Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

by Barry, Mike

  “Peyote,” Williams said, “and cocaine and hashish and maybe a little bit of elegant pot but none of the really hard stuff. It doesn’t figure. That’s no place for him.” He took his hand off the phone. “He’s in bad trouble,” he said, “that’s for sure—if Calabrese’s stashed him down there.”

  “It isn’t your affair,” his wife said. “David, it has nothing to do with you; you’ve got to get well—”

  “I’ll never get well,” Williams said matter of factly. He rubbed a hand over his stomach, nearly unconsciously. “Never well that way again. I got to find that bugger,” he said, “I got to make real contact with him; I got to tell him he was right from the start and I was wrong. That he saw it right and I was missing the boat. You can’t beat the fucking system. There’s no fucking system to beat. It’s all horseshit. He was right and I was wrong. I got to tell him that. I got to tell him that I’ll help him any way I can.”

  She had heard all of this in the hospital, over a period of weeks. Almost the same words every time. “David,” she said, “please, David.”

  “No,” he said, but not in response to her, “it won’t work. Can’t you see? It just won’t work anymore; they’ll knife you up in the gut for even trying. I just want to tell him that. Want to tell it to the man. Want to tell it to him loud and clear, want to apologize to him too, for sending him out to Vegas in the first place for that Bill Stoneman valise. All my fucking fault. I could have helped him, we could have worked together but instead I had to be Mr. Inside, let him play Mr. Outside. Stupid, that was stupid. How’d he get to Peru?”

  “Enough David,” his wife said. “I’m going to shut the lights out.” They were in their bedroom in St. Albans, split-level, seven-and-a-half percent FHA mortgage, he sitting in a posture of attention facing the windows looking out toward the tiny backyard, she lying flat out. “Please,” she said, “worry about it later.”

  “I always worried about every fucking thing later,” Williams said. “It wasn’t my revolution, it was the darkies down the street that were stirring things up. No, I was the white man’s nigger. Fucking Wulff. How I wish I could tell him he was right.”

  “I’m shutting off the light,” she said and did so. They lay in the darkness quietly for a moment. She put out a hand, lay it on his arm. He let the hand stay poised there but did not respond. “David?” she said after a while, “David, if you want to get out of the department then you should. You should, I’ll never stop you. I can’t stop you from that, David, but you can’t go on hating yourself this way; you should just feel lucky that you’re alive. It could have been much, worse. Oh David—”

  “Don’t you understand?” Williams said with sudden urgency, tossing her arm away and sitting bolt upright in the bed, sending little splinters and intimations of pain through the place in his gut where the wound had been. “Don’t you see that? It’s hopeless.”

  “What’s hopeless?”

  “He’ll never get out of fucking Peru,” Williams said.

  IV

  Wulff had been a New York City cop, had been one for ten years. Two years of it counted in the pension plan toward active duty retirement benefits because he had been probably the only man in the force in greater New York who had enlisted for combat in that crazy war when things were really going good. Just to see what the hell was going on; you couldn’t believe a thing in the press anyway. It was always important to see what was going on, to have a firsthand look at a situation; because only in that way could you have true knowledge and if Wulff had no other outstanding qualities, he liked to think that he had a basic and real curiosity. Anyway, that was the way he had thought in his early twenties.

  Ten years in the police force and Vietnam: well, they were almost the same thing. He had seen every aspect of that war from helicopter duty over the jungles dropping defoliants to getting a firsthand look at how the service clubs in Saigon operated. He had gotten a look at the New York war too, doing everything from patrol duty at the outset to three years on the narco squad when he had come back, more or less intact, from Vietnam. The narco squad assignment had been set up for him as a kind of gift, or that was the rationalization of the department anyway—a payoff for him having been so nice as to have represented the department in the war. It looked good in the public relations files, a New York cop who had served over there. They could mention that members of the department had been in the war. The idea of the narco squad had been to keep him as happy as the public relations people.

