Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare (9 page)

The helicopter which was supposed to take him out with the shipment had been sabotaged and had gone down with the pilots in the mountains on their way to pick it up. Therefore he would have to get the stuff out of the mountains on foot. There was no other way. That at least Wulff was able to gather from one of the natives who was able to speak English, but the English was halting and convoluted and he was not able to get much further than that. What he gathered was that Calabrese had called in the heavy reinforcements, that Stavros’s plans had fallen through and that Wulff was very much on his own. That was no surprise. Of course, it didn’t help matters too much either.

The man who passed the shipment on to him and who spoke English was an old, old man with a beaten face, a face long since smashed into impermeability. These people appeared to live in a small settlement of some kind behind the tourist city of Cuzco, appeared to have blended into the landscape and were living with little more than stone-age implements. But for a product of a culture seemingly without technology of any sort the old man seemed surprisingly sophisticated and all of them, at least those that came by and who spoke to him, seemed to know a good deal. Wulff wondered about the setup—he wouldn’t be surprised if they were all employees of Stavros and if this was not some kind of blind, a thriving little network tucked in behind Cuzco manned by people who appeared to be the most poverty-stricken and hopeless kind of natives—but he guessed that it did not matter. None of it mattered except getting the stuff out of here. The old man made that very clear to him, not that Wulff didn’t know it well himself already.

He retched twice in the thin air, the second time, after his conversation with the old man a little blood had come out of his nostrils mingling with the sputum, and it had been at that point that the old man told him that it would be best to lie down for a while; there was certainly no getting out of Cuzco before nightfall anyway. So they had made Wulff a pallet in an empty tent thrown up against a pile of slag and he had laid in the tent for a long time, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not, coming from between the flaps a couple of times to check the terrain, seeing only the slow passage of the natives in front of him in what appeared to be a self-sufficient settlement. Two miles to the north, just below, was the tourist mill, the cable cars, the guides and the lost city of the Incas but that was merely gilt;
this
, goddammit, this right here was the lost city of the Incas and he was in the middle of it. He was a living artifact.

They had given him the shit in an innocuous-appearing burlap sack. Wulff had looked in it immediately, suspicious of course, wanting to see if Stavros was playing some kind of elaborate trick on him or, worse yet, if the people down here did not know shit from the truth; but the first look, the first careful test with a moistened finger had convinced him: Stavros knew exactly what he was doing. This was beyond a doubt the purest, the most extravagantly clean shit he had ever had contact with. It was unadulterated, in its most natural state, ready to be juiced, cut, bound, knifed; and market value was pretty much of a fiction when you got into an area of this sort but, yes, the street value here would be well into a million, maybe multiples of that. It all depended on how it was cut.
That
was what predicated market value even more than the original worth of shipment … how much and what kind of adulteration would be going into it. The peasants of Cuzco had done their job. They had turned out a product of inestimable worth. Now it was up to Stavros and his agents where it went from there.

If indeed this was Stavros’s shipment. You simply did not know; he might be handling this for someone else. In neither case did it matter; the problem was to get the drugs out, get them out of this fucking country and back to the States. Once in the States it was a new situation altogether. The thought had occurred to Wulff that once he was back onto his own turf, if the drugs were still in his possession and he had the luck to work it through that way, it would be a new ball game entirely. What would Stavros do if he charted his own course from there? The best disposition for those drugs would be at the bottom of the El Paso. Or maybe he could play this by instinct, could use them as bait to suck out Calabrese and kill the old son of a bitch. That would be worthwhile, killing Calabrese. If he did nothing else, if he had done nothing else, that would almost justify his odyssey in itself, getting
rid
of that ruined, terrible, corrupt old man.

But you had to take it step by step and now he would be all kinds of a fool, a complete fool to calculate what he would do if he got the drugs out of the country. There was no saying that he would get them out of the country. Calabrese’s men had almost killed him twice; now, it seemed, they had sabotaged the helicopter that would have taken him out. You could not, against an enemy like this, make any deductions on your future course whatsoever, except to accept the fact that you would have to go step by step. Obviously, the old man regretted his mistake. He regretted it severely; he wished that he had killed Wulff face-to-face. Well, perhaps he would have that chance once again. Perhaps they would have the opportunity to meet face-to-face. Wulff looked forward to that; no matter how dim the chance, it was at least a possibility and worth pursuing.

