Authors: Mike Barry
It had gone even more easily than he had thought. Wulff had known from the instant of ignition that he would have no problem in establishing a fire; it was the cheapest glue imaginable and endlessly combustible. Thank the contractor for that; he had sized up Marasco and decided to take the man over. The problem was whether Wulff in the process of creating a fire would be incinerated in the room; it would make a nice, neat, tight little coffin for a man six feet four and the walls tumbling in around him would press slabs of pain into his body for awful, wrenching instants before the last moments. Wulff knew that he was a dead man already but there were ways and ways of dying; if it were all the same to circumstance, he would just as soon die the second time without pain. Feeling the heat pressing against his body, the already rising odor of the glue he had found himself for the first time that day on the outside of panic, but then, hurling his weight over and again against the door he had burst free. Fire had weakened not only the glue it seemed but the very connections holding the house together. Hell, the way the thing was made you could probably have demolished it just by vigorously jumping up and down a few times. A man like the blond could probably have carried out the entire upstairs on his shoulders.
Wulff came out of the room quickly, seeking the stairs. That would be his only problem, working out the geometry of the bottom and getting the hell out of there but the fire provided not only heat but light, and Wulff found the stairwell immediately. The flames traced a clear, clean path out of his cubicle, swung toward the heavy boiler pumping like a heart at the far corner, then almost majestically pivoted and walked their way to the opposite wall. The whole place was going up incredibly faster than he could have hoped. When the flames hit the boiler there was going to be a hell of an explosion. Already, Wulff could smell the thin, escaping gas.
But there was margin. Enough margin. Breathing heavily, he lowered his head and charged at the stairs the way that you were trained to break into a suspect’s room: no wasted motion, all activities concentrated on the front end. Taking the steps two at a time as he was it must have been those instincts which had saved him when the heavy, clawing weight of Albert Marasco had landed in his arms. Wulff swayed, felt his right foot begin to lose purchase, thought for one sick moment that he was going to carry Marasco’s body below the boards and into hell but his motion had been pitched forward, all of his body weight had been veered toward going
up.
The balance held. He dragged the man upstairs.
He could have tossed the man into the flaming basement and closed doors behind him, of course. Left him to incinerate there. But something beyond instinct caused him to hold onto Morasco, struggling to make the last four or five steps of the ascent. The man was semi-conscious, babbling, shrieking, lunging at Wulff’s eyes with burnt fingers like little talons. There was no attack in it, only panic. Marasco literally did not know where he was; he did not know who was holding him. Mewling, spitting, crying, Marasco clung to Wulff, his body shaking and shifting. He was much lighter than Wulff would have thought. A little man. One hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty pounds. A hoist carry was easy.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Marasco whispered, “I’ve got to get
out
.”
“You’re out,” Wulff said, “you’re out now,” and came through the door at the top. One quick glance behind; the flames were charging after them like dancers. The hall itself was beginning to incinerate, little pockmarks on the floor, black rings on the walls. The house was going to collapse
inwards
rather than out, imploding upon itself like an apple crushed in a man’s hand. Oh, the builder had done his work well on this one. Wulff looked at the thing in his arms and with revulsion tossed Marasco to the floor, stood over him. Hard to see now; the smoke was whipping into his eyes. “Out,” Marasco was whimpering on the floor, “I’ve got to get
out
.”
“You’ll get out,” Wulff said, “oh you’ll get out.”
“Please,” the thing said, whimpering, scrambling on the floor. It seemed to be trying to achieve a sitting posture. Wulff put a foot in the man’s chest and pushed him prone.
It
prone.
“Fire,” the thing babbled, “I always knew that there was going to be a fire—”
“Where is it?” Wulff said, “where’s the next step, Marasco?”
“Fire. Oh my God, I’m going to die.”
“Who takes it after you, Marasco?” Wulff said and kicked the thing. He inhaled smoke, looked at the little flame-dancers ringing them. Not much more time now.
He kicked the thing again.
“I want to know the next step in the detail, Marasco,” he said. “It’s a chain, a never-ending chain. Who’s next? Who do you take it to?”
“I’ve got to get out,” the thing mewled and tried to crawl toward a door blindly sensed. Wulff kicked it again.
“Stay put,” he said.
The thing rolled on its back and looked up at Wulff, eyes glinting with tears. Recognition seemed to assault it. “Please,” it said.
“Where are the others?”
“What others?”
“The others in the house. Your wife, your daughters. Your blond boyfriend.”
The thing came up on its elbows. “I don’t know,” it said hoarsely, “don’t know. Got out I guess. Got to get out too.”
Wulff kicked it down to the floor, heard sirens and a gong in the distance. So someone at the gatehouse had finally turned in an alarm. Not much time now.
