Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

by Barry, Mike

  XIX

  Williams said, “This won’t do. Pull yourself together.” The advice seemed unnecessary. Wulff was already assembling the various parts of himself, control flowing into him like ice, beginning in the dark chambers of the heart, then carried by the blood through his system. He would be all right. It was the other one, the man in uniform on the floor who Williams was worried about; the man appeared to be in complex shock, gibbering, rolling, grappling with his ankles, humping the floor as if it were a woman, then subsiding to lie there. He belched, a thin stream of fluid coming from his mouth. Williams looked at the man with revulsion and then at Wulff. “Well,” he said, “well, it’s been a while.”

  “Yeah,” Wulff said, “it’s been a while all right.” After the maniacal fit of laughter, his control seemed to have returned absolutely; he seemed almost nonchalant, completely unaffected. “I should kill him,” he said. “All I want to do is kill him.”

  “Killing’s against the law. There are very stringent rules against that, Wulff.”

  “For human beings,” Wulff said, staring meditatively, “but this is in a different category.” He looked up at Williams. “He killed her, you know. I’m sure of it.”

  “It’s too late for that now. She’s dead and he’s not going to be killing anyone any more.”

  “I don’t know,” Wulff said. The lieutenant revolved, lay sighing on his back, blank eyes staring at the ceiling. “There’s no saying; he might be doing a lot of things. You can’t close the books on a human being until he’s dead.”

  Williams said, “It won’t work, Wulff.” It occurred to him for the first time that he was unarmed. Wulff held the pistol, moving it between Williams and the man on the floor. Fascinating, Williams thought, fascinating that it should come down to this; that Wulff should wind up being dangerous to him. But he guessed he was. He concentrated on keeping his voice flat and level. “Let’s go, Wulff,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go upstairs.”

  Wulff was still looking at the lieutenant. “I can’t do that,” he said, “I just can’t do it, you see. They’ll arrest me.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You know they’ll arrest me, David,” Wulff said. His voice was low, patient. Williams had never heard him so calm. “And then what will it come down to? Everything’s going down the drain, it will be for nothing. That’s not right. You’ve got to admit that that isn’t right, David.”

  “It can’t go on,” Williams said. The basement was very quiet. He had thought that behind him they might be throwing in reinforcements, a few daring TPF coming under his lead. But police, generally speaking, were more clever than that. Why bother? the thinking was upstairs. If Williams was able to bring him out, save them the trouble, so much the better; he would have taken the load off them. If he failed, if Wulff added one more corpse to his cycle, then that would make him a cop-killer and compound the case. Either way they figured they could not lose. They had him under siege. One thing was quite clear: Wulff was not going to get out of here alive. Under no conditions would they let him, they had him ringed in. So they had all the time in the world. They could wait.

  “I’ve got to kill him,” Wulff said again, looking at the lieutenant. The lieutenant, it seemed, had fainted; his respiration was even, his eyes closed. One way or the other now he was out of it. “If I don’t kill him it’s ridiculous. Everything goes down the drain; it’s for nothing, all of it.” He turned toward the body on the floor, leveling the pistol. “He killed my girl,” he said. “He started off everything.”

  “They’ll deal with that.”

  “No they won’t. They won’t deal with anything.” But Wulff did not shoot the man. That was the interesting thing; he did not shoot him. Some fine strand of reluctance seemed to have looped his neck, he shrugged, twitched, looked uncomfortable. Williams said, “Give me the gun, man. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I can’t do that. Now you know I can’t do that; if I give you the gun you’ll just take me upstairs and walk me into that net. And then what?”

  “That’s right, Wulff,” Williams said, “I’ll take you upstairs and turn you over.”

  “I’ll never make it through there alive.”

  “Wrong, Wulff,” Williams said quietly, “dead wrong, wrong, you’ll make it through there alive. They want you in custody, they want to take you in, and I don’t think that it’s going to be that bad. You see, you’re something of a hero. They don’t shoot heroes.”

  “They crucify them.”

  “No,” Williams said again. Strange, his relationship with Wulff from the beginning had been so equivocal, so uncertain; who was the leader, who the follower? Who had created, who had enacted? These questions had torn around and through him to no conclusion, no conclusion whatsoever. But now Williams thought that he saw the answer coming finally as if glimpsed after a long, gasping crawl through high ground to the top of a mountain, the view showing only waste. He was stronger because he was inside. From the inside, no matter how corrupt it was, came strength. He stretched out his hand. “Give it to me,” he said. “You want it to be over, Wulff. You want it to be over just as bad as they do, as I do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  Wulff looked at the crumpled thing on the floor, the flanks of it heaving. “And that?” he said, “what about that?”

  “They’ll take care of him.”

  “Like they’ve taken care of everything else?”

  “They’ll settle with him. He won’t get away with it. If he did it I’ll guarantee that he pays. Even,” Williams said, “even if I have to do it myself.”

