Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare (10 page)

Two million dollars worth of shit. Two million dollars worth of shit. Wulff found that it was a litany, some kind of a litany anyway, riding horseback through the Andes, the sack strapped on him, he strapped to the horse, the three of them: Wulff, sack, horse, staggering their way through the thin, deadly air. Here there was an isolation so profound that the fields of Havana could not equal it; the closest might be the tablelands that five miles out cut off Las Vegas from the horizon, but there was not in Las Vegas the quality of emptiness here. It was land so barren that the living and dead could co-exist; ghosts had the same weight that people did. No wonder they had such theories of reincarnation here; the living had no more weight than the dead, the dead had the same presence as the living. There was no lost city of the Incas in these mountains, there were only the lost cities of man or men … hundreds or thousands of them, some of them stalking. Wulff shuddered, a sheer superstitious awe overtaking him possibly for the first time, and huddled deeper into the saddle. Ahead of him the unspeaking man who was his guide kept on riding implacably ahead, the bobbling head of his horse casting shadows, those shadows the only break in the terrain. The man had said nothing since they had left. He would say nothing for hours more or until they reached the outskirts of Lima; always assuming of course that they
would
reach those outskirts. There was no saying. Literally nothing was sure. Wulff felt the sack cut into his ribs, grunted, loosened the strap slightly. It began to shuttle painfully against his neck, then.

Two million dollars worth of shit. Right now, in enclosed rooms, hot dry junkies’ spaces, they were shooting up; all the junkies of America were putting a prayer and voyage into their veins, carrying themselves far far out and into a sphere where consequence and calamity no longer existed. And with each of those prayers injected with the junk was an implied prayer for Wulff himself, for his burden. For more shit, cleaner shit, sharper shit, cheaper, higher, greener, whiter shit that would take them further and further into those spaces which they occupied, shit so great that they would never come down again, shit which would make the need for more of it impossible. The ultimate trip, the ultimate shit, that was what they were seeking in its various particles, and here was he, Wulff, slung across a horse, slung across his back, carrying with him a billion dreams at seven dollars a drop, moving from this one unimaginable country toward that other one in the north. If only they could see him now. The bagman to end them all. He would be a saint in every shooting gallery on the north side, south side, east and west if they only knew what he knew.

Madness: to become a bagman. But survival was the name of the game; survival and to carry on his quest. What else could he have done, Wulff thought. It was a lousy deal which Stavros had offered him, but then again it was the only deal going. The alternative was to be ground to death under Calabrese’s heel in Peru. He would not have lasted long. He would not have lasted long at all in the Hotel Deal. Sooner or later, probably much sooner if he knew the man, Calabrese would have pulled the plug and then what?
Then what, Wulff?

Better not to think about it. Better not to think about what he was doing either: plowing through the Andes, the deadly hills, the unimaginable excavations, the bag slung across his shoulder, the bag of Stavros’s jewels heading for its destination in five hundred thousand veins to the north. Maybe he could pull a double-cross over the border and ditch the shipment, maybe he could not. Maybe for that matter Stavros’s own planning had backfired somewhere and Stavros would not be in a position to re-appropriate the bag from him. Even so, that did not change at all the basic equation of his condition. He was running junk. Burt Wulff was running junk.
He
had become the enemy.

Well, what was there to say? What could you say about something like that except that it had happened and that the basic situation remained unchanged? Every man in his life sooner or later had to become aware of the basic ambivalences, had to realize that he contained within him a duality of purpose and that he was to a certain degree that against which he fought so bitterly. It was this in fact which might give fuel to one’s determination … knowing that one was striking against, trying to eliminate, the hated and omnipresent self. Almost all of these men with whom he had been dealing over these months were exhibit to that to greater or lesser degree: he suspected that no one could loathe these men as much as they did themselves, no man could repudiate them from the company of humanity as they had walled themselves off from all but their own kind. That duality was at the basis of all human relationships. There was a very thin line between the narco cop and the informer; scratch one and you had the other. They were working the same street for the same purposes; even the methods were the same. The only difference was the piece of paper which said that one was law and the other felon, but what did that matter? What the hell did that matter anyway when you had to realize that it was a paper discrimination and that what both of you were doing all the time was simply hustling drugs? Well, the hell with it.

