by Barry, Mike
to ask? I ask one shot and then you can have me. But I won’t miss it. I absolutely guarantee that I will not.
“Listen,” someone said out of the darkness, “listen, this is ridiculous. I mean, we’re not doing each other any good here at all. This isn’t solving a fucking thing.”
Keep on talking, Wulff thought. Go on talking. That conversation is the passport.
“I mean,” the voice said, “here we are somewhere in a fucking mountain range, shooting at each other, right? I’m under orders to kill you and you’re under orders to kill me, probably because you’re supposed to kill anyone who tries to stop you from what you’re doing. But I’ve been thinking and it’s ridiculous. Isn’t it? I mean we should lay off each other, try to help each other out of this fucking mess, that’s what I think.”
That’s good, Wulff thought, that’s good, keep on talking. Remorse would get you nowhere, not in this business; but fear was the name of the game and it was fear which was operative in that voice. It could mean anything, everything, if it could only feed upon itself, that balloon of fear. “You’re there,” the voice said, “I know you’re out there. You’re very close, you can’t be more than a few feet away.”
Make it ten yards, Wulff thought. The voice was somewhere to the south of him so that ten yards down, southeast make it, he might be able to deposit a blind shot with some kind of luck. Then again the speaker might be protected by a ledge of rock, it was impossible to tell. Certainly until he could tell it would be foolish to attempt anything. The thing to do was simply to wait it out. Didn’t that make sense? He would simply wait the voice out. Proper police procedure, he thought, and it was as if a hundred supervisors in the background speaking in the voices of the academy were applauding him. That’s the stuff, Wulff. Go to it. Kill the son of a bitch. Lead him out and then get rid of him. Proper police tactics; concentrate on the assailant, let the assailant’s own mood defeat him.
“Please say something,” the voice said. It sounded tentative, far more tentative than it had when it started. It had started out with the booming tones of assurance, a we-are-both-reasonable-men point of view, but now it had moderated down toward whimpering. Like Marasco. Like Marasco when he had killed him on those stairs. Put the pressure of the uncertain on them and they would always crumble. Only a very prideful man like Calabrese would not break in circumstances like these; but there was a way into them too, if only he could find it. He thought he had found it now; he hoped that he had the opportunity to put that insight into practice. “Listen,” the voice said, “whether you say anything or not it’s ridiculous. Can’t you see the stupidity of it? We’re two men a couple of thousand miles from home, struggling to get the fuck out of these mountains, and we’re set at each other’s throats. We’ve never even seen each other but we’re supposed to kill. But it isn’t the two of us, don’t you understand that? It’s the people who have sent us here. All we’re doing is acting on orders. Can’t we meet face-to-face? What the fuck are we doing in these goddamned mountains? The people who sent us here wouldn’t be in the mountains.”
Wulff held his position. The voice was becoming higher, less certain all of the time. If he could only wait it out, he thought that the voice might be at the point of breakage. Not that he needed breakage, that was not necessary. He had no point to prove in terms of the strengths of the individual personalities. No, it had only to do with the giving away of position and he was getting in, getting in closer all the time. “I’m right you know,” the voice said, “you know I’m right. We have nothing against each other. This has nothing to do with us at all. I don’t want to kill you, you don’t want to kill me. If we passed each other on the street somewhere there wouldn’t even be any recognition. We’re just doing the job for people without the guts. Look,” the voice said, “I’m going to throw my gun away now. I’m going to show you my good faith because I’ve got nothing to prove anymore and because I want the two of us to come out of these mountains alive. Not one, both. It doesn’t have to be this way you know. We don’t have to fight and kill one another. Fuck Calabrese. What did he ever do for me?”
I don’t know, Wulff thought, I don’t know what he ever did for you but I sure as hell know what he did for me. He made a fool of me and he sent me south, that’s what he did, guaranteed himself in his own mind that he would never have to deal with me again, but I’ve got one reason to live if I’ve got no other, one real reason to live and that is simply to see him again, once more, and to prove to him that he’s wrong. To show that evil, corrupt, deadly old man that he made a mistake and that you did not send a man out of your life simply by sending him out of your space, to show him that the world did not work in this fashion, that there were certain men, certain considerations which went beyond the manipulations of power. Come to me you
bastard, come to me. He held out his pistol, holding it straightline and waited for the shot. He knew that it would come now. He knew that it would come.
“Be reasonable,” the voice said, “be reasonable. Please talk to me. Please say something. I don’t have a gun. I threw my gun away.”
Good, Wulff thought, you threw your gun away and now we’re going to throw you away. You are inseparable from your gun, the two of you because I know you people and who you are and how you work and the way in which you think and in the throwing away of the gun it is yourself that you’ve stripped. Come on, you son of a bitch. Come on now. Stand up.
