Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

by Barry, Mike

  He would read all about it in the papers.

  So Wulff went back in the Electra to his furnished room in the nineties. Parking the Electra in the neighborhood would have been too complicated, and he did not even want to think of what it would have involved to seek garage space for it. The hell with it; he left it as a junker on West Ninety-fifth Street off the river, tearing off the hubcaps and throwing them down the palisades into the stinking, odorous Hudson, ripping off the antenna and laying it on the front seat, smashing in a window with a rock. It would lie there for weeks and weeks; passersby would take it for a car that had been wrecked on the highway and towed off by precinct tow trucks, left there to rot until city pickup and junking could be arranged. The cops would take it for a vandalized car and with their customary dedication would open it up and take anything serviceable out of the engine compartment. The car would sit there until some night when, for the hell of it, a neighborhood pack might throw a match into the gas compartment just to see what would happen, and then the black parody of the car would sit there for a while longer and eventually, after a long time, one of the junkers would get it. In the meantime he had nothing to worry about.

  He went back to his room with the gun he had pulled from the man he had killed and with a couple of the grenades he had seen still rolling on the floor of the Electra and had picked up for possible further use. Two flights off the street, behind his police-locked door, Wulff knew that he was on the verge of a decision now, right on the perilous lip of some kind of commitment that would one way or another take him past a point of no return: he could give up, give up utterly, stop it right now when he was ahead, and turn himself in to the police who would not know what the hell to do with him but were bound to give him a sympathetic hearing, probably get him off on a few minor manslaughter charges arranged through the DA. And he would get himself jailed for two to three years, come out and make a new life for himself. Or he could go on, go on the course he had set with this latest attack wherever it would send him.

  Two months or even two weeks ago there would have been no choice. He had been committed to his lonely and terrible quest no matter where it would take him. Butnow, since he had returned to New York, the two-to-three for manslaughter had almost looked tempting at times and for that he cursed himself. It was a hell of a thing that he would actually consider throwing himself upon the mercy of a system that he despised, that he had left exactly because of his hatred for it. But how far could he go? Certainly Miami had been the pivot. Tamara dead, the drugs gone, Calabrese dead, Williams fled. It had all seemed pretty pointless if it came down to that death on the beach and he might be better off out of it. Certainly it could be said that he had tried. He had done more to cripple the vermin than anyone since drugs had become the outfit’s new toy in the 1960s.

  But he had found out in Harlem that this was merely rhetoric, a fancy, something he had conjured up from his fatigue and pain, nothing more, no conviction. Harlem had shown him that now as always that pure, fine, high, dead lust for combat and destruction sang within him; he had listened to its voice calling him as he had attacked the vermin in the car and then the shooting gallery, and the voice had sung high and sweet, had sung out its dreadful purities in language that he could not ignore and that he knew reached him as no voice of reason or caution would. Back in his barren furnished room, pacing between stinking chest, stinking bed, stinking walls, Wulff said, “All right then, I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” and saying that had not known what he had said until the import of it struck him, redounding back from those walls, and then he knew; he knew that he had said it and the impact coming back on him slowly, a fist beating upon him like a heart, the rhythm of that fist pounding slow knowledge, and he said, “I’ll do it again,” awed with himself, at the singleness of that conviction, at the return of the rage and the sense of mission after all he had been through. At this stage he should have known better. Certainly at this stage he should have lost that sense of commitment. But it had been there all the time, all of the time indeed, merely waiting to reclaim him.

  But if it had been waiting to reclaim him so be it: he knew what to do next. From Williams, during their week in Los Angeles when they had talked about everything, he had obtained the whereabouts and nature of Father Justice’s Brotherhood of Divinity and Truth Church, the storefront in Harlem behind which was a weapons shop of such awesome selection and range as to make even an infantry commanding officer turn envious. To Father Justice he went to load up on new armaments. He knew that there would be a great deal of trouble with this. In the first place, going back to Harlem after the attack on the shooting gallery was risky altogether, highly risky; and in the second place, Father Justice had leased out a large amount of ordnance to Williams on an 80 percent refund basis. This Williams had had swiped from him when Calabrese’s troops had waylaid him and his U-haul on the desert on his return trip from Los Angeles. Father Justice could not be too happy about having lost so much ordnance. Williams had paid for it all, of course, and the good reverend had no claim whatsoever upon it. But if Wulff thought he knew this business as well as he did, Father Justice was not really in sales; he was in the rental business, and he could not look too kindly upon the loss of all this rare, valuable, and powerful material whether it had been paid for in full or not.

  Still, no doubt about it. If he was going to go on, he was going to have to load up, and as far as loading up was concerned, Father Justice was the only place in the vicinity that he knew about. The good reverend had the goods, that was for sure. Perhaps Wulff could best risk it by not letting on that he had any connection with Williams at all. That made it a question of a single white man going up to Harlem and asking for ordnance in quantities. That, too, Wulff suspected was not Father Justice’s kind of thing. Father Justice, a black revolutionary, dedicated and megalomaniacal, according to Williams anyway, was not in the business of leasing out guns to white men. This would get him nowhere; at best it would give him a sermon on conversion to the ways of righteousness and peace.

