by Barry, Mike
Tucci felt the anger assaulting him first as spots of dampness in the groin and underarms. He could feel the frustration, the rage. Everything he had done had been right. He had played by the book, controlled situations, worked his way along carefully until, he thought, he had placed himself in a situation where everything worked as it should. Now this son of a bitch across from him was telling Tucci that he had been wrong, the situation was uncontrollable after all. Furthermore, men he had trusted had turned out to be untrustworthy. That said a good deal about Tucci’s judgment. It also meant that the entire organization was shaky. Hand-picked traitors.
“I want to hit that son of a bitch,” he said. “I want him out of here within a day.”
“What about the valise?”
“We’ll deal with that later. We’ll get working on that too. But it all starts with that bastard Wulff. If he hadn’t headed this way it would never have happened.”
The messenger shrugged, sipped his coffee, finished it. “That’s all right with me,” he said. “All of that stuff’s out of my hands. I just wanted to bring you up to date.”
“Nothing’s out of your hands.”
“Yes it is,” the man said. He stood, looked down at the table. “I’m going to get out of here,” he said.
“No you’re not. I’m not finished with you.”
“I’m afraid you are,” the messenger said, looking at him. There was a glint of amusement in the man’s face. Did he see weakness? Was that it, Tucci’s failure had made him weak in the man’s eyes? “You are definitely finished,” the messenger said. “There is nothing more that I can do for you.”
Tucci stood furiously, faced the man. His hand was already fumbling for the pistol in his pocket. He could feel the beat of rage within him; it would be insanity to gun down this man in a public place but Tucci had a violent temper. “Stay here,” he said.
“Not really,” the man said. He backed away three paces, looking to his left. Tucci followed the man’s gaze, realized suddenly that the place was empty. The waitress and counterman were out of sight; the two customers that he had seen walled over in a corner booth when he came in had got out.
“Tucci,” the messenger said, “Tucci, you’re a stupid son of a bitch.”
Tucci went for the gun, wheeling. The man threw himself to the floor. Two men came out of the kitchen holding guns. Before Tucci could reach his own pistol, one of the men fired, hitting him in the shoulder. Tucci, turned around completely by the pain, dropped his gun and stumbled into a wall. The place rattled.
“No,” he said. It sounded like a protest but was a sound of futility. Stupid. He had thought himself insulated and all the time they were merely waiting. Tucci had not faced death since the old wars of twenty years ago. But it came back to him, this taste of death, like an old lover. He should have known. He always should have known.
The messenger stood, holding Tucci’s gun. It must have slid directly into his grasp. He waved at the two men by the door of the kitchen. “Let me,” he said, “this one is for me.”
“No,” Tucci said again. He was made rigid by the pain in his shoulder. It spun through him on litile tendrils and he felt himself becoming dizzy and nauseated. “Please—”
“You’re stupid,” the messenger said. “You lost us the junk and you lost us Wulff. You can’t cut it. You can’t cut it anymore, Tucci. Right of succession.”
He lifted the gun and shot Tucci in the eye. Tucci fell gasping across the table. The messenger hit him in the back of the neck. Already dead, the corpse contracted like a frog’s leg and then rolled onto the floor.
“All right,” the messenger said, throwing the gun on the body and motioning to the men by the kitchen. He gave the corpse a kick. “Let’s get out of here.”
The three of them massed near the door, walked out in file, quickly. After a time the waitress and the counterman came from the back and looked at the fallen Tucci wordlessly. “I suppose we should call the police,” the counterman said finally.
The waitress shrugged. “You do it,” she said. She stood there for a while and looked at the dead man, fascinated. She was only nineteen years old and had never seen a corpse before. She had always hoped she would see a dead man and now she had. What they said was right. It was as interesting as the movies.
Her breath began to move in her throat unevenly.
III
Wulff ditched the Continental finally on Beacon Street. It had been a pretty good car, much better than he had had any right to expect, but sentiment played no part in his new life; it was time to get rid of it. Everyone in town would be looking for it now. First there had been the matter of getting the machine gun and clips and the remaining grenades into his room at the cheap hotel, but the clerk downstairs had chosen that time to pass out completely, lolling stuporously behind the counter, a half-consumed bottle of gin beside his head, so no sweat on that. Boston, fair Boston. One thing Wulff was learning fast: the dirty sections of every city looked the same. Boston might have a reputation different from New York or San Francisco but when you were in the guts of the city, looking for a place to sleep or a connection, all of the territory was familiar. He felt right at home already.
He had pulled the plates off the Continental, raised the trunk and hood, left the keys in it. With luck it would look exactly like an old abandoned car and the scavengers would get into it before the police or the hoods did. Now he sat on the fourth floor of a Boston hotel, the machine gun held absently across his lap, the room secured by a chain bolt. For the first time in several days, Wulff allowed himself to think. The drive cross-country hadn’t counted. He had been bombed-out, exhausted and the effort of pushing the old car all the way, half-expecting some Dodge Challenger to pull up from behind, outrun him and gun him down had kept all real thought from his mind.
