by Barry, Mike
Then Wulff looked in the other direction and saw a man he had never expected to see again.
XXIV
“That’s him,” Williams said. He was astonished. It was one thing to calculate a bizarre possibility, even decide that it might be true, but it was another to actually see it develop. Nixon must have reacted that way when the pressures began to build. “He’s just standing over there,” Williams said, trying to restrain his excitement, pulling Evers back against a building wall out of Wulff’s line of sight. “I’ll be damned.”
Williams looked at Wulff and said, “He looks pretty much out of it to me. What the hell is he doing there?”
“I don’t know,” Williams said, “I don’t know,” and staring at Wulff, he thought that much was the truth anyway. The man was just not in relation to the circumstances. Something in the way he was standing, the abstracted way in which he was looking at the ground, at his hands, at the television crew which had set up about fifty yards down range, gave him the impression that indeed his attention had turned inward, and that he was simply not paying attention to what was going on around him. He had never expected it of Wulff. If nothing else, Williams had expected to find him at the catastrophic alertness which had always characterized him, but then again you never knew, did you? It was hard to say what a man might be until you came up against him, and much had happened to Wulff, as well as Williams, since he had last seen the man in Los Angeles. “All right,” Williams said. “I’m going to take him.”
“Take him?” Evers said. “Isn’t that a little premature? Are you sure that you shouldn’t—”
“I’m going to take him,” Williams said. He felt slow waves of purpose building. Or, it might have only been dread, he did not know. That was the cop’s curse anyway, to move into situations which had no definition, which could either end harmlessly or with you dead on the pavement within thirty seconds, your life oozing away, and unless you disguised the terror that you were moving into and cloaked it with a different name like curiosity or eagerness or a businesslike sense of method, you would be unable to function at all. He had his service revolver with him. Nobody seemed to notice what was going on. There was a small cluster of police around the television crews, and the crowd had drifted that way. Otherwise, the block had already become sealed off, just as it might have under quarantine. The television cameras covered everything anyway. People could only define or justify their existence through the media. If the crews had not come here there might have been no one on the street at all.
Wulff leaned against the wall of the tight little alley, one leg crossed against another, his eyes half-closed, seemingly a picture of the most enormous casualness. He appeared to see nothing, to be locked wholly into himself, but that could only have been cover. And then again, he might have been stuporous. You did not know. You did not know what lurked behind any apartment door.
“All right,” Evers said. “I’ll cover you; I’ll be right behind all the way. Let’s go.”
“No.”
“You want to shoot him right down here? That’s risky,” Evers said, quietly. “That could lead to a lot of explanations we don’t want to get into. But then again, maybe that’s best when you’re dealing with someone like this.”
“You don’t understand,” Williams said. “It’s all right. You couldn’t understand. I’m going to take him face-to-face. I want you to stay back.”
“Stay back?”
“This is between us,” Williams said. “It had to be this way from the beginning. Just me and him.”
“This isn’t a gunfight,” Evers said. “This isn’t the Okay Corral or High Noon.”
“In a way it is,” Williams said. His pistol was in his hand. He checked it, checked the cartridges, put it back, holding his hand in his pocket, and began to move slowly toward Wulff. “Don’t interfere,” he said.
“I’m here to help.”
“The only way you can help is not to interfere.”
“All right,” Evers said. His face seemed to flood with understanding. Or, then again, it might have only been submission. Williams was nominal head, and any experienced cop understood chain of command. “Whatever you say, then.”
“It has to be that way,” Williams said, and began to move slowly down range toward Wulff. The man was still not looking at him, seemed sealed off within himself, but in that posture you just could not be sure. You could not be sure of anything. The high acrid smoke was in the air, little clumps of rubble lay on the ground, but it had been an implosive charge. Most of the damage was inside. Williams wondered what would happen if Wulff looked up and saw him. You never could tell. He could hold back he supposed, and do as Evers had suggested: he could shoot him. The man was open for a clean shot now; no one would ever know the difference. He would be acclaimed by the NYPD; they would not give a damn. Philly might, but they would have the whole story straightened out for them by PD and then they wouldn’t give a damn either. Easy. It would be so easy. It was not the way it was going to be. He closed the ground easily.
