by Barry, Mike
So that was about the way things were on vice, or on narco. It was no wonder that the entire system was geared to pushing away the crimes rather than to apprehending them. The cops were so weary, so bitter, so fragmented and so drunk most of the time that they were in a mood to do almost anything but deal with the source of their business. Besides that, the source of their business was also the source of almost half of their income, and you did not take something like that lightly.
Wulff was not sure exactly what all these speculations about vice and narco had to do with the situation at hand, which was that the car coming up the road had disgorged three men, and the three men had surrounded him and had disarmed him so quickly, so professionally, that there was nothing to do but go along with it. Resistance would have been foolish. The three men piled him back into the limousine and took him to the airport and onto a private plane, which they told him finally was going to Mexico City. Even these men were kind of curious about vice, it turned out. They knew his background and they asked him the usual questions. So rather than have a tough, tense flight to Mexico City with them watching him every moment and the possibility of death hanging in the air on the jolting, private plane, he had decided to open up and tell them the full story. What the hell. It passed the time. And the men were very interested.
XIX
Montez thought he had handled things fairly well up to this point. He had gotten Carlin, that was the important thing, and had now put him under wraps under the tightest kind of security in the basement of his mansion. He had scouted out his contacts to the north and verified that no one would mind in the least if he took Carlin out of their calculations forever. As a matter of fact, it was such a messy business altogether that they would take it as a favor if he would take over the responsibility. He could even have Carlin’s territory gratis.
So that was good. That was taken care of, and then Montez had fallen into the unusual luck of having his intercept team pick up the man who Carlin had been afraid of, the man known as the Wolf, who had been responsible, as far as Montez could make out, for the triggering burst behind the murders Carlin had committed, not that Carlin himself did not have to bear the absolute responsibility for his condition. A murderer was a murderer, Montez believed that deeply, there was something about a man who would commit murder that separated him from the rest of humanity as effectively as if he were a grotesque creature of another species. Montez was proud to feel that whatever his other sins—which were not slight and which were not scattered occasionally over a period of years but seemed to have picked up in clumps, and in fact were accelerating—in spite of all those sins, Montez had at least never committed the crime of murder. There were certain things a man of honor did not do, and murder was one of them.
So Carlin was effectively separated in his mind from anything that happened to him next. Whatever Montez decided to do was not performed upon a human being but a member of a subspecies. He had tortured Carlin and he expected to kill him because there was no other just termination, but this would be no exception to his rule against murder. That rule was for human beings, not for members of this subspecies who he had wholly isolated in his mind. The fact that Carlin’s murder would intersect with certain ambitions of Montez’s own, which had to do with taking over what was Carlin’s with the effective blessing and pledge of assistance from possible competitors in North America … well, that simply did not count. Montez was an ethical man; he had an intricate code of behavior in which he deeply believed and to which he had absolutely committed himself. He was going to torture and kill for ethical reasons, not for reasons of aggrandizement. If he did not believe that, he thought, if he did not really hold onto and accept that as the truth, he would be incapable of doing what he was doing.
But things had worked out nicely. Carlin was in a sub-basement, Wulff was heading toward him on private plane, he had the cooperation of North American authorities, he was free from any of the archaic law enforcement systems of North America, he was in a position he had never really thought he could attain … expediency and morality had intertwined. It just proved, Montez thought, it proved that there was justice in the world. He had suffered and he had gone through difficulties and times had been hard for him … but he had come out the other end and now everything was looking up. Not that he wanted to witness the tortures, of course. He was not a cruel man. He himself derived no personal satisfaction from human suffering.
And Wulff was heading down by charter flight. That was going to be interesting, Montez thought. He knew little of Wulff himself. Of course there were fragmentary reports. It was impossible to be in the trade without picking up a good deal of scattered information on this ex-policeman and combat sergeant who had stated the necessity to “clean out the international drug trade.” That was the kind of thing you had to keep up with in your business if you took your business at all seriously … possible rivals, sources of opposition. But it really was hard to believe. The man had to be crazy, even for a norteamericano he was loco. That was why the reports that had started to drift in had made him laugh: ten dead in New York, a thousand in a freighter fire in San Francisco, a hundred in Boston, a hotel burnt out in Las Vegas … impossible. It was to laugh. No man could do all of this and survive. No man could even think of doing this. Didn’t this Wulff know that the world was in the hands of the people like Montez who were truly only giving people what they wanted?
