Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

by Barry, Mike

  The car, maddeningly, was still climbing: there had been a rise behind the depot which Wulff had not seen approaching and they were still ascending, going into the mountains. The road was barely one lane wide so that an opposing car could have mashed them to shreds if the driver of the Futuramic did not back off, and the driver showed no such disposition. The car was, in fact—thin air, age and all—managing fifty miles an hour on the ascent and picking up speed all the time. Wulff felt himself thrust into the slick, dark cushions behind, felt his own perspiration penetrating his shoulder blades. “Where are we going?” he said again. You never knew. If he kept it up they might come out with something to say after all.

  But they did not. They seemed stolid, immovable, part of the machinery in front, as inarticulate as the landscape itself, just as menacing. Well, perhaps Stavros selected his men for their lack of articulation, gave them strict orders to say nothing. Why take it so personally? Why take it personally at all? “You know,” Wulff said, “it’s all a little too much for me. I mean I’m entitled to feel that it’s all going by a little too rapidly.

  Don’t you think so? I mean, don’t you think that that’s a good point, that there’s too much happening here and I don’t even know what the hell is going on?” He sounded plaintive, petulant. Well, so be it. Self-pity was not quite the proper emotion for the circumstance but at this time it made more sense than almost any attitude. He had been bucked from Calabrese to Stavros to these men with inconvenience and murder in between and there was still the feeling of pervasive unreality; matters were entirely out of his hands, there seemed no way that he could connect with them.

  “All right,” he said, “all right then, the hell with it.” He settled lower into the back seat sulkily, shrugging his shoulders, closed his eyes. If they didn’t want to tell him anything that was their business. See if he would care. If he fucked up their job, if everything fell through simply because they refused to address him as a human being and tell him what the hell was going on here, it wouldn’t be his fault. Let it be on their heads. Let everything be on them; it was no longer his responsibility. As close as he could get to responsibility in his position, he was absolutely out of it now. In the normal course of events, he would have been dead, anyway. So fuck it.

  Dazzling views of the ruined city assaulted him. Cuzco was in a plain, a shallow bowl of land nestled in the mountain ranges, as it were, protected on all sides by the mountainous territory. Doubtless the Incas had cleaved it out of rock themselves, some advantage taken of their natural terrain, but so much of this had doubtless been done by men, scrappling away at rock. He smelled something sweet in the car, something that was not upholstery or transmission fluid and looked up to see that one of the men had lit a joint, marijuana he supposed, and was inhaling it meditatively, holding it like a cigarette, taking huge irregular puffs now and then and flicking ashes from the end of it indiscriminately. He certainly was not conserving the joint the way that any American teenager would learn to within five minutes of his initiation. Any American would say it was a waste of grass. But then again, maybe the stuff was more plentiful here. Probably it was.

  He was relieved to see that the driver at least did not take any part of the joint. That was good; driving and pot did not mix. Not that he was any too sure that it was pot; there could have been cocaine, hashish, peyote rolled up in that joint. Although they were usually pipe drugs, there was no accounting for foreign customs.

  The car came to an abrupt halt, spinning against a rock facing to the right of it, the driver yammering. Wulff had to hold on desperately to the back seat to avoid pitching through the windshield. The man with the joint screamed and cursed, threw the remains out the window violently even as the car was braking. Then, the first of them to recover, Wulff saw that the road had been blocked by something that looked, at least at first glance, like a truck; seen secondarily it was a van of some sort from which men with guns were already spilling. They were waving their hands at the car, whose driver was now paled and slumped almost wholly behind the wheel. Abruptly there was a spang! something growing in the windshield. The joint-smoker screamed and himself tried to huddle down in the seat, but a second spang! caught him in the forehead and he fell into his blood.

  Wulff was already free of the door and rolling, his body being battered by the stones. Oh shit. Shit on it anyway.

