Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust

by Barry, Mike

  “And how will he recognize you?”

  “That’s no problem,” the voice said, “that’s no concern. He doesn’t have to recognize me, I’ll recognize him and that’s sufficient. I want ten thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills.”

  Calabrese inhaled, held the phone away from his ear briefly, then brought it back. The man in the room looked at him incuriously, his eyes dull, then looked down at the floor, broken, defeated in spirit. Everybody he dealt with was, Calabrese realized in a sudden flare of insight; he had surrounded himself with men who offered him no challenge. In one way this was good; standard organizational practice but in another … well, in another it left him improperly prepared to deal with characters like this one he was speaking to. Maybe he needed to deal regularly with a few people who would not break down so easily … but no, he thought, no, I’m seventy-three years old and at seventy-three the battles have got to be behind me; it’s better that way, just give me Wulff and I’m finished. I ask for very little, almost everything I’ve wanted I’ve got, just let me get this one cold and I’ll call it quits. I’ll never ask for anything again. “You are not a modest man,” he said into the phone.

  “I know you want him. You’ve got him now. The information is probably worth three times as much to you.”

  “Yes,” Calabrese said, “the information is worth a good deal; everyone knows that, but how do I know that I can trust you?”

  “It’s mutual. How do I know that I can trust you? This way, meeting your man in a public place I’ve got just a little bit of a chance. Not much but a little. I’ll be there at ten o’clock tomorrow morning and if I were you, Calabrese, I wouldn’t try any maneuvers. You’ll get me but you’ll lose him, and Wulff’s the one you really want, isn’t he?”

  Yes, Calabrese thought, Wulff’s the one I really want but you too, you son of a bitch, I want you too. You’re quite right not to trust me; in ordinary circumstances you deal like a gentleman. You might have but not now. I’m going to get you, you bastard, I’m going to make you pay for this. “All right,” he said flatly, “ten o’clock tomorrow morning my man will be there. You’d better be there.”

  “Oh, I will,” the voice said. “I definitely will, Calabrese, the only thing is you’d better be ready to go in attack force because the one thing I guarantee is that they can’t be counted on to stay there long. Not too damned long, time is catching up with all of us,” the voice said and hung up. Calabrese held the phone in his hand, feeling the damp welling off his palm, noting that the phone now seemed to feel lighter with the weight of the voice out of it. An illusion, of course. Everything was an illusion. He put the phone down carefully and looked at the man who was in the room with him, the man with his hands clasped, looking down at the floor like a penitent, or like someone with a serious disease holding down space in a doctor’s waiting room. “We’re ready to move,” he said. “We’re going to move now.”

  The man sitting there said nothing. There was, of course, very little for him to say. Calabrese knew the problem. Once you got started talking there was sometimes no end to it and this man did not want to make waves of any sort. Calabrese looked at him shrewdly, eyes narrowing, and then he had an inspiration. It would do. It would certainly do. The man lacked a certain energy but he had loyalty and fear and those were the more important qualities for a job like this. The world was full of energetic types. Some of them even wound up making phone calls like the one he had just received.

  “Can you make it out to Los Angeles by tomorrow morning?” Calabrese said.

  The man looked up quizzically.

  XII

  At first, holing up in the Idle Hour trailer park wasn’t too bad for them, at least it wasn’t too bad for Wulff. Williams was so screwed up by that time Wulff figured that anything would have set him off; he was racked by guilt about his wife, worried as hell about the ordnance piled into the U-haul which he was convinced was under surveillance, and most of all he was bugged by the conditions of camp life itself, which he took to be oppressive, a concentration camp in fact. “People live here the way the black man lives all over the country,” Williams took to saying and when Wulff said that there was nothing racist about the attitude here; everybody, white or black was being screwed equally, Williams said mysteriously that that was the point and let it go at that. Also, the people who ran the Idle Hour weren’t crazy about a black man moving into Wulff’s trailer, and they had solved that one only by offering a rent increase of seventy-five dollars a month flat, which had brought them around sullenly although they suggested that Williams stay the hell inside the trailer as much as possible and not let people be exposed to him. That would have been the case anyway; they were functioning under very tight wraps. As a matter of fact, they weren’t going to go anywhere for awhile.

