Lone Wolf # 14: Philadelphia Blowup

by Barry, Mike

  Wulff killed three top men in New York City and several smaller ones, went to San Francisco and blew up a docked freighter with a couple of hundred who had been involved in a big delivery, had gone to Boston to blow up a few more of the higher echelon, and then to Las Vegas, heading south toward Havana and Peru before coming back to finish up matters—or so he thought—in New York. Along the way he had picked up a lot of enemies, a huge bounty, and a little help from David Williams, the young black patrolman who had been the driver of the car on the night that they had gotten the dead girl squeal. Williams had a neat little house in St. Albans, a pregnant wife and a devotion to the system, but through the course of the months he had turned around, first working on getting heavy ordnance to Wulff and then joining him in Los Angeles for an abortive campaign that had still resulted in slaughter. Williams had thrown in the towel then and had gone back to the system, but Wulff had gone on to Miami and to beachfront massacre. He returned to New York then and even solved the mystery … found out that the man who had murdered Marie had been none other than the lieutenant at the booking precinct.

  But by that time it was too late. It was too late to make the solution of a mystery the end of a quest. They had had Wulff in detention in Manhattan for a while, but he had gotten out, carried the fight to Detroit, Phoenix, and down to Mexico City and a resort south of there where he had met a man named Diaz who had a notebook full of names of second echelon people. The second echelon, Diaz had said, was now, thanks to Wulff, the first echelon and would be assembling in Philadelphia around the time of the bicentennial to make the decisions for the American drug trade for the next two hundred years, or at least a fraction of them. Wulff had killed Diaz, taken the names, moved north and then east, slaughtering, working his way patiently toward Philadelphia where, hopefully, he would make his own impression on the meeting. Meanwhile, Williams had, for a variety of reasons, re-enlisted. Maybe Wulff’s way was the right one after all. They arranged to meet at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

  Wulff had not wanted it to work out this way. Sometimes there was the realization that he had gone far beyond his original intention which was to get even, knock off the top echelons, and be done with it. It was just that the top echelons were so fluid, and the network was so complex. Open it up as he had and there was virtually no way out of it clear to the bottom.

  He had seen, in Vietnam, what drugs had done to an entire country. Vietnam was not an ideological war at all. It was a drug war, pure and simple, with levels of influence contesting in that arena for control of the international markets. There in Saigon all of it had flowed free, and coming back to New York Wulff could see that the issues being fought out in Vietnam were going to be carried to all the capitals of the world. And from those capitals would flow the decisions determining how drugs would be funneled and by whom for the rest of the century. The American Legion and Westmoreland—to say nothing of Johnson—could have their patriotic bullshit to ram down the minds and hearts of fools because Wulff had the truth: Vietnam was a drug war, pure and simple. All of the ideologies were constructed to hide that simple fact.

  Wulff was not the kind of man who the NYPD should have put on its narcotics squad, but the NYPD, in its ignorance, thought that it was doing Wulff a favor. It thought it was doing something nice for perhaps the only patrolman on the entire force who had given up his automatic deferment and enlisted for combat. They couldn’t figure Wulff out, and thought that he would have to be crazy, and he was crazy—in a guilt-provoking way. Narco was a payoff for him; easy duty, regular hours, almost everything on the arm and a fair amount of graft. Vice would have been even nicer, but vice was practically a hereditary assignment. There was no way short of direct intervention of the commissioner that you could maneuver an outsider onto vice.

  So Wulff had wound up on narco. The idea was to keep your traffic with the informants who would now and then turn over a small, convenient bust to you, and in hard times—that is, when the press energized the mayor’s office which in turn began to make unpleasant sounds to the commissioner—the informants themselves would be busted and moved around the courts on bond procedures for just the amount of time that the squad itself felt was necessary to give the impression of action and keep the commissioner happy. The commissioner was made happy easily in those days. There was always something new coming along. A badly decomposed body would be found in a woodland of Richmond or a couple of student nurses would be pretty badly mangled in the east eighties, and the focus would shift. Now and then U.S. Customs would even cop a little smack at Kennedy, thus easing things.

