Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (9 page)

“Ah. I see. Well,” Father Justice said, and in a sudden, spasmodic motion of devotion that Williams might have found quite touching in other circumstances—
the motion of devotion creates commotion
, he thought—“such a man was in here just a very few days ago to request some materials.”

“Ah,” Williams said, “ah. I thought so.”

“Of course I had no idea whatsoever that he is, as you say, responsible for the theft of the ordnance. Otherwise I would not have dealt with him. The eye of duplicity is deep and penetrating, and the antichrist himself will dwell in the form of the familiar.”

“That is true,” Williams said, “that is very true.” The crucifix was rolling and banging around in idle breezes now; it was really amazing how much circulation of air there appeared to be in the church. Of course, there was no saying either what sources Father Justice had tapped into for his power. “I agree with that philosophy.”

“I was tempted,” Father Justice said. “I was deeply tempted.” He crossed himself, a gesture that Williams had always associated with Catholicism, but this was a peculiar offshoot of a sect; one simply did not know of their devices. “I trust that I will be forgiven for this lapse.”

“I’m sure you will be,” Williams said encouragingly, “forgiveness may be granted for true penitence.”

“Do you think so?”

“I truly think so.” It was easy when you got into it; it was just a different way of looking at things. “The only sin that is unredeemable, beyond redemption that is, comes from the sinner who will not admit the error of his ways. But for those who grant it, redemption will come.”

“That is very comforting. That is truly comforting; I appreciate those words of counsel, my son.”

“It is nothing. Really it is nothing.”

“Perhaps not. But there is true and real relief nevertheless to hear you say those words.”

“I am glad of that,” Williams said, resisting an urge to reach out and touch the suffering Father Justice. Perhaps he really was a minister of the Lord, one who merely dabbled in ordnance on the side to support his mission. Then again he might be an arms seller who used the church as a front. That was the more logical explanation, certainly the one he had accepted at the outset. Still, there was no saying. Life and religion were far more complex than you might think at first glance. It was entirely possible that the reverend was indeed supporting his ecclesiastical activities through satisfying a basic demand and then, conscientious man that he was, paying penance for it. One never knew. In Harlem there were at least three levels to everything. “Yes, there was such a man in here. He purchased a machine gun, some grenades, an M-15 rifle, and other miscellany. I had my doubts about serving him but he was sincere and advised us that he would not use these materials in any way to raise up a hand against our people but would instead be supporting our own great and holy mission to restore the world to black peoples as was ordained. So, in my great weakness, I gave unto him according to his demand. I am truly shamed.” His shoulders sagged. The crucifix banged, jingling on the rostrum. “I will pay for the vanity of pride, for the sin of greed. I am paying for this already.”

“What did he look like?”

“What did he look like?” Father Justice said, and paused. “It is hard, hard to give a physical description of one who functions as one of the tempters or comforters. He was a tall man, about six feet four inches, in his mid-thirties, who seemed to have had some kind of military background. That, at least, was in his bearing, but this may be a false assumption on my part. God must guard against the sin of pride.”

“That is the man,” Williams said. “Do you have any idea where he went?”

“Ah,” Father Justice said. Benevolence radiated from his features; it seemed that he had come close to having a religious insight, would, in fact, have mounted an altar if there had been an altar instead of merely a flat sunken place in front of the crucifix. “I think that I might have an idea where he went. We have many devoted followers in the brotherhood here, many of whom are willing to cooperate in any fashion that will enable us to complete our mission, to serve our God. Accordingly,” he said, “accordingly we felt it best when this white, this antichrist, left our quarters to have him followed, very subtly of course, to that place from which we came.”

“Were you able to locate it?” Williams said hoarsely. He was poised on a tip of anticipation; in another moment he might have been on his knees in front of the reverend. “Were you able to locate the place where he is living?”

“I do not know if he is living there, my son,” Father Justice said peaceably, “but we were able to, or I should say, certain devoted followers, whose place shall be numbered with the very best, were able to follow him to that place in which I believe his evil schemes are hatched, in which he broods like the great snake itself over his apocalypse.”