  So it was a bad time but Wulff found it better than it had been being alone; in a way he found being cooped up with Williams better than almost anything he had gone through since he had left New York. At least there was someone to talk to now, someone who he could feel, even incorrectly, was carrying the burden with him and he and Williams had a lot of catching up to do. Williams wanted to know every detail of Wulff’s mission which he had picked up only half-assed through various sources and the misinterpretation of the press; Wulff wanted to know exactly what the hell was going on in the department and specifically what changes were being made under the new drug laws. Williams said that all of the changes were for the worse and all of it was full of shit and then went into the Evans business but all of this was strung out over several days. There was plenty to talk about. There was a brief period during the first week when it seemed that their conversation was literally inexhaustible and Wulff allowed himself to succumb for the first time in many, many months to a feeling of leisure, to a feeling that things would work themselves out next week or the week after that, and in the meantime they were out of his hands. It was a good feeling; it was the way that most people lived. Also, at that point it made a lot of sense to calculate that way because coming out from under tight hiding in the Idle Hour, no matter what amount of ordnance they had, would probably have been disastrous. They had lost the guy who had trailed them from the racetrack. (“We should have killed the son of a bitch,” Williams said, “goddamnit we should have pulled over on the side of the highway and nailed him; I don’t want to live with that cat hanging around.”) But that was only temporary; somewhere the guy was around, in the picture, going to make a move sooner or later. Also, there were a hell of a lot of other people looking for them, both of them by now. Really, there was nothing to do but stay there. Wulff figured that it would have to be a month before they could push out and cautiously venture east. He had an appointment with Calabrese.

  But by the end of the second week, things had begun to fall apart. The conversational topics had been gone through over and over again. Williams, increasingly guilty about his wife, was getting irritable and sometimes even aggressive and Wulff, looking at the walls of the trailer, making small trips to the outrageous commissary where residents were compelled to make fifty dollars worth of purchases of overpriced goods every week, found himself beginning to palpitate with tension, his body shaking at odd moments, turning and turning in the well of sleep, images of blood on his mind. It was quite obvious already that they would never hold out the full month; they would not manage it without, insanely, turning upon one another. He was not geared for inaction. Williams had not travelled cross-country with a U-haul full of death to hang around a wretched trailer park and leave the next move to the enemy. No, Wulff decided toward the end of that second weel, it wouldn’t work out. They were going to have to break out.

  “That suits me,” Williams said, “that suits me,” pulling aside the frayed curtains of the trailer, peering outside, looking out on the same view of miserable, rutted path cutting between the trees that they had looked out on, once every few waking minutes, for twelve days. “I told you it was a bad idea. We can’t sweat them out, man; we’re just sit
ting here and leaving them make the moves. The longer we stay here the more time they have to get a good fix on our position. You think they won’t find us sooner or later? We’re just sitting here, waiting to be mopped up.”

  “It seemed like a good idea,” Wulff said, “I knew the pressure; I felt it was good to get under—”

  “Get under?” Williams said and began to laugh a little hysterically. “Get under what? That’s the question I want to ask, what the fuck are you going to get under? You’re a marked man, you’d have to get under Mount Everest to find something big enough to cover you, and people climb up Mount Everest. The only way you got this far was by making your moves before they could make theirs; now you’ve changed your pattern but that’s just goddamned stupid. I didn’t drive cross-country, I didn’t get involved with that lunatic in Harlem, so that we could sit holed up in a plantation and let them fuck us over.”

  “It won’t work,” Wulff said suddenly. He stood, walked away from Williams, leaned against one of the thin trailer walls, feeling it buckle and give. Nothing worked like it should in this country filled with junk. “Now I understand the problem. We can’t move together.”

