Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (10 page)

It looked like De Masso was going to get awfully lucky tonight.

They were talking urgently among themselves, in low whispers, with little fluttering signs in the darkness that might have been the hand signals with which a group of professionals can communicate almost as well as with speech, can fill in the pauses between. Wulff knew without being able to hear what they were saying to one another: they did not know if he was still in the lot but they were pretty sure he was. It stood to reason, and in the next moment there were a series of nods as if some hastily negotiated decision had come out of this. And a flashlight leaped like a spear from the darkness.

Its strobe pierced the night, coming across the place where Wulff lay in a low arc, just sputtering past, and swung in full radius, paused, began to come back slowly. At this rate they were going to be able to locate him; they knew exactly how to use that flash for maximum sweep, knew how to make quarters of the area to be searched, an old combat technique, and then probe those quarters. As the flashlight curved back through the lot Wulff knew what was going to happen, if not on this sweep then surely on the next; they were going to pin him in that strobe, blind him, hang him like a frog squirming on laboratory pincers and quite remorselessly shoot him. There would be only two sensations, so quickly would they work: first the pain behind the eyeballs as the light lanced him, then the quick, thudding impact of the bullet as it dove into his heart or head, exploded the life out of him. Once he allowed himself to be open to the light, there would be no way he could stave off that second impact. They would not wait, they would shoot him on the spot.

So he had this small moment, this instance of reprieve as the light wove toward him again, and he thought that it was the smallest chance he had yet been given: a small pistol and a hand grenade he had been saving for De Masso, against four of them with reinforcement troops behind. But there was no way out of it. To lie crouched in the lot waiting for the light to come in was merely to huddle like that laboratory frog in the tank and hope that those pincers swooping forward had some entirely different objective, some different frog in mind. But men were not frogs; they did not have to be fools either. The difference between men and frogs was that men were aware of their mortality and could take steps, at least halting and limited steps, to counteract it.

So he fired off the pistol toward the invisible arm at the end of the light, the bullet spattering bone in the darkness, heard the yelp as the man was hit and then the light leapt like a fireball from that hand, went rolling to ground on the lot, spinning, turning. Someone else leapt forward to seize that flashlight but caught the second bullet high in the throat. A hard whimpering sound came from something that had been hit, and then the light went off totally as if a body had fallen on it, was shutting off all light forever, and Wulff did not pause, but in the last flash of light that he had been given before the light was obliterated he got off two more shots, the first one missing—he knew it from the moment it left the gun, you had a feeling about things like that, you could tell the good and bad shots as they emerged from the barrel of the gun even before they had hit; maybe shooting was like sex in that way, knowing a good come from a bad—but the second shot was right on target: he heard a wet sound as if something were being pulped, a vegetable falling open with a splat like thunder from the rottenness pouring out. Then he was on his knees, he was on his feet, first weaving, then running in the darkness, first pausing, then moving, first calculating, then going flat out, and he ran low to the ground holding the gun before him, following the light of the street lamp, breaking the angle, the building falling away, and as he cleared the obstruction he took the grenade from where it had been, pulled the pin and threw it.

It twinkled in the air. He could see it rising in flight in the rays of the street lamp. Then it dove, like a bird, like a stone, toward the figures that he could see in the quick light massed on the ground squawking like chickens, strange sounds of dismay and concern ripping from them as they saw the grenade coming and surmised what it was. And then the grenade was down, rolling, ticking. Wulff in full flight wondered if it was a dud; no, it could not possibly be, Father Justice took great pride in his merchandise. It was inconceivable that in the war for divinity and freedom any of the grenades would be duds, that in the army of Christ there would be any section eights. And down the grenade went, then up, he heard the
oop!
of the explosion, and the night was filled with light, the secondary concussion, rolling in thickly on the heels of the first, and in the air then was only hissing fragmentation. The screams were cut off by that secondary explosion just as the light had been.

