Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

by Barry, Mike

  “Forget it,” Wulff said. “I can’t come near that.”

  “Where are you going to better the price? Can you go down the block, find another supplier?”

  “Five thousand is ridiculous. Four thousand would be. I just made you top offer. Twenty-six hundred.”

  “No.”

  “Then why invite me back here at all?” Wulff said. “You wouldn’t have asked me to step into this room unless you saw something in my offer, some territory to be explored.” He paused, put down an urge to light a cigarette, looked instead at the glinting, terrible contents of the room and said, “Three thousand. But that’s the last. I won’t go any higher than that.”

  “Three thousand is a small contribution to the temple of the holy spirit.”

  “Three thousand is the top,” Wulff said, “that’s the limit for what I’m asking. I’m not asking for an army’s worth of stuff, you know.” Rage was overtaking him. This was the way it had been now for a long time, drift along, go through the motions, try to do the best you could reasonably, taking it step by step and a sudden stab of revulsion, some aspect in the enemy’s eyes, some quirk in the situation would trigger off an eruption from the layers of grief and rage buried within, his perilous control over himself would lapse, and perhaps that would throw the adversary more than any calculation could; perhaps the adversary, looking at what this did to Wulff would suddenly realize that he had moved past the point of manipulation and could no longer dissemble. Hard to say. Hard to know. Looking at Father Justice, seeing the quickening and confusion in those eyes, Wulff began to see the phenomenon work again, that phenomenon of reversal when the adversary felt the situation beginning to slide away at cross-angles, something in his eyes like the very light of religion himself. Why, the man might indeed be a reverend, that might be the secret of his power, his conviction, guns for the eyes of the Lord. Justice said, “That is a ridiculous sum. And from a white man, to accept this kind of money from a white man is suicidal. Nevertheless I am going to do it.”

  “Good,” Wulff said.

  “I will do it on condition that the materials are returned.”

  “I can’t promise you that. There’s no way that I can make you that promise at all. I don’t know where I’ll be.”

  Justice shook his head with a kind of weary, stubborn insistence. “Then we can’t do business,” he said. “There are limits to this, but you must understand that I am not autonomous, I am no more a free agent than you are.”

  “I’m a free agent.”

  “Well you may be a free agent,” Justice said, “although in the eyes of the Creator, as you must surely know, there is no such thing as a free agent, all of us must merely commit God’s will—”

  “Save that for outside. Outside this room you go into that.”

  “That is neither here nor there,” Justice said with a hint of irony. “You may be a free agent, Mr. Wulff, although only a fool believes that he exists on his own with full options, without connection to outside forces, but I am not. I have interests to whom I answer and for whom I must be accountable. Selling to a white man is difficult enough. Giving you these weapons outright would be irreparably dangerous. You must say that you will return them.”

  “How do I know if I can return them? How do I know where I’ll be—”

  “I didn’t say,” Justice said cunningly, “that you had to return them. I said that you must state you will return them. Give me your firm, pledged word that you will yield these armaments back to me in the condition in which you are given them and that you will be responsible for them during the time that you have them in your hands. That is all.”

  “For an 80 percent refund.”

  “That is the way the brotherhood of the divine works,” Justice said coldly. “That is the principle upon which our great church was founded. An 80 percent return for merchandise returned in good condition. You may have these ordnances on a two-week lease.”

  “For three thousand dollars down.”

  “For three thousand dollars down,” Justice said, and Wulff went into his pocket, went into his pocket where the money taken from the suit of the man he had killed lay; it was a hell of a price, he thought, a hell of a price to pay for some armaments taken on a risky and speculative basis. But Williams was right: Williams had always been right about things like this, he had street knowledge and he knew how this business worked. Cash on the line, 100 percent deposit for lend-lease. There was no way around it. He had pushed the matter as far as he could.

  “All right,” Wulff said, “I’ll go along with that. You’re not giving me any choice, you know.”

  “Free will is absolute,” said Father Justice as he smiled and worked his way toward one of the far shelves on which an array of machine guns perched. “We live in a system of choices; we can choose what we will, we are condemned to nothing, we can be whatever we wish to be.”

  “And those are the choices,” Wulff said, following him, “those are the choices upon which the church of the divine is founded.”

  “Why, of course,” Father Justice said, “of course. Your grasp of our theology is improving. Did you ever think that it was anything else?”

  VI

  Gianelli had him scented out. Gianelli had the prick scented out; he knew where he had to be, he knew that he was closing ground. He had been closing ground all the time on him in the three days that he had been on the trail; now it was narrowed down to just a couple of streets, no more than fifty houses. In one of them the vermin lurked. He would get him. He would get him and kill him.

  But first things first. First things were always first; now it was time for a shot of the needle. Gianelli had been a heroin addict for forty years, piss on all of the newspaper articles and popular scientists that made it look as if you dropped dead after a few years of it. Bullshit, all of it was bullshit; it was a habit like cigarettes or alcohol or sex; keep it within bounds and you could live with it, let it get the upper hand and you were in trouble. But a strong man could keep it in perspective. For forty years he had been on and off horse; he was not dependent, he simply used it when he needed, didn’t when the need was lacking. He liked to think that he took the habit the way they did in the old country; there were a lot of people in Europe who could use heroin or get along without it. But Americans, Americans, they had no sense of control.

