Night Raider

by Mike Barry

  “Be my guest.”

  “You used to be a cop, weren’t you?” Marasco said, “you worked on the narco squad.”

  “For a time.”

  “And then you got busted off the narco squad.”

  “That was inevitable,” Wulff said. “I took my job as seriously as you take yours. Most people on my side didn’t. You weren’t supposed to.”

  “They busted you back to patrolman and sent you out in a radio car again,” Marasco said, “and then you ran into this little problem over on West 93rd Street with some girl you knew.”

  “Yes,” Wulff said quietly, “that’s right.”

  “It was the business about West 93rd Street that touched it off,” Marasco said. “There are details you never forget. Now I know who you are, Wulff.”

  “You could have asked and I would have told and saved you all the trouble.”

  “You’re mad, aren’t you, Wulff?” Marasco said. “Drugs got your girl and the narco squad got your goat and now you’re burning.”

  “I’m not burning.”

  “You’re going to shape up the world, right? Single-handed. You knock off a little supplier and a little dealer and right away you’re conquering the world. You’ve got the skids on the business.”

  “I never thought that for a moment.”

  “You’re crazy, Wulff,” Marasco said harshly. He slammed his free hand to the rifle. “You know that, don’t you? You’re crazy!”

  “Of course I’m crazy,” Wulff said, “but that doesn’t mean that I’m not serious.”

  “Straight cops wind up in the river or on pension, Wulff.”

  “I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “Reformers wind up in the river.”

  “And filthy little parasites wind up in Islip with blond goons to do their shooting.”

  Marasco trembled all over and leaned on the rifle. For an instant Wulff thought he might have bought it. But his judgement held. Marasco wouldn’t do it. If he could have done it he would have the minute the blond left the room.

  People like Marasco always sent someone to do the work.

  The blond came in, kicking the door closed and looked at Wulff in half-surprise, as if he did not expect to see him there. If one of the prerequisites of a safe job was to know your employer, the blond had fucked up. He did not know, still, what Marasco was. “I put him away,” he said to Marasco. “In the morning—”

  “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  “Well sure. I only wanted—”

  “I don’t want to hear any more about it. That’s your business, not mine!”

  “Well sure,” the blond said. “All right. What are we going to do with this one now?”

  “That’s my decision,” Marasco said in a terrible voice. “When I decide what I’m going to do with him, I tell you and you do it. And that’s where it ends.”

  “Okay,” the blond said. His eyes were wide with puzzlement as well as fear. Apparently he had never seen Marasco like this before. Wulff repressed a smile. The blond might have had a better job if he had seen this. Because Marasco was losing control.

  “I think I’ll be going now,” Wulff said offhandedly. “It’s been nice talking but we’ve reached the end of the road, you see? I hardly think I’m in a position, unarmed, to take on the two of you.”

  “You’re crazy, Wulff.”

  “Although I’d certainly try if I thought I had even a one out of four chance,” Wulff said, “as it is, I may be crazy but I’m certainly not stupid. Not with a rifle held on me and your assistant as backup man. Been a pleasure, Marasco,” he said, moving toward the door. “I’ll just pick up my guns at the gate, all right and maybe we’ll talk some other time. Don’t worry about giving me an escort. I’m sure that I’ll be able to find my own way and I’ve already put you out more than enough, don’t you think?”

  For an instant he thought that he actually had a chance to get away with it. The blond was unarmed and Marasco, Wulff had settled, was not going to fire that rifle. Could not fire that rifle. If the situation had held for just ten seconds longer he might have, crazily, walked out of Islip with all the laurels although, unfortunately, no kill. Not yet.

  But the blond was more alert than his employer. He came against the door, backed it, held out his hands in a karate posture and Wulff backed off. Going into a karate chop was one thing and he didn’t think the blond really knew how to handle himself, but once activity started Marasco would forget what kind of man he was and shoot in self-defense. No odds. He stopped and stayed there, hanging on his toes, his hands in position to block anything the blond threw if the man made the first move.

  “Pretty good Wulff,” Marasco said, “that was really nicely handled.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But what kind of poison you think I am you son of a bitch? You really think I’d let you get away with this? I’m no Jack Scotti.”

  “That’s right,” Wulff said quietly, not facing the man. The blond glared at him. “Scotti didn’t have an estate or a gun.”

  “Take the son of a bitch down,” Marasco said. “Put him away for a little while and in the morning I’ll play with him. I want to do a couple of things before I get tired of him.”

  “All right,” the blond said. He reached toward Wulff and then became hesitant. Wulff could see the man thinking, however uncertainly. “I think though—”

  “Wait,” Marasco said with disgust and there was the sound of a receiver being taken off a hook, “I’ll get some assistance on this.”

  “Yes,” the blond said gratefully. “I think that would be best.”

  “Would you like ten guys or fifteen?” Marasco said. “Should I ask for double riot guns and grenades or do you think that you could make it with a little less?”

  “Now I don’t need all that.”

  “Oh fuck you,” Marasco said furiously and began to talk quietly into the receiver.