Wulff ran. He ran through the streets of Fort Lee. His interview with De Masso, it seemed, would have to be abandoned for another evening; he had had an interruption along the way but it was a worthwhile interruption; trade off four for one. Then, as his pace slowed to normal, as his breathing eased, as the sweat dried on him, he felt the quick rising of the gun within his pocket like a little animal scrambling away in there, and he thought why the hell, what the hell, why the hell not? What did this have to do with the business at hand? He might as well do it anyway.

Temporary interruptions, no matter how pleasant, just should not divert the course of a campaign. That was combat logic for you.

So leaving the lot to the sirens and the vultures of the press and photography corps, Wulff went off to see De Masso.

The slaughter in Fort Lee and a story buried on page sixty about a man who sounded like Gianelli being pulled dead out of a furnished room on the West Side hit the papers on the same day. They hit Miller, who made it his business to read the papers, very hard. For a long time, particularly since the interview with Gianelli, he had felt himself trembling on the verge of a decision. Now the two events, in concordance, a great pivot seeming to link and hold the two, pushed him over the edge, and he knew that the decision had always been waiting for him. There was no one else to make it. Of course there were plenty of people to make it, but in the war of attrition, Miller had moved further up along the line than he wanted to think.

“I’m going to call it off,” he said to the woman lying in bed next to him. Her name was Stella, and she had been going to bed with Miller, first formally, then informally, for something over five years. In the beginning it had been all passion, a shared apartment, candlelight, and heavy seduction; but now it had eased into a long-standing relationship without frills; Stella still had the apartment, but Miller had long since moved back to his quarters and looked upon the rages, convulsions, passions he had felt with her years ago as the characteristics of a different man, one he had long outgrown. Now she came in once or twice a week, more if he felt like it, to fuck him and otherwise stayed out of his life, pursuing a vague career in modeling or some such. On the other hand, he trusted her absolutely, only as a man can trust a woman who would otherwise have been his wife, and he told her everything. She listened, evaluated, and said nothing back to him, which was even better. After five years Miller still could not decide if she was a very bright girl working on being dumb for self-preservation or whether she was indeed as dumb as she seemed but, with the cunning of the attractive, stupid woman, had cultivated the appearance of intelligence behind silence.

In any event she said nothing whatsoever, merely rolled in the bed, placing a hand on Miller’s thigh, running her fingers all the way up the surfaces, touching his scrotum lightly in a way she knew he liked. He felt himself twitch, respond faintly, then the impulse to couple was submerged in the urgency of what he was thinking. Also in the fact that he had had her not fifteen minutes before. He did his best, most lucid thinking after a fuck; purged of all desire it was possible to see the world in the cold glass of suspension that it really was. It was only desire, as a matter of fact, that fucked you up, got you involved in calculations that were not suited to reality. If for no other reason than this, Miller was dedicated to Stella: she helped him to cancel desire, keep him thinking rationally most of the time.

“Cut it out,” he said, putting his fingers around her wrist and drawing her hand down. It drifted to his knee, lay there warmly. “I’m trying to figure out something.”

“Sure,” she said and rested her cheek against his. He felt the soft imprint of her lips, then the darker mold of her tongue touching him, moving quickly across the panels of his cheek and for just a moment the temptation was there to immerse himself within her, to seek within her again what he seemed unable to find anywhere else, a total blankness, a total reversal of discontent. But no, it would not work, he was forty-three years old, too old for double-headers regardless of her cooperativeness and his optimism. Besides, he was trying to frame his thoughts. To see this right. “All right,” she said, when she felt him moving away from her, they were that attuned to one another after all these years anyway. “All right, I won’t do anything.” She turned, threw an elbow across his stomach, looked at the ceiling, and sighed.

“I’ve got to call it off,” Miller said. “There’s no point in pursuing this any more. He’s costing us too much, too much in men and energy, don’t you understand that?”

“I don’t understand anything. I just listen.”

“Right,” Miller said, “you just listen. Now he’s killing people in Fort Lee, this old man, this friend of Calabrese’s who came to me to ask permission for vendetta and I figured what the hell we had nothing to lose, he’s dead too. He’s bombing out joints in Harlem, he’s conducting a one-man campaign here, and do you know something? I don’t want to go up against him any more. So I’m going to call the troops off. I’m going to make it clear that we no longer want him; some bounty hunter, someone outside the organization wants to give him a shot, we can’t stop him, that’s for sure, but we won’t cooperate either. We’re not paying rewards. We’re cooling it in the New York territory.”

