Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust (3 page)

Wulff had been a New York police narco for three years. They had thought that they were doing him a big favor on his return from Vietnam, giving him a job with the ones who were considered to be the golden boys of the department in those days. Only the vice squad could come near it for sheer fun in the sun but the vice squad was in the process, in those late sixties, of falling apart whereas narco just got bigger and better all the time. J. Edgar was gearing up his Federal Bureau for the final assault on the international drug merchants at about that time, and surprisingly the new federal money and interest just made things better for everyone in the racket. There was no competition between the bureaucracies, there was just fallout.

Wulff was on the squad for three years. Considering his state of mind when he got the assignment it might have been something of a record; longest time in a job held in highest state of revulsion.

He had come back from mid-sixties Saigon in a total rage, a rage which was only partly compounded of war fatigue, mostly it was the clear intimation that here it all began. Saigon was the living, beating heart of the world’s corruption, and it was this heart that was being used by the blood of America to test out the most advanced forms of death. Here funnelled the poisons and from them the poisons spread out again through the trunk and limbs of the world and much of the poison was junk. Saigon was awash in drugs.

Wulff had seen whole platoons wrecked on hard shit; he had seen hundreds of men, boys really, who had been sent to death by shit, and all the time that he was living and seeing this and keeping his own hands off in horror the trade was going on. He could see its map streaked out in a thousand Saigon faces every day and when he came back to New York, finally, it was with the feeling that he would either have to single-handedly put shit out of the world, or failing that, would have to get as far from the racket as possible so that he would not have to think about it. In more ordinary circumstances he would have gone the latter route; Wulff was angry but he was not
that
angry, and war did things to a lot of people’s heads that eventually got pushed away back in civilian life. Or drove them to suicide.

Wulff might have settled for the comfortable, easy way but narco wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t escape the war frame of mind. New York
was
war. He was in the middle of it every duty day.

He saw the informers: smiling, empty men with the shit stashed in their own back pockets, the informers who were working arm in arm
with
the arm as the saying went, selling their brothers on the streets down the line for a nickel bag and a little less heat. He saw the periodic sweeps when the inspectors would move in from headquarters in response to the newspaper campaigns demanding arrest, and the narcos would go out to pick up truckloads of smiling, willing, nodding informants. In with them today, out by the middle of the next morning, all charges dropped for lack of evidence. He saw the other empty, smiling men in their big cars cruising by the distribution depots at midnight, a last check before turning in for the wife and kiddies and home. He saw the look on the lieutenant’s face when a rookie had been stupid enough to have busted one of the Eldorado men. Wulff got a good taste of all of it.

Well, Vietnam and Harlem; they were both places in the same city. When the dusk began to crawl they even looked the same; combat zones. It made no difference, shit was the name of the game, over here, over there. Fight to keep America free for shit. Twenty-forty a bag or fight. Don’t give up the shit. It got Wulff angry, all right. It got him pretty damned mad.

Finally, he got mad enough to bust an informant in a bar for possession. He collared the son of a bitch and took him into the local precinct. The informant must have had six decks sticking out from his jacket and back pockets. Smiling, nodding, bullshitting Wulff along, just daring him to do something because he knew that Wulff was the man and the one thing that the man never did was to break the rules. Wulff wasn’t going to put up with it. He had his limits, too. So he brought the informant into the precinct and lost sight of him for four hours. He was sitting around the record room, filling out his reports like a fool, bullshitting with the sergeant, until the lieutenant came in finally and said that Wulff had made a false arrest. No evidence. All evidence had disappeared. How could Wulff have brought in a man who was not holding? The lieutenant was very serious when he said this; he was even able to meet Wulff’s eyes. If there were any drugs in the informant’s possession he must have managed to ditch them somehow, somewhere between the bar and the precinct when Wulff had not been watching, the lieutenant said. Wulff had been watching. The lieutenant was a liar. Still, what was he going to do about that? Bust the lieutenant himself?

