by Barry, Mike
“Well,” Wulff said, “I’m at one hell of a places, one hell of a place, old friend.” And he went on from there, giving Williams exact details as to where he was and in what section of Los Angeles and how to get there and what to do when he came in. “Not that it makes any difference,” Wulff finished up, “they have this place under such tight surveillance probably that you’ll have a hell of a lot of trouble getting up here unmolested. I hope you know what you’re getting into, that’s all. I just hope so.”
“I think I do,” Williams said, “I think I do.” And then there was suddenly, awkwardly nothing else to say. He told Wulff that he would try to make it out soon, within a day anyway, depending upon airline schedules and he would do what he could after that.
“You’d better bring some pieces,” Wulff said. “I mean, both service revolvers and anything else that you can get hold of. What I could use, tell you the truth, is a fucking machine gun.”
Williams said that he doubted that very much, for one thing it was a hell of a job to get a machine gun onto an airplane these days. Wulff said he knew what he meant about that and then he hung up because there was simply nothing else to say.
Williams lay there in the dark for a little while. In a vague way he was astonished at himself; how quickly he had siezed the bait, how happily he had collaborated with Wulff. His revulsion with what had happened must have been even greater than he had calculated if he could abandon it so quickly. But then again merely the idea of a desk job might have been what had touched him off; he was no ornamental cop, no play cop with toy armaments. If he was going to do the job he wanted to do it on the front lines or not at all. Funny; he could admit that now. Funny what you sometimes learned about yourself only in the worst of circumstances. His gut was still shuddering but somewhat less than it had before; constriction had overtaken that looseness of uncoiling and he was able to stand and move without pain. He did so. It made no difference now; there was no point in waiting. He got off the bed and packed a suitcase shoving in both service pieces and he left the ranch-style home in St. Albans, New York.
Poising at the threshold for a moment, Williams thought of calling his wife, at least telling her what had happened and where he was going but he did not. It would not be worth it. There was nothing to say to her and the less she knew of his whereabouts the better off she would be if Calabrese decided to put the pressure on. Nobody was going to mess with a woman pregnant in her ninth month, not even Calabrese, and his sister-in-law would take good care of her. He would only be a liability at this time; he would only contaminate the child. I’m sorry, he guessed he could say to her, I’m sorry, sorry about everything, but even this would not have been true. He simply did not know what, if anything, he should feel sorry for. None of what had happened was really his fault. It had all been inherited; inherited pain, inherited destiny.
Maybe the path he was taking now had been the only solution from the first. He would see. He would just see about that.
Williams walked to a corner and hailed a cab, went out to the airport. His wife had taken the Montego when she had split. There were ten payments still due on it. The shocks were gone and the transmission at seventeen thousand miles had already begun to slip. Junk. Junk.
VII
Wulff, ‘62 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, and a small trailer checked into the Idle Time Trailer Park in the San Fernando Valley about twelve hours after his phone call to Williams. Wulff did not look like Wulff any more, wearing a false beard and sideburns which he hoped would make it through the night. The ‘62 Sedan de Ville looked like no Cadillac conceived by the mind of man since the golden days of the automotive age, and the trailer was a horror, a rotting construction that he had picked up along with the Sedan de Ville from a junk lot, the best he could get on short notice. Only the gift from Peru was the same but that was stashed in a corner of the trailer, folded in upon itself, covered with scraps of newspapers, and hopefully no one would be able to tell the difference. If they could find that bag so much the worse for him … but if they could find that bag, Wulff thought, it would only be because his cover was completely blown and in that case it simply did not matter. He had a couple of carbines, too. He would make it very unpleasant, at the least, for anything less than a small army. He did not think Calabrese would send an army out after him. On the other hand, you never could be sure. He was top priority now; he knew that.
The Cadillac, the trailer, the trailer park were out of character, of course. What the hell was Wulff doing underground anyway? But it was a simple calculation of possibilities. Dealing with Tamara after the man had burst in, talking with Williams and then the understanding had finally broken upon him that he was in too deep. He could take on the world, maybe, but he could only do it in small groups, sequentially, over a period of time.
Calabrese had the whole fucking world after him.
Not only that, but organization security could be conceived to be as fouled up as security anywhere. If the word was out through the organization that he was top priority then it would long since have leaked out … his picture, his biography, his probable whereabouts and methods, as well as the goods he had on his person … all of those would be available by now to almost any ambitious freelancer with the price of a gun and a train ticket in his possession. A man could do worse than to go after Wulff at this stage of the game. Killing him would be career-making. Getting hold of the goods would be something more than that.
It was just too hot. He was too deeply in. Surfacing to pick up Williams, if the cat got to LA, was as far as he wanted to go at this time. Even that was a risk. He needed to continue his quest, he needed to kill Calabrese—they were the same thing after all—but right now most of all he badly needed to get underground. Discretion was the better part of valor. Common sense was the only preservation of the courageous man.
“You can be thrown out on an hour’s notice, my notice,” the man at the check-in office of the Idle Hour Trailer Park told him. He looked at the trailer and the Cadillac with revulsion, then reached under his arm and brought out a pamphlet, gave it to Wulff. “These are the rules of the park,” he said, “read them. Any violation and you’re out on your ass.” His eyes would not come off the trailer. “Where did you get that shit?” he asked.
