by Barry, Mike
“Look at that son of a bitch,” Williams said, pointing toward the Sedan de Ville. The flak had pitted even deeper holes in the body frame; parts of the roof were literally torn open. “Look at that; you think that’s going to drive?”
“Your Cadillac is a quality car,” Wulff said, “they’re built with quality, they’re serviced carefully, they’re your best value in a used car, don’t you know that?” wondering vaguely if he were a little mad even as he started toward the car. The trailer, tilted crazily, shed some more strips of fragmentation, little steel joints collapsed into the mud. “Can’t get anything out of that,” he said, “let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Get out on the highway,” Wulff said. “Follow me. We get thirty, forty miles, maybe we’ll be able to stop. Don’t you understand?” he said, and suddenly there was a siren whooping in the distance. “Don’t you see? We can’t stay around here; they’ll nail everything.”
“Yeah,” Williams said, “yeah.” Wulff got into the Cadillac thinking it was sure a fortunate thing that he had stashed the sack in the trunk, done that a couple of days ago on a vague impulse which he could not understand, just a feeling that it would be better in the car than in the trailer. Prescience, foresight, some word like that. As he had expected the motor turned right over, the transmission caught, the car began to roll.
Watching Williams maneuvering behind him Wulff went into a long, shaking U-turn and headed out toward the highway.
The siren was closer but not close enough. They turned south and began to move away at a slow, even, regular pace, leaving three dead men behind them.
XVI
The report got to Calabrese within thirty minutes. If nothing else, he thought, he had intelligence. His intelligence sources were excellent. A man with his intelligence sources could sit in a room high above a drive and do nothing except to give orders and hear results; he would certainly never have to go out into the world. That was fine, not going into the world; after seventy-three years Calabrese had had quite enough of it. But now the world was turning against him.
Surprisingly, he was able to take it calmly. He would not have thought so himself but at some level of foresight he must have seen how this would go, what was going to happen, he must have already dreamed the failure. Three men dead in a trailer park, the pair escaped again. There seemed to be no reason for there to have been three men; the deaf-mute and Parsons were a team but where had the third man come from? Cross and double-cross? Who knew? Eventually he might find out but it was in the category of ancient information already. It simply did not matter. None of it mattered; it was esoteric. The sons of bitches had gotten away again.
At least he had them nailed to the ground now. He had suspected that they were in the coast area but nothing was certain. He had had to fan out the alert all through the country, had had to diversify his forces but now he had them nailed in, in a pocket. He could bring down everyone in the Los Angeles area, get them into a net, sweep them in. He knew it. It stood to reason.
So it was for the best. It was for the best that three men had been lost, a trailer park blown up, Calabrese frustrated and defied once again. He wanted to look at it in that way; really wanted to feel that the disaster had done him a favor but Calabrese could not. He simply could not take satisfaction in it. Time and again he had had this bastard cornered, time and again there seemed no way that he could have gotten loose … and yet he had. Peru was an enormous box; he had had him tied in Peru with a ribbon. And yet the bastard had hijacked his way out. It was mystical.
No. No, it wasn’t mystical, Calabrese thought. It was retribution, that was all that it was. It was retribution for that moment in Chicago when he had had the man in this very room, had had him positioned for a kill order … and had let him go because he liked the excitement of having danger within compass. Liked it because he was an old man, losing his grip; that was why he had liked it. Walker had been right, the son of a bitch. He had killed Walker for saying it but it would not take away the inescapable truth of the matter. He had acted like an old fool, he had missed his one real chance and now there was no recovery. He would never have that chance again.
He would never have it again. The thought was chilling; it sent a thrill of dread through him and Calabrese stumbled away from the desk from which he ran the world, went to the concealed liquor cabinet and taking out a bottle of scotch he swilled a good fraction of it in a series of choking swallows, handling the scotch like beer. It went down into his gut like a wound, then spread out into lazy, indolent fingers which poked through his esophagus. He belched.
