by Barry, Mike
Well, it was no difference, no point in worrying about it, the country would go on and the people would take different shapes or roles to accommodate themselves to the beast. The country ran lives now, the country which once these people thought they had known and controlled was nothing but a beast now, a slavering beast that absorbed and excreted and there was little place in it for the Joes and Emilies, damned little place as well for the Wulffs too. Men who fought the beast, who threw themselves into its jaws to try and choke and sicken it on its own fetid juices, people like Wulff did not last very long. That was probably his greatest sin, the one that they would impale him for after all of the others were forgotten: he had bucked the system, he had defied it and you simply did not, in modern-day America, take on what fed you. He moved a hand over, poked open the sack and idly let his fingers play with the powder, the little, sticky grains adhering to his fingertips like sugar or salt, clinging to him in little teardrops. Here, properly adulterated, cut down, spooned and injected were a thousand dreams which he was clutching in those fingers, dreams for all of the Joes and Emilies of the land, dreams which would take them back to that easy, gentler time when US 1 had been the world, the boundaries of their world laid out as easily and precisely for them as the drug itself laid down murderous little patterns in the capillaries, pulsating then from those capillaries through the complex and ruined network of the system, squeezing the heart, coursing into the brain, moving out again then into the lungs, the vena cava, the pancreas, the vena cava …
It occured to Wulff that he was not thinking very rationally. Strain, fatigue, the pursuit, the business of murder itself had changed him, perhaps in some permanent fashion. He was no longer rational, he was through some complex combination of that fatigue and the murder-lust driven into a condition which, without drugs, might have duplicated the mind of the junkie. He was what he despised, he thought lolling above the wheel, inclining his head toward the windshield, maintaining contact with reality in only the most tenuous and exhausting way, he had become what he had dedicated his life to destroying. He was a junkie himself. What he was hooked on did not go into the veins but it was the same thing, all of it was always the same.
He kept on driving. If he thought about it more he supposed this was the very thought that could push him over the edge, the realization that in some complicated way he had become the enemy. But maybe you had to do it: you had to become a killer to destroy the killers, a madman to purge out the lunatics … maybe then you had to become a junkie to squeeze all the junk out of the world.
He let his mind hang at that thought, the thought dangling like a fluorescent bulb off the ledge of his consciousness and then he was in Miami, poking and prodding through the slums at the outskirts, the Chrysler snaffling almost instinctively toward the rich, beating heart which was the beachfront—all of the seashore cities were laid out the same, it was exactly like Atlantic City—and from that time on there was little time at all to think. Maybe the residue of junk left on his fingers, the fingers resting against his nose had been inhaled and he was reacting to those mild, gentle vapors. You never knew. You just never knew. If this was a heroin jag, perhaps the Governor himself should try it.
IX
“Come on up,” Calabrese said to him on the lobby phone, “just come on the hell up.”
Wulff said, “You must think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy, I know it,” Calabrese said. He sounded as much in control as ever, his voice firm and assured. “I’m in room seven-oh-one. Come on and we’ll have a nice talk.”
“Walk into it?” Wulff said, “you think I’m just going to walk into it?” He looked around the lobby. The standard: people in evening dress, bathing suits, all stages between drifting through, a busy newsstand at the far corner, jingling phones, bellboys … but at least three and possibly as many as five of these people had him under tight observation. He knew that. Still, observation was not capture. The call had been a reasonable risk.
“Why not?” Calabrese said, sounding cheerful. “You’re not going to do anything to me because only I know where I’ve got the girl and your partner stashed and I’m not going to do anything to you because I assume that you’ve got the sack good and hid and only you know where it is. Am I right? So it’s a standoff.”
“That’s not what I heard from you the last couple of times we talked. You don’t want the sack, you want my ass. You want to kill me.”
“Oh,” Calabrese said and laughed, a healthy, unfettered laugh that had no trace of affection. “Oh, that was just to get your interest up, Wulff, and besides we all have episodes of temper, you’ve got to admit. Little outbursts; really, they don’t mean a thing. I’m perfectly calm, this is just a business proposition to me now. Bet your life. You come up and we’ll have a nice talk.”
Wulff flicked a glance through the lobby again. If there was a net of surveillance it was deep and subtle, probably came from the desk clerks themselves because nothing looked untoward at all. Possibly Calabrese was so sure of his position now that he did not even think he had to observe Wulff, just let him walk into the lair and start firing … but there was always the chance too that the old man was telling the truth, that indeed the only thing he had in his mind was a casual chat. A casual chat between old antagonists … he had the sack stuffed into a big locker at the airport, the key to that locker checked into a smaller one as the only contents and the key to the small locker taped high in an abandoned alleyway three miles from here … yes, Calabrese was right, the stuff was pretty much under wraps. Still, did any protection justify the risk of confronting the old beast whole?
He guessed that it did and another jolt of the same force that had been hitting him in the car on US 1 came through. Of course he wanted to see the old bastard, of course he wanted the confrontation … it was what he had wanted since that last time in Chicago when Calabrese had mocked him and laughed at his impotence and even if the old man were holed up there with machine guns and men to operate them, even if room seven-oh-one was a cell of fire whose flaming walls could drop around to embrace and consume him … even if all of that were true he still wanted to go up there, to see the enemy whole. “All right,” he said, “I’m coming.”
