by Barry, Mike
“I’ve never seen you like this. I’ve—”
“Look again.”
“All right,” the blonde said. “I can’t get near this kind of stuff. I mean I can’t even touch it; it’s not my kind of thing. If there was anything I could do to help you—”
“Fucking won’t help it,” Calabrese said. “All you can do is fuck and that’s not the solution. I’m seventy-one years old. I’m going to die soon. It’s a miracle that I can fuck like this but how long can it go on? I mean even a fool has to understand that everything ends sometime. Fucking is not the answer.”
“I’ve had enough of this,” the blonde said. She said it very gently but her face was purposeful. “This isn’t doing any good for either of us.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know anything.” She stood, brushed some scraps of dust from her tight blue dress. In profile her breasts were straight up even without a brassiere, enormous. You had to get on top of her in bed, Calabrese thought, to realize that they were as soft and yielding to the touch as they appeared hard to the eye. Paradox, paradox, but who gives a shit? He did not. At this moment he did not care if he ever fucked again. “I’ll see you around,” she said.
Calabrese half-sat on the bed. He reached toward the night table, a look of alert intelligence in his eyes, took the pack of cigarettes and carefully broke one, tossed it against the wall. “I didn’t touch drugs for a long time, you know,” he said. “I just didn’t think it paid, you know what I mean? Who wants to get into that kind of shit, mess with that kind of poison, when there’s enough around from a nice simple operation with the kind of things that maybe don’t do people damage. I never really wanted to do people damage, just try to make out. But I got chased into it. The drugs I mean. I had to do it out of self-defense; if I hadn’t done it I would have been knocked out of business.” He broke another cigarette. “Of course a lot of other guys had that problem too,” he said meditatively. “I’m not the first.”
The blonde’s eyes were widened, deepened; she turned on him with slow attention. “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, forget it,” she said. “I don’t want to get into that kind of stuff at all, you understand? What we do, we do just as two people. I don’t want to get into biography and all that stuff. I don’t want to know who you are and you shouldn’t know who I am. We just—”
“Cut that shit out,” Calabrese said casually and ran the back of his hand against a knee, took it up his thigh, plucked some dried semen from his groin. “I don’t need to hear that crap; I need it, I get it in the movies. Two ships in the night and all that kind of shit. If you don’t want to listen, you don’t have to listen; get the fuck out. But don’t start playing Mary Sunshine now. I got driven into it out of self-defense, that’s all. Even then I protected myself. I was just overseeing, really. I never messed with distribution myself. Who needs it?” he asked again. “Of course I was right about all of that.”
“Drugs?” the blonde said. “I don’t know anything about drugs.” She was at the door now, a hand curling around the doorknob. “All I know about drugs is what I read in the papers, what I take out of the aspirin bottle.”
“Self-defense,” Calabrese repeated, to no one in particular, “and supervision. But then I begin to hear about this guy and before I know it, it’s a storm right over my head, raining right into my territory. What the fuck could I do? He’s in my lap even before I know what’s going on, before I get a chance to think this thing out. Who would have believed he was that kind of guy? You hear stuff around but mostly it’s all bullshit. I didn’t believe a word of it, and what I believed sounded like fun. How did I know? He’s killed four men on me already, that’s what I know.”
“I’m going,” the blonde said, “I’m really going. I don’t need to hear this anymore. I got my own troubles, honest to God.” She had contracted, her skin had taken on a harder, brighter tint. “Really,” she said, one hand on the door. “You tell me any more of this, I’m going to get sick.”
“What you don’t know won’t hurt you, eh? Well life’s not like that.”
“My life is,” she said. “That’s the way my life has been for a long time and that’s exactly the way it’s going to be.” She had the door open finally, was poised in the hall. “Listen,” she said earnestly, “you’re going to go on this way, you don’t call me. You call me only when it can be the way it’s supposed to.”
“I should have killed him,” Calabrese said, reached over, broke another cigarette. “I know that was my mistake, but you know the real shit part of it? You want to hear it? I know you don’t, but stay ten more seconds, humor me, what the fuck do you care? I’m seventy-one, I’m going to die soon and you’ll be nicely remembered. If I had it to do all over again, I mean if the fucker was standing here right now and we were replaying the scene, I’d probably let it go the same way. I wouldn’t kill him. There’s just something about him that’s fucking unkillable.”
“Goodbye,” the blonde said, “goodbye,” and went through the door, closed it.
Calabrese lay back on the bed, stroking, tickling, playing with his groin, plucking at the little hairs. Dead there. Absolutely nothing. Give the bitch credit: when she was finished with him he was completely fucked out. No solace down there; if there were any solace it would have to come out of his head, but things weren’t happening there either. Things were happening nowhere. He was at a dead-stop.
He could call downstairs, have her intercepted, sent up again, and he could beat the shit out of her, just for kicks. That would be satisfying in a way, and Calabrese considered it. There was a lot to be said for pure, simple sadism; he liked to think that he had a higher, somewhat more refined intelligence. But as for those types who had always enjoyed it at the basic level: live and let live, that was all. But he decided to let it go. It wouldn’t prove much. It wouldn’t be that satisfying. And someday he might want to call her up again.
