by Barry, Mike
Lazzara kicked the corpse without malice and went on his way. Now he could see the silvery glint of wiring tracking its way on the carpeting. The wiring had been implanted by a quick yet subtle hand, it had been buried in the nap of the carpeting in such a way that it might have escaped a casual glance … but Lazzara was a professional. Now he saw the wiring and he bent over almost languidly, picked it up in his fingers, felt the little circumference and then incuriously, almost mechanically, he began to follow it to see where it led. His mind was almost blank. After the tension of the day, now drained by the knowledge that Wulff was bottled up somewhere in the bowels of the building, trapped in an elevator where they could pick him off or gas him out at leisure … after all of this, Lazzara was not thinking very well at all. There was nothing to think about. There was only the mopping up.
But he followed the wire anyway, running his hands along that silvery glint, following where it would take him into the room and as he tracked it from the far edge of the carpet toward a wall, the wall separating the bathroom something began to register, however dimly. There was an appliance of some sort over in that corner, at least it looked like an appliance at this distance, a squat boxlike little thing holding two objects like eggs, a plunger on the top of it. It looked comically like plumbing. Lazzara found himself giggling; it looked something like a portable toilet holding two little brown turds. Turds that looked like canvas.
Canvas! Suddenly he was moving much more quickly. He dropped the wires almost as if flame had lurched through them although they were cool to the touch and moved at a quick, lumbering pace over to the corner; there he saw the device that he had been looking at and Lazzara reached out a hand; almost instantly however he drew his hand back, trembling at the thought that he had almost touched it. He looked at the device and then Lazzara knew exactly what it was and what the man had been doing in this room and what had been prepared for them. Rage, rage was there of course because of the cunning of the plan and the destructiveness, and it was rage which took him toward the device, his hands extended, trying to smash it; but a second wave hit him on its heels and that wave was called fear. Lazzara realized with terror that he was playing with a live incendiary device which could detonate at any time and tear him into a thousand pieces.
It was a thought of these pieces, of the living flesh of him being exploded throughout the room, the blood and fibers and filaments of nerve circulating in the desperate light, it was this which drove him away from the device in a reflex action even more rapid than that which had taken him toward it. He couldn’t defuse it. He couldn’t even begin. He had a little technical knowledge of explosions, everybody did if you hung around long enough but he didn’t know how the hell to disassemble this thing and certainly not under the time pressure. He might have seconds left, no time in which to patiently work it out, explore the seating of the wires, find out what would work against what inside that plunger to set off the dynamite.
He couldn’t do it. He didn’t have the time. Lazzara scuttled backwards reeling, dizzied made sickened by the thick fumes which were now coming off the device mingling with the odor of death in the room. Abruptly he realized that he too was only one in the long succession of people who had underestimated Wulff, taken him too lightly, not understanding what the man really was or what he was capable of doing. Revulsion, self-hatred mingled with the fear, he turned toward the door of the room and began to scream. He caught a glimpse of himself off-angle in the mirror as he scuttled away and saw himself then for what he was; a fat, middle-aged, awkward man with the fear for self turning his body white, loosening the muscles, saw what he had become and diving toward the door he did not know in that moment if it was merely age which had turned him into this or something harder and more specific, no way of knowing. He had to get out of the room. He had to get to safety. Somehow he would have to warn the others, would have to sound some kind of alert, would have to make sure that at the very least Wulff was killed quickly; no man like this could be permitted to go on alive …
He almost made it. He was halfway through the door, head out, buttocks in, reaching toward the hallway when the detonation hit him as light, a bright orange coming up against the haze of his vision and the light had force, it blew him into the opposite wall … which he did not hit because the wall was no longer there.
Lazzara never heard the sound.
There was nothing with which to hear.
XV
Wulff, stumbling, blinded by smoke and the fumes, staggered through the rubble and into the air. Blindly he had gripped his revolver, the last instinct being that if he was dying he wanted to die with a gun in his hand. The air hit him like a cold sheet though and he felt himself reviving. He was able to walk; if he could walk, he supposed, he could do all of the other things as well and reason would return.
The basement must have had one of those obscure side-exits which luxury hotels have, it had dumped him not at the plaza on the strip, not even on a sidestreet but apparently in some kind of courtyard filled with refuse and as he backed through it, looking for the doorway that would lead him into the street he looked up for the first time and saw the Hotel Paradise coming apart. Halfway up the ten stories, at the site of the explosion, the walls appeared to be buckling, searing apart and through those walls were little flames and gasps of smoke, below this blocks of plaster and stone were falling. He could hear nothing; the detonation, past the first impact, had occurred in a small, soundless area walled off from all expectation or reaction but as he staggered through the doorway and came then into the street, crowds and crowds of people huddled there looking toward the hotel, he heard the sound for the first time. It was not the sound he would have normally associated with an explosion, not a dull, booming roar this, not at all but rather a thin, higher sound like then thousand sheets of paper being crushed in an enormous fist, then crushed and crushed again: the Paradise was on fire.
