by Barry, Mike
Díaz said nothing, did not move, and then in a single spasmodic gesture his hand came out for the gun. It was a well-timed grab. Wulff could admire it—the tension and the control and the way in which Díaz had shielded his intention until the last moment, all necessity masked until he had sprung—but the man was hurt and in fear; he could not coordinate to the best of his ability, and the single spasming reach went far wide, threw him off balance. Díaz fell back on the floor. Coming out of his crouch, Wulff methodically kicked him near but not exactly in the solar plexus; a blow there had to be controlled, or it was killing. He did not want to kill Díaz just yet. The man let out a low scream, and then he simply lay there, arms rolling out above his head, legs spread, in an attitude of submission and despair. Eyes closed, he seemed to be waiting for the perfect blow that would lead him toward ascension.
Wulff looked down at him and said, “All right. Names, dates. Addresses.”
Díaz said nothing, breathing in shallow little gasps. Tremors moved up and down the length of his body. Blood from the short man, still moving in thick ribbons, trickled near Wulff’s feet. Distractedly he rubbed a little of it into the polished linoleum surface of the floor. Almost instantly the linoleum began to fade. Cheap. Cheap goods. There was absolutely no quality control at any level anymore.
“Come on,” Wulff said after a while. “You can talk now. Tell me.”
Díaz lay there. It would be interesting to study the psychology of a man who had reached absolute hopelessness, Wulff thought, who had moved from control to its utter loss within a period of half an hour, but he did not have the time for that now. Besides, he had seen all of that before. “Names and addresses,” he said, “or I’ll kick you again, and this time I won’t go low.”
Squinting, thrashing, rolling on the floor, Díaz began to talk. He told Wulff what he wanted to know, with admirable specifics, and he did not stop at any private confidences about the personalities involved. Wulff listened without comment. It was highly interesting. He would not have imagined, having gone this far in, that there was this much of a new echelon left. It just went to show you that enterprise was endless.
“All right,” Wulff said when the man was finished. “Thank you very much.” He leveled the gun at Díaz and shot him in the head three times, very fast, making the blood jump, the skull slam against the wall. Then he put the gun away and went out of the room and started immediately upon his final mission.
VI
David Williams, the twenty-five-year-old black patrolman who had been the rookie in the squad car the night that Wulff had discovered Marie Calvante, who had first shared, then joined Wulff’s mission against the organization, who had been almost knifed to death near a methadone center on Lenox Avenue, had almost been killed by Wulff in Los Angeles before an attack had caused them to rejoin forces against the bigger enemy; David Williams, who had given it all up at the age of twenty-four to come back to his pregnant wife and small house in St. Albans, feeling like a burned-out case, who now wanted only a little bit of the peace that life had denied him; Williams, who had been part of the squad of special cops who had been put together to trap Wulff in New York, and then, after apprehension, had watched him escape from the courtroom; David Williams, who had had at least fifteen years of very complicated experience jammed into something less than seven months, sat across a desk in the office of the assistant commissioner and said for the third time that week to the third person, the third level of hierarchy, that he had no idea where Wulff was.
“We’re not saying that you’re in contact with him anymore,” the assistant commissioner said. “We believe that there’s a complete break there. Still, we had hoped you might have some ideas. Maybe you had gotten a call or a letter from him.”
“This man doesn’t write letters,” Williams said, “and he would call only if he wanted something. He doesn’t want anything more from me. I mean, he may want a lot more from me, but he knows that that’s finished. He’s an honorable man. He knows that if he called on me I’d probably want to help him but I’d have to break the law to do it, and I’m not going to do that.” He almost said “do that again,” caught himself. The commissioner’s office was pretty sure, but without a grain of hard proof, that it had been Williams who had been working side by side with Wulff during the Los Angeles shootout; that during the month when Williams had mysteriously jumped the department, his home, and the East Coast, he had been participating on the hard end of Wulff’s mission, but they had never been able to make the tie; the only people who could tie Williams directly to Wulff were dead, and Williams wanted to keep it that way. He would just as soon stay with the NYPD now. He had functioned at all levels of the system in his life, first hating it, then surrendering to it, then becoming joyfully part, then turning on it with Wulff in an attempt to bring it down by outreaching, but now, at the end of it, with a deep knife scar in his belly and a world’s worth of pain in memory, he wanted nothing but to stay out, stay under, stay away for the rest of his life. That included giving Wulff any kind of help, or for that matter, participating in bringing him down. He did not care anymore. It was something that a lot of men took forty years or more to learn, but Williams had accepted it at the deepest level at barely a quarter of a century: nothing mattered but to survive. You hung on, you got as much life as you could, death would take you soon enough, and it would be permanent; in the meantime, you did what you could to stave death off. Hero or martyr, poltroon or tyrant, death was all the same to you. It did not matter. So you held on. “I’m sorry,” Williams said after a long pause, all of this going through him while the commissioner sat tolerantly but impatiently on the other side of the desk, tapping with his knuckles and rubbing a small area to a high shine. “If I could help you, I would, but there’s no contact.”
