by Barry, Mike
He moved toward the door. “So you’re making it necessary for us to consider a whole new series of arrangements,” he said, “which we probably should have done a long time ago. But first you’ve got one more chance. We’re letting you handle this one. That shipment gose through and that man is taken care of tonight—both of those conditions—and we’ll forget about this. Any fucking up,” he said flatly, looking at each, one by one in the eye until the men shook like flowers and folded under, “and you’ll all end up like Severo.”
Anthony opened the door and walked out, not closing it. The eight men sat there for a while not looking at one another, each slumped in some personal meditation.
Then, one by one and quietly, they got up and left until the room was now empty, only the sound and shape of Anthony’s words still hanging, like poisoned vapors, in the air.
XIV
Wulff picked up the stuff in mid-afternoon at an obscure little shop downtown. Williams for all his doubts had fantastic leads. From the front it looked like of all things a bookshop, but inside it was pure infantry barracks; and what the old man had in the back was fantastic. He had never seen anything quite like it.
Williams had said that all he could say was it seemed that the San Francisco police used this place to build up their private arsenal. Trade was not restricted to police of course; the fact was that anyone with the price and manners could probably get into a place like this one and do business. Here was one establishment, in short, where the enforcers and the enforced could mingle, cheek by jowl, for exactly the same purposes. The line between the two, of course, was getting thinner all the time.
Wulff knew that this was an increasing phenemonon in the cities; the cops were loading up. They wanted more than the regulation equipment which the cities were issuing them. Walking around the inner cities all day was enough to convince you that a pistol would never be enough. They wanted full riot gear, they wanted a battery of devices, they wanted mace and tear gas and even deadlier stuff, and they wanted to have access to them at all times. These cops’ basements might well look like the back room of this store, in miniature of course.
It was just not enough for them, the regulation gear. How could it be? The cops wanted more, they were arming up. You had to figure that being a cop meant that a lot of people would get your home address sooner or later; most of them would stay away because even in this war there was a code which said that you left a man’s family out of it—but the old codes were breaking down. There was a new breed coming in at the edges which invented their own code or more likely had none at all. They would do absolutely anything to get their share of the power.
So the country, underground, was turning into an arsenal. It might not take the fabled enemy attack at San Francisco to blow this city up, much less the famous earthquake that was supposed to be due at any time at all, next year by the latest. Most likely when the city went up it would be the enforcers, those sworn to protect it from attack who would do the blowing. Imagined attack and then the over-reaction. The basements would empty and the blood would be running fresh and free in the streets.
Wulff hoped very much to be out of town when it happened, but he doubted it. His quest, inevitably, would carry him deep to the heart of the inner cities. That was where the vein terminated, the cities were the carotid of the junk business. It began in little fields in Turkey or Malaga where indolent farmers stroked the ground and stared in emptiness at the sun; it moved then to little ships and planes over great surfaces of water—but always, always like corpuscles tumbling toward the site of an infection, it would have to come into the cities.
The old man gave him everything that he asked for and made suggestions as well. Williams had obviously alerted him; otherwise Wulff wouldn’t have even gotten into the shop, not with that perpetual CLOSED sign banging against the doors. Wulff took grenades, he took tear gas, he took a machine gun and two more pistols. He loaded up like a small platoon.
The owner stood aside and let him take what he wanted. He knew his customers; he did not get between them and their purchases. His eyes were reserved, calm, blank; he did not know what the materiel would be used for and he did not care. Probably he was half a fanatic himself. You had to believe very deeply in this stuff to get into the business. A lot of it was for love.
Wulff paid him twelve hundred dollars in cash. He still had the New York money but the twelve hundred stripped him down pretty well. He knew that he was going to have to go and raise some soon. The one problem he couldn’t face in the life he had now given himself was lack of financing. Stupid that he hadn’t stripped the bodies of the men he had killed. Stupid that he hadn’t frisked Severo down; the little man was the kind who carried twenty or thirty grand on him around the waist, just to convince himself that he was real, that he was alive. But the habit of being a cop stayed with you at least a little while; it was hard to realize that just as the bounty-hunters were closing in on him, so he too must take bounty off his victims.
But then again he had seen plenty of cops strip corpses before the wagon came. For a man on street detail, it could be a pickup of ten percent on his yearly salary. Not steady, nothing to depend on, but like eating on the arm, it was a fringe benefit, every little thing helped.
“Got a car?” the owner said as Wulff stood over the stuff, considering it.
“Yeah,” he said. He had jumped the wires on a beat-up Continental a few blocks away, driven it cautiously over here and parked in front of the store. Stealing cars was a tricky business, but he needed something with the trunk capacity of the Continental to carry the stuff, and maybe the owner would not even miss it.
The owner shrugged, looked at him. “Big job to transport,” he said.
“It beats working for a living.”
“I guess so.” There was an unhealthy pause. Wulff realized that the man was not going to offer him any help transporting. Well, why the hell should he? He sold the stuff; he didn’t offer pickup and delivery service.
