Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

by Barry, Mike

Dillon was frantic by now. The order had come in by telex from Calabrese that morning, and even in code it had been quite direct. Dispose of the problem. Dillon knew exactly who the problem was; he had been watching the problem for three days. Five of them in the hotel had been working on the problem fulltime. The fact that he was the one asked by Calabrese to do the disposition was a definite step up—it boded all kinds of things. But he could not find Wulff.

  Wulff was not in the hotel. He was not in his room, he was nowhere in the lounges, the surrounding area. A quick check of the travel logs indicated that he had not arranged to go anywhere, either. Where the hell could the man be? It was impossible that he could have given all five of them the slip. He was supposed to be kept under observation at all times. Nevertheless, he had gotten away. What the hell did that mean and where did it leave Dillon? What was he going to say to Calabrese when the second inquiry came in? He could hardly lie about it. Calabrese would want proof The old man was no fool.

  There were five of them in the hotel. Two of them had been the escort down from Chicago: stupid thugs, both of them, but the orders were to get along so Dillon had simply had nothing to do with them one way or the other. The other three, including himself, were Calabrese’s international detail, and Miller and White were good men. He had no quarrel with them; they had done a lot of jobs of this sort in a lot of places for Calabrese. But Miller and White were unaccountably missing now. They simply were not around, and Dillon had the feeling that he did not want to take up the issue of their disappearance with the Chicago thugs who were very much around, hanging sullenly around the coffee shop. If the thugs had been supposed to know that kind of thing then they would have gotten the kill order, not Dillon. Besides, asking them what the hell was going on, sharing his troubles with them, would have been a clear pipeline back to Calabrese. He had a strong feeling that the more that was kept from Calabrese at this point, the better off he would be. He didn’t want to get into that. But Wulff was not turning up, either, and Miller and White’s room was empty, their beds still made up from the night before. So they hadn’t even slept in. What the hell was going on? Dillon saw no way around it. He had to talk to Stavros.

  He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to mess with Stavros at all; there was nothing about the man he liked or trusted. He was pretty sure that Stavros was a cover name, too; he really didn’t know a damned thing about the man. But Stavros was the owner/manager, or at least nominally the owner/manager, fronting for some other people, probably, and had a working relationship with Calabrese, which meant that half the responsibility for Wulff’s disappearance could be put on him. It was Stavros’s fault; it was his hotel, it was at least partially his problem that Wulff was unlocatable. Wasn’t it? Hesitating at the door of the man’s suite, though, Dillon felt a quivering reluctance which was very much unlike him. He had tried to keep his contacts with the man to a minimum. Finish up this job and get the hell out of Peru; get your ticket punched and go onto the next country. Stavros was not worth worrying about in the context of a mere passage through. But now he had to deal with him. He did not want to. The man was treacherous, that was all, and probably half-crazy. Still, you had to go ahead. You had to keep on going. You had to do your work.

  He knocked at the door of Stavros’s suite and then he knocked again. Something within grunted. Dillon patted his gun, held onto it in his pocket for comfort and then pushed open the door and went through. Stavros was sitting there behind his desk, holding a gun on him. The little old man’s face was curiously intent and he seemed energized. “Drop your gun, please,” Stavros said.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Just drop your gun if you will,” Stavros said. His face was friendly, his eyes quite warm. That was what frightened him most about the little man; his expressions were almost always totally out of accord with what he had on his mind. It wasn’t American. It wasn’t an American kind of thing to be. “I said, drop it,” Stavros said.

  Dillon carefully pulled the gun from his pocket. He tried to get his finger on the trigger, tried then to move it subtly up but Stavros, without moving, got off a shot. The shot hit Dillon’s gun, spanged it into the wall. Dillon looked at the small threads of blood on his hand. “What the hell is this?” he said again.

  “It would have been very unwise for you to have shot,” Stavros said. “You are a fool. All of you people are fools.”

  “What is this?”

