Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit (8 page)

“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.

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 settle 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.”

“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.