Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (11 page)

Calabrese lived in a mansion at the end of Michigan Avenue. Most of the people with his money, at his social level had long since fled to Evanston or Urbana but Calabrese was a city boy, and anyway he liked to keep an eye close on his operations, all of which were in the city. So it was still Chicago. But he was sealed in.

He was sealed in by a twenty-four hour security force that numbered at least ten men (the exact number was a secret of course), by gates, by an alarm system and by one of the nastiest patrol dogs Randall had ever seen, a dog so vicious that it appeared to have its own keeper who was paid to do nothing but stay with the dog full-time and minister to it. It was the keeper with whom Randall started his negotiations; forty-five minutes later it landed him in Calabrese’s study where the man himself rolled a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and studied Randall with a curiously calm, kindly expression. He might have been a whimsical old businessman devoted to philanthropy, who took a fatherly and detached interest in everyone who came to his door, a man who regarded humanity from the sidelines with mingled wonder and scholarly concern, and this was in a sense true although it was not quite all of it.

Calabrese was about seventy years old and was such a remote, patriarchal figure that to the best of Randall’sknowledge even
Versallo
had dealt with the old man only over the phone and then, perhaps three or four times a year to get approval for this thing, clearance on something else. Nevertheless, Randall had been able to run the gauntlet and get into the man’s presence within forty-five minutes. This was a tribute either to Randall’s charm and determination or to Calabrese’s whimsical old philanthropist’s willingness to humor a would-be visitor but Randall did not think that it all ended there.

He sat on the couch under the old man’s gaze and tried to keep himself as calm as possible, forced himself to meet Calabrese’s eyes. He had heard it told that Calabrese preferred people who were not in awe of him and not easily intimidated, and he would do the very best that he could to oblige although it was very hard to sit there calmly under the gaze of the most important distributor and chieftain in the midwest, a man who had been to Versallo what Versallo was to Randall. Randall had had a rough day. The shock of seeing his boss dead, the trip to the guardhouse, the interview with the police had left him drained. Still, he had all of
this
yet before him. If he did not succeed with Calabrese everything that had gone before was meaningless, and it would be as if everything had been nothing. Versallo would die unavenged, Randall’s future would disappear, everything would fall apart.

He suspected that if he failed with Calabrese he did not, at least, have a long, bitter, lonely future to await him. Calabrese would take care of the future for him.

“I don’t understand,” Calabrese said now in that gentle, low voice of his. Randall might have thought that Calabrese got it out of the movies except that everyonewho had any sense knew that the Calabreses were the reality from which the glittering sentimental fantasies came. “What do you want of me? And how did you get hold of a valise with that amount of uncut heroin?”

“That’s part of what I can’t tell you,” Randall said.

Calabrese’s eyes narrowed and he did not, suddenly, look quite so benevolent and whimsical. “If the source of that valise is what I think it is,” he said, “it doesn’t matter whether you tell me or not. That shipment has caused many people a great deal of difficulty.”

“Of course,” Randall said, “you can have it.”

Calabrese’s eyes broke out of their narrowness and widened considerably. “Have it?” he said. “You must doubtless be out of your mind. The unfortunate murder of your employer must have unsettled you completely.”

“Of course you want it,” Randall said. Already he felt off-guard and helpless. Class was class; he admitted it. He was running out of class with a man like Calabrese. He could not, in any terms deal successfully with a man like this; he would always come out feeling like a fool. The only thing was to go stolidly ahead. This man was not born on Michigan Avenue surrounded by pewter. Once he had been a struggling, sweating little man like all of them. Concentrate on that, he thought. Remember he’s the same as you, they all are. This did not help.

“But I don’t want it,” Calabrese said, leaning forward slightly. “I will talk to you very frankly although I do not want you to think even for a moment that I am conceding to you that I am who you seem to represent me as being. I am just a simple, common businessmanwho has many interests and I am seeing you as a favor to my staff who you have given quite a difficult time. And besides that,” Calabrese said with a little glint that made Randall nauseous, “if you ever cause me any difficulty I will have your heart ripped out from your chest cavity, barehanded. There are people I know who can do this kind of a job and even enjoy it.”