  “You ask questions,” Stavros said, “but you really don’t want answers. All you want is blood. Sit please.” He gestured with his gun toward a couch at the side of the room. Confused, backpedalling, Dillon sat on the couch. He felt disoriented. He worked for Calabrese. He was one of Calabrese’s best men. Things like this could not happen to him.

  “You’re looking for Wulff,” Stavros said.

  Dillon said nothing. He looked out the windows, seeing the mountains in the distance. The mountains were deadly, oxygen-thin. He had never been there. At this moment, however, he wished that he had gone. That was it. He should have pursued Wulff into the mountains.

  “I am terminating my association with you people,” Stavros said softly. “I am a man who prefers to come right to the point and I wish you to understand that we have no more business to conduct.” Quite neatly he moved away from the desk, leaned over and spat, came back again, the gun steady. Wheels on his chair. “You people disgust me,” he said. “You have no sense of dignity, of personal worth. You have used my hotel as a charnel house. This will cease.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dillon said.

  “Of course you do not know what I’m talking about. You do not speak the language.” Stavros inspected the gun, leveled it again on Dillon. “Your Mr. Wulff is an interesting man,” he said. “He is certainly a far better specimen than any of you. I wish that you were on his level.”

  “Calabrese will kill you,” Dillon said suddenly, on instinct. “You can’t get away with this.”

  “You are functioning in your American’s context again. Culpability and retribution. I assure you I am quite uninterested in what your Mr. Calabrese does. Your Mr. Calabrese disgusts me. Although,” Stravros said softly, “he has done me something of a service.”

  Dillon had an insight, or thought he did. “You’re working with Wulff,” he said. “You’ve gotten together with him on some deal and you think that you can get around Calabrese.”

  Stavros raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?” he said.

  “You can’t get around Calabrese,” Dillon said, “no one can get around him. You’re making a very bad mistake if you think that you can. Anything you do to me you do to him. You’ll pay for this.”

  Stavros leaned back with a little sigh. “You are so stupid,” he said. “All of you Americans are so stupid; you think that you are rational men and that the world works in terms of your crazy visions, but you are wrong. You are wrong about everything. Do you think that I care about your Calabrese?”

  “You should,” Dillon said. Looking down the line at Stavros it occurred to him for the first time that he was going to die. He had ducked this knowledge for a long time. Other men died, he had administered death to them often enough to be very familiar with all of its ramifications … but death was not for him. He was in a special, privileged category and he was going to live until the age of eighty and die in a richly appointed, quiet way. Except that he was not. He was forty-seven years old and this little old man was going to kill him right now. “You should care about Calabrese,” he said.

  “Why?” Stavros said, “why should I care about your Calabrese? Why should I care about any aspect of your American system. This is my hotel, this is my country, at least I should say that it is my adopted country, which is almost the same thing at this stage of the game, and all of you mean very little to me.” He directed the gun toward Dillon again. “Your Mr. Wulff is a very sensible man,” he said. “I find that we have an almost mutual accord on many things.”

  “You won’
t do it,” Dillon said, “you won’t do it, this is crazy, you can’t do it,” and Stavros shot him in the lower spine. The bullet came out of the gun off-angle, the shot taken almost absent-mindedly, the little man ducking down to the surfaces of the desk as if he were reaching for a cigarette, and Dillon in disbelief had half-pivoted his way out of the chair when the unexpected bullet hit him in the lower back. He tried to rise but found that he could not; the bottom part of him was disconnected. And then as he fell back in the chair, appalled, he felt the pain beginning to rip at him.

  “Stupid,” Stavros said, “all of you are so stupid,” and then he shot Dillon again, this shot coming into the lower neck, near the jugular, just above the Adam’s apple. Dillon had one moment to understand what was happening to him, the impossibility of it suddenly colliding with the actuality, and as he fell back in the chair his limbs, restored and inflamed by death, yanked once, twice, twitched like a beetle’s. Then he fell back flatly, sliding all the way down, feeling nothing, not even the surfaces of the floor as they enveloped him. This can’t be happening he thought again, the brain still intact, whimpering out its protests, but then he heard the sound of Stavros’s laughter and he guessed that it was. He guessed that it was.

