by Barry, Mike
She stirred, opened her eyes. Alertness, intelligence returned. “He’s gone?” she said.
He nodded. “He’s dead,” he said, “he’s somewhere down on the next landing or the one below that and he’s dead.”
“Too much death,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s too much death.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Wulff said. “There’s a dead man in those rooms too. We can’t stay now. We have to leave.”
“Why?” she whispered, “why—”
“I can’t explain,” he said, kneeling by her. “There’s just no time. There’s no time at all.”
“Everybody wants to kill you,” she said, “why does everybody want to kill you?”
“Because I’m dangerous,” he said, “because I’m digging in closer to them than anyone has for a long time.” No time to talk now. He took her thin wrist, prodded her, rose. She came to her feet and fell against him heavily, licking her dry lips. She reached out toward the wall weakly, then balanced herself.
I can’t take much more of this,” she said.
“I know,” said Wulff. “We’re getting out of here. Is there someplace you can go now?”
She looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Someplace safe you can stay. I don’t mean another crash pad and I don’t mean back wherever you’ve been. Do you have a family? Do you have parents?”
Her eyes narrowed, seemed to calculate. “I did,” she said, “it was a long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Six months. Six, seven months.”
“You’ve got to go back,” Wulff said. He pulled her into the room. The corpse lay there in a solemn pile, unblinking. She gasped and covered her face, then slowly drew her hands down, past her cheeks and held them on her chest.
“I can look at it,” she said. “I’ve seen death before.”
“I don’t want you to see any more now. You’ve got to go back home.”
She shook her head. “I want to come with you.”
“You can’t.”
“Why?” she said.
“Because you see what’s happening. This is the way it’s going to be from now on, right through to the end of my life. You can’t stay. The next time we won’t be so lucky. It’s happened twice already.”
“Why don’t you stop?” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, can’t you stop it, can’t you get out of it before it’s too late?”
He felt her touch against him and the touch made him think about that, if only for an instant. “No,” he said then, “I can’t.”
“You’re the avenger, you mean.”
“I don’t know what I am,” Wulff said. He left her standing there, went to the closet, took down his one suitcase, reached again, seized the attache case. “It doesn’t matter what I am either just as long as I don’t take you all the way down with me.”
“You saved my life twice.”
“I only saved your life because I put you in situations where I almost got you killed,” he said grimly. “It can’t go on this way. I think your gratitude is misdirected.”
She looked at him. Beneath the wall he could see feeling in her eyes. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, you won’t stop.”
“No, I won’t.”
“You can’t stop, is that it?”
He nodded once. “Something like that,” he said. “Come on, this isn’t going to last here. We aren’t safe here anymore. We never were.”
She stepped over the corpse delicately, however, went to the window and looked out. This was a girl who could adjust to anything. “I won’t forget this room,” she said, “I won’t forget you.”
“All right.”
“Will I see you again?”
He looked at her, paused. “If I get out of this, maybe,” he said, “maybe you’ll see me again. But I won’t be out of it for a long time.”
“Being the avenger is a full time job, isn’t it?”
His voice sounded strange to him. “It isn’t a job,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”
“That too,” she said, “I knew that.”
“Will you go back to your parents?”
“I never thought I would. They’ll ask me questions. They’ll ask a lot of questions. They’re not people who can just accept—”
“So tell them. Tell them what they want to know. You’ve got to be safe for a while.”
“And tell them about you?”
“If you want. It doesn’t make any difference at all.”
He hoisted the suitcase, the attache bag. “Let’s get out of here,” he said then.
She turned from the window, stepped back over the dead man and took his arm. “This is ridiculous,” she said, “this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever lived. There’s a dead man in this room and another one downstairs and ten minutes ago they were going to kill us and now I’m going to walk out of here as if it doesn’t matter. Did you ever hear of anything like that in your life?”
He said, “Of course it doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference to them so it can’t to me. You just have to go on.”
“But can people really live that way?”
“I can,” he said. He led her to the door, they walked through. In the hallway she dropped his arm so that they could go down the stairs single file.
The man he had shot twice lay still at the second landing. His hand, clenched in death, was holding his shirtfront, pulling it straight up. His face looked much younger than Wulff had seen it before and seemed to be utterly at peace. For some of them, death indeed was a release.
He stepped over the body. The girl followed him. It was very quiet in the rooming house. No one was looking out at all. As long as events did not infringe upon their lives, these tenants could take anything. It was like the war or the drug business. Business as usual, just don’t touch me.
He went outside. He had expected, ten minutes ago, never to see the light again but the sight of day did not impress him. Day and night, the landscape, it was just a background against which you carried out the acts of your life. Would the man named Willie have noticed the daylight streaming over Wulff’s shoulder as he shot him?
