Narco had been just swell. Narco had been contrived as the biggest, nicest present that they could give Wulff, a returned Vietnam veteran, decorated in combat no less, as a kind of gesture of their appreciation for what he had done, which was mostly to louse up the figures on all the guys who hung out at the bars saying that Vietnam was a great cause, it was just a fucking shame that they were draft-exempt because they had a more important duty here on the front lines of America, defending it from the scum right on the doorstep, otherwise they’d be out there catching Charlie’s flack. All of them looked pretty lousy next to Wulff, who had passed up the exemption on the grounds that if the war was to be seen then someone from the supposed front lines of the city ought to see it. It had created quite an uneasy feeling in the department, and there were even a few people around at the headquarters level who weren’t shy about saying that Wulff had to be crazy; any man who would buy himself a piece of that when he had an exemption had to be out of his mind. Still, they felt guilty, they wanted to do something nice for him, the PD had a long and not entirely untruthful reputation for taking care of its own. So they put him on narco.
Narco was second to vice of course, which was the greatest thing in the world altogether but strictly for relatives of relatives, impossible to crack, on a hereditary basis like the washroom concessions at the top nightclubs. Narco in the mid-sixties was the biggest, boldest thing a PD flatheel could fall into. Narco was supposed to keep the city safe and pure from the ravages of King H by working not on straight busts, which would have netted only small fry and little mainliners, but instead through a network of informants who, the PR work went, would be able to lead the narcs right to major dealers, the guys who were working the shit over with both hands and were at the absolute top, kicking shit at everybody. In truth, of course, all that the informants would lead narco to were small fry like themselves who were happy to show their appreciation for the cops by giving them a few dollars, and about a quarter of that would be then kicked back to the informant for his trouble. This made everyone happy: informant, dealer, and narc who would get it on both ends because he could cheat on the informant’s cut and now and then hold out on him altogether threatening a bust. The informants grumbled about it and there would occasionally be a nasty scene—almost every time you read about a narc being shot on or off duty or found in the trunk of his car, it was usually an enraged informant who didn’t want to be held out on any more. But all in all it worked pretty well, better than most things in the world, anyway. It certainly worked a hell of a lot better than Vietnam. As much as he hated it, and he did from the very first day there, Wulff had to admit that the system was quite workable.
Every now and then the press would start twitching around, usually as the results of more circulation pressure coming from their intent to raise the advertising rates, and narco was supposed to go out and prove that it was keeping New York free of crime by helping to keep it free of drugs. In the beginning there were panicky scenes and shakeups every time the papers would send reporters out to East 4th Street and Avenue ? to pick up some stuff outside the local elementary school, and there would even be shakeups on the squad, but as the sixties went on, by the time Wulff had gotten with it, they had even that down to a system like the rest of it. What they would do would be to make a prearranged bust of a few informants who would have a stash, the stash would mysteriously disappear somewhere between the bust and the courtroom, and charges would be dropped for lack of evidence. Occasionally it was necessary, under severe pressure, to pick up a stash and hold it in the evidence room, but that worked out nicely too because when they finally did a complete search of the evidence room early in 1973 in the early glory days of the impending new drug law prescribing death for the pushers, they found out that some fans of the system had walked off with two million dollars worth of heroin, clean. That was nice. Wulff was able to get even with some of it, but that, of course, was much later.
No, this was all back in the late sixties and early seventies, at the height of the narco operation when things were running free. And who was Wulff, who the fuck did he think he was to be sickened by it? Wulff was unable to come to terms with it at all. Not much more than enough to just barely save appearances for a while.
It went back to Vietnam. He had been in Saigon, he had seen what drugs had done to that demolished city. Saigon was the drug carnival and capital of the world; it was a city totally devoted to the peddling of shit and Wulff found it easy to think toward the end of his hitch that this was perhaps what the truth of Vietnam itself might be. We were not fighting for freedom there, we were fighting for shit. Western dealers were hand to hand with the Orientals for control of the rich supply fields of Turkey, and Saigon was the place where it all came together in glittering embassies and ruined corridors and the explosion of the bombs that killed children. And all in the name of bigger and better shit for the West, less kickback and payment to the sinful East, which should stay on the softer stuff anyway. Cocaine and opiate country. Coming back to New York and the narco squad after two years in the Vietnamese countryside was maybe something like coming to work in a very high-grade whorehouse after having spent two years in a field hospital treating advanced and deteriorative cases of paresis. At least that was the way it looked to Wulff.
It simply would not wash. None of it would; he couldn’t take the easy lies and that the squad had been created to conceal rather than to reveal, could not face the fact that as a narc he was supposed to be dedicated not to the elimination but to the perpetuation of the drug traffic. The real hatred started then, and the grinding rage. But Wulff had a nice girl, he planned to get married; marriage to this girl looked pretty good to him and although getting off the squad and out of the PD was important, being with Marie Calabrese was even more important. At least that was the way it had looked to him then. But in the long run it had only cost her her life. Agonizing, but she would have been better off alive and lost to him then dead and his forever. He still believed that. He still believed in life.
But it was all academic; the rage spilled over even as the marriage plans went along and Wulff busted a grinning informant who laughed at Wulff with the bricks of smack coming out of his jacket pockets because this was not the night for a bust and under the arrangement Wulff could do nothing. Informants were untouchable anyway, but something broke in Wulff and right in the bar he slapped the man, handcuffed him, busted him for possession and dragged him into the precinct. The informant cried. At least he had that satisfaction; he had broken the man. A hell of a lot of good that had done him.
So he had busted him, but the precinct lieutenant had busted him right out because he had denied that Wulff had turned in evidence. The informant had gone back on the streets within hours and Wulff had gone off the streets and into patrol car duty because the lieutenant had done something at headquarters, and maybe he had done Wulff a favor at that because Wulff did not think that he could have taken one more night of narco anyway without killing people. So things had worked out for the best, perhaps. Except of course that on the first night of patrol duty they had gotten a blind call to find that the OD they were talking about was his own girl, Marie, dead in an SRO. No, he would not think of that any more. That was canceled.
Wulff was pretty mad, in any event. Eleven cities and jail had hardly spiked his rage. In fact it was self-feeding; he was madder now than when he had begun. Mad enough certainly to want to kill Carlin. Carlin was the sole remaining big dealer in the Southwest. That made him very much worth killing.
Wulff looked forward to it.