Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

by Barry, Mike

  It was hard work. Furthermore, he now had Father Justice to contend with, too. Father Justice was not very pleased at the way things were going. After the Gianelli murder Williams had gone up for the last time to the storefront church to find out if Father Justice had any information that could track Wulff, but the reverend had been almost speechless, whether with rage or grief Williams could not tell. He had refused Williams admission to the church, staring through the slats, saying that there was some kind of service in progress and no outsiders were permitted. When Williams had asked if he had read the papers and whether he had any ideas, the reverend’s face had clotted with rage. “Get out of here,” he said. “Just get out of here and pray that you find him before my men do, because if my men find him it is not going to be very pleasant. For either of you.” So that had been pretty clear, laying it on the line, so to speak: Justice felt responsible because he had not been able to turn up Wulff before the murder and his own ordnance had been used to commit it, which brought him up on a conspiracy charge, possibly, if it was ever traced. This left open the question of why Father Justice, if he had known where Wulff was originally, did not simply attack and bring him out. But the ways of the Lord, as the reverend himself often pointed out, the ways of the Lord were extremely strange and complex, and there was no saying as to how or why He worked. Mysterious and strange, most of this went into metaphysical areas that were not Williams’s area of expertise. Anyway, there would be no help at all there, that was for sure. It all came down to him.

  Williams felt that he could get him. That confidence had been lurking within all through this; there was no doubt in his mind that sooner or later he would locate Wulff. And would have their confrontation. The question was what he was going to do when he came up against him? He did not know, and that reluctance might even underlay the pace of his detective work. He was proceeding methodically rather than in great, intuitive leaps, possibly because intuition would have worked a hell of a lot better than method. He did not know what he was going to do.

  But he had an idea. The idea was forming within him. And when the word came out of the precinct, it was as if that moment of preparation would extend forever, so sure was he of what he was going to do next.

  The call came from the precinct only indirectly. Actually it came from the lieutenant of the Wulff Squad on one of Williams’s few evenings home. He had given up, knocked off early, gone home at five that night for a change, simply because he was exhausted and the smells of the West Side were deep within his nostrils. Now, sitting in the living room with a drink, listening to the sounds of his wife making dinner in the other room—she was cooking more and more elaborate meals, he sometimes thought, as a means of punishing him—he heard the phone, let his wife answer it, waited while she came into the living room and said that someone wanted to talk to him. Williams went into the kitchen to answer it, conscious of the fact that she was going to the bedroom to pick it up on the extension. All right. She could do that. That kind of thing hardly mattered any more.

  “I think the case has broken,” the lieutenant said when Williams got on. His voice was high, nervous, Williams had never heard him quite that way before. “I think the case is breaking right now.”

  “All right. Tell me.”

  “We got a call in from the sixty-second precinct. I mean, it came into headquarters of course, but they put me onto it because it’s our responsibility. We—”

  “Come on,” Williams said. He squeezed his fingers into a hard ball, looked at his hand suddenly discolored from the pressure. “Tell me.”

  “They’re putting in headquarters detail of course,” the lieutenant said uncertainly. “I mean it’s a downtown matter, I think the TPF is moving in. But it’s our business too, isn’t it? I thought so right away. I think we have to get in on it.”

  “Tell me,” Williams said, “for Christ’s sake, you stupid son of a bitch, you tell me right now.” There was a shrilling gasp on the other side of the phone. He thought it might be the lieutenant, but no, that was less likely than his wife, listening in. Don’t blow it, he thought, don’t blow it now.

  “All right,” the lieutenant said. He seemed to take no offense from Williams’s curse. As a matter of fact, it seemed to have relieved his mind in some way, as if he had always known he was a stupid son of a bitch and was merely waiting for someone to deliver the word to him so that he would be relieved of the responsibility of sole knowledge. ‘Our man is in the sixty-second right now. Or someone who sounds very much like our man.”

  “All right,” Williams said, “all right.”

  “They can’t go right in and take him, though. We can’t, either. There seems to be a sort of problem.”

  “What?” Williams said, “what’s the problem?”

  “It’s not clear. But he’s got himself barricaded in there and he’s holding some personnel for ransom. That seems to be it.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Williams said, “son of a bitch.”

  “You cursing me again?”

  “Yes,” Williams said, “no. Yes, no, what does it matter? All right. I’m going in there.”

  “Be careful,” the lieutenant said. “I’ll see you up there, I guess. We’ve all got to go in there. You know where the sixty-second is?”

  “Yes,” Williams said, “I know where the sixty-second is. And this one I’ve got to handle myself.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Forget understanding,” Williams said, “forget all of it,” and, throbbing with a sense of urgency that came over him like ague, flung down the phone, went from the kitchen, took his service revolver and identification and headed for the door. No time to change into blues, not that that mattered. At the door his wife, now holding the baby, met him, looked at him in a silence that extended toward pain. Williams tried to break the moment, fling himself through the door, but he could not. He could not do it. There was something to be said, he supposed, but he did not quite know what it was.

