by Barry, Mike
“Son of a bitch driver,” the New Englander said. “Doesn’t he know what he’s doing?” He looked at his gun moodily. “Maybe he’s got us assigned to take care of the wrong people. I’d like to shoot the fucker.”
“Why don’t you cut it out?” the other gunman said as if at the end of his patience. “I’ve had to listen to your shit all the way up from Boston. Couldn’t you give me a break, for Christ’s sake? I didn’t ask for this anymore than you did.”
“Yeah,” the New Englander said, “yeah, that’s right, you didn’t ask for it anymore than I did but there’s nothing else you could do with your life. I could have been all sorts of things if I had put my mind to it. But it sure as hell’s too late now, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Wulff said, “is it?”
“What’s that?”
“You could get out of the business,” Wulff said. “You could try to break out on your own. Set up your own shop, work as a freelancer. You might have a place like this yourself someday.”
The New Englander gave him a look of hatred. “I’ve got my orders,” he said, “and believe me I’ll follow through with them, but I’d like to put a gunhole into your fucking skull, would you believe it?”
“I’d believe anything.”
The driver yanked the car to a stop, cut the engine and almost instantaneously departed from view. Wulff, leaning over instinctively, wondered exactly what the hell was going on but then he saw the driver stretching out, somnolent and peaceful, on the leather cushions. What he was doing, it seemed, was going to sleep. Well, there was much credit to be given a man like this: he took his percentages where he could find them, and Wulff himself had been able to manage a little doze on the way.
The New Englander kicked open the door, seized Wulff by the wrist and guided him out of the car. Wulff did not resist. It would have been easy in getting out of the car to have felled the man and with the chauffeur now on the cushions there would have been a small but real chance of getting away with this—but he had made his calculations. He would let it ride. He stood on the path, listening to the sounds of the sea.
“Inside,” the New Englander said. They flanked him left and right and walked toward the house, set level to the ground, a flat ranch but sprawling and sprawling through layers of space. Someone opened the door and they went inside. At the end of a long hallway which fronted them someone stood at the end. He smiled when he saw them.
Wulff looked at the man, wondering if he could be right and then as the distance closed between them step by step he saw that he was and a sudden, rushing, vaulting sense of connection filled him. It was the same kind of feeling which maybe a not-too-advanced junkie got from the first rush. It was everything for which he might have hoped a few months before when all of this madness had started.
Unless he was very, very wrong, and Wulff did not think he was, he was looking at Louis Cicchini, reputed to be the kingpin of the East, and Cicchini’s lieutenants, having been acknowledged and dismissed were already scurrying away leaving him face to face with the man.
He felt like an exterminator without his equipment.
IX
“I want to be very honest with you, Wulff,” Cicchini said a few moments later. “There must be no misunderstanding between us and I want to make this as quick as possible.”
He was holding a gun on Wulff with the loose, easy detachment of the professional. The boys in the Continental might have been good with all their personality problems but Cicchini with a gun was like Isaac Stern to a wedding violinist. He held it almost absently, dangling from his fingers, a detachment which might have been deceptive for anyone that had tried to rush the gun. Then Cicchini, his eyes still bleary and half-closed, his hand still out of position would have ripped off the shots to have killed him. All in about three seconds. “All right,” Wulff said, shifting on the couch where Cicchini had directed him, some yards back of the large desk from which the man had risen to look out the window toward the sea. “I have business elsewhere too, a big appointment list, so maybe we can keep it short.”
“I despise you, Wulff,” Cicchini said, in a flat, unaffected voice. “I’ve done a good deal of research on your background and your recent travels and I think you’re the most dangerous man by far with whom we’ve ever dealt.”
“That says a lot for enforcement,” Wulff said bitterly and then, with an effort, sat back on the couch, wedging the pillows tightly into his back. Shut up, he thought, and then, fascinated, followed Cicchini’s eyes to the sea. The roaring, vaulting landscape of ocean beyond. Glancing at this a man, even a Cicchini, must have understood the possibility of his own death.
