Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler (7 page)

Severo was angry. That was all it came down to; they were trying to squeeze him out, bypass him, circulate the traffic around his domain, eventually shut him out of the lucrative junk trade altogether. Why they were doing this was obscure but it seemed to have something to do with a power struggle in which he had been involved, a power struggle which he was losing. Severo’s business was just like anything else corporate in America; it went through levels of influence, interlocking directorates, conglomerates, spheres of influence and so on. Severo was a good American. Now he was being undercut in a business which he had spent two decades building from the ground, a business which had given him much pride and sustenance, and he was mad. Extremely mad.

Junk had nothing to do with it at all. It could have been anything that the fat little man was involved in. Talking to him Wulff could begin to understand that. He had a lot to learn about this business, he was the first to admit it, and Severo taught him a lot. The people who dealt in junk didn’t think of it as junk at all. They thought in terms of gross lots, profit, loss, inventory, turnover, round figures and even distribution. What they were buying and selling never crossed their minds, at least in any way that they would have to come to terms with it. They were poisoning the country, they were killing people, they were breaking up the old social order of America, that’s what Severo and his interlocking conglomerates were doing, but they just didn’t see it that way at all. They didn’t see it any way. It was just a job.

So there was nothing to do with the fat little man. You might want to kill him—Wulff had not discarded the possibility—but it would be just like putting the squeeze in a junkyard on an old car. The car was in no position to understand what was being done to it. It was inanimate, insensate, it didn’t realize that it didn’t work. The same way with Severo. Pull the trigger and you would get elimination but you would never,
never
get understanding. You could parade his victims in front of him by the hundreds and thousands, quivering, beaten addicts, the victims of the victims following them, all of the people who the addicts had stomped and burned and mugged and stolen from and killed to keep the mainline running, but that would not make any difference to Severo either. He just would not see it.
Really?
he might say raising his eyebrows and whispering so that his gentle voice would not disturb the addict’s march.
Is that so? Terrible social condition; what can I do to help? Will you take a check?

So that was the way it was. It was no more personal to the Severos than Trotto’s murder had been personal to Wulff. In that way if no other, he guessed, Nicholas and he had a great deal in common. They were out to achieve objectives and people who got between them and those goals simply had to be cleared out of the way. The trouble was that Severo, at least to date, had been a hell of a lot more successful than Wulff ever expected to be.

They drove around and around the surrounding area in the Fleetwood, Wulff at the wheel, Severo hunched forward near him, hands outstretched, talking earnestly and inexhaustibly. If the little man took any notice of the bloodstains he made no comment; he was like a well-bred relative talking to a child with a harelip. He would not embarrass Wulff. He would not make him feel awkward about the blood in his car. They drove past estates, wooded areas, trees and glades, they drove past children playing in the streets and beautiful women in tennis shorts carrying racquets and walking their way gracefully toward the courts. They drove past used car lots and hamburger stands, Wonder Waffles and clothing discount stores and then past the estates again. It was a nice area. It was convenient to all shopping, as the real estate ads would put it, but secluded enough from the shopping that commerce did not have to infringe upon the private life-style. Just like the junk, in short. Severo was a man of taste, it would seem. He knew how and where to live.

The junk was coming into San Francisco Bay tomorrow night. It would get there by a circuitous route according to Severo. From Saigon to Peking, a little crossover at Istanbul, switch to airplane to get to Malaga, another flight then back to Peking and finally by laborious freight, weeks on the ocean, toward San Francisco. Severo did not try to explain the reasoning behind this. Wulff did not press him.

Traffic was always a complex and dangerous business and nothing which he had ever tried to understand; the point was that it
worked.
Customs was a joke, security a punch line. The country had ten million points of access. Who could cover them all?

