by Barry, Mike
“Don’t,” he said, “no more. Don’t hit me.”
“Who sent you here?” Wulff said. “What do you want?”
“He called me,” the man said weakly.
“Who? The clerk?”
“Yeah. Yeah, Jerry downstairs. He called me. He thought you might be somebody they were looking for. He thought that you were—”
“Who?”
“You know,” the man said sullenly. “You know who he thought you were. Everybody knows what you look like. There’s no goddamned big secret about it.”
Wulff hit him backhanded across the left cheekbone. The man’s eyes went wide and empty and his head rolled into the wall. He did not, however, collapse. A little bit of blood, showing first in his eye, rolled out of a corner of the mouth. “Bastard,” he said.
“Who sent you?”
“I won’t—”
Wulff hit him again. One could get into a simple rhythm of connection where he did not have to think about what he was doing at all; everything was reflexive, simple. Not only the captive but the torturer responded to the simple imperatives of the situation: who then was the captive? “Come on,” he said.
“He’ll kill me.”
“Be killed,” Wulff said and hit the man. The blood had come down to the left shoulder of the overcoat now and oddly had not sunk in, but rather it was travelling, sliding down with gravity to the sleeve and pooling in one distended drop near the cuff. “I’m quite willing to kill you,” Wulff said. “It doesn’t make any difference to me whether I do or not. You’d be one of a thousand.”
The man looked at him and something in his face changed; it was as if at that moment some absolute perception of Wulff which had not been there before came to him, and his eyes were suddenly dull and pained like those of a suffering dog. “You’re Burton Wulff, aren’t you?”
Wulff sighed and used another backhand. This one caught the man, slamming him into the wall even harder, and the man rebounded. He looked weary, as if he had long since expended energies worthy of an employee and was now beginning to think about the long-range fringe benefits of his job—of which there seemed to be very few. “Martin,” he said, “Martin sent me.”
“Who’s Martin?”
“It won’t do you any good to know,” the man said. “It won’t make any difference whether you know or not.” He seemed to be reasonable now, pleading, settling upon a vein of desperate earnestness which, if he could only properly track it through, might carry him all the way home. “There’s no need for this,” he said. “Nobody really wants to get involved; nobody wants to hurt you. I was just sent to do a job. But what the hell, if I can’t do it that doesn’t mean there’s any hard feelings; it doesn’t mean that the situation has to go on this way at all.”
“Who is Martin?”
“Just a guy in business,” the man in the overcoat said. “Just a guy who I work for—”
“Just a guy who wants me killed.”
“All business,” the man said sullenly, “just business.”
“So is death.”
“You go out to do a job, that’s all. You do the best you can. It’s like war, isn’t it? So I couldn’t do it, so I fucked it up. You’re a better man than I am. So it should just end like that, shouldn’t it?”
“Let you walk back to your own lines.”
“Something like that.”
“That’s an interesting attitude,” Wulff said. “I’ve never really met anyone with your attitude about the business up until now.”
“Well,” the man said ponderously, rubbing his chin as a hopeful little light came into his eyes; light that filtered down from his eyes and through all the cracks of his face. “Maybe that’s because there aren’t enough guys who have thought this out the way that I have, who don’t have my attitude on the business. It should just be a job, that’s all. If I fail why should I be killed?”
“That’s true,” Wulff said, “I see your point. Completely business.”
“Right. That’s right.”
“Who is Martin?”
“Now I can’t tell you that. Now that wouldn’t do you any good at all even if you knew who he was. He’s just a guy—”
Wulff shot the man in the shoulder.
He squawked once and hammered into the wall, grasping himself, looking at Wulff with disbelief. “You can’t do this,” he said, “you can’t do it,” and then the pain caught him fully and his features seemed to cleave, break open in little glistening jewels of sweat. He pounded an elbow into the wall, his shoulder heaving within his grasp. “No,” he said again, “oh no.”
“Who is Martin?”
“I don’t want—”
Wulff pointed the gun again. “The other shoulder,” he said. “and then I’ll start to work on the knees. Four points. I’ll have you crawling around like a frog.”
“Oh Jesus,” the man in the overcoat said. “Oh Jesus Christ,” and then he began to talk. Little pieces of information, words, and phrases came out, painfully moving at cross-angles to the movement of his mouth so that they seemed not to be so much impelled as squeezed out like a long-delayed and hopeless ejaculation after too much self-stimulation. He told him more about Martin than Wulff could conceivably have wanted to know. Not only the man’s full name, address and business and why he had sent the man in the overcoat to assassinate Wulff simply on information phoned in by the clerk, not only all of that, but also Wulff was told certain things about Martin’s personal life and obsessions and interests which had nothing to do with the situation. And yet, in a different and more obvious way, of course, they had everything to do with it because what controlled a man’s actions were not only the mechanics of necessity but also what the man had constructed the necessities from … and the shit dealers were into it because in one basic sense or another they had always wanted shit.
