by Barry, Mike
He had closed the door neatly, turned away, and taken the fire exit down, blind staircase, all six flights of it, to a small alley hidden in the bowels of the development, opening up to a small patch of grayish light outside, the street. That exit had carried him far away from De Masso’s side of the building, and it had been simplicity itself to clear his way through the streets and back to the bus terminal. In all respects the tenants of these high-rises were transplanted Manhattanites. Nobody came out into these streets at night except on very urgent business. The place was as deserted as the lot had been.
So he had gone back to New York. Again that shuddering feeling had hit him in transit; how close, how very close he had corne to shooting the woman. That had not been the point of his odyssey; he was not going to hit bystanders, witnesses, victims, relatives of his enemy, but only the enemy himself. It was going to be a clean series of kills; like the enemy itself, at least in the old days, he had wanted to abide by the principle that the families stayed out of it; what was being settled was an extension of business practices. But he had come to the verge of hitting the woman, not in panic, not even in feeling, but simply because it would have been easier to have done it than not. And there would have been a pleasure in it too. He would have multiplied his fury against De Masso.
So what did that make him? Did it mean that something subtle or not so subtle had been altered within him: that he was turning now into an indiscriminate killer; that the indiscriminate kill itself was the new shape that the campaign was taking? He did not know; what he realized was that in some dark and complex way he was turning the corner, and he simply was not looking at this situation the way he had when he had begun. People changed. He changed. The price he had paid in nine cities was too great.
And they had killed Tamara. They had violated their own principles; she had been abducted and murdered only because they knew they could reach Wulff through her. Seeing her dead on the beach, soaked with blood like water, the blood pouring freely from all the vents of her body, Wulff had had a clear insight down the tube and into the bright center1 of all implication: if you were in the business of death, you could not go into it halfway. Death, like sex, was a totality; you had to follow it through to its logical end, just as you could not, as a mature man, interrupt intercourse, pull out, be courtly, spill all over her piled clothes instead. That had been the turn that the campaign was taking. He was bringing death home now; he was killing them viciously and indiscriminately, just as the junk they peddled anointed some with death, others with cramps, many with jail, and a few with great wealth. Wulff’s own great wheel was spinning and spinning in the night, and where it came up death was delivered.
Still, the papers had not reported De Masso.
Now, in another furnished room in the west nineties, only a few blocks from where he had murdered the old man, Wulff braced himself against his ordnance and talked to the man that he had brought up from the street—a junkie, nodding and nodding his time away on the sidewalk outside, too offensive to pass by, too pitiful to harass and yet he could not let it go by, had jammed a finger in his back and said start walking and now that he had him in his room he literally did not know what he had wanted. “Where did you get the stuff from?”
“What stuff?” the junkie said. He could not have been more than thirty, but he had the posture of an old man, the same quavering delicacy of movement, the same tentative gesture of hand and mouth. “What you talking about?”
“Where’d you get it?” Wulff said again. “Who’s your supplier? Who gives it to you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” the junkie said. He had been nodding off even as Wulff had poked him up the stairwell into his bare, bleak room, the open cases of armaments glinting away. But now some comprehension seemed to have seeped into him, some realization that he was not in a run-of-the-mill situation, that he was not dreaming this but coming to terms in some way so complex that he could not get at it. “I don’t know.”
“Yes you do,” Wulff said. He showed the junkie the gun. “You see this? I’ll blow your head off if you don’t tell me your source of supply.”
“Now that’s shit man,” the junkie said, “that’s shit if you think that I know anything about that.” He looked at the gun in a querulous, highly interested way, as if he had read about things like this somewhere but had never quite had to deal with them until this moment. “That is fucking ridiculous,” he said. “A gun.”
“I’m running out of patience.”
“I’m sure you’re running out of patience,” the junkie said. His eyes were large, white, luminous, distended almost like tentacles from the hidden spaces of his skull, “but that don’t have nothing to do with it.” Those eyes became cunning. “You from the governor’s task force?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The governor’s task force. Understand he’s rounding people up the streets to kick the shit out of them.” The junkie blinked. “There’s no more supply left in New York,” he said. “The governor ought to understand that. His program’s working away just fine; you can’t get a fucking thing this side of the river.”
“All right,” Wulff said, showing him the gun, clicking the trigger gently, an old trick that he understood had worked pretty well in the interrogation rooms right up until things had tightened up. “You see this?”
The junkie’s face was very weary. “Yes,” he said, “I see that.”
“I’m going to use it. You know I’m going to use it, don’t you? Don’t you?”
“Yes. I believe you’re going to use it.”
“Make it easy for me,” Wulff said almost pleadingly. “It doesn’t have to be this way at all, you know. You can resolve it very simply. Where are you getting the stuff from? Tell me your source of supply.” I’ve been through this before, he thought. I started this way at the very beginning, back in an Eldorado in Harlem. Started by tracing it up piece by piece. A hell of a thing to be back at the beginning now. But wasn’t life, all of it, in itself a beginning? What the hell were you supposed to do when you knew you would have to repeat the same acts over and over again? Deny them?