“You got two good people in New York,” Cicchini said tightly, “and a lot of bad ones and you’ve fucked up San Francisco for years to come. Was it necessary for you to blow up the ship?”
“I thought so.”
“You’re insane, Wulff,” Cicchini said levelly. “You take all of this personally. You don’t understand that our business is merely that, a business: a lot of people are doing the best they can. If there weren’t a demand, there wouldn’t be a supply. We didn’t create the demand, it was always there. We’re merely filling it.”
“You’re wrong,” Wulff said, unable to keep quiet. If he was ever going to leave Louis Cicchini alive, and he doubted it, he could only do so by being silent and letting the man’s rage exhaust itself, roll over him like that enormous ocean outside, but he could not. “You’re creating the demand. The poison feeds upon itself. If you were just filling a need you’d have opened a couple of heroin clinics twenty years ago to registered addicts and you’d have a clientele left now of about twenty. The rest you would have killed off.”
Cicchini’s face clotted, abruptly he turned and sat down behind the desk. He took off the rimless glasses he wore, extracted a handkerchief from his breast pocket and very carefully wiped them, the gun swaying back and forth with the motion. Don’t even think about jumping him, not with that desk between us. At length he sighed, apparently satisfied and put the glasses back on, rolled up the handkerchief and put it away. “I’m not going to argue metaphysics with you, Wulff,” he said. “I didn’t come up here to have an argument and you weren’t brought here so that we could discuss motives.” He made an abrupt dismissive gesture. “Let it be.”
“Good,” said Wulff, putting his knees together, palms flat to knees and standing, “in that case I’ll just go—”
“Sit down,” Cicchini said, his voice modulated. “Don’t be ridiculous. I just want to say one more thing about this and then I’ll tell you why you were brought up here—which was, incidentally, not to be killed. If I wanted to have you killed that would have been taken care of twenty miles from here about two hours ago.”
“You brought me up to offer me a partnership,” Wulff said, “what you need is new blood—”
“I want you to shut up and listen to me,” Cicchini said. “I’m going to make you a better offer than you have any right to but you’re trying my patience. That girl who died in Manhattan, that Marie Calvante—nobody within my purview had anything to do with that at all.”
Wulff felt his breath suddenly become ragged. It was uneven, tormenting, fire in his chest. “Don’t talk about the girl,” he said.
“I know that this is a sensitive subject for you. I’ve done my homework on you, Wulff, a man in my position would have to do some pretty thorough checking, and I know all about that business. I don’t blame you for being bitter. But no one at any level of the interlocking organizations had anything to do with it. I’ve gone through this very thoroughly and it’s the truth.”
“Shut up,” said Wulff.
“As I said,” Cicchini said, “I know this is a pretty sensitive subject for you but I’m afraid you’re just going to have to sit there and take it.” He slammed the desk hard with the flat of his hand. “You’ve gone through all of this under a misapprehension. You’ve gone around shooting and killing and destroying and generally making a gr
eat deal of trouble and it’s all been a mistake. We had nothing to do with that. If that girl died it was either by her own hand or she ran into something like a tenth-rate burglar who didn’t expect to see her and panicked.”
Wulff sat on the couch. He leaned forward and looked at Cicchini, got his eyes finally, met him at every conceivable level of search-and-connection. “If you mention that girl once more,” he said “you’re going to have to kill me. I’m going to jump you and I guarantee you can put five shots into me before I’ve stood but I’ll have my hands on your throat anyway. I’ll get you. I’ll cut off your wind.”
Cicchini made a gesture of disgust. “All right,” he said, “you’re never going to listen, are you, Wulff? I’d be better off putting a bullet into your heart now and putting you out of your misery.”
“Why don’t you?”