“This man is dangerous. He’s damned dangerous. We shouldn’t have let him get away,” the commissioner said. “Goddamnit, that was a royal fuckup! How we could have let this man get out of a crowded courtroom is beyond me. It was the stupidest goddamned thing I’ve seen in twenty-six years of police work.” He looked sullenly at the polished spot and worked then to obliterate it. “Of course, I didn’t see it,” he said. “I wasn’t there.”
“May I be excused, commissioner?” Williams said.
The commissioner stared at him. “I don’t think you understand why you were called in here. You were deeply involved with this man.”
“I know that. But I’m not anymore.”
“Your involvement with him was greater than that of any other person in his life.”
“I doubt that very much, commissioner,” Williams said levelly.
“I’m not talking about his personal life. I mean when he started to get involved in this business. For Christ’s sake!” the man said, and pushed back his chair and stood. “This man is a murderer. He’s killed over five hundred people, and he’s still at large. There are indications that he’s been in Detroit and somehow got down to Phoenix or somewhere near there in the Southwest. I don’t know what the hell he’s done in Phoenix yet; we won’t get the reports on that for a while, but he seems to have bombed out an assembly plant in Detroit because it might have contained drugs. Where does it end, goddamnit?”
“I don’t know, commissioner.”
“This has got to come to a finish. This man is our responsibility, don’t you see that? In a certain sense, all of this can be said to be on our heads. We had him on our payroll, we wind up with him in custody, and then we lose him, he disappears somewhere into the Midwest, and the next thing we hear, he’s blowing up factories…. What does the man want?”
“I think he wants to blow up the drug trade, commissioner.”
“Well, that’s just fine,” the commissioner said, “but he wants to blow up the world with it.”
“Maybe if he had been allowed to do his job within the system, he wouldn’t have come to this point. Maybe it’s your fault for that too. Maybe it was the system that killed him and sent him outside of it.”<
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The commissioner turned, his face old and parched in the gray half-light that was cast through the stones from the courtyard. “Whose side are you on, patrolman?” he said.
“Are you saying I’m on his? I’m not on his. I’m on mine. But you’ve got to see it his way, too. He lost his girl, commissioner. He lost someone he loved. She was murdered. One of our men murdered her.”
“I’m not sure about that. I’ve heard it around, but there’s no proof, absolutely no proof at all, and we’ll never get any now. Even if that’s true, one rotten cop—”
“It isn’t a matter of a rotten cop. The system is rotten, and it makes almost everybody turn out that way.”
“All right, Williams,” the assistant commissioner said after a pause, “this isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“But it couldn’t. It couldn’t get us anywhere, because you don’t even know what you want. You just want to find someone to blame for your own predicament, for what you call your own fuckup. This whole thing is stuck on the NYPD, and you know it. I don’t mean his escape, I mean what started Wulff off in the first place. It was built right into the system,” Williams said, “and he was forced to it step by step until he went over the edge and there was no one to haul him back. I’m not going to take it, commissioner. I don’t have to take it. It isn’t me who sent him out there, it’s you and what you represent, and you know it. You’re going to have to look for your own goddamned causes,” Williams said, and he stood then. He had not known until that moment about the extent of his rage, but there it was, building and stoking within him, forming little drops of perspiration that he could feel moving like animals up and down the ridges of his back. “And you’re going to have to live with this in whatever place you live, because goddamnit, if there isn’t an honest cop in this whole damned department, the couple of hundred that you might have left, who aren’t cheering him on, who don’t want to see him go on and on until he blows up everything and proves what every one of these cops knows in his heart anyway. That one man operating single-handedly can do a job that a thousand honest men within the system can’t. The system isn’t for them, it’s for the criminal, it’s for the shit-purveyors,” Williams said, and turned and walked out of the office, leaving the commissioner standing there, the little astonished bulb of his face blinking and receding in his memory. Jesus, Williams thought as he went down the grimy receding corridor, little shaking waves of rage seeming to carry him, disconnected, from the floor, Jesus Christ, that wasn’t bright at all, was it, was it really, now? I had no business doing that. I’m in enough goddamned trouble in this PD anyway, and now I’m called on the carpet by the assistant commissioner and wind up attacking him.
That wasn’t bright at all. I’m not going to get anywhere with that kind of shit, I’m going to blow myself right out of the nice little house and the nice little career and salary plan at exactly the time that I’ve decided that this is the only way that I can stay sane. And yet, as clerks and cops and citizens drifted by him, as he went quickly through the ripped and dirtied halls of the municipal building toward the outside, Williams could not keep from himself the knowledge that he was smiling, nor conceal the realization that there was a bounce and drive in his step that had not been there for a very long time.
Since he had come into Los Angeles, as a matter of fact.
