by Barry, Mike
“I’ve got to call it off,” Miller said. “There’s no point in pursuing this any more. He’s costing us too much, too much in men and energy, don’t you understand that?”
“I don’t understand anything. I just listen.”
“Right,” Miller said, “you just listen. Now he’s killing people in Fort Lee, this old man, this friend of Calabrese’s who came to me to ask permission for vendetta and I figured what the hell we had nothing to lose, he’s dead too. He’s bombing out joints in Harlem, he’s conducting a one-man campaign here, and do you know something? I don’t want to go up against him any more. So I’m going to call the troops off. I’m going to make it clear that we no longer want him; some bounty hunter, someone outside the organization wants to give him a shot, we can’t stop him, that’s for sure, but we won’t cooperate either. We’re not paying rewards. We’re cooling it in the New York territory.”
“Cooling it in the New York territory,” she said quietly and nibbled at Miller’s earlobe. “Yes, I understand that.”
“I mean it’s ridiculous,” Miller said. “Someone might say that he’s beaten us, that I’ve given up, but it isn’t that way at all. Not really. This is completely a business decision, that’s all it is. He’s wrecking us, we’re putting far more into him, taking far greater losses than he’s worth. So we’ve got to cut away. I don’t even think that he’s attacking us any more; he’s just on a guerilla campaign.”
“Guerilla campaigns are a lot of fun.”
“Not in fucking Southeast Asia they aren’t,” Miller said. “I just can’t justify going on this way any more, that’s all. Hell, if we could get him, we would. It’s not a matter of guts; I’d face him anywhere if it was just a man-to-man proposition, and I’d get him too. But we’re losing more on this now than we can possibly gain. It’s ridiculous. I’m calling it off.”
“All right,” Stella said, “you’re calling it off.” She was still on his earlobe. “But don’t you think you should think about this?”
Sometimes she opposed him; once or twice in the course of a conversation she might pick up on a point and cross-examine in a way that hardly pushed the point. It was one of the reasons why he had not reached a final decision on whether she was smart acting dumb or dumb faking smartness, because she knew that the bright people asked questions. “I have thought about it,” he said, “I’ve thought a lot.”
“Because it’s a big decision.”
“Oh I know that,” Miller said, “I know it’s a big decision.”
“If he’s as dangerous as you say he is, should you just let him go on this way?”
“I’ve thought about that,” Miller said. He put a hand on her thigh, ran it up, entwined a finger in her pubic hair, turning it, without desire. Sometimes the greatest pleasure in touching a woman was when there was no desire in it; he would think about this. “But you see I don’t think he’s dangerous to us any more. He started out, it was a campaign, no question about it.”
“I see.”
“But the campaign is over. He’s not fighting a planned action any more; he’s just striking out anywhere, any way he can. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. He’s just hitting the stops. So it’s not a question of protecting our interests the way it might have been at the beginning.”
“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know it was that way.”
“It’s that way,” Miller said. He turned toward her. She was looking up at the ceiling, curiously inert, curiously absorbed, and he felt once again a touch of desire, a gentle finger of ice pressing him at the base of the spine, radiating out little tentacles of cold to the upper and lower parts of his body. “Believe me it’s that way.” He began to stroke her in earnest now. He felt better. Sometimes it was that way with decisions; you didn’t even know what you were going to say until you started talking, and then the talk framed out the decision that had been there all along. Maybe presidents or heads of state operated the same way, viscerally, didn’t know what they were up to until they heard themselves saying it. Then they would have advisers draft position papers justifying all of it after the fact. It was a fairly terrifying way to look at the way the world worked, to think that everything went on this way, but then again you had to accept it.
“All right,” she said, “all right,” and then she was all over him, her body a fine network, a mesh draped over him, little holes in the mesh through which he was able to brush and just barely touch all of the forgotten, buried sweets that he must have been able to seize fully only in dreams, all of her rising thickly against him, groaning, panting, and he felt her tongue penetrate like wire into his mouth, and he moved down and around her and then very slowly, precisely began to make the motions of generation.
“Good,” she said cooperatively, “ah, ah, that’s very good,” and he wondered if she felt desire or whether all of this was simulated, had been faked from the beginning, nothing within her whatsoever, Stella merely a receptacle. But in the rising or deepening gloom of his energy, he did not think of this any more, and as he worked his way toward orgasm the image that predominated was that of the murdered old man as revealed in the one small clip that the tabloid had printed; the body lying swathed in its blood, the face rolled back, constricted, dead eyes locked to the ceiling. And as Miller came he thought that the old man Gianelli and he might be seeing exactly the same things, Gianelli at death, himself at the come. And then it all came crashing down upon him as he carried himself toward the end of all recollection.
XIII
Williams was the one who made the actual discovery of the corpse. Not that it made much difference; the porter had been damned curious about that apartment, having a feeling that something was wrong inside it. When Williams showed his police credentials, he said that it was just as good that Williams had shown up because he, the porter, had been planning to call the cops about it anyway, quite soon. Something was wrong in that place, he was sure of it; and he didn’t like the looks of the guy who had rented it either; he seemed to be a strange type. So it was academic as to who would actually find the corpse in there, although Williams supposed that it was just as well that he had; it would indicate to the deputy commissioner that the Wulff Squad was making progress, at least of some sort, and the deputy probably needed all the help that he could get at headquarters.