  X

  Calabrese knew that he had trouble early on, even before he got word of Dillon. Any fool could tell just from the sense of the situation that there was plenty of trouble, but he believed in functioning step by step. That was surely the only way to go in this business, and maybe Dillon would eventually get through to him. And, when Dillon hadn’t reported back hours after he should have, well, maybe there was trouble in the international phone lines or Dillon was having difficulty in finding a phone. It was best to look at matters in that way. You simply could not get far looking too much ahead in this business. Past the end of the immediate problem, that was about it.

  But by ten that evening he had known Dillon had blown it. It was a matter of instinct, that was all; you didn’t need much objective material in this business to see what was going on. Those who needed it were only to be pitied. People who needed the facts laid out in front of them were stacked at the bottom of the river. A suggestion here, a possibility there, a lapsed conduct, the look in a man’s eyes, the way a woman might look at that same man … and you knew everything. He put through an international call to the Crillon and got Stavros. Ordinarily this would have been a three-hour process but Calabrese knew a few people and he knew how to get hold of them even through the blind of pseudonyms that the phone company used. He got the call through in fifteen minutes to Stavros direct.

  “Where is he?” Calabrese said without preamble. If Stavros did not recognize his voice at this point then Stavros was a fool and Calabrese would not have credited himself with such luck.

  “Where is who?” Stavros said. Even through the network of the international phone lines, the ten-second delay, the flattening, mechanical interposition of wires and tapes which meant that he was not hearing Stavros’ voice but only a reassembled recording of it … even through all of this Calabrese could sense the fear.

  “You know who I fucking mean,” Calabrese said. “Your house guest.”

  “I haven’t seen him in a long time. Not all day.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m quite sure.”

  “I’m a little concerned,” Calabrese said. “I sent some friends of mine after him. They should have located him by now.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “I think you know everything about that.”

  “Leave me alone,” Stavros said after a flat little pause. “Just leave me alone. I have nothing to do with your affairs. He is merely a guest in my hotel.”

  “Listen to me, you fucking Nazi,” Calabrese said, “I know what you’re up to. I know exactly what the hell you’re up to down there. You think I’m a fucking fool? I let all of that go; I didn’t give a shit. After all, I’m not in the business. But you’re fucking around with my life now.”

  There was a much longer pause and Stavros said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. You fucking well know everything that I’m saying … you Nazi son of a bitch.” Calm down, Calabrese said to himself, feeling his gorge rising in his throat. There is no need for this, no need, and you are an old man. Stavros is thirty-five hundred miles away. “I don’t like it,” Calabrese said, “I want you to turn him up.”

  “How can I turn him up if I don’t know where he is?”

  “I don’t know. That’s your problem.”

  “You’re crazy,” Stavros said. The distance was giving him courage. “You’ve got to be out of your mind.”

  “I’ll show you how much out of my mind I am.”

  “You think that I have something to do with this man? He is not in my custody. He is m
erely using my hotel, that is all. My auspices, my rooms. I bear no responsibility for this at all.”

  “I can do anything I want to do with you,” Calabrese said. “You think that you’re a long way out of the picture, that you can do anything you want to do, but you can’t. You’re not a free man. I know everything about you. I can kill you with two phone calls, that’s how far from me you are. I want you to produce him.”

  “Why should I produce him?” Stavros said. Slowly he was turning around. Calabrese could sense the initial, instinctive fear giving way to defiance. No, not defiance, not quite, something more terrible than that: a low-key assurance that he knew things which Calabrese did not. Calabrese did not like that. He did not like it at all. “I don’t have to produce him,” Stavros said, “and if you think you can kill me for failing to produce a man then you are genuinely crazy. If you do anything to me the word will get around what kind of person you are and you will never get any help in this country again. In many countries.”

  “Don’t argue with me,” Calabrese said. “Just produce him.”

  “I don’t have to produce him. Anyway,” Stavros said, almost lightly, “that is the purest kind of stupidity and foolishness. Produce him so that you can kill him, that’s all. What if the job has been done for you? What if he is already dead?”