He stumbled into the enormous mall setting back the hotel from the strip, seeing then in front view what he had wrought. The essential structure of the hotel seemed to be only faintly altered but there was a buckling which was moving down in waves and rivulets, like drops of sweat running down the face of the building and the sweat was fire. The secondary explosion, the dynamite itself feeding off the grenades had probably blown the halls out and the fragments as they fell became firebombs, igniting the building below. The wound was not mortal so far; the hotel might survive. But unless something were done quickly the Paradise was going to go to the ground.
And it did not look like anything was going to be done. Far down the line Wulff could hear sirens, hear the whooping of horns, the familiar baying of the hounds who came into disaster sites but they were too far away and the press of the crowd around the hotel was too large, too mobile to probably permit in the kind of equipment that would be necessary to save it. Wulff was surrounded by people in all states of dress and reaction, some of them obviously just out of the hotel, roused from bed, others in evening dress from the Casino; a large crowd of those having nothing to do with the hotel had begun to swell and fill the courtyard … and still people were streaming out of the doors, most of these escapees in progressively worse condition as they emerged; some of them with blackened faces, women screaming, men trying to support the women or themselves as they stumbled to the air. Wulff felt himself fascinated in the old New York fashion, the old New Yorker’s taste for a disaster which utterly confirms his certainty of inner disintegration and he found himself looking at the scene almost dispassionately, almost as if not he but someone else had been responsible for this and he merely a spectator. He was deep into narcolepsy, he knew that. There was blood on his hands, he had probably scraped himself badly clawing out of the cellar, there was a wound over his eye which was dripping blood jaggedly across his vision and his entire frame felt weightless, distant from what was happening. What the effort of rigging the explosion and getting out of it alive had cost him he did not know yet. He suspected that he had come close to t
he end of his reserves. He had to get out of here. He had to get away from this.
What he had to do, what must be done now was to get to the airport somehow with that locker key and find what it bought him. He suspected that it was going to buy him a great deal, a prize so significant that it would make what he had dragged out of San Francisco look very small … but he just could not will himself to move. He felt himself behind glass, felt himself sliding on the pavement, supported by bodies. “What the fuck is this, friend?” someone said to him and Wulff reared to his feet, the sirens much closer now. He started to move away from there.
But the man who had spoken to him was still at his elbow, holding, detaining, locking into step with him. “What the fuck is this?” the man said again in a more penetrating way and Wulff looked at him; he saw the recognition in the man’s eyes and it rebounded upon him; suddenly he knew who the man was and why the man’s grip on his wrist, tentative at first, had become harder. “It’s you,” the man said, “it’s you, you son-of-a-bitch,” and Wulff recognized the man fully, saw the face of a man he had passed fleeing down the hallway, one of the men of the attack force who had somehow gotten onto the pavement and the fingers were now digging in more tightly to his wrist while with a free hand the man began to fumble in his pockets.
“I’ll be goddamned,” he was saying, “be goddamned,” and Wulff knew what the man meant, what he was saying was that he could hardly trust his luck, the luck of the journeyman who does his job and expects nothing and after thirty years suddenly finds himself confronted on the sidewalk by the Main Chance … and he yanked his wrist, broke the hold in a sidewise gesture, plunging into the man to knock him off balance and calculating the situation only for an instant, Wulff ran. There was nothing to do but run. The crowd offered him protection only if he used it to cover his flight. They would certainly not save him from being shot.
In the midst of the burning, starting to choke now from the smoke, Wulff bulled his way through the crowd, the rising sirens adding impetus to his flight and finally finding an open space he ran. Behind him he could hear the man screaming. He was calling for reinforcements and then he heard a confusion of voices behind him and knew that he had found them.
Wulff ran. It was as if all of his life had coalesced to this one last flight and he thought nothing, knew nothing, only worked to put space between him and the assailants. Two blocks or five from there, he had no way of judging distance or time the Hotel Paradise exploded. The joints around the fifth floor gave out and the massive hotel came in around itself like a terrified virgin being skewered by a rapist, falling within, falling within, and then the burning.
XVI
His flight had no sense or direction for a while; he only knew that space was the answer. He had to put distance between him and the remains of the attack force; there was no question of making a stand and fight with only a revolver. But as his heart began to slam and bounce through his rib cage, as his respiration and pace began to give out Wulff began thinking again, realized that he would never be able to get away on foot. Already he had gone most of the distance along the strip, the avenue was becoming highway, the desert lay before him. He had opened no ground; they were still after him, on foot, shouting instructions to one another and surely by now others had been dispatched to get a car. Once they got a car they would run him to ground. If there was escape for him it would have to be in a car as well and thinking no further, he ran into the middle of the avenue, weaving slightly, traffic screeching around and tore open the door of an idling Pontiac Tempest at curbside, its young driver sitting there, shaking his head to the beat of a radio, looking at two one dollar bills in his hand. He showed the boy his revolver. “Give me the car,” he said.
