by Barry, Mike
“Yes,” Wulff said, “I’m afraid that it’s the best you’re going to get.”
“You drive a very difficult deal.”
“I know I do. Still,” Wulff said, “consider my position.”
“I have,” Calabrese said. He seemed distracted, almost amiable, working again with the cigarette to take another enormous inhalation. Three of them now and the cigarette was almost gone. The old man, in his day, must have been quite a smoker, Wulff thought. Did you win admiration, did you get awards from the speed with which you could finish off a cigarette? Or did it merely count for prestige in the world which Calabrese inhabited? Either way, the old man was a ferocious smoker. “All right,” he said, “see? See how easily I can capitulate, how cooperative I can be? You’ve built up a myth in your mind which is largely insupportable. I’m a completely reasonable man. Only you, Wulff, are unreasonable.”
“No I’m not.”
“You’re completely unreasonable. You don’t even know what’s going on, you poor fool. Still, we won’t get into that area now, will we? Where would you like me to deliver the girl? At the same time you understand, you’ll have the drugs with you. An even exchange.”
“On the beach,” Wulff said without thinking, “the beach at night. Just the two of us and the girl, no bodyguards, no hoods, no snipers in the dunes. I’ll be able to spot them; I was in Vietnam.”
“I know all about that.”
“You bring the girl, I’ll bring the shit. A pure exchange.”
“On the beach,” Calabrese said. He paused. “The beach in front of this hotel?”
“Why not? I guess that’s as convenient as any place.”
“There are a lot of people on the beach,” Calabrese said, “you envision a scenario but you have not considered witnesses.”
“Four in the morning,” Wulff said.
“There are people who go out to fuck on the beach at four in the morning. They consider it romantic. There are a lot of people who pay two hundred dollars round-trip air fare to fuck on the beaches of Miami in front of the Fontainbleau at four A.M. They consider it living.”
“All right,” Wulff said, “five-thirty in the morning.”
The death mask smiled. “Now,” it said, “you are beginning to perceive reality. At five-thirty in the morning, all of those couples have exhausted themselves, drained their impulses and have returned to the hotels. Five-thirty in the morning is a very promising time. The only living creatures on the beach in Miami at five-thirty in the morning are drowning fish, beached whales and derelicts. And us.”
“Bring the girl,” Wulff said. It was amazing how difficult it was to speak in a level tone of voice, to maintain control whenever Tamara verged near his consciousness. “She has nothing to do with this. It’s not her fault. I want her free.”
“I will bring the girl.”
“Don’t try to follow me when I pick up the sack. If you do that everything is off.”
“I would not consider it,” Calabrese said, “I will assume that you are a man of honor. By your own testimony, you are a man of honor, no? You will deliver the sack and I will deliver the girl. Presently I will release the black man as well and that will be the end of our dealings. You will go back to New York and I will return to Chicago. We will both be very happy because you will have your friends back and I will have a shipment which should have been mine from the beginning. Everything, everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Five-thirty this morning? Is that enough time for you to make arrangements?”
Wulff looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. “Thirteen and a half hours should be enough time for anything,” he said, “enough time for anyone except a dead man.”
“Good,” Calabrese said, “excellent. So our interview is at an end.”
“Is it?”
“I assume it is. That would be my assumption. Is there anything else you have to discuss?”
“You shouldn’t have taken the girl.”
“That is no subject for discussion.”
“You shouldn’t have gotten involved in this. You’re an old man, you’ve got most of your life behind you, you’ve got all the money you’ll ever want, the law can’t touch you, you’ve got your private police force and you’re sealed off from all of this. There’s no one who can get you and you’re probably not as stupid as Capone, you pay your taxes. You declare your income from legitimate business and you pay every cent, probably overpay. Why,” Wulff said and paused, “why would you get into this in the first place?”
“Get into what? The drug trade?”
“Yes,” Wulff said, “that’s about the way I’d put it. Why did you touch it? Or if you got into it in the early sixties when everybody was, why the hell didn’t you get out when the going was good? You didn’t need this. You didn’t need any part of it at all; you could have been home free.”
“Ah,” the death mask said, “ah,” and it stood. “Ah, you understand nothing, do you Wulff, do you at all?” and then it picked the gun off the desk, was brandishing it, was convulsively motioning him from the room. “Get out,” the death mask with the gun said, “get out right now,” and Wulff said “Why?” once more and the death mask looked at him and then it said, “You do not understand at all, do you? For all of your foolishness, for all of your energy and violence you understand nothing, isn’t that right? you do not understand, the quality of necessity,” and then it had walked to the door, the door was open and Wulff went through it quickly, under the steaming breath which came from that figure and as he walked down the hallway it occurred to him that he knew nothing about Calabrese and as he walked further it occurred to him then that it was not necessary to know, all that you had to understand was power and it was this which sped him through the hallway, around a door, past the guard who had been lurking there and toward the elevators, Calabrese’s uncertain shouts still behind him. Son of a bitch, Calabrese was saying, taking shit from a stupid son of a bitch. Just like the phone conversations from Chicago, he had lost control again.
