Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare (7 page)

Stavros thought he had it figured out. Killing the man Dillon had shaken him (killing was nothing but if it were all the same he just did not want to get involved with Calabrese; it would be best not to stir that man’s wrath if he could help it, but then again he had had no alternative to killing Dillon) but only for a little while. Now he felt more positive than ever that he had handled this situation right, that he was making the best use of it. He had not expected anything like Wulff coming into the Crillon, had not even known that he was there until he had seen him, as a matter of fact. But once he was confronted by the man’s presence, how could he let him go without trying to make arrangements with him? He simply could not.

The stuff had to get out of Peru, that was all there was to it. Stavros had known that for a long time; it was just entirely too difficult a situation to bluff through. You could go on and on with something like this for a long time—set it up and keep it going so that you even thought you had some kind of autonomy—but sooner or later someone like Calabrese would pick up the word. It would leak through; there was too much at stake not to have a leak somewhere. And once Calabrese or someone like that got word of what was going on here, what Stavros had, what Stavres planned to do, it would be all over. He could fight off one of them, or even ten, but he could not possibly fend off the resource of the full organization to the north … and whatever internal problems that organization was having they were not fools; if they knew what Stavros was up to they would mass together in any way to take it away from him because the alternative was too dangerous.

So he knew he had done the right thing. The shit had to get out. Putting it into Wulff’s hands was insanely dangerous for many reasons; the primary insanity might be that Wulff was absolutely committed to its destruction … and there was a very slight likelihood, if any, that the goods would arrive intact at the delivery point to the north. It would be a miracle if they did.

But that was not the point. Stavros had gone through hours of agony about that one, seeing a shipment like this irrevocably lost. But in the last analysis he had to go along with it and, in fact, even be grateful. Because saving the shipment was not the primary thing. It would be a bonus if it could be done, unquestionably, and it would be nice to be able to hold onto it for its profit potential and for the leverage it would give him. But the main thing was to get it out of Peru. It was a survival matter. If they found it here, not only would it be destroyed but he would be destroyed also. They would see it and trace it back and comprehend quickly enough what he had had in mind to do, and they would deal with him mercilessly. From his point of view he could hardly blame them. It was business. It was purely a business proposition. There would be no feeling as they killed him, they would kill him simply because it would obviously be too dangerous to let him live … but nothing personal. Nothing was really personal in the organizational politics of these people. It was like the practices of another part of his life, a part which he refused even to think about now in which there also had been nothing personal, in which what had been done had been done by men who did it not for the joy but only the sense of it … and took no responsibility. There
was
no responsibility. It simply originated in circumstances.

All right. Get it out then
. Get it out any way he could. He did not trust Wulff ever to turn the shipment over, but if he knew one thing it was where interests could lie, where the checks and balances of relationships truly rested, and Wulff and he were in perfect accordance on this one point: Wulff needed to get out of the country, the drugs needed to get out of the country; if each was the only way that the other could, then they would. Then they certainly would.

Stavros sweated it out, then. If things were going according to the schedule he had prepared, Wulff was at that moment in Cuzco, arranging the transfer. At this moment, as Stavros sat in his office and ran the progression of scenes through his mind, he was heading under escort for the helicopter which would take him the first leg of the way. But what if he were not? What if Calabrese had informants deep, deep within his organization and had anticipated all of this, was already working on a counter-thrust? What if—Stavros jumped as he had the thought—what if Wulff had been intercepted and shot down?

No. He would not think of it. Life was real, rational, earnest and he was cleverer than Calabrese. He had planned for all of this; unlike Calabrese he had never been so stupid as to present the enemy on his very ground the means of his salvation as Calabrese had done. He must have faith that now as before he was superior to Calabrese and that when their two intelligences meshed lock-to-lock through the agencies of other men he, Stavros, would be the superior. His instincts told him this was so. And he knew many things that Calabrese did not.

He waited and he waited and toward nightfall he received a clear psychic flash that he had won. Somehow Wulff had gotten through. He had gotten into Cuzco, Calabrese’s men having been either unalerted to his coming or unsuccessful in their attempts to block him. He had gotten into Cuzco, had taken over the shipment and now was on the next level of operations. As the impact of this hit him Stavros almost gasped, his body becoming a fist as it cramped over, then he relaxed and smiled. He believed profoundly in his psychic input; it had saved him all his life, it would not fail him now. If the inference was that Wulff had made it, then he could accept this. He could accept the inference. He was halfway out of it and toward survival.

He celebrated. He sat alone in his working suite and poured himself a victory drink of scotch, three fingers, taken neat. They made him feel good, and another three fingers made him feel even better. The sons of bitches thought that they could overcome Stavros but he had showed them. He had showed them! Then he remembered that the sons of bitches had thought nothing, probably, because they did not even know of the trade that Stavros was trying to set up, which was the reason they had not tried to overcome him, and this made him intensely solemn. He took another three shots of scotch to quench the solemnity.

