by Barry, Mike
A scream of absolute rage came from Wulff as he sprawled there in the heat and the haze of the courtroom, his fists clenched, his eyes closed not against sight but against what he saw as a vision of the future—America as a 137th Street and Lenox Avenue of the mind, forms reeling and scattered through filth, the filth rising, the great plunger throbbing…. He could not bear it. If everything he had done would come only to this repeated monstrosity, then it was worse than having done nothing at all, it would make a mockery of his battle, would even mock the dead, because if nothing else, they had died in the furtherance of what was right. No, Wulff thought, no, he could permit that only by losing himself entirely, obliterating his past, obliterating Marie himself, who might have died so that the battle could begin. Bellowing, he rose to his feet; bellowing, he ran through the stench of the courtroom; bellowing, he ran toward the door. And in the screams and the shouts, the confusion and the terror, the only one who might have noticed him was Williams, but Williams himself was too occupied with protecting his own position, which, if he had thought about it, was so close to Wulff’s as to be indistinguishable.
Wulff knew, now, that he would never stop running.
V
Detroit. Something was going on in Detroit. It all tracked back there; hell was breaking loose in the motor city, and Wulff’s first thought when he had come clear of Centre Street, running, still running, was that this would be the next stop, but in the meantime there was much to be done, much to be accomplished before he could make his way twelve hundred miles west to Motown. Looked at objectively, the odds against him getting there were overwhelming; he was wearing prison fatigues, he had no money, he had no clear sense of direction, he had wasted weeks of his one, his irreplaceable life, dreaming in his cell as if the world did not exist anymore, as if it would stop at the time of his own cessation. And this was not true; it had gone on, everything was moving ahead. Had they not tried to kill Smith? Would they not have killed him, given the same opportunity? What the hell was going on in Detroit?
No, in a war, in a long-range quick-combat war like this one, you improvised, you played it by ear, but above and beyond everything else, you kept on moving. So what Wulff did in the next two hours was to do exactly that: improvise, make the changes the way that they had to be made, but concentrating always on the one single goal, which was to get himself back together again and get out to the Midwest before they took away everything that he had built. When you played it by ear, you functioned in a kind of haze, the smoothness of your functioning sometimes in its well-oiled fashion almost replacing consciousness, so that what you did you did as if it were someone else, but that someone else could be trusted to do it right, being a part of you, and you only the observer.
So the stranger who was Wulff did the following things within the next couple of hours: he stole a car at Worth Street simply by stepping into an old Ambassador which was idling at curbside and telling the terrified driver to get out. “Get out,” the stranger said, “get the hell out right now before you buy more trouble than you can handle.” And the driver, a man in his mid-thirties, clutching a briefcase, got out the passenger side so quickly that he hardly seemed interested in finding out what kind of trouble he was avoiding exactly, much less trying to see if Wulff had anything evidential to back up the threat. Next time, Wulff guessed, the man would remember to drive with his doors locked, but then again, on a bright, panting fall day in the downtown district, who the hell would think that something like this could happen? New York was bad, New York was going downhill, but you still had a reasonably better than even chance of getting from here to there in heavy traffic with at least your car.
But the stranger could not worry about issues like that; the stranger kept on moving. Hand-shifting the battered Ambassador, which seemed barely able to get out of second gear, wrenching on the nonpower steering, he guided the car uptown to Ninety-second Street, which was the site of his final stay in New York before he had gone score-settling with Smith; it was there that he still had a small cache of arms, clothing, and money which could get him going again—if they were still in the SRO room, that is, if he hadn’t been locked out, if the room hadn’t been cleaned out, if the PD hadn’t tracked him to this place. And granted all of that, there was still the problem of gaining access. They had, needless to say, appropriated all of his goods downtown, although he would be damned if he would tell them where the key fit.
