Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit (7 page)

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.

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 transparent. 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….

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.”