by Barry, Mike
“You going to kill me, too?”
“Not unless it’s strictly necessary.”
“You know,” Stevens said, almost offhandedly. “It’s interesting, the things that you learn about yourself when you go under the gun. Two hours ago I would have told anyone who listened that I didn’t give a shit about dying; I didn’t care what happened to me; that I was already a dead man and it couldn’t happen twice.”
“Yes,” Wulff said, “I know what you mean.”
“But you want to know something?” Stevens said inquiringly, looking at him, his features open, neither defiance nor irony in the small eyes. “That’s all a lot of bullshit. It’s crap. I’m as afraid of dying as anyone; the idea of death terrifies me. I can’t stand even thinking of it and I’m terrified that you’re going to kill me like you killed that cop out there. Now isn’t that interesting?”
“It’s interesting,” Wulff said, “everything is interesting. Where’s my valise?”
“What valise? What’s that?”
“Delgado said that we were going to go airborne with the valise.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Stevens said, “All I do is take orders and carry them out. They didn’t tell me anything about a valise and there’s certainly none aboard this copter.”
“Then that explains everything,” Wulff said and indeed it did, it made everything come clear, not that there was any satisfaction in this or that knowing what Delgado had been tracking from the first made the situation here any less difficult. But he knew now what the man had been trying to do; saw the outlines of the plan. The only question—and Wulff supposed that it did not matter particularly—was whether Delgado was freelancing this one out or whether he was acting as a government agent. Did the regime itself want the valise? This was doubtful; Delgado’s remarks about the new puritan-ism, the self-righteousness of the regime were probably well-taken. At the hightest levels they would not want to deal in drugs; would probably not even want knowledge of them. That brought it right down to Delgado, then, who was walking a very tight line indeed; on the one hand he had to carry out his official capacity, on the other there were a million illegal dollars to be made. Wulff could feel a certain sympathy for the man; he was in a difficult spot and needed all of his courage and diplomatic abilities to get through. On the other hand, this sympathy was not going to make it easier for Delgado if they ever met again. Which he suspected they would. Which he was going to make happen.
Wulff said, “Stay here,” to Stevens and walked through the canvas into the passenger compartment. The man in the uniform was still in the process of dying but dying had already shifted toward decomposition; the bleeding had at last slowed and his face had tensed into the first signs of rigor mortis. He looked somewhat like a dog taking a scent, the staring eyes considering the ceiling, the mouth pursed, the long nose pointed straight upwards. Wulff had seen and touched many a dead man in his time but this one gave him a stab of revulsion; he had never seen a corpse that so actively bore the signs of death. Be that as it may, be everything as it may, the first thing to do was to dispose of the body.
He went over to the hatchway and kicked it open. The metal fell away; smells of woods and fields drifted into the cabin, overtaking the deeper, richer odor of the corpse; they mingled with the smell of flesh and rotting blood and the end compound of odors was almost of a kind of gaiety; all they needed, Wulff thought, were a few grazing animals, perhaps a shepherd or two and there would be a delightful pastoral scene. Of course there would be. He looked out over the terrain, then cautiously stepped from the copter, prodding at the grass and feeling its resiliency, under that first springing response corruption and ooze, of course, that was Cuba for you, that was the whole damned world but what were you going to do? In the world or out of it everything was corrupt but maybe things had come a little further since the regime because in the good old days Delgado would have shot him right in the office and had the guards carry him out but now Delgado had gone to the trouble of getting a copter to take him out of there … which was the best indication, after all, that the man was freelancing. It was not really government policy to mingle in the drug trade; in the old Battista days everybody was into it just about the way that they were into torture but things had changed a little. They had moved along.
Well, that was progress for you; no reason not to be optimistic. Now they did it under the table, the officials worked their operations on the side and bowed to policy in the capital. Not only did it show that government was turning around, it also gave an enterprising man like Delgado the opportunity to make a few dollars on the side and that was important. Why not? all of the tourist trade was out of the island, the great casinos were closed, the tree drug lines had been cut off and the least that a man could hope for was a little private enterprise. That left him squarely up against it then. It was just him and Delgado mano a mano; he would not have to take on an entire government, lines of militia, the premier himself to recover his valise. Just a nice, tight simple operation: probably fifty hired hands and an arsenal. Well, that was better than the entire Cuban army. Maybe not though. Maybe not. You could never be sure.
