Lone Wolf #8: Los Angeles Holocaust (13 page)

You waited and waited for something, Calabrese thought, and then it came through and it was so ordinary, so routine, that you wondered if it had been anticipation you were feeling or simply the act itself, already throwing back its implications so many times that by the time it came off you were bored. There was a spark of philosophy in that but he didn’t want to pursue it. The phone call from the guy came in almost to the hour, when he thought it would, and the guy and he, as soon as it got through the referral network, resumed their previous relationship almost as if nothing had intervened. Why didn’t I kill him? Calabrese thought. It would have been so easy; I had him where I wanted him, why didn’t I kill him? No answer to that. But he knew now that there would be a second chance.

“Where is he?” the caller said. “Just tell me where he is.”

No fencing around. Too late for that now. “That’s none of your business,” Calabrese said, “but we got him. Oh, yes, we’ve got him.”

“How do I know that?”

“How do you know that? Do you know about a yellow U-haul? Do you know enough about what was in that U-haul, enough stuff to blow up Chicago, you prick, you fuckface? Don’t start quizzing me, you son of a bitch; I’m going to have plenty of time to answer your questions when I get hold of you. I’ll get hold of you.”

“Did you kill him?” the voice said.

“That’s for you to wonder about,” Calabrese said. “Why don’t you come on over and just find out?”

“Well, why don’t I?”

“Why don’t you come over and have a look at the situation? We’ll keep him on ice for you until you come; I promise.”

“Did you kill him?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out, you evil son of a bitch,” Calabrese said. He held onto the edge of the desk seeing the fluttering and trembling of his hand thinking, I didn’t expect to lose my temper like this, he’s not worth it, I must exercise some control over myself. I cannot allow this bastard to make me lose control just when things, finally, are beginning to sort themselves out. I won’t, I just won’t do it. “Think about it,” he said, aiming for some lightness of tone, “think it over and when you’re in town give me a call. We’ll always be happy to hear from you.”

“You’re holding him, aren’t you?”

“This isn’t a fucking quiz show,” Calabrese screamed. The bodyguard in the room with him looked up in surprise, looked down again. They must think I’m losing my grip, Calabrese thought, that must be the word going all through the house: the old man is losing his grip, he’s screaming and swearing at people. Somehow, some way that word is going to get around and someone is going to want to find out first-hand, take a shot on the fact that the old man at seventy-three was blowing it. That was about the way these things worked, he thought, there was no reason to let it anger him further; he was seventy-three years old. If he were in someone else’s position he would make the same move … in fact, he had. “Come on you bastard,” he said again, “come on out, make a house call. We’ll be glad to see you.”

“Let him go, Calabrese. He doesn’t matter.”

“I didn’t even say I had him.”

“Let him go. Let him out of the way. This is only between you and me.”

“You and me and the world, you fucking scum,” Calabrese said, and the bodyguard yanked his head up from the newspaper again. “You come on out and I’ll let him go. That’s a deal. I’ll let him out of here in return for you.”

“How do I know you have him?”

“You don’t. You don’t know a fucking thing. You’re just scrambling around in the dark and trying to make it stick. Fifteen men. I counted, you son of a bitch; there are fifteen men gone.”

“That’s your fault.”

“Come on!” Calabrese said a little hysterically. He had lost control and all right, he could live with that, anyone could: just let it all come screaming out of him. It was healthier that way, not bottling it up. “Come on out to Chicago. I’ll give you safe conduct. I’ll let them give you a nice free passage. You give me an address. I’ll even send you tickets and arrange to meet you at O’Hare. A welcoming committee.”

“Where is he, Calabrese?”

“You let me worry about that.”

“Is he alive?”

“He’s alive. He’s alive and screaming a lot. I think I’ll let him scream more.”

“All right,” the voice said, “all right, I’m coming out there. You won’t kill him because you know that he’s the only good hold you’ve got on me and you won’t even push him too hard because you don’t want to take any chances on killing him. I know how you operate. But don’t fuck with me, Calabrese.”

“We’ve got another hold,” Calabrese said, and then, relishing it, he let the words come out smoothly, slowly, imagining how the scum’s face must look at this moment. “There’s a girl in San Francisco.”

The response was everything that he could have hoped for. There was a long pause; it extended into ten, twenty, thirty seconds surrounded by little gasps and intakes of breath and Calabrese let him have it. There was no rush. This pig was hooked good now; he wasn’t going to go anywhere. “Leave the girl out of it,” the voice said faintly. “I want to make that clear, you leave her out of it.”

“For the moment. Because it suits our purposes. I take it that we can get our hands on her in ten minutes, though, if I want to. Just think of that, Wulff. Think of it good, now.”

