Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (2 page)

Animal said, “Get that white motherfucker.”

The Dude followed Animal’s point, looked down the street to see the guy coming toward them slowly, looking from right to left, shrugging his way toward them in a curiously graceful series of leaps, really good moves for a white man, and said, “The hell with it. You want him?
You
get him.” He tapped his devil-head ring on the steering wheel.

“Fuck that shit, man,” Animal said, almost pleading already. “I can’t do it myself, you know that. Anyway, it’s your turn. You get him.”

They were sitting in the front seat of the Dude’s 1971 Electra 225, custom kit, snow-white tires, rising fist for a hood ornament, trading a pint bottle of Thunderbird, just sipping a little, sliding with the wine, not so much trying to get drunk as just cement the good high that they had gotten from the Animal’s very good stash about three-quarters of an hour ago in the building right across from them, which from the front appeared to be abandoned. The Dude got a laugh out of that, the patrol cars coming through five, six times a day, looking at that boarded-up storefront and checking it off as just another ruined piece of Harlem. Actually the joint was jumping. There was more action behind those fake boards than there was in the Apollo Theater at midnight; in back of those fake boards was a hidden entrance and another entrance over to the side that most of those in the know used. On the ground floor they were selling it outright; there was a nice, clean, dark basement for shooting, and on the upper levels there were even supposed to be women if you had the ambition after a veinful of that good stuff to go up and get yourself laid. The Dude had heard that that was about the best there was, fucking a woman on a horse-high, but it sure as hell wasn’t for him. He could barely get up the energy after a horse high to sit behind the wheel of the Electra, tap the wheel and dream. Animal, on the other hand, became manic, wanted to get started right away on all those plans that he was dreaming up by the minute, giggling away. The stupid fuck. Still, what the hell, live and let live. It took all kinds to get along, took all ways to enjoy a horse-high, too, and if Animal wanted to react this way, the hell with him. He, the Dude, would just tap the wheel and dream, sing to the teddy bears dangling from chains in the custom kit, and get along. The trouble was that Animal was hustling him. He didn’t have that old give-and-get-dead philosophy; he crawled up and down your ass. Insect-like. Someday, the Dude thought, someday soon, like maybe right after the down, he would have to straighten out Animal. Dragging. Dragass.

“
Get
the motherfucker,” Animal said again and shifted position in the car, holding himself easily, nudging the Dude in the ribs with an elbow, and all of a sudden Dude felt himself build into a real sweat and rage, sitting right there in the car with Animal, listening to the guy rapping on him, some game of the soul that Animal was playing with him. “Shit, man,” the Dude said, “
you
get him,” looking at the tall white guy poking his way down the street easy as you please, quick glance at the trash cans, peek into an alley, finger rubbing behind his ear, free hand jammed in his pocket. Looked like he was just rambling through the territory, that was how he looked. “Son of a bitch,” the Dude said, trying to get his point across, “what’s this wasting him? The guy might be a narc, for one thing.” Or one of the special attack force on drugs, the governor’s shit, he thought. Hell, they were in enough trouble anyway.

“Waste him?” the Dude said, coming to a point of decision right then, feeling everything clicking into place like little wheels and tumblers getting together in his mind, “I’m not going to waste him, I’m going to get the fuck out of here.” He jiggled the keys in the ignition lock of the Electra, trying to get them through the ignition point. Everything moved much more slowly when you were high, seemed to be taking place under water. He could not, somehow, get the keys out of the lock position. He wrenched at the wheel, bringing his right knee up to brace against the shock, trying to tear the thing into gear.

