by Barry, Mike
“I’m sorry,” Wulff said, “I’ve got to see someone.”
“Well of course you’ve got to see someone. I assume that you came up to this floor to keep an appointment and it was very generous of you to help us out in the first place, but now that you’re here, won’t you have a little drink? All that I have to do is to look at her passed out on the bed and do you know something?” Gerald said, “I don’t find that very appetizing. I used to love to watch her sleep, when we were first married I could draw a chair up to the bed and just watch her for hours, you know, after sex, the way she would curl up with that little smile on her face, it was really exciting but that was a long goddamned time ago and she still has that little smile. Do you know,” Gerald said, pursuing Wulff to the door, lumbering over the carpet, supporting himself now and then on the walls with hard, little slaps that reestablished his balance before he stood again, weaving, hands in pockets, “this hotel, the Fontainbleau, was the headquarters during the 1972 Republican National Convention for the Committee to Reelect the President. Isn’t that interesting? It’s a little piece of history. Why in this very room that we’re in right now they might have been setting up the taps, making plans for the houseboat. For all we know John Mitchell was in this room, why the President himself might have been. It’s hard to tell. You know, hotels are very stuffy about this kind of thing, they won’t release any definite information and God knows I tried to find out but for all we know the President himself might have been right here. Isn’t that something?”
“I don’t follow politics,” Wulff said, “I have no interest in politics at all.”
“Well you ought to,” Gerald said, holding the open door for Wulff as Wulff went through it, this less a gracious gesture than another of his necessary balancing gestures, “everybody ought to make himself more interested in politics, why if we had an involved citizenry the country wouldn’t be in the sad shape that it is now. This is a kind of sentimental return for me, going to the Fontainbleau, you know. I was an alternate at the convention that year.”
“That’s fine,” Wulff said, stepping into the hallway, “that’s really fine.”
“Yes indeed. I was an alternate with all rights, rank and privileges and if that bum who I was switching with hadn’t been such a son of a bitch I would have had a chance to vote myself, get my name in the papers. I would have shown them a thing or two. I had some ideas I want to tell you, I was going to get a microphone and start a floor fight for the vice-presidency. Give the party back to the people, that was my motto. I had some real support in the Wyoming delegation too, I want you to know that; together we could have broken up the convention completely; put the party on an entirely different course—”
“Gerald,” the woman on the bed said, “Gerald, will you please shut the hell up, you’re disgracing yourself,” and the man turned back to her to say something undeniably forceful and unanswerable; in that moment Wulff slipped through the open doorway and walked quickly down the hall. Only five or six yards out of their room he already felt that he had worked himself into another facet of existence entirely; they were entirely diminished, even the sound of their voices as he moved away was a frail peep, and then at long last he had turned a corner and shut them entirely away.
There was rich material there, no doubt about it; if he had been in another line of work he might have wanted to pursue this further because in a certain way this pair represented everything about America which had turned it into a madhouse lined by money and sustained by drugs … but the edge of his consciousness extruded elsewhere, he simply could not get involved, even psychically, with people like this, because there was a total kind of madness indeed. You could not clean up the entire world: all that you could do was to set yourself into one part of it and do the best that you could there.
At the end of the hall the arrow indicating rooms 1701-1709 pointed straight ahead and he walked down there, putting his hand inside his pocket, feeling the point thirty-eight. He took it out, cupped it into his hand. If Calabrese were waiting in ambush this gun would do him very little good but it nevertheless was comforting to have in his hand; at least he would be able to take a bodyguard or two with him. He did not think however that it would come to that. Calabrese was too shrewd to try anything like that and as he had said to Wulff, it was at this time a standoff. Calabrese wanted him dead very badly but Calabrese wanted the sack as well. He would never have gotten to this point if it had not been for the sack; the old man was too much of a businessman to make this kind of an investment in sheer vendetta.
