A Quiet Vendetta

THIRTEEN

Miami is a noise: a perpetual thundering noise trapped against the coast of Florida between Biscayne Bay and Hialeah; beneath it Coral Gables, above it Fort Lauderdale; everywhere the smell of the everglades – rank, swollen and fetid in summer, cracked and featureless and unforgiving in winter.

Miami is a promise and an automatic betrayal; a catastrophe by the sea; perched there upon a finger of land that points accusingly at something that is altogether not to blame. And never was. And never will be.

Miami is a punctuation mark of dirt on a peninsula of misfortune; an appendage.

And now – of all places – my home.

Cuba was behind me, and with it the trials and tribulations of a land that still wrestled with its own conscience. 1960 folded up behind us, and looking back I saw events that somehow scarred a people’s history, Castro vacillating indecisively between the promise of a dollar-rich hedonistic west and the validation of political ideology presented by the USSR. Castro seized US-owned properties and made further agreements with communist governments. He agreed to buy Soviet oil, even as John Fitzgerald Kennedy assumed the presidency of the United States in January of 1961 and sanctioned the cessation of diplomatic relations with Cuba. On 16 April 1961 Fidel Castro Ruz declared Cuba a socialist state. Three days later, backed by CIA funding and US military support, one thousand three hundred Cuban exiles invaded Cuba at a southern coastal region called the Bay of Pigs. Khrushchev promised Castro all necessary aid. The United States government incorrectly assumed the invasion would inspire the people of Cuba to rise up and seize power from Castro, to instigate a coup d’état, but they assumed wrong. The Cuban populace supported Castro without question. The invaders were captured, and each of them was sentenced to thirty years in jail.

The United States, in its continued infinite wisdom, went on pouring the nation’s hard-earned dollars into military support for South Vietnam.

In February of ’62 Kennedy imposed a full trade embargo on Cuba. Two months later Castro offered to ransom one thousand, one hundred and seventy-nine of the Bay of Pigs invaders for sixty-two million dollars. Kennedy sent the Marines into Laos. Sonny Liston K.O.’d Floyd Patterson in two minutes and six seconds.

October brought the discovery that Castro was permitting the Soviets to establish long-range missile launch sites in Cuba, ninety miles from the American mainland. A blockade of Cuba was instigated that Jack Kennedy had every intention of maintaining until Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. Castro announced his commitment to a Marxist-Leninist ethos; he nationalized industry, confiscated property owned by non-Cuban nationals, collectivized agriculture and enacted policies designed to benefit the common man. Many of the middle classes fled Cuba and established a large anti-Castro community in Miami itself.

On 28 October, after thirteen days during which the entire world dared not to blink, Khrushchev announced that all missile-launching sites on the island would be dismantled and returned to the USSR. On 2 November Kennedy lifted the Cuban blockade.

In December, the United States paid a fifty-three-million-dollar ransom and the Bay of Pigs invaders were freed.

I watched the events of those months unfold from a house in downtown Miami. I was twenty-five years old by the time the world exhaled once more, and though I had paid attention to these things it was as if they were merely moments of radio interference interrupting the soundtrack of my life.

And this was now my life. I had arrived here with no more mention than I deserved. In some small way I was myself an appendage, an addition to something so much bigger than myself, and though I was absorbed into the extant operation that existed in Miami, there was always the awareness that I was different. These people – people with names like Maurizio, Alberto, Giorgio and Federico, who all seemed to have secondary names like Jimmy the Aspirin (because he made Don Ceriano’s ‘headaches’ go away), Johnny the Limpet and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom – were part of a crew nicknamed the Alcatraz Swimming Team. They drank plenty, they laughed more, they spoke in broken Italian-American, and every other phrase seemed to be ‘Chi se ne frega’, which meant ‘Who gives a damn!’, and I believed they didn’t, and never had, and never would.

By the time I arrived it was March of 1962. January had seen the death of Lucky Luciano, a man whose name I heard quoted more times than perhaps any other. In some small way his death had played a part in Don Ceriano’s return to the United States, for there were ‘family matters’ to attend to that seemed pressing and urgent. His return was met with great enthusiasm, and those who were there to greet him as we arrived at a palatial three-story house in downtown Miami seemed to ask nothing of me. I was taken in without question, and on the two or three occasions Don Ceriano was asked about me he merely said, ‘This is my friend Ernesto. Ernesto has taken care of some things for me, some very important things, and his loyalty is beyond question.’ This seemed enough, for I was given a room in that house, a house where I would live with Don Ceriano and members of his family for a little more than six years. Don Ceriano let me keep the car, the Mercury Cruiser that had once belonged to Pietro Silvino, and money was available whenever I needed it. I felt at once part of this family, but yet so much an outsider. I did not feel afraid, only perhaps a little overawed by the people that I met, the seeming magnitude of their personalities, and I tried my best to be a part of whatever I had been inducted into. Once again it was merely a matter of self-preservation and survival. I had left Cuba, I had come to America; I possessed nothing but those things afforded me by Don Ceriano and his people. I had made a bed perhaps, and it was not difficult to lie in it. The world went about its business and I went with it.

The ‘important things’ I had taken care of were simple enough. Don Ceriano would give me a name, sometimes show me a photograph, and I would be despatched. I would not return until the man that bore the name was dead, no matter how long it took. Between the death of Pietro Silvino and my departure from Cuba I had taken care of eleven ‘important things’. Each of them was unique, each of them special, the last one of which was my father.

Killing your own father is a truly spiritual experience: such a thing cannot exclude killing a little of yourself, yet at the same time it is an exorcism. There are some I have spoken with who talk of carrying the faces of the dead, as if some small part of their spirit enters you as they die, and from that point forward they will always be there. If I close my eyes and think hard enough I can remember all their faces. Perhaps, just perhaps, I can look in the mirror long enough and see their reflections in my own eyes. Imagination plays a part I am sure, but I believe there is some truth in what I have been told. We carry them all, but I – at least – carry the image of my father the most.

When he died he was all of forty-six years old. I had arranged a job for him at one of the smaller nightclubs in Old Havana, a club owned by Don Ceriano’s brother-in-law, a wild-eyed and aggressive gambler called Enzio Scribani. Scribani had married Don Ceriano’s youngest sister three or four years before, and though his promiscuity and perverse sexual tastes were legend, there was something about the way in which such things were handled that denied the possibility that he would be anything but family. Later, six or seven years after I had left Havana, Don Ceriano’s sister, Lucia, a beautiful innocent-looking girl, killed her own husband by driving a pair of pinking shears through his right eye. She had then taken her own life.

My father, his reputation as the Havana Hurricane still to some degree intact, was employed as a doorman at the Starboard Club, a relatively minor concern in the grand scheme of things. Here the walk-on players and bit-piece actors in the grander theater of Havana’s Mafia operations came to flirt with the hostesses, to gamble hundreds instead of thousands of dollars, to sometimes wander through the rear curtains where worn-out Cuban housewives would dance and take their clothes off for ten or fifteen dollars a time. It was a shabby place in reality, and though Enzio Scribani was the owner and proprietor of the establishment he seemed to make it his business to be there as infrequently as possible.

