by Barry, Mike
The empty eyes. The blind fish.
4
Calabrese was ready for the call when it came. He had the black man Williams and his two guards in one room, he had the girl Tamara and a guard in another, both with extensions; he had his own phone ready. Wulff knew about Williams but he did not know of the girl; that would be a nice surprise for him. Calabrese was looking forward to that. He was looking forward to almost every aspect of the call but particularly hearing the sound of the bastard’s voice when he knew that Calabrese had him and that his options were over. But first there was the waiting.
There was the waiting and nothing to be done about it. It infuriated Calabrese; here he held all the cards and yet it was Wulff who was deciding the time of the call; all that he had said was three or four hours until the next check-in and here it was going on five and no sound from the bastard. Of course that could mean the best kind of news; some freelancer, say, had spotted Wulff wherever he was and had killed him. That would be fine and actually Calabrese should not be so nervous, should not feel pressured. But he doubted his luck. No, the son of a bitch was toying with him again.
“Where the fuck is that call?” he said to the man in the room with him. The man said nothing, he was well trained. He shrugged impassively, showed his palms, looked at the floor. “Ah, fuck you,” Calabrese said and went out of the room, went down the hall, looked in first at the room where the girl and her guard were, the two of them against the wall, drinking coffee, the girl looking at him with wide, luminous eyes. He wondered what it would be like to have fucked her. He would not touch, by force or desire, anything which Wulff had touched, would not corrode himself but it would be interesting. She was a piece of ass all right. “How are you doing?” Calabrese said.
She held the coffee cup, said nothing. “I said, how are you doing?” Calabrese said again, and the guard poked her.
“You’re going to regret this,” she said, “that’s how I’m doing. Kidnapping is a capital crime.”
“This isn’t kidnapping,” Calabrese said, “this is a pleasure,” and then, feeling disgust overwhelm him, turned, went from the room and into the next one down the hall, the one where Williams was sitting with his two guards, the three of them, of all things, playing poker, nickels and quarters on the table. Williams looked up at Calabrese, nodded, then looked down at the table. He was cool, this one. He had established a wonderful relationship with the men guarding him. He was Wulff’s buddy, that meant that he had qualities of adaptability.
“I’m waiting for your friend to call,” Calabrese said.
“Me too,” Williams said, not looking up from his hand. “Me too, I’m waiting for him to call.”
“You know why he hasn’t called?”
“Shit no,” Williams said. “If I knew why he hadn’t called I’d tell him to call because I’m getting pretty sick of this crap. I’ll raise a dime,” he said and shoved two coins onto the table. The near guard grunted, peered at his hand.
“You must think this is some fucking kind of vacation,” Calabrese said and the guard looked up, the three of them looked up, Williams put down his hand, something seemed about to happen in that room and the phone to the left of the table rang.
Calabrese paused, waited for it to ring again so that he could be sure that this was really happening and it was not some kind of ploy with himself as the butt. Then when the phone went off he went out of the room quickly, leaving the door open, went back to his office and picked it up quickly, feeling the dampness circulating through his palm as he picked it up and straightened it against his ear. The operator said that the call was collect, would he accept? Calabrese said he would without even asking for the name of the party and after a moment the voice of the enemy came on.
“Put him on,” he heard Wulff say, “put him on right now. I want to hear him.”
“All right,” Calabrese said. He put the phone down delicately, walked past the puzzled guard, went into the room with the door open, said to Williams. “Pick it up,” and then turned, went back to his own room, picked up the receiver and listened. After a while he heard Williams say, “Hello.”
“Hello David,” Wulff said, “where are you?”
“Don’t answer that,” Calabrese said, cutting in, “don’t answer that at all.”
There was another, slightly longer pause and then Wulff said, “How are you making it?”
“I’m playing poker,” Williams said, “with two very tough guards, right now. I’ve just been raised back two times but I think I can stand it.”
“That sounds good,” Wulff said, “how are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling wonderful,” Williams said, “I’ve never felt better in my life. It’s what I’ve been waiting for, three-hand poker with a couple of really tough mob guys.”