“I’m glad. That’s a wise move, Wulff.”
“It’s a goddamned dumb move, Calabrese.”
“All right,” the man said almost pleasantly, “it’s a goddamned dumb one, but you haven’t been smart yet and you’re not going to start now, are you?” Hanging up the phone he guessed he wasn’t.
Wulff walked rapidly through the lobby, streaming fountains in the background, soft music pulsing through him, little gusts of air purring from the central air conditioning hitting him as he walked underneath the vents. This was probably the closest that it was possible to come in the Fontainbleau to a sense of climate. Here indeed was where a certain kind of Americana had peaked: sheer insulation from the environment, the shutting off of any sense of strong, uncontrollable forces which were mysterious and deadly. To be an American was to seek relief from these forces, to move further and further up the socioeconomic scale was to move further away from the irreconcilable and the monstrous to some state in which death itself was merely an unfortunate aspect of the weather and could be held outside by rigorous technology.
Cadillacs operated on the same principle, Wulff thought, which might have to do with his affection for them but there was, he liked to think, some humor and at least a trace of irony in this obsession because the Cadillacs he loved were not the new but the seven or eight-year-old jobs where the bloom was off and where the environment came peeking in all the time: a bad muffler here, ruined tailpipe there, leak in the exhaust vent, the air conditioning, the leather seats themselves coming askew, all of the marvelous insulation falling apart so that you knew all the time what America consisted of. It consisted of holding onto a rotting, dismembered apparatus which could not perpetually deny what it had been conceived to abolish. The rich could have Cadillacs
and the Fontainbleau, at least eight years worth of Cadillacs and Fontainbleau to wall them off, the middle class could at least get a piece of them through two-week flight-included package tours and three- or four-year-old de Ville series coupes and sedans. The poor, however, had to settle either for the Fleetwood Eldorado series in very bad repair, seven- or eight-year-old cars which were literally spilling through the joints … and heroin. Heroin was the Fontainbleau of the poor man … except, Wulff thought, that the rich had all the bargains as usual. Heroin was far more expensive.
He rose up six flights in an empty self-service elevator whose speakers sung to him, the one hundred and twenty-one strings sweeping their hearts out for him, flowers and bowers, breezes and sneezes they were playing, a chorus of heavenly voices was singing about in front of them, the chorus and strings intertwining richly, ripely, lushly … Wulff could have thrown up if he had the energy, but of course he was merely a simple cop at heart, he could not appreciate the intricacies of beautiful music which the one hundred and twenty-one strings, as he remembered, definitely had a fine reputation for playing.
The doors came open on the seventh floor and he walked out into vacancy, vacancy glinting from the chandeliers, vacancy on the rugs, a couple of people in evening dress making their way along the hall, holding on to the walls almost tenderly, both of them in their mid-sixties. The man was whispering words of encouragement to his wife, or at least the man thought that he was whispering although there was some difficulty with his auditory sense. What he was doing was hoarsely mumbling in a rasping, carrying tenor. “Just a few more steps dear,” the man was saying, “a few more steps and we’ll be in our nice little roomsie and we’ll shut the lights off, go beddy-bye,” and the woman said, “I can’t make it, I tell you, Gerald, I just can’t make it anymore.”
“Yes you can,” the man said tenderly, rubbing a large, splayed hand over her bare back, leaving little red streaks across the freckles.” You can so make it Virginia, you can make it if only you think you can make it and once we’re in our roomsie with the lights out and the do not disturb sign out you’ll be a changed woman, you’ll look back on this tomorrow morning and laugh.”
“I’m not laughing,” the woman said, “I’m not laughing, Gerald. I’ll never laugh again. I don’t think I even have the strength to cry,” and lurched perilously into the wall, gripped it like a swimmer sinking beneath panels of water. “I just can’t make it anymore, Gerald,” the woman said, and laid herself out neatly, with a sense of finality, on the carpet.
The man made a half-hearted attempt to hold her, then as if succumbing to forces which were far beyond his comprehension, let alone control, he let her sink, let her spread out on the rug and then looked at her with a disgusted expression, his hands on his hips, shaking his head. He belched once, a deep, sour sound that reverberated from the plastic of the corridor and then for the first time noticed Wulff, who had been trying to get by them as inconspicuously as possible. “I guess you think that this kind of thing happens all the time,” he said.
“Oh no,” Wulff said, “not at all.”
“Well it does,” the man said, “that’s the whole point of it and I might as well admit the truth, there’s no sense living a lie anymore and now that we’re on our vacation I can’t hold it back, I just have to face the truth and be done with it. The woman’s a total drunk. I thought that I might be able to bring her around, give her a little personal attention, try to talk her out of it in these two weeks that we had down here but it’s hopeless. She just can’t control herself.”