  “No?” Williams said.

  “No. I thought it would be a good idea; I thought that I had gone as far as I could going it alone and that I needed real help but I see that it’s all wrong now. That’s why we’ve just been sitting here instead of moving. I’ve been afraid to move.”

  “Oh. How’s that?”

  “Don’t you understand? There’s no mobility and we’re so goddamned recognizable that there’s no cover either. Calabrese knows who you are; he’s been in touch with you, he’s made the connection between the two of us. We might be twice as dangerous as a team but we’re also twice as visible and they’ve got us nailed. One man is a guerilla army; two are a division.” He sighed, shook his head and looked levelly at Williams. “We’re going to have to split up,” he said.

  “Split up? How?”

  “I mean I’m going to have to work on my own. We can’t go it together. It was an idea and I was at the bottom, it seemed to be a solution. But it’s no solution; it’s no goddamned solution at all.”

  “So I’m out on my ass,” Williams said. His face was peculiar, impassivity and expression chasing one another across his features, his eyes shrouded. He looked much older than Wulff would have ever thought he could look; at the beginning, in the patrol car, Williams had had one of those rookie’s faces that seemed to literally resist the effects of experience. But that had been a long, long time ago. … “You’re pitching the black man out on his ass,” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” Wulff said, “don’t be ridiculous.” He bounced off the wall, the trailer shaking a little and went over to Williams. “It’s just that I’m in too deep,” he said quietly, “don’t you understand that? I’m on the bottom now; I’m so far down that I’m probably on the way out. Why drag anyone with me?”

  “I don’t know,” Williams said quietly, “why drag anyone with you?” He slumped over, clasped his hands, leaned on the knuckles. “I never did think of us as a team,” he said.

  “I can’t be a team with anyone.”

  “You were right about the system though. The system sucks. The system is what makes it all possible; I found that out. So what am I supposed to do? Go back on the force? Get a nice desk job with security and a pension plan? Don’t you understand how deep in it I am?”

  “Go back to your wife,” Wulff said suddenly. What he had said caught him by surprise; he found himself looking around the room to see if just possibly someone else had said it. No one had. “Go on back. She’s a nice girl. You’ve got a child by now. You’re a father. You’ve got something to go back to.”

  “Don’t you understand?” Williams said. “It’s too late. I’m closed off. I did the same thing that you did; I walked out. They all know who I am. You think that they’re not after me the same way they are after you? Shit, man,” Williams said violently, standing, kicking the wall, “it’s too late for all of this crap. We’re in too deep. It’s no fucking time to turn sentimental.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Don’t give me that shit about a wife and a child,” Williams said. His face contorted suddenly, grief and rage merging into a quality which was neither; call it simply gelatinous, little pores and spaces falling that way. “Don’t you give me no hearts and flowers right now, you son of a bitch. You were the one who turned me against the whole wife and child bit, you remember?”

  “I did nothing.”

  “You said the system sucked and you were right: it does suck. So don’t cop out on me now, man, say go back, tend lawn, grow up strong and straight in St. Albans, Queens, New York. It’s too late for that now, you motherfucker.” Violently Williams yanked his shirt up, showed Wulff the thin scar implanted by the knife; months later it still seemed to glow, turning subtle colors in the dim illumination of the trailer. “That’s my mark,” he said, “that’s what the system got me. That’s what it gives anyone at the bottom who takes it seriously.” He brought his shirt down, the ends dangling, closed in on Wulff then, fists balled. “I could punch you out, you son of a bitch” he said.

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Everybody knows what to do or not do and I’m fucking sick of it,” Williams said and then insanely, ducking low, threw a fist into Wulff’s mid-section. It missed the plexus but still it hurt, the unexpectedness of the cheap-shot sending little groping fingers of pain up and down Wulff’s body. Instinctively, Wulff brought an open hand down, wedging the side of it into the back of Williams’s neck, just dropping it at the last instant so that instead of hitting the killing area near the medulla he struck him on the bony part near the nape of the neck. Williams gasped, sprrawled on the floor, rolled against the wall, then got up slowly, his face holding an expression that Wulff had seen many times before … but had never expected to see on Williams’s face.