  Calabrese had laughed during some of the kills, too. Dillon had heard him.

  VII

  The shit was in Cuzco. The little man had not been much more specific than that, only telling Wulff that he should take bus transportation up there; someone would meet him at the bus and give him further instructions. It was impossible to make the transfer at the Crillon, the little man had pointed out, because the observation from Calabrese’s men was entirely too close. It would be better if Wulff went to the source and got a plane out from there. “We’ll make arrangements to get you out,” the little man had said, “but the first thing is to get you out of this hotel.”

  “It won’t work,” Wulff had pointed out, “this place is crawling with Calabrese’s agents. They’ll never let me get out of here.”

  “Oh yes they will,” the little man had said. “It isn’t crawling with agents, as you put it. There are exactly five men we have to contend with, no more, and I know who each of them is. I assure you, I can handle that part of it. The problem is to make the transfer, but that can be taken care of. We’ll make the transfer in the mountains and you’ll take the bus back here and we’ll get you airport connections. Simple and routine,” he said. “It’s going to be a simple and routine operation, and at the end of it we’ll all feel much better about many things.”

  “It’s impossible,” Wulff had said, “it’s impossible. Calabrese is no fool, we’re not going to get anywhere with this,” which had really been a strange position in which to find himself, a strange way of putting things, because here was a man who, for whatever motives, was working to get him out of this trap and Wulff was in the odd position of defending Calabrese, who had entrapped him. Nevertheless there was a basis to it; he thought that he understood Calabrese and his methods. He was relatively comprehensible; he just happened to be better than most of the others. But Calabrese’s thinking was only a heightening of conventional methods whereas this owner, this man here, was something entirely different. He was simply like no one else; the channels through which his mind plowed were not those with which Wulff or Calabrese or any American, he suspected, were familiar. “All right,” Wulff said then, understanding this phenomenon, understanding, too, that the kind of corruption with which he was familiar was only a part of a vast spectrum of evil, a dot on the radius, so to speak. “All right, I’ll go to Cuzco. I’ll do what you say but I don’t like it.”

  “What an American statement,” the little man said then without humor. “Really, Mr. Wulff, it is admirable in all ways, the manner through which you people are capable of disassociating yourselves from all the consequences of your actions. But I’m sure,” he said, “I’m sure that this will work out to our mutual benefit. In fact, I’m absolutely confident that we are embarking upon something which will be of enormous profit. I will have a difficult situation—a difficult transfer, I should say—worked out for me by one of the true geniuses in the drug field, and you will gain your freedom to continue your very useful efforts in the abolition of the international drug trade.” He shrugged. “Who is not to say that we do not both win?”

  “Could you at least tell me your name?” Wulff said, “and where I’m supposed to transport this stuff after it’s passed on to me?”

  “You can call me Stavros,” the little man had said. “It is as good a name as any; in my time I have used several. Names at best are abstractions, labels of the unknown.”

  “You don’t look like a Greek.”

  “Stavros is not necessarily a Greek name, and then on the other hand, appearances can be deceiving. As far as where the disposition of your package will be made, you will be informed of your destination in Cuzco. It is best, perhaps, not to complicate matters. One thing at a time and it is now important for you to get to Cuzco. After we get you there we can worry, so to speak, about the next stop.”

  “If I get there,” Wulff had said.

  “Oh you’ll get there,” the little man said. “You’ll get there, I have every confidence in you, Mr. Wulff. I wish that I had as much confidence in myself as I do in you, or, for that matter, as you do in you.”

