by Barry, Mike
So enough. Enough thinking. Wulff moved with his attaché case through the lobby of the hotel, knowing that he was being seen by a hundred eyes, that at least three or four pairs of them would be checking his face back against a register, recorded and unrecorded, that somewhere, someone was going to make the necessary connection and that in almost no time at all Vinelli would know exactly who he was and when he had entered. He was walking right into the maw of the enemy, presenting himself to them. It was not subtle, it was extremely dangerous, but Wulff knew of no other way to handle it.
He thought that he could handle Vinelli. Then again perhaps he could not. He might have misjudged everything. But he suspected that he might be able to deal with the man because although this was Vinelli’s turf, controlled entirely by him, Wulff had something on the man as well. He knew why he was here and so did Vinelli and if Vinelli was as nervous about Stone as Wulff suspected … well, then, an interview could work two ways, couldn’t it?
Regardless, he did not know any other way. He never really had; it had always been a question of walking into situations, taking them at the level confronted and making the best of them. It had been that way from his earliest days on the force as a patrolman pounding up the filthiest alleys of Harlem; it had been that way in Saigon when, in what seemed to have been another lifetime, he had once walked through a minefield alone and taken out a nest of twelve guerrillas. No medal of honor on that one; the company commander had fucked up everything, had not accounted for the presence of that team and had been about to order the company into the area until Wulff, on the point, discovered the mines and then the embankment … not a bronze star nor a silver medal nor a cross of distinction, not even a three-day pass for that matter from his panicked young captain, but he had not minded. It was a lesson. Everything could be a lesson if you approached it in the spirit that almost nothing good would ever happen. So he had kept on walking into things; back in New York he had done it on the narcotics squad which was the plum they thought they would assign him for his self-sacrifice in enlisting in the army, and it was that which had finally gotten him into trouble, bounced off the squad for turning in an informant, back to the patrol car, the dead girl and everything which had followed. Walking into situations with his eyes open, willing to pay the price of prices. A smarter man would not have functioned that way. A smarter man would not have blown up San Francisco either.
He walked through the lobby into the casino. They had him spotted by this time, he was sure. A man who had been lounging against a pedestal reading a racing sheet and smoking a cigar, apparently a relaxed horseplayer, had taken one quick look at Wulff and almost dropped the paper, scurried then toward the bank of elevators. A well-dressed girl who might or might not have been a hooker looked at him sidelong as he passed and then went to a lobby telephone; two middle-aged men with menacing faces had conferred with one another and then had hastily moved toward the desk. These people were not fools, security was strong here and Martin Wulff was famous too, never forget that: he was probably one of the best-known names in the world now to the people with whom Vinelli circulated. Fleeting thing, fame, but real while it lasts. So it was only a matter of time now: five minutes, ten minutes until they made their move. He decided to let them come to him.
Plenty of time. He felt the old combat calm coming over him, that deadening sense of certainty with which he had walked toward the embankment knowing that the worst thing the mines could do would be to blow up and kill him. Only one death however in a lifetime, and he had had his. The calm leveled him down, gave him a cold sense of purpose. He wished that Williams had been with him now, right this moment, so that he could see how Wulff could operate when the pressure was on and that vision would have wiped the contempt from the man … but Williams, no fool, was on patrol duty right now, his part of the assignment finished. Who was using who? Wulff thought vaguely and kept on moving into the casino.
Here, the noise overtook him. On an upper level grim men in evening dress watched everything going on below; below, over an enormous area, half-partitions thrown up here and there to split it, the roulette wheels were grinding, the great lights of the casino were fluttering like birds, the croupiers and housemen were grinding away. It was the kind of sound you might have heard at the end of the world; a sound of gathering, forces meeting at a concentration of focus and even in terms of the situation he had to react with awe to the sheer power and dimension of it. Here it was all out in the open: drugs were quiet, drugs went inside and broke down the mind and the body in a series of smooth, deadly implosions but gambling was public, an extension of heat and light in which the evil became stretched so thin as to be almost transparent. Wulff felt that he could look through it, almost, down to the center to see the souls of the people at the tables, their little dead souls encased in the wood called greed and pain … but then again maybe you could tell nothing about them; it was an exaggeration to think that gambling revealed anything other than the sheer results. The hell with it.
