Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit

by Barry, Mike

  An elderly woman clerk looked in through the door, jabbing Williams in the back with the knob; he jumped away. Clerks would come in anywhere; the interrogation rooms meant nothing to them. That was civil service for you: there was nothing that could be done to interfere with the career-&-salary plan. “David Williams?” she said.

  “I’m David Williams.”

  “You’re David Williams?”

  “I’m David Williams,” he said, again. “Don’t I look like David Williams? Don’t I feel like David Williams? That’s who I am.”

  The kid broke off from his whispering into the white patrolman’s ear. “Get me out of here,” he said to the clerk, “they’re torturing me.”

  “That’s a police matter. There’s a telephone call for David Williams upstairs.”

  “All right,” Williams said, “I’ll take it.”

  “They really can’t do this to me,” the kid said. “There are constitutional things, aren’t there? They’re not allowed to torture you for testimony.”

  “Shut up,” the patrolman said.

  “I don’t know anything about the Constitution,” the clerk said, “that’s not my concern,” and walked out of there. The kid slumped on the floor shaking his head as she went away.

  “I’ll be back,” Williams said.

  “I don’t like it,” said the patrolman. His name was Thomas and he had been on duty with Williams for a fortnight and he didn’t like anything. Then again, Williams conceded, there was no particular reason why he should. “I don’t want to be alone with him.”

  “Be a man,” Williams said. “Consider the stakes; we’re going to break up the international drug market on the strength of what information is divulged here tonight.” Thomas did not know quite how to take this. His face suffused with confusion. “I’ll be back,” Williams said. “It’s probably my wife; she’s five months in, you know; this kind of thing can happen anytime.” This seemed to mollify Thomas; even the kid looked impressed. Williams went up the stairs directly behind the room two at a time, not bothering to close the door. Once he was out of there, he knew, Thomas was going to back away from the suspect with an embarrassed expression, pull out cigarettes, even offer the kid one maybe, trying to take the pressure off. Odd but all the sympathy for the kid would come from that quarter; Williams was the one who had put the knife-edge in the scene. He went through the reception room and into a back area, opened a door and went into a small, bleak office where there was nothing but a phone on the desk and a huge picture of a naked girl on the wall. The picture, in black and white showed the girl fingering herself; over this, on the wall itself, someone had neatly printed the caption ON THE TAKE. It had been hanging there for almost a week which was a record for this precinct house; probably it would hang on for another few days after which a lieutenant would come in and demand that it be taken down. Either that or the lieutenant would add his own caption which would render it instantly unacceptable to everyone else and it would be taken down. Williams turned his back on this—of course the girl was white but ten years ago she would have been black; such was the progress of interracial understanding in the department—he picked up the phone which if the clerk had been efficient had already been set into the line for his personal call. “Hello,” he said unhappily.

  “This is Wulff,” a voice said. “You’ve taken long enough, Williams; where the fuck have you been?”

  “I’ve been breaking the international drug trade,” Williams said. He held the phone tightly against his ear, trying not to show surprise. “Where the fuck have you been, man?” he said. “Where are you calling from?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “I have lost track of you,” Williams said. “I have lost track of you since you climbed on a certain flight outward bound from Las Vegas and got yourself taken to Cuba. But up until then I kept pretty good tabs on you, man. I guess everybody in the country knows who you are by now. You’ve made a pretty good name for yourself. You are no longer obscure.”

  “The hijacking got around.”

  “Everything got around,” Williams said. He propped the telephone under his ear, looked for a cigarette, realized that he had left them in the interrogation room and cursed.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” Williams said. “Where are you?”

  “Well,” Wulff said and paused, “I seem to be in Cuba.”

  “Still. Still in Cuba, eh? Well that’s fine,” Williams said. The need for a cigarette was overwhelming him but he would come to grips with it somehow. Discipline. “When are you going to come out?”

  “That all depends,” Wulff said. “I’m still looking for a certain valise.”

  “You got the valise, then,” Williams said. “You found it in Vegas.”

  “I found a lot of things in Vegas, Williams. I found about fifty corpses.”

  “And the valise. And you got on the plane with the valise and that was the reason for the hijack.”

  “Something like that,” Wulff said thinly. “You ought to go into police work, Williams. You’ve got a lot of talent for picking up clues and following a trail. Have you ever thought of getting into the police racket?”

  “How are you going to get out of Cuba?”

  “I don’t know,” Wulff said. “I don’t even know yet how I came in so it’s hard to figure the getting out. By plane, probably. But I’ve got some unfinished business here yet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve got to pick up the valise. Somewhere along the line I seem to have misplaced a valise but I’m going to get it.”

  “Why tell this to me?” Williams said, looking at the nude picture. These things were posed by professional models, all of them, but this girl looked as if she genuinely liked her job. Funny that he had never noticed the tilt of the mouth before. The fact that he was desiring a white woman sent guilt to mesh with lust somewhere in his head; it drew a coil, his fast erection faded. “Is there any way I can help you?”