The lieutenant had been pleased as hell, of course. Williams had phoned the call into the precinct with full identification, and the lieutenant had been on the scene almost before the homicide squad, beaming and nodding, talking to all of them, giving whispered confidences to the one police reporter that had come up with the squad, and he had taken Williams aside in the hallway while the squad was working to tell him that he thought he was doing a wonderful job. “I haven’t found him yet,” Williams said, “so what’s a wonderful job? As far as I can see, this is just another murder that we weren’t able to prevent.”
“But it means that we’re closing in!” the lieutenant said. “It means that we’re throwing the net around him and this is clear evidence, clear evidence of effective progress that we were first on the scene. We’re hot on his trail, don’t you understand that?”
“I don’t think it means anything at all. I got an idea, I got a good lead, was able to track his whereabouts to this place, that’s all. I have no idea where the hell he is now.”
“But of course you do!” the lieutenant said with wide, astonished eyes. “If you got this close, then you’ve got an excellent lead on him and it should only be a matter of a short period of time until you apprehend him, right? Of course we’ll have reinforcements for you now; you won’t have to take him alone. I can tell them,” and he motioned back toward the open door, the sounds of the squad working, the presence of the reporter, “I can tell them a capture is imminent, right?”
“That would be very stupid,” Williams said, “and what would be even stupider is to release news that there’s a special detail to track him. Do you really want to make him aware of us?”
“O
h,” the lieutenant said, “ah. I see what you mean,” and went away looking rather vague and troubled. The squad had lumbered through its basic details, the meat wagon had come, and the corpse had been taken out of there. Williams gathered that the victim might be some kind of minor mafioso figure, a fringe guy on the edges of the organization. There was something familiar about the face, and Williams suspected that he had operated out of the Midwest. They would check Chicago on this; the teletype was already going through. Williams did not see where the identity of the victim made a hell of a lot of difference, but if it gave them satisfaction to make him, then they could go ahead. He had a far more serious and basic problem: he had the feeling that he had lost Wulff.
He had had his one good shot; he should have had him, he had obviously been just a few hours too late. If he had gone to see Justice faster, if he had not bullshitted with Justice so long but had forced the information out of the reverend at gunpoint (but how would that accord with the principles of brotherhood?) if he had nine-elevened his information into headquarters instead of making the arrogant gesture of trying to get to Wulff himself, he might have gotten him. Perhaps the old man there on the floor would not have been dead. Perhaps some people who Wulff had in mind for his next outing would be alive as well.
He was in a difficult position. It was hard for him, on the one hand, to think of Wulff as a felon, an assailant, an arrest case, but on the other hand he guessed that he agreed with what the deputy commissioner had said. Wulff was too dangerous; he was dangerous not only on principle but example, and if the department would tolerate a campaign of this sort in its midst, it was opening up the possibility for a lot of other people, less principled than Wulff, trying similar campaigns. And that could not be done.
No. He had to be stopped. And Williams guessed the reason that he had not nine-elevened the call in was really quite simple: he had thought that a private confrontation with Wulff might have worked. He owed him that much; maybe he was crazy, he thought that he owed to Wulff the chance to be talked around to reason. But if Wulff did not listen …
Well, what then? What was the difference? Why pursue it? Now there was the report out of Fort Lee and that report was very bad, worse than New York even. Here he was up to his guerilla campaign again, and the cost was high, four more bodies and fragmentation that had substantially rocked an adjoining high-rise. It was fortunate that there had been no one surrounding that vacant lot when the incident had occurred, otherwise innocents might have been added to Wulff’s death roll of honor.
It was escalating out of sight. Now Williams had the feeling that the real crunch was on.
He told his wife about it. Not the full details, just sketches here and there to give her some conception of what he was going through; a way of seeking out advice. He was back in the house in St. Albans; so was she, so was their month-old son; superficially he was living exactly as he had when all this had started in the neatly mortgaged home protected from the world by the lawn and his civil service job; but inside everything had changed, only part of it having to do with Wulff, and he was sick of living inside himself now; he could not steer a solitary decision as he had before. Solitary decision had driven him away so that he was not even there when the baby was born. Now he had come back but there was a kind of pain that he could never transmit to her and a determination never to do it again. Whatever he did from now on could not come merely from inside himself but would have to be shared with her.
Not that there was much she could do about it, of course. She thought the Wulff Squad was even worse than Williams thought it was. Also, she had met Wulff, she had liked him, there was some kind of feeling there and oddly she had more to say in his defense now than Williams had. The scar he had taken from the knifing near the methadone center1 still ached, it burned late at night, a flame of implication circling through his gut; sometimes he could not differentiate the pain within from the pain without; maybe they were the same thing. Maybe not. He did not know what he would do if he had Los Angeles to live over again. Wulff and he had attacked each other in the trailer park; if it had not been for the onslaught of the enemy, one of them might have been killed. Knowing this, would he have gone out to Los Angeles still?