“Cooling it in the New York territory,” she said quietly and nibbled at Miller’s earlobe. “Yes, I understand that.”

“I mean it’s ridiculous,” Miller said. “Someone might say that he’s beaten us, that I’ve given up, but it isn’t that way at all. Not really. This is completely a business decision, that’s all it is. He’s wrecking us, we’re putting far more into him, taking far greater losses than he’s worth. So we’ve got to cut away. I don’t even think that he’s attacking us any more; he’s just on a guerilla campaign.”

“Guerilla campaigns are a lot of fun.”

“Not in fucking Southeast Asia they aren’t,” Miller said. “I just can’t justify going on this way any more, that’s all. Hell, if we could get him, we would. It’s not a matter of guts; I’d face him anywhere if it was just a man-to-man proposition, and I’d get him too. But we’re losing more on this now than we can possibly gain. It’s ridiculous. I’m calling it off.”

“All right,” Stella said, “you’re calling it off.” She was still on his earlobe. “But don’t you think you should think about this?”

Sometimes she opposed him; once or twice in the course of a conversation she might pick up on a point and cross-examine in a way that hardly pushed the point. It was one of the reasons why he had not reached a final decision on whether she was smart acting dumb or dumb faking smartness, because she knew that the bright people asked questions. “I have thought about it,” he said, “I’ve thought a lot.”

“Because it’s a big decision.”

“Oh I know that,” Miller said, “I know it’s a big decision.”

“If he’s as dangerous as you say he is, should you just let him go on this way?”

“I’ve thought about that,” Miller said. He put a hand on her thigh, ran it up, entwined a finger in her pubic hair, turning it, without desire. Sometimes the greatest pleasure in touching a woman was when there was no desire in it; he would think about this. “But you see I don’t think he’s dangerous to us any more. He started out, it was a campaign, no question about it.”

“I see.”

“But the campaign is over. He’s not fighting a planned action any more; he’s just striking out anywhere, any way he can. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. He’s just hitting the stops. So it’s not a question of protecting our interests the way it might have been at the beginning.”

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know it was that way.”

“It’s that way,” Miller said. He turned toward her. She was looking up at the ceiling, curiously inert, curiously absorbed, and he felt once again a touch of desire, a gentle finger of ice pressing him at the base of the spine, radiating out little tentacles of cold to the upper and lower parts of his body. “Believe me it’s that way.” He began to stroke her in earnest now. He felt better. Sometimes it was that way with decisions; you didn’t even know what you were going to say until you started talking, and then the talk framed out the decision that had been there all along. Maybe presidents or heads of state operated the same way, viscerally, didn’t know what they were up to until they heard themselves saying it. Then they would have advisers draft position papers justifying all of it after the fact. It was a fairly terrifying way to look at the way the world worked, to think that everything went on this way, but then again you had to accept it.

“All right,” she said, “all right,” and then she was all over him, her body a fine network, a mesh draped over him, little holes in the mesh through which he was able to brush and just barely touch all of the forgotten, buried sweets that he must have been able to seize fully only in dreams, all of her rising thickly against him, groaning, panting, and he felt her tongue penetrate like wire into his mouth, and he moved down and around her and then very slowly, precisely began to make the motions of generation.

“Good,” she said cooperatively, “ah, ah, that’s very good,” and he wondered if she felt desire or whether all of this was simulated, had been faked from the beginning, nothing within her whatsoever, Stella merely a receptacle. But in the rising or deepening gloom of his energy, he did not think of this any more, and as he worked his way toward orgasm the image that predominated was that of the murdered old man as revealed in the one small clip that the tabloid had printed; the body lying swathed in its blood, the face rolled back, constricted, dead eyes locked to the ceiling. And as Miller came he thought that the old man Gianelli and he might be seeing exactly the same things, Gianelli at death, himself at the come. And then it all came crashing down upon him as he carried himself toward the end of all recollection.