But now, oddly, he was not exhausted. Fatigue and dread had been chasing one another in his skull so long that they had burned one another out, at least temporarily. He felt himself raised to that peculiar, burning sense of alertness he had felt now and then in the department when running down a call on an unknown assailant. And he had felt that way in Vietnam all the time; to be poised on the edge of dissolution was in a way a happy feeling because you knew that you could go no further, that you were, at least, existing at the limit of your possibilities and there were very few people who could say that. Stupid. He had been stupid.
He had been incredibly stupid to think that he would be able to get a quarter million dollars’ worth of junk into this city or into any other major distribution point. Communications in the drug trade must have been at least as effective now as they were between nations and the word had been flashed by the survivors at San Francisco clear across the country: get Wulff. They must have figured that he was going into Boston because, as the dying mobster, Anthony, had told him on the burning freighter, Boston was the next point of distribution for the junk once delivery had been taken. It would probably have been flown there in bulk to be cut up and put into the pipeline there.
They already knew plenty about the Wolfs modus operandi. How could he have possibly thought that these men operated in a vacuum, that they did not know what was going on? He was going up against the shrewdest, most cunningly effective network in the history of cities; they had in only a decade managed to change and poison the nation: did Wulff really think that he would be able to slip by them undetected, undetectable? He had cut a swath of flame in New York, he had gone to San Francisco and killed fifty of them there, hitting the whole western axis in the solar plexus—but as far as the enemy was concerned, it only meant that they had not taken him sufficiently seriously. They had not put the proper troops into the fray.
Now, here in Boston, they would meet him in combat gear. Here in Boston, he would clash with the enemy for the first time in their full realization of the menace he represented.
Wulff, running his hands over his face, trying to restore some circulation to the spaces behind his burning eyes, decided that he w
as extremely lucky to be alive. It was only luck that the toll booth job had been assigned to men who would not murder in front of witnesses and that somewhere beyond that toll booth the men who should have blocked off traffic were incompetents. Failing either one of these two factors he would be dead now and his brief war over. A few quick flurries, a couple of minor campaigns won, to be a corpse on the outskirts of Boston….
Wulff shuddered. Dying was not so bad. He had been killed the day he saw a girl named Marie Calvante lying dead of a heroin overdose in a rotten furnished room on upper Broadway. Since then the life functions had worked, but inside, in all the places where a man lived, except for a few brief moments with a girl in San Francisco, he had been a corpse. All right. He had told the enemy that they could not kill him twice; he had not been lying about that.
But failure. That was something else. To be ambushed, to have the goods and his plan taken from him, to see everything that he had hoped to do collapse because of his own stupidity—that Wulff could not bear.
They should have killed him, he decided. The hit men should have gambled on the witnesses and shot him. The gang behind them should have closed off the damned road or come down the pike themselves to have shot him.
Because he was mad now. He was very mad. He could feel the anger pulsating within him and it seemed to stitch him together with a further intensity of purpose. They thought he had been serious in San Francisco or New York? They thought that he had been playing for keeps in those two cities?
Well that was nothing. That was absolutely nothing to what he was going to do now.
He was going to burn them out of Boston for this.
Wulff went to the valise. He still had the stockbroker’s notebook, taken off the corpse in Manhattan. The notebook with names, addresses, points of location which the police in any city would have given up their pension plans to see, if only because they could sell it back to the racketeers for enough to set fifty men up for life.
He leafed through the notebook which had been arranged by the precise stockbroker by geographical area and then by city and found under Boston a name and address of a man who appeared to be important.
All right. All right, he would start there.
Henry Tucci, here come the Wolf.
IV
At about the same time or perhaps a little earlier, the bell rang at the home of a man named Phillip Sands who was an associate professor of linguistics at Harvard. When he went to the door, two men with grim faces were standing there, holding guns.
“Don’t panic,” one of them said, “this is no stickup, nothing like that at all. We just want to come in and have a conversation.”
Sands held his ground and said, “My wife is in the living room. I don’t think she’d appreciate the guns.”
“That’s all right,” the man said, “you just go back there then and get her out of the living room and then we’ll come in and talk. Meanwhile you can let us stand here in the hall. My friend and I aren’t here for any trouble at all, and you’d make a big mistake if you started some on your own.”
For a man holding a gun, this one had a surprisingly light voice, almost a lilt to it. The other one, a shorter item, stood behind the speaker in the hall, holding his gun firmly and pointing it at Sands with an almost demented expression. Sands decided that the speaker was not used to guns particularly but on the other hand this one was and would have to be carefully watched.
Not that he was in a position to do anything much besides watching. He shrugged and walked quickly back to the living room where his wife was sitting watching television and knitting. For a girl of twenty-two, a coed he had married in passion only a year before, she had certainly moved past the revolutionary stage quickly, Sands thought. What she was almost consciously trying to do, of course, was to disassociate herself from him—but there was no time to think about that now. A crisis was coming but it was months off, with these two guests in the hall it might be never. “Karen, there are some people here to see me,” he said, “you’ll have to shut that off and go upstairs.”
