by Barry, Mike
She was crying. Shaking little tears welled out of her eyes. She raised both hands to her mouth, knuckles against her teeth like an infant. That was all. She was a child. He had never understood her until this moment.
“Cunt,” he said, “cunt, get out of my house.”
“Oh my God—”
“Get out of my house,” Sands said, “get out of my house,” and yanked open the door, put his hand on her chest, surprisingly unsubstantial under the bright, pitiful dress and pushed her into the hallway. She fell away from him like jelly. Groaning and gasping she continued to gnaw at her knuckles.
“Fucking cunt,” he said, “fucking whore son of a bitch,” and seized the suitcase, hurled it violently against the wall. It hit with a crack making the sound a skull might make, fell to the carpeting.
“Don’t come back,” he said. “Don’t ever come fucking back into my life again, you cunt.”
Trembling, he closed the door, turned the lock. It was not enough. His whole body was shaking, he could feel the dislocation tearing through him like fever, like knives. He lunged into the living room, took a straightback chair, wedged it against the door in a police hold as once, long ago, he had done against a feared raid that had never come off. To keep this woman out. In rage he stormed through the rooms then, yanking off tablecloths, ripping linens from closets, seizing plates from random points in the kitchen and shattering them against the wall.
At length, all of this burned itself out and he was quiet. Sands sat gasping by the fireplace, holding himself against the great, tearing sobs that arced through him, forcing his respiration back to normal, feeling his heart pound away the small crucil passage of the blood which was his only—which was anyone’s—hold upon life. And at the dead-center of all of this, he saw what he would have to do.
Everything came together for him then with a dull and final sense of connection and he saw before him the only way that this could be handled, the only way that he would be able to fit the pieces together. If he wanted to hold onto that valise, make it count, make it work, he had to do it this way. There was no other choice.
All of his life he had worked for the avoidance of risk. It had gotten him a doctorate and a failed project and a wife turned cunt who had walked out on him. And had put him nowhere at the age of thirty-four. Now he had to try it another way.
He had to take the path of risk which he had so carefully avoided. All of his life he had been the one at the head of the class, the one who got the assignments in on time, made a personal relationship with the instructor, took careful notes, never burned his bridges, considered all of the angles of a situation, never did anything whatsoever without careful, ponderous reflection. And this is what it had gotten him. No, now he had to try it the other way.
Every nerve and instinct shrieked against what he was about to do but Sands did it anyway. Everything started in the reversion against habit. He picked up the phone. He dialed a number that he had long known by memory although he had never expected to use it. But there were numbers that you would never use that it still paid to know simply because it was a small advantage. This was one of them. God help him, Sands thought. The phone rang dimly at the other end. After a time, someone picked it up.
Sands said that he had important business and he wanted to talk to a man named Cicchini. The secretary wanted to know his name and Sands said he wouldn’t give it but he would guarantee that Cicchini would be interested: it had to do with a quarter of a million dollars. Maybe more. The secretary put him on hold.
After a longer time a man with a lilting voice came on and said that he was Cicchini’s confidential assistant, his employer was out of town for the day but could he help him? Sands told the man that he could screw off, this was big business and he was going to talk to the man on top or no one at all. He offered to hang up. The confidential assistant asked him to hold on for a little while.
After a much longer pause than the first two, a man with a curiously flat, dead, dull voice came on and asked Sands what the hell he wanted and exactly who in hell he thought he was.
Sands nodded with a staisfaction mixed with the most terrible kind of fear, and quickly, intensely, levelly, he began to spell out his situation to Louis Cicchini, the head of the Boston family.
Cicchini heard him through without interruptions. A man did not get to where he was without being, among many other things, a good listener.
VIII
Wulff read all about the firebombing the next morning but it gave him no satisfaction. No reason why it should; he was as far from objective as ever. Firebombing the press called it: had the grenade been undiscovered in all that wreckage? Apparently. Little satisfaction. He was, for all of the excitement, back to square one.
Eight of them dead, almost twice as many injured, a good haul, but what had it done for him? He had to face the fact, he had accomplished nothing. The valise was still in the hands of the others, the essential structure of the enemy remained unchanged. It was like laying down artillery fire in a country ruled by guerillas, he thought; you could clean out isolated spots here and there but the basic organization would hold because it was dispersed, indigenous to the countryside itself. The only way that you could beat the enemy was to destroy the country itself, but the country was worth saving. You had to work from that single assumption; if you didn’t you were dead altogether. Wryly, he thought of Vietnam.