“You supply the junk and take the money,” Wulff said, “but you’re small time. Islip isn’t anywhere; you live in a house built like paper. You’re nothing, Marasco. Who’s next? Who’s next up the line?”
“Don’t know. Don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t know—”
“Tell me or I’ll leave you here, Marasco.”
“No.”
“I’ll leave you here to suffocate. They won’t even find your ashes, Marasco, they’ll all be mixed into the embers of the house. Your wife won’t even have something to cremate. But don’t worry about it. These funeral directors do marvelous things these days.”
The sirens opened up, penetrated the air, came closer. Wulff’s eyes were already squeezed half-shut, he was weeping from the fumes, knew that he could not hold out much longer himself. His physical reserves were near the breaking point. Still he pressed on. There was some margin. There
had
to be some margin, enough to squeeze information out of the thing on the floor.
The thing extended its arms, looked up. “Carry me out,” it said.
“What?”
“For God’s sake, Wulff, I can’t move. Don’t let me die here.”
“You’re going to die here.”
“No. No.”
“Then tell me who it goes to next? Who’s your contact point? I figure you for just a middleman, Marasco. You’re the guy in the center, working on margin. Who’s up or down? Who’s inside and out? Tell me. Tell everything.”
The thing got up on its elbows, looking at Wulff through a haze of stinking fumes. “I didn’t have anything to do with your girl, Wulff,” it said.
He started to shake. “Shut up,” he said.
“I looked it up. I told you, I understand everything about you. That had nothing to do with us.”
“Just tell me where it goes, Marasco.”
“You’re all wrong,” the thing on the floor said. It was crying. “We didn’t have anything to do with it at all. I don’t know what you think happened but it wasn’t us. It was something else entirely.”
He hit the man. Underneath the pulp he could feel heat, beneath that the suggestion of ash. Coming up fast he kicked a shin, heard it crack under his heel. Marasco squealed.
“Who’s next on line, Marasco?”
“Get me out of here.”
“Who’s next?”
“I’m dying, Wulff, I’m dying.”
Wulff knelt over him. The man was in extremis; his eyes cold and open, the face structured in shadows of bone. He inhaled; his breath caught, he gasped, and knew then that time was running out; he had to get out of here. One last try. He put a finger in the man’s belly, indented in the soft place, pushed.
Marasco must have felt that he was exploding. He coughed, screamed. “I don’t know,” he said, “all I do is arrange the deliveries.”
“Who do you pass the funds onto?”
“I’m a freelance—”
Wulff pushed again into the soft place. Marasco vomited, fluid coming out of him like blood. “Guy named Vincent,” he said, “in New York—”
“Vincent. First name or last?”
“Don’t know—”
“First name or last?”
“I’m dead,” Marasco said, “I’m a dead man.”
“You’re dead anyway. Do you want to die inside or outside?”
“Peter Vincent,” Marasco said, “a townhouse in the East Eighties—”
“No good. The address.”
“Can’t think. Can’t breathe—”
“Goodbye, Marasco. You’ll never make it out of here. I’ll break your legs and leave you to die.”
“Six-eighteen,” Marasco said, “six-eighteen East 83rd.”
“Good. Better.”
“I never been there. Just once.”
“Well of course,” Wulff said, “you wouldn’t deal on a social basis. Purely business.”
He came out of his crouch, waved plumes of smoke from his eyes. Almost blinded now. The thing on the floor, inert, looked up at him. “You’re not going to leave me, are you?” it asked.
“Of course I’m going to leave you.”
“You can’t. You can’t—”
“Yes I can,” Wulff said. “You watch me and see.” He took off his jacket, held it against his face, stumbled that way toward the place where he remembered the door as being. He grasped for it, felt it come reassuringly into his hand, heard the groaning of the sirens coming ever nearer and as if from an even greater distance, the sounds of shouting men, pounding feet. He pulled the door open, felt the touch of wind against his face and blindly stumbled into the open abcess of grounds.
Behind him he could hear the thing on the floor whimpering; then he shut the door and he heard nothing at all. Leaving the thing sealed in its tomb now, pent up like all of the crawling things, left to the pure, cleaning fire. It should have been done a long, long time ago. Back there, locked in with all the crawling things, arcing to the brush of flame the thing was still babbling and whining away the last moments of its consciousness and that too was fine with Wulff. Marasco would be alert to the moment of his death, would be able to touch and clasp and embrace it as he would a woman. He would know what was happening to him and he would drink deeply in those last instants before consciousness, like an aberration, was snuffed out of him.
Most of his victims had not had that alertness. It was the only mercy which the thing called Marasco had ever shown to anything in his life.