My father did his job. He turfed out the drunken Cubans; he protected the dancers from their irate brothers and lovers and husbands; he escorted the money couriers from the club to the bank; he made little noise, he did not complain, he took his dollars at the end of each week and he drank them away before Monday rolled around again. With the money I earned from my Havana work with Don Ceriano I had rented a five-room apartment off Bernaza near the Old Wall Ruins. Here, my father had a room where he would sleep off his drunk until it was time to wake and return to work. I saw little of him, and with this arrangement I was satisfied. He spoke little, and when he did there was always an underlying apologetic tone, and as the months drew on I became less and less interested in what he had to say, and more intent that at some point soon he would cease to be my responsibility. I did not hate him. Hate was too strong an emotion for someone towards whom I felt nothing. Less than nothing. I often imagined that, in attempting to eject an undesirable from the Starboard, he would embroil himself in a fight that would get him shot or stabbed or beaten to death. But there was no such event. It seemed that my father, in relinquishing his arrogance and conceit, had also relinquished his right to be involved in anything of moment at all.

In the latter part of August 1961, a few days after another engagement had been organized for myself and an adversary of Don Ceriano’s, after another small matter had been perfunctorily despatched, I received a visit at my apartment from Giorgio Vaccorini. To me he was known as Max or Maxie, after Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom the boxer. The nickname had been earned as a result of an incident outside the Hotel Nacional when a parking attendant had tried to take Giorgio’s keys from him in order to park and valet the car. Giorgio, drunk and incoherent, had believed he was being robbed, and he turned and let fly with a roundhouse that broke the kid’s neck. One punch and the teenager was dead. The matter was closed within half an hour with the delivery of ten thousand US dollars to the home of the Cuban National Chief of Police. So Maxie came to see me late afternoon. He looked serious, a little tense, and he asked me to sit down as he had some news for me.

‘A little problem,’ he started, and again he assumed a serious expression. When these guys got serious then life was serious.

‘Your father,’ he went on. ‘There seems to be some kind of problem with your father.’

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs. I looked around for my cigarettes but could not see them.

‘He went with the delivery guy to the bank this morning,’ Maxie said, his voice hushed, a little hesitant. ‘They took the usual kind of money, maybe five or six grand, and they went off to the bank just like regular.’

I sat patiently, waiting for the problem to be voiced.

‘Seems they never reached the bank, Ernesto. Seems that your father and the courier never arrived at all, and we got to thinking that perhaps they did a runner with the money.’

I nodded understandingly.

‘An hour or so ago we found the courier. You know Anselmo, young guy with the scar on his face here-’ Maxie raised his right hand and indicated a point above his left eyebrow.

I knew Anselmo Gamba; had fucked his sister one time.

‘We found Anselmo with his throat cut down an alleyway off of one of the sidestreets near the Starboard, maybe two or three blocks away. There was no sign of your father. Not the money neither. So Don Ceriano… Don Ceriano said I should come down here and speak with you and see if you couldn’t take a look for your father and take care of things, you know?’

I nodded.

‘So that’s what I came to tell you,’ Maxie said, rising awkwardly from the chair. ‘See if you can’t find him, sort out what happened, okay?’

I smiled. ‘Okay Maxie, I’ll sort things out. Tell Don Ceriano that whatever the problem is isn’t a problem any more.’

Maxie smiled back. He seemed relieved to be going. I showed him to the door, placed my hand on his shoulder as he stepped into the hallway, and noticed that he flinched. I noted this inside. Even Slapsie Maxie, a man who had hit a kid with a roundhouse and busted his neck, was a little scared of the Cuban. This pleased me, confirmed once again that I had become someone.

I waited until Maxie was out of sight and then collected my coat and my cigarettes. I left the apartment and started towards Old Havana and the watering holes where I knew my father would be hiding.

It took me three hours to find him, and by then it was evening. The sky was black, almost starless.

Even as he saw me coming towards him across the floor of a beat-to-shit rundown joint on the coast side of the quarter he started to cry. I felt nothing. This was business pure and simple, and I had no time for over-emotional performances.

‘The money?’ I asked him as I slid in beside him on the seat.

‘They robbed it,’ he slurred. ‘Robbed the money and killed the kid… I tried, Ernesto, I tried to stop them, but there were three of them and they were quick-’

I raised my hand.

‘Ernesto… they came out of nowhere, three of them, and there was nothing I could do…’

‘You were supposed to protect the courier,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘That’s your job, Father. They send you along to protect the courier, to make sure that the money gets to the bank, that nothing happens to him on the way.’

My father raised his hands as if in prayer. ‘I know, I know, I know,’ he whined. ‘I know why they send me, and every time I have done my job, every time I have protected him and nothing has happened-’

‘You have the money with you?’

My father opened his eyes in shock. ‘The money? You think I took the money? You think I would kill someone for money? I am your father, Ernesto, you know I would never do something like that.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I know you, Father. I know you would kill someone for no money at all.’

He did not reply. There was nothing he could have said. All these past years the death of my mother, his wife, had sat between us like a third person. It had always been there, spoken of or not, it had always been there.

My father shook his head. ‘You have to tell them… you have to tell them what happened. You have to make them believe that I did not steal the money and kill the boy. I didn’t do it, Ernesto, I couldn’t…’

‘You have to tell them, Father. You have to stop running away and hiding. The longer you stay away the more they will believe that you took the money. If you come with me now and tell them what happened, how these men robbed you and killed Anselmo, I will support you, I will make them understand that there was nothing you could have done.’

My father nodded. He started smiling. He was already rising to his feet. He reached out and gripped my arm. ‘You are my son,’ he said quietly. ‘I will never forget what you have done to help me. You brought me here, you got me a job, a place to live, and I will remember this for the rest of my life.’

My father, the Havana Hurricane, did not have to remember how much he owed me for very long at all. A little more than twenty minutes later he lay dead in an alleyway two blocks from the Starboard Club. He did not question me when I turned right and walked him down that alleyway, which he would have known went nowhere at all. He did not cry out when I hit him across the back of the head and he fell awkwardly to the ground. He lay there for a moment, stunned and speechless, and in his eyes was an expression of such resigned inevitability that I knew he was aware of his own death coming fast like a freight train.

From the ground I took a brick, and squatting down with one knee on his chest I raised the brick above my head.

‘For your wife,’ I told him quietly. ‘For your wife and my mother this is long overdue.’

He closed his eyes. No sounds. No tears. Nothing at all.

I think he was dead after I hit him the first time. The corner of the brick destroyed much of the right hand side of his face. I imagined the subsequent repeated blows to his head and neck would not have been felt at all. It was like killing a dog. Less than a dog.