The hell with it; New York was a long, long way behind him; all of the choices had been made, all of the probabilities long since acted out to this one bitter equation. He had chosen his course in a moment of grief and now he was walking down that gray, enclosed pathway; whichever way it took him there was no exit except at the very end, and he did not even see light at the end of the tunnel. Light at the end of the tunnel: that was one of the Vietnam phrases, wasn’t it? They were always seeing the light at the end of the tunnel—the joint chiefs, the field commanders, the commander-in-chief himself—and meanwhile the killing went on, the drugs kept on trafficking, men died, other men replaced them and the dance continued. All of it was a game, that was all. This too. A game. The stakes changed but it was the same combination.

Wulff leaned into the saddle, put his hand on the cold mane of the horse and held on as they edged their way through a difficult rock formation, a fault line of some sort, struggling and slipping for purchase in the difficult ground.

Ahead of him suddenly something, either a horse or a man, screamed coldly in the darkness. As he reacted by grabbing onto the horse, flattening himself down against the mane, gripping the hairs which stuck to his sweating palms, there was a second scream in a different tone, then a crack of light flooding the horizon. And in that light he saw the guide’s horse stumble, the form of the guide flung free. And then the light came up, there was a second crack, and Wulff was rolling on the cold deadly stones of the Andes.

Where was Walker? He hadn’t been able to get hold of Walker, either at home or at any of the contact points for three days, and now David Williams knew that the man was dead. That was a cop’s assurance for you—you couldn’t tell about life but you always knew death—and he knew that Walker was gone. And now this man Calabrese was on the phone, seeming to know everything about Williams, everything there was except for the one crucial fact which Williams could not impress upon him—that he had no idea of Wulff’s whereabouts.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” He had no formal idea of who this so-called Calabrese was, but he could make a pretty good guess. In fact, Williams guessed that he could make a hell of a guess but he simply would not. It didn’t pay. Better to let it go. He assumed that Calabrese meant Wulff no good, but even so, if he had known he might have told him. Because he wanted to dig Wulff up too, just to tell him a few things, and Calabrese sounded like exactly the man to do it. He certainly did. There was no doubt of that at all.

“I don’t know,” he said to the voice yet again, curling his fingers, motioning his wife to get out of the room, to leave him be. Ever since the accident he had been unable to get away from her at all, unable to shut himself off. Not that this wasn’t understandable. She was terrified. Still, she had to respect his autonomy, now more than ever, if he was going to pull himself out of this. “If I knew I’d tell you,” he said truthfully, “because I’m looking for him myself. But I just don’t. I simply don’t.”

“I don’t believe you,” the voice said in tones of such quiet and controlled menace that, even knowing everything he did, Williams could feel himself beginning to shake, hundreds of miles from the source. It was just too much to deal with, a voice like that. It held qualities he had never before intuited in this kind of person. Was this what Wulff was dealing with? It was incredible that he had had any success against people like that. “You’ve had good contact with him throughout. That would continue.”

“I’ve been sick. I’ve been in the hospital. I’ve had no contact with him at all.”

“I don’t believe that, either.”

“He’s out of the country,” Williams said, surprised at himself. He had not meant to say even this much. But there was a feeling that he could not hold back, not with a voice like this. His wife was staring at him intensely now, her mouth beginning to open in an
0
of concern. The concern would begin slowly to move toward rage and then she would snatch the phone from him, hear everything. Even worse, the caller would know that he had a wife. Somehow it was important to Williams to prevent this knowledge if possible, let alone the knowledge that she was pregnant as well.

“Yes,” the voice said, “we know he’s out of the country. We’re quite aware of that, Mr. Williams. The point is: what are you going to do about that?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about again.”

