Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare (5 page)

But when he went up the stairs of the tenement, prowling his way through the dust and fumes past all the closed, bolted doors of the dwelling he found that the girl on the floor was named Marie Calvante and she was very dead of an obvious heroin overdose. She was a very pretty middle-class Italian girl out of Rego Park and by some coincidence she was, or at least had been until she ran into a little difficulty, Wulff’s fiancee. They were going to get married soon. Plans had been made. Somewhere along the way he had had the bad luck to pick himself up a fiancee.

They had been going out together for a year. They even had the house picked out. All in all, it was quite an unfortunate thing to find this very girl, this Marie Calvante, O.D.’d out in a tenement. If Wulff had been able to think straight he certainly would have appreciated the coincidental aspects of this. Small world and all that. As it is, however, he had not been able to do much thinking at all.

He kept a lid on himself though. When Williams, sitting in the car for a while, wondering where the hell Wulff was, finally came out to join him, Wulff had kept himself from showing much to the rookie at all. Instead he had very neatly taken off his badge, put it next to the corpse and then had left the two of them, Williams and the girl, that way to settle for themselves what was going to happen next and he had walked straight out of the tenement and out of the force. Maybe it hadn’t been right to take no part in the funeral arrangements, but he had learned from Vietnam that a corpse was a corpse, just dead meat, it didn’t matter what the hell happened to it from then on; certainly the corpse didn’t care. Arrangements were for other people and he had a better idea of what he wanted to do.

So she had wound up O.D.’d out on West 93rd Street. To Wulff it was a simple proposition: turning in the informant, telling the lieutenant what he could do with his fucking narco squad, making a lot of, maybe important people, unhappy; and they had decided that it made sense to make Wulff equally unhappy as a kind of advance payment on the trouble they would make for him. If you looked at it objectively, it made perfect sense. Certainly they were being objective; from their point of view it was altogether a good move. Feelings, people—they just didn’t matter when you got into that kind of calculation.

A lot of important people denied that they had anything to do with it, though. Wulff picked up that information later on. When he had walked out of the department, dumped his badge on the body, bothered to inform no one but Williams later what he had done, and made his decision to singlehandedly destroy the international drug trade, he got himself moving in circles where people were in a position to deny any involvement with the O.D.’d girl. And they did. All of them did. But by then it was too late for everyone.

He went out to destroy the international drug trade. It was crazy, maybe, but so was the drug business itself. Madness versus madness. He started to roll out his swathe of death and destruction then, roaming across the continent, moving from New York to San Francisco, back to Boston and then to Las Vegas, on a hijacked liner to Havana, then to Chicago, and at most of these stopover points he found himself sooner or later facing a person of some importance, usually in the process of being killed. And one by one they swore that they knew nothing of Marie Calvante, much less of West 93rd Street. The word had gotten around on the organization circuit that Wulff was out for vengeance, and each of them explained that whatever else they had done none of them had any knowledge whatsoever of the girl. It looked, in short, like a setup of some kind. Either that or it was a coincidence which had sprung Wulff loose finally.

But he would have done it anyway. That he guessed was the point. He had been aching since Vietnam to take on those bastards; but only a marginal man, a man half-dead and without hope, could try anything so desperate and the murder of the girl, then, had only triggered him off. Anyway, he did not care to believe what they told him about organization non-involvement. Why should he? Why should he believe anything? All of these people were liars anyway. All of them.

But even if it was the truth, what the hell did it matter? For a little while, particularly in San Francisco early on, he had had the satisfaction of knowing that he was at least getting a job done. It might be a brief life on which he was embarked but it was an effective one—a hell of a lot more effective by any standards than the narco squad. Maybe he had taken out five hundred by now including the heads of the northeast and western sectors. The Bay area, the New England area would not be the same again for a long time, if ever; the organization was wrecked. So he plugged ahead. He kept on killing. He got a helicopter pilot somewhere along the line too; that one had really hurt, but the man in the last analysis had proved to be a traitor. What else was there to do?

