Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

by Barry, Mike

  “I know all about that. Congratulations.”

  “And I’ve got to put my life together,” Williams said. “I’m in a whole lot of trouble and I admit it; I shouldn’t have taken the walk that I did, but I was very confused and I had my reasons.”

  “We know you had your reasons.”

  “Let me finish!” Williams said, his voice shaking to a kind of passion, and the deputy retreated, put both hands on his desk, pushed himself away imperceptibly but in a way that for Williams was a signal that he had temporarily gained some kind of control. “I admit that I made a mistake, and I’m the first one to say it, but does a man have to live all his life in shame because he’s made one mistake? Does a whole life have to rest on one decision? I want to get back; I admit I was wrong but it didn’t seem wrong at the time, and I’m willing to apologize and come back. I’m not asking for any favors, but there’s a hell of a lot of training and experience that I’ve got tied up in me and you can’t send it down the drain.” Crawl you bastard, he thought. Go on and crawl. Still, what alternative did he have? He even more than the deputy knew how limited his options had become. If it wasn’t the police department, what was his alternative? Send his wife back to work in a department store, take care of the baby during the days and tend night bar? That was promising. That was really promising for a guy who two years ago thought he had the game beat: you would join the system and make it work for you, laugh at all of them from behind the career and salary plan. Oh, he had learned a few things all right. He had learned a few goddamned things; the trouble was that everything that he had learned he would have been better off not knowing. “I’m asking for a chance,” he said, loathing himself. “I’m entitled to a chance.”

  “You’re entitled to nothing,” the deputy said mildly, “nothing at all. But we’re not out to punish people. We’re not out to humiliate here; we’re trying to save people.”

  Sure you are, Williams thought furiously, that’s exactly what the PD is in, the people-salvation business. But he said nothing, merely looked at the man impassively. Nothing, nothing to say. Sooner or later you had to learn to keep your mouth shut.

  “I’ll offer you a deal,” the deputy said, “but I don’t know whether you’ll be interested or not. If you’re telling the truth you’ll probably be interested, but if you’re not you won’t be.”

  “What deal?” Williams said and almost added, swab out latrines in the sixty-second precinct for a couple of months just to prove my loyalty to the department? Or maybe I should go out in a black T-shirt and jeans, prowl Forty-Second street, go out on the fag patrol to get broken in. But again he said nothing. Shutting up was easy once you made a discipline of it. He should have tried it months ago.

  “We’re putting together a special squad,” the deputy said and ran his fingers over the memo he had shown Williams, “trying to put together a special squad to find this man.”

  “Wulff?”

  “Wulff,” the deputy said flatly. “You know who I mean. He’s an embarrassment to the department, and in many senses he’s a departmental responsibility. He comes from New York and if certain things has been handled differently by us he never would have been in business in the first place.” He looked at the ceiling, gave a half shrug. “That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “I’m not discussing whether we were right or wrong in handling him that way. As you know I wasn’t here when all of this happened. I was appointed only three months ago. We’re putting together an elite squad, some of the best men we can find, heavy weapons men, intelligence operators, men experienced in intelligence work, keeping it small and compact, trying to keep it to ten men. And I think that you could be useful on it. You have first-hand knowledge of the man, his habits, his modus operandi. For one thing you were out in Los Angeles with him.”

  “No,” Williams said, “I was not.”

  The deputy stared at him, and Williams held the gaze until he could no longer, looked away, past the photograph, swinging his gaze toward the gates covering the window. No, the man was no fool. He had to face that; the photograph, the particulars of his appointment might show that the deputy was as human and fallible as any of them except Wulff himself, but this did not mean that the man was a fool. On a certain level he had his own control, own self-awareness, enough insight. Williams could not look this man in the eye and tell him that he had not been with Wulff in Los Angeles. For all its weaknesses the PD had compiled a pretty good dossier on Wulff, better than it would have been credited with achieving. Keep quiet. Keep your mouth shut. At a certain point forbearance was the only tool left in the arsenal. “I just don’t know,” Williams said, “I just don’t know what to say about that.”

  “You don’t want to be on the squad? You don’t want to be responsible for finding your friend?”

  “That’s not it,” Williams said.

  “I think that is it. I think that’s exactly what you have in mind. Do I have to spell it out for you, patrolman? This is a man who has murdered some five hundred people in six months, all of them for what he considers to be good purposes, but that does not mean that he is anything but a dangerous killer. The end does not justify the means, and as long as a man of this sort is on the loose it means that no one is safe, not only criminals, but all of us, because escalating violence involves many innocent people and also creates a state of consciousness where there is increasingly more violence.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you really know it? Secretly in your heart of hearts, your sympathies are with Wulff. You think that he’s doing a wonderful job, that he’s doing a job about the only way that it could be done, because bureaucracy can’t deal with criminal control and in many respects is part of the criminal system. Don’t you believe that, patrolman?”

  “I try not to think about that,” Williams said. “I don’t want to think about the ethics of the thing any more.”

