by Barry, Mike
“You fool,” Hamilton said, and stood, went over to Shields, struck him again in the same place that he had hit the man before. The white of the foreman’s face turned to a deeper, purplish streak; he groaned. “You stupid fool,” Hamilton said. “I don’t care if somebody fucks up, drops stash into the car, because that kind of thing happens. You’ve almost got to expect that kind of thing in any operation as complex as that. And if some fool on the line happens to get a look into the car, I don’t like that at all, it isn’t good publicity, it doesn’t make the situation too good for us. That’s for sure, but on the other hand, you can live with it. You’ve got to learn to live with setbacks like that in any kind of business. But what I do mind, what I mind very much, is somebody getting out of control, somebody thinking that the only way to deal with a mistake is to erase it. That’s stupid thinking, Shields. That’s stupid, right down to the center, and I can’t afford that kind of thing. I can’t afford it at all.”
“Listen,” Shields said, and spread his palms in a gesture that was both despairing and oddly menacing, the despair not bothering Hamilton a bit, the menace something else, because he could see in this aspect of the man, could get an idea of the way he might react in a pressure situation; yes, he was the kind of guy who might arrange to drop a beam on the head of someone who had been inconvenient. It was possible that any man crazy enough to fall into an intimidating attitude even in a situation like this might lose control of himself in that manner. “Listen, I don’t have anything to do with it. I don’t know shit, don’t you understand that? This guy Hooper, I don’t know who he is, I don’t know what he saw or what it comes to, I just—”
“No,” Hamilton said. Unwillingly, but out of a sense of dry compulsion, he hit the man in the face yet again, and this time Shields yelped with pain, little marks jutting out on his skin as he backed away, and now the expression in his face changed subtly. He seemed somehow less at bay, the obsequiousness draining away, the slow conviction coming into the shades and panels of his cheeks that he might have to fight. Hamilton thought: Yes, that was part of it too; driven far enough, Shields would strike back, no matter what the odds were. No matter what the situation, his temper might seize control of his functioning, and almost helplessly he would strike out in retaliation. “It won’t work,” Hamilton said, and backed away from the man as if he were a painter admiring his work. “I don’t believe you. You did it, Shields, and now you’ve got me in a real stink, a far more serious pickle than there was any need to have. That was damned stupid of you.”
“The beam fell! He just happened to be walking there; nobody had anything to do with it. It was just an act of God. They’ve got the place crawling with industrial inspectors; you know that they wouldn’t do something like that unless it was an accident.”
Hamilton took the gun out of his desk drawer and showed it to the man. “No,” he said, and shook his head with a grave, deliberate sadness. “No, it won’t work, Shields. It’s just damned stupid, and it won’t wash, not any of it now. You panicked and you set the whole thing up, and now the man is dead. It’s all set up in a way that could be traced back to me, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”
“How the hell,” Shields said, “how the hell would I know what was in the car, how would I know what’s going on? I have nothing to do with it, Hamilton. You can understand that, you can understand what I’m saying, can’t you? I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what’s in the car, I don’t even know what’s running through, or what there was to be seen. So that means that I wouldn’t be involved, can’t you tell? You can tell that, damn it, I’m sure you can,” Shields said, and all of the time he had been closing ground, closing ground slowly toward him. Hamilton had watched all of it; some instruments of calculation deep in his consciousness had been working on this all of the time that Shields was babbling, trying (Hamilton thought) to mislead him, to throw him off cue. And then, in one desperate gesture, one spasm of his body, Shields leaped, his hand clawing at the air, trying, trying desperately to reach the gun.
Hamilton let him come, the scene slowing down, Shields seeming to drift through the air with odd and absent grace like a paratrooper; and then, as the man’s hand came swinging clumsily forward, Hamilton shot him in the face.
The skin fragmented, and then Shields’s head exploded like a piece of warm fruit.
Hamilton dodged out of the way, let the man fall. Shields kicked once on the floor and then lay still. Looking at him, Hamilton felt all passion drain from him. Now, past the impact of the bullet, Shields meant nothing. He was just damp, clinging meat on the floor; he was a piece of ruined goods which had been yanked through the machinery and had come through the other end. He meant nothing, nothing whatsoever.
It was only what he had done that had mattered. He had blown cover, and from Hamilton’s point of view, that was something which absolutely could not be done. Anything could happen; you could get into difficulties that might be uncontrollable once cover was blown. Once the whole intricate network of relationships, subrelationships, traffic, and conditions was ruptured by some impatient fool like Shields, you were in a position where the entire operation could break open.
And Hamilton could not have it. He could not have it at all. This was his life, his operation, his business.
No one was going to take it away from him.
One of the men who had been holding Shields until dismissed poked his head into the door with enormous delicacy, and seeing the body on the floor, said, “I just wanted to check if—”
“It’s all right,” Hamilton said, standing behind the desk. “No problems.”
“I didn’t think there were any problems. I didn’t think—”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle myself,” Hamilton said. “You don’t have to worry about anything like that.”