But the stranger Wulff had become was resourceful indeed; he was willing to take matters step by step and to gamble that even at his worst he could stay a couple of steps ahead of the two bands that were going to follow: the network and the enforcers. Each in their own way had their limitations, and of the two, the enforcers were to be feared less, because they were—he had long since faced this, even when he was on their side—almost completely incompetent. At this moment he could imagine the condition of that courtroom on Centre, the chaos, the stink, the dead body of Smith being gawked at by the court reporters, newspaper reporters, a couple of magazine stringers who would be frantically trying to reach their offices to nail down a good five-hundred-dollar assignment. He could imagine the way that the judge would look, back in his chambers, his face white and fearful, remembering only that there had been gunfire in another courtroom a few years ago and that that time a judge had been killed. There would be hundreds of uniformed police pouring through the pews looking for an explanation that simply did not exist anymore. Because the man who had shot Smith, Wulff was sure, was dead. If he was not dead by his own hand, then the cops gathered around him, all of them with guns, would have done the job. At least one of them would have panicked and fired with all the justification in the world.
So the full story would never get out. All of the stringers with all of their expense moneys would get no closer to it than Wulff was at this moment. And Wulff would follow it through in a way which would never result in getting expense moneys.
He was going to find out. He was going to get them. He was going to get the men who had gotten the man who had gotten Smith, because Smith had been his meat, and no one was going to get between the two of them and live.
At Ninety-second Street Wulff pulled off Broadway, idling down the block, then cut the wheel right and drifted into a spot near a hydrant, looking over at the rooming house in which he had lived, checking out the window of the third-floor room to the west, streetside, where the armaments and money were stashed if he was going to find them at all. Racing the engine lightly, holding his foot stiffly on the brake, he thought for a while, thought of the actual risks of getting into the street, going up the stairs and making a direct attempt to get into the apartment; but there was nothing else to do, there was literally no other way to play this, he thought, if it was going to be played at all. It was certainly a hell of a time for caution; caution should have operated back at the courthouse or long before that if it was going to be operative here; and with that he seemed to sever the last of his bonds with the exhaustion and revulsion he had felt since the time that they had taken him to Centre Street; he seemed to come fully back to himself, the edges of his old and new personalities fitting together with a hard click, and simultaneously with the click he cut the engine, took the keys out of the ignition and considered them for a while, then tossed them on the seat and got out of the car. It was above the Seventy-ninth Street line; that meant no tow job, but after five or six tickets the cops might get curious and check registration. Then again they might not. There was absolutely no way of judging or anticipating the incompetence of the NYPD unless you had been their employee, and then the knowledge was something to get you sick.
He got out of the car, slammed the door, walked briskly up the stairs into the rooming house. In the lobby the odor overwhelmed him along with the sign someone had posted behind the glass of the front door: ALL RESIDENTS WILL USE KEY TO ENTER. GUESTS ARE TO RING BELL AND BE PERSONALLY ADMITTED. He kicked the door through easily, the spring lock sighing back, and went up the bare flight to the roo
m that had been his, the door sutured tight against the light, seemingly impenetrable.
Wulff looked it over for a few moments, shaking his head, and then, at a point of calculation reached somewhere at a subconscious level, kicked out again as he had done downstairs and hammered his heel into the door, grinding a little at the end and then recoiling.
The door buckled. He came in again, a little lower and toward the toes this time, and the door came open like a zipper, collapsing from the top, strips of light opening like wounds down the sides, then all of it caving backward. He had made hardly any sound at all. No one looked into the hallway; that was always an advantage of Manhattan living, whatever else you thought of it.
Wulff went into the room which had been his and found that everything was exactly as he had left it. In the closet, the rifles glinted at him like swords, the bayonets sent little echoes of circling light. In the top drawer of the bureau his money was there, fifty one-hundreds neatly stacked, winking at him like eyes.
When he had not gotten back the last time they had simply sealed up the apartment and waited for his return, sure that he would come back, sure that they could get the rent out of him then.
