by Barry, Mike
So why not just let her sleep? He was tempted. Whatever happened would happen outside of these rooms, and if he was clever enough, the two hit men outside would not even know from where he had emerged. The girl was probably safe here, as long as she kept under cover. Why not simply go on his way, do what we had to do? If he came back she would see him in good time and if he didn’t she probably wouldn’t even miss him. That was the way they were.
He couldn’t do it. He admitted this to himself wryly. He was willing to face the fact: he was involved with this girl at least to the degree that he wanted to say goodbye to her, let her know that he was going. He couldn’t just walk out on her with the small but real chance that he would never see her again, and with her unwarned.
Not half a day into San Francisco and he was more involved than he had been with anyone in months. Not since the day he had seen the girl named Marie Calvante in that furnished room had he been involved with anyone. He had dealings with the rookie cop, Williams, who had been on patrol with him that night and had offered to help Wulff any way he could, but Williams did not really count. If he ever got in touch with the man and he suspected that he would it would be strictly business. That was all. He would be getting in touch with Williams because he needed something out of the man. Whereas this was different. There was nothing this girl could do for him. Anything that she could do would lead only to disaster. If nothing else, even if all of his luck had run out, Wulff still had his instincts. His instincts told him that there was no future here at all.
Who needed a future? He had all the past that he could take. He reached out and touched her again, in the sensitive part in the small of the back. She stirred in the deep sleep, seemed to revolve to the finger-point, fluttered her eyes again. “Tamara,” Wulff said, “please get up.”
She rolled toward him, her eyes still closed. “I don’t want to get up,” she said.
“You can go back to sleep in just a minute.”
“I don’t want to sleep either.” She pivoted on her back, opened her arms. “Do you want to hold me?” she said. “I want to hold you, Avenger.”
“Not now.”
“Can’t I hold you, Avenger? I’ve wanted to hold you for so long. You can do anything to me you want.” Her eyes opened then, slightly and suddenly, her mouth poised into a smile more open than he had ever seen, her breasts straining against her sweater. She was very pretty. He should have seen that all along. How had he not been able to see it? Tamara was a very attractive girl.
“Come,” she said, “come here now.” She put a hand against his lips. “It’s all right,” she said, “it’s all right. I don’t mind. I want you.”
“No,” he said, feeling the gentle pressure of her finger, and with that pressure it was like moving back into an abcess of memory he had deserted a long time ago, thin tubes of sensation opened within him and he felt the stirrings of old, grey liquids which slowly moved through him. And more insistent than all of this was a sensation of tenderness, and it was this, more than anything else, which stopped him from what he otherwise might have been tempted to do. Not the men staked out in the car, not the attache case and its thousand horrid reasons why he had come to San Francisco—he could have dealt with any of these; he might even have been able to deal with the memory of Marie Calvante who was, after all, and he could now admit this, dead.
But he could not deal with the tenderness. Because a dead man could not, would not, must not feel tenderness and Wulff had worked himself into a territory now where the only way he could operate at all was if he calculated himself to be dead. A dead man could exact penalties but he could not be destroyed himself. A dead man knew the darkness and there was no greater darkness into which he could be dragged. Only the living felt fear, only the living would be able to calculate the odds against him and the furious quest of revenge that he had set himself upon in New York months before. He would not join them. If tenderness would vault himself into the land of the living he could not afford it.
Later on he might be able to deal with the two of them together. The ability to feel and the ability to go on and do the job that must be done. But not now. He was not ready. It was as simple as all that. It was too early.
He pressed a hand against the bed and came away from her, gently, but so quickly that she must have felt it only as a kind of ferocity. “No,” he said, “no, Tamara.”
She caught the force in his voice and something seemed to collapse within her. “All right,” she said. “All right. See if I care, Avenger.”
“I have to go now,” he said. “I may be back, I may not. But I wanted to tell you that I was going.”
“All right.”
“You may hear some shooting and some excitement downstairs. There are two men sitting in a car waiting for me and they’re going to have bad luck and find me. But nothing will happen to you if you just stay up here.”
She nodded solemnly. “All right,” she said.
“Stay away from the windows,” he said. “Under any circumstances, don’t go to the window, don’t look down, don’t look out, don’t draw attention to yourself. If police come later, stay inside, don’t get involved in the crowds and if by any chance they come up here to check you out, you’re staying here alone.”
“That won’t last too long Avenger,” she said. “The landlord saw us, we were together—”
“We can worry about that some other time,” Wulff said. “Hell, that’s a long way off, there may well be no police and there probably won’t be any checking out of the buildings at all. I don’t see why there should be. But if it gets to that point, you can always say that I helped you into the room and then took off and you have no idea at all whom I am.”
“That happens to be absolutely true,” she said. She twisted on the bed. “You know, if this keeps up, I’m not going to want to stay here at all. I’m going to want to come out there with you.”
“That’s impossible. That’s absolutely impossible; that’s the one thing you must not do.”
She looked at him her eyes deep and penetrating. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said.
