Lone Wolf # 14: Philadelphia Blowup

by Barry, Mike

  Martin said nothing.

  “Where do you keep it?” the figure said again, and Martin felt something, probably the hand, shaking him again. There was pain moving below his neck. He began to feel sensibility return. He did not want it to return. “Go away,” he said.

  “Where is it? Where do you have it?”

  “Have what?” he said. The words were painful. Each syllable was a grunt, each grunt a jab of pain. Something was seriously wrong inside him; something had been terribly altered. But he could not even focus his consciousness on the point of pain.

  “The shit,” the figure said. “The smack.” It leaned closer. Martin could see the face now; hard, crude features defined by shadows, and in the hand a gun. Suddenly he understood who the man was and what had happened to him. A sense of connection came to him, the loop of circumstance which tied this to all the other things which had happened, and he was himself again, hurt and dying on a lawn. There was the sound of thunder in the distance. “Tell me,” the figure said.

  This was Wulff. This was the man who had blown up his home. The man who had called to threaten him, who Martin thought he had outmaneuvered by having the house guarded, by taking every reasonable precaution. How had he gotten through? This was the man who had killed Jeanine, who had destroyed his property, killed his guards, had brought him to the edge of death. He opened his eyes wide and considered the man. He wanted to look on him. “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “I have no time.”

  “You have to be crazy,” Martin said weakly. “I have no shit.”

  “Where is it? Back in the house or do you carry it on you?”

  “You have to be out of your mind,” Martin said. Of course he was. It had never occurred to him with this simplicity and clarity up until now. Wulff was crazy. Everything that he had been, everything that he was doing was the action of a crazy man. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Let me die.” Oddly he felt a little stronger. Accepting his weakness, the imminence of his death, his total destruction energized him slightly. He had always anticipated this in small corners of the night. He had known that he was heading for an ending like this. At least I don’t have to face old age, Martin thought. At least I don’t have to face being wheeled to a corner in a nursing home, faced away from a window and left to die. At least I won’t see all of me turn to dust and gelatin. I have that. Say what you will for quick, terrible and violent death. It may outdo the hell out of old age. In any event, which of us can see our passage?

  The figure slapped him. The blow was not unpleasant; it resolved further connections inside Martin’s mind, fused him more closely to circumstance so that he could smell smoke, the odors of the lawn, and taste the grass and fire in his mouth. Assimilating it was like assimilating all knowledge itself. “No time,” Wulff said.

  “No smack.”

  The man slapped him again. It still did not hurt. He felt his hold upon the situation beginning to go, however. Voyage in, voyage out. Drift together, drift apart. He spat out blood. “Fuck you,” he said.

  “You’d better tell me.”

  “You’re crazy,” Martin said. “I don’t deal.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No I don’t. I never did. You have this all wrong. I blew a little pot, I had a little cache of the stuff upstairs for myself and friends. That was all.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “It’s true,” he said. He did not have to convince this man. He owed him nothing, and it made no difference, Yet he had a sudden lurching need to convince Wulff that he was telling the truth. It would take the heart out of Wulff if he were to accept the fact that he had done all of this—that he had killed—in error. “You’re crazy, Wulff,” he said. “You’ve killed an innocent man.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care,” Martin said. “I don’t care whether you believe me or not, you see. It doesn’t matter any more because I’m going to die no matter what I say or do. You’re crazy, Wulff,” he said. “I don’t deal. You got it all wrong.”

  The man looked at him, jerked his head up, looked right and left. There was a vague sound of sirens, rolling in, still far away. It was impossible for Martin to tell from this angle how much of the entire block had gone up, but surely someone would have put the call in. Sooner or later the disaster equipment always arrived, but there was no equipment for that ultimate disaster of life. “No time,” Wulff said. “I don’t have any time for this.”

  “You’d better get the hell out of here, Wullf. You still have a chance. Run.”

  Wulff looked at him. He seemed confused. Martin would have laughed, but he had sense of his body. If he laughed he knew that he would hemorrhage on the spot and he did not want to do that. No, he wanted to keep on looking up at Wulff. That was all he wanted. He wanted to see the way the new apprehension was sinking into the various planes and levels of the man’s face. Leaching through the grey skin, every place where the knowledge rested it burned. “You mean there’s no smack?” Wulff said.

  “That’s right.” You had to be very slow and patient with the insane. You had to repeat a truth over and over again until, in their own fashion, on whatever level where their frightened birdsouls fluttered, they were able to accept it. Here he was lying on his back dying amidst smoke and sirens, and yet he was administering to Wulff. That figured, however. Everything figured if you considered it deeply enough. “There’s nothing,” Martin said.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh my God,” Wulff said. “Oh my God, I think I believe you. I think this time I believe you.”

  “That’s great.”

  “You don’t deal?”

  “No. I never dealt.”

  “Then who does in the neighborhood?” Wulff said. “I know that it must be someone. It’s got to be someone around here; otherwise Diaz would never have sent me here.”

  “Sent you here?”

  “His notebook. His notebook had you down.”