  Wulff almost smiled. The blond’s confusion was so total, Marasco’s rage so uncontrollable, Scotti’s death—and this was the kicker—so final that it almost felt like a victory. They were going to put him on ice and he felt that it was a victory.

  With victories like this, Wulff thought, who needs defeats?

  VII

  Wulff sat alone in a room in the bowels of the house. No mansion Marasco’s three-story home but large enough, more than large enough to stuff away subterranean passages, little rooms like piping strung along the bottom, spaces in which a dead man could lay for a very long time. Advantages of the newly-crowned he thought. He leaned forward in the darkness, testing the dimensions of the room. It was small. It smelled. It felt like a grave.

  He had to get out.

  He knew that it would only be a matter of time; awe or curiosity had determined Marasco’s decision to stack him on ice for a while but awe or curiosity were never qualities which could withstand the dawn. By noon tomorrow Marasco would know everything he needed to about Wulff and would have concluded that there were no penalties in eliminating him. The blond would come down and put a pistol to Wulff’s belly, pull the trigger and black him out. Then again the pistol might go to his temple. Compulsively neat. That was what the blond was. If nothing else he did nice work.

  In his pocket Wulff had a pack of matches and a deck of keys. Little enough to be left but then he might as well be grateful; the blond had sneered at him before he was pushed at gunpoint into the chamber and said, “We ought to strip you naked. How would that be?”

  “Not good,” Wulff had said, “it’s cold down here.”

  “Going to be a lot colder for you,” the blond had said with a hollow laugh but then apparently having not been given such orders by Marasco settled for pushing him into the room, closing the door and leaving him to the darkness. At seven in the evening or maybe it was eight, Wulff’s time sense having been wrecked by the darkness, some cold cereal and a closed thermos filled with water had been tossed in through an opening in the door. Marasco seemed to have planned his I
slip lodgings with care; this room and probably others were equipped with locked partitions. The imprisonment business must have been good, at least for those that the blond had not finished off in the reception room. Well, be that as it may, Wulff drank the water, ate the cereal without trepidation—if Marasco had decided to poison him he simply would have found a more direct way of elimination—and considered his situation.

  He had gone so far. The tracing through Marasco was significant; the real dealings did not end here but they certainly seemed to begin. Marasco was only another link in the network, the network was infinite; it went on and on but here he had reached a dead stop and that in itself was meaningful. The degree of resistance was the key to the importance of the connection, that was an old police procedural and the police background came in handy although, of course, it would be a mistake to take that kind of thing seriously. The best, the most cautious, the most diligent kind of police work might have traced its way painfully to Maasco and there it would have quit: a laughable arraignment, five or seven years later, after all the appeals, a laughable indictment and sentencing. Marasco was just the beginning. He was on the trail, that was all.

  He had to get out of here.

  Wulff crouched in a corner of the room, considering the situation. The room was impermeable; he had already tried the routine methods of exit. Possibly with a revolver he might have been able to do something with the locks but the blond had not sent him down here, por favor, with artillery. If there was a way out of this he would have to work it out himself, more in his own head than elsewhere. It was that important to get out, Wulff had decided. He figured his expected lifespan at this moment to be slightly less than seventeen hours. Sooner or later, even police work would give you instincts worth cultivating and that was what the instincts said. Maybe twenty-four hours if he was running in great luck. Marasco would certainly have him killed before dinnertime tomorrow; judging from Marasco he ate at seven thirty or eight o’clock like all of the newly crowned. The fashionable hour, they thought. But part of making it, however cautiously, into society was to manufacture the corpses before dinner so that you could eat without excess acid. Wulff sighed, less from panic than enormous regret. His entire outlook might have been different if Marasco had not moved out to Islip. In Little Italy, people like Marasco were hardly so regularized in their habits.

  Wulff reached into his inner pocket and took out the matches. Bought with a pack of cigarettes two days ago, the cigarettes appropriated by the blond with eighteen still left in that pack—concentrated tension, he had found, reduced smoking rather than raised it—but the matches had been tossed back contemptuously. Smoke ‘em the blond had said. Eighteen left; Wulff cautiously expended one to gain light and looked for the first time at his quarters; he was living in a room six by eight, a ceiling another eight feet high, a room in short just large enough for a man six four and two hundred and fifty pounds to go crazy in if he conserved his time and luck. Asphalt of course with little interstices of glue between the bricks and the match flicked out.

  He lit another. His stock was limited, this meant only sixteen left but sixteen matches, his entire riches in this place could be worth more than the four hundred and fifty dollars which the blond had also taken from him. The glue was interesting; it was a characteristic of this kind of building of course. Hasty construction for the nouveau riche who usually were in a great hurry to move in and claim the premises for their own meant that corners had to be cut almost anywhere you could and certainly by the time you got to the basement or the sub-basement (Wulff was not quite sure) you would get into an area where glue was forgivable; it was the quickest way to slap the bricks together and although it would hardly work in the living room, guests were not likely to come poking or prying around in the nether regions checking out the builders for an angle-job. Not that the kind of guests which the Marascos would have would know the difference, of course.

