by Mike Barry
“I wouldn’t know about help,” Wulff said. He flexed his hands, investigated the damages of the day in the battered mirror propped on the shelf over the bed. Marasco, Davis, Jessup. Dead as they were they had exacted their penalty. He looked like a man of forty. The face was dented; his body bore the markings of the fire.
Wulff took a towel and some clean underwear out of the dresser. “I can’t discuss system strategy,” he said, “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Hold up,” Williams said with that deadly grin, “I can’t stay long. Midnight shift coming up. Got to look beautiful to represent the finest.”
“You mean you were just leaving when I woke up the systems man.”
“I’m no systems man,” Williams said, “but I was waiting. Patience I’ve got.” He looked at his watch. “My wife gets nervous about a black man walking around in uniform, you know?”
“That’s touching,” Wulff said. “You put that uniform on; don’t blame me.”
“You better believe it,” Williams said. “I love that uniform; that uniform is like a sheet kids wear when they play ghost. I put that on, I’m a different man. People don’t see the face, just the blue and that means that no one gets near me. Let me tell you how we can do business though, Wulff. You see, I think I can use you and God knows you can use me.”
“How?”
“I’m your man in the mainstream,” Williams said and gave him a deadly smile. “I’m even a man of good will, I’ll help you. I want you to succeed, Wulff. But the way you’re going at it, vigilante, you could use an invisible man in blue poking around behind the net.”
“Vigilante?” Wulff said, “you’re thinking about someone else here in this room. I’m retired. I’m semi-retired, I’m beating the bushes in the park for birds and someday I’ll write a book about it. My fucking memoirs. Listen, I just want to take a shower and get lost if it’s all the same with you. Nothing personal of course.”
“Never personal between a black man and a white man,” Williams said wryly. “But that’s all right. I respect you, you’ve got your reasons for this just like the rest of us do.”
“That’s nice. I’ve won your respect and admiration.”
“A vigilante has the best reasons in the world even if he has no control. The boys in the Klan, they are convinced of their righteousness Wulff and so are you.”
“I’m not in any Klan.”
“In a way,” Williams said vaguely, standing, “in a way, but let’s not get into that. I figure the girl was mixed up in this somehow,” he said after a pause. “No one else knows but I figured that out on my own. You figure they got her, huh?”
“The girl is out of it,” Wulff said quietly. He moved toward Williams, looked at the man in level fashion and such force must have come from him then that even Williams blinked, gave an inch. Looked downwards, back-pedalling slightly.
“I don’t want you to mention the girl,” Wulff said, “ever. You dig that?”
“That’s all right, man,” Williams said, “the girl can stay out of it. She’s got nothing to do with it if you want it that way.”
“That’s all,” Wulff said. He did not move. “I ever hear that mentioned again and I’m going to kill you, Williams. Let it go this one time.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“This one time. Because you’re a cop and I have nothing against you. But after the one for free, no more.”
“All right,” Williams said. His cool was intact but there were a few absent dribbles of sweat on his forehead, “Have it your way on the girl issue. I won’t bring that up again here.”
“Anyone mentions the girl gets himself killed,” Wulff said. He moved away then. “I don’t see anything more to say now,” he said, “I’m not negotiating for ransom or a partnership and I need my rest.”
“Just take it easy,” Williams said, raising a hand which did not tremble at all. “I still haven’t said what brought me here in the first place.”
“You’re not getting any closer.”
“We can make it Wulff,” Williams said quietly, “the in man and the out man. I think that I can give you some help.”
Wulff paused for a while, looked at the empty spots of the ceiling of the room. “I don’t work with anyone,” he said finally.
“Yes you can.”
“This is a death trip.”
“I figured you’d see it that way. But you don’t have to die if you don’t want to. Life comes too cheap if you don’t know what death is. I do.”
“How do you know what I’m doing? I told you, I’m a retired man.”
“Bullshit,” Williams said, his voice very low. He could have been working over a suspect at this moment, toying with the meat, playing him in for the collapse. “Whatever you’re up to, you’re not retired.”
“Prove it.”
“I’m not out to hurt you baby,” Williams said, “paranoia, that’s supposed to be my game. I’m here to make myself useful to you. Man, I love the system; I’d be dead without it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do a little prying from the outside.”
I’m not accepting any help.”
“I didn’t think that you’d be begging for it, that’s for sure.”
“So what brought you up here?”
“You know,” Williams said. He moved toward the door, adjusted the table. “You know you can’t do this all alone, you’re going to need something along the way from someone. You’re a crazy, overprivileged white if you think this thing is rigged for you.”
“It’s not.”
“You’re going to make it all the way on your own? You became a nigger the minute you quit the force. You’ll be a nigger until they drill you full of holes.”
“I’m still waiting for it,” Wulff said.
“I could help you, Wulff,” Williams said. “Whatever you’re doing can’t be all on your own. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Sometimes it can.”
“Besides, you amuse me. I’d like to see how you feel when you find what it’s like to go up against the system. I want to be there when it all comes clear, right at that moment. You’ll see why I’ve learned to love it baby.”