Animal’s hand was suddenly on his, the fingers almost caressing the back of his own hand, a curious intimacy in the gesture that made the Dude realize something: he had never
liked
Animal. They had taken highs together, they had swung a little bit, but that didn’t mean that he had to like the man. And to tell the truth of it, he did not; the Animal was crazy in a dark way, some fascination with death in the man, here he was looking at this white fucker dragging ass down the street and thinking about wasting him and that was not just sensible, no sense to it at all, hard high or not you just did not go around thinking about wasting people on sight. “Let’s
go
,” the Dude said, talking less to the Animal than to his fingers, “let’s go, let’s go,” shouting, the keys finally driving through, and the starter of the Electra ground alive, but stupidly the weight of Animal’s elbow pressing on his right knee drove his foot all the way down into the accelerator, mashing it into the floorboards, and the car started with an enormous, surprised bellow, like a lion caught sleeping by gunfire, and then promptly stalled, the cylinders screaming as raw gas flooded them. Still, Animal would not release his elbow from the Dude’s knee, the Dude could not pull his leg off the damned gas pedal, and this position somehow struck the Animal as funny. He was very high, spitting, coughing, wrenching into laughter, and the Dude felt himself turning toward panic.

Horse-high always did it; you were supersensitive to lights, sounds, noise, heat, one minute floating easily, painlessly, above the whole motherfucking, gangbusting world, the next minute you were ditched, brought low, something in the air, some sound for which you had not accounted driving a nail through the pane of consciousness, and you were brought down again, plunged into the stinking, sinuous bowels of the earth itself where the real fucking was going on. This was where the Dude now found himself, some collaboration between the white man still walking, walking toward them and Animal’s crazed laughter bucked him all the way down. The car was an intestine; red, white, and black it writhed around him. Animal was some crazed devil of the bowels trapped within. And even as the Dude was telling himself to keep it down, keep quiet, lay low, it will pass, he was scrambling out of the car, wrenching himself away from the wheel and out into the street, standing, weaving dangerously, struck by some aspect of the sunlight. He had the feeling that he was being observed, that they were pouring out of the shooting gallery to watch him, that Animal himself was pulling himself along the seat hand-over-hand to get behind the wheel of the Electra, but his attention had narrowed to the white man himself, still walking, coming toward them, and insight broke upon the Dude: the man was coming to get them. He had tracked them from 125th to the lot where the Electra was tucked, uptown to the shooting gallery, and now that they were happy and high with a few grains for extras still on them, he was going to bust them for possession. He was a narc. He had watched them for days, probably years, waiting, just waiting for the new drug laws to go into effect so that he could hook them in, and now he had them. Real shitfit, the Dude thought, I’m having a real shitfit
… but there was no place to hide.

No place at all to go: he was naked, exposed upon the street, under observation from a hundred, two hundred people, and then, as if this were happening on some other street, a street with which he had no connection whatsoever, there was a roar,
gunfire
, the Dude thought, son of a bitch, that’s gunfire, and looking in that direction, leaning toward the right, he saw Animal holding out a low-caliber pistol, already into the second shot: where the hell had he gotten the pistol
from
? Well this did not matter, nothing mattered, the Dude urged his legs to run, get out of there, work it all out later, but his legs were gelatinous, nothing was happening there at all, and so he could only stay rooted in posture, then, locked in position. The gun Animal was holding went off for the third time, but the big white motherfucker, untouched by any of the shots, seemingly invulnerable, possibly immortal, suddenly went inside of himself for a gun of his own, and then as the Dude watched, unable to move, unable to locate that heart of desire that would enable him to confront the situation at all, the white motherfucker fired off his own pistol, and the Dude did not have to verify, did not have to look, did not have to swing his attention to the right to know the truth that had burst within his brain, the final inescapable truth of it, that the shot had hit Animal dead on, and that the Animal was croaking, choking, smoking, singing out his life on this damned street, his body suspended against the cushions of the Electra, and there was nothing whatsoever for him to do then but to watch this as the white man lifted his gun yet again and pumped the second, unnecessary shot into the corpse, staining and ribboning with blood the interior of the car.

They were everywhere. There was nothing you could do to stop them. They would follow you and follow you and then they would kill you off. Overcome by a spasm of weeping, the Dude fell into the sidewalk, then, screaming into the stones while everything went on outside him, and for all the impression that it made on him, he might have been on another world, and all these creatures were aliens.

Horse-high.

Teach him to fuck around with it.

“No,” Gianelli said, “don’t tell me I can’t do it. I want to get him.”