The junkie seemed to sigh in collaboration; a look of knowledge passed between them then, outside the context of the confrontation as if the two of them might have been old actors staggering through yet another repertory season together: different masks, different sets, different towns to play in but underneath the same script, the same tired, ravaged old faces behind those masks, the same sense underlying the staging. No, you could never really get out of it.
“Tell me,” Wulff said again and realized that there was a pleading tone in his voice; nothing to be done about it. He could not cancel out the tone because he was pleading. Any fool, even the junkie, could see that the balance had shifted the other way.
“I can’t tell you that, man. You know that as well as I do; I can’t tell you shit and besides that,” the junkie said, “besides that, I’m not really on the stuff anyway. You’ve got me pegged the wrong way. I’m just being social.” His eyes blinked, the whites becoming even more luminous. Wulff leaned forward to find such a clarity there that they might have been tiny screens in which he could see running the clips of his own response as he stared at them. Wide eyes, wide mouth, wide heart, the junkie was telling him the truth, and Wulff could see that. He could no more tell him where he was getting supplies than he could have cut out his heart and presented its palpitating mass to Wulff. In the New York that had been created by the new laws that confidence would be death. Dealing was life imprisonment without parole now; a man facing that would have very little compunction about killing anyone who had put him in that position.
So things had changed. It was not like the old days on the narco squad when you could squeeze out the squalid information you needed from the informants, all of it a game, an end-run against the middle with only a few people hurt and most of them held at bay. The days of the trade-off or the deal were gone now; it was all or nothing.
Looking at the junkie, Wulff thought, yes, you could see some merit in the old ways after all. Damn it to hell but you had to face that insight: the narco squad, the old lax drug laws were more workable; at least you could get along in a world that would not have worked at all had it not been for the easy collaborations you had forced. But now it had changed. It had changed for all of them, enforcers, junkies, dealers, vigilantes alike, all of them were pinned on the edge of that drug law, fluttering away like insects. Nothing could be done. Nothing.
He could kill the junkie or he could let him go. But the trail of information would end here.
“All right,” Wulff said then, “get out of here.”
The junkie did not move. He looked at the floor, spread his palms, looked up at the ceiling. “Out of here?” he said.
“Out. Get the fuck out.”
“All right,” the man said. He came to his feet in a beaten posture, shuffled, clasped his hands together. “You just going to let me walk out of here?”
“Not if you don’t go right now.”
“All right. All right, I’ll go right now. I can’t tell you shit, you understand? Maybe you’re law, state police or something like that, right? Well let me tell you that you can’t get nothing this way. It won’t work. It just won’t work.”
“Go,” Wulff said again, “just get out of here, get out,” and the rage overtook him, he was swinging the revolver, butt end before he became quite conscious of it, hit the junkie a blow high on the shoulder, stunning him. The man cracked against a wall, little showers of sweat droplets exploding from him. “I mean it,” Wulff said, “I mean get out.”
“Yeah,” he said weakly. “Yeah, I’m going, I’m going,” and turned weakly, went to the door, opened it. The foul, dense odors came pouring from the hall, a mixture of plaster, poison, cooking, grief. “Yeah, I’ll go,” the junkie said and went out of there, closing the door quickly, quietly behind him, the door on automa tic lock clicking once. Wulff could not hear him as he went down the hall.
Gone: he was gone. And so much for that.
Wulff did not like the room. All furnished rooms looked the same in these old single-room-occupancy tenements; all of them served the same basic purposes, but some were more ominous than others, some fell wholly below the line of acceptability. If this room had been his life, he would have had to leave it because the overall effect, the density, the unpainted ceiling through which he could see the bare struts of the building themselves coming through, the flaking walls, the stinking furniture smelling of urine lined up against the walls military fashion: bed, desk, chair—this effect would not have been tolerable for a sane man who found himself committed to these quarters. No, you could understand the drug freaks, the junkies, the acid freaks, the potheads, the hash droppers, the cocaine sniffers, the whole cornucopia of twentieth-century American visionaries, if you could see that they were trying, many or most of them, to escape rooms exactly like this. You had to have sympathy for them. You had to understand as he had finally, confronting the junkie in this room, that all of them were victims.
But not so for the dealers and the distributors.
No, it was not true for them: they lived in pleasant houses shielded by trees, or in high apartments in the better areas of the city. They drove their cars in and out of the areas that festered with drugs, on superhighways that walled them off from sight. They had batteries of lawyers, accountants, corrupt cops to shield them from any consequences of what they had done. No, there could be no mercy for the dealers.
