Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

by Barry, Mike

  No. These men were no team. They were not working together, in fact, so much as at fundamental cross-purposes. God knows what had thrown them together or for what end … but even as he was assimilating this at some base level Wulff was already moving. He moved on the second man, the one with the gun, hit him backhanded across the cheek and sent him sprawling across the bed. Then, instead of closing that gap which would have been perilous—the man raising the gun now, willing himself to fire—Wulff reached forward and seized the man by his shoulders. He yanked him off the bed.

  For a moment he held the heavy, sweating bulk of this one against him, sadness and fright leaking out of the pores with an animal’s panic and Wulff breathed it deeply, inhaled that panic, felt the fear and enjoyed it for what it was. Then with an explosive thrust he half-lifted the man, grunting, and threw him at the other one who was on the bed.

  There was a crack as if a baseball had been hit: skull against skull. The two of them screamed as if powered by electricity, the notes of the screams evenly spaced.

  Then the impact became flesh against flesh, modulated to a damp collision as the two of them were spilled to the floor, bouncing. In that tangle it was hard to differentiate them for the instant but Wulff did not follow the arc of the motion. Instead he was already diving toward that section of the floor near the wall where the gun he had kicked out had landed. He stretched forward desperately, feeling the metal slide into his palm with the shock of wire, that cold—so helpful—curling his palm and fingers up into the gun and then he had it … had turned, and now was lying on his back facing the two on the bed. They were struggling like some grotesque creature trying to raise itself from a swamp but from that tangle a shot came. It was the one with the gun looking for him, placing the fire through the arms and legs of the other. The shot went wrong, hit the wall and buried itself deep within and Wulff aimed the gun. He shot at the tangle without differentiating his target.

  There was a scream. The struggle on the bed accelerated as if not one but both of them forming that grotesquerie had been wounded and Wulff watched the broken thing suddenly tear into halves: the man hit falling away from the creature. Then Wulff got a second shot into the other. This one fell back on the bed with a scream and the forms interlocked again. It was a parody of intercourse. They began to heave rhythmically, crying.

  Blood puddled from them. It dribbled out of both, meshed, mingled with itself, the two strains of blood coming out against the denser white of the sheets and Wulff looked at this for only an instant, then turned his attention toward the door of his room, already heading in that direction. He had seen death before; it held no interest for him. The important thing was what was going to happen next. What was going to come through that door or, if nothing came, what was he going to do here with two corpses in a room which was being clocked at every level of the hotel?

  He did not know. He simply did not know what he was going to do with these two now, or what the others would do for him; he did not even know where to begin. But one thing was clear. He had to get out. He had to get out of this room and take his chances, if he could, on the outside.

  Death followed him everywhere. Sometimes he had created it; other times death itself had been imposed upon him. But one way or the other it was his certain legacy. Having come to avenge death, he could only create an ever-widening pool.

  And in death the two forms were no longer threatening. Lashed to one another they seemed faintly comic. In fact, collapsed as they were into their postures, there was a clownish aspect to these two who had been so menacing before, gutted as they were now like burnt-out cars, the wiring of the bodies itself now unspliced, hanging loose in the flowers of blood. He could see little ropes of exposed muscle tissue.

  He went toward the door holding the gun, cursing. He had created death again, and death was laughing at him. It delighted in the trouble it had brought. What the hell was he going to do with these two now? And what were the others going to do to him?

  It had to have been Calabrese’s work. Who else’s could it have been? And yet Wulff found that he could not believe this. The old man simply was not that stupid. He was not. He would not set up something as crude as this, nor would he have taken two inept men who were not a team, one of whom hated him. You did not, above all, put haters on the job. Calabrese knew this. He knew all of the angles of a job like this.

  And the old man had at least taste.

  Wulff opened the door to move into that aseptic hallway, poised sixteen stories above the unimaginable streets, and an immensely calm voice behind him said then, “No, Mr. Wulff. Not just yet. Please wait for a moment.”

  He thought for an instant that one of the corpses had spoken and that it would have been peculiar, although not catastrophic; he just would have taken another shot. But, when he turned, Wulff saw sitting on the bed near the bodies, dangling his little legs as if in an excess of glee, a tiny man with a mustache and an empty face. Slowly, then, the sense of the situation burst upon him.

  The little man held a gun with an opening as large as a mouth.

  “I do like your work,” the little man said. “I’m really quite impressed by your work, but then I expected to be. Please drop the gun, by the way. I can pull the trigger long before you can reach yours. And they’re slow action too; I wanted them to be that way.”

  Wulff said, “This is crazy.”

  “It may well be. But you’re a professional and you can accommodate yourself to craziness just as well as the next professional. Consider the lessons of the last quarter-century or so, Mr. Wulff: the human psyche, let alone a superior one like yours, can tolerate anything. Now why don’t you just drop that gun casually and face me?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Oh come on,” the man on the bed said, his limbs quivering with delight. “I’m not going to shoot you; believe me that’s the furthest thing from mind. It would be disastrous for me to do anything like that; I’d be losing an excellent man and, whatever else my biography may reveal, I’m not self-destructive. Not in the least. Not even a tiny bit.”