“All right,” the voice said after another pause, not quite as extended, this one, as the last. “All right, Calabrese. We have a date: the two of us. You and I are going to meet. But it’s going to be just us.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“I’ll bet on it,” the voice said with a sudden, chilling authority. “You know who I am and how I work and what I can do and I’m telling you right now that this is
mano a mano
. I’m coming to get you, Calabrese. I’m coming to get you and after I’ve taken care of you you’ll never be the same again.”

“I’m waiting.”

“You won’t be waiting long,” the voice said and hung up.

Calabrese, holding the phone like a dead fish, looked toward the walls, turned on the swivel chair to look out at the lake below, holding the phone for so long, locked so deeply into an abstracted state that when he finally became aware of a pressure in his hand and looked down it took him a couple of seconds to remember what he was holding and how had gotten into that position. Slowly he put it back in the cradle, shoved the receiver away from him, and looked over at the bodyguard who was ostentatiously reading the newspaper now, flipping the pages frantically, his lips moving in little purses and circles as he skimmed a finger down the racing charts.

“Get out of here,” Calabrese said.

The man stood, letting the paper fall. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Get out. And I want this place locked up tight.”

“All right.”

“I want this place buttoned up like the Vatican, you hear me? Nobody moves for any reason. No traffic in or out without my express approval.”

The man shrugged. “Okay,” he said. He went out quickly, closing the door, using a key on the other side to click the tumblers shut. Step one in security; lock everything. The man was showing reasonable intelligence. Good. Good: at least he had a staff that was functioning. Maybe he even had one that he had trust in. No one had ever worked harder at it; that was for sure.

But no satisfaction. I’m getting old, Calabrese thought, sitting behind the desk, I’m getting old, gray, stupid, and frightened and I don’t know if it’s this guy or seventy-three years that are doing it to me. Maybe a little bit of both. Maybe this guy is seventy-three years given human form; maybe he’s just death that I’m dealing with. If I can beat him, then I can beat death itself. It may be a one-way ticket but you can hold on until the last stop and sometimes, some way, you could get a little control over the Master himself by taking him into your own hands. If you killed, that made you death itself, at least for the moment, and if death was your servant … well, you could have control over your staff, couldn’t you?

Calabrese sat in the room for a long time, looking up at the ceiling, perching his feet on the desk. After a while his head lolled back. His eyes closed, he folded his hands. Little images of blood and torment danced through his mind and then he was sleeping, sleeping more comfortably perhaps than he had in a long time.

One way or the other now, it was coming near to being over.

Williams sat in the hotel room, across from the other guy, looking at the green curtains, and tried to keep his mind blank. That was Wulff’s trick, had to be. If you didn’t think, then you didn’t fear; the engines of the imagination were what conveyed horror but you could beat them by simply pulling the switch. It wasn’t that bad after all, he had to remember that. It could be a hell of a lot worse. They weren’t going to kill him, at least now. That was obvious. If they were going to do it they would have done it already. So you had to look at it that way; that his life was as precious to them now as it was to him because if he got killed they were going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Of course, orders could change. You had to remember that things were out of his hands and essentially out of the hands of these two also. They were just doing a job the best they could; that involved listening and obeying. Orders could change, they certainly could, but to think that way was just to start up the engines once more and thank you very much he would not. He would not do it. If you didn’t think, if you refused to project your mind didn’t think, if you refused to project your mind even a moment ahead, living only in the present, then they couldn’t get you. What got you, what created the fear, was living in the future. The present, however, was only itself; expressionless, without form. What was it they called it? Existentialism. That was a fancy name for a modern philosophy of death that most American blacks, he thought, had been living with for two hundred years. That was what had kept the slaves going and that was what had made them eventually, not-slaves. You simply weren’t a slave if you refused to think.

Another man came into the room sweating lightly, dabbing a hand at the perspiration. He looked at the man observing him in the chair, then at Williams who was bound against the bed in another chair, not uncomfortably. “All right,” he said, “no change.”

The man guarding him said, “I figured that. There’s never any fucking change.”

“There are going to be a lot of changes but for the moment just go on like before. That’s it. Hold steady.”

“Fuck this,” the first guard said. He stood, stretched, leaned against a wall. “I’m going to go downstairs and get some coffee. You want some coffee?”

“I want some coffee,” Williams said, “black, heavy on the sugar, and maybe a doughnut.”

“You’re very funny. You’re really a character, aren’t you?”

“No. I just want some coffee.”

