by Barry, Mike
Now, the NYPD had not done this to be malicious or even humorous; they had done it because in those days, the late sixties, when Wulff came back, narco was, next to vice, considered the softest and most enjoyable detail the department had to offer, and they gave it to him as a present, a guilt offering for the services he had rendered in Vietnam on behalf of the department. Vice would have been the ultimate plum for personnel, of course, but vice was simply too tightly controlled; no outsider could get onto that softest and most rewarding of details. But narco had been almost as good; there was plenty of graft and easy assignments, and now and then, under political or journalistic pressure, a routine sweep where the informants would be busted and sent back quietly on the streets fifteen days later or until the next exposé. Narco and the informants worked together, and things went along pretty smoothly; it was certainly a tight and commodious operation, and it did serve an important function, which was to assist and promote the flow of drugs through New York City, so everyone was happy.
Unfortunately, Wulff took it seriously—that is, he took the idea of being a narco seriously; he entered upon the squad with the idea that the job was to eliminate or at least harass the drug dealers rather than to keep them going. He could not be blamed for taking it seriously; he had the advantage of having seen in Saigon exactly what happened when the drug trade took over the essential administration of human affairs. But taking it seriously did him no good at all; it merely stoked his rage without there seeming to be any outlet. All of narco was predicated upon graft and getting along in good times and the busting of informants in bad to give the appearance of control. Of course, the informants, once the good times came again, had to be paid off for their services, which led to more graft and getting along, which meant merely that the operation was cyclical; but then, Wulff discovered that this applied to most of human affairs and should not, perhaps, be taken personally.
Still, he might have gotten along. He met a good woman and became engaged to her; they negotiated a down payment on a house and planned a wedding, and because Marie Calvante was beautiful and loved him, Wulff felt that he might be able to exist in a world in which narco seemed to be the median of human affairs. But things from that point of resolution had deteriorated so quickly that, looking back, Wulff was unable to pinpoint exactly that time at which it had all been destroyed.
Had it been when he had busted the informant for possession? Well, maybe, maybe: the man had been laughing at him, defying him, taunting Wulff with his invulnerability, just grinning and glinting at him in that bar, and Wulff could not bear it anymore; he had taken the informant right in with his cache. But that in itself hadn’t been the turning point; a bust was a bust, after all. All right, then, was it when the lieutenant at the booking precinct had taken the informant away and had left Wulff in a small trap of a room almost as ugly as interrogation, and led Wulff to realize in two hours of pacing that the precinct was not on his side? Well, that too, but he should have seen it from the moment that he had brought the informant in. Okay, then, how about the lieutenant finally coming in and telling Wulff that it had been a false bust, there was no cache at all, an innocent man had been arrested without evidence, and what the fuck did those narcos think they were, anyway. Wulff could get into plenty of trouble for that kind of thing, and the lieutenant was damned well going to take it up the line.
Oh, that had been pretty bad, all right, and the informant laughing his way past him and out of the precinct. But it was not crucial, because it was hardly as if Wulff had been unaware before of corruption. Of course, precinct was closer to certain aspects of the situation than narco; of course, precinct would protect them. That hadn’t been the pinpoint either, then; he had merely learned again what he had already known—that you did not lose your temper working narco.
Okay, then, how about being yanked off narco by an angry superior and sent back on beat duty, riding sidesaddle in a car driven by a rookie? Well, that had been the beginning edge of the real killing rage; it was one thing to encounter corruption—life itself was corrupt, after all, and everyone over the age of thirteen knew that—but it was another to find the knife end of that corruption turned against you, to realize that the full force of the institutions for which he worked could be brought to bear upon him for simply having taken those institutions too seriously. Still, he might have gotten by that one too. He had pretty well determined to get out of the department; only Marie urged him to hold on, at least until they got married and got the mortage and moved into the house; after that, with all of that in his pocket he could throw everything back at them and go off for himself. But only for a few months, she urged him, only for a little while, try to hold on.
So he tried to hold on. Even the demotion might not have broken him. But what finally put him over the edge was picking up a blind homicide report on the radio of the patrol car, and his first night on duty at that, going over to a single-room-occupancy rooming house in the West Nineties, and finding out that the body the squealer was talking about, the young girl who had OD’d out, either accidentally or deliberately induced, had turned out to be his own. Marie. Marie Calvante. His fiancée. She was the one who had been lying on the fifth floor of that wretched tenement in a cold and empty room, and as he looked at her—the dull, fishlike stare of the dead, the glaze of her open eyes as her mortality had passed from her—something within Wulff had broken. It was at that time—and not a moment before—that he had made his pact against the international drug trade. He would destroy them. He would kill every single one. He would kill the men who had killed his woman, and there was nothing that they could do against him, nothing that could be held that would buy him off the quest, except a bullet, because from the moment that he had seen her, he had passed over the line. He had died, all but the functioning part of him. There was nothing more that the murderers could do.