The man burped again, a stab of heartburn took his face and wrinkled it; he put a hand against his mouth. “I admit that I’ve neglected her,” he said, “but it’s very difficult, you know, very difficult to have any kind of model marriage or romantic union when you’re breaking your ass out there in the tunnels just trying to put a living together, trying to make some kind of a decent life for the wife and kiddies. I did it all for her,” he said, his face slowly smoothing out as the bubble of heartburn passed, “everything that I did was for her I definitely want you to know but she never understood that. They never understand and appreciate what you’re trying to do and then they’re fifty-seven years old and all washed out and you’re down in the fucking Fontainbleau. I tell you,” the man said, a strange cunning passing over his face as if the belch had transmitted to him some expansive insight that he had never previously grasped, “I tell you, I should have fucking spent these three weeks in the shop, that’s what I should have done. Sent her down by herself, maybe she could have picked something up.”
The woman on the rug murmured something and then, convulsively began to sob, her fingernails gripping at the red ply of the carpeting. She was trying to get up but what it was seemed merely a parody of gymnastics as if she were trying an unusually complicated sort of pushup without success, the biceps failing to relay the messages passed from the impoverished brain. She subsided, muttering into the rug, then lay at perfect peace with herself.
“And it’s not the first time,” the man said, “it’s not the first time this has happened, I want you to know that, or the second or the third. The disgusting scenes we’ve had; the only thing that I can be grateful for is that we’re not with any of our friends. I wanted to come down with friends but it was she who said we had to have our private time together, just a couple of weeks to get to know one another again. You know what she’s gotten to know?” the man said. “She’s gotten to know about ten gallons of gin, that’s all. You wouldn’t give me a hand, get her down to our room, would you? It’s seven-sixteen, it’s just down the hall. I can’t make it anymore, I just can’t make it anymore. It’s going to be the fourth time this week that I’ve carried her down the hall and I’m not as young as I used to be.” He reeled into the wall, put his palms flat against it in a rather expert way and his features, seeming to contract in apprehension, smoothed out again.
“Yeah,” Wulff said, “yeah, that’s all right, I don’t mind.” Leaning forward heavily, putting his hands on the ankles of the woman, then heaving and tugging, he managed with the man to get her into a semi-erect position, her legs dangling in front of her in a set of curious motions as if she were dimly remembering pedalling a bicycle, and they got her down the hall in that way, her legs scuttling and pedalling beneath her, her mouth opening to emit little bursts of song.
“For Christ’s sake,” the man said as they got to seven-sixteen, “she’s going to start singing again. I don’t think I can stand it anymore, last night she was singing to me so I didn’t get any sleep.”
He dropped her, leaving Wulff with the full weight through the shoulders and he strained to hold her into position as the man looked through his pockets and came out finally with a set of keys and rammed one into the door. The woman was still singing, little obscenities beginning to curl like weeds through the lyrics of the song, the same song, as a matter of fact, that the one hundred and twenty-one strings had been playing in the elevator.
Groaning, the man got the door open, pushed it back into the wall, then, hands on hips, stood there, looking at Wulff, at the woman on the floor, at the key dangling from the hole, shaking his head. “If I had any goddamned sense,” he said, “I’d get out of this right now, I wouldn’t even stay here, I’d get right the hell back to Neponsit. At a hundred and fifty dollars a day, who needs this?”
“Let’s get her in,” Wulff said, bending, gripping the woman’s shoulders. They shifted like sand under his grasp: he could feel the flesh, little grains, moving in that grip. “Come on now.”
“Well of course. Of course I understand what you’re saying. I mean who needs this, that’s your attitude, right? She’s not your responsibility, you were just a passerby who was kind enough to stick your neck out, get involved in this kind of thing. Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”
“Shut up, Gerald,” the woman said softly. “Stop hounding the man, he’s taken quite enough of you. Just cooperate and get me onto the bed. I think I’m
going to throw up.”
“Well we can’t have you throwing up,” the man said, “that would be absolutely ridiculous, I mean that would be the last complete, entire, goddamned utter straw; when you start throwing up in hotel corridors it’s time to throw in the towel, don’t you think?” He bent over uncomfortably, heaved the woman upright like a board, Wulff balanced the weight of her shoulders and they staggered into a huge suite, all of the blinds closed and drawn, the unmade bed in the middle of the room strewn with books, and pitched the woman onto a small, cleared space in the center. “She won’t even permit them to clean it up,” the man said, “really, she’s a goddamned filthy slob, that’s her real trouble and always has been. She can’t even keep a hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-day suite clean, that’s her problem.”
Wulff decided that it was time to get out. It was definitely time to get out; it had been time from the moment that he had run across this pair: how the hell had he gotten involved in the first place? Best not to think about that; maybe he could put it down as a refreshing break from his larger problems. One thing that this proved, drink was as pervasive in its effects as drugs, at least for the upper-middle-classes. The room reeked of scotch, of gin, of bourbon, of a hundred drinks consumed hurriedly from open bottles. Looking toward the dresser top as his eyes adjusted to the light he could now see the empties lined up like little soldiers on the glass.
The woman sighed, twitched on the bed like a frog and then subsided into a deep, dramatic doze, her eyes fluttering once and then ceasing to move. “You are going,” Gerald said, “you don’t want to go, do you? You can join me for a drink.”