She looked up, gave him a bright look of resentment. “I’m not good enough to listen to your discussions?” she said. “This happens all the time, Phil.”
“We can’t discuss it now.”
“We’re going to have to discuss it,” she said, but she stood. “We can’t go on this way. We have nothing to say to each other when we’re alone and you’re always dismissing me when people come around. We can’t go on this way.”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “I know what you’re doing.” She went to the foot of the stairs, balanced herself there, quite a pretty girl really, although Sands thought wryly enough, he had overrated her sexuality by more than a little, and what he had thought to be malleable raw material that he could mold to his needs had turned out to be a stubborn, fearful, resentful little girl. No time to think of that now.
“I’ll be up as soon as I can, Karen,” he said.
“Maybe you will,” she said, “but don’t expect that you’ll find me up there just waiting. I can’t go on this way, Phil, I really can’t.”
“All right,” he said, “you can’t go on this way.” Phil she had always insisted upon calling him. No one else called him Phil: he was Phillip or Dr. Sands. He realized, almost absently, that she was right, things could not go on this way much longer; not if everything she did irritated him so.
The hell with it. He went back to the hall where the men with guns were waiting very patiently and motioned them inside. They followed him, guns dangling, seeming to be ill at ease in the relatively well-furnished apartment of an associate professor. That gave him a leg up, Sands thought, he was in his element, they out of theirs. On the other hand, this fancy speculation would get him precisely nowhere if one of them chose to pull a trigger. Guns had been created for people like this; they were the ones who needed equalizers. Sands felt an unpleasant tingle moving through the back of his neck and wrists, suddenly felt lightheaded and collapsed onto the couch behind him. The gunmen, seemingly less ill at ease simply by seeing this, took up positions against the wall, the one with the lilting voice even leaning against some bookshelves. “Let’s get right to the point,” he said.
“That suits me.”
“We know who you are and what you can do for us. Now we’ve got ourselves a load of uncut heroin which may be one of the biggest hauls in history. Don’t know and we’re not going to run it through any chemists just yet. We need someone reliable to dispose of it.”
Sands felt his knees shaking but he kept himself tightly in control. Control was the key to his life, he reminded himself of this. “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about,” he said trying to keep his voice steady.
“Come off that shit, professor,” the shorter one said. His face had become clotted with rage; his eyes were blinking rapidly. “We didn’t come here to play cat and mouse or to go through any of this shit. Now you’re one of the biggest pushers in the East, or at least the biggest one we can hang into on short notice. We’ve got some very hot, important stuff and we need it unloaded.”
“My friend is a little abrupt,” the other man said in that curious voice. East European, Sands found himself thinking with academic detachment, probably came here at a very early age and doesn’t even speak a second language, but can’t lose the accent anyway. “We wish we had the time to play it your way, professor, to drink some tea and get at the point longhand, but we’re a little pressed for time so we’ll have to take a rain check on that. We know your record and what you’re doing; you can take my word for that. And we need some help.”
Sands looked up at the serene, floating lights of his living room, looked up at the carpeted staircase which his wife had ascended, looked briefly out the window, but his gaze came back, as he knew it would have to, to this man. His hands clenched against one another involuntarily. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re after
,” he said, “but I won’t touch a deal like this.”
“We’re not cops,” the short man said, “if you’re thinking that, professor.”
“In fact,” said the other, “we happen to be very much on your side of this, professor. We’re allies, not enemies. We need you very badly and I’m afraid that there’s no time to negotiate.”
“Those guns are making me very nervous,” Sands said, holding his palms to knees to lessen if not conceal the trembling. “Whatever you are or think you have in mind, it’s impossible for me to discuss anything while I’m looking down the barrel of a gun.”
The man seemed to shrug, looked at the other. “Don’t do it,” the other said with disgust but made no gesture to stop the speaker from opening the chambers of the pistol to show Sands that it was empty.
“Both are,” the man said. “We’re not the type of people who pull loaded guns on complete strangers, which so far unfortunately you are. We like to feel that there’s some kind of a relationship before we start shooting people.”
The stocky man said, “You’re a great help, you really are,” but put his gun away inside his jacket and, moving from the wall, went over to the doorway leading to the kitchen and then turned to look at Sands in an almost pleading way. “Please,” he said, “don’t play games. There’s too much at stake for all of us here and we just don’t have the time. We’ve got a quarter of a million worth of goods but unless we put it into channels it’s worthless to us and it’s just going to get a lot of people killed. We know that you can help us if you want to, it’s your specialty.”
Sands said, “Assuming that I could help you—and I still deny that because I am an associate professor at a major university and know nothing of drug distribution—but assuming for the sake of this discussion that I could help you, why the hell would I? You say that a lot of people may get killed because of what you’ve got. That means that you not only have what you have illegally and all of us could go to prison for life for possession or distribution, it means that there are other people who think that they should have it and they’re looking for you. And, inevitably, they’ll look for me. Do you think that I’d really put myself into a situation like that?”