“You fool,” the voice said tiredly, “you damned fool, I know you’re there and you haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said, have you? It doesn’t mean a fucking thing, none of it, anything I’ve said, anything I’ve meant. I’m going to stand up now. I’m going to show you myself. I’m going to give you a shot at me but I don’t think that you’re going to take it because, don’t you understand? We’re the only way that each of us has out of the mountains. We must love one another or die,” the voice said, somewhat drunkenly, Wulff thought, “we must love one another or die,” and then there was a sound of scrappling to the southeast, hands and knees working tentatively against rock. Then as Wulff caught his breath in his throat in the same way that he might have if an unfamiliar pretty woman was about to take off her clothes in front of him, something came against the horizon—black, black against blackness, uneven against the sky, a faint smudge against the greater dark. Wulff saw that form rearing, bearlike against the horizon, framed as if in the flash of light unseen up until now; and in one motion, bringing his gun smoothly across his chest, leveling everything into the one action, he pumped a shot high into the form, hitting it in the neck, a sound coming then from that form less solid than liquid. Aqueous, bubbling.
“Ah, God,” the form said bubbling, little murmurs of water in the words, “you didn’t have to do that. You son of a bitch, if you had wanted to do that you could have done it when I had a fair chance, you treacherous fucker.” And then the form fell, not during but after the speech, almost as if it had been holding itself up for that one line, that one message of import and then, almost casually, fell. It bounced from one slab of rock to the next, groaning in a very informal, very human way. Then it lay there.
Wulff closed ground carefully. He felt some need to come upon the assassin, a need which he could not have labeled, could not have in any way explicated and which, yet, was absolutely profound; he felt drawn, flesh-to-flesh, to that other particle of humanity which had been out with him in this high place. (And maybe then the voice had been right in saying that they had more in common than they had apart; they had nothing against one another, but he did not, would not, have to connect that voice with the form if he were careful.) But at the same time he did not want in the lapse after victory to do something stupid like lose his grip on these rocks and fall himself. So he kept on moving instead in the low-crawl position, belly to rock, rock to belly, sliding like a fish from one place to the next, closing in upon the burbling and whistling sounds that were still to the southeast but lower down. He held his pistol straight out in
front of him, the pistol digging into the stone always poised so that he could if necessary pump a shot into the assassin if the move was deception … but he did not think that this was necessary. It was merely technique, absent self-protection. But there was nothing wrong with technique for its own sake; you could not go wrong by doing at all times the most professional and cautious thing possible.
At length, after a long crawl which felt as if it had been for hundreds of yards but could not have been a tenth of that, he came upon the form itself. He heard fluttering, sensed motion in the darkness and then, in some occlusion of light, a light that must have come from the heat of their blended bodies, he saw the man lying in a suspension of agony, stretched across two rocks, one at his neck, the other at his knees, bleeding his life away out of a large hole in the center of his neck, the skin around it pulped. He could see everything looking into that hole; it must have been the blood itself that provided the light, an aura from which illumination cascaded. But then again, Wulff reminded himself, he was very weary and under great tension, and these hallucinations were quite common, particularly in the Andes where the peyote was so thick that it was almost part of the content of the air. He must be freaking out, he thought. As the junkies called it, this must be a pure freakout; and yet he was drawn to that hole, it was fascinating, a little vagina in the neck, protected by flaps. The man was breathing through that opening, the breath whistling faintly in that dense space. The lips were moving. “You fool,” the man said, hoarsely.
There was still nothing to say. He did not know what attitude to take; it was not quite a deathwatch because this man was not yet dead; but then he owed him better than the clear, pure eyes of the morgue attendant. At length he took his gun more firmly in hand and tucked it inside his clothing. Putting death away in sight of a dead man.
“You damned fool,” the man said. The words were curiously distinct. “We could have made it out together. Don’t you talk? Are you a dummy?”
“No,” Wulff said finally. It was strange to find speech after all this time, this tension. “No, I can talk. You can hear me.”
“We could have gotten out of these mountains. The two of us. We could have saved ourselves. But all you know is killing.”
“That’s right. That’s right.”
“All you know is killing,” the man said, “all that anyone in this business knows is killing, you goddamned fool. What’s going to happen to me now? I’m going to die. There’s an airport half a mile from here with a helicopter waiting. The two of us could have made it out.”
“No,” Wulff said, “it wouldn’t have worked.”
“It wouldn’t?” the man said incuriously. He put a splayed hand to the opening in his neck, felt his wound, his eyes retracting. “Why wouldn’t it have worked?”
“Because it can’t be that way,” Wulff said, “because they sent you to kill me and you would have waited for the opportunity and done it the first chance you had.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would. All that matters are the positions in which you find yourself. You’re wrong you know. You can’t be just a man. They won’t let you be. What you are is where they put you. That’s all.”
“You know what?” the man said with a faint grin, his eyes opening, his hand opening, coming away from his neck in an abrupt gesture, touching Wulff, then darting away, moving in the direction of the sky, “you know what? That’s fucking deterministic, that’s what the fuck it is,” and saying nothing else he died. The ebbing of his life was quite natural and unelaborate; one moment the man was still filled with breath, gasping and thundering within him, the next the breath had gone out and there was nothing to replace it. His eyes rolled back within his head, his body convulsed faintly and then, his head rolling to one side, he was dead. Or at least he was in a posture inseparable from death, it was the same thing. Everything was the same thing, at the end of matters.
