Lone Wolf # 14: Philadelphia Blowup

by Barry, Mike

  The impact literally tore the features apart, and the face exploded like fruit that had been thrown at a wall. Little fragments of brain paste and bone burst in a sudden halo that showed on Maury’s hands, and then the truncated form of the man, head lolling, was spinning and kicking beneath him, the disconnected legs, the dead appendages still rolling in neurological response to shock and pain. Maury looked at what lay beneath him in astonishment, and yet underneath that, underneath the fear which started to work through him as if a wound long sealed had burst open, along with this there was—and he admitted it—a little bit of pride, too, because he had shown that people could not get away with this. People could not do this to him. One man once—Wulff in Atlanta—had humiliated him, but he would pay for it and even if he did not, that would be the only time. The only time. He would not be tampered with.

  He looked down at the man who was bleeding copiously, almost decapitated by the force of the shot and then up at the bartender, and at the faces around the bar. He was drawing attention now, he noticed. No one was making an effort to avoid his eyes now. “Drop the gun,” the bartender was saying. “Drop the gun. Drop it now. Nobody has to see this, nobody has to try to stop you. Just drop it and leave. Drop it and leave.” His eyes bulged, his face itself seemed squat and protuberant, like an overripe melon. “Please,” he whispered. “Get out.”

  Maury looked at him, at the gun, at the panorama of the faces, and then he looked once again at the corpse. He was, he supposed, in the worst trouble that he had ever been in his life; worse even than at that moment in Atlanta when he was sure that the man was going to kill him, but it was hard to come to terms with that understanding, hard to deal with anything really except that he had killed a man who had much deserved killing. He turned the gun toward the bartender. “Get down,” he said. “Get down behind there.”

  The bartender dived immediately below counter level, vanished. Maury looked at the others. They said nothing whatsoever. Someone had pulled the cord on the jukebox. He had never heard it quieter in a public place in his life, not even in the diner he had been in when the word came through that Kennedy had been killed. “You sons-of-bitches,” he said to them, “you-sons-of-bitches, you don’t understand anything. You don’t understand why I did it.”

  And that was true, he thought. That was absolutely true. He could barely understood why he had done it. It had something to do with Wulff. Wulff had fucked up his mind, fucked up everything within him, made him not a murderer once but a murderer twice now, and the end not yet in sight. Wulff had plunged him into a world where killing was as routine as on a coon hunt and the victims meant no more than coons either. That was what Wulff had passed onto him, and yet it should have been different. At the very least, he should have been allowed to have killed the man instead of misdirecting fire in a bar. “You don’t understand,” he said again, rather wildly. He knew that he was not making too much sense, but then again what in this world made sense? What in the whole fucking panorama of events would even reproduce in true color? “No way,” he said. “There’s just no way that you can do this to me you sons-of-bitches.”

  They all looked at him, but none with understanding. They just did not understand, that was all. They were not aware of the pressures that could come upon you just from doing your job, and then, too, there was always some son-of-a-bitch, some dirty son-of-a-bitch who would try to stop you, manage to keep you from carrying out what you had been ordered to carry out. That was just the way of the universe. For every doughnut a hole, for every birth a death, for every action a reaction, and you could not carry something through straight forward and simple. No, they would get you coming or going, in or out, because the whole fucking thing was rigged. Like Wulff, himself, who had arranged a universe for himself only so that he could kill within Maury’s life. It had been stage managed in the same way. He did not know what he was saying. He did not know what he was thinking, but it seemed to make sense. Everything made sense if you could only get to the end of it and look at it within perspective. All of them were out to get him. He had never had a chance.

  “I never had a chance,” Maury said almost conversationally. “Damn it, I never had a chance. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t try,” and with enormous casualness, offhandedly really, the way that you might slap dirt off your shoes in the vestibule of a house, the way that you might slam the door of your car at a roadside stop heading toward the men’s room, Maury raised the pistol to his head, gave the bartender a shrug and a wink, nodded without rancor at the patrons of the bar who were watching him with great attention, and blew his brains out.

  XXI

  Wulff dreamed that he was back in New York again doing routine work for narco, hanging around a joint with a couple of informants and pretending to be in deep conversation, while really watching the door for the score that the informants had promised him. He dreamed that he sat at the bar at easy attention, listening to the informants mumble, while the lights changed and he worked out the slow hours of the afternoon toward the meaningless bust. He dreamed that he was twenty-nine again in Red Hook and did not care, but when he awoke he was back in the hotel room in Philadelphia and everything was as it had been before he had passed into the thick and trapped doze. He tried to burrow back into the sleep again, telling himself that now he was with Marie in Queens somewhere; they were looking at houses and evaluating how many bedrooms they would need for how many children how soon. Marie was close to him in the empty spaces of the houses they were seeking, and her hand was against his. He took it and kissed it, and as she came against him they began to grind against one another until in the cold and in front of the real-estate agent they began to sink into the flat boards of the living room seeking one another …