“The man, your friend, is out of the country. But what are your plans?”

“I have no plans,” Williams said angrily. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” and now his wife indeed was striding toward the telephone. “I can’t talk,” he said, “I have nothing to say.”

“I would advise you when he gets in touch with you to find out his whereabouts,” the voice said, “and at some subsequent time when we contact you, you can pass this information on to us. That would be extremely useful not only to you but to your highly pregnant wife,” the voice said and broke the connection, dumping the line into a clear blank singing space where Williams could only gather the sound of his breath coming back at him irregularly. He put the phone hurriedly back on the receiver.

“I quit,” he said to his wife. “I’m getting out of the business.”

“Let’s not discuss it now.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” Williams said, “I can’t put up with this; I cannot take it any more. None of this is my fault, and I refuse to be involved any more.”

“Quiet,” she said. “Quiet.” She reached forward, touched him lightly on the shoulder. He leaned forward, partly out of the line of that touch, and said, “I nearly got my guts taken out. Wasn’t that enough for them? No, it wasn’t. Nothing’s enough for them.”

“David—”

“They want everything,” he said. “Bag and baggage. The system wants your guts and the organization wants your soul and in the middle somewhere is my black ass. I thought that I could go with Wulff but that’s crazy too. They’re out to get him. He doesn’t have a prayer.”

“All right,” she said. She moved away from him, her face haughty and blank now in a way he had seen it only a long time ago. She was a poised and gentle girl. “If you can’t stand it then get out. I won’t fight with you. But where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his hand still resting on his stomach. He could not escape the feeling somehow that it would come open at any time and that what would come out of himself would
be
himself, not only his guts but his blood and hope mingling on the floor. “There’s no way out of it at all. Anywhere you turn it’s the same fucking thing. Maybe we’ll become a third-world couple,” he said, trying to smile. “We’ll plan to emigrate to the Congo or one of those exciting republics that have a full vote in the United Nations. There are about fifty of them now, aren’t there? Maybe Lincoln was right in the first place; before he got around to freeing the slaves he thought that it would be a hell of a good idea to send all of them back to Africa. Go back to Africa,” Williams said bitterly, “that’s all; I don’t give a fuck anymore. There’s no way out of it.”

“All right,” she said.

“Do you understand? I thought that there was a way out but I was wrong. You’re stuck, fucked up, trapped inside no matter what you do.”

“Well, that means,” she said, straightening something against the wall, “that if you can’t get out, you might as well stay, right? Isn’t that what you’re saying. You’ve got no choice at all.”

He thought about that for a time. He looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, let his glance pass through the window where he could see his neighbor’s hedges across the street in peaceful, vacant St. Albans. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe that’s right.”

“Maybe it is.” She stood, unmoving, confronting him. “Maybe it is.”

“It bears thinking,” he said then. “It certainly bears thinking, doesn’t it?” and he gestured toward her; she came toward him slowly, the bleakness falling away from her face in stages as she moved toward him and then she was against him, the two of them blending slowly in a way that they had not for a very long time.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Williams said as he slipped inside his wife for the first time in many weeks discovering that it was the same as it always had been and that there were, at least, certain constants. “I’ll be double-damned,” he said, but that was not until much later.

His own horse, squalling, stumbled free when Wulff had been thrown and galloped off into a chasm; there was the sound of bone cracking as hooves hit rock and then a scream of pure terror, almost human except that Wulff knew it was no man, but his horse which had fallen into the abyss. The second, duller sound came what seemed to be minutes later at the end of a series of shrieks from the animal, the dull sound as blood and bone collided with rock, and now he heard nothing whatsoever. He lay as if embedded in rock, gripping onto the sack with both hands, stifling the sound of breathing against his palms, waiting for the assassin to reveal himself.

