by Barry, Mike
The lieutenant went for his pistol, gibbering; the sergeant, puzzled, looking at all of this through narrowed eyes, the child in the woman’s hands sniffling and too late, too late for all of them. Wulff held the pistol very level at the lieutenant’s midsection.
“Don’t do it,” he said quietly. “Don’t think of a thing. You make a fucking move and you’re going to be without a gut.”
The lieutenant’s hands fell away, his hands shook, the sergeant’s face folded over in amazement and the fat woman, still carrying the child, turned and ran at full sprint down the steps and out into the street. Wulff could hear the door bang behind, and then there they were in perfect confrontation—sergeant, lieutenant, Wulff. And Wulff said it as he had worked it out before and knew in the saying that it was going to be all right. It would work. He had the feeling within him that a good pool player would have when he was about to start what he was sure was going to be a hot run.
“All right,” he said to the sergeant then. “I’m just going to take this man into one of the interrogation rooms. You’d better get the word out that I’ve got a hostage here and that if anyone makes a move, any kind of a move to break this up, they’re going to lose that hostage. You understand that?”
The sergeant nodded once, very slowly. “I know who you are,” he said.
“I’m glad of that. Are you going to listen to me and cooperate, or is there going to be trouble?”
The sergeant looked at him and there was calculation tempered by a certain amount of insight. “No,” he said, “there won’t be trouble. I’m not going to buck you. You don’t knock over precinct houses, you know. We can’t stand that. You ought to remember that much.”
“I remember plenty,” Wulff said. He took the gun then, prodded the lieutenant in the back. The man had not said anything since the gun had been pulled on him; he was sweating lightly, terrified. Probably had never been under the gun before. Not that it made much difference one way or the other; mean bastards came in all forms, some had seen too much of the gun. “Let’s go,” Wulff said. “I remember where that room is. Let’s go and have a talk.”
“About what?” the lieutenant said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat, tried again. “What’s there to talk about?”
“There’s a lot to talk about,” Wulff said, prodding him. To the sergeant: “You’d better tell them to keep their distance if you want to see this man again.”
“Do it,” the lieutenant said, “don’t fuck around with him.” He was already walking. “For Christ’s sake, he means business. What is there to talk about?”
“A lot of things,” Wulff said, guiding him. “For one thing I want to know how you put me here and for another what you expect to do to get me the hell out.” To the sergeant: “Tell them they shouldn’t fuck around. Tell them I’ve got a couple of hand grenades too.”
On the phone the sergeant looked up, spread his free hand and said, “I never would have doubted it.”
XVII
Outside they had the TPF, the emergency squad, floating cars from other precincts, the emergency rescue squad, a cordon of cops ringing the building holding back the crowd, which was five-deep and growing. They didn’t know what was up, but in Harlem it was bound to be something bad for them, and it sounded ominous. Williams ignored all of it, pushed his way to the front. “Let me in,” he said to the patrolman at the sawhorse. “Let me in there.”
“You’ve got to be crazy,” the patrolman said. “No one’s going in there. That place is under siege.”
“No,” Williams said, “I’ve got to go,” and pulled his identification from his pocket, shoved it under the patrolman’s face. As the man instinctively reached forward to take it, momentarily distracted, Williams hurdled the sawhorse and in three leaps was moving up the steps of the precinct into the interior. Another set of police was at the door standing, hands on hips, one of them clawing at his gun as Williams came up. “Get away,” Williams said again, “I’m going in there.”
“No one’s going in there,” the cop said. He put a hand on his sergeant’s stripes as if wanting to show levels of authority yet feeling vaguely embarrassed about it at the same time. “We can’t risk it.”
“We’ve got to risk it,” Williams said. “You’ve got to let me in there. I’m the man he wants!” and while the sergeant was thinking about this, Williams was already through him. The others on both sides made reluctant efforts to stop him, like men snapping flies out of the air, then let him go. If he wanted to kill himself, Williams imagined their thinking was, if he wanted to go into the sixty-second and be a sacrifice, it was his business. Cops were very loyal that way; they were loyal to themselves. They had a fervent belief in the right of brother cops sacrificing themselves if that would take the heat off them and get the cops some sympathy in the media. He was in the precinct house itself now, the murmurs of the crowd dimmed to mutters behind the doors. The desk sergeant, rearing from his post, telephone to his ear, looked at Williams with amazement and then slammed the phone down. “Don’t you know what’s going on here?” he said. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I know what’s going on,” Williams said. “Where the hell are they? Just tell me where they are.”
The desk sergeant could not take it. It was as if the multiplication of events had worked its way into him up to a certain point, the circuits taking it with only slight overheating or strain, but now like a computer there was an overload and he was about to shut down. “Don’t you understand,” he said, “I’ve got TPF, I’ve got special units, I’ve got—” and then swallowing in a constricted way several times he could say no more. His eyes bulged. “I can’t take it any more,” he said, “I just can’t fucking take it any more. You go along to a certain point, and this is a tough precinct, but it’s too much. It’s too much,” he said almost indolently, leaning back from his high chair, the tilt precarious, and then he came slamming forward, his elbows banging hard on the desk. “Get out of here,” he said, “just get out of here before I begin to take you seriously, before I believe that there’s someone here.”
