Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno (13 page)

Murder like sex heightened one’s sensibilities, and the moment that he saw Montez with two big, ugly, impassive men coming toward him in the terminal building, Carlin knew he was in trouble. He should have understood from the conversation, should have understood from the beginning exactly what was going to happen, but he had been stupid. From too much fatigue and excitement he had given way to too little anticipation, he had looked for Montez for help when what he should have understood was that Montez would only see him as a dangerous rival who now, having put himself alone into the hands of his enemy, could be dealt with quickly and quietly. All Mexicans were treacherous. Montez had always seemed obsequious with him, had never given Carlin any reason to feel that the man was dangerous, but then again he had never seen Montez alone either. Or announced himself to the man as coming in alone.

Stupid, Carlin thought, as the three of them surrounded him, the two silent men yanking him to his feet, Montez nodding in a peculiar and private way. Stupid, Carlin thought, as they led him through the terminal, one in front and two of them to the sides to the limousine. Stupid, he thought, when they piled him into the back seat of the limousine flanking him, Montez sitting in front, turning back to spread the glass partition and lean back to talk to him, the driver something invisible to the left moving the car. He should not have done this. He should have anticipated. Still, how long could he continue at the level of alertness with which he had operated when he killed Janice and the houseman? There were limits to anyone’s will. It was not really his fault. That was no comfort, of course. None whatsoever. In the back of the limousine the men checked him quickly and professionally for weapons while Montez looked back at him through the partition, his face solemn. The limousine began to move. “You know I didn’t have anything,” Carlin said, “I couldn’t have gotten anything through the airport detectors.”

“People are resourceful,” Montez said. “People have endless resources in crisis.”

“You’re doing this wrong,” Carlin said. He had no desire to fence with the man; both of them knew exactly what was happening and why. “You can only make things worse. You’re a fool. We did good business together. We could have kept on doing business. Why did you have to make it this way?”

Montez nodded to the man on his left and the man on his left hit Carlin in the jaw. It was a careful blow professionally administered; Carlin heard something crack in there, but there was only a minimal lost of consciousness and that unblocked swiftly so that he could feel the pain. The pain was terrible. He brought up a hand and rubbed the jaw, and that sent new splinters of pain through. The man on his left folded his hands like a child who had been given approval in a classroom for something difficult but necessary. A little smile worked its way through his face, but that could only be an illusion in the strange illumination of the car, refracted glitter from the dashboard the only light, the tinted glass keeping the mountains out. They were moving fast and low to the ground through hilly country. “Murderer,” Montez said, “filthy fucking murderer.” The elegance of his diction, the strange formalism with which he said this only made it the more horrifying. “Putrescence,” he said, “diseased slime.”

Carlin, sliding into unconsciousness on the seat, shook himself like a dog and said, “I can explain everything. “

“You can explain nothing. Filthy disgusting pig.”

“Everything,” said Carlin weakly and the man on the right pinched his thigh midway between knee and groin in a painful way that Carlin had never felt before. He would not have known there was much sensation in the area. “Please,” he said, “please stop it.”

“Now you are weak,” Montez said through the partition, “now you babble, now you beg. Would that you had shown such mercy to your victims.”

“They were doing it to me,” Carlin said. “I mean I did it to protect myself. To protect you.”

“You are an excrescence,” Montez said. The man on the left hit him on the cheekbone, the arc of pain intersecting with what was pouring from his jaw, and Carlin involuntarily retched, spewing little gobs of saliva and vomit not only on himself but on the man next to him. The one on the right moved over silently and very seriously began to choke him.

The scene wavered before Carlin and then it went away. When it came back Montez was saying, “Enough for now. We do not want to kill him just yet,” and the pressure had receded. He was sitting straight and hard against the panels of leather behind him, his eyes feeling as if they were burning their way out of his skull. “Oh my God,” he said then in a voice he could not believe was his own, so terrified did it sound, so childlike, so at bay. This could not have happened to him. He could not have been reduced to such a condition. “Oh my God,” he said again, realizing that even if he closed his eyes it did not go away. It was happening. It was all happening to him right now and he was in the center of it.

“We will deal with you when we return,” Montez said. “We will find out exactly what kind of a pig you are.”

