Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown

Present whereabouts, plans, deeds unknown. It is possible that Wulff is dead, although this is merely an unverified hunch. Reason for speculation: there has been no evidence of activities for two months. This represents, by far, the longest period of inactivity since his war began, seven months ago. Results then were so widely publicized that we concluded that this level of activity would continue.

Brief summary incorporating materials of previous report and updating: Burton Wulff, thirty-two years old, Vietnam combat veteran (more than a few years counting toward civil service pension “good time”), ten-year veteran of New York Police Department. Various duties before three years on narcotics squad, 1970-73. Suspended from narcotics squad for allegedly making an arrest without proper evidence. (It is known that the arrestee was an informant who did indeed have hard drugs on person, and that the release was arranged by lieutenant of the booking precinct. See file #43712. Collaboration between dealers and precinct personnel not uncommon in that precinct during period of arrest. New command instituted.)

Returned, temporarily, to patrol car duty with new partner, David Williams. On first night of patrol car duty, Wulff was sent on anonymous tip to rooming house on West Ninety-third Street in New York where a twenty-three-year-old white female, subsequently identified as Marie Calabrese, was found dead of heroin overdose. Apparently Calabrese, decedent, was the fiancée of Burton Wulff.
This is carried as an open case, and no leads have been uncovered.
It is possible that girl did die of overdose. Based on autopsy, however, murder was not completely dismissed. There were signs of forced induction in the pulmonary vein, and decedent bore no external signs of drug addiction.

Wulff never returned to the patrol car, the precinct, or the police department. Much of what follows has been developed from public data and the hearsay of certain unidentifiable informants.

Wulff declared a “total war” on the international drug dealers, apparently believing himself and the decedent to have been “targeted” because of the previous day’s drug arrest.
There is no evidence of such targeting.

The “war” began in New York and Long Island where Wulff, apparently relying upon combat experience and knowledge of ordnance, incendiaries, and guerilla tactics, killed at least six men, three of them identified as being prominent in the higher circles of East Coast drug distribution. After blowing up a townhouse on the East Side and assassinating a major distributor (taking with him, apparently, the plans and directives for a major shipment due to arrive on the West Coast), Wulff went to San Francisco where his “war” continued, escalating into a massacre when a freighter containing the shipment, along with a large crew and many operatives on board to receive it, was blown up in San Francisco harbor. Escaping with the shipment itself, at least a million dollars worth of uncut heroin, Wulff proceeded east to Boston, using shipment as “bait.” In Boston, through continuously escalating guerilla tactics, he destroyed the fabric of extant distribution in the New England states before apparently disposing of the drugs.

Wulff then proceeded to Las Vegas where a large quantity of drugs stolen from the evidence division by a now deceased police sergeant (see file #43926) was rumored to be. Terror tactics continued, a major casino was destroyed, and several more important figures were assassinated. Returning East with stolen goods, Wulff’s flight was hijacked to Havana.

Here the trail is lost, not to be picked up until weeks later when, emerging somehow from Havana, Wulff was known to be in Chicago. There he confronted Nicholas Calabrese, seventy-three, long suspected to be the kingpin not only of Midwest distribution but also of the national council of families. Apparently Wulff was entrapped by Calabrese, but mysteriously was not killed but instead exiled to Lima, Peru, from which country he again emerged in unknown ways, next being seen in Los Angeles weeks later where more violence was committed.

(There are unsubstantiated reports that throughout some of these incidents Wulff had been receiving help, both overt and covert, from David Williams, his former partner. Williams, critically injured by knife attack near a methadone center1 in west Harlem, was hospitalized for several weeks, left home shortly after his return, and
might
have been with Wulff in Los Angeles. Many aspects of the Williams situation are interesting, and a separate report is being prepared. Williams, as you know, has now applied for reinstatement, refusing to give details of his involvement with the subject.)

Details of Los Angeles events will be found in supplementary reports being prepared, as will details, when available, on previous episodes. Wulff left Los Angeles for Miami at the same time that Calabrese was heading there, apparently for a finai “confrontation” of some sort. (It also appears that a second and even larger lot of drugs was taken by the subject out of Peru, a multimillion-dollar load of uncut heroin diverted from Calabrese, who had arranged the shipment.) In a massive guerilla action on the beach in Miami, some forty or fifty men, apparently Calabrese’s employees and security personnel, were slain. Also found on the beach was the corpse of a female in her mid-twenties who highly suspect sources indicate might have been Wulffs paramour. By the time authorities had arrived, Wulff was gone. His body was not found, leading to the conclusion that he had somehow escaped. However, the failure of subject to surface during the subsequent months indicates that he might indeed have been killed in the massacre, his body somehow disposed of.