“All right,” Calabrese said, “that’s enough. He’s perfectly healthy, you see. We haven’t messed with him.”
“He doesn’t sound too healthy to me, Calabrese,” Wulff said and then seemed to laugh. “He’s a lousy poker player.”
“I’m not that bad,” Williams said, “I’m better than you think. I’ve got control and patience, anyway.”
“Hang it up,” Calabrese said, “hang the phone up right now.”
“All right,” Williams said, “I think I’ll just go back and raise him again. Why not? It’s only fifty cents,” and then Calabrese heard the phone clatter. Wulff said, “Where is he?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“I think it’s time we met,” Wulff said. “I think it’s time for another face to face.”
“That suits me. That’s what I’m waiting for.”
“Good,” Wulff said. He breathed in harshly once, a sharp intake of breath, and said, “I’m coming, Calabrese.”
“Not here you’re not.” He had worked this out carefully, meditated it through, strung it through the channels of possibility for hours; now Calabrese knew that he had been right all along. “Not in Chicago,” he said, “I don’t want it to be here. We’re going to make it in Miami.”
“I don’t like Miami. It’s a sad, phony, hustler’s town. It’s not your kind of territory at all.”
“But that’s where it’s going to be.”
“Let him go,” Wulff said, “let him go and I’ll meet you anywhere you say. Otherwise it’s no deal.”
“Oh yes it is,” Calabrese said, “it’s definitely a deal. I didn’t tell you about my surprise, remember?”
“I remember that.”
“I have a surprise for you. I think you’ll be pleased and interested if you’ll hold on a moment.” Calabrese put the phone down quietly, went out of the room for the second time and down the hall to the room where the girl was. Pushing the door open he found her in the same position, looking at him open-mouthed as he stared at her. “Pick up the phone,” he said motioning to the desk, “there’s someone who wants to talk to you.”
“You won’t get away with this,” she said. “By now my parents have notified the San Francisco police and they’ve notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is a federal crime; the FBI is in on it and they’ll get you. There’s still a death penalty for kidnapping.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Calabrese said, realizing that he had not been as irritated in this way since his wife had died twenty years ago. There was something about the capacity of women to complain which was infuriating; they were obsessive, single-minded creatures. Whatever you tried to do with them, whenever you tried to pursue a line of reasoning they would stick maddeningly at a single point. “Just pick up the phone and listen, will you?”
He motioned toward the guard, the guard shrugged and came from his seated position, moving toward the girl in an off-handed, rather menacing way. Carefully, so as not to give ground but at the same time reacting to this, the girl moved toward the desk and picked up the phone.
Satisfied, Calabrese walked out of the room, back to his office and picked up the phone again, listening to the humming
, dead wire. “Your surprise is coming,” he said.
“If it’s the girl,” Wulff said quickly, “you’re out of luck you son of a bitch,” and Tamara said “Hello,” then tentatively, her voice barely carrying, “Hello?”
“Tamara?” he heard Wulff say, “is that you?”
“It’s me, Wulff. This is Wulff?”
“What the hell are you doing there?”
“I’ve been kidnapped. They took me out of my house and flew me here on a plane. Kidnapping is a Federal crime.”
“Let her go, Calabrese,” he heard Wulff say, “you don’t mess with the girl. She’s out of it. She has nothing to do with this at all.”
“Come and get her,” Calabrese said quietly, “why don’t you come and get her?”
“You lousy scum—”
“That will get you nowhere, Wulff. Haven’t we had enough invective here? If you don’t like the situation, you’ve got the power to change it. Meet me in Miami and turn over the bag to me and we’ll let the girl and Williams go. Otherwise, we’ll torture them to death. I want the bag, Wulff.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Wulff said, “not Miami.”
“No negotiations. It’s not going to be here because I say so. It’s going to be Miami.”
“Don’t do it Wulff,” he heard the girl say, “don’t listen to him. He’ll kill us anyway no matter what you do, you know that. Don’t get stopped. Don’t let him stop you. Do what you have to do, don’t listen—”
“Shut up,” he heard Wulff say, “shut up and don’t tell me what to do.”
