by Barry, Mike
Randall stood his ground, not believing that this was happening to him, not willing to accept the fact that he had come to Calabrese as an equal, to appeal for help and was going to end up being mugged and shot by one of Calabrese’s men but then, the old man smiled himself, an odd, uneven, wintry little smile that seemed to break down the component parts of his body: slouch, paunch, concave chest, high forehead seen as individual parts floating around the nexus that was Calabrese, rather than assembled into a whole, and Randall saw he had been set up for this like a child and that Calabrese was amused. This was the old man’s sense of humor; he was playing. He found it amusing that Randall would think that now he was going to be shot. Calabrese raised a hand and pointed. “Mario will take you to your car,” he said, “and I’m sure that your memory and powers of recall will sharpen on the drive. Go now. Go.”
So Randall went. Mario led him through the hallway and into the rear of the grounds where he found himself in an enormous garaging area; acres of land which never could have been seen or sensed from the front, cars and trucks scattered through this acreage in all states of repair and preparedness. Calabrese had almost as much area back here as Versallo had had in the warehouse. Of course that was a common tactic, Randall understood; the chieftains would buy up acreage adjoining their own houses for whatever exorbitant price was necessary and would often demolish what structures had been on this acreage … simply for privacy. So he should not have been as surprised as he was by the sheer dimensions of Calabrese’s holdings but then again he was, that was all, it reminded him—if he needed reminding at that point—that Calabrese meant business. He had taken the valise and put him in a car, given him instructions on where and how to get Wulff … and now, he was supposed to do the job. The Calabreses of this world or any other did not extend themselves to efforts of this sort unless they intended completion. If he failed …
Well, he would not fail, Randall thought, yanking the wheel of the small Falcon viciously, almost past his exit, pouring the car down the ramp at the last possible moment, all six cylinders whining and screaming beneath him. The Falcon had even been overlaid with a federal seal on the right passenger entrance; a deep khaki color it looked like every expressionless vehicle which he had seen on Army posts or outside the federal buildings. Calabrese was a careful man; no detail was beyond him.
In the uniform, in fact, Randall felt somewhat official himself; if the uniform indeed was the man, shaping and framing the personality as theory had it, then he did not feel like anything so much as a federal marshall at this moment. He was going in his capacity as a federal marshall to pick up Wulff and convey him to the office buildings where the grand jury was in session. He even thought like a federal marshall, and it occurred to him that if he could go on thinking in this way it would be very easy, could continue being quite easy right up until the moment when he killed Wulff.
Which he would. He would do this because he wanted to avenge Versallo, that was the original impulse and not to be discounted, but beyond that he would do it for another reason: he did not want to think of what might happen to him from Calabrese if he did not. Calabrese was serious. How he had located Wulff, how precisely he had made the arrangements for the pickup he did not know but he knew this: any man who was willing to extend this kind of effort was not to be trifled with.
It was either Wulff or him now. It was that simple.
Randall brought the car to a stop in front of the precinct, wedging it within a row of illegally-parked private vehicles with police stickers, and went up the steps and into the grim, green reception area and found that his man, flanked by two cops, was already waiting for him. He had never seen Wulff before but he would have recognized him anywhere. There was no trouble in knowing the man, not only from the photographs which had been passed around through channels with the bounty offer some weeks ago. No, there was in the eyes of this tall man, flanked by cops, and waiting for him, an intensity not unlike that which he had seen in Calabrese’s. Yes, Wulff was of the same stripe as Calabrese; here was another one who believed in himself, believed in his ability to control situations and who, no doubt, was able to convey that intensity so well that there were almost no situations which he was not able to control. State of mind, state of will. One of the cops stepped forward and said, “You took long enough.”
“Did the best I could,” Randall said, feeling uncomfortable. Were the cops in it or not? Did they know that this was a setup or did they take him for federal staff? It was best to play it completely straight, of course. “We have to work on schedule too,” Randall said, trying to think like a federal marshall would. “We’ve got a caseload.”
“I don’t give a shit about your fucking caseload,” the cop said, pushing Wulff forward as if he were a bag of fruit. Wulff took a calm pace forward, looked at Randall levelly. “Just get him the fuck out of here right now.” So the cop was pissed off, to be sure, that Calabrese had taken away his play for an afternoon, that was clear. “I said now,” the cop said and Wulff kept that level stare on Randall.
“All right,” Randall said, “I’ll do the best I can.” He took a pair of handcuffs that had been dangling from his waist and maneuvered them off his belt buckle with some difficulty, held them out. Wulff, still giving that amused, level stare extended his hands, held them that way and Randall put the cuffs around them.
He had never realized until this moment how difficult it was to cuff a man; it always looked easy when cops did it and the movies made nothing of it at all but it was a strange, sweaty job. The cuffs seemed too small for the wrists, they would not come all the way around and then he was unable to lever them in properly, he tried to compensate by adding more pressure but pressure simply buckled them. They slipped away from his grasp and fell to the floor with a little clang. The cop with a detached grin stood there saying nothing. Feeling inept, Randall bent over, picked up the cuffs and tried again. “No,” Wulff said as Randall tried to loop one wrist. “That’s not the way. You’ve got to work against the pressure point,” and then, one-handed showed Randall what he was talking about. Randall, feeling that he was beginning to blush let Wulff help him and at a certain point the cop came over and finished the job. Wulff’s hands, cuffed, fell to stomach level.
