by Barry, Mike
“Where is it? Did you take it with you? That would figure; you’d probably keep it in the car. You’d play a lone hand; you’re too goddamned selfish to let it out of your hands. The lone game—”
“For Christ’s sake, Wulff, there are going to be cops all over this place in just a second.”
“I’ll handle that. Tell me.”
“No cache. Nothing.”
“You’re lying.”
“No I’m not. It’s the truth. You have this wrong. Would I lie now? Shit! Would I lie now?”
“Yes. Tell me.”
“Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,” Sperber said, and Wulff shot him in the left eye.
The man staggered back, expressing blood. The woman at the bar screamed again, but in a hopeless way, no energy in it. Wulff turned toward her, focused the gun, and then at the last minute decided the hell with it. He could not shoot. It would have been easy to, it involved no additional penalties, and it would have eliminated an important witness, but there were witnesses to other things all the hell the way over the country. It simply did not matter. It would serve no purpose sufficient in killing her to make him feel like anything other than a casual murderer. He put the gun away, looking at the dead man on the floor, thinking of the dead man behind the bar. “You keep the wrong company,” he said to the woman.
Her eyes were quite wide and round. She looked childlike, credulous, too staggered even to faint. Wulff knew the feeling well.
“You ought to try to move in better circles,” he pointed out, and ran from the bar.
XXIV
Looking back on it, Wulff decided that in tracking down Sperber and killing him he had for the first time in his quest become truly intuitive, had begun to operate on a visceral level of extrasensory perception.
How else could he have found the man so easily? There was simply no way in which his finding the man’s trail, in picking him up, could be explained in terms of other than the mystic. It was as if Sperber had been inside him, as if some aspect of the man, reconstituted within himself, had drawn him levelly, easily to the motel outside of Washington in which he was staying. Rationality could not explain it. What it had to do with, Wulff decided, was that he had been utterly transformed by his Odyssey; now, as he moved north through the last jungles of purpose and toward the conclusion in Philadelphia, he had become something other than merely the avenger; he was the agent of all the mysterious corrective forces in the universe in whose service he had put himself.
Getting away from the bar was easy. The guest who had stumbled in there had put through a call to the police, of course, but these suburban cops just were not like those closer in to the city; for whatever reason, they functioned on a different level of priorities. If word got around that there was a murderous lunatic shooting up people in a bar, they might decide that little purpose could be served by fighting to be on the scene early. Why screw up matters by offering more targets? That was one way of looking at it; in any event, Wulff was back in the Fairlane and barreling north on the Shirley Highway within five minutes of the motel, and no one seemed to be on his trail, either.
The Fairlane had served him well. It was not a bad car, considering its heredity and the purposes it had served; he would have been a fool not to have used it. But it was obviously approaching the end of its usefulness now, wobbling badly in the tie rods, shaking ominously as he gunned the car over sixty. The tie rods were shot, that was all; if he did not get rid of the car soon, he was going to have one hell of an accident all right, and that would not be the way in which he would want his career to be ended. Let it happen at least on the field of open fire, not skittering off the road trapped like an insect in a loose suspension. No. Not that way.
No one seemed to be on his trail; the highway was broad and empty. Most American highways were empty; they were the least utilized of all transportation facilities. The highway fund was a boondoggle, lavishing more and more funds on redundant roads for a population that could not use the roads it already had. Unless it came near the inner cities, of course, in which case there was no money at all, because expensive interstate highways convenient to the inner cities would have allowed the inhabitants there to get out easily, and that was not the object of America; America was born to keep them in. The trouble was that he had just about run out of leads from Díaz’s last confidence now.
He had no more names, not really. Sperber was the last of them. Maybe he should have pumped Sperber a little, tried to get the next chain of connection out of him, but he had been impatient to kill at the end, and it hardly would have made sense to stay in the bar in terrogating the man. But now Sperber was gone, and Wulff found that he had, at least for the time being, exhausted his leads. He had nowhere to go. He had a small cache, but it wasn’t going to do him much good at all, and it would hardly function as bait to lead anybody else into it.
From the beginning he had functioned on leads and bait, using what he had on hand as a means of sucking increasing levels of the hierarchy into making an attempt on him. It had been a good system, and the fish had been taking the bait eagerly, too; there had been damned little reluctance on the part of almost any of them to take their best shot, but now it had reached the end of the line, and the easy circumstantial path was no longer there. From now on there would be no leads presented him.
He would have to go into Philadelphia.
And he would have to do it blind too, months before the time that had been established for the formal meeting. He would have to do it before the alignment had even been worked out, which meant that essentially he would be at rest waiting for them to make their move rather than the reverse. It was not a comfortable situation—for one thing, he had no idea who had even called this meeting or under whose auspices it was being run—but it was the only situation that he had to work with. Unless, of course, he wanted to pack it in himself. Follow Sperber’s line of reasoning, check into a motel or run out somewhere to the countryside and literally bury himself for a couple of months.