As it turned out, it had not been the dealers who had killed his girl, after all. One by one, as he chased and killed them from New York to Vegas to Mexico and Miami, they had sworn that they had nothing to do with that murder, that they knew nothing, and it had turned out that they were telling (for perhaps the only time in their lives) the absolute truth. The murderer of Marie Calvante had turned out to be none other than his old friend, the lieutenant in the precinct where he had tried to book the informant for drug possession. The lieutenant had been tied in tight with certain interests who might find the bust embarrassing, and in his enthusiasm to please—he was very well paid—the lieutenant had not only destroyed Wulff’s case and evidence, but had arranged things that he thought would break Wulff’s spirit as well. It had been a very unfortunate decision, of course, and the lieutenant had died for it, but dead or alive, the lieutenant had affected not only Wulff’s life but about three hundred others through his gesture of overzealousness. There were a great number of people dead because Wulff had come to the decision that the drug trade and he could no longer coexist, and none of them had to be in that condition: almost all of them could have been alive if the lieutenant had not gone out of his way to please imagined superiors. Wulff at this moment could have been a married man living in a split-level with a pregnant wife and a bright future somewhere in a department of police science. It all went to show you. Instead, he was somewhere north of Mexico in a room with a dead man and a dying one, drugs all over the place, zeroing in on target.
It just went to show you, all right.
V
He got a lot of information out of Díaz. Once the man started to talk, he was inexhaustible; that was the way so many of them were, once they got into pain, became vulnerable. It was as if the urge to talk, to express themselves, to let everything be known, so long bottled within them because of the necessity for absolute cunning and control, once released, proved stronger than any impulse for retention. Wulff had found this again and again: the toughest and most brutal of bosses became almost chatty when he was facing death, when he was feeling pain; what it meant was that at the root most human beings were
the same, had the same needs and responses; and although they could be shut off by conscious will, these needs would sooner or later, given the chance to balance, reassert themselves. The most controlled and dangerous became the most vulnerable and communicative under stress, as if they were seeking, indeed welcomed, the opportunity to give up small parts of themselves, just as the most cowardly in normal circumstances would, under stress, surprisingly often turn out to be among the most courageous. It all came down to a matter of balancing action, Wulff supposed.
In any event, Díaz had plenty to say, and he gasped it out in little bursts until interrupted by pain or the need for another drink of water, which Wulff would bring him from the bathroom. The short man in the corner, having died some time before, was unavailable for duties of this sort, but Wulff did not mind: it made him feel useful. According to Díaz, a good quantity of drugs and potential successors to the old organizers were planning to descend upon Philadelphia, the bicentennial city, sometime late in the year or early in 1976, for the purpose of a general realignment and restructuring of the network. There was some irony in that they had chosen the bicentennial city at the anniversary of America to set up this kind of meeting, but if Díaz was aware of it, it did not come through in his little whimpers and gasps; it was simply a matter of setting an important meeting at a logical place at a logical time. And then too, there was going to be a lot flowing through Philadelphia in 1976, not only many tourists, but important federal personnel, all of whom might be expected to have an interest in the new arrangements.
It was for these purposes that Díaz had set up the meeting with Wulff, allegedly to buy some drugs, in truth to kill him and take his own cache. There was nothing personal to this, Díaz wanted Wulff to know; he had no quarrel with Wulff at all. It was just a matter of building up his own influence and position within the emerging line of the network-to-be. As crude as it might sound, the new positioning that would come out of Philadelphia would be at least partially the outcome of the size of each cache. The man who brought the largest amount of drugs into the city (although he would not be stupid enough to take them to any meetings, of course; he would cache them somewhere else for secret manipulations and viewings) had a good chance of coming out near the top of the organization, and Díaz was as anxious to be in that position as anyone. Not because he was naturally ambitious, Díaz pointed out weakly, but because lack of any ambition in his business would almost certainly result in elimination. There could be no halfway measures; if a man was sincerely committed to rising in the profession, he had to be willing to do anything to implement that rise. Otherwise he would find his career very quickly aborted. There were a lot of corpses resting in various areas of the continental shelf, and in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, who had only wanted to be decent businessmen and make their way without hurting anyone.
Wulff heard him out. It really took only fifteen or twenty minutes, all told; a man in great pain tends to talk in a kind of shorthand, particularly if he is trying to be communicative after many years of being the reverse. But just at the point when he seemed to have reached the end of what he had to say, Díaz lurched into a new position and began to tell Wulff about his itinerary.
He was planning a trip through the United States, it turned out, beginning just as soon as the planned business in Mexico had been concluded. Meeting Wulff in the bar and going for his cache had caused a slight delay, but in any case, it could not be put off any more than by the end of the week. At that time Díaz would leave the hotel, cross the border into Texas, and begin to make his long, slow way north, with stops scheduled at Shreveport, Mobile, and Raleigh, finally ending in Philadelphia in three or four months, depending upon what kind of connections he would make at the various cities and exactly how much complication there would be.
At every city along the way Díaz was to pick up a load of junk from a specified source.
