Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (7 page)

The formal/informal name the department gave it was the Wulff Squad, the detail of six whose full-time assignment was to run Wulff to ground and bring him alive—or, if necessary, dead—into headquarters for delivery. But in his own mind, Williams had a better name for the squad: just call them the fuckups. He was dealing with a disaster area; he was dealing with a squad that in the good old days would have been working the urinal circuits in Times Square or trying to pick up queers in Greenwich Village. Now, with the new liberalized policies and the tolerance of minorities, the department’s worst were no longer able to work colorful details like this, but on the other hand there was nothing that you could do with them in normal channels. Put the fuckups into patrol cars or even behind the desks at precincts and they’d be screwing around with the public; bring them up on departmental charges and you were risking a nasty stink. Besides, what the hell could the charges be? Incompetence? Psychopathology? It was not like the army; there was no clean article system in which every condition had a label, just stick it on the discharge and pitch them out.

No. No, these men were staying. The commander of the squad, a lieutenant, had gone through a colorful adultery-and-divorce case that had gotten his picture on the front page of one of the tabloids, piling out of a motel room in his underwear, grappling desperately for his gun, which was the one article that a policeman was never supposed to be without, a hint of bare shoulders in the background. He had been shacked up with a prostitute on Route 9 near Peekskill, and his wife through a private detective had traced him. The lieutenant was very bitter about it, claiming that all he was trying to do was to satisfy some sexual urges and practices that his wife, a cold bitch, would not let him. There were a couple of fat patrolmen who had been partners in a car once until they had driven the car, in hot pursuit, clear off the docks and into the Hudson River in search of a fleeing junkie; they had not found the junkie or the stash, but they had succeeded in sinking the car, and that too had been the subject of a humorous story in one of the tabloids with a picture of the patrol car sunk to its roof line, floating on the surfaces of the oily Hudson like an inner tube. There was nothing you could do with them, either. And there was nothing to be done with the slender, unspeaking Puerto Rican patrolman, very delicate in his features and movements, who had been working in drag as a prostitute for the purposes of entrapment, but had apparently become so enthusiastic with one of his prospective customers that he had tried to take him into a hotel, had had to be literally pulled off the John’s body by the pair of surveying cops who somehow got the idea that the Puerto Rican was not only on patrol; he might be an actual transvestite. It was that kind of squad.

There was no order or procedure. Williams came in the first day and heard a long, rambling talk from the lieutenant in the filthy back room of an abandoned precinct house on the West Side. The lieutenant said that he didn’t know exactly why they were there or what the hell they were supposed to do, but this was the job anyway and he had passed around copies of the departmental memorandum on Wulff, the memorandum that Williams had found so surprisingly accurate, considering how little they had had actually to work with, but sloppy in small details and missing out on a lot of the stuff Wulff had pulled along the way. In the memo, Williams was not tied to Wulff specifically, which was very much a benefit. “He’s a dangerous man,” the lieutenant said, “a very dangerous man, he’s out to kill all the junkies and dealers, it seems, but anyone gets in his way he’ll kill them too, he’s a killer, probably psycho,” which was complete bullshit as far as Williams was concerned. But it impressed the Puerto Rican no end, he began to mumble to himself in a louder and louder voice, saying at last that he didn’t want to deal with any goddamned psycho, life was too short to get involved with psychos, and then said nothing else while the ex-partners of the sunken patrol car laughed and belted him around a little bit. “We have to go pretty much on our own on this one,” the lieutenant said. “You see, we’re a squad, we’re the Wulff squad, but we’ve got to split up and act as individuals, we can’t move with one another, we can just spread out all over the city and create a network of intelligence, right? You refer all your findings to me and I’ll coordinate.” The patrolmen turned very sullen at that and asked the lieutenant exactly who the hell he thought he was. You mean to say that they were going to do all the work while the lieutenant sat on his goddamned ass and made
reports
? That sounded pretty lousy to them (they always spoke in the plural; it was
us
, not
me
), why didn’t the lieutenant get off his ass and chase this killer if the department was so interested in getting him, instead of making them setups. The lieutenant said something about policies and procedures, words filtered down from headquarters, the most efficient and viable use of human resources, and so on.

