by Barry, Mike
“I’m going to leave you alone,” the man said. “I’m going to leave you alone for eternity.” He was a white man; funny that Lincoln had not even noticed that until this moment, so overwhelmed had he been by other terrors, the man had simply been a force, not a color. But of course: of course, he could have known, should have known that when death came to take him it would be wearing a white mask. He licked his lips again. “So kill me you son of a bitch,” he said, “kill me and be done with it, don’t talk about it, just do it.”
“I will do it,” the man said, almost sorrowfully, “I have to, you see. I have no choice. You always have to go back to the beginning and do it over again, that’s what I’ve learned, there are no ends, only beginnings.” What the fuck was he talking about? Then the gun was unslung in the man’s hand like a heavy prick being pulled from the pants of a urinating stranger in an adjoining pew, the fat edge of death coming over his face, and the man said again, “There’s got to be an end to it. But where? Tell me where. I don’t see any end, all that I see is a beginning.” And the sirens were all around him, the sound of the sirens rising and falling, falling and rising, the cops were coming in and the gun came down and the man put the pistol against Lincoln’s ear, tight, and pulled the trigger.
An image of a head exploding like a grapefruit came into Lincoln’s mind at that moment but that head could not possibly have been his, that imploded and devastated brain must have been someone else’s, had to be someone else’s because this was not him, was it? He was already committed to the blackness.
Lincoln fell out of Harlem.
VIII
The formal/informal name the department gave it was the Wulff Squad, the detail of six whose full-time assignment was to run Wulff to ground and bring him alive—or, if necessary, dead—into headquarters for delivery. But in his own mind, Williams had a better name for the squad: just call them the fuckups. He was dealing with a disaster area; he was dealing with a squad that in the good old days would have been working the urinal circuits in Times Square or trying to pick up queers in Greenwich Village. Now, with the new liberalized policies and the tolerance of minorities, the department’s worst were no longer able to work colorful details like this, but on the other hand there was nothing that you could do with them in normal channels. Put the fuckups into patrol cars or even behind the desks at precincts and they’d be screwing around with the public; bring them up on departmental charges and you were risking a nasty stink. Besides, what the hell could the charges be? Incompetence? Psychopathology? It was not like the army; there was no clean article system in which every condition had a label, just stick it on the discharge and pitch them out.
No. No, these men were staying. The commander of the squad, a lieutenant, had gone through a colorful adultery-and-divorce case that had gotten his picture on the front page of one of the tabloids, piling out of a motel room in his underwear, grappling desperately for his gun, which was the one article that a policeman was never supposed to be without, a hint of bare shoulders in the background. He had been shacked up with a prostitute on Route 9 near Peekskill, and his wife through a private detective had traced him. The lieutenant was very bitter about it, claiming that all he was trying to do was to satisfy some sexual urges and practices that his wife, a cold bitch, would not let him. There were a couple of fat patrolmen who had been partners in a car once until they had driven the car, in hot pursuit, clear off the docks and into the Hudson River in search of a fleeing junkie; they had not found the junkie or the stash, but they had succeeded in sinking the car, and that too had been the subject of a humorous story in one of the tabloids with a picture of the patrol car sunk to its roof line, floating on the surfaces of the oily Hudson like an inner tube. There was nothing you could do with them, either. And there was nothing to be done with the slender, unspeaking Puerto Rican patrolman, very delicate in his features and movements, who had been working in drag as a prostitute for the purposes of entrapment, but had apparently become so enthusiastic with one of his prospective customers that he had tried to take him into a hotel, had had to be literally pulled off the John’s body by the pair of surveying cops who somehow got the idea that the Puerto Rican was not only on patrol; he might be an actual transvestite. It was that kind of squad.
