Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (5 page)

But there were differences, of course. In the drug culture there were very few doubters, disbelievers, or reluctant attendees.

Drugs made fanatics of them all.

The door was opened by a black man in his mid-forties, black, black, black as the darkness, that darkness of his skin so intense that it might have been light. He was wearing a turban and religious garb of some sort, mottled pastels, and in his eyes danced a strange and merry light. He looked at Wulff appraisingly for a while and said, “The church is closed for the festival season.”

“I would like to come in and discuss something with you,” Wulff said.

“That may be very true,” the black man said, “that you wish to have a discussion, but as I say, the church is closed until the conclusion of the festivals and also it is a specifically African, that is to say a pan-African institution. I do not believe that you would be interested in the teachings of the church or that it would speak to your condition.”

Wulff moved forward against the black man, stood there feeling the heat radiating from his body, and it occurred to him that there was no way to physically overpower the man. He had run up against a resilience and determination that simply could not be overcome. You might be able to kill Father Justice but you could not overpower him. “I pass onto you the blessings of peace and of this great festival of the moon,” Justice said. “I share with you our thoughts for universal connection and brotherhood at the end of this holiday, and now if you will pardon me I must return to meditations.”

“My name is Wulff. I know David Williams,” Wulff said and added quickly when the black man’s eyes remained dead, “the man who was here weeks ago to buy a lot of ordnance. He’s my partner. He was bringing that stuff out to me.”

“I do not believe I know what you are talking of,” Father Justice said. “We do not sell or deal in ordnance in this church, this church is a church of God. Also,” he said after a judicious little pause, “not only do we not deal in ordnance, but this man who you say you know who I am not conceding for a moment that I have ever heard of, in the hypothetical instance that he existed, he has failed the mission. He has failed his brotherly and spiritual duties by a failure to return any of this ordnance.”

“I wanted to talk to you about that.”

“I believe there is very little to talk about.”

“You’re Father Justice,” Wulff said. “Listen, I know you quite well through Williams. I know that you—”

“I think,” Father Justice said, “that you had better come in. The street is not the proper place for concourse or devotions of any sort,” and stepped aside. Wulff saw looming blackness. He walked into it, a light flicked, and he found himself in a surprisingly large room, benches front to back, seating capacity of fifty penitents at least, religious ornaments dangling from the walls. One of them, a huge, golden crucifix seemingly suspended by invisible threads from the ceiling, particularly fascinated Wulff. As he looked at it, it seemed to glint, glow, change colors. He began to feel very much out of his own area of specialization, which was a peculiar way indeed to feel.

Father Justice noted Wulff staring at the crucifix and said, “His mercy and his love is everlasting and evermore and this, as you see, is a concrete symbol of that everlasting mercy and love. Some of our congregation need concrete symbols to reinforce their feelings, but those of us truly in the church know that he is within, rather than without us.” He brought his hands together, looked at Wulff in a peculiar and intense way and said, “There have been difficulties with this Williams you claim to know. He has betrayed the Church of the Brotherhood.”

“Everything was hijacked out West. He was kidnapped.”

“I am afraid that kidnapping is a personal problem. I am concerned with the, ah, materials that you say have been lost.”

“As I understood it, he paid for those materials in full.”

“The Church of Brotherhood is never paid in full,” the reverend said. “Any recompense that we may take for our materials is far, far less than their actual value. In truth, we lend our materials, we do not sell them, much as the trinity lends or leases out the soul to us, to reclaim it at the moment of death. You understand that it is impossible to pay in kind for the receipt of materials.” His hands came apart. “I was expecting, in short, their return.”

“I’m sorry,” Wulff said, “I’m sure that Williams is sorry too. But we can’t be accountable—”

“Everybody is accountable!” Father Justice said loudly. He seemed to expand, rise six inches or more, his robes, falling to the floor gave a further illusion of ascension as if he were floating, suspended, within his ecclesiastic garb, moving, drifting now at off-angles to the crucifix. He looked at it with reverence. “In this world or out of it, all of us are truly accountable for our deeds and our acts. Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten, nothing is misplaced in the giant eye of the Creator who gave breath to us all. I do not think that there is any comfort or mission I can offer you.”

