Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (4 page)

“You don’t want to be on the squad? You don’t want to be responsible for finding your friend?”

“That’s not it,” Williams said.

“I think that is it. I think that’s exactly what you have in mind. Do I have to spell it out for you, patrolman? This is a man who has murdered some five hundred people in six months, all of them for what he considers to be good purposes, but that does not mean that he is anything but a dangerous killer. The end does not justify the means, and as long as a man of this sort is on the loose it means that no one is safe, not only criminals, but all of us, because escalating violence involves many innocent people and also creates a state of consciousness where there is increasingly more violence.”

“I know that.”

“Do you really know it? Secretly in your heart of hearts, your sympathies are with Wulff. You think that he’s doing a wonderful job, that he’s doing a job about the only way that it could be done, because bureaucracy can’t deal with criminal control and in many respects is part of the criminal system. Don’t you believe that, patrolman?”

“I try not to think about that,” Williams said. “I don’t want to think about the ethics of the thing any more.”

“Oh, you do,” the deputy said, his voice rising, leaning across the desk, “you do so believe. In your heart of hearts, you have a secret admiration for this man. You may feel that his methods are a little too violent, but you and a good many police officers like to feel deep down that this is the right way to approach the situation: vigilantism, murder, that Wulff is making fools of the authorities because they can’t do the job and he can by going outside the normal processes of law and order that hold our society together. That’s what law and order is, Williams, not an excuse for beating heads, like certain politicians like to say in code; law and order is that fabric of rules and manners and understandings and codes that hold together a large, unhappy, polarized society such as we have today and make it possible for people to live their lives. And your man is attacking all of this; he is turning life back into a jungle, and every cop,
any
cop who believes in his heart that he’s right, who is secretly rooting him on, that cop is killing himself because he’s cheering on a situation in which that cop will stand for nothing, in which any man with the price of a gun and what he thinks is a set of reasons can kill that cop, make life hell for all cops.”

“Listen,” Williams said, mildly enough, “he’s not my man. You’ve got this thing wrong—”

“Your man, my man, what does it matter?” the deputy said. “Listen, we’re not fools, there’s a great deal of Wulff-sympathy in this PD and in departments all through the country. Don’t you think we know that? We’ve learned from informants that cops in certain cities have had information from sources that he was coming in their direction, plenty of time to mobilize for his coming, anticipate his moves, stop him if they could. But they did nothing because a lot of cops—I mean highly placed cops, men at the top levels—think he’s fighting their battles, and as far as they’re concerned he’s taking the heat off them, taking off the pressure, maybe doing a job too dirty and risky for them. But they’re crazy! This isn’t enforcement, this is vigilantism, and this isn’t a vigilante country any more.” The deputy tapped the desk three times earnestly, more conviction in his face and voice than Williams had seen, more than he would have suspected. He could understand, at least was beginning to understand, why this man might have political connections and talent. Furthermore, he had a point. Definitely he had a point. As between Wulff attacking the system and Williams once believing in it, neither of them was completely right, but it was possible that Williams had been more right than Wulff. Because once you went outside the system you had nothing. Not righteousness, not an end to corruption, but simply
nothing
: death. The system was man’s way of imposing some order, no matter how perilous, upon the essential void of reality. And this thought was too difficult for him, Williams did not want to face it, there was no end to the trouble you inherited if you started charging down channels like this because you might end up believing that anything was better than that void, any corruption, any pain, any madness, simply so that you would not have to face the darkness of no choices at all. Enough. Enough.

“Do you see what I’m saying?” the deputy was going on, apparently having continued even more passionately while Williams had been charging into his own subterranean channels. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t hate the system and cheer on a man who’s in effect destroying it and yet working for it at the same time. It’s one or the other. Your problem is that you wanted it both ways; you wanted to be a cop because you thought it was a good living, a safe job, decent pay, good pension, but at the same time underneath you hated the system you were supporting. You thought you could be a double agent, Williams, you thought that you could have it one way on the outside and another on the inside. But it doesn’t work that way. You found that out, didn’t you? You found out a few things.”

“I found out a few things,” Williams said, “I am not denying that.”

“The question is,” the deputy said, “will the innoculation take or was it just a booster shot, a temporary injection with no staying power?”

Williams looked at him and at that moment felt all evasion and deception drop from him as if they had been a cloak he had been carrying around for twenty-six years. Free of it now, feeling the breezes of these new thoughts closing around him, it was as if he had not been conscious of the weight of that cloak until it had fallen. “I don’t know,” he said, “I can’t answer that. But I do see what you’re saying. I really do.”