  “I don’t know Diaz,” Martin said. Pain flooded his throat, he tasted blood, felt the liquid begin to move within him, his body breaking in the sudden pressure. “I don’t know anything.”

  “They couldn’t have lied to me,” Wulff said. “They wouldn’t do that.”

  “I don’t deal,” Martin said again. “I’m dying,” he said, with sudden conviction. “You’ve killed me. You’ve killed everyone.”

  “Then you deserve to die,” Wulff said. He ran a hand across his forehead, shook his head. “If you deal, you deserve to die. All pushers are murderers.”

  “But I’m not a pusher.”

  “Then you deserve to die,” Wulff said uncertainly. The sirens were building, but slowly; too slowly Martin suspected, for him to ever see another man again. Let alone a woman. He would die here on the grass of his lawn looking at Wulff. This is the image which would transport him from life, that of the man who had killed him. “You must die,” Wulff said, “all the dealers must die.”

  “I’m not a dealer.”

  “You have to be a dealer,” Wulff said. He looked over his shoulder, as if checking for the approach of the sirens. He was not nearly as big a man as Martin had imagined him to be, but then again Martin had judged him to be something in excess of seven feet tall when what he was looking at was a trembling, preoccupied man under six-and-a-half feet. Wulff turned back toward him, and brushed the hair out of his forehead. “Last chance,” he said.

  “Last chance to what?”

  “To tell me where the stuff is.”

  “There is no stuff,” Martin said. “There is no stuff. I am not a dealer. You’re crazy. You’re just crazy if you think that I’m what you’re looking for. I’m not a dealer,” he said and something within him wrenched and he vomited thickly, the dry heave full in his stomach, but reduced, when it made passage to his mouth, to a thin, dense trickle of burning material which came from a corner. “Oh shit,” he said, “oh shit on this.”

  “Shit on you,” Wulff
said and pointed the gun. Martin looked at the gun, the gun closing in on him, and as he saw the finger tighten, it occurred to him with absolute clarity that he was seeing the truth now, and not only seeing but being. He was participating in an absolute reality which arced between his head and the gun, nothing else, and as he saw that, as he saw the reality toward which his life—all of it—had been moving from the very first, he stared absolutely transfixed. It was not given to every man to see in the moment of his passage the sum and destiny of his life, and that made him fortunate, he thought. That made him more fortunate than most because such knowledge was not often granted … But this was the last or the next to last thought that he ever had, because something came out of the gun with terrifying force to make a hollow impact within his consciousness, and he moved toward obliteration. But there was a clear moment then, a moment in which he saw the man’s face, and Wulff was saying you’ve got to, you’ve got to. All of it was quite distinct to him, and as he saw that, Martin had a sudden vision of the torturer as trapped, the assassin as victim of his own dreams of murder. But before he could quite follow it all the way through to the interesting and complicated insights which he no doubt would have derived, the shroud of death came over him and was tightened, and he saw and heard no more, at least on that brief if complicated cycle.

  XIV

  The assistant commissioner was summoned by the commissioner for a conference. This was something which made the aycee automatically nervous, since he had not seen the commissioner more than three times in the last four years. Two of them were at public functions and another was at a New Year’s Eve party. Being called in was automatically bad news, but the aycee had no choice in the matter and was relieved to find that the commissioner was even more nervous, it would seem, than the aycee himself. The commissioner had files spread out all over his desk and was clawing at his cheeks, reading them, when the aycee came in. The commissioner said without looking up, “We’ve got to get this Burton Wulff now. We’ve simply got to get him.”

  The aycee sighed and sat down in a straight chair facing the desk. He was covered on the Wulff issue, at least. There were a hundred issues on which the commissioner could have called him and the aycee would not have been sure what to say, but Wulff was clear cut. “I’ve done a lot of work on that,” he said.

  “He’s in Philadelphia now. There’s been a bombing which is obviously his work. At least they say it’s his work. How the hell would I know? How the hell would I know what’s going on? Rizzo himself called me on this. They’re pretty goddamned mad in Philadelphia. They seem to think that it’s our fault.”

  “I know all about that,” the aycee said.

  “Then tell me,” the commissioner said, “Tell me what the hell is going on with this guy? He used to be one of us, right? But I don’t see where that goddamned makes us responsible if he’s turned into a maniac. There are fifty thousand ex-cops in the country. What am I supposed to do? Keep a personal file and attendant on every one of them who gets drunk someplace or knocks over a supermarket?”

  “It isn’t quite that simple,” the aycee said, and laid out the facts of the Wulff case to the commissioner. The presentation, if he said so himself—and he was sure that he would many times in the future, if only to his wife—was notably concise and explicit, and managed to wrap up the circumstances in less than ten minutes. The commissioner listened with great interest. His predecessor had known all of this, of course, but there had been a change of administrations and a reshuffling at the top, and the Wulff case was one of the responsibilities which the new commissioner’s secretary had delegated from the start. Then, too, because the old commissioner was not exactly a great admirer of his successor, certain facts that might have otherwise been given at the routine series of briefings preceding a change of administration had never been turned over. You started from scratch all the time, the aycee thought. That was the key to any understanding of the processes which ran the government. There was no history, and turnover took care of all knowledge. And if there was no turnover, stagnation took care of the rest. Either way there seemed little reason for hope.