When the man in the overcoat had finished he ran down with little sighs and groans, as if turning off his speech was as difficult as getting started; as if a man who had lived all of his adult life in the belief that to talk at all was to risk danger could not, when forced to speak at last, see any limitations to what should be said. He stood there then, leaning against the wall, head lolling, grasping his shoulder. His eyes were bleak and ruined; on some vague level he did not so much seem to be destroyed as he did beyond any sense of himself. He might have needed a new self-image, as the speaker. “I’m hurt,” he said, “I’m really hurt.”
“Of course. You’re shot.”
“I’m bleeding. It’s really bleeding in there. If I don’t get this attended to I’m going to be in trouble.”
“You shouldn’t mess around with guns,” Wulff said. “You see, you have no idea what kind of people you’re going to run into if you go around with a gun.”
“Will you let me go?”
“What?”
“I said will you let me go?”
“I don’t think so,” Wulff said and paused. “No, I don’t think that I will. I don’t think that it’s going to do any good at all to let you go because then you’re just going to be one more complication and I’ve got too many. Too goddamned many complications, too much already. I’ve got to simplify,” Wulff said, pointed the gun, and shot the man over the left eye. He pumped another shot, and then backed away like an artist considering the final draft of a canvas to which he had, at the last moment, slashed on a final explosion of color, and watched the man fall. The man pitched onto his face heavily, dead meat from bottom to top; dead meat moving heavy and useless within the sack of his clothing. Wulff put the gun away. There was simply nothing else to do.
He thought for a while about staying in the room for a few more hours because the corpse didn’t bother him and it would have been even kind of comforting to doze on the bed with the presence of the dead man an assurance that he had not lost his touch. But he finally decided that was pretty silly, because sooner or later the man named Martin who had sent this man would begin to worry about the absence of a report and would send some
one else to check on him. People like Martin always worked that way. They sent their assassins in waves and shifts but they never did the work themselves. No need. There was no need for Wulff to stay either.
So he left. Might as well go to deal with Martin directly. Or, then again, maybe pass a few hours in a movie house, meet Williams with, hopefully, some new ordnance and go into Martin’s quarters fully armed. No point staying though. The lobby was empty and the clerk, huddled over his newspaper, looked up and gave one startled peep when he saw Wulff, and then dove expertly beneath counter level.
Before he could come up with whatever he was going to come up with Wulff went over, leaned over the counter with the gun drawn and shot the gleaming mass of the clerk between the shoulder blades.
Then he went out. Nobody had paid any attention at all. It was a not very sucessful hotel that was in a very poor section of a town and now in as bad trouble as anything else on the east coast.
IV
Martin lived in a big house just east of Harrisburg and preferred to work by telephone. Now and then—particularly when he was dealing with those above him in the hierarchy—it was necessary to present himself, to deal face-to-face, but for the most part he could handle everything he needed over the phone and this was better. It imparted a sense of mystery to his directives; he could really intimidate people more if they did not know what he looked like. And also there was a good deal more protection in handling things in that way.
He had gotten the word from the clerk in the hotel in Philadelphia about Wulff’s checking in on the phone, and had dispatched the assassin in the same way. The clerk was paid a small retainer to pass onto Martin little pieces of information that he might inherit on the south side, and also to now and then run a packet of live goods to some prearranged contact. He had not really come up with much in the past, but that did not mean that there would not be something in the future. The purpose of keeping an informer around was precisely that he was unpredictable, and you never knew what he might come up with. The best informers were not predictable. Certainly the word on Wulff had been worth all of the hundred dollar bills that Martin had been feeding the ruined old man month by month for a long time.
He had known that Wulff was coming north, but the luck of his actually coming into a place which Martin had under this kind of surveillance was just too good. It was outstanding luck, that was all. It confirmed for Martin what had long been an instinctive feeling that he occupied a plane of possibilities higher and finer than most other men. He had sent the best man available to the hotel with the feeling that he was getting rid of a particularly urgent problem before it had even had a chance to hurt him; long before it would force itself into his life. It was like a free finesse in bridge—that was all—to learn that Wulff had checked into a near-flophouse in the south section and that he was apparently alone. He had tried a couple of people before getting Vines to agree to take it, but Vines had been all right. Well past his prime, of course, and a little slow and on the cautious side, but certainly as good with a gun as anyone around, and, after all, how much skill did an assassin really need? Wulff was alone; it was simply a matter of going into the room and shooting him.
So, he had been happy. Everything had been moving along in the proper way; and now that Wulff was out of the way it was all going to fall into place. He would be able to make the meeting and establish control, no two ways about it. He was going to come out of this one on top. No one would stop him: he would have the whole goddamned northeast and he could thank Wulff for that. Had to give the bastard his due. If anyone had cleared the decks for Martin it had been this guy killing off all of the prospective competition. In the long run eveything worked out for the best, that was all. It even served well to be a second-rater, the way things were going nowadays.
