by Barry, Mike
Wulff had seen whole platoons wrecked on hard shit; he had seen hundreds of men, boys really, who had been sent to death by shit, and all the time that he was living and seeing this and keeping his own hands off in horror the trade was going on. He could see its map streaked out in a thousand Saigon faces every day and when he came back to New York, finally, it was with the feeling that he would either have to single-handedly put shit out of the world, or failing that, would have to get as far from the racket as possible so that he would not have to think about it. In more ordinary circumstances he would have gone the latter route; Wulff was angry but he was not that angry, and war did things to a lot of people’s heads that eventually got pushed away back in civilian life. Or drove them to suicide.
Wulff might have settled for the comfortable, easy way but narco wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t escape the war frame of mind. New York was war. He was in the middle of it every duty day.
He saw the informers: smiling, empty men with the shit stashed in their own back pockets, the informers who were working arm in arm with the arm as the saying went, selling their brothers on the streets down the line for a nickel bag and a little less heat. He saw the periodic sweeps when the inspectors would move in from headquarters in response to the newspaper campaigns demanding arrest, and the narcos would go out to pick up truckloads of smiling, willing, nodding informants. In with them today, out by the middle of the next morning, all charges dropped for lack of evidence. He saw the other empty, smiling men in their big cars cruising by the distribution depots at midnight, a last check before turning in for the wife and kiddies and home. He saw the look on the lieutenant’s face when a rookie had been stupid enough to have busted one of the Eldorado men. Wulff got a good taste of all of it.
Well, Vietnam and Harlem; they were both places in the same city. When the dusk began to crawl they even looked the same; combat zones. It made no difference, shit was the name of the game, over here, over there. Fight to keep America free for shit. Twenty-forty a bag or fight. Don’t give up the shit. It got Wulff angry, all right. It got him pretty damned mad.
Finally, he got mad enough to bust an informant in a bar for possession. He collared the son of a bitch and took him into the local precinct. The informant must have had six decks sticking out from his jacket and back pockets. Smiling, nodding, bullshitting Wulff along, just daring him to do something because he knew that Wulff was the man and the one thing that the man never did was to break the rules. Wulff wasn’t going to put up with it. He had his limits, too. So he brought the informant into the precinct and lost sight of him for four hours. He was sitting around the record room, filling out his reports like a fool, bullshitting with the sergeant, until the lieutenant came in finally and said that Wulff had made a false arrest. No evidence. All evidence had disappeared. How could Wulff have brought in a man who was not holding? The lieutenant was very serious when he said this; he was even able to meet Wulff’s eyes. If there were any drugs in the informant’s possession he must have managed to ditch them somehow, somewhere between the bar and the precinct when Wulff had not been watching, the lieutenant said. Wulff had been watching. The lieutenant was a liar. Still, what was he going to do about that? Bust the lieutenant himself?
There would be an investigation, the narco supervisor told Wulff when he came on for his next TDY. Something about Wulff fucking up. In the meantime, though, they had no choice; false arrest was a very bad thing for the department’s image and they were going to send him back to a patrol car. The narco supervisor at least had had the decency not to meet Wulff’s eyes when he went through this but maybe he was not the old hand that the lieutenant was.
Well, going back to a patrol car was a bitch as they conceived it but it was all right with Wulff. He would have taken a beat for that matter except that about that time the department was phasing out the beat policy. Patrol was fine with him. After three years in narco, hustling family disputes and bar hassles, delivering a couple of babies or pegging numbers, runners would have looked like a good clean job, and he found himself looking forward to the assignment as if it was actually some kind of an honor. Which in fact it was. It was fairly rare to get bumped down in the PD for making any kind of an arrest.