He went from retching to uneasy, clotted dreams in which Marie Calvante rose from the floor of the tenement and greeted him with open, astonished eyes, telling him once again of her love, and on the floor of that tenement he took her, bearing her back to the planks again and giving back to her what she had offered him and more as well; he passed from that dream to a muddled conception of the girl in San Francisco whom he had fucked, who had restored him at least partially to himself and the two images muddled, however dimly. The sexual content of the dreams gutted him and passed him onto another terrain completely in which he moved into asepsis, confronted by a bleak, gray panorama of the faces of all the men who had tried to kill him, from New York to Boston to San Francisco or Havana, and these dreams no less than any of the others left him quivering and spent, too much happening in too little time, a compression of incident which he could not understand, let alone handle. And then somewhere in the middle of one of those dreams, a dream in which he had confronted Albert Maraco in his Long Island home and once again on a burning staircase had killed him, in the middle of this dream he arose from it the way that a penitent after a long time, his grief done, might come from an altar, coming into all the cool, deadly spaces of the tent in which he lay and found that the old man who had talked with him was leaning over him with a mingled expression of compassion and inquiry, his eyes interested yet somehow curiously dead. There was a welter of experience behind those eyes which Wulff could hardly grasp, let alone appreciate. “Are you stronger?” the old man said and then without pausing, “I hope you are stronger, because it is time to go.”

“Yes,” Wulff said. He came off the pallet slowly, feeling strength reconstitute itself in all of the crevices of his body. “Yes, I’m stronger now. I think—”

“Night,” the old man said, “night is always better in which to travel. Also, we have reports that your presence here is extremely dangerous.”

“To whom? To me or to you?”

“To us,” the old man said, “of course to us. We are not concerned with you, we are concerned with us.” Some complex failure of language seemed to overtake him; he struggled for sound. “You must realize we have our own culture,” he said finally, “our own—”

“Your own way of life to protect. Your own interests, your own people.”

“What’s that?” the old man said.

“Nothing,” Wulff said, “nothing at all.” He looked outside tentatively, then came back, brushed sleep and dust from him in a series of motions, then picked up the sack. It had a faint warmth. The old man looked at it implacably. “How am I supposed to get out of here?” he said.

“We will arrange an escort at least part of the way.”

“But how?”

The old man shrugged. “The roads would be extremely dangerous,” he said. “There is only one way in and one way out if you go by the road. You will have to go through the mountains.”

“I figured as much,” Wulff said, “but how am I to get through the mountain?”

“By horseback.”

Wulff hefted the sack. “I should have known that too,” he said, “but that’s going to be a problem. You see my experience doesn’t cover any time with the mounted police. Somehow I missed that one.”

“What’s that?” the old man said. He looked genuinely puzzled yet eager if he could to derive some information. “I do not quite understand you.”

“That’s all right,” Wulff said, “that’s perfectly all right. I don’t understand any of it, either. I don’t even think that I understand myself.”

“That is a common problem,” the old man said after a pause.

“Isn’t it?” Wulff said.

Stavros said, “This is my room. This is my hotel. Get out.”

The man with the gun leaned against the wall in an easy, casual posture and said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to get out and you don’t control anything anymore.”

“I mean it,” Stavros said. He held himself in check. He held himself from doing something foolish, disastrous, stupid, something like going to the desk drawer in a lunge to try to seize his gun. This man was no fool; Stavros would never complete the action. He would get his brains blown out for his trouble. The only way around this situation was to talk his way through, but he did not know how much talking he could do at this moment. His mouth felt dry, impacted, his hands fluttering. He looked at his hands with almost clinical detachment, noting the fear that was manifested through the tremor. Odd. So it could get to him also. Philosophy and resignation be damned; he was as frightened of dying as anyone else. All right. He would remember that, he would remember that for the next time. He did not hold life so cheaply after all.

No one could hold life cheaply. No matter how painful you might have found it, no matter what the distance you cultivated, it was still the only thing you knew. The other thing, death, was an abstraction. Stavros had seen heroic men—men whom he knew to be powerful, self-contained, in control of themselves—whimpering like puppies at the moment of death because nothing in the handling of life affected the ability to manage death. It was not to be held against them. It was no disgrace.

“Put the gun away,” he said to the man. One of Calabrese’s operatives of course. He could be none other. But he was a different sort from the types that Calabrese had sent to the hotel in the past; this man did not have the look of being a freelancer or stringer hired out, but of direct payroll. Top troops. Top operative. He had misjudged, Stavros had, that was all. He did not think that the old man would take the trouble to move and certainly he had never pictured him moving this quickly.

