by Barry, Mike
“I’m doing Díaz’s business.”
“That would figure. That sure as hell would fall into place. Someone ought to do the son-of-a-bitch’s business. He sure as hell couldn’t have done it himself.”
“Where’s your cache?”
Cohen looked up at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve got some drugs here. A hell of a lot, at least, according to Díaz, but I’ll take what I can. Where are they?”
Cohen said, “You’ve got this all wrong.”
“I don’t have anything wrong.”
“I don’t have any fucking cache. I have a little private supply, that’s all. When I need some more, I know where I can score. But I don’t have anything in the house. In this town? No way.” His eyes seemed suddenly laughing and relieved. “Hell, is that what you came here for? Is that what Díaz expected? The bastard was even stupider than I thought.”
“I want the stuff.”
“I hope you killed him,” Cohen said seriously. “I really hope that you did that; a guy so stupid doesn’t deserve to live. Really? He really thought I had smack in the house? That’s the goddamnedest thing you ever heard. Hey, you mind if I stand up now? It’s pretty tough to be in a position like this, and as you can see, we’ve got no quarrel at all. Nothing’s wrong here, mister, you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist.” Cohen rolled over easily on his palms and knees, arched his back, came to a standing position, slapping dust from a pants leg. “It’s just too goddamned much,” he said. “It’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of in my life, but at least it’s all settled now, you see, there’s nothing here for you at all, so maybe you’ll just get the hell out of my house.”
Wulff sighed and hefted the gun, turned the business end around, put it deep in his palm, checked to make sure that it was on safety, and in one motion whipped it out in front of him, struck Cohen hard. The blow hit the man’s left cheekbone, and Wulff could hear the crack and splinter of bone even before Cohen’s shriek, but the shriek, high and piercing, had even more terror in it than the sound the man had made when the bullet had hit the wall. It was a satisfying sound, but Wulff was not interested in satisfaction right now; his rage had shifted to its older, more comfortable level. He kicked out, caught Cohen’s ankles behind his feet, and the man landed in a tumbling screaming heap at his feet, spread out all over the rug, holding onto the left side of his face and whimpering. Wulff stood over him, legs spread slightly, and showed the man the gun.
“Stop it,” he said. “Stop crying.”
Cohen looked up at him. His face was small and helpless. “It wasn’t much,” he said. “It was only a little.”
“But it was something.”
“Yes, it was. Yes, it was something.”
“It’s more than you would have admitted to unless I had broken your cheek. You could have told me that,” Wulff said almost gently. “You would have saved us both a lot of trouble.”
“I’m entitled,” Cohen said. “I worked hard. It wasn’t very much. It was the only fucking thing I had. You think anything else meant anything to me? It was all bullshit. But I worked, I worked hard to build up a little edge. You can’t take everything from me.”
“Where is it?”
Cohen said, “It’s in a safe-deposit box.”
“What?”
“It’s in a fucking safe-deposit box downtown.” His hand worked around in his back pocket, quivering, took out a ring of keys, thumbed one. “That’s it,” he said, “that’s the key right there. I think you broke something inside. I think that I’m bleeding in the brain.”
“You’ll live.”
“No. Really. You broke the cheekbone, but you might have gone into the brain tissue.”
“You don’t shut up, do you?” Wulff said. “Now, what the fuck am I supposed to do? I can’t get in there on my own.”
“I’ll go down tomorrow and pick it up and bring it back to you. You can wait right outside the bank.”
“I don’t intend to be here tomorrow.”
“Then there isn’t anything that I can do. I can’t do it tonight, and you sure as hell can’t break into a safe-deposit box.”
The man’s resilience was extraordinary, Wulff thought. Cohen’s house had been broken into, he had been fired at, beaten up, sustained a broken cheekbone, and screamed with irretrievable pain, and yet here, after all of it, he was still defiant. Credible, Wulff thought, because it could only be sustained, this defiance, in terms of a craziness that he was beginning to understand. It was the same craziness that drove Wulff—a refusal to admit the reality of circumstances, an inability to come to terms with the fact that they were beaten. Call it obsession, call it what you will, these little dealers and pushers and the big ones too were set apart. So was Wulff. Perhaps that was what held them together when all was done. “Give me the keys,” he said.
Cohen gave him a wondering, phased-out stare. “I told you, they won’t do any good.”
“Give them to me.”
Cohen extended the ring. Wulff took it, put it in his pocket, and then leveled the gun.
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” the man said.
“I think I’d better,” Wulff said.
“You can’t kill me. I’ve cooperated with you in every regard, I’ve given you everything you wanted.”
“But you haven’t given me your life,” Wulff said. “I’ve got to have that too, because as long as you live, you see, right up to the minute of your death, you’re still a murderer. You’re still dangerous.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Cohen said, “now, just wait a minute here …” Wulff pointed the gun at Cohen’s head and pulled the trigger in one convulsive motion. The bullet came forward, tore off the left side of Cohen’s skull, and blew it against the wall; from the open spot that had been created, blood charged in a muddy explosion, a series of spurts like semen moving out unevenly. The corpse rolled over onto the floor, kicked once in an absent way, and lay there in that peculiar and knowledgeable way of all the dead everywhere, seeming simultaneously to embrace all knowledge and to reject it, as if that knowledge, of what it was like on the other side of passage, was no longer worth passing on to the desperate and trivial living.