“But—”

“But nothing,” Calabrese said and raised a hand. “But
nothing.
Assuming that I am what you think I am, why would I want this amount of uncut heroin coming into my distribution sources, eh?”

“I only offered it to you for help you might give me,” Randall said stubbornly. Concentrate on the one main objective. “If you don’t want—”

“You’re stupid,” Calabrese said in a slightly louder voice. “All of you men are stupid. It’s a miracle that you get anything done. Shut up and think for a moment. Do you know what this supply would do to the market?”

“Make you richer.”

“No,” Calabrese said, “it would not make me richer.” He put the cigarette he had been holding into his mouth and looked at an exquisite gold lighter on the desk before him, then as if rejecting the very concept of smoking, shook his head, broke the cigarette and threw it into an ornate wastebasket to his right. “It would make me poorer. It would be as if a massive convoy of enemy airplanes were to fly over downtown Chicago, dropping millions of dollars of perfect counterfeit currency into the south side. How long do you think the economy would last?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if they simultaneously appeared in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Dallas? What if a hundred million perfect counterfeit dollars were to fall into the hands of the population of Watts or Harlem? Have you thought of that?”

“I guess,” Randall said after a moment’s pause and he really did think this through because he saw for the first time what Calabrese was getting at and with it was an enormous and valuable insight, “it would destroy our economy.”

“Of course it would,” said Calabrese. He fumbled inside his jacket, took out a pack of cigarettes and extracted another, looked at it sadly for a moment and then broke this one too across and threw it into the wastebasket. “It’s the only way I can control the habit,” he confided. “I go through seven packs an afternoon, just breaking them up and throwing them away like this but it’s better than dying, isn’t it? I don’t believe in drugs, you see. It,” he said again in that other, more pedantic tone, “would destroy the economy, because it would utterly wreck the objective medium of exchange which is the clear, visible outcome of the most delicate, profound, wonderful system mankind has ever known, which we refer to crudely as supply and demand. There is less currency than desire at any given moment, you see.
Currency.
However, the transferred desire and energies that would otherwise lead us straight to anarchy are transferred over to the pursuit of the abstract, currency.

“But if you meddle with that,” Calabrese said, “you risk destroying everything. That was actually considered and rejected, by the way, as an actual means of sabotage during the Second World War. They were going to flood the Berlin of 1942 with marks. The presses were ready to roll and the best, the most expert counterfeiters the government was able to buy or to take out from the prisons for the war effort had prepared plates which were absolutely indistinguishable from the reality. It went up to the highest levels of the security service and only at the last moment was the plan rejected. Do you know why?”

“I think I’m beginning to.”

“I think you are as well,” Calabrese said. “Because there are certain means of warfare which are absolutely intolerable, even worse than poison gases, and this would be one of them. It was decided, finally, that it would be better to risk losing the war and still inhabit the world which we do inhabit then to win it in a way which would have changed everyone’s reality. Of course,” Calabrese said after a pause, “there was also the possibility that if we did it to them they would have the capacity to do it to us, and no one was willing to take even the smallest chance that such would be the case. Decency prevailed, you see. It usually does.”

“And that’s why you don’t want the contents of that valise,” Randall said.

“Exactly,” Calabrese said, “that is why I do not want the contents of that valise. You have, by presenting it to me, already put me into a nearly impossible position. I must arrange for its disposition, and yet how trustworthy would be even the best of those who I would elect to dispose of it? You are going to send an old man to the lake himself on a very sad journey, Randall, and I am not pleased with that. Also, I hate physical exercise of almost any sort.”

Calmly, Calabrese took out another cigarette and broke it with an air of sadness.

Randall sat there, thinking about what the old man had said. When you looked at it the way Calabrese had put it, it was logical, completely pure; why couldn’t everyone see it? The market was dependent upon the limitation of supply. It was from that limitation of supply that all other possibility flowed. Open up the supply, change the rules of the game as they applied to a man in Calabrese’s position, and his position was threatened, possibly destroyed. Wasn’t it? What benefit could Calabrese possibly derive from a million dollars or more worth of junk dumped into his comfortable, carefully-controlled operation? It might, to a much younger or more adventurous man be riskily interesting. But Calabrese was not interested in risk or excitement; as he had already pointed out to Randall, as he doubtless had made clear to Versallo and others many times, he had a business to run.