“Where would that be?”

“Why I have it right here. I have it right here,” Father Justice said and went to the altar, stood behind the podium, dug a hand into an empty space underneath the podium and came out with a large manila envelope, his hand splayed outward within it. Williams could see the little extensions his fingers made against the paper, and then Father Justice came out with a slip of paper, which he looked at intently, the lights twinkling in his eyes, bringing a sheen to his forehead, before he passed it to Williams. “Here,” he said, “it is believed that he was in residence at this address. Of course in this flawed and difficult world it is a mistake to confuse design with reality; he may not be living there at all. Nevertheless, one of our devoted congregants was able to trace him to this address.” He seemed to bow subtly, inclining his head altarwards, his hands gripping the podium then in an embrace. “I hope that it will be of service.”

“I’m sure that it will be.”

“If it is of service and if you are able to establish contact with this individual, I trust that you will keep our priorities very much in mind.”

“Oh, I will,” Williams said. “I can assure you of that.”

“We would be very interested in dealing with this individual should you find him. It was a serious mistake, a very serious mistake indeed for me to deal with him. Nevertheless, he presents a superficially winning appearance, and the church has long wished to establish that it is devoted to forms of righteousness no matter what color they may wear externally,” Father Justice said. “For this reason I allowed myself to fall into the hands of the tempter, but this will not happen again. Truly it can be said that I have learned from this and that never again will I be so persuaded.”

“Sure,” Williams said, “certainly,” and backed toward the door, his business completed. It was time to leave, but it was hard to bring himself to leave the form of Father Justice, now fully embracing the altar, hugging it in fact, moving belly to belly against the crucifix, his back to the podium, which he had abandoned in the last flight toward ecstasy. He seemed to be humming a liturgical chant. “Thank you very much,” Williams said again uncertainly and went toward the door, began to struggle for the knob nestled in the midst of the panels.

“One thing,” Father Justice said, turning in prayer, his eyes heated and intense, glaring at Williams, “just one thing. The measure of vengeance is sure and terrible, and it would be highly unpleasant for you if you were lying to us. If indeed this white devil of yours had nothing at all to do with the materials you failed to return, it would be you who misled us, and our devoted followers would surely be as unhappy as I. Some of them are overeager; this is a regrettable habit on their part, but then again, until dedication can be tempered by mercy, one has to get along with them. You know the problems of the pastorate in these troubled times.”

“Oh yes indeed,” Williams said, “oh yes indeed, I do know what problems religion is facing, it’s truly a time of transition,” and finding the doorknob he wrenched open the door, it came stickily, ungratefully into his hands. He had to struggle with it to hold it into place, and then he was in the street, the decayed, binding smells of Harlem once again around him, and in his hand the precious slip of paper with the location to which Wulff had been tracked.

He looked at it quickly and it was as if even without seeing he had known what it would be; a furnished room in the west nineties. Yes, indeed, it would end where it all began. Everything in life made sense after all; it all came together in a perfect closed circle of unity if you only knew how and where to look. Father Justice was right. He was right: there was a divine order to things; even the doubter would find it if only he knew where to look.

Walking down the street, the paper already ripped into shreds and discarded, feathers to the breeze, he found himself wondering: perhaps the true religious services of the brotherhood church were in the transfer of money and guns; perhaps the sacraments were arrived at through the blood that its ordnance customers ripped from the bodies of others. Perhaps when you came right down to it the good reverend himself found his glimpse of the divine in the dull, dead stock of the rifle, in the hard shell of the grenade, in the shelves in his ordnance room where all knowledge, transferred to hard, impacted pieces of destruction, lay piled upon itself ready to be turned at any moment toward the true mission of the church, which was nothing less—when you looked at it in the overall sense—nothing less at all than to clean up the world.

If you looked at it that way—and Williams saw nothing sacriligious about it—it was an entirely new insight into religion. Perhaps that was what it had to become: an instrument of vengeance.

