A Quiet Vendetta

TWENTY-TWO

‘And that,’ Hartmann said, ‘is possibly the best reason for not having been able to find the wife. Now we know that not only is she dead, but the daughter as well.’

‘But the son,’ Woodroffe said. ‘The son is still alive. Well, we can assume that he’s still alive. He would be what, born in June 1982… he would be twenty-one by now?’

‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ Hartmann asked.

‘That the killing of Gerard McCahill, at least the lifting of the body itself, could not have been done by Perez alone?’ Woodroffe asked.

‘Right,’ Hartmann said. ‘It has always bothered me that this whole thing was arranged and executed by one man… now there’s a good possibility that there were two of them.’

‘Speculation,’ Schaeffer interjected. ‘It’s nothing but another guess on our part. We don’t know anything about the son. He could be dead as well for all we know.’

‘I don’t disagree,’ Hartmann said, ‘but right now we have something to follow up on. We can assume from what Criminalistics and Forensics have told us that McCahill’s body could not have been lifted into the back of the car, and then again from the rear seat of the car to the trunk by someone alone.’

‘We can assume that, yes,’ Woodroffe stated.

‘And there was this thing about the scratches on the rear wing of the vehicle. Where’s the report?’

Schaeffer stood up and walked across the main room to a stack of bank boxes against the wall. He opened one, leafed through the pile of papers inside, and returned with Cipliano’s report.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘He says that there were some scratches on the rear wing of the car. He says they could be consistent with the rivets they put on jeans… you see Ernesto Perez wearing jeans?’

Woodroffe smiled. ‘Somehow I don’t think so.’

‘And the height?’ Hartmann asked.

‘Says that if the person who carried the body had used the rear wing for support, and if he’d been standing straight at the time, then his height would have been estimated at five-ten or eleven.’

‘How tall is Perez?’ Woodroffe asked.

‘About that height… but that tells us that his son could be about the same height as well.’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Schaeffer said. ‘I’m five-nine and my son is six-one-and-a-half.’

‘It’s something,’ Hartmann said. ‘It takes me in the direction of the son… well, at least someone other than Perez also being involved, and the son seems the most likely possibility.’

‘We ain’t gonna know until we know, that’s the real truth,’ Schaeffer said.

‘And we still have the wrong name – or what we can consider to be the wrong name. If the wife and daughter were called Perez then that name would have come up,’ Woodroffe said.

‘I’m having people follow up on the car bombing. Chicago, March of ’91. If it happened, there will be details – names, reports, documents that we can access. I imagine we will have word on it within the hour.’ Schaeffer leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms out beside him. He looked exhausted. ‘Don’t know about you guys, but I could manage a steak and whatever else comes with it. Feel like I haven’t had a decent meal in a week.’

‘Sounds good,’ Woodroffe said. He stood up and retrieved his jacket from the back of his chair.

Hartmann rose also. He figured no harm could be done. What else would he do? Head back to the Marriott, watch TV, fall asleep in his clothes thinking about Jess and Carol and wake in the early hours of the morning with a bitch of a headache?

‘Any suggestions?’ Schaeffer asked. ‘This is more your town than ours.’

‘Vieux Carre… old New Orleans side of the city. They have some great restaurants.’

‘Good enough,’ Woodroffe said. ‘We’ll leave Ross here. I’ll make sure he has all the numbers and tell him to call as soon as he gets word back on the Chicago bombing.’

The three of them left by the front entrance. Ross was located and briefed on the situation, the information that was expected.

He and three other agents stayed behind in the office to take calls, to inform Schaeffer and Woodroffe if anything came up that would require their attention. Once again, the obvious absence of so many of the field operatives reminded Hartmann of the money and manpower that were being devoted to this. Those teams had been out for days, and not one of them had come back with anything substantial.

‘Bring me a take-out or something, eh?’ Sheldon Ross called after Hartmann, and Hartmann turned and raised his hand.

‘Next time you come with us,’ Hartmann called from the doorway. ‘And we’ll talk about how to find you an FBI girl that looks like Meg Ryan!’

Ross laughed and waved as Hartmann disappeared. He turned back and headed for the central office within the complex.

They took Schaeffer’s nondescript gray sedan, as much an advertisement for the Bureau as a red Pontiac Firebird, but still they insisted on using them. Hartmann sat up front, Woodroffe in the back, and Hartmann directed Schaeffer away from Arsenault towards the old side of the city.

There was much for him to remember, although he tried his best not to. Thoughts came thick and fast, with them images: he and Danny, his mother, even a memory of his father that he believed he’d forgotten. It was close to the bone, always had been perhaps, but Hartmann had somehow managed to bury it in the believed importances of his own life. Roots were roots, weren’t they? Everybody has roots, he thought, and then remembered that that had been a line from a poem by William Carlos Williams that Carol had been so fond of. He believed there was a fragment of hope for his marriage, and certainly there was no lack of love from his daughter. She missed him. She had said that, as clear as daylight. She missed him. His heart soared when he thought of her, the sound of her voice still echoing inside his head. But Carol had doubts. She’d said that. That she had doubts. She said he should call her when he got back to New York, and then she would see how she felt. Looking from the window along the streets of his past, he could hear her voice as if she had been sitting right behind him, almost as if he could have turned and looked right back at her in that very moment…

The memory of her voice and the image of her face were broken up then, and at first it seemed that he was imagining something. They had just taken a left turn towards Iberville and Treme, and the sound that came up behind them was like a tidal wave. There was no way to describe it, but it took Hartmann’s attention by surprise, and he turned suddenly and involuntarily to look out of the rear window.

