by Barry, Mike
On this Thursday night in late November Cohen had just injected one cc of dynamite shit, feeling the kind rush move in little blotches into all of the crevices of his body, feeling the old gratitude and warmth for what had been given him, when he heard the doorbell ring. That in itself was not surprising; the doorbell rang quite often, and June herself would have to ring to get in, since he had never given her a key to his place. Cohen felt that he had a right to protect his privacy; give her a key and soon she would move into other areas of his life. But the way the bell sounded was unusual. It hit in two sharp bursts, and then, with only a little break, whoever was there pressed it in and left it—one burning, continuous peal, which resounded through the house. Cohen was in the bathroom, bent over the sink, taking the full rush of the jolt, and was able to come away from it only in little stages, limping and hobbling toward the door. Whoever was at the door certainly had no manners, he thought vaguely, but then again, manners had nothing to do with the situation; all that mattered was helping yourself along, getting a little edge. The same kind of edge that the drugs gave him was probably provided by the doorbell for the visitor. What the fuck? Cohen staggered merrily through the living room and down the small hall that led toward the door, thinking about all the peculiar ways that people managed to get out of life what they needed and ignored the rest. Like June and her gifts, like himself and the dealership, with only enough drug action on the fringes to keep a hand in, to mostly guarantee his own supply. That was the primary reason he had gotten into it, come to think of it. He always had his best thoughts in the first damp, clinging rush of the shit; it seemed at these moments as if he had utter insight into every aspect of his life. Of course, the wonderful thoughts and insights would go away, sure as shit, and he would be back where he had been before, but he could always take another jolt, always climb up the mountain again. Climb every mountain, Cohen thought, ford every stream. He lurched to the door and opened it.
A man with a gun was standing in the open space in front of him.
Cohen stood there and looked at the man. He could not believe it. He simply could not believe it. On the other hand, the drugs were a little disorienting, and he was, perhaps, imagining all of this. In Shreveport, Louisiana, no one was coming to his door at night with a gun. This kind of thing would happen in Baton Rouge, and of course it was very common anywhere north of here, but Shreveport was a peaceful town. Cohen had lived a controlled existence. He backed away from the door, moving slowly, on legs that felt insubstantial, away from the door.
The man with the gun came in.
He moved in short, determined strides, the gun leveled at Cohen, and now, in the improvement of light as he came into his house, Cohen could see that he had not imagined it at all, that this first flash had, in fact, been perfectly true, and that this was no joke, this was something real that he was living through. A stranger had come into his house with a gun, and now, even through the dark haze of the drugs, Cohen felt a lurch of inadequacy that moved toward terror. He had his own gun, of course, would be a fool not to have it, but it was buried under a pile of underwear in the second drawer of his bureau and had not, as a matter of fact, been checked for more than a year. He could not remember the last time he had looked at it. For all he knew, it wasn’t even loaded, would malfunction. Helpless, he thought, backing through the hall and into the living room, absolutely helpless, and it wasn’t fair; he was coming down now, he had taken a good rush of fine smack, and there was no reason why it had to be wasted, absolutely wasted because of an intruder. This turned his fear at least momentarily toward anger, which was strengthening. “What do you want?” he said. “I’m going to call the police.”
The man pointed the gun at Cohen and fired. The bullet went by his right ear, no more than by a few inches, impacted into a wall behind, and Cohen felt his legs go on him, felt himself, as if in a dream, pitch toward the floor, hit it face-first, collapse, and run into the floor like water, his body breaking, spreading out. The man was crouched over him, his hand enormous, grasping him by the collar. “You son-of-a-bitch,” the man said, “did you think I was playing games?”