“No,” Wulff said aloud, checking the rear-view mirror. Still a clear road. Whirring in the tie rod, dangerous shaking at the base of the steering column now; he cut the Fairlane back to forty-five and let it slide into the truck lane, listening to the brakes squeal as he hit them in short, burning jabs. “No, I can’t do that. If I do that, if I pull off and get out of the game, I’ll never get back in again.”
And that, he thought, that at least was the absolute fucking truth. Once you got out of the game you could never get back in again. You had to stay in until the very end, take your chances, do the best that you could, and when you got out finally (if you got out alive, which was an unlikely possibility anyway), it was to be with the acceptance that you never would be able to get back in again. You had one shot and no more. Calabrese, the old bastard, at least he had understood that. No false retirements for him, no changes of life style, no slowing down. At sixty-three he had gone down to Miami in the biggest contest of his life because he had been willing to play the game all the way.
You had to admire that. You admired the old bastard if you had any sense at all. He was old and losing his grip, and at the end he had been defeated by sheer bad luck; who would have imagined that the plane carrying his defeated old body back to Chicago would have gone down and denied Wulff the pleasure of killing him? But he had stayed in all the way, fighting, and that was what he was going to have to do also. You could not sidetrack; how could you do so without giving up? And to give up would be to have negated everything that he had done so far.
He guessed that he would head into Philadelphia and see what was going on there.
First, though—he cautiously cleared his rear vision again, everything looked fine but he had better go at least fifty more miles before he ditched the car—he would get clear of this situation and then make a little phone call.
XXV
“Last chance,” Wulff said. “I won’t ask you again.”
“Philadelphia is a tough town,” he sa
id. “Philadelphia is a bastard of a town. All those Phillie and Eagle jokes, they’re just public relations to give it a loser’s image, make people laugh. It’s probably the roughest town in the country, parts of it. The south side.”
“You want to or not? I told you, this is the last phone call. I won’t ask you again.”
Williams said, “Excuse me please,” and put the phone down and looked at his wife, who was standing in the aperture of the hallway, smoking a cigarette and staring at him. There was a fixity of gaze, a level of attention that he had not seen in many months. From this aspect it was hard to believe that they had been barely talking to each other, had been sleeping separately. “I’m on the phone,” he said to her.
“I know you’re on the phone.”
“So I’d appreciate your not listening.”
“Is that so? And what would I appreciate? Am I supposed to appreciate what you’re talking about now?”
“Please go away,” Williams said.
“I know who you’re talking to.”
“Not now,” he said, “we can talk about it later.”
“It’s starting again,” she said. “Everything you went through, the whole thing. Once wasn’t enough for you. You want to do it again? You want to get killed, you damned fool?”
“Please go away.”
“You get killed, then. But you remember that, you’re a goddamned fool,” his wife said, and turned and walked away, went into the kitchen. The door banged. Williams looked after her for a moment and then picked up the phone again. A cigarette, hanging from his lips, had almost gone dead; he pulled on it frantically.
“Hey,” he said, “I can’t talk now. There’s a kind of situation here.”
“There’s always a situation there.”
“I think I want to meet you,” he said. “But I’m not sure. I won’t be sure for a little while. There are some other things I got to work out here.”
“Yeah? Things? Like what things?”
“I think if I meet you I’m never going to come home again,” Williams said, “or if I do, I’ll come home in a box. Now, that’s okay, but I got to kind of pave the way, you understand?”
“You don’t have to meet me,” Wulff said. “I just called to give you one last chance. I can make this alone.”
“I know you can make it alone.”
“I made everything alone up to this moment.”
“I know you made everything alone up to this point, Wulff. I know that you were able to do everything your own way; that all I did was to screw up matters. I don’t need to hear that, don’t you see?” The cigarette was going again, although burned more than three-quarters down; he blew out an enormous spray of smoke, feeling the heat of it flare against his lip like an incendiary device. “No one’s arguing with you on that, man. It’s just that I got to work out some things here myself before I can join you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I think I want to.”
“I’ll be at Independence Hall on Thursday,” Wulff said. “You show up there sometime around midnight, I’ll find you.”
“And how will I find you?”
“I’ll do the finding.”
“You always wanted control, you know that?” Williams said, not angrily. “No matter what you did, how it worked out, you were the one who wanted to be handling things.”
“It’s the only way.”
“I agree with you. I absolutely agree with you there. But sometimes I got to have control too.”
“So don’t come.”
“But I think I may,” Williams said, “I think that I really may,” and Wulff said, “Okay, then,” and hung up. Williams put the receiver down carefully, cradling it, and went into the living room to lie down on the couch again, but before he could get comfortable his wife came in, ready for him. Her hands were clasped, her expression was tight, as if layers of her face had collapsed within themselves to a harsh brightness. She had never looked that way to the child.