Wulff lifted his head and saw him. His eyes showed recognition. He clawed for his gun.
XXV
Wulff had never expected to see Williams here. How had Williams gotten here? How could he have possibly known? There was a moment of panic, but then the gun was in his hand and he knew that it was going to be all right. Everything, eternally, would be all right as long as you had the gun. Had it in your hand.
“Stop,” he said to Williams. He said it loudly and distinctly. No way that the man could possibly misunderstand him, could have missed the meaning. Drugs. Williams must have been drawn to the site by the drugs which were in the apartments he had bombed out. He was probably looking for the cache before the apartments were sealed off. Which meant that Williams was in it too. How, otherwise, would he have known to come here, would he have picked up the trail, unless he knew unerringly where the drugs were and that Wulff was in their pursuit. He should have known. He should have known it from the beginning.
Williams was one of them. All the time that he was working with the man, depending upon Williams, listening to his advice, Williams had actually been in the employ of the dealers. Had been funneling information to them, had been laughing—and laughing at Wulff—as he collaborated with the enemy to abort everything that Wulff had tried. That was why his mission had been so difficult. How could it have been otherwise? “Stop you son-of-a-bitch,” he said and motioned with the revolver. “Stop or I’ll shoot you.” He would have long since won by now. His quest would have ended in Chicago, in Peru, in Los Angeles. If it had not been for Williams, laughing, taunting, teasing, observing and turning over everything he had received to the enemy. “You dirty bastard,” Wulff said. He thought he had Williams levelled in his sight. The distance was a little tricky to estimate and the light peculiar: it seemed to dazzle his eyes. But, then again, he was very tired, and tricks of light would never disturb a real marksman. He aimed the gun and shot.
XXVI
The bullet went by his left ear and Williams hit the ground at once, bringing his pistol forward. He had known from the start that it must end this way. In some subterranity of feeling, surely, he must have known that he and Wulff would wind up in this stinking street and that one would have to put the other down. In the night he must have dreamed it below the threshold of recall, but it had been one of those dreams which had informed his days. He lay on the ground, prone, his pistol extended in front of him.
Behind him there were sounds, but he could not distinguish them: shouts, cries, warnings, running, they were no longer differentiated. All had become a tunnel, and at one end of the tunnel was Wulff and at another was Williams. He aimed his own pistol. In a way he had very little time for the shot before Wulff would get off one of his own, but in another, he had sufficient time, all of the time that he needed. All of the hasty, discolored instants of his life which had rushed by seemed to have been in anticipation of this one moment when he could extend confrontation slowly toward
sufficiency. There was almost a leisurely sense to the way that he pointed the pistol at Wulff, a time during which he felt he was able to consider what he was doing and how, on balance, it would work out. He could kill Wulff. Then again he could pull or wait on the shot and let Wulff kill him. Either way it did not seem to make a hell of a lot of difference. They were both dead. One way or the other they had been killed a long time ago, and the fact of respiration or attention did not seem likely to change that.
Too abstract. Too metaphysical. Bullshit. Life was life; you could not value it so cheaply. It did make a difference. Everything made a difference. To go on, to deal with one instant after the next was in itself its own solution, its own justification. It was easy to say you were dead, that you were better off dead, that death made no difference, but that decision could itself only be made in life. Death was a kind of life then. Well. You did not know.
You simply did not know. Williams pulled the trigger.
XXVII
Raising the gun he could see that the other man was going to get the shot off first and there was nothing to do. Sometimes you could see your death even as it happened to you: he had had that sensation in Chicago when Calabrese could have killed him. He had known exactly what it was like and here it was again. Hello death. Pleased to meet you death. Been with you for a long time death, waiting in these rooms for your call, and now here you are old friend, old bastard, and absolutely nothing to do. Have a chair, death. Warm your hands by the fire, pal, rest easy. We’ll be together for a long time so don’t feel in any hurry at all to start talking. We have a thousand years. Ten thousand years. All of the millennia to get acquainted, so just take it easy, don’t rush, don’t stammer the way you often do, death, when you get excited. Just take it easy. Slow and easy and everything will come into place.