Williams stood with his arms folded and let all of it pass over him. Obviously this was no time to start protesting, and he was at least half-involved in the squad
not
finding Wulff He was on the fence about it, but he was not by any means committed to his capture. Actually, he did not know how he felt about it at all except to know that he needed his job back to fit together the pieces of his life. If he ever came up against Wulff, man to man, he would probably have a very difficult decision to make. But one look at this squad was a pretty good indication that he would not have to face that problem; these men could not have caught a hooker in a whorehouse. So much for the department’s efficiency and commitment to capture Wulff.

But then again, maybe the deputy commissioner had not been such a fool after all; perhaps he had an insight, that the only kind of squad to put on a problem like Wulff was one that was in itself composed of brigands, fools, fuckups, vigilantes, the dregs of the department whose methodology in its peculiar convolutions would approach that of Wulff himself: set a thief to catch a thief, a dog to catch a dog. Wasn’t Wulff the biggest fuckup of all? That had been the deputy’s point, of course, that Wulff the maverick, the vigilante, the brigand, could be considered as the ultimate rogue cop, and under those circumstances the squad made a good deal of sense. Of course this was looking at things in an abstract, metaphysical fashion, as deputy commissioners far removed from the field were often inclined to do. For Williams the difference between the deputy’s view of things and the squad that he had mustered was that irony that made the universe itself, hundreds of millions of years ago, reluctantly inflate and begin to go about its business.

They split up districts among the city; each taking a section of Manhattan. They had decided to focus on Manhattan on orders from above because this was where Wulff had come from and where all the internal signs indicated he was still operating. If it was the Bronx, Staten Island, or Brooklyn, it would have been impossible anyway, and Queens was unto itself at least ten cities, maybe twenty. You had to start with a modus operandi that contained possibility, and that meant focusing on Manhattan. If he wasn’t in Manhattan, the hell with it. The Puerto Rican got the West Side from the Battery to Ninety-sixth Street, the two patrolmen got the east side the same way, and Williams, of course, got Harlem. All of Harlem to cover. Well, he was black, wasn’t he? so it made a good deal of sense. The lieutenant seemed to be pleased at his intelligent decision, sending the Hispanic to the lower West Side, the whites to the East, the Negro to Harlem. It appeared to compose in his mind one of the few great original techniques evolved in modern police work; suiting the man to the territory. He, the lieutenant, would of course have a special phone number and a code name through which he could be reached at this precinct house during the days and at home at night. He lived with his mother in Staten Island.

All right, Williams had Harlem; he took Harlem. Burrowing through his mind was a crazy, fervid idea anyway; if anyone was going to catch Wulff, he would. These others did not have a chance; any possibility resided solely within Williams. If Wulff was catchable at all, it would be by Williams, and in that sense it didn’t matter where they sent him, because wherever he was sent, there Wulff would be, in a strange, metaphysical connection of some sort, driving them toward one another. He was sent to Harlem, he would go to Harlem. The two patrolmen, mumbling about pension rights, went out of the room turning at the door to curse the lieutenant; the Hispanic signaled for Williams to join him in conversation at the improvised desk that the lieutenant had thrown up out of a set of packing crates. “Listen,” he said in unaccented English, “is this man a killer?”

“Of course he’s a killer,” the lieutenant said with some satisfaction, “haven’t you read the reports?”

“I don’t want to be killed,” the Hispanic said. “I don’t want to deal with any killers. Do you?”

Williams shrugged. Keep it cool, play it down. He had no idea how much any of them here knew about him but it was best to concede nothing, to proceed as if he had no knowledge. The less known the better. “I don’t think we’ll find him,” he said.

“Of course we won’t, with that attitude,” the lieutenant said. He hit the crate hard, causing the slats to tremble. “I don’t want any goddamned defeatism on this squad,” he said.

“I have defeatism,” the Hispanic said, “I have a great defeatism. I do not want to be killed.”