And so he made it through the evening, made it through the evening in his own unique and individual way, just, he thought, as Wulff had to, as all of them had to … until one of his lieutenants got him on the phone and said that he had something to tell Stavros and said it was important and Stavros said okay, tell him, and the lieutenant came in and in a very grave and distracted way told Stavros that the helicopter in Cuzco had gone down somewhere in the mountains. Natives had seen the pieces. The pieces were unmistakable. They had brought the reports right into the Crillon and the associate knew it and now Stavros knew it too.

The first thing that got you, Wulff thought, was the incredible height, the sense of distance in the terrain; unlike America where everything was impacted, driven in upon itself, here in the lost city of the Incas there was a sense of distance unknown to the north, a scale of landscape entirely different from that on which all the assumptions of America had been based … that life was controllable because compressed. Doubtless that was why the pioneers had cut away at the awesome continent above, closed it in with walls and cities, to restrict the unimaginable emptiness. But Peru, outside of the cities which were American imports, was a different culture; here it was not life but death, or at least acceptance of it, which was celebrated, and in these ranges one could see the outlines of one’s death coming upon one as clearly and closely as if it were perceived in sleep. And this was perhaps, or perhaps not, the key to Peru; to the lost city of the Incas it was dreamlike. The conquistadors might have had that feeling of unreality as they closed ground upon the ancient civilization, a feeling of consequences simultaneously heightened and reduced because what was happening here was not happening in the ordered sense of Western civilization. Death was a constant here but not disproportionate; it co-existed with life, that was all. Life and death, two sides of the same great balance wheel and little discrimination to be made between the two.

Perhaps this was why no one at the depot had paid any attention to him as he came in except for the two men who were evidently waiting for him. Two men had died just beyond that turn in the road, one by Wulff’s hand, but it made no difference; death being the omnipresent quality it was, it could hardly bestir any excitement. The two men recognized him immediately and came toward him; they reached toward him with a shared intensity as if they were wired through the same electrical socket, were being powered by the same impulse, but at the last instant each of them withdrew and Wulff saw that they were not going to touch him. He looked from one face to the next, trying for some kind of differentiation, but there was none. They looked the same—their heavy, blunt faces, their compressed aspect, the black, expressionless clothing they wore which might have been business suits if they were wearing ties, the pointed shoes and in their lapels some kind of obscure emblem which he could not fathom. More than anything else, they looked like paired miniatures of Stavros.

“What is it?” he said, “where are we supposed to go?” They looked at him without curiosity, miniature men, miniaturized eyes; in a moment he realized that they were not going to answer him and that language had not been one of the factors keyed into them, at least in this instance. Truly, there was nothing to say; he should have understood that. Much of life here was sub-verbal.

They motioned, both of them in the same gesture, and Wulff followed, trudging from the bus depot. As he came out of the enclosure, the dry hot air of the mountains hitting him fully again and filling his lungs with emptiness, he thought that something was going to happen this time to yank the situation around; for there, up the hill, were the passengers from the bus trudging slowly downward, some of them looking at him, a few waving langorously (actually they were waving frantically but in the climate could not generate much energy; Wulff knew that) and Wulff had a vivid image of flight, pursuit, entrapment, and a long, ringing collision with stone as he fell down the faces of the mountains … but nothing whatsoever happened. Most of what went on occurred within the spaces of his own mind, and in truth, at least here, people were simply not that interested in him. He followed the wide, flat backs of the two men, carefully putting one foot in front of the other, concentrating upon the activity of walking in the way that a child might—one step, two step, pause, hesitate, one step, two step, reaching out for the oxygen and the will to power himself between strides.

A few yards down from the depot there was an old car, a 1951 Oldsmobile he thought it might be, already idling. One of the men gestured for him to get into the rear seat and Wulff did, a faint, ominous sweetness coming up from the cushions and the floor like cyanide although it could only have been age. The man to his side slammed the door on him, got into the passenger seat while the other walked slowly around, got into the driver’s seat and then sat there breathing for a few moments while his respiration slowed to normal. They acted as if they had all the time in the world. Perhaps that was exactly the point; they did have all the time in the world. American versus warm-climate concepts of time. The car began to move. Hydramatic transmission, rough on the shifts, two-speed as all of them had been until 1955 when Oldsmobile along with the other GM cars had introduced the three-speed, the what-did-you-call-it, the turbo-hydromatic automatic transmission. First shift point in normal driving at 12 miles an hour, second shift point at 27. That was a hell of a good transmission except that they had a way of going bad at forty thousand miles or so; Olds couldn’t get the bands right. Of course the two-speed was nothing to rave about; generally speaking you could expect to drop two transmissions on an Oldsmobile Futuramic 88 within three years of delivery and each replacement was a cool two hundred dollars. Why was he thinking of all this? Why did it all come back to him, why was his mind racing through ancient Oldsmobile specifications when he was supposed to be picking a milliondollar load of shit out of the Andes, running it back in exchange for his freedom to some unknown destination up north. Who the hell knew? He guessed that it probably had to do with the atmosphere here; he was still lightheaded. Then again, that was no excuse.