  Carefully, stirring, blending, Gianelli prepared the mix. He was in his own furnished room, a tight construct four flights up in the west seventies of Manhattan, a good base of operations, exactly the kind of place you wanted when you were on a vendetta, as he was, because you were traveling so light, had so little sense of connection to these rooms that held you that they could be barely said to exist; on the other hand—always, always, Gianelli tried to think on the other hand, see the other side to a question—you had a place to sleep when you needed it, you had an abode of some sort. You had a place to shoot some dope.

  The stuff was bubbling now and he took it off the stove looking at the fluid as it lay there in the spoon, the little insolent bubbles prodding and poking themselves to the surface like little messages from under the earth. He swilled it around in the spoon to get the consistency just right and then carefully, unhurriedly, carried it over to the side of the room where the syringe and needle were, put the plunger delicately into his hand, inserted the plunger into the spoon and drew the clear, dead-white fluid all the way up behind the needle.

  Nothing to do then but to slide it in, but Gianelli allowed himself that one, necessary moment of hesitation before he did so. In many ways this was the best part of all, the anticipation, waiting for the stuff to go in, extending the moments until the needle would bite in a sacred way into a vein and begin to pulse through its bright messages of salvation. No need to rush it, he had all the time in the world. Looking at the spoon, he thought that he could see not only bubbles but also little, astonished animals swimming around in it, animals that were part of the compound, small, vital, living things that would be injected into
his bloodstream and were in themselves the heart of the connection. Wasn’t that the folklore of horse after all? That there were little men in the fluid, little creatures swimming in the substance that added their life, their thoughts and vitality to yours so that it was not one brain but many occupying the surfaces of one’s skull? Of course it was. It was very important folklore. Unhesitatingly, thinking about the rich and ancient traditions of his background that had brought him to just this moment, Gianelli put the needle into his arm, pressed the plunger all the way through, and took the rush.

  It was like thunder in the head, blood in the gut, a feeling of warmth below, alertness above that had not been duplicated in anything else that he had found in his sixty-three years. Women were all right, but with women the pleasure was too quick, a few brief spasms at the end of the manic jerking and you were spent, exhausted, lying across them gasping out the heartbeats. But horse carried you on and on; liquor was all right, but the induction was too slow and sometimes in the getting there one would lose all sense of what had sent him that way. Other earthly pleasures not excluding sleep were not even worth considering. But horse, ah! horse went on forever. He felt it beating like a bird within him now, felt it rising, his heart itself enlarging like a butterfly with gigantic wings to embrace the horse as it hit his system. Then, just barely getting the needle out, just barely maintaining enough sense of the situation to get the damned needle out and put it somewhere on a high shelf where it would be safe for the next time, for the next sacred rush, Gianelli staggered to the bed, sat on it heavily listening to the springs whoosh and then lay straight out, feet up, arms extended, looking upward, looking at the ceiling, watching the pretty pictures that began to float across the slate of his mind.

  Beautiful, it was beautiful. He writhed with joy watching those pictures: there were women being chalked upon that slate, flaring hips and gigantic breasts; there were forest images that he had not seen except under the horse for thirty years. Oh, there were a multiplicity of things, and Gianelli enjoyed every one of them, writhing, thrashing, screaming on the bed as the images blasted through. Behind all this the vague thought that he should not be doing this, that he was wasting valuable time doping when he should be hard on the trail of the Wulff was so frail, so transparent as to be negligible; he did not have to think of it at all. Later. There would be time for all of this later. Wouldn’t there be? The man was at his mercy, Gianelli had the upper hand, everything was a mere matter of time and he could take the man any time he felt like it. In the meantime he was entitled to his own relaxation. Wasn’t he? Of course he was. No less than anyone, his old, dear friend, Calabrese would have approved.

  Calabrese would have understood why his loyal and devoted friend Gianelli would be entitled to pause during his vendetta for a little bit of the horse that he so loved and would not begrudge him this great and simple pleasure. Had not Calabrese himself, after all, shown his own sympathy and understanding for heroin by being critical to its distribution?

  Of course he had.

  Gianelli lay on the bed dreaming, and all sense of time or urgency perished from him as it always, always did when inside the great gong of self began to ring.

  VII

  Lincoln was just about to score, huddling intensely over the gleaming frame of the bar, dealing hard and fast, the deck in his hand twinkling like a magician’s pack of cards in the lights, edging in, closer and closer to the score all the time, the buyer just sitting there, astounded, paralyzed by Lincoln’s self-sufficiency and spiel, the vision of pure, white wonder and release that Lincoln showed in his hand … when everything blew up.