Wulff looked at the body with disgust and then put his gun away and went over and kicked it once in the ribs, feeling the dull give, the amorphous crackle of the useless bone. Then he went to the door and down the hallway almost absently, fingering the safe-deposit key and trying to plan his next move.
Shit. And shit again.
IX
Marie Calvante had said to him, “I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything that you want to do. If you want to quit the department, you can do it, I don’t care, we’ll get married whenever you want. In the meantime, I’ll live with you. I won’t stop you from doing anything that you feel you have to. But don’t you think that it’s better to stay in? You can’t fix anything from the outside, because once you’re out, you lose control of it, but inside, inside you can work for change. You can work to better things. Don’t you think so?”
And he had said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. You can’t change them from the inside, because they turn you into the enemy, don’t you see that, Marie? You’ve got to become one of them just to survive, that’s the way they have it rigged. Once you’re on narco, you don’t last unless you play their game, and if you go off narco to complain, they take care of you in other ways. They’ll put you on a nowhere beat in Brownsville until you’re fifty years old, that’s what the hell they’ll do.” She had been a very pretty girl, oh my, had she been pretty; there had been something heartbreaking as well to her aspect, the nature of her sensuality had been such that it seemed likely to shatter at any time, shatter into something gentle and weeping, or had that only been the way that he had felt when he had looked at her? Well, he would never know now, that was for sure. “I don’t know,” he had said again, “I don’t want to stay, but I don’t want to do anything
to hurt us, either. I need this job, we need it for a little while.” And she had said, “Anything that hurts you hurts the two of us,” and that had almost broken him, hearing her put it that way, but it had broken him into something stronger rather than the reverse. A reassembly plant of the soul—that was what she had called him once, thinking of her own background, but it had not been true; it had gone the other way. She had put all the pieces of him together: the Vietnam pieces, the narco pieces, all of the things that shrieked and squeaked in the night.
Well, that had been a long time ago. That had sure been a hell of a long time ago, a different stage of existence for Wulff, although the time could be really measured only in months since he had taken the steps two at a time in that miserable SRO building to find her dead. OD’d out alone and in the middle of a bare room. That just went to show you where you would get, going around busting informants and taking narco seriously. It would have been a good lesson for him if he had taken it on that level, resolved to shape up and from that time onward follow the dictates of the department under the rules and regulations of the career and salary plan. Of course, it had not gone that way at all; seeing Marie dead in that room had sparked him to a hell of a lot of killing; a lot of people had come to regret the death of Marie Calvante, but still, sometimes, he wished that he could go back to the way it was when she had told him that even if he stayed with the department, if he played it as rotten and corrupt as the rest of them, she would still love him, it would make no difference at all. Maybe it would not.
Maybe it would not at all, but she was indisputably dead, and since then nothing had been quite the same, notably the careers of a couple of hundred top-echelon drug dealers. Still, now and then Wulff would find himself thinking, without any conscious control or understanding, of the way it might have been if none of this had ever happened. He would be living in a house with his wife, Marie, right? He would still be a part of the narco squad, absolutely. He would be keeping his mouth shut and doing what narco required, and not making any waves at all—well, maybe. Maybe, again, not. Perhaps he would have turned himself to working from the inside, subverting narco instead of carrying it forward. It was the kind of angle that anyone who knew his way around the squad could have worked out; it would have meant turning down all graft, turning all supplies of drugs confiscated over to the property clerk, going after the to-line street dealers without letting the informants take the heat. Well, again, maybe not. He wouldn’t have lasted more than a month on narco carrying on that way; busting an informant had gotten him thrown off in a day, but how long could he have gone the other?
No, there was no point in thinking about it. There was no reason to carry it on through; what had happened had happened to him, all right, and the only comfort that he could find might be in understanding that it would have worked out this way in any case. Maybe Marie had to die anyway. Maybe it was ordained that she would die and fate had thus contrived her death in a way that would have the maximum effect upon Wulff and the maximum effect upon the evil people toward whose destruction he was bent. Maybe. Maybe you could see it that way.
All that he knew was this—that he had turned toward her in the dense spaces of the car when all of the talking was done, and just before they had gone out of there, he had held her, held her against him, and said, “I don’t want anything to hurt you, that’s all. Whatever happens, I don’t want you to be hurt by any of this,” and she had come against him, against him in the night, the slight, beating moths of her hands against his cheekbones, and had said, “Don’t you understand that you can never hurt me, never, no matter what you do?” And it was that that he would have to live with always, not the way she had kissed him then, or later how she had come against him in that small and final enclosure that they had made of their connection in the close and gripping theater of his bed.