  III

  Wulff didn’t exactly know what the key was to the Philadelphia situation, but he had ideas. Diaz had let a couple of useful names drop and he had picked up some valuable leads in the southland. The important thing, he knew, was to get to Philadelphia to make contact with Williams and establish some kind of means of operation. Once they had done that the rest of the thing would fall into line. They would look someone up who had a connection with the international drug trade and they would start killing. The first kill would inevitably lead to the second and so on. That was the way the method had worked in twelve cities for eight months up until now, and Wulff saw no reason to change.

  There was vague news about some big assemblage of the new echelon, each of them bringing along a little bit of their business, to decide how the territory would be cut up in the future. But if Wulff had his way, there would be no meeting at all. He would cut them down before they ever had a chance to get together and make their plans for the continued poisoning of the nation. He would not give them the time, that was all. He was on top of the situation now, and as long as the Lone Wolf remained in business they would never be able to destroy the country. When you considered the whole thing objectively, he was practically the only force in the country that was working against these people. If it were not for him they would have had everything by now; and they might do it yet. But he was shrewd. Shrewd and cunning. And as long as he was able to function they would not find things easy.

  Now he was in Philadelphia. His meeting with Williams in front of Independence Hall was still eight hours away. In the meantime he had checked into a cheap hotel in the business district, ditched the Fairlane, and was carrying his small ordnance in a valise, his jacket packed with handguns. Small hotels in the business district were just about Wulff’s speed; he felt comfortable in them, they gave him the anonymity he needed and he liked the grubbiness, the bleakness of their character. Here was something which, in any city, seemed to match his own mental state, his purposiveness. The furniture of the rooms and the look of the streets through the dirty windows complemented the decor of his own interior. You could travel light into one of these hotels, live there on the margins, disappear, murder, be found dead or perform unspeakable acts, and do all of it with the assurance that it wouldn’t make any difference to the other tenants, who were all inhabiting similar margins. There was no other place for a dedicated assassin to live.

  In the early part of the century, before the automobile had come to break the cities open, these hotels had been places of light and laughter in which people who had real business to transact in the cities would stay with one another, but now the people who had business in the cities all lived outside of them or stayed in the great hotels which had been made over, just as the city itself, for the absence of life, for convenience. But in a Colony Arms or Heritage Hermitage you could come as close as it was possible in 1975 to making some sense of how the country had turned out, what America had truly become at the end of all of this, and Wulff liked it. He was happy to be there, the hotel made him comfortable; this was where he ought to be.

  He checked in at the desk, the old clerk nodding in front of him as he signed the register, paid twelve dollars in cash, and adjusted his ordnance inside his clothing. Fumes of whiskey roiled from the clerk’s breath to Wulff, but the aspect of the clerk was not merry, and he did not seem particularly conscious of the fact that he
was drunk. Wulff capped the pen, handed it to him and bent to pick up his valise. There was, of course, no bellhop. The mailboxes behind the clerk were dark and empty except for stray sheets of single papers; the ones folded once, probably rent due notices.

  “You like Philly?” the clerk said.

  “What? What’s that?”

  “You like this town?”

  The clerk had an unusually piercing expression, but then again it might only have seemed so because of Wulff’s alertness. He was carrying a hell of a lot of metal. “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Just all right?”

  “It’s great.”

  “No,” the old man said, “no seriously. I really want to know what you think of the town? You come from New York, right?”

  “East of there.”

  “East of New York? Where’s that?”

  “The goddamned Atlantic Ocean,” Wulff said, stooping to heft his bag. “I think it’s an okay town.”

  “Gets bum rapped,” the clerk said. “People come in from New York, think that Philly’s a dump, a town for losers. But not since the Flyers.”

  “Flyers?”

  “The hockey team. They beat the shit out of people.”