“All right,” Wulff said and opened his suitcase. He was able to fit most of the incendiaries in there, but the machine gun, the extra clips would just have to go into the open air, no way about it. “You can keep an eye out when I take this stuff into the street though.”
The owner laughed. He was a younger man than Wulff had at first thought, maybe only in his forties, but the steel-rimmed glasses, the thinning grey hair gave an impression of senescence. Maybe he had gone into the arsenal business because it gave him a feeling of recaptured youth. Who the hell cared? Why worry about it? “Don’t sweat it,” the man said. “You don’t think that anyone’s going to bother one of my customers, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Everybody knows about this store. The police aren’t going to touch any man coming out.”
Wulff guessed so. That stood to reason; the policeman would wind up, likely, questioning another cop and you never knew when positions might be reversed. Of course he might also be questioning a criminal, someone buying for the purpose of perpetrating a felony and so on, but you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs and if you wanted access to a store like this, you could tolerate the other customers. This, Wulff was thinking, in the modern jungle of the cities, was as close as you could get to a true neutral zone. Here, everyone declared truce, if only because it was a refueling stop. He was probably as safe here, he decided, as he had been anywhere since he got off the plane, in what seemed to have been another stage of life altogether.
“All right,” he said. He hoisted the suitcase awkwardly, stumbled to the door of the shop and checking the street quickly, staggered to the Continental, pulled open the trunk which he had left unlocked and tossed the suitcase inside, then went back for the rest of the stuff. The owner looked at him impassively, hands on hips.
“Big doings, eh?” he said.
“Not exactly, no.”
“You got enough stuff there to clean out a brigade.”
“I wasn’t thinking somehow of taking o
ut a brigade.”
The man shrugged as Wulff struggled with the machine gun and clips. “It’s none of my business what you do with them,” he said.
“I didn’t figure it was.”
“I just sell the stuff, that’s all.”
“One thing,” Wulff said, pausing at the door, balancing things uncomfortably. “I’m just curious. Has anybody come in here to make a buy and then turned the merchandise on you when you asked them to pay?”
The owner smiled, a big but somehow impassive grin. It was the most animation he had ever seen on the man. “Oh yes,” he said, “that’s happened. Once. Once or twice it has happened.”
“What did you do then?”
The grin broke open into laughter. “That was all taken care of,” the owner said.
He closed the door in Wulff’s face.
Reconnoitering the street again he went to the Continental, put the rest of the stuff in and closed the back, breathing hard. His first idea had not been a very good one, he decided. He was just going to use the Continental to transport the stuff back to his quarters, empty it out, then leave it back on the street, as close as possible to the point where he had stolen it. But he had not taken into account the weight and heft of the stuff he would be carrying. His best bet then would be to leave it in the car for keeps and drive it down to the Bay tonight, which meant that there was going to be one pissed-off owner of a beaten up, mud-grey Lincoln Continental walking round.
Then again, the owner might be pleased as hell. The book value of this thing was probably twice as much as it was worth. The transmission was gone, the front end suspension completely shot, the car had an alarming wobble at any range over thirty miles an hour. All in all, he supposed, a certain inexperience was showing.
If he was going to go into automobile theft among his other activities, he sure as hell could have stolen something in better shape than this bomb, Wulff supposed.
He got into the car and started the engine. The car came to life reluctantly, he drove it out of there and toward the outskirts of town, back to his room. Just getting out of the inner city made him feel better. San Francisco downtown looked the same as Chicago, as New York, as all of the metropolitan areas he had seen. Past the bright scatter of office buildings, the center business district, there was the grim, grey clutter of the streets where only the victims could live. It looked like Munich must have in 1946, a bombed-out war zone in which everything worthwhile had been stripped by the enemy or smashed up by the occupants in sheer frustration. Garbage sifted in those streets; throughout was an air of total hopelessness and acceptance. In these streets, even in daylight, people either walked quickly looking to neither side or sat aimlessly on crates, leaned against building frontage.
Oh yes, the cities were finished. Wulff could not doubt it. In his ten years in New York, minus two for a little reconnoitering in Saigon, he could see the total devastation of that city. It had gone from a city perilously on the edge of defeat to one which was untenable for all but those shielded from it in that decade. The illness was strongest and most visible in New York because it was the largest of the cities, but New York was only a taste of everyone’s future. The same thing was happening throughout the country. Detroit was already finished. There were midwestern cities which had been literally walled off by factories and expressways; no one went into them outside of these protected zones.
And then there was San Francisco, which by all indications would eat itself up long before the earthquake got it. At the rate this inner city was going, the earthquake would have only the rats and staggering, post-human forms to work on if it did not get down to business almost immediately.
Let the earthquake come, Wulff thought, if this is all that we can put up against it. It would be better by far to have the cleansing fire of nature’s devastation than this, if this was the best that men could do. Nature, even at its most mindless, brought a more purifying form of destruction than man could.
