by Barry, Mike
Son-of-a-bitch, Martin thought, and son-of-a-bitching Vines, too, for that matter, He was no damned good, that fucker, no good at all. You gave a man a job because you thought that he could do it, because you showed some faith in a person who really did not justify it at all … and what did you get? What did you get for that?
Better off dead, Martin thought. Better off dead than this. But, oh no, this will not go for me. It is not going to happen. I will not be another neuron in the synapse of a kill-crazy madman … and he lurched toward the phone, his first and final line of defense.
V
Williams was at least able to retail a couple of point forty-fives from a source in Queens who had once been a patrolman and now in his retirement was selling off a little of his private, stolen stock to stay away from the inflationary spiral. And he was able to pick up a shotgun from a contact of the retired cop’s from a depot in the distant Bronx. The shotgun had been a particular coup; he hoped that Wulff would be proud of him. Of course, in the state that Wulff had reached now it was not likely that he was still in a position where he could understand or appreciate anything going on outside of him, but even though praise was strictly not to the point, Williams hoped that Wulff would acknowledge what had been done. It had been remarkable—particularly after all lines of conventional supply had been closed off to him—that he had been able to get what he had. The shotgun alone could probably hold off a crowd of forty, and the pistols would come in handy. Wulff would have every reason to be pleased. But then again the way that the man was behaving now, after all that had happened to him, Williams thought that he would be lucky if Wulff even acknowledged the efforts. Probably he would not. He was just too deep into his situation now to comprehend, let alone appreciate anything that was outside of himself.
That was all right though, Williams guessed. That was the way it had to be and it would be foolish to become emotionally involved with Wulff’s moods at this stage of the game. Wulff was hardly significant to Williams in the emotional sense. It was only that he was going his way and Williams another, and there was a point of intersection. That was all. You had to keep that in mind at all times. You did not want to make any more of this thing than existed.
Williams rode a Greyhound bus to Philadelphia, sitting over the rear wheels, smelling the exhaust and enjoying the relative isolation of this unfavorable spot in a bus that was less than half full. No one near him, no one to smoke in his face, no one with whom he had to fake conversation or turn from in disgust. The ordnance was in a valise over his head, tucked into a tight space between the railing and the top of the bus, undetectable as far as he knew. Also undetectable was the resolve within him which had come stealing upon him slowly from the time that he had left the second retired cop’s house with the shotgun. The resolve had come upon him almost absently like the little forgotten images of a dream from which you would awake with an erection and no clear inkling of what had inspired it, and at first he had ignored it, but as it continued growing upon the screen of his consciousness, it was now unavoidable and he allowed himself to inspect it like a collector appraising a rare and hidden jewel. Turning it in mental fingers, he toyed with it, letting it revolve as it caught all of the twinkling aspects of his life: In Philadelphia it all has got to end. This is the last. Then: In Philadelphia I’m going to have to kill Wulff.
In Philadelphia I’m going to have to kill Wulff. Where had this come from? What area of the consciousness had disgorged it? It did not matter, of course. No one cared about origins in this business or in any other. It was only the results which counted … and as Williams allowed the thought to overtake him, as he allowed it for the first time to escape from whatever crowded corner of the consciousness it had occupied to breathe the open if musty air of attention, he saw that it was right. It was going to have to be done. Unbidden the thought had come to him, vomited out by some shrewder and more knowing part of the brain which must have been making its careful evaluations a long time ago, pending this moment. That may have been why I agreed to go to Philadelphia. Williams twitched on the seat and began to shake with excitement.