“Too risky,” Miller said. He was trying to be reasonable about this, trying to maintain his sense of balance, but fifteen minutes with Gianelli was half an hour in the ring with the heavyweight champion. He did not know if he could take the constant battering any more. “No, you can’t do it.”

“I’m going to do it,” Gianelli said. He squeezed his hands into, then against one another. “I want to and I know I can do it. I’m going to.” He showed Miller the .45 again. “With this,” he said, “I can handle anything: the heavy stuff, the light stuff, but this is right. I’m going to do it.”

Miller shook his head, stood, walked to the window. Hilton Hotel, seventeen stories up. There was a good view of Central Park from certain rooms here, he understood, but he wasn’t in that class. Transient trade; no credentials. “I don’t want you to do it,” he said. “In the first place, no one’s sure of where he is, and in the second—”

“He’s in New York,” Gianelli said. He was a pale, squat man in his sixties who claimed to have known the late Nicholas Calabrese from way back and to have once sworn a blood oath with him: if either was murdered, the other one would avenge that death. Of course, that had been a long time ago; Calabrese had gone one way, Miller another, Gianelli still a third. And Gianelli was in the worst position of all because Miller, who figured he knew everyone, did not know Gianelli. Hired muscle, he supposed, or on the fringes acting as a runner, but at sixty how much muscle, how much running, could a man do? Still, there was Gianelli back from the dead or from Kansas City, which was practically the same thing, swearing he could locate Burton Wulff and avenge the death of his old, great friend, Nicholas Calabrese. What was Miller supposed to do? It isn’t worth it, he thought: Calabrese’s death, what he left behind him, was sloppy enough; there was no reason why he should have to deal with loose ends like Gianelli as well. Still, the man was here: what was he supposed to do with him?

“How do you know he’s in New York,” he said.

“He’s got to be in New York,” Gianelli said, “I’ve figured this out, there’s nowhere else he could be. This is what he knows best, this is where his contacts all are, this is where he figures is the absolutely last place that anyone would be looking for him. He wouldn’t be anywhere else. And I know I can find him.”

“No one’s found him yet,” Miller said. “There are a thousand men looking for him.”

“That’s all right,” said Gianelli. He cocked and uncocked the .45, giving Miller the uneasy feeling that he was going to discharge it at any moment, then in a spasmodic gesture put it back in his pocket. “Listen,” Gianelli said, “I’m not asking for very much. Am I asking for a hell of a lot? Let me go out on my own, that’s all.”

“With a couple of men,” Miller said. “Don’t forget that; you’re asking for a couple of men. Otherwise you’re not asking for anything.” Except the impossible, he thought. He looked down the airshaft, seventeen stinking levels down into the polluted hole that New York had become. Sixth Avenue, Broadway, it was all garbage. They had torn the great city apart. “And what’s to say he’s in New York at all?”

“He’s in New York. I know he’s here. I know how that man thinks; I spent weeks just thinking about him, reading up, familiarizing myself. He’s uptown, probably around Harlem, and I can get him,” Gianelli said. “I want to get him very badly.”

“We all want to get him very badly.”

“I’ll do it. I’ll put him out of business.”

“It’s too late,” Miller said. “It’s too late to worry about that. I’m not in New York to deal with him, I know that. I’m trying to put this thing together again.”

“That’s right,” Gianelli said standing, going over to the window, standing shoulder-to-shoulder then with Miller, “you’re trying to put the whole thing together because he’s hurt all of you bad, he’s changed the whole setup, you’ve got to get reorganized straight from the top, find new routes, get hold of new supplies. You think I’m a fool? I know all that.”

“So don’t say it. Say nothing.”

“You’re afraid to send me out,” Miller said, “because you know that I can get him and I’ll show the rest of you up. I’ll show up your fifty-million-dollar organization for the fools and shits they are. One man, just one man with a gun and a couple behind him is going to deliver him in ribbons to your door. You wouldn’t like that, would you? It would make all of you look like shit. So you’ll send me back to the provinces, won’t you? That’s what I figure.”

Miller could not take that. There were certain things that you could take, were bound to, others that you could not if you were trying to run or as in this case, desperately hold together, an organization. He slapped Gianelli flatly across the mouth, a dull, hollow, single impact.