They had checked out the closets just to make sure that he had something worth coming back for, and then they had forgotten about it.
Oh, boy.
New York was a groove, all right.
But now he was back in action.
VI
The plan as Hamilton had worked it out carefully over a period of months was airtight, and nothing could possibly go wrong. There would be the matter of detection, maybe, but since he was a union steward and controlled almost everything on the floor, passed on everything that got up to management, he had almost a perfect hand upon it, and he would not, in fact, have gotten into this at all if he felt that that control was lacking. The stuff would be sealed into the frames only of those cars headed for Toronto, a small and random fraction of all the de Villes, Eldorados, hearses, and flower cars that rolled off the line, and they would be only random at that; only one Cadillac in five or six would receive the stash, and which one that would be was known only to Hamilton and to the foreman, Shields, who was actually putting the stuff in. Sealed up, the cars would be loaded from the plant for Toronto without even a touch-up or inspection, since that was the responsibility of the Canadian authorities. (That was the beautiful part of it, there were spot checks and final touch-ups on the American cars, but the attitude toward the Canadians was that they could go screw themselves; it was their problem, they could do anything they liked with the damned cars as long as they paid for them.) Then, in Toronto, the connection, a man whose last name Hamilton did not even know and did not want to know, would put the stuff into his own channels. Hamilton did not know anything about that. Where the shit went, who took it, what became of it, was none of his business at all. It was strictly a cash operation. He had no opinion that extended beyond the cash.
And there was plenty of it; it was payment on receipt, COD, and every Monday morning an envelope would arrive from his contact in Canada, carried by a uniformed messenger. The messenger service was incredibly expensive, having to work customs and the border as they did, but it had been Hamilton’s decision to do it that way, skim it right off the top, and it was the cleanest and most satisfying feeling: nothing could compare with opening an envelope right in his own living room, with his kids still asleep upstairs at seven in the morning, and pulling the money out, denominations of one hundreds only—to the nearest hundred was his arrangement with his contact. And so it would roll in, twenty bills a week, thirty, twenty-five, thirty-seven, except for one beautiful week when he had moved out seventeen cars and ten thousand dollars had come in in one beautiful wad of a hundred bills. Twenty percent of that had to be skimmed off and passed along the line, of course, but that was a bargain too, just like the messenger service. Twenty percent for the loading and for the checker to keep his eyes off it was really like stealing money. Although Hamilton would never have admitted it, he would have paid a flat fifty if he had been put to pressure. But he never had. It was found money for the others, and no involvement. Nobody wanted to get involved. That was America for you, okay.
So it was a beautiful operation. It was one sweetheart of a beautiful operation. Running the stuff out was as profitable as running it in, and a hell of a lot safer, what with not having to worry about distribution problems or possession. As a matter of fact, it was absolutely the best deal-that Hamilton had fallen into in thirty-three years of looking for an edge, and the way that he had things calculated, if things worked out, if he could only keep them going like this, in another six months to a year tops he would be able to get out of the plant for good, live quietly at home for a couple of years so that there was no undue attention caused by his early retirement, and then he could take off completely, not only from his bitch-wife, but from the kids too. Beautiful as they were, he was too far ahead in life, too old to have to deal with a twelve-, two-, and six-year-old. All girls. Beautiful kids, he loved them, he would pay through the nose so that they could have everything that they wanted for the rest of their lives. Margaret could get hers too, they all could, on just a fraction of what he was going to be able to take out of the country; but as far as he was concerned, he was going to go to someplace like Sweden or maybe Djakarta or Majorca where it was warm and catch up with some fucking. Go to all three, and twenty other places besides, be a citizen of the world. Fuck girls of every nation and description, every ability and perversion. Sometimes in his sleep at night, dreaming of them thickly, he could get hard in a way that he hadn’t for twenty years, just knowing what it would be like to live that way.