“It’s generally better to do them behind the back,” the cop said, “that way they can’t come up over their head high,” he pantomimed this, “and then come down on your head,” and he made a sweeping gesture which just missed Randall by an inch or so. Randall felt a moment of fury and resisted an insane impulse to seize the gun from his jacket and begin to shoot. He could certainly get Wulff and the cop before anyone here knew what was happening. He decided that he did not want to do this however. He restrained the impulse quickly, noting that five or six cops who had been lounging around the desk were fastening profound stares on him. “That’s all right,” Randall said, “he won’t do anything.”
“You mean, you really know how to take them into custody,” the cop said, “all of that fine training under federal auspices, right?”
Wulff said, “The man’s only trying to do a job, officer. Give him a break,” and the cop gave Wulff a look of hatred, his hands coiling unconsciously into fists. There had undoubtedly been difficulties before he had even walked into this one, Randall thought. Calabrese had done the job but maybe it had not been necessary after all; these cops might have killed Wulff themselves and saved him all of this trouble. He decided not to dwell on the irony of this, it did not appeal to him. He pointed the gun at Wulff. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”
Wulff shrugged and began moving. Randall let him pass, then moved in behind him. The cop gave Randall a swat on the buttocks as they moved toward the door.
“You show him the real stuff,” the cop said and all the others around the desk laughed. They really did not like federal personnel here, that was clear. Fuck them. Fuck all of the sons of bitches. Randall fell into line, took Wulff down the steps. Now he was on his own, a strange, vacant barren f
eeling hitting him along with the wind. At the door Wulff paused, waiting. Randall opened the rear door and Wulff slid in.
“I’m going to let you sit that way without restraint,” Randall said.
“I’ll cooperate.”
“I’ll assume you’ll cooperate,” Randall said. “I’ll be driving one-handed with the gun out and I can see everything in the rear-view mirror. I want you to sit at the extreme right of the rear seat.”
“I’ll do that,” Wulff said, “I’m not going to make any trouble at all.” He sounded almost meek. This was not the man that Randall had been reading about; it surely did not sound like the kind of man who could kill Versallo as Versallo had been killed. “I want to get where we’re going as badly as you do,” he said.
“Then cooperate,” Randall said. “Just be reasonable and there’ll be no trouble at all,” and slammed the door on Wulff, walked around the other side and got behind the wheel, holding the gun in a good, light grip all the time.
How well did Wulff know Chicago? If he knew it well there would be hell to pay when he realized that they were heading in the wrong direction. But even so he had a few moments clearance until he hit the expressway, heading toward the marshes. After that, as Calabrese had said, he was on his own. All right, he was on his own.
Randall started the car. He felt the killing lust once again firm within him. He put the car into gear. He drove.
Chapter 19
Wulff knew early on that he had put himself into a box. Who did this clown in front think that he was fooling? He was no federal marshall and this was no federal car. Nor were they going in the proper direction. It was one of the crudest fake-up jobs of a vehicle he had ever seen; on the other hand, maybe it was a pretty good job, it was just that he had seen so many of these doctored vehicles in the NYPD that it seemed laughably obvious to him. Maybe not to the men that had done it though. Give them credit.
He knew that he had been sucked in, phonied in somehow, but he found the situation so interesting that for the time being all he did was sit back, his wrists beginning to ache slightly within the clamp of the handcuffs, and take in the situation. The audacity of the ploy was amazing to him; also if he was not being taken to Patrick Wilson, exactly where was he going? And how deeply was Wilson involved in some kind of illegality if a trade-off like this could be maneuvered? It was fascinating; it also, he knew, probably involved his life but he would get to that soon or sooner. In the meantime, he and the driver were working in accord, and that was to their benefit. Both he and the driver shared one overwhelming purpose; they were getting him away from the Chicago cops. That was a good thing. That was really the most that Wulff could have asked, to have gotten out of that precinct house at the time that he did. The situation, menacing at best, had shown signs of deteriorating into an irretrievable ugliness and he was not sure, ultimately, that he would have been able to have gotten free of this one. Maybe. Maybe he would have finally gotten himself booked and thrown into a cell but he suspected that there was a good deal that would happen to him before then. Booked into a hospital bed, most likely.
He leaned back in the seat, his wrists aching progressively from the handcuffs and looked at the back of the driver’s neck. This was not the neck of a federal marshal either; there was a certain aura which came off people like this which, dealing with them as he had, no one could miss. It would be just possible, he thought, to lean forward and strike the man before he would have a chance to react. This could be done. But what then? The car would lurch out of control and the driver would certainly have the presence of mind to make the accident a devastating one. That determination would be communicated to Wulff, as a deterrent of course.
“How soon will we be there?” Wulff said.