The man who had been sitting in the room throughout all of this, sitting silently, looked at Calabrese wonderingly, then looked away. No questions, his expression showed clearly. He was a bodyguard; he was here at the old man’s request; that was where it all ended. Think not and you don’t get hurt. Now he took the gun out of his inner pocket, played with it, his eyes glowing with a faint light. The man loved guns. He loved everything about them. That was why Calabrese had brought him in here.
“I’ve been a fool,” Calabrese said.
The man said nothing. He hunched over the gun, considering it. If any man came into this room to try and hurt Calabrese he would kill him; if Calabrese ordered him to go out and do a job he would do that. Otherwise he would do nothing at all. That was clear. He shrugged, looked at the floor.
“I’ve been a goddamned old fool,” Calabrese said. He took the bottle, proffered it “You want some of this?” he said.
The man shook his head.
“Come on,” Calabrese said, “it’s only a goddamned bottle of scotch, it’s not going to kill you.”
The man refused for the third time, his eyes glowing just a little. “Peter denied Christ three times before cock-crow,” he said, “I couldn’t do it a fourth.”
“Don’t,” Calabrese said, “don’t do it a fourth. Don’t call me Christ, either.” He passed the bottle over; the bodyguard took it, put away a few neat swallows, smiling to himself in a private way, then handed the bottle back. Calabrese put it on his desk. Drinking and bullshitting with a religious bodyguard. That was what it had come down to. All of the power, all of the roots and interconnections put down over forty years, the struggle, the manipulation, the control … all for this. There was something very wrong with it.
But on the other hand, he couldn’t think of a goddamned thing to do otherwise.
“I want him,” Calabrese said. “I want him badly. I want pictures. I want pictures of his corpse.”
The bodyguard shrugged.
“I’m a goddamned fool,” Calabrese said again and picked up the bottle, wiped it, put down another drink, “but if you ever take that news out of this room I’ll kill you.”
The bodyguard shrugged, showed his hands. “It’s okay,” he said, “it’s okay by me. It’s none of my goddamned business, believe me, I don’t care, I won’t take nothing away. I’ll do whatever you say.” He looked sidewise at the scotch bottle. “You got me started,” he said, “if you don’t mind—”
“Oh, no,” Calabrese said, “I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.”
He handed the guard the bottle.
And then for a long time, the two of them just sat there, seventy-three and forty, getting drunk in the cool chambers of Calabrese’s throne room.
XVII
Picking up Route 80 at San Francisco, heading east this time, the U-haul flat behind him and filling the rear-view mirror, Williams, alone, had an insight: the men who had waylaid him in Nebraska had not been looking for him at all. They had merely been freelancing, shopping around, seeing what they might be able to get off the road in the same spirit that fishermen would toss a net into promising waters. It would have been less horrible, somehow, if he could have thought that they were organization men and they had had a tracer on him but even the organization was not that sophisticated. No, these men had merely been on a fishing expedition. The roads, with the closing of the continent fifty
years ago, were now the last frontier; the last space in which the highwaymen, pirates, freebooters, sharks could roam. That was even worse. It meant that in addition to worrying about everything else on his three-day haul East he’d have to think about walking into some freelancers again.
Still, he thought, it was the only thing to do. Wulff and he had discussed it; nothing else made sense. They had to split up and he had to go back on his own; together now they were twice the target, not twice as deadly. It had become quite apparent to Wulff from the moment of the attack in the trailer camp that they would not be able to stay together; Williams had seen it even before that Not if they were jumping each other the way they had. No way. The fight in the trailer, just before the grenades hit, had been terrifying because it had not really been anyone’s fault. It was just the way that the situation had developed. “Go back to your wife,” Wulff had said to him on the vacant back road into which they had pulled their caravan, “get the hell out of this while there’s still time. I’m a doomed man now but you can still get away.”