He didn’t like it for the most part; only a lunatic would get pleasure from killing, and despite the word that was being passed around about him Wulff was not at all crazy … but he couldn’t say that he disliked killing, either. That would have been a misrepresentation too. It was just a job. He had little feeling. He had no feeling. He was dead altogether, or so he wanted to believe; the important part of him had died back in New York. Along the way, in San Francisco, there had been a girl and he had had sex with her and it had not been bad but it really didn’t change the equation. Did it? He would not accept that. The equation was cold and hard. It had been laid to rest in a stinking, single room occupancy tenement.

Until he had hit Chicago.

He had hit Chicago carrying out of Havana a million dollars worth of smack which he had chased from the police stash room in New York City where it had been taken out by a corrupt cop named Stoneman clear across the continent and onto a hijacked plane. And he had hit Chicago still holding on, a million dollars clear, and there he had run into a man who lived on an estate overlooking Lake Michigan named Calabrese.

Calabrese had been something else again.

Calabrese sat or stood on top of the network; he was so far above it in his estate that he did not even acknowledge its existence let alone his connection to it. He was a man who had fought all of his wars forty years ago, had won them all, now was rewriting history so that the losers never existed at all. Calabrese was a cunning old man with a deadly and precise way of handling things and he had almost killed Wulff twice. The second time, holding the gun on Wulff, he had told him that he was going to pass up the opportunity, at least this time. Killing Wulff was no challenge, Calabrese said. The idea was to keep him alive, provide Calabrese with some excitement, send Wulff under heavy guard to someplace far out of the country where Calabrese could titillate himself with the simultaneous knowledge that Wulff was still alive, still a danger … but totally controlled by Calabrese.

Out of the country, then, but where? Wulff had wondered when they piled him aboard a private plane at O’Hare. Majorca was a possibility, Istanbul another, or possibly postwar Saigon. Those as far as he knew were the three great throbbing hearts of that monster, the trade. They were the hearts which initiated the flow of the blood and where the poppies were tilled out to begin their billion dollar journey. But it had not been any one of those places which, in a way, was a damned shame, because Istanbul and Majorca were interesting and he would not have minded seeing Saigon again.

Instead it had been Peru.

Wulff had not even known the destination until the plane had touched down, until the men guarding had begun to talk with one another. What the hell was Calabrese sending him to Peru for? But later on in the hotel, when he had been checked in and left alone, Wulff thought it through and decided that like everything else in Calabrese’s life it made sense. Peru was one of a number of the South American countries which would likely be accessible to Calabrese. Hell, half a million dollars could buy you a government, but of almost all those countries this was one of the most tightly held, the country where the concentration of power was the greatest. And also, past the urban sprawl of the few great cities where the tourists prowled, this country was wild, unsettled, just as it had been thousands of years ago. It was as unimaginable as the great forests of Brazil.

Anything could go on here.

The men had taken him to the Crillon, had put him into a room, had told him that he would be under watch at all times and that it would be inadvisable for him to think of escape but that on the other hand he could within those clearly-defined limits come and go as he pleased. At Calabrese’s pleasure. His accommodations would be taken care of, the hotel would be paid off. Calabrese and the owner of the hotel seemed to have a comfortable working arrangement. At least this was the word that he got but the man telling Wulff this sounded vaguely confused, as if conveying orders which he did not understand or could be physically dangerous to him. On the other hand the message had gotten across fairly well that although Calabrese was a long distance away he was still very much there in person.

Fucking Peru. For three days he did nothing. Even if he had wanted to chance some activity, Calabrese be damned, there was something about the climate here, the very aspect of the country, that got to him. It was dead, dead: dry, hot, a faint odor of bones and death in the air. Too much history, too much present suffering. Wulff tried not to think about it.