All that mattered was that it was coming in by freighter tomorrow night, and a little piece of it was for Severo. Most of it was not; the shipment was being cut up in twenty to thirty pieces to be taken by various distributors and point men all over the country. Severo was only a twentieth or a fiftieth of the pickup. But because the delivery was being taken in his territory he had a kind of loose control over it, a loose responsibility for the connections. That was the way the business worked. In San Francisco you had to clear everything with Severo. Drive twenty miles east or five miles north and it was two other people you had to talk to. But here his control was what mattered.

They drove into Severo’s driveway again just as the man had finished mapping out the specifics. Wulff had been listening for an hour, saying very little, saying nothing in fact, taking it all in and wondering if he dared trust the man. He supposed that he could. Severo by getting into the Fleetwood had absolutely put himself at Wulff’s mercy. You did not put yourself under a gun and then begin to babble lies. Or did you? He could not figure these people out. He supposed that he did not have to as long as he could beat them.

“I don’t like the business,” Severo said as Wulff brought the car to a stop, “you hear me? I just don’t like it. I didn’t get started to get into it, it just came along five, six years ago, and how could I pass it up? if I didn’t take it over some other guy would instead and they’d use it as a wedge to push me out. But I’ve been thinking it over for a long time and I don’t want to mess with it anymore. It’s a dirty business. You know, back before the 1960’s they didn’t even want to touch the stuff. Most of them had children, they could see what the stuff would do, they didn’t want to get involved. But they had to get into it finally in self defense.”

“Why?”

“Why? I told you why. Because they were starting to get squeezed out. Because the business just got out of hand, it was so big, there was so much money, and so many guys started to push their way in that things were starting to fall apart. Pressure built up, and they were losing so much money, so much money was going to these other sources that they were really beginning to lose hold. So they had to get back into it but there were a lot even then who didn’t want to touch it and they started to get obstructed. So—”

“So the gang wars started again,” Wulff said.

“Yeah,” Severo said with a shrug. “I mean it wasn’t quite that simple, but that’s the general idea. I forgot; you were in New York through all that shit, weren’t you?”

“I got around a little, yeah,” Wulff said, “Just a shade. And now, I should just march in there and take it over, right? And what about you? What are you going to be doing when I’m ditching all of your plans?”

“I won’t be there,” Severo said. “You don’t think anyone in the higher echelons appears personally, do you?”

“You have people who do the contact work.”

“Something like that,” Severo said. He opened the door and pushed his way out of the car. “So I’ll wish you luck now,” he said.

“Wait a minute.”

Severo raised his eyebrows and stayed in position, half-in, half-out, hunched over. “What is it?”

“You think I’m just going to let you go? We finish our talk and I let you out of the car and you go home?”

“Those were my plans,” the little man said. “You had another idea?”

“You think you’re just going to walk away from this?”

“I think we understand one another, Wulff. You have nothing to gain by killing me. Look, I’ve put myself at your mercy as a measure of good faith. I think you can trust me.”

“Why should I trust you?”

Severo held his position, looked at Wulff levelly. “Because I’m telling you the truth and because I think we can help each other.”

“You’re using me to work out a double-cross.”

“Something like that, yes. It’s much more complicated than that, though. Like the gang wars.”

“I ought to kill you,” Wulff said.

“Of course you ought to kill me. I know your track record, Wulff; you’ve been killing everyone. But what do you have to gain? Actually you’re not a killer at all; you’re a businessman. You’re just trying to get a job done like I’ve been doing, and that means getting people out of your way. But I’m not in your way, you see. I’m trying to help you.”

“Just let you go back into the house and call down every hit man in San Francisco to catch me near that freight tomorrow.”

“If you think so. You’re quite wrong, though. You know,” Severo said, “I’m getting very uncomfortable standing in this position, Wulff. Now the Fleetwood is mine of course but I can see where you might find it awkward to leave it here and just take a bus on back to wherever you’re staying, so you can have it to get back there. I suggest you leave it somewhere convenient and give me a call and I’ll arrange for a pickup.”

“You’ve got nerve,” Wulff said, almost admiringly. “You have really got nerve. Severo, I’ve got to give you that.”

