Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno (16 page)

“You interest me,” Montez said and offered Wulff a cigarette. “I’ve followed reports of you, only fragmentary ones, of course, but recently I’ve been hearing a good deal. I’ve been extremely anxious to meet you.”

“You could have sent an invitation,” Wulff said. He leaned back in his chair. Unlike the Americans who were his counterparts, Montez seemed to have exquisite manners. He had offered Wulff a drink, a cigarette, and a chair, only the last taken, had leaned back in his own exaggerated ease, had even put his feet up on the desk and turned his attention toward Wulff as if Wulff occupied such a complete position of attention in his consciousness that Wulff’s time would be his for as long as necessary. Of course the two guards, both of them armed with the pistols centered on his neck did not make Montez’s mood any less forced, Wulff thought.

“You wouldn’t have responded to an invitation,” Montez said. “That really does not appear to be your style. Rather it seems you prefer to drop in unannounced.”

“Only occasionally.” Wulff said.

“You are such an interesting man,” Montez said and frowned slightly. “Why does a man of your intelligence want to clean up the so-called international drug trade? And even if you could, what’s in it for you? People must be happy, you know. They will try to buy their happiness in the manner and style that they can afford and to which they are accustomed. If they can’t have drugs they will only have something more terrible. Besides, who are you to decide that one man’s happiness is illegal? Is this under your American tradition? Your happiness comes from killing people. Why cannot another man’s happiness come from injecting heroin?”

Wulff said, “I don’t enjoy killing people. I—”

“—Find it necessary,” Montez said. “You do it with the greatest regret, of course.”

“Why don’t you take your philosophy and shove it up your ass.”

Montez said, “I am not mad at you, Wulff. I am trying to understand you. I am genuinely interested in you. I have found out a lot and would like to know more. That’s why I’ve invited you down here. It isn’t an opportunity I would have missed.”

“Why don’t you try and find out about me without two guards and a gun? Wouldn’t that be an easier way?”

Montez smiled again and said, “I refuse to get mad at you. I bear you no ill will at all. I have no personal feelings against you, I am just trying to get into your psychology. If I felt that without two guards and a gun you wouldn’t attack me, I would certainly talk to you that way, but you are clearly a maddened dog. You would try to kill whatever the odds and circumstances were. You can’t be reasoned with unless a gun is held on you. This doesn’t make you a bad person, Wulff, just an unfortunate one.”

“Fuck you,” Wulff said. He had had enough of Montez. He had had enough of Montez’s men, Montez’s arrogance, being held at bay by this empty diplomat, and he had not been in his home for twenty minutes yet. A deep and vital rage began to work within him, and Wulff knew that Montez was wrong. Guards or not, gun or not, he was going to be goaded into a situation where he possibly would attack Montez no matter what the odds were. There were limits. There were just limits to what a man could take.

“You are such an American,” Montez said, “you believe in violence, always violent solutions. You think that the shortest direction between one mind and the other mind is a fist, thus converting both minds to the same point of view, but you neglect all the wise virtues we have so patiently piled up—”

Wulff stood, pushing back the chair and said, “I’ve had enough of you, Montez. You can take your fucking philosophy and shove it. You think you have brains but you don’t. All you have is manner and manner won’t get you very far.”

The guards seemed to giggle behind him. Of course that could be an illusion, but then again the expression of rage that whipped across Montez’s face, blank until then, was not an illusion. It was something to see a man humiliated in front of his help. They had a very intricate system of honor here. Wulff however did not give a shit. “I have nothing to say to you,” he said. “You’d better kill me now, because if you don’t I’m going to kill you.”

“It is quite hopeless, isn’t it?”

“Nothing’s hopeless. I could kill you very easily.”

“I am not talking about that.”

“What are you talking about? You with two guards and guns and me unarmed? Is that what you call damned easy? The trouble with you sons of bitches is that you’re on your own ground, you’re the toughest thing going as long as you’re calling off the shots, but you die whimpering, Montez. All of you die whimpering and sniveling and begging, and you will too. Your time will come.”