He headed downtown on his way to see the wolf.

Wulff had chucked the book of the man who looked like a stockbroker a long time before, but a couple of names still stuck in memory. One of them was De Masso. He remembered De Masso well; the name had rung a connection from his narco squad days. De Masso was worth seeing; he had put off the idea of visiting him only painfully because the important thing, the book disclosed, was to get to San Francisco and head off a shipment due there. But he had abandoned the idea of seeing De Masso with regret; now he would be able to make up for it. Make up for the long stopover.

So he went off to greet him.

De Masso had lived and worked in New York until only a few months before, when he had quite suddenly moved to a high-rise apartment in Fort Lee. A crossout of his old address and the entering of the new one, including the date that it was good, in the stockbroker’s book had indicated this; from the date it was also pretty clear exactly why De Masso had decided to move at that time; there was a happy concordance between the enactment of the new New York State drug law providing life imprisonment for convicted drug dealers and De Masso’s decision that bucolic, pastoral living in a high-rise overlooking the Hudson beat all hell out of struggling along on Manhattan’s West Side. If nothing else could be said for the governor’s drug law, you could definitely say this: it was shuffling people around. It was moving them from here to there; a surprising number of people in the drug business had come to the decision that city life was intolerable and what they really needed was to live piled over one on top of the other in some rabbit warren of a high-rise slum in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Maybe the governor had worked in accordance with the Fort Lee real estate brokers and builders. You never could be sure of this; he had connections everywhere.

In any event, De Masso was in Fort Lee, and Wulff decided that it was time to pay him a visit. Nothing to it; he was getting around quite a bit this time, now it was time to see how De Masso was enjoying country living, how all of that west-shore-of-the-hudson air was agreeing with him. Wulff, carrying a valise, boarded a bus at the Port Authority and rode with the commuters all the way, standing in the aisle, holding perilously to a strap, as the bus, sputtering exhaust fumes, staggered through the tunnel under the Hudson, heading west. This was the life, the commuters agreed with one another. Getting the hell out of the city at five; you couldn’t beat it.

At Fort Lee, Wulff got out with the rest of them, walked to a diner a block from the bus stop. He had already worked his disguise over back in the furnished room, using the men’s room at the Port Authority only to give it some final touches, to see how it was holding up in public. It seemed to be holding up fine. The moustache and the little dabs of charcoal he had placed under his eyes managed to convey an impression of age and weariness; he might have been a forty-five-year-old clerk/accountant coming home from a difficult day in the municipal building, or better yet he might have been a forty-five-year-old police sergeant, fleeing the city after a day of interrogation, glad to get back to the swamps of New Jersey after a risky and perilous attempt to deal with New York for another nine hours, his face and body clotted with the wastes of the city now, but essentially optimistic: after all he was going home. Oh, it worked, all right; it wasn’t the most effective disguise, but then no one on the homeward bound bus at the Port Authority gave a shit about anyone else, and he had to assume that surveillance was not of the highest quality anyway. There was still a high bounty on him, and there were a lot of people who might be keeping an eye out for his appearance. But what he had done in nine cities so far would have to discourage all but the absolute hard core or the financially desperate, neither of whom were the most difficult kind of assassins to defeat. And so many of those people who had carried his name and photograph around in their pocket—well, so very many of them were dead. He had effectively raised the price on himself by cutting by four-fifths the number of potential assassins—which was a crudely direct but highly effective way of going at the problem, of course.

De Masso. He thought about De Masso. The inclusion of the name in the stockbroker’s book had not surprised him at all; everybody in narco knew that De Masso was one of the major dealers working within the tight confines of the East Side. He handled Lenox Avenue, around 120th street, east over to Fifth, that was pretty well how they had him mapped on the departmental charts and from the stories of informants. The thing was that there was adsolutely nothing to get De Masso on and for that matter no interest in getting him; you could hardly bust him for possession because he was too clever to ever have anything on his person or in his home. And as far as catching him in the act itself, well, how the hell were you supposed to catch a distributor? Could you tap his phones, get a court order, get cameras and tape recorders to bug the critical conversations in which the careful, almost unspeaking arrangements were made? The hell you could. And De Masso, sure as hell, was never going to be found out on the corner of 124th Street and Lenox, hawking heroin at the top of his lungs from a fruit stand. That would be entirely too much to ask.