You weren’t fucked out forever.
Calabrese thought about the blonde and then he thought about Wulff and then he thought of the phone calls he had received, all of the bad news filtering in, and something occurred to him; it wasn’t all that bad after all. It wasn’t as if the books were closed altogether. The last act was a long way from being played. He was going to get another shot at the bastard.
Definitely, he would get another shot at him. Everything was in flux and, if you looked at things in a certain way, the bad news was good, because it meant that Wulff was not irrevocably lost to him; the moment was a long way from being tracked back in the past. The bastard, if he got out of Peru, would be heading dead on him—Calabrese, in fact, would be stop number one—and that was good, that was really good, because he would have a chance to play the scene over again and this time it would come to a different ending. This time he would not repeat his stupidity.
This time he would kill him.
Calabrese lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, simulated sleep. In a few moments the simulation became fact; he passed from one heavy state of consciousness to the next, moved into dreams. And in those dreams thick ropes of speculation were thrown up and he clambered up them, just he, just Calabrese, struggling on the rope. Above him was the pure, white light of the arena. Streaming through the skylight was the sun. And below him was the pit, and in the pit was Wulff himself—spread-eagled, tortured, begging for release, as Calabrese—the avenger, the athlete, the dancer, the trapeze-artist—made ready to fall upon him.
XVIII
The rest of it was easy. Wulff huddled in the ledges and rocks until dawn; at dawn the light streaked through his closed eyelids, rousing him to a corpse. Beyond the corpse, which was stiff and smelled of wood, he was able to see the outlines of what appeared to be an airport.
It was amazing how what in the darkness had appeared to be a completely isolated spot turned out to be nothing of the sort; the guide had led him toward the rim of what appeared to be half of a town
carved out of the rock, midway between Cuzco and Lima. The assassin had been quite right. There was the airport from which he had come and to which he doubtless had intended to return alone. Craning around the rocks, Wulff could see it. About three miles, maybe less. He had a difficult, staggering walk to make through all of these ledges, but it should not take him more than an hour or two.
He got up stiffly, feeling the wastage spread through him, the large and small losses which the night had extracted. Somewhere far, far down on the rocks he could see the outline of a form, no two forms: larger and smaller, huddled together, and that could only be the guide and his horse, the two of them swaddled in death. But Wulff turned from them quickly because there was nothing that he could do. His own horse was a speck down on the other side, much further in its fall than these two. But then again that speck might be something else: a ruined bird, perhaps, you could not tell. He looked at the corpse of the assassin—a small, roundish man, very peaceful in death, very unremarkable; he looked something like that businessman he had murdered on Wall Street a long, long time ago.
And then, resolving to look no more, Wulff set out on his way. You had to leave the dead behind you. They could suck you in all the time, no question about it, but death was not the trip, drugs were, and that was a different trip altogether. He began to move down.
Slowly, then with increasing facility, mastering the way the rocks behaved under his hands, Wulff managed his way down the ledges, pausing now and then to catch his breath. There was a small, precise brown spot where the shot had touched him last night; just one pearl of blood had come out and then the system had shut itself down like a tap without plumbing. He was able to pick the blood away with his fingers leaving only a faint impression beneath. No trouble there. It was the third or fourth wound he had taken in his quest, but none of them serious; all of them but one in the shoulder area. A charmed life? He doubted that, he thought wryly. He doubted that very much; not when death seemed to touch almost everyone with whom he associated. And not when the quest was still in progress. Death was just taking a seat on the sidelines, that was all, a fascinated spectator; with chin in hand it was watching him struggle on, involved for the moment in his efforts. Sooner or later, however, like the old cheater he was, death would come out of the stands, pull his knife and take care of Wulff.
At best he figured he had a raincheck.
At the bottom of the valley; nothing now but flat tableland into the little airport. Wulff paused for the second time, stopping by a little gully to rub some water into his hair, clean himself off a little. The sack was intact, its contents slightly dampened by the dense night air, but nonetheless precious for all of that; forming into little blocks in the sack, it looked even prettier. He looked into the sack for a little longer than he actually needed to before he put it away. Face it: the stuff was beautiful. There was a beauty in it which could not be denied; he felt himself seized by the same emotions which must be granted the junkie before he took the needle. It had the fascination and loathsome beauty of Satan himself, this white junk; only a fool would not concede its powers. In the dreams-and-death business, it was absolutely the best that America had to offer. And considering that dreams and death were what the country was all about … well, you had to respect it. You simply had to respect the shit, that was all.
At length Wulff got to his feet again, tossed the sack over his shoulder and labored his way into the airport. It was a small enclosure, hardly larger than two football fields, hammered out of the native rock. There were a few discouraged Piper Cubs lined up at the sides of the slick, oily runway which circled it. A couple of the Piper Cubs were revving idly, men working on them, cursing. The dispatcher’s office appeared to be closed, but then again you never could be sure with things like this; probably there was a dispatcher and he was lying on the floor drunk or coked out on peyote. It didn’t matter. The airport business was probably the last refuge of the entrepreneur. He went up to one of the Piper Cubs that was being worked on. Since it didn’t matter which one, he took the closest.