“I picked it up at a garage sale,” Wulff said and turned to go back to the car, the engine still idling.
The guard pursued him though, leaned against the door, blocked Wulff before Wulff could make entry. “How long are you going to be here?” he said.
“I don’t know. I paid a month in advance up front.”
“That didn’t answer my question. You think you’re going to be here a full month?” The man was in his fifties, a transplant, Wulff thought. He was wearing California costume but the look, the face, the eyes were all New York. Probably he was a civil servant, maybe even a cop, who was living on his pension; enjoying the good trailer life in the San Fernando. Sure. Sure he was enjoying the good life.
“Could be,” Wulff said. “I went all through that in the office.”
“Office don’t mean shit,” the man said. He reached under his arm again, felt something, not the pamphlets he was holding. Probably he had a gun in there and likely he had fantasies of using it. Wulff fought for control, opened the door slowly, finding a foot of space between him and the man, and squeezing himself through. The gaseous odor of the car interior rose, enveloped him; looking down at the floorboards he could see the suggestion of wires, gutted steel peering up at him. The car was idling unevenly, at least five of the cylinders dead, choking out clear dribbles of gas he could see in the open spaces purling beneath. He did not want to antagonize these people. Trailer parks were the last frontier. But the urge to smash the transplant was full within him.
“Tell me,” the guard said, “you in any kind of trouble?”
“Not that you should know of.”
“Plenty of people with trouble, they think that they can use this space as a stakeout, a hideout. No address y
ou know, just a lot of trailers.” The man motioned down the path; Wulff following it could see the trailers, many colors, grouped close upon one another. Nesting pattern. “But that’s a goddamned mistake. We report everyone who comes in here to the cops for a routine check. Any troublemakers, the cops come in and bust them up. Also,” the man said, “also, we got our own security forces.”
“That’s nice,” Wulff said. Gently he closed the door, eased the Cadillac into gear. The transmission slammed, bucked, more metal fell off from somewhere. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Anyone we don’t like,” the guard said, still scratching at the place in his armpit, “gets thrown off the land on an hour’s notice like I said. And you lose your whole goddamned deposit too. That’s the way we run things around here. You don’t like it you can move your ass right out now.”
“All right,” Wulff said, releasing the brake, “all right.” He let the car roll; it parted the mud, and he brushed the guard out of view, the car moving, the old, yellow trailer lumbering behind him. He was aware that the guard was standing, following him all the way down the path but whether this was real curiosity, something about Wulff in the heavy disguise which had provoked him, or whether it was the natural hatred which this transplant felt for all people, people who mucked up his grounds, impinged on his territory, Wulff did not know. Nor did he care. He was desperately tired and beginning to feel for the first time now that he was approaching the limit of his possibilities. Always the pursuer, Calabrese had him rammed now into the posture of quarry. He did not like it.
From the road the Idle Hour had looked something like a camping area, a rather bucolic one, set off by fringes of trees and little signs. But now as he penetrated the area in which the trailers were actually parked the bucolic nature went away and Wulff found himself inching down an ever-narrowing path, trailers of all colors parked crazily in every direction, a few forms sitting on those trailers or wandering in the spaces among them in a dishevelled condition, barely enough room now on the declining path to keep the shaky Sedan de Ville properly pointed. Here, he thought, here was the new slum, the new disgrace. Harlem, the agony of New York and the central cities were thought of as the slums in the popular mind but they reflected a reality which had existed seventy or eighty years ago, an industrial reality, say. The slums of today’s New York were little different from the factory towns which had sprouted in the Midwest … the diseased sinkholes that the great cities had been by 1900 … but the trailer park was something new, a post 1950’s invention coming out of an America whose new mobility had merely enabled it to spread its poisons further and thinner. So here in the Idle Hour were the thin segments of agony brushed over the landscape, the same thing really: Harlem, the Idle Hour, miserable areas carved out of the landscape presided over in the one case by landlords and corporations who milked it dry, in the other by small-time entrepreneurs like the guard and his brother who were squeezing a living out of the Idle Hour in a kind of tyranny. But if it ever became profitable, truly profitable, why then the corporations would move in here just as they had moved into Harlem and really make it pay. Wulff smelled over the odor of the car the denser smell of the trailer park: too many forms huddled together in these demolished woods, the tangled odors of fires, washing, human feces. Something within him balked, really revolted. He brought the Cadillac to a shaky stop in the first open area that he could find and hit the brakes hard, the yellow trailer behind slamming against his bumper bringing him into the windshield, and the car stalled. He sat there in mud, little rivulets and trickles of foul water running on two sides of him, a welter of trailers of all sizes closing him in on three sides. The man up front had said something about finding a spot with plumbing facilities, hooking into flush toilets and running water. But where? Where the hell was he supposed to go?