There was no order or procedure. Williams came in the first day and heard a long, rambling talk from the lieutenant in the filthy back room of an abandoned precinct house on the West Side. The lieutenant said that he didn’t know exactly why they were there or what the hell they were supposed to do, but this was the job anyway and he had passed around copies of the departmental memorandum on Wulff, the memorandum that Williams had found so surprisingly accurate, considering how little they had had actually to work with, but sloppy in small details and missing out on a lot of the stuff Wulff had pulled along the way. In the memo, Williams was not tied to Wulff specifically, which was very much a benefit. “He’s a dangerous man,” the lieutenant said, “a very dangerous man, he’s out to kill all the junkies and dealers, it seems, but anyone gets in his way he’ll kill them too, he’s a killer, probably psycho,” which was complete bullshit as far as Williams was concerned. But it impressed the Puerto Rican no end, he began to mumble to himself in a louder and louder voice, saying at last that he didn’t want to deal with any goddamned psycho, life was too short to get involved with psychos, and then said nothing else while the ex-partners of the sunken patrol car laughed and belted him around a little bit. “We have to go pretty much on our own on this one,” the lieutenant said. “You see, we’re a squad, we’re the Wulff squad, but we’ve got to split up and act as individuals, we can’t move with one another, we can just spread out all over the city and create a network of intelligence, right? You refer all your findings to me and I’ll coordinate.” The patrolmen turned very sullen at that and asked the lieutenant exactly who the hell he thought he was. You mean to say that they were going to do all the work while the lieutenant sat on his goddamned ass and made reports? That sounded pretty lousy to them (they always spoke in the plural; it was us, not me), why didn’t the lieutenant get off his ass and chase this killer if the department was so interested in getting him, instead of making them setups. The lieutenant said something about policies and procedures, words filtered down from headquarters, the most efficient and viable use of human resources, and so on.
Williams stood with his arms folded and let all of it pass over him. Obviously this was no time to start protesting, and he was at least half-involved in the squad not finding Wulff He was on the fence about it, but he was not by any means committed to his capture. Actually, he did not know how he felt about it at all except to know that he needed his job back to fit together the pieces of his life. If he ever came up against Wulff, man to man, he would probably have a very difficult decision to make. But one look at this squad was a pretty good indication that he would not have to face that problem; these men could not have caught a hooker in a whorehouse. So much for the department’s efficiency and commitment to capture Wulff.
But then again, maybe the deputy commissioner had not been such a fool after all; perhaps he had an insight, that the only kind of squad to put on a problem like Wulff was one that was in itself composed of brigands, fools, fuckups, vigilantes, the dregs of the department whose methodology in its peculiar convolutions would approach that of Wulff himself: set a thief to catch a thief, a dog to catch a dog. Wasn’t Wulff the biggest fuckup of all? That had been the deputy’s point, of course, that Wulff the maverick, the vigilante, the brigand, could be considered as the ultimate rogue cop, and under those circumstances the squad made a good deal of sense. Of course this was looking at things in an abstract, metaphysical fashion, as deputy commissioners far removed from the field were often inclined to do. For Williams the difference between the deputy’s view of things and the squad that he had mustered was that irony that made the universe itself, hundreds of millions of years ago, reluctantly inflate and begin to go about its business.
They split up districts among the city; each taking a section of Manhattan. They had decided to focus on Manhattan on orders from above because this was where Wulff had come from and where all the internal signs indicated he was still operating. If it was the Bronx, Staten Island, or Brooklyn, it would have been impossible anyway, and Queens was unto itself at least ten cities, maybe twenty. You had to start with a modus operandi that contained possibility, and that meant focusing on Manhattan. If he wasn’t in Manhattan, the hell with it. The Puerto Rican got the West Side from the Battery to Ninety-sixth Street, the two patrolmen got the east side the same way, and Williams, of course, got Harlem. All of Harlem to cover. Well, he was black, wasn’t he? so it made a good deal of sense. The lieutenant seemed to be pleased at his intelligent decision, sending the Hispanic to the lower West Side, the whites to the East, the Negro to Harlem. It appeared to compose in his mind one of the few great original techniques evolved in modern police work; suiting the man to the territory. He, the lieutenant, would of course have a special phone number and a code name through which he could be reached at this precinct house during the days and at home at night. He lived with his mother in Staten Island.
