Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare Read Online Free PDF Page B

I had to do this. You understand that it had to be done. To perform this test upon you …” he glanced at the two bodies, “… to find out if you were wholly as good as your advance notices indicated,” he said. “They were excellent notices.”
    “And what if they hadn’t been?” Wulff demanded. “What if it had turned out that the notices were bad copy and that I wasn’t nearly the man you thought that I was? Tell me, what then?”
    He looked into the little man’s eyes and found himself drawn into a sense of such profound corruption that for the moment he almost gasped. Then he managed to right himself: he had seen this in the interrogation rooms before when the suspect would open up under pressure and all of the corruption would pour out; this was merely another interrogation room—you had to maintain your sense of perspective. Everything repeated itself. Everything, truly, was the same.
    “I was coming unarmed against two men with guns who knew how to use them,” he said. “Suppose that I hadn’t performed up to snuff while you were skulking in the bathroom, watching the excitement. Would you have saved me? Or would you have sat back rubbing yourself?”
    The little man took no notice of this. If it was insult Wulff’s attitude seemed to be implying, he simply did not acknowledge the language. Indeed, he seemed to have moved from the issue, his mind scuttling into more complex, useful channels. “Why I would have let them kill you for sure,” he said absently. After a pause he added, “And I would have given them a bonus and arranged for a very prompt and discreet disposition of the few remains. It’s not that I’m a hard man you see,” he said as he paused again, looked at his fingertips, brought them together, and stared at the ceiling meditatively, “but on the other hand business is always business.”
    He stood. “I think that we should go somewhere else,” he said. “We can talk quietly for a while, Mr. Wulff, and perhaps find more advantageous quarters. I’m really quite pleased with what you’ve done and I want you to see how I’m going to show appreciation.”
    “No,” Wulff said, “we’ll talk right here. Right in this room.”
    “I’d much rather not.”
    “I don’t give a shit what you’d much not rather. There are a lot of people hanging around here who would be very interested in seeing the two of us together. So if you have anything to say you’ll say it right here.”
    The little man stayed rooted in place, his face bright with approval. “You’re an interesting and determined man,” he said, “but even though that’s admirable I’m sure you don’t have to worry about the, ah, security problem. The people you say are watching you are doing so on my sufferance, my grounds. I’m sure that we can talk privately and there’s no reason,” his eyes shifted distastefully, “to dishonor the dead with talk of more death.”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “No,” Wulff said, “right here. You’re not Calabrese. Do it on my ground.”
    “Calabrese,” the man said. “Ah yes, Calabrese, of course. He means nothing to me.”
    “He means nothing to me too, but he’s godamned responsible for a lot of things.”
    “Don’t worry about your Calabrese,” the little man said abstractedly. “You’re in the right hands now. I’m sure that I can do much better for you than your faithless Calabrese ever could.”
    Wulff looked at him and then he believed. The little man was no longer everyone’s grandfather: no, he was something else, something which had spawned no children from whom would come issue of themselves. Instead he sat there on the bed, a cold, abstract, self-contained mass so gathered unto himself that he would be incapable—this was quite clear—of giving himself to anything. He was to himself sufficient; he had come from nothing, nothing would succeed him. That did not make him bad, not at all. It was merely the way that it was.
    “It’s my hotel,” the