Carlin tried to say something but it caught in his throat. He could not get sound out. It occurred to him that he might be dying, and this was surprising because he had always been very frightened of death but he had comforted himself with the feeling that cowards die many times but brave men only once and that death, when it came, would be very easy. It would be like a swimmer falling into sheets of water, one gesture of parting and then done. But this was not easy. This was not easy at all; it was terrifying. He felt spittle catching in his throat and hawked it, this brought him into a partial alertness and he smelled the odor of the men in the car. They were smoking cigars blowing the smoke casually into the compartment. Montez also had lighted a cigar and was still staring through the partition, the cigar in his teeth, little casual clouds of smoke coming from it. “I didn’t mean to do it,” Carlin said pointlessly. “I didn’t mean to do anything.”

“Now you did not mean to do it. Of course you did not mean to do it; no one means murder when they must face the consequences,” Montez said.

How, Carlin thought, could this be happening to him?

He had always been in control. Montez had been nothing more than his supply man.

Montez said, “Because you did not understand what you were. Because you thought that I was working for you when all the time you were working for me.”

Everything wavered. Nothing made sense. “I’m sorry,” Carlin said, and so he was, he guessed he really was. He began to understand what sorrow might be, but this would not do him any good, he knew, no good at all. The limousine moved on through the dense high hills surrounding Mexico City. Never did he think that it would have come to this. You lived in the open but you died in close. You lived in light and possibility but death was a little cell that squeezed around you. Funny, he thought, funny to know this now, but would it have made any difference to him to know this way back? No it wouldn’t, he thought, no it wouldn’t and Montez snapped the partition closed, and temporarily Carlin retreated into that final cubicle of space, layers of warmth around him but one shuddering, suffering part of his mind told him that it was only temporary and that soon enough he would be back. Back and back. Well, consciousness was better than death.

People who knew that Wulff was a narc, the few of them who he told, were not so much interested in his job as in the fact that his being on one special squad might give him special information into the habits and working lives of some members of another. What did vice cops tell their wives or girlfriends, people wanted to know from Wulff. Did they tell them the truth of their job or keep secret about the whole thing, and if they did tell the goods, what did the wives and girlfriends think of it? The idea that night after night their husbands or fiancées or boyfriends were out being solicited to get laid, going up to hotel rooms with women whose job it was to fuck.

Of course, theoretically, the vice squad was not supposed to fuck. That would have been illegal entrapment just as solicitation would have been. They were supposed to wait until a request for money had been made, until the money had actually been received by the prostitute, and then pull out their badges and bust them. That was the procedure according to the manual. But nobody really believed that. No one believed that a cop, if he was with an attractive prostitute—and he wouldn’t bother making the bust unless she was attractive; why remove merchandise from the streets that no one wanted anyway?—was going to come back into the puritan tradition precisely at the moment when he had canceled it out. Indeed there were plenty of stories of cops who after paying over the money would show their badges and then promise not to make the arrest if they could get sex for free, and then there were others who got their kicks out of screwing and then making the bust, as if immediate punishment for sex made the sex that much more exciting. And then, too, the prostitutes were not exactly objects. They had their own minds and thoughts and opinions and desires and they would be doing everything possible to entice the cops into a kind of vulnerability that would enable them to get off. All in all, it was pretty clear what was going on in the vice squad and it was a matter of envy more than anything else … but still, what did the wives and girlfriends do? What did they think of all this? Were all those rumors about a high percentage of divorces on the vice squad true and also the rumors about all the VD that was being spread around?

It was impossible for Wulff to make the questions go away. In other circumstances, he was willing to admit, he might have been curious himself. But there was no way to explain to those who asked that there was no real answer. There were as many solutions to the problem as there were vice cops or wives or girlfriends of vice cops; stereotyping them into a single response was just as bad as what the vice squad did to the prostitutes, which was to make them objects subject to the single standard of entrapment or paid fucking. People were individuals first and members of a class second, Wulff would have said if he were up to a discussion of the matter, and because of that you could make no flat judgments. Of course, that would have been a lot of bullshit, but if he had wanted to turn the question away by speech he would have handled it that way.

