by Barry, Mike
“Does it? Does it really?”
“Traffic is the same,” Williams said harshly. “I’m a little closer to the goddamned New York statistics than you are, Wulff, I know what’s going on at street level here. There’s the same amount of shit as before. It gets through, don’t you understand? It always gets through.”
“Are you going to ship me some ordnance?”
“No,” Williams said, “because it doesn’t make any fucking difference. There’s twice as much traffic since the new drug laws were put in, there’s twice as much since you started killing, Wulff. All it means is that the game has become more dangerous and the stakes are higher. It isn’t a picker’s game anymore, it’s scared the weaker people off, so those who are ready to come in and play can do so for greater reward. Nothing you do is going to make any difference at all. Can’t you understand that?”
“You’re a coward, rookie.”
“You’re fucking right I’m a coward. I’m watching my own ass, that’s what I’m doing. It doesn’t mean a bit of difference whether I live or die to the world; it’s going to be the same shit no matter what happens to me, so I’d just better stay alive and hang in the game for the people that matter. I’m not playing anymore, Wulff.
This is the end. It ended in Los Angeles, and I’m not going to go back to it.”
There was a long pause at the other end. Williams could hear the drifting sounds of the juke, could hear clattering and smashing in the background, imagined Wulff huddled there against the panels, the phone clutched very close to him. It would not be hard to move from this mental image to a kind of pity; he could feel pity for Wulff if he pushed it just a little bit further, saw the man as essentially helpless and defeated at a level where defeat left him no rationalizations whatsoever, where, having been in the game up until the end, he could only understand that to play was to be battered, but he would not make that connection. He would not feel sorry for Wulff if he could help it at all, because that too would lead nowhere. It would at worst force pity, and if pity came, he would feel the need to make it up to Wulff somehow, and he did not want to do that. He could not. “All right,” Wulff said finally, “all right, if that’s the way it has to be.”
“Come back,” Williams said. “Give yourself up. I don’t think that they would make it too hard on you. You’ve done a hell of a lot of good work, a valuable service. I don’t even know if they’d want to hold you, if they’d have the heart for a full prosecution. You could cop to something smaller and be out in no time. You’d make bail right away. I guarantee that; I’d help you make bail.”
“Never. I’m never coming back.”
“It won’t get any easier.”
“Nothing gets any easier. But you don’t think I’m going to turn myself over to them, do you? You don’t think that after all I’ve been through I’m going to go into a cell.”
“You can’t change the world, Wulff.”
“You’re a coward, rookie.”
“Somewhere along the way you’ve got to give up.
This is my way; I just don’t want to see anybody hurt anymore. I can’t do any more hurting. And it won’t make any difference.”
“You’re a fool,” Wulff said. “Goddamn you, you’re a fool,” and the music came over, and then he paused again and said, “Maybe you’re not a fool.”
“No way.”
“But I’m not coming back. I’m never going to come back, don’t you understand that? I’ve got to play it out until the end.”
“If you have to.”
“I really wish you’d work with me, though. I’m going in there naked, rookie. I need some submachine guns and some grenades. The grenades would help more, I guess, if you could send a few.”
“No,” Williams said, “it’s all over, Wulff. It’s all over,” he said, and the line at the other end went dead, and for a while he lay there with the phone on his chest looking at the dark and swollen aspect of the ceiling as it seemed to curve down upon him and finally take him, phone still disconnected, to deep and murky sleep.
XIII
Nolk had done everything that he thought he could. Within reason. He had covered the grounds with five men on patrol, stationed another two at the end of the one-way street on which he lived, the only way in which a car could turn in; he had three of them in the house at all times, two of them downstairs, one of them up to serve as a person force. That made ten altogether, which wasn’t the one hundred that he had dreamed about, the twenty-five that he had reasonably anticipated as being a protection force, but after he had started calling around, he began to see how ridiculous that was. Twenty-five men to defend a single household against one crazy man! It was ridiculous. Furthermore, it was exactly the kind of ridiculous thing that could get around; certain people might get the idea that Nolk was afraid of Wulff, pathologically afraid, that was. That would not be good. His own situation was pretty good, bound to get better all the time with so many of his potential competition out of the way, but word that he needed twenty-five men to defend himself would not have been helpful. It was better to just settle for the ten and keep a stiff front. They were expensive enough; it would be tough enough in the aftermath to get ten to keep their mouths shut, let alone two and a half times that number. Fuck it. He would ride with what he had, that was all. Besides, what could Wulff do to him? What could anyone do to him, really? He was sealed in. Tight and behind the barriers, he had the situation under control.