And besides, narco simply did not work that way. Narco was not after the dealers or distributors at all; at the root narco wasn’t after anything. All that narco was there to do was to act as a buffer between the police department public relations division and the newspapers and federal government’s war on narcotics, so that PD could say that they were indeed making an effort: for one thing look at the full-time squad they had working on nothing else. Narco worked on hustling cheap informants and doctored reports; occasionally when the heat came up very high they might bust a miserable, sniveling informant or two on a prearranged charge, which would be dropped for lack of evidence in a couple of weeks. But by that time there would have been another murder in the East Village, and the newspapers, hopefully, would be off covering it, meaning that maybe only three or four times a year, five if there were a lot of dull news days, you would feel any heat at all. The rest of the time narco was pleasant, easy work; now and then you could bust a college kid stupid enough to be smoking a joint in public or peddling the stuff to his friends, and that would build up the charts too, but most of the time it was a breeze. Narco, in the late sixties, was absolutely the best place to be; it was a clover detail, almost as good as vice, but vice was too good to be true altogether and had just about been phased out. The amateurs were taking the professional trade away anyway. There just wasn’t much percentage in hustling street hookers who were the dumbest and poorest of the lot, and the other ones, the ones operating out of high-rises and studio apartments had plenty of buffer zones between themselves and arrest; and many of their friends worked down at the precinct. So vice was scratched altogether; narco wasn’t too bad, but narco had been such fun for all that it too was being scrapped, amalgamated into the federal bureau of narcotics was the way the newspapers had put it. They were phasing it out, which was a spectacular shame for a lot of informants anyway.

But that was all behind him; it left the issue of De Masso. No narco squad could touch him; that made him only riper pickings now in Fort Lee. Wulff, finishing off his coffee at the diner, was thinking of the ways best calculated to make the approach and what he would do when he got to him. Pity about the old bastard he had killed in the furnished room. His thoughts skittered back that way although he did not want them to. Hell, that was finished, the old bastard was dead, the room was cleaned out, Wulff was now in another place two blocks down and three blocks over. It would be weeks until someone decided to check out his tightly-locked room, investigate perhaps the smell drifting through the walls and find out what was lying in there. In the meantime he had all the room to operate that he needed, and that was what the mission was all about. Operating room. Opening up some space for himself in which he could function again, paring open the night with the clear, deadly edge of his assault. The old man in the room that he had occupied would stink and inflate, his body assuming grotesque and comic proportions finally in the onslaught of death, the pure, high scent of him merging with the walls to produce something so penetrating that at last curiosity would draw someone in there. But death on the West Side was such a familiar, completely unremarkable event, death on the West Side was so much a part of the urban redevelopment program itself, that Wulff doubted if there would be any follow up at all. If there would, the hell with it. How were they going to tie him to it, and what good would that knowledge do them weeks after the fact?

At the rear of the diner, there was an intense little huddle around one table, eight or nine people wedged into that tight space, all of them men, all of them conversing intensely. He could pick up scraps of conversation if he wanted; all that it meant would be a slight alteration, a shift of consciousness and he would be attuned to what they were saying. Already little scraps of words were coming out of the huddle, words like
kilo, hash, nickel
, and that could mean that they were talking about only one thing, they were talking about shit, they were talking about its distribution, probably niggling out the last details of a deal. But what, he thought, granted that this was what was going on at the table, what was he supposed to do about it? Enactment of the new drug law along with his own crusade had already driven the vermin across the river and into the towers of the Hudson; it was drug paradise here and nothing to be done to stop that, but what was he, Wulff, personally to do? Was he supposed to lunge over to that damned table, scatter them like fruit, bring vengeance upon them right in this diner? Did you have to clean up the world indiscriminately, taking on evil as you saw it in whatever form, simply because it could not be tolerated, or did you have, as he still believed, to pick your spots?