He had no idea how many there were. If he knew Calabrese’s tactics, if he deduced the very sense of this attack there were not many at all: perhaps two, perhaps even one, no more than three in any event. But two was a fair bet, one an excellent one. One man who knew these mountains could go out himself with a good chance of success. Somewhere ahead of him in the darkness, the guide and horse were lying trapped by rock themselves; they had not fallen only because of some accident of geology, some parapet lofted against their fall so that dead horse and rider had hung on the shelf of rock rather than collapsing beneath it. Wulff was sure that guide and horse were gone; there was not even the necessity for calculation on this part. It was only him, him and one pistol taken from the man in the Buick, versus the assassin. He held to his position and waited.

The dark was total, enveloping. His guide had made a little light with a flare, casting back illumination through which Wulff had tracked, but the flare of course was gone, and that was for the best because that flare had killed the guard—would have killed Wulff if it had stayed alive. Now the darkness came like a blanket around him, swaddling, choking, taking him in all of its spaces. At the end of this darkness, hours from now, there was the dawn and with that dawn a kind of mutual discovery; but he did not think that this would go on until dawn. Whatever happened was going to happen quickly, now. For the enemy knew the darkness. All of his advantages would disappear in the light; at that point he would be on equal terms with Wulff and this would be what he wanted to avoid. The enemy was cunning, but then again he was only doing what Wulff had done, would have done in a similar situation. He was protecting his advantages.

Wulff crouched, smothered his breath against his palms. He thought he heard something but it might only have been his blood circulating rapidly, moving through all the spaces of his body, carrying all of its deadly, incomprehensible messages; he put that apart from him, attuning himself only to the external, fixating upon what was happening. Ledged against a shelf of rock, the stone pressing against his cheek, coldness against his knees, that coldness circulating upward through his limbs, he felt himself to be in a position of either vulnerability or attack; it all depended upon from what direction the assassin was stalking him. If the man came from above Wulff was doomed. On the other hand, if he came from the sides Wulff was in a position, shifting his attention between those two poles, to lash back at him. It all depended. Everything depended.

Everything depended.
It was a hell of a journey from the streets of Manhattan, haggling with informants in the bars of Lenox Avenue to this position in the mindless and unimaginable Andes; but if only looked at in an objective way, if only truly understood, the journey was inevitable. If you were going to trace that vein through which the poison was injected, move your way back to the source, then you were going to come, would yourself have come, into a situation like this. The drugs began in the open spaces, then moved their way through the clotted veins into the places of compression, the cities, but it was as logical to find yourself here in that quest as in anywhere else. This was the reality: the mountains, the blankness, the presence of the assassin. It could be said that of the two, Harlem was the one that was the dream; this the reality.

Wulff crouched, held his gun closer to him. From the left there was a subtle sound, a couple of stones clinking in the darkness, the sound of pebbles displaced as if a form was carefully working its way toward him. He fixated upon that sound, concentrating his attention into a small, thin tube which moved out from himself no more than twenty to thirty feet, a tenth of the distance of a football field, that was all. And somewhere within that line of attention the assassin was stalking him. He knew this. He felt that certainty beginning to flood him. The man was closing in, using the darkness, the darkness which manufactured haste because once it lifted advantage would be evaporated … and even as he thought this, Wulff thought that he saw a flare in that darkness, a sudden explosion of light to his left. Turning toward it he saw a man suddenly framed within that light, a man sparkling and dancing on the ledge. Then the man who was holding a gun had screamed, had lurched on that precipice and was hurling himself toward Wulff. “Bastard!” the man was screaming, “bastard, you dirty son of a bitch!” and Wulff understood, he understood everything: stalking him carefully the man had lit a flare which was supposed to be contained only to a limited area; operating on a short fuse, a short wick, the flare was supposed to kindle and die … but it was a dud. The equipment was a failure. The flare had worked too well and in exposing Wulff’s position, now the man had exposed his own.