So the phone call had been a shock. It had been an extremely bad shock; one of the worst that he had had in a while. And Martin was getting to an age now—easing near forty—where he was beginning to worry about his heart, to worry about the cancer that was back there in his family tree, the rheumatism, the glaucoma, the strokes, and all of the things that lurked to destroy a man just when he had managed, on his own, to beat the game cold. Life was a bitch that way. The phone call had been a shock all right; it had generated what he knew the medical texts called a sympathetic storm, or a sudden escalation of the pulse rate accompanied by shortness of breath and flushing which indicated severe stress upon the heart itself and which had to be guarded against if one wanted to survive to a good age without a heart attack. Most of the aerobic exercises were designed to build up the body against the sympathetic storm, which was the reason why Martin had done them for a time before losing interest a few years ago.
“Hello,” the voice on the phone said, “this is Wulff.” Martin had known right away that it was. Sometimes he got a crank call even with his unlisted number, but there was no way of looking at this as a crank. He knew, and from the moment that he knew Martin felt his metabolism start to slide out of control. One had to watch that kind of thing if he wanted to live a long or at least a longer life, and so what Martin did right then and there with the man on the other end of the phone and with, as far as he knew, his virtual life at stake, was merely to stand there drawing the even breaths down, stroking his epiglottis with little strobes and wires of intake, trying to bring his heartbeat down in a deliberate and calculated fashion from the unreasonable 130 that it had hit.
On the other end of the phone the caller waited him out with uncanny patience, almost as if he knew what Martin was doing, as if he had made enough calls of this sort in the past to be able to judge, without need of explanation, exactly what was happening to the man that he had reached. That was pretty frightening when you came to think about it. All of this was pretty frightening; but then, Martin had long since decided it was a lousy business. If you were going to be in it, though, it meant that you had to deal with all of the penalties, one of which very definitely was calls of this sort. There was no way around it, and it was hardly the first time that he had had to deal with a man whom he loathed and feared. But even within that context of reassurance he was trying to find, this was bad. It was very bad. Finally he said, with his pulse storming down to an uneven ninety-six, bobbling and jerking in his chest like vagrant cells that had been torn loose from the heart muscle to be overtaken in the ruin of the blood, “All right. It’s you. I accept the fact that it’s you.”
“You’d just better do that.”
“What happened to Vines?”
“Vines?” the man said. “You mean the guy in the overcoat? He’s no longer with us.”
“You killed him?”
“I dealt with him,” Wulff said. “And now I’m going to deal with you.”
“That wouldn’t be very bright,” Martin said. “That would be ill advised.”
“How so?”
“Don’t do it,” Martin said. “Whatever you have in mind don’t come near me. Get out of Philadelphia Wulff.”
The man seemed to laugh at him. Well, all of the reports that Martin had received indicated that Wulff was a lunatic; but that meant nothing. “Is that an order?”
“It is for you.”
“I’m going to get you,” Wulff said. “I know where you live and how you seal yourself up and what kind of security system you have. I even know about your basement entrance. Vines got quite talkative before he died. Even chatty. It just goes to show you what a little fear will do for a man. Or maybe a good companion.”
“You son-of-a-bitch.”
“That won’t do you any good either.”
“Why are you calling me, Wulff? What do you want?”
“I want you to sweat. I want you to know that I’m coming and to think about it all the time, that’s all.”
“You’ve got to be crazy.”
“No,” the man said, “I’m not crazy. I’m absolutely sane. I want you to suffer like the junkies suffer. Like the busted out kids in Harlem, like the bodies stretched out
in the shooting gallery, like all the hip kids in Berkeley who got strung out in 1969 and went crazy. That’s what I want you to feel like Martin.”
“You’re crazy,” Martin said again. “You think I mess with that shit? I don’t have anything to do with that; I’m a businessman. I wouldn’t run drugs; that’s a black business.”
“Black business,” Wulff said, “black heart,” and laughed into the phone, one short, terrible bark and then put it down. Martin could hear the emptiness moving in little waves of pain into his ear, and he yanked the phone away and in fury threw it at the pedestal. Missing, and instead striking the wall on the bounce, the phone and receiver then skittered somewhere underneath the bed. Martin turned from his bedroom and went into the living room, headed for the liquor cabinet, reached for the shelf of gin, thinking that he would pour a short one to try and calm down, beat off the ravages of respiration, and try to figure out what he was going to do with this lunatic who was hard and heavy on him. But even as his fingers had closed on the bottle Martin knew that it was no good, no good at all. He could not escape that way. There was only time for one thing. He would have to take what protective action he could. He had been lucky so far; up until this point he had been safe from Wulff because he was well insulated and because he was at too low an echelon for Wulff to even pay much attention to him … But that was going to change now. All of that had obviously changed. What he had always feared at some level was going to happen had happened at last: the man’s line of sight had zeroed in on Martin and now … well now he had to do something. Obviously this was intolerable. He had to do something fast because this madman had him marked down as a major drug dealer and unless this was quickly come to terms with Martin was going to be added to the list, already in the hundreds, of victims.