“You’re starting again,” she said.
“No,” he said, “I’m ending this.”
“Why?” she said. “That’s all I want to know. Why can’t you bring an end to this? Why can’t it finish?”
“Because they won’t let it,” he said.
“I don’t understand you.”
“You never understood me,” Williams said, “but that’s all right. I never understood myself. Not until the last week or so. Then it all came into focus. I hope it’s not too late.”
“When you came back from Los Angeles, you said that it was all over. You promised me—”
“And what did I get?” he said. “What did I get from you? You’ve treated me like shit in my own house.”
“That’s the way you wanted it. You wanted it yourself, David, you know you did.”
“It’s no good,” he said. Painfully he brought up his knees, the slash in his stomach aching reminiscently, as it did when he was tired, changed position suddenly. “None of it is any good. This is not the time for this. It should have happened a long time ago, this talk, or never, but not now. I’m done.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s shit,” he said, “it’s all shit. The system stinks; you can’t work within it because all it does is make sure that the criminality pays off. It’s not there to make an end to criminal behavior, just to keep it in channels so that dues are paid. That’s easy to see. But you can’t go outside the system either, because everybody’s out after you, and there’s something even worse than that.”
“What is it? What are you saying now?”
“I’m saying that if you go outside the system you are probably crazy, because a man outside of the institutions is going to be insane. We are social creatures, we are creatures of circumstance. But it doesn’t matter now, because if you get whipsawed one way or the other you might as well do what you want to, and that’s what I want to do.”
She stood there, looked at him. “I can’t take this anymore,” she said. “I simply cannot.”
“What are you taking? I was almost killed in Los Angeles. You’ve done nothing except keep the home fires burning and treat me like shit, of course.”
“I’m through,” she said. “This is the end, David. If you go out of here this time, there’s never going to be another. I promise you.”
“Listen to me,” he said. He brought up his knees, touched his chin, groaning, turned to his left, and then lurched out of the couch, palms first, coming to an uncomfortable standing position. “Listen to me and try to understand this one time.”
“Understand what?”
“That it’s all a plot.”
“What? What are you saying to me now?”
“Junk,” he said, “shit. Smack. Heroin. It’s been a plot from the start. Not for money. I mean, money was a part of it, the men who did the actual operation did it for the money, of course, but they were only put in business by the government. It was the government that gave them the license, and they weren’t doing it for the money at all. They had something else in mind, and they didn’t care if money was made out of it or not, as long as it could be done.”
She was standing at the door now. “I’m not going to be your audience,” she said. “I’m not going to listen to you while more insanity comes out. You’re not the man I married.”
“Who is? First it was the slave trade, and then the plantation, and then, after Lincoln, it got a little tough, so it had to be the industrial revolution, keeping our people at the machinery, having them do all of the work so they couldn’t think, but then the wars came along and the pressure started to build again, because they were dying just as good as the white folks for about the same reason, and it didn’t seem fair. A lot of people got very angry, and then you had the NAACP and the civil-rights revolution and the Supreme Court integration decision and there was a time in the middle fifties that it seemed that we were pushing right along, that we wouldn’t be able to take much more of it without breaking throu
gh. That’s when they got serious and pulled the plug on us. That’s when the stuff really started to flow.”
“You’re crazy.”
“They gave us the drug trade,” Williams said, “they gave it to us so that we would stay where we always were. The smack was the new slavery, that was all. The whole thing was worked out at the highest levels. They didn’t give a shit, not a damn, who ran it or what they pulled out of it, as long as the stuff went through. Then they could do a rigmarole of control just so it didn’t look as if government was licensing it out. But that did not fool anyone. At least,” he said, “it hasn’t fooled me. Now I see it. Now I see what they were doing to us.”
“David—”
“You have no use for me,” he said passionately, “you haven’t had any use for me for a long time. Ever since I came back from Los Angeles you figured I went over the deep end, that there wasn’t too much that was left. But you did what you could, squeezing a little here and there, taking what was possible, holding out a little promise here, a little hope there, when all the time I was being milked. But we weren’t going nowhere, and I should have seen it right away, just as I see it now. And the government’s going nowhere too. It’s all a charade. The only guy going anywhere at all is Wulff, and I don’t know how far he’s going, but I’m going to lend him a hand.”
“You have it all wrong. You didn’t see—”
“I saw everything. Everything. I got a good insurance plan. I got life insurance up the ass; any cop does. You’ll get yourself a couple hundred thousand I get knocked off in Philly. You won’t have to worry about anything for the rest of your life; you’ll be doing better than you are on a cop’s salary.”
She stood at the door and said nothing. Her mouth opened, she seemed on the point of making some statement, then it closed, and she sealed up from the inside, tight. Standing now, leaning a calf against the couch, he was ready for her, ready to hear anything that she had to say, ready to take it and deal with it as he could, but she said nothing.