  “Be careful,” she said after a while, “for God’s sake, be careful.”

  “Being careful has nothing to do with it.”

  The child stirred in her arms, opened an eye, looked at Williams. She looked down at it. “Do you have to do it?” she said, “must you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ve got to do it. This time I’ve got to do it.”

  “Is it the end?”

  “I think so,” he said, “I think so. I think that this is the end, at least for me,” and he leaned down and kissed her once, one light contact on the forehead, feeling the cold, impermeable surfaces of her flesh open up like lips to something like contact. Then, without thinking any more because thought would have been pain, he slammed the door, bolted toward the Ford, got into it and backed it screaming out of the driveway, not even clearing the street, trusting to luck, came into a wide arc on the other side, slammed it into drive and headed toward the sixty-second.

  The sixty-second. Central Harlem. Where Wulff had set it up for siege.

  And somehow Williams knew exactly what it was all about.

  XVI

  The idea had occurred to Wulff in sleep or semiconsciousness, hard to differentiate between the two, he had been drifting and dreaming in his room, looking at the ordnance, thinking or not thinking, his mind perfectly blank, whirring at idle as he tried to pick up his next move. And then it had been there, clear, hammered into his mind as if it had been there all the time and he had merely turned his attention to the inscribed words. Clear, clear: it was so devastatingly, hopelessly clear that the only question was why he had not thought of it a long time ago. But it did not matter. The important thing was that he had thought of it now. It was merely a matter of acting on it.

  Because it had not begun with Marie Calabrese, with the dead girl on the floor. He thought that it had; that was why he had returned to the West Side, to close full circle, to end as he had begun, to unite the end with the beginning. Maybe he had thought that if he went back, if he could clean it up and mak
e it right here at the source, the girl would still be alive, nothing would have happened, he would have cleaned out not only the recent but the total past and all would have been as before: Marie close to him, their engagement an impatient waiting, their marriage a finality. Maybe that was what he had wanted. But he had not understood.

  No, he had not understood. This odyssey did not begin with the girl, but somewhat earlier. It had begun with the informant that he had brought under the gun into Harlem’s sixty-second precinct, the informant who was carrying and whose insolence and mockery in the neighborhood bar he could not stand—shit man, you fucking narco, no narco’s going to bust anyone but a tip, the informant’s sneer had said—and which had made him bring the man into the sixty-second if only to prove to him that there were limits to defiance. And at the sixty-second there had been the lieutenant, the fucking desk lieutenant, the tall son of a bitch who had put Wulff in one room and the informant in another, made Wulff sweat it out for two hours before the lieutenant had come into Wulff and said that it was false arrest; the informant was not carrying. He had nothing. He had been turned back into the street. How did Wulff think that he was going to do the department any good if he got them into suits for false arrest because of his goddamned stupidity? And although all of this had been said to him straight, there had been a little mad twinkle in the lieutenant’s eyes, a little of the same, man, I’m just shitting you, that he had seen with the informant. So he had lost his temper, he had been under very great pressure by that time, and had belted the lieutenant in the jaw, just a light one, but hard enough anyway to send the uncoordinated lieutenant lurching back into the wall.

  And that was how it had all started. The lieutenant had called narco, narco had busted him back to patrol, patrol had put him into the police car next to Williams, and the next night he had discovered the body of the o.d. ‘d girl five flights up on West Ninety-third Street. It had started with the lieutenant. The lieutenant had crossed him. Not narco. Not even the monsters, whoever they were, who had killed his girl. No. The lieutenant. Because some how, some way, he had called them in on him.

  A man who was collaborating with an informant sure as hell would know people a little higher up along the trail. He would pass on information to them. Routinely.

  All of this slid into Wulff’s mind almost unobtrusively, dropping in like a series of chain gears, like a hoist dropping engines into new cars on the assembly line, one a minute, driving in the works, and the simple clarity of it had brought him out of his chair, his sleep, his reverie, whatever it had been. In that moment Wulff had seen all of it clearly mapped for him: why he had been at loose ends, why he had not known what to do next, why this second New York campaign so far had been such a hit-or-miss affair, such an essential loss of purposes. It was simple. He had never approached the basic problem.

  The basic problem was the lieutenant.

  No doubt, no indecision now. He knew exactly what he had to do now. He got out of the chair, armed up with two grenades and an extra pistol. After long consideration he dropped the idea of the machine gun, not because he could not use it, but because its concealment, entering a station house, would be almost impossible. He found it a very easy load to carry, considering all the death packed away. In relation to the damage he could cause, he was carrying one of the lightest packages one could possibly conceive. Combat technique of course—the most artillery in the lightest possible package. Someday they would arrive at the perfect weapon, which would be a mechanism capable of destroying a city, and which one could carry in the palm of one’s hand. That would be worth more to the generals than any amount of plutonium bombs; they could wreck the world all right.