Cicchini sighed, stood again and began to pace back and forth behind the desk in a rigid, spaced-out line. “I’d like to,” he said. “You’re dangerous and stupid and probably I’ll get around to it sooner or later. But right now I happen to need you.” “To do what? Mainline junk?”
Cicchini laughed almost boisterously, cut off that laughter almost as quickly as it had come. “You’re obsessed,” he said, “you’re a single-minded man. You have only one purpose and the pity is that we’d never be able to bring you over to a more sensible point of view. No, not quite, Wulff. I need you to get hold of a valise.”
Wulff kept himself under control. Inside, the astonishment was ripping out of him like blood. Show nothing. Betray nothing. “What valise?”
“The valise you brought into my territory, Wulff. It’s fucking up my life and my work and I’d like you to get your hands the hell back on it and take it out of here if you’d be so good. Is that simple enough?”
“I don’t understand,” Wulff said. “I just don’t understand what you’re talking about.” He paused and then, almost against himself, smiled. “If you wanted me to keep hold of the valise and get it out of your territory,” he said, “why did you take it from me in the first place?”
Cicchini shrugged. “Situations change,” he said. “Frankly, it was a very bad idea. It was no worse though than your decision to bring that valise here in the first place. You see, Wulff, I’d like to explain something to you: I’ve got more or less a very nice, tight operation here. I don’t know what you encountered in San Francisco but I suspect that it was something quite behind the times. Here, I like things to run smoothly and efficiently.”
“Don’t we all,” said Wulff. Cicchini, the businessman. But Wulff had to make, however grudgingly, the concession: in his travels Cicchini was the best he had seen yet. He had to admire him. He was everything which Nicholas Severo, the fat little boss in San Francisco, had imagined himself to be, except that Cicchini knew what he was doing and had the obvious strength to back it up. All levels of competence in any field, he thought bitterly. This bastard would have made a good desk sergeant. “Don’t we all like smoothness and efficiency as long as we don’t have to see those who pay the price for order.”
“You’re getting abstract again, Wulff,” Cicchini said, “and I told you, I don’t have the time for this. Now bringing the valise in here was a very bad idea, a dumb, stupid idea—it was a New York-cop idea if you want to know the fucking truth—but it was done and it was my decision that it would be best to get that thing away from you before complications developed.”
“You fouled it up,” Wulff said.
“I certainly did. I certainly did foul it up,” Cicchini said. “I fouled it up very seriously and I’ll look you in the eye and tell you that because my ego is not involved in this job so much that I can’t see my own errors. I misjudged my personnel and I misjudged timing and I misjudged other things and—”
“And you lost control of the valise.”
“Exactly,” Cicchini said. “Don’t interrupt me. That is right. I lost control of the valise.”
“And you don’t know where it is.”
“I know exactly where it is,” the man said. Momentarily his confidence seemed to falter, just for an instant tiny chinks, cracks, flaws appeared in his face, eating their way through the thin flesh so that grey bone seemed exposed, Cicchini seemed older, he seemed much older, and Wulff had the total comprehension that this man who was in such control of everything he touched could not truly control his own biology: he would not live long. He would die in two to three years. Not that this would make much or any difference of course. The face reassembled itself and Cicchini was once again forty-three, forty-four years old and polished: “That’s the trouble, I know exactly where that valise is. If it had vanished altogether I would just assume that it would no longer bother me and I would write it off. I have learned to write things off in my life, Wulff. This is the only way that you can build and hold an organization. I never wanted that valise anyway, its contents only make problems, its contents as a matter of fact could only flood and depress my market and I don’t need it. If it hadn’t surfaced I would assume that it was out of my territory, which is perfectly all right, and if it had surfaced I would have dealt with it for the usual routes. But I seem to have a little bit of a problem now.”
“So why don’t you just go out and get it?” Wulff said, “if you know where it is.”
Once again those tiny lines and chinks appeared in Cicchini’s face and this time they did not go away so quickly. “I wish it were that simple,” he said vaguely, waving his hand. “Would you like a drink, Wulff?”