A bearded man was pouring gasoline into a fuel tank under the wing, humming to himself, his hands shaking as he inhaled the fumes, most of the gasoline getting into the tank, some of it dribbling out. He made a point of ignoring Wulff. But as Wulff stood there hands on hips, the sack over his shoulder, quite willing to wait the man out for hours if necessary, the man finally turned and looked at him. “Yes?” he said, “what is it?”
“You speak English?”
“No,” the man said. “I speak fucking French. Can’t you tell that I speak fucking French? It’s my native tongue. What you’re getting is an instant, unconscious translation to English, I think. Of course, I really don’t know about that stuff.”
“All right,” Wulff said. He tried not to smile. Actually smiling would have been pointless; the man was not being funny. “I need a flight.”
“Good,” the man said. He was very interested in the gas can again. “Get yourself some wings and take up straight over the mountains.”
“I would if I could,” Wulff said, “but I don’t work that way. I work in planes.”
The man turned to him. “Where?” he said, his manner abruptly changed. “Where do you want to go?”
“The States.”
“Not Lima?” the man said.
“No,” Wulff said, “I don’t want to go to Lima. I want to get all the way up north, as far north as you can take me.”
“That would be a bad idea,” the man said. He ducked, put the gas can down and then looked at Wulff straight on, and Wulff saw that it was no illusion, the man had changed completely. He seemed to have recognized him; now he was functioning in a different context altogether. “Ordinarily that would be a very bad idea, a Lima bypass. But not now,” the man said, “right now it isn’t such a bad idea.” He looked at Wulff intently, then his eyes suddenly changed and he had looked away. “Stavros is dead,” he said.
“Oh,” Wulff said. He felt nothing at all. What was there to feel? But it was a surprise. “I didn’t know that.”
“We knew that somebody was coming out of the mountains today and was going to go back to him. I should have known it was you right away, but I didn’t.” The man shrugged. “He’s dead,” he said again.
“How do you know that?”
The man pointed toward the dispatcher’s office. “You learn,” he said, “the word gets around. You learn a few things.”
“All right.”
“So you want to get back to the States, eh?”
“I’d like that very much,” Wulff said. “That’s exactly the way I want it.”
“Who’s going to take care of it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stavros is dead. He’s not around to take care of it, then.” The man looked meaningfully at the bag. “Only you are. What’s in there?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know if I’ve got enough gas even to get into the air,” the man said. He looked down the line to the man at the other Piper Cub who was lying on the ground now underneath the open engine compartment. “I don’t think that any of us here have enough gas.”
“That’s a damned shame,” Wulff said, “I can sympathize with that.”
“Maybe you have some gas in the bag,” the man said. He had not taken his eyes off the sack. “Who knows? You might have exactly what I need in there.”
“I don’t run drugs,” Wulff said.
“I know you don’t fucking run drugs. I didn’t say anything about drugs at all, did I? I just said that you might have some gas in that bag. It was what you might call a question. A speculation.”
“I want to get to the States.”
“We figured that,” the bearded man said and paused. “That was made quite clear. Stavros is dead,” he said softly. “It’s every man for himself now, you understand that? Nothing’s like it was. Nothing is ever going to be like it was again. Nothing is simple anymore.
It’s a different world. I’m no
longer a working man. Nobody here is. We’re on our own.”
Wulff slowly took the sack down, opened it on the ground, then stepped away. “Tell me,” he said, “do you see any gas in there?”
“I don’t know,” the bearded man said. He leaned over to take a closer look, moving his head toward the bag, suffused with alertness.
Wulff kicked him in the head. The man fell heavily to the ground, groaning beside the sack. He rolled on his back, opened his eyes. Blank, they rapidly moistened and filled with color again. Good. He had not wanted to put the man out of commission. That had not been his intention.
Wulff took the pistol from his pocket, aimed it at the bearded man. “I don’t run drugs,” he said again, “that’s not my racket. I’m not in distribution.” The other man down the line had disappeared completely behind the plane, he noticed. All through the field motion seemed to have ceased. Even the wind was drier. “You’ve got to get your signals unscrambled,” Wulff said. “The first thing you’ve got to learn when you go out for business yourself is to be able to tell the difference between a live one and a dead one. I’m a dead one.” He waved the pistol. “Get up,” he said.
The bearded man rolled, managed to get to his knees. A fine, light trickle of blood was coming from his nose; he slapped that blood away as if it were a mosquito. “No need,” he said. “There was no need to do that.”
“Let me be the judge.”
“You shouldn’t have done that. You don’t have to pull a gun on me.”
“Get in the plane,” Wulff said. He held the gun on the man, leaned over, picked up the sack, drew the drawstring closed. “Let’s go.”
“I don’t think she’ll fly. She needs to be checked—”