“It is hopeless,” Montez said again. “I thought we could talk, could reason with one another, could perhaps even arrive at an understanding—”

“What kind of understanding? Put me on your staff?”

“I thought I could take out some of your anger. Show you the hopelessness of your business, show you how childish your position really is … you are not thinking like a man but like a child, Wulff, with your belief in magic acts of violence that will make the bad things go away. There is no such absolute Wulff. There is no magic. There are bad things and not-so-bad things and almost everything is in the middle between that.”

“We have no accommodation.”

“I see that,” Montez said. “I see that we have no accommodation at all. You will not listen. You deal in death, but when it comes time to talk—”

“You deal in death,” Wulff said. “You live on death, you juice it along, you love to throw it in veins. You like to see a junkie’s eyes pop out, your blood sings when you see some fifteen-year-old kid in an alley, dead white and expanded with junk, his features all scrambled, his eyes painted all over with death. That’s your discussion for you, that’s where all of your wisdom and your money lies. Don’t give me any of that shit, Montez, you know exactly what you are. You are filth. You disgust me. You are putrescence and slime and you can sit in a hundred rooms with a thousand guards and golden rugs all over the floor and paintings all over the walls and I still know you for scum and you know yourself for it too. That’s why you can’t face me alone. That’s why you’ve got to shield yourself.”

“Son of a bitch,” Montez said, “do you want to see what happened to Carlin?”

“I assume you killed Carlin.”

“He is not that lucky.”

“So you’ve tortured Carlin. That doesn’t mean anything to me, you bastard,” Wulff said. “Carlin doesn’t exist any more, don’t you see that? None of this is personal; the only reason I hate you people is for what you represent and what you’re doing. Once you’re out of the picture, once you’ll never kill a kid again I don’t give a shit who you are or where you go or what you do. Don’t you see that?”

“You son of a bitch,” Montez said. “I want you to take a look at Carlin. I want you to see what he has become. And I want you to know what is going to happen to you too.”

“I don’t care,” Wulff said. “You have no terror for me, you cannot give me dreams. You have no dreams to give, Montez. All you have is death, and the death you know you’ve lived over and over again. You’re the man who is tortured and dead; you’re meat on the rack. You can’t touch me. You can kill me but you can’t touch me.”

“Get up,” Montez said.

“I am up. Haven’t you noticed I’m standing?” Wulff sat down in the chair, put his legs on the desk. “Here,” he said, “ask me to get up now.”

“Get up,” Montez said. He reached into his desk and took out a small silver gun, pointed it at Wulff and waved it. “Get up and begin to move.”

“And if I don’t? You’ll kill me where I sit?”

“I do not prefer to speculate. I do not care to discuss possibilities, not when there is enough reality around us. Get up now.”

Wulff turned in his seat, looked at the guards. “What do you think?” he said to them, “should I get up?”

They said nothing, stared at him bleakly. One was old and one was young, but they were two versions of the same self, thirty years apart. Their faces were sad, their mouths under the moustaches tight, their eyes glinted messages that Wulff could not read. “I do not know if you speak English or not,” Wulff said, “but I think if you do or if you have children, your sympathies are with me. You know I’m right. For all the children.”

“Get up,” Montez said again behind him. “Leave my men alone and stand, you dog.”

“Am I right?” Wulff said and stared at them. “What do you think? Should I stand and go with him, or do I stay? And does it make any difference?”

The old guard said, “It makes no difference at all.”

“But in a way it does,” Wulff said. “I’ve lived so that I won’t die obeying men like this. Would you want your children to obey a man like this? You do because you have no choice and it is a job, but if it were not a job would you stay? Would you listen?”

“I would get up,” the older guard said, “I do not wish you to die. You are a good man, a man with quality. Why is it necessary for you to die?”

“Roberto,” Montez said, “Roberto, you fool—”

“Leave him alone,” the younger guard said to Montez. Montez’s face dropped open. “You may speak to him,” the younger guard said, “and you may tell him your ideas and you may even do with him as you say you must but you have no right to humiliate him. You have no right to humiliate this man.”

“You are a pig,” Montez said, “both of you are pigs. You are discharged from my employ.”

