by Barry, Mike
The block on which Nolk lived was being patrolled by guards. Wulff could see that, could see the two men casually standing near the trees at the turn-in point, and knew right away from the way that they were handling themselves, a certain counterpoint in their movements and sense of connection between the two, that they were definitely on patrol and that the patrol had everything to do with Wulff. You could pick up those signals if you had had any kind of reconnaissance experience in combat; Wulff had had plenty of that in Vietnam, but more important, he had spent the last several months coming close in on men who had urgent reasons not to want to see him.
The first thing to do was to take a pass, handle the situation the way the bullfighter handles a dangerous bull, with cape and grace and evasion. He drove the Fairlane unobtrusively past the two men at right angles to the street which they were covering, hoping that they did not have a specific description of the car, or that if they did, they were not paying close attention. On long patrol, lapses of attention were inevitable, and any commander had to take them into account, for the enemy, for his own troops. Wulff drove the car down half a mile of empty street quietly, just letting it coast, moving by the curb at slow idle, playing with the brake. It was a Saturday morning in what was already a quiet neighborhood. No one was around. A little later on there might be a few children, but in a neighborhood like this, the children were indoors or in their own backyards, and the adults and teen-agers took automobiles everywhere. Two men on an empty street stood out. That was one of the advantages or disadvantages of suburban living: street reconnaissance could hardly be undertaken subtly.
It was a nice neighborhood on the northern outskirts of a relatively cosmopolitan Southern town. The houses, most of them ranch or split-level, got their space by spreading across the property, not arching above it, as was common almost everywhere except in the Northwest, where land had a different valuation. The houses, Wulff estimated, were in the forty-to-fifty-thousand-dollar range, expensive for Mobile, but then again, hardly palatial. They were not estates. It was just a nice area for nice people who worked hard at nice jobs and wanted to give their children nice lives. If there were suicides, cancer, miscarriages, and death here, they would occur offstage in the quiet areas of the inner city, the hospitals and funeral homes, which were left to deal with the refuse of the suburban life when the refuse came home.
But right now it was just a nice, quiet suburb. All of Wulff’s quarry seemed to live in nice places. It was those whom they serviced, those at the bottom of the line, who lived in alleyways or bombed-out SRO flats in the central cities; it was the customers who shot the shit who lived there, but the dealers and distributors, the quiet, semipolished men who had created and serviced the habit, all lived very nicely, thank you. In Boston they lived by the Charles, in San Francisco by the Bay, in New York by the Sound; here by the Gulf of Mexico. And, here too, almost every house had its swimming pool.
Wulff could almost enjoy the pastoral serenity of the same Mobile morning that must have entranced Grant’s troops before they began their final sweep, just sitting and contemplating the way in which these new Americans had come to rest in a way that, on a smaller scale, was little more than a reconstruction of the old. Instead of plantation lawns, instead of slaves humming, instead of a rigid caste system, a nice inner city to stuff the majority of the blacks into, while the few who were able to get out of the inner city could be put into an equally nice but different suburb. America always came back to itself, that was for sure; the country was a wheel, that was all; it was not progress, but mere turning. Oh, Wulff could have thought about it for quite a while, including the complicated and interesting role that junk had come to play on the wheel when it seemed for a few perilous years in the early fifties that the lower classes just might do something really mindless and angry and attempt to pull down the system. That wouldn’t have worked at all, and that was when the shit had really begun to pour into the inner cities. However, he had other business to do, which was to plan out an attack upon Nolk’s house.
Nothing mattered but killing the man, of course. He had had quite enough of negotiations, quite enough of impassioned discussions with the likes of Díaz. After a while, sitting there with the car parked in neutral, left foot on the brake, right foot idling the motor, which had a severe miss anywhere above two thousand rpm, Wulff shrugged and reached behind him, plucked one of the rifles from the back seat, and put it beside him, then reached across the front to the gray box that Maury had yielded so reluctantly. He pried off the lid lovingly, looked at the little black turds of grenades nestled against one another, twelve of them squat and mysterious in the box, and then worked his hand in, took one out, hefted it carefully.
It felt all right. A live grenade had a certain cast and heft to it, which this one possessed; he could feel the fragments within sifting and settling. He looked at the pin, dead center, and the pin looked all right too, well oiled and slick, no rust on it; they were good product, all right. Maury had done himself proud, from whatever source. The only question was whether they would work, and that was something that he could find out only in performance. There could be no test runs in this quiet and sleeping neighborhood. It would lead to difficulties he was not prepared to face.
Wulff smiled finally and laid the object in his lap. He loved grenades. Every man had a weakness, it was said, and in his new person, his post-Marie Calvante persona, that was, this must be his. From where he was sitting, the grenade was the most efficient, deadly, workable instrument of war available. It was also the most satisfying. There was a lot of pain from a grenade. The fragmentation was apt to cause blindness, the shrapnel could cut a body open.