Woodroffe was looking too. They saw it together, and though there might have been words to describe what they saw those words were never voiced.

Smoke seemed to rush upwards from the ground like a tornado in reverse. And then there was another sound, like a hundred thousand cannons going off at once, and Schaeffer slammed on the brakes and hit the curb with force.

‘What the living fu-’ he started, and then there was something like a slow-motion dawning realization, and after that came a sense of recognition, and close on the heels of everything came an awareness that none of them could even begin to comprehend.

‘Ross,’ Schaeffer said, but it was more like a sound than someone’s name, and he slowed the car, pulled it into reverse, skidded one hundred and eighty degrees in the middle of the street and started back the way they had come. He hit sixty or seventy by the time he reached the junction at the end, Hartmann leaning forward to see through the windscreen. Woodroffe was behind him, his hands gripping the rear of the passenger seat, and the nearer they got to Arsenault Street the more they realized that whatever was waiting there for them was not something they wished to see.

A hundred yards from the Field Office the smoke obscured everything. Schaeffer pulled to the side of the road, opened the door and started running immediately his feet hit the ground. Hartmann came up behind him, Woodroffe following, but within fifteen yards the pall of black and acrid smoke prevented them making any further progress. The heat was unbearable, like an inferno, and all Hartmann could think of was that they would have been within it had they left no more than ten minutes later.

Schaeffer was at the side of the road doubled up. He was gasping for air. Woodroffe dragged him back, shouting something unintelligible over the roar of flames, and when he turned Hartmann realized that he needed help bringing Schaeffer back to the car.

‘Radio!’ he was screaming at the top of his voice. ‘Gotta get back to the fucking radio!’

Hartmann could barely co-ordinate himself. He felt sick, not only with the smoke and the heat but with the import of what was happening around him. Then he remembered Ross and the other men, the men they’d left behind to take messages while they drove out to the restaurant. Impulse and instinct drove him towards the source of the heat, but survival inhibited him. He knew there was no way he would make it five yards closer to the Field Office.

Suddenly another sound, like something being wrenched wholesale from the ground, and Hartmann heard shattering glass, echoing all around him, and when he felt another rush of heat he threw himself to the ground and covered his head. It was like a hurricane passing over; he felt sure the hair on the back of his head was scorched. He lay there for a moment, and then he heard Woodroffe’s voice again, screaming for him to get up, to get back to the car and call for help.

Hartmann rolled over. The sky was black above him. He lay on his side for a second, and then with every ounce of strength he possessed he forced himself up onto his feet and ran back towards the sedan.

The three of them made it back within seconds, and even as Woodroffe snatched the radio handset from the dash, even as he started shouting into the mouthpiece, Hartmann heard sirens. They were coming from his left, and he turned and saw flashing cherry-blue bars through the smoke. He could hear the thunder of flames behind him, relentless and deafening, and he sat down on the road, his back against the side of the car, and held his hands over his ears. His eyes were streaming with tears, a sharp burning sensation in his chest, and when he started to breathe deeply he felt the acidic smoke scorching the inside of his throat and nostrils.

Later, from evidence, from Crime Scene Investigation reports, from everything they could gather without any eyewitnesses, it seemed that a suitcase had been hurled through the door of the FBI Office on Arsenault Street. Forensics and Bomb Squad estimated there must have been eight or ten pounds of C4 plastic explosive packed inside that case. It was a simple detonation. The impact of the case landing in the foyer would have been enough to trigger it, and the force of the explosion took out the majority of the building’s lower floor and much of the first. It also resulted in the deaths of Sheldon Ross, Michael Kanelli, Ron Sawyer and James Landreth. Every shred of evidence, every report, every document, every tape and transcript, every piece of recording equipment was destroyed too, but in that moment – as Hartmann, Schaeffer and Woodroffe watched flames bursting out from the back of the building – their only thought was for the men who had stayed behind.

None of them spoke. Dinner was forgotten. Medics came down from New Orleans City Hospital and checked each of them over. Hartmann suffered no burns or abrasions, but Woodroffe had skidded sideways into the car and bruised much of the left side of his body. Schaeffer was merely stunned into silence, and when the medics attempted to direct him away from the scene he told them to leave him alone. He was the assigned Duty Section Chief for the New Orleans FBI Field Office. This had been his territory, these had been his people, and something had torn his small world apart. The sole purpose of their being there – the investigation, the disappearance of Catherine Ducane, the details of Ernesto Perez’s illustrious history – was wiped clean in the face of the horror that had been perpetrated.