“Forget it,” Williams said. He put a hand delicately on the Puerto Rican’s elbow, trying to draw him out of the room. The man shuddered, little waves of motion cresting throughout his body, and shoved off Williams’s hand violently.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “I do not like to be touched in this way. Don’t touch me!” he said, his voice breaking up an octave, “I will not tolerate this.”

“All right,” Williams said, “I won’t touch you.” He moved away from the lieutenant. “All of Harlem,” he said, “I’m supposed to go through all of Harlem and find him.”

“You will. Unless you give up on it now.”

“I’m not giving up,” Williams said, “I’m just thinking that’s a lot of territory to cover.”

“Ambition!” the lieutenant screamed. “It’s ambition that made this goddamned department
work
, that made law enforcement possible. What if they said they couldn’t get Dillinger?”

“I can’t cover the West Side,” the Hispanic said. “Two million people are on the West Side. What am I supposed to do?”

“Enough!” the lieutenant said. “That’s enough of that!” and rose from his seat. Standing, he was six feet eight inches tall, his paunch trembling like a bombsight in front of them, leveling in, aiming at Williams.

Williams, already at the door of the room, said, “Enough, enough, I’ll take Harlem, I’ll
take
it,” suspended somewhere between insane laughter and rage. But there was no reason for rage: what was the point? why get excited over something like this? It meant nothing at all.

The Hispanic seemed from this aspect to be about to leap on the lieutenant, impale himself upon him in some ecstasy of feeling, but backed away, some shade of disconnection had dropped between them, and the Puerto Rican felt obviously that he could push it no further. “All right,” he said, “all right then, we’ll show you, this will show you! I’ll go out there in Times Square and get knifed to death, that’s what’s going to happen, and it’ll all be on your head!”

Wear a dress and high heels, Williams thought he heard the lieutenant murmur, but could not be sure of this. In any event the lieutenant had subsided behind his desk, all six feet eight of him folded up neatly like a ruler, and Williams got out of there quickly, not even waiting to see what the Hispanic would do next. Outside he found the two patrolmen engaged deep in conversation; they were arguing as to where they were going to go for lunch and who had the better credit with a decent neighborhood place, but they decided that neither of them had any connections at all in this precinct, no one knew them, and this made the discussion become quite heated. Passing them without acknowledgement, Williams was afraid that they might come to blows, and what good would that do? Anyway, he had no time to get involved in a fight between these two. He had ideas.

If you were going to do the job, you might as well do it right. And Williams had an idea, a pretty goddamned good idea of where Wulff had been picking up all of those armaments that he had been using so spectacularly.

There was only one place in New York where a man traveling light could pick up stuff of this caliber quickly. And hadn’t it been Williams himself who had made the referral? That made him responsible in a way that was a grim way to look at it, but he supposed that he had more at issue than he was willing to admit when he had come into the Wulff, the fuckup, Squad.

Williams went uptown to see Father Justice at the Church of the Brotherhood.

Now the war had started again, but the war was working only in little bits and pieces, it did not have the grand sweep, the devastating overview that the earlier campaigns had had. Then Wulff had been working at the top, blowing up estates, smashing dealers and top distributors. He’d had the feeling that he was moving tentacles from top to bottom, squeezing the lifeblood out of the trade, and it had been good, it had been effective; no one could ever talk away what the campaign had meant to the organization. But this was different, now he had come down to the bottom again, was mucking around in the sewers, catching one by one the vermin that ripped out of that excrescence, and it was not the same; it was piecework instead of a grand overview, a sense of overriding control and majesty that he had had at times during the beginning of the campaign, even toward the middle. Now it was just wearying, plodding work.

