by Barry, Mike
“I don’t feel like getting into philosophical discussions,” Stevens said. “We’ve had a very rough ride and I’m ass deep in mud. Let’s go back.”
“You piloted a plane that was supposed to take me on a death flight. So why should you turn around?”
“Because you don’t understand,” Stevens said. “You’re the one who says that people don’t dig, don’t follow your deep message, Wulff, but you’re the one who’s missing now.” He turned toward him, even in the darkness, his eyes were luminous. “You’ve got to trust me,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I got you this far, that’s why.”
“I had a gun on you.”
“That didn’t matter,” Stevens said.
“Sure it does. You were the one who said it mattered. You’re the one who’s afraid of dying.”
“Listen,” Stevens said, “are we going to have to stand here in this goddamn mud and discuss attitudes or can we get the hell back? This can’t go on, you know. It just can’t go on at all.”
“I don’t understand anything about you, Stevens,” Wulff said but this was not true, not exactly because he thought that he understood Stevens very well. Stevens reminded him very much of David Williams. The two of them were playing the same game, it would seem, and almost for the same reasons except that Williams was working inside the system, Stevens on the edge. But they were high-bidder men. They were for sale. It all came down to a question of self-protection.
“All right,” Stevens said. A curl of wind took him and he shuddered standing, a light opened up in the distance, sending little splinters of flame through the clearing and Wulff instinctively ducked, looking back toward the copter. Stevens was right. The machine was already shrouded; by morning it would be up to prop level. “I believe in you. Okay? That’s all.” His voice had dropped perceptibly, become hoarse. “Do you think I’m a fool?” he said, “I’m a lot of things but not that. I know who you are. I know what brought you here and why Delgado sent you out. I know what you represent and what you’ve been going through. Don’t you think that everyone here knows?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re right,” Stevens said, his voice still in that peculiar monotone. “You’re hitting them at their own level with their own weapons. You’re not going to put up with the shit anymore; you’re going to get right at them where they live. I can admire that. I’d do the same thing myself if I had the guts.”
“I’m touched,” Wulff said, “I’m really touched.” Stevens was right. There was no question about it; this was no place to stand and hold a discussion. The light was beaming in again, the splinters shaking. A probe, no doubt. Soon enough, if they stayed here, the beam would pick them up.
“You want me to say more?” Stevens said. “You want me to get a violin accompaniment? Well fuck that anyway; you’d just think that I was begging for my life. I’m not begging for my life, Wulff, I just want to get out of here. You want to kill me, I’m as prepared for it now as I’ll ever be; just draw your gun and get it over with. Get it done now; I won’t crack but five minutes from now I might. Otherwise let’s get the fuck out of here. These people are no idiots. They’re going to get us on a tracer, damn it.”
“All right,” Wulff said. “All right, enough of it, let’s get the hell to ground,” and Stevens, wanting to hear no more turned and began to trudge from the clearing. Wulff followed him, head down, hands in pockets, stumbling after him in the ooze, smelling the night and the insects swarming around them, wondering exactly how crazy this could get. How far out of control it would slip. Did he really think, following Stevens to a hotel room, that he was going to get anywhere? Did he really think, following this mercenary blindly, that he was in any position to deal with Delgado? Fuck that: screw it, Cuba was death country, Havana oblivion city. They had sucked him in here and beaten him as bad as anyone since they had almost gotten him at the tollgate heading into Boston. Boston had been a sucker play but at least he had been working his own territory there: what the hell did he know about Cuba? Cuba had been a foreign country for fifteen years now, a country controlled by the enemy, and now he was so deeply in trouble that he did not even know where his adversary was, he was dependent upon a desperate mercenary who had been piloting a death-plane, he had absolutely nowhere to turn … and in the bargain, Wulff thought wryly, he was absolutely at the end of his physical rope. Even he had to rest, the tensions and pressures had been so great that he felt that he was caving inward, slowly.
But he trudged behind Stevens. There was nothing else to do and he had a kind of wistful, crazy faith in the man now, the same faith that Stevens for all he knew might feel for him. They went into the back section of Havana, a slum so crude, ragged, disjointed and mean in all of its aspects that Wulff decided it had to be, there was just no alternative, the worst he had ever seen short of Saigon which was of course in a different category altogether. The people staggering around these streets seemed to be suspended at the last edges of humanity; street scenes in Harlem were bad enough but at least the junkies there had drugs to hold them up for a while. Here, Wulff suspected, there was not even that. Drugs along with hope had dried up with the coming of the revolution; these people had nothing to buffer them from the stones except the conviction that as bad as today was, tomorrow would certainly be worse and next week inconceivable. They reached out hands toward them as they went through, these people did: some of them Wulff supposed were old and others were not so old but they all looked the same age, a ruined, beaten point of chronology where all of the organs, one by one, were ceasing to function. Not only did they look the same age, these people all appeared to be of the same sex, neither male nor female but something in between, something horridly complex which drove them past biology and made them part of the landscape and it was the landscape itself which persisted in Wulff’s mind, which he knew would last far longer than anything else he would take out of Cuba, even the valise if he got it because the landscape proved beyond a doubt that revolutions did not work. They simply made no difference. Movements, people, regimes came and went but the landscape was eternal; it was the only politics that any of them would know, here in the backyard of Havana, and Wulff felt himself retreating into a tunnel of revulsion as he and Stevens, step by step, trudged through those streets.