Still smiling, Wulff turned the car around and drove back to the street on which Nolk lived. At the street entrance he cut sharp left and came past the two men, tires screaming, pistol cocked, moving one-handed. He was twenty yards past them before they could react, and by that time he was beside the house, had stopped the car, and had both hands free.
Wulff yanked the car into neutral, picked up the grenade, stepped out of the car quickly, coming around low to use the hood as cover, and in one easy pitch threw the grenade at the house, aiming high for a rooftop punch. It came down, and at that moment the first shots came, and Wulff used the pistol to return fire and put down one of the men at once, and while the other halted at once, thinking about this, the grenade fired and the house started to blow up, and Wulff, diving beneath the left side of the car, was able to have a perfect view of all of it in almost complete safety.
The second man, however, standing, had no such opportunity, and soon fell from Wulff’s line of sight.
XV
Nevertheless, hating himself but feeling that he had to do it—but not able to explain the reasons for feeling that way either—Williams went the next day to the assistant commissioner’s office without an appointment on his free time, waited through the chain of command until the inspector had allowed him in, then, without any introduction, told him everything he knew about Wulff, which was, of course, not much. But he told about the phone call, the request for ordnance, and the fact that Wulff was near Mobile.
The assistant commissioner had the same question too. “Why are you telling me all this?” he said.
“I’m cooperating with the law. Why are you asking me why I’m obeying the law, commissioner?”
“It isn’t that. Of course the law should be obeyed. But yesterday you said you knew nothing, and now you’re prepared to put all this information on the line.”
“The call just came in since we spoke, commissioner.”
“I understand that too. But still …”
“It’s puzzling? You don’t know why I’d turn him in? You think I think he’s a hero, that I shouldn’t squeal on a hero?”
“He’s not a hero. He’s a maniac. We settled that. Anybody who thinks this man is heroic is crazy. He’s more dangerous than the people he says he’s fighting.”
“I know that.”
&nb
sp; “But it’s still hard to believe. It’s hard to believe that he just happened to call.”
“He would call me, commissioner. I’m the only man that he could call. He’s got no one else now.”
“All right,” the man said, “all right. I accept that. He’s in Mobile, then.”
“He says he is. He was heading in that direction, anyway. Of course, he might have been interrupted. ”
“We ought to be reading about that pretty soon if it’s true,” the commissioner said with a little smile. “I’m sure that he’ll make his presence known.”
“Aren’t you going to call in federal strike?”
“I’ll handle this as I see fit,” the commissioner said. “I want to thank you for the information, of course.”
“You’re telling me to get out, right? I told you what I had to tell you; now I should just get on my way.”
“Patrolman, you’re a little out of line. You know I appreciate your cooperation; in fact, your cooperation has been deemed essential, but—”
“My ass is in a sling,” Williams said, standing. “It’s been in a sling for eight months now, but it’s practically hanging out.”
“Now, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t take to this kindly. I said you’re out of line, and I’ll repeat it. Now, I’m ready to thank you for your cooperation and to ask you to keep us posted should any other calls come in, and I think we should control ourselves, patrolman.”
“Wulff was right,” Williams said, “he was right. I thought he was wrong, and then I thought he was right, and then I’ve been thinking he was wrong again, but now I know. Now I know what’s going on. It’s the only way.”
“Don’t counsel felonies, patrolman.”
“I’m not counseling anything,” Williams said, and went to the door. “I’m at the bottom of the ladder. What the hell influence does a cop have? I don’t have to counsel felonies,” he said, “the law does,” and the door opened and he went through it, and all the way down the gray line of offices past the gray people in the hallway performing in their gray fashion in the bright and terrible tasks of the city, he thought: general delivery Mobile, general ordnance Mobile, oh, shit, if he calls again, if he gives me one more chance, I’ll do it … and am I ever, ever going to be out of this?
XVI
After the first blast there was a secondary explosion that made the house shudder, and then up and down the block glass began to blow out in the other dwellings. Wulff, crouched behind the Fairlane, watched it dispassionately, knowing that in just a few seconds now doors would start to open, the screaming would begin, the phone calls to the police would be made if phones were still in operation; but he had time, he had just the necessary little bit of margin that he needed, and in that small bubble of time he watched the house with unusual intentness, waiting to see who would come out. If no one did, he was going to go in there, but it was worth waiting, to judge what kind of shape the people within might be in at this time.
A man with black all over his body, clothing ripped, came staggering out of the door, his hands flailing, his mouth an O for a scream that Wulff could not hear. Wulff aimed the pistol and dropped him with a clean shot in the solar plexus, then held his position and waited. A second man came the way of the first, looking just as disheveled but with the presence of mind to be holding a gun. He was shouting, shrieking, looking frantically around him, and Wulff stood for an instant, just so the man could see what had happened to him, and then pulled the trigger, and this man too was dead. Wulff crouched down again, waiting, and a third man came out, his eyes flicking right and left, searching the street for the guards. Wulff shot him in the neck in a clean, pumping shot that dropped him on top of the body of the second. That was excellent.
