by Barry, Mike
“We told you he was dangerous—”
“Yes, you told us he was dangerous!” Severo said, his voice rising to a shout again. “That’s a big godamned help, isn’t it? You drop a bomb on us and tell us there might be fallout. Who the fuck you think you guys are anyway?”
“There’s no need to shout,” Cippini said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“You bet your ass it isn’t getting us anywhere!” Severo said. He grasped the edge of the desk to still his shaking free hand, noted how the circulation was cut off almost immediately, the knuckles turning pure white. Only forty-eight but the circulatory system was starting to break down. How long did he have? With this madman at large in his territory, how long did he have anyway? Severo felt the distant prod of what he would have known twenty years ago to be outright fear; now he could not deal with it, had to give it a different name, called it rage instead. “I want this guy out of here,” he said. “I want him taken clear. Do you understand that?”
“We’re doing everything we can—”
“This guy is your responsibility! You dropped me a loaded gun and told me to pull the release! He’s not mine, he’s yours!”
“We know that,” Cippini said soothingly, “and believe me, we’ll have this situation resolved sooner than you think. In the meantime, normal precautions—”
“Now you listen to me,” Severo said. He had the feeling of coming down several feet, now he was talking to Cippini at ground-level, man to man, addressing him through bleak panels of empty space, “because I’m not going to say this again. This is my territory and I’ve spent a lifetime building it up. I’ve made it good and I’ve made it tight and the way I’ve done this is to make sure that there are no problems. Now if any more of my men are hurt by this lunatic I’m going to hold you personally responsible. Do you hear that?”
Cippini seemed to sigh. “I hear it.”
“I’m going to go out and take care of this guy with my own men in my own way,” Severo said, “and fuck your specialists. But if it turns out that it has to be me who has to solve the problem that you gave me, then that’s worth remembering, isn’t it? That’s something which I’d have to keep in mind in the future, wouldn’t it? Because if you’re not giving me cooperation, then exactly what the hell is the point of any of this, eh?”
“All right,” Cippini said. His breathing was rapid; through three thousand miles of circuitry, Severo could deduce the rasp as it passed over what were undoubtedly uneven teeth. Wonders of technology. “I think I’ve heard enough, Severo.”
“You’ll hear more.”
“I hope not.”
“He was one of my best men.”
“That’s not my affair,” said Cippini, “it’s not my affair who your man was and now if you don’t mind I’ve got other things to do.”
The clang of the receiver was a dull, hurtful thump in Severo’s ear. Severo put down his own end, swearing at the New York son of a bitch. That was the way all of them were; it was typical of everything about the operation right down the line. They thought they were superior, they still felt that the East Coast was top flight, and that the people like Severo could only, eternally, be the second string and they did not know, these New York bastards, that they were finished. They had been finished for a long time. They could not even run their own operation; now they were starting to spread their problems out in ripples.
It was only a matter of time, Severo knew, until it would be necessary to go in there and reorganize. It was still a while away; they held a stranglehold over the formal organization and the East Coast roots in the network of the system were deep, and sunk through thirty years—but the time was coming when they would have to be settled because they were no longer the system. That was all there was to it. The whole thing was falling apart on them and they still could not, would not admit it.
When people will not face the truth it is sometimes necessary to ram it down their throats.
Severo looked out the window toward the hills. Once this view had given him pleasure; soon enough he was sure it would give him that pleasure again, but now for the first time it communicated only unease. The hanging mist, the tracks of the freeways pressed down into the distant hills as if they had been laid in there with mesh, only reminded him of something that through twenty years he thought he had forgotten: that he was in a highly exposed position. Not that he had ever looked at it this way until this moment—but anyone who really wanted to go out to get him probably could.
He turned from the window with a shudder. Not to think of it. He pressed a buzzer on his desk and instantly his secretary responded. She might be too brightly blonde, and she was certainly dumb, but that one thing gave him pleasure and had for the years he had carried her: she responded to his calls instantly. On a worse basis than that he would have kept her going.
“Send him in” he said into the intercom and closed off the buzzer.
He hooked his thumbs into his belt line, strode around the room ignoring the window. The man who had been waiting outside for three hours came in, as noncommittal and obsequious as if he had been kept waiting for three minutes. That was professionalism. Severo had to admire this. Just like his secretary, the man knew what counted. If nothing else he had surrounded himself with good people. Pity that New York had not done the same.
“All right,” he said to the man who carried a luger pistol in his belt, used a rifle anytime he could get away with it, drove a car armored and weaponed like a late 1960’s tank. A walking arsenal this one. “It’s all settled.”
“That’s good,” the man said. His name was James Trotto and he was both competent and ambitious although the ambition had always been subsumed, for Severo anyway, in the respect that breeds absolute trust. “Anytime then?”
“I want you to get that son of a bitch,” Severo said. “I want you to hit him just as fast and hard as you can.”
“I intend to.”
“I want him dead, do you hear that? If he’s as dumb as he is crazy, he’s probably left a trail a mile deep and I want you to track him and get him. Do you hear me?”
