Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder (4 page)

“Get off your ass,” Calabrese said and the man twitched, jumped, and came off the chair and into a posture of attention, ashes scattering throughout the room. Calabrese looked at him with disgust: a small, repulsive man who knew nothing but dim fantasies of violence, closed his eyes and dreamed for entertainment. Then like a gong the thought came within him: you made him this way. He’s your responsibility. He’s exactly what you wanted him to be.

Too much. Too fucking much. “We’re going to Miami,” Calabrese said harshly and feeling returned to the man’s face, it opened into something both pompous and fearful, the two emotions chasing one another like dogs across the panes of the face, the features riven into those two parts as he groped uncertainly for an attitude and then the man said, “Miami. That’s all right with me, we go to Miami. What’s doing in Miami?” and then before Calabrese could answer the man had already turned from him shrugging in contrived disinterest, walking toward a corner of the room. “Miami,” he said again.

Miami. Chicago, Athens, New York, Lisbon, Hawaii, London, Reno and Nevada. This man, the men like him, would follow him everywhere, Calabrese thought, because he was paid to do so; the others, the girl and the black man, would follow because they had no choice … but who, who he wondered would follow him for love? You’re getting soft you old fool, Calabrese thought and then he went determinedly through the door to assemble himself for the trip. The girl had had something to do with it. The girl had reached something within him that he had thought had been dead a long time.

Pity it wasn’t.

Wulff thought about the history of the railroads in America. Their history was complex and interesting like almost anything in this damned country, riddled with ambiguities and eventually, it seemed, possessed of failure. In the middle of the nineteenth century the railroads had spread across the country, joined the frontier, moved the technology of the country and made its industry possible as the century lurched into the turning point; in the early twentieth century the railroads had been kings of everything, everyone moved on the railroads (those that moved that was), so did the goods … and then Lindbergh flew across the ocean and suddenly everything was changed; airplanes became a practical means of conveyance and meanwhile Henry Ford and the General Motors’ assembly lines were knocking out thousand-dollar cars a thousand a day for the common man … and all of a sudden the railroads were dead. Finished. Of course they took another thirty years to die.

They still moved the freight of course, but in their anxiety to get the profitable freight business and not have to be bothered with passengers, they did everything within their power to make transportation by railroad as miserable as humanly possible; they succeeded and by the beginning of the nineteen-sixties the only passengers were commuters, those who linked to the railroads and their freight for short, stifling, miserable hops into the cities which sustained them … but also in the nineteen-sixties the truckers had taken over. Freight movement by truck was cheaper, faster and more convenient than railroad; it could go door to door, it did not have to stand expensively at some station twenty miles from the central city until connections could be arranged … and at that point the railroads found themselves in very difficult straits indeed. They had long since driven off the passengers for freight but now the freight had gone away from them as well. The bankruptcies began. By the end of the decade every major railroad in the country was in bankruptcy, receivership or rapidly heading that way. It looked pretty bad. Railroad presidents were writing suicide notes with the same floridity and dash with which stockbrokers had been throwing themselves from buildings four decades before that. Considering that they represented the tradition of the country as it had ended a hundred years earlier, it was pretty depressing. It was also depressing for the commuters, most of whom had no alternative to riding on the bankruptcy specials. It was agreed that it looked pretty terrible. Some of the commuters were even in the railroad business themselves, to say nothing of the automobile or aviation-related trade. The government moved in.

The government reckoned that if the railroad was part of the great and ongoing tradition of America, the spike that joined the continent and so on, then it was a pretty piss-poor idea to let the railroads slide into oblivion, lousy public relations and so on. Also a large percentage of commuters could vote and swung the balance of power in the suburbs that were beginning to control the country. So the government in its generosity conceived of a plan to subsidize the railroads, trying to bring them back into the passenger trade—the freight business was already pretty hopeless and besides the government was deep in hock to the teamsters union—by pouring large amounts of money into them to provide for more amenities, faster trains, better intercity connections and so on. Of course none of these improvements had much to do with the commuter trade but then again that was government for you.