  “That’s incredible,” the commissioner said when the aycee was finished. He did look genuinely astonished. He put his feet up on the desk and leaned back, shuffling the files. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. He’s done all of that himself?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Twelve cities, six hundred murders? All because he has a grudge against the narcotics squad?”

  “Not quite that simple but something like that. You have to remember that he lost his fiancée, and it turned out that one of our own was behind that.”

  “So what the hell!” the commissioner said angrily. “We can’t be responsible for every damned man who works here! Of course there’s going to be corruption, there are going to be some rotten ones at every level. But it has nothing to do with the department, and there certainly has been a considerable elevation of standards—”

  “I know,” the aycee said. “But he doesn’t think that way.” The commissioner, under pressure, always politicized, and since he constantly felt himself under pressure, it was almost impossible to catch him without defenses at ready, mired in semi-speech. Still, this did not mean that the aycee had to accept the implied responsibility. He had to keep himself covered, too, and he knew a hell of a lot more about the devices of the NYPD than did the commissioner, who had originally been in sanitation and public works before being moved over, an object of departmental resentment but good for the press and the mayor’s office, who liked the idea of a new man not beholden to any of the apparent power groups in the department. “He seems to pin it on us,” the aycee said. “And since he’s pretty goddamned mad—and out of control in the bargain—a lot of people blame us also.”

  “Our men aren’t like that. He is no longer one of us. He left the department.”

  “That man escaped from custody,” the aycee pointed out. “It really wasn’t our fault. It was, in fact, one of those things that couldn’t be anticipated, but nevertheless, it was. He is an escaped criminal now.”

  “Rizzo is mad as hell,” the commissioner said. “Miserable bastard. He can’t control his own department and couldn’t when he was commissioner, but when something comes in that they can pin on New York—”

  “They’re damned grateful,” the aycee agreed. “New York can always take the heat off. Next to it they think they can look good in comparison. I’ve had several talks with his ex-partner, you know, the patrolman who was in the car with him the night this whole thing started. I think that this man, Williams, may have some information as to his whereabouts, or at least may have had it.”

  “And you let him get away?”

  “Well,” the aycee said. “He’s had problems of his own, Williams. He was hurt pretty badly near a methadone center a few months ago. Knifed up and almost died, and he’s pretty lucky to be here. Under those circumstances we wouldn’t look too damned grateful pushing him. But I have a hunch that Williams has a lead into him.”

  “That doesn’t do us much good.”

  “It might,” the aycee said thoughtfully, “because I have a feeling that Williams has come around to feeling just as we do; that Wulff is intensely dangerous. And if he ever catches up with him he might take a more direct kind of action.”

  “Like kill him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The commissioner took his feet off the desk and leaned forward. “That doesn’t do us much good,” he said. “That doesn’t say much for us at all, in fact. That Philadelphia business was very bad. Have you heard the reports?”

  “I read the papers, that was all. There wasn’t a hell of a lot.”

  “He blew up damned near a whole block in Harrisburg.”

  “I know it was Harrisburg. So how did Philadelphia get involved anyway? What is Rizzo calling about?”

  “There were some pretty important people on that block. Also, they had him definitely tied to Philadelphia just
a few hours before the blast. They had him in a hotel downtown there and the Harrisburg police know it. They don’t know exactly who he is yet. They’re still doing investigation, but they’re going to make the tie pretty soon and then we’re going to be in it,” the commissioner said. “I’ve been checking around, and we’re going to be in it pretty damned deep.”

  “We are already.”

  “So I think we’re going to have to get him,” the commissioner said. “We’re bound to this case anyway. We’re going to have to get in and take part because we’re going to get dragged in within a matter of days or less. We might as well take what credit we can by plunging in now.”

  “All right,” the aycee said.

  “They’re scared in Philadelphia. They’re damned scared. They don’t like the picture and they say that we’re to blame. They say they’re going to approach Harrisburg themselves unless we do.”

  “And do what?”

  The commissioner said, “Who the hell knows? Tie the tin can, that’s all. Make sure that we don’t get away without being held responsible for every goddamned thing this guy has done since he ever took a civil service examination. Is he crazy? He is crazy, isn’t he?” The commissioner put a hand to his tie, straightened it absently, then stood and went over to the window. “Any man who wants to eliminate the international drug trade, well, now—”

  “I guess he’s crazy,” the aycee said. “He’s pretty damned angry too, though. The anger came first.”

  “One way or the other. I want you to get him.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m putting you in charge of this. I’m giving you a detail. You can pick the men you want, do it the way you want. I want this man picked up now. He’s around Philadelphia again, they seem pretty sure of that. You can send them down there, send them to Harrisburg, split the squad, fan out …”