It would be more than an hour before the flames were finally extinguished, before Crime Scene and federal Criminalistics teams could enter the site, before anyone even began to ask questions about what had happened and why.

‘Feraud’ was Hartmann’s first word. By that time they had made their way from the scene and were close to the Sonesta. Woodroffe concurred, Schaeffer also, but they knew that such an investigation took weeks, and evidence would have to be collected for days before anyone could even begin to understand how this had been done, let alone by whom.

Hartmann was incensed, angered beyond words, and yet he watched as Stanley Schaeffer’s training kicked in. Hartmann’s immediate response would have been to hit back at Feraud, hit back hard and fast, but Schaeffer kept telling him how such a thing could not be considered until they possessed direct and unquestionable authority to act. It was the same world of rules and regulations, the same command channels and disciplined rigidity that prevented them taking any steps towards investigating Ducane himself. The degree of corroboration they had already obtained regarding so much of what Perez had told them, the fact that everything pointed to a clear and undisputed motive for Perez’s actions, nevertheless counted for nothing in the face of federal protocol.

Hartmann was beyond the point of questioning it any further and said nothing.

None of them spoke again until they reached the Sonesta. The second floor of the hotel was opened up and every agent was called back from the field. The atmosphere was one of disbelief and shock; men asking questions that could not be answered, men standing stunned and silent, their faces white, their eyes wide. Schaeffer stood before them, and to Hartmann’s surprise he said some words for the four men who had been killed, and then he led the attendant crew in the Lord’s Prayer. Some of them were not ashamed to show their emotions. Some of them could not stand, and so they sat with their faces in their hands, and all tried to reconcile themselves to the fact that such things could almost be expected, for this was their chosen life, this was the world into which they had walked, and some… well, some never walked out again.

Later – two, perhaps three hours – Hartmann went up to see Perez.

The man seemed genuinely distressed and upset.

‘How many?’ he kept asking. ‘Four men… all of them young. Families, with children also? Aah, such a waste, such an unnecessary waste.’

And then he said something that Hartmann did not understand, and perhaps would not understand until this whole thing unraveled.

‘This thing,’ he said. ‘This thing that Feraud has done… and I am sure, as sure as I am of my own birth and death that it was Feraud… this thing he has done has merely served to confirm that I have made the right decision.’

And though Hartmann questioned him, insisted that he explain himself further, Perez would not divulge anything.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait, Mr Hartmann, and you will see what I have done.’

Hartmann, Schaeffer and Woodroffe did not return to the Marriott. They stayed there at the Royal Sonesta, for this now had to be their base of operation, and while they lay, restless and afraid, in their beds, while they asked themselves if Feraud would also attempt to kill Ernesto Perez in the very hotel where they now were, Lester Kubis sat up until the early hours of Saturday morning preparing another room in which Hartmann could speak with Perez.

The following morning Feds would be stationed en masse in the foyer and around the Royal Sonesta Hotel. Less than a mile away three teams of Crime Scene investigators would pore through the rubble of the FBI Office’s lower floor, and from the still-smouldering wreck they would salvage what little they could to help them understand what had happened. Schaeffer exercised a degree of self-control and military precision in everything he did, and he stressed time and again that they could not afford to lose sight of what they were doing and why. The investigation of the bombing was now someone else’s problem; theirs was still the task of finding Catherine Ducane.

A report would come back from Quantico regarding the bombing in Chicago in March of 1991. Seemed that whoever had overseen the investigation had been in the employ of the Irish families, and with a word from their Italian counterparts the details had been ‘lost’. Official documents acknowledged that a car had in fact exploded, but whether it was an intentional attempt on someone’s life or a vehicular ‘accident’ was never established. Two deaths were noted but there were no names, nothing at all to indicate who might have been in the vehicle when it exploded.

Sheldon Ross’s mother would wake to find a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on her doorstep, as would the wives of Michael Kanelli and Ron Sawyer. James Landreth had been orphaned at the age of nine, but his sister was still alive and well and living in Providence, Rhode Island. Her name was Gillian, her husband’s name was Eric, and three weeks before they had been informed that there was a ninety-five percent possibility they would never conceive children. Gillian greeted the agent, a man called Tom Hardwicke, and while he told her of her brother’s death she made coffee at the stove and cried without tears.

‘Such a waste,’ Ernesto Perez kept saying as he sat facing Hartmann that Saturday morning. ‘Such an utter waste of life, is it not?’

And Hartmann – still shocked and horrified at what had taken place only hours before, still ragged from too little sleep and insufficient appetite to manage breakfast – looked back at Ernesto Perez and wondered when this nightmare would end.

The trick, he kept telling himself, is to keep breathing.

Ross, Kanelli, Sawyer and Landreth had missed the trick, it seemed, and so might Catherine Ducane if this went on much longer.

‘Tell me,’ Hartmann eventually said. ‘Tell me what happened when you went back to Havana. Tell me what happened to your son.’

And Perez, seated there in a room on the second floor of the Royal Sonesta, surrounded every which way by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, leaned back in his chair and sighed.

‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘I will tell you exactly what happened.’