Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown (8 page)

When Father Justice opened the slats of the storefront to peek out, it was with a truly reverential expression, and Williams felt like a petitioner. But then as he stared within, the eyes narrowed, the slats fell and what came to the door was not the benign, nodding Father Justice who had given him both blessings and ordnance a few weeks ago, but instead a grim, compact black man in his middle forties whose robes hung from him like a saddle might from a horse so much did he seem to resent their touch. “You,” he said at the doorway, “
you.
”

“May I come in?”

Father Justice blinked and said, “Yes, you may come in,” and the door opened just enough for Williams to squeeze his way through; in the trap of dankness within, he felt Justice’s hands, surprisingly strong, gripping the wrist, squeezing, applying pressure. Painful as it was, Williams submitted, allowing himself to be led through the pews into the massive back room where the ordnance lurked. Funny, he thought absently, looking at the improvised altar, the crucifix, the large, sentimental portrait of the black Saviour that hung on canvas behind the podium, the little strips of fine wire pasted down on the stage with Scotch tape, probably so that Father Justice’s tones could be inconspicuously amplified. Strange, strange: I’ve never seen a service here at the Brotherhood Church. I wonder if they
have
services. Well, that’s none of my business, and in any event one thing is sure, one thing is sure as hell, I wouldn’t want to see the kind of service that they have here.

He had spent half the day in plain clothes in a bar near the Apollo, drinking beer and plotting his approach to Justice. He knew he was going to go, there was nowhere else to go, it was the only possibility from the first. But in the bar he’d had to balance off a number of things, the most important being, if he could find Wulff, did he really want to confront him? Did he want to have that choice thrust upon him if he could run Wulff to ground? Granted that the deputy commissioner’s point of view made a great deal of sense, granted that the Wulff Squad, as pitiful as it was, might be the proper rogue’s squad to catch him, granted that he desperately wanted to get back inside the department and start building on what he had almost thrown away. Granted all of that, was he prepared to make the choice that he would have to make if he ever found Wulff? He had drunk the beers to no conclusion, no real conclusion at all, listening to the thud of the jukebox, looking at the walls, listening idly to the conversation at the bar, which had a good deal to say about the lounge just a few blocks down that had been bombed out the previous night. Some thought that it was some kind of drug dealers’ war, the old organization retaliating against the black distributors who were not cutting them in and who were using the lounge as an important point of distribution; others were convinced that it was an inside job, an insurance job of some sort. But on one point everyone was quite clear: at least five people had died in that explosion, including one gunned down on the street. Thirty or forty more had been checked into hospitals overnight, and there was no reckoning the damage that had been done even beyond this in terms of the sheer assault on the neighborhood. Now even Harlem was not safe; it was going to be the same battleground that had been made of other sections of other cities. There was plenty of crime in Harlem, but it had been of the small arms, face-to-face, individual ripoff type. This was a newer and meaner construct, and people in the bar were damned scared, so scared that Williams, simply because he was an outsider, had attracted a good deal of unpleasant attention up and down the bar, people staring at him, whispering about him. Finally the bartender, flickering a towel, had come down the line to tell Williams that he thought it would be a good idea for him to get out of there, and Williams had left. There was no sense in fighting that decision. He had no ground to defend.

And that, oddly enough, had been what had tipped the balance, had sent him after all to Father Justice. If Wulff was carrying on his war in distant ports or cities; if Wulff was carrying his war to the exclusive districts where the vermin lived and walled themselves behind their guards and possessions, that was one thing. But if he was going to take it into the streets where the poisons themselves flowed, then he had to be stopped. It was simply too dangerous; Wulff might be thinking that he was attacking at the source now for his last and greatest campaign, but what he was actually doing, Williams thought, was springing his trap on the victims. The war could not reside in Harlem. Harlem was a combat zone itself, a devastated area, like Dresden in 1945 or Hiroshima. It was merely feeling the effects of the corruption, it was not causative. It was only a receptacle. So Wulff had made a very serious mistake, a misjudgment, really, his first misjudgment, perhaps, but one serious enough to swing Williams all the way over to a decision: he had to go after him. It had to be stopped. Perhaps if he could see Wulff and merely explain to him the folly of what he was doing, the fact that he was not striking back but merely
in
, Wulff would see it and desist. He would have to proceed on this basis anyway. There was another possibility altogether that Williams did not even want to consider at this time: the chance that Wulff had seen all this and simply did not care, that Wulff too had evaluated this in his mind and had decided that he
had
to bring the war home to the victims. But Williams did not have to consider that now. Maybe he never
would
have to consider it; Wulff would listen to him when they met and decide to be reasonable.