  “I’m going to get you.”

  “I’m sick of your threats,” Stavros said, “I’m sick of you Americans and your threats of murder. You hold life so cheaply that the threat of its removal means nothing to you. Or to me. I do not know where your man is and I remind you that this is my hotel. Your men are here at my sufferance. I’m going to throw them out.”

  “You’re fucking me up.”

  “No I’m not. You’re fucking yourself up.”

  “I told you. I know what you’re doing down there. I let you get away with it for a long time because it didn’t mean shit to me. Like I said, I’m not in the business.” Calabrese reached for his pack of cigarettes, cracked two of them and threw them across the room. Son of a bitch. The son of a bitch. Sitting in his barred office in Peru, the Nazi, and laughing at him. “But this is too much,” Calabrese said, trying to make his voice come level. “This is too fucking much. I’m going to put you out of business now.”

  “No. You have put yourself out of business. That’s what you have done. You have delivered my salvation unto me and I am grateful.”

  Obviously the man had gone crazy. The distortions in the voice were not purely the product of the international lines. He had never heard Stavros sounding like this before. But there was an undertone of purpose as well, and it was this purpose which Calabrese found terrifying. “I’ll show you your salvation,” he said.

  “You have. You already have.”

  “I’ll show you your fucking salvation, Stavros, and I’ll make you beg for release from it.”

  “I don’t care anymore,” Stavros said thinly. The connection must have been going bad; the voice was now fading. “I’m not interested in your threats or promises anymore. I’m going to attend to my own set of purposes now, and the hell with yours. This is my country and this is my hotel, Calabrese.”

  “That’s a fucking joke. Your country? It’s no more your country than mine.”

  “It’s been mine for thirty years,” Stavros said. “I’m not afraid of you anymore. I’m not afraid of anything. I don’t have to be afraid,” he said and broke the connection, leaving Calabrese looking at an empty phone. The first, flaming sense of disbelief modulated into a dull, gasping rage that moved through him like an electrical impulse through wire, and then Calabrese found that he was trembling all over.

  He was a fool. He had been a fool. Face it: Walker, that crooked cop, that son of a bitch, had been right. He had had Wulff face-to-face in these very rooms and he had not killed him. Why had he not killed him? Was it that he was losing his grip? Did it all come down to that?

  “It doesn’t matter what it comes down to,” Calabrese muttered to himself and he was right. It really didn’t. Fuck the psychology of the thing; for whatever reason he had blown it very badly with Wulff, but that was behind him; what was ahead was the necessity now to rectify the mistake. It was a problem, one of the biggest problems he had ever had, but at least it was the kind of difficulty that could lend itself to relatively rational resolution. You moved ahead with a practical business problem like this; you brought in the artillery and you did what you could.

  The only way you got into difficulty was wondering about the motives for a condition in the first place, but that had never been his style. Not at all. The gravesites, the deeps of Michigan, were filled with men who had pondered all the motives.

  Relatively simple, this equation now: he had to get Wulff because the man was on the loose again with Stavros’s coaching and obviously hell-bent to get out of Peru and get on with his life’s work; he had to get rid of Stavros because the little Nazi bastard was a traitor who had sprung Wulff free and was probably hoping to use him to play out his own options. Stavros and Wulff. Wulff and Stavros. Take care of those two and then it was home-free.

  What he had to do was to move in now with the heavy artillery.

  It was a wonderful thing—just think of it!—to be in a room by yourself with nothing but a phone and the capability to call in literally hundreds of men through that one weapon, the telephone. It was an accomplishment. It was something to strive for.

  He went ahead and he did it.

  He called for total war.