Jennifer didn’t like it, of course. But then, Jennifer did not like anything at all; less and less did she seem to be able to get along with any of the facets of Nolk’s life, and after worrying about it for a while, he no longer gave a damn. He was the only man of all the men he had known who had made, until very late on, a serious attempt to bring his wife along with him and make her a part of all his life, who had not even done much screwing around on her. But all of that was over; that last scene in her bedroom the night that he had gotten the call on Wulff had just about done it. She could go fuck herself, Nolk thought. These men were in here for her own protection, and if she didn’t like it, then she could bloody well pick up and get out, which, as far as he was concerned, would be a break for both of them. Once this situation was resolved, once he had Wulff out of the way and had the meeting in Philadelphia taken care of, he was going to make real changes in the rest of his life. Fifty-eight was not too late to change, to make a new start and have another way at solving the problem, which was what he regarded life itself as, just one goddamned problem. But soluble. He did not have to put up with her anymore.
So he had the house outfitted and the men stationed and Jennifer pretty much under control, or at least out of the way now, and it was just a matter of waiting. He did not think that he would have to wait too long. Wulff would make his move quickly or not at all; that had been the man’s characteristic from the beginning, and now, as the pressure increased, as the evidences of alert became greater, he would become even more anxious to strike before forces could be gathered; there was the likelihood that Wulff would do something really desperate, and when it happened here, when it turned out that Nolk was the man to dispose of him … well, that would increase his prestige accordingly. It would send him to Philadelphia a few months hence with the equivalent of a full house. They might think in the North that the Southern people were a bunch of meatballs and shit-kickers, good only to run moonshine and kick niggers around the plantation, but they would learn differently when Nolk became the man to do the job that they had been unable to do. Wulff had pretty well decimated the North; the South was still there, wasn’t it?
Nolk entertained himself waiting for Wulff by bullshitting with the guards and for kicks watching them beat the shit out of Harris, the man who had gone on detail with Strauss and had made the fantic call of alert. Why Harris had turned up at Nolk’s door the next morning stammering and confused was beyond Nolk; it didn’t seem to make any sense to him, but then again, you never could tell with this hired help. Sometimes in their st
upidity they did dependent childlike things like turning to the man who had hired them to get them out of a tough spot. Actually Harris would not have been in a tough spot at all: Strauss was dead, and Nolk would have been willing to write off the whole thing as a bad investment, that was all. But Harris showing up, still babbling apologies and offering to help out when Wulff attacked, because Harris thought it was his responsibility to do so—that was too much. Too much by far. Nolk tossed him in the basement, and every time he got bored, went downstairs with one of the house men and stood off in a corner while the man beat Harris up a little. Harris whimpered and pleaded, bleeding from many new and old places while he was worked over, and begged Nolk to give him just one more chance, one chance to prove his loyalty, and Nolk laughed and threw in a couple of kicks himself, even though he did not like, as a rule, to get physically involved. That was what you hired people for. Then he would go upstairs with the house man, leaving Harris whimpering down there, and pace around a bit, waiting for Wulff to come. Now and then they would dump some bread and water downstairs so that Harris could keep going. Actually it was quite tense and boring waiting for Wulff to strike, without any real means of controlling the time of his coming, and if it had not been for Harris downstairs to beat up for laughs, it might have been a tough vigil. So Nolk was not ungrateful. In the long run, maybe Harris had done them all a favor by showing up, kept them from getting too nervous. Nolk had Jennifer segregated in one of the bedrooms far away from the screams, so that she couldn’t hear a thing.
It was Jennifer, however, who was making things difficult. She finally got hold of him after he had made another phone call in the bedroom, checking various sources, trying to find out if Wulff had been picked up anywhere in transit (he had not), and said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t like it. Why are all these men in the house?”