Gianelli took it, his face broadening under the impact, his eyes springing involuntary tears. Otherwise, he remained impassive.

“Don’t say that,” Miller said, “don’t you ever say that again.”

“I’m not here to talk,” Gianelli said, cautiously rubbing his cheek as if it were someone else’s; this is not happening to
me
, his eyes said, someone else, some phantom Gianelli stands in this room being slapped around, the real Gianelli is merely observing this from a far distance. He wouldn’t be any part of it. The real Gianelli would not undergo such humiliation. “I’m not here to talk,” he said again, “I don’t want to talk. Are you going to let me go after him?”

“I don’t know,” Miller said, “it depends. Why don’t you give me your information and let
us
go after him?”

“No. It’s not information anyway, it’s just a feeling. I’ve got a feeling for this guy, I’ve studied him, I know his moves, where he probably is. But it’s nothing I can tell you.”

“We won’t give you any men,” Miller said. “We’ve lost enough men going after him. This time we’re not going to take any risks at all.”

“All right,” Gianelli said, the knowledge sinking into him that he was going to get almost nothing. “So I don’t get any men. I don’t get any help. Then all I want is permission.”

“Permission for what?”

“Permission to work in your territory. Permission to kill him. That is all I want.”

“It’s a free country,” Miller said, “I can’t stop you.”

“No, but you can make things very unpleasant for a man operating without your permission. I know about such things,” Gianelli said. “I am, after all, not any kind of a fool and I know how these things are done. If you will not give me help, you must at least give me permission so that I can avenge my old friend.”

“Listen,” Miller said, turning to face the window, back from the window and to Gianelli, who was now rubbing his palms together, his eyes bright and somehow limitless in their apprehension. Miller saw small, doomed images of himself pinned in those eyes, blinking, blinking, blinking away. “Now listen, Calabrese wasn’t killed. Calabrese, I mean, he was
killed
all right but not by Wulff. There was no sabotage on that plane, the indications were that it just went down—”

“No difference,” Gianelli said loudly, waving a hand, and Miller began to feel the focus of the conversation shift, now he was no longer in control: how had he lost control of this? It had been he who had slapped Gianelli the petitioner. Now it was Gianelli who controlled the room. “No difference, he sent my old friend to his death as surely as if he had pulled a gun on him; he was responsible for his going to Miami, he was responsible for bringing my old friend to this position, he put him on that plane, and he made him die. You know nothing of honor or vengeance,” he said, little white streaks appearing on his face, “you know nothing of these qualities; you come from a generation that laughs at these qualities, mocks them, makes the words stand for something that is only cause for laughter,” Gianelli said, and he was suddenly quite powerful, the dominance in the room was no longer something that Miller merely imagined. It was a physical fact. Gianelli looked years younger, his body seemed distended to great proportions, his face alive with youth—or merely energy, it was difficult to tell, they could have been the same thing. “This is for my old friend, Nicholas, and it is not for you to stand between the two of us. I do not do it for profit,” he said, “I do it for honor.”

Miller had nothing to say. What could he say? There was no way to respond to the old man. In fact the old man was right, he was now being put into a context that had nothing to do with the way he regarded life, tried to run it. Life for Miller was a numbers proposition, input here, output there, balance the books, try to make every loss a gain in the long run, try to stuff the gains to cover up the losses. That was management, that was what the organization was all about now in the seventies—just holding on, declaring your position, and trying to maintain it. Passion did not enter into Miller’s calculations, nor did vendetta.

Calabrese’s death was a disaster, of course, but a disaster that could be calculated down to the last decimal and had mainly to do with the convulsions that would be taking the Midwest in the wake of his death, the need to put the Midwest slowly, painfully together again. That was all that Calabrese’s death meant; considered objectively you had to recognize the fact that the old man was seventy-three, that good health or not he was reaching toward the end of his years and that within the next five or ten the convulsions would have started anyway, possibly worse because like all the old-line men Calabrese would be trying to pass on a line of succession, and that simply did not work these days. The outfit would not sit still for it. So there would have been a power struggle, the Midwest would split into factions, the factions would crawl and slash, and in due time peace would be declared, but six or ten months might have passed by and much business would have been interrupted. It was better, perhaps, to do it this way: a quick death, a shocking removal, the troops caught completely by surprise, and in that quiet aftermath the organization had a chance to get hold of the Midwest by itself and put its own procedures in with less difficulty than it might have had otherwise.

