by Barry, Mike
But however you were prepared for that abstract quality, death, it always came as a great, uninvited beast, springing at the banquet table of life. The banquet with ptomaine.
XI
Wulff took a cab to the airport, not caring whether he was observed or not. Surely there was the possibility that he was on tail and that Calabrese’s men would try to wrest the goods away from him when recovered but Wulff did not think so. They were not that stupid; they would not interpose between a plan of action and its execution. Nor did he think that Calabrese would permit this kind of thing; Calabrese obviously had worked out a plan of action with which he felt he could live, the old man had a tactic of sticking to his modus operandi once decided upon. Stubbornness, perhaps, or merely a habit of command, staying with your decisions, once they were made. They would make that encounter on the beach, anyway.
The girl. He had to get the girl back. It was no longer even a feeling of closeness to her, anything they might have had had long since perished in the diversion of their lives … but he was responsible for her. He had gotten her into this; he had to get her out. The settling with Calabrese would come after the fact. So the old man had judged correctly; he had known, truly, what a hold the girl was upon him. Calabrese was no fool. None of them were fools.
At the airport he told the driver to wait. The driver had been cursing Miami all the way, the stinking trade, the nick-and-dime tippers. As far as he was concerned the conventions had screwed up the town altogether, given Miami a lousy reputation. The good crowd just didn’t seem to be coming down as they had in the old days and the city, mostly was full of pensioners. Wulff said that that was all right; pensioners had their strong points, they at least gave the city a rather placid nature and the driver got off on the subject of the Miami Dolphins; in the beginning they had done the city a lot of good when they developed into a good team but once you were on top all of the fun went out of it. People came looking to kick the shit out of you, make their reputations at your expense and anyway you couldn’t rely wholly upon a running game as the Miami Dolphins did to set up your attack because the running game rested on two or three star backs and if any of them got hurt or lost his ability the team tended to disintegrate around them. Wulff said he guessed that that was true also.
He had never had any interest in pro football since he had worked a couple of Stadium patrols for big Giant games back in the early sixties. As far as he was concerned the best you could say for it is that it didn’t hurt anyone except the players, but looking at the drunks reeling out of the stadium at five in the afternoon, their eyes far-gone, their faces with the bleak, staring, burnt-out aspect of men who had once again come to the realization that nothing about their lives would ever change and that all diversion could bring them back to that insight again and again, each time more painfully because they were consequently older … well, pro football was kind of a variety of smack too, everything was, some was legal and some was not, the only credible difference was that smack was death and the only way to conquer death was to kill it. Yes, that was what you had to do, kill death by controlling it. Did that make sense? Well, none less than anything else he had seen.
At the airport he let the cabbie go, grunting, cheering him up slightly, he hoped, with a large tip. Money was no trouble; money would never be a problem again. If he needed more he could always raise it. Into the large terminal building with the key to the small locker, open up that locker and get the key to the larger one, over to the large locker then in a different section, all of the terminal filled with the smell of plane exhaust, and then, opening that second locker he put it back into his hands again, five pounds of death. The sack, misshapen from hours stuffed into confinement, unfurled gradually in his grasp, feeling oddly warm, tingling to his touch, and he threw it over his shoulder. Midnight on the terminal clock, five and a half hours until the rendezvous. Was it conceivable that in five and a half hours it would all be over? No, it was not conceivable. It would never be over. He still had Williams to retrieve. He was responsible for the man being there. He had to get him out.
Two men were at his sides, two men wearing heavy jackets, dark glasses at midnight. Even in the empty spaces of the terminal they had come on him quickly, no warning, now he felt something protruding into his back that was unmistakably a gun. “All right,” one of them said, neither moving his lips, he could not tell which one, “just start walking. Start walking and don’t try anything at all,” and then skillfully the man to his side had put a hand in Wulff’s jacket pocket, emerged with the point thirty-eight, looked at it with satisfaction and then prodded him along. “Let’s move,” one of them said, “let’s just keep on moving,” and he did so, maintaining an even pace, the sack still jiggling against him. Neither made any move to take the sack. That move, he supposed, would come outside or in the place they were taking him. In the meantime they had a perfect setup; he was the bagman they were the observers … if deus ex machina, any airport security guard, should take a second look at them they could fade away … leaving Wulff to hold an enormous sack of uncut heroin.
Oh, it was a pretty setup all right; they had had this one figured nicely but all of a sudden Wulff felt himself lose patience with the whole issue. If they were Calabrese’s scouts then the old man should play honorably for once instead of trying a juvenile double-cross like this and if they were freelancers, more goddamned bounty hunters, well the hell with them, let them deal with someone else. He was not going to be the target of every twobit mercenary around.
They were walking toward the main doors of the terminal now, the doors sliding noiselessly open and closed on their electronic gear as people walked through them, a steady flow of traffic in the airport even at this hour, about fifty to sixty people that he could see within range of sight in the main building and as they got close to the doors Wulff pivoted to his left, bringing the man on his right into an awkward position as he pivoted with him. Trying to see what he was doing and still holding position, Wulff swung back suddenly, using his free hand to strike this man viciously across the face. The man downed with a little squeal, one chicken-squawk of protest, lay on the gleaming floor kicking and Wulff came back toward the left where the other man was fumbling for his gun.
