by Barry, Mike
Well, he had been a long time getting to this position; first as a rookie patrolman he had been taking on criminals, then in Vietnam something vaguely defined that was merely called “the enemy,” and then back to the department again where on narco he was supposed to do something vague to people called “drug merchants” or “users,” and finally in his odyssey he had taken them on in a far more forceful fashion, more forceful indeed. But he had been building toward this last and most critical step for a long time, that point at which he would be taking on all of the world. Not in pieces, not splinters of possibility here and there, but the whole damned swinging door of the world would now be coming upon him.
All right. High time.
He turned and there was someone standing in the doorway.
The door had opened so quickly, so quietly, that there had been no sound whatsoever; the construction of these old tenements had something to do with it, too. Impermeable walls, well-oiled bolts with doors that hung far above the floor in their arc of opening. That was solid construction for you, you had to admire the integrity of the buildings of old New York, although all they were good for now was for junkies and the welfare population. The man standing in the door must have taken advantage of that, and of the fact that Wulff had not locked the door when he came in. That was stupid, of course, but it simply had not occurred to him that anyone would be interested.
The man was in his early sixties. He was small, well-dressed, had one of those ruined-but-still-alert faces you see so often at the whiskey bars in the old neighborhoods. He was holding a gun in his hand, the gun absolutely level, no shake in the hand at all, bearing down on Wulff. His eyes glistened with something that might have been satisfaction and a feeling of good fellowship; he seemed, as a matter of fact, prepared to emit little cries of pleasure. “Ah,” he said. “Aha!” and Wulff could see the finger begin to tighten on the trigger.
But something had happened to the old man, perhaps the strain of climbing the stairs, perhaps some element of unexpectedness in his own situation that undercut his alertness no matter how refreshed and satisfied his face appeared. The gun wavered subtly in his hand as he was trying to get off the shot. Then, in slow-motion, he was able to bring the gun to fire, and Wulff, hitting the floor, rolling already on the floor in a spasm of reflex that might have saved him even if the shot had been accurate, heard the bullet hit the wall just above him, little showers of plaster coming down, spanging off his forehead.
“Son of a bitch!” the man said, “son of a bitch!” and Wulff could hear his breath, his little aimless kicks at the floor as he concentrated on the gun, trying to get off the second shot, but the second shot, when it came, did so only very slowly, this one hitting all the way above him, splattering the ceiling. Wulff, rolling, a fine sense of aimlessness as he spun on the floor, the revolutions a disconnection, reached into his pocket, got out his own gun and fired almost blindly, pumped a single shot into the place where he thought the man was standing. “Son of a bitch!” the man screamed again, “dirty bastard!” and got off yet one more shot, completely wild. Wulff now had him placed exactly and in one careful motion bore in on the man and shot him in the gun hand.
The man screamed, the gun fell from his hand like ash, and suddenly he was hurled in upon himself, covering his wrist, yanking it against his chest like a shopping bag, an expression of fine and discrete agony coming all through his face, opening that face to an almost youthful expression. He did not look sixty in his pain, but fifteen, a young man astonished at the violation of his body. Wulff was already on his feet, drawing up his knees underneath him, scrambling to a weaving, standing position, the gun dangling from his hand like a leaf. Then, instead of closing ground on the man who had caved into a corner, holding his wrist and squealing like a rabbit, he went to the door, kicked it shut, threw the bolt and chain on it, then came back to the center1 of the room and looked at the man once again, an inconsequential object huddled down against the wall, shrunken and, in some reversal, aged once again, his eyes spinning him through decades of chronology so that within seconds what looked at Wulff out of those eyes was again a very old man. “No,” he said, as he saw Wulff raise the gun, “no, don’t do it.”
“Don’t do it!” Wulff said. “How can I not do it?” He concentrated on the series of actions—death was very easy to bring if you looked on it only as a matter of mechanics; let the rest of it be a religious problem, he would concentrate on the technology of the administration of death—he pointed the gun at the old man, leveling it slowly, holding it locked in place by that knot of concentration, then tensing the body to deliver the torrent of death.
Everything locked into place, froze, drifted in a moment devoid of time, the old man’s mouth opening like a fish, his hands twisting, eyes fluttering; his attention seemed to shift from Wulff to something inside him then, as if death had announced itself from some secret place and was now stalking him, greeting him with upraised fist. The old man doubled into that knowledge. Holding the gun Wulff felt a sudden moment of indecision: the old man was dead now, he was dead as of this moment. If he were to pull the gun away and order him out of the room, the old man would go and never bother him again because in some intricate way he had been broken. But on the back of that was the insight that only death’s apprehension had broken the old man, only the sure, swift knowledge of his own death, and that came out of certainty; remove the certainty and it would be as if nothing had happened.
No. He could not tolerate that. Wulff thought no more, did not think at all, it could be said that he had not thought during any of this but had only done what he had to do, which was to pull the trigger. The gun exploded in and out of his hand.