Wulff, free now, staggered into the empty air, feeling consciousness return. Turning at the edge of the lawn he could see the great sheets of flame arcing into the sky, smell the deadly fumes. Figures scurried on the rim with him, charging toward the house. They ignored Wulff. Some of them wore helmets. A clang and an enormous truck, a vision from an OD’s last dream rumbled near the house, trailing hoses like tentacles.
Crouched on the ground a woman hung into herself, weeping. Marasco’s wife. Wulff went over to her. She did not look up. No one noticed. No one noticed anything.
“It’s better this way,” he said to her. He couched, clearing his lungs, looked up at the sky, down again. “Believe me, this is better.”
The woman said nothing. Fire had dried up her body; the sobs were dry heaves, racking. She held her hands to her face and fell into the lawn.
“Just be glad you’re free,” he whispered, straightening, turning from her. “I wish that I were free.”
He began to move then, rapidly, away from there. Motion pumped air into his lungs, his senses cleared, he felt himself running in command of himself. Past the abandoned gates he ran, down the dusty, rutted path, small things squirming under his feet, and toward the great highway.
As he approached the road he turned then for a last look and saw the estate ringed by fire, the flames leaping twenty or thirty feet in the air, the fire cutting out tracing patterns in the atmosphere so that what Wulff thought he saw as he stared at it was the outline of a human face leering at him from three hundred yards. Fire was the eyes, fire the ears, fire the crown of the head and in the center of the fire a line of sparks which mapped out an upturned mouth as the face that Marasco’s home had become hovered high in the air and laughed.
That face his face, his face the fire:
Wulff felt that he was looking into a mirror. Held in fascination and yet it was time to move on. For soon, they would be looking for him and he knew that unless he found a place in which to hide himself soon, they would finish the job. He was at the end of his physical limits.
Wulff took the gun he had seized from the thing called Marasco on the floor and hefting it, struck out in a stumbling, determined gate toward the highway. He would flag down a car. He would steal it. He would use the car to get him out of here. He did not want to kill anyone more tonight to do this but God and no one else would help the motorist who ignored the flat or who refused to yield the car easily.
He was going to play their game now. Set a wolf to catch the wolves.
He would be what they were but only more of it.
He had no trouble. The fat man driving the Ford LTD was only too happy to give him the car and take his chances on his own hitchhiking. “For God’s sake,” the fat man said, little odds and ends of jewelry flapping from his exposed shirt front, “I’ve got a wife and children. Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me. Take the fucking thing and get out of here. The mileage stinks anyway and the goddamned carburetor float mechanism was never right. She keeps on stalling on cold idle for God’s sake. Don’t shoot me.”
Wulff didn’t shoot him. He waved the man off the road, reached into the back and flung a heavy valise after him, put the gun away inside and got the car back into gear. Maybe they only did get ten miles to the gallon and maybe the exhaust-emission devices did shut the choke down too soon on warmup but the LTD’s were good machines, at least for the purpose of getting back to the city on a warm August night. Wulff put the accelerator to the floor, decided to take his chances on the Southern State going flat out. He thought he had the skills to outrun an ordinary patrol car and short of that he simply did not give a damn. There was activity back at Islip but sooner or later, probably much sooner, the blond was going to get on the job and he would bring a battalion with him. Scum like Marasco had to be avenged, not out of personal feeling—there was none—but to prove that any chinks in the armor could be sealed off instantly. Otherwise, things might collapse. The people who surrounded Marasco, top and bottom, would risk death themselves rather than letting the idea get around that there might be a way to snip through the protective net
Wulff drove like fucking hell. There was no traffic; he picked up the telltale signs of radar approaching the Grand Central link but barrelled right on through that as well. A patrol car going the other way, sirens open, flashers like a quartet of bubble dancers might have noticed him but had other things, down the line, on its mind: possibly the soon-to-be-famous Marasco fire. Wulff found that he still had his wallet, used it to pay the toll at the interchange—without it he just would have gone on through—and took the Grand Central at a slightly more reasonable pace. Thursday morning at two or three; almost no traffic. He took the Triborough, swinging wide to dodge across three lines, drove the car off at 125th Street, cut crosstown then to get to the West Side.
125th Street was active. Even at two in the ayem on Thursday, even in still August, 125th was alive and hopping. You had to give the Marascos that much credit. They were unleashing poison into the cities at the rate the utilities were pouring smoke in, but poison could have a greenish, exciting lustre of its own and 125th Street, the central point of this dying part of the dying city was filled with activity. Pimps moved their cars in and out of curbside spaces. Little clumps of junkies talked excitedly on the corners, gesturing toward one another about their scores. These were the ones that were up. The ones that were down or heading that way were individual stragglers, stretched out along the building lines or tucked as stragglers onto the stoops of buildings on the sidestreets. A few discouraged prostitutes that hadn’t gotten the word yet that the action had moved out in the path of drugs, all the way to midtown and the East Side, held themselves in doorways and looked at the scene alertly. Maybe they
had
gotten the word, come to think of it. It was simply that there was less competition on 125th Street. Of course there were no customers either. White men had not come up to this area to get laid for seven or eight years. Give King H credit for that. Even the Johns got the word eventually that this was, under no circumstances, any place to be.