“It can be smashed.”
“I’ve got the blue,” Williams said. I’m not like you, I’m playing it by the book. Hating it from the inside. I’m in for the big hitch, I’ve got a wife and the wife is going to have a kid soon. Know that? Congratulate me. We hope. But that doesn’t mean that this isn’t all a big game to me too. That’s all it is.”
“You wouldn’t want to touch it.”
“I’m in it too deep already. I’m in your room.”
“Why,” Wulff said then, pausing at the door, looking at the man, “why would you want to get involved in something like this anyway?”
“Williams? Why would he get involved?” The eyes swung in the black’s head, he tipped a hand. “I think you know that,” he said.
“No I don’t.”
“Because I want to see some shaking and some making. The roofs over my head; let’s see how it is if the house comes down in sections.”
“Maybe it’ll all come down.”
“And maybe it won’t,” Williams said intensely, “maybe it’s a prefabricated house and I’m the man in the right room.” He put out a hand. “Far enough,” he said. “You think about it and let me know.”
“Quit the force,” Wulff said savagely, backing away from the hand, “turn in your badge and pistol and wife and fucking Queens and get yourself a furnished room in this nice section of town.”
“I can’t do that, Wulff,” Williams said, again with that amused tint to the eyes, “I owe the system everything. But if I can see a man working around the edges like you are and it isn’t flaming my territory then why not? Why not do something like that?”
“You want to make me a tool.”
“How say that?” Williams said, “how can you say that? Now you know they’ve got me hooked in. I’ve got the mortgage and the wife. I bought their lies al
l the way down the line and I even have a nice college degree from Fordham too to hang on the wall, it helped me get this civil-service job. I love them. I love them so much I hate them. You want me on those terms?”
“I don’t think I want you on any terms.”
“You’re going to need help, Wulff. You can’t do it all alone, you can’t even think that you could. Don’t tell me that, man.”
“You don’t even know what I’m doing.”
“No,” Williams said, over this, “no I guess that you just don’t understand. It’s easy not to understand when you’re a white man and that’s all you are.”
He took his hat off the bed, knocked it against a knee, put it on and walked toward the door. There weren’t many around who would wear a hat like this in dead summer, let alone with that kind of style. Why did the blacks, just about all of them, have style?
“I’m through negotiating,” Williams said flatly, “I’ve put it on the table and that’s enough.”
“Were these negotiations?”
“I don’t know,” Williams said. He grasped the knob. “I think you thought they were begging but that’s your mistake. It was a simple business deal you were being offered.”
“Call it a misunderstanding.”
“What a hostile man,” Williams said, “you are one angry son of a bitch. You even sound black.”
Wulff shook his head. There was just nothing to say about that. Nothing at all. He had somehow managed to think about everything else in his life but never the so-called race issue. It had never entered one way or the other. If the blacks wanted to think of themselves as a race apart that was, as far as he was concerned, their problem. Except that it was becoming his problem. That was what Williams was bringing home to him now. Quickly. “Shit,” he said under his breath.
“You know where to reach me,” Williams said, “you’ve got anything to say, you need some help, you just give me a call. This is my first and my last offer, man and it’s on terms of mutual respect. I’m going to stay clear.”
“You lay around here for ten hours just to tell me you wanted to help?”
Williams smiled. “It’s a little more complicated than that, Burt Wulff,” he said, “because there’s no such thing as help in this world.” He patted his pocket where the gun was hidden. “That’s what it comes down to,” he said, “and that’s why I’ll take the system my way, because I’ve got the equalizer right here. Power over power and nothing else matters, not to them, not even to people like you.”
He opened the door, stepped outside. “You need help from one solemn black rookie cop with good access to the files, you just give me a call,” he said, “and then again if you don’t need help you just don’t bother. One thing is sure, Wulff wouldn’t call to socialize.”
“I might have once. You just don’t see that, do you?”
“You might have once but now you’re not in the system anymore, you don’t have to look up a black man for social reasons. That’s all right with me,” Williams said quietly, “that suits me fine. It’s all business.”
“If you want it that way.”
“If I can help you in your business, you give me a call.”
“I don’t have any business.”
“Good deal,” Williams said, “good deal. Have it your way and we’ll sink the ship.”
Slowly, solemnly he winked, balanced himself on the threshold of the room and then went out closing the door gently.
He left Wulff alone.
Slowly, carefully, Wulff put his things together and worked his way down the hall like a blind man. He went into the stinking little bathroom containing the single rusty shower outlet. The accommodations, like the system, left a good deal to be desired.
The system indeed sucked.
But so did his life. Explain that to Williams.
XII
Peter Vincent got news of the Marasco fire early the next morning. News simply filtered into Peter Vincent without his having much to do with getting it. It was like affairs being offered to a beautiful woman. You turned down fifty for the one that you picked up but that didn’t mean that you minded the other ones. They kept you in the center of things, improved the feeling of self-worth. Vincent got this news on the phone from a contact on Wall Street who liked to call himself a stockbroker. At least the contact did have an office and a phone; there were a lot who didn’t.