He did not know which one was Nolk, of course, but it was reasonable to assume that he had just killed three bodyguards. Nolk would not come out of that house first; to the contrary, he would, if conscious, have ordered the others out first, and only then, after having seen what had happened to them, would he come out. That was merley business; it was the way any businessman would act. Still, Wulff was a little surprised to see a woman come staggering out of the house next, a woman in her fifties who was obviously in distress, and yet, unlike the men, showed no signs of dishevelment; she was probably Nolk’s wife. At least, that was as good a guess as any. Wulff kept the pistol trained, and then, after a moment, he lowered it slightly. He could not shoot a woman, at least without absolute provocation. She might have everything to do with Nolk’s business, she might for all he knew have been the originator of all schemes, but you had to draw a line somewhere. Otherwise you were nothing but an indiscriminate murderer, he thought. He held the pistol steady, at his side. The woman leaned weakly against the side of the house and began to retch.
He should be going, Wulff knew. It was impossible to stay here much longer; a hundred calls must have come into the police by now, and it would be a matter of moments or less until they were swarming all over. He had a better than reasonable chance to escape now, but only if he did it immediately, and yet, tight against the Fairlane, he found that he could not move. Not yet. He wanted to see Nolk.
A man appeared at the door of the house, a stout man in his late fifties, who like the woman, did not appear disheveled, merely confused. That would have to be him, Wulff thought. It would have to be Nolk and his wife who had come out of the house last. Not near the front, not near the site of the explosion, they had been protected from physical injury, and yet, from the man’s appearance, he had been as shaken as if he had been hurt. These people were good at insulating themselves, they were not nearly so adequate in putting up with what they routinely subjected their employees and victims to. Wulff looked at the stumbling, shaken man who stood in the doorway and smiled. The first sound of sirens, wavering, came at him.
Easy, he thought; it was almost too easy to shoot the man where he stood. There had to be another way, one which would pay ample penalty for what this man had done to thousands of others. Death, quick death, was the easy way out; Nolk would go scuttling down the trap of his mortality, and then he would be out, clean at the other end, never to be touched again. It was not fair at all; it should not be this way; there would hopefully be developed by science sometime a means by which the dead could be resuscitated to full awareness and pain only so that they could be killed again over and over, each time more horribly, and this would be a treatment reserved only for the worst of criminals; but until that time, you had to settle for the clean death, the quick one, and leave it to other forces to extract true vengeance. You had to sustain belief in religion or an afterlife only in the hope that people like Nolk would get theirs in full measure. He stood so that the man could see him then. He wanted to be seen.
“Here I am, Nolk,” Wulff called to him. “Look at me, you son-of-a-bitch. Look at me.”
In the doorway the man twitched his head feebly, looked at him. The woman, four yards downrange, still against the house, bracing herself now with her arms, looked at him too. “No,” she said. Her voice carried very distinctly. It was remarkable how well her voice carried against the background of the sirens. “Don’t do it.”
“Look at me, Nolk,” Wulff said again, “look at me,” and the man twitched his gaze downward, was looking at the concrete. He does not want that moment of contact, Wulff thought; he thinks that if he does not recognize me, if he turns away and denies, that I won’t kill him, and this made him giggle slightly, because Nolk of all people had no business working through implied codes. “It’s me,” Wulff said to him, “it’s me, Burt Wulff, that’s who it is,” and pointed the gun at the man and shot him in the head.
The thing that was Nolk, already dead, came down into the doorway and then lay there openmouthed. The woman was screaming in a high, thin, contained way. Wulff looked at her and then put his pistol away and opened the door of the Fairlane.
But she had stood away from the house now, was impossibly moving toward him. She was a woman in her fifties who had been destroyed a long time ago, with whose destruction the events of the morning had had absolutely nothing to do, and yet there was a kind of strength in her as she approached Wulff, a strength that he could see. “You killed him,” she said, looking at him as he bent over the car. “You killed my husband.”
The sirens were all around them now. He should be going, Wulff knew, if he were going to get out of here, and yet what she had said demanded some kind of answer. Fair was fair. You did not come calling without saying the proper words of departure; you did not deal rudely with your host unless you made yourself well understood. “He deserved to be killed,” Wulff said. “He was a bad man.”
“Nobody deserves to be killed.”
“That never occurred to your husband. He was killing people.”
“He never wanted to. He was only doing what he must.”
“What your husband felt he must do was something that was killing people,” Wulff said.
“You’re a murderer.”
“So was he.”
“I’ll remember you. I’ll remember who you are and give a full description. They’ll get you for this.” She looked frantically up and down the street, grabbed his wrist. “All those bodies,” she said. “What are you? What kind of man are you?”
Revulsion filled him; he broke from the slippery and glassine aspect of her touch. “Your husband made me necessary,” he said. “Can’t you understand that? Anything that I am, he created.”