  He went up to the sixty-second precinct. Coming back to Harlem was an exercise in familiarity. It was for him like a sleeper’s blankets being piled over him as he sank back from nightmare into the surge of an equivocal dream. He would have had to come an awfully long way for Harlem to have struck him as an exercise in familiarity, for Harlem to have been comfortable to him, but coming out of the subway that was exactly how he did feel; it was a foreign land but occupied territory. He thought he understood it far better than the barbarities of the East Side, better than all the strange cities he had seen. The despair kindled in Harlem was a New York despair that worked within the landscape rather than being imposed upon it like the angst of suburbia; he could breathe it in, breath it out, shrug his way with it like most of the residents. No, Harlem had been bum-rapped all over the country. The media had dug their tentacles into it as they did into everything. But after all was said and done, Wulff guessed he understood it.

  Two brisk blocks to the sixty-second precinct. Rambling through the sidestreets he had the good old Harlem feel, one of blending, meshing with the landscape rather than fighting against it. Even though he was white, a white man in the vicinity of the precinct was not an unusual sight, and he felt no tension as he walked past the crumbling brownstones. The police to Harlem was the occupying army, treated with the sullenness and respect due such an army. Occasionally, like every five years, there would be a flare-up, but it was quickly put down, as almost all of the local revolts were, and things returned to normal. At the sixty-second he saw the private cars of the cops angled up and down the pavement, parked in the street, on the sidewalk in the way that cops had; the only civil service position in town where free parking was considered a fringe benefit, a right not guaranteed by contract but by unwritten understanding. The residents loved that, the cars all over the street, but then they understood that an occupying army had its own rights and privileges, and who were they to protest?

  Wulff walked up the steps of the precinct almost humming. Everything was certain now; everything was in place, all doubt and indecision gone. It seemed impossible that he had not known this a long time ago: that the way to attack was frontally and at the base of the problem. Inside, the odors of the precinct house, the stains on the walls, the ruined furniture were as familiar to him as the pictures he made behind closed eyes to ease him off to sleep. He inhaled, grateful to feel at home. Once a cop, always a cop; that was the truth. You could repudiate a hell of a lot of it, know its rottenness and stink, but the rottenness and stink were part of you. It was better to accept this.

  The desk sergeant looked at him incuriously; a white man coming in this way could only be reporting a robbery or mugging, but Wulff was moving too slowly for that, seemed to be not agitated. On the other hand, the desk sergeant had watched a hundred a day come in here for eight years; that meant twenty thousand faces coming into the precinct house. He could hardly take any of them as remarkable or as a basis for response, because if he did he would blow himself apart. He merely sat there writing in a book, making painful entries of some sort, probably logging in his pension credits, Wulff thought. The reception room was otherwise deserted; overhead, in the cages, he could hear the faint murmurs of staff, the sound of typewriters. Downstairs in the pit there might be screaming, but there was plenty of insulation in this, as in all the old precinct houses; he would not be hearing this. And things had changed a good deal through the last decade; he doubted if there was such stuff going on now. Nowadays they did it more efficiently and usually out in the street. It was easier to log in a dead perpetrator. And it saved arraignment difficultues and the problem of going to court.

  “Yeah,” the desk sergeant said finally. He was a small, weary man with a face like a doorknob. “What do you want?”

  “What do I want?” Wulff said, “I want—” and then he paused dead because he realized that he did not know the lieutenant’s name. Had never gotten it. That was pretty stupid of him, he thought. To go through all of this and not even know the name of the man he wanted. Little foresight. He should have checked it out somehow.

  “I’m waiting,” the desk sergeant said, “I’m really waiting now,” and behind his eyes a little light was kindling, a faint light that only a practiced eye could see, but Wulff saw it and he realized that the desk sergeant was not as dumb a
s he looked, desk sergeants never were, nor was he as dead, this being an exception in the trade. Some connection had been made, something was worming its way slowly through the mind of the sergeant, something on the verge of recognition working its way through those eyes, and Wulff thought: he’s going to make me, he’s got me, they’ve got my picture in their wallets. He stood there momentarily indecisive, not knowing whether the next move was to move right on or out, whether he dared push the sergeant or instead had to retreat. And then the lieutenant of six months ago walked into the room straightening his uniform, pulling his slacks into alignment, strolled over to the desk, and winked at the sergeant without even looking at Wulff. “How you doing?” he said. “I think I’m checking out.”

  Too much. It was too much, but the wrenching bizarreness of the coincidence was exactly what Wulff needed to enable him to go on. A fat woman was coming up the steps carrying a small weeping child, running a hand through her hair, and this distracted the sergeant, he swung his angle of vision to take her in, then came back to Wulff. Wulff said, “All right. That’s it. Let’s hold it.”

  The sergeant looked at him flatly; the lieutenant sighed and said, “Jesus Christ, have we got another goddamned nut case here?” and then he turned and saw Wulff, and everything came together for the lieutenant in that moment. Wulff knew the feeling, he had had it himself a few times, events tumbling, colliding, and then slamming into one another with the majestic precision and solemnity of ships crashing.