He did not know. It was certainly better to pick your spots; he had been doing that all the way. Here in New York, although with a harder edge, he still wanted to think that he was selecting the battleground and the terms of attack rather than having it thrust upon him. He had been functioning in a meaner, lower, more emotional gear here than anywhere else, but planning was still paramount. You just did not seize a gun and go out on the streets hunting, shoot any piece of vermin who looked like a junkie or a dealer. Or did you? Did you have to hit them just that way: randomly, violently, without any planning whatsoever in order to play their own vicious game?

Well, it was something to think about. He would worry about it after De Masso. Maybe. On the other hand, maybe he would not. With De Masso it was likely that he would already have all that he could handle. All that he knew was that he was not going to do anything in this diner; he was going to take it one step at a time. One step at a time.

He passed the table quickly, ignoring the glances. There was a flicker, then a flurry of interest as he walked to the door, first one and then down the line, all of them were looking at him. He could see the exchange of intelligence as knowledge passed between them, and he kept on moving, thrust the door open, walked into the winds of Fort Lee, the high winds spinning off the river, and cut in back of the diner into the parking lot, then into a blank field, the fastest way to the high-rise in which De Masso lived. He walked through rubble, feeling little blocks of concrete and stone coming up against his feet. Fort Lee was impermanent, hastily assembled as if by a gigantic child playing with materials on the bank of the Hudson; the high-rises came up fifteen stories or more, cheap plastic and steel glinting, the foundations poking down into rock. In the streets between and behind the high-rises, there were still patches that had not been paved, little ruined houses in which the poor lived, neighborhood groceries, cement-strewn fields of debris on which the children played. The building had been helter-skelter, piecemeal, and no one was responsible for the spaces between the buildings but the town itself, which was too busy raking in payoffs from contractors to be worried about anything as elementary as services. So what you had was a great deal of money and architectural ambition funneled into a town that thirty years ago had been little more in population than any of the cow towns working their way up the east and west side of the Hudson above Peekskill, with the difference that Fort Lee had accessibility. Half of the New York mafiosi lived in these towers.

Oh, it was a mystery all right, Wulff thought, that was for sure, a mystery how all of this had been thrown together, a mystery as to how it was able to continue. Considering the graft and greed that lay behind the assignment of these contracts, it was a miracle that any of these high-rises remained standing; the half-life of the plaster could be measured in months. But someday there was going to be a hell of a judgment. Up and down the line it was going to happen; one by one these blocks were going to fall right into the river, thousands of people were going to be incinerated and drowned, and where would the contractors be then? Well, Wulff did not want to think about that. Surely the contractors at this moment were laughing and working over their balance statements and tax-evasion schemes, and were not concerned about what would happen when their constructions began to topple.

He heard steps behind him in the rubble. Instantly he slowed, worked to the ground. There was nothing here against which to brace himself, nothing to act as cover. The only cover would be in going to ground, and Wulff did it without hesitation. The footsteps might be in his imagination, he might be overreacting, but it would be better by far to overreact and pay the penalty in scraped knees and embarrassment rather than to go up against what he thought he might be facing. The field was almost entirely dark; there was slight illumination coming from a single streetlight about three hundred yards straight ahead of him, the rays of the light half cut off from this angle by the jut of a single building. Wulff could just about see his hand in front of his face, and he cautiously worked a gun into it, kept it leveled, lay on the ground. No sight to shoot by but voice would be good enough, voice would give him an edge. Then he could hear the sounds of the men talking as they scuttled to a stop about twenty yards from him. It was that group from the diner, at least some of them, he thought, say four, maybe five come out to pursue him while the rest stayed back. It was as he had suspected, what he should have known when he had allowed himself to look them over too closely in the diner; they knew who he was. They had identified his face even in the half-disguise of false sideburns he had affected, and now they were seeking an enormous bounty. He should have known it. He should not have looked them over as he had.