Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

by Barry, Mike

  And besides, narco simply did not work that way. Narco was not after the dealers or distributors at all; at the root narco wasn’t after anything. All that narco was there to do was to act as a buffer between the police department public relations division and the newspapers and federal government’s war on narcotics, so that PD could say that they were indeed making an effort: for one thing look at the full-time squad they had working on nothing else. Narco worked on hustling cheap informants and doctored reports; occasionally when the heat came up very high they might bust a miserable, sniveling informant or two on a prearranged charge, which would be dropped for lack of evidence in a couple of weeks. But by that time there would have been another murder in the East Village, and the newspapers, hopefully, would be off covering it, meaning that maybe only three or four times a year, five if there were a lot of dull news days, you would feel any heat at all. The rest of the time narco was pleasant, easy work; now and then you could bust a college kid stupid enough to be smoking a joint in public or peddling the stuff to his friends, and that would build up the charts too, but most of the time it was a breeze. Narco, in the late sixties, was absolutely the best place to be; it was a clover detail, almost as good as vice, but vice was too good to be true altogether and had just about been phased out. The amateurs were taking the professional trade away anyway. There just wasn’t much percentage in hustling street hookers who were the dumbest and poorest of the lot, and the other ones, the ones operating out of high-rises and studio apartments had plenty of buffer zones between themselves and arrest; and many of their friends worked down at the precinct. So vice was scratched altogether; narco wasn’t too bad, but narco had been such fun for all that it too was being scrapped, amalgamated into the federal bureau of narcotics was the way the newspapers had put it. They were phasing it out, which was a spectacular shame for a lot of informants anyway.

  But that was all behind him; it left the issue of De Masso. No narco squad could touch him; that made him only riper pickings now in Fort Lee. Wulff, finishing off his coffee at the diner, was thinking of the ways best calculated to make the approach and what he would do when he got to him. Pity about the old bastard he had killed in the furnished room. His thoughts skittered back that way although he did not want them to. Hell, that was finished, the old bastard was dead, the room was cleaned out, Wulff was now in another place two blocks down and three blocks over. It would be weeks until someone decided to check out his tightly-locked room, investigate perhaps the smell drifting through the walls and find out what was lying in there. In the meantime he had all the room to operate that he needed, and that was what the mission was all about. Operating room. Opening up some space for himself in which he could function again, paring open the night with the clear, deadly edge of his assault. The old man in the room that he had occupied would stink and inflate, his body assuming grotesque and comic proportions finally in the onslaught of death, the pure, high scent of him merging with the walls to produce something so penetrating that at last curiosity would draw someone in there. But death on the West Side was such a familiar, completely unremarkable event, death on the West Side was so much a part of the urban redevelopment program itself, that Wulff doubted if there would be any follow up at all. If there would, the hell with it. How were they going to tie him to it, and what good would that knowledge do them weeks after the fact?

  At the rear of the diner, there was an intense little huddle around one table, eight or nine people wedged into that tight space, all of them men, all of them conversing intensely. He could pick up scraps of conversation if he wanted; all that it meant would be a slight alteration, a shift of consciousness and he would be attuned to what they were saying. Already little scraps of words were coming out of the huddle, words like kilo, hash, nickel, and that could mean that they were talking about only one thing, they were talking about shit, they were talking about its distribution, probably niggling out the last details of a deal. But what, he thought, granted that this was what was going on at the table, what was he supposed to do about it? Enactment of the new drug law along with his own crusade had already driven the vermin across the river and into the towers of the Hudson; it was drug paradise here and nothing to be done to stop that, but what was he, Wulff, personally to do? Was he supposed to lunge over to that damned table, scatter them like fruit, bring vengeance upon them right in this diner? Did you have to clean up the world indiscriminately, taking on evil as you saw it in whatever form, simply because it could not be tolerated, or did you have, as he still believed, to pick your spots?

  He did not know. It was certainly better to pick your spots; he had been doing that all the way. Here in New York, although with a harder edge, he still wanted to think that he was selecting the battleground and the terms of attack rather than having it thrust upon him. He had been functioning in a meaner, lower, more emotional gear here than anywhere else, but planning was still paramount. You just did not seize a gun and go out on the streets hunting, shoot any piece of vermin who looked like a junkie or a dealer. Or did you? Did you have to hit them just that way: randomly, violently, without any planning whatsoever in order to play their own vicious game?

  Well, it was something to think about. He would worry about it after De Masso. Maybe. On the other hand, maybe he would not. With De Masso it was likely that he would already have all that he could handle. All that he knew was that he was not going to do anything in this diner; he was going to take it one step at a time. One step at a time.