Three days later it was discovered that Anselmo Gamba and my father had been robbed on the way to the bank. They had been robbed by three Cuban brothers – Osmany, Valdés and Vicente Torres. I was not despatched to attend to them, for such things as the killing of three small-time Cuban hoodlums was considered beneath my talents, but someone was despatched and the money was recovered, and a month and a half later an oil drum was recovered from the Canal de Entrada with three heads and six hands inside.

Don Ceriano had been the one to tell me that my father had not lied, that they had in fact been robbed on the way to the bank.

‘I sent you to attend to this matter for my own reasons,’ he told me. ‘I sent Maxie over to tell you so that you could help us find your father and discover what had happened.’

I did not reply.

‘I wondered what you would do when you found him,’ he went on. ‘I wanted to know what action you would take.’

Again I said nothing. I was asking myself if there was a point to what he was saying.

‘And you killed your own father,’ Don Ceriano said.

I nodded my head.

‘You have nothing to say, Ernesto?’ he asked.

‘What do you want me to say, Don Ceriano?’

Don Ceriano looked both surprised and perplexed. ‘You killed your own father, Ernesto, and you have nothing to say?’

I smiled. ‘I will say three things, Don Ceriano.’

Don Ceriano raised his eyebrows.

‘Firstly, my father murdered his own wife, my mother. Secondly, his punishment was both appropriate and overdue.’ I paused for a moment.

‘And the third thing?’ Don Ceriano asked.

‘We shall not talk about it again as it deserves no importance.’

Don Ceriano nodded. ‘As you wish, Ernesto, as you wish.’

It was not mentioned again. Not a single word came from Don Ceriano’s lips, nor any of those who worked with us while we were in Havana. My father’s murder was as effortlessly forgotten as his life.

During the coming months I was to understand more of the connections between Florida and Cuba than I had believed existed. Of these things Don Ceriano spoke, but it was also from conversations between the members of his family and those who attended the house in Miami that I learned much of the background. Mafia money had been moving into Florida since the 1930s, with investments in such places as the Tropical Park Race Track in Coral Gables and Meyer Lansky’s Colonial Inn. During the 1940s the Wofford Hotel had been a base for both Lansky and Frank Costello, Costello having close ties with a man called Richard Nixon who would later become president of the United States. Ironically, during the Watergate investigation some years later, an outfit called the Keyes Realty Company was identified as having been the intermediary between organized crime and Miami-Dade County officials. In 1948 Keyes Realty had transferred ownership of a property to a Cuba-Mafia investment group called ANSAN. Later, that same real estate interest passed in ownership to the Teamsters’ Union Pension Fund and Meyer Lansky’s Miami National Bank. Subsequently, in 1967, ownership was signed over to Richard Nixon, and it was discovered that one of the Watergate burglars, a Cuban exile, was a vice-president of that same Keyes Realty Company. Lou Poller, one of Meyer Lansky’s trusted confederates, had taken over control of the Miami National Bank in 1958, and it was through this bank that Mafia money was laundered, often used to purchase apartment buildings, hotels, motels and mobile home companies. The house in which I stayed during those six years in Miami was one of those real estate interests, and it was to here that many of Don Ceriano’s people would come to talk business, to pass details on about who ‘needed their ticket punched’, or who should ‘get a letter on the Chicago typewriter’.

I heard word of Santo Trafficante Jnr again. His name had been mentioned in Cuba, but I had not appreciated that he had in fact been born right there in Florida. Trafficante had operated the Sans Souci and Casino International operations in Havana, and possessed interests and influence in the Riviera, the Tropicana, the Sevilla Biltmore, the Capri Hotel Casino and the Havana Hilton. In Tampa he controlled the Columbia Restaurant, the Nebraska, the Tangerine and the Sands Bars. Trafficante had fled to Havana in 1957 after Grand Jury subpoenas were issued for his arrest and questioning. In the early part of 1958 he had been questioned by the Cuban National Police regarding the Apalachin Meeting, which he denied having attended. He was still wanted in New York for his alleged involvement in the killing of Albert Anastasia, but the Cuban National Police were interested in his manipulation of the bolita numbers for Cuban operatives on behalf of Fidel Castro.

Whatever may have been the allegations against him, Don Ceriano said enough for me to understand that Santo Trafficante Jnr had overseen all Mafia-related operations in Florida since the death of his father in August 1954. As far back as 1948 and 1949 Trafficante had been involved with Frank Zarate, the principal defendant in a case instigated by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who collaborated with US Customs and the New York City Police Department to break a Peruvian cocaine supply coming into the US through Cuba. Irrespective of this matter, Trafficante was granted resident status by the Cuban Immigration Department in October 1957. In a memo issued by a narcotics agent called Eugene Marshall in July 1961, it was made clear that Castro had operatives working in Tampa and Miami who made significant bets on Cuba’s bolita through Trafficante’s organization. Trafficante himself was observed meeting several times with a man called Oscar Echemendia. Echemendia was not only a part-owner of the Tropicana Night Club in Havana, but also one of the most influential controllers of the bolita in Dade County, Miami. It was rumored that after Castro’s seizure of power, after he ousted organized crime from the casinos and hotels in Cuba, he kept Santo Trafficante Jnr in jail as he so disliked the man. This was a cause for amusement among the families in Miami, for they knew that Trafficante was an agent for Castro, and he was influential in establishing the terms upon which the Mafia could return to Cuba.

Thus there was a connection between Florida and Cuba, and thus I was accepted as a member of their family. Ceriano was a main player, a heavy-hitter, and I played my part for Ceriano. I consorted with an organization called Cuban Americans in Miami; I relayed inside information from employees of Radio Martí, a US-government sponsored station, and soon I could utter the words Chi se ne frega with as much conviction as the rest of them. I was young, I was willing, I could wear a silk Italian suit with as much panache and style as anyone, and I felt no compunction. I believed these people, I believed their motives and rationale, and if the instruction came that someone needed to be excommunicated from the world, I executed that request with punctuality and professionalism. To me it was a job that had to be done. I did not ask questions. I did not need answers. In some small way I wanted for nothing.

Once upon a time, as a child perhaps, I had been driven by the urgent desire to become somebody. Among these people, these crazy hot-headed Sicilians and Genovese, I was somebody. I believed I had arrived, that there was a purpose to my life, and considering my natural ability to do things that no-one else was prepared to do, I was afforded a degree of respect and camaraderie that was ordinarily reserved only for blood relatives.

I was Ernesto Cabrera Perez, adoptive son of Don Giancarlo Ceriano, soldier of Santo Trafficante Jnr, head of the Mafia in Miami. There were people here who would figure more prominently as the months became years. It was an era of tension and political subterfuge. Anti-Castro feelings were high amongst some factions of the families, and it was in Miami that wealthy Cuban exiles collaborated with Sam Giancana to oust Castro from Cuba. From what little I could gather, both the CIA and the FBI were instrumental in funding such operations. A man called Robert Maheu, apparently ex-CIA, had hired Sam Giancana to form assassination squads to go after Castro, and Giancana had put his Los Angeles lieutenant, Johnny Roselli, in charge of the operation. Years later, in 1978, when the House Select Committee questioned Roselli he said that those teams were trained for the Kennedy assassination as well. That was all but part of the truth. Kennedy was a different story, a story that would not emerge for more than a year. From Roselli the Select Committee never established any further details. His body was found floating in an oil drum off the Florida coast. Sam Giancana was shot in Chicago. There were three different assassination teams in Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed, and only one was known by Roselli. The other two came from within the United States Intelligence community, and those that filed reports for the Warren Commission, those that handled the legal implications of all subsequent investigations, were far more informed as to what actually occurred than they ever said. They had their own cosa nostra, and they kept their mouths shut and their thoughts to themselves, and have done to this day.

