by Barry, Mike
“Hello,” said the voice of Louis Cicchini. “I thought you’d go back to the hotel.”
“If you thought I’d go back to the hotel why call?” Wulff said.
“I like to keep in touch. I’m very interested in you, Wulff. I have a feeling of great personal warmth and closeness and an almost excessive interest in your movements over the next few hours.”
“I’m very moved.”
“This is just a reminder, Wulff,” Cicchini said. “You’re being kept under observation. Everything you do, every single action is being reported back to me. I know what you’re doing and where you’re going and you’re under the tightest kind of observation.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to get lonely.”
“You have a sense of humor, Wulff, and a little self-possession and that’s good. That makes you more useful to me. But this call is just a little reminder that I want you to carry around with you: don’t get any ideas. Don’t get cute with me, Wulff. You know exactly what you have to do and I want you to go ahead and do it and get the hell out of town. You get clever with me and I’ll push the button. I can wipe you out.”
“I want you to understand something,” he said, the fury which had been bubbling within finally coming out now through the thin pipeline of his mouth. “I want you to fucking understand something, Cicchini, lay off me. I’ve had all that I can take; I don’t give a shit who you are or what you think you’re doing but you let me be now. You let me handle this my way.”
“To a point,” Cicchini said. “Stay calm, Wulff. A man who has been pushing as hard as you’ve been, under the enormous pressures you’ve been tackling, could have himself a heart attack or a stroke if this keeps on. You’ve got to learn to relax. Thirty-two isn’t ancient you understand but you aren’t as young as you used to be when you were taking graft on the narco squad.”
“Fuck you, you son of a bitch,” Wulff said. “You lay off me now.”
“Temper, Wulff, temper,” Cicchini said with something that sounded like a giggle and hung up on him. Wulff smashed down the receiver, then went through the process of completing the loading and checking of the machine gun. Everything in place. He could feel the deadliness of the stock in his hands, the power exuded from the gun. In Vietnam a few times on patrol he had handled the Browning Automatic Rifle, and that had given him the feeling of this kind of equipment, but what he had in his hands was infinitely deadlier than the Browning because it was mobile, a man of average size and weight could handle it expertly, whereas the Browning was so big that you almost needed a wheeled stand to carry it properly. He thought of what he was doing—taking a machine gun up against an associate professor—but the thought was not as amusing as it could have been; he had a feeling that Sands would give him all that he could handle.
He checked everything out in the room, tossed the gun into a canvas bag and got out of there. His plans, dimly formulated, were already emerging into sharp relief as he went down the stairs and he knew then exactly what he was doing, what he had probably planned to do from the moment that he realized that Cicchini was not going to kill him.
He was going to get that valise back. The valise came first and he would not rest until it was back in his hands. But the valise was only preparation; the real job lay ahead.
He was going to wipe Louis Cicchini out of business.
XIII
On the way back to his apartment, Sands finally caught the item about the two hoods on the turnpike. It had been moved up to the front page of the Globe, the afternoon paper, because further investigation had uncovered the indications of gangland involvement. The corpses were charred almost beyond recognition but identification had been made. Sands felt the sickness going through him.
It tore through him as he walked back to his apartment house like influenza or fever, ripping away small sections of his gut and seeming to open up layers of adult reaction and knowledge, peeling them away until he was a quivering eighteen years old again. He remembered that eighteen-year-old who had been Phil Sands—he had been a freshman at college, or maybe again it was a sophomore, hard to keep the years in perspective when time was slipping away from you—but this eighteen-year-old Phil Sands had never been able to bear pressure of any sort. Going to whorehouses had terrified him, dates with girls had scared the shit out of him, any kind of an examination could reduce him to a mumbling, frenzied despair and yet, for precisely those reasons he had forced himself to go to the whorehouses, forced himself to go out with girls, driven himself through cramming for the examinations simply because he would not concede to anyone at all, least of all himself, that he could not bear the simple and terrible exigencies of living. A lot had happened in the fifteen or sixteen years since that time, he had gone a long distance and had indeed probably been the first, although hardly the last, faculty member at the university to get into drugs as a sideline. He had spent the last decade in the process of denying that this younger, frightened Phillip Sands even existed, let alone could have any control of his own life—and yet it was all still there. Underneath it seemed he was the same person that he always had been.
His bowels became watery looking at the newspaper; he crumpled it into a large, tumbling ball and hurled it into a wastebasket, missing, increased his stride, began to feel his teeth hitting against one another in nervous response. This was the worst news of all now; he had intended to give the valise back to these men when they came tonight and tell them that it was hopeless. Coming to this decision, which he had slowly done in Harvard Square after the man had left, had half-killed him—he could not remember any decision he had made in years which had hurt him as much—but even in the act of making it he had felt that characteristic vaulting sense of release and certainty which always accompanied what he knew was a correct choice. He could not live with it. He was clearly and evidently out of his depth with the valise, and the only thing to do was to admit it and then get rid of the thing as quickly as possible. Gone with it was the idea of the ultimate score which would free him, the life-changing break which would take him out of the trap his life had become—but he would be a better man for all of it. He knew that.
