Lone Wolf # 14: Philadelphia Blowup

by Barry, Mike

  “There’s nothing more to say,” he said to Williams quickly. “The hell with you. The hell with them all. You’ll never get me. From the beginning all you sons-of-bitches ever wanted to do was to use me.” He slammed the phone down. The idea that he could have ever wanted to call Williams to apologize was repulsive to him. There was no reason for apology. He owed them nothing. He owed no one anything. How could he? They were all out to kill him. He stood up in the booth, pulled the door open, and stepped angrily out into the space of the bar. The bartender, caught in mid-dive toward the gun, saw Wulff’s eyes, his aspect, and stood up rapidly, his face congested with terror. Wulff’s point forty-five was in his hand now, solid, comforting. This was the only thing that they would ever understand. The only message. They sold death and lived by it and so, at last, it was only death which they could understand as the medium of exchange. “Put your hands up,” Wulff said.

  The bartender backed against the mirror, his old frame shaking. He must have been in his mid-seventies; a senior man in the organization. Fifty years behind a counter, freelancing for them. “Put them up!” Wulff screamed, and the bartender’s hands came up. He backed as far as he could, his old, shrunken mouth opening and closing. The female drunk sighed heavily, threw out an arm, and knocked over the stale glass of beer in front of her. This woke her up. “Another one,” she said, her head moving off her forearms. “Pour another one, Jim.”

  The bartender looked at Wulff in a pleading way. “Don’t,” Wulff said. “Don’t think of it.”

  “I need another beer—”

  “Shut up,” Wulff said. The woman looked up at him. She might have been as old as the bartender; or then again it might only have been the clotted dense lines of slow hemorrhage in her drunk’s face which gave her the appearance of age. She was probably working with him. All of them were working together. They were one unit; the organization, and the lines of interconnection, which soldered them all. “Put your head down,” he said. The woman dropped her head immediately to her forearms, her eyes on the gun all the time. “Don’t move,” he said.

  “Listen,” the bartender said. “Listen, there isn’t much money. What do you think a place like this can take in? You can see, nobody’s come in except you in the last fifteen minutes. Nobody comes in until five, six o’clock, and then it’s one beer, two beers and gone. There might be twenty in the register but—”

  “Shut up,” Wulff said. “Stay away from the gun.”

  “Gun? What gun?”

  “Don’t go for the gun,” Wulff said. You had to stay calm. You had to keep a lid on your feelings and not panic them even if at a moment like this it was all you could do to stop yourself from pumping three or four shots into them to show them once and for all that they couldn’t get away with what they thought they could do to you. “Just point,” he said slowly. “Point to where it is.”

  “There’s no gun.”

  “Show me where it is.”

  “You think there’s a gun here? What the hell is this? Is that what you thought I was trying to do?” The bartender’s face, oddly, was slack with gladness. “Oh hell, no, if that’s what you’re worried about. I don’t keep no stuff below the bar. I don’t want to mess with shootouts. Anything you want you’re entitled to have. That’s my policy, to turn it right over. What little there is, I’m not going to kill myself to hold on to.”

  “Show me the gun,” Wulff said again. “I don’t think you’re listening. I don’t think that you’re listening to me. Give me the gun now. Show me where it is.”

  The woman raised her head again and said distinctly, “I think he thinks you’ve got a gun down there, Harry. I think that he thinks that you were trying to shoot him. That’s how this whole thing started.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” the bartender said, not to Wulff but to the woman. “I wouldn’t have no gun. What’s there to protect for Christ’s sake? Anyone knows there’s nothing here.”

  “Sons-of-bitches,” Wulff said. “I know that you’re lying to me. I know that you’ve got a gun down there; that you were going to shoot me when I was in that booth.” The bartender shook his head, and looked at him helplessly. “Admit it,” Wulff said. “You know it’s the truth.”