Well. One thing. The door to seven-sixteen was closed and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was out. You took what you could get, when you could get it.
X
The rape had left her curiously untouched. She thought, in the first onslaught of feeling after the old man had left her, that she would never be the same again, that some intricate violation had occurred which she would not even be able to calculate let alone conquer for the rest of her life, but that had passed quickly: who was she, she found herself thinking, to be shaken by the act of rape after what she had been through? Pothead at seventeen, speedfreak at twenty-one, little intermezzos in which she had dealt with uppers, downers, inners, outers, shit, smack, LSD, left abandoned in a speedjag to die in a furnished room, rescued by an insane ex-cop who was out to destroy the international drug trade, a wild affair with this cop which had lasted all of three days the first time, one day the second, her insides plumbed by him in a way that none of the drugs had ever found …
No, she was no one who could find the act of rape scarring, particularly when the rapist had been a seventy-three-year-old man who was impotent. When was it rape? at the point of entrance? she thought, or did it start somewhere before that, with the intent? If it started with intent she had been raped, because Calabrese had been desperate to possess her, but if you only considered the act itself then she was untouched. He had not been able to get near her in any private way although he had squirreled and battered away at her desperately for fifteen minutes. No, it was not rape. Not in any legal sense of the word. Even the most militant feminist would find it hard to justify this one in a court of law. Perversity, possession, hatred, pain: no doubt about it. But not rape. No. Not classical rape.
He had tried to pierce her weeping, had failed, weeping, had left her room in the same way, a bedraggled, wretched old man (and perhaps the most repellent aspect of it, the thing that had hurt her the most, was the pity that he had leeched out of her, feeling pity she knew was the on
ly terrible aspect of the act because it had been given freely whereas everything else had been wrenched from her and the pity was none the less painful because it was real) and she had been on the bed for a long time, trying to put herself together. Then it had passed from her, like some cloak dropping away from her shoulders; the true pain and indignity of what had happened had fallen away from her and she had known that whatever else happened, however it was recollected, she would never be able to feel that kind of pain again. Then she had dressed herself, put on makeup in the bathroom and when she had come out, her guard had been back there, his face bland and embarrassed, turned toward the wall. So he knew exactly what had happened.
So had Williams, probably. The walls were thin in this miserable rooming house, it was impossible that anything could pass between people in these rooms that was not instantly available to those not only in the room adjoining but probably all the way down the hall. It must have been a wonderful place for a family to live all together as it must have been in the old days before the section had become rundown and the house reconverted for the tourist trade. But if Williams knew what had happened he would say nothing, nor would his guards; she had passed that room only once when she had gone to the bathroom at the end of the long hall and he had been there, hunched over in one of his eternal games of poker. She could hear every word of them, every bet coming through the walls so they must have heard what had happened to her. But Williams merely looked up at her with a bleak, impassive smile, the guards had clumsily inclined their heads in a parody of politeness. None of them had otherwise made any acknowledgment of what had happened.
Still, what the hell were they supposed to have done? you had to see their side of it too.
You had to see everybody’s side of it; that was the liberal ethic, the liberal dilemma for you and if there was one thing she had picked up in the Haight-Ashbury section during all those dear, dead, departed years it had been the liberal ethic. The guards had their side because they were in Calabrese’s employ, they were an underclass who were in thrall and neither their environment nor their education had prepared them to do anything but accept their position as an underclass; Calabrese himself was an old man suffering from the old man’s corruption and fear of death and he had been driven into her by forces as profound and symbolic as any radical analysis could find; double the profundity and the symbolism since he had not been able to function. He was suffering, the guards were suffering: everyone throughout the world was in pain as it had been all through history and who was she to cry injustice? Well, it sounded good, even though it did not quite work. What she wanted to do was kill the old man for the double insult; the attempted violation, and then, the failure to function. It was true; the only thing worse than being treated as a sex object was failing as a sex object. Well, the hell with it.