Cohen, looking up into the face, tried to say something, but could not. His throat gathered on him. He hawked, choked deep back in his throat, and began to gag. The man twisted his collar more tightly. “You’re on shit,” the man said with disgust. “You son-of-a-bitch, you’ve just taken a dose.” Cohen felt the man’s hand move across his face; there was a clatter deep in the back of his skull. He fell into the floor, gasping. I’m going to die, he thought, I’m going to die, and I’m not even fifty years old. It had never occurred to him that he could lose his life. He had avoided a violent existence for precisely that reason; other men might get killed messing on the fringes of the drug trade, but not him. Not him. It was just not that important to him. He felt the hand around his collar again, and the man had yanked him upright. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch,” the man said, “you’re going to talk whether you like it or not. You’re not going to get out of this so cheaply. You’re going to talk.“ And he hit him again. Cohen felt channels open and then close in his mind, and he pitched forward against the enormous bulk of the intruder, moving through a long, dark passage, a clinging, wet cunt of oblivion.
VIII
Wulff had had a lively time crossing the border. Up until that time it had been a piece of cake, a stolen car from the Díaz estate winging him free and clear, not a trace of harassment, and driving the long miles toward El Paso, he had coaxed himself into the illusion that the true danger was over. He had been out of the country for weeks; it had really been months, except for Detroit, since he had conducted a large-scale campaign, and it was sensible to believe that, filled with their own problems, the organization and law enforcement alike had forgotten about him, gone on to other matters. There were, after all, so many other problems with which they had to deal; even a Wulff could be only a temporary diversion from their basic mission, which was to promote the distribution and sale of junk. But as he had come up to the border at El Paso it had been with the sudden and astonishing feeling that the wedge of containment was dropping on top of him. There had been a long, long line of cars backed up at the checkpoint, nearly a two-hour wait until he had squeezed the Díaz Oldsmobile up to the guards, and the first thing that they had asked was for him to get out of the car so that they could do a thorough check. That had given Wulff a little thrill of tension, all right. He was not worried about junk being found in the car, there was none, but what he had was the Díaz cache on his person, rammed up and down his legs and thighs, strapped in tightly against his body in tight leather bands, almost ten pounds of good if not entirely pure heroin, and the danger of personal search had to be considered. There was also the possibility that they would have his picture and description at the border; NYPD at any rate must have been laying for him some time now, and one thing balanced against another, it had been with a distinctly uncomfortable feeling that Wulff had gotten out of the car and moved into the small pen area where tourists were held while their cars were checked. His options if they actually decided to search or stop him were quite narrow. He could either submit, in which case he would almost certainly be in a federal prison within an hour, or he could resist, which would probably render him dead, or at least completely outside the law. All in all, there seemed nothing to do except to wait it out and hope for the best.
As it turned out, he had had reasonable luck. The Oldsmobile was clear, and personal search was not in the agents’ mind, at least at that time. They had taken a cursory ID check, which was easy, because Wulff in the past ten months had picked up enough false ID’s to float an entire platoon of enemy infiltrators, and they had done a superficial check of his pockets as he had gotten back into the car, but had not gone beyond that. Obviously they were very nervous but feeling their way. It had only been on the way over the border, then well past it, that it had occurred to Wulff that he might not have been in as much trouble as he had feared while in temporary
detention; for all he knew, enforcement might have been very sympathetic. He was, after all, a one-man Operation Intercept. Still, it was a nervous procedure, and the Díaz kill had left a series of ugly sensations; there was nothing wrong with killing, it was absolutely necessary, it had to be done, and he had long since accepted the necessity, but this kill had been one of the most painful so far; his tolerance level was ebbing, that was for sure. One thing that he did not think he quite had the stomach to do, at least at the time that he had crossed the border, was to come into confrontation again. There was no saying what he would have done if the border guards had come to him after a little while, solemn expressions on their sad, bleak faces, and had said, “Excuse me, Señor, we must detain you to ask further questions.” Would he have gone for the gun in his right pocket, attempted a shooting-and-escape, or rather would he have gone quietly, wearily even, submitting to the pressure of their hands and voices with a sense that underneath all of the struggle, the thing that he had really wanted from the start, what had driven him, was the urge to submit? Had it been weakness, exhaustion, the desire for that submission that had really been the key from the beginning?