They had never really discussed his police work. He seemed to remember that pretty clearly. They might have mentioned it now and then, she knew he was a cop, knew he was a narco, knew what the job was doing to him. But life was full of other things; there was never enough time to do and talk about all that they had to share … and life and times on the narco squad had been pretty well at the bottom of the list.

Only once. Only once had she really had to come to terms with it, had he had to come to terms as well with what it could do to her. He seemed to recall this much fairly well. This was when the shakeups were just starting, the word was just beginning to drift down from the Commissioner’s office that pressure all up and down the line was coming on the squad and that they had better pay attention to what some of the assistant DA’s were saying. Later on, of course, this had ended with revelations that something over eighty percent of the squad was directly or indirectly involved in traffic themselves through actual handling or through payoffs and with the breakup of the squad. That had been wonderful. But this was a long time before that when the first rumblings were coming through and when Wulff had found that the few real busts he was getting were going into the precinct in the morning and coming out on bond in the afternoon, usually forfeiting bond and leaving the state. That had been pretty much par for the course, you expected this all the time but Wulff on an informant had busted a medium-grade seller in Harlem who was holding three or four kilos secreted through his pockets at the time of the bust, and, in the midst of the shakeups and the lectures from the Commissioner, he had been pretty surprised when this bust too had been released on five hundred dollars bond within twenty-four hours (he had spent a full day on the papers) and the lieutenant, when he had complained about it had told him to get lost, there were elements to this Wulff could never understand, he had nothing to do with the legalistics and why didn’t Wulff hit the streets anyway?

It had occurred to him then that he was probably in over his head, that even the easy and necessary cynicism which he had cultivated about narco was not sufficiently protective … no, if even in the face of the pressure coming through from headquarters they could pull a stunt like this, then what he had thought he understood about narco he did not. He understood nothing. All of his assumptions would have to be renegotiated and painfully; the squad appeared to be corrupt not because it was line of least resistance—shit, that part was human nature—but as a matter of conscious, persistent choice, like New York City itself it would stubbornly seize upon the worst alternatives available in any situation, those that would make the most gain for the least amount of people … no, he could not think about it. He did not want to pursue it any further. Yet it sickened him. It occurred to him then for the first time that the sickness might go beyond narco which he had known stunk almost from the beginning, it might go to the heart of the PD itself. It was the PD and its system which were rotten, narco being only a logical extension of this … and if that were true then there was nothing to do but to consider not only getting off the squad but out of PD itself.

That hurt. That would really hurt. Wulff liked being a cop. He still had a modicum of hope then.

He had talked about it with her, the only time, he seems to remember, that they had discussed his job. It must have been his apartment at night; they were spending almost all of their time together in his apartment around then but Marie with a kind of propriety and determination which he could not quite understand had never stayed all night with him … she was not going to wake up in his bed until it was her bed too she had said once with a smile and he had known enough not to push her further. But that had given them hours and hours together, sometimes it had been three or four in the morning when he had driven her to the little studio apartment in Queens which was nominally her own, and those hours were too important to waste in talking about anything as wasteful as narco. Except that this one time the need had overflowed within him and he had found himself ranting to her while she lay on the couch, a blanket drawn up just past her shoulders and had listened to him her eyes wide and luminous, her face impassive except for small convulsions of feeling when she could see his pain.

“Then you’ve got to get out,” she had said finally. “You’ve got to.”

“I guess maybe I do. Off the squad? Or out of the department?”

“You say that the department is rotten, that the squad is just one part of it. So that means the force itself, doesn’t it?”

He shook his head. She was very desirable and very receptive and he supposed that in some basic way she understood more about him than he did about himself but there seemed no way to communicate what he had to. “You see,” he said finally, “I wanted to be a cop. I thought that it would stink; I was never naive that way but I still thought that you could do a job. Because it’s a dirty, necessary job. But they won’t let you.”