“All right,” Randall said, standing, wondering if he would be allowed to leave this house. “You make your point very well. I understand. I’ll take it—”

“Sit down,” Calabrese said.

“What?”

“I said, sit down,” Calabrese said again in the tone of a man who in mind’s eye had already placed Randall back in the seat. Randall did so. There was certainly no way that he was going to break out.

“All of that having been said,” Calabrese said calmly, fishing out another cigarette, “I am very interested in the man from whom you took this valise. That is a different issue altogether, that man.”

“I didn’t take it from him,” Randall said. “I came by it indirectly.”

“Did you?”

“I’m interested in him too,” Randall said. “That’s why I’m here. The valise was just an offering.”

“Oh?” said Calabrese and broke a cigarette. “Was it now?”

“I wanted your help.”

“Ah,” said Calabrese. “Everybody wants my help. Everybody wants money, some people like Versallo want money and drugs and some people want money and my
help.
Everybody however wants something; that seems to be a basic fact of that supply and demand we’ve discussed. Help in what?”

“I want you to help me kill him,” Randall said.

Calabrese put the pack of cigarettes on the desk and leaned forward, looking more patriarchal, whimsical and soothing than ever. “Now,” he said softly, “at last we are talking on common ground. I think we can do business. Tell me what you had in mind.”

Randall’s eyes swept the office, then came back to Calabrese’s.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” the old man said, “for a few million dollars, anyone can have absolute security. Just tell me.”

Randall told him.

Wulff wanted to see Patrick Wilson. He started in at the door of the precinct saying this, repeated it at thirty-second intervals thereafter and stepped up the ratio when the interrogation began. You set it in their minds what you wanted and you kept on pounding at it. Cops were single-minded but you could meet their single-mindedness with an obsessive cast of your own. At least Wulff was willing to play it that way. Their booking procedures were incredibly archaic and clumsy. He had thought that the NYPD was a rotten deal but Chicago operated as if there were no dividers whatsoever between police and ultimate authority. These people not only wanted to enforce the law, they wanted to administer what they thought of as justice.

Under the Miranda Decision, he did not have to say a word of course. But these boys did not seem to know shit about Miranda. “Name, address, identification,” the booking sergeant said holding a pencil and repeating it when Wulff stood mute. “Name, address, identification please.” He looked sleepy but at the same time capable of going on this way until the end of his shift if necessary. “Name, address, identification,” he said again and one of the cops who had brought him in gave Wulff a little encouraging shove between the shoulder blades. “Come on,” this cop said, “cooperate. It’s just going to get harder if you don’t, not any easier. We haven’t begun to put the pressure on yet.”

Wulff had thought that that stuff had gone out with the 1930’s or at least with Miranda, but it had not. In the NYC stationhouse they were at least interested in getting onto some personal level before they beat the shit out of you; that is, they tried to decide whether you were
worth
beating the shit out of, if only for kicks, before it started. Then they kept one eye on the door at all times. But Chicago was a different apple altogether. They were both terribly serious and not serious at all. Wulff expected that in just a few moments one of the cops would begin to laugh uncontrollably and the rest of them would snicker along and send him out the door. No chance. No such chance.

“I want to see Patrick Wilson,” Wulff said to the sergeant, “he’s a federal prosecutor—”

“I don’t know shit about federal prosecutions,” the sergeant said. “I’d like some information on you, though.” For a fat, dishevelled man he spoke with a curious precision; indeed his voice had delicacy. Perhaps it was that flat midwestern accent; it threw the hell out of easterners.

“The way to get some information out of me is to get me to Wilson,” Wulff said. “I’ll talk to him.”