  XI

  Rolling out of the exploding car Wulff had a single, sickening instant when he thought that it was all over; he was rolling and rolling in hilly country and he could lose his grip entirely, just keep on rolling, bounce off a precipice somewhere and start rotating through the stones. But the survival instinct was within him as ever, and although in many ways that seemed tempting, just giving up like that and going with the roll, he did not do so. He was able to get hold of some ground, heavy, dense mud which retarded the roll and then, wrenching himself against the force of the spin, was able to bring himself to a stop in some kind of crevice. Looking to his right then he saw the open, empty valley; hundreds of feet below, it reared up like a cup to seize him … but he sprang away from that vision, looking toward the left and up the hill. Some two or three hundred feet from the point of the impact he saw the Futuramic, lying on its side burning, flames leaping through the open scar of the windshield. Around it men had gathered, some beating at the flames, others poking and prying through the interior of the car, looking obviously for some sign of life within it which they were not going to find. The two men were dead. Wulff was sure of that.

  But they were not interested in the two men, of course. They were beating at that car like birds, looking for Wulff himself, and as he concentrated in some tube of attention, looking uprange, seeing what they were doing, he found himself caught between the impulse to run and that to start shooting. There were four men around the car, all of them having come from an old Buick sedan which he could see huddled between a pair of rises, quite invisible from the road but perfectly apparent here. These four must have waited quite patiently for the Futuramic to show and now they were atoning for their excessive patience with desperate haste, literally pulling doors off the Futuramic as they rammed themselves within. Four of them: he had used one shot in the bus and that meant simply enough that he had five bullets to kill these four men. Excellent if it worked; they would be dead and he would have the Buick at his disposal as well, excellent even if he missed the one shot that he had to spare. But if he missed more than that one shot, of course, Wulff would be in trouble. In fact, he would be dead. There was just no way that he could miss two shots and live.

  He took out the pistol and looked at it, considering what to do. It was a considerable risk; he was firing from sixty to seventy yards, two-thirds of a football field, not a bad shot with a rifle but a very difficult one with a small pistol. If perfectly aimed, which was not likely under the circumstances,
there was no saying if this little instrument had the power to kill from this distance; anything less than perfect aim was surely disastrous.

  All in all the smart thing to do was to run. But where? Wulff was standing in a clump of dry dirt looking out upon an abscess of emptiness—nothing on this road, no sign of civilization, Cuzco shrouded in mists below. Where would he go from here? He did not have any idea where the two dead men would have taken him.

  His prospects, in short, were terrible. Thinking that, settling in his mind that at least there was almost nothing to lose, Wulff had the pistol at waist-level before thinking further, was already in the process of squeezing off the first shot by the time it occurred to his conscious mind that he was going to go through with it. Son of a bitch, his conscious mind said admiringly. Wulff aimed the pistol at the nearest of the four, a stout man who was kicking at a fender now, smashing it down with his heel, obviously infuriated by their failure to find Wulff in the car. Emotions projected uprange like odor. He would be an easy shot, pitifully easy. Of course he would draw a lot of attention, too.

  Well, the hell with it. You couldn’t have everything; you couldn’t have both a corpse and perfect safety. Not considering it further, Wulff welded himself into the gun, concentrated, then got off a shot, deliberately aiming it low, compensating for the air pressure now. The man kicked once and went down, crumpling over the fender of the car, then slid downward, a surprised expression on his face visible even at this distance, blood tearing from his opened body.

  The three surrounding him responded instantly. These were top-grade troops, at least the best that Calabrese (for he had assumed that it could be only Calabrese) could pick up in Peru; they were not fools, they knew what was going on. They hit the ground, the three of them, at least two already digging for their guns, the third screaming orders gesturing in his direction, and it was this one, the nominal leader, which Wulff decided to aim for next. There was a moment when he thought that his finger was going to jam on the trigger but no, this did not happen; the trigger pulled free and he got the shot off. It hit this man in the forehead. He was already prone on the ground, there was nowhere else for him to go, but as the bullet struck him he began to roll and Wulff could once again see the betraying smear of blood. The man brought a hand to his forehead and wiped it off. Ah, you son of a bitch, Wulff thought, you can’t fool me, you’re dead, you son of a bitch, I got you, you can’t wipe everything away.