Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare (8 page)

Calabrese knew that he had trouble early on, even before he got word of Dillon. Any fool could tell just from the sense of the situation that there was plenty of trouble, but he believed in functioning step by step. That was surely the only way to go in this business, and maybe Dillon would eventually get through to him. And, when Dillon hadn’t reported back hours after he should have, well, maybe there was trouble in the international phone lines or Dillon was having difficulty in finding a phone. It was best to look at matters in that way. You simply could not get far looking too much ahead in this business. Past the end of the immediate problem, that was about it.

But by ten that evening he had known Dillon had blown it. It was a matter of instinct, that was all; you didn’t need much objective material in this business to see what was going on. Those who needed it were only to be pitied. People who needed the facts laid out in front of them were stacked at the bottom of the river. A suggestion here, a possibility there, a lapsed conduct, the look in a man’s eyes, the way a woman might look at that same man … and you knew everything. He put through an international call to the Crillon and got Stavros. Ordinarily this would have been a three-hour process but Calabrese knew a few people and he knew how to get hold of them even through the blind of pseudonyms that the phone company used. He got the call through in fifteen minutes to Stavros direct.

“Where is he?” Calabrese said without preamble. If Stavros did not recognize his voice at this point then Stavros was a fool and Calabrese would not have credited himself with such luck.

“Where is who?” Stavros said. Even through the network of the international phone lines, the ten-second delay, the flattening, mechanical interposition of wires and tapes which meant that he was not hearing Stavros’ voice but only a reassembled recording of it … even through all of this Calabrese could sense the fear.

“You know who I fucking mean,” Calabrese said. “Your house guest.”

“I haven’t seen him in a long time. Not all day.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m quite sure.”

“I’m a little concerned,” Calabrese said. “I sent some friends of mine after him. They should have located him by now.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“I think you know everything about that.”

“Leave me alone,” Stavros said after a flat little pause. “Just leave me alone. I have nothing to do with your affairs. He is merely a guest in my hotel.”

“Listen to me, you fucking Nazi,” Calabrese said, “I know what you’re up to. I know exactly what the hell you’re up to down there. You think I’m a fucking fool? I let all of that go; I didn’t give a shit. After all, I’m not in the business. But you’re fucking around with my life now.”

There was a much longer pause and Stavros said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know what I’m talking about. You fucking well know everything that I’m saying … you Nazi son of a bitch.” Calm down, Calabrese said to himself, feeling his gorge rising in his throat. There is no need for this, no need, and you are an old man. Stavros is thirty-five hundred miles away. “I don’t like it,” Calabrese said, “I want you to turn him up.”

“How can I turn him up if I don’t know where he is?”

“I don’t know. That’s your problem.”

“You’re crazy,” Stavros said. The distance was giving him courage. “You’ve got to be out of your mind.”

“I’ll show you how much out of my mind I am.”

“You think that I have something to do with this man? He is not in my custody. He is merely using my hotel, that is all. My auspices, my rooms. I bear no responsibility for this at all.”

“I can do anything I want to do with you,” Calabrese said. “You think that you’re a long way out of the picture, that you can do anything you want to do, but you can’t. You’re not a free man. I know everything about you. I can kill you with two phone calls, that’s how far from me you are. I want you to produce him.”

“Why should I produce him?” Stavros said. Slowly he was turning around. Calabrese could sense the initial, instinctive fear giving way to defiance. No, not defiance, not quite, something more terrible than that: a low-key assurance that he knew things which Calabrese did not. Calabrese did not like that. He did not like it at all. “I don’t have to produce him,” Stavros said, “and if you think you can kill me for failing to produce a man then you are genuinely crazy. If you do anything to me the word will get around what kind of person you are and you will never get any help in this country again. In many countries.”

“Don’t argue with me,” Calabrese said. “Just produce him.”