No one assaulted them. No one seemed very interested in them at all; the reaching of the hands was more a reflex action than anything else. Tropism they called it, at least the botanists did, the vegetative turning of flora to and away from light, depending upon the season, and these people, he thought, had no more minds than plants had. Still, they were terribly important; in their name murders had been committed, vast shifting flux, the rising of castles, all of this had come in the name of the people even though these people, in no true sense, could be said to exist.
Enough. He had a job to do; he was not a social revolutionary. Even if he had been, where would you begin? Where would you try to make these people right? Even if you could cleanse all drugs out of the vein of the United States, New York City would still look like an occupied zone toward the end of wartime. It would take fifty years to make any changes even if the root causes themselves were instantly removed; most of these people would have to die off before anything could be done. The sickness bit too deep. Everything did after a while; the answer was not politics.
They went into Stevens’s hotel. It was a hotel only by Havana standards Wulff supposed; it was a crumbling, rotting three-story hulk on a street even more depressed and rancid than those through which they had walked. There was no clerk sitting on the bottom level, only a lobby in which in various attitudes of despair or catatonia a scattering of men sat, staring at the walls, a few of them singing to themselves in aimless little voices. “It’s not much,” Stevens whispered, “but it’s home,” and they went up a winding flight of stairs, beating at insects for purchase on the landings, up one more flight and down the hall into a small, dirty room in which there was a bed
, a chair, a bulb dangling from ceiling wire and an old-fashioned telephone propped next to the bed which Stevens pointed to with a flourish. “All of the conveniences,” he said, “the phone is particularly important; that’s how I get my assignments.” He locked the door on an unsafe, insecure bolt, kicked it and walked back toward the windowsill where the bottles stood like little dishevelled troops, removed a gin bottle. “You want a drink?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” said Wulff.
“I do.”
“You go right ahead.”
“If any man ever was, I’m entitled to a drink. I never thought I’d see this place again.” Stevens uncapped the bottle and drank from it straight, groaning as the gin hit his stomach, then doubling over, half-retching. “Never thought I’d see it again,” he said and collapsed on the bed holding the bottle, falling straight back, clutching it as his head hit the blanket. He put the bottle in his mouth and drank again. Wulff could see that as far as Stevens was concerned the night was over; he would use the gin to drink himself into stupor and then that would be the end of all things.
“What are we supposed to do?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Stevens said, “that’s kind of your problem, isn’t it? I told you that I’d give you a place to hole up, a place to get underground while you decided what to do next, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. It’s your move, isn’t it? I don’t see how I can help you.”
“I’ve got to find Delgado.”
“I know you’ve got to find Delgado and don’t you worry about it,” Stevens said, shaking his head, giggling, taking another swallow from the bottle. “You are in the right place to find him because don’t you think he’ll be calling in here sooner or later? He’s going to want to know where the fuck I am; that phone is going to ring.”
“I thought that you said he’d take us all for having been killed someplace.”
“He will,” Stevens said, “he definitely will, that’s exactly the way he thinks you see but he’s a man who covers all his possibilities first. He’ll call, check in just to make sure that I’m not here by any chance. That’s routine surveillance procedure, isn’t it? I mean, it makes sense that he’d check to see if by any chance I’ve returned.”
“So you’ll set up a meeting with him.”
“If you want,” Stevens said, “you see, I don’t give a shit about this anymore. If you want to use me as a setup you can go right ahead and do that because I’m finished. Do you mind if I pass out, Wulff? If it’s all the same to you I think I’m at the end of the line. You can use all the conveniences here. You can even go out in the streets and go looking for Delgado if you want. Help yourself. There are a couple of pistols on the bottom panel in that bureau in a dead compartment but I don’t know if they work or not. I’ve never touched them; I just carry them around for show. Actually I’m afraid to even handle a gun,” Stevens said and this seemed to bring forth his giggling all over again, the giggling became a wild, uncontrollable fit which clawed and heaved at him; he rolled on the bed groaning with the convulsions. “I wanted a quiet life,” he said, “a quiet life, a simple existence, no pressures, no politics. Look at me. Look at it now. I had it all figured out, Wulff. I’d freelance or soldier of fortune myself into a permanent crippling injury by the time I was forty and then I’d find myself a nice foundation to take care of me for the rest of my life. The whole thing was to get an injury or illness which wasn’t too painful but had a good foundation back of it so that you could get free room and board and plenty of sympathy. Muscular dystrophy? Retardation? Polio? But they wiped out polio years ago and anyway I’m really afraid of physical pain. In fact I’m afraid of almost everything,” Stevens said and quite neatly passed out on the bed, the gin bottle plopping to one side, his empty hand to the other, his mouth open, fishlike he groaned in air through his mouth, looking at the ceiling with fixed eyes and then his eyes closed. He slept.
