by Barry, Mike
“I just came off the highway to make a phone call here. What the hell? Were you waiting for me? How did you know that I’d come in here?”
The bartender was still shaking his head, biting his lips. His hands grasped one another, and then he wrung them slowly, despairingly, the way a woman might at hearing bad news. He was very quiet. The two men on the floor were both bleeding from the ears.
“It’s stupid,” Wulff said, “it’s fucking stupid not to talk. You’re going to die anyway. Why don’t you do some good for once in your life and answer a few questions before I go?”
The bartender licked his lips. “Why should I?” he said in a very low voice.
“You want to live?”
The bartender said nothing. This was dangerous, Wulff thought. The bar was open, it was a roadhouse, it was noon; sooner or later, probably much sooner, someone was going to come in for a drink. Even in a place like this there was the possibility of trade. You just couldn’t make a hell of a living beating up the people who dropped in; the word would get around, and business would fall off. You had to serve them a drink, at least occasionally.
“Jesus Christ,” Wulff said, and wiped the back of the hand he thought was broken against his mouth. There were little flickers of pain, which was good; if it were broken, it would have been a screaming arc of anguish. “This isn’t your affair, you know. This has nothing to do with any of you at all. Why do you let yourself get hired into it? You know what it’s going to lead to?”
“Kill me,” the bartender said. “Just kill me and get it over with, Eddie.”
“Eddie?”
“Yeah, Eddie, you son-of-a-bitch.”
“I think you missed something,” Wulff said. “I’m not Eddie.”
“I don’t care what you say. Just shoot me.”
“I think you guys have made an awful mistake,” Wulff said. “You got the wrong guy. I’m not Eddie.“
The bartender opened his eyes fully, looked at him, blinked. “Of course you’d say that,” he said. “It don’t mean a thing. You’re fucking Eddie.”
“I wish I were.”
“You can’t be some other guy. Eddie was the only one we expected in. It was all set up.”
“Well,” Wulff said, “it wasn’t set up too good. Or you got your scheduling screwed up. You got some other guy.”
“Oh, shit,” the bartender said.
“I’m sorry that you had to go through all that for the wrong guy.”
“Oh, shit,” the bartender said again. “I don’t believe you, that’s all. I can’t believe you. Why would they do a thing like this to us? It was all set up.”
“Wrong time,” Wulff said, and looked at the pistol in his hand. “Now what?” he said with disgust. “What the hell am I supposed to do now? Go ahead and kill you anyway? You got screwed up.”
“Nobody got screwed up,” the bartender said desperately, “you’re lying to me. You got to be Eddie.”
“I wish I were,” Wulff said, “oh, I wish I were now,” and the door banged and a man came into the bar and looked at the two of them and then at the bodies on the floor and said, “Oh, my God,” and turned quickly. He was a man in his early thirties with blond hair and an earring in his right earlobe.
“Eddie?” Wulff said.
The man turned and looked at him. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and then bolted through the door. There was the sound of glass tinkling somewhere, and then an engine screaming.
Wulff looked at the bartender. “I think that was your man,” he said.
The bartender looked even sicker than he had before the man had come in. “Christ,” he said, his hands coming down, shaking on the polished surface of the bar. “Oh, Christ.” He looked much older, translucent and weak. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
“See what I mean?” Wulff said, and looked at the pistol in his hand. “That’s clumsy work. Amateur work. Didn’t you have a picture at least, or some kind of description?”
“They said he had to be in here at this time. They said that they were sending him right on. It’s impossible …”
“Now what?” Wulff said with disgust, and looked at the bartender. “I have to kill you, I think,” he said. “I can’t leave any witnesses.”
“It isn’t fair,” the man said weakly. “The whole damned thing doesn’t make any sense.”
“You telling me?” Wulff said. “You telling me?” He shot the man in the face and turned and went directly to his car and drove away, deciding that he would leave the business of giving Sperber a second call until he got a little closer in to his section.