  Wulff stood there. The moment extended, reshaped itself, curved back in like a long, floating scarf drifting in wind. Outside it was still very quiet. They were waiting. They would let Williams settle it out. They had conferred and as always they had let the black man do their job. Muck around with the shitwork. Clean up the world.

  “You know you want it to be over, Wulff,” Williams said softly again. “They’re all dead. Calabrese, Marasco, the Nazi in Peru, all of them. You did what you had to do. You’ve done your job. Now you can rest.”

  “It’s always going to be the same.”

  “But it’s a little different. Every time around it’s a little different. Hell, man, you can’t clean up the world, not in one shot. You tried. You tried.”

  “That’s for sure,” Wulff said, “I tried.” He extended the pistol, butt end first, and Williams reached forward, touched it delicately, feeling a hint of resistance from Wulff’s fingers, then slowly pulled. The pistol came into his hand. He touched it, gathered it, put it in his pocket. Wulff looked at him then and seemed to smile.

  “You forgot the grenade,” he said and took something gray and round from his jacket pocket, gave it to Williams. Williams felt it like an apple in his hand, held the place where the pin was locked in securely, put it carefully into his pants pocket. The lieutenant kicked once on the floor.

  “All right,” Williams said, “let’s go.”

  “And leave him here?”

  “I don’t know where else to leave him. I don’t know any other place, do you, Wulff?”

  “No,” Wulff said. “I don’t.” He moved past Williams, went to the open door of the interrogation room and moved out into the hall. Williams came behind him and then they were in the hall. Wulff turned and Williams could see a sudden light kindled in his eyes, a trace of humor perhaps, something that he had not seen there before. Wulff extended a hand, touched Williams on the wrist and then seemed to wink at him.

  “You’re right on one thing,” he said. “You hit the nail on the head one way, friend. You can’t imagine how I want it to be over.”

  They headed upstairs.

  EPILOGUE

  Williams had a dream. In that dream someone had attacked him during the night and, just like Marie Calabrese, had overloaded his system with junk. Now his body had expanded to fit the proportions of the planet; another astronomical body, he drifted within the solar s
ystem, gross, distended, seeing the other planets filtered through their surrounding haze, drifting in their orbits around him. He was a million miles in circumference, revolving around a sun that looked like a light bulb, the light burning hard into his eyes, and even though he was impossibly huge, every inch of it was built for pain, and he writhed in the darkness.

  He had been overloaded with junk and now he was a world, no longer a man but a specimen, a huge artifact drifting in the solar dust, trapped there, his movements controlled by gravity and by the bombardment of the Van Allen belt, no sense to him, no movement. Someday he would be entwined in ropes and brought like an artifact, a beached whale, to be examined by aliens in some museum. Now he thrashed in orbit in impossible pain and the screams began. He was no longer human, but he had retained all the human capacity for pain; he had the feeling but not the possibility of being human, and this was hell, it was as close to hell as he could come. He screamed and the scream broke him to the surface of what he dreamed to be his condition; he was lying on the floor of a room, a needle in his arm, junk flowing like minerals through his system and as he looked upward he saw the faces of those who had overloaded him, and there they all were, there they were: Calabrese, the two guards, Tamara, Wulff.

  He woke up bellowing, shouting, rattling in the sheets, and his wife was over him then, her hands on his body pressing him back, cool from her fingertips, threads of cold pulsing into him, and after a while he was able to lay on the sheets without movement, the quivering slowly working within him like the sea. He shook his head, coughed, then sat up slowly in the darkness, her hands still on him. He put on the lamp. “It’s all right,” she said finally, “it’s all right.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bad dream?”

  “I’ve had better ones.”

  “It’s going to be all right. It’s all over now and you can rest.”

  “That’s what I told Wulff,” he said. “That’s what I said to him, that it was all over. That’s how I got him out of there. But I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t think that anything’s over.”

  “It has nothing to do with you any more.”

  The dream had begun to recede; already the outlines, like some great animal dissolving in a swamp, were beginning to merge into the background of the night. In ten minutes he would have forgotten all but the feeling of it, but that would stay, that would stay a long time. “In Los Angeles,” he said, “we saw that it wouldn’t work, the two of us couldn’t work together, so I headed back East but I got kidnapped. I got kidnapped by two men who worked for Calabrese, and I was held in Chicago and Miami for a week.” It was the first time he had told her any of this. Before then he had said that that month would have to be shut out of their lives if they were to live again.

  “All right,” she said, “it’s over now.”

  “I spent a week in a room with a couple of men who were paid, going to get paid for killing me. We got along fine after the first couple of days because they didn’t like their job too much, but do you know what it’s like to be in a room with a couple of men who want to kill you?”

  “It’s not good,” she said, “it’s no good.”

  “They’re dead now,” Williams said. “Everyone’s dead, except for Wulff and me, and he’s in jail and I’m lying here in bed and supposed to go back into uniform next week. So that means that no one’s left, do you understand?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t. I don’t understand it.”