“They know who I am, too,” he had pointed out, “they got me spotted; I told you Calabrese knows—”
“They only want you because you’re with me,” Wulff said. He spoke slowly, softly, with the determination of a man who had sifted through all of the choices in his mind a long time before and now had gone long past indecision. “Otherwise you don’t matter. It’s me they want.”
“I’ll stay with you.”
“Can’t,” Wulff said, “can’t do it. We can’t operate together.” He smiled in a strange way, stared at Williams intently. He was leaning out the window of the ruined Cadillac, Williams having come from the Ford to talk to him. “You see what happened.”
“Forget it.”
“I can’t forget it. You don’t really want to be here. I don’t see why you should. There’s no way to fight it together. I’ve got to be on my own.”
“I can’t go back to being where I was,” Williams said, “it will never be the same again.”
‘What is? What the hell is? You get out of bed in the morning; you’re never going to be exactly the same as you were. Everything changes moment to moment. But you can still pick up the pieces. You can get back somehow the way it was before.” Wulff shook in the seat, pressed his back then against the rear and restored control so quickly that if Williams had not been alert to it he never would have suspected anything. But for just a moment there had been a real aspect of pain in the man; now he was impassive again. “I can’t do that,” he said, “I can’t ever get back near to how it was. It’s all the way to the end now.”
“So what are you going to do?” Williams said, looking nervously beyond the cars toward the road. No traffic; they had picked a gutted local highway here running parallel to the interstate. Twenty years ago it had been filled with gas stations, diners, used-car lots, people … now it had been abandoned. “What’s your next step?”
“That’s simple,” Wulff said flatly, “I’m going to get back to Chicago and kill Calabrese.”
“Are you?”
“My way. I’ve got to be alone.”
“You’ll need some fucking ordnance,” Williams said, looking at the U-haul.
“No way. No way at all I’m going to be able to go in with that stuff. I’ve got to travel light; that’s the only way. Load myself down with that, and I not only restrict my mobility, I risk turning it over to them. They could use it; you’ve got half an army in there.”
“So what to do? Take it back?”
“Take it back,” Wulff said, “take it back to your Father Justice, argue for ninety percent. Most of it’s unused, untouched even, he ought to settle for ninety percent. He’s a businessman and he’ll see the value of renting out merchandise that wasn’t even used.”
“Shit,” Williams said obscurely, shaking his head, “shit, I thought we could have done something—”
“I did, too. But we can’t. We couldn’t It wouldn’t have worked out, I see that now. So we’ve got to settle, cut our losses.” Wulff bent over the ignition, cranked the car. The Cadillac started with a gasp, idling unevenly. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I am, too.”
“But you see what happened.”
“Yeah, man, I see what happened all right.”
“If they hadn’t attacked then they might not have saved us from ourselves,” Wulff said softly, and raced the engine, the valves clattering, then threw the Cadillac into reverse. The tires spun, then caught softly.
“Wait,” Williams said, throwing up a hand, “what next?”
Wulff braked the car, the frame shuddering on the chassis. “What do you mean by that?” he said.
“Is this how it ends?” Williams said. He found himself being betrayed by an odd kind of sentiment, it was not loss exactly, nothing in circumstances like this could be called loss, but then again it was not sheer eagerness to get out. “Never again?”
“I don’t know,” Wulff said, leaning out the window again, “this can’t go on much longer, you know.”
“I know that.”
“It’s been this way but it can’t continue. I’ve got one more job to do before it’s over.”
“Calabrese,” Williams said.
“Calabrese,” Wulff said nodding, “Chicago and Calabrese. The stakes are too high; one man can’t carry this alone. It’s a one-way ticket on a death trip, don’t you know that?” He revved up the motor again, the Cadillac starting to reverse. “Go to Father Justice,” he said. “Get a refund, see what percentage you can have returned. Go to your wife, go back to the force. Be happy. This isn’t the answer either, don’t you see that? You can’t beat the system, make it work, but you can’t go outside of it either because that way you just get crushed out. There’s got to be another way, but I don’t know what it is. If I find it I’ll send you a telegram,” Wulff said, “I’ll send it to you back at home.” And then the car was moving over the ruts on the highway, lumbering out of his line of sight, Wulff trailing a hand out of it for a long time until the car was invisible. Leaving him alone with the U-haul, the Ford, and himself. As he must have known from the beginning that it would have to be.