There would be an investigation, the narco supervisor told Wulff when he came on for his next TDY. Something about Wulff fucking up. In the meantime, though, they had no choice; false arrest was a very bad thing for the department’s image and they were going to send him back to a patrol car. The narco supervisor at least had had the decency not to meet Wulff’s eyes when he went through this but maybe he was not the old hand that the lieutenant was.

Well, going back to a patrol car was a bitch as they conceived it but it was all right with Wulff. He would have taken a beat for that matter except that about that time the department was phasing out the beat policy. Patrol was fine with him. After three years in narco, hustling family disputes and bar hassles, delivering a couple of babies or pegging numbers, runners would have looked like a good clean job, and he found himself looking forward to the assignment as if it was actually some kind of an honor. Which in fact it was. It was fairly rare to get bumped down in the PD for making any kind of an arrest.

But the gig that he had been looking forward to turned out to be his first and last TOY pulled that way because on duty, riding sidesaddle with a black rookie named David Williams, Wulff had stepped into a blind tip about an OD’d girl in a tenement on West 93rd Street. When he, as the sidesaddle, had sprinted up the five flights of the premises to do the honors he found a girl named Marie Calvante lying in the middle of the room, absolutely OD’d out, all twenty-three years of her, her eyes fishlike on the ceiling trip.

Seeing a pretty white girl OD’d out in circumstances like that would have been bad enough for Wulff, hardened ex-narco, combat veteran and all that, but the Calvante call had been even tougher because, unfortunately, Wulff knew her. He knew her very well. In fact, he and Marie Calvante had been engaged to be married within a couple of months, earlier if he could push her, and it was hard for him to believe that she was lying on the floor of that tenement unless someone had put her there. Someone personally interested, not so much in the girl, but in Wulff. It all tied in pretty clearly, he thought, to the informant bust. Cause and effect Chain reaction. It was nice to think that at least this was one murder in New York which wasn’t senseless.

All things considered, Wulff had taken it pretty well. Pretty professionally. He hadn’t cracked up, he hadn’t pulled any dramatic shit like throwing himself across the body, he hadn’t sworn vendetta. That kind of crap was for the movies. All that he had done was to move out of the room right away, almost immediately after David Williams, the rookie, had come upstairs to find out what was taking Wulff so long for verification. He had told Williams very quietly where they could take their police department and stick it and then he had gone onto the streets past the patrol car (Williams had left the keys in, the motor still running, pretty stupid, Wulff had noted professionally) and chucked his badge and credentials into a sewer. In this way he had resigned from the department immediately without bothering to give them the benefit of notice. Loss of pension, of course; he would have to swing his own way after the twenty. But Wulff did not expect to get anywhere near the easy twenty now. He doubted if he would make eleven.

He went out to murder the international drug trade.

He had wanted to do it ever since Vietnam. That was for sure. For a long time a lot of things had held him back, all of those things wrapped together under that deadly, all-inclusive word
system
: the good twenty was system and busting the informants was system; the thirteen grand a year plus increments and benefits and graft was system, too and system with a capital
S
had been the gentle girl named Marie who had really hooked him in with pictures of the house they were going to buy, the babies they would make. Nobody in the house-buying, baby-making bit was going to attack the shit-dealers when he had something like that to protect, but the murder of the girl after what they had taught him in the precinct house the night before carried the message for him pretty well. They weren’t going to let him play after all. He was going to have to go outside of it.

Well, he thought, why not? Why not fulfill an old ambition now that the furniture of life had been carried out for him? He might as well try to put all of them out of business. One at a time. Face to face.

The funny thing was that they all denied it.