In truth Miller cared very little about Calabrese’s death. The fact of it was important and if his death looked like an attack upon the outfit it would have to be avenged, cruelly, quickly, brutally, if only to make sure that an appearance of weakness was not given. But beyond that it mattered very little. He was not here. It was not Miller’s intention to shed tears because a powerful old man had gone down in a plane outside Chicago. The feelings would have to be left to the Gianellis.

“All right,” he said, with surprising mildness, considering what he could have done to Gianelli for defying him like this on his own ground. “All right then. If you want to conduct your own search-and-destroy mission, that’s all right with us.”

Gianelli’s face fell in upon itself, lines seeking lines, toward satisfaction. “Good,” he said, “that is very good.”

“We cannot protect you.”

“I understand that.”

“We cannot give you any assistance of any sort, and this is your own vendetta; if you are killed by him or others, you will not be avenged.”

“I am sixty-three years old,” Gianelli said. “My own life is a matter of indifference.”

“All that I can promise you is that you will have safe conduct on our territory as far as we are concerned. You may conduct yourself as you see fit.”

“That is what I wanted.”

“But we don’t control Manhattan,” Miller said. “We don’t control Harlem, we have only certain officials, certain procedures, certain pockets of business … what I am trying to tell you is that this is a violent and dangerous city, and we are as much subject to the violence and danger as anyone. We cannot pledge your protection. This is not any Sicilian village.”

“I take no offense at that,” Gianelli said. “I appreciate your bluntness.”

“We are businessmen,” Miller said. “This is a business organization. The time of the blood feuds, of the great wars are over. I am not here to perpetuate them. We are trying to hold together a business operation, that is all.”

“I am a man of the times,” Gianelli said and granted himself a little smile; here was a man, Miller suspected, who rationed out smiles to himself the way other men rationed out cigarettes or drinks. It was a luxury. “I am a completely realistic man and I know what you are speaking of. You can guarantee nothing. This is a dangerous city.”

“So it is,” Miller said, “so it is,” and found himself losing interest in the conversation now. What did it matter? What did any of this matter? Calabrese was dead, the old fool gone in a downed plane, behind him all the problems of organization and control, bureaucratic charts, levels of approval. All of this was administrative, none of it personal. No time to mourn. From what he had understood, there had been no more than twenty people at the funeral, none of them from the organization. It was not like the old days; funeral attending was not something you wanted to get involved in unless it was something unavoidable, like your own. “So it is,” he said, the disinterest lashing at him like the sea, “and now I’d like you to go.”

“Very well,” Gianelli said, “I think that our business is concluded,” and with a little bow, half a salute at the end of it, he let the smile fall away from him like a woman dropping a towel to nakedness and then grimly backed out of the room, retreating step by step, out the door then and into the whispering air-conditioned hallway of the hotel. “Thank you,” he said in the doorway, and pulled the door toward him. “I am sorry that you do not have feeling,” he said almost apologetically and was gone.

Didn’t have any feeling? Did not have any feeling? For a moment Miller felt himself tumbling into a rage so extreme that he could have leapt from the chair and pursued the old bastard down the hall shouting: What do you mean I don’t have any feeling? I have plenty of feeling, but business is business! But as quickly as it had hit him, the impulse was gone and he was in his chair thinking: Feeling? What is this about feeling? Didn’t the old bastard know that this was a world with which they were dealing, not a dream, and that were it not for Miller and a very, very few like him, that world would rush in, throw tentacles around him and carry all of them from their rooms and corridors to be deposited in the sewage of history? Feeling had nothing to do with it, feeling was entirely beside the point. The question was one of utter control, and toward its maintenance he would let anything, anyone, even Wulff do what they must. If only the situation would remain, for him, cold and focused.