  “Harry,” the woman said, “I figured the thing out. It took me a little while but now I got it. The guy is crazy. He’s out of his head. He comes in here looking to shoot. Let me out of here,” she said, standing abruptly, weaving by her bar stool. “I just came in here for a little conversation and to pass a sunny afternoon. I don’t want no part of this.”

  “Stay,” Wulff said. “Both of you stay.”

  “You wouldn’t shoot an old lady, would you?”

  “Don’t move.”

  “You can fuck if you want,” the woman said. “Maybe he’s that kind of nut,” she said to the bartender hopefully. “If he’s crazy enough to shoot, maybe he’s crazy enough to want to fuck. You want to screw me?” she said. She opened her arms. She was wearing a black coat, many-holed, which hung in a single straight line to her feet. Her old cheekbones, however, were dazzled with light. “Look at that,” she said. “That’s not such bad stuff after all, is it? You give an old woman a chance, she’ll show you she’s learned a few things.” Her mouth quivered then opened. “Please don’t shoot,” she said. “There’s no reason to kill people.”

  The bartender screamed suddenly and dived below the level of the counter, but his knee hit something and he screeched with pain, then up-ended and sprawled full-length behind the counter. The woman screamed too, in a voice even more hoarse and desperate than the bartender’s, and then began a desperate side wise waddle, trying to get to the door. She would get away then. She would get away and get to the police and tell them everything. Either that or she would go right back to the network captain, the head for the district, and tell him everything about Wulff, including his appearance and his whereabouts. Either way he could not let her out of the bar. That was obvious. They were closing in now to the degree that everything was covered by their operatives. Even a sleazy, ruined neighborhood place like this. The next thing would come when they picked up his trail, started to track him on the streets. But at least he could forestall that a little. “Don’t,” he shouted to her as she came near the door. “Don’t do it.”

  She did not react. Moving within her own conception of time, her own dream of event, just as the kid on the south side had been, the woman continued to hobble to the door, her palms thrashing, knees scuttling. Obviously, nothing would stop her now. She was moving within a conception of event which was entirely different from his own or from that of anyone who might have tried to stop her. And there was nothing that he could do, nothing at all, because in order to stop her by persuasion he would have had to have entered into her scheme of time, and that was as private as her own death would be.

  “Please,” Wulff said nevertheless, pointlessly, “please stop.”

  She did not. Her body crashed against the door and then she was struggling with it and the door was open. She lifted a foot and started to move outside.

  And Wulff shot her in the head.

  She gave one squeak, like a bird, and collapsed in the doorway, half-in, half-out, totally immobile. Her legs kicked once, uselessly, and then he could tell by the way that they flexed and froze that she was dead. He had seen enough dead people. For sure, he had studied death from enough angles to know its presence.

  He went over to the bar and craned over the counter like a customer looking for a bill that had drifted behind, standing on toes, peering. The bartender was down there on his stomach lying on the slats, his hands drawn in little fists against his cheeks. He was apparently unconscious, or at least skillfully playing possum, respiration fast and shallow, face slack, eyes closed.

  Wulff shook his head. Somewhere there was a sense of overwhelming choice, but as he stood on the rim of that circle, he could not seem to penetrate. Whether or not he shot the bartender would key into his sense of destiny, determine what he had be
come. But he could not, somehow, take it seriously. “Look at me,” he said to the man. “Look up at me.”

  The bartender lay there rigidly, made no effort to come to terms with what Wulff had said. Perhaps he really was unconscious. This was a possibility that had to be considered. Still, someone was going to see that woman pretty soon. Even in this section of the city the sight of a dead woman wedged half in and half out of a bar would attract some attention. “Look up,” Wulff said, “or I’ll kill you now.”