Still, he had the shooting gallery in Harlem burned out and he had the Royal Lounge. The Royal Lounge: three hundred injuries, the whole, huge drop joint and trafficking center1 burned out in that one, lunging explosion; then, waiting across the street for the first bodies to come hurtling out, the flames, the explosion, the pain, the sound of sirens, and then getting across the street in the middle of that havoc to confront the dealer on the street, extending the confrontation too long, perhaps, in the middle of that chaos, letting the flames and enforcers get too near him. But he could not resist that opportunity, the opportunity to see the enemy whole, to have him at his mercy. And at the end the killing had been less one of vengeance, vengeance being long past him, but one of simple release, the man’s eyes impacting into his skull, the groaning skull imploding within itself and then quickly, quickly, the flight downtown, on foot for several blocks and then by taxi. No one was going to touch him. The explosion had drawn attention from two square miles of houses and police, even a fleeing white man would not attract much attention in Harlem on a night like this. At last, at 110th Street, he had slowed, taken a cab, gone back to his room.

It occurred to him that up until this last New York siege he had not specifically been acting against the law; he had been acting outside of it, dealing with criminals, many of whom laughed at the law, administering to them his own justice, not lashing out against authority or against the uninvolved, but delivering his message of justice to those who had needed that message for a long time but could not be touched by normal processes because the framework of social retaliation had broken down. It had been that way in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York the first time, Havana, Lima, and Los Angeles. None of those who had felt his vengeance would have been entitled to the protection of the law in a state where the law worked. But New York was different; on this second go-around he had to admit that for the first time he was going up against the authorities themselves; bombing the lounge and gathering ordnance for further attacks put him at poles with the enforcers, and the enforcers if they found him would be merciless now. They would have to be. He had jeopardized their own position.

So he was acting against the law, he vas a lawbreaker who would be dealt with now as mercilessly as any junkie under the new drug program. And yet, back in his room, the door secured, the ordnance neatly packed in a suitcase near him, Wulff found it impossible to feel any sense of guilt or regret at this. It had been building for a long time, this last, great confrontation. He had known every step of the way that there would be a time, finally, when he would be placed in open opposition to the enforcers, and in a way he welcomed it. The lines were clearly drawn now; there would be no equivocation. He would be in contest against all of them: not only the dealers and distributors, but also the enforcers; not only against the inhabitants of the sewer, but also against those who were supposed to keep the lid on tight. All of them. He would be taking on the world.

Well, he had been a long time getting to this position; first as a rookie patrolman he had been taking on criminals, then in Vietnam something vaguely defined that was merely called “the enemy,” and then back to the department again where on narco he was supposed to do something vague to people called “drug merchants” or “users,” and finally in his odyssey he had taken them on in a far more forceful fashion, more forceful indeed. But he had been building toward this last and most critical step for a long time, that point at which he would be taking on all of the world. Not in pieces, not splinters of possibility here and there, but the whole damned swinging door of the world would now be coming upon him.

All right. High time.

He turned and there was someone standing in the doorway.

The door had opened so quickly, so quietly, that there had been no sound whatsoever; the construction of these old tenements had something to do with it, too. Impermeable walls, well-oiled bolts with doors that hung far above the floor in their arc of opening. That was solid construction for you, you had to admire the integrity of the buildings of old New York, although all they were good for now was for junkies and the welfare population. The man standing in the door must have taken advantage of that, and of the fact that Wulff had not locked the door when he came in. That was stupid, of course, but it simply had not occurred to him that anyone would be interested.

The man was in his early sixties. He was small, well-dressed, had one of those ruined-but-still-alert faces you see so often at the whiskey bars in the old neighborhoods. He was holding a gun in his hand, the gun absolutely level, no shake in the hand at all, bearing down on Wulff. His eyes glistened with something that might have been satisfaction and a feeling of good fellowship; he seemed, as a matter of fact, prepared to emit little cries of pleasure. “Ah,” he said. “Aha!” and Wulff could see the finger begin to tighten on the trigger.

But something had happened to the old man, perhaps the strain of climbing the stairs, perhaps some element of unexpectedness in his own situation that undercut his alertness no matter how refreshed and satisfied his face appeared. The gun wavered subtly in his hand as he was trying to get off the shot. Then, in slow-motion, he was able to bring the gun to fire, and Wulff, hitting the floor, rolling already on the floor in a spasm of reflex that might have saved him even if the shot had been accurate, heard the bullet hit the wall just above him, little showers of plaster coming down, spanging off his forehead.

