Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare (11 page)

I don’t know,
Wulff thought,
I don’t know what he ever did for you but I sure as hell know what he did for me. He made a fool of me and he sent me south, that’s what he did, guaranteed himself in his own mind that he would never have to deal with me again, but I’ve got one reason to live if I’ve got no other, one real reason to live and that is simply to see him again, once more, and to prove to him that he’s wrong. To show that evil, corrupt, deadly old man that he made a mistake and that you did not send a man out of your life simply by sending him out of your space, to show him that the world did not work in this fashion, that there were certain men, certain considerations which went beyond the manipulations of power. Come to me you

bastard, come to me.
He held out his pistol, holding it straightline and waited for the shot. He knew that it would come now. He knew that it would come.

“Be reasonable,” the voice said, “be reasonable. Please talk to me. Please say something. I don’t have a gun. I threw my gun away.”

Good,
Wulff thought,
you threw your gun away and now we’re going to throw
you
away. You are inseparable from your gun, the two of you because I know you people and who you are and how you work and the way in which you think and in the throwing away of the gun it is yourself that you’ve stripped. Come on, you son of a bitch. Come on now. Stand up.

“You fool,” the voice said tiredly, “you damned fool, I know you’re there and you haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said, have you? It doesn’t mean a fucking thing, none of it, anything I’ve said, anything I’ve meant. I’m going to stand up now. I’m going to show you myself. I’m going to give you a shot at me but I don’t think that you’re going to take it because, don’t you understand? We’re the only way that each of us has out of the mountains. We must love one another or die,” the voice said, somewhat drunkenly, Wulff thought, “we must love one another or die,” and then there was a sound of scrappling to the southeast, hands and knees working tentatively against rock. Then as Wulff caught his breath in his throat in the same way that he might have if an unfamiliar pretty woman was about to take off her clothes in front of him, something came against the horizon—black, black against blackness, uneven against the sky, a faint smudge against the greater dark. Wulff saw that form rearing, bearlike against the horizon, framed as if in the flash of light unseen up until now; and in one motion, bringing his gun smoothly across his chest, leveling everything into the one action, he pumped a shot high into the form, hitting it in the neck, a sound coming then from that form less solid than liquid. Aqueous, bubbling.

“Ah, God,” the form said bubbling, little murmurs of water in the words, “you didn’t have to do that. You son of a bitch, if you had wanted to do that you could have done it when I had a fair chance, you treacherous fucker.” And then the form fell, not during but after the speech, almost as if it had been holding itself up for that one line, that one message of import and then, almost casually, fell. It bounced from one slab of rock to the next, groaning in a very informal, very human way. Then it lay there.

Wulff closed ground carefully. He felt some need to come upon the assassin, a need which he could not have labeled, could not have in any way explicated and which, yet, was absolutely profound; he felt drawn, flesh-to-flesh, to that other particle of humanity which had been out with him in this high place. (And maybe then the voice had been right in saying that they had more in common than they had apart; they had nothing against one another, but he did not, would not, have to connect that voice with the form if he were careful.) But at the same time he did not want in the lapse after victory to do something stupid like lose his grip on these rocks and fall himself. So he kept on moving instead in the low-crawl position, belly to rock, rock to belly, sliding like a fish from one place to the next, closing in upon the burbling and whistling sounds that were still to the southeast but lower down. He held his pistol straight out in front of him, the pistol digging into the stone always poised so that he could if necessary pump a shot into the assassin if the move was deception … but he did not think that this was necessary. It was merely technique, absent self-protection. But there was nothing wrong with technique for its own sake; you could not go wrong by doing at all times the most professional and cautious thing possible.

At length, after a long crawl which felt as if it had been for hundreds of yards but could not have been a tenth of that, he came upon the form itself. He heard fluttering, sensed motion in the darkness and then, in some occlusion of light, a light that must have come from the heat of their blended bodies, he saw the man lying in a suspension of agony, stretched across two rocks, one at his neck, the other at his knees, bleeding his life away out of a large hole in the center of his neck, the skin around it pulped. He could see everything looking into that hole; it must have been the blood itself that provided the light, an aura from which illumination cascaded. But then again, Wulff reminded himself, he was very weary and under great tension, and these hallucinations were quite common, particularly in the Andes where the peyote was so thick that it was almost part of the content of the air. He must be freaking out, he thought. As the junkies called it, this must be a pure freakout; and yet he was drawn to that hole, it was fascinating, a little vagina in the neck, protected by flaps. The man was breathing through that opening, the breath whistling faintly in that dense space. The lips were moving. “You fool,” the man said, hoarsely.