  “Dead,” Williams said again. “Calabrese, the girl, the two guys who were guarding me, everybody else, hundreds of corpses, Wulff himself in jail under tight security, and me getting out of it, supposed to go back to patrol work as if none of it ever happened. It’s all gone,” Williams said, “it’s like it never was. It’s all covered over.”

  “That’s for the best,” she said. She put a hand on his elbow, tugged. “Get back to sleep,” she said. “It’s five in the morning.”

  But Williams was beginning to see what the dream had been trying to tell him, what signal had been pulsing from the quasar of distant intelligence there; he could not let it get away. “All for nothing,” he said, “all of them gone, all of it gone, everything the same. Sure the trade’s been hurt; he hurt it a lot. But there’s still junk in Harlem. There’s still somebody dying right this moment from an o.d. There are still men hustling it, dreaming it, pushing it. They just have different names and faces in the middle, and at the top it’s probably been the same all along, people so high that Wulff couldn’t even touch them. People who probably run things. It’s still flowing. It was just a campaign.”

  “This doesn’t mean that it failed,” she said, but she didn’t really know what she was talking about. Williams could see that, sense it, she had missed the point completely, but that was all right, he understood, everyone would miss the point, no way that they could see it. Wulff himself, in the bowels of the police station had missed out; saying only that no one had any idea how much he wanted it to be over. If Wulff missed it, could Williams’s wife get it? Of course, Wulff was entitled to be tired. At the beginning he might not have thought this way; he might have seen what Williams was now seeing. But he could be forgiven. At the end, in exhaustion, there was remission. You did what you had to do, that was all; there was nothing that you could do to change the circumstances and breeding that had made you what you were. Wasn’t there a name for this kind of thing? Behaviorism? Cultural determinism? Something like that.

  Williams leaned over, flicked off the lamp, turned on his side, and lay there. “It’s all right,” he said. “I can sleep now,” and he thought that he could, he really could. His wife came over from her side of the bed, lay against him, an arm draped around his stomach, the fingers touching his chest, drawing him against her, and he felt a thin rush of desire instantly superseded by exhaustion; he could not take her, even now when she was doubtless more accessible than she had been in a long time. He was too tired. It was just fear, that was all it was, less desire than fear and the need to draw him in. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ll be all right now,” and closed his eyes, watching the images leap up once again on the screen of the mind.

  Wulff in Los Angeles using heavy ordnance to fight off the assailants at the trailer park. Justice in New York, clamping his hands together, his black face pulped with rage as he said he could not tolerate the loss of explosives. Wulff’s face when Williams had seen him up on the fifth floor at West Ninety-third Street, his face as he turned toward Williams, the eyes and cheeks riven as if scraped by chisel and behind him the dead girl. Flame around it. Calabrese on the plane to Miami when the old man had told Williams almost amiably that he would have to kill him if Wulff did not cooperate. Tamara, the girl on the beach in the midst of the corpses, the second girl over whom he had seen Wulff standing, keening his song of loss the more dreadful because there were no words or music to it. The look on his wife’s face the night Wulff had come to their home. The link that had passed between them that he knew he could neither see nor touch. Santa Anita. Santa Anita in the sun in August where he and Wulff had met.

  It was all there and it was not there; close your eyes and the images came swirling up, close them and they were gone. Christmas-tree lights on a circuit breaker: up, down, on, off. Open the eyes and it all dissolved; it was New York and the gray dawn outside; close them and all of it returned shimmering in color. Up, down, in, out. They existed and they did not. They were here and they weren’t. Now you see it, now you don’t. Voyage in. Voyage out.

  Wulff was incarcerated. They were still working on the charges. Maybe he would get out. Maybe he would not. Maybe the war would go on in some way and perhaps it was ended. But the past could not be changed. It had happened. All of it had happened.

  Williams stirred, felt himself entering the vault of sleep. This time the beasts of dreams were not inside; it was cool and dense within the vault, filled with the rich air smelling of ozone that poured in from the vents. In the vault w
as surcease and you crawled into it seven or eight hours a day, every day of your life, a little light glimmering at both ends, and then entrance into the vault forever. Death was already familiar; already the lover for it brushed against you one-third of your life, all of your life, and when it came it was no stranger. It came with the bright face of beckoning and you went into it.

  Los Angeles. Santa Anita. Calabrese. Tamara. Marie Calabrese. Wulff holding the gun looking at the lieutenant on the floor, that sick expectation in his eyes fading off to something else. Something that might have been knowledge. You did not know. You did not know what was going on.

  You could not judge another man.

  Always, always: you had enough trouble judging yourself. Always there was that one confrontation to make, to come up against oneself in or out of the vault of sleep and to know another truly. Sleep could do it. So could love, bright death, dark death, circumstance, or the lance of the needle itself. It took all ways. It took all kinds. But at the end perhaps it made sense, and then perhaps it did not.

  Breath pouring from him, breath coming in, Williams lay in the vault of sleep. For a long time in the room there were no sounds at all but the sounds of the city gasping to life around them. And time then for another day, for another crack at it, for another possibility, and maybe at the end, at the end of all of it, another life.

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