The boy looked at him. “The transmission is shot and I think the driveshaft is going,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for a diagnosis. Get out.”
“All right,” the boy said. He shrugged and languidly put a foot out of the car, touched the pavement with a toe, then hoisted his frame through. “They’re not going to believe this,” he said.
“Come on, get out of the way.”
“They won’t fucking believe this,” the boy said, handing Wulff the keys with a flourish. He could only have been nineteen or twenty, unshaven, wearing a polo shirt. His eyes showed indications of a three-day bout. “They won’t believe it but I’ll tell them. They took three hundred and ninety-eight dollars out of me and now they’re going to send me out of here on foot.”
“Nothing personal,” Wulff said. He idled the engine. There was a strange clatter somewhere inside there, a miss and a squeal. Fan belt? Camshaft? He put it into gear. The car grudgingly dropped into drive.
“I would’ve given it to you,” the boy said as he moved it away, “you didn’t have to pull a gun on me. Believe me, it’s not worth fifty dollars.”
Wulff shook his head, rolling up the window and pushed the car out of there. The Tempest accelerated unevenly, the engine hammering as it pulled reluctantly to forty and then he had to drop it back quickly at an intersection, a limousine pulling out without stopping; the car lurched down into first gear and stalled. He tried to start it in motion but the starter was blocked; it was necessary to bring it to a complete stop, put the lever into ? and then grind at the starter hopelessly, hearing the solenoid miss and click and then, finally, reluctantly, the car came over again and feathering the gas pedal against another stall he pushed it up to thirty, then thirty-five miles an hour. At forty everything in the car finally began to pull together, bolts soldered, rattles tightened as if the sheer effect of speed had been all that it ever wanted and he got it up to fifty and then sixty in easy stages, Las Vegas beginning to fall away from him. The strip had been thrown up on sand and now the sand was overtaking it once again, two miles off and he was already into desert. He checked the gas gauge which was close to the empty level, decided that like it or not he would have to stop somewhere for a fill, got the car up to sixty-five feeling better all the time, convinced that somehow he had managed to evade them, they had not figured that he would be able to get off from foot so quickly. He even fondled the locker key which along with his revolver he had held onto through all of this desperately and single-minded and wondered whether he could cut back from the desert and get into the airport. Then he risked a checking glance into the rear-view mirror.
They were behind him and growing.
He tried the side-mirror, they were doing the same. There were two Fleetwoods behind him, black, closed-over sedans laying back no more than forty or fifty yards, moving side by side, pacing one another. At any time these cars could have overtaken him; the fact that they had not was probably indication that they were waiting for him to get into the desert, into the open spaces. Once there he would be in a trap of sky burning isolation: they could take him at leisure.
This time he had bought it. Everything that he had done since he left the hotel room had been wrong, he had trapped himself in an elevator, mingled in a crowd filled with the enemy, appropriated a car which did not work, sentenced himself to a desert which would destroy him. Wulff pounded the wheel in rage, feeling his control beginning to break, waves of self-loathing lashing at him but all the time he was working on the car as well, putting the accelerator through the floor, trying to work more speed out of the car. Somehow, he thought, he would get out of this. He had gone so far, he could go a little further, they could not finish him off so easily now. If the desert was a trap it cut two ways because not only they but he was isolated. Things would play themselves out there and finally there would be a conclusion to this and it would be done.
He checked the rear-view again; they were keeping pace. They were not accelerating. They figured, no doubt, that they had him anytime they wanted; they could wait, there was no hurry. They were playing it with patience and calculation but then again these people were not fools. They had been clumsy from beginning to end here, that was true, but now the first-string was coming in.
Feelin
g terribly exposed, feeling like a fly in a bottle, not a man heading into the desert, Wulff drove. After a time he ignored the rear-view mirror and its news. There was just nothing to be done about that now.
XVII
The man in the front seat of the Fleetwood said, “Let’s take him now.”
“Plenty of time,” the driver said. There were only two of them in the car. Behind them the other Fleetwood, carrying four had fallen back, now they had opened up a hundred yards of distance. Protecting the flank.
“I want to get it over with,” the passenger said. He was no more than twenty-five years old and looked as if this was his first assignment. The driver knew that this was not so and that the man next to him had been at this for years but it was no comfort. They were both nervous. The stakes on this one were high and mounting.
“Just a little longer,” said the driver. “We’ve got him in a box. Anytime we want we can take him; it’s best to get the hell way out of town.”