Williams said, “I’m here to take him. I’m on the special squad dealing with him. Tell me where he is and your troubles are over,” and he thought, screw this, what was he even bothering to pump information out of the desk sergeant for? It was merely a delaying tactic, a delaying tactic against his own reluctance. The basement; they would have to be in one of the old rubber hose rooms lined up down there. “Let’s go,” he said, more to himself than the desk sergeant and bolted toward the staircase.
The phone rang at the sergeant’s elbow and the sergeant cut it off, Williams could hear him babbling into the receiver. Good enough, let him babble away, it had nothing to do with his own problem. He had run the barricade, but that did not mean that anyone else was going to do so. He charged down a staircase reeking of urine and old fires, little scraps of paper twinkling under his feet, and he found himself in a low, flat basement, the ceilings near his head, down at the end little lights winking from the various rooms. From one of them, way down, he could hear a voice. Wulff’s voice.
Williams took out his gun. It felt cold in his hand, more like a sheathed knife than a gun, deadly, present in his grasp. He began to move toward the voice. The fluorescence of the lamps sparkled. He might have been in a street, not the basement, the street lamps winking down at him. It was like the night that he had been near the methadone center1, the night before the knife had gone into his ribs. He felt his ribs quiver; a spot of bright reminiscent pain darting from that special place where he had been hit. He put a hand over it, cupped it, eased the pain away and kept on moving. Toward the sound of the voice. Low, maniacal, it had fallen into a chant that now filled the hallway. He went down in an instinctive combat low-crawl and he kept on moving.
XVIII
Wulff had the lieutenant braced against a wall in the prisoner’s position, hands high above his head, palms flat to the wall, kneecaps touching, stomach against the plaster. He held
the gun in the lieutenant’s back and every now and then gave him a small prod, just to keep him alert. He had adjusted the one spotlight in the room so that it came down in a white, heated spot focusing on the back of the lieutenant’s skull. The lieutenant’s cap was off, ripped off by Wulff, flung to the floor, and sweat was coming from him so profusely that even the back of his head was wet. He breathed in uneven, shuddering gasps, shunting the breath through as if it were passing many obstacles. Wulff knew that if he turned the man around he would see that he was crying. He did not turn him around: he did not need to see him do it. All of the confirmation was in the lieutenant’s voice.
“Tell me,” he said, “why did you do it? Why did you let him go? You could have booked him, you know there was enough evidence to hold.” His voice was calm, level. He had started by screaming but soon had realized that there was no need for this; what you had to do was to cultivate an absolute sense of control. He had it now. He was completely self-possessed. “You should have booked him,” he said, “why didn’t you book him? All the evidence was there.” He kept on going. He could go on that way now as long as he needed.
“I told you,” the lieutenant said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His body quivered. “Please stop this,” he said,” it’s not doing any good.”
Wulff hit him at half-speed in the ribs with the butt of the gun. “No good,” he said. “It won’t wash. It’s not what I need to hear; it’s not what I like. Why did you let him go? What had you worked out with him?”
“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said, “I don’t remember. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“No I don’t. Listen, let me turn around, let me face you, let me talk—”
Wulff hit him again in the ribs the same way. The lieutenant screamed lightly, then went back to the concentrated effort of breathing once more. “I told you,” Wulff said, “I don’t like it. It doesn’t wash. Remember. Tell me.”
“I can’t tell you anything.”
“Yes you can. Try to remember.”
“I know who you are,” the lieutenant said. “I swear to God that it doesn’t affect anything. Listen, nobody here has any quarrel with you. We all think you’re doing a real job. All of us here at the precinct—”
Wulff thought of hitting him again, but one more blow might topple the lieutenant and that was not necessary. He did not want to kill him. Not at all, at least until he got the answer. “Cut it out,” he said again. “You remember. You remember everything. Why did you let him go? Why did you turn me into the command post? What did I do that you didn’t like; who was paying you off?”
“Oh shit,” the lieutenant said, “oh shit now, just listen, nobody was paying off. Nobody remembers anything, it’s all gone, it’s all forgotten,” and he turned then, a stricken aspect to his face all that Wulff saw, and then the man was on his knees, facing him. “Please,” he said, “please.”
Wulff said, “That’s no attitude for a cop. Particularly one dedicated to protecting the rights of informants like you were. I’m not impressed. Get off your fucking knees.”
“It’s all forgotten. It all happened a long time ago; it doesn’t really make a bit of difference. You’ll never get away with this,” the lieutenant said, a shade of cunning moving, then retreating on his face. “They’ll storm the precinct. You won’t get away with it, you hear me?”