  Slowly, then, Wulff let the gun fall from his hand.

  There was nothing else to do. The voice was too self-assured, the little man too much in control of himself. The delight was that of a cobra, a gathering rather than loosening of the situation. It was possible to Wulff that he was yielding only to the assurance in this man and not to the reality of the threat, but he could not risk it. And even so, even if he yielded too easily, what did it matter? Weariness assaulted him.

  It was happening more and more often now, that weariness. Maybe it had started in San Francisco, stemming from when he had been in bed with the girl and she had sapped out of him some vital impetus, uncovered within him the knowledge that he was not so much dead as sleeping and that the stakes on life could be high once again if only he let them. Maybe it was not the girl’s fault and he was only thinking of Boston, seeing the bodies go up in flame—another thirty or forty dead and for what? For what? The poison would just be pumped into a different place. From San Francisco to Boston to Havana to Las Vegas back to Chicago and now to the Andes that weariness had pursued him, and now once again it struck. There were too many of them; there was only one of him. He had fought and would continue to fight, but would it make any difference? Did any of it? All that he could do was to struggle. If ever he became too temptingly dangerous as he had to Calabrese, then he was pure target.

  It was just too much.

  The gun, along with part of his resolve, hit the floor. He turned then, looking at the little man on the bed. His small bald skull was gleaming, the eyes reflecting amiability, and underneath it was a pain which Wulff could see as well but never touched, his tiny mouth creased into a deep, greeting smile. He might have been someone’s grandfather appearing at a wedding after a separation of decades, the difficult reunion accomplished through great effort, collisions, concern, trains ripping through the night. Now, panting from his efforts, at the wedding at last, he bestowed up
on assembled relatives that smile of great kindness.

  The little man waved his gun at Wulff as if Wulff were the orchestra, the gun the baton, and then put it inside his jacket with a flourish. He raised his hands. “I see no need to hold a gun on you now, Mr. Wulff,” he said. “I merely had to assure myself, you see, that you would not do anything rash until I had a chance to talk to you. I know that you’re a sensible man and I merely wanted the opportunity now to talk sense.”

  He turned, looked at the corpses huddled against one another next to him, his mouth still kindly but the eyes showing a pleasure, even an ecstasy, which that mouth would never admit. Wulff felt the coldness begin to spread within him: he knew the little man now, he knew the syndrome; this was another one who got his kicks from death. “Our interests, you see,” the little man was saying, “are almost entirely the same—not only in this but in most instances.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “I’m really quite positive. I merely had to assure myself that this reputation of yours was deserved. There is so much deceit in the world—so much misdirection—huge corporations which have no purpose in life other than to spread lies. As individuals become dedicated to the lies, it is more and more difficult to ferret out the truth. I am devoted to the empirical method and I’m happy to say that you have confirmed my hopes in every way. You really do excellent work.” The old man patted the corpses, his hand smoothing the dead forehead of one of them as if he were coaxing splinters from a plank of wood. “Really excellent work,” he repeated.

  Wulff held his ground. When there was nothing to say, you simply left it that way as long as you could; sooner or later the situation would finally come around. In the meantime silence was the answer. He estimated his distance from the little man, and then with an imperceptible shake of the head that he knew could not be caught decided against jumping him. No. No, it would not pay. He had an excellent chance of disarming this man—a better chance, once that was done, of killing him—but then what? For what?

  He would still be in a room, with three corpses instead of two, in a hotel in a city he hated; his prospects would be worse than ever. Much worse. He did not know this assailant at all but one thing was clear: he was not Calabrese’s man. He was no one’s man. And that meant that their interests, after all, might be in common.

  The little old man curled on the bed like a fish, held that fixated smile on Wulff as if he had measured his prey’s own line of calculation and had found it good. “You understand, of course,” he said as if they already knew each other quite well (and in a sense they did, so well that conversation could be shifted from one point to the other with a shared line of association), “that I had to do this. You understand that it had to be done. To perform this test upon you …” he glanced at the two bodies, “… to find out if you were wholly as good as your advance notices indicated,” he said. “They were excellent notices.”

  “And what if they hadn’t been?” Wulff demanded. “What if it had turned out that the notices were bad copy and that I wasn’t nearly the man you thought that I was? Tell me, what then?”

  He looked into the little man’s eyes and found himself drawn into a sense of such profound corruption that for the moment he almost gasped. Then he managed to right himself: he had seen this in the interrogation rooms before when the suspect would open up under pressure and all of the corruption would pour out; this was merely another interrogation room—you had to maintain your sense of perspective. Everything repeated itself. Everything, truly, was the same.

  “I was coming unarmed against two men with guns who knew how to use them,” he said. “Suppose that I hadn’t performed up to snuff while you were skulking in the bathroom, watching the excitement. Would you have saved me? Or would you have sat back rubbing yourself?”

