by Barry, Mike
“Let’s get out of here,” Wulff said.
“You killed him and I’m a witness.” She began to laugh, ricocheting little spasms making her breasts jump again. Her face was dead white; underneath the panels Wulff could sense the animals crawling. “Are you going to kill me too?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Why don’t you just kill me too? You came up here to kill me, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re crazy, you killed him. You killed John. Nobody can kill John. He told us once that he was already eight hundred and fifty years old and that he was going to live forever.” Laughter split her open, she fell against him. “What am I going to do now?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
‘Where am I going to get all the pretties? Where?”
“We’ll talk about it,” Wulff said. He put an arm around her, wrenched her off her feet. Hoist-carry. It was going to be literally the only way he would ever get her down those stairs. She launched herself against him with the force of a small child, then collapsed.
“I don’t have anything anymore,” she said. “I can’t fight. Go on. Kill me fast.”
“Let’s go,” he said, kicking open the door. He half-expected to see people waiting for him on the landing, but no. No one. John was a loner. He got the girl down the steps. Speed had wasted her; for all her height she was maybe one ten, maybe just a hundred pounds. There was nothing there. He could feel water sliding underneath her skin. That was all she was: a reservoir for water and for jolts of energy that had eaten her away.
“I’m glad you killed him,” she said, starting to laugh again, “I’m glad, I’m glad.”
“I’m not.”
“You did the right thing. You must be the avenger, that’s who you must be. I had a dream about the avenger,” she said as he carried her. “I used to have this dream that the avenger was going to come, he would be ten feet tall and he would save me from all these people and what they were doing to me, and I really believed in the avenger. Tamara’s avenger, I used to call him, and it was my secret, but do you know something I realized only a little while ago? Do you want me to tell you? There’s no such thing as an avenger at all, because he couldn’t do it to anyone. He would have to do it to me. To Tamara. Because all along it was just me, you see. I was the one doing it to myself. There was no one else.”
“All right,” Wulff said, “all right.” One more flight down. Lucky if he could make it. If anyone came into the building now he was dead. The only way out would be to use the girl as a shield and fall, fall atop her those last stairs, hoping that she would take the attack. But he doubted that he could do it “Come on,” he said. He readjusted the carry, staggered through the darkness and grease odors through that last flight.
“So I gave up,” Tamara said. “I knew there wasn’t any avenger—don’t you see?—that I was the avenger and I was dead, but then just when I had completely lost hope you came along. You killed John. But what am I going to do without John? I can’t cope, Avenger, I just can’t cope.”
“All right,” Wulff said. He kicked open the door, carried her through the reeking vestibule and onto the street. Not much traffic here, no pedestrians at all; nobody was on the streets out here unless enclosed by a vehicle. A bus passed them on the other side of the street, the few passengers facing this way looking at them without curiosity. Street scene. Wholly unremarkable. Tall men and straight-haired girls came out of places like these in hoist-carries all the time. Live and let live.
“Can you walk?”
“I can’t walk,” she said, “I can’t even breathe.” The air hit her; she started to laugh again. She ran a hand through her hair, fell against him. “Hello Avenger,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He put a hand under her armpit, felt her small breast with the back of his finger, rooted her to her feet. There was no sex in it whatsoever. He felt no desire; desire was something that, along with many other things, had been purged out of him a good long time ago. What he did feel, and the sensation was strange, was a kind of distant protectiveness. He liked the girl.
The air seemed to take hold of her, she steadied, began to walk with only slight assistance. “Hey Avenger,” she said, “there are going to be a lot of people looking for you now. There seems to be a dead body up there. Have you thought of that?”
“I’ve thought of it,” Wulff said grimly. Down the winding block he could see his rented Ford parked exactly where he had left it. False credentials to make the forms, but who cared about that? America was a credentials society; lousy or true the only point was to have the proper papers in your wallet.
“You know,” she said, a little distant sea-wind bringing sudden color to her cheeks, “you’ve done everybody a favor, Avenger, but a lot of people aren’t going to be thinking that way. Have you thought of what you’re going to do?”
“Briefly.”
“The avenger would only think briefly,” Tamara said. “Is this your car?” she said as he brought them to a halt. “Oh, it’s beautiful. Somehow I had you figured for a Sedan de Ville or maybe a Cougar, but the avenger in a Galaxie 500! That’s wonderful.” She giggled again, reeled, fell against a door. “Johnny was a wonderful, wonderful person,” she said, “and I’m so glad he’s dead that I could spit.”
He opened the door from the driver’s side, propelled her through. “Get in there.”
“Are you going to kill me too, Avenger? Are you going to take me for, what do they call it, a ride? I’m the only witness to the murder you know. But I promise you,” she said from the seat, wrapping a knee under her and looking at him almost seductively, “I won’t tell a soul. You see, you’ve made my day. You’ve just made all my dreams come true.”
“That’s fine,” Wulff said. He eased her over, got behind the wheel, and slammed the door. Put the keys into the ignition and held the wheel. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” he said.
“I don’t want to go to a hospital.”