He nodded. “Yes, it’s bad,” he said.
“I knew it would be. Does it have to do with your killing John?”
“Maybe,” he said, “probably. Everything ties together pretty quickly out here I’ve noticed.”
“I’m glad you killed him,” she said, “and I’m not afraid of you. I should have been frightened when I saw you kill him but I wasn’t. I wanted to go with you. I know he would have killed you if you hadn’t killed him.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re a serious man,” Tamara said “you’re a very serious man.”
“That I am.”
“All right,” she said. “Will I see you again?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Getting past those men is just part of it. I have to get somewhere from them.”
“You don’t want to get past them at all. You’re going to kill them, aren’t you?”
“It’s possible,” Wulff said. He shrugged and stood. “Anything’s possible.”
“I think you’re a good man,” she said, “I really do. I mean that. I don’t even know who you are and I may never know, but you’re a good man.”
“All right,” he said, “that does help.” Strangely he meant it, it really did help. He stood by the door, reached inside his jacket in that characteristic gesture, checked the presence of the point thirty-eight. All ready. He gave the attache case a sidelong glance, decided not to bother with it. It might give him some minimal bulletproofing if it got to that but it would also encumber him. And he did not, whatever happened, want it falling into the hands of these others.
He pointed at the case. “Take care of it,” he said. “Put it under the bed or something.”
“All right. I won’t even look at it.” She came to the side of the bed, sat with some effort, shaking her head, leaning her chin then on a hand. “I don’t feel as good as I thought I did lying dow
n,” she said.
“You’ll be all right. You’ve come back a long way.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be all right again.”
“Well,” Wulff said, “that makes two of us then, doesn’t it?”
Standing by the door he looked at her for just an instant more. If he wanted he could stride over there and kiss her; he even knew that he had a hold on himself now and the kiss would mean nothing. It would just be a passionless, affectionate goodbye between two people who had known one another. But although the impulse hung like a little balloon in the air, so near that he could have reached to grasp it he let it float by. Then he punctured it. Then he nodded to her once, abruptly, almost formally, and ducked his way out the door, closing it firmly to hear the lock click.
And then, carefully blanking his mind so that he could turn into a killing machine, he went out into the street to cut his own little slice of destiny.
IV
Trotto touched the other man in the ribs from behind the wheel and said quietly, “I think he’s coming out.”
The other man who Trotto knew only as Ferguson grunted and without turning said, “Good. Do we hit him now or wait thirty seconds?”
That was Ferguson; a good practical man. Not much imagination but a performer all the way. Give Severo this much: he had taste in personnel, and when Trotto asked for a man Severo got him a dependable one. Nevertheless Trotto felt a little thump of unease. It wasn’t that simple and never had been. If it was just a matter of knocking the man to the pavement and bailing out, Trotto could have done it himself. The trouble was that there was just almost no way you could teach the Fergusons that they lived in an enormously complicated world.
“We wait,” Trotto said, holding the wheel loosely and reaching for the ignition. “We see where he goes.”
“Why not hit him and be done with it?”
“Because you can’t hit a man in broad daylight even on a sidestreet without taking risks,” Trotto said irritably. “We’re not here to take risks at all, just to get a job done. Besides,” he added, “let’s let him get a little closer in. We want to make sure that he’s our man and not some poor fool who looks like him.”
“I don’t know,” Ferguson said unhappily fondling the gun which was exposed at his hip, “Back in the East we used to hit them in broad daylight on streets which had ten times the traffic this one does. What’s the difference? If you got a good silencer and you know how to get away through local traffic it’s better just to do the job, not sweat it.”
“That’s the difference between here and your East,” said Trotto without humor. “Differing lifestyles, you know?”
Their man came down the street casually, showing no indication that he knew he was being cased. A big bastard, just like the reports had said. Shit, Trotto had pictures but the pictures somehow had given no indication of the bulk of the man. Six four, that was about all, six four wasn’t so sensational in a world where your average professional basketball player went six-nine, two-seventy or so, but this guy was massive. It had something to do with his being constructed low to the ground so that everything seemed to compress purposefully in his center. Yet for all of that he moved quite swiftly and gracefully, his eyes alert, Trotto knew, to every indication in the scenery. Hell, he had picked up the Fleetwood and its two passengers a long time ago. Those eyes, those New York cop’s eyes missed nothing at all. But the guy was good, Trotto had to admit, he could see and he could take in, but he could do all of these in a way so offhanded that you might think, if you were casual, that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
Trotto decided that he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. This guy, whoever the hell he was, was no clown; he had left a short brilliant trail in the East which had left them in panic and worse yet they had let him get away. They had not even cleaned up their own mess but had dumped it on Severo. And now he was walking toward them, walking right toward the Fleetwood, those casual eyes, sweeping right and left seemingly not noticing anything, their quarry was coming right toward them, just striding along and by mother of God they were the prey:
“Watch out!” Trotto screamed, seeing all of it in an second, lunging for his own gun, trying to alert Ferguson, “for Christ’s sake watch it!” trying to do everything in one motion, fire the gun, start the car, move the car, galvanize Ferguson, protect himself, and although his reflexes and coordination were as good as they possibly could be for a man of his age, Trotto could see from some dead calm center of all of this that it was too late. It was not going to work. The second was crucial; this guy worked on seconds just as Trotto did and he had the drop on them.