Gianelli’s head cracked open like a cantaloupe, and in the middle of that impact Wulff could see the grayish, oozing mass of the old man’s brains, slowly expanding toward the air, embraced by the air, and in sudden frieze the brains danced like a waterfall, little greyish ropes springing in the air. Then the old man had croaked, had croaked again, and with a sigh fell before Wulff limp on the carpet, his blood flowing into it gently, gracefully, gray of brains, red of blood, gray and red together puddling into the thin, green fabric of the cheap furnished goods. Looking at all of it, Wulff thought he had an insight and then, looking at it again, he knew that it was no insight at all: it was merely the same thing, the same over and over again; here some brains, there some blood, and in the whole long line of murder and vengeance that he had committed, all of them were the same in death as never before in life. Nothing changed. Nothing ever would, ever could change: all differences were resolved in blood. All that he was looking at now was a rack of dead meat.
Outside, in the dank hallway, he thought he could hear the rise of voices, but it was only his imagination. Anything could happen in New York. No one cared. No one listened.
He took the gun that had belonged to the corpse, holstered it away, and looked at the thing on the floor, deciding what he was going to do next. Any way he turned, it was death.
X
When Father Justice opened the slats of the storefront to peek out, it was with a truly reverential expression, and Williams felt like a petitioner. But then as he stared within, the eyes narrowed, the slats fell and what came to the door was not the benign, nodding Father Justice who had given him both blessings and ordnance a few weeks ago, but instead a grim, compact black man in his middle forties whose robes hung from him like a saddle might from a horse so much did he seem to resent their touch. “You,” he said at the doorway, “you.”
“May I come in?”
Father Justice blinked and said, “Yes, you may come in,” and the door opened just enough for Williams to squeeze his way through; in the trap of dankness within, he felt Justice’s hands, surprisingly strong, gripping the wrist, squeezing, applying pressure. Painful as it was, Williams submitted, allowing himself to be led through the pews into the massive back room where the ordnance lurked. Funny, he thought absently, looking at the improvised altar, t
he crucifix, the large, sentimental portrait of the black Saviour that hung on canvas behind the podium, the little strips of fine wire pasted down on the stage with Scotch tape, probably so that Father Justice’s tones could be inconspicuously amplified. Strange, strange: I’ve never seen a service here at the Brotherhood Church. I wonder if they have services. Well, that’s none of my business, and in any event one thing is sure, one thing is sure as hell, I wouldn’t want to see the kind of service that they have here.
He had spent half the day in plain clothes in a bar near the Apollo, drinking beer and plotting his approach to Justice. He knew he was going to go, there was nowhere else to go, it was the only possibility from the first. But in the bar he’d had to balance off a number of things, the most important being, if he could find Wulff, did he really want to confront him? Did he want to have that choice thrust upon him if he could run Wulff to ground? Granted that the deputy commissioner’s point of view made a great deal of sense, granted that the Wulff Squad, as pitiful as it was, might be the proper rogue’s squad to catch him, granted that he desperately wanted to get back inside the department and start building on what he had almost thrown away. Granted all of that, was he prepared to make the choice that he would have to make if he ever found Wulff? He had drunk the beers to no conclusion, no real conclusion at all, listening to the thud of the jukebox, looking at the walls, listening idly to the conversation at the bar, which had a good deal to say about the lounge just a few blocks down that had been bombed out the previous night. Some thought that it was some kind of drug dealers’ war, the old organization retaliating against the black distributors who were not cutting them in and who were using the lounge as an important point of distribution; others were convinced that it was an inside job, an insurance job of some sort. But on one point everyone was quite clear: at least five people had died in that explosion, including one gunned down on the street. Thirty or forty more had been checked into hospitals overnight, and there was no reckoning the damage that had been done even beyond this in terms of the sheer assault on the neighborhood. Now even Harlem was not safe; it was going to be the same battleground that had been made of other sections of other cities. There was plenty of crime in Harlem, but it had been of the small arms, face-to-face, individual ripoff type. This was a newer and meaner construct, and people in the bar were damned scared, so scared that Williams, simply because he was an outsider, had attracted a good deal of unpleasant attention up and down the bar, people staring at him, whispering about him. Finally the bartender, flickering a towel, had come down the line to tell Williams that he thought it would be a good idea for him to get out of there, and Williams had left. There was no sense in fighting that decision. He had no ground to defend.
And that, oddly enough, had been what had tipped the balance, had sent him after all to Father Justice. If Wulff was carrying on his war in distant ports or cities; if Wulff was carrying his war to the exclusive districts where the vermin lived and walled themselves behind their guards and possessions, that was one thing. But if he was going to take it into the streets where the poisons themselves flowed, then he had to be stopped. It was simply too dangerous; Wulff might be thinking that he was attacking at the source now for his last and greatest campaign, but what he was actually doing, Williams thought, was springing his trap on the victims. The war could not reside in Harlem. Harlem was a combat zone itself, a devastated area, like Dresden in 1945 or Hiroshima. It was merely feeling the effects of the corruption, it was not causative. It was only a receptacle. So Wulff had made a very serious mistake, a misjudgment, really, his first misjudgment, perhaps, but one serious enough to swing Williams all the way over to a decision: he had to go after him. It had to be stopped. Perhaps if he could see Wulff and merely explain to him the folly of what he was doing, the fact that he was not striking back but merely in, Wulff would see it and desist. He would have to proceed on this basis anyway. There was another possibility altogether that Williams did not even want to consider at this time: the chance that Wulff had seen all this and simply did not care, that Wulff too had evaluated this in his mind and had decided that he had to bring the war home to the victims. But Williams did not have to consider that now. Maybe he never would have to consider it; Wulff would listen to him when they met and decide to be reasonable.