And now the men had gotten themselves murdered. Murdered, doubtless, over the valise itself. He could feel the chills gradually becoming warm within him, it was as if a set of bells strung along his nerves, one by one, were all beginning to ring. He felt the ringing moving from level to level, arcing, soaring, in just a moment the gong in his head would begin that indicated he was going to go through one of his migraine attacks and nothing to do to prevent it. He was helpless. He who had always believed in the principle of utter control, who had sacrificed his life in a sense to order and caution, he was now in the grip of a migraine and the migraine in turn was caused by the realization that he had moved far beyond his ability to control the situation and could now wait, only helplessly, for the denouement.
Fool, Sands said to himself, fool, fool, but this did not help. What was self-loathing going to do for him now? If he had been a fool all his life, which was indeed quite likely, what was the naming of names going to do? He went into his apartment building, a large cooperative near the University, feeling the sweat coming out from him more freely as he went into the acrid, dusty lobby, signalled for the elevator. He was going to be sick. He knew it, he was definitely going to be sick. Going up in the elevator alone, leaning against the wall for support against the sudden and sickening waves of faintness which lashed him, Sands had one last desperate idea: he could give the valise back. He was no fool, he had a good idea now of whom it had been taken from and who would want it back. But even as the thought gave him some comfort it was snatched away, the doors of the little car sliding open in a sickening jolt to disgorge him. It was too late. Who cared whether or not he turned the valise back? By this time the people who wanted it undoubtedly knew exactly who had it. They did not need to bargain with him, they did not even need to accept the valise gratefully.
They could simply come in and get it and g
ive him a going-away present in the bargain.
Sands stumbled down the corridor to his apartment. He was sick; he was sick, he had never been so sick in his life. Everything had turned against him, and yet it had appeared so innocuous; he was so sure when the men had come to his door that he would be able to handle this. He took his keys from his pocket with a shaking hand, noted the shaking absently, the palsied, uncontrollable quiverings of the hand which caused the keys to jingle. I’m falling apart, he thought and opened the door, staggered into the hallway where the men had stood last night. Oh last night was a long, long time ago; it was in a different eternity altogether. Last night he had had a wife and a conviction that he could control anything, now he had neither. Deserted. Abandoned. He took off his coat, hands shaking, sweat streaming down his forehead, gasping at his appearance in the large mirror which faced him across the living room at the base of the stairs of the duplex. A desperate, frightened man. That was all. All his life he had been desperate and frightened but the masks had covered it up: professor, husband, dealer, confessor, now one by one they had all fallen away and Sands saw the face of a boy he had used to know twenty years ago. No help. Nowhere. Simple greed had got him here; if he were going to live, he realized, only simple greed could get him out. The simple greed to live. That was all. He did not want to die. He wanted to live; he was only thirty-four years old. He was entitled to better than this. He was entitled to better than this.
Sands went to the phone. It was on the wall near the kitchen. He looked at it blankly for a moment, his instincts having run ahead of his power to identify. It could have been an artifact this telephone, some curious object from the other side of the Moon. Then he remembered what it was and what he had to do with it. He had never wanted to hurt anyone. Never. He had never wanted to hurt anyone. He had only gotten into his sideline because the demand for soft goods among the students was so visible, the students themselves were so vulnerable that it almost stood to reason that they got them from someone they trusted. It was a service. He was only performing a service. For the kids.
But only soft goods. Never hard goods. Not until this time and that did not count because he had not been able to do anything with the valise. Had he been able to do anything with the valise? Of course he had not, he couldn’t move this stuff. It was fate. It was fate stepping from behind a curtain with a pointed finger and showing him all the time that essentially he was slated to be a good man. He was not a junk pusher. Not at all. He was merely a teacher who had the trust of his students and who in turn had tried to help them by providing the kids with the necessities of life.
They would take it into account. They would certainly understand his position when the deposition was taken. They would know just as he did that Phillip Sands was a good man. He was not a bad man. He was a good man who had never wanted to hurt anyone, and they would see this and take all of it into account and they would give him mercy.
God almighty, he thought, picking up the phone, it was not mercy he needed, it was protection. And that was another issue altogether.
Trembling, he had to dial the number twice to get through, the first time his fingers going utterly awry on the dial. Finally however the connection was made. A voice came on.
“I want the police,” Sands said.
“You have the police.”
“I want them. I want them.”
“Your name and address sir.”
Struggling to remember these facts which slipped in and out of his mind like stones in water, Sands got them out. He said that he needed help urgently. Something about a valise.
The desk sergeant told him to sit tight.
XIV
Wulff saw it all. He got there too late to do anything but see it, but he was not short of details. Parked outside of the cooperative was a prowl car and that right away had made him revise his plans; he had decided to sit tight and do nothing at all until the occupants of that car got back and went away but even as he watched a second patrol car came up and then a third. Then a fourth and with full siren a fifth. Something big was going on up there. Wulff had a good idea of what it was. It made sense to move the Plymouth away from its illegal parking space near the entrance and he did so, wheeling it around the circle and at the rear of the line of police cars. He sat there, motor idling slowly, ramming his hand on the steering wheel, already almost sure of exactly what was going on there.