“Where is it?” Wulff said, the car rolling, “where are we going to go?” In front of him the two heads bobbed, unspeaking. “I said,” Wulff said, “where are we supposed to go for the shit?”

There was a longer, thicker pause here and he realized that they were not going to say anything. Probably they did not speak English, although that in itself was no excuse for ducking the inquiry; they could have nodded, demonstrated to him with their hands, at least, that they would be delighted to converse with him but did not know what he was saying. Bastards.

The car, maddeningly, was still climbing: there had been a rise behind the depot which Wulff had not seen approaching and they were still ascending, going into the mountains. The road was barely one lane wide so that an opposing car could have mashed them to shreds if the driver of the Futuramic did not back off, and the driver showed no such disposition. The car was, in fact—thin air, age and all—managing fifty miles an hour on the ascent and picking up speed all the time. Wulff felt himself thrust into the slick, dark cushions behind, felt his own perspiration penetrating his shoulder blades. “Where are we going?” he said again. You never knew. If he kept it up they might come out with something to say after all.

But they did not. They seemed stolid, immovable, part of the machinery in front, as inarticulate as the landscape itself, just as menacing. Well, perhaps Stavros selected his men for their lack of articulation, gave them strict orders to say nothing. Why take it so personally? Why take it personally at all? “You know,” Wulff said, “it’s all a little too much for me. I mean I’m entitled to feel that it’s all going by a little too rapidly.

Don’t you think so? I mean, don’t you think that that’s a good point, that there’s too much happening here and I don’t even know what the hell is going on?” He sounded plaintive, petulant. Well, so be it. Self-pity was not quite the proper emotion for the circumstance but at this time it made more sense than almost any attitude. He had been bucked from Calabrese to Stavros to these men with inconvenience and murder in between and there was still the feeling of pervasive unreality; matters were entirely out of his hands, there seemed no way that he could connect with them.

“All right,” he said, “all right then, the hell with it.” He settled lower into the back seat sulkily, shrugging his shoulders, closed his eyes. If they didn’t want to tell him anything that was their business. See if he would care. If he fucked up their job, if everything fell through simply because they refused to address him as a human being and tell him what the hell was going on here, it wouldn’t be his fault.
Let it be on their heads.
Let everything be on them; it was no longer his responsibility. As close as he could get to responsibility in his position, he was absolutely out of it now. In the normal course of events, he would have been dead, anyway.
So fuck it.

Dazzling views of the ruined city assaulted him. Cuzco was in a plain, a shallow bowl of land nestled in the mountain ranges, as it were, protected on all sides by the mountainous territory. Doubtless the Incas had cleaved it out of rock themselves, some advantage taken of their natural terrain, but so much of this had doubtless been done by men, scrappling away at rock. He smelled something sweet in the car, something that was not upholstery or transmission fluid and looked up to see that one of the men had lit a joint, marijuana he supposed, and was inhaling it meditatively, holding it like a cigarette, taking huge irregular puffs now and then and flicking ashes from the end of it indiscriminately. He certainly was not conserving the joint the way that any American teenager would learn to within five minutes of his initiation. Any American would say it was a waste of grass. But then again, maybe the stuff was more plentiful here. Probably it was.

He was relieved to see that the driver at least did not take any part of the joint. That was good; driving and pot did not mix. Not that he was any too sure that it was pot; there could have been cocaine, hashish, peyote rolled up in that joint. Although they were usually pipe drugs, there was no accounting for foreign customs.

The car came to an abrupt halt, spinning against a rock facing to the right of it, the driver yammering. Wulff had to hold on desperately to the back seat to avoid pitching through the windshield. The man with the joint screamed and cursed, threw the remains out the window violently even as the car was braking. Then, the first of them to recover, Wulff saw that the road had been blocked by something that looked, at least at first glance, like a truck; seen secondarily it was a van of some sort from which men with guns were already spilling. They were waving their hands at the car, whose driver was now paled and slumped almost wholly behind the wheel. Abruptly there was a
spang!
something growing in the windshield. The joint-smoker screamed and himself tried to huddle down in the seat, but a second
spang!
caught him in the forehead and he fell into his blood.

Wulff was already free of the door and rolling, his body being battered by the stones. Oh shit. Shit on it anyway.