There was still nothing to say. He did not know what attitude to take; it was not quite a deathwatch because this man was not yet dead; but then he owed him better than the clear, pure eyes of the morgue attendant. At length he took his gun more firmly in hand and tucked it inside his clothing. Putting death away in sight of a dead man.

“You damned fool,” the man said. The words were curiously distinct. “We could have made it out together. Don’t you talk? Are you a dummy?”

“No,” Wulff said finally. It was strange to find speech after all this time, this tension. “No, I can talk. You can hear me.”

“We could have gotten out of these mountains. The two of us. We could have saved ourselves. But all you know is killing.”

“That’s right. That’s right.”

“All you know is killing,” the man said, “all that anyone in this business knows is killing, you goddamned fool. What’s going to happen to me now? I’m going to die. There’s an airport half a mile from here with a helicopter waiting. The two of us could have made it out.”

“No,” Wulff said, “it wouldn’t have worked.”

“It wouldn’t?” the man said incuriously. He put a splayed hand to the opening in his neck, felt his wound, his eyes retracting. “Why wouldn’t it have worked?”

“Because it can’t be that way,” Wulff said, “because they sent you to kill me and you would have waited for the opportunity and done it the first chance you had.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Yes, you would. All that matters are the positions in which you find yourself. You’re wrong you know. You can’t be just a man. They won’t let you be. What you are is where they put you. That’s all.”

“You know what?” the man said with a faint grin, his eyes opening, his hand opening, coming away from his neck in an abrupt gesture, touching Wulff, then darting away, moving in the direction of the sky, “you know what? That’s fucking deterministic, that’s what the fuck it is,” and saying nothing else he died. The ebbing of his life was quite natural and unelaborate; one moment the man was still filled with breath, gasping and thundering within him, the next the breath had gone out and there was nothing to replace it. His eyes rolled back within his head, his body convulsed faintly and then, his head rolling to one side, he was dead. Or at least he was in a posture inseparable from death, it was the same thing. Everything was the same thing, at the end of matters.

Wulff slowly stood. As he did so the darkness overwhelmed him again. There was a corpse below him, a man who had just died—one of Calabrese’s best men, he had no doubt. Yet he could have been in another city, another country altogether, for all the impression that that corpse made on him from this discovered perspective. He was dead, that was all; death was a different quality. He moved away from the body, stepping out of the circle of death, and darkness came over him swiftly. He was alone again. Somewhere far down in the stones, a horse screamed again.

He held onto the sack, running his hand up and down the strap. An assassin was dead and he was alive. A little while before both of them had been alive, but now only one was. Still, it made no difference. You could hardly ponder the wonders and mystery of life and death when your own position was where he stood now.

Then Wulff remembered what the dying man had said about the airport.

And thinking of it, his attention riveted on this recollection. He thought then that he could hear the sounds.

There was a girl Calabrese called in only for special occasions like this one, a girl who was reserved for moments of crisis and doubt because she had qualities that could assign new values to all of these problems; but even with the girl it did not seem to work. Rearing above her, fucking her methodically, Calabrese thought for a moment that he would break through into a different life-frame altogether, a frame in which Wulff had been killed and he, Calabrese, no longer had reason for shame. But it was only an illusion, an illusion brought on by orgasm, and a moment after he came he was still plunging away at her in a small abscess of gloom, miming the motions of intercourse, his semen pooling in and around her vagina, moving in a stale stream to the bed. She looked up at him as if from a great distance, her eyes shrouded. She was a blonde, or at least mostly a blonde, going gray only in a few small places, with enormous breasts and the ability to take almost anything that Calabrese could throw into her. She was thirty-eight years old. He had been fucking her for fifteen years. If he was lucky he would get another fifteen out of her before it was all gone. But fucking her this time had not done what it had most of the others, and now, rolling from her, Calabrese already felt the self-revulsion building, stoking within him fires of impulse that lust before had not touched. “All right,” he said. “Enough. Get out.”

“Okay,” she said. She was nothing if not accommodating. She had a perfect understanding of exactly what Calabrese wanted her for, and her calculations were obvious: if it suited him then it suited her. A hundred and fifty a week for a retainer, and sometimes months would pass before he needed her. At the most he might get her twelve to fifteen times a year. A hundred and fifty for that kind of action wasn’t bad, the only requirement was that she be on call when he needed her—but it was a reasonable price to pay. He had no idea of her personal life. He had found her in a bar in Las Vegas, but in these fifteen years she might have gotten married, gotten married three times, even squeezed in a kid or two in the long periods when he had not seen her. Calabrese did not give a fuck. It was her life. Now, as much as he had wanted her, he wanted her out. She made no difference. It had been a bad idea to call her in the first place. Fucking her had only reminded him of how insoluble his problems were, at least by fucking. “You look terrible,” she said.