It was a matter, the man explained, of being a negotiator, of putting together a position which would be representative of many other subsidiary interests. What he would be picking up from each of his steps would enable him, Díaz said, to go into Philadelphia in very strong bargaining position, a position, hopefully, which would be superior to anyone else’s. He might well emerge from the series of conferences and arrangements there as the most important figure. You never could tell. In any event, it was certainly worth the risk.
It was only at that that Wulff balked. Up until then what Díaz had been saying seemed credible; a little bizarre, perhaps, but then, almost everything having to do with the international drug trade was bizarre, but the business about converging on Philly, all of the second-rank elements in the country trying to carve up the territory for the next two hundred years, sounded right. At the first Continental Congress they had settled up the country for two hundred years of slavery; why not set it up for two hundred years of drugs at this one? That was acceptable. What wasn’t acceptable was the image of Díaz hopping from town to town in the southernmost part of the country trying to pick up a larger cache, working in earnest if subterranean negotiations. That somehow did not figure at all.
“You were going to kill these people,” he said.
Díaz, weakened from pain and conversation, was still able to summon some energy as he looked up at him. “No,” he said.
“You were going on a killing quest. You were going to murder your contacts in these towns so that you could show up in Philly with a lot of credit. You’re a murderer, Díaz.”
The man bit his lip, said nothing. He cast a haunted look toward the corner where the corpse of the short man lay. Deep in his eyes was burning a kind of reminiscent hope, as if he thought that the short man would come off the floor roaring and change the balance of power. “No way,” Wulff said. “He’s dead.”
Díaz said nothing this time. His left hand was splayed over his smashed wrist. “Are you going to get me help?” he said quietly, almost reasonably.
“For a broken wrist? You’ll make it.”
“I am in great pain.”
“Give me your list,” Wulff said.
“What? What’s that?”
“The people you were going to see. The sources that you were going to meet, Díaz. You must have it written down somewhere, or at least in your head. Tell me who they are.”
Díaz said, “I can’t understand you.”
“Yes you can, You understand me perfectly.”
“There is no list,” Díaz said. “Nothing is put in writing. Do you think that I would be that foolish? Do you think that any of us are so foolish?”
“Yes,” Wulff said.
“Leave me alone,” Díaz said. The outburst of confession had left him white and drained, even beyond pain, as if for the first time he had become aware of what he had said. “I have told you everything; there is nothing more to say.”
“The list.”
“My shame is entire,” Díaz said. “There is no more shame than what you have brought upon me. I appeal to you now to leave me alone.”
“All right,” Wulff said, and crouched next to the man. “If there’s no list, suppose you tell me.”
“What is this now?”
“Tell me the people you were going to see. Their names and addresses.”
Díaz said, “I cannot do that.”
“Oh yes you can.”
“I don’t care anymore,” Díaz said. “Whatever you do to me must be done. I cannot give you that information.”
Wulff had been through that before. It was not the first shattered form beside whom he had crouched, it was not the first man who had come through the first haze of pain to find resistance. In Díaz’s business there were worse things than dying or being in pain; there were the consequences of truth. Still, you had to go ahead. You had to educate them in the differences, that was all. You had to present them with alternatives worse than confession.
Wulff took his pistol and pointed it at the man. He held it almost casually, his finger easy on the trigger, just beyond range of a
desperate grab for the gun. “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to kill you.”
“What does it matter? What does this information have to do with you, why do you want it?”
“I’m going to have a party,” Wulff said. “A whole series of parties. I’m going to invite myself over to see some people, and we’re going to have some fun.”
“I cannot do that,” Díaz said, looking at the gun, his eyes pinned on it. “I just cannot.”
“Have you ever died?”
The man said nothing. His face was shattered, yet the separate parts of it seemed to be seeking realignment. “No,” he said after a time, “I have not.”
“You’re going to die,” Wulff said. “ ‘My death is in your hands,’ you can say. You can see your own death happen to you, in full consciousness, in full control. That’s something that very few men can have, you know. Most people are unconscious when they die; they’ve been sick for a while anyway. But you’ll have it in the best of health, Díaz, and that puts you in a special category. They’ll want to know all about it down in hell.”
“Listen,” Díaz said, “This is ridiculous. There is no reason for us to be enemies; surely we can cooperate. What you have against me is only a matter of speaking, a question of possession. You may have everything that I have; I give that to you fully. All that I ask is that you respect—”
“Drugs are death,” Wulff said. “Drugs are shit that goes into the body and destroys the mind and probably the soul. You’re a murderer, Díaz, you and all of the others, the cunning men who were too smart for the law and too smart for all of the procedures, the men who were going to turn the country around by giving it death for your own profit. You’re as much of a murderer as if you had taken the gun in your hand and killed people by the thousands, but you never even had the guts to look at your wreckage, were never even willing to face them down and do it on your own hook, and that makes you even worse. There must be a very special place for men like you, Díaz, the men who walled themselves off, lived in the high places, lived by the sea and in the mountains with space around you, and all of the time it was shit and death which had put you there. How does that make you feel now? You’re going to die. You’re wrong about us being in the same business, but in a way, you see, you’re right; we’re both in the death business, both dealing it, and now I’m going to give you yours.”