And then Shields had screwed him up. That fucking Shields had screwed him up; even if this black, Hooper, had seen something on the line, there was no need for Shields, one of his pay-out men, to panic and cause an industrial accident. At the least Shields should have consulted with him first; they surely would have been able to work out something. But Shields had panicked, all right; like everybody else, he was just out to get his, but unlike Hamilton, he was unable to consider the long view, and now he had really fucked things up like never before. Hamilton was no fool. He knew it. He knew that he was in but deep now.
Killing Shields had been bad, a bad move. Doing it with the two others around, witnesses to murder and burial, was even worse. But it had struck Hamilto immediately that it had to be handled clean, it had to be sealed off right away, or it would get a good deal worse. Shields would have had nightmares, he would have talked to someone about Hooper. Other people would have talked. No, it was better to take the most extreme action at once and not worry about the consequences.
The truth was, and Hamilton had to admit that he knew it, he was probably doing the same thing that had gotten Shields killed; he had panicked and taken extreme action. But there was nothing else to do. He would probably have to advance his plans to leave the country by several months.
Meanwhile, though, there was too much to deal with. The Hooper business had created a real stink. Shields’s death had helped a little, because there was so much mystery and excitement in the plant about that, about his body being found dumped without identification in a lot the next day, that for a while conversation had even gotten away from Hooper’s accident. Hamilton himself wasn’t asked about Hooper at all; they had a few perfunctory questions about his relationship with Shields and when he had last seen him, but they meant nnothing, and he had dodged his way through them in an almost absentminded fashion. They couldn’t pin a goddamned thing on him, no matter how they tried. There was no apparent connection with Shields at all.
It was the Hooper business which was bad. The stuff in the car, which Hooper had seen. Had the car been caught at intercept, or had assembly been finished? He didn’t even know. Had they paneled up the car and had it gone out on the truck, or did they have it in some workshop with the stash, stripped down? And if they did, could they track it down to him?
&n
bsp; No. No, they could not. He was safe there, too. His own sources of supply were absolutely airtight. They had as much as or more at stake than he did, and by virtue of what they were, they were the best damned cover in the world. No one could work past him to find out his supply source, and if they did, it wouldn’t do them any good at all. He was covered that way.
He was covered all ways. He was even covered with the Shields murder, because there was no way it could be tied to him and because the two men who had buried him were in just as deep as Hamilton himself. What the hell could they do to him? Not a damned thing; that was for sure and certain. He was sealed up tight.
Tight. All that he had to do, he knew, was to wait the thing out, and everything would be fine. All roads would lead to blank facing. But it was hard, my God it was hard to play the waiting game when every cell of him screamed for action and when there was that feeling, at all times, that they were closing in. That circumstances were roping in tighter and that no matter what he did, he was in the center of the noose. It was not possible. His best instincts told him that he was completely in control; no one could touch him. But at some base level …
On the evening of the sixth day after the discovery of Shields’s body, Hamilton got a call at home from a man who would not identify himself to Hamilton’s wife. That right away was trouble; his contact had never called at home, it was an unwritten but tight understanding that there was to be as little personal involvement as possible, that all the personality should go into the decks of one-hundred-dollar bills; those were the smiles. But when Margaret handed him the phone, saying, “He won’t say who he is,” he could tell something from her tone, from her aspect, that she probably knew much more about what he was doing than he had ever suspected. What he had taken for ignorance might only have been indifference, because there was knowledge in her eyes. It was frightening that at some level his wife might be an unwilling collaborator. It shed an entirely different light on this circumstance, not that he wanted to get into that now. Not that he wanted to think of it at all. “Yes,” he said into the phone. He still thought that it might not be his contact. Maybe it was only something down at the plant, some bastard caught holding on duty, or a sitdown strike on the line. It was not his shift, but they sometimes would call you in anyway just as a show of force. That hope went right away, though. “Hello,” the voice said, “sorry to bother you at home.”