“Won’t let you do a job?” she said, “then if that’s so, if you really feel it’s that way, then you’ve got to get out.”

He paused for a while, thought about this. He did not want to answer this too quickly. “I could,” he said, “and do what?”

“That’s ridiculous, Burt. There are hundreds of things you can do. You’re a capable man.”

“Oh I guess there are things I could do,” he said vaguely and let that hang in the air, leaning over, she seemed to stab at it with a hand, cup it like a butterfly, then sat up on the couch dislodging the blanket suddenly, disturbingly.

“You mean you don’t want to leave,” she said, “that’s what you mean.”

“Oh, in a way.”

“You like the job.”

“No I don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I put that wrong, didn’t I? Of course you don’t like the job; you hate it, what it’s doing to you all of the time. But you love what it could be. That’s the most important thing in the world to you, what it could be.”

“I’m not a reformer,” he said after a while, “I’m not a moralist, I don’t believe that you can change anything really except in the long run but—”

“But you are,” she said with a smile, “and you do, you do believe that it can be changed, you
are
a reformer. A moralist.” She pulled the blanket up around her again, then, shaking her head as if coming to a decision let it drop. He looked at her.

“Come here,” she said.

He stood, came over to her. He felt as if he were shuffling, as if his stride suddenly were that of a very weary, beaten old man although this could not possibly be so; he was thirty years old at this time, make it thirty-one, an age when the first signs of physical limits might be sensed but then only intermittently and in illness or at the long end of the day; actually you retained almost everything that you had been and added to that knowledge and a sense of pace. Athletes had their best years in the early thirties … he had no reason to feel so old. But he did, he felt old, he felt in stride all the intimations of his decline.

She gathered him to her and held him for a while. He let her breast rest on, then in his mouth, moving slowly against her, without passion for a time. “Poor Burt,” she said, “poor Burt.”

He said nothing. It felt good, finally, not to have to say anything, not to have to defend himself, to struggle. He felt the beginnings of passion, instead, as he moved against her.

“Poor Burt,” she said again, “poor, poor Burt, you want to clean up the world. You want to clean it up all yourself my baby and it cannot be done, it simply can’t be done … but you know that too, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said against her, “I know that too.”

And then for a long, long time there was nothing else to say; nothing else necessary. They told it all to one another first subtly, then vigorously, and finally with cries.

That had been the only time he had discussed business with her.

Thinking could only drive you straight up a wall in a situation like this. It was no habit to get into.

He did nothing; he stayed in his room, wandered through the slick, empty corridors of the hotel, tried to consider his situation. It did not look promising. True the observation here was loose, they were not on top of him, they were watching him from distances; but on the other hand he would have to be crazy to think that Calabrese’s men were going to let him get far. He could take the tourist route of course, maybe they wouldn’t object to that—go out and inspect the Incan ruins, what the brochures called the mysterious destroyed civilization whose artifacts would probably outlast anything in modern-day Lima. That was what the brochures said anyway. What a great prospect: to start off by trying to break the international drug trade and to end up wandering around Incan ruins with a bunch of tourists, waiting for a Chicago hood to decide exactly when he would be disposed of and in what manner. That would be one wonderful outcome.

Wulff stayed around the hotel. The hell with it. He wanted nothing to do with this, it was not his country. All of these South American countries were the same all right: the technology superimposed on the poverty led to repression and revolution by turns, but nothing really changed. It would always be the same. The In-cans knew that; maybe that was why they had given up on the whole thing.

He tried to work out his moves, tried to think of what options were open to him, but he could not avoid the knowledge, finally faced up to it, that his options were closed off. This was how it all ended; they had him in a box. He tried to be resigned. Hell, he had certainly done more to hurt them than any ten men had ever done; but it was not comforting. Wulff came to a realization. He had liked his work. On its level it had been satisfying. He hated to give it up.

Then on the third day, toward the end, he walked into his hotel room and there were the two assassins.

Things moved pretty well after that.