“I’ll just drop you off,” he said, “I’ll trust you not to say anything, and even if you do what difference does it make?” He was thinking aloud, an old habit garnered from working in partnerships. “You don’t know who I am and then again too many people know exactly who I am.”
“Of course I know who you are,” the girl said, “you’re the avenger. I created you out of my dreams and you’re not going to take me to any hospitals because I’ve already had the detoxification unit scene and like who needs it? All I need to do is to get some food, crash for a couple of days and I’ll be fine again.”
Wulff started the motor. “Ready to take off you mean.”
“Oh no,” she said, clasping her hands, “why I wouldn’t think of it. I wouldn’t possibly go back on speed or anything else again. I’ve learned, you see. I’ve had a profound shock which has changed my personality completely and has made me regret my wasted life. Drugs, Avenger? Nothing. Not even an aspirin from now on, I swear.”
He put the car into gear, began to move it slowly. “Besides,” she said, “if I went to a hospital they’d only have me back on the street in a couple of hours. You don’t think they’d move someone like me out of the emergency room now, do you?”
“Where do you live?” Wulff said, poking the car up a hill. All of San Francisco was hills, it seemed. Hills and mist, that deep-hanging grey fire which on even the brightest days clung to the nostrils but was in a way, somehow, not unsatisfying. He came to a major intersection, pointed the car north. What he was going to need was quarters outside of the central city. He needed a little space opened up, anyway, between him and the quarry—that is, until he made his run at them….
“Nowhere in particular,” the girl named Tamara said. “What I mean to say is that I live in a lot of places but don’t like to call them home except that anywhere they hang my hat is home if you know what I mean.” The air had brought her to life again; she seemed a little manic now. One way or the
other, it would take forty-eight hours to clean the girl out, even to see what kind of person she might be under all the junk that she had been pouring into her system. If there was a system left. There probably was. All of these people were strong and healthy right up until the day they fell apart, and Tamara’s time had, apparently, not yet come. “Where I was I’m not going back,” she said more quietly. “That’s for sure.”
“Was that why I found you up there this morning?”
“Something like that, Avenger,” she said. She tilted her face upward at him; looking at her sidelong he could see that she once might have been very pretty. In fact still was, in and out of the haze of sickness. “You not only shoot the bad guys to kill, you think,” she said, “you think really good. I think you’d better take me with you. I’d like to move in with you, Avenger.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Not as crazy as you think,” she said. “I won’t be any trouble, believe me. I can cook, clean, keep house, make conversation or shut up as the mood hits you. I can even make fairly intelligent conversation because the fact is that I had two years of college at State.” She belched, covered her mouth. “English major. I learned a lot about Chaucer at State, would you believe that? And I learned about a lot of other things too. Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said as Wulff gazed at her quickly again before he overtook a bus, leapt ahead of it and shot the car into a freeway entrance headed north, opening the Galaxie up immediately to sixty, old prowl car technique. “Don’t you worry about me, Avenger, I’m not making an illicit gesture or anything like that at all. In the first place I know that the avenger isn’t interested in sex, he’s too pure and fine to get involved with it at all, and in the second place I don’t have anything there at all.” She looked at him bleakly, her eyes suddenly cold and empty. “There’s nothing like that,” she said. “It all went away a long time ago. No, we can live together in a purely platonic relationship. You’re not going to let me go,” she said, her voice suddenly becoming panicked. That was a characteristic of the drug, the moods shifted violently, there was no emotional rudder at all. “Please, don’t let me go, they’ll just throw me out of the hospital because I’m not sick enough to stay. That’s happened before and if I go back where I was I’m finished.”
“You have nowhere to go?”
“No,” she said. She slid against the seat, the pressure on her shoulders seemingly brightening her again. “No, I guess that I’m what you’d call one of those liberated bitches. Here, there, everywhere and nowhere.” Her head rolled and her eyes closed suddenly. He swerved the car, almost panicky himself until he noticed that her breath had become deep, even, regular. The girl was asleep. That was all.
He continued to drive. There was nothing else to do. Sausalito would be all right; he could pick himself up some kind of furnished quarters in Sausalito. A motel was no good at all. It wasn’t a matter of money—there had been plenty of money in that attache case, cash and certified checks, his prey had carried his escape hatch with him at all times—but of a relatively exposed position. Motels were on freeways, they were at cloverleafs, they were wide open and exposed to the major traffic arteries and were at all of the points of convergence. In a furnished room on the other hand, off on a sidestreet, he might be able to buy a little time before they would close in.
Not much of course, but maybe two or three days. Wulff did not think he would need much more than that. All in all he had planned his San Francisco expedition to take no more than a week. Longer than that would be diminishing returns; they would surely get him. No, if he was going to be able to accomplish what he was out to accomplish, a week would be plenty of time. If he did not get them in a week, the odds are he would never get them. He would be dead….