XX
Sperber’s first thought was to make a good line of defense and nail the son-of-a-bitch once and for all. His second, though, after much consideration, seemed to be better. He decided to pitch it in and run.
It just wasn’t worth it, that was all. All of the reports were too rough, and besides that, he had six months’ worth of newspapers and communiqués to study and sift through his mind. The guy was good, that was all. He was just too goddamned good and too angry for Sperber to want to deal with. If some of the best people in the business had been blown up by him, if no one from Vegas to Mexico City had been able to bring him down, one man, since this had begun, then Sperber had to be sensible about this. You had to admit your limitations; that was as important as self-confidence, and Sperber had not gotten as far as he had by being self-deluded. No, this Wulff was a one-man army. He was a shrewd, cold, cunning, and utterly efficient killer who could do the damage of a hundred men, and Sperber could not stand up against him. It was better to get the hell out, lie low for a while.
Sperber made this decision without fear. Fear was not part of the equation; after the first shock of the phone call he found that he could deal with the situation, emotionally, pretty well. He had plenty of time to think things over, and unlike Wulff’s prediction, he had not used that time merely to sweat; he had instead worked things through gradually, carefully. But the more he looked at it, the clearer it seemed. He had to get out.
For one thing, nobody he called really wanted to stand with him. The contract men simply weren’t having any. There was not a free-lancer around who wanted any part of the account anymore, for whatever bonus. There were a couple who owed Sperber personal loyalty and whom he certainly could have recruited, but they were all junkies. Every last one of them. You did not want a group of dopers out there trying to fend off a machine.
So it made sense to skip for a while, let Wulff blow himself down and out, let someone else take care of him. He couldn’t go on this way anyway; half of the FBI was probably looking for him, in addition to what was left of the network. A couple days, weeks at the outside, and it would all be over. In the meantime, there seemed no sense to Sperber in adding his name to the kill list. It wasn’t going to gain him anything. And he faced right up to it, he was an intelligent man. Wulff could kill Sperber. He was just too goddamned good.
Like everything else in his life, Sperber planned the skip carefully. The thing was to travel light and unencumbered and give an idea of his whereabouts to no one. That meant getting some kind of false cover story out to the few people with whom he was in daily contact, and it meant cutting Doris off very hard. The latter, at least, was a pleasure. He had had quite enough of the bitch; it had been a month with her, which was much longer than average, but she had been tenacious, had gotten hooks into him that the others hadn’t. Also, he was getting older, and women were harder to shake. Still, he could deal with her now, and he did so quite cruelly, waking her up at nine in the morning and telling her that she was finished. That pleased him. Oh my, did she love to sleep; did she hate being awakened. But what he said to her would ruin her sleep for a few nights to come, he bet.
That taken care of, Sperber blew a little pot and considered his next move. He enjoyed pot; it was the only drug, soft or hard, that he would touch, but it improved his disposition and made everything always look just a little better than it had before he had a joint. He kept a
small private stash in the bathroom hamper rolled up in a bag underneath dirty underwear; it was the only thing he would permit in the house. The other cache was elsewhere in a safe-deposit box. He was no fool; they were never going to get him on some cheap charge of possession. But the pot was different. Strange for a thirty-eight-year-old man to take up marijuana as he had two years ago after a lifetime of avoiding all opportunities for drugs, but what the hell. He enjoyed it. He enjoyed it now, holding the joint lightly in his fingers while he considered his next move. He would enjoy it wherever it was; the kids were right, it was fun, it was as relaxing as Scotch, without the hard, sick edge that alcohol could give you, and it was a hell of a lot cheaper and safer, at least if you were supplied with decent stuff, and if one thing was sure, it was that Sperber could find his sources of supply. Standing in his living room, he carefully tapped the butt out in an ashtray, took a small piece of silk out of his suit pocket, and pressed it reverently within, then put it all back. Waste not, want not.