I did not understand the politics, and I did not pretend to. I knew that people visited with Santo Trafficante, and from Trafficante would come messages to Don Ceriano, and some of those messages would find their way to me and I would be sent forth to see to things in the best way I knew how. Connections between Miami and New York were tight, also with Los Angeles, but when I heard of Don Ceriano’s intended move into the casinos and clubs of New Orleans, I felt that an aspect of my own past was in danger of surfacing. I believed I had disconnected, but – through my loyalty and allegiance to those who’d brought me back from Havana – I was to be obliged to return to my own homeland, the place of my birth, the beginning of all these things.

It was soon after the murder of Marilyn Monroe, August of 1962. Found dead in her Hollywood bungalow after taking an overdose of Nembutal, Marilyn Monroe was a casualty of war, it seemed. Jack Kennedy’s sexual preferences were not unknown within the Mafia community, for it was Jack Kennedy who’d had an affair with Judith Exner, a girl who had also slept with Sam Giancana, the most influential Chicago mob boss. Exner had been introduced to Kennedy and Giancana by Frank Sinatra, who had entertained the likes of Albert Anastasia, Joseph Bonanno, Frank Costello and Santo Trafficante on Christmas Eve 1946 during a break in the infamous Havana Conference, a conference which had resulted in the contract to kill Bugsy Siegel for the theft of several million dollars from the Flamingo operation in Las Vegas. Besides Judith Exner, it was known that Kennedy had had an affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, a fact recorded in the memoirs of White House assistant Barbara Gamarekian. The Meyer girl wound up dead only months after Kennedy himself, and it certainly wasn’t from natural causes. Another girl, only eighteen when she went to the White House to interview Jackie Kennedy for a school newspaper, was Marion Fahnestock, known at the time as Mimi Beardsley. After Kennedy met her she was rapidly assigned a post as a White House intern, and from then until days before Kennedy’s assassination she continued an affair with the most powerful man in the world. Marilyn was a different story. Interns, secretaries, legal aides and internal White House staff – these people could be hushed up and paid off. But Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn had to die, and die she did. On 5 August 1962, a little more than a year before Kennedy got his own cranium ventilated in Dealey Plaza, Marilyn was obliged to take a few more Nembutal than she really needed to get herself off to sleep. Don Ceriano knew the details. I asked him one time, and he said, ‘You know enough to know that she is dead.’ He said nothing beyond that, and I didn’t ask again.

It was in the latter part of that month that I was asked to visit a man called Feraud in New Orleans. I had been away the better part of four years, and in my expression Don Ceriano saw that I did not wish to go.

He asked me why.

‘I have my own reasons,’ I replied.

‘Reasons enough to dissuade you from doing something I need you to do?’

‘There would never be enough reasons to dissuade me, but I can ask you only once if there is someone else who can be sent.’

Don Ceriano leaned forward. He rested his elbows on his knees and steepled his hands together. ‘This man, this Antoine Feraud, is a very powerful man. He has much influence and importance in New Orleans. New Orleans is like Havana of old, it is a gambling city, a city filled with prostitution and drugs and great potential. We need to work out a co-operative agreement with these people, and as a gesture of goodwill I wish you to go to see this man and do something for him, you understand?’

I nodded. ‘I have asked, and you have answered.’

‘You are a good man, Ernesto, a true friend. I would not ask you if there was someone else I could trust as much, but there is not. I am not prepared to risk the possibility of losing the business that will come our way because of this man by sending someone who may make a mistake.’

‘With your blessing I will go and do this thing,’ I said.

Ceriano rose to his feet. He placed the flat of his hand on my head. ‘If only my own sons were of your caliber and ability,’ he whispered, and then he leaned and kissed my cheek.

I rose. He gripped my shoulders. ‘I will be with you,’ he said quietly, and I believed he would be – if in spirit alone – for he had become more a father to me than the Havana Hurricane had ever been.

Louisiana came back to me like a cancer, once benign, now malignant.

Louisiana came back to me like a nightmare I believed I had forgotten.

Times were that the law would walk these tracks: the Revenue men driving their unmarked cars along these winding roads, out here amongst the everglades, the bayous, the intersecting canals that cut some fine-drawn line between the swamps and stagnant tributaries. Times were that they would bring their city prayers down here and fight for what they believed was equitable and just. They would find distilleries, dynamite them, arrest the families’ men and bring them to trial before the peripatetic circuit court judges who traveled these quarters dispensing law and judicial expertise. The families would retaliate the only way they knew how, returning justice in true eye-to-eye manner, killing and maiming and despatching wounded Revenue men back to the city. For many years this process continued, until statisticians with sharp pencils and white collars proved that these search-and-destroy missions were fruitless. They lost as many men as they arrested. The belief in the law changed, civilization seemed to grow around the family territories, and people were no longer interested in what was done beyond their limits. The police did not so much concede defeat as adopt a live-and-let-live attitude. This itself wore these agreements into the earth, a path cut through by the passage of many feet rather than any conscious decision, and the territory stayed the territory, the law that applied to these people quite the opposite to any law known and followed elsewhere.

I entered this country with the degree of respect ordinarily reserved for the dead, but I also understood that the dead could perceive nothing, and thus deserved no respect. Don Ceriano had spoken to me of Antoine Feraud. Daddy Always, he called him, for this was the name he was given in these parts. To take the law into your own hands down here was to play into the hands of Feraud, and his authority was close to autocratic. Those who followed him, Don Ceriano told me, followed him reverentially. Those who did not walked a fine line between his compassion and his own form of brutal and indifferent justice.

A bridge spanned a small tributary close to the limits of Feraud’s land. His property ran a good mile from the large colonial house that had passed down the family line for many generations, and where the swamps began his necessity to guard his boundaries ceased. The bridge was stationed at all times by at least two of Feraud’s men, tall, invariably ugly, and they carried carbines or pump actions with no threat of unlawful possession. The police knew, and they understood a man’s desire to protect his land and his family, and concessions had been granted.

It was 1962, but here time had stopped somewhere in the 1930s.

One afternoon, with the threat of imminent rain darkening the sky as if evening had already begun, I approached the bridge with a deepening sense of desperation. I did not want to be here, but I had no choice. To return to Don Ceriano with this thing undone would be to return with betrayal. There was work to be done, and as an act of good faith between Feraud and Ceriano I had been sent to complete the work. This I would do, but this thing scared me. This was my own homeland, a place where I had witnessed the death of my mother, and though my father had paid the price for his actions, though I had exacted my own justice for what he had done, I still harbored a memory of this place in the darkest recess of my heart.