  He passed the table quickly, ignoring the glances. There was a flicker, then a flurry of interest as he walked to the door, first one and then down the line, all of them were looking at him. He could see the exchange of intelligence as knowledge passed between them, and he kept on moving, thrust the door open, walked into the winds of Fort Lee, the high winds spinning off the river, and cut in back of the diner into the parking lot, then into a blank field, the fastest way to the high-rise in which De Masso lived. He walked through rubble, feeling little blocks of concrete and stone coming up against his feet. Fort Lee was impermanent, hastily assembled as if by a gigantic child playing with materials on the bank of the Hudson; the high-rises came up fifteen stories or more, cheap plastic and steel glinting, the foundations poking down into rock. In the streets between and behind the high-rises, there were still patches that had not been paved, little ruined houses in which the poor lived, neighborhood groceries, cement-strewn fields of debris on which the children played. The building had been helter-skelter, piecemeal, and no one was responsible for the spaces between the buildings but the town itself, which was too busy raking in payoffs from contractors to be worried about anything as elementary as services. So what you had was a great deal of money and architectural ambition funneled into a town that thirty years ago had been little more in population than any of the cow towns working their way up the east and west side of the Hudson above Peekskill, with the difference that Fort Lee had accessibility. Half of the New York mafiosi lived in these towers.

  Oh, it was a mystery all right, Wulff thought, that was for sure, a mystery how all of this had been thrown together, a mystery as to how it was able to continue. Considering the graft and greed that lay behind the assignment of these contracts, it was a miracle that any of these high-rises remained standing; the half-life of the plaster could be measured in months. But someday there was going to be a hell of a judgment. Up and down the line it was going to happen; one by one these blocks were going to fall right into the river, thousands of people were going to be incinerated and drowned, and where would the contractors be then? Well, Wulff did not want to think about that. Surely the contractors at this moment were laughing and working over their balance statements and tax-evasion schemes, and were not concerned about what would happen when their constructions began to topple.

  He heard steps behind him in the rubble. Instantly he slowed, worked to the ground. There was nothing here against which to brace himself, nothing to act as cover. The only cover would be in
going to ground, and Wulff did it without hesitation. The footsteps might be in his imagination, he might be overreacting, but it would be better by far to overreact and pay the penalty in scraped knees and embarrassment rather than to go up against what he thought he might be facing. The field was almost entirely dark; there was slight illumination coming from a single streetlight about three hundred yards straight ahead of him, the rays of the light half cut off from this angle by the jut of a single building. Wulff could just about see his hand in front of his face, and he cautiously worked a gun into it, kept it leveled, lay on the ground. No sight to shoot by but voice would be good enough, voice would give him an edge. Then he could hear the sounds of the men talking as they scuttled to a stop about twenty yards from him. It was that group from the diner, at least some of them, he thought, say four, maybe five come out to pursue him while the rest stayed back. It was as he had suspected, what he should have known when he had allowed himself to look them over too closely in the diner; they knew who he was. They had identified his face even in the half-disguise of false sideburns he had affected, and now they were seeking an enormous bounty. He should have known it. He should not have looked them over as he had.

  It looked like De Masso was going to get awfully lucky tonight.

  They were talking urgently among themselves, in low whispers, with little fluttering signs in the darkness that might have been the hand signals with which a group of professionals can communicate almost as well as with speech, can fill in the pauses between. Wulff knew without being able to hear what they were saying to one another: they did not know if he was still in the lot but they were pretty sure he was. It stood to reason, and in the next moment there were a series of nods as if some hastily negotiated decision had come out of this. And a flashlight leaped like a spear from the darkness.

  Its strobe pierced the night, coming across the place where Wulff lay in a low arc, just sputtering past, and swung in full radius, paused, began to come back slowly. At this rate they were going to be able to locate him; they knew exactly how to use that flash for maximum sweep, knew how to make quarters of the area to be searched, an old combat technique, and then probe those quarters. As the flashlight curved back through the lot Wulff knew what was going to happen, if not on this sweep then surely on the next; they were going to pin him in that strobe, blind him, hang him like a frog squirming on laboratory pincers and quite remorselessly shoot him. There would be only two sensations, so quickly would they work: first the pain behind the eyeballs as the light lanced him, then the quick, thudding impact of the bullet as it dove into his heart or head, exploded the life out of him. Once he allowed himself to be open to the light, there would be no way he could stave off that second impact. They would not wait, they would shoot him on the spot.

  So he had this small moment, this instance of reprieve as the light wove toward him again, and he thought that it was the smallest chance he had yet been given: a small pistol and a hand grenade he had been saving for De Masso, against four of them with reinforcement troops behind. But there was no way out of it. To lie crouched in the lot waiting for the light to come in was merely to huddle like that laboratory frog in the tank and hope that those pincers swooping forward had some entirely different objective, some different frog in mind. But men were not frogs; they did not have to be fools either. The difference between men and frogs was that men were aware of their mortality and could take steps, at least halting and limited steps, to counteract it.

  So he fired off the pistol toward the invisible arm at the end of the light, the bullet spattering bone in the darkness, heard the yelp as the man was hit and then the light leapt like a fireball from that hand, went rolling to ground on the lot, spinning, turning. Someone else leapt forward to seize that flashlight but caught the second bullet high in the throat. A hard whimpering sound came from something that had been hit, and then the light went off totally as if a body had fallen on it, was shutting off all light forever, and Wulff did not pause, but in the last flash of light that he had been given before the light was obliterated he got off two more shots, the first one missing—he knew it from the moment it left the gun, you had a feeling about things like that, you could tell the good and bad shots as they emerged from the barrel of the gun even before they had hit; maybe shooting was like sex in that way, knowing a good come from a bad—but the second shot was right on target: he heard a wet sound as if something were being pulped, a vegetable falling open with a splat like thunder from the rottenness pouring out. Then he was on his knees, he was on his feet, first weaving, then running in the darkness, first pausing, then moving, first calculating, then going flat out, and he ran low to the ground holding the gun before him, following the light of the street lamp, breaking the angle, the building falling away, and as he cleared the obstruction he took the grenade from where it had been, pulled the pin and threw it.