Wulff looked at him. He had really bought it this time he decided. But bought or not it seemed that he had a companion. Stevens was right, for all of his posturing the practicality of the man was awesome. There was nowhere else to go now. He was safer in the hotel room than he would be elsewhere. And Delgado would be checking in.
He went to the bureau and just as Stevens had said, in a compartment slatted in above the bottom drawer was a small, rather seedy array of pistols, four of them in various stages of age and finish, looking up at him. He checked them out one by one and they seemed to be operative. A full clip was in each; the clips themselves were in the drawer. Probably the pistols would work if they didn’t blow his hand off first. He was not going to pump a few shots into the walls or ceiling to find out, that was for sure.
Wulff put the stuff in his pockets, secreting armaments like jewels in various crevices of his body. Then he looked at the sleeping Stevens and at the floor. The floor looked more inviting; he could probably get a few hours rest here.
Then his attention was caught by the phone. It was there; it leered at him temptingly, surely in a place like this no one could possibly perform a tap. Technology, even with the new regime, had to be at least forty years behind the United States here. They had not yet had the advantage of defoliants, phone tracers, organized systematic distribution of drugs … Oh, they had a lot to look forward to if only the regime could keep on going and bring them to the point where America stood. Probably they could make it. If nothing else, in a few years one of the corporations or a mass of them would simply buy up Cuba wholesale. For a tax write off.
He picked up the phone.
That was when he called Williams.
VIII
Delgado was trying to stay calm. Stay calm, he was telling himself, do not panic, but it was difficult to contrive this mood, more difficult than it had been in a long time and he knew that he was showing the visible signs of a man disintegrating. Only the fact that he was in his office, that the door was locked, that there were definite orders that he should not be disturbed for any reason were preventing everyone from seeing his deterioration. His hands were shaking, sweat was pouring from his cheeks. He was not acting like an old revolutionary but like some nineteen-year-old peasant, trapped in the hills by the militia, pouring out his heart and guts to them for fear of being castrated by their knives. He could not go on this way. He had to get hold of himself.
The copter was missing; the men had not returned. Their whereabouts were unknown. Obviously something had botched the job; they had not killed the American. It had been a simple flight, a simple assignment: two men should have been able to handle it easily. What was there to do? The American was unarmed, helpless, he had been sent up with a skilled gunman and an equally skilled pilot. Two against one in the air and the American weaponless. Nevertheless the assignment had not been carried out. Somehow the American had overcome the situation, probably killed both pilot and gunman and had gotten the copter down and away.
Where had it gone wrong? Had he gone wrong? Should he have sent out more men? But that was the problem; he was playing this situation as close as possible: the more men he sent out the higher were the chances that he, Delgado, would be found out. Still, two men had obviously not been enough. He should have taken the risk. He could have found another and another, two more reliable men. One risk outbalanced the other. His mistake. He had underestimated the American. And he knew who the man was. What he had done! How could he have been so stupid? A streak of self-loathing went through Delgado like an electric bolt, so jolting that it was almost purifying, it cleansed him in a way. It was his own fault. There was no one else to blame. He stood alone; he took the blame, he would now have to save the situation himself.
Somehow the American had escaped and doubtless was bearing down upon Delgado. He would be looking for vengeance. This man was a killer. It was not enough for him to merely escape; this man killed because his purposes as he saw it was to abolish evil and Delgado would seem evil, at least from his point of view. The American would not leave Havana let alone the coun
try until he confronted Delgado and although that was bad because Delgado did not want to face a man who would kill him it was also good because it provided a certain sense of security. There would be no loose ends. He would not have to think of the American somewhere in his own country, outside of the borders of Cuba, planning for revenge—waiting months and years for that hammer to strike. No. It would not be that way. The American would not leave until he had performed his mission and that meant that the situation would be settled quickly and between the two of them. All right. All right, he could deal with that.
The drugs were in his possession. He knew exactly where they were and he could get his hands on them instantly. The temptation would be strong, Delgado thought, to take that valise and make his own run for freedom. A less judicious man than he would have done it. He would already have arranged his flight, plotted out the means of disposition. This less cautious version of himself would be in the United States by now, frantically seeking connections through which he could unload close to a million dollars worth of heroin. This less cautious version of himself would have been killed, too. The American was no fool. The arrangements which Delgado would have been trying to make would have drawn attention like carrion drawing the restless animals of the desert. The American would have picked up the rotten scent and closed in. No, there was nothing to do but wait. Take care of that business first. First things first as the Americans put it. Until Wulff was out of the way he would sit tight, make no moves, attempt no disposition. It should not take long. Then, Delgado thought, then he would be home free.
He would have the drugs then and no one who knew their possessor, no one trying to take them away. His title would be clear. It would be absolute; the interests in the United States, if nothing else, respected property rights and the fair interest of the holder and they would be doing business with him, not threatening attack. They respected property these people. Once the American was out of the way: clear sailing. And how could he lose? He had the full and righteous force of the government behind him. The American was a felon, in two countries now. He had no rights, no means, no defense. The full force of both governments were mobilized to find and kill him and Delgado not only had the valise, he had government sanction to use all forces to kill him. How could he lose?