The alternative was not worth thinking about.
In the bowels of the ordnance room, Father Justice reached inside his robes and suddenly there was a gun on Williams, a .38, which is a light, inaccurate, and short-range piece, but a .38 at this range could do as much damage as a .45. When you were lying in a coffin, the quality of the weapon that killed you hardly mattered. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Father Justice said softly.
“I’m here,” Williams said. “You can put that thing away.” He paused, then said, “I don’t think that that’s in accord with the principles of brotherhood and divinity, is it?”
“You leave brotherhood and divinity out of it,” Father Justice said hoarsely. He coughed, cleared his throat, hawked out a clear drop of phlegm which he leaned over to deposit on the gleaming floor. “You let me worry about brotherhood and divinity. Where is all the materiel?”
“I got hijacked,” Williams said. “I got hijacked in Nevada. It wasn’t my fault; I was trying to bring it all back but I got waylaid.”
“I don’t like that,” Father Justice said and spat again. “I do not like the idea of materiel falling into the hands of hijackers. What I wish to know is what made you come back here to begin with without that ordnance? You know how seriously I regret its loss. So seriously that I have already been sending out representatives to discuss the matter with you.”
“No more than I regret it,” Williams said, “I feel very badly about it, believe me. But something more serious has happened.”
“Has it?” Father Justice said softly. “What could be more serious than the loss of much firepower, which our brothers could have used in the unending war for justice? Tell me what exceeds this in seriousness?” The .38 did not waver. Williams looked at it, calculated the chance that he could take the gun from Justice, wrestle it free and turn it on the man. In some intricate way, all the shifting odds passed on tape through the teletype of his mind; he might be able to do it. The odds were sixty-to-forty in his favor in any event: he had surprise and age on his side as against Justice’s obvious alertness and familiarity with the weapon; put it all together and three times out of five he might be able to make it, might actually take control of the situation, but for what? Williams thought: two times out of five, in two worlds out of the five of possibility he would have his brains blown out, and the odds were not good; it was not worth it. Beyond that, Justice was obviously not threatening to kill him, merely pulling out the gun to establish a certain level of relationship, which is the way that the good reverend would approach most of his business dealings. That looked pretty sensible, considered that way. It isn’t worth it, Williams thought, and put it out of mind.
“I’m still waiting for an answer,” Father Justice said. He looked less ecclesiastic than Williams had ever seen him; but then again, Williams thought, aspects of the Old Testament prophecy called for a hard and unyielding witness. The reverend was merely being faithful to one aspect of the teachings.
“I have no answer,” Williams said, “I really have no answer for that. It wasn’t done in my interests. Besides, I purchased the ordnance. Wasn’t it a straight purchase deal?”
“With an 80 percent refund when they were returned,” Justice said. “We expected them to be returned. You agreed that you would return them. It was a rental with a 100 percent full value deposit.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Williams said. It really wasn’t, and abruptly he was tired of confrontation, tired of Father Justice and his .38, tired of the materiel room itself, whose odors brought him back unpleasantly to a time only a few months ago when he had looked at matters in a sick and wrongheaded way that he was still trying to put behind him, l
abor out from under the color of a disease. “Put that gun away,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”
“No, you are ridiculous. You have severely jeopardized the cause.”
“What cause?” Williams said. “You sell munitions for profit, that’s your cause?” Father Justice’s face became dense, thickened, seemed in the light to become gray, and Williams said, “There’s a small chance that we might be able to get them back, but I didn’t come back here for that.”
“What did you come back here for?”
“I think that a man might have been here to buy some stuff from you,” Williams said.
Justice looked at him bleakly, still holding the gun. Then, with a massive, unwinding sigh, put it back in his robes. “I see that a vindictive approach will not work with you, my son,” he said gently. “You are sunk too deep in the great corruption of your ways. Instead, we will have to pray. We will have to pray for you.”
“I hope you’ll do that,” Williams said. “I’m looking for a man who I think would pray for me, and you may be just the one to do it.”
“Indeed,” Father Justice said. He seemed to have converted himself and his conversation to an amiability so gross that Williams decided that it could be as offensive as the good reverend’s aggressiveness. Unfortunately, Justice could not seem to find a proper middle ground; this, perhaps, being the true and final definition of religious fanaticism. “Indeed, I will have to pray for you.” He shook his head, looked at the shelves and shelves piled with M-15s, grenades, and Browning Automatics and said, “Let’s get out of here. I find it very difficult to discuss salvation in an environment like this.”