X
Heading the car east, pushing toward Mobile, Wulff had a blazing moment of total insight: they would mass together to get him. Probably at Atlanta, but not beyond Philadelphia, they would be in wait for him, and this time there would be no reprieve, this time they would be there by the hundreds, all of them massed in a final pact of desperation, and he would not have a chance. It was obvious; they could not allow this to continue. News of what had happened to Cohen would have gotten around; they would have picked it up, and from that they would have assimilated the one message that they could not bear—that Wulff was back in action, that he had somehow swung clear of all the traps that Mexico and the international organization had set to trap him, and that now, extremely angry, he was out after them again, his anger, if possible, intensified by the fact that there was an element of personal revenge.
And they would not be able to stand for it. This last news, coming at a point when they had reason to believe that Wulff was out of action or dead at last, would be sufficient to drive them together for the first time in a pact to preserve their mutual interests. These vermin tore at one another, they simply refused to cooperate, and it was this, really, that was the only reason Wulff had managed to get as far against them as he had: they had as much stake in the bad luck of one another as enforcement did, and so Wulff had been able to go at them without at least a unified counterattack. The memos they were passing one another through intelligence, the verbal agreements they had made to try to kill him, the supposed thousands of messengers or button men who were alert at all times to find and kill him for bounty—that had been so much bullshit. Calabrese loved what Wulff had been doing just as long as it did not affect him; it was just that much less potential rivalry. Carlin could not have hoped to rise to the top levels without Wulff working for him, and so on. No, their fracture had been his strength, but now, Wulff thought, it could not possibly continue that way, because at last they would see through the fact of Cohen’s murder that the situation was desperate if they did not mass together; but if they did so, it was no-lose. Surely they would see that. Surely they would know that he was working alone, that he had long since exhausted all possibilities of assistance, that he was now officially an escapee from the New York City prison system, among everything else, and that he had blown the last chance that he might have had of assistance from law-enforcement personnel. They would never protect an outright felon; they had to protect their own asses too. No, if they gave it a little careful and patient thought, no more than a couple of minutes apiece, a few phone conferences, a little bit of give and take in their informal councils, they would see that alone he was quite dangerous, that he might be able to do to them what he had done to Cohen; but if they worked together now, he was helpless. He had absolutely no chance against them once they got together, and after everything that they had been through, they certainly would. Probably from the fact that he had hit Cohen they had a good idea of where he had come from and what his information would be and where he would be going next. They had to know that by now, all right. And they would be waiting.
So why, he thought, hustling Cohen’s Toronado through the fast, dense Southern night, why was he going on? Why was he pushing toward Mobile when death was almost certainly waiting for him, death by the hundreds? Well, there were many interesting reasons for that; he would have to consider them sometime. In the meantime, he was going to go on, add speed if possible, hasten the moment of his rendezvous with Mobile so that it would all come to a point quickly. He guessed that he needed confrontation; what he might be in pursuit of now was not so much victory as an ending, fast and conclusive, to his mission. He would rather, toward that ending, take them on by the hundreds than one by one. It was almost empty on the flat span of the Interstate tonight; he had not passed a car, nor a car him, for several miles. Locked into the utter isolation of the Toronado, Wulff felt himself succumbing to the illusion, which he had had before, that he was the only person in the world, that the world contained no motivations, no possibilities other than his own, that indeed these men whom he had been fighting and killing from coast to coast could in themselves be constructions out of his ow
n imagination, projections from his own necessity, and that were he to pull the Toronado over to the side of the road, cut the engine, clamber out of the car, and say to the night, “This is enough now, I have reached the end, no more, no more of it,” everything would dissolve, all would be as it had once been, and he would awaken probably to find himself on the floor of some Harlem bar, stiffed out on a dose that had been slipped to him, his senses reeling, stomach sickened, as the informant leaned over him and Wulff realized that all of this had been a dream of alternative. Well, if he had it to do over again, he might not bust the informant.
Maybe. And then again, maybe not. When you came right down to it, there was an air of inevitability to his entire mission. That air was filled with the odor of outrage. It had started in Vietnam, merely solidified when he had come back to narco. If one thing had not set him off, another might. He might have married Marie and done it anyway. And in a sense, that would have been worse. Look at what had happened to Williams, who had come out of a house in St. Albans to do war. A car on his left moved over fast, cutting him off, and Wulff felt himself bouncing on the shoulder of the Interstate even before realization had caught up with reflex. It was reflex that gathered him over the wheel, contracted into something tight and cold and in command as he yanked the Toronado over the sudden ruts and incisions of the difficult ground, forcing it to a stop; it was reflex, too, which made him aware of the other car, a stain to his near vision as it rebounded from its one clanging contact against him and then rolled clear, ten to twenty yards in front of him, coming into the shoulder at an easier angle than Wulff had.
The Toronado under control, he started to make a run for the Interstate again. It was the only thing that he could do, acting reflexively or not; he could only hope that the other car had been surprised by his failure to go off the road; but even as he put down the accelerator, began to yank the car toward the hard panel of road to his left, lights within the other car flickered, the dome-light switch being jabbed as someone came out of the right door, diving, then blackness again, and Wulff felt the shot hit his right-front tire.