  “You helped me into Vegas,” Wulff said. “You helped me into fifty murders, you helped me into a hijack, you helped me into a helicopter with a man who expected to kill me. Any more of your help, Williams, and they’d carry me out of here for a state funeral.”

  “This is your war,” Williams said, “Not mine. I don’t want any responsibility for it. You were the one who started this. You asked me for help—”

  “And you gave it, Williams,” Wulff said. “Oh boy did you give it. Do you help everyone this way? It’s a lucky thing I caught you at the precinct, you know. Your wife really wasn’t sure where the hell you were. But I had a feeling, Williams. Old cop instinct, you know? I figured that you were downstairs in the stationhouse, probably beating the shit out of some suspect. Upholding the system, of course.”

  “I got no time for this,” Williams said, “I’m on duty now. I don’t know what you want but there’s nothing—”

  “I’m calling international wire,” Wulff said, “and it’s taken me about fifteen minutes to get this one through so don’t think that I’m going to keep you. I’m not going to keep you at all. I got a big problem down here. I just wanted to tell you one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  Williams took the mouthpiece slightly away from his lips and said, “I have no time for shit, man. I don’t know what position you’re putting me in, what you’re trying to make me but you’ve got this wrong—”

  “I don’t have anything wrong. I have most things right, Williams. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to get out of Cuba with that valise. Nobody thinks I’m going to make it now but I’m going to do it.”

  “I hope so. I really hope so, man.”

  “And you know what then? I’m going to take that valise straight up north to your pretty little living room in St. Albans, Williams, and I’m going to dump it at your feet and open the clips one by one and show you a million dollars of shit, most of it stolen from the
property clerk’s office in the good old municipal court. Have you ever seen a million dollars worth of shit?”

  “No I have not.”

  “Well neither had I, Williams,” Wulff said almost gaily. “So don’t take it personally. There are very few people walking around, even top-type organization people who have even seen a quarter of that. A tenth of it is pretty big stuff nowadays. And you know what I’m going to do after I’ve got the clips open on the valise and you’re staring down at all that stuff? You know what the next move is?”

  “I couldn’t imagine. I simply couldn’t imagine, Wulff, so you tell me what the next move is.”

  “I will. I’m going to ask you what to do with it, Williams. I’m going to let it be your fucking decision because I’ve had enough decisions for the time being. I’m going to rest on this one. You’re the one who sent me out for the shit; you can make a decision on what to do with it next. You always knew all the moves, Wlliiams: you got the mortgage and the pregnant wife; you’re the one who loves the system so you make a decision for the system. What is best in terms of your fucking system, Williams?”

  “Enough,” Williams said and withdrew the phone from his ear.

  “Think about it over the next few days,” Wulff said thinly, “because I’m getting off now but I guarantee you, I absolutely guarantee that I am going to come out of here alive and I’m going to have that stuff with me. What is it going to do if it gets into New York? Can you throw it into the sea and say it doesn’t exist? Can you toss it into the market and watch what it does to prices? Do you want to take it back to the property office and say that, here, they can cover their tracks; we’ve pulled them out of an embarrassing situation? Do we go with the system or against it? And if we go with it do we know what’s right? It’s time you did some thinking, that you came up against it. I have in the last couple of days, Williams. I’ve learned a good deal about myself. Now it’s time you did the same thing.”

  “All right,” Williams said.

  “All right yourself,” Wulff said, “all right yourself, you middle-class son of a bitch,” and cut the connection. Williams stood, holding the phone at arm’s length, looking at it with astonishment and then, with a total abandonment to fury, he lifted the thing over his head, heaved it up several feet in the air and with all his force smashed it down on the receiver, brought it down so hard that the plastic split, the desk shook, the picture on the wall shook. Two deskmen came sprinting into the room to see exactly what the hell was wrong but one look at Williams’ stricken face convinced them. They turned and got the hell out of there.

  So did Williams. So did he. He went back to the basement and finished up the interrogation; the kid completely broken babbling out names and addresses now as if he were giving a list of people invited to his funeral. Small potatoes, but all of it would entail careful checking. It would keep a few men busy for a few days; give the narcotics division something else to be hopeful about.

  Things, in short would proceed, just as if Wulff were not coming back with his valise.

  But Williams knew he would.