  Slowly, hesitantly, the bartender’s head, and nothing else, came off the floor. It was just as he had known. The man was not really unconscious at all; he had merely been manipulating Wulff, trying to make him think that he had passed out. You could not trust people. That was the final lesson of all of this. You could no longer trust their actions, expect them to behave honestly. Given the chance, all of them would lie, look for an edge. You found the same dishonesty here as you did at the highest levels of the organization. Of course, that had to be kept in mind too. In all fairness to humanity you had to admit that the bartender was part of an organization which did not subscribe to the highest rules of ethical conduct. The man’s eyes were dull, yet seemed to give back to Wulff a reflection or two reflections of his own face peering down at him. The eyes were frozen, perfectly fixed, like those of an animal by night. “You should not have done that,” Wulff said.

  “Done nothing,” the bartender said. His voice was buried deep inside of him; he had one hand wedged protectively now against the back of his skull. “Not a thing.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it,” Wulff said. “You knew that I was going to catch up with you, didn’t you? That freighter in San Francisco. Those men on the beach in Miami. They didn’t think I was there but I made it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’ve got to understand that it catches up,” Wulff said. “This is fate. This is your death. You thought you could avoid it but you were wrong. You never could. You never had a chance. Not from the moment that you got into this. Look at me,” he said. “Look at me.”

  The bartender tried to twitch his head in Wulff’s direction, but he could not make the full circuit. It fell, lolling to the boards. “Look at me,” Wulff said sharply, and the head came up slowly, reluctantly, the eyes longing, deep in the face, solemnly looking at Wulff now like a child in an amusement park being granted one last wonder before it was time to leave. He was no longer an old man, but a credulous, vulnerable eight-year-old. Why could we not stay that way, Wulff thought. Everything would have been so much easier, always, if we could only have stayed that way instead of fragmenting into the corrupt and pained adults that we are. “You know you’re going to die,” he said.

  The bartender ran his tongue across his lips. “I don’t want to,” he said. “I don’t want to die.”

  “But you know you must now don’t you? Nod your head. Show me that you accept it.”

  The bartender nodded his head slowly, but the eyes, lustrous and dismal seemed to stay locked to Wulff’s, unmoving.

  “Say it,” Wulff said.

  “I’m going to die,” the bartender said.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you going to die?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Bullshitter,” Wulff said, thinking of the onlookers that were surely going to see the body lying in the doorway, that were surely going to phone the police. Which meant that his margin was diminishing all the time; had severely diminished it. He could not now have more than two minutes, after all. But he could not leave until all was sealed. “Bullshitter, thief, bastard, pusher, dealer. I don’t care whether you want to or not. Tell me why you’re going to die.”

  “I have a bad heart. I’m going to have a heart attack.”

  “Then you don’t have to worry about the gun, do you? Then that shouldn’t worry you at all.”

  “I’m going to die because you’re going to kill me.”

  “And why am I going to kill you?”

  “Because you’re crazy.”

  Wulff shook his head. It was too much, that was all. Sometimes you would run up against someone stubborn who would not make the concession, who simply would not under any circumstances admit what he was and what he had done. That was psychopathology for you. He had dealt with his share in the PD. There were perpetrators who literally did not believe that they were, and you could do nothing with people like this except to protect society from them, lock them up some place, keep them there until they rotted. The bartender obviously fit into that category. He was not going to give Wulff the satisfaction of a confession, no matter what happened.

  All right. All right, you had to deal with these disappointments. You had to realize that you could not bring the whole world into line. Some would confess, and others would not. Some would admit what they would become and others would never separate that truth from themselves. The important thing, of course, was that you did your job, that you got the work done. That one way or the other you removed them from the earth. The matter of admission could be left to other judgment.

  “All right,” he said, “all right,” and shot the bartender in the head in just the fashion that he had killed the woman, with the same short, quick burst of fire. A terrible bark belched from the man, followed by the collapse of that body toward the well-known waxy flexibility, the melding with death, the absorption of death by what had once been alive. Wulff was already out the door. He leapt over the body of the woman as he had leapt through the fields of the enemy, and was on the deserted streets then and moving. Moving high, moving high and free, leaping toward the gauzy surfaces of the day as the bartender had leapt at death at that moment where it seized him by the throat and thunderously took him beyond all pain.