“Forget it.”

“You really do. You look awful.” Their relationship admitted comments like this as long as they were not pushed too far on either end. As far as he was concerned she thought of him as a businessman, a successful businessman with a big estate, that was all. If she had any other ideas he didn’t give a fuck what they were as long as she kept them to herself. “Okay,” she said again and moved from the bed, went for her dress. Her shoes she had kept on while fucking; she knew it excited Calabrese, so that meant only one garment to put back on. She did so efficiently in a couple of motions. The woman knew her way around. “You ought to take it easy,” she said, “that’s all.”

“I had no choice,” Calabrese said suddenly. “I had to let him go.”

“Oh?”

“Of course I did. If I killed him it was saying that my life was a lie, that everything I had lived was impossible. Calabrese is a big coward, they would have said.”

“You’re a strong man,” she said. “You’re no coward.” She tugged her dress into place.

“I had to let him go. If I didn’t let him go it would have been too easy. I had to show all of them that there was no one that I was afraid of, that I could give this man a lead and still kill him.”

“You want me to go now?” she said. She raised a hand, suddenly, strangely touched his cheek in one of those gestures which had not been frequent between them. “Hey, I’d better go. You got things on your mind. It’ll be better next time though, believe me.”

“Don’t go,” Calabrese said. He was lying on the bed naked, looking up at the ceiling. Spider-lines on the ceiling, small opening cracks of corruption in the walk
:
strange that he had not noticed them before. The house was aging. With all the money, all the time he had put into it, yet it was falling apart. He would have to have some work done with it. “Do go,” he said, “I don’t give a shit.”

The woman sat heavily on the edge of the bed, put a hand on his calf. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said.

“Go. Stay. Just don’t tell me that you don’t know what’s wrong.”

“Is there anything you can do to help yourself?”

“Nothing.”

“Is there anything I can do to help you? Just say it if—”

“Nothing,” Calabrese said, still looking at the ceiling. Someday, if not worked on, those cracks were going to open up like knife-strokes and dump polluted water, filth, corruption, the bowels of the house upon him in his bed. He would definitely have to do something to prevent that. But at the moment he felt inert. He did not care. “There’s nothing anyone can do to help me.”

“I’ve never seen you like this. I’ve—”

“Look again.”

“All right,” the blonde said. “I can’t get near this kind of stuff. I mean I can’t even touch it; it’s not my kind of thing. If there was anything I could do to help you—”

“Fucking won’t help it,” Calabrese said. “All you can do is fuck and that’s not the solution. I’m seventy-one years old. I’m going to die soon. It’s a miracle that I can fuck like this but how long can it go on? I mean even a fool has to understand that everything ends sometime. Fucking is not the answer.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” the blonde said. She said it very gently but her face was purposeful. “This isn’t doing any good for either of us.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know anything.” She stood, brushed some scraps of dust from her tight blue dress. In profile her breasts were straight up even without a brassiere, enormous. You had to get on top of her in bed, Calabrese thought, to realize that they were as soft and yielding to the touch as they appeared hard to the eye. Paradox, paradox, but who gives a shit? He did not. At this moment he did not care if he ever fucked again. “I’ll see you around,” she said.

Calabrese half-sat on the bed. He reached toward the night table, a look of alert intelligence in his eyes, took the pack of cigarettes and carefully broke one, tossed it against the wall. “I didn’t touch drugs for a long time, you know,” he said. “I just didn’t think it paid, you know what I mean? Who wants to get into that kind of shit, mess with that kind of poison, when there’s enough around from a nice simple operation with the kind of things that maybe don’t do people damage. I never really wanted to do people damage, just try to make out. But I got chased into it. The drugs I mean. I had to do it out of self-defense; if I hadn’t done it I would have been knocked out of business.” He broke another cigarette. “Of course a lot of other guys had that problem too,” he said meditatively. “I’m not the first.”