He moved into a roulette table. In a short period, men with huge palms would grip him by the shoulders and spin him upwards to Vinelli; for the time being one way of waiting was as good as any other. He watched the wheel spin, the mottled, crazy wheel ticking and brushing away all possibilities as a woman in front of him put her hands to her ears and closed her eyes breathing deeply. She seemed to be in anguish. Then the wheel stopped, the croupier said “quatre noir”—the black four hovering under the brush, even here they must have thought that using French gave the operation a touch of real class—and the woman leaped, one tiny bounce and ran toward the table, her hand extended for the chips. “Double your money!” she said, “Double your money!” Her mouth hung open, her hand scrabbling at the table. At another time she might have been pretty but all of that was behind her now. Wulff watched her take handfuls of chips, sprinkle a few of them at the croupier and run from the room, her buttocks moving unevenly under the dress. It was impossible to tell where she was going.
“Chips,” a girl in a short costume on his left said, “do you want some chips, sir?” She looked up at him in an appealing way, holding a tray on which glasses were balanced. Impulsively he took one and drank from it, raw scotch on ice; choking. “You shouldn’t do that, sir,” she said, “these are for the players …”
“I’m a player,” he said, “I’m a player,” and walked toward a cage on the end leaving her behind, looking for some chips but down the line, swinging his case, he felt a hand hitting his shoulder with a finality which was unmistakable. He turned, holding steady under that handhold and saw the two men, one very tall, the other short. The short one was the one with the hand on his shoulder and he was smiling, smiling, Wulff had never seen a smile like that in his life or then again perhaps he had; coming into a shooting gallery once, a man clamped against a wall had turned to him, his face breaking open into an expression so ecstatic and terrified by turns that Wulff had been almost unable to deal with it. This was the same smile and dear God, he had it now and it all came together, Vegas was a shooting gallery.
He slowed. The smiler kept on the grip, applying some pressure now, surprisingly forceful for such a little man. “Well,” the tall man said, “you’re wanted upstairs.”
“Right away,” the smiler said. His fingers became sharper. Wulff felt them hit bone. He tried to shrug them away but the pressure only came in harder. No one was looking at them. There was nothing you could do in a casino to attract attention except to die or break the bank.
“Let go,” Wulff said.
“Make me,” the smiler said. With his free hand he reached inside his coat. “Just make me.”
“We can do it easy,” the tall man said quietly, “or we can do it hard. Your decision.”
“Don’t try it,” Wulff said.
“Why not?” said the smiler, his hand fondling his chest. “What’s to stop us?”
“Easy or hard,” the tall man said. He seemed to be enjoying himself. They were both enjoying themselves.
That was the kind of thing you liked to see, all right, people who enjoyed their work. A light heart was the most important thing.
“All right,” he said.
“Just walk toward the door,” the tall man said.
“Tell this clown to let go of me then.”
“I don’t think he wants to let go of you.”
“I don’t want to let go of him. I really don’t want to let go of him.”
Wulff turned on the smiler, came down across his wrist with a short, heavy blow. There was no sound of impact but instead a high, thin sound as of wood snapping. The smiler gasped and his hand came away, shaped at an odd angle. It was jammed up against his arm. The wrist seemed to have vanished.
“He broke my wrist,” the smiler said in a sobbing whisper. “The son of a bitch broke my wrist.” He started to draw something out of his jacket but the tall man stopped him, one easy gesture, and the smiler abandoned the idea. He clamped the broken wrist between his knees and screamed soundlessly with the pain, semi-crumpling. At a table near them a woman screamed. The field had come in, tens twice, apparently she had a parlay working. There was a trace of blood at the corner of the smiler’s mouth.
“Forget it,” the tall man said, “let’s just take him upstairs.”
The smiler had sunk to his knees now. He was small; pain was compressed within him, far more intense than it might have been in the taller man. Wulff stood, looking at him. He felt something prodding his back in a familiar way.
“That was stupid,” the tall man said, “that was really stupid of you.”
“I told him to let go of me.”
“Now what the fuck am I going to do with him?” the tall man said with disgust, looking at the smiler. He had come in on himself like a snail now and was shaking on the floor. For the first time, a little attention was being paid to him. Chips, after all, might come rolling out of his pockets.
“Leave him there,” Wulff said, “the sweepers will be along.”
The tall man seemed indecisive. He functioned well under orders apparently but something out of schedule threw him off balance. Vinelli could hardly be in such a good position after all; not if the help could not even handle a simple job like this. The point seemed to be that almost all of them were incompetent. Only Cicchini in Boston seemed to know what the hell he was doing and he had gotten through to Cicchini as well. The smiler, no longer a smiler but a pale little man whose eyes had rolled up beyond the sightline weaved to his knees and crouched on the floor. “Kill the bastard,” he said.