Wulff drove. The wind, battering his face through the open window of the Galaxie, felt good. It enabled him—that and the fatigue drifting through him—to momentarily avoid his biggest problem. The problem was not the dealer who lay back there dead. He was cancelled out and all leads would come to Wulff anyway. No, the problem lay beside him. He glanced at it through peripheral vision and then away. He simply did not know what to do.
In its sleep the problem reached out a hand and touched Wulff delicately on the hip. He felt the pressure, as gentle as it was, all the way through him. It was not a sexual thing at all. It was much more complicated and ominous than that….
“Oh please, Avenger,” the problem said, “do not desert me in my hour of need,” its eyelids fluttering, its mouth smiling in semi-sleep. And Wulff drove and drove through the gathering mists of San Francisco, feeling all of his fibers come to the slow realization that it looked as if he had himself a roommate.
He just couldn’t dump her. If he did it would negate everything that he was trying to do.
His war was for the victims.
II
On a hill twenty miles south of this in the living room of a house framed by glass that looked out upon clear area for almost five miles, a short, heavy man sat alone at a desk crumpling a sheet of paper savagely before he threw it into the wastebasket beside him. He cursed in a dialect which no one had heard him use for a decade and looked out upon the sea, taking for the first time little pleasure in the view. All of a sudden Savero felt very exposed. It was not a view, godammit, he was a target.
Who were they anyway? Who did these New York men think they were, to dump a memo like this on him and then just get out of the way? Did they think he was a fool? Did they think that their Wulff, this lunatic who they had failed to cancel was no longer their responsibility just because he was three thousand miles away? The hell they did. They just did not care. As long as Wulff was off their turf, they didn’t give a shit, that was all. They could even write a taunting memo like this which said between every leering line, go fuck yourself friend.
“Well fuck you, you sons of bitches,” he said to the empty room and went for the phone. Nicholas Savero did not have to put up with this kind of shit. Nicholas Savero had not struggled for all these years to earn a house on a hilltop and then be told by a bunch of schmucks from New York that some raving lunatic had landed in his territory and it was Savero’s job to get rid of him. If there was one thing that he had learned in all these years, and he guessed he had learned several things, it was that you protected your territory for all it was worth but you did not dump your problems outside of it. What you had to settle on your own you settled. That way you expected the same of others within their territories.
And now the code had been broken.
Well fuck that, Savero thought again and put through a long-distance call to New York. The call switched through grids and wires, operators and circuitry, was bounced from a receptionist to another line, shifted over to a connecting link, radiated through the miracle of modern communications through a routing grid which took it sixty miles from there, and finally Savero got his party. “Hello Cippini,” he said without preamble when the man got on, “this is Savero out in San Francisco and I got your fucking statement this morning.”
“Now take it easy,” the man named Cippini said. He had a low, pleasantly modulated voice; he was a good public relations man. That was all he was. Behind him there were other people who sent out memos over Cippini’s signature, and those people, Savero knew, he would never be able to get hold of, but this was at least some satisfaction. Get the man who signed it anyway. “This is all a little more complicated than you might think—”
“It’s a fuck a hell of a lot more complicated!” Savero screamed and then thought of the slight heart irregularity his doctor had noticed at the last visit, nothing serious the doctor had said, but nevertheless watch it. He tried to watch it. “What the hell kind of lunatic are you dumping into my city?” he said more quietly.
“We’re not dumping anyone,” Cippini said. “We’ve had a lot of problems here. The man got away—”
“I know the man got away! I goddam well see that he got away and I want to know how he got away and what the fuck I’m su
pposed to do about it!”
“That’s not going to do anybody any good,” Cippini said pleasantly. “We’re all sorry about this, but we’ve got specialists working on it, specialists who are on their way to the coast at this hour, as a matter of fact, and I’m sure that we’ll have the problem solved. We’re all in this together, Savero, and believe me, they understand that well.”
“Do they understand this?” Savero said. “He already killed one of my distributors!”
There was a dead, flat pause at the other end, then Cippini said quietly, “You know, there’s the question of a tap—”
“Don’t give me any tap bullshit! I take care of my own territory and you take care of yours! If there’s any tap, it’s at your end, asshole. Did you hear me? They killed one of my best men, that fucking ex-cop madman of yours.”
“That’s impossible,” Cippini said haltingly. “We’ve traced his moves and he didn’t even leave New York until late yesterday. He can’t have been over there for more than half a day at the most and we’ve got to assume that he would go to ground—”
“He went to ground all right. He put a hole in my man’s stomach! I protect my men, do you understand that? I don’t know what kind of shit you’re playing with in the East, but here when I work with a man, when I send him out, I’m with that man all the way. I don’t just hide myself and take the money and let them get filled with holes. They hurt my men, they hurt me, you understand that?”
“Are you sure it’s the same man?” Cippini said. His voice, filtered through the continental wire sounded almost unctuous. “Surely there’s no definite evidence; it could be anybody. Don’t tell me that there aren’t certain risks—”
“My man lived,” Severo said flatly. “John lived. He was hurt bad and he was dying when we found him but he bled to death, he wasn’t shocked to death, and he was able to talk. He told us who did it and it was your guy. What do you think of that?”