  It twinkled in the air. He could see it rising in flight in the rays of the street lamp. Then it dove, like a bird, like a stone, toward the figures that he could see in the quick light massed on the ground squawking like chickens, strange sounds of dismay and concern ripping from them as they saw the grenade coming and surmised what it was. And then the grenade was down, rolling, ticking. Wulff in full flight wondered if it was a dud; no, it could not possibly be, Father Justice took great pride in his merchandise. It was inconceivable that in the war for divinity and freedom any of the grenades would be duds, that in the army of Christ there would be any section eights. And down the grenade went, then up, he heard the oop! of the explosion, and the night was filled with light, the secondary concussion, rolling in thickly on the heels of the first, and in the air then was only hissing fragmentation. The screams were cut off by that secondary explosion just as the light had been.

  Wulff ran. He ran through the streets of Fort Lee. His interview with De Masso, it seemed, would have to be abandoned for another evening; he had had an interruption along the way but it was a worthwhile interruption; trade off four for one. Then, as his pace slowed to normal, as his breathing eased, as the sweat dried on him, he felt the quick rising of the gun within his pocket like a little animal scrambling away in there, and he thought why the hell, what the hell, why the hell not? What did this have to do with the business at hand? He might as well do it anyway.

  Temporary interruptions, no matter how pleasant, just should not divert the course of a campaign. That was combat logic for you.

  So leaving the lot to the sirens and the vultures of the press and photography corps, Wulff went off to see De Masso.

  XII

  The slaughter in Fort Lee and a story buried on page sixty about a man who sounded like Gianelli being pulled dead out of a furnished room on the West Side hit the papers on the same day. They hit Miller, who made it his business to read the papers, very hard. For a long time, particularly since the interview with Gianelli, he had felt himself trembling on the verge of a decision. Now the two events, in concordance, a great pivot seeming to link and hold the two, pushed him over the edge, and he knew that the decision had always been waiting for him. There was no one else to make it. Of course there were plenty of people to make it, but in the war of attrition, Miller had moved further up along the line than he wanted to think.

  “I’m going to call it off,” he said to the woman lying in bed next to him. Her name was Stella, and she had been going to bed with Miller, first formally, then informally, for something over five years. In the beginning it had been all passion, a shared apartment, candlelight, and heavy seduction; but now it had eased into a long-standing relationship without frills; Stella still had the apartment, but Miller had long since moved back to his quarters and looked upon the rages, convulsions, passions he had felt with her years ago as the characteristics of a different man, one he had long outgrown. Now she came in once or twice a week, more if he felt like it, to fuck him and otherwise stayed out of his life, pursuing a vague career in modeling or some such. On the other hand, he trusted her absolutely, only as
a man can trust a woman who would otherwise have been his wife, and he told her everything. She listened, evaluated, and said nothing back to him, which was even better. After five years Miller still could not decide if she was a very bright girl working on being dumb for self-preservation or whether she was indeed as dumb as she seemed but, with the cunning of the attractive, stupid woman, had cultivated the appearance of intelligence behind silence.

  In any event she said nothing whatsoever, merely rolled in the bed, placing a hand on Miller’s thigh, running her fingers all the way up the surfaces, touching his scrotum lightly in a way she knew he liked. He felt himself twitch, respond faintly, then the impulse to couple was submerged in the urgency of what he was thinking. Also in the fact that he had had her not fifteen minutes before. He did his best, most lucid thinking after a fuck; purged of all desire it was possible to see the world in the cold glass of suspension that it really was. It was only desire, as a matter of fact, that fucked you up, got you involved in calculations that were not suited to reality. If for no other reason than this, Miller was dedicated to Stella: she helped him to cancel desire, keep him thinking rationally most of the time.

  “Cut it out,” he said, putting his fingers around her wrist and drawing her hand down. It drifted to his knee, lay there warmly. “I’m trying to figure out something.”

  “Sure,” she said and rested her cheek against his. He felt the soft imprint of her lips, then the darker mold of her tongue touching him, moving quickly across the panels of his cheek and for just a moment the temptation was there to immerse himself within her, to seek within her again what he seemed unable to find anywhere else, a total blankness, a total reversal of discontent. But no, it would not work, he was forty-three years old, too old for double-headers regardless of her cooperativeness and his optimism. Besides, he was trying to frame his thoughts. To see this right. “All right,” she said, when she felt him moving away from her, they were that attuned to one another after all these years anyway. “All right, I won’t do anything.” She turned, threw an elbow across his stomach, looked at the ceiling, and sighed.