  One moment Lincoln was working away, going into particulars, holding the deck like a wand, while the buyer, a thin cat who Lincoln had never seen in the lounge before just watched everything, fascinated, his eyes rolling like pebbles. The next moment there was a dull, pounding rush, a whoomp! as if the stars in the sky had suddenly punched out holes of heaven, and he was rolling, rolling, all around him the bar, maybe fifty people along its length, another couple of hundred in the front and back room, the jukebox screaming, the bells banging. Then there was a second roar, this one with light in it, and Lincoln found himself pitched into the street, pushed backward through the glass, the glass breaking all around him as he was on concrete, rolling and rolling, trying to protect himself. And then me third whoomp!, something final about it, he had a sensation that the bar rather than moving further outward was now collapsing within itself, layers and layers clinging to surface, and he was pressed into the sidewalk cinking like a stone through levels of concrete that rushed by him like water: no thought, no dreams, nothing but pain, and at the end of it he was on his back, looking at the sky while someone or something was going through his pockets, twitching away in those violated places as if a frog’s leg had somehow penetrated him, and Lincoln was cold, cold.

  Cold: he did not think that he would die this way; cold: he did not think that the lounge in which he had dealt for so many months would turn out to be a place of fire; cold: it was the shock of it more than anything else that had destroyed him. To die was one thing; to be blown off a stool and into the street, lying on your back, looking at the rotten sky with the sound of sirens all around, that was bad enough, that was not the way you dreamed your life would end when you were twenty-five years old. But you could come, you could just barely come to terms with something like this if you had had any warning, if you had known that it was going to happen to you. If you had been able to anticipate.

  But lying there on his back, seeing the fires, hearing the sounds, Lincoln knew that he had been wrong; it was precisely this state of unpreparedness that was the key to death itself; you were never prepared for it; you were never prepared when the Man came walking down the pike and that was something that everyone, each one alone and in his own time would have to find out. Find out that it came in the night as a stranger, seized you in an embrace that felt at first like sleep and carried you off. He shook his head from side to side, feeling blood running within all the secret, broken places of his body, and someone was leaning over him, looking at him, a tall man with grey hair at the temples, infinite sadness to his eyes, infinite perception and knowledge clambering out of small, difficult holes on his face. “Give it to me,” he said, and Lincoln understood that it had been the hands of this stranger probing his pockets, that touch inside. “Where is it? Give it to me right now.”

  Lincoln shook his head, gritted his teeth, unable to speak. He did not know how many bodies were around; he did not know the shape of the land; everything had narrowed to him and the stranger. His sight was periscopic, a small, dense tube of vision connecting only to this man, even the sounds faded away. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”

  “I want the shit,” the man said almost calmly. “I know you’ve got it on you; I know that that’s what you were dealing with in there. Be a good boy. Give me the shit, please.”

  “No,” Lincoln said again, trying to move a hand toward his pocket, trying to see if the stuff was in there for himself, but he was paralyzed; something in his spinal cord was not relaying messages and he lay there, looking up at the stranger, thinking, Not only my body but my mind has been paralyzed; what am I going for the stuff in front of him like this? If I find it then he will find it too and that will be the end of anything. “No,” he said again and lay there quietly. He licked his lips.

  “Don’t call me boy,” he said then.

  The tall man held that infinitely weary, infinitely thoughtful gaze. “Don’t you hear the sirens?” he said, “don’t you hear the sound of the horn? They’re coming, you know. They’re coming right now. Wouldn’t you prefer to die fast?”

  “I don’t want to die,” Lincoln said.

  “No you don’t, but you sold death.”

  “Leave me alone,” Lincoln said, “leave me alone,” and the man’s fingers fluttered and probed within, Lincoln felt a sudden jab in his armpit, sensation of pressure like a knifepoint, and then the
sensation went away, there it was, he thought, and the stranger came away with the deck of heroin. It had not been seared or scorched by the impact; it looked exactly as it had when he had flashed it for the last time and put it into his pocket. Then the explosion.

  “You see?” the tall man said quietly, “there it is. It was there all the time.”

  “Leave me alone. Please leave me alone.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it, son,” the man said. “Dealing is very bad. Dealing fucks up people’s minds and bodies and hearts and souls because you’re distributing poison. Don’t you know that? Don’t you, son?”

  The sirens were indeed louder. Lincoln was able to turn his head weakly from side to side; to his left he could see the smoke, feel the scorching heat of the flames on his cheek radiating into the bone; on his right everything was dark and wet as if something had spattered the street; the contents of the bar perhaps becoming liquid, liquefied matter pouring onto the concrete of Harlem. As hearing returned he could hear around him the faint moans, the gurgles, the sighs of what seemed to be a hundred people scurrying, sound of footsteps, stone against stone, the sounds of combat and evacuation, density, impaction; and filling his line of vision, overtaking him, swelling before him as if there were nothing else in the world was the face of the man looming over him: it was like a woman, like sex then, those final moments of intercourse when the woman became not only a part of the world but the world itself, the essential source from which the world came, life, death … and tumbling over the cliff of copulation then into a dead space of fading. But the man would not fade away. Lincoln knew he was going to die. Death was all right; dealing and drugs, shit, you faced that all the time. The fact of his own death had been real to him since he was five years old and began to see, looking at the landscape of Harlem, what a pretty destiny the world had figured out for him. But not like this. No, not like this. “Leave me alone,” he said weakly. Speech had returned. He licked his lips, feeling the flame growing on them. “Leave me alone.”