  XIX

  With a free hand, with a promise of all the co-operation he asked for from the PD, Williams, after studying the situation for a day, decided to settle for taking just one man with him to Philadelphia. The Wulff squad had been a joke; he did not want to deal with that group of clowns again. He had asked for a competent weapons expert who also knew a little about demolition technique, and the aycee had delivered Evers, a grim sergeant from the bomb squad who said that after ten years on that job his nerves were shot and that he would appreciate the opportunity to set some explosions rather than to try to defuse them. Evers had brought along some heavy ordnance from the most heavily guarded cache the department had, an installation in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s outskirts that only the high officials and important gangsters knew about. He had also brought his own speculations about Wulff which were based on a great deal of what Evers remarked to be honest, heavy thought, and with which he regaled Williams all the way to Philadelphia. They were definitely going to go to Philadelphia, Williams had decided. There was no point in waiting around in New York for news about Wulff’s next strike. Surely Wulff would stay in the area. That was his method, always had been; to clean a place right down to the ground before going onto the next one. And in Wulff’s obvious present state of mind, he probably would not consider Philadelphia to be cleaned down to the ground while there was still a body moving within it.

  At least Williams had not had any trouble with his wife, in clearing out on the next assignment. They simply did not speak to each other any more except about casual or necessary matters, and Williams knew that whatever else came from Wulff, when this assignment was finished his marriage would be finished also. That break was permanent. He simply was not the man his wife had married, and he found himself incapable of taking anything to do with St. Albans or the middle class seriously any more. If this assignment was ever finished, he would have to devote his attention to the situation for a few days, decide what would be the least painful and most friendly means of clearing out so that she could have the house, but he would not worry about that now.

  He would not worry about anything now. All that mattered was catching up with Wulff. The last conversation had b
een definite, if he had needed to be convinced any further. The man had gone absolutely crazy now. He was a menace to everyone, and that did not limit itself to the network. He would probably be committing random murders, if he was not already, and this kind of thing was obviously intolerable. The aycee had been right after all. Anything had to be done to bring the man to heel, and if that involved Williams, if Williams had to make a large-order sacrifice to head up a patrol, then it would have to be. It simply would have to be that way. Anything was worth it. The long shot gamble of putting Williams in control of a pursuit might not have made much sense in an objective way, but when you were in over your head—and all of them, PD and Wulff alike were certainly in over their heads—you simply had no alternative.

  So Williams, with Evers this time, headed toward Philadelphia again. Evers, for a change, was an interesting PD man, and the conversation at least was stimulating. Also, they had been given the use of a big fast 450 SEL, which was a special commissioner’s car, and which was beyond a doubt the best that Williams had ever driven, even though the steering was so devastatingly quick and the suspension so tight that the slightest error would pitch the automobile off the road. The SEL, like Wulff himself, was not a forgiving institution, and for a driver like Williams, accustomed to the slow, wallowing performance of the American cars which transmitted right down the line, the SEL was an almost devastating experience. It demanded his total attention to driving and made conversation very difficult. For that reason, he spent the hours on the New Jersey Turnpike listening to Evers almost non-stop, and contributed little, but that was not too bad, because Evers had a lot to say. Some of it dove-tailed with Williams’s own thinking about the situation other parts extended his insights, so to speak, so he was able to look at Wulff in an entirely new way.

  Evers was a big, solemn, once-divorced detonation expert from Massapequa who had been around, seen a great deal, and looked at Wulff in a slightly different perspective. He had made a hobby of studying the man’s activities, and he felt that the clearest thing indicated was that Wulff was out of control. He had, in fact, become the very person that he was chasing, his outlook and methods indistinguishable from that of the network heads themselves. According to Evers it was inevitable.