by Barry, Mike
He could use a coup. His luck had been lousy for a long time; sometimes recently he had given in to the feeling that he was truly doomed. Of course, he had a small amount of power left, he had people who would free-lance for him, and he had a cache of heroin, small but nonetheless pure, which he had been moving around with him over recent months; a cache which in certain circumstances might be leveraged to his benefit, but the problem was that he was dipping into it himself; more and more; against all the principles with which he had originally entered this business, he was beginning to dabble with the stuff himself, and that was something that a dealer simply could not do. An eyedropper here, a little bit of a snort there … He had not, thank God, taken to the needle yet.
Still, at the rate things were going, why should he not? Somewhere in his future lay his own habit; at certain times he could grasp it, sense it, as he might intimate his own depth or the presence of a long-ago woman in his bed. Up north there was a crazy American who had gone crazy, was going around the country shooting all of the leadership and destroying the existing distribution channels; he was even killing down to the second and third levels, so that it was impossible within any brief period of time to reconstruct supply and the mechanics of the organization, and even from this distance, from the remove of what was little more than a free-lancer’s position, Díaz had felt the shocks; not only was the American screwing up his business, but Operation Intercept two years ago, the government of the United States cutting off free flow through the border, had made things exquisitely difficult for him; he was still recovering from that. Of course, Operation Intercept had been largely a fraud; it had been little more than the government cutting off one source of supply so that the other could have freer channels, be better manipulated—South America’s loss, in short, was Turkey’s gain. It was the kind of vicissitude you had to put up with in almost any business; Díaz understood that, but Intercept had been infuriating and had marked the beginning, right there, of what had been the turnaround in his career; no longer a simple matter of garnering supply and finding a few men to work on a piece basis, but rather the whole thing—negotiations, manipulations, politicking, hard risks. Intercept had made things much more difficult for him, although it had made a number of other people whom he knew rich.
But that was behind him now. His troubles of the last two years, he knew, were behind him, if only he could bring this off properly. From the moment he had met the American, had begun to talk with him, had started to put the outlines of the deal together, he could see that there was a way out which had been offered him. This American knew drugs, and he was carrying them. Taking him over, taking his supply, was promising enough, but even more promising than that was the prospect of where it might lead him. The information that the American might be able to give him was potentially fascinating; it could lead, for all he knew, back to new, rich, completely untapped sources of supply that would give Díaz an edge for all time. Maybe this was all fantasizing; all right, he had a tendency, maybe, to imagine more of a situation than the situation might actually produce, but at least you had to start with an element of hope. “Be hopeful,” he said to the short, bitter man whom he had hired to guard him in the room that night, to disarm the American, and to help him take control of the situation. “You must be hopeful.”
“Whatever you say,” the short, bitter man said, and helped himself to another drink from the bottle on Díaz’s nightstand. Díaz looked at the man, at the tight walls of his room, and watched the tremor as the short man lifted the glass to his lips; he was not fully in control of himself. If anything, the short man was a weak bodyguard; he had energy and the proper amount of menace, but at some deep level coordination and force had been lost. Still, you had to do the best you could with what was in hand; Díaz was armed too. “I am very hopeful.”
“We must do this quickly and cleanly,” Díaz said.
“I expect so.”
“Do you think that you can do that?”
The short man shrugged. “I will do whatever you say.”
“I have reason to believe that this man has access to large amounts of drugs,” Díaz said. “I do not think that this is any small operation here; I think that it can lead rather to some very important things. If you cooperate, if you do well, you can be part of them.”
The short man said nothing, looked at the floor. After a long time he took another sip of his drink and put it down on the nightstand with a crash, the tumbler clattering. “I think I’d like to get some rest now,” he said.
“You can rest here.”
“I could go down to my room—”
“No,” Díaz said. “I would feel much better about the matter if you would stay here. You can rest on the bed.”
The short man looked up at him, a single, glinting stare, and then went to the bathroom, leaving the door open. He stood there urinating, only his arm and shadow protruding against the door ledge, and after a long time there was a surge of water, and the man came back, leaned against the wall, leaned there without motion, staring at Díaz. “You seem pretty nervous,” he said.
“Not really.”
“Who is this American, anyway?”
“A man of no significance. A man who simply has some items which I may be able to use. Which we might be able to use.”
“What are they? Shit?”
Díaz said, “Yes, that is what they are.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?” the short man said. “You could have saved us both a hell of a lot of trouble if you had said that in the first place. For shit I wait,” he said, and coughed, little sprinkles of moisture coming from behind his hand. “For shit I definitely wait.” He gave out a single groan of laughter and went inside his pocket and took out a .38-caliber pistol, looked at it with interest. “All the time in the world,” he said.