Severo shrugged and moved away from the car, hitched his pants up in the driveway, kicked out a leg, a dancer. “You don’t get into a position like mine without learning a few things,” he said and started to walk toward the house.

“Stop,” Wulff said.

The man poised, arched in the air almost as if expecting an impact and for just a moment Wulff could see, even from behind, the mask of this man shift and fall: Severo was terrified. Underneath all of it he had been a man on the edge of terror for two hours. Regardless, he had gone on and done what he had to do.

Severo turned slowly and looked at Wulff. Whatever happened to his face had already been subject to reassembly work in the instant after he had seen that no bullet would hit him. Now little trace of what he must have looked like was on his face, there was only a hint in the eyes, closure, blood, then vanishing in the whiteness of pupil. Nevertheless, just knowing that he had opened up the man in this way was probably enough for Wulff. He understood himself now. There was no need to kill Severo after all, at least not yet. He only had to see that the man recognized the line where the killing might have been done. Severo saw it. He saw it clear.

“I had a question,” Wulff said.

“Oh?”

“It’s a question about you, not me.”

“You’re interested in me? Why that’s very touching, Wulff.”

“What’s going to happen to you, Severo, if I break up this delivery of yours and everybody in the area begins to wonder who might have tipped me onto it? What are you going to do when every middle boss and hit man in the area starts to crawl around these trees?”

“That’s a problem I’ll face, Wulff. Nice of you to think of me, though.”

“You really think you
can
face it? You think it’s something you can deal with, you’d put your head into that kind of oven?”

“I know my business,” Severo said. “I’ve been in my business for twenty years. How long have you been in yours, three months? Goodbye, Wulff.”

He walked away. No twitch in his shoulderblades this time, no swerve of his head. The bastard knew he was safe. He had gone through the other side of the confrontation and now even if Wulff hit him it would not be the same. Severo would die in confidence.

Wulff let him go.

He let him go, nothing else to do. Obscurely he understood that, by the code he had created for himself and was now living by, if he was going to kill Severo he would have done it immediately. Or at the latest, as soon as he had pumped the man clear of information. You did not keep the butterfly on the pin, you did not draw out the moment either for your own enjoyment or for their suffering. That put you on their level. They loved death. They played with it like normal men might play with a woman.

Wulff did not. He merely used it as another technique. And by letting the moment go by he had lost the opportunity to bring it.

Severo, positions reversed, would have shot him. He was sure of it. But the positions were not reversed. Lonely, locked in, he was always going to be himself.

He watched the man walk confidently into his house, close the door and flick out the lights.

Very meditatively, Wulff started the Fleetwood and drove the hell out of there.

Severo did not stop shaking inside until he had closed and locked all the doors clear up to the study on the third floor which had chain bolts and which no one, he hoped, would ever know about. It was his fortress; at the last moment if they ever came to get him he would meet them there. In that fortress now, bolts on, bars across the window, he sat in a chair in a great gasping explosion of breath and allowed the tension at last to ease out. He put his hands in front of his face and in the private way he allowed himself only in this room and only then once or twice a year, rationing it out, he cried.

He cried convulsively for two or three minutes and then all of the little crawling sounds and fears were gone and he was himself again. He leaned back in the chair, lit a cigarette and smiled.

He had won, though. He had walked into the valley of death all right, he had met the monster, he had worked him over like a woman or a violin and he had won. He had him exactly where he wanted him now.

They could have done the same thing to him in New York and cancelled him right out if any of them had the guts or the craft. But no, it had all come to him, Nicholas Severo, and he had done it. They called everything outside of the northeastern circle the minor leagues, did they? They would have to begin to re-evaluate their thinking.

He picked up the phone and dialed a number, got a voice which he recognized. He told the voice to call another voice to the phone, and when the second voice came on he explained quickly what had happened and what he had done and exactly where Wulff would be tomorrow night.

“I want you to hit him with everything you’ve got,” Severo said clearly.

The voice said that he would take care of it.