  “I’m going to kill you for that, you son of a bitch,” he said.

  He rushed Wulff then, coming in at him straight and low, Wulff angling away from the mad dive only at the last moment so that Williams pitched into the wall … and at that moment, outside, there was a dull roar, the earth under their trailer shifted, Wulff, too, went sprawling toward a wall, the trailer rocking, flame all around him. Dimly, he could hear Williams’s bellowing. It looked like the world had blown up. The second explosion came, then.

  XIII

  Billings had been in front of the Times-Mirror building fifteen minutes before the meet, checking out the scene; five minutes before he went into the lobby where he had a good vantage point on the street, a good controlling view of everyone walking, out of sight himself. Calabrese would have taken him for a fool if he had done anything else, Billings thought. His maneuver might be risky here, entirely risky when going up against someone like Calabrese, but there was one thing he definitely was not and that was stupid. He figured that Calabrese would send at least two men into this meet, one of them dressed as per instruction, the other one supposed to merge into the crowds until the last moment and then emerge to overpower him … but he could figure at least one move ahead, at least at this primitive level. That he was ready for.

  Anyway, Calabrese did not know Los Angeles if he thought that a man could be merged into the street scene here. In New York it would have worked well, Chicago too: there was always plenty of traffic on the street and in the middle of those eddies figures who simply loafed around, peanut vendors, bums, junkies, hippies cruising a handout, pimps, all of this was part of the downtown scene in the great metropolitan centers … but Los Angeles had no center, it was not a city. There were no crowds. The presence of a second man could not be concealed. So when a stranger had set himself up in an uncomfortable position across the street two minutes before the meet, shifting from one leg to the other, smoking a cigar, scratching himself in an armpit where a big Luger probably was holstered … Billings knew exactly what he was and ev
en under the tension of circumstances was able to grant himself one thin grin. Calabrese was smart all right, the smartest of the old-line bosses, one of the true greats … but he had worked this one out along traditional lines. Billings had had him figured. Sure you could figure out these bastards; their reputations meant nothing, they had the same tricks that anyone else had, just a little more originality in the switches, that was all. Calabrese leaned tightly against the lobby, no movement here either, 11 A.M., lunch hour for no one, no traffic coming in, and a man in a business suit wearing a blue necktie came out from some abcess of the street and stood in front of the building. He had a high, dedicated look, the kind of look that a man might have, Billings thought, if he was about to sacrifice himself in the line of a better cause, or maybe it was merely the expression that the horseplayers at Santa Anita took on somewhere around the eighth race, the beginnings of the knowledge that they were battering themselves against the tote, the impermeable machineries of chance, but still, what could you do? It beat working for a living. Billings slowly disengaged himself from his position, moved through the doors.

  The man in the blue suit looked at him and at the same time something else happened; the other one, the man across the street who was supposed to be part of the scenery except for the problem that no scenery existed, looked from right to left in a nervous, distracted manner and then began to pace, his arm moving within his clothing, drifting from chest to waist, then nestling in a pants pocket. Son of a bitch, Billings thought, they wouldn’t be that audacious. Still, on the other hand, when you were talking LA, who noticed? There was, strictly speaking, no street scene whatsoever in LA. If there was a murder right here, the few pedestrians, the people passing by in cars would probably take it as part of a shooting script, on-location shooting. With the breakup of the big studios, after all almost everything was being done on the cheap, on a shoe-string, in far-flung areas of the globe. A company could move out and try to get some location shots in front of the Los Angeles Times-Mirror building while a couple of extras sprouted fake blood. Why not? Everything was going into the countryside, Billings thought.