“He’s up to it again,” the deputy said. “He’s back in town, and it’s going to be the same thing all over again. This business in Harlem is just the beginning if we don’t stop him, and I mean stop him now. You see, there’s just not going to be any end to it. There’s never a cutoff point. And no man, not even Burton Wulff, is in a position to make judgments as to how much is enough.”

“All right,” Williams said, nodding slowly, “all right, I understand. I understand what you’re saying. You want me on your squad? I’ll be on your squad.”

“But do you want to? Or do you just want to get back on that career and salary plan so desperately that you’ll agree to anything just so you can get hold of the tit. Because that isn’t going to work. This time, Williams, it isn’t going to work.”

“I understand,” he said, “I understand that. I’ll get on the squad. I’ll do the best you think I can. I’ll give what help I can. I see your point,” Williams said, looking up at the photograph, thinking again: this man is no fool; he looks like a fool, in a way sometimes he may act like a fool, he may be in a fool’s position, but there is just no saying what the real measure of a man is and, middle-aged woman, stupid handshake and all, he is on the ball. He sees things I have not seen; he has told me things I did not know.

Maybe, he thought, and this was a strange new thought, maybe this deputy commissioner was like everyone else; he had to do things he did not like to do, become something he did not want to be, simply to be in a position where he could get these ideas across to someone and have a small chance of feeling that they were being put into practice. There was no saying what ass a man had to kiss to become a man—or what the ass kissing might in the long run mean; it might mean something entirely different from what it seemed.

Puzzling and confusing; he would have to work it all out, he would have to give it a great deal of thought. “I’ll do what I can,” he said again and extended his hand across the desk to the deputy. “I’ll do what I can,” and they shook hands then, the grip in his hand as light and sweaty as he would have thought. But you could not judge a man by his handshake either, or by the number of corpses he was willing to pile high for what he believed to be the justification of his purposes.

He saw the point.

He hated the seeing … but it was there.

Wulff had to get back to his quarters to think, had to reconnoiter with himself to see what was going on. But after the attack in Harlem there was almost no time; there was just no way that he could. Once again it was a feeling of events lurching out of control, mindless, insane. From the moment that the one in the Electra had pulled a gun on him, he had seen it all laid out before him, the violence, the necessity to kill, and he had met that with reluctance because he was tired, he had seen enough. And because going back to killing on the streets of Harlem was going back six months to a stage that he thought he had left behind him. If he had accomplished anything in Peru, in Havana, in Miami he had hoped that he had escaped from the shooting galleries of the inner city.

But they would not leave him alone. It had been madness to think that they would; furthermore, he should have realized that reconnoitering Harlem was in a sense asking for it. What was he doing in that blasted land if not seeking, perhaps consciously, more likely unconsciously, exactly this kind of attack? His first reaction had been rage, and he had used that to kill simply, quickly, destroying the man in the car who had shot at him, the other one reeling out crazily, gesticulating, fleeing across the street and into the shooting gallery, and at that moment Wulff had felt all his purposes coalescing: he
knew
why he had come to Harlem and what he had to do next.

Pitching the body of the dead man out of the Electra, he had taken the wheel. It was there, wrenching the car away from the curb, that he had seen that the floor of the car was littered with incendiaries, literally covered with them; these men were not only addicts but pocket revolutionaries of some sort. Amidst the bloodstains tracing out their delicate network on the floor panels of the Buick were small, rolling objects that seemed to be hand grenades, sheathed knives, unsheathed knifes, the disassembled pieces of what seemed to be a small-bore rifle. They had everything covered, these men, no doubt about it. Shoot it in, shoot it up, shoot it out.

They were coming out of the shooting gallery to see what had happened, cautious ones and pairs of them standing there, gesticulating, and at that moment the clear certainty of inspiration had hit Wulff: those were grenades on the floor of the car, and if they were grenades they were meant to be used. It would be pointless not to do so; it would not be a fit memorial to the man he had killed—he wanted to look at it that way—not to put his weapons to some use in his memory. So quickly, impulsively, not even bothering to think it over, he had picked up one from the floor—it was standard army issue—curled it within his palm, a strange, even, even heat radiating from the grenade, and then in one quick, brisk gesture had thrown it twinkling through the air toward the shooting gallery, the grenade twisting in a high arc, and it had hit dead in the storefront in the middle of a bleached and ruined
O
and then in a single
whoomp
! it had gone up.

