Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (15 page)

“Shut up,” Wulff said quietly. Coming out of it a bit Calabrese thought. “Don’t talk about her.”

“I
have
to talk about her,” Calabrese said reasonably. “I have to talk about everything, Wulff, because, you see, your so-called war on the international drug trade is not only futile and pointless because there
is
no international drug trade, merely a group of businessman who are trying to service an extant need which is very strong among all of us, but because your so-called war is also misguided. It comes from a fundamental error. Your motivation is all fucked up, Wulff,” Calabrese said flatly, leaning across the desk. “We had nothing to do with Marie Calvante at all.”

“Drugs did,” Wulff said quietly.

“Yes,” Calabrese said reasonably, “that may be true but if she had died of natural causes would you go on a campaign against heart disease? or cancer? If she had jumped out of a window in a fit of depression would you have declared war on the international suicidal and depressive tendency cartel?” He leaned back. “It’s perfectly ridiculous,” he said and went to his inside coat pocket. For the first time during this absorbing interview, one he had walked through in his mind many times before it finally happened, he needed to break some cigarettes. He found the pack, took out four cigarettes in a lavish gesture and,
one, two, three, four!
cracked them and spilled them across the desk. “And the thing is that you’re a remarkable man,” Calabrese said. “You could have been of some real use to us.”

Wulff said nothing. He sat there, his eyes locked to some screen within his head, probably flashing pictures, Calabrese thought. He was making pictures of the girl behind the brain. Good. Get him back there. Make him think, make him come to terms with what he had become.

“But instead you’re just making a lot of difficulty,” Calabrese said. “On the other hand I can’t deny the fact that you’ve done us some good.” Wulff looked up with interest at this. “Or at least
me
some good,” Calabrese added. “The organization was getting very complacent, things were becoming sloppy, a lot of incompetent people had succeeded to positions which were utterly beyond their means but no one sought to depose them. You’ve washed out some of the weaker elements and you’ve tightened and firmed up the remainder. You’ve made us lean and battlehard and the survivors won’t be so complacent for a long time.”

“If I really believed that,” Wulff said, “I’d kill myself right here.”

“Well, don’t do
that,”
Calabrese said, “I’d hardly feel right having something like that on my head. You know what I’m going to do with you, Wulff? I’m going to send you out of the country. I’m not going to kill you at all; that would be entirely wasteful. Instead of think we’re just going to send you away for a while, under supervision of course, so you can get a look at how the other side of the globe lives. And meanwhile we’ll carry on here, somehow, without you.”

“You’d better kill me,” Wulff said, “because if you don’t someday I’m going to kill you. You realize that, don’t you?”

“Of course I realize that,” Calabrese said, “I know you want to murder me and even think that you have a chance. But I’m not going to kill you Wulff, I’m through trying to kill you for the time being because you’re just too useful and interesting. We’re going to send you out of here and put you where you can’t bother any of us for a long time. And maybe after a while when you’ve had a chance to think things over, you may even see that you’d do better working with us. We could use you. And you really have nowhere else to go. Do you think that you have any life above ground left in this country? Every law-enforcement agency in the world has a bounty for you.”

“I’d rather die than work for you.”

“You’d rather die than a lot of things, Wulff,” Calabrese said and took out another cigarette, “but I think that I’d like to keep you alive.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Calabrese said. “Do you really want to know why? Well, then, I’ll tell you Wulff: because things get very boring and stultifying here for an old man who has probably seen all of the real action that he’s going to see in his entire life. Who wants to sit on a mountaintop and wait for the deathbirds to come and pick me to pieces? No, there has to be more to life than just waiting for the end, reliving what has already been done. And you’re my option, Wulff. I want to know that you’re still alive and out there and that you want to kill me.” He broke the cigarette and flung it in Wulff’s face. “It’s interesting,” he said in a shaking voice, “it gives an old man something to think about.”

The cigarette glanced off Wulff’s cheekbone, fell to the floor. Neither of them looked at it. Calabrese stood and found that he was shaking: from head to toe his body was betraying him and he was moving uncontrollably. His bowels felt loose and he had a sensation of shame: was he going to deaden and cheapen himself forever by having an accident in front of this man? Abruptly he felt tears come to his eyes. He had not meant to say what he did. It had just come out. It had not even been there five seconds before he had said it and then, when it came out, it did so with the solidity of absolute truth and Calabrese knew that it had been this way all along and that this was the reason why he had cooperated with Randall, made the call to Wilson, had Randall tracked and finally brought Wulff in here. He had never intended to kill him at all. He had just been looking, every step of the way, for a means of bringing him in here and saying what he had to him … without revealing to himself until this moment what he had really had in mind.