  But when he came from this second sleep it was with a feeling of doomed alertness, still Philadelphia, still the hotel room, and this time he had been torn from the sleep in a way that told him that he would not be able to get back there. He could not put himself in New York even on narco; he could not bring himself back to Marie …

  Finally and incontrovertibly he was in Philadelphia, back in the reeking hotel room and eight months beyond even the conviction that things could have been different. They never could have been different. Everything had led him always to this, and he should have recognized that a long time ago. You might think that you had a series of alternatives, that your life was a reckoning composed of thousands of smaller reckonings at all of the corridors of choice, but that was bullshit. That was bullshit, indeed … Los Angeles and Chicago and Lima and Detroit and Philadelphia itself were as fixed in destiny from the moment that he had stepped into that room on West Ninety-third Street as his face in the mirror might have been fixed by the tilt of his head as he sought the reflection. You had to believe that. You had to believe that your life could never have changed, that you always became the sum of what you were meant to be because if you believed anything else, if you believed that it could be different, if you believed, for instance, that the girl could have been alive and that you might have been with her at just this moment—

  Wulff got out of bed and turned the lights on. He had had trouble sleeping for a long time, and now he no longer could sleep at all. In that first onrush of true sleep would come the dreams of narco, dreams of Marie, dreams of Vietnam, and he would come torn from within them the instant, gasping and unable for the moment to accept the fact that his waking life was not a dream. And dropping back into sleep it would really be the same again, those moments relived over and over … It was better to stay awake; it was better to avoid sleep altogether than to go through this. He put his face in some water and checked the room, just to make sure that everything was still safe, and then he opened the valise in which he had stored the little ordnance that he had and took out a bottle of rye and began to drink it neat in straight, sullen gulps.

  He had never really been drinking before, had avoided it throughout his quest. Goddamn it, if he was going to fight the drug trade it would
be ridiculous to need a drug himself. But now there seemed little enough harm in it. It had been a long time. He had picked up the bottle in a local store after coming back from the bar, and it was surprising how quickly it went down, how good the rye felt. He needed it. Seagram’s Seven. It was all right. It beat all hell out of the way he had felt when he came back, after the way the dreams had assaulted him. A quick image of what had happened in the bar lurched at him suddenly. He saw the way the woman had looked when he had shot her, heard the whimpers of the bartender lying on the slats, and his stomach convulsed a little, the fumes of Seagram’s coming back at him sourly from the interior. He lifted the bottle again, drank in a series of choking gulps, much as if it were beer rather than hard whisky that he was downing. His stomach heaved once more, then took the alcohol gratefully, and he began to feel the old sensation of drunkenness, something he had not known since Vietnam, when in the fields there was nothing to do night after night. Little fibers and strands of knowledge seemed to extrude from within him, and he felt as if his system was pouring perception richly into him. Time itself seemed to adjust itself around him like a shawl, drawing in comfortably to a proportion that was right for him. He might have sat there for several hours, or only for minutes, continuing to drink the rye, it did not matter. All that concerned him was perception, and perception worked with the liquor. Hand in hand. Beat the band. He felt good.

  He ought to feel good, he had beaten the game. He had come in with all the odds against him and had had more of an effect upon his enemies than had all the enforcement agencies in a decade. One angry man had managed to prove what everyone had known for a long time, anyway: that the system was bullshit, and acted only to preserve itself, and in order to preserve itself it needed what it was supposed to oppose. That was what the hell it proved. Of course it was more difficult than he would have thought, and his enemies were still around in good measure. As a matter of fact, he had more enemies than ever before because everyone was now out to get him, but still. Still. He had made some progress. That was all that counted in the long run anyway, that you were able to make some progress. You could not be depressed, you could not give up, you could not succumb to the illusion that you were a failure simply because your enemies were always increasing while you were simply trying to carry on a job. Evil would always demand that one’s enemies increased. Anyone who ever tried to do some good in the world found that. Kennedy had tried to do some good and look what had happened to him. To his brother. And Martin Luther King. Malcolm X, who had tried to drive the pushers from Harlem, who had started to put together a vast movement at the core of which was the religious opposition to drugs. They had taken good care of Malcolm. They had, come to think of it, taken care of just about everyone who had tried to make some progress in the fight against drugs, but that was no excuse. That was no reason to give up. Was it now? Was it really.

  He felt, with the onrush of rye coming over him now, the rye deep in his system, moving through all the coils of his consciousness, the urge to go out on the streets again and kill. The two in the alley in the south side. Martin. The bar. It was not enough. All the time that he was in here resting up and brooding, his enemies were waxing stronger and stronger. Working together. Working out their plans. Their plans to kill him and to increase the international drug trade. They were all over. There was not a portion of the world which did not contain his enemies, and all of them were plotting at just this moment how to overcome him. I cannot let this go, he thought. I cannot give them this chance. I must go out onto the streets again. Start outside. Start anywhere. Before they destroy me.

  Are you sure that this is the way to do it, some other voice said within him, a quiet, rational voice which strangely enough sounded very much like his own, although much less excitable. Are you sure that your enemies are out there.

  Of course I’m sure, he said. They’re all over. Can’t you see what it’s come to? I have to kill everywhere now. Everyone’s turned against me. Everyone is in this together.