The door of 1701 was ajar. Wulff saw the light glinting through it, falling in panels to the rug, the light cascading from the open windows of the room, heard the little viscous murmurs of conversation within and then, no sense of transition, no sense of preparation either, he stepped over the threshhold, walking in quickly, holding the gun like a dense little ball clamped into his hand, and there was Calabrese, sitting, facing him across an enormous space, his hands folded on the polished surfaces of a long sloping desk. The man who he had been talking to, someone who Wulff had never seen before, a bodyguard, probably, was standing against the wall beside the desk. Seeing Wulff he slid out of position, backed his shoulder blades into the wall and walked that way around the corner. Wulff could see the gun in the man’s hand; from this aspect it looked like a cannon, the hole open and gaping. He looked at it calmly. If death was going to come, he thought, it might as well come out of a big gun, it might as well happen now. Oddly he felt no fear at all. Looking at Calabrese he was not even sure that he had emotion of any sort. All of the hatred was gone; it had somehow been scraped free in the long, staggering cross-country drive and now he was scraped down to the raw bone of personality; he felt little more than a bleak kind of acceptance.
“All right,” he said, “I’m here.”
“Close the door,” Calabrese said. To the guard he said, “Get out of here.”
The guard looked at him wonderingly, then opened his hand to display the gun lying over his palm like a stone. “Do you—” he said.
“I want you out of here,” Calabrese said, “that’s what I want. Right now.”
“I don’t—”
“I can handle him,” Calabrese said, “believe me I can handle him. Don’t be so goddamned protective.” He looked at Wulff, then, oddly, winked. “My staff is protective of me,” he said, “overprotective I would say, but then again they’re a very loyal and devoted staff. Aren’t they?”
“Oh yes,” the guard said, putting the gun into his pocket, rubbing it into place, smoothing folds of clothing over it, “oh yes, we’re very loyal and protective,” and he gave Wulff a look of hatred, walked to the door, went out of the door and closed it. Wulff heard the knob click twice, the second a thinner, higher sound and then Calabrese smiled, went into his desk drawer and emerged with a large gun and with a key. It was the key he showed to Wulff.
“It’s locked from the inside now,” he said. “The only way we can get out is to use this key.” He put it on the desk within easy reach and then held the gun on Wulff. “I guess you might as well put yours away,” he said.
Wulff looked at the gun in his hand and at Calabrese and said, “Why bother? You hold on me, I hold on you.”
“Yes,” Calabrese said, “but that doesn’t do either of us any good.” He put the gun down on the desk delicately, and spread his palms. “All right,” he said, “have it your way. Go on and shoot. Do you feel any better now? I’ve got the girl and I’ve got your partner. If you shoot me, they go down. It’s as simple as that.”
Wulff held the gun on the old man. “Why do you think that’s any hold?” he said. “He’s not my partner; I’ve never had a partner. And she’s not my girl.”
“She seems to think she is.”
“She’s wrong.”
“And what were you doing with that guy in Los Angeles if he wasn’t your partner? You don’t understand, Wulff, I’ve been watching you very, very closely.” Calabrese coughed deli
cately, reached into a pocket, brought out his pack of cigarettes. In just a moment, Wulff knew, the old man would start to break them. A reformed or at least controlled chain-smoker, he seemed to get his satisfaction that way. All right. Let him do it. “I think it’s time we talked,” Calabrese said, “just talked very reasonably man to man without guns or demonstrations. This has been building up a long time.”
Wulff looked at the gun in his hand, then he looked at the old man yet again and then, slowly, he put the point thirty-eight into his inner pocket, went back to the wall, pulled out a straight chair from there in front of the desk and sat down. “All right,” he said, “talk.”
