by Barry, Mike
“Why me?” the assistant commissioner said.
“Because you’ve been on it already. You’ve been in touch with Williams. You’ve done some investigation, and you were in charge of this damned silly squad they had here—”
“All right,” the aycee said. It was hopeless. And part of surviving in any situation like this was to know exactly that point where you had passed no return, where you had to do their will, where yours no longer mattered and you could then only impose your will by sliding around rather than going head on. The earlier you saw it the smarter you were, and the longer your career was bound to last. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Maybe you can put Williams in command,” the commissioner said, “if he knows so damned much about this guy.”
“I don’t think he’d want any part of it.”
“You can try. He was on that squad before himself, wasn’t he?”
The commissioner had done more background than he had admitted. It was, the aycee admitted, a good trait. Little bits of knowledge piece-by-piece were being broken off the block of his intent now. “It wasn’t much of a squad,” the aycee said.
“They got him, didn’t they?”
“In kind of a coincidental way, yes.”
“Well, coincidence is as good as anything else. What the hell is wrong with coincidence as long as you can break the case? Something like that is probably the only way something crazy like this is going to be ended, anyway.”
“No doubt,” the aycee said. He stood and went to the door, turned there, and saw that the commissioner had turned from the window and was looking at him intently. “Sam,” the commissioner said. “Sam, he is crazy, isn’t he?” His voice seemed near pleading. “He’s got to be insane; a man who would do something like this, kill people, bomb buildings, blow up neighborhoods, ships. Damned fool, endangering life—” His voice faded and he looked much older and confused. “It’s madness,” the commissioner said quietly. “Madness.”
“Yes it is.”
“He is crazy.”
“Yes,” the aycee said, “of course he’s crazy. How could he do something like this and not be that way.”
“I’ve got to believe that.”
“I know what you mean,” the aycee said, standing at the door. “You see I know exactly what you mean.” And he did. It was interesting how his thoughts seemed to track with those of the commissioner. Usually they did not, but every now and then there was that kind of hollow apprehension of what the man was thinking that depressed the aycee, because it meant that he had the same mentality. “Because if he isn’t crazy,” he said to the commissioner, “if by any chance that man is sane and he’s going about this in the right way, then it means that we, that all of our methods are mad.” And then he went out of there quickly before he could see the commissioner nodding back at him. He simply did not want to see agreement at this moment. He could not stand the sense of collaboration. He could not bear the thought that there was a chance that all of the devices of the PD and law enforcement itself as they bore down now on Wulff were not in the pursuit of justice … but merely to replace the system that Wulff had torn down with its gleaming and awful homonym: reconstructed.
XV
Wulff returned to Philadelphia. Harrisburg had been a disaster. It did not seem possible that Martin was not the man he had been seeking, but even dying the man had denied his involvement. It had been Wulff’s observation that at the end all men told the truth. He had certainly been with enough of them, and he had never known one yet who at the very end would not confess what he was and what he had wanted, trying to make pact before passage. So the fact that Martin had refused to admit it was very disturbing. It raised the possibility that Wulff had been pursuing an innocent man, that the material in Diaz’s notebook had not been as dependable as he had thought. But, then again, had he gotten it out of Diaz’s notebook? Was he really sure that he had been given reliable information that Martin was dealing? It was hard to be sure. His recollection was not quite what it had been in the past. It came in odd white flashes, off-center, grey on grey. His memory was not all what it should have been, but then he had had so much to deal with. It was not easy keeping all the strands together. If he had made an error on Martin, he was sorry. But it was just one of those things. It was difficult enough to have to carry his responsibilities and be letter perfect in all of the identifications in the bargain. If he had fucked up it had been for the first time, and that was all. Probably he hadn’t fucked up. Some men were just liars anyway. Martin was not willing to give him the satisfaction. That was all.
What the fuck did they want of him anyway, Wulff thought. He was doing a difficult job all alone and under very difficult circumstances. They could not expect him to be perfect. Anyway, it was over. It was all over now. He would not think of it any more.
He was back in Philadelphia. He had just gotten out of the burn site before the police and disaster crews had arrived, and he had been well clear by the time they had come. Everything was a matter of timing. If you had a little confidence in yourself, in your ability to slide around the edges of a situation, then you could come to grips with it and nothing, nothing could ever trap you. Entrapment was a state of mind. Martin was dead and Wulff was off the street before the first of the cars had closed in. And then in the confusion and the flames, with four dead men with which to deal and the secondary explosion of the grenades which were still flaring and popping on the lawns … the police had their hands full. Particularly the Harrisburg police. They did not even know who to look for.
Wulff had gotten out of there. He had gotten out in the original ninety-eight in which he had come. He did not want to deal with that car anymore. He was, more or less, done with it, had explored all of its advantages, but under the circumstances he had very little option. He could not take the car in which the two assassins had been because that was pretty damaged, and under the pressure of sudden flight he did not have the time to find another car or flag one down. So it had been back to Philadelphia in the Olds.