They called this new program
Am Track
, short for American Track, Wulff supposed, a government program which partially subsidized the railroads, and their flagship liners were the huge, bright, new passenger trains that sped at a hundred miles an hour between the major cities. These trains not only had the usual historical amenities of railroad travel … porters, bar cars, sleeping compartments, shoeshine men, partitions and what-not … they had separate cars linked onto the trains which accommodated passenger cars so that aged, fearful or lazier drivers could put their cars right up on the ramp and have all of the advantages of car travel to a distant city and possession of the car at destination that was, without the narcoleptic experience of driving on the turnpikes, an experience which would eventually lead even the nonaged, nonfearful, energetic drivers right down the trap to insanity. It was the perfect mating of government and private enterprise; private enterprise having proven itself incompetent enough to leech onto government funds for its survival, the government cheerfully and uncompromisingly throwing the money in because it was easier to do that then to take a long look at the country which the post-railroad era had become. Bring back the railroads and restore, wholly, the past. The past was always better than the present, to say nothing of the unimaginable future. Everyone benefitted here.

The Amtrak train that went from Chicago to Miami was called the
Floridian
, and Wulff was on it, sitting alone now in the bar car, traveling through the American night at a one-hundred-and-five mile an hour clip.

The car that he had loaded on the
Floridian
was a 1964 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with cruise control, air conditioning and autotronic eye. Wulff had an affinity for ruined Cadillacs, that was for sure. It was the fourth or fifth, he had lost count, that he had picked up during his Odyssey. There was something about all of this spoiled grandeur, all of this marvelous, rotting junk which excited him in a way that no new Cadillac could: here, seven to ten years later, you got right down to the rotten guts of America itself and saw it clear. America was an old Cadillac, all right; it was gilt and plastic long past its time and now, in the empty spaces, one could see the thin, luminous edge of its demolition peeking through. He loved the ‘64 Coupe de Ville. He did not love it quite enough to drive it down to Miami; he put it on the train this time and hoped for the best. The trans was wrecked, wouldn’t downshift at all and slipped in high gear, the carburetor was plugged on at least one side and the power steering made noises even at idle … no, he could not drive this thing down to Miami. One trip to Los Angeles in a ‘64 Sedan de Ville had been as close as he wanted to get to the testing edge with an old Cadillac.

But the train was fine. Amtrak was fine. The car was behind him somewhere in the night, he was in the bar car putting a load on, the sack was locked up somewhere in a cubicle. He had stolen the Cadillac from a street on the South Side of Chicago; the moment he had seen its red glitter, the paint almost phosphorescent in the darkness, he had known that this was the one for him. But he knew the limits of his obsession; he wasn’t going to drive this damned thing to Miami. Not in one piece, he wasn’t.

Wulff sat in the bar car and listened to the sounds of the train and the night slowly overcoming him, an experience which two generations of Americans now had not known, the peace and isolation of a train at night. The bar car was deserted except for a heavy man toward the front who was slumped over in his chair looking meditatively at a glass of scotch. He had not moved in the thirty minutes that Wulff had been sitting in the car; drunk, probably, or contemplating that species of doom and possibility which trains in the night could bring upon one. Come to think of it, the incumbent President had once talked about listening to the trains at night when he was a young boy. Maybe that had given him the weary and contemplative frame of mind that had led him to declare the war on drugs at the Mexican border, to say nothing of his other many political innovations. Wulff sat with the gin glass in his hand, turning it absently, letting his mind drift away from modern-day politics and the disastrous war on drugs—which had merely escalated the graft changing hands at the border, that was the only difference, that and the uniforms of the men taking the payoffs—and onto his destination and what would happen then.

It was all drawing to a close. That sense of finality had begun to steal on him in the cab of the vast truck carrying him east, a feeling that this was one of the last times that he would be travelling the highways at night, clearly the last time that he would be going in this direction. It was coming to a close; he knew it during the second conversation with Calabrese when the certainty in the man’s voice had matched some certainty in Wulff’s; this was the clearly defined end that they were coming to. Then, saying goodbye to the trucker at the huge turnpike gateway to Chicago, all the roads merging at the airport at the great sign WELCOME TO CHICAGO: RICHARD J. DALEY, MAYOR (yes, it was Daley’s city all right, the largest civilized center in the history of the world that could be said to belong to one man no matter how corrupt and aged), pressing his hand into the trucker’s and passing on the two one-hundred-dollar bills that the trucker would look at in puzzlement some time later in a different light, not sure how they had gotten there or what he was riding with, seeing the trucker for the last time, then picking up an empty cab and getting into the South Side, appropriating the red coupe from a slum section … he had known then that he was grinding through the last series of an action. He was going to Miami; so was Calabrese.