“I like your cool,” the man who wanted coffee said. He came over, hit Williams on the face once, hard, the cheekbones seeming to splinter a little under the blow although Williams knew that this could only be his imagination. Fuck it. Imagination was the fuel that fed the engine. So think nothing at all. “You’re a sweetheart,” the man said, rubbing his knuckles and walking away from Williams, “I can see why your partner would ransom his ass to get you back. Maybe he likes your ass itself for that matter. I’ve heard of such things.”

“Lay off,” the man who had been on the phone said, “lay off that shit. I don’t like to hear it.”

“I don’t frankly give a shit what you like to hear. I want some coffee, that’s all. You want some coffee?”

“I don’t want nothing except for you to get out of the room. And you lead anyone back to it I’ll have your ass, speaking of asses which you always are.”

“Fuck you,” the man who wanted coffee said and walked out. Williams braced himself against the bed, shook his head, closed his eyes. He would have liked to have gotten a hand up to rub the cheek but that was impossible. So you had to live with it, that was all. What was a little pain? He hoped that Wulff was out of it. He hoped his wife was out of it. He wondered if he had a son. He wondered if his wife had noticed, maybe, that he was nowhere around and had put out an all-points bulletin. That would be a big help in this hotel room, of course.

“Want to rub the cheek?” the man said. Williams opened his eyes and looked at him; the man extended his hands, began to work slowly on the ropes holding Williams’s right hand. He did this one-handed, the other one holding the gun. “Go ahead,” he said when Williams’s hand was free, moving away then out of any possible grasp. “Go on, rub it, that will help a lot You know, I don’t like this anymore than you do.”

Heavy and the nice guy. An old police technique but they probably had picked it up from the other side of the fence, the cops never having had an original idea in their lives. Williams rubbed the cheek slowly, getting a little fresh blood through, finding as he would have expected that it did help. He said nothing.

“We got in over our heads, that’s all,” the man said, “we didn’t think it would be a job like this. We thought it would be fetch and carry or maybe a hit. We didn’t think it would be a goddamned kidnap.”

“My heart bleeds,” Williams said. He extended his hand. “You want to tie me up again?”

“No,” the man said, “leave it free.”

“Your partner may get goddamned pissed-off if he comes back and finds that I’ve got a hand out.”

“I don’t give a shit about my partner.”

“I do. I very much do.”

“He’s not going to do anything to you until the words comes down. He just bitches a lot.” The man seemed to give Williams a nearly ingratiating smile. “Hell, we don’t like this anymore than you do,” he said again, “it’s a goddamned pain in the ass. You think we like this? Living in a stinking hotel room, babysitting? We could be here for weeks. We didn’t plan on it being weeks.”

“I know,” Williams said, “it’s tough. It’s just real tough. It’s just real tough to be in that kind of a position.”

“It’s a lousy job. We’d just as soon be home, I know I would. I don’t have anything against you. I don’t even know who you are.”

“I won’t bother telling you.”

“Except that they want you awfully bad,” the man said, “oh, yes indeed, they seem to want you very bad, indeed. So I guess you must be pretty important or at least that guy you’re running with is pretty important.”

“Read the papers.”

“I don’t read shit,” the man said and the other guard, holding some coffee walked back into the room, two cups in his hand.

He extended one toward Williams and said, “Untie his right hand, did you?”

“Yeah. Bother you?”

“No,” the man with coffee said, “it’s just as easy. Here, you can have some coffee,” he said and handed the steaming cup to Williams. Williams grasped it, sipped tentatively while the man holding his own coffee looked at him with a puzzled expression. “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Sure, sure.”

“No, I don’t like the rough stuff. I don’t like this job anymore than you do, you know it’s—”

Williams and the first man exchanged a look; the first man, unreasonably, stifled a smile, then put a palm to his mouth. Perhaps he was giggling. Oh, they were a lot of laughs, all right: these were wonderful people. They were the kind of people you might want to dedicate your life to knowing, that is if your business was in genocide.

“I know, I know,” Williams said quietly, “you don’t like it anymore than I do. It’s dirty, sweaty, mucky business and actually you wouldn’t have been in it at all except that you never had the right opportunities and your old man left the family when you were seven years old and instead of getting the money to go to college and take a degree in the English classics you had to go to work as a hard guy for the organization. Tough. It’s really tough shit, I’m weeping,” Williams said and then he sat there thinking for a moment that he might blow the whole scene by doing just that: by weeping, by breaking apart. But no, his control held, pride of the black man and so on and so forth, and so for awhile in the hot, dense little room in Skokie, Illinois the three of them just sat there, whiling away the spaces of the afternoon while slowly like a blanket Williams felt circumstances closing in on him—

Or was that just the engine of the imagination again doing its wicked work?