The Olds had at least settled down. The transmission was tighter and the engine quieter then it had ever been before. All that it had apparently needed was a little road work. Even the radio functioned, and driving back Wulff was able to listen to the reports from Harrisburg which were pretty muddy, confused and unclear. No one could quite sort out what had happened, let alone what it all meant. There was an all-news station in the area, and for a while it was delivering five minute reports from the disaster scene on the quarter hour, but the reporter had no more idea of what was going on than did any of the dead men. They were having a hell of a time identifying the bodies. For a while they were not even sure who Martin was, and then they called him a businessman dealing in imports. Wulff had to laugh at that. Imports was right, all right, but they weren’t quite willing to come out and say what the goods were. Sons-of-bitches. They understood nothing at all. By that time Wulff had gone back to believing, of course, that Martin had lied even as he was dying. Of course he was in the drug business. Of course he was one of the major figures in the international drug trade. How or why else would Wulff have declared vengeance upon the man if he were not exactly what he had been taken to be?
So he went back to Philadelphia, getting bored with the all-news reports after a while and putting the radio back to some music instead. Music was fine, it enlivened and invigorated him. The mission to Harrisburg could hardly, he decided, have been a failure. Not if he had been able to accomplish the murder of the international drug dealer, Martin. Of course it left him a little at loose ends, for the first time without a trail to follow, but that would work out. He would pick up something. He always had, after all. He would find a way.
Wulff went to another cheap hotel, once again in the inner city. It was the kind of place in which he was most comfortable and where he was positive that he would not be identified. Anonymity was what made the inner city run; nobody there wanted to know anything or anyone else, and there were no channels of
communication. It was possible to stay in the inner city for years and years: no one would ever find you there unless you foolishly exposed yourself. On the third floor of the Stafford Arms Reasonable Rates and Suites, Wulff filed away his ordnance and pondered what his next move would be. He would come to it sooner or later. In the meantime, he had at least gotten rid of the ninety-eight safely. He had ditched it seven blocks away with the keys in it and walked his way into the Stafford Arms. The owner would be right pleased when the recovery was made. His car would be a revelation to him; it would be almost—if not quite—like having a new one.
Wulff tried to figure out what his next moves would be. Up until this point, he had always been able to trace one thread of possibility through circumstance and move from one event to the next, from one part of the chain to the next link. It had never failed him. Not from the time in New York when he had opened the door of the idling Eldorado, almost at random, and met the small-time pusher and user Ric Davis who had led him inexorably up and up the line and finally to the lieutenant who had killed his girl. Then again, breaking out of custody and heading toward Detroit he had found the leads easy to follow…. and Diaz’s notebook containing definite information on the personalities which would be attending a meeting in Philadelphia to cut up the territory for the next two hundred years had seemed to clinch the task, and hand him his last mission cold.
But now at last it had trickled out. He had slaughtered his way through the southern rim, he had come north to Philadelphia and finally, in Harrisburg, he had reached the end. Martin was the major dealer in the emerging echelon; Martin was the man who was going to bid for power at the bi-centennial get-together. With Martin dead and with the contents of Diaz’s notebook all eliminated, there was, for the first time since this had all begun eight months ago, nowhere to go. The chain had run its way through. It had come from Riccer Davis straight through to Martin, and now he was finished.
He could have started again, of course. The man he had been in August would have done exactly that. The man he had been in August would have gone back to step one and started to pull people out of ghetto Eldorados once again. He could, in fact, do exactly that. South Philadelphia had more than its quota of Cadillacs whose quota had more than its share of men in dark glasses sitting behind the idling engines, tapping the accelerator and smoking while they stared out at nothing in particular. If the top levels had been slaughtered, at the bottom things remained pretty much the same. Business as usual while the corridors of supply were realigned, that was all, And he could have gone around tearing them from their automobiles, slaughtering.
But where would it lead him? That was the question to consider. He had already been to the top, and all that further investigations could take him to would be a damaged and quivering middle. And he did not have the energy for it either; he had lost his taste for investigation. He had to admit that. The killing was fun, was more fun than it had ever been. The killing, in fact, was great, but it had nothing to do with the investigations, which were pretty dull. Also they took too long. It took too long if you were investigating to find someone who was really worth killing. You plodded on and on for days that way before you had a lead, and more often than not it turned out to end up nowhere or take you into a blind alley where you understood that the killing would make no difference at all.
No, that was no good at all. That part of the mission, the stalking, the careful threading of the line of connection … that meant nothing. He would not go back to it. If he were going to stay in the game now he was going to go directly into the meaty, rich part; the only part that had ever appealed to him, that had any justification at all … the killing. Like hitting New York the second time, throwing a bomb into the bar on 125th Street, the fifty-at-a-time hit that was so much more satisfying and direct than the careful piecing out. That kind of thing. If he stayed in the game at all that was how it was going to be, now.