At the bridge I was greeted by Feraud’s men. They spoke in broken New Orleans French, and they directed me up towards the house. I started through the banks of swollen, fetid undergrowth that infested this land like spreading sores. Perhaps the water was bad, stagnant and oily; perhaps the density of foliage denied sufficient light; perhaps the earth was deficient in nitrogen and minerals, for the trees down here were twisted and gnarled, and the branches that leered over the footworn pathways were like beckoning arthritic fingers, summoning harsh words and harsher actions. When darkness drifted through these groves and banks, there could be no man who didn’t feel some sense of unease, the shadows pressing against the face, the hands, the humidity exaggerated, the vision blurred and limited to ten or fifteen feet. Years ago I had walked near this territory. Years ago I had driven a dead man out here and crushed his head beneath the wheel of a car. I could recall that journey, fine lines of condensation chasing tracks down the car windows, the smell of the everglades, the intensity of it all…

I walked out towards Feraud’s house, paused at the end of a wide, churned-up driveway, its mud ridged and dried where the tires of arriving and departing cars had twisted the earth into patterns of progress. I stood with my hands buried in the pockets of my coat. I was apprehensive, tight in the stomach, and when I walked on I felt my heart beat a little faster with every step. It was not the prospect of meeting Feraud that scared me, nor the promise of whatever he might ask of me, but the fact that this territory – after all these years – still aroused feelings that I could not comprehend.

Ahead of the house’s wide frontage, a cream-colored sedan was parked, the rear door opened towards me and an elderly man seated inside smoking a long cigar. Up on the wooden-balustraded veranda a swing hammock rocked gently back and forth. On it sat two small dark-skinned children who said nothing, who just looked at me as I approached.

The man in the back of the car watched me also, drawing on his cigar every once in a while and issuing a fine pall of silvery smoke out into the darkening atmosphere. The breeze came up from Borgne, the trees shifted with the breathless vacuum it created, and the sound of cicadas punctuated the static silence with a regularity that seemed unnatural.

The hollow echo of my feet on the wooden planking at the front of the house, the screen door creaking as I reached for the handle and drew it open, the wire mesh casting fine checkered patterns on my skin, sweat breaking out across my forehead: nervous tension sat in the base of my gut like something awful sleeping.

The house smelled of roasted pecans, freshly-squeezed orange juice and, beneath these vague aromas, the bitter-sweet tang of alcohol and cigar smoke, the haunt of old leather and wood, the ghosts of the everglades that invaded every room, every hallway and corridor.

I took my left hand out of my pocket. I stood there silently. I heard footsteps approaching from the rear of the house and instinctively took a step backwards.

A domestic, an ancient Creole with a face like warped, sun-bleached leather appeared through a doorway alongside the stairs. A wide grin creased the lower half of his face.

‘Mr Perez,’ he said, his voice like a deep ache coming from somewhere within his bones. ‘Mr Feraud is waitin’ for ya… come this way.’

The old man turned and walked back through the doorway. I started after him, the sound of my footsteps resounding in triplicate through the vastness of the house’s interior.

We walked for minutes, it seemed, and then a door appeared as if from nowhere on the side of the hallway, and I waited while the old man opened it and indicated I should pass through.

Feraud stood there, immobile. He looked out through the ceiling-high windows that seemed to span the entire length of the room, and when he turned, he turned slowly, all the way round to face me.

He smiled. He was not an old man, perhaps no more than forty or forty-five, but etched into his parchment skin were lines that spoke of a thousand years of living. Don Ceriano had told me that this man was responsible for many killings, people shot and hanged and garrotted and drowned in the bayous, and even as I looked into his eyes I imagined that this man was perhaps responsible for the fights that my father had attended; that a man such as this would have sufficient money and influence to not only arrange such things, but also take care of any misfortune that might befall one of the fighters.

‘To make a man a myth determines his stature,’ Don Ceriano had told me before I’d left. ‘For despite the rumors, some of which have been exaggerated, there are still many stories that are factual in their origin. When he was thirteen Feraud killed his own father – opened his throat with a straight razor, cut his tongue away and sent it to his mother in a handmade mother-of-pearl box. With his father silenced, Antoine Feraud became the child Napoleon. There were many who refused allegiance, more from their revulsion at his merciless lack of respect for his forebears than his age, but a few examples brought opinions around. Feraud was renowned for one unerring quality. In his favor you were protected. If you crossed him you followed the advice of those who knew him: you left the county, the state, even the country, or you killed yourself. By the time he was twenty, Feraud was credited with more than ten suicides, people who had apparently killed themselves as a result of his dissatisfaction. Better to die fast with a bullet in your head than to suffer the penalty that Feraud would inflict. He took the law away, and everything ran by his word. He created a territory, and within that territory everything was his and his alone.’

‘Mr Perez, venez ici-’ Feraud said. His voice was rich and deep; it echoed within the huge room.

I stepped forward, apprehension flooding my body. I approached him. He smelled of lemons, of some vague and haunting spice, of smoke and ancient armagnac.

‘You have come from my friend Don Ceriano,’ Feraud said. ‘Il dit que vous avez un coeur de fer… an iron heart?’

Feraud stepped back. He reached up and held my shoulders. I could not move, could barely breathe, and then he steered me gently towards a high wing-backed chair in front of the window. He took the chair beside it, lowering himself slowly, tugging the creases of his pants before he sat.

‘I know of Don Ceriano,’ Feraud said. ‘He is a powerful man, a man of spirit and virtue. He possesses ambitions and dreams, and this is good. A man who does not possess dreams is an empty shell. He believes that we can conspire in business, that we can serve each other well, and I am inclined to agree. In order to initiate what I believe will be a mutually beneficial relationship, he has offered me your services in a small matter that needs to be addressed. Comprenez-vous?’

I nodded. I was here not for Feraud but for Don Ceriano. I did not need to understand anything but the details of what had to be done.

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘We shall have dinner here. You shall stay with us, and then tomorrow we will discuss this business and see what is to be done.’

It was late afternoon of the following day when Antoine Feraud sent Innocent to fetch me from my room. I once again followed the old Creole through the corridors of the vast house and was shown into a room where Feraud stood talking with another man. He was perhaps the same age as myself, somewhere in his mid-twenties, though any similarity between us stopped there. He was Louisiana-born and bred – not the Louisiana of my mother and father, but that of old Orleans money, the kind of money that wanted for nothing, and thus was unaware of any such notion as absence.