  Better to lay it on the line, then.

  He went up there very cautiously, checking out the terrain as if it were a foreign combat zone before he came out of the subway at 137th Street, reconnoitering carefully from that vantage point, moving uptown then exactly as one would infiltrate an enemy zone, high alertness, careful positioning, the willingness to use any part of the terrain for camouflage or cover, no matter how painful or awkward. He was ducking into storefronts, hopping buses, watching carefully in all directions as he made a sidelong, careful, circuitous passage uptown to the place where Williams had told him the storefront was. When he got there, looking at the dusty, shabby, decaying boards, the street almost deserted, the street in fact absolutely deserted as a young, terrorized female welfare worker, carrying her casebook under her arm tap-tapped her way up a wrecked brownstone and trembling into the lobby, Wulff had a moment of doubt, doubt piled upon indecision, the idea of going into this storefront, seeking arms from a lunatic seemed somehow appalling. But he drove through the point of indecision, shaking it off desperately and rammed his hand into the smashed boards of the Brotherhood Church.

  The storefront was decorated with religious symbols, little aphorisms, scrawled posters announcing the date of the next prayer meeting, the social club, the breakfast club, the revival society. Religiosity and crime stalked together in the inner city, Wulff thought, both of them heightened and irrational, both of them somehow as bizarre to the nestled inhabitants of the suburbs as might be the nature of an alien star (except that the inhabitants of the suburbs knew enough to be scared to death). And it would take a greater writer or politician, certainly a greater thinker than he to point out that the two of them were the same: crime and religiosity, both of them somehow mystical over-reactions to an unbearable present. Any cop knew that, any cop’s knowledge could inhabit and encompass the despair of these streets; but insight was not enough, there would have to be a way to frame it and to frame too the realization that drug
s and religiosity were also the same thing, at least in their intended effects, a trip, a trip out, an effective journey out of self and into some area where connection and control reappeared, the same connection and control that were lacking in the lives that brought the penitent to this position.

  But there were differences, of course. In the drug culture there were very few doubters, disbelievers, or reluctant attendees.

  Drugs made fanatics of them all.

  The door was opened by a black man in his mid-forties, black, black, black as the darkness, that darkness of his skin so intense that it might have been light. He was wearing a turban and religious garb of some sort, mottled pastels, and in his eyes danced a strange and merry light. He looked at Wulff appraisingly for a while and said, “The church is closed for the festival season.”

  “I would like to come in and discuss something with you,” Wulff said.

  “That may be very true,” the black man said, “that you wish to have a discussion, but as I say, the church is closed until the conclusion of the festivals and also it is a specifically African, that is to say a pan-African institution. I do not believe that you would be interested in the teachings of the church or that it would speak to your condition.”

  Wulff moved forward against the black man, stood there feeling the heat radiating from his body, and it occurred to him that there was no way to physically overpower the man. He had run up against a resilience and determination that simply could not be overcome. You might be able to kill Father Justice but you could not overpower him. “I pass onto you the blessings of peace and of this great festival of the moon,” Justice said. “I share with you our thoughts for universal connection and brotherhood at the end of this holiday, and now if you will pardon me I must return to meditations.”

  “My name is Wulff. I know David Williams,” Wulff said and added quickly when the black man’s eyes remained dead, “the man who was here weeks ago to buy a lot of ordnance. He’s my partner. He was bringing that stuff out to me.”

  “I do not believe I know what you are talking of,” Father Justice said. “We do not sell or deal in ordnance in this church, this church is a church of God. Also,” he said after a judicious little pause, “not only do we not deal in ordnance, but this man who you say you know who I am not conceding for a moment that I have ever heard of, in the hypothetical instance that he existed, he has failed the mission. He has failed his brotherly and spiritual duties by a failure to return any of this ordnance.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that.”

  “I believe there is very little to talk about.”

  “You’re Father Justice,” Wulff said. “Listen, I know you quite well through Williams. I know that you—”

  “I think,” Father Justice said, “that you had better come in. The street is not the proper place for concourse or devotions of any sort,” and stepped aside. Wulff saw looming blackness. He walked into it, a light flicked, and he found himself in a surprisingly large room, benches front to back, seating capacity of fifty penitents at least, religious ornaments dangling from the walls. One of them, a huge, golden crucifix seemingly suspended by invisible threads from the ceiling, particularly fascinated Wulff. As he looked at it, it seemed to glint, glow, change colors. He began to feel very much out of his own area of specialization, which was a peculiar way indeed to feel.

  Father Justice noted Wulff staring at the crucifix and said, “His mercy and his love is everlasting and evermore and this, as you see, is a concrete symbol of that everlasting mercy and love. Some of our congregation need concrete symbols to reinforce their feelings, but those of us truly in the church know that he is within, rather than without us.” He brought his hands together, looked at Wulff in a peculiar and intense way and said, “There have been difficulties with this Williams you claim to know. He has betrayed the Church of the Brotherhood.”