Then he made his last preparations to leave. He had decided to go underground somewhere around Washington, find himself a motel off the main road, and under an assumed name just sit there for a week or two. He knew plenty of people, of course, any man in his position would, but this would be a strictly incognito job, and he would keep his cover for as long as necessary. Fortunately, no one here would miss him; that was one of the benefits of working wholly free-lance. And for himself. A lot of others kept their jobs as cover or simply used the drugs as a sideline, which meant that they were involved with a number of people on different levels, but none of this was true for Sperber. No one gave a damn about his comings and goings, when you came right down to it, except himself and the very few connections that he had. Not even the woman. It was the best way to live. At this stage of the game, when you were starting off, you had to be entirely dedicated to your business, make all the sacrifices that it entailed. Later on, when he was established, when he had less pressure of all sorts, he would put down roots, make a life for himself. But not now. The call in the middle of the night proved it, if any proof of that sort was needed. He simply could not expose a wife or a family to that kind of shit.
Sperber was not surprised when the phone rang. It didn’t have to be Wulff; it could have been anyone. There were a lot of calls of a business nature coming in, particularly with the subtle arrangements he had made in order to make leaving town possible for a while. But then again, when he heard the voice, he was not surprised. It would figure that he would call again. Wulff was a thorough man. In certain ways he was almost as thorough as Sperber himself.
“Still there?” Wulff said.
“Yes. I’m still here.”
“Scared?”
“I’ll manage,” Sperber said. The only thing he had to worry about was that the man was calling from very close quarters, that he was literally up the block, ready to strike. But Sperber did not think so. He would stake his judgment on that, if nothing else; he knew how this man operated. Wulff really wanted him to sweat. He liked the idea of coming in closer and closer, and as far as keeping Sperber alert, well, he would just take his chances. You had to admire it, in a way. “I’ll get through this.”
“Not much longer now.”
“Can’t we reach an agreement?”
“What kind of agreement would you wish?”
“There’s no need to go on with this. It doesn’t help anyone, and I’m not the one you want anyway. I don’t have much to do with this at all,”
“You’ll let me be the judge of that,” Wulff said.
“No. It’s true. If you’re so goddamned passionate about this quest of yours, then you should at least be willing to listen to reason, to hear what someone has to tell you. I’m no kingpin. I’m no operator at all, really.”
“We’ll see.”
“I don’t care what Díaz might have told you, where you got that information from. Díaz was a liar and a cheat. The only thing that I’m moving is a little pot. What the hell is pot?”
“And what the hell are you?”
“Why don’t you wise up, Wulff?” Sperber said. He felt the phone begin to grow in his hand, a feeling of enlargement, pressing against the surface of his palm. Rage began to distort his line of sight, and that was dangerous; he had to remain calm, and yet, in an almost luxuriant way he felt himself descending into it. “You’re not doing yourself any good, even if you think that this makes sense. You don’t even know who you want anymore; you just want to kill.”
“Bullshit, Sperber. Bullshit, Leon.”
“It’s the truth! You’re coming through the South killing people, but it doesn’t even make any sense! At least when you were blowing up people on the coast or in Boston you were getting at guys that I happen to know were in the racket. But here—”
“How did you know they were in the rackets?”
“I read the fucking newspapers, Wulff.”
“I want you to sweat, Leon. I want you to think of me every moment, and what’s going to happen to you. I want you to run.”