The driver said nothing. He yanked the wheel left and right and they were on a flat open avenue, East St. Louis, Wulff guessed, heading north at forty or fifty miles an hour. “Is this the right direction?” Wulff said.
The driver still refused to talk. Wulff leaned forward, jamming a knee into the seat in front of him and said, “I have a right to know, I think.”
“No conversation,” the driver said. “I told you that.”
“I’m not making conversation. I asked you one question.”
“Keep your fucking questions to yourself,” the driver said. He reached across the seat, hefted the gun, showed it to Wulff by raising it against the windshield. “I mean that.”
“That’s not too bright,” Wulff said, “showing a gun in a crowded area. We might get pulled over. The cops here are very alert.”
“Shut the fuck up,” the driver said and moved the car faster. He seemed to be afflicted with a kind of sullenness, a dangerous, deteriorating gloom spreading out from him. Wulff caught it. That gloom probably had something to do with the fact that the driver was considering the true implications of what lay ahead of him. Up until this moment he had never really confronted the necessity to murder Wulff mano a mano. He had been possessed with the excitement of getting him out of the precinct and into the car. My sympathies, Wulff thought, and just to keep the man preoccupied said, “I’ve got a lot of information to give, you know.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“That’s why I wanted to get to Patrick Wilson, you understand. There are a lot of important details I can give him, specifics for the investigation.” Would he really talk this way if he did not know what was truly going on here? Probably not. He warned himself to cool it.
“I told you and I tell you the last time,” the driver said, “I don’t want no fucking conversation.”
He hunched over the wheel, holding the gun like he might a cigar and concentrated on speed. The car burst free of traffic lights and, as was so common in even the densest of the metropolitan areas, found itself on what had become a flat highway, low buildings and barren land around them, flowing out of the city. There was no city that man could construct so complex that it did not, ten to fifteen miles in most directions away from its central point, fall away.
Wulff looked out the rear window where he could see the buildings of Chicago wrapped in smog and filth. If the junkies had their shit, then the cities had pollution. Same thing. Shroud events, corrupt realities. The car swerved to the side. They had come suddenly into a deserted, abandoned area; the car curving on a side-road now almost hidden from the main, a few dismal buildings poking up from the flats around which the car circled. It looked like an abandoned dispatch station of some sort; years ago before the cars and suburbs destroyed public transportation, buses or trolleys must have been sent out of this area; there were still the remains of tracks, gutted and porous, lying half-exposed in the mud and ancient ruts left from tires. Twenty years ago this must have been a very busy place, Wulff thought, hundreds of men must have worked here moving out the network. But now, as they came close on the crumbling buildings, looking through open spaces in the ruined concrete to the patches of darkness inside he decided that it was no such place anymore. Places like this served only one function and that was murder. Thirty or forty years ago the gangs had had to load their victims into cars and take them to Evanston or Joliet to dump them … now they could do it in the inner city. There was an irony in there somewhere, Wulff supposed, if he wanted to bother looking for it.
The car stopped, shuddering a little. The man in the front tilted down the sun-visor, took the pistol, turned on Wulff. The handcuffs were really biting in now. The cop may have laughed in the precinct but the man had done a good job. He knew his work. Clumsily applied the handcuffs had almost stopped circulation not only in the hands but moving up to the shoulders as well. Wulff felt that he was close to losing control of his arms. “All right,” the man said, holding the gun on him, “everybody out.”
“This is no marshall’s office.”
“You noticed that.”
“This is no federal building,” Wulff said, “and you’re no marshall.”
“Is that so?” the man said. With the gun in his hand, turning to
face Wulff fully without the distraction of having to handle the car he seemed to have come to some full sense of himself, indeed seemed to be enjoying things. “You noticed that.”
“You must think I’m some kind of fool,” Wulff said.
“Oh no. I don’t think you’re any kind of fool at all. You’re Martin Wulff and the last thing I’d call you is a fool. Get out of the fucking car,” the man said.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll shoot you right in the back seat and let the bloodstains puddle out. But I’d rather have the car to get back where I’m going and I figure that it’s worth a minute more of life to you to cooperate with me.” The man brushed hair out of his eyes, sweating lightly. “Get out of the car,” he said again.
He was right, of course. You could talk about death as an abstraction, calculate your willingness to accept death in the face of many things or even as a gesture. But people, almost all people, when they were forced right down to it would do almost anything at all for an instant more of life. They would suck cock, dig their own graves, slobber and beg, dance in circles or lie in a terminal bed in a hospital ward somewhere, juice dripping into their veins like heroin while they wheezed and gasped against the life supports for just one more breath. Just one more breath, steer clear of death; we know life, Wulff thought, but we know nothing of what is contained outside of it. Life is only a fraction of experience, this is true, but it is that fraction we know and that is why, righteous or evil, pious or profane, even the most fanatical preacher would deny God under gunpoint just so that he could have enough breath to deliver that denial. Sadness, sadness: he had learned more about death than he ever wanted to know and this man had not misjudged him. Oddly, however, he did not have a sense of crisis. This man was a professional but Wulff was pretty sure that he could not kill him. It was just a question of feeling.