It was remarkable how Calabrese had aged. He was simply not the man Wulff had dealt with in Chicago. It was not a failure of the will he could see so much as a simple collapse of the flesh; peering out through the thin folds of the face was the death’s head that Calabrese would someday become. The death’s head had a kind of ageless perception and resignation even more profound than that of the man who surrounded it; if Calabrese had himself been a man whose perception encompassed almost to the center, then the death’s head had moved beyond that, it was the aspect of a creature who could no longer be misled, goaded, misdirected by anything. Looking into that face Wulff saw his own future. It was not only the death, the fact of his own death which he saw there … no, it was a certainty he glimpsed in that face which he had only dimly felt himself, driving on those roads, perhaps, in the American night. “Talk,” he said again, his voice hoarse and strangely trapped within his throat, the gun hanging heavy within his jacket and he thought, what has happened here goes beyond guns, what is happening now goes beyond words. There is nothing to talk about. “I want the girl,” he said, “and I want Williams. That’s all. I want them now.”
“In time,” Calabrese said, “but I have certain requests of you as well. I want the drugs.”
“The drugs mean nothing to you.”
“On the contrary,” Calabrese said, “very much to the contrary. That was my shipment. I worked on it very carefully. I made it possible for those goods to be gathered, they were prepared by my man to leave the country in his possession, I invested a great deal of time and effort to get them into my hands and I want them. I deserve to have them. That’s a major shipment, it’s not nickels and dimes, it has to do with keeping things afloat here for the next couple of years and a lot of people are depending on it. So you will please give it to me or tell me where it may be gotten. That is the first thing, the rest will then come into line.”
Weeks ago, when Wulff had first met this man, it would have been inconceivable for Calabrese to have made any reference to the fact that he was in the drug trade, let alone be as specific as this. Calabrese had lived in a high estate on Lake Michigan and had walled himself off in those spaces not only from the world but from any direct contact with what had put him there. Calabrese would no more have admitted to handling drugs than a pimp, stopped for a license-and-registration check by a cop, would have explained exactly how he earned the money to drive an Eldorado. But now all of that had slipped from him; looking at him across the desk, Wulff saw that Calabrese had become that stranger inside, the death’s head, and the death’s head would not lie anymore. “I want those drugs,” Calabrese said again. “I worked to develop them and I want them.”
“I want the girl and Williams.”
“You won’t get them until I see the drugs. I’ll kill them first.”
“The shipment is the only hold that I have on you,” Wulff said, “once I turn it over, you’ve got the whole ball game: you’ve got me too. I won’t do it.” He shook his head, feeling the decision settling into him, that decision which he must have known he would have to face this flatly and soon. “Them first,” he said, “you get them out of where they are and into safety and I’ll turn the stuff over to you. And then,” Wulff said, “then it will be just you and me in a room like this one and we’ll see who comes out of it. Because that’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
Calabrese shook his head, took out a cigarette, broke it and flung the pieces against a window. “No,” he said, “I wanted to do that when we last spoke, when you were in Los Angeles. I wanted to kill you, Wulff, because you represented maybe the only thing I’ve ever found that I wasn’t able to beat and because I’m an old man who’s pretty afraid of losing control anyway, that was enough.” The death’s head winked at him, gave a half-bow from its dead, glowing eye sockets. “But that’s all past now. I don’t stay mad long, you can’t let your temper get the best of you if you want to stay at the top in this business and that’s where I am. At the top. No, Wulff, it’s purely business. I just want the drugs.”
“Then you know where I stand.”
Calabrese leaned back, fingered another cigarette from the package and said, “You know, you’re making things difficult for me. Very difficult.”
“I was counting on that.”
“You say that the shipment is the only hold you’ve got on me but what have I got on you? Just the girl and the black man and I’m not too sure about the black man at all. You split up with him in Los Angeles, that wasn’t going to work at all. So it probably comes down to just the girl and that isn’t enough, but it’s all I’ve got and if I let her go, then what? Then you’re a free agent again.”
“I’m a man of honor.”