That might have been it. He had been on something called the “Wulff squad” back in New York after he had come back from Los Angeles and before Wulff had been intercepted in Harlem. It had been a seedy group of losers and drunks, most of them refugees from the bow-and-arrow squad put together by the commissioner in a hopeless attempt to deflect possible adverse publicity and give the appearance that the department was making serious attempts to collar one of its own renegades. The Wulff squad had not come to much, although it had given Williams interesting material and further resolve to take nothing about the system seriously except its twice-a-month paychecks. But from the beginning he had not quarreled with the purposes for which the squad had been put together. Wulff should have been apprehended. The department could not countenance his activities, whether he was hitting the dealers or not. He should be in custody. And now, months later, after having traversed more ground in and out of his head than he would ever want to trace again, Williams had reached the same set of assumptions. All along he had been kidding himself to think that he was going to go to Philadelphia to bring Wulff ordnance, to lend him a hand. He had wanted out of the system, that part was clear. He had come to see that Wulff was right about the essential corruption and hopelessness of any bureaucracy that would inevitably collaborate with those it was created to destroy … but seeing that Wulff was right about the system did not mean that the alternative Wulff represented made any more sense.
Wulff was crazy. That much was clear. Maybe if you pitted yourself absolutely against the system you would have to be a crazy man; that was not to be discarded, but it was not right. Just as he had in Harlem at the end, Wulff had embarked again upon a career which would result mostly in a great many innocent people getting themselves killed. It seemed that Wulff could no longer discriminate, and he had also become as deadly as any of those whom he was fighting. So what was the point of it? It was all getting out of hand, that was clear. It would continue to get out of hand unless he stopped it.
“I have to stop it,” Williams said aloud staring ahead into the tunnel of night, his hands clasped before him. “Damn it, I have to stop it or a lot of people are going to get hurt.”
“Excuse me?” said a man in front of him, half turning. Williams could not see his face, only an aspect of color, of white pasted against black. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Williams said, “absolutely nothing.”
“Who’s going to get hurt? What are you going to have to stop? The bus?”
“Has nothing to do with you at all,” Williams said heavily and the man turned away, and quietly said something which Williams could just pick up; something which had the word fuck in it. Williams thought yes, it is true, that if I were Wulff and this man had said that about me I might kill that man, might shoot him dead in his seat with the silenced point thirty-eight I have in my pocket. I might shoot him for cursing me and no one the wiser, and if I were Wulff this very well might have happened. But I am not. I have learned to draw a line and I do not think that he has any more. I believe that he has lost the line. That is what has happened here, and he no longer perceives the discrimination between what is unacceptable and what, although dangerous, must be tolerated for the sake of humanity. He does not understand; he does not understand at all. He understands nothing whatsoever, Williams thought, and as the bus prowled on to Philadelphia he thought three hours or a little less up until Independence Hall. I wonder what I’ll do. I wonder what I’ll do when I see him. Whether I’ll shoot him at once and the hell with it or whether I’ll try to work him around to some quiet place and time where I might be able to do it and come out of it clean. They would always think that it was some member of the organization. They would give credit where credit never would be due … but where, to be sure, it would be taken.
VI
Maury, on the other hand, was doing nothing so contemplative or essenti
ally passive as sitting on a Greyhound bus working out the philosophic delicacies of Wulff’s living ethic. Maury was barrel-assing it north on Route One, the radio screaming, whipping the Pontiac through the turns at something close to eighty-and-a-half, whistling against the sound of the radio and making his plans in the pauses between whistles, at the top of his lungs. He was pretty sure where Wulff was now. The conviction had grown in him that he would nail the son-of-a-bitch to the ground in Philadelphia, and he knew a couple of people up there who could give him a good lead onto him. Philadelphia would be no problem at all as a place where he could level this Wulff character to an ultimate justice. The only problem was getting the fucking Pontiac to Philly. The transmission was shot and there were at least two-and-a-half cylinders under that hood that weren’t putting out, to say nothing of a brake pedal that went through the fucking floorboard. Still, you did the best you could. That was all that could be asked of a man; that he did the best he could. And at the end—the very end of it for him and his time—they had a soft bed for him and a girl with breasts like headlights glowing, glowing for him to find his way home. All right. All right. He patted the rifle beside him on the seat.