The alternative was not worth thinking about.

In the bowels of the ordnance room, Father Justice reached inside his robes and suddenly there was a gun on Williams, a .38, which is a light, inaccurate, and short-range piece, but a .38 at this range could do as much damage as a .45. When you were lying in a coffin, the quality of the weapon that killed you hardly mattered. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Father Justice said softly.

“I’m here,” Williams said. “You can put that thing away.” He paused, then said, “I don’t think that that’s in accord with the principles of brotherhood and divinity, is it?”

“You leave brotherhood and divinity out of it,” Father Justice said hoarsely. He coughed, cleared his throat, hawked out a clear drop of phlegm which he leaned over to deposit on the gleaming floor. “You let me worry about brotherhood and divinity. Where is all the materiel?”

“I got hijacked,” Williams said. “I got hijacked in Nevada. It wasn’t my fault; I was trying to bring it all back but I got waylaid.”

“I don’t like that,” Father Justice said and spat again. “I do not like the idea of materiel falling into the hands of hijackers. What I wish to know is what made you come back here to begin with without that ordnance? You know how seriously I regret its loss. So seriously that I have already been sending out representatives to discuss the matter with you.”

“No more than I regret it,” Williams said, “I feel very badly about it, believe me. But something more serious has happened.”

“Has it?” Father Justice said softly. “What could be more serious than the loss of much firepower, which our brothers could have used in the unending war for justice? Tell me what exceeds this in seriousness?” The .38 did not waver. Williams looked at it, calculated the chance that he could take the gun from Justice, wrestle it free and turn it on the man. In some intricate way, all the shifting odds passed on tape through the teletype of his mind; he might be able to do it. The odds were sixty-to-forty in his favor in any event: he had surprise and age on his side as against Justice’s obvious alertness and familiarity with the weapon; put it all together and three times out of five he might be able to make it, might actually take control of the situation, but for what? Williams thought: two times out of five, in two worlds out of the five of possibility he would have his brains blown out, and the odds were not good; it was not worth it. Beyond that, Justice was obviously not threatening to kill him, merely pulling out the gun to establish a certain level of relationship, which is the way that the good reverend would approach most of his business dealings. That looked pretty sensible, considered that way. It isn’t worth it, Williams thought, and put it out of mind.

“I’m still waiting for an answer,” Father Justice said. He looked less ecclesiastic than Williams had ever seen him; but then again, Williams thought, aspects of the Old Testament prophecy called for a hard and unyielding witness. The reverend was merely being faithful to one aspect of the teachings.

“I have no answer,” Williams said, “I really have no answer for that. It wasn’t done in my interests. Besides, I purchased the ordnance. Wasn’t it a straight purchase deal?”

“With an 80 percent refund when they were returned,” Justice said. “We expected them to be returned. You agreed that you would return them. It was a rental with a 100 percent full value deposit.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” Williams said. It really wasn’t, and abruptly he was tired of confrontation, tired of Father Justice and his .38, tired of the materiel room itself, whose odors brought him back unpleasantly to a time only a few months ago when he had looked at matters in a sick and wrongheaded way that he was still trying to put behind him, labor out from under the color of a disease. “Put that gun away,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”

“No, you are ridiculous. You have severely jeopardized the cause.”

“What cause?” Williams said. “You sell munitions for profit, that’s your cause?” Father Justice’s face became dense, thickened, seemed in the light to become gray, and Williams said, “There’s a small chance that we might be able to get them back, but I didn’t come back here for that.”