They were drawing a crowd. The flow of play seemed to have eased off at the tables; one by one, as if word was being passed down the line telegraphically, people were turning, looking at them. The tall man seemed to tremble, doubt and indecisiveness pouring through him like water. He seemed, however slowly, to come to some kind of a decision. He reached inside his clothing.
Wulff beat him to it. His revolver was in his hand and then he was holding it, jamming it tightly into the tall man’s ribs, closing off the contact by turning his body so that it would have taken someone very close in to see what was going on here. “Don’t think of it,” he said, “just don’t think of it.”
The man’s hand fell away. He turned toward Wulff, his face falling open. “If you shoot,” he said, “you’ll never get out alive.”
“You botched the job,” Wulff said, “what kind of clowns are you people?”
The tall man said nothing. He lifted a hand weakly as if in greeting. The smiler had managed to get to his feet and stood there, holding his wrist with a broken expression.
“All right,” Wulff said to the tall man, “let’s go.”
“Go? Go where?”
He prodded him with the gun indelicately. High above he could see the attention of a houseman focusing down on him. The man leaned over a railing as if he were trying to fix everything in memory. Then he turned and reached for a telephone.
“Where?” Wulff said, “where you wanted me to go, of course. Take me up.”
“I’ll kill the bastard,” the smiler said. Rage seemed to have given him new energy. He lunged toward Wulff and Wulff kicked him in the ankle, hard. The smiler screamed and fell to the floor on the broken wrist. He opened his mouth then and vomit came out.
Definitely, the flow of play began to break in the casino. Housemen were coming toward them. People were moving away from the tables, not toward the incident but rather the doors. In a moment, the situation might get out of control.
“Let’s go,” Wulff said. He prodded the man in the ribs hard, again. The tall man began to stagger toward an exit. Wulff kept on top of him, allowing not even an inch of space to open between them. They got through the door without any trouble.
“You’re crazy,” the tall man said, “you’re crazy. Don’t you know what you’re walking into here?”
“I’m walking into a place full of people like you,” Wulff said. Expertly, pivoting, he frisked the man, removed his gun. They were in a long, curving hallway filled with light. No one came out of the casino in pursuit. No one looked for them at all.
He took the gun and put it away, gave another prod with his own. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”
“Let’s go?”
“To see the man,” Wulff said, “to see Vinelli.”
The tall man began to move again. He moved ahead of Wulff in twitches, like an aged beaten man, dragging his leg. A door opened down the corridor and like a sunbeam an arc of noise hit them, high, panicked shouting from the casino. Then the door closed, and they were in silence again.
The tall man shook his head and plodded on, his shoulders heaving slightly against the impact of the gun. “You’re just out of your mind,” he said, “if you think that you’re going to be able to get away with this. No one takes on Vinelli. No one gets near him.”
“I’m off to a start though, right?” Wulff said. The tall man said nothing to this, and they went on.
V
Vinelli remembered the great councils of the early 1960’s. That was when it had all started to come apart. Up until then it had been a clean, tight operation, dispersed, of course, but run through a central committee and with a remarkable degree of efficiency and union considering the personalities involved…. But the councils had signalled the beginning of the era of breakdown—the 1960’s when everything had started to come apart and nothing could be done about it. You could not go back. That was clear, anyway. Whatever happened, you could not go back.
The councils had had to do with the drug trade. What it came down to very simply was that the people at the very top, the older men, wanted no part of the drug business. The great wars of the 1930’s had convinced them that there was a clearer, easier path in gambling, loan-sharking, smuggling, prostitution to say nothing of getting into construction and all other areas of so-called legitimate business. They did not need drugs, which only served to bring a lot of crazies into the organization and were far more trouble than they were worth, what with the problems of controlling traffic, watching for adulterated supplies and so on. Also a number of the old bastards had simply been against drugs on so-called moral grounds: they did not like the idea of peple putting shit into their veins when there were so many more pleasant ways of getting out of the world like fucking or running policy. Back in the 1930’s that had probably been a good idea, there was no rhyme or reason to the trade in the thirties, all kinds of shit was coming in from all over the world, a large part of it smuggled in by students and vagabonds and there was no way of clamping a lid on it. Also that stuff could kill you.
So the Mustache Petes had a point. The trouble was that the point had to do with the situation as it was twenty or twenty-five years ago; in the fifties the situation had broken open. Drugs were everywhere now, they were already a highly refined, organized business and in the absence of organization control and administration a lot of independents had moved in, most of them blacks getting their chance for the first time at the kind of independent organization and
money which was enabling them to set up a distinct counter-organization. There was no way to cut off these interests short of getting into drugs on your own and knocking them down that way with the old organization power and coercion.