  Their mistake.

  But then, the personnel policies and procedures of the department had always been ignorant; consider the million dollars of heroin which had passed out of the evidence room before the property clerk’s virtual line of sight back in the late sixties, the early seventies. Police work was civil service first and foremost, and the idea in civil service was to fuck up quietly, never make waves. In line with that the narco squad was the best place to be. It was easy work, setting up fake raids with the informants, palming a little stash for oneself and generally signing out early. Almost everybody on the squad was picking up a little something on the side for himself.

  Up in the higher echelons, then, they had conceived of this as a nice bonus for Wulff, advancing his career, giving him a little source of extra income: had it been personnel’s fault that Wulff had hated it? Personnel was certainly not to blame, they were just trying to make things pleasant. But the narco squad had probably been the worst place for a man like him, fresh from Vietnam and full of rage. To Wulff the flow of drugs out of Saigon, the flow into the narco squad seemed to be opposing sides of the same great balance wheel. It was literally the same … and he had had enough of Vietnam.

  Well, personnel department had fucked it up but that was personnel for you. The Police Benevolent Association wasn’t such a hot union either. More or less they worked with personnel; certainly it was not in the union’s interest to take a stand on the narco squad. Not when it was almost every cop’s golden assignment. (The vice squad was everybody’s favorite, but by the end of the sixties the commissioner had just about given up on it, what with Supreme Court decisions on entrapment and the amateurs coming out of the woodwork from anywhere to compete with the professionals.)

  Wulff had come out of Vietnam angry all right. It seemed to him that the army was not the problem; they were simply trying to do a job out there. The war was neither moral nor immoral, just a neutral entity which could have gone any way at all … but the way in which the war had been conducted was some summation of everything that was insane in American life. They wouldn’t have it one way and they wouldn’t have it the other. Look, but do not touch. Stop, but do not listen. Go, but not too fast. So they tried to cover everything there, have a war but not fight one, fight a war but not too damned hard, tell the truth but work it through lies. And because they would not go in and fight with the nuclear weaponry that was the only way to end an otherwise unbeatable guerilla situation, they tried to adopt the methods of the enemy on their own grounds. That was stupid. And hopeless.

  You couldn’t go mano a mano guerilla against an enemy that had been fighting this way for a hundred years on a landscape whose terrain was familiar only to them. Not unless you wanted to get your ass whipped time and again, which is precisely what happened. Any fool could see that. But the bastards back at the Pentagon or even higher would not have it one way or the other: a directive into the field would start them into heavy weaponry and then the directive would be cancelled. Our men were supposed to fall back, operate only defensively, and the guerillas would lash out at them mercilessly. So headquarters would insist that it could not take these losses (as if the clerks and colonels at headquarters were getting killed) and that an assault would have to be made. Our men would trudge out again to meet the enemy and be smashed from behind … and in this way the war had been literally passed away, pissed away, in all of the burning and empty fields of Vietnam.

  But all the time that the officials were fucking around this way, trying t
o sustain a full-scale war without public knowledge or support, trying to fight a limited war that could only be lost … all of this time the army was being ground away in that country. Men were dying, fifty thousand of them, some by fire, others through the treachery or incompetence of their own troops, many by disease, some at the hands of the enemy himself (but everything in Vietnam was the enemy, there was literally nothing that could not turn on you). And they were dying through the needle also, the cheap, good shit funneled through Saigon and into the countryside, part of every good soldier’s carrying kit, and the shit proved to be for many of the men in this impossible and unwinnable war literally the only way out. What else was there? Women were outnumbered fifty-to-one in Vietnam; even the cheapest whores had to beat them off in Saigon, in the countryside. But there was no competition for the shit. That there was plenty of.