Wulff had his pistol out and was firing even before this set of inferences had reached consciousness. The light had come and gone, showing the man dancing on the mountaintop and Wulff fired into the center of the space where the light had been, concentrating his fire. The gun that he had appropriated from the man in the Buick was certainly a more responsive piece of equipment than what Stavros had given him. But then again it was unfamiliar—he did not know if he had been able to adjust to the different feel of it—and as if confirming this a second shot came through, this one from the assassin, splintering rock behind him. Wulff felt the rock shower into and against the orifices of the body, little shards lodging in ears and neck, pellets of the fragmentation worming their way into him and the pain was intense. It was just like flak, this secondary effect but he discarded the idea of pain, putting it into some other area of the consciousness. Instead he steadied the pistol and ripped off his own second shot, trying to put it dead into the place where he had last seen the man, lodge it into his guts. A scream came from somewhere uprange, a thin, high, bloody scream, waters warbling in the throat, and Wulff knew that he had found the assassin. He put a second shot into the same place, working to concentrate the fire, letting the line of variation stay within the narrowest possible compass. Then, as if in reward, the scream came again, and out of that scream came one final shot, going somewhere far into the air above him and Wulff was staggering forward, using his hands to guide him on that rock, guiding himself by feel, trying to close ground.

The warbling birdsong of the shot assassin was somewhere below him, he knew that much, but whether it was a lowering of ground, an incline, or whether it was a different ledge or shelf of rock, he did not know. He dropped to his knees, using hands and knees to drag himself toward that interception. Then the second shot came, the last which the assassin could manage from that posture, the bullet sending out little nervous tendrils of heat which Wulff could feel as it passed his ear and then the screaming began. Screams such as Wulff had not yet heard began to come from that point below him, the sound of some thing in terrible distress, and from the center of that scream he sensed that there was an attempt to form words but the words came blurred, almost indistinct. He had to focus his attention in order to deduce what was going on. “I’m falling,” Wulff heard, “my God, you’ve got to help me, I’m falling, falling, falling!” and now Wulff could picture all of it, the assassin, driven back by the gun’s recoil clinging frantically to some ledge, having spun back in the emptiness, his gun falling from his hand like an object chopped out by assault, the assassin now holding onto rock with both hands, babbling, babbling his life away. “Please,” the voice cried again, “please help me!”

“Help you?” Wulff said. “I’ll help you,” and he began to move, belly to rock, low-crawl, toward the sound of the voice, spacing out in his mind the shape of the terrain, evaluating what position the assassin occupied in order that he could make that connection. The sack of drugs banged into his shoulder, the strap, caught on an outcropping of rock rubbing him painfully and he groaned; he put a hand to his shoulder to relieve the pressure of the strap. Another shot, the assassin’s fourth, came out of the darkness, spanging Wulff on the shoulder, then glancing off into some crevice.
That was stupid
, Wulff thought, putting a hand to his shoulder, feeling a faint, suspicious line out of which the blood was welling against him,
that was really stupid, making a sound, giving away my position
like that,
but of course this was no time to think about stupidity, not at these difficult times. Difficult, difficult, everything is problematic, he thought meditatively and used his pistol to squeeze off one more shot, very little hope in it because he could not reach the man in the darkness. But he heard a squeal, a pig-sound coming from behind layers of rock and he realized that he had.

Well, win one lose one, right? It was a percentage game, all of it, and he was bound, even in fucking Peru, to hit some luck somewhere along the way. He flattened himself against rock again and as he did so something came up from way below, some fire in the valley, or perhaps only a flash of heat lightning; he saw then the space below him, the dimensions of the drop. He was poised like a beetle against a shelf, three or four hundred feet above a sheer, clear drop, one that would take him down the length of a football field and convert him to sheer clear stone—sheer clear stone from that sheer, clear drop. But he would not fall, was not going to fall, and he hugged that rock then, grasping onto it as he had never grasped to Marie Calvante, letting the pistol dangle from his finger. He was not going to fall. He would not give them the satisfaction. You could not go through what he had merely to wind up a crushed bit of pulp at the bottom of a valley. There had to be some justice. He would accept that. He would accept the concept of justice.
You son of a bitch,
Wulff thought, hugging the rock, feeling the rock bite against his teeth, his sweat rendering that part of it against his face as slippery as the sea,
you son of a bitch, give me one clear shot at you and you’re gone. That’s all I ask. Is that too much

to ask? I ask one shot and then you can have me. But I won’t miss it. I absolutely guarantee that I will not.