A commercial airline flight carrying Nicholas Calabrese and seventy-three other passengers crashed five miles west of Chicago’s O’Hare airport on the morning after the massacre. Only the pilot, copilot, and one stewardess survived the crash, but all died within thirty-six hours of the incident.

It is conceivable that Wulff did survive the massacre with the intent to follow Nicholas Calabrese back to Chicago and kill him there, that the crash made this plan of action unnecessary, gave him the feeling that his “war” had come to a successful conclusion, and enabled him to go underground. However, this is doubtful, considering the previous record of Burton Wulff—the scope of his activities, the anger with which they were carried out, and his unswerving dedication to destruction of the international drug trade, of which Calabrese was merely one important symbol.

Supplementary reports, as noted, are in preparation and will be forwarded.

Although Wulff is a former police officer, and although he has made efforts throughout not to involve/injure/kill enforcement personnel, he must nevertheless be considered extremely dangerous. Since his capture would undoubtedly result in life imprisonment—he is guilty of several hundred murders and, regardless of the motive and the nature of the victims, many murders are still first-degree—and since he knows this and would undoubtedly not allow himself to be approached, it is reluctantly recommended that he be shot on sight,
end report.

Calabrese dead, Tamara dead, Williams gone, the drugs destroyed, the cities burnt behind: lost, lost.

Calabrese dead, Tamara dead, Williams gone, the drugs destroyed, but here he still was, he was here, he was back in Harlem. A few months, a different life ago, his quest had started there when he had pulled a dealer from a car and choked out of him information about the next higher link in the chain. On and on he had moved then: snapping links in the chain, leaving it a slithering, broken serpent behind him as he had moved on and on, through the great cities of America into Havana, Lima, building toward that confrontation with old Nicholas Calabrese, toward that time when he would accomplish the purpose of his quest; he would kill him and be done. Behind him then was wreckage, ahead of him the darkness, but he would have Calabrese. He would find him in his lair in Chicago and kill the old man; hell, he would torture him to death.

But Calabrese dead, Tamara dead, Williams gone, the drugs destroyed, everything had come to an end and an end away from him. Getting off the plane in Chicago, the Miami-Chicago flight one hour behind the one that Calabrese had taken, seeing the panic at the airport, the reporters, the photographers, the grim men in black suits from the aereonautics agencies, the security personnel holding off the crowds that wanted to surge down the runway under the blank spotlight to see the wreckage in the distance, the fires and hoses playing upon it—seeing this he could not believe it, it was not possible that Calabrese could have gone down, denying his own vengeance. And yet, on the heels of this was a second level of feeling: an acceptance. He knew that it would have to have been this way. The old man was too cunning, clever, corrupt. He had managed all the details of his life; now at the end of his purposes, his troops destroyed, Wulff hard behind him, could not the old man strangely have willed his death and in that one megalomaniacal gesture of the heart and will brought down seventy innocents with him?

Well, Wulff was no mystic. The world was still a rational place; it was only the corrupters and the thugs who made it irrational. He would not get into that issue at all; what he had to do now was to adapt to the fact that Calabrese was dead, that he would not return, and that he, Wulff, had to get out of Chicago as quickly as possible. He had obtained the casualty information quickly and easily. The reporters were talking to anyone. Only three survivors had been pulled from the craft, the pilot, copilot and one of the stewardesses, and they were en route to the hospital now with 85 percent of body surfaces burned. No one was expected to live.

Get out of Chicago, then. First was the rage that Calabrese had used death, that trap door, to evade him; second was a feeling of emptiness, deserted purposes; but the third conviction, spilling all through him like heat and light, was that he had to save himself and he would. The shipment of drugs had been shredded and destroyed in Miami. Williams had left him for the last time to try to pick up the pieces in New York. Tamara, who might have at another period of his life wrenched him into feeling—well, Tamara was dead, but that was all over. He was still alive. He had to survive. If he did not, everything that he had done so far was meaningless. He had to get out and back to New York because at least he knew New York, he felt safe there.