“I don’t have to produce him. Anyway,” Stavros said, almost lightly, “that is the purest kind of stupidity and foolishness. Produce him so that you can kill him, that’s all. What if the job has been done for you? What if he is already dead?”

“I’m going to get you.”

“I’m sick of your threats,” Stavros said, “I’m sick of you Americans and your threats of murder. You hold life so cheaply that the threat of its removal means nothing to you. Or to me. I do not know where your man is and I remind you that this is my hotel. Your men are here at my sufferance. I’m going to throw them out.”

“You’re fucking me up.”

“No I’m not. You’re fucking yourself up.”

“I told you. I know what you’re doing down there. I let you get away with it for a long time because it didn’t mean shit to me. Like I said, I’m not in the business.” Calabrese reached for his pack of cigarettes, cracked two of them and threw them across the room.
Son of a bitch. The son of a bitch
. Sitting in his barred office in Peru, the Nazi, and laughing at him. “But this is too much,” Calabrese said, trying to make his voice come level. “This is too fucking much. I’m going to put you out of business now.”

“No. You have put yourself out of business. That’s what you have done. You have delivered my salvation unto me and I am grateful.”

Obviously the man had gone crazy. The distortions in the voice were not purely the product of the international lines. He had never heard Stavros sounding like this before. But there was an undertone of purpose as well, and it was this purpose which Calabrese found terrifying. “I’ll show you your salvation,” he said.

“You have. You already have.”

“I’ll show you your fucking salvation, Stavros, and I’ll make you beg for release from it.”

“I don’t care anymore,” Stavros said thinly. The connection must have been going bad; the voice was now fading. “I’m not interested in your threats or promises anymore. I’m going to attend to my own set of purposes now, and the hell with yours. This is my country and this is my hotel, Calabrese.”

“That’s a fucking joke. Your country? It’s no more your country than mine.”

“It’s been mine for thirty years,” Stavros said. “I’m not afraid of you anymore. I’m not afraid of anything. I don’t have to be afraid,” he said and broke the connection, leaving Calabrese looking at an empty phone. The first, flaming sense of disbelief modulated into a dull, gasping rage that moved through him like an electrical impulse through wire, and then Calabrese found that he was trembling all over.

He was a fool. He had been a fool. Face it: Walker, that crooked cop, that son of a bitch, had been right. He had had Wulff face-to-face in these very rooms and he had not killed him. Why had he not killed him? Was it that he was losing his grip? Did it all come down to that?

“It doesn’t matter what it comes down to,” Calabrese muttered to himself and he was right. It really didn’t. Fuck the psychology of the thing; for whatever reason he had blown it very badly with Wulff, but that was behind him; what was ahead was the necessity now to rectify the mistake. It was a problem, one of the biggest problems he had ever had, but at least it was the kind of difficulty that could lend itself to relatively rational resolution. You moved ahead with a practical business problem like this; you brought in the artillery and you did what you could.

The only way you got into difficulty was wondering about the motives for a condition in the first place, but that had never been his style. Not at all. The gravesites, the deeps of Michigan, were filled with men who had pondered all the motives.

Relatively simple, this equation now: he had to get Wulff because the man was on the loose again with Stavros’s coaching and obviously hell-bent to get out of Peru and get on with his life’s work; he had to get rid of Stavros because the little Nazi bastard was a traitor who had sprung Wulff free and was probably hoping to use him to play out his own options. Stavros and Wulff. Wulff and Stavros. Take care of those two and then it was home-free.

What he had to do was to move in now with the heavy artillery.

It was a wonderful thing—just think of it!—to be in a room by yourself with nothing but a phone and the capability to call in literally hundreds of men through that one weapon, the telephone. It was an accomplishment. It was something to strive for.

He went ahead and he did it.

He called for total war.