Wryly, he thought of many things as he made his way back cautiously on foot to the flophouse hotel, the LeSabre, like so many cars before it ditched some distance away, keys in, motor running. Walking through a grey midmorning rain which had chased everyone, even the junkies, from the downtown streets—but then again Boston was a tightly-run city, with the levelling of Scully Square they had sent their junkies scattering north and west, east and south, eliminating the problem then by simply denying it—Wulff thought a little of the nature of the enemy, of the nature of his own struggle. Now he could see that everything had just been skirmishes, little forays on the outside. New York had been a joke really because he had not touched the men who controlled the network; San Francisco had been something less than a joke, it was a sunshine spectacular is what it had been, complete with a pier fire and a lot of death. But all that he had been able to take out of San Francisco was a valise, and how long had that lasted? How long would any of this last? If he died today, got himself gunned down on the pavement, which was more likely than not, the way things were going, the enemy would roll over as if he had never existed. They were so deep into the vitals of the country that no one man, no group of men could make a difference. The enemy, in fact, was infinitely replaceable. Everything so far had proven that. Crush one ant in a colony and two would come to take it away.
At the hotel entrance two men approached him from opposite sides, pinning him against a wall. He felt the looming pressure of their bodies, tried to go for his gun but the gesture was blocked and before he could react further they were expertly frisking him, patting him up and down, relieving him of the revolver which one of them shoved into a side pocket. They were tall, indistinguishably grim men wearing curiously elegant hats and they had caught him cold.
Stupid again. To go through all of this to be nailed down on a slum pavement. Wulff calculated briefly the chance of an all-out assault. But the men were professionals. The frisk completed they backed away, pulled guns beyond his reach and looked him over calmly. For the second time since he had come to this accursed city, Wulff waited for death.
“All right,” the one on the left said, “let’s go. Move.”
Law enforcement? Wulff doubted it. Falling into the hands of the cops would not, however, be an improvement. He was in as deep with the one as the other and a quick death was preferable to confinement for life. He swung his line of sight from one to the other, looking for some vulnerability, some kind of weakness against which he might launch himself. But part of his own professionalism was in knowing not only when to attack but when to hold off. These men were impermeabl
e. They had their guns out, they knew how to handle guns and they would put him on the pavement before he could close any distance. It would be a very poor supposition too for him to think they might miss a vital spot.
“I mean it, Wulff,” the one on the left said, “let’s get going.” He reached forward but did not touch him, merely made a directing gesture and the one on the other side slipped behind to prod him gently. There was nothing to do. Wulff walked past the hotel, up the street. No one bothered to look at any of this. In the cities the most drastic and terrifying events could occur before crowds and there would be no interference. It was the only protection these people had.
There was a Continental idling at curbside near the corner, a third man behind the wheel. In an odd touch which indicated that these men had not missed a single detail, he was wearing a chauffeur’s hat and reading a newspaper. He would attract no attention at all; just another employee of the gentry bringing some terrified businessman into the slums. As he saw them near, the chauffeur tossed the paper to the floor, adjusted his cap and, gripping the wheel delicately, eased the car out of its space and toward them. Wulff heard the sound of power door locks unsnapping and then one of the men, coming up in front of him, opened the rear right and showing him the gun again, motioned.
“Get in,” he said.
Wulff got in. The car was a full divider, the glass probably inches thick and bulletproof. He could see the chauffeur’s head only as a vague outline surrounded by what seemed to be clouds of vapor. He moved halfway across the seat and the other man, the one who had been behind him, opened the left door and slid beside him, knee to knee. The one on the right got in easily, closed the door, and almost imperceptibly the big car yawed into gear and began to move.
Frozen in. Wulff looked to the left and he looked to the right. No hope there. The gunmen had merely increased their alertness now that they were seated. They looked at him, weapons exposed, casually, almost pleasantly. In their eyes Wulff saw that familiar look: it was nothing personal at all. The gunmen barely knew who he was. They would, if he moved at them, gut him like a fish on this shiny back seat, but there would in all of it be nothing but the casual efficiency of a job performed for pay.
Wulff sighed, sat straight back and closed his eyes. No conversationalists, his abductors, no conversationalist he. They might be taking him out for the last fifteen miles of his life but in the meantime he was going to sleep.
Surprisingly, he did so. He must have passed into an uneven doze, broken only when the car got free of downtown Boston and began to move north in a clear surge of power. It was the speed which awakened Wulff; he was sensitive to the quality. It looked to be eighty-five, ninety miles an hour and this was both good and bad, bad because the limousine was not strung for speeds like this no matter what the manual said, but good because his abductors, obviously, had a destination. They were not looking for a place to ditch him; they wanted to get directly to where they were going and this was a good sign. Even professionals—mostly professionals, in fact—did not drive fast to the site of an assassination. It gave any man pause.
“Should we blindfold him?” the man on his right said. It was the first word from anyone since they had gotten into the car.
“I don’t give a shit,” the one on the left said in a thick New England accent. “Were we told to?”
“Well, no, not really—”
“Then the hell with it,” the man said flatly. He leaned over toward Wulff, again with that strange solicitousness and Wulff knew then with a sense of positiveness that they were not going to kill him. Not now, anyway. And not these men. “Would you like to be blindfolded?”
“Not particularly.”
“A lot of people prefer to be blindfolded,” the man on his right said. “Would you believe that?”
“Why not?”
“They’d rather not see where they’re going; they think it’s better to see nothing. People are really strange,” the man said and sighed, toyed with his gun. “Don’t make a move or I’ll kill you,” he added in an obligatory Way.
