by Barry, Mike
“Doesn’t matter,” Wulff said, “doesn’t matter at all. The point is, once I get into Detroit, I got to drop you somewhere. Where do you want to be let off?”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anywhere that’s convenient. I can always get a hitch.”
“You’re really unattached, aren’t you?”
“In my head I’m unattached. That’s the place for real disconnect. In life I just kind of drift.”
Wulff thought of pursuing the issue, but he was moving the truck at high speed, seventy-five, eighty miles an hour over some twisting territory, and it seemed to demand fuller concentration than he could give it and at the same time dig into the girl. Also, he was simply not that interested. If she were disconnected, it was her business; he was not. He had been both ways, attached and unattached, and maybe unattached was better, although you were not talking about a girl who was maybe eighteen years old when you said this. “What’s all that stuff in the back?” the girl said suddenly.
“What stuff?”
“The stuff you loaded from the trunk of your car. That was heavy ordnance, man. I know a few things.”
“I’m kind of fond of it.”
“You a gun runner?”
“Not exactly.”
“I mean,” Jessica said, “I don’t give a damn how you got hold of it, you understand? It’s none of my business. I was just curious.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Wulff said again, “it just doesn’t matter.”
“I know he would have killed you.”
“Damn right.”
“He was vicious. He was crazy. I think that he was some kind of drug runner, if you want to know the truth.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Jessica said, “he mentioned something about running coke. It was when we were having sex; things just sometimes pop out of a man’s mouth when he’s hot. You know how it is.”
“I know how it is.”
“He said he was running coke. So he was running coke, and you’re running guns. I don’t give a shit. Everybody’s into something, right?”
“Yeah,” Wulff said, thinking about the coke thing. “I guess so.”
“Coke, guns, sex, it’s all the same thing, right? It’s all part of the same condition. You got to be into something in America or die. That’s how I feel. Nixon was into something too.”
“Yeah,” Wulff said, his mind abstracted, thinking of the coke business and just for the hell of it holding the wheel with one hand, driving stiffly, with carefully precise motions; slowing the truck to fifty-five, he started to fumble around inside the edges of the seat, and that is when he came in his wanderings up against fifty bricks of the purest and finest that he had ever touched.
Which, added to Jessica, just complicated things entirely.
XI
Williams had heard nothing from Wulff since the call informing him that Wulff had gotten away. Not that he had expected to hear from him, not really; Wulff had better and more complex things on his mind than maintaining a close relationship with Williams. Still, it would have been nice to hear. It would have been nice to hear something.
Williams felt ambivalent. On the one hand, he had no more business being on the road with Wulff. The one time he had done it in Los Angeles it had worked out disastrously; only the fortunate intervention of an army bent on killing them had prevented them from killing each other. It had been a mad, bitter scene, which came, Williams supposed, from the fact that they could not define who was leader and who was follower. If they were to work together, they would eventually get into a tangle where there would be no intervention, and besides, he had promised his wife, and meant it, that he was going to pick up the pieces this time, that he would sit on his nice easy desk job and his potential pension and not try to clean up the system single-handedly. Trying it the police way had almost gotten him killed near the methadone center on 137th Street.
On the other hand, Williams could not completely paper over a sense of guilt. He belonged on the front lines with Wulff, he supposed. Even if it didn’t work, he belonged there, because if he did not, it somehow reduced the validity of Wulff’s quest. Wulff had made progress, but for all intents and purposes the world was as full of shit, minus two trunkloads, as it had been when Wulff had started. Wulff had not reduced the amount of shit in the world so much as he had merely reduced the absolute number of people handling it, but that merely meant that there would be other people in the gap soon enough to take over the wonderful and profitable work of distribution. Shit was like that. There was never any lack of customers, and if that should ever develop there would certainly be no lack of people looking for fresh customers. Call it America.
Still, ambivalence or not, he should have heard something from Wulff. Wulff was headed out to Detroit on a wing and a prayer and with a handful of ordnance; meanwhile, there were a lot of people in New York who were very anxious to find him. One was the commissioner and another was the judge in the courtroom and the third was the man who had assassinated Smith in open court, only to find out later that he had gotten the wrong man. It turned out that this man had been a free-lancer originally detailed out of the far west to kill Wulff, and when Wulff had pretty well blown up the far west and every line of supply in it, there had been no one around to call the man off the job. So he had plugged away at it and eventually picked up word of the arraignment, and on the day of the hearing had managed, no one knew exactly how, to get into the courtroom respectably dressed and with a point-thirty-eight against his hip. He had kept calm, kept a professional hand on himself, waited out the entrance of the principals, and had then very neatly killed Smith with the second of two shots, which lodged in the sternum, the first one hitting the occipital regions and causing, the autopsy pointed out, little more than superficial wounds. The man was extremely distressed to find that he had killed the wrong person and that in fact he had provided exactly the excitement and distraction necessary for Wulff to make his escape. He had virtually babbled when this word had been broken to him during the interrogation. Williams had almost been able to feel a kind of sympathy for him; it was an awful thing to work toward a goal, sacrifice everything in that direction, actually achieve that goal, and then lose it all on a simple mistake. Like having colitis before you opened, after a twenty-year haul, at the Metropolitan Opera. Something like that.