Rolling out of the exploding car Wulff had a single, sickening instant when he thought that it was all over; he was rolling and rolling in hilly country and he could lose his grip entirely, just keep on rolling, bounce off a precipice somewhere and start rotating through the stones. But the survival instinct was within him as ever, and although in many ways that seemed tempting, just giving up like that and going with the roll, he did not do so. He was able to get hold of some ground, heavy, dense mud which retarded the roll and then, wrenching himself against the force of the spin, was able to bring himself to a stop in some kind of crevice. Looking to his right then he saw the open, empty valley; hundreds of feet below, it reared up like a cup to seize him … but he sprang away from that vision, looking toward the left and up the hill. Some two or three hundred feet from the point of the impact he saw the Futuramic, lying on its side burning, flames leaping through the open scar of the windshield. Around it men had gathered, some beating at the flames, others poking and prying through the interior of the car, looking obviously for some sign of life within it which they were not going to find. The two men were dead. Wulff was sure of that.

But they were not interested in the two men, of course. They were beating at that car like birds, looking for Wulff himself, and as he concentrated in some tube of attention, looking uprange, seeing what they were doing, he found himself caught between the impulse to run and that to start shooting. There were four men around the car, all of them having come from an old Buick sedan which he could see huddled between a pair of rises, quite invisible from the road but perfectly apparent here. These four must have waited quite patiently for the Futuramic to show and now they were atoning for their excessive patience with desperate haste, literally pulling doors off the Futuramic as they rammed themselves within. Four of them: he had used one shot in the bus and that meant simply enough that he had five bullets to kill these four men. Excellent if it worked; they would be dead and he would have the Buick at his disposal as well, excellent even if he missed the one shot that he had to spare. But if he missed more than that one shot, of course, Wulff would be in trouble. In fact, he would be dead. There was just no way that he could miss two shots and live.

He took out the pistol and looked at it, considering what to do. It was a considerable risk; he was firing from sixty to seventy yards, two-thirds of a football field, not a bad shot with a rifle but a very difficult one with a small pistol. If perfectly aimed, which was not likely under the circumstances, there was no saying if this little instrument had the power to kill from this distance; anything less than perfect aim was surely disastrous.

All in all the smart thing to do was to run. But where? Wulff was standing in a clump of dry dirt looking out upon an abscess of emptiness—nothing on this road, no sign of civilization, Cuzco shrouded in mists below. Where would he go from here? He did not have any idea where the two dead men would have taken him.

His prospects, in short, were terrible. Thinking that, settling in his mind that at least there was almost nothing to lose, Wulff had the pistol at waist-level before thinking further, was already in the process of squeezing off the first shot by the time it occurred to his conscious mind that he was going to go through with it.
Son of a bitch
, his conscious mind said admiringly. Wulff aimed the pistol at the nearest of the four, a stout man who was kicking at a fender now, smashing it down with his heel, obviously infuriated by their failure to find Wulff in the car. Emotions projected uprange like odor. He would be an easy shot, pitifully easy. Of course he would draw a lot of attention, too.

Well, the hell with it. You couldn’t have everything; you couldn’t have both a corpse and perfect safety. Not considering it further, Wulff welded himself into the gun, concentrated, then got off a shot, deliberately aiming it low, compensating for the air pressure now. The man kicked once and went down, crumpling over the fender of the car, then slid downward, a surprised expression on his face visible even at this distance, blood tearing from his opened body.

The three surrounding him responded instantly. These were top-grade troops, at least the best that Calabrese (for he had assumed that it could be only Calabrese) could pick up in Peru; they were not fools, they knew what was going on. They hit the ground, the three of them, at least two already digging for their guns, the third screaming orders gesturing in his direction, and it was this one, the nominal leader, which Wulff decided to aim for next. There was a moment when he thought that his finger was going to jam on the trigger but no, this did not happen; the trigger pulled free and he got the shot off. It hit this man in the forehead. He was already prone on the ground, there was nowhere else for him to go, but as the bullet struck him he began to roll and Wulff could once again see the betraying smear of blood. The man brought a hand to his forehead and wiped it off.
Ah, you son of a bitch
, Wulff thought,
you can’t fool me, you’re dead, you son of a bitch, I got you, you can’t wipe everything away.