“Leave it,” she would say to him late at night, sometimes holding the baby, sometimes not, sometimes lying next to him in the bed, sometimes speaking from the high, straight chair she would use in their bedroom to breast-feed the baby, a scene that Williams would have found maternal and touching if there had not been so much desire in it, and if she had not been so conscious but so ungiving of that desire. “If it hurts you that much, if you can’t straighten it out in your own head, David, then get off the squad. It isn’t worth going through this,” she would say in the bed, on the chair, with the child, without the child, clutching her breast to the baby, and sometimes just lying on her back looking at the ceiling. She would not let him touch her breasts or have anything to do with them while she was nursing the baby. That was definite. She had made it clear to him from the first that she would take him back but she would do it only on certain terms, and that was one of them. It had seemed easy then; it did not seem easy now. Still, comparing his life to the lieutenant’s or the two patrolmen, did he have the right to complain? “Get away from it,” she said, “I can’t listen to it any more.”
“I can’t leave the squad,” he said. “My squad is the way back to the PD, don’t you understand, if I don’t stay on the squad then they’ll break me for good. I’m back on probation. I’ve got to stay, but I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t do anything,” she said. “Don’t do anything, let the others worry about it, let it be their decision.”
“I can’t,” he said. “It all comes down to me. I’m the only one who can take him.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You’d better believe that. He’d kill any of the others on sight. I’m the only one who would have a chance to talk to him.”
“But there’s nothing to talk about, is there?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know,” and got off the bed and began to pace through the night as she watched him with that imperturbable, closed-in, mysterious expression that women with infants have; an impression of special knowledge denied everyone outside that circle. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I think you know what you want to do,” she said. “You just don’t want to face it. You don’t want to face your real feelings, what you know you should feel about this.”
And this was almost true, it came so close to being true that he could not take it. So he said, “All right. Forget it, I won’t talk about it anymore; I’ll work it out on my own.”
“Can you?”
“I think I can,” he said, “I’ve got to.” He thought of the attack in Fort Lee, the dead man he had seen in the furnished room in the west nineties. “It’s starting to come clear,” he said. “It won’t go on this way any more.”
“He’s your friend. You don’t want to kill him. You’re not even sure if you want to stop him.”
“I don’t know about that either. I don’t know whether I do or not. But the squad is doomed. The squad isn’t going to work; it’s either me or none of them.”
“And you can’t stand that,” she said, “you can’t stand having to make that decision.”
“All right. All right, I can’t, but I’ve got to make it anyway. There’s no way around it. I’ve got to face up to it and no one else will,” and he said no more. Sometimes, after these conversations, he slept; sometimes he closed his eyes and merely looked at the wall of darkness superimposed upon them; sometimes he left the room to sit by himself by the television set staring out through the slats of the blinds at the empty lawns of St. Albans; sometimes he did none of these whatsoever but merely came to terms with all of them in some private way that had nothing to do with the blankness or the darkness, had nothing to do even with his wife.
XIV
De Masso had fallen eas
ily. That was the funny thing; the papers were full of the bombed-out area in Fort Lee, they had picked up on that old man he had killed in the furnished room (Gianelli? was that his name, Gianelli? It was funny: once you got a name to put on a corpse, an entire sense of identity began to filter in along with the complexity that came with murder. Before he had known the old man’s name, it was not a murder but merely an administrative act, what you could call an exchange; now he had another to add to the list,) but they had missed on De Masso completely. Either De Masso was so obscure that his death was not even worth a mention, because he had thoroughly covered his tracks in dealing or, and this was the more difficult part of it, the De Masso murder was big news, really substantial and they were keeping it out of the press for other reasons. That was something to think about, not that he didn’t have enough on his mind already.
But De Masso had been a simple process. He had simply gotten through the unlocked door of the lobby, looked the man up on the building residents’ board downstairs, taken the elevator to the seventh floor, knocked on the man’s door, had it opened on him, confronted a short, grim man in his late fifties wearing an undershirt, made a voice identification (De Masso? yeah, De Masso), taken out the .45, and shot him in the head three times with the silencer, using his left hand braced into the outer wall for leverage, aiming deep and true. And the man, De Masso, had fallen backwards into his foyer, his palms splayed outward, shrugging and jerking away as if he were apologizing, somehow, for the indignity of his collapse, and lay there on the carpet, his blood soaking into it, little pulpy sounds coming from his throat as his life ran away. It had been a noisy death as so few of them were, De Masso lying there, squeaking his life away. Then a woman in her twenties had come from somewhere behind, had peered out from the living room and seeing De Masso lying there on the rug had begun to scream. The screams had started even before comprehension had settled; reflex action, spastic tremors like frogs in a laboratory, and Wulff had struggled with the temptation to shoot her as well, nothing personal, just cut off the screams … but at the last moment he had not, holding back, shuddering with the knowledge of how close he had come to murdering her.