  “Oh, you do,” the deputy said, his voice rising, leaning across the desk, “you do so believe. In your heart of hearts, you have a secret admiration for this man. You may feel that his methods are a little too violent, but you and a good many police officers like to feel deep down that this is the right way to approach the situation: vigilantism, murder, that Wulff is making fools of the authorities because they can’t do the job and he can by going outside the normal processes of law and order that hold our society together. That’s what law and order is, Williams, not an excuse for beating heads, like certain politicians like to say in code; law and order is that fabric of rules and manners and understandings and codes that hold together a large, unhappy, polarized society such as we have today and make it possible for people to live their lives. And your man is attacking all of this; he is turning life back into a jungle, and every cop, any cop who believes in his heart that he’s right, who is secretly rooting him on, that cop is killing himself because he’s cheering on a situation in which that cop will stand for nothing, in which any man with the price of a gun and what he thinks is a set of reasons can kill that cop, make life hell for all cops.”

  “Listen,” Williams said, mildly enough, “he’s not my man. You’ve got this thing wrong—”

  “Your man, my man, what does it matter?” the deputy said. “Listen, we’re not fools, there’s a great deal of Wulff-sympathy in this PD and in departments all through the country. Don’t you think we know that? We’ve learned from informants that cops in certain cities have had information from sources that he was coming in their direction, plenty of time to mobilize for his coming, anticipate his moves, stop him if they could. But they did nothing because a lot of cops—I mean highly placed cops, men at the top levels—think he’s fighting their battles, and as far as they’re concerned he’s taking the heat off them, taking off the pressure, maybe doing a job too dirty and risky for them. But they’re crazy! This isn’t enforcement, this is vigilantism, and this isn’t a vigilante country any more.” The deputy tapped the desk three times earnestly, more conviction in his face and voice than Williams
had seen, more than he would have suspected. He could understand, at least was beginning to understand, why this man might have political connections and talent. Furthermore, he had a point. Definitely he had a point. As between Wulff attacking the system and Williams once believing in it, neither of them was completely right, but it was possible that Williams had been more right than Wulff. Because once you went outside the system you had nothing. Not righteousness, not an end to corruption, but simply nothing: death. The system was man’s way of imposing some order, no matter how perilous, upon the essential void of reality. And this thought was too difficult for him, Williams did not want to face it, there was no end to the trouble you inherited if you started charging down channels like this because you might end up believing that anything was better than that void, any corruption, any pain, any madness, simply so that you would not have to face the darkness of no choices at all. Enough. Enough.

  “Do you see what I’m saying?” the deputy was going on, apparently having continued even more passionately while Williams had been charging into his own subterranean channels. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t hate the system and cheer on a man who’s in effect destroying it and yet working for it at the same time. It’s one or the other. Your problem is that you wanted it both ways; you wanted to be a cop because you thought it was a good living, a safe job, decent pay, good pension, but at the same time underneath you hated the system you were supporting. You thought you could be a double agent, Williams, you thought that you could have it one way on the outside and another on the inside. But it doesn’t work that way. You found that out, didn’t you? You found out a few things.”

  “I found out a few things,” Williams said, “I am not denying that.”

  “The question is,” the deputy said, “will the innoculation take or was it just a booster shot, a temporary injection with no staying power?”

  Williams looked at him and at that moment felt all evasion and deception drop from him as if they had been a cloak he had been carrying around for twenty-six years. Free of it now, feeling the breezes of these new thoughts closing around him, it was as if he had not been conscious of the weight of that cloak until it had fallen. “I don’t know,” he said, “I can’t answer that. But I do see what you’re saying. I really do.”

  “He’s up to it again,” the deputy said. “He’s back in town, and it’s going to be the same thing all over again. This business in Harlem is just the beginning if we don’t stop him, and I mean stop him now. You see, there’s just not going to be any end to it. There’s never a cutoff point. And no man, not even Burton Wulff, is in a position to make judgments as to how much is enough.”

  “All right,” Williams said, nodding slowly, “all right, I understand. I understand what you’re saying. You want me on your squad? I’ll be on your squad.”

  “But do you want to? Or do you just want to get back on that career and salary plan so desperately that you’ll agree to anything just so you can get hold of the tit. Because that isn’t going to work. This time, Williams, it isn’t going to work.”

  “I understand,” he said, “I understand that. I’ll get on the squad. I’ll do the best you think I can. I’ll give what help I can. I see your point,” Williams said, looking up at the photograph, thinking again: this man is no fool; he looks like a fool, in a way sometimes he may act like a fool, he may be in a fool’s position, but there is just no saying what the real measure of a man is and, middle-aged woman, stupid handshake and all, he is on the ball. He sees things I have not seen; he has told me things I did not know.

  Maybe, he thought, and this was a strange new thought, maybe this deputy commissioner was like everyone else; he had to do things he did not like to do, become something he did not want to be, simply to be in a position where he could get these ideas across to someone and have a small chance of feeling that they were being put into practice. There was no saying what ass a man had to kiss to become a man—or what the ass kissing might in the long run mean; it might mean something entirely different from what it seemed.