“I’m quite willing to—”

Father Justice made a dismissive gesture. “We do not deal in earthly goods here; we do not accept the symbols or tokens of mammon but seek a higher, a finer, a truer and if I may say a somewhat denser truth. One load of ordnance has already been lost. I cannot risk the loss of another. Also,” he said, giving Wulff a look of loathing, “we are a ministry of the community and for the African, that is to say, pan-African peoples. I would not care to deal with a member of your race, a member of that sect of devils who through time immemorial, through all of known and unknown history have turned their hands against my brothers.”

“I need a machine gun,” Wulff said, “I need a good machine gun with full clip, an extra set of clips, and an M-15 rifle with silencer. I’m willing to pay two thousand.”

Father Justice stepped back, looked at Wulff in an even way again, that cool, contained gaze flickering between crucifix and Wulff. Then he brought his hands together in that gesture again, touching the fingertips delicately against one another as if preparing to incline for prayer. “I am afraid you do not understand,” he said. “We are not dealing with earthly considerations here; we are dealing with a finer, higher, darker creed, one which unites all of my brothers—”

“Twenty-five hundred dollars,” Wulff said, “and not a penny more. And for that I want it to be good, dependable stuff. You’ll probably never see it again but I’m taking that into account and paying you at least fifteen hundred dollars more than it’s worth.”

Father Justice shook his head. “You do not understand,” he said, “the risks of prayer, the risks of dedication to the unearthly spirit, to the spreading and the gathering and the annealing and the dispensation of the word—”

“Twenty-six hundred dollars,” Wulff said. “No more. That’s all.”

“I see,” Father Justice said. “I see.” He bent, looked at the floor as if seeking some kind of meditative answer, some equation that would wrench him past a moment of crisis, and then he said very gently, “It will be necessary for us to seek the answer to this prayer in the back room. We will have to retire into the holy of holies for further meditation and consideration and hope that therein we will find the answer.”

He turned, walked back toward the wall, touched it with a delicate gesture and suddenly there was a panel that splayed open, another panel buckling with it, and there was a man-sized entrance into a huge, dark cavity behind. Quickly, gracefully, the reverend walked through it, Wulff following, and Wulff found himself in an odorous, enormous room, rich smells of wood and metal around him. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Wulff saw that he was in the largest arms cache he had ever seen in his life. From shelves piled to the ceiling fifty yards from him downrange in any direction, were the glinting aspects of ordnance: ordnance of all forms, of all apparent stages of modern history: here were hand grenades from the world wars piled neatly atop one another: here were M-l rifles, the old dependables from World War II and Korea; shading off in the rear were the modern, repeating M-15s; there were incendiaries of the most sophisticated type used in Vietnam; a little bit closer were clumsier bayonets of the type that had inhabited every barracks since the First World War.

Remarkable. It was absolutely remarkable. Williams had not been kidding, all right; Father Justice had a cache here like nothing he had ever before seen. Conceivably army supply center1s in the ordnance depots were stocked like this, but in civilian life, of which Father Justice could be considered to be a part, you would have to go long and hard to see a stockpile like this.

It would have made a religious man of the most avid skeptic, just to see what prayer and devotion had accomplished for Father Justice in this warehouse.

“Twenty-six hundred dollars is insufficient,” Father Justice said, coldly. His manner once he had entered the room had changed entirely. The mask of the divine had fallen from the good reverend’s face and had been replaced with seamless lines of perception and purpose. “You must think that we are fools here to sell to a white man in the first place,” Justice said, “and in the second, that is ridiculous compensation for the risk involved. How do I know who you are? How can I know for what purposes you’re going to use this stuff? Five thousand.”

“Forget it,” Wulff said. “I can’t come near that.”