“Yeah,” Wulff said, “I hear you,” thinking how many times he had heard this before, all of the organization guys, the mob guys, the shrewdsters and the speedsters standing before him telling him that he did not have a chance, that there was no way he could get away with this, that they were going to be rescued, that they would be bailed out, that terrific vengeance would be exacted from Wulff for fucking around with guys as significant and important as them. Oh yes he had heard it, standing in a hundred rooms, listening to a hundred speeches like this, and here he was listening to it once again. Under the gun, cops and mobsters talked exactly the same way; there was a message in that, leave it to whoever was good at digging out messages. As far as he was concerned, he had enough trouble figuring out exactly what he wanted. What was he after? Exactly what did he hope to gain from the lieutenant? There the man was, the man who had started him on the great voyage, the man who in a sense was responsible for a hundred deaths himself: a gnarled, sniveling mass at his feet, as effectively broken as Wulff could ever have hoped him to be, the precinct ringed with troops he was sure, and yet he had not dug out what he wanted. There was something obscure, something he was after, but he could not quite lay his finger on it—and then it was there as if the finger had been resting on this one jot of information all the time and had now leapt away, springing free the one damning insight that he had been looking for all this time. Now he knew why he was here; now he knew why he wanted the lieutenant. “Who killed her?” he said. “Who killed her?”
The lieutenant looked up at him. His face was streaked with sweat. “Killed who?”
“Killed the girl. Who o.d. ‘d her out and left her for me to find in that rooming house? Tell me,” he said. He pointed the gun at the lieutenant’s head. “Tell me now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said frantically. “I don’t know—”
“All of them said they didn’t know who did it, that the organization had nothing to do with it. I chased them all over the country and I heard it in nine cities, no one knew what had happened to her but they weren’t responsible. Ï called them liars and one by one I killed them all. All of them. And you know something? The message finally got through this thick skull. I think they were telling the truth after all. I don’t think any of them knows who did it; I don’t think they were responsible for it.”
“Leave me alone,” the lieutenant said. It was the most ridiculous, unresponsive thing he could have said; some knowledge of this caused his mouth to arc into a tormented grin. “For God’s sake, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do. I think you do too. Somebody here killed her to teach me a lesson; to make me lay off. To hit me so hard that they wouldn’t have to worry about me ever again. And it could only have been a cop.”
“Stop it,” the lieutenant said. He was rigid in posture, thin blotches on his cheek. “Stop it, you’re crazy.”
“Only a cop could have picked her up, only a cop could have gotten her trust long enough to have brought her there and done what they had to do. No one else. Anyone else had tried it, they would have had to kill her on the way. She was a fighter. The girl was a fighter.”
The lieutenant said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about the girl.”
“Yes you do,” Wulff said, and indeed he felt that finally everything was falling into place: he was seeing with a dreadful clarity that could only have been accumulated from stepping over a hundred corpses. Win one, lose one, lose yourself but win knowledge. Was it worth it? “You,” he said, “it would have been you all the time. Or one of your contacts, some other rotten fucking cop who would have gone along with it. But most likely it was you. You got hurt bad. I put you in a hell of a spot, dragging in one of your own protection cases. So you had to dig for a way to get back at me, and it wasn’t very hard, was it? If you know a little investigative technique, if you can reach the local precinct, which any cop could, pull rank, dig out some information, it wouldn’t have been very hard at all.” He pointed the gun at the lieutenant. “I make it you killed her,” he said. “It was you all along. All this time I’ve been killing hard guys, busting up the trade and you’ve been sweating it out.”
“Listen,” the lieutenant said. The blotches had become great spots, circles on the cheeks covering them with red, the trapped blood spiraling upward toward the temples. “You’re wrong. If you think what I guess you are, you’ve got it wrong. I wouldn’t; I couldn’t. You don’t involve someone else in this; it would have been jus
t you and me. Your girl wasn’t any part of it. She was out there in Queens—”
“You knew,” Wulff said, “you knew she was my girl and out in Queens. That’s all I need to know, that and everything else coming together. It’s stupid,” he said. “I’ve been going one way all the time when I should have been going the other. It could have been so simple. I could have done this from the beginning.” He pointed the gun. “This is it,” he said.
“No!” the lieutenant shrieked, the wailing scream of a dying man and Wulff concentrated on the trigger, freeing the trigger and someone behind him screamed: Stop it, Wulff, don’t do it! His hand shook, the gun shook, the shot went wild, and the lieutenant dove to the floor, Wulff already turning. And there was Williams behind him, the .38 special in his hand, pointing. And as Williams watched, astonished, Wulff shot the gun out of his hand, the gun cracking, spinning against the wall. Wulff looked at Williams under the hot, harsh light of the naked bulb, the lieutenant whimpering on the floor. For the longest time Wulff did not know what to do or what to think, but finally the attitude hit him, the only proper attitude that there could have been, and the maniacal laughter hit him like a pile driver, working through all the spaces of his body, and he fell to his knees looking at Williams, laughing and laughing until the sweat had in that instant come through his clothes and hung them, glistening, to his skin.
Because the way that everything, in these last moments, had all come together was too much for him. There was a neatness and artistry to it that Calabrese more than anyone would have appreciated.
He wished Calabrese, his old and most respected enemy, could have seen it. He might have understood. Wulff was not sure that he did.