“I’m afraid you’re in no position to pick your spots,” the sergeant said comfortably. Someone slammed Wulff with a club in the small of the back. Clumsy, Wulff thought; it had missed the kidney. Usually you went for the kidneys; that was the right spot.

“Nevertheless,” Wulff said, enjoying, even through the pain, the
nevertheless
, “I want to see Wilson.”

“We want some information on you,” the sergeant said. He picked up a piece of paper in front of him. “Arrested in a one-car accident on US 90, dishevelled condition, bloodstained, would produce no credentials of ownership, no driver’s license, no identification—”

At least he was unarmed, Wulff thought. As usual he had dumped the pistol leaving the warehouse; he figured that he could always pick up that stuff in transit and in the meantime the less he was risking the better off he would be. The sergeant put down the sheet of paper. “I don’t like it,” he said, “I don’t like your attitude for shit, buddy.”

“Let me take him downstairs,” the cop behind him said in a bored tone. “We’ll improve his attitude.”

“Eventually,” the sergeant said. He leaned toward Wulff, assumed a confidential air. “It would be much easier if you cooperated,” he said. “Really, it would be.”

“I’ll cooperate when I reach the proper authorities.”

“You’re making life very difficult,” the sergeant said. “Essentially we’re not looking for trouble, you know. We like things to be quiet and reasonable here. This department has been bum-rapped.”

Wulff stood there, looked at the sergeant levelly and said, “I have nothing more to say, I want to see Wilson,” and something hit him in the small of the back again this time painfully and much closer to the kidney. He turned and the cop hit him again this time on the side of the face on the cheekline and Wulff abandoned the careful control with which he had come into the station, let it slide away from him like a cloak and hit the cop in the forehead, a glancing blow that made him stagger. The other one moved in then, a club suddenly extended from his hands but the cop who had been hit, backing away toward the wall raised a hand and said, “No. Don’t do it.” He was smiling although there was a large, greenish bruise already coming out on the forehead. “This is mine. He’s all mine. Let me take him downstairs.” His eyes glowed with a quality which might have been warmth if Wulff had not known better. “Come on,” he said to Wulff and carefully took out his service revolver, levelled it, “let’s take a walk. I’d hate to have to report that you were shot and killed in the process of attempted escape.”

Wulff looked back toward the sergeant who sat there quietly, hands folded, then he looked at the two cops, finally he moved slowly toward them. He had handled it wrong, he supposed; coming into custody had been a mistake. He had sealed himself in now. It all started with wrecking the van and letting himself get picked up but, of course, it had happened a long time before that. He had been set on this road from the time he had walked into a building on West 93rd Street. Someone was going to get killed downstairs, he decided, because he was not going to submit. The phone on the sergeant’s desk rang. He stood there; the cop put a hand on his shoulder, the sergeant was talking quietly. The cop started to pull him out of the room.

“Hold it,” the sergeant said suddenly in a voice of enormous disgust and surprise. “Just hold it.” He took his hand off the mouthpiece, continued talking, listened. “All right,” he said, “all right, then.” He seemed to listen some more, shook his head, replaced the phone with a crash. He stood and Wulff noted that the shoulders and chest gave a deceptive impression of mass, actually the sergeant was a rather thin, spindly man below the waist, the legs seeming barely adequate to hold his weight, his pose showing unsteadiness. Probably retired to a desk position for incapacity.

“Would you believe this?” the sergeant said with disgust. “That was federal offices calling. They want to pick this guy up.”

“Who?” the cop said, not releasing Wulff. “Who is this guy anyway?”

The sergeant’s mind was still back, apparently, on the injury of the call itself. “I can’t believe it,” he said, “I can’t believe it.”

“Just downstairs for a few minutes,” the cop said furiously. “Just let me at him for a few minutes.”

“Can’t do it,” the sergeant said. “I cannot fucking do it.” His dismay was total. He turned toward Wulff. “Wulff,” he said, “we won’t forget this. Now sit the hell down.”

So Wulff went to the bench against the wall and sat. And did not know, after all, how he approached the issue of salvation. It was good to know that he was headed out of their hands and that he was, after all, getting where he wanted to go from the first.

But how the hell had they found him here?