  “Everything was hijacked out West. He was kidnapped.”

  “I am afraid that kidnapping is a personal problem. I am concerned with the, ah, materials that you say have been lost.”

  “As I understood it, he paid for those materials in full.”

  “The Church of Brotherhood is never paid in full,” the reverend said. “Any recompense that we may take for our materials is far, far less than their actual value. In truth, we lend our materials, we do not sell them, much as the trinity lends or leases out the soul to us, to reclaim it at the moment of death. You understand that it is impossible to pay in kind for the receipt of materials.” His hands came apart. “I was expecting, in short, their return.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wulff said, “I’m sure that Williams is sorry too. But we can’t be accountable—”

  “Everybody is accountable!” Father Justice said loudly. He seemed to expand, rise six inches or more, his robes, falling to the floor gave a further illusion of ascension as if he were floating, suspended, within his ecclesiastic garb, moving, drifting now at off-angles to the crucifix. He looked at it with reverence. “In this world or out of it, all of us are truly accountable for our deeds and our acts. Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten, nothing is misplaced in the giant eye of the Creator who gave breath to us all. I do not think that there is any comfort or mission I can offer you.”

  “I’m quite willing to—”

  Father Justice made a dismissive gesture. “We do not deal in earthly goods here; we do not accept the symbols or tokens of mammon but seek a higher, a finer, a truer and if I may say a somewhat denser truth. One load of ordnance has already been lost. I cannot risk the loss of another. Also,” he said, giving Wulff a look of loathing, “we are a ministry of the community and for the African, that is to say, pan-African peoples. I would not care to deal with a member of your race, a member of that sect of devils who through time immemorial, through all of known and unknown history have turned their hands against my brothers.”

  “I need a machine gun,” Wulff said, “I need a good machine gun with full clip, an extra set of clips, and an M-15 rifle with silencer. I’m willing to pay two thousand.”

  Father Justice stepped back, looked at Wulff in an even way again, that cool, contained gaze flickering between crucifix and Wulff. Then he brought his hands together in that gesture again, touching the fingertips delicately against one another as if preparing to incline for prayer. “I am afraid you do not understand,” he said. “We are not dealing with earthly considerations here; we are dealing with a finer, higher, darker creed, one which unites all of my brothers—”

  “Twenty-five hundred dollars,” Wulff said, “and not a penny more. And for that I want it to be good, dependable stuff. You’ll probably never see it again but I’m taking that into account and paying you at least fifteen hundred dollars more than it’s worth.”

  Father Justice shook his head. “You do not understand,” he said, “the risks of prayer, the risks of dedication to the unearthly spirit, to the spreading and the gathering and the annealing and the dispensation of the word—”

  “Twenty-six hundred dollars,” Wulff said. “No more. That’s all.”

  “I see,” Father Justice said. “I see.” He bent, looked at the floor as if seeking some kind of meditative answer, some equation that would wrench him past a moment of crisis, and then he said very gently, “It will be necessary for us to seek the answer to this prayer in the back room. We will have to retire into the holy of holies for further meditation and consideration and hope that therein we will find the answer.”

  He turned, walked back toward the wall, touched it with a delicate gesture and suddenly there was a panel that splayed open, another panel buckling with it, and there was a man-sized entrance into a huge, dark cavity behind. Quickly, gracefully, the reverend walked through it, Wulff following, and Wulff found himself in an odorous, enormous room, rich smells of wood and metal around him. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Wulff saw that he was in the largest arms cache he had ever seen in his life. From shelves piled to the ceiling fifty yards from him downrange in any di
rection, were the glinting aspects of ordnance: ordnance of all forms, of all apparent stages of modern history: here were hand grenades from the world wars piled neatly atop one another: here were M-l rifles, the old dependables from World War II and Korea; shading off in the rear were the modern, repeating M-15s; there were incendiaries of the most sophisticated type used in Vietnam; a little bit closer were clumsier bayonets of the type that had inhabited every barracks since the First World War.

  Remarkable. It was absolutely remarkable. Williams had not been kidding, all right; Father Justice had a cache here like nothing he had ever before seen. Conceivably army supply center1s in the ordnance depots were stocked like this, but in civilian life, of which Father Justice could be considered to be a part, you would have to go long and hard to see a stockpile like this.

  It would have made a religious man of the most avid skeptic, just to see what prayer and devotion had accomplished for Father Justice in this warehouse.

  “Twenty-six hundred dollars is insufficient,” Father Justice said, coldly. His manner once he had entered the room had changed entirely. The mask of the divine had fallen from the good reverend’s face and had been replaced with seamless lines of perception and purpose. “You must think that we are fools here to sell to a white man in the first place,” Justice said, “and in the second, that is ridiculous compensation for the risk involved. How do I know who you are? How can I know for what purposes you’re going to use this stuff? Five thousand.”