Wulff revved the LTD, kept it moving crosstown. He had an appointment with Peter Vincent now and he had a pretty good idea of how that was going to develop but not now. Not now. He would have to be a fool to take on the next link in the chain in his present condition. He had not slept in thirty hours, he had killed three men, he had been imprisoned for half a day, he had survived a fire. The Peter Vincents of this world did not fall into men in his condition if they fell at all. He had to get back under cover for a few hours if for nothing else but isolation. He did not know if he would be able to sleep. Sleep was not the point. It didn’t matter. It was a question of incorporating what had happened into his system so that he would be able to get to the next step.
He ditched the car finally, keys in, at St. Nicholas and 125th; went for the subway. Funny how things had gone full circle; he had started out at an intersection like this one a few hours, a lifetime, ago. Leave the keys in; give some fifteen-year-old junkie an early Christmas present. Stripped for parts the LTD might be worth five hundred to someone, sold just as it was, same plates, motor running off the street, maybe two-fifty. A hell of a lot of depreciation but that was probably closer to its real value than the five thousand the salesman had probably been suckered into paying for it, ballooning into six what with the payments spread over a period of time. He cleaned his gear out of the car, hailed a taxi, and took it downtown to the furnished room on West Side which had been his coop for three months.
Now he would turn it into an arsenal and a siting point.
“You know,” the cabbie said, “I took two of them up here and I was shaking like a leaf every block of the way. I figured that they were going to pull a gun on me the first red light we had and knock me over.”
“You wouldn’t have been the first.”
“First? I wouldn’t have been the
fifteenth
this year if they blew my head off. That’s what drugs have done to this town.”
“You’re right,” Wulff agreed mildly enough, “you’re absolutely right.”
“And you know what? They get to the Apollo Theatre and get out nice as you please and
thank
me and lay on a two dollar tip! Two perfectly nice guys; must have been musicians.”
“Not too many musicians at the Apollo these days,” Wulff said.
“Yeah, yeah,” the cabbie said with some excitement pounding the wheel, “maybe not, but the point I’m trying to make with this story is that they’re perfectly decent guys, just like you or me but they’ve got me in a frame of mind all the way driving uptown that they’re going to hit me over the head and rob me blind and shoot me. That’s what drugs have done to this city. That’s what the fucking things have done.”
“You’re right,” said Wulff.
“I told my wife last week, I told her no more. No more night shift. Just one week, two weeks more and I’m telling them they can take their cab between eight at night and six in the morning and stuff it. That’s what I’m going to tell them. But how am I going to live? How the fuck can I walk away from the night shift when they got ten times as many guys trying to make a living in daylight and the only time the money’s around is at night?”
“It’s rough,” Wulff said.
“I keep on telling myself, my wife, one week, two weeks, I’m turning it in. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow I’m going to tell them no more, I’m fucking finished. But I keep on putting it off! How am I going to make two hundred dollars a week on day shift? I tell you, there’s just no way.”
“It’s a tough racket.”
“But you work night shift and sooner or later you’re going to get it. I’ve known guys, two already that got it and six or seven others that got robbed and were lucky to get out alive. So what to do? Tell me what the hell I’m going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Wulff said as the cab stopped at the rooming house and he gave the driver five dollars of Ric Davis’s money, “I really don’t know. But let me tell you, I’m working on it.”
“Sure you are.
Everybody’s
working on it. The Mayor and his fucking task force and the Governor, they’re
all
working on it. The Governor’s going to give them life for possession, you like that? When I’m lying somewhere in an alley with a bullet in my heart, it’ll be nice to know that the guy who killed me is going to get life for possession. When they catch up with him of course.”
“I’ll keep you posted,” Wulff said and swung lightly out of the cab, slammed the door, waved and vaulted the eight steps into the lobby of the rooming house. Amazing how your energy levels could stay up there, even after all that he had been through. It must have had something to do with the therapeutic nature of the work.
He used the key to get in, security being better in this building than most of them around, and walked up the two flights to his cubicle, room twenty-five, and found slumped in the bed against the wall the sleeping figure of his ex-patrol car partner, Williams. He was in a deep sleep. He must have been waiting for a long time.
But the kid’s instincts were good. He came alert quivering the minute Wulff walked into the room, grappling in his plain clothes for a gun and then, as understanding wiped sleep from his eyes he grinned a slow, foolish rookie’s grin and put the gun away.
“Been looking for you,” Williams said.