Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

by Barry, Mike

  “No. It’s not information anyway, it’s just a feeling. I’ve got a feeling for this guy, I’ve studied him, I know his moves, where he probably is. But it’s nothing I can tell you.”

  “We won’t give you any men,” Miller said. “We’ve lost enough men going after him. This time we’re not going to take any risks at all.”

  “All right,” Gianelli said, the knowledge sinking into him that he was going to get almost nothing. “So I don’t get any men. I don’t get any help. Then all I want is permission.”

  “Permission for what?”

  “Permission to work in your territory. Permission to kill him. That is all I want.”

  “It’s a free country,” Miller said, “I can’t stop you.”

  “No, but you can make things very unpleasant for a man operating without your permission. I know about such things,” Gianelli said. “I am, after all, not any kind of a fool and I know how these things are done. If you will not give me help, you must at least give me permission so that I can avenge my old friend.”

  “Listen,” Miller said, turning to face the window, back from the window and to Gianelli, who was now rubbing his palms together, his eyes bright and somehow limitless in their apprehension. Miller saw small, doomed images of himself pinned in those eyes, blinking, blinking, blinking away. “Now listen, Calabrese wasn’t killed. Calabrese, I mean, he was killed all right but not by Wulff. There was no sabotage on that plane, the indications were that it just went down—”

  “No difference,” Gianelli said loudly, waving a hand, and Miller began to feel the focus of the conversation shift, now he was no longer in control: how had he lost control of this? It had been he who had slapped Gianelli the petitioner. Now it was Gianelli who controlled the room. “No difference, he sent my old friend to his death as surely as if he had pulled a gun on him; he was responsible for his going to Miami, he was responsible for bringing my old friend to this position, he put him on that plane, and he made him die. You know nothing of honor or vengeance,” he said, little white streaks appearing on his face, “you know nothing of these qualities; you come from a generation that laughs at these qualities, mocks them, makes the words stand for something that is only cause for laughter,” Gianelli said, and he was suddenly quite powerful, the dominance in the room was no longer something that Miller merely imagined. It was a physical fact. Gianelli looked years younger, his body seemed distended to great proportions, his face alive with youth—or merely energy, it was difficult to tell, they could have been the same thing. “This is for my old friend, Nicholas, and it is not for you to stand between the two of us. I do not do it for profit,” he said, “I do it for honor.”

  Miller had nothing to say. What could he say? There was no way to respond to the old man. In fact the old man was right, he was now being put into a context that had nothing to do with the way he regarded life, tried to run it. Life for Miller was a numbers proposition, input here, output there, balance the books, try to make every loss a gain in the long run, try to stuff the gains to cover up the losses. That was management, that was what the organization was all about now in the seventies—just holding on, declaring your position, and trying to maintain it. Passion did not enter into Miller’s calculations, nor did vendetta.

  Calabrese’s death was a disaster, of course, but a disaster that could be calculated down to the last decimal and had mainly to do with the convulsions that would be taking the Midwest in the wake of his death, the need to put the Midwest slowly, painfully together again. That was all that Calabrese’s death meant; considered objectively you had to recognize the fact that the old man was seventy-three, that good health or not he was reaching toward the end of his years and that within the next five or ten the convulsions would have started anyway, possibly worse because like all the old-line men Calabrese would be trying to pass on a line of succession, and that simply did not work these days. The outfit would not sit still for it. So there would have been a power struggle, the Midwest would split into factions, the factions would crawl and slash, and in due time peace would be declared, but six or ten months might have passed by and much business would have been interrupted. It was better, perhaps, to do it this way: a quick death, a shocking removal, the troops caught completely by surprise, and in that quiet aftermath the organization had a chance to get hold of the Midwest by itself and put its own procedures in with less difficulty than it might have had otherwise.

  In truth Miller cared very little about Calabrese’s death. The fact of it was important and if his death looked like an attack upon the outfit it would have to be avenged, cruelly, quickly, brutally, if only to make sure that an appearance of weakness was not given. But beyond that it mattered very little. He was not here. It was not Miller’s intention to shed tears because a powerful old man had gone down in a plane outside Chicago. The feelings would have to be left to the Gianellis.

  “All right,” he said, with surprising mildness, considering what he could have done to Gianelli for defying him like this on his own ground. “All right then. If you want to conduct your own search-and-destroy mission, that’s all right with us.”

  Gianelli’s face fell in upon itself, lines seeking lines, toward satisfaction. “Good,” he said, “that is very good.”

  “We cannot protect you.”

  “I understand that.”

  “We cannot give you any assistance of any sort, and this is your own vendetta; if you are killed by him or others, you will not be avenged.”

  “I am sixty-three years old,” Gianelli said. “My own life is a matter of indifference.”

  “All that I can promise you is that you will have safe conduct on our territory as far as we are concerned. You may conduct yourself as you see fit.”

  “That is what I wanted.”

  “But we don’t control Manhattan,” Miller said. “We don’t control Harlem, we have only certain officials, certain procedures, certain pockets of business … what I am trying to tell you is that this is a violent and dangerous city, and we are as much subject to the violence and danger as anyone. We cannot pledge your protection. This is not any Sicilian village.”