“I’m not going to put the gun away,” the man said. He looked at it with the absent affection with which a man might confront a friendly dog. “I’m going to kill you with it. Your trouble is that you’re stupid, Stavros. We know what you’ve been doing here for a long time, but as long as it didn’t interfere we let it go. The old man is a generous person. But now you’re getting out of range.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You wanted to turn a miserable little operation, that was your affair,” the man said. “Live and let live, that’s the old man’s philosophy. But you didn’t want that Stavros. You wouldn’t let us live.” He gestured with the gun. “So I’m going to kill you.”

“No you won’t,” Stavros said with a sudden positiveness. He looked up, directly confronted the man for the first time. The man was somewhat younger than he had appeared on first impression, maybe only in his early thirties; it was merely his eyes and unshaven appearance that had given him the aspect of an older man. He was younger than Stavros had taken him to be, and that meant that he would be less certain. Always, inevitability, youth could be equated with uncertainty. That was a rule of judgment by which he would stand. “You’re not going to kill me,” he said, “because if you were, you already would have. You wouldn’t have talked it out. You’re here to bluff me, intimidate me, and it won’t work.”

“Yes, it will work.”

“No, it won’t,” Stavros said. Keeping control of himself, forcing an assurance that he was trying to draw from the air and push inside himself, he opened the desk drawer, looked at the loaded pistol within. He did not reach for it at the moment, merely considered it. “Get out of here,” he said, “get out of my room. Get out of my hotel.”

“No,” the man said but something shattered in his complexion. There was an impression of sweat on his forehead. “Don’t make any moves, Stavros. Don’t go inside that drawer.”

“Of course I’m going to go inside that drawer. I’m going to take out my pistol and shoot you.”

“No you won’t.”

“Yes I will. You won’t shoot me. You’ve got your orders to bluff, to threaten, frighten … but you don’t have a kill order. If you did you would have already. I know about death,” Stavros said. “I know everything about death; I was living it before you were born.” He reached toward the desk drawer. “Get out of here,” he said.

The man pointed the gun at him. “You’re a fool,” he said, “you don’t know what you’re dealing with. Get your hand away from there!”

“No,” Stavros said. He was very frightened but matters were in progress. He was gambling everything on his instincts but this was not the first time that he had done so. When you came right down to it, a man had only his instincts on which to draw. You could talk all you wanted to about logic, reason, causes, consequence, but that was all deceit. Typical American deceit; the pushing away of the irrational when it was the irrational on which men’s lives rested. That was why America was going insane, because they had denied the irrational for too long and now it was reaching out into everything. But he, Stavros, had accepted the irrational as long as he remembered. Man was a creature of the blood, the blood was mysterious and corrupt, it moved in strange and various directions, always coming back upon itself. Could you pull a spoon of water from the sea, replace it, spoon out exactly the same water? No more than that could you pluck a motive or a reason from the stew of the unconscious. It was merely there. It was there all the time. “No,” he said again, “I’m not going to stop.” His hand was on the gun now. It curled into his hand in a gentle, familiar way. He had been feeling this gun all his life; it communicated little waves of pleasure into his palm. He hoisted it, looked at the man across the desk.

“See?” he said, “and now we are equal.”

The man’s eyes were bleak and serious. He held his own gun steadily, leveled on Stavros’s forehead. “That was very foolish,” he said.

“It was not foolish. Nothing is foolish. You have no orders to kill me and therefore would be in serious trouble if you did. You can take no action against me. Get out of my room.”

“It would have been better the other way,” the man said, the shape of his face, the arc of his mouth not changing. “We thought that we could reason with you. We thought that you could give us some information.”

“I have no information to give you.”

“You have a lot of information to give us,” the man said. “We would like to know where Wulff went, when he will reappear, what you have assigned him to do specifically. We are much less interested in you than in Wulff, as you might suspect. You could have told us that.”

“I will tell you nothing,” Stavros said. Some of the fear was easing. He had been in terror at the time he had moved for the gun, he would admit that … it was not pleasant to face the prospect of your imminent death as you performed the only action that might possibly save your life; poised that way, on the edge between life and death there had been a sheer, knife-thrust of terror which had skewered him apart, bisecting him at the crevice between those two possibilities.