Well, there was no way of knowing that; it was not a question, thankfully, with which he would have to deal. At least, not at the Mexican border. The guards had done nothing of the sort; they had checked him through, the drugs had jogged unpleasantly but with authority against his thigh as they had nodded at him and sent him on his way. Operation Intercept be damned; it was all bullshit, everyone knew that. Even when it had been supposed to be in full swing, it had never been more than hit-or-miss. Wulff knew that. In any case, he was out of Mexico now, and he put the Oldsmobile into the long task of the miles, hundreds adding up on the odometer in a dreaming, half-connected state, stopping only for gas, only once pulling over to sleep, and there in a wretched motel in which he had been able to spend only three hours, the sound of dogs shrieking into the darkness knifing into his sleep and sending him on his way. There would not be any more sleep for a long time now. Whatever he had needed he had caught up on in the hotel, but that was behind him, and with it another period of his life.
He headed toward Shreveport. Shreveport would be his first stop. Díaz in his last gasping monologue had laid it all out to him: the names, the places. Cohen in Shreveport, Nolk in Mobile, and Sperber in Raleigh. Three dealers, three exchanges in the South before the long flat drive into Philadelphia. It had been Díaz’s plan—he had, dying, confessed it all—to meet with them one by one on the pretext of putting together their forces and pooling the supplies they had on hand and to kill them, moving on toward the bicentennial city then, with not only the supplies of these three but with a reputation that would stand him in good stead when it came to showdown. It was a risky business, Díaz admitted, but the stakes made the risk worth it, and the four he had set up appointments with were for various reasons at an acceptable level of challenge; they were among the weakest of those who had enough standing in the network to matter at all. Cohen was first, not only geographically but because of all of them, Díaz had said, Cohen was the weakest; he was less of a dealer than a junkie, in fact, the only reason he had gotten into dealing at all was probably to grant himself an assured supply.
So Wulff had picked up the trail. Coming into Shreveport had been like coming into any of the hundred American cities that he had seen or passed in the months of his odyssey; once again he had been overwhelmed by the flattening of America, the gathering of all its cities into one, so that not only difference but any sense of partition had been obliterated. Now it was truly one country, all of it united by highways, loops, cloverleafs, abandoned downtown districts, hamburger stands, and the flat, blank surfaces of the screens of drive-ins coming up hard against the broken horizon; through that corpse where all cells had become one flowed the deadly silvery milk of heroin, which had first killed and was now embalming the corpse in clear frozen strips of hard poison, which yet glinted like something beautiful in the darkness. The vision of what drugs had done to his country was beautiful to Wulff only in the way that total disaster, utter corruption could be, but he did not think of this as slowly he pulled the folds of the tent which was Shreveport aside, looking for the place in which Cohen lived. When he found the man, he was going to kill him.
No question about that. He was, in fact, going to kill them all; he had passed now over any line which separated intention from execution. The Carlin kill in Mexico City had been the start of it, absolute ruthlessness, but the Díaz kill had launched him all the way: now and for the first time Wulff found that he was taking an almost physical pleasure, great chunks of open sensation, from the act of murder. In the beginning it had been revenge; later on, past the first clean, mass kills and long-distance snipings, it had been business, but now it had launched itself into a third stage, and he could see that killing could become an end in itself. It was something that it was possible to enjoy on its own terms, like alcohol or sex, needing no rationalization past the necessity and the feeling it evoked upon discharge.