  “I take no offense at that,” Gianelli said. “I appreciate your bluntness.”

  “We are businessmen,” Miller said. “This is a business organization. The time of the blood feuds, of the great wars are over. I am not here to perpetuate them. We are trying to hold together a business operation, that is all.”

  “I am a man of the times,” Gianelli said and granted himself a little smile; here was a man, Miller suspected, who rationed out smiles to himself the way other men rationed out cigarettes or drinks. It was a luxury. “I am a completely realistic man and I know what you are speaking of. You can guarantee nothing. This is a dangerous city.”

  “So it is,” Miller said, “so it is,” and found himself losing interest in the conversation now. What did it matter? What did any of this matter? Calabrese was dead, the old fool gone in a downed plane, behind him all the problems of organization and control, bureaucratic charts, levels of approval. All of this was administrative, none of it personal. No time to mourn. From what he had understood, there had been no more than twenty people at the funeral, none of them from the organization. It was not like the old days; funeral attending was not something you wanted to get involved in unless it was something unavoidable, like your own. “So it is,” he said, the disinterest lashing at him like the sea, “and now I’d like you to go.”

  “Very well,” Gianelli said, “I think that our business is concluded,” and with a little bow, half a salute at the end of it, he let the smile fall away from him like a woman dropping a towel to nakedness and then grimly backed out of the room, retreating step by step, out the door then and into the whispering air-conditioned hallway of the hotel. “Thank you,” he said in the doorway, and pulled the door toward him. “I am sorry that you do not have feeling,” he said almost apologetically and was gone.

  Didn’t have any feeling? Did not ha
ve any feeling? For a moment Miller felt himself tumbling into a rage so extreme that he could have leapt from the chair and pursued the old bastard down the hall shouting: What do you mean I don’t have any feeling? I have plenty of feeling, but business is business! But as quickly as it had hit him, the impulse was gone and he was in his chair thinking: Feeling? What is this about feeling? Didn’t the old bastard know that this was a world with which they were dealing, not a dream, and that were it not for Miller and a very, very few like him, that world would rush in, throw tentacles around him and carry all of them from their rooms and corridors to be deposited in the sewage of history? Feeling had nothing to do with it, feeling was entirely beside the point. The question was one of utter control, and toward its maintenance he would let anything, anyone, even Wulff do what they must. If only the situation would remain, for him, cold and focused.

  IV

  Williams had been passed up the line through a series of interviews, and now one of the deputy commissioners wanted to see him. Williams’s case was unusual, exceptional, and no one knew exactly what to do with him. On the one hand he had been a competent patrolman during his time there, and what with the constant racial issue the department did not want to get into anything with those overtones by holding a black man back from reinstatement. But on the other hand, the circumstances under which Williams had summarily left the department, amounting to a defiance of normal procedures, were quite mysterious. On top of that, Williams simply would not talk about them at all. Why he had left, what he had done during those two months was his business and none of the department’s. He had told this to the personnel sergeant, he had told it up the line to the lieutenants, and now he had been bucked up to the deputy commissioner. And on top of all that, there was the news item today about that murder in Harlem and the grenade thrown through a storefront that turned out to be a shooting gallery. Williams needed no prodding to know who had done that work.

  Nor did the department. The department people weren’t fools. They read the papers and they had their contacts in the underworld. Even the new, fancy, modern, computerized NYPD made out in the same old ways, scruffing around with informants and informants on the informants, and they were pretty well briefed on what Wulff’s activities had been over the past six months, right up to this latest one, which was clearly his modus operandi and meant that the man was back in the city. The NYPD wanted him very badly. And for a number of reasons, they had gotten it into their heads that Williams had had some contact with him, that as a matter of fact, his mysterious AWOL might have been directly tied to Wulff, that he might have spent that period of time in his presence. The department was very anxious to find out everything they could about Wulff. Getting him was not only a matter of pride. For one thing they didn’t even know if they had that much to stick him with. No, it went much deeper than that. Wulff was conducting a vigilante campaign, which in essence was pointing out every step of the way that the authorities had lost control of the situation, but that a single, grim, determined man with a multiplicity of techniques might be able to do the job that they had failed to do for decades, to make real inroads against the drug traffic. This was not the kind of news with which the authorities were completely pleased, and the fact that Wulff had started off in the NYPD made him in a sense their responsibility, gave them an unusual interest in the case, just as a group of alumni might have a morbid interest in the activities of a fraternity brother.

  So they wanted Wulff very badly, and they pretty much had the idea that Williams was a lead into him. Even so, Williams might have gotten away with it, not felt the really heavy pressure. Except that the incident in Harlem was the clear giveaway that Wulff was somehow back in town and operating in the old fashion. That, with the colliding circumstance that Williams was also in town, just trying desperately to be reinstated and to get back to where he had been six months ago before what he liked to think of as the madness hit him. That was all the department needed.