He pointed his pistol to shoot the man because that was the kind of thing you had to do. You had to go through the motions right up to the end, even when you knew the solution, because that was also the way the game was rigged. But he knew that the shot would go wild and he knew that it was meaningless. Everything was meaningless. The shot went wild. Williams’ fire hit him right in the temple.
Wulff felt it. He vaulted to meet it. It was much easier even than he thought it would be. Death seized him in an embrace and he fell through West Ninety-third Street and down the crevices of later circumstance.
Wulff died.
Epilogue
Williams said to the aycee two days later, “I had no choice at all, you know.”
“We know that.”
“Not the way you think, I mean. I didn’t have to kill him. I could have put him down with a shot anywhere. He didn’t have to die. But I knew that I was going to shoot to kill. I knew I would go for the killing shot.”
“No one’s blaming you,” the aycee said. He stacked some papers on his desk, looked at his watch. It had been a long summary interview and it had come after a day of dealing with the commissioner, with the Philadelphia commissioner, with the FBI, even with the U.S. Attorney’s office and the federal strike forces. He was obviously tired and wanted to go home. “It’s over,” the aycee said, “and under the circumstances this was the cleanest and the best way. He was a dangerous man and of course he had gone completely out of control at the end.”
“He was always completely out of control.”
The aycee shrugged. “This could be.”
“It was only when he stopped shooting mobsters and dealers and started to kill at random that he had to be put down,” Williams said. “Isn’t that the truth? Until then, whatever we said, every man in the department was secretly cheering him on. Every cop in the country felt there was a little less weight because the wolf was in action. But he was just as crazy then as he was at the end.”
“Maybe,” the aycee said. He picked up a paperweight, fondled it, put it down. “Everything you say has a good point to it, but there really seems no reason to go on with this. You’re in the clear, we’re all in the clear. It’s been a long day and I think we should all go home and just try to forget this now.”
“I’ll never forget it.”
“Put it behind us then.”
“You knew I was going to kill him,” Williams said. “That’s why you put me on this. You couldn’t be as sure of any other man as you could of me. You wanted him killed.”
“We wanted it ended.”
“You wanted it ended and then in order to end it you had to have him killed,” Williams said. “That shut him up for good. That sealed him off. Otherwise he might have talked,” Williams said again, “and then a lot of people might have seen how completely he was our creation.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“The creation of every one of us,” Williams said. “The PD and the Army and the pushers and the users and the whole country. They all created what he became. He was only them after a time. And he might have tied it all up if he had talked.”
The aycee stood. “That’s enough,” he said. “It’s very interesting, and you can take it to the newspapers if you want. No one will stop you from expressing your theories.”
Williams stood too. “It’s all right, commissioner,” he said, “I’m not going to take it anywhere. No one outside of these offices will ever hear about it because, you see, he’s my creation, too. I made him what he is just as thoroughly as the bastard who killed his girl. We were all cops, we were all system and the system creates everything, even its own poisons. Even the poisons are system-created, just to flush the other poisons down the drain.”
He turned then and went to the door, and when he got to the door he reached into his pocket, took out his shield and very neatly, very deliberately laid it at his feet. “Here,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s quite obvious what it means, isn’t it?” Williams said.
“I’m not quite sure I follow.”
“You follow,” Williams said. He stood in the doorway, looked at the aycee. What an old, foolish man he was, for all of his position. How little he understood. How little any of them understood. They simply did not know what was going on. And never had.
“I quit,” Williams said, and walked out the door and out of headquarters and into the mindless, tumultuous day.
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Copyright © 1975 by Mike Barry
All rights reserved.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4247-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4247-3
Cover art © 123rf.com/klotz