Antoine Feraud introduced the man as Ducane, Charles Ducane, and when he shook my hand he gave that impression of worldly confidence that comes from having sufficient family money to make anything go away. He was a handsome man, perhaps a little taller than I; dark-haired, his features almost aquiline. He appeared to me as a man who knew that anything could be obtained with sufficient money or sufficient violence, and yet his features told me that he understood neither. His looks would gain him the attention of women, and yet the lack of compassion behind those looks would ultimately drive them away. His position and connections would gain him associates and ‘friends’, but such people would remain loyal only so long as his position served their own ends. I was there to make something go away, and where most men would have believed me dangerous, at least a man to be wary of, this Charles Ducane seemed to register nothing. It was only as I watched him that I saw the seams and joins that defined him. He was somehow awkward in his manner, and as he spoke he seemed to be seeking Feraud’s approval for each word he uttered. Feraud was the Devil, and this man, this young and inexperienced man, was perhaps his acolyte. I imagined there was some arrangement between them, that Feraud was orchestrating the execution of some necessity, and for this thing Ducane would be forever in his debt. For all the world Charles Ducane wanted people to believe he was someone important, someone special, but in all truth I believed that whatever was happening was going to take place solely and exclusively because of Antoine Feraud. A Faustian pact had been engineered, and though Ducane appeared to be of significance in this matter, it was Feraud who had created the reality.

We three – the head of the Feraud family, his old-Orleans-money friend and myself, the crazy Cuban-American – sat in a room not dissimilar to the one where I had first met Feraud. Feraud and I said almost nothing throughout the whole exchange, and Ducane spoke with me as if we were close, had always been close, and would remain so for the rest of our lives. He was pretending that I had entered his world, that I had been granted an audience with Lucifer and should be appreciative. But Charles Ducane, unknown to himself, was in truth talking to Satan.

‘Politics is Machiavellian,’ he began, ‘and where once a concession might have been made for territorial indiscretions, we have an indiscretion here that cannot be forgiven. My family owns a great many businesses, many interests right across the state, and behind those interests are people whose names must never be questioned or sullied, and whose pockets must be kept fat with enough dollars to make them feel they need no more. You understand, Mr Perez?’

I nodded. I didn’t need the précis, merely the name, the place, the manner in which the job needed to be done.

‘My father owns a factory where canned goods are processed. There is a senior manager there, a man of little significance, but his brother is the head of the workers’ union, and the workers are restless and agitated. This, in and of itself, is of no great importance, but the company is to be sold, and if there is the slightest hint of unrest within the ranks the deal could be soured. The union man is a voice for the workers, he is their guiding force, and with a few words he could march those men right out of there and collapse this sale. We are not interested in the union. They can fight amongst themselves until Kingdom come after the factory has been sold, but for the next two weeks we require nothing but silence, compliance and hard work.’

Charles Ducane, a young man, a man perhaps asked to ‘take care of this small matter’ by his father, leaned back in the deep leather armchair and sighed.

‘The union man we will not touch. He is too visible. We have spoken with him but his head is as hard as rock. He has no wife, no children, and thus the closest person to him is his brother, the manager. Tonight, a little after nine, the manager will take a young woman to a motel off the highway down here, perhaps three or four miles away, and he will stay the night. We require a message to be carried to the union man, a message he will not misinterpret, and how this is done we do not care. There is to be no connection to me or my family. It must appear to be the work of some crazy person, a vagabond or an opportunist thief perhaps, and we will ensure that the message is received loud and clear. We need this to be unmistakable but unconnectable, you understand, Mr Perez?’

‘The name of the motel?’ I asked.

‘The Shell Beach Motel,’ Ducane said. He paused for a moment and then withdrew a single monochrome photograph from his inside breast pocket. He handed it to me. I studied the man’s face, and then I returned the picture to Ducane.

Ducane smiled; he turned and looked at Feraud. Feraud nodded as if granting Papal indulgence.

I believed then that I understood what was happening. Ducane, perhaps his family, needed this man killed. They could not do it themselves, such a thing would have been too great a risk, but more importantly it seemed that such a thing had to be sanctioned by Feraud. Ducane, important though he considered himself to be, had been sent as the negotiator. I wondered what price these people had had to pay in order for this execution to have been granted.

Feraud looked at me. ‘Any further questions?’

I shook my head. ‘Consider it done.’

Ducane smiled and rose to his feet. He shook Antoine Feraud by the hand, and then me. He said something in French to Feraud which I did not understand, and Feraud laughed.

He looked once more directly at me, and in that second I saw the fear manifest in his eyes, and then he started towards the door. Innocent appeared and escorted him to the front of the house.

‘This is important enough,’ Feraud said once Ducane had disappeared.

‘I understand,’ I replied.

Feraud smiled. ‘You do not care for details, do you, Ernesto Perez?’

I frowned.

‘The whys and wherefores of all of this business we are involved in.’

‘I ask when I need to ask, and when I do not I keep my thoughts to myself.’

‘Which is the way it should be,’ Feraud said. ‘Now we will eat, and when we are done you will do this thing. Then you will return to see Don Ceriano and tell him that he and I will do some business of our own.’

It was close, the air thick with the smell of verdant growth. Out there I was alone. Out there the sky pressed down on me between the thick overlapping branches of the trees, and between the gaps I could see the stars watching me in silence.

To my left the highway ran a straight line back towards Chalmette and the Arabi District, and every once in a while the faint hum of some traveler drifted through. From where I lay in the mud, from beneath the ankle-deep water that stuck to my skin, I could see the vague haunt of lights in the distance. I lay quiet for some time, and then I rose slowly and stripped naked. I became one with everything around me; I became truly, seamlessly invisible. I stood there in the swollen heat of night, and then I shifted back and disappeared into the silence and darkness of the everglades. Sometimes I went under, walking out along the bottom of some stagnant riverbed, and then I surfaced, my hair slicked to my skull, my eyes white against the blackness of my face. Around me the trees stretched their roots through the soft and forgiving earth, teasing their gnarled fingers into the weed-infested water as if to test it for temperature, and everywhere, inside every breath, was the smell of decay, the strong odor of a country dying – inborn, inbred, slime-caked boles crumbling into the ground, and from the mulch of their stinking graves a new land would be born. The ground was thick with this amniotic pulp, the effort of life attempting escape, the stench heady and enervating, a high like smoking something dead.

Sometimes I paused to kneel, the sensation of undergrowth between my legs, and I leaned back, my head angled away from my body, and I closed my eyes. I could smell burning, like gasoline, oil, cordite, wood. I could smell gasoline on my skin, see the colors that grew and spread across my arms, my chest. I imagined my face in deep rainbow hues, blackened at the nose and chin, and above this the frightening starkness of white eyes. I bared my teeth, and wondered how much like a nightmare I looked. I smiled, I crouched and crawled back to the water and sank beneath the filth.

I walked a mile, perhaps more, and above me the stars watched all the way. They bore witness, they understood, but they did not judge. They saw us all as children, because compared to them we came and went in one brief twinkling, and if I understood this I understood how we were all truly nothing. Nothing mattered. Nothing bore any significance in comparison to that. Nothing meant anything any more.

I eventually tired, and lying at the side of some swollen tributary, the dank and stinking water overlapping my chest, I closed my eyes and rested. After an hour or so I rose once more and started out towards the highway.

