Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare Read Free Page B

and Peru; it was better, maybe, than the alternative Calabrese had offered him, which was death, but not by so much that you wouldn’t think of it long and hard if you were offered the time to make a careful choice. Dead city, dead country: dead hotel, steel and glass smacked into the middle of it, the tourists curiously internationalized, no one set of characteristics which would define most of them as being from a particular place, all of it blending into the heat, the dust, the very odor of the Incan ruins which Wulff felt that he could smell lofting from Cuzco miles to the north. Something was very wrong in this country; it was even rottener than Havana but it was not a definable rottenness either, nothing that you could quite nail down. It had to do with the fact that this hotel did not belong with the landscape, that the landscape itself was shockingly out of order—old and new jammed up against one another, the ruins behind all of it. He did not want to think of it. The more he thought of it the worse it looked.
    It stunk but that was only the beginning of the trouble here. He was an insect in screens; he could not get out. He could wander out of the hotel, he could test all of the spaces of the hotel itself but the observation was so close that he felt he could almost see Calabrese himself here, let alone his men. They had him under the closest guard; there had to be ten or fifteen of them working in shifts, tracking him. Sooner or later the word would come from Calabrese to dispose of him and what could he do then? He might be able to take one or more of them face to face, but it would come in a different way. And then too the madness and cunning of Calabrese was that Wulff would never know when the time was coming. They could get him anytime or they could leave him to swelter in these spaces for months.
    That was the hell of it, not being able to face the situation directly. But it was also, he supposed, what made Calabrese just about the best at what he was doing.
    So it was that half an hour before his interview with the hotel owner and three days after he had been dumped in the hotel, Wulff had walked into his room on the sixteenth floor of the Crillon and found a man with a gun sitting in the chair nearer the door, looking at him with the kind of low-key interest which Wulff had not seen since he left the States.
    “Just hold it right there,” the man with the gun said as if he were an usher working a motion-picture line. “Don’t move please and we’ll be perfect.” He looked as if he had been waiting for a long time, but as if the waiting had meant no more to him than the confrontation did now. Peyote? Wulff thought. As far as he knew, they worked peyote down here like it was chewing gum. But that was no drug-glaze in the man’s eyes.
    “Check him out,” the man said to someone.
    Wulff’s gaze swung. He saw another man come from the bathroom, walk toward him briskly, giving little nods and waves as if he were a politician walking the last mile. Maybe he was. Maybe he, Wulff, was trapped into some kind of insane campaign and these two were simply using him to impress one another. The chemistry of the looks between them said something—that they were slightly nervous but each was drawing force from the presence of the other. Good psychology; that was why you worked in pairs, even for the easiest kind of jobs. It took an unusual man like Wulff to carry off things alone.
    The second man looked just as short and efficient as the first. Definitely he was an American; they both were. Wulff could not tell the identities of the tourists in this international city, this city which with too much history had simply decided to take on no more, but he could tell these. These were Chicago—Midwest. Calabrese’s men? Well, Wulff thought, that was it then. If so, it was a relief. At last, no matter what happened, he was facing the end of waiting.
    He held himself still, said nothing. It had been coming, now it