this secondary effect but he discarded the idea of pain, putting it into some other area of the consciousness. Instead he steadied the pistol and ripped off his own second shot, trying to put it dead into the place where he had last seen the man, lodge it into his guts. A scream came from somewhere uprange, a thin, high, bloody scream, waters warbling in the throat, and Wulff knew that he had found the assassin. He put a second shot into the same place, working to concentrate the fire, letting the line of variation stay within the narrowest possible compass. Then, as if in reward, the scream came again, and out of that scream came one final shot, going somewhere far into the air above him and Wulff was staggering forward, using his hands to guide him on that rock, guiding himself by feel, trying to close ground.
The warbling birdsong of the shot assassin was somewhere below him, he knew that much, but whether it was a lowering of ground, an incline, or whether it was a different ledge or shelf of rock, he did not know. He dropped to his knees, using hands and knees to drag himself toward that interception. Then the second shot came, the last which the assassin could manage from that posture, the bullet sending out little nervous tendrils of heat which Wulff could feel as it passed his ear and then the screaming began. Screams such as Wulff had not yet heard began to come from that point below him, the sound of some thing in terrible distress, and from the center of that scream he sensed that there was an attempt to form words but the words came blurred, almost indistinct. He had to focus his attention in order to deduce what was going on. “I’m falling,” Wulff heard, “my God, you’ve got to help me, I’m falling, falling, falling!” and now Wulff could picture all of it, the assassin, driven back by the gun’s recoil clinging frantically to some ledge, having spun back in the emptiness, his gun falling from his hand like an object chopped out by assault, the assassin now holding onto rock with both hands, babbling, babbling his life away. “Please,” the voice cried again, “please help me!”
“Help you?” Wulff said. “I’ll help you,” and he began to move, belly to rock, low-crawl, toward the sound of the voice, spacing out in his mind the shape of the terrain, evaluating what position the assassin occupied in order that he could make that connection. The sack of drugs banged into his shoulder, the strap, caught on an outcropping of rock rubbing him painfully and he groaned; he put a hand to his shoulder to relieve the pressure of the strap. Another shot, the assassin’s fourth, came out of the darkness, spanging Wulff on the
shoulder, then glancing off into some crevice. That was stupid, Wulff thought, putting a hand to his shoulder, feeling a faint, suspicious line out of which the blood was welling against him, that was really stupid, making a sound, giving away my position like that, but of course this was no time to think about stupidity, not at these difficult times. Difficult, difficult, everything is problematic, he thought meditatively and used his pistol to squeeze off one more shot, very little hope in it because he could not reach the man in the darkness. But he heard a squeal, a pig-sound coming from behind layers of rock and he realized that he had.
Well, win one lose one, right? It was a percentage game, all of it, and he was bound, even in fucking Peru, to hit some luck somewhere along the way. He flattened himself against rock again and as he did so something came up from way below, some fire in the valley, or perhaps only a flash of heat lightning; he saw then the space below him, the dimensions of the drop. He was poised like a beetle against a shelf, three or four hundred feet above a sheer, clear drop, one that would take him down the length of a football field and convert him to sheer clear stone—sheer clear stone from that sheer, clear drop. But he would not fall, was not going to fall, and he hugged that rock then, grasping onto it as he had never grasped to Marie Calvante, letting the pistol dangle from his finger. He was not going to fall. He would not give them the satisfaction. You could not go through what he had merely to wind up a crushed bit of pulp at the bottom of a valley. There had to be some justice. He would accept that. He would accept the concept of justice. You son of a bitch, Wulff thought, hugging the rock, feeling the rock bite against his teeth, his sweat rendering that part of it against his face as slippery as the sea, you son of a bitch, give me one clear shot at you and you’re gone. That’s all I ask. Is that too much