The first response shot came now. It came from one of the two uninjured men, he could not tell which, and he had no time to avoid it, no time even to set himself. The shot hit in front of him, he could see the little puffs of dirt and stone fragmenting outward; and then a second shot placed right behind came even closer to the ground. The man was not a particularly good shot and he was firing under pressure, but his technique was all right; he was leading the shots into Wulff. Wulff got off another shot and this one went high; he knew even as he pulled the trigger on this one that it was going to be a wasted shot. It squeezed the two unhurt men further into the ground but it hit neither. It hit neither.

Abruptly he felt panic seize him, the panic of knowing that now he had two shots for two men, an almost impossible condition under this circumstance, but then again it was nothing to worry about because he either would or would not place the fire—either would or would not kill them—and in any case, the end would come so fast now as to avoid any brooding on his part. He had gone this far; he could go a little further. Anyway, it did not matter. Nothing mattered. One of the men on the ground panicked, probably, and reared to his knees clutching the tube of the gun, looking frantically in Wulff’s direction, obviously trying to place him but unable for the instant to do so, and this gave Wulff a pitiably easy shot. Nothing to do but aim and fire. He did so casually, not tensing his wrist, squeezing it off as absently as you might on patrol take a shot at a second-story felon. The shot hit the man above the left eye, tearing upward through the plate of his skull, discharging pulp and membranes and then he was back on the ground in a different condition from the way in which he had taken leave of it, his gun in a spasm of agony hurled at some distance from him.
Keep that in mind
, Wulff thought. He might be able to use that gun later.

But there was still the fourth to dispose of and the fourth was cunning. While Wulff had been killing the third, the fourth had taken a new tack entirely, had labored his way back inside the Buick. Wulff did not know this until he heard the chuck of the door, the dim metal-against-metal sound of the old car’s door closing and then, from somewhere inside the car came a shot, a poor shot which went high above him but which nevertheless sent him rolling and spinning to the earth again, rolling so frantically that he almost lost his gun, just holding onto it with a fragile grip as he looked desperately for some sort of cover. But there was no cover. His roll had taken him away from that little outcropping of rocks which he had used as a blind, and drawing his legs up against himself he had a feeling of vulnerability, was trussed up in the landscape now like a chicken, a clear, clean shot for the man inside the car. But even as the next shot came, just a little bit high, he felt the good, clean rage overtake him: they had no right to do this to him. He had killed three, three for none, and now the fourth was still firing away and this was not right; Calabrese had no right to send four men out against one, no matter how skillful the one. This was not the way of a man.

Oddly it was this which enabled him to level the gun to get off his final shot. It was a foolish rage, foolish because Calabrese of all people was not interested in the fairness of a matter but only in the winning of it; in Calabrese’s position Wulff would have been the same (had he worried about the lives and the stakes when he had blown up that freighter in San Francisco?—a hundred men unaware of the danger, had that bothered him for a moment?—no, it had not) but there was nothing like a little rage, even false rage, to catapult a man into a position of efficacy. And so he felt it, allowed it to build within him in a controlled way. The son of a bitch was skulking in the Buick, the son of a bitch did not even have the simple guts to confront him man-to-man on open ground: who did he think he was? Actually, looking at the situation objectively, he was in an impossible situation now.

Of course he was. The man was in the car, shielded by glass and metal on all sides, the coward, protecting himself, shooting at Wulff who was an exposed target, only one crucial bullet left in Wulff’s pistol. Blame that son of a bitch Stavros too for being so clever, for restricting his fire like this, but then Stavros could not be blamed for everything; doubtless the man had had no suspicion that Wulff would get into a situation like this, would have the safety of his own men to consider.
Well, consider their safety
, Wulff thought; both of them were dead in the Oldsmobile. Another high shot came out. The man inside the Buick was panicking, no question about that. As much as he had the situation in hand, he was unable to take advantage ot it; three deaths to his left and right must have given him plenty to think about. In fact he might have absolutely no more taste for combat at this point, and then, confirming this line of thought, Wulff heard the engine of the Buick roar, lifter sounds, valves tapping, little golden streaks from the mufflers. The man had broken. All that he wanted to do was to get out.