“Yes sir,” James Trotto said. “Yes, Mr. Severo.”
“And I want you to come back here and tell me that he’s dead.”
“Yes sir.”
“Go on,” Nicholas Severo said, “what are we waiting for? Go out and do it now.”
“All right,” Trotto said. He inclined his flat bald head gracefully. If he felt any confusion or doubt it was held completely in check. A professional. Just like Severo. He was a professional. What had been built here was a sound, professional organization, and no New York lunatic was ever going to fuck him up.
“I even think I know where to look,” Trotto said, and saying no more quickly left the room.
After the initial surge of trust and confidence was displaced yet again by the unfamiliar—like a heart attack, in the first onset always known—Severo was left with a taste of fear.
III
San Francisco was a beautiful city. It was built over the San Andreas Fault of course, and someday, probably within the next ten years, was going to fall into the sea. But it was still a beautiful city and Wulff could appreciate it. It had the best climate in the country even counting the rain, which was good for the jungle animal from which man had evolved. It had hills and beaches and views and wealth, the best landscape in the country, and vaulted straight into the ocean and that clear escape from America for which Americans had always yearned. It had good sex, good bars, good colleges, good restaurants and, barring the San Andreas Fault, almost every natural advantage which men could seek or want. But Wulff could not enjoy it. Not even for a moment.
He had not come to San Francisco for relaxation; now, in the town for no more than four hours, he could feel the old tension and terror beginning to leak from his gut into all the other places. Of course he was scared. He had been scared all his life and he would go on being scared; it was a myth that people like him did not feel fear. Of course th
ey felt fear. It was the fear which kept them going, drove them forward, saved them time after time from accidents which would have finished off courageous men because it was the fear which kept you on the move.
He felt it now. Looking over the two large furnished rooms with kitchen he had hastily rented, looking at Tamara who had collapsed into one of the single beds and was now, finally, in a deep, wistful sleep, he could feel the little hedges and outcroppings of the fear. Here in San Francisco he was perhaps coming closer to the enemy than he ever had before. San Francisco was a transfer point; lying on the ocean, nearest point of access in the country to the major supply routes, everything probably passed through here before heading east and south. San Francisco then was the major node; it was the vein into which the poison was introduced and it spilled it all through the body of the country.
Looking out the window Wulff could see through the mist the familiar wreckage and devastation, the signs of what junk had done to the country. It could only be junk that was doing it. The organized, massive drug trade was the only new element since the beginning of the 1960’s, and as the one wild card in the deck, Wulff thought, it had changed everything. It was not his country any more. Like a burned-out tenement it was no one’s country; it existed only for the looters and the vermin.
There were a few people shambling on the streets, there to the south were the grey buildings which signified the downtown district. There again in the distance he could see the bridge, gateway to the West, he guessed they had called it, but he did not know if the mist through which he stared was climate or drugs; probably it was a little bit of both. The factories had spilled the poisons into the air, that was true, but there was a deeper poison running on the surface and underground, infesting every crevice of life, and that was what had put the stink up. Pollution and industry were only the excuses they had given for what had happened to the country. What had really happened to the country was more obvious and irrevocable than that.
He looked at the bed where Tamara was sleeping. That was one sign of what was going on. Multiply it by millions, Wulff thought, and you could begin to see what had happened. Part of a whole generation, maybe all of it had been permanently removed from the line of succession because of what the manipulators at the far end were doing. In Harlem it was heroin, in the college and bohemian scene it was speed and hash, scattered all through this was pot, clouds of it, the easiest and most insidious drug of all because it set them up for the harder stuff. Pot was to heroin, Wulff knew, like that first ceremonial beer the neighborhood bartender used to give you when you were eighteen was to hard gin. It established the mood, it opened you up, it got you going. Once you could accept pot you found the next steps easy; you were just trading in a mild high for a series of shorter but more thrilling ones. At the end it was all the same. He looked at the sleeping girl. She came from a culture where pot was handed around the way beer had been drunk in Wulff’s living room a long time ago. She could not understand. None of them could understand. That was the key.
Enough of this. He could feel the restlessness edging within him. What he needed to do was to get out and begin to smash, hit San Francisco the way that he had hit New York, but he felt an undertow of reluctance. Gerald’s papers had already yielded one bad item, the distribution point in the Oakland Hills. Did he dare to trust it for another? The first place he had hit had turned up a sick girl and a dealer who had tried to kill him; now this girl was in his room and the dealer lay dead. One hour in town, one corpse. Wulff had nothing against killing, killing was necessary if you were going to get anything done against these people—just the price of the operation, so to speak, kill or be killed—but it was time to retract, be cautious if only for a few hours, until he had figured out a game plan. A lot of people were going to be out looking for him, he knew. Half of them would be from the East, the remainder would be local talent. They would be coming at him in waves.
Well, he had not expected to live a long life, anyhow. Most of his life had been given away in a furnished room on West 93rd Street in Manhattan; he had not been kidding when he had told the New York people time and again that they could not scare him or buy him off because they were already dealing with a dead man. Wulff was dead. He walked and talked, breathed and thought, functioned and conceived but something was gone, gone for good. Could a dead man be killed? Not really, he supposed.