“Not particularly.”
“I’m not going to poison you. We’ll drink out of the same bottle and you can choose your glass.”
“I don’t believe in drinking,” Wulff said. “I get my kicks from killing stinking drug-pushers and cheap mobsters.”
He thought that that might push Cicchini all the way over the line, and frankly he did not care if it did. He was sick of the interview, sick of the gun held on him, and he was beginning to get the clear feeling that Louis Cicchini was as crazy as Cicchini thought Wulff was. This could go on and on for some time at the end of which Wulff would probably be headed for the bushes anyway. Might as well end it sooner than later. He did not care. He did not care. You could not kill a dead man. Remember that.
But Cicchini took it. He did not falter, his face even reassembled. “It’s quite hopeless,” he murmured. “Really, it’s very difficult to try to reach an understanding with you, Wulff. You seem to think that I’m the enemy but I’m really not. I have nothing against you. What you’ve done in New York and San Francisco leaves me a clean slate as far as I’m concerned. We start from the beginning. But you’re not being reasonable.”
He ducked, still holding the gun and a glare on him—the man was a professional—burrowed in his desk, brought out a scotch bottle and put it with a crash on the panelling. “Cutty Sark,” he said. “It’s not the best, but it’s only mid-afternoon. Do you want some?”
“No.”
“All right,” Cicchini said. He opened the bottle and lifted it, took a series of swallows as if he were taking beer, said aah! and capped the bottle. He looked much younger now, barely out of his thirties. “I wish it were so simple as to move in and retrieve the valise,” he said. “Unfortunately, the valise is in hands against which I’m reluctant to move, but you will not be, Wulff, and that is precisely the point. That is why I think we’ll be able to do business here.”
“Who’s got it?” Wulff said. “Just tell me who’s got it.”
“I will,” Cicchini said. “The valise and what I estimate to be not a quarter but a half a million dollars’ worth of uncut heroin stolen from a freighter in the San Francisco Bay is in the hands of a man named Phillip Sands who is a professor at Harvard University.”
“Fine,” Wulff said, “I always wanted to meet a Ph.D.”
Cicchini blinked. “Sands is one of the most significant independent purveyors of hard and soft goods in this area,” he said.
“That’s a nice way of saying
that he’s a pusher working the college circuit.”
“I suppose so,” Cicchini said. He sat behind the desk, his joints loose, oiled by the scotch but his face and hands still alert. “Everything is supposed to be semantics with the college crowd. Sands got hold of the valise because it was put into his hands by a couple of men who are unfortunately no longer with us. Sands expects to see them again but he will not and very soon he will realize that he is by attrition, so to speak, the sole owner of those drugs.”
“So I suggest,” Wulff said, “that you send in about forty people to Phillip Sands who you seem to know pretty well and just take the fucking valise away from him. Make it sixty thugs come to think of it; I wouldn’t want to see them outnumbered.”
Cicchini concealed a hiccup with a palm. “I told you it wasn’t quite that simple,” he said. “Not at all. The fact is that for certain reasons which I don’t want to go into at this time, I don’t want to move against Sands. I find myself very reluctant to get into that area. That’s where you come in, Wulff.”
“You want me to go in there and get that valise.”
“That’s the general idea,” Cicchini said. He put a palm to his mouth again, burped, shook his head. “That’s what you’re here for.”
“You want me to go in and take the valise from this guy, Sands.”
“I think that I said that already, Wulff. There’s no need for repetition.”
“What’s to guarantee that you’ll ever see the valise again? You think I’d turn it back to you.”
“That’s the point,” Cicchini said. He made a twitching gesture with his shoulders, leaned forward. “You can have that fucking valise, Wulff,” he said, “because I don’t want any part of it, don’t you understand? I didn’t ask for it to come into Boston and since it did it’s been one damned thing after the other. You killed a lot of people last night.”