In any event, it was done; the assassin, whose name and actual background mattered so little that Williams had not even cared to recall it, was in custody; Wulff had gotten out of the city; and the PD from the highest to the lowest levels was hopping mad. The guard who had been detailed to accompany Wulff to the courtroom to watch him therein had been placed on indefinite suspension and was waiting with his Local 371 representative for a hearing, the department was on an all-points alert and had transmitted, grudgingly, information to the FBI for all the good that that would do, and Williams himself had had to submit to some pretty hard interrogation on the theory that he was Wulff’s closest friend in the PD, he had worked with Wulff on a few assignments (although no one could prove this), and he had also been with Wulff, nominally providing custody, on the day of the shooting. He had had to talk his way out of that one with great intensity and under the kind of pressure that he had not thought that he would ever be able to bear up under again, but he found that after the shooting, after lying on your back living with death in a hospital for weeks, anything that life had to offer looked pretty inconsequential. So he had gotten through the interview, at least to the extent that he had not given them any piece of information that they could work on, and had then gone back to the precinct house near the Gowanus Canal in Red Hook, where they planned to keep him until his pension rights came up. Which would be in approximately nineteen years and seven months. He had lived a full life during his period in the PD.
So the news from his contact in the Detroit PD that things were in an uproar there due to the discovery of Hamilton’s body in a vacant lot on the North Side did not upset Willia
ms as much as it might have if he had had the full facts of the case in front of him. For one thing, he didn’t know who the hell Hamilton was. When he found out that Hamilton was the man who the contact was pretty sure was responsible for the scheme of running the drugs in skeletal frames up to Canada, when he found that Hamilton had probably been killed by the man who was supplying him, and when he learned that the supplier-murderer appeared to be a Detroit police lieutenant who had not been on the job for several days, appeared to have vanished, Williams became considerably more interested. The stink in Detroit seemed, if possible, to be greater than the stink in NYC. Of course, the one had little enough to do with the other; it was hardly to the NYPD’s credit that things could be pointed out to be even worse elsewhere, but it was exactly the kind of thing that the union might have taken to the mayor at a bargaining session in an attempt to raise more funds.
“All hell is going to break loose,” his contact—a rookie patrolman who had gotten in contact with Williams spontaneously some months ago because he was an “admirer”—said to him over the phone. “If they killed Hamilton, it’s very serious. It means that they’re going to destroy the system rather than risk losing it. They’d rather give it up altogether than let it be penetrated.”
“Yeah,” Williams said, “I guess that you could put it that way.”
“He should stay out of Detroit. He should stay the hell out, that would be my advice to him. I mean, I think he’s okay, all of us do, you know what we think of Wulff here in the PD, he’s the only guy who’s doing something, actually doing something for the fucking cop, doing the work the politicians won’t let him do, but this one is too rough. It’s too rough for anyone. If they’ll kill their own kingpin, goddamn it, rather than take a chance on having the thing opened up, then anything could happen. Anything at all.”
“Yeah,” Williams said. He was sitting hunched at his typist’s desk in the Gowanus precinct, looking at a sheaf of files on the unsolved beheading of a career girl in a furnished apartment on Atlantic Avenue two weeks ago and wondering if there was any file system which would accommodate materials like this. No one had any leads on the beheading, but then again, it was pretty well decided that this kind of work had to be attributed to a perverted and murderous type of individual, and that was a good set of clues right there. “Yeah,” he said again, and pushed the papers from him, wondering vaguely if there was a tap on the phone, deciding on the instant that he did not give a damn if there was, “but there’s no way to call him off anyway. I can’t reach him.”
“I guess not.”
“I have no idea where he is. I know that he left New York, all right, and that he’s headed in that direction.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” his caller said almost gloomily, “and he’s walking into hell here. Listen, this isn’t like any other operation he’s ever been in before.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s never had the goddamned PD on his ass.”
“The whole PD?”
“Parts of it.”
“He’ll make out,” Williams said. “You’d be surprised”; and then because the conversation was beginning to bore him, because he saw no point in it anymore, because there was something almost servile in the man’s tone, something which rang of sycophancy, he said, “Look, something just came up here, I’ve got to handle it,” and then hung up the phone before the man could even reply, not that anything could come up in a place like this except the outlines of corpses slowly taking the air in the roiling and muddy Gowanus days or decades after their immersion.
What could happen? Williams thought; the answer was that nothing could happen, not only that whatever Wulff did it would in the long run make no difference at all, but even in the short run all that he would accomplish would be realignments of power. The junk was not going to go away; there was no fashion in which the absolute amount of shit in the world would not keep on increasing day after day, year after year, and as long as it kept on growing, as long as the white mounds and bricks and flakes and sprinkles were there, there would be people in the pass-along system. Nothing would change.