Wulff walked back to the copter, peered in the hatchway and took the corpse firmly by the ankles. He pulled and the body came loose, sliding on blood and then jammed, stalled in the doorway. “Come on,” he said, “help me get this guy out of here.”
Stevens looked out from the compartment. “I’m squeamish,” he said. “I’m not only afraid of death, I can’t bear to look at it. I—”
“You’re going to help me,” Wulff said. “You’re living from moment to moment right now, friend. You understand that? You’re living on my indulgence.”
Stevens shrugged wryly, a man, it seemed who had come to grip with vast weaknesses in the last hour and having known them, found he could never be touched by anything again. “All right,” he said. He came out cautiously, stood behind the policeman and got a grip on the shoulders, then hoisted him, gasping. Wulff backed down the ramp, the body swinging in their clutch like a tent, ballooning slightly, streaming blood again, and they staggered downrange a hundred feet or so to a small raised hill, little strips of tar clinging to it. “Dump it,” Wulff said. Stevens dropped the body convulsively, the full weight of it rearing into Wulff momentarily and he lost his balance—the dead feet prodding deep into his chest—and he fell heavily in the ooze, still embracing the policeman. Stevens stood with his hands on his hips, looking at this expressionlessly. Wulff got to his feet, little strips of mud and tar clinging to him and said, “He’ll keep for a while. How far are we out of the capital?”
“About ninety miles.”
“Where are we?”
“It’s hard to judge. We’d need a map.”
“You used to flying blind, Stevens?”
“I follow instructions,” Stevens said expressionlessly. “I do what I’m told to do and don’t think much about it and at the end of the day or week I get some money. I was told to fly south until ordered otherwise. I assume that I would have heard from our friend down here but he had an accident before he could have a chance to talk to me.”
“You’re serious,” Wulff said, “aren’t you Stevens? You’re really serious about this. You don’t think, you just follow orders. Something must have happened to you a long time ago.”
“Nothing happened to me,” Stevens said, “I’m not getting into personal details at all. I’m not serious. You’re the one who’s serious, Wulff. You’re the one who goes around killing people. Me? I just work here.”
He turned toward Wulff then, a precise, neat man dressed in slightly stained flight clothes, only the curl of his lips showing fear and that in such a well-controlled way that Wulff could only admire him. The man was doing well. He was doing far better than almost any of them he had faced with death so far. “Well?” he said, “are you going to kill me?”
“I don’t know,” Wulff said honestly. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“You seem to kill everyon
e sooner or later. You’re reputation gets around. Even a guy like me hears about you sooner or later.”
“I can’t decide,” Wulff said, “I have to get back to the capital, you see, the fastest and easiest way and I really don’t know how to fly one of these things. I can fake it but it’s not my area.”
“Let me fly it then.”
“I’m thinking of that,” Wulff said, “but I don’t know whether or not I can trust you.”
“You can trust me,” Stevens said. “I just work here. I go for bids. I don’t have anything against you at all; in fact I rather admire what I think you’re trying to do.”
“Sure you work for bids,” Wulff said. “The question is what you think they’re bidding now.”
Stevens motioned toward the corpse. “That’s what they’re bidding,” he said. “I think I get the message. I live in a hotel room and I drink a lot. This year I’m in Havana but next year I’ll be somewhere else. The way I figure, there’s always corruption and troubles and room for a man with certain biddable skills. It has nothing to do with ideology.”
“Where does Delgado live?” Wulff said.
“I don’t know where he lives. You saw where he works. Somewhere in Havana I suppose. Maybe he lives in his offices. How the hell do I know? You want to find out where he lives I’ll put you there in a three-point landing. I don’t give a shit, Wulff. You’ll reach that point sooner or later but you don’t really believe that now.”