He didn’t know. He supposed that he could worry about that later, if it made any difference. He was not here for plumbing, hot water, conveniences. He was here for the same reason he guessed that everyone else was: to get out of it, to find some cover, to get the hell out of America. But looking through the bitter, bitter landscape, the faces peering through the windows of the trailers, dirty children playing somewhere in the piles of mud, the plumes of exhaust as someone down the line revved his stinking motor … it occurred to Wulff that you could never get out of America, not ever, not if you had the remotest connection to this diseased country … and that when he had been out, in Havana, in Peru, nothing had motivated him so much as the need to return.
You are your world, he thought wearily and went back to the trailer to see if the goods were still there. They were. He wondered if he was simply renting out space.
VIII
Williams was on US 90, halfway across Nebraska, when the first ambush team hit him.
But a lot had happened in the three days before that, so much that it made the ambush almost inconsequential. Not that that was the right way to take it … because the men at the roadblock were really ready to kill him. Still, it was something of an anti-cimax after what he had been through. He was proceeding through Nebraska in a rented Ford, behind the Ford was a U-haul closed to the world and loaded to the hilt with mortars, grenades carbines, automatic rifles, pistols … more ammunition than he had ever seen in his life outside the barracks of the police academy. It would be more than enough to get Wulff back in business again. It might have put the Eighth Army back in business again.
But coming by it had not been easy. Williams had scratched right away Wulff’s suggestion that he pick up what he could carry in a large suitcase and fly out to LA. That was crazy; his old friend was not really thinking right, the pressure was obviously getting even to Wulff. What with the federal surveillance of luggage and passengers, in light of the hijacking problem, Williams would not even have been able to sneak a water pistol through the loading areas at Kennedy. And even if there had been no surveillance what would he have been able to take on a plane, a couple of rifles at best, a few compact grenades, a scattering of pistols? No, if you were going to get into something like this you had to do it right. You had to get the real stuff and in quantity on a do-it-yourself basis … and you had to do your own trucking and hauling.
Williams was going to go into it. There had never been any doubt in his mind from the moment of Wulff’s call. In a sense, he now understood, he had probably been waiting for that call for a long time, many months, even before he had taken the knife in the gut. But putting down the phone he had gotten past his wild first impulse to grab a couple of pistols and make it out to LA. That wasn’t going to help Wulff a hell of a lot. It wouldn’t have helped him much either. He had to do it right or not at all.
So Williams waited until the next day and then he made a few phone calls. He had a pretty good idea of whom to get in touch with, a black cop had really decent contacts if he wanted to cultivate them, and Williams had done so. Also, being a black cop was an advantage to get through to sources like this because if you handled them the right way they thought of you as less of a cop and more of a black. He knew that he would have to go outside of conventional channels to get his hands on what he was seeking. He found himself set up for the meeting in a basement on 139th Street between St. Nicholas and Eighth Avenues.
The man he had come to see wore flowing robes and had a religious aspect. That was quite natural; he was working behind a storefront, labelling the basement as the ALL SOULS DIVINITY AND BROTHER’S CHURCH, just another of the thousand storefront churches in Harlem; religiosity and disease mixing there as in no other country in the world. Perhaps they were the same thing. Not anything to think about now. The man’s name was Father Justice. He was about thirty years old and held a prayer book. The basement had a small altar thrown up against a bleak wall, a few benches lined up behind the altar serving as pews, a couple of collection plates lying on racks to the side. Standing in here, looking at Father Justice, Williams could hear the music.
“Yes?” Father Justice said. He had a quiet, flat voice
. “There are no services. Services are at seven, evensong at nine and—”
“Michael sent me,” Williams said. Getting through the door had been easy; the key was supposed to be the word Michael after you were already through. Father Justice’s expression did not change. His eyes, however, slowly kindled with light.
“Michael?” he said.
“That is correct.” Williams held his ground, tried to lean against the wall to show control, put his hand in his pocket where ten thousand dollars lay in rolled up hundreds. Seed money; his inheritance. Someday it was going to pay off the house if he ever needed to pay it all off in one chunk. He had pulled it out of the bank this morning. The other ten in the account he had left for his wife. Fair enough. Fifty-fifty split. William’s father had made absolutely no provisions; it was his to do with as he saw fit. What would his father think now? Williams thought wryly. The old man had died just six months ago, time enough to see Williams inducted into the force but very little else. The old man had been proud. Well, moderately. “Michael,” he said again.
“Ah,” said Father Justice. He moved behind Williams delicately with motions as graceful and imperceptible as the wind, closed the door of the storefront behind him, came to Williams’s side. “We do not believe in violence,” Father Justice said. “Violence is a very terrible disease in this society. Furthermore, it is a slander on the name of the Lord.”
“That is true,” Williams said.
“The ways of the violent are corrupt and their ends disatrous. Those who live by the sword must die by the sword. Always throughout generations this has been the word of the Lord.”
“I know that,” Williams said. “Violence is a terrible disease within our society.”
“On the other hand,” Father Justice said after a little pause, his eyes opening and closing ecstatically, his hand clutched in his robes, tugging at them, “we are confronted by a paradox. For who is to say that the man of decency must not turn to violence just as must the evil man to counteract those deeds? What can speak to the mighty but their own weapons, their own greed and evil?”