Actually he turned the questions away simply by refusing to answer them, telling them that PD work was holy and kind of privileged and that there were laws of confidentiality surrounding all departmental policies and procedures and he was under oath not to discuss any of the internal workings … which was not quite true but was backed up by six feet four inches and the expression Wulff got on his face when he said it. People—or at least the kind of people who asked these questions—were not at all likely to press the issue. And in the second place, it was not entirely true because there were certain generalities that could be applied to the vice squad that would have applied to narco as well. They were the same, vice and narco; one dealt with sex and the other with smack, but all of it was the same; all of it came down to objects being manipulated. Tits or needles, bags of smack or cunts, all of them fit into the police department view of things, which was to manipulate reality right up the pike to the point where it could not be controlled, and then simply deny reality.

So he could have told him on the basis of his experience with narco what was happening on the vice squad, too; he could have told them about the fragmentation of relationships, the busted marriages, ruined courtships, the dead men with blinded eyes drinking in their off-duty hours at short stops in Queens on Saturday nights, the men moving from one level of drunkenness to the next like a painter ascending a ladder and at the top of the ladder was merely the void, the glittering, empty space they would do anything to avoid … so they would scramble down the ladder and at the bottom of it there was always a fight or another drink or sometimes both. The cops fought like madmen with one another and with the public, and there was no saying what a drunken man with a service revolver might not do. Cops were getting into shootouts with each other all the time, they were killing passersby, there were a lot of people in bars picking fights with what they thought were unarmed drunks who turned out to be anything but.

He could have told them that the vice cops just like the narcs couldn’t sleep at night but couldn’t quite stay awake during the day either; you went through the day in the kind of fine, concentrated rage that took you through basic training or the police academy, denying the consequences of everything that was happening, thinking of all this as being funneled through a different person. The graft was there in both vice and narco: maybe a hundred, hundred and a half a week in front money from the pimps and pushers, but what could you do with it? Really, what in the hell could you do with this money?

You couldn’t put too much of it into the house because your wife or girlfriend would want to know where it was coming from, and those wives who didn’t say anything, who demanded only that the money come in faster and faster were even worse than those who asked too many questions. You could buy a little better car or a better class of suit, but no narc could be caught driving around in a new Eldorado; any car that was less than three years old was automatically suspect. The pay was fourteen and a half a year on the average, and with prices the way they were who the hell could afford four or five grand, even on payments, for a new car? No, only the stupid ones would let the money show up where it could count, either on the highway or in three-hundred-dollar suits. Most of them just sat on it in safe deposit boxes or pissed it away in an extra drink here, an extra toy for the kids there, and it was astonishing exactly how easy it was to make a hundred and a half a week disappear. People could and did live in New York City, even with families, even in 1970, on a hundred and a half a week, but then again a hundred and a half was something that could go out and past the counter of the Highlight Bar and Intimate Hideaway on Queens Boulevard in less than a week. Often enough you found yourself with a tab at the Highlight that steadily climbed on the last couple of days before payday. Of course the tab was a fiction, and more often than not both you and Willie the proprietor knew it, no one really tried to collect on a cop’s tab … but still the fiction was there and you had to take it seriously. You had to take all fiction seriously. It might turn out being something exactly like life.

So that was about the way things were on vice, or on narco. It was no wonder that the entire system was geared to pushing away the crimes rather than to apprehending them. The cops were so weary, so bitter, so fragmented and so drunk most of the time that they were in a mood to do almost anything but deal with the source of their business. Besides that, the source of their business was also the source of almost half of their income, and you did not take something like that lightly.

Wulff was not sure exactly what all these speculations about vice and narco had to do with the situation at hand, which was that the car coming up the road had disgorged three men, and the three men had surrounded him and had disarmed him so quickly, so professionally, that there was nothing to do but go along with it. Resistance would have been foolish. The three men piled him back into the limousine and took him to the airport and onto a private plane, which they told him finally was going to Mexico City. Even these men were kind of curious about vice, it turned out. They knew his background and they asked him the usual questions. So rather than have a tough, tense flight to Mexico City with them watching him every moment and the possibility of death hanging in the air on the jolting, private plane, he had decided to open up and tell them the full story. What the hell. It passed the time. And the men were very interested.