  It must have been then that Wulff had conceived his true horror of and loathing for drugs. He saw what the big H was doing to the army—it was breaking it up as the Russians or Germans or Japanese had never been able to. Or maybe that revulsion had started earlier, when he had been on patrol car duty in Harlem in the early years, whizzing around those extinguished streets, the landscape falling apart like ash after a paper fire … and he had seen, driving around, what drugs were doing, had done to the city. The city was dead. Harlem was a monument to and a map of drugs, a gigantic network of veins through which the drugs were being funneled in and out all the time, just like Vietnam. And just as in Vietnam, people were dying, turning in their death-struggles on the lovely, burning city … and then, cementing that insight, he had seen Vietnam.

  Whether it had started there and he had merely looked at Harlem through a rookie’s what’s-in-it-for me eyes, whether the hatred for drugs, distributors, the high men, the low men, the entire insane network through which they worked themselves into the diseased limbs of the nation had started there and had merely been implemented in Vietnam (men in their teens, deep into shit, could look eighty; they went staggering out, turned their rifles on themselves, were quite glad to die) did not matter. The important thing was that Wulff came out of Vietnam a very angry man.

  So they took his anger to be the expected combat fatigue of a man both crazy and patriotic enough (but they were the same) to leave a good civil service position to enlist in that deadly war, a war that only career men or luckless draftees or unskilled enlistees would get into. These well-wishers thought that they would give him a good start back in civilian life.

  They sent him to the narcotics squad with their blessings; told him he would like it.

  Maybe in their minds, Wulff thought, it was the best gift to give a crazy man; it would soothe him down with stash. But after three years of it out there Wulff could not take it any more; he could not even maintain the appearance. He hadn’t, really, been able to take it from the beginning, so that was no surprise. But somewhere around the time of the incident that ended his hitch he had found that it was getting to him in a very personal and ugly way; he had come to the feeling that the narco squad not only was doing nothing to shut off the drug trade in the city but, in fact, was working with the pushers, the distributors, the users themselves to keep it going.

  They were all part of the system. The narco squad was merely working for the network in its own way, keeping up a front of enforcement, an appearance of normalization so that the trade itself could roll on undeterred. The narco squad was just the way the force had of cutting into the trade and taking out its own pound of flesh, that was all. Part of that might have had to do with the fact that the squad and the informants had an entirely too unhealthy closeness. The informants, people on the bottom of the pile, used the squad to raise monies to finance them a fix or two ahead, maybe even a few weeks ahead if they could make a sufficient score. And as far as the squad was concerned, if pressure stepped up they could always bust a willing informant or two for the sake of pleasing the press; but these busts were always dropped for lack of evidence and the informants drifted back into circulation, always there in the future if needed. It was a comfortable arrangement. You could get it to the point where you could make a bust by the telephone—get in touch with your informant, that is, and have him meet you at some mutually agreeable place.

  It sickened Wulff.

  He could live with it, he guessed, up to a point. But then like Vietnam itself, which had simmered away so long before public revulsion burst the boil of the war, Wulff had found at a given point that he was fed up, literally fed up with all of this shit.

  He should have taken it to the lieutenant which would have been normal procedure (and probably one that could have been manipulated into leave with full pay; the departmental doctors were wonderful, they would certify everything), but instead he had done something really stupid: he had busted an informant for possession.

  Well it was raw, it was just too raw—even looking back on it he would not regret it. This fucking clown in Harlem with the bright little eyes was giving him false leads and laughing while Wulff estimated that there were a couple of hundred dollars worth of shit in his pocket just sitting there beyond being grabbed while the clown giggled away. He blew his cool. He took the man in.

  He took him into the station house, he pressed charges, he even threatened to take it outside to the press and blow everything up in the department’s faces. His conduct was that of an angry but righteous man. The informant system stunk, he had said. He was doing this not only for himself but for the good of the department. If they did not have the strength to straighten themselves out, he would do the straightening for them.