“Where are you going to better the price? Can you go down the block, find another supplier?”

“Five thousand is ridiculous. Four thousand would be. I just made you top offer. Twenty-six hundred.”

“No.”

“Then why invite me back here at all?” Wulff said. “You wouldn’t have asked me to step into this room unless you saw something in my offer, some territory to be explored.” He paused, put down an urge to light a cigarette, looked instead at the glinting, terrible contents of the room and said, “Three thousand. But that’s the last. I won’t go any higher than that.”

“Three thousand is a small contribution to the temple of the holy spirit.”

“Three thousand is the top,” Wulff said, “that’s the limit for what I’m asking. I’m not asking for an army’s worth of stuff, you know.” Rage was overtaking him. This was the way it had been now for a long time, drift along, go through the motions, try to do the best you could reasonably, taking it step by step and a sudden stab of revulsion, some aspect in the enemy’s eyes, some quirk in the situation would trigger off an eruption from the layers of grief and rage buried within, his perilous control over himself would lapse, and perhaps that would throw the adversary more than any calculation could; perhaps the adversary, looking at what this did to Wulff would suddenly realize that he had moved past the point of manipulation and could no longer dissemble. Hard to say. Hard to know. Looking at Father Justice, seeing the quickening and confusion in those eyes, Wulff began to see the phenomenon work again, that phenomenon of reversal when the adversary felt the situation beginning to slide away at cross-angles, something in his eyes like the very light of religion himself. Why, the man might indeed be a reverend, that might be the secret of his power, his conviction, guns for the eyes of the Lord. Justice said, “That is a ridiculous sum. And from a white man, to accept this kind of money from a white man is suicidal. Nevertheless I am going to do it.”

“Good,” Wulff said.

“I will do it on condition that the materials are returned.”

“I can’t promise you that. There’s no way that I can make you that promise at all. I don’t know where I’ll be.”

Justice shook his head with a kind of weary, stubborn insistence. “Then we can’t do business,” he said. “There are limits to this, but you must understand that I am not autonomous, I am no more a free agent than you are.”

“I’m a free agent.”

“Well you may be a free agent,” Justice said, “although in the eyes of the Creator, as you must surely know, there is no such thing as a free agent, all of us must merely commit God’s will—”

“Save that for outside. Outside this room you go into that.”

“That is neither here nor there,” Justice said with a hint of irony. “You may be a free agent, Mr. Wulff, although only a fool believes that he exists on his own with full options, without connection to outside forces, but I am not. I have interests to whom I answer and for whom I must be accountable. Selling to a white man is difficult enough. Giving you these weapons outright would be irreparably dangerous. You must say that you will return them.”

“How do I know if I can return them? How do I know where I’ll be—”

“I didn’t say,” Justice said cunningly, “that you
had
to return them. I said that you must
state
you will return them. Give me your firm, pledged word that you will yield these armaments back to me in the condition in which you are given them and that you will be responsible for them during the time that you have them in your hands. That is all.”

“For an 80 percent refund.”

“That is the way the brotherhood of the divine works,” Justice said coldly. “That is the principle upon which our great church was founded. An 80 percent return for merchandise returned in good condition. You may have these ordnances on a two-week lease.”

“For three thousand dollars down.”

“For three thousand dollars down,” Justice said, and Wulff went into his pocket, went into his pocket where the money taken from the suit of the man he had killed lay; it was a hell of a price, he thought, a hell of a price to pay for some armaments taken on a risky and speculative basis. But Williams was right: Williams had always been right about things like this, he had street knowledge and he knew how this business worked. Cash on the line, 100 percent deposit for lend-lease. There was no way around it. He had pushed the matter as far as he could.

“All right,” Wulff said, “I’ll go along with that. You’re not giving me any choice, you know.”

“Free will is absolute,” said Father Justice as he smiled and worked his way toward one of the far shelves on which an array of machine guns perched. “We live in a system of choices; we can choose what we will, we are condemned to nothing, we can be whatever we wish to be.”