Tamara came beside him. The street was very quiet. A car which probably had been the one in which the men had come was parked crosswise, front tires nestling against a telephone pole, over the curb. They had not expected to be very long, obviously. An old Plymouth, dented in on both sides. Probably bounty-hunters after all. Regular operatives would have driven a better car.
“I’m going to put you in a taxi,” he said, “and get you out of here as quickly as possible. That’s the best way.”
“You’ll find very few taxis around here,” she said and then one turned the corner, coming up fast. Wulff waved at it, half-expecting that it was carrying someone who would again take a shot at him. But it was empty. The driver brought it to a halt, leaned out, a young bright-eyed man with a beard. All through the country it was a new breed of taxi-driver. The middle-aged men without hope were being phased out.
“I’d come with you,” she said, “you know that.”
“I know that.”
“If you really wanted me to I’d come with you through it all. But you don’t want me, do you?”
“No,” he said.
“You don’t want anyone.”
“I want someone,” Wulff said, “but she died sometime back and that was the end of that.”
She moved toward the taxi. “Did I remind you of her?” she said.
“In a way.”
“I thought so.” She opened the door, then stopped. “Do you want to know where my parents live?” she said, “so you can get in touch with me when this is all over?”
“It will never be over.”
“Do you want to know?”
“Yes,” he said.
She told him. It was just numerals on an avenue in a suburb; it had no significance to him. But he knew he would r
emember it. “All right,” he said. He reached into his pocket, took out his wallet. “Let me give you some money,” he said.
“I don’t want money.”
“Don’t be foolish; you can’t even pay the taxi.”
“I hate to break this up,” the driver said, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’ve got to make a living too.” Wulff had sentimentalized him; once he began talking he sounded exactly like the middle-aged men.
“Here,” Wulff said. He took out two hundred dollars and put it in her palm. It was all New York money anyway. Compliments of the great Northeast to the culture of Love. Tamara looked at it wonderingly.
“You make me feel cheap,” she said, holding the bills, “that’s all.”
“No need,” said Wulff, “you’re not cheap at all.”
“Oh no?” she said with a bitter smile, “you should only know what you don’t know.”
“You made me feel alive again,” he said. He pushed her into the cab before the driver could make another protest. Then, on an impulse he would not try to understand or guide he leaned down and kissed her. He felt the cool surfaces of her forehead underneath his lips, touched her cheek once tentatively, moved away.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said. She ducked inside the cab. He slammed the door and the cab, steaming out little ropes of exhaust, moved away from there.
He stood there and watched her go. Sentiment had nothing to do with it, although he knew that if he gave into the feeling that was all there, moist liquid rolling inside him, he would never get out of the vat if once he opened the tap. No, this time it was not sentiment. He looked after her with wonder.
She had been with him for no more than a day. In that time she had seen him kill one man, watched him leave the room to kill two more, lived through a nearly-successful attempt on her life to see him kill yet another two. She had made love to him, pumped him dry, taken everything that had happened and at the end it was she who had comforted him.
She was one remarkable, tough broad and that was all there was to it.
And she had gone through all of this on the down-end of a speed cycle.
Too much. Too much. Wulff watched the taxi out of sight and then very slowly, checking his rear and sides, he trudged down the sidewalk after her. Where she could ride he could, for the moment, only walk. He took off his hat to her. Also his badge—if he still had a badge that is—and about thirty-two years of knowledge.
Remarkable. She was absolutely remarkable. She beat him cold.
He wondered if he would ever see her again.
XI
Severo felt the nervousness hit him again. He had felt pretty good behind the two locked doors making his calls and better yet when he had called in the reinforcements. Now he had the place absolutely locked up tight. This clown Wulff had almost gotten through to him because Severo had not taken the proper precautions, but that was mere sloppiness. It would not happen again. Now he had the situation absolutely under control. There was a cordon of the finest, toughest men anyone could command ringing the place and if anyone even thought of penetrating those defenses he was out of his mind. This Wulff had knocked over a steel townhouse in Manhattan, that was the story on him anyhow, but just let him try it here. Just let him try it. They would take his grenades and his incendiary devices and give them back, all of them, right up his ass.
But the nervousness was there. It was a little roaring fire in his belly which was being stoked, gradually but incessantly by little scraps of information. First was the word that he had somehow broken out, with the girl no less, of the miserable rooming house where he had been holed up. Then impossibly, he had not only gotten away from the Mercedes, which had figured since he had obviously gotten back to the room, but he had knocked the car off the road and had killed two men. And then there was the growing knowledge—and this was the worst of all because it had been building up in the back of his mind from all the other pieces—that he had given Wulff the right data on the shipment tomorrow night. Time and place, chapter and verse.