No time for retreat, no time even to scream; there had been in the faces of those watching him only that one astonished instant of comprehension when they understood what he was going to do, but caught between the grenade and that realization they had not been able to move for the critical two seconds that might have saved them. The fragmentation from the grenade and the concussion had blown the building
within
itself, an implosion rather than explosion. It brought back memories of bodies Wulff had seen in the fields of Vietnam where it had been this way; the incendiaries driving the bodies into themselves so that they had been small, terrible ruined balls of blackened flesh. What a death that must be! driven in upon oneself, the moment of death not even a release but instead burning and blasting within, a seeking of the flesh for its ruined and rotted core!

Wulff had already been driving the Electra frantically, beating out the heart of the machine through that lever on the floor, moving the huge, rotting car through the back streets of Harlem, possessed with the necessity merely to get out of there. He could think of the explosion later. No, he would never think of it again.

There had been no pursuit, but he had not really expected that there would be. What was pursuit? What was the nature of entrapment now that he had bombed out the shooting gallery? These people were not interested in pursuit, they were not geared for it at all, all that they were interested in doing was in shooting the poison through their veins by the quart, and any interruption of that purpose was merely that, an interruption. They would not deal in retaliation No, he was safe, he was dealing with a population so bombed out, so fatigued, self-involved and desperate that there was literally nothing that could not be perpetrated upon them. Harlem was in itself witness to five decades of exploitation by generations of looters, and the map of that precinct was a map of shame; only in movies would Harlem enforcers come speeding out of the ghetto in fast, black cars to locate the thrower of the grenade and bring him to justice, extract small pieces of vengeance out of his flesh. Only in movies would this happen because only in movies was Harlem a community at all, a community that could be expected to gather around and protect its own.

No, no, Harlem was nothing like this at all. Harlem was a concentration camp or a prisoner-of-war compound in which groups of the brutalized milled around in small and smaller packs, each of them seeking only his own preservation. What a million dollars might have been for one of the distributors, what the Presidency of the United States would have been for the governor, so one more fix, one more day was to your run-of-the-mill Harlem junkie. Let the governor have his presidency, let the Calabreses have their million. The junkie would take tomorrow in the same spirit, one more step into the imponderable and unspeakable future. No one was going to pursue him. There was no will to even try.

He would read all about it in the papers.

So Wulff went back in the Electra to his furnished room in the nineties. Parking the Electra in the neighborhood would have been too complicated, and he did not even want to think of what it would have involved to seek garage space for it. The hell with it; he left it as a junker on West Ninety-fifth Street off the river, tearing off the hubcaps and throwing them down the palisades into the stinking, odorous Hudson, ripping off the antenna and laying it on the front seat, smashing in a window with a rock. It would lie there for weeks and weeks; passersby would take it for a car that had been wrecked on the highway and towed off by precinct tow trucks, left there to rot until city pickup and junking could be arranged. The cops would take it for a vandalized car and with their customary dedication would open it up and take anything serviceable out of the engine compartment. The car would sit there until some night when, for the hell of it, a neighborhood pack might throw a match into the gas compartment just to see what would happen, and then the black parody of the car would sit there for a while longer and eventually, after a long time, one of the junkers would get it. In the meantime he had nothing to worry about.

He went back to his room with the gun he had pulled from the man he had killed and with a couple of the grenades he had seen still rolling on the floor of the Electra and had picked up for possible further use. Two flights off the street, behind his police-locked door, Wulff knew that he was on the verge of a decision now, right on the perilous lip of some kind of commitment that would one way or another take him past a point of no return: he could give up, give up utterly, stop it right now when he was ahead, and turn himself in to the police who would not know what the hell to do with him but were bound to give him a sympathetic hearing, probably get him off on a few minor manslaughter charges arranged through the DA. And he would get himself jailed for two to three years, come out and make a new life for himself. Or he could go on, go on the course he had set with this latest attack wherever it would send him.

Two months or even two weeks ago there would have been no choice. He had been committed to his lonely and terrible quest no matter where it would take him. Butnow, since he had returned to New York, the two-to-three for manslaughter had almost looked tempting at times and for that he cursed himself. It was a hell of a thing that he would actually consider throwing himself upon the mercy of a system that he despised, that he had left exactly because of his hatred for it. But how far could he go? Certainly Miami had been the pivot.
Tamara dead, the drugs gone, Calabrese dead, Williams fled.
It had all seemed pretty pointless if it came down to that death on the beach and he might be better off out of it. Certainly it could be said that he had tried. He had done more to cripple the vermin than anyone since drugs had become the outfit’s new toy in the 1960s.