But the gig that he had been looking forward to turned out to be his first and last TOY pulled that way because on duty, riding sidesaddle with a black rookie named David Williams, Wulff had stepped into a blind tip about an OD’d girl in a tenement on West 93rd Street. When he, as the sidesaddle, had sprinted up the five flights of the premises to do the honors he found a girl named Marie Calvante lying in the middle of the room, absolutely OD’d out, all twenty-three years of her, her eyes fishlike on the ceiling trip.
Seeing a pretty white girl OD’d out in circumstances like that would have been bad enough for Wulff, hardened ex-narco, combat veteran and all that, but the Calvante call had been even tougher because, unfortunately, Wulff knew her. He knew her very well. In fact, he and Marie Calvante had been engaged to be married within a couple of months, earlier if he could push her, and it was hard for him to believe that she was lying on the floor of that tenement unless someone had put her there. Someone personally interested, not so much in the girl, but in Wulff. It all tied in pretty clearly, he thought, to the informant bust. Cause and effect Chain reaction. It was nice to think that at least this was one murder in New York which wasn’t senseless.
All things considered, Wulff had taken it pretty well. Pretty professionally. He hadn’t cracked up, he hadn’t pulled any dramatic shit like throwing himself across the body, he hadn’t sworn vendetta. That kind of crap was for the movies. All that he had done was to move out of the room right away, almost immediately after David Williams, the rookie, had come upstairs to find out what was taking Wulff so long for verification. He had told Williams very quietly where they could take their police department and stick it and then he had gone onto the streets past the patrol car (Williams had left the keys in, the motor still running, pretty stupid, Wulff had noted professionally) and chucked his badge and credentials into a sewer. In this way he had resigned from the department immediately without bothering to give them the benefit of notice. Loss of pension, of course; he would have to swing his own way after the twenty. But Wulff did not expect to get anywhere near the easy twenty now. He doubted if he would make eleven.
He went out to murder the international drug trade.
He had wanted to do it ever since Vietnam. That was for sure. For a long time a lot of things had held him back, all of those things wrapped together under that deadly, all-inclusive word system: the good twenty was system and busting the informants was system; the thirteen grand a year plus increments and benefits and graft was system, too and system with a capital S had been the gentle girl named Marie who had really hooked him in with pictures of the house they were going to buy, the babies they would make. Nobody in the house-buying, baby-making bit was going to attack the shit-dealers when he had something like that to protect, but the murder of the girl after what they had taught him in the precinct house the night before carried the message for him pretty well. They weren’t going to let him play after all. He was going to have to go outside of it.
Well, he thought, why not? Why not fulfill an old ambition now that the furniture of life had been carried out for him? He might as well try to put all of them out of business. One at a time. Face to face.
The funny thing was that they all denied it.
As Wulff cut his path across the continent, starting in New York, sweeping his way to the coast and then back to Boston, into Havana and Vegas, out the pipe to Chicago and then to Peru, spreading death in bright, broad strokes, there were a lot of system men he met, most of them at the point of his gun or theirs, and none of them would admit that the organization, if there was such a thing, had had a thing to do with Marie Calvante. They had never heard of her. It must have been ten different people was the consensus, because no one in the organization killed anyone on the sidelines, particula
rly relatives or close friends of antagonists because that could only put things into a newer and uglier context where it could, by implication, become open season on everyone. Marie Calvante had been an unfortunate accident, then. Some freelancer might have done it, maybe the girl had secretly been a junkie and ran into very bad luck on West 93rd Street. But Wolff should understand the protocol of the trade the systems men had advised, averred, insisted, articulated, slobbered, begged, gibbered across desks, back seats of cars, open fields. Wulff should know that the organization had its own code of honor more stringent than anything in the outside world.
Wulff killed them anyway.
What the hell, they were all liars, and responsible for the girl or not, they had killed a lot of innocent people. Directly or indirectly. It was a good philosophy. There was nothing wrong with killing when the enemy was dealing from a stack of cards smeared with blood.