“Listen,” someone said out of the darkness, “listen, this is ridiculous. I mean, we’re not doing each other any good here at all. This isn’t solving a fucking thing.”

Keep on talking
, Wulff thought.
Go on talking. That conversation is the passport.

“I mean,” the voice said, “here we are somewhere in a fucking mountain range, shooting at each other, right? I’m under orders to kill you and you’re under orders to kill me, probably because you’re supposed to kill anyone who tries to stop you from what you’re doing. But I’ve been thinking and it’s ridiculous. Isn’t it? I mean we should lay off each other, try to help each other out of this fucking mess, that’s what I think.”

That’s good
, Wulff thought,
that’s good, keep on talking.
Remorse would get you nowhere, not in this business; but fear was the name of the game and it was fear which was operative in that voice. It could mean anything, everything, if it could only feed upon itself, that balloon of fear. “You’re there,” the voice said, “I know you’re out there. You’re very close, you can’t be more than a few feet away.”

Make it ten yards
, Wulff thought. The voice was somewhere to the south of him so that ten yards down, southeast make it, he might be able to deposit a blind shot with some kind of luck. Then again the speaker might be protected by a ledge of rock, it was impossible to tell. Certainly until he could tell it would be foolish to attempt anything. The thing to do was simply to wait it out. Didn’t that make sense? He would simply wait the voice out.
Proper police procedure,
he thought, and it was as if a hundred supervisors in the background speaking in the voices of the academy were applauding him.
That’s the stuff, Wulff. Go to it. Kill the son of a bitch. Lead him out and then get rid of him. Proper police tactics; concentrate on the assailant, let the assailant’s own mood defeat him.

“Please say something,” the voice said. It sounded tentative, far more tentative than it had when it started. It had started out with the booming tones of assurance, a we-are-both-reasonable-men point of view, but now it had moderated down toward whimpering. Like Marasco. Like Marasco when he had killed him on those stairs. Put the pressure of the uncertain on them and they would always crumble. Only a very prideful man like Calabrese would not break in circumstances like these; but there was a way into them too, if only he could find it. He thought he had found it now; he hoped that he had the opportunity to put that insight into practice. “Listen,” the voice said, “whether you say anything or not it’s ridiculous. Can’t you see the stupidity of it? We’re two men a couple of thousand miles from home, struggling to get the fuck out of these mountains, and we’re set at each other’s throats. We’ve never even
seen
each other but we’re supposed to kill. But it isn’t the two of us, don’t you understand that? It’s the people who have sent us here. All we’re doing is acting on orders. Can’t we meet face-to-face? What the fuck are we doing in these goddamned mountains? The people who sent us here wouldn’t be in the mountains.”

Wulff held his position. The voice was becoming higher, less certain all of the time. If he could only wait it out, he thought that the voice might be at the point of breakage. Not that he needed breakage, that was not necessary. He had no point to prove in terms of the strengths of the individual personalities. No, it had only to do with the giving away of position and he was getting in, getting in closer all the time. “I’m right you know,” the voice said, “you know I’m right. We have nothing against each other. This has nothing to do with us at all. I don’t want to kill you, you don’t want to kill me. If we passed each other on the street somewhere there wouldn’t even be any recognition. We’re just doing the job for people without the guts. Look,” the voice said, “I’m going to throw my gun away now. I’m going to show you my good faith because I’ve got nothing to prove anymore and because I want the two of us to come out of these mountains alive. Not one, both. It doesn’t have to be this way you know. We don’t have to fight and kill one another. Fuck Calabrese. What did he ever do for me?”