So he went to a counter and bought a shuttle service coach ticket and, accident and all, was on board on his way within twenty minutes. If he had had some vision of hundreds of Calabrese’s soldiers ringing the airport, waiting for his entrance, if he had thought of hundreds of equally dedicated police carrying his photograph, alert to his return from Miami—the soldiers, if any were left after what Calabrese had invested in Miami, had undoubtedly taken for the hills as soon as they had gotten word of the crash, and the cops had other things to do. Mostly trying to hold the gapers and the press in check. He slipped through all of them like a soldier low-crawling barbed-wire and headed back toward New York, a three-hour flight against headwinds during which he had time to evaluate his position.

His position, of course, was impossible and had only been magnified by the crash that had downed Calabrese. He guessed that his plan had been to kill the old man, thus rounding off as best he could his six-month struggle in the jungles of the international drug trade, and then to turn himself in to the federal authorities as proof that the trade could be broken if a small group of trained and dedicated men were allowed to operate vigilante style outside the scope of conventional enforcement procedures. Or he might simply have slipped away, breaking through the border to Mexico. He was tired, the price had escalated, the risks now outweighed the potential for further damage, and Calabrese had seemed to be the proper murder with which to round off at least this phase of his career. But then the son of a bitch had gone and died on him.

Well, it just went to prove that you never knew. You could never be sure of anything. Calabrese himself must have had that feeling as the plane fell.

Calabrese dead, Tamara dead, the drugs shredded, Williams gone. He came off the plane at Kennedy, this beginning to throb like a litany through his consciousness: Cal-a-brese
dead/
Ta-ma-ra
dead/
drugs
de
stroyed/Will-yums
gone.
He had ducked underground at once, striking out not toward the hack stand or the highways but toward the odorous, rolling swamps beyond Kennedy. There, climbing fences, moving through water, he had gotten himself to a side road in Jamaica, and only then had he hailed a cab, a cruising gypsy.

And he had had the cab take him to Manhattan, to the West Side.

Only in the saying of it, in the destination coming out of him, had Wulff understood the perfect sense that this made, the feeling of perfect circularity, closing the cycle: bless the subconscious again. Or curse it, hold no odes for the subconscious, because it knew better than he did that what had happened had begun on the West Side and here, then, it would end. On the West Side, in a stinking rooming house on West Ninety-third Street, he had seen Marie Calabrese overdosed out, twenty-three years old and gutted, her body aged fifty years in the impact of the drug, her lovely body, which he had known so well … but it was better not to think of this, to remove thoughts of this sort from the conscious mind, because they would get him nowhere. He was beyond rage. All that he knew was that there was a compelling
rightness
in returning to the West Side.

And who would suspect his being there? Here, with the remnants of the shattered organization still staggering around, still seeking him, they would never expect him to come back to New York where it had all started. And the enforcement authorities who wanted him at least as badly as the organization, if only because he had shown them for the cheated, cheating fools they were—they too would not expect him to be here. Anywhere but in New York, with which he was most identified, and where he was most identifiable. So it was perfectly safe, it had been safer than any port in or out of the world, and when the cab had pulled onto the Triborough Bridge, it had been with absolute certainty that he had said, “Let’s go over to the West Side. Drop me off in the west nineties, anywhere at all.”

And they had gone into the west nineties. Going there, being there for the first time since he had seen the girl dead there had been a single moment of disconnection, lurching panic when he did not know whether he could take the sights or sounds of it anymore. But this had all gone away, he had felt the clamping certainty as the car came off at Ninety-seventh Street to make it through the transverse. He would not lose control of himself. He was back on home turf now. He could handle himself.

Into West Ninety-seventh, off the transverse road, across to Broadway, and this was where he had the cabbie stop, paid him off, got out. He was carrying only a small overnight bag. Losing the sack of drugs had lightened him down to bare essentials. In his pockets he had a .38, a .45, and four thousand in cash. Money was no problem; when he needed some he would pick it up. Take what you need, don’t be greedy. Criminal mentality, he guessed. He walked south, through the midnight freaks and geeks of Broadway, turned after four blocks and found exactly what he had been looking for, what he had probably been looking for from the moment he had left Chicago.

West ninety-third Street. A rooming house.