“Don’t do it,” Wulff said quietly, urgently, “don’t do it, don’t even think of it, you fire off a gun in this terminal and you’ll have fifty witnesses,” and he saw the man thinking about this, the thought buzzing around in his head like a mosquito, snapping here and there, drawing small bites from the intellect as he considered it, his eyes fluttering away and while he was thinking about it Wulff dropped the sack, reached forward, seized the man by the collar and holding him that way dropped him in place with a single left hook delivered with a radius of inches. The man screamed. Wulff kneed him in the groin, feeling the man’s flesh shift underneath him, then used the hand that he had been steadying with to deliver an open-handed blow across the nose. The man screamed again, thinly, and fell on top of the other.
People were looking at them of course; he guessed that the first scream had galvanized almost everyone and now the terminal was in freeze, the traffic flow had been stopped and instead attention was focusing down upon them. But no one was moving, not even a security guard who he saw at the periphery of the crowd, the guard looking at them cautiously, hat in hand, hat waving at the floor, his other hand wiping sweat from his forehead. Obviously trying to evaluate.
The two men beneath him were lying quite still, the one who he had beaten was making little stirring gestures but there was no force in them. In an explosion of rage he kicked him again, catching him in the armpit. The man screamed again, unnecessarily, and lay still on the floor. That was better now. The other one, his eyes rolled up high, was looking at and through Wulff, seeing and yet not seeing, almost certainly unconscious. They were out of the picture, that was clear. And it had to be only the two of them because if it were a matter of having backup … why he would have been shot by now. He would have been d
ead. It was as simple as that.
He picked up the bag again, looking at the security guard, that one dark look passing whole subtleties of information which Wulff did not even have to sort out verbally: the guard was not an airline employee, he was leased out from some private agency, he did not like his work, his feet hurt, he was already collecting disability pension from the police force and he did not want to go on one hundred percent disability, not if he could help it … the guard did not want to get involved in this, not unless Wulff did something so drastic that not getting involved would have meant his job or his life. But that would have to be a mass-murder or something like that; Wulff would have to begin firing into the crowd, scattering people, shooting old women and children in the head in order to involve the guard. And the guard, having made the obvious decision that this was a private quarrel, that Wulff was not going to menace people outside of the two on the ground had already turned away then, one motion of the shoulders turning him three-quarter profile to Wulff, his palms extended in an unconscious gesture of capitulation and Wulff turned then, looked at the two on the ground for the last time, the pallid, twitching forms which would have taken him outside and killed him as casually and mercilessly as he could now kill them … except that he did not have the time to do it.
The crowd was starting to move, little darting on the edges as people ran toward safety and surely it would only be a little more time than this, perhaps in the minute, before city police were summoned. It would have been a pleasure to have killed them but it was not worth the risk and so he turned, putting them out of mind instantly, finished business, the two of them, and moved toward the flicking doors, the sack heavy and heavier in his hand, the string leaving an imprint of pain which he knew would be there for hours, leaving a deeper stain of implication which would never wash away. This was the price. This was the price that it had made him pay.
But it simply did not matter. Finished business was finished; the two on the floor were merely obstacles which he had had to overcome and he had no more feeling toward them now than he did about the guard. You functioned brutally, impersonally in his business, you did what was necessary and only invested enough emotion to keep you going, doling out to yourself little jolts of feeling every now and then simply to keep going, but you never confused finished business with unfinished.
Twelve thirty. Five hours to the rendezvous with Calabrese. He did not know if his presence on the beach would surprise the old man or if he had expected it all the time. He suspected that Calabrese, even if he had sent these two, was enough of a businessman not to care either way. You kept on moving, you kept on poking away, you kept your options open but you never expected anything but the worst and Calabrese, that grim old realist, would be waiting for him.
He damned well better have the girl.
Wulff looked behind him, no one coming yet. He flagged down a cab, not noticing until the last instant that it was with his gun hand, then as the vehicle slowed he put it away, got in and told the driver where to take him.
“You know what I thought?” the driver said when they were in motion. “It’s the strangest damned thing, I could have sworn you were holding a gun when you were flagging me down. Boy did that give me a turn, a guy with a gun! I almost didn’t stop. Light can play funny tricks, can’t it?”
Wulff agreed that life was a trick of light down the line.
XII
Williams knew everything that was going on. How the hell could he not know what was going on? the walls were goddamned transparent. You could almost see, let alone hear, everything that was going on down the line and even if he were not desperately attuned to finding out exactly what the hell was going on with the girl and with Wulff he still would have known. As it was, with both of the guards bored and practically in his confidence, with an opportunity almost to listen at will he had the timetable down almost to the second. The girl was supposed to be down on the beach in front of the Fontainbleau at five-thirty in the morning. That could mean only one thing; that Wulff and Calabrese had worked out some kind of a switch with the girl as bait. Williams was not part of it; this did not disappoint him, the girl was more important to Wulff than he was, obviously, and she was also helpless. So that part was all right.
