by Barry, Mike
Now the two of them were cleaving into a ball of activity and he could feel the gun pressing various areas of his body; nape, kidney, groin with a shy tentativeness that was the more dreadful because at any moment he expected it to go off and discharge the slug that would destroy him. But the gun did not fire, there was some mistake in the angle between finger and trigger and Joe could not get off a shot. Then Wulff had managed to wrap himself over and was lying on top of the man, panting, still reaching for the gun, noting with some corner of perception that the other man, Al, on the floor was stirring. He had not been knocked out by the blow then, only stunned, a resilient type this one and in just a few moments, unless Wulff was able somehow to get free of this one, it would be two against one, two with guns … and this energized him into one last burst of effort. He heaved against the man whose body now covered him like a cup and threw Joe off him. The man hit the floor with a thud, rolling, his knees drawn up, still holding onto his gun and stretching out flat. Wulff kicked him, feeling his toe dig into something soft, something that pulped underneath the pressure … and the man screamed.
And the screaming was a rope that yanked him to his feet, then. Wulff was leaning against the wall, momentarily in an attitude which he supposed would have struck the men on the floor, the couple standing at the door as contemplative, this man brooding against the wall over the two he had downed and Wulff imagined that there was something almost comical about this, this attitude of repose coming off the battle.
Then, in the next instant, a second scream filled the compartment, this one coming from the girl, her hand fluttering against her mouth, her chest struggling for the next intake of air that would give her a second, even more terrible scream … and there was nothing to do, he could not stop her, did not even know that he would if he had wanted. He was turning, stumbling, reeling from the car, holding the gun against him, the gun a welt in his side. He had to get out. He had to get out of here. All of his impulses were screwed toward flight and he gave into them wholly, feeling only now the panic that he might have felt back when the man with the gun had accosted him.
Wulff burst through the compartment shrouding the bar car from the next, hearing the sounds behind him. He almost stumbled over something lying huddled on the floor. Stopping for only an instant he saw that it was the unconscious form of the bartender and then he was moving onward through a sleeping car, the soft, even breathing of passengers around him. Let someone else clean up the mess in the bar car. Let someone else slap the bartender into consciousness, comfort the screaming girl, deal with Al and Joe. He would have no more of it. His options were running out.
He had to get off the train.
VI
The hotels fronted the bay, in back of them were the big, shiny motels glittering in color, in back of them were the older hotels, further back still were the ring of cheaper rooming houses and furnished apartments and then, two miles back of the ocean, the slums began, no transition, merely the passage of a street and the ruins in which the slum tenants, mostly blacks, dwelt. On good afternoons they might be able to pick up a breeze from the ocean, might be able to climb to the flat roof of one of the developments and see the Fontainbleau in the distance. In the same spirit they could get on the Harlem rooftops and watch the cars moving out across the Triborough Bridge, into the sun and the safer suburbs. Miami then was like all cities everywhere, the good and the rotten, the glittering and the corrupt all jammed up against one another, the line of segregation holding not through geography but terror.
Tamara guessed that they were pretty far back in the ring of furnished houses. They had come in quickly at night, the ride in the limousine from the airport done quickly, shades dangling from the windows of the limousine so that they could not see the streets, not that it would have mattered anyway; she did not know Miami nor want to know it. Williams, riding in the limousine, had fallen asleep during the ride. His two guards and hers had settled into a desultory conversation which seemed largely to have to do with Calabrese and how he was underpaying them—she tried not to hear any of it—and toward the last part of the ride she had fallen off herself, the droning of the motor carrying her back like water to San Francisco where she wished to hell she had stayed after she had walked out on Wulff back in Los Angeles. If she had done that instead of going back to her home she would not have been a sitting target for abduction and she would be out of all of this. Instead, it was just beginning.
Or perhaps it was ending. She did not know about that either; she had no idea what Calabrese had in mind except that clearly the old man intended to kill Wulff. He had said it over the phone, he had said it to her, and on the private plane to Miami he had settled beside her for a long, raving monologue in which he had tried to find out from her what Wulff was like and had told her that if he had one mission left in life it was to kill the man. She had decided then that Calabrese was a little crazy; for an old man he seemed to be as obsessed and single-minded about Wulff now as any fourteen-year-old might be about his father; in fact, that was possibly an angle, Calabrese that old man, was seeing Wulff as a father figure, an authority symbol of some sort and he was trying to kill him to remove all symbol of challenge in his old age. But that was all cheap psychologizing, Berkeley stuff and it was better perhaps not to think along those lines. She did not want to think along those lines. All that she wanted to do was to go home. She wished that her life had never intersected with Wulff’s. Then she knew she was lying to herself.