“I wasn’t worried. I didn’t say you couldn’t handle it. I only thought—”
“Don’t think,” Hamilton said. “You’re not paid to think. Your job isn’t to think, it isn’t to have conclusions. The last guy who did is lying there. Clean him up,” Hamilton said. “Clean the dead meat up,” and cursing, slammed the desk drawer, walked out of the room, past the man and into the hallway, his mind scurrying away in channels of infinite distraction. Yes, he thought, it was true, this thing had hit him more deeply than he had thought possible; he had thought that if there was one thing that he could count upon it was his ability to control situations absolutely, control them to the ground. That had been his force, his belief, but something like this …
Fuck it, Hamilton thought, and kept on walking. This should be the end of it, he knew. By all rights, this should be the end.
But he had the damnedest feeling that it was only the beginning.
IV
Wulff went to the arraignment under custody of his guard and with Williams to keep both of them company. The conversation with Williams had touched him at some corner of consciousness, but he did not want to think of it. Mostly because it did not concern him.
Fuck it. Whatever they were doing in Detroit they could damned well go ahead and do. It was no longer his affair. It was no longer his business; his quest was behind him. Right now, all that he wanted was to be left alone.
It was not the greatest thing this way, to be sure: living in solitary was no man’s idea of finding the right destiny. On the other hand, it had its points. No one bothered him; he had a feeling of completion. And with the man who had killed his girl, had killed her as deliberately as if it had been he who had inserted the plunger in her arm—with that man in custody and now set for a long, long time off the street, Wulff had the feeling that his work was done.
No, it would never bring Marie back to him. But that was all right; maybe the man who needed her back was dead, had died in that filthy SRO apartment. So it was merely a matter of completion. Somewhere the work would have to go on, and maybe there would be someone else to do it, but he, Wulff, wasfinished. What did Detroit matter? The filth and cor
ruption would go on; the stuff would keep on moving in the vein of the nation, everything would be as it had been. New interests would take over where the old had fallen; the poison would continue to flow. America was poison. If it could not get it from one set of sources, if the rivers were dammed in one place, then they would be opened up in another. That was the physics of the matter. Everything was mechanistic, determined. Stimulus. Stimulus-response. Twitch here, synapse there; and then the dead leg would quiver.
“There he is,” Williams said, leaning against Wulff’s shoulder, poking him gently. “Doesn’t look so hot, does he? I think he’s carrying a few marks that he never knew were there before.”
Against his will, Wulff, sitting in the courtroom now, near the back, wedged into one of the pews against Williams, the guard standing by the door behind the two of them, looked, saw Smith being wheeled toward the judge’s bench by a male attendant. There was a blanket drawn up to his lap; his head bobbed aimlessly in shallow little circles, the tight skin glinting.
“Looks old, doesn’t he?” Williams said. “Looks a lot older than he did a few weeks ago, I bet.”
Wulff shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and tried to turn inward again, tried to pick up the bleak, even tread of his thoughts which had so contained him since the moment that he had been taken out of the precinct. Voyage in, voyage out, remain within the confines of the self. It hurt less that way. What did it matter how Smith looked? Smith was dead; all of them were dead to him now. He could not avoid seeing, however, the way in which Smith’s head rolled as the wheelchair was pushed, the fashion in which the attendant’s hands splayed out over the iron. Hell. The man was in hell all right. Well, much luck to him. He didn’t care. He just did not care anymore.
“Makes your heart bleed, doesn’t it?” Williams said, still nudging him. Wulff said nothing, looked straight ahead. “Don’t tell me you’re not happy,” Williams said. “Don’t tell me that it doesn’t give you pleasure to look at the son-of-a-bitch like that. Come on. Don’t try that.”
“I’m not saying anything,” Wulff said, “nothing at all. I don’t give a damn.”
“Lots of people are probably just as happy as you are to see him in that shape,” Williams said. “You’ve left a great big hole in the organization now. A hole which someone sure as hll would like to fill.”
“No,” Wulff said. “Enough.” It was easy, he thought. Easy to sit on this bench, the hard wood curving underneath him in cold little slivers of feeling, and denying, denying. Perhaps he could deny everything. Perhaps if he could stay on this bench long enough, if he could become a kind of artifact implanted within the courtroom like the dull, dead planks of wood, like the fat women who sat alone fanning themselves and crying in a quiet way whenever the bailiff’s door clanged, perhaps if he could do that, after a certain period of time they would all go away and leave him. He would be history, no longer present time. But rising stiffly in response to the judge’s entrance, standing there then as the judge, an old man with a face like a doorknob, stared out at them bleakly, he doubted that this could be so. He did not think that it could work out in this way. You were never free, he thought, you were never disentangled; there was never a moment at which you were not locked into your humanity, which was itself merely that perilous construction which hung like a rack of meat between future and past. He was no more free, Wulff thought, than he had been at the beginning of this, and probably a hell of a lot less so. It was interesting. It was interesting to realize that everything you had done under the illusion that it would gain you freedom had only locked you further in. He would have to concentrate on that a little later on.
Williams was nudging him in the back, his finger prodding like a plank of wood. “He wants you to approach the bench,” he said. The guard grunted, made an indication toward the front of the room. Not his affair. “You’re a material witness,” Williams said. “You’ve got to give evidence. You’re part of their case.”
