by Barry, Mike
“That is a common problem,” the old man said after a pause.
“Isn’t it?” Wulff said.
XIII
Stavros said, “This is my room. This is my hotel. Get out.”
The man with the gun leaned against the wall in an easy, casual posture and said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to get out and you don’t control anything anymore.”
“I mean it,” Stavros said. He held himself in check. He held himself from doing something foolish, disastrous, stupid, something like going to the desk drawer in a lunge to try to seize his gun. This man was no fool; Stavros would never complete the action. He would get his brains blown out for his trouble. The only way around this situation was to talk his way through, but he did not know how much talking he could do at this moment. His mouth felt dry, impacted, his hands fluttering. He looked at his hands with almost clinical detachment, noting the fear that was manifested through the tremor. Odd. So it could get to him also. Philosophy and resignation be damned; he was as frightened of dying as anyone else. All right. He would remember that, he would remember that for the next time. He did not hold life so cheaply after all.
No one could hold life cheaply. No matter how painful you might have found it, no matter what the distance you cultivated, it was still the only thing you knew. The other thing, death, was an abstraction. Stavros had seen heroic men—men whom he knew to be powerful, self-contained, in control of themselves—whimpering like puppies at the moment of death because nothing in the handling of life affected the ability to manage death. It was not to be held against them. It was no disgrace.
“Put the gun away,” he said to the man. One of Calabrese’s operatives of course. He could be none other. But he was a different sort from the types that Calabrese had sent to the hotel in the past; this man did not have the look of being a freelancer or stringer hired out, but of direct payroll. Top troops. Top operative. He had misjudged, Stavros had, that was all. He did not think that the old man would take the trouble to move and certainly he had never pictured him moving this quickly.
“I’m not going to put the gun away,” the man said. He looked at it with the absent affection with which a man might confront a friendly dog. “I’m going to kill you with it. Your trouble is that you’re stupid, Stavros. We know what you’ve been doing here for a long time, but as long as it didn’t interfere we let it go. The old man is a generous person. But now you’re getting out of range.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You wanted to turn a miserable little operation, that was your affair,” the man said. “Live and let live, that’s the old man’s philosophy. But you didn’t want that Stavros. You wouldn’t let us live.” He gestured with the gun. “So I’m going to kill you.”
“No you won’t,” Stavros said with a sudden positiveness. He looked up, directly confronted the man for the first time. The man was somewhat younger than he had appeared on first impression, maybe only in his early thirties; it was merely his eyes and unshaven appearance that had given him the aspect of an older man. He was younger than Stavros had taken him to be, and that meant that he would be less certain. Always, inevitability, youth could be equated with uncertainty. That was a rule of judgment by which he would stand. “You’re not going to kill me,” he said, “because if you were, you already would have. You wouldn’t have talked it out. You’re here to bluff me, intimidate me, and it won’t work.”
“Yes, it will work.”
“No, it won’t,” Stavros said. Keeping control of himself, forcing an assurance that he was trying to draw from the air and push inside himself, he opened the desk drawer, looked at the loaded pistol within. He did not reach for it at the moment, merely considered it. “Get out of here,” he said, “get out of my room. Get out of my hotel.”
“No,” the man said but something shattered in his complexion. There was an impression of sweat on his forehead. “Don’t make any moves, Stavros. Don’t go inside that drawer.”
“Of course I’m going to go inside that drawer. I’m going to take out my pistol and shoot you.”
“No you won’t.”
“Yes I will. You won’t shoot me. You’ve got your orders to bluff, to threaten, frighten … but you don’t have a kill order. If you did you would have already. I know about death,” Stavros said. “I know everything about death; I was living it before you were born.” He reached toward the desk drawer. “Get out of here,” he said.
The man pointed the gun at him. “You’re a fool,” he said, “you don’t know what you’re dealing with. Get your hand away from there!”
“No,” Stavros said. He was very frightened but matters were in progress. He was gambling everything on his instincts but this was not the first time that he had done so. When you came right down to it, a man had only his instincts on which to draw. You could talk all you wanted to about logic, reason, causes, consequence, but that was all deceit. Typical American deceit; the pushing away of the irrational when it was the irrational on which men’s lives rested. That was why America was going insane, because they had denied the irrational for too long and now it was reaching out into everything. But he, Stavros, had accepted the irrational as long as he remembered. Man was a creature of the blood, the blood was mysterious and corrupt, it moved in strange and various directions, always coming back upon itself. Could you pull a spoon of water from the sea, replace it, spoon out exactly the same water? No more than that could you pluck a motive or a reason from the stew of the unconscious. It was merely there. It was there all the time. “No,” he said again, “I’m not going to stop.” His hand was on the gun now. It curled into his hand in a gentle, familiar way. He had been feeling this gun all his life; it communicated little waves of pleasure into his palm. He hoisted it, looked at the man across the desk.
“See?” he said, “and now we are equal.”
The man’s eyes were bleak and serious. He held his own gun steadily, leveled on Stavros’s forehead. “That was very foolish,” he said.
