A Quiet Vendetta

TWENTY-SIX

‘It’s the son,’ Woodroffe said, once again stressing his certainty that Perez had not acted alone.

Hartmann turned at the sound of someone coming through the door of the hotel room. They had set up camp on the second floor, a suite of four rooms – one for Schaeffer, Woodroffe and Hartmann, another for Kubis and his recording equipment, a third for Hartmann to speak with Perez, the fourth to house the dozen or so Feds that always seemed to be on hand.

Schaeffer paused in the doorway. He looked confused, fatigued, worn around the edges.

‘Whether it’s the son or the Archangel Gabriel is the least of our worries right now,’ he said.

‘What?’ Woodroffe asked.

‘Attorney General Richard Seidler has somehow managed to convince Director Dohring to go after Feraud.’

‘What?!’ Hartmann said.

Schaeffer looked down at his shoes as if embarrassed to relay the message.

‘Go after?’ Woodroffe asked. ‘Go after, as in pursue a line of investigation, or go after as in arrest him and bring him in?’

‘The latter,’ Schaeffer said, and then he crossed the room and sat down in an armchair against the wall.

‘Bloodbath,’ Woodroffe said. ‘It’ll be a goddamned bloodbath.’

‘Nothing, I mean nothing, goes out of this room, right?’ Schaeffer said, and he looked at Hartmann as if Hartmann could not be altogether trusted.

‘I don’t believe this,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I understood that the policy decision regarding Feraud was to leave him be, let the old bastard croak and then take the family apart.’

Schaeffer scowled at Woodroffe and shook his head, attempting to be discreet.

‘Guys,’ Hartmann said. ‘I’ve been here right from the start of this. I am well aware of the fact that Feraud was a known quantity… I mean, for God’s sake, you know how many times I came across his name over the years? The only thing that has come as a surprise is his connection with Ducane.’

Schaeffer looked away for a moment, and then he turned to face both Hartmann and Woodroffe. His eyes said it all before he voiced the words. ‘Not Ducane,’ he said.

Woodroffe stood up and started pacing the room. ‘You gotta be kidding,’ he said. ‘You cannot be fucking serious. Seidler is not going after Ducane?’

‘Seidler wants Feraud and Perez, but more than anything else he wants the girl back, dead or alive.’

‘So Ducane will just walk away from this?’ Hartmann asked. ‘Despite everything that Perez has said?’

‘Attorney General Seidler has received a transcript of every word that has passed between you and Perez,’ Schaeffer said. ‘He has tracked this every step of the way, first and foremost because of his responsibility to the system, secondly because we are dealing with the daughter of a United States governor. It is only recently that he has begun to appreciate how deep this might go, and that if any part of what Perez has said is true then they have someone within their own system that could cause them a great deal of trouble.’

‘Ducane will roll over on Feraud in order to save his own neck,’ Hartmann said. ‘No-one, absolutely no-one has been willing to testify against Feraud, but Ducane will… guarantee it. That’s why they’re not going to go after him officially. They will have him give confidential testimony to the Grand Jury-’

‘The plea bargains that will go on I don’t even wanna know,’ Schaeffer interjected, ‘and if that’s what happens then all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that we still have Ducane’s daughter missing, and whatever her father might be guilty of we still have a responsibility to find her. That has to be at the forefront of our minds regardless of whatever else might be taking place.’

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Hartmann said. ‘He said that tomorrow morning he will finish this. The deal was that we would hear him out, hear every word he had to say, and then he would tell us where he has the girl.’

Schaeffer nodded. ‘And I hope to God she’s still alive.’

‘But why?’ Woodroffe asked. ‘Why all of this performance? What the hell has Perez actually gained by doing this?’

Hartmann smiled. ‘I think he wanted Ducane and Feraud taken out.’

‘For what reason?’ Woodroffe asked. ‘What would he gain by having these two removed? These are people Perez has killed for. I mean, for Christ’s sake, he killed three people here in Louisiana in 1962 at the behest of Feraud and Ducane, and then it appears that the death of Jimmy Hoffa, while not perhaps organized and ordered by Feraud, was certainly sanctioned or condoned by them both. This whole thing with the pattern that was drawn on McCahill’s back. Surely that was nothing more than a reminder to Ducane about Hoffa? Ducane was willing to send McCahill to kill Hoffa, remember? Perez was an employee, that’s the truth. These people were the ones who paid him, in effect. What on earth has actually been gained by doing this?’

Hartmann shook his head. ‘I don’t believe we’re gonna find that out until tomorrow.’

There was silence for a moment, and then Woodroffe once again spoke of the son.

‘What the hell is this with you and the son?’ Schaeffer asked.

‘It’s the thing about family,’ Woodroffe said. ‘Perez was always an outsider. True, he might have worked and lived with these people for the better part of his entire life, but the fact of the matter was that he was never really one of them. His wife and daughter were murdered and the families did nothing. They couldn’t do anything, because of the nature of their relationship with Perez’s wife, but primarily because Perez wasn’t Italian. He was Cuban, an outsider, and really nothing more than a hired hand. Had he been Italian they would have taken their revenge. Of that I am sure.’

‘But they didn’t,’ Hartmann interjected. ‘And so perhaps he has taken his own.’

Neither Schaeffer nor Woodroffe said a word. The silence in the room was tangible, and when Hartmann spoke once more it was as if he was the only person present.

‘Maybe all of this was about Feraud and Ducane. Maybe the girl is dead. That’s the worst scenario, right? She’s dead someplace, her heart cut out, or her body in pieces and thrown into the swamps for the ’gators. Maybe the son had nothing to do with it and never did. Maybe he was ignorant all these years to the kind of man his father was. Truth is, the only person who knows everything is Ernesto Perez, and come tomorrow – if he tells us everything – then we will know as well.’