“That’s my business, Jennifer,” he said, trying to push past her, get downstairs again, where the action was. “You let me worry about that, and you take care of your own business.”
“Why are you staying home, and why are all these men here? What’s going on?”
“Please,” he said, “don’t ask me questions. If you want to leave the house for a few days, maybe that would be the best thing. You could go to Atlanta—”
“No,” she said. She stood against him, blocking passage in the hallway, and he looked at her, the differences in their height minimized by the heels she was wearing and by the bright flush spreading across her cheeks, which seemed to have brought her to a level of attention that lifted her further. “You’re not going to walk away from this. You’re going to tell me what’s going on.”
Nolk stared at her. She was aging. He had an aging, ugly, tired wife. Furthermore, it was ridiculous. How could something like this be? Who else in the distribution business had a wife who insisted upon participating in his life, had a wife with whom he had to negotiate almost everything that he did? It was unheard of; if the word got around to what degree he was involved with the woman, how close she was to his situation, he would be laughed or assassinated out of the business. It would be even more devastating than Wulff. The thing was, of course, that he should have had a cover occupation like everyone else in the business, a little firm or at least a payroll somewhere where he could go during the days and collect a false salary to keep the taxes at bay. To say nothing of keeping away from his wife. But instead, starting from the time ten years ago when he had fallen into it, he had decided to play it straight, give it his full time, work out of the house, do his negotiations over the phone, and so on. That was stupid. It was even more stupid to think that Jennifer knew nothing of what was going on, even though he had tried to keep as quiet about it as possible. But she would have to know something. Anyone would, granted the situation. Definitely he should have had an outside job of some kind; for one thing, it would have made adultery a hell of a lot easier. As it was, he had to scramble for it, he had to invent appointments and urgent business across town and lie his way out of the house, and the way it worked out, if he could get clear for a couple of hours it was unusual. The separate bedrooms might have been a help, he could have sneaked out during the nights, but he was so damned tired when he went to sleep anyway that it was simply too much of an effort to get up. “Look here,” he said to her now, shaking his head and feeling the old despair, “this is serious business here. Please stay out of the way. You can’t get involved in this.”
“I won’t be pushed away. You’ve got men all over the house, and you won’t tell me anything that’s going on.”
“Look,” Nolk said, taking her by the shoulders, her skin like crumpled paper under his fingers, her body seemingly translucent. He could have peered through her toward the light. “I don’t know if you know this or not, Jennifer, but maybe it’s time that you did know. You see, for a good many years I’ve been dealing in drugs, not taking them, you understand, not trying to hook anyone either, just in the distribution part of it for the market that’s already established, and I seem to have gotten into a complicated situation.”
“I knew that,” she said. “I knew what you’ve been doing. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“So if you knew what I was doing, Jennifer,” Nolk said reasonably, “then why are you objecting to it now? This is all part of the business, don’t you understand? Now and then you get into problems, complications, and there’s a little bit of that now, other interests, you understand, that may want the share of the business that I’ve carefully built up, without having any right to do it. I’ve put my life into this, you understand, don’t you, Jennifer? I’ve got a good piece of myself wrapped up in this, and so do you, because it’s provided a good living—”
“I don’t care about that,” she said. “I don’t care what your business is, don’t you think that I knew that years ago? Anyone could tell that. And I never said anything against it, because if it was something that you wanted to do, well, then you were entitled.”
Downstairs two of the guards were shouting at each other. Apparently one had stumbled over the other while coming into the living room, and the second was in a rage, not only because he had been inadvertently kicked but because the living room was his territory and he took it as an infringement. Nolk let the shouts go on, feeling little shudders of passage through his body. It really was a ridiculous situation, he had to admit that. In certain ways Jennifer had a point. It was not a normal suburban weekday morning. “You son-of-a-bitch!” one of the guards said, and there was the sound of a slap. “They’ll settle it,” Nolk said quickly, taking his wife’s wrist. “Just let them work it out between the two of them; it doesn’t have to concern us at all.”