No, he did not, of course, and it was Wulff’s failure to absorb this simple measure that had led to all the difficulties. Still, this was really excessive, what the man had done. Montez had to shake his head with admiration when he read the reports, saw the American newspapers from the cities where this had gone on. Any man who could do something like this was remarkable. Any man who was capable, singlehanded, without any apparent assistance of any sort, of doing what he had done to agencies and to people was a man to cherish. It was a pity that he was on the wrong side, that he was on the unreal side of the war. His side was hopeless. But still, what an hombre! Montez thought that it would be an excellent thing to have a man like this working for him. The news from Havana had only increased that feeling. But what could you do? Wulff was crazy, he would rather die than work for Montez even though he would surely find out sooner or later that it would have been to his advantage to do so. Where was all of this going to get him? Surely it was going to make him as dead as his victims. Whereas working for Montez he would have become very rich. Still, you could not force a man to work against his instincts. Montez knew that very well. If Wulff felt that his life was best served by blowing up freighters and destroying houses, then Montez, no matter how reasonably he discussed things with the man, no matter how much he offered him, was not going to win.
So let it be. But it was interesting to know that his men had luckily managed to get the man at the Carlin estate. If Carlin had been so afraid of this man, Montez had thought, that he would commit murders out of fear of him, then maybe he had a reason. Maybe this man would come around to Carlin’s estate sooner or later. It was worth a chance, anyway; it was not as if Montez had to do it personally. He could lease out the job at a minimum wage with a bonus. He hadn’t expected it to work out; the bonus was very large, the minimum payment very small. Nevertheless, they had gotten Wulff, they had found him lurking around the estate, and they had disarmed him without a struggle. That was good. That was very good.
Montez felt in control. For a long time things had not seemed this way, what with having to pay Carlin so much of his receipts and being under Carlin’s thumb, but now things had definitely changed and were coming around. It almost went to bear out the conventional Catholicism of his youth. Not that he had been a strict Catholic for many years now—honestly, how could any man in his business be religious?—but it showed that to the meek and the patient, to the workers and the committed fell within their life span the fruits of the city of Rome. Montez repressed an impulse to sing and dance around the large room that was his study. It would not be dignified for
a man of his years. Singing and dancing was for women and children and for very young men at festivals. Dignified, mature men such as Montez would have other releases.
He went down into the sub-basement to see how Carlin was doing. Carlin was lying on a couch with a towel over his head, two guards standing near the wall with pistols, looking at him. Little streaks of blood were on Carlin’s face, and underneath the gray clothing that Carlin had been given to wear, his body looked like a ruin. Montez shook his head in revulsion. Torture was all right, it was a political and psychological necessity, it was also justified in the case of people like this … but he did not like to see it. It was an ugly thing to see and caused him great personal pain.
The guards stood deferentially at the sides, looking at Montez with happy expressions as Montez walked over to Carlin to see if the man was awake. He had promised all of them, his entire staff, huge bonuses as a result of the sudden and great success that had come his way, and morale had never been higher in his quarters than it was now. Of course, morale could sink just as quickly if things started to go badly, men being what they were, employees being conditioned as they had to be … but Montez appreciated their pleasure and saw no reason to be cynical about it. Employees were like children; if you treated them well they were happy; if you treated them badly they were not. They had no understanding of motives or cause and effect or larger purposes. But if they did they would no longer be employees … and without that class of people, no amenities were possible. Montez, occasionally bitter in his long life, could see all sides of the question now. Everything made sense when looked at from the aspect of success. Success resolved all doubts and gave order to the universe.
“How are you feeling?” he asked Carlin. He did not care, of course; he could not care less about the state of Carlin’s health, but this was the kind of question Americans often asked one another when they were starting an interview, and Montez admired the Americans. He had learned almost everything he had to know from them, and if this was their custom then so much the better. “Are you feeling all right?”
Carlin, who had been lying with his eyes closed, opened one to half-size and looked out at him, the eye gray and moist behind its cover. He gurgled something deeply in his throat. “I am truly sorry to hear that,” Montez said.
“Leave me alone,” the man said weakly. The words came out as if they were endearments torn from the throat of a lover who wanted nothing but to leave at the earliest possible moment, now crouching over an object that had become repulsive to him. “You have got to leave me alone.”
“You shouldn’t have murdered those people,” Montez said. “You brought all of this upon yourself. If you had not brought this upon yourself everything would be well and you would be happy now.”
“I shouldn’t have come to you,” Carlin said, slowly, his throat croaking out each syllable. Montez let it come out that way; he had plenty of time. “I should not have come to you at all.”