  “I don’t follow hockey.”

  “Beat them to pulp,” the old man said contentedly, rattling a magazine beneath counter level. “Pounded some respect into them. Got a world champion team now. That’s the only way to be champions. Got to pound the shit out of people. You like to pound the shit out of people?”

  “What’s that?”

  The old man swallowed several times, the small joints in his neck popping and bulging like little grapes, and wiped a hand across his forehead. “We don’t go for that here. Run a nice quiet place. In the Spectrum, that’s where you beat the shit out of people. Here you just go about your business.”

  “Sure,” Wulff said. “I’ll just do that.”

  “If we get any trouble I’ll have to run you out. You understand that of course. We have good contacts with the police; we can get them here in a jiffy.”

  “All right,” Wulff said, “all right,” and went away from the desk, struggling with the valise. As he walked into the small, self-service elevator whose door was ajar, he looked at the key to his room and pressed number three. The clerk looked at him intently, poignantly. The shelf of door cut off the clerk’s line of sight, and Wulff could see him looking at him with curious intensity; certainly far more interest than he might have generated considering what Wulff took to be relatively limited social contact.

  The elevator moved up in trembling, slow jerks, and hesitated at the second floor with the door closed for so long that Wulff thought that it might be stuck. He had long since figured out what he would do if he were trapped in an elevator: he would shoot his way out. He had a fear of self-service elevators which was almost irrational. It was not as strong a feeling as his hatred of drugs or dealers or his love for Marie Calvante, but it was on that level, and he was perfectly willing to pull a gun on a stalled self-service elevator if that seemed to be the only way to get out of one. First he would put a shot through the door to crack open the locking mechanism, then another one overhead through the skylight, carefully placed so that he would be able to pull down a beam and wriggle through. And if neither of those two shots did it … well, then he would go mad, putting a fusillade down until someone in the corridors got the message. But the car moved shakily upward after a while and clung to the third floor for only a short time before reluctantly opening its door like a stubborn child might release a fist sticky with hidden candy.

  Wulff went out into the corridor and down to the third room on the left, struggled with the latch, and let himself into a room as bare and clean as he knew the interior of his soul to be. He put his valise down with a sigh, and turned then to inspect the spaces of the room which were the spaces that he had inhabited in a hundred others like it. His life had turned full circle; he was tracking through it all again and knew nothing would ever change. Wulff sighed once, very deeply, feeling a revulsion shiver through him; revulsion which was circuited more than anything else around impatience. Impatience for it all to be done with, and impatience for the moments to crawl forward toward confrontation so that in action again it could all be over. He kicked the door closed, went to the valise, opened it to see that the armanents were still there—lined up in their gleaming little rows like surgeon’s materials—and then went to the bed, sat on it, and lay on it, bringing his knees up to his chest. Six hours until he met Williams. He could have killed the time just as well with a woman as in any other fashion, but since the girl Tamara had been killed in Miami there had been little of that for him, and even Tamara had been merely a short-circuit in what had become the dead wiring of his sexuality since Marie had been found killed.

  No, whatever he needed, it was not a woman. It was only a twitch; it had nothing to do with sex at all. On the bed he closed his eyes, drifted absently through dreams which themselves seemed to contain circuitry and wiring; dreams which had little flickers in them which seemed to come off the vast, dense machinery of purpose which hummed within him. And in the pit of that sleep he twitched a few times, reaching once reflexively toward the point forty-five which was in his side pocket. In the dream someone had come into the room and was staring at him, looking down at him on the bed with a gun in his hand. He was an enormous man with eyes that were only surface, and as the color and motion of the dream became more penetrating, like a knife within him, Wulff twitched again and opened his eyes … and the dream merged with the aspect of what he saw.