“It can’t go on this way,” she said. “I was willing to put up with it because, after all, it was your life, you were doing what you wanted to do, and I wouldn’t stand in your way. But when you start bringing men into the house, when they start to carry on in here, when even the house isn’t mine …”
“Oh, come on, Jennifer,” Nolk said, “come on, be reasonable.”
She stamped her foot. He could not believe it; it was a literary expression, but he had never in actuality seen a woman stamp her foot, even the helpless, dim little girls he had bedded, when he had left them in the late evening telling them that it was impossible for him to stay any longer, and no, he could not make arrangements to see them again. “Don’t you tell meto be reasonable,” she said. “This is your business, your disgusting choices, and it was you who brought all these people into the house. I didn’t mind as long as you kept to yourself, but this is my house, too. Remember, I signed the mortgage, I was the one who got the down payment up. I tell you, I don’t have to stand for this!”
Nolk looked at her and thought of murder. He had never murdered anyone in his life, at least face to face; assigned jobs and things like letting the guards kick the shit out of Harris were different, of course. He really was not responsible for things like this. But looking at his wife, it occurred to him that
he could indeed kill her, that, pushed to the edge of patience, he could strangle her in his own hallway and entertain no other feeling than a hope that he could get away with it. “Get out of my way,” he said, and moved her wrist up, pushed her across, and tried to move past her. Downstairs, to the guards, to the basement and Harris, anywhere. But away from her. “Get out of my way,” he said again.
“You can’t do it,” she said. “You can’t just walk away from your problems, you’ve got to face them. I want to talk to you, I’m going to talk to you, and you can’t avoid it.” And she came against him like a net, grappling with him, her arms swinging. She was drawing him in, he could not stand it, she was bringing him in closer and closer, and he could not drag free, and fury seized him, he wrenched away furiously and said, “Goddamnit,” and brought his hand, slow and awful, upon her, her eyes turning solemn, but just at that first satisfying moment when he would have struck her, and everything therefore would have changed, there was a sound of rustling downstairs, and then a dull explosion, and the screaming and chanting of the guards broke the more interior and deadly chant of his own consciousness telling him to kill her, as he broke and ran down the stairs and toward the man who would kill him.
XIV
Wulff had had a difficult trip, but now he was at the end of it, and he simply would have to take his chances. Williams’ turning him down had not been unexpected by any means, but he had had, after all, to have a try; his dedication was complete, and if you were dedicated to a mission, you worked every alternative. Williams had refused, as Wulff had suspected that he would, and that had left him in a hell of a spot; a beat-up Fairlane and a couple of battered pistols were not exactly the equipment that you would want to take into Armageddon. Still, he had struggled with worse and had gotten through. Letting the man named Harris go might have been a bad move, but Wulff had recoiled, finally, at the sight that he had had into the joy that he was beginning to take in murder, and in that spirit he wanted to let at least one sure victim go. It wouldn’t make any difference in his battle; Harris was a pitiable basket case, hired muscle without muscle, but it might give Wulff credit on some abstract balance sheet somewhere, and he had a suspicion that the way things were going, he could use all the credit that he could get. Wulff did not exactly believe in the concept of an afterlife, but he did not reject it either; it seemed to fall into a perilous kind of half-possibility, like really good sex or an absolutely unblemished, angry, incorruptible narcotics squad in a major American city, and granted that it was best to make some kind of preparations, give himself a little credit just in case it should turn out that what he had rejected all along turned out to be true, and there he was dragged up before judgment and called a murderer, crazy too, because he had been trying to come to terms with the international drug trade. Harris had been slobberingly grateful. He had crawled out of the car like a bent, broken little animal, almost licking at the mud of the Interstate on which Wulff had let him go, and as he had raised his eyes, wide and damp, caught in the flickers and reflections from the Fairlane’s dome light, he had said with awesome simplicity, “You wouldn’t put me through all of this to kill me, now, would you? I mean, you’re not just doing this to torture me and you’re going to shoot me just as soon as I think that I’ve been freed.” No, Wulff had said, he was not going to do anything like that; he understood that Harris probably did work for men who would operate in such a fashion, take pleasure, as a matter of fact, in that torment, but he, Wulff, was on the level. Then, in a flare of disgust he had tugged the door closed and left Harris there, his last image of the man being of supplication, the form crouched in the roadway.