He did not have long to wait. After a little while a distracted man in his mid-thirties, scratching at himself and mumbling ferociously to the policemen who flanked him on four sides came out of the building and proceeded straight to the original patrol car. A moment later another four police came out, one of them carrying a valise which looked strikingly familiar to Wulff. It should have. He had known that valise, taken it cross-country as a matter of fact, and its every outline was as familiar to him as the contours of his own body, not that this did him any particular good at this time. The valise was within ten yards of where he sat but it could as well have been in Turkey or on the remains of that freighter buried in the waters of the San Francisco Bay. The cop carrying it went to the second car in line and tossed it carelessly into the back—how well Wulff knew that careless toss, it meant that he would kill anyone who tried to take it out of his car, his goods!—and the police fanned out into their vehicles, started a procession. All of this could have taken no more than two minutes. Detention was always quick; the longest flight could end so quickly as to trivialize it.
The cars drove off. Wulff released the clutch and mechanically, fascinated, followed them. It served no purpose, of course—what was he going to do, cut off that second car in line and lunge into it for the valise? No, he guessed that he better stop with this kind of thought—but he felt himself irresistibly impelled. What else was there to do? His mission had been aborted without even the confrontation that he had been goading himself into making. He knew that he would have killed Sands face to face; it would have been a pleasure.
The cars majestically, elegantly, cut through the university area and headed toward downtown Boston. The sonofabitch had probably called some informant inadvertently and without the proper kind of protection had gotten himself booked in instantly. Either that or more horrifying Sands had turned himself in because the valise had proven beyond his capacity to handle. Did it matter? Did any of this matter? The valise was out of his hands now, reasons did not matter. Whether the bastard had fouled up on his connections or whether the pressure had been too much and forced him to the police, it all came down to the same thing. He had lost.
He followed the procession, dodging and winking in and out of the traffic. For one instant he thought of trying to take them by force. There was a chance at least, a small chance that he might be able to cut off that second patrol car and get himself into it. But what chance would there be? These cars were moving in a body; immobilize the second and the first, third and fourth would be there in a second to cut him off.
Then Wulff saw the possibility.
It was crazy, it was a chance in a million, but it was one worth taking. Trailing the procession, concentrating on keeping them a level thirty yards in front of him—the cars themselves locked almost bumper to bumper, no sirens going—he took out his pistol, checked it, cocked it rapidly. Everything in order. He held it in his right hand then, held the wheel rigid with his left—and he began to gain.
Through the maze of downtown Boston they went. The cars could make no headway on him; Boston’s reputation for the worst downtown traffic in the country was well-deserved. The streets were narrow, cluttered, they had been constructed for horse-and-cart traffic rather than automobiles, and the staggering of the traffic lights was awesomely inept At every intersection now, in early rush hour, the cars were piling up bumper to bumper, not shrilling at one another, simply sitting, the drivers poised in various attitudes of hopelessness and the police cars could not cut through the maze. In downtown New York, a little flasher let alone a siren would have opened up the streets
like tubes to the procession, but here these Boston cops knew apparently that resignation was the better part of valor. They stayed inside of the stream, not trying to buck it.
There they were in front of him, laboring in gear, at rest on a side street. Wulff swept the Plymouth right, diving out of the line of traffic. The car beside him gave him an irritated tap of the horn but nothing else. As he drew cheek-by-jowl with the driver Wulff could see the man’s irritation turning toward astonishment as Wulff slowly moved the Plymouth along the sidewalk, then cut dangerously back into lane now behind the fourth car, revving the engine as he waited for the light to change.
Now he was directly behind them. That was good because he could not do what he intended to if there were any gaps, then again it would make him more noticeable. That was the way it had to be. Lose some to win some. He could not move in on them at close range, he would have been annihilated. What he was looking for now was a little spread, a little distance, just a little bit of an opening….
The light changed. The lead car moved out slowly, poked its way through the intersection, was blocked by a huge trailer trying to move left, but finally squeezed its way through, the other cars following. These Boston police were certainly polite; any other large city cop would have been apoplectic. Well, maybe they were in no hurry to go down to the station house to start to fill out the forms. The valise would bring down at least half of the assistant DA’s in the county and each of them would have his own individual idea of the best way to process it in. The procession blundered its way through another side street, a less congested one this time, and then broke out onto a little tree-shaded avenue, beginning to gather speed. Heavy traffic here but moving rapidly the way that blood manages to move through a clotted artery. Uneven but pumping away. Wulff, still locked bumper to bumper with car number four, pulled out suddenly, crossed the divider line, ducked an oncoming Volkswagen and began to squeeze against the critical second car of the procession. Now he was being noticed for the first time. Astonished faces under visored caps filled the windows.