There had been a girl in San Francisco who had given him back a few particles of life; there had been a copter pilot in Havana who had turned out to be a bastard but had taught Wulff a few things first; there was the rookie cop, David Williams, who had pitched in and made himself useful a couple of times before he got hit in the stomach checking out a methadone center in central Harlem. What would cautious Williams make of his precious system now? Wulff wondered. So every now and then you met a few people who were not as bad as most but essentially it had been his own trail. He had played out his own hand without expectation of help and in the conviction that he was going to die soon anyway; why not, then, take all those he could down with him? Peru had been the roughest of all the stops so far, but he had even managed to get out of Peru with a big bag of shit, so what the hell, what the hell indeed … maybe his luck would hold to the end of the trail after all. But Peru had been a rough one.
Peru had damned well not been on his list to start with.
Peru had been the decision of a Chicago boss named Calabrese. Chicago had been on Wullf’s list all right and finally in Chicago he had run up against something really major league, something that possibly was not within his capacity to handle, although he did not want to truly accept this. Chicago, in any event, had been the stomping ground of an old, deadly man named Calabrese, a man in his early seventies who lived in an estate on Lake Michigan and who was so far ahead of the rest of them that he could almost operate out in the open. He virtually did. Calabrese had insisted to Wulff that he, Calabrese, was simply a legitimate businessman trying to make it in a very tough world. He had almost killed Wulff twice, this legitimate businessman. The second time, locked in his office with Wulff, he had laughed in his face, said that he guessed he would not take Wulff out of the game for the time being because he was interesting, he gave Calabrese something of a charge and a challenge just knowing that he was around and functioning.
The idea, Calabrese, that deadly old man, said, was to get Wulff out of the picture for a while but only to a place where he would remain under Calabrese’s control. Peru had been the choice then. He had dumped Wulff into the Hotel Deal in Peru where Wulff had met an ex-Nazi named Stavros who was trying to work his own figures around Calabrese, and although Stavros had been Wulff’s exit ticket from the country, Wulff had been the ex-Nazi’s undoing. Stavros was dead. His pilot who had flown Wulff into El Paso was dead, too.
Almost everyone with whom Wulff had been dealing was dead, come to think of it.
Still, that was one of the breaks of the game. If you administered death you were going to get caught up in it, sure as hell. Wulff found that he didn’t mind it that much. After awhile, for high purposes or low, killing could be almost as much fun as sex if you put it in the proper perspective … which was easy. He had nothing, personally, against killing. As a tactic against these clowns it beat all hell out of busting informants in prearranged sweeps to get headquarters and the newspapers off your neck.
Wulff, carrying a big bag of shit with Stavros’s odor still on it, cut his way out of the border town of El Paso. He had a pretty good idea of where he wanted to go and who he wanted to deal with. But the girl came first. Los Angeles came first. Too much action, too much impacted in too little; he needed a stopover before he could gird himself to take on Chicago again.
So take the show to LA. There was the girl and he wanted to see her … and maybe LA could use a little bit of his action, too. He had the bag. He had the bag of shit and that would suck them in.
It always did. Vermin loved shit.
V
He had the gun in his hand when he yanked the door open, of course. That was routine procedure; anybody who opened a door to a blind knock without a pistol in his hand was asking for a shot in the gut without reply. But it was not the gun that saved him so much, it was what he did after he had flung the door open; he kicked it back into the wall with an ankle, slamming it hard, feeling it rebound, and simultaneously with the crack against plaster, he was rolling, diving, bringing up the gun for a shot.
There was only one man in the hallway. He could see all that in the stop-action of the roll, but his attention was fixed less on the man than on Tamara, the sheets gathered around her, the look of her as she arched up in the bed, a palm like a bud against her mouth as if screaming into it. She did not make a sound. The girl had guts, there was no question about it; call it guts or class, maybe it was the same thing but there was something unbreakable there, and he knew it, recognizing this almost idly, absently in some pocket of the mind as he pumped a bullet into the assailant, then another one, still rolling. There was a sound of flesh hitting wood, then the man was down, the gun leaping from his extended hand, spanging off a wall, and then coming to a stop next to the bed. In that moment the girl looked at it incuriously, hand extended, all of her attention seemingly drawn to the gun, and then her hand came away, disinterest or fear overtaking dispassion, and she leaned back against the headboard. She was still naked. So was Wulff. Remarkable accomplishment, to rear from bed and murder, but he did not think of that now.