But sooner or later, he thought, you had to make a distinction, you had to separate the two. At the beginning of his war, he had seen all of it as a swamp: everything was mixed into one slimy mass. Dealers, distributors, junkies, pushers, peddlers, occasional users, even the journalists who sympathized, glamorized the drug culture had been in that swamp as he had envisioned it, all of them equally needing to be torched out. Bring flame to the swamp, burn it out, he had thought then. But, no, he had been wrong. There were whole levels of authority and responsibility here, varying levels of implication. The junkies were not the same as the dealers; the dealers were not in the same category as the potheads. Even within this subculture, and perhaps here more than on the outside, there were whole shadings, gradations of moral confrontation. He had to face it now. All right, he would face it. He was not unequal to it. He had never thought that he had known everything. He had moved into this from a simple position of ignorance, seeing things in clear-cut terms exactly because the fucking liberals who underlay modern police procedure along with the criminals who manipulated and paid off the cops—exactly because they would see no discrimination. But there was. There had to be.
The junkie could not, under the new drug law, tell him who his supplier was. For the junkie to have told him this would have subjected the purveyor to life-imprisonment without parole. Who was going to buck those kind of odds? Who would tolerate them?
The dealer had undoubtedly made it quite clear that it was worth the life of anyone who sprung the news of his whereabouts. And that meant the end of the informant system.
It also, Wulff thought, it also very likely meant the end of his crusade. It would be impossible to go back to the beginning and pick up the threads again. And after the big ones he had killed, ending with De Masso, there was nowhere else to go.
There was also little point in indiscriminately attacking the junkies, once you realized they were victims. No, nothing was so simple any more. None of it at all.
Wulff put his head in his hands.
It had seemed so easy at the beginning. At the beginning had been clarity, purpose. You started at the bottom and rode clear through to the top, that was all, and then you moved along the line of the top, killing and killing. Eventually there was no one else to kill and then you were finished. The task had been awesome to confront but it had been nothing more than a lot of work; there had been no ambiguities in it. But now, and for the first time, he saw that there were a considerable number of ambiguities.
Wulff sat in his furnished room, head deep in his hands, his eyes closed shut against knowledge. Leaping like fire against the canvas of his mind came not thought of junkies, distributors, dealers, big men or purveyors, not even the image of cold, white death itself—but rather the image of Tamara, not as he had last seen her bloodstained body, but the Tamara he had held in his arms in Los Angeles and San Francisco, all of her flesh a blanket to cover him, smooth, warm, full against the night, her lips all over touching him, touching him, carrying him past certainty into the cold, final tunnel where the great gong roared.
XV
Williams kept on plugging away at it. The decision was made now; he would have to take Wulff. He would do his best. It had nothing to do with the squad any more, it did not even have much to do with Williams himself. Nothing personal in it. It was just something to be done.
Everything leaves a spoor: the deer in the forest, the needle in the arm, the ruined eyes of amphetamine users, the trails by which junk made its way into the country. Wulff would leave a spoor also; it was only a matter of picking it up from where he had been and tracing through. Knowing that Wulff had been in the one furnished room gave him a way of mapping out his progress from there; there would always be signs, indications, if you were patient enough to look for them, and Williams felt a horrendous patience settling upon him now. He would go as far as he could, as long as he could, until he found the man. He functioned out of time, outside normal motivation, outside any considerations of what would happen after he did face Wulff. He simply did what he had to do. That was all.
So he worked his way across town in the most patient, plodding, monomaniacal investigative work that he had ever done; the kind of work that the detective squad might have been able to do forty or fifty years ago when there was a detective squad and the time and lack of distraction to make this kind of work possible. He wandered up and down the streets; he checked neighborhood stores, he moved slowly and patiently through the well of the c
ity, looking for any scrap that he might turn up. A fleeting glimpse of a man who looked like Wulff seen through a shop window might be the insight that would break the case. Something heard or sensed on a street corner might lead him straight through to what he was seeking. You never could tell, in short, when the case might break; you would slog along for hours or days, weeks or months possibly, getting nowhere, doing nothing, and then the one tiny detail would fall into your fingers like the thread that when severed would open up a cheap suit of clothes. Williams was willing to wait it out. So was the lieutenant. The Wulff Squad had gotten a lot of backlash from headquarters because the dead man was so clearly, as the pieces of background on him started to filter in, Wulff’s work. But it was also indication that the squad was on the right track, that they now had him pinned somewhere in the city.
At least Williams thought that he was pinned in the city. So much of this was a matter of instinct and reckoning; so little of it worked out in terms of normal, logical processes. He simply had a strong feeling that Wulff was within a radius of a few blocks on the West Side and that he would not, could not leave. If everything had started here for Wulff, so then would it end, and there was one great piece of unfinished business that Williams could see that would be on Wulff’s mind. He could not quite articulate it, found it hard to spot, but it had something to do with the dead girl, Marie Calabrese, whose discovery had sent Wulff off on his campaign. He had found her here and here for Wulff her spirit remained; until that spirit was buried he could not leave. Williams could sense that. He could even, he supposed, respect it. Not that it meant anything in terms of his search.