VII
Cohen lived by a freeway on the outskirts of Shreveport in a large, high house and thought about drugs all the time. He was not in the business in a big way, but soon all of that would change. For the time being he worked as the sales manager of the largest Chevrolet dealership in the New South—or at least that was the way it was billed in the Times-Picayune when the owners got fancy and went into a full regional campaign—and he spent almost all of the time not actually involved in work in planning how, with the top echelons staggering or dead, he would move into a position of power within the business within the next couple of months.
Cohen did not have everything that he needed yet, but he was getting there. He had contacts and sources and a small amount of credit, which he was building slowly month by month into the possibility of a really large pipeline. More significantly, he had made contact in recent months with a strange Mexican named Díaz, who represented himself as having access to a mother lode of the purest stripe, for which he needed a few chosen American distributors. Cohen had a good reputation on the inside; Díaz had heard that he came highly recommended, and it was agreed that Díaz would be coming into Shreveport within the next weeks to work out the details of an agreement, which, although it was still nebulous, struck Cohen as being among the most promising he had ever heard of. It might make him, along with a few others, one of the truly important figures in the business as it began to shake down into new form. It might even put him at the absolute top, all depending. In any event, Cohen could wait. A long time ago, when he had first gotten into the business on the very fringes, he had been a restless and impatient young man, but he had long since learned the virtues of taking the long view. If there was any way to survive in the business, it was in not being greedy. Cohen was prepared to wait.
His patience had well-served him already. The mass murderer who went under the guise of the Lone Wolf had swept through the country a few months before, toppling figures at the highest level of the network, and Cohen had had a long and impressive lesson in the power of being obscure. If he had pushed hard, if he had willed himself into a precipitate rise in the organization, he might have been at a high level of notoriety; might even have been a Calabrese, who he understood was the shadow figure behind the manipulations in the Southern district. But he had not; he had settled for pushing and arranging strictly as a sideline, and so it had been Calabrese who had died on that beach in the Miami massacre, and not William Cohen. It was not worth being a Calabrese if you were going to come to an end like that: that was the thing that had occurred to Cohen as soon as he had heard the news. No one needed power and wealth if you were going to end on a beach at sixty-two years old, with bullets in your head, water lapping into your ears. Comfort; comfort and survival were enough. Also, Cohen had a habit that was more important to him than power; he sometimes thought that the reason he had drifted into distribution to begin with was that it was the easiest, least humiliating way of keeping himself supplied.
The habit was at about a hundred dollars retail a day, which was a hell of a habit, Cohen realized, except that he wasn’t paying retail, he was going wholesale or a little bit under that, and it had no effect on him other than to make him feel good. He sure as hell wasn’t addicted, not if being off the drugs had no physical effect upon him. He could quit anytime he wanted. It was just that he felt so much better when he was on the stuff, that was all. His normal, pleasant personality reasserted itself; he was the same optimistic, hopeful man that he had been at twenty-three when he had started off in the agency as a salesman fresh from college, rather than the rather nervous, unhappy thirty-four-year-old he had been fifteen years ago when he had had his first contact with smack at a party. It was true that his old drive was there only in flashes and that it was harder and harder to take the dealership seriously, but that was as much a consequence of getting older as of supporting a mild heroin habit. Besides that, without heroin, getting older would have made him even more bitter.
He lived in a house by a freeway in which there had once been a wife and children, but, thank God, they had not been there for several years: the divorce had been amicable and without scandal, but they were gone, and good riddance to them. In San Francisco, now living with her parents. They could stay there for the rest of his life; he didn’t even care if he never saw the kids again. No custody battles for Cohen. Now he had a mistress, or at least a semimistress, who worked as a hairdresser and came to see him two or three nights a week and stayed until the morning with him and otherwise stayed out of his life. Every time she left the house he would give her seventy-five or a hundred dollars for a gift. What the hell? That didn’t make her a
whore; it was just a gift freely offered, not for services rendered, a means of showing his affection for her, and June’s taking the gift didn’t make her a whore in her eyes either; they had long since established that she was not at all embarrassed by the money. In fact, the idea of giving her money after every visit had been hers in the first place, not his; she said that she knew it would be easier for both of them if he gave her a gift every time he wanted to rather than feel an overwhelming sense of obligation to buy her something really incredibly expensive for birthdays or Christmas. And he was just the sort of generous man who would want to give her a gift every time that she was there; both of them knew that. So it had been a very satisfactory arrangement. Everyone down at the dealership knew June; he took her often enough to the parties and conventions and end-of-the-year special deals for the top salesmen, and no one thought any less of him or her because they were together. It had been a completely friendly divorce, and since it everything had been peaceful and happy. And June knew nothing about his habit at all, or at least she had never mentioned it; she would have to know something, maybe, going to the bathroom at night, when he would leave all the paraphernalia around, but she never said a word, and sure as hell Cohen didn’t bring it up. If she had, he would have told her everything she wanted to know, except for the fact that he was dealing in it, of course. If she got into the area of dealing, she would have to go.