Lights were ahead of me. Something stirred within, something excited, something indefinable, and I stepped into the depth of the trees and watched. A car turned off the highway and slid silently into the forecourt of a semicircular arrangement of small cabins. A motel. Lights from a cabin. People. My heart beat beautifully, had never worked better, and I understood that I was loved by the stars, loved by the earth, loved by everything, for that’s what I was, wasn’t I? I was everything.

Again I sank to my hands and knees, and from where I hid within the dank and humid woods I started out through the undergrowth towards the lights. I was one with the darkness. I was unseen, unheard, unknown. I was everything and nothing. My thoughts were hollow and weightless, and they turned in invisible circles, back and forth within the bounds of some limitless and empathetic mind. Ghosts, you see. I haunted the world.

I reached the edge of the road. I crouched in silence. I held my breath. There was nothing out there, nothing but me and the lights, and I slipped across the surface of the highway, my feet never touching the ground, it seemed. I was perfect. More than perfect. I was somebody.

There were twelve cabins, five with lights, seven without. I was within speaking distance of the first but I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

In my hand I held a knife I had carried all the way without thinking, as if a natural appendage to my arm. Its blade was blackened with mud and filth, and wiping it clean between my fingers, I turned it beneath the light of the neon sign. It flickered beautifully, colored like gasoline on water – indigo, purple, blue, indigo once more.

I slipped through the shadows that clung to the walls of the cabin. I edged up against the back door, and crouching low beneath the window I peered over the edge.

People I did not recognize.

I moved away, once more slipping between the cabins as if I was a shadow myself.

I found them in the fourth lighted cabin.

I crept to the back of the low building, and leaned up against the wall. I slipped the edge of the knife in between the latch and the striker plate of the rear door. I heard the snick of the metal as it clicked back. The door eased open effortlessly, and I slipped into the room, gliding like air, like slow-motion fire.

The woman was asleep on the bed, her bottle-blond hair spread out over the pillow. Her hand had slipped free of the covers, dangled from the edge of the mattress as if she had forgotten its ownership.

I could smell sex in the air, and I breathed in the bitter tang of liquor mingled with the raw stench of sweat. I leaned closer as she exhaled. I could hear him. He was talking to himself, mumbling something incomprehensible as he stood in the bathroom doorway watching her. I waited until he turned out the bathroom light, slipped off his robe, and slid beneath the sheets beside her. She turned towards him, towards me, and in the flickering light of the neon sign through the thin curtains I could see her mascara was smeared, her hair tousled, dark roots creeping out from the surface of her scalp and giving it all away.

I watched these nothing people, and I thought of the man’s name, his age, where he came from, where the world believed he was. There was no-one here but people who meant nothing, said nothing of consequence, listened to themselves speaking as if they possessed the only voice in the universe. They have been watched, from the moment of their inception, by the stars. They did not understand. I understood.

I leaned back. I smiled. With my left hand I grasped my erection, with my right hand the knife, and then, sliding across the floor on all fours I approached the edge of the bed. I lay right beneath the man. He could have reached out and touched me, but he heard nothing. I rose slowly, as if I had grown from the carpet, and then I raised the knife and held it a foot above his heart. I pushed forward with all my weight, felt the knife puncture, and then with greater force than even I believed I possessed I drove that blade home. I felt it slide through flesh and cartilage and muscle. I felt it stop against the back of his ribcage.

The sound from his lips was almost nothing.

She did not wake.

I frowned, and wondered how much she had drunk before she lay down on the bed. The man was dead. Blood ran across his chest like a rivulet of black. Light like that turned blood the color of crude oil. I touched it with my fingertips. I raised my head, and then leaning gently forward I painted a cross on the woman’s forehead. She stirred and murmured. I touched my finger to her lips. She murmured again, sounded like someone’s name but I did not hear it clearly.

‘Huh?’ I whispered. ‘What was that you said, sweetheart?’

She murmured again, a breathless whisper, a distant nothingness.

From the side of the bed I rolled the man down onto the floor. I lowered him without a sound, and then I climbed in where he had lain, the sheets warm, the mattress imbued with the heat of his body. I felt the dampness, could smell the raw earthiness of what had happened here before I arrived, and moving my hand down I slid it across her stomach, over her ample heavy breasts, down across her navel and between her legs. I stroked my fingers through her pubic hair, she smiled in her sleep, her lips slightly parted, her eyelids flickering, and then when she spoke I could feel my heart thundering in my chest. I felt the emotion and power of that moment rising to my throat.

I closed up against her, aware of the filth that had dried to my skin, the smell of the everglades, the sweat I had bled in the miles I had walked to this place.

I thought of the dead man who lay on the floor beside us. I thought of the reasons why Feraud and Ducane had to have him killed. Reasons were inconsequential. Reasons were history.

Perhaps it was such thoughts that woke her. Alien thoughts. Strange sensations as she reached out her hands to touch me, to feel for my stomach, my legs, the memory of something she had found there that once had her scratching the walls, gasping for air, crying with pleasure…

She opened her eyes.

So did I.

Her eyes were rimmed with sleep, bloodshot and unfocused.

Mine were stark, brilliant white against the blackness of my face. I looked like a nightmare.

She opened her mouth to scream, and with one hand I forced her jaw closed. Gripping the base of her throat with my other hand I rolled over and on top of her. I could feel the pressure of my erection against her stomach. She struggled, she was heavy, strong almost, and it was some moments before I could push myself inside her. I thrust hard. I hurt her. Her eyes widened, and even as she felt me thrusting up inside her again, even as she struggled to breathe at all, she knew from the expression in my eyes that she was going to die. My hand tightened relentlessly around her throat. And then it was as if she resigned herself to it. She seemed to fall silent inside, and even though I knew she was still alive there was nothing left within her with which to fight. I thrust again, again, again, and then I sensed the moment that her life gave way beneath her. I released her throat. She lay still and silent. I thrust once more, and as I came I kissed her hard and full on the mouth.

I lay there for some time. There was no hurry. Where I was going would wait forever, it seemed. I teased her bleached-blond curls around in my fingers. Her eyes were open. I closed them. I kissed her lids in turn. Her mouth was open, gasping for air that would now never come. I moved against her, felt her fading warmth, felt the softness of her flesh turn cool and unyielding, and after an hour, perhaps more, I grew from the bed like some angular tree and padded barefoot into the bathroom.

I showered, scrubbed the dirt from my skin. I washed my hair with shampoo from a bottle labeled Compliments of the Shell Beach Motel. I soaped myself with a small ivory tablet that smelled of children and clean bathrooms. I stood beneath the running water, my face upturned, my eyes closed, and I sang some tune I remembered from years back.

I dried myself with clean towels, dressed slowly in the man’s garments, much as I had done after Pietro Silvino had died. The clothes were large. I turned up the cuffs of the pants, left the shirt unbuttoned at the neck and did not wear his tie. His shoes were two or three sizes too big so I stuffed the toes with the woman’s silk stockings. The jacket was cut wide at the shoulders, ample in the waist, and when I stood before the small copper-spotted mirror I looked like a child dressed in his father’s clothes.