Wulff looked at his pistol and then at Stevens. Easy. It would be so easy. The thing about the power to bring death is that after a while it can get to you, almost demand application. It starts small and then it grows; it begins in an alley somewhere or in some secret room and then it spreads out, moves to larger and larger stages and eventually you can end up being a Louis Cicchini. A Marasaco. Or a Delgado. He could see that in himself now: a vivid picture of what he could do to Stevens. It would take so little out of him; it would be virtually effortless. The gun raised, the shaking terror of the man, the slow desertion of life then as the realization hit him, that realization which always took them, even those killed in surprise, then the explosion, the powder, the impact, the small, neat hole or the ragged one, blood pumping through, kicking limbs, a flurry of collapse … and Stevens would be lying next to the policeman on the grass and tar, his body stained by blood and earth, transported from the life that until thirty seconds ago had been as much his as Wulff’s. The mystery of this deliverance; death as something co-existent with life, so near that it could be brought about casually. And yet men would reinforce that separation forever, do everything they could to deny the reality of death, build and destroy people or cities merely to prove that death could not overtake them.
He could not kill the man. Not deliberately, not up against him like this. All of those others he had killed had been for a reason, there had been no choice at all, ultimately, but this would be face-to-face considered murder … and he was not a murderer. Slowly, almost relunctantly, Wulff lowered the gun. He had found and measured a weakness in himself; it was that simple. He hoped that he would not have to pay for it later. It was the same weakness that had driven him into Tamara’s body in San Francisco, rutting and screaming in copulation when he had thought all desire had died with the girl in the hotel room. It was a weakness which he could not account for but would nevertheless have to live with and work around. He did not enjoy killing. He could do it if the circumstances necessitated, he could do it if the price were right, and, as on that freighter explosion in San Francisco, he could certainly do it easily enough if the victims were generalized and invisible. But face to face, unless it meant his life or vengeance, he did not like the kill.
Slowly, then, he put the pistol away inside his coat. He knew that Stevens represented no threat. If Stevens had seen a weakness in him, then Wulff had long since seen the weakness in Stevens; he was a man, simply enough, who went for bidders and he did so because he held onto life so desperately that he wanted the path of least resistance, of service rather than decision. This was true of all the mercenaries; they laughed at death, gave the illusion of great courage. But there was no courage whatsoever, merely the desire for survival, to go on and on, not to die but merely to live, confront nothing, seek nothing, merely to stagger on from moment to moment because that great Prince, Death was always there—
Wulff felt sick. He walked past Stevens, for the moment only dimly conscious of the man, and toward the copter, his feet sinking in the ooze, feeling the weight of the corpse he had carried still pressing against his wrists and shoulder blades. Nausea overtook him; if it had not been too much trouble he might have stopped there and retched.
It was just too much. It was all too much. You did the best you could and he would go on, but it was a hard thing to realize that only the enemy could enjoy his work. He had thought in New York, at the beginning, that he could turn the tables on the enemy by killing in his own joy—and the first kills had been that way—but now every death, like a fingerprint, was a stain on himself….
He went inside and sat there quietly waiting for Stevens to return. Of course the man would return. He had nowhere else to go … and he worked for the highest bidder.
Wulff was the highest bidder.
VI
Williams was working interrogation in the basement of the station house when the phone call came in. It was a simple, routine kick-the-shit-out-of-the-guy type of interrogation; the subject an eighteen-year-old junkie moving now deep into the withdrawal stages and panic. The collar had been made while the kid was in the act of ripping a handbag off a fat woman in daylight at Broadway and 107th Street in front of the patrol car, an act so stupid that the kid obviously had been far gone to even consider it. Soon enough they would book him in on something or other and throw him into the Tombs where like it or not he would go into his private withdrawal program, but there was a chance before they gave up and took him upstairs that they might get the kid, in his panic, to blurt out some information they could use: something about sources of supply, connections, quality of drugs and so on. You could never tell with these things; you worked every angle you could. Nothing would happen or the junkies would be stupid and then, suddenly, you could fall into a great deal of information, enough to break open a pending case. What the hell: you tried. Williams didn’t mind this kind of work; it got closer to reality then most aspects of PD and because he was a black man he might be able to work on the kid’s confidence a little more than the white ones could, not that black or white made much difference in the present structure of the street or the PD. That kind of shit had gone out five or six years ago.