“Get out of here,” Calabrese said, his voice still shaking. He picked up the phone on the desk. “Get him out of here!” he said. “What?” a voice said and Calabrese screamed,
“Get him out!”
seeing the smile that came to Wulff’s face, seeing the mirror of his own discovered weakness in Wulff’s face, his own shame beating like a heart within him and
soldat
came in, seized Wulff by the arms, started to carry him out of there, roughly. Wulff kept those flat, dead eyes on him all through this. The
soldat
struggled with one another and one of Wulff’s arms was twisted but the man let go no sound. “Don’t hurt him,” Calabrese said, “take him downstairs and put him into confinement. I will have instructions shortly.” To Wulff he said, “You will be escorted out of the country. You will be informed of your destination later.”

“I’ll kill you when I can, Calabrese,” Wulff said and the
soldat
twisted at him again. Wulff made leverage, turned with the twist, his face impassive. “I said leave him alone!” Calabrese screamed in a rage and the
soldat,
ashen-faced, put Wulff into a standard escort pin and led him from the room, not looking back at Calabrese. The door closed quietly.

Calabrese stood there, not moving. The cigarettes lay open on his desk. In a brutal gesture he took one from the pack and rammed it into his mouth like he would have rammed his prick, when it worked ten years ago, into a woman, held it there and then dug in his desk for matches, removed them, struck a flame with three and lighted the cigarette. He inhaled immediately, sulphuric fumes coming in with the tobacco and gasped, then held all of it in his chest for a long time, the sickening mass beating like a fist, clawing like a dog on the inside, near his heart. He felt that bird of shame battering away within him and it was like fire, like darkness, crying out all the sounds of the night. Surely everyone could hear it … except that he knew, no one could. All of it was contained inside. Always, always: a man lived within the depths of himself.

Wulff had measured him.

That was the day Williams got out of the hospital. No one saw any point in holding him further and the NYPD was pulling off surveillance which seemed to be the signal to the hospital to quit. He could rest at home on full leave for three or four weeks depending on the doctors and then they would see. They would indeed see. His wife held his arm as he walked unsteadily down the stairs and put him in the passenger seat of the car, then went around to the driver’s side, opened it and found Williams already sitting there with a shy, tentative, embarrassed grin. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I just can’t sit. I’d rather drive.” She gave him the keys and got back on the passenger side.

Driving, Williams saw all of it again but it was like seeing it for the first time. Metropolitan Hospital adjoined East Harlem and rather than ducking right for the East River Drive, heading toward the Triborough Bridge and home, he stayed on First Avenue up to 125th, seeing all of it. At about 110th the junkies became visible in clumps rather than as isolated, staggering forms. They stretched out on pavements, huddled in doorways, a few of them were weaving across First Avenue in the midst of traffic. Williams rolled up all the windows.

“Why are you going this way?” his wife said and Williams gave her one sidelong glance and in his eyes she saw the answer and said nothing else. He kept the car at an even fifteen for the progressive lighting, looking at what was going on. He had seen it a thousand times but he had never seen it before. At 125th, finally, he cut east to the bridge approach. Traffic was sparse. He took the Impala up to forty. Twenty-two payments left on the thing, as he recalled. Five hundred down and one hundred a month for the rest of your life. The car was a piece of shit. That was the way the system worked. His side ached.

“Wulff’s right,” he said.

“I know,” his wife said, “you’ve said that already.”

So he had. He had said it to her several times, passionately from the hospital bed when he had started to put all the pieces together. He was embarrassed. He should have known better than to have thought that she had forgotten. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it just occurred to me again.”

“All right.”

“He was always right. It’s all shit.”

“Does it make any difference to us?”

“I don’t know,” Williams said, holding the wheel steady as they headed into the filth toward Queens. He threw a quarter into the exact change slot, barely halting. “I just don’t know if anything makes any difference.”

“You have to go on,” his wife said. Unconsciously she looked down at herself. She was six months pregnant now. She looked up again. “You do have to go on.”

“For what?” David Williams said. “To what?” and the car sailed on into Queens, little foul clouds from Flushing Bay drifting toward them, the stupendous and brutal skyline of that evil city to the east and Williams, hunching his head into his shoulders didn’t know: he didn’t know. He didn’t know.

His wife leaned against him.

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Copyright © 1974 by Mike Barry
All rights reserved.

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-4239-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4239-8

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