“It was not foolish. Nothing is foolish. You have no orders to kill me and therefore would be in serious trouble if you did. You can take no action against me. Get out of my room.”
“It would have been better the other way,” the man said, the shape of his face, the arc of his mouth not changing. “We thought that we could reason with you. We thought that you could give us some information.”
“I have no information to give you.”
“You have a lot of information to give us,” the man said. “We would like to know where Wulff went, when he will reappear, what you have assigned him to do specifically. We are much less interested in you than in Wulff, as you might suspect. You could have told us that.”
“I will tell you nothing,” Stavros said. Some of the fear was easing. He had been in terror at the time he had moved for the gun, he would admit that … it was not pleasant to face the prospect of your imminent death as you performed the only action that might possibly save your life; poised that way, on the edge between life and death there had been a sheer, knife-thrust of terror which had skewered him apart, bisecting him at the crevice between those two possibilities.
But now, holding the gun, holding the situation against himself, he had the feeling that he had passed through the crisis. This young gunman, this messenger from Calabrese would not kill him here because he would not risk the loss of his own life. Life was too precious for this young man; Stavros could play on the necessity this one had to hang on, a necessity which would go far beyond Calabrese. “I will tell you nothing,” Stavros said again and clicked the chambers ominously. “Get out of here now.”
The gunman shook his head. He sighed. “You understand you give me no alternative,” he said. “You’re calling on me to kill you.”
“I’ll kill you too.”
“You won’t be reasonable,” the gunman said and sighed again. His eyes blinked, he shook his head and seemed then to leap over the void of a decision, came out on the other side, ki
cking for balance but finding himself. His eyes cleared as if with relief. “The trouble with all you goddamned Germans is that you’re the least reasonable people who ever lived. You talk a lot about rationality but it comes down to blood-stubbornness and mysticism.”
“I agree with that,” Stavros said. “I agree with that. I have not been a rational man since 1945. For the last thirty years I have accepted fully the truth of what you say, that life is a mystery, a dream, a disaster, that it can be understood only in terms of its uncertainties and irrationalities. You tell me nothing,” he said, “you offer me no analysis, you offer me no judgments, you offer me nothing that I have not long, long since understood,” and he raised the gun then, and with a little cocking motion pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit the gunman hard in the stomach and with one groan of astonishment, he lurched toward the floor and Stavros was already falling out of the way of the expected return shot … but even though he had calculated everything, even taken into account the pain of what that shot might be, he had not calculated in any way whatsoever the pain of what hit him. It felt like a brick hit his forehead, tearing it open, and even as he became aware of the ringing pain, the feeling of spreading, oozing breakage above the neck, he saw the blood which sprang like a curtain in front of his eyes, a sheet of blood ripping down from his forehead and spreading its way in the ledge of consciousness. I’m dead, Stavros thought, my God, he’s killed me and a far different part of him on another planet, the part of him that held the gun, tried to pull the trigger, deposit another shot, but somehow he could not connect brain and hand in the old, smooth familiar way. The command was blocked at his armpit, fibers of pain opening like a scar in that place and then, as he sat there paralyzed, the second shot caught him in the windpipe, in the bloodiest part of the neck.
Now Stavros felt himself overcome by his blood; he felt that the blood was coming not from two but from twenty parts of himself, rivers of blood roiling over him like implication and in the center of it a dim mewing, the sound of some animal in whimpering distress which he thought for a moment was the man across his desk but which became apparent to him was not; it was himself. He was crying as his life ebbed away and he was able to look at that in an almost clinical way, detached for all the hurt that seemed separate from him like an animal: he did not think that he cared for his life that much. It had not occurred to him in all those years since 1945 when he had given up upon all basic assumptions of life and had merely consented to a survival contract, which was entirely different … it had not occurred to him that he cared for his life that much; yet apparently he had. He did. He did not want to die. Well, be that as it may, like it or not, he was dying. Something that was not aqueous came against his forehead and he knew it was the ledge of desk as he plummeted to the floor. Lying on the floor then he smelled the odors of death and corruption coming out of him thickly, roiling further with the blood to pitch him to some level below consciousness, or perhaps it was above consciousness. Anyway it was at some point beyond the situation where he could both assess what was happening to him and at the same time not care. He did not care. He had now been dying for a long time; perhaps this was merely another level of dying for which he had been long prepared. He did not care. He did not care. The man whom he had shot was mewling in the background just as he was, but the cries were of no significance. It was merely another presence at a point from which he had ascended.
Dying Stavros heard bands: dying Stavros heard the music again and the shouting of the crowds in the great square; dying, Stavros saw 1933 again and it was good, it was everything that he remembered it as having been except that this time he saw it two ways: young as he had been, old as he was now, age and youth linking in the remembered once again. And for one perilous moment standing in that recollected square, listening to all the sounds that were coming from the speakers that ringed them, stemming out like flowers from that far place, for one perilous moment he heard the voice again and then it came crashing upon him: the blood, the chambers, the bare fields, the deaths and the deaths assaulted his second death. And so rising and falling, heaving and billowing like the sea itself Stavros died and for all the difference it made—this was his last insight—why, for all the difference it made he might as well have still been alive. What was the difference? Who cared? What sensible man, looking at the sweep of existence, could find any consequence in whether something as inconsequential as Stavros lived or died, prospered or withered away?