“What did you come back here for?”

“I think that a man might have been here to buy some stuff from you,” Williams said.

Justice looked at him bleakly, still holding the gun. Then, with a massive, unwinding sigh, put it back in his robes. “I see that a vindictive approach will not work with you, my son,” he said gently. “You are sunk too deep in the great corruption of your ways. Instead, we will have to pray. We will have to pray for you.”

“I hope you’ll do that,” Williams said. “I’m looking for a man who I think would pray for me, and you may be just the one to do it.”

“Indeed,” Father Justice said. He seemed to have converted himself and his conversation to an amiability so gross that Williams decided that it could be as offensive as the good reverend’s aggressiveness. Unfortunately, Justice could not seem to find a proper middle ground; this, perhaps, being the true and final definition of religious fanaticism. “Indeed, I will have to pray for you.” He shook his head, looked at the shelves and shelves piled with M-15s, grenades, and Browning Automatics and said, “Let’s get out of here. I find it very difficult to discuss salvation in an environment like this.”

“No,” Williams said, “let’s stay here. I have one question. I want to know if a man, a white man might have been—”

“You have already asked that,” Father Justice said. “That question has already been asked of me and you may recollect that I did not elect to answer it. I am extremely distressed with you, my son. I am afraid that you are preoccupied with violence. You are, in fact, obsessed with it. Thoughts of violence seem to be central to your brain and spirit, and that, of course, is very bad. We must cultivate love, peace, that peace which passeth all understanding—”

“Now listen,” Williams said. With the gun safely tucked within the reverend’s robes, with the axis of the conversation seemingly tilted toward him again, the urge was clear: pull now his own service revolver on the good reverend and reestablish that natural balance that should exist between the authorities and the governed. But then again he was no authority, not really, and it could hardly be said that Father Justice would label himself as being among one of the governed. Quite to the contrary, if Father Justice took orders from a higher authority it would be one to whose level Williams could not ascend. He shook his head, bit his lips, dismissed the idea. Fuck it. “Now listen,” he said, “let’s try to be reasonable about this. You see,” he said then, trying to be cunning, deciding that there might be another approach after all with which to entice the good reverend, “that white man, the one who I’m looking for, he might be the one who would know where all that ordnance is. As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m looking for him.”

“Dissemblance,” said Father Justice, “dissemblance is a sin not only in the eyes of God but in those of man himself, and we must deal, all of we poor stricken creatures must deal with man primarily if only as the access route to God. Sin of all kinds blocks our passage to the higher realm, but of all the sins of which we speak, mendacity may be the worst. I—”

“I’m not lying,” Williams said, “I mean it. If there was a white man looking for stuff from you, if he was in here to try to check out some armaments, he’s very likely the one you want, the one you got your stuff heisted from. I’m looking for him.” he paused, tried a careful breath, found it all right, took a deeper one. “If I can find him, there’s at least a good chance that you’ll get all the stuff back.”

The reverend came closer to him. “The sins for mendacity’s use are great,” he said, “and they will be paid in full in the higher realm; they will—”

“I’m not lying,” Williams said, “believe me, I’m not lying at all. If we can find him, we may find the stuff.”

“Ah,” Father Justice said. “Ah,” and paused, his robes seemed to rise slightly as if he were taking deep, gasping breaths, but then again he might have only been preparing himself for a devotion of some sort. “I wish that I could truly believe this, but I detect within you some inner tension, some doubt and indecision—”

“No,” Williams said, “it’s true,” and extended an arm to take Father Justice out of the ordnance room, slowly the reverend extended an arm to meet his, the two of them linking, and then he led him, surprisingly weightless, out of those damp, dense spaces and into the sacristy where Williams felt that he heard murmurous voices, although they might only have come from the sound of the crucifix as it gently brushed against the curtain on the little Harlem winds as they hit the panels of the storefront outside. “All true,” he said outside. “Why I think you’d be surprised at how much this man may have to do with the stolen ordnances, how much responsibility he may bear for what has happened to you. I can almost assure you that all the answers will emanate from there once you help me find him.”