That had been his mistake. He should have concocted something else for the guy just as he had concocted the whole story of running out on the business. But how was he to think, once he talked his way out of this spot, that Wulff would be able to get away? If the guy was gullible enough to have fallen for that piece of shit song and dance which Severo had made up for him, then he was surely so dumb that they should have been able to have taken him out with one shot in a matter of hours.
Yet there was the guy now out of contact and by all lights he might well show up tomorrow night.
What it came down to, Severo admitted sourly, pacing the grounds restlessly outside, was that he had cracked. Severo had cracked. Under stress, the pressure and tension and knowledge that he was in the toughest spot of his life and that this guy Burt Wulff could actually, genuinely kill him, he had failed to invent details but instead had blurted out the whole story. It gave little credit to him, that was all. Severo, who thought that he was impermeable and knew all the moves, had buckled under the knife.
If something went wrong tomorrow night there was going to be all hell to pay. So far he had handled this right, he thought. It was all his own show and they were letting him call the shots on it since it was in his territory, but if the guy actually got through and fucked the deal up tomorrow, Severo was going to be in far more trouble than a lot of people above might think he was worth. There would be only one way, consequently, to deal with him then.
Severo didn’t even want to think about it.
He jumped as he saw a large Cadillac come up the drive, heading toward him at least ten miles an hour faster than it had any business doing on his property, and then as the car swerved and slowed, he forced himself to relax. The men surrounding the place were absolutely trustworthy. They would let absolutely nothing through unless it had been checked out. Cursing himself for breaking open for the second time that day—but the first time in the study, crying, with all the doors closed could not count because no one could ever see him there—Severo strode toward the Cadillac, a car he had never seen before.
A tall man wearing dark glasses got out of the car on the driver’s side. He was travelling alone. He took one step as if checking the ground and then waited, allowing Severo to come up to him.
Severo scuttled up to the tall man, aware as almost never before of his awkwardness, and stood there. The tall man who was wearing a heavy overcoat despite the comparative warmth. He looked at him, both hands in pockets, with seeming impassiveness.
“Yes?” Severo said, furious with himself again. This was his ground, his house, his terrain. What was he doing running up to this guy like a butler?
He should, by all rights, have been in the house, waiting for the guy to come to him. He was not himself. Godammit, he was falling apart and it all traced itself back to this Wulff. He was going to have to kill the son of a bitch himself to get any peace. All right. All right then. If that was the only way, he would do it.
“Severo?” the tall man said.
“Yes.”
“Severo, you’ve done a piss-poor, fucked-up job.”
“It’s my job and I’ll handle it my way,” he said. “Who the hell are you—”
“You’re no fucking good, Severo. You’re smalltime. You’re out here on the Bay because you’re minor league, do you understand that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, although with a thrill of terror he realized that he knew exactly what the man was talking about. “You let me handle this my way all the way through to the end, and then tell me if you have any complaints.” It did not sound like defiance. It sounded like the whining of a small boy.
“If you go on handling this your way, Severo, we’ll all be six feet underground,” the tall man said. He held himself lightly alert, hands still deep in pockets and Severo realized then exactly what he was doing and what was going to happen to him. But it was unfair. It was profoundly unfair. They had never even given him
a chance.
“Get out of here,” he said. “How the hell did you get through anyway? There’s a roadblock—”
“You stupid fuck,” the man said and he sounded almost pitying, “after all you’ve managed to do so far, do you really think we’d let you seal yourself up here with your own men? Who the hell do you think is out there?”
Severo turned to run but he could not. His frame was locked, body frozen. He had never been any good at this kind of thing anyway. He could talk his way out of a tight spot and he could put the screws on others but when it came down to a matter of body, he could not function. That was one of the reasons he had lived to seal himself in; why he did his business over the telephone.
He saw everything. He saw the dark man lift the gun out of his pocket, take careful aim and fire. For one instant Severo’s heart and hands fluttered desperately, but almost instantly he relaxed. He was dead. He knew he was dead.
He began to realize how a woman must feel when she is about to be raped and realizes that there is nothing, absolutely nothing she can do to stop it. Lay yourself back honey and just enjoy. Death was coming out of the gun and he realized that he had wanted it, had always wanted it; it was one of the reasons why he had ordered so many others killed. Bringing to them what he had so terribly wanted for himself. The Golden Rule.
The man shot him in the heart and Severo staggered backward two steps and fell, a little flower or insect opening up in his chest, burrowing, burrowing away.
The dark man looked down upon him from a great height with an expression which Severo knew because it had been on his own face so very many times.
His last thought was that he hadn’t really been lying to Wulff; when you came right down to it he hadn’t been lying at all. He had always wanted to get out of the junk business.