“Oh, the hell with it,” he said, “this is ridiculous,” and slammed down the phone and picked up his one traveling valise, which was at the door, tugging it up with a series of grunts, and went out. He could not listen to it anymore. It simply was not worth it. Fear and anger would get him nowhere in a flight that he knew would have to be absolutely cold if he were to succeed, and beyond everything else, he was beginning to have the conviction that Wulff was crazy. Wasn’t he? He certainly was not acting like a sane man, that was for sure. Picking on Sperber when Sperber really was so much on the fringes of soft-drug supply and demand that he hardly counted in terms of impact, then making unreasoning threats which simply made no sense if he were interested in catching up with him. What the hell did the man want really? That was the issue, but Sperber had no stomach to explore it. All that mattered was to get away. Somewhere in the vicinity of the capital he would find the quiet and anonymity he needed, and in just a little while, in a matter of weeks, or less than that, it would be over. Wulff could not go on. He could not go on this way; he was out of control; that fine edge of reason that he had had at the beginning was now a razor that was knifing against him, splitting him open, causing the blood of function to run away. It could not continue. You could not go up against the mass in this way. Sperber went quickly to his car and drove away from there thinking that it would not be long, it could not possibly be long now, and if his luck held out, it might even be finished, Wulff was so rudderless, by the time that he had crossed the Virginia line.
XXI
Wulff had thought now and then in his early months on the squad, while he still had a sense of humor or at least was still recovering from combat fatigue, that he might want to write a book someday called Great Moments in Narco. It wouldn’t be as good or as colorful a seller as Great Moments in Vice, of course, which is the book that would be guaranteed to put the NYPD well up there on the talk shows where it belonged, but what the hell, a position on the vice squad in those days was practically hereditary anyway, and none of those guys could write. Or would have been able to find time to; the only thing that they were interested in was fucking and money, and they had plenty of both.
But Great Moments in Narco might have been nice if he could have persuaded some newspaper reporter to do the ghost job for a fifty-fifty split. It would mean taking the reporter around to the joints, of course, and showing him what was really going on, and you knew that you couldn’t trust reporters, which was probably the reason that he had given up on the idea, that and the fact that after just a couple of months none of it was funny anymore.
None of it. It was deadly. But still there were those moments: the time when a dude on his way out of a One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street joint with about three narcs in there arranging a small planned switch with an informant had about three bricks of heroin fall out of his pants on his waltz to the door and just stood there astonished as the white stuff broke into little pellets and beg
an to scatter on the floor. Shades and all, you could see the dude’s staring eyes, getting as white as the shit itself as the realization of what he had done began to seep through him.
But the narcs had their own problems, if there was one thing they didn’t want or need, it was a heavy bust at this time. It would have opened up all kinds of areas for questioning, and furthermore, beyond that, headquarters would have been very upset with all the kilos of stuff; it would have been questions for them as well, and all in all it would have been a lot of paperwork either to cover it up from above or to deal with higher levels, should it become unavoidable.
So what the narcs did was merely to stand around at the bar afflicted with a sudden mutual case of blindness while the dude scrambled the bricks up and stuffed them into the side pockets of his suit and kicked around the stuff that he couldn’t pick up into dust and then very hurriedly left. All the time that this had been going on the narcs had taken a great interest in the surfaces of the bar or in an inspection of the bottoms of their glasses. It was so neatly done that even the bartender had to laugh, although he did not laugh very long or hard, knowing what was good for him.
Wulff had been one of the glass-starers, of course. He had also been around when there had been a shootout in front of a tenement on a Hundred and Fifteenth Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, a shootout which later turned out to be the climax of a long drug war in the section between two rival interests, which were never really to resolve it, which continued to fight intermittently for four years, until a third group, which had been honing their weapons in Bedford-Stuyvesant, moved in and took care of both factions. But that had come later; at this time, in 1971, the war had been at its peak, and there had been bodies all over the street, some of them dead.
Wulff had been in the vicinity because he was arranging for the transfer of an insignificant amount of drugs from an informant to a student at Columbia a few blocks south. Busting college students was always fun and easy—they never resisted arrest—and they made bail quickly, so there were no long-range consequences there, either. No one got hurt when college students were busted, and for Wulff it had been an easy detail, taking up stake on the opposite side of the street five minutes before the anticipated transfer, smoking a cigarette, and enjoying the midday aspect of Harlem. Everyone knew who he was, of course, and had long since cleared the streets for him.