As Wulff cut his path across the continent, starting in New York, sweeping his way to the coast and then back to Boston, into Havana and Vegas, out the pipe to Chicago and then to Peru, spreading death in bright, broad strokes, there were a lot of system men he met, most of them at the point of his gun or theirs, and none of them would admit that the organization, if there was such a thing, had had a thing to do with Marie Calvante. They had never heard of her. It must have been ten different people was the consensus, because no one in the organization killed anyone on the sidelines, particularly relatives or close friends of antagonists because that could only put things into a newer and uglier context where it could, by implication, become open season on everyone. Marie Calvante had been an unfortunate accident, then. Some freelancer might have done it, maybe the girl had secretly been a junkie and ran into very bad luck on West 93rd Street. But Wolff should understand the protocol of the trade the systems men had advised, averred, insisted, articulated, slobbered, begged, gibbered across desks, back seats of cars, open fields. Wulff should know that the organization had its own code of honor more stringent than anything in the outside world.

Wulff killed them anyway.

What the hell, they were all liars, and responsible for the girl or not, they had killed a lot of innocent people. Directly or indirectly. It was a good philosophy. There was nothing wrong with killing when the enemy was dealing from a stack of cards smeared with blood.

There had been a girl in San Francisco who had given him back a few particles of life; there had been a copter pilot in Havana who had turned out to be a bastard but had taught Wulff a few things first; there was the rookie cop, David Williams, who had pitched in and made himself useful a couple of times before he got hit in the stomach checking out a methadone center in central Harlem. What would cautious Williams make of his precious system now? Wulff wondered. So every now and then you met a few people who were not as bad as most but essentially it had been his own trail. He had played out his own hand without expectation of help and in the conviction that he was going to die soon anyway; why not, then, take all those he could down with him? Peru had been the roughest of all the stops so far, but he had even managed to get out of Peru with a big bag of shit, so what the hell, what the hell indeed … maybe his luck would hold to the end of the trail after all. But Peru had been a rough one.

Peru had damned well not been on his list to start with.

Peru had been the decision of a Chicago boss named Calabrese. Chicago had been on Wullf’s list all right and finally in Chicago he had run up against something really major league, something that possibly was not within his capacity to handle, although he did not want to truly accept this. Chicago, in any event, had been the stomping ground of an old, deadly man named Calabrese, a man in his early seventies who lived in an estate on Lake Michigan and who was so far ahead of the rest of them that he could almost operate out in the open. He virtually did. Calabrese had insisted to Wulff that he, Calabrese, was simply a legitimate businessman trying to make it in a very tough world. He had almost killed Wulff twice, this legitimate businessman. The second time, locked in his office with Wulff, he had laughed in his face, said that he guessed he would not take Wulff out of the game for the time being because he was interesting, he gave Calabrese something of a charge and a challenge just knowing that he was around and functioning.

The idea, Calabrese, that deadly old man, said, was to get Wulff out of the picture for a while but only to a place where he would remain under Calabrese’s control. Peru had been the choice then. He had dumped Wulff into the Hotel Deal in Peru where Wulff had met an ex-Nazi named Stavros who was trying to work his own figures around Calabrese, and although Stavros had been Wulff’s exit ticket from the country, Wulff had been the ex-Nazi’s undoing. Stavros was dead. His pilot who had flown Wulff into El Paso was dead, too.

Almost everyone with whom Wulff had been dealing was dead, come to think of it.

Still, that was one of the breaks of the game. If you administered death you were going to get caught up in it, sure as hell. Wulff found that he didn’t mind it that much. After awhile, for high purposes or low, killing could be almost as much fun as sex if you put it in the proper perspective … which was easy. He had nothing, personally, against killing. As a tactic against these clowns it beat all hell out of busting informants in prearranged sweeps to get headquarters and the newspapers off your neck.

Wulff, carrying a big bag of shit with Stavros’s odor still on it, cut his way out of the border town of El Paso. He had a pretty good idea of where he wanted to go and who he wanted to deal with. But the girl came first. Los Angeles came first. Too much action, too much impacted in too little; he needed a stopover before he could gird himself to take on Chicago again.