  Are you positive about that? Don’t you think that this is maybe a little extreme? I mean, the voice said, what you’ve been doing recently looks a little bit like indiscriminate killing to me.

  Well of course, he said, a little angry now, taking another pull on the bottle. Of course it’s indiscriminate. Just like they are. They’re indiscriminate. They don’t care who gets the drugs or where the drugs wind up. They just keep on tunneling them into the cities. They put the poison in the system and they couldn’t care less, they couldn’t care less—any of them—where it winds up or who it kills. They kill at randon; they did it in Vietnam too. So the only way to fight them is to be just as indiscriminate as they are. That keeps them off balance.

  That’s one way to look at it, the voice said, but there’s another way too.

  Is there? What’s that?

  It’s possible that you’ve gone crazy, the voice said. It’s possible that all of the pressure has driven you off the edge and that you’re killing people now who have absolutely nothing to do with the international drug trade. That’s just a theory now, so don’t jump up and down and get excited, but have you ever considered that Wulff?

  It’s possible, Wulff said. Anything is possible. Maybe you have to be indiscriminate to get anywhere.

  But how indiscriminate? How indiscriminate, Wulff?

  I don’t know, he said. This is beginning to bother me, he said and put down the bottle. Leave me alone, he said.

  I’d leave you alone but you don’t want that. Not really.

  No?

  You summoned me. I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to listen to me in some way. I’m only telling you what you want to hear.

  Well, I’ve heard it. I don’t want to hear it any more.

  You can’t kill the world, Wulff. You can’t kill everyone. You started to do the same thing in New York the second time, remember? When you blew up that bar in Harlem. You weren’t sure that they were dealing in there at all, Wulff. You just did it because you felt like blowing up a bar.

  It had to be done.

  They took you away then and put you in jail. Maybe they ought to take you away now, have you ever thought of that? Maybe that would be the best thing.

  Leave me alone, he said. He stood and went over to his valise, opened it, pulled up the leather tray and looked at the grenades lined up inside. Five of them still left. He had seen at Martin’s house the detonative power of the instruments. They were everything that the southerner had promised, they were sheer death. Five of them carefully placed could probably take out a square mile. He looked at them and then bent and gathered them up. All right, he said, not quite sure of what he was talking about but responding to some unasked question. All right.

  That’s what I mean, Wulff, the voice said. You’re going to take those damned things out now and start throwing them at people.

  You let me decide what I’m going to do.

  Some innocent people are going to get hurt.

  How the hell do you know that they’re innocent?

  Not everyhody can be in the international drug trade, Wulff. A hell of a lot more people than you would think have never even heard of it. Besides, you can’t kill the world.

  He hoisted the grenades, began to stuff them into his coat. He felt good, a little bit unco-ordinated with the rye within him, but that would pass in time, and as he hit the air essentially he felt cold, composed, utterly in command of himself. Liquor only accentuated what you were already, anyway. It was a lie that it reduced your reflexes. Actually, if you knew how to use it and how to compensate for its presence in your system, it made you stronger. Fuck off, he said.

  I’ll do that. It isn’t my responsibility.

  Good. Get lost. Leave me alone.

  It’s your life, Wulff. But at the rate it’s going now it’s not going to be a long or a happy one.

  It was never going to be long or happy. I knew from the start that it wouldn’t last. I didn’t think I’d get this far.


  You got this far by being sensible. Now you’re not being so sensible any more and now you know it.

  I think I told you to fuck off.

  It’s my pleasure, the voice said. I have nothing to do with this, it added. It doesn’t affect me either way. I just thought that you would like the benefit of some advice.

  I’ve had it and thanks he said. He patted down his pockets, the grenades smooth within like little walnuts secreted in the pouches of his jacket. Smooth and tight and a walking land mine. He selected the point thirty-eight and added it to the point forty-five he already had, and then slammed the lid and walked toward the door. You’re making a mistake, the voice said. You know you’ll regret this.

  Get lost.

  I’ll get lost. You can lose me any time you want you know. I have no existence unless you summon me. You know who I am, Wulff.

  He opened the door, stood there in the vagrant breezes that seemed to stir through the dank hallway of the hotel. All right, he said. I do know who you are. But that doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference at all.

  If you think so.

  It has to be done. I can’t stop now. I’ve got to carry it all the way through to the end.

  Only if you think that way. No one else does.

  It’s just me, he said. It’s always been just me, I know that. So even at the end why can’t it be my decision?

  You’re protesting too much, Wulff, the voice said. You’re protesting just a shade too much.

  Fuck you, Wulff said. Fuck you, he said again, and went through the door and into the hallway and out, remembering only when he was near the steps that he had forgotten to close the door. That was pretty stupid, all things considered. That indicated a real loss of control. Angrily he went back and pulled the door closed and started walking again. He thought that he could hear the shrieking and stirring of the voice, now trapped within the room, but as he got onto the stairs he understood that once again he had called the shots wrong. It was neither shrieking nor stirring which he heard from within. Not that at all.