She was on the second floor of a rooming house about two miles in back of the Miami shore. She guessed that it was two miles, hard to estimate, but it could not have been much less than that and if there were any more they would have been in the slum section proper which she saw rearing up behind them, a few blocks distant. She was doing a little bit better than she had since her abduction; she had a small room for herself, toilet facilities down the hall, a bed, a desk. The man who had been guarding her was not even in the same room, he was a few doors down the hall, alert, she supposed, to any sound of footfall if she headed toward the stairs. Williams, the black man, was in the room next to hers but he did have a guard with him, that was male supremacy for you; they felt that Williams was more dangerous, more likely to try to make an escape than she was. Well, they were quite right. She had no intention of trying to get out of here. It was quite hopeless, even she saw that, there was no way that she would get out of this alive unless Calabrese released her and he would only do that, she supposed, if Wulff were dead.
Either way the situation did not look very promising. If Wulff came to meet Calabrese in the Fontainbleau, and she had no reason to think that he wouldn’t because he was as obsessed with Calabrese as the other way, he would never get out of it alive and if he didn’t come, she would be killed, quite casually and expertly. She had no doubt of that whatsoever. Calabrese was as single-minded about such things as Wulff was.
Oh, she was really in a good position now. She was jammed between the two of them and it occurred to Tamara that in many ways there was no difference between them; Wulff and Calabrese functioned in exactly the same way. One was in the drug distribution business and the other one was out to destroy it, but they were both monomaniacal, they were single-minded and mostly they regarded the world as something that got between them and their purposes. If she had any interest she guessed she would go to the room down the hall and talk to the man, Williams, who had obviously been Wulff’s partner through some part of this, try to find out some facts about him—even the guards would be terribly interested in this; they would hardly interfere in a discussion if it went on in front of them—but she did not care. She simply did not care anymore; she had lost interest in the whole thing. What she had told Wulff in San Francisco was quite sincere. She wanted to get as far from him, as far from the situation as possible. She owed him a great deal; he had saved her life, she was very attracted to him, the time that they had spent in bed together had done both of them a lot of good … but what was past was past; she di
d not care now if that quality of feeling within them might have somehow expanded … no, she did not care at all.
The magnitude of his obsession had been frightening. Back in San Francisco, having left him the second time, she had been able to think of putting her life together, getting back to school in the fall, working on a small, closed cycle of purposes the seriousness of which she had not been able to accept for many, many years. He and his war represented a different stage of her life, a closed chapter. She was finished with people who felt too largely, who acted too passionately, whose purposes were magnified by desire. If it were all the same to the world, if it really did not matter to anyone except herself, she would just as soon live with the self-deceiving people who coated over their desires with acceptance and whose lives were a series of evasions from the deep, frightful, meaningful issues which drove people like Wulff into death and sent people like that younger version of herself into a filthy drop point of a room in San Francisco where, if it had not been for Wulff who had happened upon and saved her, she would have died of an amphetamine overdose. Speeded out. Freaked out and dead at twenty-four. So much for living passionately.
She turned from the window where all of this had been revolving in her mind, she did not know how long, and Calabrese himself was at the door. The old man was leaning against the open panels, arms folded, looking at her with a strange, distorted expression which as she received his stare modified and then shifted into something close to pain. Then he had moved into the room, leaned against and closed the door and was waving a hand at her, almost awkwardly. She had not seen him in the light until now, she realized, only in the dim spaces of his office and then in the dark plane which had sped them to Miami; seeing him close-up it was as if she could look beyond the wrinkles and surfaces of the aged face into the corruption below … or was that merely imagination, a heightening of perception which had no basis in reality?
A clean old man, that was what he looked like; a nice, well-kept old man. He might have been a United States senator. All of them were nice, well-kept old men too, who made good appearances, talked softly and with many gestures and had sent a generation or two of younger men off to die. No point in thinking about that. Nothing political anymore, she reminded herself. You are not even Tamara, you are a girl named Susan Jenkins and this Tamara business will stop when you get home, stop for the last time, although it is just as well that these people think of you as Tamara because when Tamara goes away you will have disappeared too. Disappearance; to sink below the viscous surfaces of reality and be no more.
“Your friend isn’t down, yet,” Calabrese said. “He should have been in by now.”
She shrugged, walked from the window and sat on the bed. “What do you want me to do about that?” she said.
“I don’t want you to do anything. I just thought you’d like to know. He should have been down by now. I’m getting a little impatient waiting for him.”
“He’ll be down. I know he’ll be down.”
“I think you’re right,” Calabrese said squinting, wiping a little bit of dust from a black lapel with an elongated index finger. Swipe, swipe, it was just like the blade of a penknife working there. “In fact I’m sure you’re right. When I return to the hotel I expect to have his message.”
“So why aren’t you there?”
“Why am I not there?” Calabrese said, and moved away from the wall, rubbed his hands together and then, in a surprisingly graceful gesture sat beside her on the bed, the springs rolling, then rebounding with a squeak. “Well, it can get very dull, merely sitting around a room, no matter how luxurious, and waiting for something to happen. Don’t you think so?” He paused. “Aren’t you getting bored?”
“I’m getting bored,” she said. “Why don’t you let me go home?”