“It’s the only thing—”
“I’ll do what I have to do,” Wulff said, and Calabrese said nothing, held his breath, listened in, finding that he was enjoying himself for the first time in weeks. Let the bastard squirm, let him sweat. It was a pleasure just once to have the advantage over him, a nice change of pace, a good setup for that final advantage he would have over him when he blew his brains out. The moment was coming. “You’re a bastard, Calabrese,” Wulff said.
“Aren’t you tired of cursing?”
“Aren’t you tired of being a prick?”
“Give me the goods,” Calabrese said, “turn them over to me and you can have your girl and your black friend too. I don’t care. That’s all I want.”
“You’re a liar. You don’t want the stuff. You want a kill, Calabrese. But so do I. This is the end. You know that, don’t you? You’re in too deep now. I have to kill you.”
“No,” Calabrese said, “I have to kill you.”
“Where do you want to meet in Miami?” Wulff said, and Calabrese resisted the impulse to hurl the receiver against the wall in triumph: he had the bastard. Now he had him. “I’ll be in the Fontainbleau,” Calabrese said, “in about two or three days. Why don’t you look me up then? We can have a nice chat.”
“The Fontainbleau,” Wulff said. “You would stay in that. You’d stay in the sleaziest, cheapest—”
“Don’t be a fucking travel agent,” Calabrese said. He wanted to giggle with joy. “It’s a prestige hotel; it’s got a great reputation. You’ll like it; you’ll really enjoy being in a resort area.”
“I’ve been in plenty of resort areas.”
“Don’t do it, Burt,” he heard the girl say again, earnestly. “Don’t fall into his trap whatever it is. He’s only going to bring you down there and kill us anyway, don’t you see that? Stay away.”
“Shut up,” Calabrese said.
“She’s right,” said Williams, who had picked up his phone again. “Burt, she’s right. Wherever you are, you’re safe now.”
“Where are the guns?” Wulff said, “did they get the godamned ammo too?”
“Don’t answer that,” Calabrese said, “don’t answer that one,” and then, feeling the conversation beginning to drift away from him, feeling his hard-won control of the situation beginning to slip, he said, “That’s it, Wulff. I’ve got your girl and I’ve got your friend and they’re both pretty safe now, but if you ever want to see them again you’re going to play this my way. Miami,” he said, “you come down to Miami.”
“I’d rather kill you in Chicago,” Wulff said.
“I’d rather kill you in Miami,” Calabrese said and disconnected, pulling the master switch on the phone so that not only his but the other two extensions were cut off. Then he slammed the phone into the receiver, pushed it from him forcibly and stood, backing against the window. The impassive man in the room looked at him, then away, showing his palms at the same time in a gesture of compliance: don’t look at me, I had nothing to do with this at all, the gesture said and Calabrese let it go, walked out of the room and down the hall where behind the two open doors everything seemed as it had just a little while ago. The girl was saying something to her guards about the illegality of being kidnapped, Williams was saying, “I’ll raise you back.” It was amazing how in almost any circumstances things settled into a routine, here, no less than at any other time, the people who surrounded him had worked out a system of habits. Perhaps it had something to do with his way of life itself. The mansion had a calming influence.
He walked into the room where the girl was and said to her, “You can’t keep you mouth shut, can you?”