“Good,” Wulff said, “fire them. Fire them right now. Tell them to drop their guns and leave the room. Then it will be just you and me, Montez.”

An expression of confusion rushed across Montez’s face, was replaced by something that might have been hate if there had not been so much pain in it. “I do not know how this happened,” he said, “I did not wish it to happen this way. I merely wanted to speak to you and to obtain your ideas of many issues. I did not mean this to turn into a confrontation and I did not mean it to come this way.” He looked at the gun in his hand as if it were in another hand. “I did not bring you here to kill you,” he said. “I came here as you did to try and seek understanding. That was all.”

“There is total understanding,” Wulff said. “There has always been total understanding. I know what you are and you know what I am. I hate everything you represent.” He stood then, moved the chair back with his calves. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’ll go with you because your guards said that I should. For them I have sympathy. They are working men who have had little choice in their lives and can do no better, and to them I can speak. I will go with you but I control this. You don’t because any time I’ve decided I’ve had enough of you, Montez, I’m going to try and kill you and you’re going to have to be very fast and very good because I don’t think that your guards are going to defend you. I think that you’re going to have to kill me yourself and you just might not be able to do that. You’ll have to be awfully fast and awfully good and awfully tightly controlled, Montez, and if you do all of that you’ll be able to bring it off, but you just better watch it. You’d better keep a good distance between us and you’d better keep me moving all the time.”

He walked toward the door then. Behind him he heard the shuffling movement of the guards and then the creak of Montez’s chair as he pushed it into the desk and followed. Montez was walking slowly and carefully, just as he had been advised. He was a good listener. Wulff didn’t know how much good the guards were going to be to him, though.

Carlin was in and out of consciousness all the time now. Once he had been able to discriminate between the dark and the light; sometimes he was awake and other times he was sleeping but as the treatments went on, as the pain grew, as the barriers of his body had created to shield him from the pain crumpled, he found that there was no longer any discrimination, that he had lost that sense of partitioning between waking and sleep through which human lives were lived.

Now he tumbled in and out, the periods blending together so that he barely knew whether he was sleeping or waking at all. Sometimes he would imagine himself striding powerfully around the room, throwing off the pain and taking control of the situation in his old, demanding way, and he knew that that had to be a waking state until he opened his eyes, thick with pain and encrusted slime, to find that he had been sleeping. Sometimes he thought he was dreaming of a pain so shuddering and intense that it was dismembering his body piece by piece, he falling into the center of it as one might fall into a particularly demanding woman, and that would have to be sleep except that he knew he was awake.

And all the time now there were the thoughts of Janice in his mind. He could smell her, hear her, see her screaming. He should not have killed Janice, he knew that now. His luck had turned bad when he had killed her. All of the time—and he had not known it—she was his luck, she had tied him to life. Now he lay in a basement and he was dying.

He was no longer conscious of men coming into the room, men leaving the room, men beating him and men leaving him alone, bits and pieces of gruel or pap being put into his mouth, tickling along the soles of his feet. He was in a pain so solid and final that it might have been pleasure or ice or anything; it was a pain that transcended pain and became something else again. This might be martyrdom, he thought, in one of his feeble periods of waking; maybe this was how the martyrs felt except that there was nothing glorious about this at all. It was all a myth. Torture was sweaty and disgusting and painful and breaking, and soon you were not a man at all and the thing that was not a man could take no pleasure from virtues. It sweated and voided and fouled itself and stank and cried and spat. That was your martyrdom for you.

So when the four men walked into the room, one of them Montez, two of them guards, a fourth someone he did not know who Montez told him was Wulff, Carlin was convinced he was dreaming again. It had to be a dream; it was impossible that this was happening. He had never met Wulff. Teams of the best men he could find had been unable to locate him, to bring him to bear. Wulff was the avenger, he was going to destroy him. How could he be in this basement? Someone or something threw water on his face and Carlin gasped into alertness, faded away again and more water came, shocking him, grinding him to awakeness. Something was propping him with pillows and then he was sitting, staring. He knew he was awake now. There were the two guards who always accompanied Montez, there was Montez himself, there was a very tall man in fatigues who looked at Carlin in a way that Carlin could not understand. He rubbed his eyes. He tried to speak but his voice wouldn’t come and he fell back. There was more water in his face and more propping and then he was awake. Definitely he was awake this time, he knew it.