He found a towel, draped it around himself as he leaned toward the man on the floor. One eye closed, the other cocked open at the ceiling in a horrid wink that even as Wulff stared, diminished, filtered itself away. One final sigh and then the eye closed, the man lay dead on the floor. He was simply dressed: killing garb you might call it, a sweatshirt and tight-fitting pants. This meant that he had probably come into the lobby with the gun exposed; there was simply no place to conceal it. Surveillance at the Colony Quarters was not too good; a man could walk into that lobby at any time in almost any condition, caveat emptor. But this, Wulff thought vaguely, was ridiculous. He turned to the girl. “He’s dead,” he said.
“I know he’s dead.”
“There was nothing else to do.” He felt vaguely apologetic. “I had to kill him.”
“I know that,” she said. She had been silent and accommodating since he had met her; now her mood had not shifted. She held the sheet up against her neck, her sole impulse seemed to be to keep herself covered. “It all comes back to me,” she said.
Wulff stood, kicked the door closed, went back toward the bed. “I don’t even know who sent him,” he said. “He could have come from Calabrese but then it might have been someone else. I won’t know.”
“It’s all the same,” she said. What he had said did not seem to have registered with her. “Nothing’s changed since I saw you in San Francisco.”
“How could it?”
“The killing,” she said, “the killing goes on.”
“It has to.”
“It never stops. I thought that it would, but it didn’t.”
“I had no choice,” Wulff said, “I have no choice at this point. None at all.” He looked at her abstractedly, then through her, his mind already scuttling away at some perilous angle. Just a moment ago, a few moments ago, he had been totally involved with the girl, concentrating on probing her body, working out through her flesh some dark necessity that he had not even known to be there until she had capped it free … but now it w
as as if she was not even in the room. Whatever passions had driven him toward her had been transitory, he realized. They did not count. The main thing that counted was the quest.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “I didn’t think they’d find me so quickly.”
“Yes you did. You wanted them to find you.”
He shrugged. The idea of arguing with her was pointless. Looking at the outline of her body behind the sheet he wondered what had driven him to her in the first place. Whatever it was, whatever she had meant to him, had been so thin that it was now gone. The corpse on the floor was leaking blood. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “I thought we had some time but I was wrong. There’s no time at all.”
“You like to live this way,” she said. There was no accusation in her voice; it was a calm, flat statement. “I really think that you do.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“When you saved me, when I was with you back in San Francisco, I believed what you were saying. I thought that you were in a bad situation that you hadn’t been responsible for, that really wasn’t your fault at all, that they were closing in on you. But I see now that I was wrong. You enjoy it.”
“I don’t enjoy any of it.”
“Oh,” she said, “but I think you do. I really think you do.”
He looked out the window then, looked out at the range of Los Angeles; no smog on this day. Peculiar, the smog was supposed to be the dominant characteristic of this landscape and yet the air was a complete, uncharted, transparent mass around them, the view from the Colony Quarters stretching far out toward the mountains which seemed to be close in on them by some freak of vision, not miles out there but only a few hundred yards away, and then his attention shifted back to the bed. She had dropped the sheet, was sitting there exposed to the waist, her breasts hanging like teardrops, much lower than they would have appeared in clothing, almost brushing her navel but for all of that there was no impression of heaviness or flab, rather the breasts seemed merely to curve on that angle. She was an attractive girl. One could see where she in herself would be responsible for an itinerary. She stood, her legs tensing underneath her thin but surprisingly strong, little muscles jumping in her calves.