Maury had an M-15 lying next to him on the vinyl. The M-15 was just in case any fuckers gave him a hard time. State troopers too. He would take the thing and blow their fucking heads off. No one was messing with him on this great mission of revenge. But beyond that, beyond all of the good reasons for having a rifle beside him, there was the simple satisfaction of having it there, tight behind him on the seat so that at any time he could put out his hand, fondle it, and feel its power. There were a lot of people around—and he knew them—who would say that this kind of conduct was that of a nut; that there must be something wrong with a guy who had to reach out and fondle a rifle for kicks. Maybe the guy really wanted to fondle his nuts or something like that. Reassure himself that he had a big prick. But Maury was there to say that it was all a bunch of crap. He wasn’t feeling the rifle because it had anything to do with sex at all. The rifle was a pleasure to fondle on its own, and there was enough significance in the stock and barrel, trigger and hammer edge of its own. As long as this bugger was next to him nothing bad would happen. He had that faith.
You had to have faith. He had faith in his ability to trap the wolf. Maury was a sporting goods store proprietor in a shopping mall in Atlanta. A week ago the wolf had knocked over his store to load up on some of Maury’s ordnance. That had been bad enough. Bad enough to have your store knocked over in daylight and made an example of to every cheap thug in the business, but the wolf had done worse than that. He had gotten into Maury’s best private stock of grenades, some smuggled beauties which were private stock and which had planned to save for his own use some day when they got the country back, he and his, and claimed their inheritance. If there was no revolution, he would have sold them to the highest bidder, and surely would gotten up in the high hundreds apiece and would have had enough to get out of the business. Those goddamned grenades were, in sum, his retirement fund. Beauties of German manufacture at least thirty years old, the weakest of them would have blown up a square block of Atlanta. No saying what it would do in a more cluttered place like New York City where the wolf appeared to come from.
But the son-of-a-bitch had come in and taken them. Taken all of Maury’s grenades away and then headed north. Toward Philadelphia, Maury knew. He had humiliated him in his own shop, made a fool of him in front of one of his own customers and injured his reputation, possibly seriously, and Maury simply was not going to put up with any of that. If you let them take even an inch off you, if the word got around that you could be knocked over and your most prized possessions taken away from you, well, then there would be no end to the succession of punks who one-by-one would be shaping up at the door of his place or his home, aching to take him on. So Maury had gone after the wolf. It was as simple as that.
He knew he would get him. Sometimes you had a feeling, that was all. A conviction which moved in all of the panels of the guts and then stirred itself through the head and the arms. A conviction or certainty, they called it, and he had it; the knowledge that he would run this man down to earth and get his goods back. And after that was taken care of, he was going to shoot Wulff, kill him because he had taken a public oath that he was going to destroy the man and he was never going to be in the position of being set back on something to which he had committed himself like that. No, it was a vow that he was going to honor. Singing, patting the rifle, the feeling of the rifle was like flesh underneath his palm. The hard, grainy feel of it was sensual and promising to him like the skin of a big-breasted woman that you would, after a while, strip to find the terrible and reaching softness within. Patting and pressing and fondling the rifle, Maury drove madly north, feeling himself drawn along the line of roadway toward destination like a big fish being hooked in by the reel of purpose, soon to surface and mesh with his destiny.
VII
Strolling through the south side, killing a little time before meeting with Williams at Independence Hall and beginning his mission of revenge upon Martin, letting the man sweat for the time being, Wulff came upon two addicts nodding out in a hallway. They were hunched against one another mumbling in the abcess beyond light, as if in the deep collaboration of the sex act. But when Wulff stopped, turned, went back to where he had seen them and pulled them out, he could see that it was nothing like that at all. They merely had been exchanging confidences, that was all. Getting high together in a way which made them the more likely to cling. One was white and one was black. But aside from this appealingly inter-racial aspect they looked quite similar; the color was merely a texture laid over faces that could have been those of twins, with clothing and postures that were images of one another. They might have been twenty-five years old apiece, although with addicts it was hard to tell. The aging aspect. Most likely they were in their late teens. Their flesh clung to him like cellophane as Wulff dragged them away from one another, giving up the connection with a vague and disgusting sucking sensation, and he just looked at them for a while in the waste of the afternoon.