Something about this new aspect of the bodyguard made Díaz tremble, and abruptly his bowels felt weak. He stood and went to the bathroom and closed the door, sat with his pants down around his ankles for a long time, but nothing came, his bowels subsided, and he knew then what he had come into the bathroom for. He stared for some time at the closed medicine cabinet, trying to put down the urge, and finally he could not; he stood, his pants still bunched around his ankles, and shuffled toward the cabinet, opened it, carefully took out the bottle with the stopper and from another part of the cabinet a delicate eyedropper.
Slowly, slowly he unfurled the bottle.
III
At exactly eight-thirty Wulff walked into the hotel room on the eighth floor where Díaz had directed him, and as soon as he had passed the open door, found it slammed behind him abruptly, he felt the situation shift around him, then went into a lower, cooler perspective, the action slowing up, as it often did when he found himself suddenly at danger pitch. A short man, back to the door, was covering him with a pistol, looking at him out of curiously disinterested eyes; at the other side of the room, Díaz, also with a pistol, was smoking a cigarette and looking at him almost with amusement. High, thin vapors were in the room, cutting underneath the smoke; they might have been perfume, but Wulff had smelled it before; it could only be the dense odors of marijuana. Then he saw that the odors were coming from Díaz and the cigarette he was holding, and that the more common odor of smoke was coming from the short man, who was very calmly lighting an ordinary cigarette one-handed now, his pistol at Wulff’s belly.
“Too much,” Wulff said unnecessarily, “too much.”
“Quite to the point,” Díaz said. “Frisk him down.”
The short man came close to him, cigarette between his lips, his hands extended for frisking, and passed them up and down the levels of Wulff’s body. He paused somewhere in the area of the hip, his eyes giving a little gleam of pleasure. “Right here,” he said.
“Disarm him,” Díaz said.
Wulff said, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“You wouldn’t do it?” the short man said. “Do you mean that I need permission?” The cigarette bobbe
d in his lips; he took it out, looked at it without interest. “You can give me permission, then.”
Wulff shook his head, held his ground, and said, “I came here to make a deal, not for this.”
“Then you should have no objection to being disarmed,” Díaz said. “After all, coming here with a pistol is hardly an example of good faith, is it?”
“Covering me with guns when I walk in doesn’t show faith either.”
“Don’t give me your evaluations of faith,” Díaz said. “This is a faithless profession, a faithless world. One must protect oneself as one is able. I am trying to defend my interests.”
Wulff looked at the man in the distance, little trick shadows of light playing in and around his face, giving him a moody and sensual aspect, which was not, certainly, what Díaz was intending. Then he looked down at the shorter man, who had curled himself now into a half-crouch, his eyes alert but questioning, something tentative in his gesture. He seemed to be awaiting further instructions. But as the two of them swung their glances back to Díaz, he seemed to be awaiting instructions also, almost as if there were some unseen party in the room from whom all of them were taking orders. Wulff could feel that sense of presence too, and he knew exactly what it was; it was hard to put your finger on exactly, unless you were as sensitive to the issue as he had become. The other force in the room was the drugs themselves. They played their music, whispered their message, created their own necessity. “No,” Wulff said.
Díaz shrugged and said delicately, as if with enormous pain, “I am afraid, then, that we are going to have to be forcible.”
“Everybody’s forcible,” Wulff said. “Everybody’s willing to use force, everyone talks of death, but no one knows what it really is. You ought to understand what you’re talking about anyway—that’s the least that could be asked.” And he put an elbow suddenly into the short man’s face, hitting it dead center, the nose, as if eager to yield, pulping under the point of the thrust. The short man screamed once, unwillingly, and staggered away, and Wulff fell on top of him, reaching for his gun.
A shot hit above his head; he could feel the little flakes of plaster falling, but it was almost peripheral to his purposes. A missed shot meant nothing; you were either dead or you drove straight through it. The second bullet, from across the room, came even closer, driving a path only a few inches above him, but by that time Wulff was wrestling and clawing with the short man toward certainty, his fingers falling around the cold and deadly surfaces of the gun, and then he had it free, had yanked it up and high above the grasp of the man underneath him, and in the same motion he kneed the man hard in his stomach, feeling the groan of deflation, the air coming past him in a sour explosion, and he kicked the man away, rising.
Díaz was in the same position that Wulff had seen him last, crouched a little, perhaps, the gun extended, trying then to get off another shot, but Wulff knew that he was not going to make it, could see and sense the hesitation in the man even before he had started his own plunge across the room. The fact was that if Díaz was going to kill him, he would have done so already; he had had two shots in open territory, and a third as Wulff had come free with the gun, but the third had not even been taken, and that could only mean that there was at some level in Díaz the absence of the willingness to kill. Of itself that meant nothing; it made Díaz neither a better man nor worse, it was merely a character trait, or like another part of the physiognomy, but one thing it sure as hell did indicate: Díaz was in the wrong business. You had no business messing with guns or men who had guns unless you were perfectly willing to use them. He came in low in a hurtling dive under Díaz’s extended gun hand, rolled against the man’s knee, and toppled him. He could feel the surprisingly thick weight of Díaz tumbling down and around, and then the two of them were rolling in opposite directions. Somewhere in the distance the short man was groaning.