  They had taken that under advisement. They had shared, at least they said they had shared, Wulff’s real sense of concern over the system which, indeed, even the precinct commander nominally in charge said probably could use some overhaul. When the stash mysteriously disappeared even before a formal arraignment could be made, they had given the informant a dismissal. Also, Wulff was taken off the narco squad immediately. It was agreed at the higher levels that he seemed to be in need of a change of assignment and was not functioning at maximum efficacy for the department in his present duties. Above all, they wanted him to be happy.

  They had put him back on patrol duty, sitting side-saddle with a rookie cop named David Williams. Williams was a twenty-four-year-old black who had a split-level in St. Albans, Queens, and was a great fan of the system, he said, because the system was what was making everything possible for him; it was his shield. The rottener the system got, Williams announced, the better he liked it because that proved that it was working—and the inequities were all in his behalf. He had been very serious about this; he had said that he and Wulff could have some good discussions about all this shit later. Wulff hadn’t minded the idea too much; even though Williams for his money was a fool for belief in the system on any level, he was still an engaging kid. He had the kind of ingenuousness which Wulff recollected he might himself have had a long time ago. Altogether it was a good thing to be back on the streets, doing honest work again, and in the car Williams had been all business, quiet and glad to do the driving, quite cool and correct even though it was awkward for the junior man to be the driver. But still that had been the word from headquarters—Wulff in the junior spot. He guessed that they had wanted to humiliate him; but it had all backfired, because Wulff did not give a damn. The less responsibility they gave him now the better he liked it.

  They hadn’t known what the hell to do with him; that was the basis for putting him side-saddle in the patrol car. They were thrashing it out at the intermediate levels, trying to keep it away from the top which they probably would. They probably would figure out what to do with him, too. He had at least that much confidence in the internal workings of the department; they could deal with their own. Unless he dealt with them first and quit. He would give that some real thought.

  Or he would have given it some real thought, anyway, if things had not moved so fast. He really might have made some kind of adjustment there. Any
man who could make it to field sergeant in Vietnam without becoming too embittered to do civilian work had potential for adjustment. But on that very first night of patrol, Wulff ran into something that he couldn’t handle.

  Someone phoned in a report that a girl had O.D.’d on the upper floor of a tenement on West 93rd Street near the river, and the call had come into them, the nearest car to the call. That was routine procedure after all. They had driven to the address and Wulff as the side-saddle man had been the one to go upstairs and do the checking out, Williams sitting cool behind the wheel. That was procedure. He didn’t argue with that at all.

  But when he went up the stairs of the tenement, prowling his way through the dust and fumes past all the closed, bolted doors of the dwelling he found that the girl on the floor was named Marie Calvante and she was very dead of an obvious heroin overdose. She was a very pretty middle-class Italian girl out of Rego Park and by some coincidence she was, or at least had been until she ran into a little difficulty, Wulff’s fiancee. They were going to get married soon. Plans had been made. Somewhere along the way he had had the bad luck to pick himself up a fiancee.

  They had been going out together for a year. They even had the house picked out. All in all, it was quite an unfortunate thing to find this very girl, this Marie Calvante, O.D.’d out in a tenement. If Wulff had been able to think straight he certainly would have appreciated the coincidental aspects of this. Small world and all that. As it is, however, he had not been able to do much thinking at all.

  He kept a lid on himself though. When Williams, sitting in the car for a while, wondering where the hell Wulff was, finally came out to join him, Wulff had kept himself from showing much to the rookie at all. Instead he had very neatly taken off his badge, put it next to the corpse and then had left the two of them, Williams and the girl, that way to settle for themselves what was going to happen next and he had walked straight out of the tenement and out of the force. Maybe it hadn’t been right to take no part in the funeral arrangements, but he had learned from Vietnam that a corpse was a corpse, just dead meat, it didn’t matter what the hell happened to it from then on; certainly the corpse didn’t care. Arrangements were for other people and he had a better idea of what he wanted to do.