But now, holding the gun, holding the situation against himself, he had the feeling that he had passed through the crisis. This young gunman, this messenger from Calabrese would not kill him here because he would not risk the loss of his own life. Life was too precious for this young man; Stavros could play on the necessity this one had to hang on, a necessity which would go far beyond Calabrese. “I will tell you nothing,” Stavros said again and clicked the chambers ominously. “Get out of here now.”

The gunman shook his head. He sighed. “You understand you give me no alternative,” he said. “You’re calling on me to kill you.”

“I’ll kill you too.”

“You won’t be reasonable,” the gunman said and sighed again. His eyes blinked, he shook his head and seemed then to leap over the void of a decision, came out on the other side, kicking for balance but finding himself. His eyes cleared as if with relief. “The trouble with all you goddamned Germans is that you’re the least reasonable people who ever lived. You talk a lot about rationality but it comes down to blood-stubbornness and mysticism.”

“I agree with that,” Stavros said. “I agree with that. I have not been a rational man since 1945. For the last thirty years I have accepted fully the truth of what you say, that life is a mystery, a dream, a disaster, that it can be understood only in terms of its uncertainties and irrationalities. You tell me nothing,” he said, “you offer me no analysis, you offer me no judgments, you offer me nothing that I have not long, long since understood,” and he raised the gun then, and with a little cocking motion pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit the gunman hard in the stomach and with one groan of astonishment, he lurched toward the floor and Stavros was already falling out of the way of the expected return shot … but even though he had calculated everything, even taken into account the pain of what that shot might be, he had not calculated in any way whatsoever the pain of what hit him. It felt like a brick hit his forehead, tearing it open, and even as he became aware of the ringing pain, the feeling of spreading, oozing breakage above the neck, he saw the blood which sprang like a curtain in front of his eyes, a sheet of blood ripping down from his forehead and spreading its way in the ledge of consciousness.
I’m dead
, Stavros thought,
my God, he’s killed me
and a far different part of him on another planet, the part of him that held the gun, tried to pull the trigger, deposit another shot, but somehow he could not connect brain and hand in the old, smooth familiar way. The command was blocked at his armpit, fibers of pain opening like a scar in that place and then, as he sat there paralyzed, the second shot caught him in the windpipe, in the bloodiest part of the neck.

Now Stavros felt himself overcome by his blood; he felt that the blood was coming not from two but from twenty parts of himself, rivers of blood roiling over him like implication and in the center of it a dim mewing, the sound of some animal in whimpering distress which he thought for a moment was the man across his desk but which became apparent to him was not; it was himself. He was crying as his life ebbed away and he was able to look at that in an almost clinical way, detached for all the hurt that seemed separate from him like an animal: he did not think that he cared for his life that much. It had not occurred to him in all those years since 1945 when he had given up upon all basic assumptions of life and had merely consented to a survival contract, which was entirely different … it had not occurred to him that he cared for his life that much; yet apparently he had. He did. He did not want to die. Well, be that as it may, like it or not, he was dying. Something that was not aqueous came against his forehead and he knew it was the ledge of desk as he plummeted to the floor. Lying on the floor then he smelled the odors of death and corruption coming out of him thickly, roiling further with the blood to pitch him to some level below consciousness, or perhaps it was above consciousness. Anyway it was at some point beyond the situation where he could both assess what was happening to him and at the same time not care. He did not care. He had now been dying for a long time; perhaps this was merely another level of dying for which he had been long prepared. He did not care. He did not care. The man whom he had shot was mewling in the background just as he was, but the cries were of no significance. It was merely another presence at a point from which he had ascended.

Dying Stavros heard bands: dying Stavros heard the music again and the shouting of the crowds in the great square; dying, Stavros saw 1933 again and it was good, it was everything that he remembered it as having been except that this time he saw it two ways: young as he had been, old as he was now, age and youth linking in the remembered once again. And for one perilous moment standing in that recollected square, listening to all the sounds that were coming from the speakers that ringed them, stemming out like flowers from that far place, for one perilous moment he heard the voice again and then it came crashing upon him: the blood, the chambers, the bare fields, the deaths and the deaths assaulted his second death. And so rising and falling, heaving and billowing like the sea itself Stavros died and for all the difference it made—this was his last insight—why, for all the difference it made he might as well have still been alive. What was the difference? Who cared? What sensible man, looking at the sweep of existence, could find any consequence in whether something as inconsequential as Stavros lived or died, prospered or withered away?