Hell, we were all children beneath the stars.

I smiled.

Nothing mattered any more.

I spent a minute at the doorway of the cabin. I breathed in the swollen air, the raw earthy ambience, and then I inhaled again and the whole world came with it.

I took the man’s cigarette lighter from his jacket pocket. I walked to the edge of the bed. The tiny flame that started climbing from the edge of the bedsheet towards the spread-eagled form of the woman looked like a ghost. I watched until the sound of burning cotton was audible within the silence. I leaned sideways; I lit the lower edge of the curtain. The cabin was nothing more than wood and paint and felt. It would burn well on a hot airless night like this.

I closed my eyes.

The past was the past.

Now this was the future.

I dreamed my dreams, I lived my nightmares, and sometimes I chose guests to stay a little while.

I left the cabin and did not look back. I walked towards the highway, the stars above me, my ears filled with silence.

Word had gone ahead of me to Don Ceriano. He greeted me like a long-lost son. There was much drinking and talking. Afterwards I slept for the better part of a day, and when I woke Don Ceriano told me that Antoine Feraud and he were working together exactly as he had planned.

‘Whatever you did,’ he said, ‘it was a good thing, and I thank you for it.’ Don Ceriano smiled and gripped my shoulder. ‘Though I think perhaps you scared these people a little.’

I looked at him and frowned.

Ceriano shook his head. ‘Possibly they are not used to things being dealt with so swiftly and with so little difficulty. I think Antoine Feraud and his friend… what was his name?’

‘Ducane,’ I said. ‘Charles Ducane.’

‘Right, right… I think they are a little concerned that if they cross me you will visit them in the night, eh?’ He laughed loudly. ‘Now they know your name, Ernesto, and they will not wish to upset you.’

I did not hear Antoine Feraud’s name again, not directly, for some time. I did what I was asked to do. I stayed with Don Ceriano in the house in Miami, and from there I watched the world unfold through another year.

I remember the fall of 1963 with great clarity. I remember conversations that were held into the early hours of the morning. I remember the names of Luciano and Lansky, of Robert Maheu, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. I remember feeling that there were things beyond the confines of those walls that were of greater significance than all of us combined.

In September of the year a man called Joseph Valachi revealed the key names in organized crime to the Senate Committee. Don Ceriano spoke of Jack Kennedy’s father, how he had been in with the families, how family money had put Jack Kennedy in the White House with the promise that concessions and allowances would be made for New York, for Vegas, for Florida and the other family strongholds. Once Kennedy was in, however, he had reneged, and with the assistance of his brother Bobby they had announced their intention to oust the families from all illegal businesses and rackets countrywide.

‘We have to do something,’ Don Ceriano told me one time, and this was after Valachi’s testimony, and the way he spoke of it made me feel that something had already been done.

November twenty-second I realized what had been done. I believed that the family had consorted not only with the wealthy Cuban-American exiles, but also with the big conglomerates who paid for the Vietnam War. It was ironic, to me at least, that the only criminal case ever brought against any man for the assassination of Kennedy took place in New Orleans, the trial of Clay Shaw overseen by District Attorney Garrison.

I did not ask questions. Who had killed Jack Kennedy and why was of no consequence to me.

On 24 November Jack Ruby, a man I knew by name and face, a man who had been to the Ceriano house on more than three or four occasions in the previous three months alone, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on television.

‘Eight bullets,’ Don Ceriano told me later. ‘They found a total of eight bullets down there in Dealey Plaza, and not one of them matched the rifling of the weapon Oswald was supposed to have fired.’ And with that he laughed, and said something in Italian, and then he added Chi se ne frega! and laughed again.

It was as if I had stepped back to watch the world commit itself to madness during those subsequent years. I was down in Miami. The weather was good, the girls were beautiful, and I had all the money I needed. Every once in a while Don Ceriano would call for me, and with a name, a face, I would walk out into the world and do what I was asked to do. Sometimes they were Italians, other times Americans, even Cubans and Mexicans. Miami was a cosmopolitan place, and I had no prejudice when it came to killing a man.

In early 1965 I heard of Che Guevara again. He had left Cuba to form guerrilla groups in Latin America. A handful of months later I would see a photograph of him dead. He looked no different than any other man. Castro still held sway in Cuba, but I did not care. Cuba was not my home, and I believed never would be again. America was a drug, and I was addicted.

I was twenty-nine years old when Richard Nixon said he would run for president. On the same day I killed a man called Chester Wintergreen. I garrotted him with a length of wire in an alleyway behind a pool hall. Now I do not remember why he died, and now it does not matter.

In March Robert Kennedy, the same man who had orchestrated the reversal of agreement between his own father and the heads of the families, announced he would run for president.

Don Ceriano spoke to me of this man, how he was the first attorney general of the United States to make any serious attempt to destabilize the hold of the families on organized crime and the labor unions. He mentioned a man called Harry Anslinger, referred to him as ‘Asslicker’, one-time US Commissioner of Narcotics, and how Anslinger believed that Robert Kennedy would hound the families until they were undone.

‘Asslicker speaks about Robert Kennedy like he’s a crazy man,’ Don Ceriano said. ‘He says that Kennedy holds these meetings, and where previous attorney generals have felt that their job was done if they merely called attention to the families, Kennedy goes down the list, one by one, and he names each and every significant figure in organized crime and asks the relevant officials what progress has been made in bringing them down. Asslicker doesn’t see eye to eye with Hoover. Hoover would always run the party line, tell the press and the government that there was no such thing as the Mafia, but after the Apalachin Conference in ’57 he had to change his tune.’

Robert Kennedy went on to win the first Primary in Indiana and the second in Nebraska. In June, after similar meetings in similar houses with similar gatherings as those in the fall of ’63, Robert Kennedy was shot dead in the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel after winning the Californian Democratic Primary. The Kennedy era was over, the Nixon era was to begin, and Don Ceriano – with him Jimmy the Aspirin, Slapsie Maxie Vaccorini, others who had become part of the Alcatraz Swimming Team – well, Don Ceriano decided it was time for a change.

‘We’re going to Vegas,’ he told me in July of 1968, ‘where the money comes down on you like rain, where the girls stay beautiful for ever, and where people like us can’t break the rules because we were the ones who made them in the first place. And if anyone complains, well chi se ne frega, ’cause we’ve got Ernesto to take care of business, right?’

I nodded. I smiled. I felt a quiet sense of importance.

We didn’t drive. We went out to the airport in Tampa and we flew. The car, the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser that had once belonged to Pietro Silvino, was housed in a lock-up owned by the family. It would stay there for as long as it was necessary. I had no idea then that it would be more than thirty years before I would see it again.

I would follow Don Ceriano to the ends of the earth, and Las Vegas… well, Las Vegas was only half as far.