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“I don’t really want to kill you. I don’t want to kill anyone. But sometimes people make it necessary.”
“It’s a tough racket,” Wulff said.
“You don’t know the half of it. You don’t even know a quarter of it, the way some people are—”
“Shut the fuck up,” the New Englander said. He bunched his coat, looked down at the folds. “Some people don’t know when to quit,” he said to Wulff.
“I guess not.”
“But I do. So we’ll just keep our conversation down if you don’t mind.”
“Suits me.”
“You got a big fucking mouth,” the man on the right said but added nothing and looked into the barrel of his gun then the way a drunk might look into a martini pitcher. Gloomily.
Still at high speed, the car broke free of the turnpike, dived for an exit, took a local road north, the driver cutting back to a mere sixty-five, the Continental absorbing the disturbances in the road like a bear grappling with its paws. Marblehead, Wulff saw.
So this was where the higher levels lived. He knew now that the two men were not assassins but delivery boys and he was being taken to the quarters of someone important enough to have a Continental and three men for hire. Marblehead was no Revere Beach, that was sure.
Here the land had opened up in the way that the pioneers moving west must have found it a hundred years ago; the clutter and enjambment of Revere Beach had given way to rolling green land chemically treated, moving right down to the seacoast, the seacoast itself richly colored and coming up to the rear of some houses which were located down at the front. The houses themselves were enormous and separated not only by the walls and hedges of a Revere Beach but space; there was space in Marblehead. Here, Wulff thought, was in microcosm the story of the drug trade itself, beginning hesitantly as a congested and horrid series of acts in the back rooms of the cities, moving further and further out then as the poisoned injection held, the poison going into the bloodstream, whirling, dispersing even further, moving through the trunk to the limbs, to all of the distant, departed places….
It was beautiful. Nothing in New York or San Francisco to equal it. You had to go to Deal, to the South, to see something like this, but the Deal estates did not have the aged, carefully molded look that these houses did. Work, restoration, a great deal of money had been put into these houses, but it was careful money, carefully applied. It preserved but did not destroy. Wulff looked at it fascinated, thinking that it would be nice if they, the people who lived in Deal or Marblehead, had had the same feeling about the cities that they did for their own ground.
The car braked, swerved, cut into a long, loping driveway to the right, the driver hitting the brakes expertly, the car skittering a little on cobblestones. At the end of the driveway, a full quarter of a mile down, was a gate; beyond that Wulff could see the house, beyond that the sea itself. The house was set directly on the sea at no rise; in the morning on a clear day the occupants could probably see out beyond the islands. On the other hand, when the mists closed in the house would be like a coin held in a fist: trapped, delimited. The young guard inside the small enclosure blinked as he saw the Continental drive in.
“You got him,” he said.
The driver gestured, said something but the soundproofing shut it out. The man to his left rolled down the window, looked at the guard. “Of course we got him,” he said.
“I could tell. I know his face.”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up and just let us drive through?”
This New Englander had a nasty mouth. Of course considering the various pressures on him, he might even be entitled to it. “When I’m ready I’ll wave you through,” he said. “This is my post.”
“I’ll give you a post in the fucking woods somewhere, you want a post.”
“Come on,” the man to his right said, “why don’t you just cool it?”
“You can shut the fuck up too,” the New Englander said. He gave Wulff a glare. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “you’re a big fucking pain in the ass. I had my way I would have pulled off the road and shot you.”
Wulff shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I put up with enough shit, you know? All I get is this kind of crap.”
“It’s tough,” Wulff said, amused. “It really is. I know what you mean.”
“But then again it’s a living. They ask you what the alternative is, I really don’t know.”
“Why don’t you just cut it out?” the man to his right said almost plaintively, “couldn’t you do that? We deliver him, we’re done. You’re just holding up the works.”
“I’d like to deliver him with a bullet in the spleen.”
The guard shook his head again, went back into the booth and picked up a telephone. Wulff sat rigid, quiet. The thought occurred to him that he had them now in a state of minimal alertness. If there was ever a time to make a break it was now. The man on the right was merely embarrassed, the one on the left was rubbing his hands into one another and whispering vague foreign-sounding threats which sounded promising but which were keeping him completely occupied. And the guard, now talking intensely into the telephone seemed to have troubles of his own.
But the chauffeur, the least noticeable of the three, would of course be the wild card. He wouldn’t get three yards, even if he were able to decapitate the other three—which he doubted—before the chauffeur disposed of him. No, Wulff decided and put the thought away carefully, inserting it into the deck next to the wild card, it wouldn’t pay. He had gone this far, he would go further yet. What he had to remember was that he was a dead man and that a dead man could not be killed twice. He wanted to believe this. He told himself that he did. But all of the time, the stakes were going up.
The guard made a waving gesture from inside the booth, directing them in. The driver put the Continental abruptly into gear and floored the gas, shoving them back into the seats. The car spun on the gravel, held for purchase, then reared forward and they headed up the pathway toward the house.