He knew about the rape too. He had been dozing, alone in the room, the guards down the hall, talking or whatever the hell they did together, when Calabrese came into the girl’s room and seized her. It had been disgusting, it had been just like seeing the old fucker stripped naked, humiliating himself but beyond the pity and disgust there had been real horror because it was not fair that this kind of thing be done to the girl. Calabrese was living his private torment; he had no reason to act it out upon her. Essentially she was an innocent, she was not at all responsible for the factors which had made Calabrese do what he did; she was merely their victim. So there had been something profound about the old man’s violation and the impulse had been strong within him to have done something really stupid and disastrous; charged that room, kicked the door down, killed Calabrese and yanked the corpse off the girl.
He probably could have done it too; Calabrese hardly sounded in there like a man possessed of alertness or one who was ready to fight. Williams could have torn him away from the girl, he could have saved her from the humiliation … but really, what humiliation would he have saved her from? Calabrese had been impotent, unable to enter her regardless and killing or beating him unconscious in front of her would only have made things worse for them. This house was ringed; it was all Calabrese’s territory. And although he might have taken some risks on his behalf, he could not be so reckless with the girl in here. Anything that happened to him if he made an escape attempt would happen to her and much worse. So in that sense, Calabrese had lucked into further cleverness. The girl was as much of a hold on Williams as Wulff. Everything had narrowed down.
But when he learned about the switch on the beach at five-thirty the picture changed. Now he had options, once the girl was out of the rooming house he had a freedom of action that he had not had before. He also had a sense of urgency because he was pretty sure that the switch was not going to go off. They would use the girl to lure Wulff there—and he would have to come; he had absolutely no choice—but once they had the man on the beach they would not allow the switch to go through. They would take the bag and they would kill the girl. Then they would kill Wulff.
Probably, Wulff knew it too. Wulff was no fool; he knew how these people operated and the little likelihood that this would go through as they had promised. But Wulff was helpless; if he had the drugs it was a very small thing indeed because they had the girl and the girl was the unshakable hold on him. For a man who claimed no attachments, no connections, no allegiances whatsoever to any cause other than his war, Wulff was one goddamned liar. They had a hold on him and it was a good one. Moth to flame, bird to snake, he was being dragged in.
So it came down to Williams. If anything could break the series of events which were going to happen on that beach they could only come from him; he was the sheer deus ex machina in the equation … and knowing this, the decision sliding through the tumblers of his mind, Williams came off the bed and went over to the guard who was sitting in the comer, reading a copy of Playboy magazine. The other one was down the hall somewhere. They worked in shifts now, both of them coming on only when it was time to start another poker game. What had been built up, Williams thought, was nothing less than a splendid relationship. Ever since the abduction near Chicago they had all gotten along splendidly; his abductors had been tough all right but when they had become his guards they had changed into kittens. They wanted no part of this they assured him; they had no more use for Calabrese and his schemes than Williams did, they even had objections on moral grounds: but what the hell could you do? A living was a living. But this was not to say that they had to be proud of what they were doing or that Williams wasn’t a wonderful guy. Williams agreed that they were wonderful too. All three of them were wonderful and Willi
ams was ahead about twenty dollars in the poker tournament; they had stripped him of his possessions of course, but they had been willing to let him play with markers. They even knew about the rape and they agreed that that was a damned shame too; a nice girl like that to be cuffed around by Calabrese. Life was shit, all right, no question about it. Still, what could you do?
“Yeah,” the guard said, looking up from a four-color picture of enormous breasts. The breasts filled the page, the nipples little staring eyes at the center and little drops of the man’s sweat had fallen across the areolae. “Look at this fucking piece of ass.”
“I don’t see any ass.”
“Look at this pair of tits, I should say. You ever seen anything like this in your life?”
“Not in the real,” Williams said, holding his arms straight down at his sides. “Pictures, yeah.”
“I don’t believe them,” the guard said, running a forefinger across the page, “I don’t think there’s really stuff like that. They just blow it up with camera angles and so on. There ain’t no such thing as a forty-eight inch pair of tits unless they’re on some fat, old colored woman.” He looked up at Williams suddenly embarrassed. “No offense,” he said.
“No, that’s all right.”
“I didn’t have to say colored woman. I just should have said fat old woman and left it at that. I’m not prejudiced, hell, you know that about me.”
“You can say fat old colored woman. They do tend to be fatter than whites.”
“Yeah,” the guard said, “oh well, yeah, maybe, maybe not. Anyway, to me this stuff isn’t real. They just make it up in the studios to drive you crazy.”
“Could be.”
“If it was real she couldn’t get out on the streets,” the guard said and Williams said, “I’m really sorry about this,” and drove his fist into the man’s adam’s apple.