Of course, he was killing scum; that made it much easier for him and meant that he did not have to deal with the more complicated issues of exactly what it meant to be a man who enjoyed killing. As long as it served the right function, that was sufficient. Still, he had a lot of time on the way to Shreveport to think this over, to decide what he was becoming and whether he liked it, and what it came down to, he guessed, was that if you appointed yourself on a mission of revenge against the worst elements imaginable in the realization that anything you did to them was deserved … well, if you became that, then a little bit of them would have to rub off on you, too. You could fight them only by using their methods, in other words, but so much of these men was the method that they had adopted. There were risks. You had to face that. There was the possibility that you could become something like them. But essentially Wulff wanted to believe that there was a difference, that there was a whole level which separated him and them. If that level were ever obliterated, it would be time to get out.
But in the meantime he could enjoy the killing. Hell, it was one of the few bonuses that his job afforded. He might as well take pleasure out of it; it wouldn’t make much difference either way, and it would keep him functioning.
In Shreveport, by the freeway, in the lair to which he had tracked the man named Cohen, Wulff came in fast, backing the man up the long mouth of the hallway, then found himself in the bright, aseptic spaces of the living room, Cohen backing into a wall, his eyes the largest part of his face, glaring, glaring. He was a short man in his late forties, a little overweight, maybe a hundred and seventy pounds spread over five and a half feet, his breath coming out in uneven little gasps, his hands shaking as he held them in front of his face. Obviously he had just taken a dose; the rush had stained his cheekbones as if a faucet had sprayed blood against dark glass. He backed against the wall until he could go no further, holding his hands poised, tried to say something, failed, tried again. His voice came out in a thin, wailing scream. How could a man like this even be on Díaz’s list as a possible rival? Wulff wondered. But then again, he had gotten to know Díaz pretty well before he had killed him; this was exactly the kind of customer that the man would pick up. Weakness. Díaz loved it; fastened upon it. And in the new cast of the network, with the top echelons gone, scum like this of course would now represent the top. Discouraging, Wulff thought, and gun extended, came on the man.
“Don’t,” Cohen said, “don’t kill me.” Drool came down his chin in uneven little spatters. “I didn’t do anything. I tell you, I didn’t do anything to you.”
Wulff put a shot into the wall above Cohen’s head. The idea had been to shake him up, to convince him with that one shot that he was in serious trouble and he had better talk, but Wulff had not intended the shot to come as close as it did; it just barely missed the man, and Cohen’s face broke into something past fear, absolutely past sensation of any kind, and onto it came a loose, hanging kind of smile. He
must have thought he was dead. “Shit,” Cohen said, “shit.”
“Where’s the stuff?”
“Where’s what stuff?” Cohen said. He turned the smile full on Wulff, a full, curious, beaming smile with much attention on it but little comprehension. His eyes were crazed. “Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cohen said. “You shot and killed me, remember? I’m dead now. But you can’t follow me into the afterlife. That isn’t fucking fair at all.”
“Listen, Cohen …”
“No,” Cohen said with a slow, awful reasonableness. “Fair is fair. You come into my house, you back me up, you scare the shit out of me, and then you start shooting, and finally you kill me, and that’s the end of it, you understand? I’m out of it now.”
“I want—”
“You can’t do a fucking thing to me,” Cohen said. “You’ve killed me, and I’ve died, and I’m not here anymore. You absolutely cannot push a man past a certain point.” He came down against the wall in a slow, clinging drop, his feet extended, back sliding down with a squeaking noise, and fell onto the floor with an astonished expression as his rear collided. “I’m not dead,” he said. “Shit, I’m not dead.”
“Where’s the stuff?”
“If I were dead, I wouldn’t be here still,” Cohen said meditatively. “If there’s some kind of an afterlife, it stands to reason that it wouldn’t be exactly like what we’ve got here. Doesn’t that sound reasonable? Because there would be no point to it at all, unless it was different.” He nodded, flicked a little sweat away from the edge of his nose. “So the afterlife would be different, and if there was no such thing as an afterlife, well, then, I would be in oblivion, wouldn’t I? Instead of being right here. So you didn’t kill me. That was just a wrong guess, a poor matter of opinion.” He looked up at Wulff with an assumed expression of benignity then. “All right,” he said, “what do you want of me?”