All right, Williams had Harlem; he took Harlem. Burrowing through his mind was a crazy, fervid idea anyway; if anyone was going to catch Wulff, he would. These others did not have a chance; any possibility resided solely within Williams. If Wulff was catchable at all, it would be by Williams, and in that sense it didn’t matter where they sent him, because wherever he was sent, there Wulff would be, in a strange, metaphysical connection of some sort, driving them toward one another. He was sent to Harlem, he would go to Harlem. The two patrolmen, mumbling about pension rights, went out of the room turning at the door to curse the lieutenant; the Hispanic signaled for Williams to join him in conversation at the improvised desk that the lieutenant had thrown up out of a set of packing crates. “Listen,” he said in unaccented English, “is this man a killer?”
“Of course he’s a killer,” the lieutenant said with some satisfaction, “haven’t you read the reports?”
“I don’t want to be killed,” the Hispanic said. “I don’t want to deal with any killers. Do you?”
Williams shrugged. Keep it cool, play it down. He had no idea how much any of them here knew about him but it was best to concede nothing, to proceed as if he had no knowledge. The less known the better. “I don’t think we’ll find him,” he said.
“Of course we won’t, with that attitude,” the lieutenant said. He hit the crate hard, causing the slats to tremble. “I don’t want any goddamned defeatism on this squad,” he said.
“I have defeatism,” the Hispanic said, “I have a great defeatism. I do not want to be killed.”
“Forget it,” Williams said. He put a hand delicately on the Puerto Rican’s elbow, trying to draw him out of the room. The man shuddered, little waves of motion cresting throughout his body, and shoved off Williams’s hand violently.
“Don’t touch me,” he said. “I do not like to be touched in this way. Don’t touch me!” he said, his voice breaking up an octave, “I will not tolerate this.”
“All right,” Williams said, “I won’t touch you.” He moved away from the lieutenant. “All of Harlem,” he said, “I’m supposed to go through all of Harlem and find him.”
“You will. Unless you give up on it now.”
“I’m not giving up,” Williams said, “I’m just thinking that’s a lot of territory to cover.”
“Ambition!” the lieutenant screamed. “It’s ambition that made this goddamned department work, that made law enforcement possible. What if they said they couldn’t get Dillinger?”
“I can’t cover the West Side,” the Hispanic said. “Two million people are on the West Side. What am I supposed to do?”
“Enough!” the lieutenant said. “That’s enough of that!” and rose from his seat. Standing, he was six feet eight inches tall, his paunch trembling like a bombsight in front of them, leveling in, aiming at Williams.
Williams, already at the door of the room, said, “Enough, enough, I’ll take Harlem, I’ll take it,” suspended somewhere between insane laughter and rage. But there was no reason for rage: what was the point? why get excited over something like this? It meant nothing at all.
The Hispanic seemed from this aspect to be about to leap on the lieutenant, impale himself upon him in some ecstasy of feeling, but backed away, some shade of disconnection had dropped between them, and the Puerto Rican felt obviously that he could push it no further. “All right,” he said, “all right then, we’ll show you, this will show you! I’ll go out there in Times Square and get knifed to death, that’s what’s going to happen, and it’ll all be on your head!”
Wear a dress and high heels, Williams thought he heard the lieutenant murmur, but could not be sure of this. In any event the lieutenant had subsided behind his desk, all six feet eight of him folded up neatly like a ruler, and Williams got out of there quickly, not even waiting to see what the Hispanic would do next. Outside he found the two patrolmen engaged deep in conversation; they were arguing as to where they were going to go for lunch and who had the better credit with a decent neighborhood place, but they decided that neither of them had any connections at all in this precinct, no one knew them, and this made the discussion become quite heated. Passing them without acknowledgement, Williams was afraid that they might come to blows, and what good would that do? Anyway, he had no time to get involved in a fight between these two. He had ideas.
