“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.