Peter Vincent sat surrounded by possessions and impermeable locks on the fourth floor of a townhouse. The third floor was his office space; the first two floors were supposed to be offices too but he had had them sealed off a long time ago. One staircase with blind entrances carried the visitor up to the third floor, a small, self-controlled elevator would take him up to the fourth if Peter Vincent desired. Two housemen lived off the corridors of the third floor, another lived on the fourth directly across from Peter Vincent although with his own entrance and exit. Peter Vincent valued his privacy. There was no reason why he should not. Didn’t everyone want privacy? Wasn’t that what man struggled for; the increasing bit of living space that was his own?
He was sealed in and he liked it that way. The call came in at ten o’clock from the man he preferred to know as Gerald. Vincent was alone on the fourth floor at the time and thought about letting one of the housemen take it downstairs before he figured the hell with it and took the button himself. It was a slow morning anyway. And there was no question that anybody who knew the number on which the light was flashing was not there to invade his privacy. Very few people knew that number. The few who had without Peter Vincent’s permission and continuing approval were mostly dead.
“Marasco’s dead,” the voice said almost instantly. Gerald cut corners wherever he could; the man was all business. Vincent could admire that. “There was a fire there last night. The place is ruined; a four-alarmer. His wife got out but she’s in the hospital. Nobody else got burned up but everything’s lost.”
“Everything?”
“Looks that way. The place is a total loss from what I pick up.”
“Arson?” said Peter Vincent.
“Probably. Of course for the police it’s an open and shut accident. They’ll be happy to leave it that way on the books.”
“I can imagine.”
“Marasco wasn’t exactly their favorite person in the Eastern District.”
“No,” Vincent said, holding the phone delicately against his ear with his shoulder, taking a toothpick out of his pocket and placing it in his mouth. He had given up smoking two years ago in the interest of long life and health; toothpicks helped a little although they were not the same. Nothing was the same, “I can’t say that he was.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“I don’t know,” Vincent said, “I’ll have to think about it a little bit.”
“Don’t think too long,” the voice said. It acquired just a little bit of an edge which made Vincent wince; for the first time that morning he seemed or would have seemed if there had been anyone else in the room to have lost his composure, “We respect your brain but something’s got to be done fast.”
“I know that,” Vincent said.
“There’s a shipment yesterday that fell through. We wanted to have that checked out even before this happened.”
“Sure.”
“Terello,” the voice said, “you’re going to have to get hold of him.”
“I will. It’s just morning now. Give me a couple of minutes to get organized.”
“It’s not good,” Gerald said sharply. “There were two men pitched off on the Harlem River Drive yesterday too. Small time guys.”
“You think that ties in with the fire?”
There was a pause; Vincent could hear the man breathing. “We think maybe,” Gerald said finally, “but mostly we don’t want to think. That’s your job.”
“That’s right,” said Vincent, “I’ll be in touch.”
“Don’t wait on it,” Gerald said and broke the connection.
Vincent sa
t, still holding the phone meditatively, placed it finally in the cradle and sat back on the chair, letting the sense of the situation build within him. Sealed in as he was from the world or at least that part of it which would have made things confusing and difficult, he was able at least most of the time to do his thinking in a vacuum. Feed in the material as input, like a computer he would come out with modus operandi as output. But as he sat there, Vincent could feel the first stalking unease hit him.
It didn’t look right. It just did not look right. The fire at Islip was a possibility and Vincent had had to deal for a long time with the fact that Marasco was pushing his authority a bit and might have to be dealt with someday. In that sense the fire only solved a problem before it truly arose, always a satisfying thing to a man like Vincent who kept his options open. Marasco would have to be replaced and that meant work of course but what the hell; he could solve it with a couple of phone calls. The missed shipment was another problem, it was inconvenient and it could make for complication but, hell, in this business missed shipments, deliveries that fell through, were all part of overhead. They almost had to be considered as part of the basic cost of doing business. You would amortize them right in.
But the business of the two bodies on the Harlem River Drive. Small time Gerald had said. Good enough; to Gerald of course almost everyone was small time. Peter Vincent was probably called small time himself by Gerald to other people. But the bodies on the drive the same day as the arson and the shipment that had not come through—
Vincent could feel his senses prickle. His skills were limited, he knew perfectly well that in the outside world he would be lucky to be in middle-management. If that. But he had gotten this far because he had one invaluable ability and it was respected, however grudgingly, by the Geralds and the people up the line who gave Gerald the orders. Vincent had sound instincts.
Things that would not have come together for an ordinary man came together in a terrifying way for Vincent: random factors, chance puzzles, little coincidences of time and circumstance could build to him a meaning as compelling and beautiful as an artist might find when a work, finally, began to take shape. And now he had that feeling again: almost with excitement he understood at some basic level below words that the bodies on the drive and the disaster in Islip came together. Neatly and irrevocably at some level they hooked in perfectly.