Wulff slowly stood. As he did so the darkness overwhelmed him again. There was a corpse below him, a man who had just died—one of Calabrese’s best men, he had no doubt. Yet he could have been in another city, another country altogether, for all the impression that that corpse made on him from this discovered perspective. He was dead, that was all; death was a different quality. He moved away from the body, stepping out of the circle of death, and darkness came over him swiftly. He was alone again. Somewhere far down in the stones, a horse screamed again.
He held onto the sack, running his hand up and down the strap. An assassin was dead and he was alive. A little while before both of them had been alive, but now only one was. Still, it made no difference. You could hardly ponder the wonders and mystery of life and death when your own position was where he stood now.
Then Wulff remembered what the dying man had said about the airport.
And thinking of it, his attention riveted on this recollection. He thought then that he could hear the sounds.
XVII
There was a girl Calabrese called in only for special occasions like this one, a girl who was reserved for moments of crisis and doubt because she had qualities that could assign new values to all of these problems; but even with the girl it did not seem to work. Rearing above her, fucking her methodically, Calabrese thought for a moment that he would break through into a different life-frame altogether, a frame in which Wulff had been killed and he, Calabrese, no longer had reason for shame. But it was only an illusion, an illusion brought on by orgasm, and a moment after he came he was still plunging away at her in a small abscess of gloom, miming the motions of intercourse, his semen pooling in and around her vagina, moving in a stale stream to the bed. She looked up at him as if from a great distance, her eyes shrouded. She was a blonde, or at least mostly a blonde, going gray only in a few small places, with enormous breasts and the ability to take almost anything that Calabrese could throw into her. She was thirty-eight years old. He had been fucking her for fifteen years. If he was lucky he would get another fifteen out of her before it was all gone. But fucking her this time had not done what it had most of the others, and now, rolling from her, Calabrese already felt the self-revulsion building, stoking within him fires of impulse that lust before had not touched. “All right,” he said. “Enough. Get out.”
“Okay,” she said. She was nothing if not accommodating. She had a perfect understanding of exactly what Calabrese wanted her for, and her calculations were obvious: if it suited him then it suited her. A hundred and fifty a week for a retainer, and sometimes months would pass before he needed her. At the most he might get her twelve to fifteen times a year. A hundred and fifty for that kind of action wasn’t bad, the only requirement was that she be on call when he needed her—but it was a reasonable price to pay. He had no idea of her personal life. He had found her in a bar in Las Vegas, but in these fifteen years she might have gotten married, gotten married three times, even squeezed in a kid or two in the long periods when he had not seen her. Calabrese did not give a fuck. It was her life. Now, as much as he had wanted her, he wanted her out. She made no difference. It had been a bad idea to call her in the first place. Fucking her had only reminded him of how insoluble his problems were, at least by fucking. “You look terrible,” she said.
“Forget it.”
“You really do. You look awful.” Their relationship admitted comments like this as long as they were not pushed too far on either end. As far as he was concerned she thought of him as a businessman, a successful businessman with a big estate, that was all. If she had any other ideas he didn’t give a fuck what they were as long as she kept them to herself. “Okay,” she said again and moved from the bed, went for her dress. Her shoes she had kept on while fucking; she knew it excited Calabrese, so that meant only one garment to put back on. She did so efficiently in a couple of motions. The woman knew her way around. “You ought to take it easy,” she said, “that’s all.”
“I had no choice,” Calabrese said suddenly. “I had to let him go.”
“Oh?”
“Of course I did. If I killed him it was saying that my life was a lie, that everything I had lived was impossible. Calabrese is a big coward, they would have said.”
“You’re a strong man,” she said. “You’re no coward.” She tugged her dress into place.
“I had to let him go. If I didn’t let him go it would have been too easy. I had to show all of them that there was no one that I was afraid of, that I could give this man a lead and still kill him.”
“You want me to go now?” she said. She raised a hand, suddenly, strangely touched his cheek in one of those gestures which had not been frequent between them. “Hey, I’d better go. You got things on your mind. It’ll be better next time though, believe me.”
“Don’t go,” Calabrese said. He was lying on the bed naked, looking up at the ceiling. Spider-lines on the ceiling, small opening cracks of corruption in the walk: strange that he had not noticed them before. The house was aging. With all the money, all the time he had put into it, yet it was falling apart. He would have to have some work done with it. “Do go,” he said, “I don’t give a shit.”
The woman sat heavily on the edge of the bed, put a hand on his calf. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said.
“Go. Stay. Just don’t tell me that you don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Is there anything you can do to help yourself?”
“Nothing.”
“Is there anything I can do to help you? Just say it if—”
“Nothing,” Calabrese said, still looking at the ceiling. Someday, if not worked on, those cracks were going to open up like knife-strokes and dump polluted water, filth, corruption, the bowels of the house upon him in his bed. He would definitely have to do something to prevent that. But at the moment he felt inert. He did not care. “There’s nothing anyone can do to help me.”