Still, you gave it a whirl. You gave anything a whirl; nothing ventured, nothing gained and like that, and even though procedures had tightened quite a bit in recent years you could still put the screws in at least a little. It was mostly the threat of the screws which got the job done anyway. Williams hit the kid backhanded, pulling his punch carefully while the other cop sitting in the corner on a stool watched absently, chewing gum, letting this one be Williams’s party. Even in the basement, the black man got to do all the work. The kid screamed and backed further away, kicking the chair against the wall. “I don’t know shit,” he said, “I don’t know nothing about anything. I been off that stuff for months; I’m clean. I kicked all that shit; I’m just trying to stay alive now.” His voice cracked. “Please leave me alone,” he said, “you can’t fucking do this to me; I got my rights.”
“You ain’t got no fucking rights,” Williams said, falling into the kid’s slang. Fordham Law School rhetoric wouldn’t take you far in a basement. “Your fucking rights are the rights I decide you got, and right now you ain’t got none.” He closed in on the kid, a nineteen-year-old, address 411 West 111th Street, furnished room, no friends or relatives. Bullshit about going to 411 to find anything out. Better to pound them face to face. “Who’s supplying you?” he said.
“No one,” the kid said. His eyes rolled; his cheekbones almost transpare
nt. At his best he weighed a hundred twenty on a six foot frame; a year ago he might have been almost double that. You could tell, you could see a big weight drop; the kid moved like a heavy man. “I told you I’m clean.”
“You ain’t shit,” Williams said and hit the kid backhanded again. The kid screamed, a high wail; the cop on the stool looked at Williams in an inquisitive way. Go easy, the look was saying, but then again go hard; it’s not my problem is it? What it came down to was just two niggers in a basement working each other over, am I right? Williams shook his head and plowed down on the kid, feeling a sudden explosion of self-loathing. What was he doing here after all? Wasn’t he merely another black man tearing at a brother while the white man watched? Was it true what some of the militants said, that at the root it was always a race issue? Don’t think of that now, fuck it; he had a mortgage in St. Albans and a pregnant wife. The system gave him shelter. Choking on his rage he hit the kid once more, a little bit harder this time than he might have meant and the boy fell over, weeping. He squirmed on the floor like an insect. “All right!” he said, “all right! I’ll tell you what I know, I don’t know nothing,” and weeping, head bowed he began to mumble names, addresses, quantities, whereabouts, all of the information which Williams had worked out so patiently … and he couldn’t hear a word. It was frustrating, that was all. He nodded to the cop on the stool who came off quickly, moved over to the boy and bent an inquisitorial ear, the kid scrambling around on the floor while the cop tried a juxtaposition of heads, trying to get close enough to make sense of the babbling. And Williams withdrew. He simply could not bear to get close to them. Hitting out at them was not a closeness but merely an expression of revulsion; diving into them though meant that he was coming into a closeness that he had dedicated his life avoiding. That was the whole principle, to build distance. That was what the system was giving him.
The cop groaned, shrugged, nodded as the kid whispered to him. Williams found himself losing interest, walking toward the door, feeling a detachment surging through him that was the next thing to disgust. Face it: if there were any satisfactions in this at all they came in breaking them down, ramming through to the corrupt, empty hearts of them, establishing control. But what came about as a result of this meant absolutely nothing to him. The interrogations were interesting but the interesting parts had nothing at all to do with the information disclosed. Let me face it, Williams thought suddenly, looking at the kid who was now embracing the other cop, rising to his knees, his head extended as he whispered horrid confidences, I am a monster. In certain ways no different from theirs, I am absolutely monstrous. Police work could do this to you, it could do it to anyone. Still, you could go back to the mortgaged home in St. Albans and act as if this were not so….