“Son of a bitch!” the man said, “son of a bitch!” and Wulff could hear his breath, his little aimless kicks at the floor as he concentrated on the gun, trying to get off the second shot, but the second shot, when it came, did so only very slowly, this one hitting all the way above him, splattering the ceiling. Wulff, rolling, a fine sense of aimlessness as he spun on the floor, the revolutions a disconnection, reached into his pocket, got out his own gun and fired almost blindly, pumped a single shot into the place where he thought the man was standing. “Son of a bitch!” the man screamed again, “dirty bastard!” and got off yet one more shot, completely wild. Wulff now had him placed exactly and in one careful motion bore in on the man and shot him in the gun hand.

The man screamed, the gun fell from his hand like ash, and suddenly he was hurled in upon himself, covering his wrist, yanking it against his chest like a shopping bag, an expression of fine and discrete agony coming all through his face, opening that face to an almost youthful expression. He did not look sixty in his pain, but fifteen, a young man astonished at the violation of his body. Wulff was already on his feet, drawing up his knees underneath him, scrambling to a weaving, standing position, the gun dangling from his hand like a leaf. Then, instead of closing ground on the man who had caved into a corner, holding his wrist and squealing like a rabbit, he went to the door, kicked it shut, threw the bolt and chain on it, then came back to the center1 of the room and looked at the man once again, an inconsequential object huddled down against the wall, shrunken and, in some reversal, aged once again, his eyes spinning him through decades of chronology so that within seconds what looked at Wulff out of those eyes was again a very old man. “No,” he said, as he saw Wulff raise the gun, “no, don’t do it.”

“Don’t do it!” Wulff said. “How can I not do it?” He concentrated on the series of actions—death was very easy to bring if you looked on it only as a matter of mechanics; let the rest of it be a religious problem, he would concentrate on the technology of the administration of death—he pointed the gun at the old man, leveling it slowly, holding it locked in place by that knot of concentration, then tensing the body to deliver the torrent of death.

Everything locked into place, froze, drifted in a moment devoid of time, the old man’s mouth opening like a fish, his hands twisting, eyes fluttering; his attention seemed to shift from Wulff to something inside him then, as if death had announced itself from some secret place and was now stalking him, greeting him with upraised fist. The old man doubled into that knowledge. Holding the gun Wulff felt a sudden moment of indecision: the old man was dead now, he was dead as of this moment. If he were to pull the gun away and order him out of the room, the old man would go and never bother him again because in some intricate way he had been broken. But on the back of that was the insight that only death’s apprehension had broken the old man, only the sure, swift knowledge of his own death, and that came out of certainty; remove the certainty and it would be as if nothing had happened.

No. He could not tolerate that. Wulff thought no more, did not think at all, it could be said that he had not thought during any of this but had only done what he had to do, which was to pull the trigger. The gun exploded in and out of his hand.

Gianelli’s head cracked open like a cantaloupe, and in the middle of that impact Wulff could see the grayish, oozing mass of the old man’s brains, slowly expanding toward the air, embraced by the air, and in sudden frieze the brains danced like a waterfall, little greyish ropes springing in the air. Then the old man had croaked, had croaked again, and with a sigh fell before Wulff limp on the carpet, his blood flowing into it gently, gracefully, gray of brains, red of blood, gray and red together puddling into the thin, green fabric of the cheap furnished goods. Looking at all of it, Wulff thought he had an insight and then, looking at it again, he knew that it was no insight at all: it was merely the same thing, the same over and over again; here some brains, there some blood, and in the whole long line of murder and vengeance that he had committed, all of them were the same in death as never before in life. Nothing changed. Nothing ever would, ever could change: all differences were resolved in blood. All that he was looking at now was a rack of dead meat.

Outside, in the dank hallway, he thought he could hear the rise of voices, but it was only his imagination. Anything could happen in New York. No one cared. No one listened.

He took the gun that had belonged to the corpse, holstered it away, and looked at the thing on the floor, deciding what he was going to do next. Any way he turned, it was death.