The blonde’s eyes were widened, deepened; she turned on him with slow attention. “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, forget it,” she said. “I don’t want to get into that kind of stuff at all, you understand? What we do, we do just as two people. I don’t want to get into biography and all that stuff. I don’t want to know who you are and you shouldn’t know who I am. We just—”

“Cut that shit out,” Calabrese said casually and ran the back of his hand against a knee, took it up his thigh, plucked some dried semen from his groin. “I don’t need to hear that crap; I need it, I get it in the movies. Two ships in the night and all that kind of shit. If you don’t want to listen, you don’t have to listen; get the fuck out. But don’t start playing Mary Sunshine now. I got driven into it out of self-defense, that’s all. Even then I protected myself. I was just overseeing, really. I never messed with distribution myself. Who needs it?” he asked again. “Of course I was right about all of that.”

“Drugs?” the blonde said. “I don’t know anything about drugs.” She was at the door now, a hand curling around the doorknob. “All I know about drugs is what I read in the papers, what I take out of the aspirin bottle.”

“Self-defense,” Calabrese repeated, to no one in particular, “and supervision. But then I begin to hear about this guy and before I know it, it’s a storm right over my head, raining right into my territory. What the fuck could I do? He’s in my lap even before I know what’s going on, before I get a chance to think this thing out. Who would have believed he was that kind of guy? You hear stuff around but mostly it’s all bullshit. I didn’t believe a word of it, and what I believed sounded like fun. How did I know? He’s killed four men on me already,
that’s
what I know.”

“I’m going,” the blonde said, “I’m really going. I don’t need to hear this anymore. I got my own troubles, honest to God.” She had contracted, her skin had taken on a harder, brighter tint. “Really,” she said, one hand on the door. “You tell me any more of this, I’m going to get sick.”

“What you don’t know won’t hurt you, eh? Well life’s not like that.”

“My life is,” she said. “That’s the way my life has been for a long time and that’s exactly the way it’s going to be.” She had the door open finally, was poised in the hall. “Listen,” she said earnestly, “you’re going to go on this way, you don’t call me. You call me only when it can be the way it’s supposed to.”

“I should have killed him,” Calabrese said, reached over, broke another cigarette. “I know that was my mistake, but you know the real shit part of it? You want to hear it? I know you don’t, but stay ten more seconds, humor me, what the fuck do you care? I’m seventy-one, I’m going to die soon and you’ll be nicely remembered. If I had it to do all over again, I mean if the fucker was standing here right now and we were replaying the scene, I’d probably let it go the same way. I wouldn’t kill him. There’s just something about him that’s fucking unkillable.”

“Goodbye,” the blonde said, “goodbye,” and went through the door, closed it.

Calabrese lay back on the bed, stroking, tickling, playing with his groin, plucking at the little hairs. Dead there. Absolutely nothing. Give the bitch credit: when she was finished with him he was completely fucked out. No solace down there; if there were any solace it would have to come out of his head, but things weren’t happening there either. Things were happening nowhere. He was at a dead-stop.

He could call downstairs, have her intercepted, sent up again, and he could beat the shit out of her, just for kicks. That would be satisfying in a way, and Calabrese considered it. There was a lot to be said for pure, simple sadism; he liked to think that he had a higher, somewhat more refined intelligence. But as for those types who had always enjoyed it at the basic level: live and let live, that was all. But he decided to let it go. It wouldn’t prove much. It wouldn’t be
that
satisfying. And someday he might want to call her up again.

You weren’t fucked out forever.

Calabrese thought about the blonde and then he thought about Wulff and then he thought of the phone calls he had received, all of the bad news filtering in, and something occurred to him; it wasn’t all that bad after all. It wasn’t as if the books were closed altogether. The last act was a long way from being played. He was going to get another shot at the bastard.

Definitely, he would get another shot at him. Everything was in flux and, if you looked at things in a certain way, the bad news was good, because it meant that Wulff was not irrevocably lost to him; the moment was a long way from being tracked back in the past. The bastard, if he got out of Peru, would be heading dead on him—Calabrese, in fact, would be stop number one—and that was good, that was really good, because he would have a chance to play the scene over again and this time it would come to a different ending. This time he would not repeat his stupidity.

This time he would kill him.

Calabrese lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, simulated sleep. In a few moments the simulation became fact; he passed from one heavy state of consciousness to the next, moved into dreams. And in those dreams thick ropes of speculation were thrown up and he clambered up them, just he, just Calabrese, struggling on the rope. Above him was the pure, white light of the arena. Streaming through the skylight was the sun. And below him was the pit, and in the pit was Wulff himself—spread-eagled, tortured, begging for release, as Calabrese—the avenger, the athlete, the dancer, the trapeze-artist—made ready to fall upon him.