He drove back to his lodgings, hearing the armaments rattling in the trunk, the Continental shifting uneasily in the roadway when he tried to compensate for the swerving. Outside of the rooming house a car was parked, two men seated in the front. Wulff saw them immediately, slowed the car, tensed himself to alertness as he headed for a parking space across the street. It was impossible to live in a constant state of crisis and yet—
And yet the men started firing before Wulff had even stopped the car.
The first bullet fired hastily hit the windshield, the second cracked into the driver’s door in an explosion of glass. Wulff forgot about anything except seeking cover. He dived toward the floorboards of the car, hitting his chin a terrific crack on the dashboard, opening up his palms to ward off some of the impact. The car, still rolling, hit a parked car and cracked halfway through it, stopping with a terrific jolt. Wedged tightly in front of the passenger’s seat, Wulff weathered the impact.
The men were still firing. Bullets hit the car like snow. He could feel glass sifting down around him. Then there was the sound of a door slamming, voices shouting to one another. They were taking no chances. They were coming to get him.
He rolled, twisted, got his gun out. These assassins did not care, obviously, who was on the street, they were going to get this job done quickly at any risks. That made them probably working under orders and it also made them desperate. The driver’s door yanked open. From his angle he got no more than an impression of a body standing there, grey cloth, an extended thing that was a hand with a pistol.
Off-balance Wulff fired into the center of the greyness. The thing in the door fell away and he found himself looking at another man right behind it, this man also holding a gun. As he faced Wulff’s pistol his round face broke into an expression of astonishment and he seemed to be trying to dodge away even as he fired.
The bullet missed Wulff. His luck, if luck it was, continued to hold. He had another word for it though, not luck. He fired at the man’s head. The top of the man’s head came off like a dummy’s and grey tears rolled down the surfaces. The man fell away.
Wulff held his position, waved the gun in front of him. He had seen only two in the car but that did not mean that there could not be a third or even a fourth taking up sentry duty. But nothing more happened. Protecting himself, bringing the gun in heavily against him, he grunted to a seated position in the passenger seat, then slid along toward the wheel and looked out.
The corpses, grotesquely, were piled against one another, almost embracing in the gutter. The black Thunderbird in which they had come was still open, engine running. Quick getaway planned, obviously. These were specialists. He got out of the car, still holding himself and checked out the street.
It appeared empty. Garbage flew in the brisk wind. Windows up and down the street were open or opening but even as Wulff checked them out, heads vanished, the windows slammed closed. This seemed to be a more public-spirited block, however. Even as he stood there, he heard the sirens. Someone had called the police.
Shit, Wulff said, putting the gun away, and measuring the situation. They were absolutely unreasonable. These people would not let him live.
He decided that this was amusing although he had not intended it quite that way.
Two bodies on the street, an idling Thunderbird. If he only had the time he would transfer the stuff from the trunk of the Continental to the Thunderbird; it would be a better car in a crisis situation. Hell, if anyone tried to take him off the road in this Continental he was done for. A bicycle could finish him off. But there was no time at all. The sirens were much closer.
For just an instant, Wulff found himself tempted. It was an unreasonable temptation but it was real. He found himself tempted to stay on the site and let the police take him. What, after all, could they do? There were witnesses around to this shooting who maybe would talk and exonerate Wulff, and in any event, once they got back to New York and got the full details on him, he would be clear. The San Francisco police might even wish him well. He had done m
ore in a day to undercut their criminal element than these same police had done for years.
Oh yes, as the sirens came closer, it was very tempting. For just a moment he could see it all laid out before him. He had a wonderful future. The San Francisco police, would turn him loose eventually and he could go back to New York. Informers on the San Francisco department would tell the New York contacts his every move. He could do the furnished room bit in Manhattan again and he guessed that this time he might last all of three hours. There would be at least ten thousand men with his description and photograph in their wallets and all of them looking for him.
He could try to duck underground all together, of course. In Fargo, North Dakota or Poughkeepsie, New York he might last a week, slowness of communications being what they were.
He could not do it. The temptation was not even real. He was doomed. He was a doomed man. He could not go to the police, he could not go to the criminals, he could not even go underground anymore. There was no underground. He was his underground. For the rest of his life, however long it might be, he would have to live exactly this way, catching sleep on the rebound, catching small pockets of escape which could not possibly last, being driven, driven, driven, until his hopeless war either battered itself out or set the whole world aflame.
He was on his own. No one was going to help him, no one could even if they wanted to. The only man he could trust was three thousand miles away and there was nothing this man could do either. There was a girl some miles from here but she not only could not help him, any kind of involvement was going to get her killed. He had not thought of Tamara since she got into the taxi. He felt a brush of pain and realized, almost with futility, that the girl had reached him. He cared. He cared for her. The ascension to feeling was almost more than he could bear.
Sirens closer and closer, only a block away. In a moment a car would turn the corner, tires screaming, and police would bolt from it. He had to move now or be taken. He could not afford to be taken. He was the Wolf. He had a rendezvous to make.