So here he was, picking up eighty, moving as fast as he dared and thinking about the hijack team in Nebraska as he locked the Ford into its seventy-five miles an hour thruway pace again. There had been nothing personal about that team, they had perhaps been as impersonal, basically, as the way in which Wulff and he had fallen upon one another back at the trailer park, doing it simply because there was nothing else to be done, because they had tuned themselves, been tuned, to fighting pitch and there was simply no one else to fight. It all ate shit, that was the point, anything stunk, whatever you did wound you up in the same trap, brought you to the same outcome. Whether you pounded it out in St. Albans for twenty years looking for the good time and the pension-and-out, or whether you started roaming between the coasts and to foreign counties looking to confront the enemy whole and destroy him … it all caught up to you. Whatever you did it was the same and the sudden knowledge filled Williams with fury. He pounded the steering wheel, aware for the first time of his mortality, of the limitation of his possibilities, of the trap into which life itself had brought him. You couldn’t get out: the system was a lie but trying to beat it was also. Look at Wulff, look at himself, and he felt his lungs blowing and dilating with rage as he thought of this, then settled the car down to sixty, shaking his head. Can’t do this, he thought, got three thousand miles to go, got to go cross-country, start carrying on this way and it’s no good at all. I’ll blow myself out before I get into Utah, got to be calm, got to look at the long view … and behind him in the rear-view mirror he saw something growing. It looked like a hearse, a long, black, gleaming car shifting back and forth on the two lanes of highway, coming on him at a hundred miles an hour or more, he thought. He could see two bodies in the front, hunched down, and at that same moment Williams knew exactly what had happened to him and what was going on.<
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There was nothing to do. He was caught in a trap so profound that his very movements were as predictable as if they had happened a long time ago. He floored the accelerator, urging the Ford to ninety miles an hour and took over the center stripe of the highway, hugging it, the car rocking with speed. He would have to try and outrun them, not because he had any chance, not because a Ford with a U-haul could outrun a new limousine with a determined driver … but only because that was the way the game was played; that was the nature of the scenario…. Knowing this Williams pounded that accelerator, moving his foot on it back and forth like an organist, trying to urge a little more speed, the U-haul beginning to sway dangerously behind him now, the U-haul trying to pull off the road with its own torque and he fought back against it, lashing the car from side to side to set up a counter-torque of his own which would carry him against the thrust of the U-haul. It worked, although perilously. Now the following car had closed upon him so that it was invisible through the rear-view mirror, shut out by the U-haul. He had to use the side mirror to see it … and looking through the side mirror he could hardly lose it. The car was a 1970 or 1971 Lincoln town car, what did they call it, Mark something or other, the jobs with the Rolls-Royce ripoff grilles and the opera windows, perfect for bulletproofing. The car gave less open glass area to its occupants than any production car made in America. The car, now insolently on his back bumper seemed to come off then, slid back almost arrogantly allowing Williams to open up three or four car lengths. They were toying with him.
Either toying with him, he thought, or waiting for the road to be absolutely clear. He could see nothing coming up behind him but then, of course, he was at a partial disadvantage. In the other car they would be able to get a clear view back on this flat, undulating terrain, looking back a mile or more, and they would want to make absolutely sure that there was no one behind. Made perfect sense. Murder, even highway murder, was a private thing. Even the vast crackups of the interstate seemed to happen in an enclosed space, attacker and victim, walled off by their disaster from the fact of the road itself. There was something very private about dying, always: no matter how you came to it, what life you had led to get there, it seemed to happen in a black tube or funnel stuffed with cotton, just you and the act and the emptiness outside.