  There was a man standing near the border of the bed, a tall man whose features were invisible in the little trapped light filtering through the first dusk, but Wulff could see that the gun, enormous in his hand, was levelled on him. It was strange how you could see certain things and not others coming out of sleep that might have to do with the light, or then again might only be some freak of attention. Wulff lay very quietly waiting for the man to do what he would. His own gun was not within hand’s reach. If the man was going to kill him there was nothing to be done. He had had a good run, all things considered, Wulff thought. If it was truly all over now he would have to take it with the assurance that it could have happened a long time ago and he might not even have gotten this far. He had gone a good distance. “Get up,” the man said.

  Wulff lay there looking at him. The man said again, “I know you’re awake. Now get off the bed very slowly and don’t put your hands anywhere but where I can see them. If you reach for a gun, if you do anything peculiar at all, I’ll kill you.”

  Wulff brought his knees down slowly, arched his feet toward the floor, and moved off the bed. The man, wearing a heavy coat in the mild November, was six feet tall or a little more, and handled the gun with absolute professionalism. He might have been about forty years old. “Now,” the man said, “Stand.”

  Wulff stood. The man reached out his free hand, patted Wulff’s pockets very carefully, and came in and then out with the gun. He held it delicately, the way one might balance a puppy, and then put it in his pocket. “All right,” he said, “what do you want? What are you doing here?”

  Wulff said nothing. There was really nothing to say. He measured the man carefully. It was barely possible that he might be able to close the distance and knock the gun from his hand. Not yet, however. It was an ultimate risk maneuver, the kind of thing you would do only if there was no apparent alternative. Right up until that time, however, you tried to negotiate, look for any other possible move. Behind the façade of the man in the overcoat Wulff saw or thought he saw a hint of uncertainty, which could only come from being in a place where there had not, perhaps, been sufficient preparation. The man looked vaguely unhappy, as if he had been cajoled or ordered from bed to take care of this. “I’m not kidding,” the man said. “I want to know who you are. You’d better talk to me. You want to get shot?”

  “No,” Wulff said, “I don’t want to get shot.”
r />   “Who are you?”

  “The clerk tipped you,” Wulff said. “The question is why? Who did he think I was? What do you want from me?”

  “I’m asking the questions here.”

  “I’m entitled to know.”

  “Look,” said the man in the overcoat, the uncertainty in his voice exaggerated through volume, and filtered through the hoarseness sounding as if the man were not demanding information but somehow pleading for it, “I want to know who you are and why you’re staying here. You see this?” he said, lifting the gun slightly. “I can use it. I’m not just waving this goddamned thing around. I know what it is and what it can do and how to handle it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Damned right I do,” the man said as Wulff put out his leg, hooked it behind the man’s ankles and tripped him.

  The man came forward, sprawling, gasping, the gun hand splaying out at an awkward, painful angle. He was too much of a professional to fire it on such a precarious hold, but his attempts to regain control, silent and intense as he dragged his arms back, made him scream with pain. Something in a shoulder had been dislocated. Wulff kicked him in the small of the back and sent him lurching forward, then dove for the gun, coming in low and hard behind him. The gun came into his hand, small and hard like a fist, slapping against his splayed fingers with that sense of absolute conviction which was always an indication that you were moving well, doing the right thing, and as the man feebly tried to hold onto it Wulff wrenched it around and through his fingers, and then pushed up hard. Something snapped inside the man’s wrist, and he screamed once, lightly. Wulff brought up his knees, rode the man all the way down, dug his fingers into the back of his neck and yanked hard, and the man screamed again, this time with greater solemnity. Wulff stood upright then, dragged the man up with him, and pushing him into the wall, caught him on the rebound and threw him back again. The man shielded himself from head impact by coming against the wall with his shoulder blades, and this seemingly woke him up, took him out of the unconsciousness to which he had descended. Wulff pointed the gun at him. Little streams of sweat were running off the face now in cracked rivulets and the man looked much older, not forty at all but rather a wasted fifty-five, an athlete gone toward disaster. His hands reached for the lapels of his overcoat, and he drew it around him with a hunched, protective gesture, swaddling himself within it like a child.