  And then Wulff had left the room, considering the interview over. If there was one thing you learned from your years in the department it was a sense of timing of the pace of a conversation—and now one day later he was on a bus in the Andes crawling the final mile to the lost city of the Incas where someone, he was told, would meet the bus, take him to the next stop. It all seemed overly elaborate and a bit childish, but then they did things differently down here. He had learned that from Havana, and Cuba was just a trace of South America.

  He was crammed in with a bunch of tourists, perhaps thirty of them, all of whom were beginning to gasp already from the thin air of the high mountains. The cabin of the bus was supposed to be pressurized in some way but it simply wasn’t working; the air was thin and moist, stroking his lungs unevenly. Even though he was in much better shape than the rest of them, Wulff was beginning to feel it, a slow dilation and constriction in the arteries, a light-headedness, a feeling that rising rapidly from his seat would not be the proper thing to do. The guidebooks (he had done a little guidebook reading in the hotel) all said that it was advisable to spend a full day your first day in Cuzco just lying in bed, reading, resting and acclimating yourself to the atmosphere. But that was a joke; at fifty or sixty dollars-per, almost none of these people planned to be flat on their backs. Acclimatization was out of the question for him; unless his deliverers had other plans, he wanted to take the stuff and head right out. A seven-hour ride in, a seven-hour ride back—how much damage could it do him? Behind him, one of the women was throwing up.

  Wulff held onto his own gorge, looked out the window, and saw a sequence of staggering views of bare mountain ranges. There were several thin, precipitous drops, and an impression from certain angles as the bus staggered up the last hills that there was a sheer drop of several miles into the canyons below. Abruptly, as he felt the nausea begin to come at him heavily in waves, he turned from the window, closed his eyes, and rested his head against the backrest. The bus driver, gasping like the rest of them, was trying to give some travelog on the lost city of the Incas—the fabulous rumors of hidden gold, the royal hunt of the sun, that somewhere within those ruins and artifacts still lay the wealth of an ancient civilization more ponderous than any on earth today. But he could barely get the words out and seemed no more interested than the rest of the tourists. Wulff kept his eyes shut, trying to blank his mind. The bus squawled to a sudden halt.

  For a moment he thought that they had reached the depot, the station, whatever the hell their destination was, but opening his eyes slowly Wulff saw that it was nothing of the sort. Something was very wrong outside the bus, someone was banging frantically at the door,
and even as this registered on him he heard the sound of shattering glass. Then the bus driver, momentarily arched behind his seat, mesmerized with terror—perhaps only attention—was trying desperately to get out of the seat, trying to reach the door, bellowing, the passengers already screaming. And then there was a short dull explosion, a forty-five caliber kind of sound. When Wulff had oriented himself to the sense of it, the bus driver was already taking the hit, grasping at his belly, mumbling something midway between a prayer and a shout as he collapsed to the floor. The passengers were still screaming but their sounds were curiously insubstantial in the thin, dead air, some of the passengers already gasping in silence. And then a man, short-bearded and with glaring eyes, came through the door of the bus, clawing and gripping his way in, his arms bloodstreaked to the elbows from the small and many punctures that the glass had made in them.

  Wulff saw what was happening then, was once again able to slow down the action into some kind of perspective; reaching into his jacket for the gun that Stavros had given him he thought for one instant that he would not make it, the gun catching on his clothing, straining against the fabric, threads of cloth holding on tight. With a desperate wrench he was able to bring out the gun then, bring it to bear on the bearded man just as the bearded man had spotted Wulff. His eyes had swept down the line of the bus, moving up and down the rows like a conductor trying to spot an empty seat and starting at the back like a professional then moving forward he caught Wulff; Wulff could see the recognition beginning to flare into those eyes and then the man’s point forty-five was coming forward. Wulff was still fighting to get a grip on the trigger of his pistol. He had never tried it out, taken it on faith from Stavros that it was loaded and worked. No more than one clip in the gun Stavros had said with a wink; if he needed to make more than six shots to get through all this he was going to be dead anyway, so why waste the ammunition?