There was no one else on the street; they had picked a side alley which was behind the enormous grey walls of housing projects vaulting upwards, on the block opposite, all of which on their side was dull glass, puddles and wire. The block itself had been stripped, presumably for the next housing project which had been held up after original demolition because of lack of funds. It was a block in Philadelphia, but it could as well have been one in New York or the back streets of old Spanish Los Angeles which Wulff had seen. Junkie territory was its own terrain; it was one vast linked city of blood, and the passage from one part of that darkness to another was accomplished just as the furious passage of the blood might occur between the cells of a destroyed organ. The kids in his grasp looked at him with terror, but the terror was merely momentary, convulsive, a quick gathering of attention which could as easily dissipate, were they to be released. If he were to release them they would pass back into the alley and begin the exchange again.
“What is it?” the white said. His hand deep in his pocket jiggled something. “What you want?” Wulff reached forward, grabbed his wrist, bringing his hand out of the pocket. The hand tightened around something, then released. Gleaming things fell into the gutter: an eyedropper, spoon, a little packet. “Son-of-a-bitch,” the white said. “Dirty bastard.”
“None of it,” the black said pointlessly and turned to run. Hands twitching, arms pumping, knees moving erratically, he must have imagined himself to be in full gallop, speeding away from Wulff and the alley with great and increasing speed. But in truth he merely lurched, stumbling over himself. Barely six feet away, imagining himself to be at distance, he tossed something onto the ground. Glint: a needle. Shuffling faster, the black moved away.
“No,” Wulff said, “stop!”
The black did not stop. In the dream to which he was locked Wulff must have been backed away several blocks now,
receding in interior vision, tiny, pointless. Wulff took his gun out quickly and fired a shot over the black’s head.
The white screamed something and went to the pavement muttering, his hands helpless tentacles clawing idly at Wulff’s ankles, but the black did not stop running. Magnified in his consciousness, the shot must have stunned him, raised him to a new level where fleeing, dreamily, he believed that he was dead and was only surprised at how easy, how very much like life death itself could be. “Stop!” Wulff shouted again and the white muttered and clawed underneath him. The black was now a hundred yards down range, slowing with the effort of flight but still in motion, nearing a corner. Soon he would turn the corner and then he would be on a main street in Philadelphia.
Wulff did not want to shoot him. Just as the black was now running in a dream, so this had been a dream for Wulff, a means of making passage before the meeting with Williams. He had gone out into the slums of the south side to look for addicts simply so that he could remember what his quest was, so he could keep a tight perspective on where, despite all of the manipulations and murder, it originated. Who he was killing for. When he had seen the two in the alley the impulse to go over to them had been clear. So had been what he thought he was going to do: he was going to seize the works from them, grind them down under his heel, and settle for giving them a lecture and scaring the living shit out of them. In the state that they were in it would have been enough. All right, he might have busted their heads or threatened to in order to find out the name of their dealer, but that wouldn’t have amounted to much. They would have disgorged the name easily in their terror, taking him for once to be an honest, angered narc. And all right again. Okay, if their connection had been near. If he had been able to get there conveniently and deal with him in the time that he had before he was due to meet Williams, he might have done that as well. He wasn’t to deny that either. He had looked for a little spot action on these trails, and if he had gotten anything to follow through he would have. If the dealer were anywhere in the neighborhood. He didn’t want to risk screwing up the meet with Williams. Williams was going to give him some real heavy ordnance so that he could get into Martin’s house and really blow the shit out of it in the old way, the way that it had been in San Francisco at the boat.