The Buick reared backwards, tracking up dirt, then the old Dynaflow gearing clashed, the car bucked forward and then it was heading toward him, the driver flat out on the gas pedal, trying to run him over. Well, that was a new way of looking at the situation; the man had guts after all. But you could not both drive and shoot at the same time, not with any real accuracy whatsoever, and it was this calculation which caused Wulff to make his last effort; he allowed the car to come upon him, holding his ground tentatively at a high point, bringing his pistol high but not firing. And then as the car kept on rolling, what had occurred to Wulff must have occurred to the driver—the realization that for acceleration there must also be braking action in equal degree and that in coming off the road, roaring toward the abutment where Wulff was standing, he was taking a very real chance of losing the car and going over the cliffs. The driver, in his rage or cunning or some mad combination of the two, had lost sight of this calculation for the instant, so eager was he to ram Wulff over the abutment. But now he came back into contact and the big car slewed wildly left, the brakes screaming as the driver tried to bring it down. Wulff heard the spattering of pistol, the driver trying to struggle off a shot or two as he worked the brakes and the wheel but that was not an intelligent idea, not at all because the shots went completely wild and meanwhile, left to its own devices, the car was skittering, literally inching toward the abutment now. The shots stopped, the car began to make the croaking, screaming noises of an animal as the driver worked desperately to brake it down, concentrating on nothing else and Wulff, feeling like a matador working with an oversized, enraged and particularly clumsy bull, stepped sideways then as the car dived upon him. He moved a couple of feet out of its path and then, leveling his pistol, putting no thought into it and less calculation (because if you began to think about what should be instinctive you merely lost control altogether), he put one shot through the side window where the drivers head ought to be.

There was a spatter of glass, the old plate glass smashing and tinkling, imploding within, and for a moment Wulff did not know if he had gotten the man or not. Then the car, suddenly straightening on its skidding course, roared with power, something coming like a stone down on the accelerator; then it swayed precipitously, went out of control, headed toward an abutment and began to roll. The driver, only dimly seen from this aspect, a fish under glass in layers of water, was obviously trying desperately to regain control of the car. He was flopping within the aquarium that the interior of the Buick had become, and Wulff could hear his gulping and screaming. And then slowly, majestically, real aspects of grace in it, a grace magnified by the age of the car, the heavy, dull sheen of the metal which some prideful Peruvian had doubtless polished at one time to a second gloss that outshone the first, the glaring portholes, three of them on the side of the car catching the last of the light … as all of this came together the car glided toward the last possible point of stoppage, poised like a diver on the lip of the chasm … and then flipped soundlessly into the valley below. Hand on hip, still gripping the gun, Wulff watched it fall with a kind of wonder. The soundlessness of the movement, the scope of the disaster covered by that soundlessness, was awesome. And then the car hit—glass, fluids, metal spraying like gunshot from its surfaces as it plunged into the chasm—and as the first fires leaped from the car, Wulff heard the screaming then, fracturing the sound of metal with its long, bloody sound.

But not for too long. The screaming was cut off in mid-syllable, a lick of fire overtaking the screamer’s lungs, searing them to ash in a single, terrible burst. And unable to bear it anymore Wulff turned, turned from the site where the car had hit to see the villagers staring at him—five, no seven or eight of them in a solemn row, hats in hands, a penitential posture, eyes solemn and reaching. They looked like a cluster of distant relatives arriving at a wake, unaccounted for and embarrassed but eager, eager as such relatives almost always are, to please. To please and ease. To please and ease the situation.