Her guard knew what had happened, of course, but he said nothing. What was there to say? Williams and the poker players down the hall might have known it too, hell, everybody knew it, but what difference did that make? Her guard tried in a few small ways to show compassion and concern, offered to get her foods from downstairs, asked if there was anything she particularly needed, babbled solicitously about the weather in Miami, how unfortunate it was that she had to be down here in this bright hellhole at all when the west coast was so nice at this time of year. Well, she’d be going back there soon, he was pretty sure of that, all of it an attempt of the fundamentally graceless to demonstrate grace, quite depressing but touching in its way as well because the guard was not responsible for what had happened to her. When you came right down to it, no one was, not even Calabrese: it was just massive social forces at work here which would lead inevitably to pain and disaster. It was just too bad that she had not been able to make Wulff see this, there had been some failure there; if he could only have seen as she did the sheer hopelessness of what he was fighting he might have stopped and if he had done so, abandoned the fight, resigned himself to living in the world as it must be … well, then, they might have had something between them: She was surprised to see how much she truly missed that. In a way he had reached her as no one else ever had; also there was the element of physical attraction not to be denied.
Too late now. Too late for any of it. Physical attraction and the relationship she had had were going to lead her straight to her death.
Tamara knew she was going to die. From the time they had abducted her from home there had never been any doubt of this; the surprise had been how easily she had been able to accept this. These men were simply not going to let her out of this alive. She was bait to catch the wolf and she did not think that the wolf would walk into the springing trap, but if he did, double the reason to dispose of her. She would know too much. Of course the thought had occurred to her that Wulff might rescue her, get her out of this, but she did not think so. Not against these men. All that he could do would be to involve himself in the coils of his own death and the black man, Williams, was in as bad a condition as she. There was literally nothing she could do about it. She knew that she was going to die.
All right, then, she would die. She had lived death for six years, come close to the rim of it in and out of dreams countless times; death did not bother her. She had never conceived of herself as living a long life anyway; like Martin Luther King she had nothing against a long life but not at the cost of other things and those things for her had been the necessity to live at a level of intensity. She had had her intensity all right, it had nearly killed her, now she was twenty-five and for a woman everything past that was straight downhill until forty or forty-two after which you definitely might as well be dead anyway. She had seen what menopause had done to her mother and most of the women her mother had known. No, she did not want this. The death of the body, the burial of the psyche, all of it moving on inevitably, making you merely an interested, terrified witness … no, she did not want that at all.
So she would not get out of Miami alive. She even said it to her guard, “I won’t get out of Miami alive and you know that as well as I do,” and he had made a dismissive gesture with his hand, sighed, told her to cut it out but some deeper sadness in his eyes rendered verification: he knew it. The sadness might well come from knowledge that he was not going to get out of this town alive either. Quite likely the only man who would would be Calabrese. That would be logical.
The guard came back into the room where he had left her alone for a little while, thinking all of this through and said, “We’ve got to go now. We’ve got to go down on the beach.”
“Down on the beach?”
“Don’t ask me anything about it. I’m supposed to escort you to the beach in front of the Fontainbleau.”
“All right,” she said. Once you had passed the point of violation as she had, everything slid into place easily, naturally, one impossibility was much like the next. “All right, I’ll go down to the beach in front of the Fontainbleau.”
“Not yet,” the guard said, “I mean we’re not going right now.”
“But we have to leave the room right now.”
“That’s right. We have to leave the room right now.”
“Well,” she said feeling that she was teasing information out of him, “when are we supposed to be on the beach?”
“In the early morning,” the guard said. He looked embarrassed, checked his watch. “About twelve hours from now. In the meantime we’re just supposed to drive around.”
“Supposed to drive around?”
“That’s what they said,” the guard said looking pained, “get out of the room and drive around and get to the beach in about twelve hours.”
“That’s a lot of driving around.”
“I can’t account for it. I guess that they want you out of the room, that’s all. Listen,” he said, moving toward her cautiously, “listen, I think you’re a very nice girl. I want you to know that. I want you—”
“Is this a goodbye?”
The guard’s face fell into little pieces, carefully, desper
ately, he reassembled it. “Oh no,” he said, “oh no, it’s not like that; it’s just that I have these instructions you see, I’m supposed to drive you around—”
“All right,” she said then, “all right,” and she walked toward him, confronted him, the top of her head just at his chin level and said, “Drive me around. Let’s go. What are you waiting for?”
The guards hands fluttered. “All right,” he said, “those were the orders.”
“I still don’t understand what you’re waiting for.”
“I’m not waiting for anything. I’m not waiting for anything at all, I was told to get you out of here, that we were going to go driving around. I don’t give a damn,” the guard said, “if we’re supposed to go driving around then we’ll just do that,” and he walked toward the door then. She followed him, he paused at the door for what seemed a long instant and then, shaking his head, walked through. She could see the revulsion in him, a profound revulsion which worked down all the levels of his body as he walked down the hallway, but it was a private thing. It could not help her. Nothing could help her and she must understand that now.
She passed Williams’s room. The door was closed, inside she could hear the eternal murmur of their voices. It was a shame that there was no way in which she could get through to him but then why should she bother? Williams was as imprisoned as she. She could look for more help from the guard than she could from this man who had been Wulff’s partner.
No, she had not expected to live a long life anyway.