The death’s head smiled. Wulff had never seen anything so terrible in his life; the cold, resigned smile of a dead man lying under the glass of the outer face. “Man of honor?” he said, “you’ve sent five hundred people into their graves. You’ve dedicated your life for reasons I don’t understand yet to driving the international drug trade out of existence. You’ve murdered, tortured, destroyed, burnt, stolen and you tell me that you’re a man of honor?” He shook his head. “No,” he said, “you are riot a man of honor. Maybe by your own code you are; you feel that you’re acting for higher purposes and that the international drug trade is composed of vermin anyway, are not truly human, so that you can do anything you wish without the normal sanctions we apply against humanity. We can leave that to the experts to argue if they’d care to. I can’t trust you Wulff, that’s all. How can I trust you?”
Wulff said, “You have to trust me. You’ve got no choice.”
“Then you me,” the death mask said, “then you me. You must accept this.” It reached into the cigarette pack and broke another, flung it against the same spot in the window where the first had gone and then leaned back in the chair. “You must accommodate, Wulff,” the death mask said, “you must learn to compromise, to accept your limitations.”
Wulff looked at the thing across from him and said nothing for a while, letting all of the thoughts filter through, all of the complex possibilities which eventually, sooner or later, could only become a clear-cut decision which was both more and less than the sum of all those parts and then said, “All right. We’ll work it out halfway. A compromise. A meeting of the minds. You give a little and I do too.”
“You give nothing,” Calabrese said, and flung yet another cigarette, this one unbroken. “You give nothing at all. Still, I will listen. I will listen to anything because I am getting tired of this and I would like to go home.”
“Bring the girl,” Wulff said “bring the girl and give her to me and I’ll turn over the shit to you. You’ve still got Williams that way and I’ll turn over the shit to you even though you’ve got him. I’ll trust you. That’s my offer,” he said and settled back in the chair, the weight of the gun suddenly heavy against his armpit once again. Was his body sending him a signal that he would have to use it? but he had never believed in this kind of mysticism. Everything, inevitably, came up front. “That’s fair,” Wulff said, “that’s the fairest offer I can give you. Otherwise, it’s a standoff.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“You want the girl,” Calabrese said, “not the black man. But I suspected all along the loyalty which you had to him. T
he girl is the one that really matters, any fool can see that. Don’t you think I know it?”
“Williams matters too. He matters a good deal.”
“Everything matters to you then, doesn’t it Wulff?”
“It’s the best I can do,” he said again. “It’s the only trade-off I can offer. After I have the girl and you have the shit you can dump him. I’ll trust you. After all, you’re a man of honor.”
“What if I do it the other way?” the death’s head said, “what if I give you the black man and hold onto the girl? Would you still do it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Wulff said, and he found that he was finding the truth as he framed it, “because it’s different. Williams knew what he was getting into. It was a conscious decision; he knew every step of the way what it meant.”
“And she didn’t?”
“No,” Wulff said, “she didn’t. She didn’t know anything at all. She was only an accident. So she should get out of it first.”
“There’s nothing else to it? There’s no sentiment at all?”
“What does that have to do with it?” Wulff said and felt the anger coalescing within him, the old, free, building anger that he really had not known since he had come into Miami. It was purifying, this anger; it cleansed him, enabled him to rise from the chair and then he was standing over Calabrese, six feet four over three feet and still the old man sat calmly, doing nothing. His hands did not even reach toward the gun on the desk; he had the peace of some great, interior knowledge. “What do you care about sentiment? I’m offering you a deal.”
“I like it better the other way.”
“No. It’s this way or nothing.”
Calabrese leaned back in his chair, seemingly oblivious to Wulff’s hovering presence, and then took a cigarette out of the pack, put it into his mouth, opened the desk drawer for a pack of matches and then casually, expertly, lit it, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs on the first inhale, tossing the match with a tic! against the wall, leaning back in the chair then and taking a deep, relishing drag from the cigarette. “I don’t like it,” he said, “I don’t like it at all.” The cigarette did not move from his mouth. He let his hand fall away, drew in deeply again, held the smoke in his lungs then for a long, bursting instant and then exhaled all of it convulsively. “But it’s the best I’m going to get isn’t it?”