But. You had to work this thing out quietly. You had to decide—or at least Wulff thought he had to decide—if this was the way you wanted to deal with matters. Maybe it was time to get out of the game entirely. Maybe it was time to concede that he had gone as far as he could, that he had made his contribution. Live quietly, decently, in obscurity and retirement. There was time to leave the country, to go to some place like Peru, perhaps, which he knew quite well by now. Live out the rest of his days in exile like all of the Nazis there. Yes, he could do that. It would be easy. In fact, it was quite tempting to feel that his mission was done, that although he had not accomplished his final goal he had done as much and as honorably as any man could be expected to do. How long could you go on? How much could you take upon yourself single-handedly? Surely it was not completely his responsibility.
But Wulff realized something else too: that he had been shaped by his quest, and that his mission had defined him. He was his mission. It would be impossible to get back to the man he had been before this had started. Nor would he ever be happy again being that man. Even if he could go back before West Ninety-third Street, before all of this had ever happened, be back in the bar with the informant … well, even then it would not be the same. He was not sure that he would have taken that recovery even if offered.
He knew too much. That was all. Knowledge was compelling and if he had known those burdens he had at least taken some of the power also. Once you knew what was truly going on, once you had that understanding of who you were dealing with, and of the simple and terrible equations that the world had become, you could not go back to being the man who did not see, because the man who did not see was a fool. Wulff did not want to be a fool. He had struggled too hard, worked too long, killed too many to go back to being in that class …
She would not have wanted him to be a fool, Wulff thought. If Marie had been here, if she had seen all of it, if she had been witness to what he had become, she might have been happy. Or then again merely terrified, but one thing surely was clear: she would have wanted him to go all the way. Not to deny what he had become but rather to move on, to be even more of it, no matter what the price … Because only that would define and give continuing life to her own sacrifice, her own death.
Wulff paced the room at the Stafford Arms Reasonable Rates and Suites. He paced it back and forth for many hours, through all the shades of the day and evening, and as he did so he sometimes thought one way and he sometimes thought another. But through all of this one terrible constancy glowed: he knew he would go on for as long as he could. He knew that he would pick up the trail again even if it was blind and indiscriminate because the creature that he had become through all the months of this was one which could exist only as it had before. And in the splinter of bodies, the shatter of bone, and the explosion of blood, that self would be framed over and over again, cleaving the fine high arc of purpose toward the necessary but often delayed demolition.
XVI
Back in New York, summoned by the aycee, Williams went. There was nothing else to do. He was still carrying a gun and a place on the payroll of the PD, and until that was taken from him he had to conform to their orders. He did not want to see the aycee at all, but as his wife had pointed out in what was probably to be their last and most terrible argument, unless he kept the appointment he was as likely as not to be in more trouble than he could handle. His interest became mildly aroused however when the aycee told him that they were putting the Wulff squad together again. With Williams heading it up this time. An honor which the aycee made clear he did not expect Williams to decline.
“He’s gone too far,” the aycee said, “and the commissioner himself has gotten into this. Now he’s demanding that we bring this to a resolution. This Harrisburg business—”
“I know about that,” Williams said.
“Everybody knows about it,” the aycee said. “But the way things are going now Harrisburg is going to stick us with it. They may bring in a federal strike force on this damned thing now and unless we can bring it to a resolution we’ll have feds crawling all ov
er the place. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Williams knew what it meant all right. Once this fell under federal jurisdiction not only Wulff but the PD itself would be fair game. Lines of authority would be severed, files would be open, federal hands would be into information about Wulff, and by implication the PD—which could not be exposed. Then too the attitude of the federals toward New York could not be characterized as helpful or patient. Quite to the contrary. Since January 20, 1969, there had been one policy toward the big cities in Washington and it had not changed. No, Williams could see the aycee’s point. Wulff, like it or not, was the responsibility of the PD. He was their product, he was their felon, and it was their custody which he had escaped. If they did not take him in, things were apt to get much worse, and they had not been good for the PD in a long time. “You want me to head this up,” Williams said.
“I think so.”
“So I get stuck with all of this.”
“All of the glory.”
“And if I can’t get him, if it falls through you’ve got someone to blame.”
“You’ll get all the cooperation you need. You can set it up your way. We’ll give you whoever you want.” The aycee was sweating, but it did not seem to be from nervousness. Rather it seemed that he was concentrating so fixedly on Williams, on giving him the assignment, that all of his organs were throbbing, every sensory device was at full attention. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, shook it out, wiped his forehead with broad, savage strokes as if it were a windowpane, and then balled it up and put it on the desk. “We’re pretty sure he’s back in Philadelphia,” the aycee said, “so you can focus on that. But you can handle it any way you want. You’ll get full cooperation.”