  The deputy commissioner, a short man with surprisingly long and graceful hands, hands that he rubbed incessantly as if he were kneading clay, looked at him with a bright and rising glare of interest as Williams sat before him, and then he looked down at the papers on his desk. They were in his office, which despite all the rumored improvements in the PD over recent years was as scruffy as anything Williams remembered from movies taking place in the old precincts—paint coming off the walls in small, dismal chips, a cluttered desk, a window with bars that looked out on a courtyard where trainees were going through some kind of a crash emergency evacuation and riot control course, complete with clubs and screams. This deputy commissioner, Williams remembered vaguely, had been a member of the opposition party; appointed as some kind of political payoff. It stood to reason that his facilities would not be of the best. Administrations had a way of changing, so did deputy commissioners, but this office would go on and on. Nothing changed. The cities were run by civil servants functioning out of offices like this, and the politicians could have all the rhetoric they wanted; the civil servants would just grunt in their shabby little offices, shrug, and go on with their paperwork. The paint chips would continue to fall off the walls, the roaches would scuttle, the battered fluorescent lights would hum, and New York City would slide off into the sea. But those who were sinking would do it on full career and salary plan.

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Williams said for about the fiftieth time since he had started shuffling through the reinstatement route, the third time in this office this morning. It averaged eight to ten denials an interview. “All I know is what I read.”

  “We don’t seem to think so,” the deputy commissioner said. He looked at a sheet of paper lying on the top of the stack, took it off, smoothed it, then passed it across to Williams. “I’ve gotten a memo on this man,” he said. “It’s going all through the department.”

  Williams looked at the memo about Wulff with some interest. Apparently compiled by the police intelligence devision, or what passed for an intelligence division, it dealt with a reconstruction of Wulff’s activities since he had left the patrol car and the force. The work, all things considered was surprisingly accurate, although there were gaps in it, and they had missed a lot of the details as well as the relationship with the girl. He thought of the girl, Tamara, and a vision of Miami came back, the corpses littered on the sands, the girl’s body among them, blood draining from her body, Wulff standing over her, Williams trying to pull him away. He pushed the image away, squeezing his eyes shut, handed the memo back to the deputy. “I don’t see what that has to do with me,” he said carefully.

  “According to this you were with him, at least in Los Angeles.”

  “No,” Williams said. “I don’t know anything about that. I wasn’t with him. I haven’t seen him since that night on patrol.”

  “People don’t accept that,” the deputy said, his voice showing some irritation. He was obviously one of those men who prided themselves on their absolute control of situations. But the voice was breaking; it seemed that the deputy commissioner had made something close to a calculated decision to go out of control. “And I don’t accept that either. I think that you’ve had contact with this guy.”

  “Not for a long time.”

  “He’s back in the city,” the deputy said. “Everybody knows that. Now that blowup in Harlem, that’s clearly his kind of operation. The question I want to have answered is what is he going to do next?”

  “I don’t know what he’s going to do next,” Williams said. The thing to do was to cultivate a kind of flat calm, a patience, the same technique they taught you for interrogation: hit the same points over and over again, and after a while they might be so convinced you were stupid that they would cave in and let something enormous slip. “I don’t know anything about his plans at all. I was with this guy for one night of patrol car duty, you know that. We took a call about a girl on a drug o.d. in the west nineties, and he went up and investigated it; after awhile, when he didn’t
come down, I thought I’d better get up there too and have a look. I go up there and I find him—”

  “Yes,” the deputy said, “yes, yes, we’ve heard all that; that’s the same story we’ve been through time and again. I don’t find that acceptable. There are some pretty reliable reports that you were seen with him out in Los Angeles, that you joined him out there, that this explains your absence. I don’t have to tell you that this is a serious thing you’re involved in; you were aiding the commission of a felony. Now—”

  Williams looked at a large picture on the wall. The picture, the only adornment in the room, aside from the cracked and falling paint and the bars on the windows, showed the deputy commissioner shaking hands with the present mayor of New York City, the background indicating that it was a political banquet of some sort; tables, a middle-aged woman in a strapless evening gown who might have been the deputy’s wife staring bleakly through huge-framed glasses through the small space opened between the mayor and the deputy. Both mayor and deputy looked uncomfortable, but for different reasons: the mayor appeared to be trying to break the handshake, wondering if the picture had already been taken, while the deputy was desperately holding on as if for dear life, wedging his hand into the mayor’s, an expression of strain and pain in his eyes that might have been from trying to hold the contact or from the middle-aged woman in the evening gown. It was hard to tell. Williams supposed that if he kept on looking at the picture it would, bit by bit, yield up all kinds of insights about the deputy commissioner that in the long run he could do without. It was in full color, badly framed, and seemed to be swaying on the wall, although this was hardly posssible, the air in the room being dense and absolutely static. “Listen here,” he said, the photograph giving him a kind of frame for conviction. The deputy’s position was as tenuous as his own; this photograph was so painful that beads of sweat seemed to be coming off it; it was impossible to conceive of the deputy as being anything other than what Williams was, a man in severe trouble. “Listen here now, I’m twenty-six years old and I’ve got a wife and a mortgage and I’ve just had a baby son—”