There was a spang! which came so quickly that it was hard to coordinate it with the revolver that had appeared in the man’s hand. The windshield before Ferguson opened up like a flower and Ferguson fell toward Trotto, a strange, discombobulated look on his face. “Holy shit,” Ferguson said his face sprouting blood, and he collapsed against Trotto’s shoulder groaning. Trotto shoved him away, wrestling for his revolver but Ferguson’s collapse probably broke open what might have been his one good chance to get a shot at the bastard. Trotto could not get to his gun. It caught inside his clothing.
In the same instant he knew he was dead. Holy shit, he muttered, echoing Ferguson and waited for the shot that would split his brains open and kill him. In one way or the other he guessed he had been looking for that shot for twenty-six years. No guy got into this kind of business, Trotto understood in a sudden flare of insight, unless a good part of him wanted that shot. But he was a professional. He was no dumb hit guy like Ferguson, waiting to have his brains exploded in a final gesture of dumbness. If he had lost he could at least lose with some dignity. He drew himself up behind the wheel of the Fleetwood, no longer struggling for the gun. Let it be this way then.
All of this had taken no more than five seconds. Things speeded up incredibly under the perception of death. But then, when the carpet of death had been yanked from under him and to his surprise Trotto saw that he was still alive, everything slowed down. Now it was as if time was a chain that was slowly expanding, bubbling under water. In slow motion he saw Ferguson roll to his lap, oozing blood from his mouth and roll across his knee to the floor; in slow motion he saw the little spurts and jets of blood that marked Ferguson’s trail. Then the guy, holding the revolver was standing by the open driver’s-side window. Stupid. Stupid again. He had had it rolled down all the time during the reconnoiter.
Couldn’t he have anticipated something like this? Why hadn’t he rolled it up? Stupid, Trotto thought, stupid.
The guy held the gun to Trotto’s head. No one was watching. A couple of college kids far down the block were squatting in an alleyway passing one another a joint. The anticipation of death had made Trotto far-sighted. He felt the gun tickle his temple. “Are you going to cooperate?” the big guy said. The gun was cold and steady. Trotto could feel it, wedging a point all the way toward his brains.
“Yes,” he said. What else was there to say? When you came right up against it you followed the orders of the man with the gun if you wanted to live. Ten minutes ago Trotto would not have believed it but yes, he wanted to live very badly. Twenty-six years old. Severo or no Severo, he wanted to go on living. Outside of this world Severo was not going to protect him. “Yes, I’ll cooperate.”
“Reach in your pocket,” the man said, “reach inside carefully and hand me your gun, barrel first. Try anything funny and your brains will be in that pocket along with the gun. You hear me?”
“This guy is dead,” Trotto said, inclining his head toward Ferguson. Funny the things you found yourself saying when you were under pressure like this. Still the discovery was new. Trotto had killed a few but he had never had to sit beside a dead man. The hits had been at far range and only once in close but he had immediately left the room. The thing was, he guessed, that he just had no stomach for it.
“I know he’s dead,” the guy said. Wulff, that was his name, Burt Wulff. Now
it all came back to Trotto. They had had information on him and everything. They had had the drop on him all the way and it should have been a routine hit, so what the hell happened? Was it possible that it wasn’t New York’s fault at all; that they had just gone up against a guy they couldn’t handle? “Hand me the gun,” the guy said quietly. “Hand it over now.”
Slowly, Trotto dug inside his clothing. No time to try anything now. He wouldn’t think of it. If you’re a professional, you know when you’re beaten, it was as simple as that. You accept challenges if they are possible but you don’t break against rock. This guy was rock. He was out of Trotto’s class. He was willing to admit it. The hell with it. Beaten was beaten.
He handed the gun, barrel first to the man outside. The man looked at the gun, looked at Ferguson, cracked open the gun and cleaned out the chambers. He dropped the bullets out onto the sidewalk as if they were pellets of candy.
“Now what?” Trotto said.
“I’m thinking,” the guy said. He looked at Trotto intently, motioned. “Unlock the back door,” he said.
Trotto twisted around slowly, opened it. The guy held the gun on him and got into the back seat. He closed the door with a sold thunk, locked it and seemed to lean forward pressing the barrel into Trotto’s neck.
“This is no good,” Trotto said. “People will see. You can’t get away with this.”
“Leave that to me,” this Wulff said. “Don’t worry about my welfare. I make out. Start driving.”
“All right,” Trotto said. He hit the ignition, something he should have done five minutes ago, of course. Too late, too late for all false chances. The car started with a little whine. 1971 Fleetwood, full power gear. No front seat/rear seat partition, the only option missing but otherwise the works. It didn’t seemed to have stopped Ferguson from dying in it, unfortunately.