She looked up at him defiantly, the tilt of her chin, slash of mouth somehow sensual in this aspect and he found himself again thinking of what it would be like to fuck her. For one poisonous instant it occurred to him that he could; she was helpless, he could throw the guards out of the room and take her by force. What the hell could she do to him? and even at seventy-three, he could overpower a woman. But looking at her, looking beyond the attitude and the clothing, seeming to see into the rotten heart of her he felt that to screw her would be only to take unto himself the corruption of this other man who had already entered her body, by stain and implication the rottenness of Wulff would pass into him, juices from her juices, wounds from her wound and then Wulff would be inside him, his demon, possessing him. The thought chilled him and he moved away from her, backing against the wall, feeling suddenly old and ill, seventy-three years of mortality cooking in his veins like heroin, and did not even listen to her saying something about being out to kill him, he was always out to kill people. Fuck this, Calabrese thought, fuck it, feeling himself winding down to the end of the trail, something within him loosening and breaking away. Then he walked out of the room, past the open door of the other and back to his office for the last time where the man who was his bodyguard was still sitting in that position, feet tilted against the floor, his eyes closed, face toward the ceiling. He was smoking a cigarette, a thick ash protruding, his tie loosened, a thin glaze of sweat coming over his face.
“Get off your ass,” Calabrese said and the man twitched, jumped, and came off the chair and into a posture of attention, ashes scattering throughout the room. Calabrese looked at him with disgust: a small, repulsive man who knew nothing but dim fantasies of violence, closed his eyes and dreamed for entertainment. Then like a gong the thought came within him: you made him this way. He’s your responsibility. He’s exactly what you wanted him to be.
Too much. Too fucking much. “We’re going to Miami,” Calabrese said harshly and feeling returned to the man’s face, it opened into something both pompous and fearful, the two emotions chasing one another like dogs across the panes of the face, the features riven into those two parts as he groped uncertainly for an attitude and then the man said, “Miami. That’s all right with me, we go to Miami. What’s doing in Miami?” and then before Calabrese could answer the man had already turned from him shrugging in contrived disinterest, walking toward a corner of the room. “Miami,” he said again.
Miami. Chicago, Athens, New York, Lisbon, Hawaii, London, Reno and Nevada. This man, the men like him, would follow him everywhere, Calabrese thought, because he was paid to do so; the others, the girl and the black man, would follow because they had no choice … but who, who he wondered would follow him for love? You’re getting soft you old fool, Calabrese
thought and then he went determinedly through the door to assemble himself for the trip. The girl had had something to do with it. The girl had reached something within him that he had thought had been dead a long time.
Pity it wasn’t.
5
Wulff thought about the history of the railroads in America. Their history was complex and interesting like almost anything in this damned country, riddled with ambiguities and eventually, it seemed, possessed of failure. In the middle of the nineteenth century the railroads had spread across the country, joined the frontier, moved the technology of the country and made its industry possible as the century lurched into the turning point; in the early twentieth century the railroads had been kings of everything, everyone moved on the railroads (those that moved that was), so did the goods … and then Lindbergh flew across the ocean and suddenly everything was changed; airplanes became a practical means of conveyance and meanwhile Henry Ford and the General Motors’ assembly lines were knocking out thousand-dollar cars a thousand a day for the common man … and all of a sudden the railroads were dead. Finished. Of course they took another thirty years to die.
They still moved the freight of course, but in their anxiety to get the profitable freight business and not have to be bothered with passengers, they did everything within their power to make transportation by railroad as miserable as humanly possible; they succeeded and by the beginning of the nineteen-sixties the only passengers were commuters, those who linked to the railroads and their freight for short, stifling, miserable hops into the cities which sustained them … but also in the nineteen-sixties the truckers had taken over. Freight movement by truck was cheaper, faster and more convenient than railroad; it could go door to door, it did not have to stand expensively at some station twenty miles from the central city until connections could be arranged … and at that point the railroads found themselves in very difficult straits indeed. They had long since driven off the passengers for freight but now the freight had gone away from them as well. The bankruptcies began. By the end of the decade every major railroad in the country was in bankruptcy, receivership or rapidly heading that way. It looked pretty bad. Railroad presidents were writing suicide notes with the same floridity and dash with which stockbrokers had been throwing themselves from buildings four decades before that. Considering that they represented the tradition of the country as it had ended a hundred years earlier, it was pretty depressing. It was also depressing for the commuters, most of whom had no alternative to riding on the bankruptcy specials. It was agreed that it looked pretty terrible. Some of the commuters were even in the railroad business themselves, to say nothing of the automobile or aviation-related trade. The government moved in.