XIV
Two million dollars worth of shit. Two million dollars worth of shit. Wulff found that it was a litany, some kind of a litany anyway, riding horseback through the Andes, the sack strapped on him, he strapped to the horse, the three of them: Wulff, sack, horse, staggering their way through the thin, deadly air. Here there was an isolation so profound that the fields of Havana could not equal it; the closest might be the tablelands that five miles out cut off Las Vegas from the horizon, but there was not in Las Vegas the quality of emptiness here. It was land so barren that the living and dead could co-exist; ghosts had the same weight that people did. No wonder they had such theories of reincarnation here; the living had no more weight than the dead, the dead had the same presence as the living. There was no lost city of the Incas in these mountains, there were only the lost cities of man or men … hundreds or thousands of them, some of them stalking. Wulff shuddered, a sheer superstitious awe overtaking him possibly for the first time, and huddled deeper into the saddle. Ahead of him the unspeaking man who was his guide kept on riding implacably ahead, the bobbling head of his horse casting shadows, those shadows the only break in the terrain. The man had said nothing since they had left. He would say nothing for hours more or until they reached the outskirts of Lima; always assuming of course that they would reach those outskirts. There was no saying. Literally nothing was sure. Wulff felt the sack cut into his ribs, grunted, loosened the strap slightly. It began to shuttle painfully against his neck, then.
Two million dollars worth of shit. Right now, in enclosed rooms, hot dry junkies’ spaces, they were shooting up; all the junkies of America were putting a prayer and voyage into their veins, carrying themselves far far out and into a sphere where consequence and calamity no longer existed. And with each of those prayers injected with the junk was an implied prayer for Wulff himself, for his burden. For more shit, cleaner shit, sharper shit, cheaper, higher, greener, whiter shit that would take them further and further into those spaces which they occupied, shit so great that they would never come down again, shit which would make the need for more of it impossible. The ultimate trip, the ultimate shit, that was what they were seeking in its various particles, and here was he, Wulff, slung across a horse, slung across his back, carrying with him a billion dreams at seven dollars a drop, moving from this one unimaginable country toward that other one in the north. If only they could see him now. The bagman to end them all. He would be a saint in every shooting gallery on the north side, south side, east and west if they only knew what he knew.
Madness: to become a bagman. But survival was the name of the game; survival and to carry on his quest. What else could he have done, Wulff thought. It was a lousy deal which Stavros had offered him, but then again it was the only deal going. The alternative was to be ground to death under Calabrese’s heel in Peru. He would not have lasted long. He would not have lasted long at all in the Hotel Deal. Sooner or later, probably much sooner if he knew the man, Calabrese would have pulled the plug and then what? Then what, Wulff?
Better not to think about it. Better not to think about what he was doing either: plowing through the Andes, the deadly hills, the unimaginable excavations, the bag slung across his shoulder, the bag of Stavros’s jewels heading for its destination in five hundred thousand veins to the north. Maybe he could pull a double-cross over the border and ditch the shipment, maybe he could not. Maybe for that matter Stavros’s own planning had backfired somewhere and Stavros would not be in a position to re-appropriate the bag from him. Even so,
that did not change at all the basic equation of his condition. He was running junk. Burt Wulff was running junk. He had become the enemy.
Well, what was there to say? What could you say about something like that except that it had happened and that the basic situation remained unchanged? Every man in his life sooner or later had to become aware of the basic ambivalences, had to realize that he contained within him a duality of purpose and that he was to a certain degree that against which he fought so bitterly. It was this in fact which might give fuel to one’s determination … knowing that one was striking against, trying to eliminate, the hated and omnipresent self. Almost all of these men with whom he had been dealing over these months were exhibit to that to greater or lesser degree: he suspected that no one could loathe these men as much as they did themselves, no man could repudiate them from the company of humanity as they had walled themselves off from all but their own kind. That duality was at the basis of all human relationships. There was a very thin line between the narco cop and the informer; scratch one and you had the other. They were working the same street for the same purposes; even the methods were the same. The only difference was the piece of paper which said that one was law and the other felon, but what did that matter? What the hell did that matter anyway when you had to realize that it was a paper discrimination and that what both of you were doing all the time was simply hustling drugs? Well, the hell with it.
The hell with it; New York was a long, long way behind him; all of the choices had been made, all of the probabilities long since acted out to this one bitter equation. He had chosen his course in a moment of grief and now he was walking down that gray, enclosed pathway; whichever way it took him there was no exit except at the very end, and he did not even see light at the end of the tunnel. Light at the end of the tunnel: that was one of the Vietnam phrases, wasn’t it? They were always seeing the light at the end of the tunnel—the joint chiefs, the field commanders, the commander-in-chief himself—and meanwhile the killing went on, the drugs kept on trafficking, men died, other men replaced them and the dance continued. All of it was a game, that was all. This too. A game. The stakes changed but it was the same combination.