“You had nowhere else to go,” Montez said. “You thought I would give you assistance and sanctuary. You did not understand that there is truly a God of vengeance and that no one could give you sanctuary against your miserable crimes. You are beginning to understand penance now. You are beginning to understand the true significance of the word grace.”
“I hope you die,” Carlin said. “I hope you burn in hell. That is the meaning of any penance I understand.”
“It did not have to be this way,” Montez said again. There were little streaks and veins in Carlin’s eyes; they showed the effects of a subdural hemorrhage. He had probably been beaten severely around the cheekbones, not that Montez wanted to know any of the details of punishment. It was sickening in any but the sense of moral imperative. “If you had not brought this upon yourself, it never would have happened. None of it.”
“Leave me alone,” Carlin said. “Leave me alone and let me die.”
“You will go to hell. Why are you in such a hurry to go to hell?”
Carlin did not answer. He obviously did not want to get into any religious discussion. Montez could understand that. You could be driven beyond religion; if pain would not do it then pleasure could. “You must think about your sins,” he said, “you must multiply your sins very carefully one by one in the cell of your consciousness, and if you come to truly understand them, if you come to terms with all your sins then you will be granted understanding and finally remission.”
“We could have had everything,” Carlin said. “Together we could have had everything.”
“What?”
“We could have shared everything,” Carlin said. The syllables were flowing more easily now, it was as if thinking of money had once again energized him. On his deathbed a man would always return to what had appeased him the most in life. “But you got greedy. You wanted to have it all yourself. But if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t even have been here.”
“You do not understand,” Montez said. “I did not do this in order to have everything. There are other things besides wordly goods. I did this for revenge.”
“Liar.”
“That is the truth.”
“You did it for the money. Everything was always for the money. Everybody does it for the money; without that there would be nothing at all.”
“You really do not understand,” Montez said with regret. “You are an American and do not know that there are more timeless values, more important factors than the secular fact of money.”
One of the guards said in Spanish: “Is he giving you any trouble?”
“No,” Montez said, “we are having a discussion.”
“If he is giving you any trouble I will go over and beat his skull in. He must be taught manners.”
“No,” Montez said, “that is perfectly all right. There is no trouble. We are seeking to understand each other.”
“I will understand him with my fist,” the other guard said. “The brains of him will understand my fist more than any amount of language, and this is a better thing.”
“Montez, I hope you go to hell,” Carlin said. “I hope all of you go to hell.”
“Hell can be temporal,” Montez said precisely, “and now you are in a temporal hell. Do you hear what my men are saying to me?”
“I don’t understand Spanish.”
“My men are telling me that they will be quite willing to beat you further in order to induce intelligence and understanding. They seem quite anxious to do it, as a matter of fact. They regret the failure you have had yet of spiritual ascension, and it is all that I can do to resist what they are saying. They are merely trying to be helpful, you see. Shall I let them discuss matters with you again?”
“I don’t care any more.”
“You have already ascended the flesh, then, you see. The spirit has become predominant if you do not care any more.”
Carlin said nothing. Montez looked down at him and said, “I thought you might be interested to know that my men have located Wulff.”
Energy came into the man’s face and momentarily he looked like the man who had been at the airport, not the blotched and ruined specter on this cot. “No,” he said.
“Oh yes,” Montez said, “my men found him lurking at your estate, apparently with plans to set incendiaries of some sort. But there was absolutely no violence. They have him and they are all coming in this way. He should be here within the hour.”
“That is impossible.”
“No it isn’t.”
“It is impossible,” Carlin said. “You could not catch that man if he did not want to be caught. I do not believe that any man or group of men could find him without his cooperation.”
“You are exaggerating. The trouble with you Americans is that you have no true sense of proportion. You always think that your worst is the worst, your best the best. He was very easy to capture. He came along quite meekly, as a matter of fact. He will be here shortly, and I am sure that you can discuss all of this with him and find out for yourself that this is true.�
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“I don’t believe you,” Carlin said again. “I don’t believe you could have trapped him.”
“What you really do not believe,” Montez said, “is that a man for whom you committed murders, the fear of this man driving you to ruin your life, could be so easily entrapped by someone else. This is a kind of vanity speaking. But I assure you that it is absolutely true and that he is on his way under escort here and you will see this and arrive at more understanding. Everything here has been calculated toward your greater enlightenment, toward your complete knowledge before you die, and this will be one of the best lessons we have offered you yet. Indeed, it will be perhaps your very final lesson; we shall see.”