  Puzzling and confusing; he would have to work it all out, he would have to give it a great deal of thought. “I’ll do what I can,” he said again and extended his hand across the desk to the deputy. “I’ll do what I can,” and they shook hands then, the grip in his hand as light and sweaty as he would have thought. But you could not judge a man by his handshake either, or by the number of corpses he was willing to pile high for what he believed to be the justification of his purposes.

  He saw the point.

  He hated the seeing … but it was there.

  V

  Wulff had to get back to his quarters to think, had to reconnoiter with himself to see what was going on. But after the attack in Harlem there was almost no time; there was just no way that he could. Once again it was a feeling of events lurching out of control, mindless, insane. From the moment that the one in the Electra had pulled a gun on him, he had seen it all laid out before him, the violence, the necessity to kill, and he had met that with reluctance because he was tired, he had seen enough. And because going back to killing on the streets of Harlem was going back six months to a stage that he thought he had left behind him. If he had accomplished anything in Peru, in Havana, in Miami he had hoped that he had escaped from the shooting galleries of the inner city.

  But they would not leave him alone. It had been madness to think that they would; furthermore, he should have realized that reconnoitering Harlem was in a sense asking for it. What was he doing in that blasted land if not seeking, perhaps consciously, more likely unconsciously, exactly this kind of attack? His first reaction had been rage, and he had used that to kill simply, quickly, destroying the man in the car who had shot at him, the other one reeling out crazily, gesticulating, fleeing across the street and into the shooting gallery, and at that moment Wulff had felt all his purposes coalescing: he knew why he had come to Harlem and what he had to do next.

  Pitching the body of the dead man out of the Electra, he had taken the wheel. It was there, wrenching the car away from the curb, that he had seen that the floor of the car was littered with incendiaries, literally covered with them; these men were not only addicts but pocket revolutionaries of some sort. Amidst the bloodstains tracing out their delicate network on the floor panels of the Buick were small, rolling objects that seemed to be hand grenades, sheathed knives, unsheathed knifes, the disassembled pieces of what seemed to be a small-bore rifle. They had everything covered, these men, no doubt about it. Shoot it in, shoot it up, shoot it out.

  They were coming out of the shooting gallery to see what had happened, cautious ones and pairs of them standing there, gesticulating, and at that moment the clear certainty of inspiration had hit Wulff: those were grenades on the floor of the car, and if they were grenades they were meant to be used. It would be pointless not to do so; it would not be a fit memorial to the man he had killed—he wanted to look at it that way—not to put his weapons to some use in his memory. So quickly, impulsively, not even bothering to think it over, he had picked up one from the floor—it was standard army issue—curled it within his palm, a strange, even, even heat radiating from the grenade, and then in one quick, brisk gesture had thrown it twinkling through the air toward the shooting gallery, the grenade twisting in a high arc, and it had hit dead in the storefront in the middle of a bleached and ruined O and then in a single whoomp! it had gone up.

  No time for retreat, no time even to scream; there had been in the faces of those watching him only that one astonished instant of comprehension when they understood what he was going to do, but caught between the grenade and that realization they had not been able to move for the critical two seconds that might have saved them. The fragmentation from the grenade and the concussion had blown the building within itself, an implosion rather than explosion. It brought back memories of bodies Wulff had seen in the fields of Vietnam where it had been this way; the incendiaries driving the bodies into themselves so that they had been
small, terrible ruined balls of blackened flesh. What a death that must be! driven in upon oneself, the moment of death not even a release but instead burning and blasting within, a seeking of the flesh for its ruined and rotted core!

  Wulff had already been driving the Electra frantically, beating out the heart of the machine through that lever on the floor, moving the huge, rotting car through the back streets of Harlem, possessed with the necessity merely to get out of there. He could think of the explosion later. No, he would never think of it again.

  There had been no pursuit, but he had not really expected that there would be. What was pursuit? What was the nature of entrapment now that he had bombed out the shooting gallery? These people were not interested in pursuit, they were not geared for it at all, all that they were interested in doing was in shooting the poison through their veins by the quart, and any interruption of that purpose was merely that, an interruption. They would not deal in retaliation No, he was safe, he was dealing with a population so bombed out, so fatigued, self-involved and desperate that there was literally nothing that could not be perpetrated upon them. Harlem was in itself witness to five decades of exploitation by generations of looters, and the map of that precinct was a map of shame; only in movies would Harlem enforcers come speeding out of the ghetto in fast, black cars to locate the thrower of the grenade and bring him to justice, extract small pieces of vengeance out of his flesh. Only in movies would this happen because only in movies was Harlem a community at all, a community that could be expected to gather around and protect its own.

  No, no, Harlem was nothing like this at all. Harlem was a concentration camp or a prisoner-of-war compound in which groups of the brutalized milled around in small and smaller packs, each of them seeking only his own preservation. What a million dollars might have been for one of the distributors, what the Presidency of the United States would have been for the governor, so one more fix, one more day was to your run-of-the-mill Harlem junkie. Let the governor have his presidency, let the Calabreses have their million. The junkie would take tomorrow in the same spirit, one more step into the imponderable and unspeakable future. No one was going to pursue him. There was no will to even try.