Meanwhile, he would sit in this barracks at Gowanus with marks in his side of an implosion that had almost killed him and wait out all the days of his life functioning as a contact man for Wulff, taking on the sycophancy of those who reacted to him only because he was as close to Wulff as they could get … and living all the time with the feeling that all of the talk about hopelessness was merely a rationalization, that actually his place was on the front lines like Wulff’s and that he would live all of his life knowing it and trying to circle the pain of that knowledge.
Man, it was depressing.
XII
“It was legal until 1913,” Wulff said as they passed the twenty-miles-to-Detroit signpost. He had given up on anything else, and now, as he was trying to figure out what he was going to do with the girl, what his next stop would be, he had gotten into a discussion of heroin, Lord knows why. “It was a prescription narcotic and it was often used the way they use morphine now, for terminal cases with terrible pain. But a lot of unsavory people started to use it for reasons other than that, and a lot of doctors found that it could be used for better than terminal trips, and the government made it illegal. There are still people, a lot of them, who think that that’s a mistake. There are people who think that making heroin possession or use a crime was the one thing guaranteed to make it what it’s become today, because suddenly there was a lot of money in it. There are even people who say that the government did it on purpose because there were certain officials way up in the administration who would get a piece of the illegal action. But I don’t believe that part of it.”
“I never ran with heroin,” Jessica said, her face bleak, her eyes on the road. “But I don’t see anything wrong with it. If people want to kill themselves, it’s their business.”
“Sure,” Wulff said, “you can’t stop people jumping off bridges or chewing poison tablets. That’s their right under the Constitution, I think. But there’s a difference between murder and suicide. There’s a difference between a man deciding to kill himself and another man deciding that he’ll put the tools in the hands of someone else to make that suicide possible. A man turning profit off it at the same time. That’s in a different category. If they set up heroin shops on the street corner and let those buy it who needed or wanted it for cost price, about twenty-five cents a shot, after they knew exactly what they were getting into, then that would be okay. But there’s no such thing as a heroin shop, there’s only a connection, and he’s making his own way by getting people into it. And at the very top there are people who never touched it in their lives, people who wouldn’t be caught dead associated with it who run the whole thing behind closed doors and have themselves mansions on the sea because people they’ve never seen are dying. Now, that isn’t right. You can’t say that that’s a good thing.”
“I suppose so,” the girl said. Her hands were folded tightly into one another. Wulff looked at her sidelong and still did not know what the hell to do with her. Anything he did, it figured, was wrong; if he let her go, she knew too much, but then, he was not a criminal, he could not detain her against her will. Furthermore, he had a feeling she wanted to stay with him. But exactly where would that get them? While he thought about it, still with no solution, he kept on talking.
“You sniff it, snort it, skin-pop it, and shoot it,” Wulff said. “Those are the degrees of use. You get about the same sensation from the first sniff as the tenth mainline, but you’ve got to go in deeper and deeper to get the same sensation, you see. Eventually, if you’re allowed to run it long enough, if you have enough money and you can stay free of the police, which is more difficult than you would think, because you can run a twelve-hundred-dollar-a-week habit easy, and even medical doctors, most of them, can’t afford a habit like that, but if you’re allowed it all the way, you’ll wind up weighing about forty pounds and in a coma with extensive liver damag
e. Any attempt to cure you would have to start with at least a modified withdrawal, and it would kill almost anyone even under the best medical supervision. There are about three hundred thousand heroin addicts in New York City alone. They’ve never estimated how many there are in the country, but the best guess is two or three million hard-core addicts and at least another two or three million who take it on a modified basis or are ex-addicts or who are on the fringes of it. That’s a lot of people.”
“I don’t want to hear about heroin,” Jessica said. “It scares me. Blowing a little pot—that’s as far as I ever wanted to push it. Heroin is a killer; everyone knows that.”
Wulff shook his head, played with the gearshift. The road was almost completely empty at four in the morning, unlike New York, where the major arteries were running heavy truck traffic almost all the time. “It’s the same thing,” he said. “Pot leads to heroin.”
The girl giggled. “No one believes that,” she said. “That’s just the stuff you hear from priests and cops. That the path to sin starts with the first reefer.”
“It’s true,” Wulff said quietly. He tried to keep his voice flat and level, but it was not easy; it was suddenly difficult to keep his breathing modulated. “It’s the same goddamned attitude that controls heroin right from the start. Indulgence. Do anything for a kick. Freak out and feel glad. Anything for sensation. Blow a little pot; if it makes you feel good, it can’t be bad. Nothing that makes you feel good can be bad. So after you’ve been doing that for a while, the next step is easy.” He found himself unconsciously running his hand under the seat where the coke reposed in its little squares, buggering his hand. “Soft and hard,” he said, “hard and soft, it’s all the same goddamned thing. There’s no such thing as soft drugs, any more than there’s soft pornography. There are merely those who need it hard and those who can take it soft, but they’re after the same damned thing.”