But he had found out in Harlem that this was merely rhetoric, a fancy, something he had conjured up from his fatigue and pain, nothing more, no conviction. Harlem had shown him that now as always that pure, fine, high, dead lust for combat and destruction sang within him; he had listened to its voice calling him as he had attacked the vermin in the car and then the shooting gallery, and the voice had sung high and sweet, had sung out its dreadful purities in language that he could not ignore and that he knew reached him as no voice of reason or caution would. Back in his barren furnished room, pacing between stinking chest, stinking bed, stinking walls, Wulff said, “All right then, I’ll do it, I’ll
do
it,” and saying that had not known what he had said until the import of it struck him, redounding back from those walls, and then he knew; he knew that he had said it and the impact coming back on him slowly, a fist beating upon him like a heart, the rhythm of that fist pounding slow knowledge, and he said, “I’ll do it again,” awed with himself, at the singleness of that conviction, at the return of the rage and the sense of mission after all he had been through. At this stage he should have known better. Certainly at this stage he should have lost that sense of commitment. But it had been there all the time, all of the time indeed, merely waiting to reclaim him.

But if it had been waiting to reclaim him so be it: he knew what to do next. From Williams, during their week in Los Angeles when they had talked about everything, he had obtained the whereabouts and nature of Father Justice’s Brotherhood of Divinity and Truth Church, the storefront in Harlem behind which was a weapons shop of such awesome selection and range as to make even an infantry commanding officer turn envious. To Father Justice he went to load up on new armaments. He knew that there would be a great deal of trouble with this. In the first place, going back to Harlem after the attack on the shooting gallery was risky altogether, highly risky; and in the second place, Father Justice had leased out a large amount of ordnance to Williams on an 80 percent refund basis. This Williams had had swiped from him when Calabrese’s troops had waylaid him and his U-haul on the desert on his return trip from Los Angeles. Father Justice could not be too happy about having lost so much ordnance. Williams had paid for it all, of course, and the good reverend had no claim whatsoever upon it. But if Wulff thought he knew this business as well as he did, Father Justice was not really in sales; he was in the rental business, and he could not look too kindly upon the loss of all this rare, valuable, and powerful material whether it had been paid for in full or not.

Still, no doubt about it. If he was going to go on, he was going to have to load up, and as far as loading up was concerned, Father Justice was the only place in the vicinity that he knew about. The good reverend had the goods, that was for sure. Perhaps Wulff could best risk it by not letting on that he had any connection with Williams at all. That made it a question of a single white man going up to Harlem and asking for ordnance in quantities. That, too, Wulff suspected was not Father Justice’s kind of thing. Father Justice, a black revolutionary, dedicated and megalomaniacal, according to Williams anyway, was not in the business of leasing out guns to white men. This would get him nowhere; at best it would give him a sermon on conversion to the ways of righteousness and peace.

Better to lay it on the line, then.

He went up there very cautiously, checking out the terrain as if it were a foreign combat zone before he came out of the subway at 137th Street, reconnoitering carefully from that vantage point, moving uptown then exactly as one would infiltrate an enemy zone, high alertness, careful positioning, the willingness to use any part of the terrain for camouflage or cover, no matter how painful or awkward. He was ducking into storefronts, hopping buses, watching carefully in all directions as he made a sidelong, careful, circuitous passage uptown to the place where Williams had told him the storefront was. When he got there, looking at the dusty, shabby, decaying boards, the street almost deserted, the street in fact absolutely deserted as a young, terrorized female welfare worker, carrying her casebook under her arm tap-tapped her way up a wrecked brownstone and trembling into the lobby, Wulff had a moment of doubt, doubt piled upon indecision, the idea of going into this storefront, seeking arms from a lunatic seemed somehow appalling. But he drove through the point of indecision, shaking it off desperately and rammed his hand into the smashed boards of the Brotherhood Church.

The storefront was decorated with religious symbols, little aphorisms, scrawled posters announcing the date of the next prayer meeting, the social club, the breakfast club, the revival society. Religiosity and crime stalked together in the inner city, Wulff thought, both of them heightened and irrational, both of them somehow as bizarre to the nestled inhabitants of the suburbs as might be the nature of an alien star (except that the inhabitants of the suburbs knew enough to be scared to death). And it would take a greater writer or politician, certainly a greater thinker than he to point out that the two of them were the same: crime and religiosity, both of them somehow mystical over-reactions to an unbearable present. Any cop knew that, any cop’s knowledge could inhabit and encompass the despair of these streets; but insight was not enough, there would have to be a way to frame it and to frame too the realization that drugs and religiosity were also the same thing, at least in their intended effects, a trip, a trip out, an effective journey out of self and into some area where connection and control reappeared, the same connection and control that were lacking in the lives that brought the penitent to this position.