  The little man took no notice of this. If it was insult Wulff’s attitude seemed to be implying, he simply did not acknowledge the language. Indeed, he seemed to have moved from the issue, his mind scuttling into more complex, useful channels. “Why I would have let them kill you for sure,” he said absently. After a pause he added, “And I would have given them a bonus and arranged for a very prompt and discreet disposition of the few remains. It’s not that I’m a hard man you see,” he said as he paused again, looked at his fingertips, brought them together, and stared at the ceiling meditatively, “but on the other hand business is always business.”

  He stood. “I think that we should go somewhere else,” he said. “We can talk quietly for a while, Mr. Wulff, and perhaps find more advantageous quarters. I’m really quite pleased with what you’ve done and I want you to see how I’m going to show appreciation.”

  “No,” Wulff said, “we’ll talk right here. Right in this room.”

  “I’d much rather not.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you’d much not rather. There are a lot of people hanging around here who would be very interested in seeing the two of us together. So if you have anything to say you’ll say it right here.”

  The little man stayed rooted in place, his face bright with approval. “You’re an interesting and determined man,” he said, “but even though that’s admirable I’m sure you don’t have to worry about the, ah, security problem. The people you say are watching you are doing so on my sufferance, my grounds. I’m sure that we can talk privately and there’s no reason,” his eyes shifted distastefully, “to dishonor the dead with talk of more death.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Wulff said, “right here. You’re not Calabrese. Do it on my ground.”

  “Calabrese,” the man said. “Ah yes, Calabrese, of course. He means nothing to me.”

  “He means nothing to me too, but he’s godamned responsible for a lot of things.”

  “Don’t worry about your Calabrese,” the little man said abstractedly. “You’re in the right hands now. I’m sure that I can do much better for you than your faithless Calabrese ever could.”

  Wulff looked at him and then he believed. The little man was no longer everyone’s grandfather: no, he was something else, something which had spawned no children from whom would come issue of themselves. Instead he sat there on the bed, a cold, abstract, self-contained mass so gathered unto himself that he would be incapable—this was quite clear—of giving himself to anything. He was to himself sufficient; he had come from nothing, nothing would succeed him. That did not make him bad, not at all. It was merely the way that it was.

  “It’s my hotel,” the little man said softly, “and I’m sure we could guarantee your security.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Wulff said, although he did already, “and I don’t give a shit about your security. We’re going to stay right here. With the bodies in my room. If you have something to say, say it in front of death. Death sure as hell won’t repeat it.”

  “Dead men tell no tales, you mean. But these are not men anymore, Mr. Wulff. They are merely blobs of flesh, the vestiges of what were men. I know a good deal about death and I assure you that I know the difference.”

  “Here,” Wulff said, “right here.”

  “All right,” the little man said. He shrugged, gestured, took out his gun again and looked at it bleakly. “How would you like to get out of Peru, Mr. Wulff?” he said.

  “I’d love to get out of Peru.”

  “Then listen,” the little man said.

  He began to lay it out.

  III

  Williams knew that somehow Wulff was in Peru now. He didn’t know how the fuck he had gotten into Peru or what the hell was going to happen now, but at least he had that much nailed. He had it nailed tight.

  A cop got around. A cop with connections got around more, and a cop with connections who didn’t give a damn and was willing to use them for all they were worth got around the most of all. Williams did not give a shit anymore. He knew Walker in Chicago through some files that he had dug up downtown. Walker—a cover name—was rotten; he was working clear through the rema
inder of the organization out there. Everyone knew that. Everyone knew too that everyone else knew it, which was why Walker wasn’t touched. He was a sieve. But Williams didn’t care. He called the man almost as soon as he got out of the hospital and got the word direct. Somehow Calabrese had scooped Wulff up and dumped him in Lima. How he had done it and why; exactly what Wulff had had in mind Williams didn’t know. Nevertheless, there it was. The guy was in Peru.

  “What the fuck is Wulff doing in Peru?” he said to his wife. He had just gotten out of the hospital.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Williams had lain in the hospital for weeks, half of them on the critical list with a deep knife wound just missing the heart. He had picked up the wound checking out a methadone center in Harlem and since then he had not been the same. She was worried about him, but the doctors had said that showing worry was the wrong thing. She would have to stand by him and let him make his own decisions. The department had already indicated that if he wanted to declare permanent disability and get out on half-pay pension they wouldn’t resist it. That was probably the right thing, the thing he should do. But he did not seem to be working in that direction either. She did not know what direction he was working in.

  “Please David,” she said. He was lying on the bed, his hand still on the telephone, the hand gleaming with sweat, palpitating the phone. “Calm down,” she said, “it isn’t worth it.”

  “Peru,” Williams said again. “What the fuck did Calabrese stash him down there for?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know Calabrese and I don’t know anything about Peru.” She was trying to humor him but maybe it was coming off as if she were talking down to him. “I know St. Albans and Bermuda and that’s about it,” she said. She was a nice girl. Williams had always liked her, even before and after he loved her. Wulff had liked her too. They had liked each other. What the fuck was he doing in Peru?