No one recognized. Who was to recognize? A cop in uniform, as everyone in the business knew, was as close to the invisible man as the postman, the milkman, the parking lot attendant. In their roles, they had no features. He told the small, bitter man at the front desk that he would be in for an indefinite period, paid fifty dollars, two weeks rent in advance; and got a room on the second floor overlooking an airshaft. The second floor was all right.

He did not think that even he would have been able to take the fifth.

He spent two or three days lying low, getting his bearings, coming back to the New York sense of things. Everything began here; so it would end. The city was dying, but magnificently: there was more energy in one decayed strip of paper blowing on its streets amidst dog shit than in all of the vast spaces of Los Angeles or San Francisco. He blended into it perfectly. Everyone on the West Side was invisible, most of them invisible even to themselves. No one came looking for him; he had no sense of pressure or menace. He fitted right in.

The newspapers gave him a little more information. Massacre on the beach at Miami, forty-three dead, mob violence, mob vengeance, assailant’s identity known to the police, intensive manhunt, no information to be released to the press at this time. Nicholas Calabrese dead in an air crash outside O’Hare, connections to the Miami massacre suspected, no definite information. Probable kingpin of the Midwest drug trade, a federal indictment was being sought for tax evasion at the time of his death. Wulff laughed at that, but not very hard. Otherwise, everything seemed fairly normal: a press service story about a possible drug panic in New England; supplies seemed to have almost vanished, to everyone’s consternation. Authorities had no explanation. He laughed at that, too, again not heartily. In New York the drug trade was bubbling right along, new state laws or not, although an inordinate number of police seemed to be getting themselves shot and wounded, even a couple killed, in the process of making drug arrests. However, most of the trafficking had simply slipped across the river; the majority of deals seemed now to be taking place in Fort Lee or Hoboken. New Jersey’s attorney general was going to ask the legislature for similarly harsh laws in his state so that New Jersey would no longer be a refuge for traffic. Wulff shrugged. Enforcement had nothing to do with the problem. Couldn’t they see that? Enforcers were merely employees of the drug traffickers, ripping off their share in civil service salaries, defense legal fees, press publicity, and so on. Nothing would ever change inside the system. The system was dead-set for drugs; they kept it going. If any change was going to come, it would have to come from guerilla technicians, working outside the system, who had absolutely nothing to gain from their efforts but the satisfaction of knowing they were solving a problem. Couldn’t they see that? Yes, he guessed they could. They knew it so damned well that they kept on passing tougher and tougher drug laws, pleading for more judges, more district attorneys, more jail wardens, more social services, more funding for their agencies …

After four or five days, he got sick of reading the papers and found himself ready to forage on the streets again. Nothing would ever change, that was for sure. Williams, the Williams of the beginning, before he had been knifed outside the methadone clinic, had been telling him the truth after all. The system was not about to change, it was going to go on the way that it always had; all that you could try to do was to hang loose and get your own. Give up any idea that you could make a difference. Go for the split-level or the two-family house in St. Albans, build your walls around yourself, go for the good twenty and pension at half-pay, and get the hell out, Williams had said. Well, maybe he was right.

Still, he wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. Close to it but not just yet. Wulff had a few last ideas of his own; you couldn’t start at the beginning, no way, but maybe you could get back to the roots just to see if you had done a thorough job, to do a little extra trimming and weeding around before standing back and admiring the finished construction. That was about what he was after now. There was no way to repeat his odyssey. But he could check back, take a craftsman’s view of his work.

He went back to Harlem. First cruising the streets casually in a cab, saying nothing to the puzzled, nervous cabbie, just looking over the blocks as he had remembered them: Lenox, St. Nicholas, 125th Street, Lexington, Park. And then when he had decided that the terrain looked pretty much the same, he decided to dig in a little bit deeper.

Just to see how close he could get to the heart of the flame and still feel his own breath.

Other books

Filthy Beautiful Love by Kendall Ryan

A Very Merry Hockey Holiday (Assassins #6.5) by Toni Aleo

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

The Education of Bet by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Almost Matched (Almost Bad Boys) by Peart, A.O.

Alien Invasion and Other Inconveniences by Brian Yansky

Kincade's Rose (Megalodon Team) by Burke, Aliyah

Betrayed by Bertrice Small

Boys Against Girls by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The Sweet Shoppe: Tempting Prudence by Schroeder, Melissa