Nevertheless, he felt the fear.
He opened the attache case and looked through it idly. San Francisco was on top because, according to these notes anyway, there was some kind of massive shipment expected in here within the next few days, a million dollars, a million and a half of heroin, the notations had not been specific. The man named Gerald who looked like a stockbroker and had worked on a high floor in the Wall Street district had never been specific, not even to himself. All that had been clear was that something big was moving in here, that it was expected around early September, and Wulff had figured that it might be a good idea for him to be here as well, because a big shipment keyed up everyone, brought them into focus and alignment the way a strategically placed lump of sugar could draw the roaches, skittering, from tabletops and basins to start lapping away. The Oakland Hills address, noted by Gerald as a transfer-point, had seemed to be a very good place to start: his mistake. Maybe he should have started off instead with a man named Nicholas Severo who, according to what he deduced, was one of the keys to the transfer. An address in Sausalito, twenty miles north. He was obviously one of the most important men in this section; he seemed to be the one arranging and controlling this deal. He should have gone, he guessed, right to Severo.
But Severo, any top man, was going to be difficult to hit and he had thought that it would be better to ease his way up the line, starting with an actual reconnoitering of the proposed transfer point. He was pretty sure that that was the proposed transfer point. Oh well. Live and learn.
He heard a car door slam in the street and instinctively was on his feet, stuffing the materials back into the case, going to the window to check it out. There were sounds and sounds; long years of training, of being on patrol in Vietnam, and then New York City again had taught him how to discriminate at some subliminal level between the meaningless noises and those which had significance. Now, immediately, Wulff was at screaming alert.
A Fleetwood had parked across the street. There seemed to be a man at the wheel; small puffs of smoke from the exhaust indicated that the car was at idle. Another man came from the passenger side, checked the street up and down, and then walked toward the rented Galaxie which was parked three car-lengths behind the Fleetwood. The scout looked at the Galaxie intently, then kneeled to check the license plates. He stood abruptly, went back to the Fleetwood, poked his head in and seemed to be in conversation with the driver. Then the scout opened the door, went in, slammed it. The Fleetwood’s motor was shut off then. The exhaust dribbled off.
So. So easy. They had found him.
They didn’t know where he was, of course, not just yet, but they had located the car. The rest would be easy for them, they must be figuring. Sooner or later Wulff would come to that car and they would take care of him then. If by any chance Wulff had observed them and made sure to stay away from the car, that was all right too. They probably had a complete make on him by this time, and as soon as he came into view they would take care of him one way or the other.
If he didn’t come into view, that was okay too. They would wait him out. The important thing from their point of view was probably to tie him up indefinitely;
they could kill him at their leisure. Right now, so quickly, they had him bottled up like a fly in a jar.
Wulff walked from the window, looked at the sleeping girl whose sleep, he now knew, was going to be ripped apart. He took out his revolver, pondered some. Sniping at this pair would be ridiculous; sealed in that Cadillac they were invulnerable, they were not going to come out of that Cadillac two at a time. All that sniping would do would be to pinpoint his position to a co
uple of competent professionals, which he was sure they were. Their employer might even be happy to sacrifice one to draw fire, just to make sure that the other put Wulff away permanently. How that looked to the professionals in the front seat, of course, he did not know.
If he was ever going to get anywhere in San Francisco, he was going to have to take them frontally.
That meant going into the street, going into the line of fire, taking whatever they were willing to offer. Riskier that way but cleaner. All right, Wulff muttered, let it be. He had not come to San Francisco on a pleasure trip. And everything within him called out now for violence. It was better that way; it was like professional football players beating up members of their own team on the sidelines before kickoff just to get the feeling of contact.
He needed the feeling of contact.
“All right,” he said to the sleeping girl, “Tamara, you’ve got to get up.” He was gentler than he had thought he would be. The girl moved slowly on the sheets. She fluttered an eyelid, seemed about to move purposefully, then collapsed into sleep again.
A hand waved idly in front of her face; she seemed to be trying to put him, along with consciousness, away.
Well, why not leave her that way? Wasn’t that the way that they came off the amphetamine jags? Twelve to twenty-four hours worth of sleep and they were ready to start again, most of the hard edges of the drug cleaned out of their systems. The trick was to be able to come down into sleep in the first place; most of them, when they were as far into the drug as Tamara seemed to be, just went on and on, showing a more highly developed schizoid syndrome until nature finally pulled the plug in the form of a complete collapse, and then there they were, a lot of them poking around mental wards or striding through the streets of the cities with a strange, absent brightness in their mad eyes. But this girl had been able to crash, without the help of any additional drugs (unless she had slipped something into her mouth—Wulff just didn’t know); she had been able to sleep, and when she came out of it she probably would be a good deal better. A healthy young girl this one for all the seeming dissipation: she would be able to take right off again. Yes indeed, Wulff thought, she had a considerable future to look forward to.