“Oh I’d like to,” Calabrese said, “I’d really like to let you do that, go home that is to say, go back to Sausalito and be a respectable little college girl again, but it’s impossible you see. You’re the only hold I’ve got on him.”
He jerked his head toward the adjoining room where she could hear dim thumping as if Williams and his guard were doing calisthenics or beating one another up. Calabrese showed no concern. “He’s certainly no ace in the hole,” he said. “Wulff dumped him in Los Angeles. They had split up. Tell me,” he said, his eyes becoming quite intense, “what is it like to fuck him?”
She said nothing. Certain questions were unanswerable. But she did not look away; she allowed that gaze to hold her and after a long, shuddering instant she felt her control dissolve. It was almost as if she had meshed into him. She began to understand the source of the man’s power. It did not merely have to do with position; power came first.
“Tell me,” Calabrese said, “I want to know. I know what he was doing with you; I’m not stupid. Any fool would know what was going on. Listen, he likes to fuck just as much as anyone; his fiancée got herself killed in New York and I know that they were fucking. Tell me,” Calabrese said, “does he come fast or slow? What is it like, does he like to do it straight or does he fuck around? Does he get on top or does he like to be on the bottom, getting a ride, the way all those tough types really do? Did he suck your nipples hard? Did he hurt?” and then unbelievably he was closing in on her, his hands on her shoulders, digging in through the soft material of the sweater, the clothing insubstantial, the only reality the hard, biting contact of nails into shoulders, feeling the pain as he dug his fingers in deeper and then he was on top of her, grunting and struggling, his eyes at some weird off-angle looking at the wall as he stunned her with pressure, beginning to move on top of her.
“I’m going to fuck you,” Calabrese said, “I’ve been thinking of it all the way for days, whether I should do it or not and I’ve got to do it. I don’t want his poisons but I want his slut, I want to do it to something that he has,” and she wrenched away from him desperately, shaking her head, screaming deep in her throat. “Don’t think of it,” he said, looking down at her then, “don’t even think of screaming for help because the only help that you’re going to get around this place, the only help at all, would want to watch me do it and make it a gang-bang. Do you understand?”
She understood. She let that understanding grow from her stomach, come into her eyes and she looked at him then, seeing beneath the angry, fervid surface of those eyes to something much deeper, something hurt and fearful within him that if it had had voice would whimper. The thing that she saw was seventy-three years old and was trembling and it was that which she spoke to now.
“All right,” she said, “I won’t make it hard for you. But I want you to know that it won’t make any difference.”
“I know that,” Calabrese said, “I learned that a long time ago, that nothing makes a difference.”
He was sliding from her, then he was on the floor standing, reaching for his belt, dropping his pants. “Nothing makes any difference but you’ve got to play the game as if it does, don’t you? Don’t you, don’t you, don’t you baby,” Calabrese said … and then shrieking, mumbling, biting hard he was on top of her, tearing at her clothing, ripping her apart, trying to move inside … but she was not surprised that at the center of all this desperation she felt not pain but merely a gelatinous substance which rubbed and rubbed against her thighs.
And all around—everywhere—the sound of his weeping.
VII
Williams remembered how it had been outside the methadone center. Activity on the street, something seizing his attention, then, before he could even see the assailant, the quick, plunging feel of the knife within him, the sound of the footsteps moving, the feel of the sidewalk as it had rolled up at him, caressed him like waves. Something almost purifying about the pain in his chest and side, a pain that he must have been waiting for all his life, now hardly so bad in the actuality as it had been in dreams; more purgative than anything, getting my black ass in gear, he thought dreamily. Then the sirens, the emergency room, the long, black space in the hospital, the
weeks after that when he had had plenty of time to think over his life and the relationship it bore to the unseen man who had knifed him. It was then that he had come, however reluctantly, to the decision that Wulff was right; any black man who truly thought that he could work with the system was a fool because the system was interested only in protecting itself and ripping off the outsider and that was what a black man would always be … an outsider. Wulff, a cop to the core who had vowed to get rid of the international drug trade, could have been an insider but he had dropped out to murder because he realized that it was impossible to clean up anything when you were part of it … and Williams, tacking the decision onto his own life, saw that Wulff was right, came home from the hospital and spent another few weeks thinking it out and then, when the call from Wulff came from Los Angeles it was as if he had merely been waiting for the trigger. He had left his eight-months pregnant wife, loaded up a U-haul with armaments from Father Justice of the Divinity & Faith Church and had gone out to Los Angeles to blow the system to hell with Wulff.
But that hadn’t worked out either; Wulff by that time was in so deep that his options were restricted. Everybody had his name and picture; guerilla tactics were almost impossible when you were public enemy number one, open prey for every bounty hunter, amateur and professional, in the business. They had been pinned into a rotten trailer court for a week, the armaments tacked near them, saying that they were waiting to make a move but what they were really waiting for was the enemy to come in after them … which the enemy did but not before Williams and Wulff had had enough to do with one another to see that no team concept was going to work.