  Glue was highly flammable.

  Wulff allowed the fourth match from his priceless pack to burn down, shook it out quickly to avoid the sulphur fumes and thought about this for a while. It was entirely possible that a single match, touched to any of those interstices would result in instant ignition. It was possible by the same token that it would result in an explosion; the glue going up with a grateful whoomp! as it seized upon the first real food that it had received in all of its constricted life. The whoomp! could well absorb the pyromaniac, however. If the glue could contain the force of the first combustion and then merely feed the fire into the brick neatly, everything would be under control, but a builder who would use glue in the first place would not be likely to order the best with the most controlled combustion he could find. It would be something like ordering the best kind of newsprint to print an art text on.

  Wulff sat in the darkness and thought about this for a time. The room was soundproof and contributed to his thinking. Somewhere in the house above him Marasco and his family were enjoying the sounds and scent of the evening: entertaining perhaps or merely sitting in relaxed positions around an airconditioner in the living room, involved in their separate tasks. Central airconditioning come to think of it; Marasco would settle only for the best. He had two daughters, Wulff had found out from Jack Scotti, eighteen and twelve, and was devoted to them to say nothing of his third wife who had once been a debutante. Marasco had really made it. Did the wife and daughters have any idea what he was doing? Wulff wondered. Probably not, he answered himself. In fact, after about six o’clock in the evening, there was severe doubt that Marasco himself would acknowledge what he did during the days. It all went away after hours; it did not matter. He was an enterprising businessman who had moved his family to Islip and was giving them the best of all worlds.

  A partition in the thick door opened and light filtered in. In the light was filtered the face of the blond. “Hello,” the blond said, “you still here?”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way?”

  “How do you like the accommodations?”

  “I love them,” Wulff said. “Why don’t you come in and share them with me?”

  “I’d love that,” the blond said, “but I have another engagement tonight.”

  “A pity,” Wulff said, “why don’t you take me along with you? We can discuss your future plans.”

  The blond giggled. “Let me tell you about your future plans,” he said, “tomorrow morning for openers.”

  “Oh?”

  “At about seven o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ll get you up at six, though so you can have a good breakfast. Ought to have a good breakfast on your stomach. It’s a full day tomorrow.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh definitely,” the blond said, “except that it’s going to be an early day too. It ought to end at about eight for you. Eight in the morning that is.”

  “So the word’s gone out?”

  “I wouldn’t say the word’s gone out,” the blond said and put a hand like a paw over the opening so that he could lean in and stare down at Wulff, “it’s more like the word has gone in.”

  “Of course.”

  “You get a good night’s sleep tonight.”

  “What are you going to do?” Wulff asked, “date one of the daughters?”

  “Well—”

  “Why don’t you propose tonight? I’m sure that Marasco would love to have you in the family.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Marasco would be delighted to have you in the family circle,” Wulff said, “I happen to know that he has not only a great professional respect for you but feels a personal relationship and tie as well. Like a son-in-law.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” the blond said, “at seven o’clock. I’m looking forward to it Wulff.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’ll see you then,” he said and closed the partition, leaving Wulff in darkness. The odor of the glue seemed to rise now in the pitch and Wulff inhaled it, felt the tongues of odor lapping at him like the frantic beating of a dog’s heart.
It was a high, exhaled, dense sweetness and breathing it in Wulff thought that it was like breathing in knowledge itself. His outcome had been decided. Marasco had either found out everything he needed to know or had lost interest or both. Either way, there was no postponing decision now.

  Wulff fondled the matches in both hands now and then, very deliberately, extracted one, feeling that slender reed in the darkness, poor crutch to carry him to freedom, stretching out the moment. It was no longer a question of decision. Decision had passed. He knew exactly what he was going to do.

  Rather it was like holding something in place until the last moment, like leading a suspect on the street with the car, knowing that he saw the pinch coming, feeling the wings of the moment tighten until at last, the clips broke and you flew in to take him. It was just like that. There was a kind of pleasure in extending the moment even when you knew, as in a case like this, that the odds were so long that it hardly mattered.

  But maybe that was the point. The chances were so slender, the situation so bad that at least, if you were lucky, you could savor the moment and the anticipation.

  They might be the only thing you would have.

  VIII

  In the living room, Marasco excused himself from his wife and went into the adjoining room to pour himself another scotch, neat. He didn’t like to have bottles in the living room, not when there was a full bar next door and besides, although he hated to admit it, he did not want Pauline to know the full extent of his drinking. It was his business. He claimed that he watered the scotches and paced himself carefully, drinking only after five in the evening; best that the woman believe it. She believed everything that he said, unthinkingly. Even though it was more like five in the morning which was his starting time.

  Marasco poured himself a double shot of scotch, looking beyond him down the long passageway toward the servant’s quarters through which the blond was now slowly moving, his head bowed, his hands in his pockets. He finally saw Marasco and assumed a more alert posture, nodded at him, indicated that he was taking the side exit.