Only one of them and possibly neither would get out of that place alive.

And Calabrese was right. When all was said and done the old fucker had taste after all, had a proper sense of destination and timing, for what better place now for all of it to end than Miami? Here was the final resting place of half of America, the other half wound up in Vegas but Miami was even more appropriate; it was a junk shop of the mind and heart where the pensioners lived in shacks and cheap rooming houses toward the north, while on the beaches themselves, rising layer upon layer, were the bright, pillared hotels of the damned, the sea eroding the beaches year after year, the beaches crawling up toward the hotels. And somewhere in those spaces, be it the landscape or in the cool, dead eaves of the hotels where the glittering people with faces like hammers looked for their fun as determinedly, with the same pulsing sense of vacancy that a junkie went from fix to fix … somewhere in there, if only you could get hold of it, was the answer to America itself, all of it there and no alternative, because America was dying; it was not only the Calabreses that were. Sometimes the death was just below the surface, other times it became manifest like the od that lurked beneath the habit of every junkie … but oh good Lord, good Lord, the death was there.

The man at the bar was looking at him now.

He was fixing Wulff with a stabbing gaze of great intensity and as Wulff returned it, looking into those eyes, he realized in the way that recovered information comes back only when tapped that this was not a brief glance, that the man, in fact, had been looking at him for a long time. Now, having caught Wulff’s attention the eyes, suddenly luminous in the shifting light, seemed to glow with knowledge. Then the man was digging into his pocket, his fingers clutching at something in the right outer jacket and Wulff saw the shape of a gun faintly coming together there; then the man had turned fully, hand in pocket, and said to Wulff, “Let’s get out of here.”

The voice carried over the dim throbbing of the train above the rails, came at him with such casual intimacy that they might have been the only two people in the bar car, in the train itself … and then, sweeping the terrain, Wulff saw that this was so; the white-jacketed waiter who had been there to pick up the drink orders and deliver them, the small old bartender who had been standing behind the counter, flicking at it with a towel … both of them were gone, the car having narrowed to him and the heavy man. Looking at him now Wulff saw that he had misjudged this man severely, allowed fatigue and self-pity to overtake him past the point of alertness because this was no idle late-hour drunk confronting him but a hard, determined man in his late forties who looked like so many of the other men with whom he had struggled over the past months … except that if possible he looked even more competent than most of them.

The man came out of the pocket slowly with the gun, a Beretta, and said, “All right. Here it is. Now you start walking toward me and you do that slowly.”

Wulff got up from his seat carefully, feeling the weight of his own gun flapping within his pocket, the gun suspended a crucial six inches from his right hand. He could get it in less than a second … but the heavy man would need far less than that to discharge from that gun the bullet that would kill him. So there was nothing to do but close ground slowly. He had had half of the second drink; more than anything now he regretted that. Sitting in the bar car had been stupid enough but he had been lulled by the rocking of the train, the conversation with Calabrese, the feeling that Chicago at last was behind him. But that was excusable, drinking was not. Every bounty hunter, amateur and professional, in the country had his name and photograph in their hip pocket. What was he doing drinking? He kept on walking slowly and when he had come to within two feet of the man with the gun the man said with a little smile, “That’s enough.” Wulff stopped, the train rocking him slightly. “That’s good,” the man said, “that’s very good.”

He turned behind him and said, “All right,” and another man of roughly the same proportions but somewhat younger came from some hidden space of the car and stood, looking at Wulff with a little smile. Obviously he had come into the car while the others were clearing out, had been working in tandem with the first man but this did not explain, not quite, the absolute pleasure on this second man’s face, the profound look of joy which seemed to be oozing from its pores. Wulff thought that he had never seen so much pleasure of that sort in his life. “Well,” the second man said, seeming to rub his hands, “well, well, well.” He beamed. “It’s the wolf himself. As I live and breathe it’s the lone wolf.”

Wulff said nothing, holding his ground. The man holding the gun said, “Let’s get him out of here.”

“Oh, we’ll get him out of here. I’m counting on that. As a matter of fact you could say that there’s nothing I’m counting on more in the world than getting him out of here, but let me take a look at him if I may. Let me just take a look at him.” The man stared, his face bright yellow in the shrouded illumination of the bar car, his eyes rolling. He might, Wulff thought, be on uppers of some sort. Certainly it was more than good spirits which were giving this cast to his face. “I’m glad to see you, you son of a bitch,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”