“This is Wulff,” Montez said. “This is the man from whom you fled.”

“Yes,” the man said, “he’s right. I’m Wulff.”

Carlin said nothing. There was nothing to say. He knew that he was going to die soon in this room. In a way the man that had just come was responsible for all of it, but this did not change the situation. It changed nothing. “Wulff,” he said, framing the word like a child, pursing his lips, “Wulff.”

“He’s going to join you, Carlin,” Montez said, “you’ll get a good chance to know him.”

“Wulff,” Carlin said again.

“Maybe you will be able to understand him,” Montez said, “because I cannot. I have tried hard to reach some kind of understanding. I have tried to accommodate myself to this man, and it simply cannot be done. But perhaps when his condition approximates yours we will be able to reach some of that understanding.”

“Wulff.”

“No,” the man called Wulff said, and turned in profile to Carlin. He was a big man, all right, a big son of a bitch, tough, no question about it, but how could he kill thousands of men? How could he do what he did, he was only one man. “No, I’m not going to stay down here with him. You’ve got this wrong, Montez. You misunderstand everything. You’re not calling the shots here. I am.”

What was this man thinking of? Carlin thought faintly. Montez was in control of everything now, two guards, three guns, Carlin tortured and helpless, Wulff about to be murdered. Didn’t Wulff understand? There were certain things in this world that you simply could not fight. He blinked, tried to signal Wulff with his eyes that it was hopeless. “Please,” he said then, weakly, “please don’t—”

Montez smiled. “You see?” he said to Wulff, “do you see now? Even your friend is pleading with you to be reasonable. Carlin is a reasonable man. Aren’t you a reasonable man, Carlin? You are trying to help him.”

“Please,” Carlin said, “don’t do it.” His voice was coming back; desperation gave him urgency. He didn’t have much life, but what little was left he wanted to hold onto. That’s how they got you. That was how they always sucked you in, life would hold, life would assert its power. “Please.”

“This man is trying to help you,” Montez said. “He has been where you will be and he is your friend. He understands the situation. He is trying to tell you with all his spirit not to make a fool of yourself.”

“Put down the gun,” Wulff said to Montez. “Put it down now.”

Montez smiled at him and raised the gun. “You’re crazy,” he said, “you are crazy. Move away or I’ll shoot you.”

Wulff turned toward the guards. Was he crazy? Yes, Carlin thought, he had to be crazy. He had never seen anything like this. This was impossible. “Put down your guns,” he said to the guards, “put them down if you won’t train them on him. This is between the two of us.”

The guards dropped their guns. First the younger, then the older unhooked the rifles from their shoulders. They clattered to the floor. Open-palmed, they turned toward Wulff nodding.

Montez said, “Everybody is crazy. Both of you are as crazy as he is. I will kill you both.”

“No you won’t,” Wulff said. He raised his hand and the gesture induced such a terrible if momentary calm that Carlin had to gasp again. He must be dreaming. All of this had to be a dream. Montez did not move.

“Give me the gun,” Wulff said. “Hand me the gun end over end, Montez. Otherwise I’ll have to go for it and you’ll be killed. If you cooperate it will be much easier and I won’t kill you. I’ll just make you suffer for a while.”

“You are crazy.”

“No,” Wulff said, “you are crazy. Your power comes from your craziness, but now I have power that is making you sane. You understand that you cannot stay against me, Montez, because I am right and you are wrong. Your men understand that. You should, too.”

“No.”

“Then you’re crazy too.”

“Don’t,” Carlin said, “please don’t. Please don’t now, you’ll get us all killed.”