Wulff got a shot off in that direction reflexively, half-turning as he came out of the roll, putting the shot in the direction from which he had heard the groan, and the short man screamed. It was less than twenty feet, a reasonable shot, and hard to miss under even these circumstances, but the scream was surprising anyway, shocking in the little cramped space of the room, and he quivered, felt the need to put out the scream as quickly as possible, not to let it take its normal course, and so he put another shot into the short man, this one slightly lower, penetrating his neck and causing a small crown of blood to leap out at the flowered and open space. The short man warbled once in a deep, suffering tenor, as if he were experimenting with some difficult line of song, and then put his hands to his neck and fell to the floor, kicked once, froglike, and lay there spewing blood, the line of that blood a trail to lead back to the head. Wulff turned from him and looked at Díaz, who had stumbled to a crouch at the far corner of the room, the gun flapping in his hand, shaking there uselessly. A broken wrist, obviously. Wulff smiled at that; there was something appropriate about a broken wrist in the gun hand, if only because it made real all of the weakness that he had already sensed in Díaz, the inability to shoot already there with the wrist whole, and he went over, quite deliberately now, feeling quite at peace, quite at ease, and kicked the gun out of the man’s hand. It went spinning across the room. He looked at Díaz then, the uneven damp blotches coming out on the spaces of his cheeks, the internalized glare of the eyes, and said, “That was stupid.”
Díaz said nothing. He looked up at Wulff, a delicate, almost poetic kind of pain oozing through the spaces of his cheeks. The pain was exquisite; Díaz looked transcendent. Sweat came out of him more furiously, and with it, the odor that Wulff had smelled upon coming into the room intensified. “It doesn’t help, does it?” Wulff said.
Díaz blinked.
“The pot,” Wulff said. “Anyone could have told you that. It doesn’t act as a mask for feeling at all. Anything that happens to you is just going to be felt more deeply. That goes for pain too.”
He brought down his gun, still holding it around the butt, and pressed it carefully against Díaz’s wrist, putting pressure on the point of the break. The man yelped once, like a dog, and then tears mingled with the sweat.
“All right,” Wulff said, relaxing the pressure slightly. “All right, now. Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what you had in mind.”
Díaz shook his head. Wulff put the gun down a little harder, working it into the break now, kneading it. Díaz screamed and fell back, lay on the floor gasping, looking up at him. “All right,” he said, “all right, then.”
“I’m listening,” Wulff said.
“I can’t talk.”
“Oh yes you can,” Wulff said, and took up the gun and leveled it at Díaz with his hand on the trigger, and let the man consider that for a while. “I think you can make it. What are you doing? I want to know what you had in mind.”
Groaning, retching, but getting the words out distinctly and at length, Díaz told him.
IV
Wulff’s career had been interesting long before he had gotten into the business of single-handedly trying to blow the international drug trade out of the water. He had started off in the NYPD as a foot cop, and when things had broken open in Vietnam, he had enlisted in the Army, probably the only cop in New York who had done so. It was a voluntary decision; he was draft-exempt by nature of his profession, but he was interested in the war and compelled by something that when he was much younger he might have called a sense of duty; in any case, he wanted to see what the hell was going on there. He found out, spending two years in Saigon and out in the field in combat artillery, and by the time he came back it was with one overwhelming conviction: in Vietnam he had seen the future, and he wanted no part of it.
He also got his first taste of the international drug trade, although he didn’t think of it as that at the time. He was concentrating upon a smaller perspective, that of Vietnam itself, and it seemed to Wulff that the so-called battle for the independence of the republic of South Vietnam was nothing of the sort; it was, in
fact, merely a drug war under ideological baggage. The stakes were high, and a number of interests were fighting for their piece of the action. Who these interests were was a little bit on the clouded side, but there appeared to be at least three or four factions, of whom the American command was only one, and the least successful. In any case, the drugs coalesced in Saigon. Shit moved through the area like water through the pipelines of a major city, and it became increasingly clear to Wulff that more than anything else the war was being fought to determine who moved how much shit and in what direction. And the streets of Saigon had shown the effects of the drug war; he had seen there a vision of how America, faced by uncontrolled distribution, would itself look in ten years: the bombed-out crevices and faces of the city blending in his mind toward a kind of inseparability, so that the faces and the city were one, and all of them were being broken over and over again under the jabs and torment of the needle.
He had come out of Saigon, then, a fairly disillusioned man, and a bitter one, but he was also at that point at least realistic. If the international drug trade was one of the key factors in the world today, and if it was killing people by the millions, he at least accepted the fact that he could hardly do anything about it. It would be best to live a reasonable civilian life, maybe to try to move up in the department, become a detective, just get as far away from the streets as possible. Meet a nice girl and get a house in Maspeth. Unfortunately, the NYPD had seen fit to put Wulff on the narcotics squad.