“No,” Wulff said, “no, I don’t want to do that.” But he was already standing, moving toward the front of the small courtroom, Williams guiding him, the lightest and most tentative of touches on his wrist. Now, as he approached the bench, he could see Smith, see the man quivering in his chair, the blank face of the attendant poised behind; he could see that one flicker, one jolt of expression in Smith’s eyes before it receded and the man mumbled something which might have been an obscenity but which Wulff knew was more likely merely a plea. Reduce them to vulnerability then, take away the devices of their insulation, and they were all the same, quivering meat on the chain, begging for protection, begging for some force which would sweep them away and save them from this mess that they had made of their lives. Vulnerability and terror, that was it, and underneate a plank of wood. “He wants you to approach the bench,” he said. The guard grunted, made an indication toward the front of those sheets stretched so tight, the flickering light of self-preservation. “Look at him,” Williams said. “I want you to look at him.”
And Wulff turned, looked at the man sitting in the wheelchair, the judge looming over them as if from a great height, the same kind of judge he had faced so many times when he had been with the PD, the bleak, blank face of the civil servant who would time and again hold the cases over, dismiss the cases, continue the cases, do anything but enact them. But it was not the judge with whom he was concerned, but Smith. They exchanged one look, one searing look, Wulff seeing his own reflection reduced in the man’s eyes, those eyes winking terror, underneath it loathing, and in that moment Wulff felt that he could see the man falling away. Smith had never mattered; he had not mattered at all. All the time he had merely been an interposition between Wulff and something larger. It was that larger thing which mattered, that larger force whose light Smith blocked that he would have to understand. And then he heard a sound, one crack, a sound he had heard in dreams and on the street so often that his body had reacted long before his brains had; he was already diving toward the floor, taking cover like an infantryman scrambling before a land mine. “Someone get the gun!” a voice was screaming. “Get the gun, get the gun!” And down on the flat, gray surfaces of the courtroom, Williams toppling to his side, Wulff could hear two more shots, closely spaced and somewhat nearer than the first, and then there was the dull sound of explosion near him, the sound of impact. Looking up, he saw Smith’s skull slowly, grandly fall open, and from it spurts of fire seemed to move toward the ceiling. No fire, of course, merely blood and brains spewed out in a halo, and he thought, almost stupidly: They want to kill Smith, not me. If it had been me, I would have been dead already. No, it’s someone after Smith; they want to shut him up. I wonder who it could be, I wonder what he knows. … His thoughts were oddly precise, marshaled in the cop’s way, but there was no time to think of it, no time to consider, not that he wanted to anyway. It was something very far, far away, and dull. Something fell on top of him as casually and brutally as if it were a hand coming across his face; it hit him between the shoulderblades and rolled, and he realized that that must be Smith toppling from the wheelchair. How interesting, he thought, his mind scuttling away from the situation in a strange and detached fashion; it might have been another mind, it might have been a different incident; how strange that all of this is happening now, now, when it is supposed to be over. This might have sent him into a reverie, might have enabled him to lie on the floor and think it all through quietly, but there were more sounds around him, bellows, screams, and little hisses; then Williams was shouting: “Make a run for it! Make a run for it!”
What the hell are you talking about? Wulff wanted to ask in an abstracted way. What do you mean, “make a run for it”? Run for what? Run from where? But his partner was hitting him now, slamming him repeatedly on the back, and then he could feel the pressure of Williams’ hand tugging.
“You stupid fool,” Williams was screaming, his mouth poised in a frantic O, his eyes glaring bright. “This is the time to do it. If you don’t do it now, you
never will, and you could get killed here!” And then, like the tumblers of a pinball machine slamming into place together, it fused for Wulff: He understood what Williams was saying; he understood what was happening. Someone was making a run on the courtroom, someone who was very interested in making sure that Smith did not testify. Someone who did not have Smith’s best interests at heart was attempting a desperate play to shut off the case right here, and Wulff was part of Smith’s case. All of them were. He was in the line of fire now, but even beyond that, even if his own presence were not to be considered, if the gunner was out merely for Smith and not for Wulff—even so, he must take this opportunity in the uproar to escape, because another would not come for a long time.
They would tighten after this. They would put Wulff so far under wraps that he might never see daylight again. If he did not do it now, he might be taking in his very last little piece of freedom.
And he did want to be free. He realized that, all of this passing through him in the tumbling event of the courtroom, forms scattering, hysterical shouts, someone in the distance being surrounded by police, uniformed and plainclothes, who were gasping, shoving, trying to move in tighter, but circling the gun, which was still being waved free in little circles above the gunman’s head. He wanted to be free; he could no longer exist like this. He had been underground for a long time, he had been deep in the bowels of his own denial, but it could not continue to exist. The stakes were too high, they had not declined at all; only he, Wulff, had changed, and not in a way which was to his or anyone’s credit. If he did not take this opportunity, it would not return.
And his quest would have been as for nothing. Everything would be the same. In another year the new order would have risen, would have sealed all of the cracks, and it would be the same as always—except the more terrible, because they would have learned from their mistakes, from the chinks in the armor which he had discovered.