  VII

  The call had been out of a hotel room in the back streets of the shabbiest, dirtiest slum Wulff had ever seen. Backyard Havana. How Stevens had managed to sneak them back into the city without detection, avoiding what must have been heavy surveillance was beyond him but Stevens had done it. He had not been kidding when he said he was the best damned pilot in the history of aeronautics or at least of the helicopter. The return from the countryside had been done at high cruising range, far above the maximum operating efficiency for altitude and the copter had groaned and bucked all the way in, Wulff clinging to sides of the cabin, trying to hold his balance and not become sick, as Stevens did what he had to do. The man was remarkably gifted; Wulff had to admit that. His skills were beyond almost any other copter pilot’s and he had flown with a few in his time. Part of it had to do, he supposed, with Stevens’ admitted cowardice. The man wanted desperately to live; it was survival technique which he had been applying to the controls and as jolting as the ride had been, it had all along been controlled by the bottom line of necessity.

  What Stevens wanted to do, he had explained, was to get them back to some kind of safety; they had to get out of the countryside because at this moment, no doubt, there would be a massive sweep and the place of safety, oddly enough, would be the central city itself, in fact in the dismal hotel in which Stevens had been living for some weeks. “They’ll never think of looking for us there,” Stevens said, “they’re just not very organized, there’s no organization anywhere along here, they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” And that at least Wulff had been willing to agree with. The likelihood was that if he could get under cover, Stevens said, get the helicopter out of sight they might decide that the helicopter had ditched somewhere and all of them would be written off for dead … which would, from the viewpoint of anyone, be a convenience.

  It was a question, though, Stevens pointed out, of how much official support Delgado was getting for this adventure or whether he was freelancing it out strictly. Stevens simply did not know that much about the operation; he contended that he was a mercenary working on a strictly job-to-job basis and knew about as little on the internal workings of things as Wulff did himself. Wulff did not know whether or not to believe him, whether to believe any of this but past the initial decision to trust Stevens, at least for the moment, there was nothing to do but ride along with it. The man, at the very least, could fly a helicopter, he could get them out of the countryside which was a very dangerous place to be, and he could provide a few leads on Delgado. Not many but better than none. It was obvious that Wulff could hardly walk into the administration building and take on Delgado face-to-face; no amount of courage or anger could make anything like this possible. He would have to find the man’s home and would have to come in behind the lines, so to speak; even then it was probable that Delgado had a great deal of security and that in light of the situation he was not going to be easy to get now. Nevertheless, Wulff was going to try. He wanted Delgado dead. That was personal, that was one killing which he would enjoy, but on an impersonal basis, he had to have him dead because he wanted the shipment back … and knew that he was going to have to kill Delgado to get it.

  According to Stevens—who kept the helicopter at high altitude, bouncing and jouncing through the air but for all of that showing complete control over the machine—a strictly telephone contact basis was absolutely essential. He would stay in his hotel room drinking and thinking; now and then a phone call would come in with instructions for a job and he would go out and perform it. That was all. All equipment was provided; Stevens had to bring nothing but himself. Stevens refused to say exactly what the jobs had entailed or how many men he had seen murdered. For that matter, he would not even say exactly how long he had been in Cuba except that it was more than a year but less than a couple, and that he was in some kind of trouble with the American government which had made this kind of exile necessary, but the trouble was not his fault, and had to do with false charges. Wulff decided that he would settle for this. For the moment he was willing to settle for anything which Stevens wanted to tell him. He had much more serious problems on his mind.

  Stevens knew exactly where to go. He came in, under the cover of night, into a dense, damp plain on the outskirts of the city, landing without lights, peering through the screens to negotiate a hand-landing and in the last thirty seconds he went for a straight descent, cutting the engines for quiet, the copter dropping down straight and plunging into mud with such force that it was half-taken into the slime by the impact and rolled there, held only by the ledge of mud created. Insects twittered and smashed themselves against the sides of the steaming copter. Wulff shook his head, raised it for the first time since the steep descent had begun—flight training or not what the descent had generated was simple nausea—and unfastening the safety gear, followed Stevens out the hatch, leaping into the mud, feeling himself sett
le into it quickly and it was a struggle to pull himself against the grip of the mud to slightly higher ground, the earth gripping at him like small hands. “Where are we?” he said at last when they got to a clearing and Stevens pointed in front of them. “We’re in the big backyard,” he said, “the big backyard of a ruined city. We can go to my hotel.”

  “Can we?” Wulff said. He looked back toward the copter. Even here, just a hundred yards away or less, the machine was barely visible, a dark animal against a darker background. It was possible that by morning it would have collapsed all the way into the mud.

  “It will,” Stevens said, following his gaze. “It will sink. It should be up to the prop soon. Besides, no one comes here but derelicts and the gangs that kill them. They’ll never look for it and if they did they sure as hell wouldn’t go around reporting it. It’s about a mile to the hotel,” Stevens said. “I live in one of the most distinguished sections of town. Let’s hike it.”

  “Why?” Wulff said. “Why should I trust you?”

  “We’ve gotten this far, haven’t we?”

  “You had to get onto the ground too. You say you work for the highest bidder, Stevens. Then why should you work with me? I’m offering you nothing.”