“No I won’t,” Wulff said. “Besides, you’re dead already,” and then he made a gesture at Montez, what happened then was too fast for Carlin, his dazzled senses could not follow it. One moment Montez was in position, trying to level the gun, and then Wulff had closed on him and Montez was no longer standing, the man had turned over on the floor, the gun was free, the gun was kicked away and Wulff was moving in even closer. Montez was on the floor squealing. Wulff kicked him hard in the face once and the squealing stopped. Wulff moved away, breathing hard and looked at the guards.

“I don’t believe this,” Carlin said. “I don’t believe it.”

“All right,” Wulff said, “you may go.”

“It is going to be very bad for us,” the older one said. “They will not understand.”

“There is no one to understand,” Wulff said. “Are you the only ones in the house?”

“In the house, yes. Outside there are five on duty, some sentries, some working in the garden disguised. They will not know what has happened if we leave.”

“All right,” Wulff said, “that’s good. That can be worked with.” He bent over, picked up Montez’s gun, put it in his pocket. “Go upstairs and just stay in the house for a while. As long as the house is secure, we’ll think of something.”

“It is going to be very bad,” the younger one said. “It is going to be very bad.”

“We will take one thing at a time,” Wulff said. “We will not be concerned with the future, but only with present time and the present will become the future. Make sure the house is secure and stay up there.”

“All right,” the older guard said. He turned and went, the other followed him. Carlin heard the door click at the top of the stairs. He looked at Wulff, unbelieving. Montez groaned and turned on the floor. Wulff went over and very efficiently kicked him under the heart and Montez was still.

Carlin said, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe what you’ve done.”

“You had better.”

“I never saw—”

“You had better believe it,” Wulff said. He raised a hand, wiped a little sweat from his forehead, came in on Carlin. “It happened all right. You knew it was going to happen.”

Carlin tried to move but could not. The pain, dull for a while, was efficient, terrible. He was dead. He knew it. Deep internal hemorrhage. But he was in more contact than he had been for a long time. “Why?” he said. “Why did you do it?”

“That’s very simple,” Wulff said, looking over at Montez, then back at Carlin. “You know the answer to that one.”

“I don’t know the answer to anything.”

“Sure you do,” Wulff said and looked at Carlin up and down and Carlin felt the fear beginning; it was impossible after what he had gone through that he could feel yet more fear, and yet he did, this was something else, this was hitting him at a level that Montez for all his ingeniousness never had. “What are you doing?” Carlin said. “Why?”

“You know why I did it,” Wulff said. “You know why.”

“Yes,” Carlin said, deep in his throat. He could barely speak. “Yes I do.”

“He tortured you and you’re in bad shape and you’re going to die, Carlin. You’re going to die very soon.” Wulff reached into his pocket, took out the gun, pointed it at Carlin. “But that isn’t enough,” he said. “That’s no satisfaction at all. I don’t want you to just die and I don’t want to know that he did it to you. I want to kill you myself. It’s very important that you die by my hand.”

“You’re crazy,” Carlin said. It was not analysis but terror. He had never been so frightened in his life, even at the worst of it.

“They all say that,” Wulff said. “They all say crazy when they mean sane. But that’s all right. I wasn’t here to debate with Montez and I’m not here to debate with you either. I’m just here to kill you.”

“Why?”

“Because you killed a few good men,” Wulff said, “and you’re a death merchant and a killer who would have gotten crazier and crazier, and you’re practically the last one left, and I think I wanted you more than anyone, even more than Calabrese because I had respect for that old bastard and he really wasn’t into drugs and death, he was just into money—drugs and death were incidentals. But you’re a new breed, Carlin. With you it was shit all the way, shit and death and that’s the worst. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take that and I wanted you very badly.”

Deep in pain, deep into the sense of his own death, Carlin said anyway, “Please don’t. I’m hurt. I’m going to die. Let me die—”

“No,” Wulff said, “no, it wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t feel good. Death isn’t worth anything unless it feels good, Carlin. I owe you this one.”

He pulled the trigger and Carlin saw nothing else, at the center of the single white hot flash there was a crevice into which he fell, but blind, blind forever he screamed and all the way down toward the end wondering, at the last of it, whether you went alone or whether you joined those who followed or whether, when you came right down to it, it made any difference at all.

He never heard Wulff shoot Montez.