If you were going to do the job, you might as well do it right. And Williams had an idea, a pretty goddamned good idea of where Wulff had been picking up all of those armaments that he had been using so spectacularly.
There was only one place in New York where a man traveling light could pick up stuff of this caliber quickly. And hadn’t it been Williams himself who had made the referral? That made him responsible in a way that was a grim way to look at it, but he supposed that he had more at issue than he was willing to admit when he had come into the Wulff, the fuckup, Squad.
Williams went uptown to see Father Justice at the Church of the Brotherhood.
IX
Now the war had started again, but the war was working only in little bits and pieces, it did not have the grand sweep, the devastating overview that the earlier campaigns had had. Then Wulff had been working at the top, blowing up estates, smashing dealers and top distributors. He’d had the feeling that he was moving tentacles from top to bottom, squeezing the lifeblood out of the trade, and it had been good, it had been effective; no one could ever talk away what the campaign had meant to the organization. But this was different, now he had come down to the bottom again, was mucking around in the sewers, catching one by one the vermin that ripped out of that excrescence, and it was not the same; it was piecework instead of a grand overview, a sense of overriding control and majesty that he had had at times during the beginning of the campaign, even toward the middle. Now it was just wearying, plodding work.
Still, he had the shooting gallery in Harlem burned out and he had the Royal Lounge. The Royal Lounge: three hundred injuries, the whole, huge drop joint and trafficking center1 burned out in that one, lunging explosion; then, waiting across the street for the first bodies to come hurtling out, the flames, the explosion, the pain, the sound of sirens, and then getting across the street in the middle of that havoc to confront the dealer on the street, extending the confrontation too long, perhaps, in the middle of that chaos, letting the flames and enforcers get too near him. But he could not resist that opportunity, the opportunity to see the enemy whole, to have him at his mercy. And at the end the killing had been less one of vengeance, vengeance being long past him, but one of simple release, the man’s eyes impacting into his skull, the groaning skull imploding within itself and then quickly, quickly, the flight downtown, on foot for several blocks and then by taxi. No one was going to touch him. The explosion had drawn attention from two square miles of houses and
police, even a fleeing white man would not attract much attention in Harlem on a night like this. At last, at 110th Street, he had slowed, taken a cab, gone back to his room.
It occurred to him that up until this last New York siege he had not specifically been acting against the law; he had been acting outside of it, dealing with criminals, many of whom laughed at the law, administering to them his own justice, not lashing out against authority or against the uninvolved, but delivering his message of justice to those who had needed that message for a long time but could not be touched by normal processes because the framework of social retaliation had broken down. It had been that way in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York the first time, Havana, Lima, and Los Angeles. None of those who had felt his vengeance would have been entitled to the protection of the law in a state where the law worked. But New York was different; on this second go-around he had to admit that for the first time he was going up against the authorities themselves; bombing the lounge and gathering ordnance for further attacks put him at poles with the enforcers, and the enforcers if they found him would be merciless now. They would have to be. He had jeopardized their own position.
So he was acting against the law, he vas a lawbreaker who would be dealt with now as mercilessly as any junkie under the new drug program. And yet, back in his room, the door secured, the ordnance neatly packed in a suitcase near him, Wulff found it impossible to feel any sense of guilt or regret at this. It had been building for a long time, this last, great confrontation. He had known every step of the way that there would be a time, finally, when he would be placed in open opposition to the enforcers, and in a way he welcomed it. The lines were clearly drawn now; there would be no equivocation. He would be in contest against all of them: not only the dealers and distributors, but also the enforcers; not only against the inhabitants of the sewer, but also against those who were supposed to keep the lid on tight. All of them. He would be taking on the world.