‘You think she’s dead?’ Woodroffe asked.

Schaeffer nodded. ‘Yes, I reckon so. Statistically, a missing persons report is filed, and within the next twenty-four hours the leads stay live. After that they go cold, people make tracks across everything. Footprints, fingerprints, hair and fibers and Christ only knows what else get lost in the passage of humanity. Another three days and the likelihood is the person is dead. Give it ten and the odds on them being still alive are down to about four percent. That’s statistics based on hundreds of thousands of missing persons reports, abductions, kidnappings, every kind of case where someone takes a walk and never comes home. The ones that are found, the ones that make it back alive… Well, they are home within forty-eight hours. That’s just the cold, hard reality of the matter.’

‘So why kill her and go through all of this?’ Woodroffe asked, knowing even as he asked the question that the answer was obvious, and voicing it for no other reason than grasping at straws, asking anything that might throw some fragile shadow of hope across the thing.

‘So we would sit here patiently and listen to his life,’ Hartmann said.

‘And that, simply enough, was the way he could make us hear the truth about Feraud and Ducane,’ Schaeffer said.

‘Maybe,’ Hartmann replied.

‘Right,’ said Woodroffe. ‘It’s all a maybe.’

Hartmann looked up at both of them. ‘Until tomorrow,’ he said, and rose from his chair. He walked along the hallway to the stairwell and made his way down to the foyer.

He believed he’d never been so exhausted in his life.

He was there on the street in front of the hotel when the FBI transporters came. There were two of them, an older man, tall and heavy-set, almost too old to be in active service, and a much younger one, dark-haired, and had he been but a few years older they could have been stand-ins for himself and Perez. Agents such as these were specially assigned to tasks such as this – the passage of Ernesto Perez to Quantico, right into the heart of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters, and there – while he awaited whatever judicial procedure the Bureau had arranged for him – there would be a hundred profilers with a hundred different tests, all of them eager to ascertain the specific common denominator that linked all such people together. There was no one thing: Hartmann knew that from studying thousands of case files on all manner of killings. These people were human beings just like the rest of us, and Hartmann believed all people possessed the capacity and will to murder; it was merely a matter of environment, conditioning, situational dynamics as they were so often referred to, that precipitated that actual moment, the split-second heartbeat when the mind moved the hand and the hand pulled the trigger or buried the knife or tightened the cord around someone’s unsuspecting throat. It was not complicated; it could not be filed or classified or cataloged or cross-indexed; it was what it was, and what it was would always and forever come down to people. Guns were never the cause of death; thoughts and emotions and reactions were the force majeure. People killed people, and that was all there was to it.

So Ray Hartmann sat smoking his cigarette while the transporters made idle talk with the other agents present, and no-one seemed to possess the same degree of tenacity or drive about this thing. Perhaps they all subconsciously knew it was coming to an end. Perhaps they all believed that Catherine Ducane was dead, and thus there was nothing else worth fighting for.

Outside the hotel stood an armored four-by-four Humvee. Dark gray, mirrored windows, bulletproof tires, skirting between the wheels that was designed to prevent anything being rolled beneath the vehicle. It was in this vehicle that Perez would make his final journey from Louisiana. Once he climbed inside that car he would never come back. Of that Hartmann was certain. And himself? Would he ever come back? He believed not, for this had not only been a trial by fire, it had also served as some means of exorcism and catharsis. Perhaps Louisiana would always and forever hold his past, both his childhood, and this particular rite of passage.

He rose and crossed the foyer. He shared a few words with the transporters – the elder one, Warren McCormack, the younger one, David Van Buren. They were cold and businesslike; they were here to do something specific, something functional and precise. They had done this sort of thing a thousand times before, ferrying the worst the world could offer to their final destination, and they were hardened and matter-of-fact and eager to be on their way.

Hartmann left the Royal Sonesta and walked the long route back to the Marriott. He felt as if he were breathing New Orleans air for the very last time. Tomorrow he would be gone. Tomorrow he would fly back to New York and call Carol. He considered once more what she had said when he’d had Verlaine call her. That she’d expressed doubts. Actions speak louder than words, she had said, and he felt sure he could demonstrate the necessary actions if only he was given another chance. But how many chances had she given him already? And how many times had he let her down? He would speak with Jess again, he knew that, and it was something he could almost physically anticipate. He wanted that meeting so much, a meeting where they could talk about the possibility of making their lives together work. He felt the conflict then: the need to know about Catherine Ducane versus the desire to know nothing more. Perhaps that was the point he believed he could let go of it all. It was so much a part of him, as intrinsically his own as his fingerprints, the sound of his voice, the way his face looked when he stared at himself in the mirror. Perhaps he had let whatever held him within this go – finally, without question. Perhaps. Time would tell.

In his room he watched TV. Cartoons, ten minutes of some awful made-for-TV movie, a brief flash of news that reminded him that the world had gone on about its business without him. He’d been here eight days, all of thirteen or fourteen hundred hours, and whereas a week had just effortlessly slipped through his fingers in New York, this week had seemed like a hundred years all crammed together with no breathing space at all.

He turned the TV channel to the hotel radio and lay on the bed. Dr John played ‘Jump Sturdy’, and following on came Van Morrison singing ‘Slipstream’. He remembered the record, the album he and Carol had bought together so many years before. Best record to make out to, she’d told him, and then she’d laughed and told him they’d wear the grooves flat by the time they were finished. It was all there just inches back of his forehead – the faces, the names, the colors, the sounds, the places – everything they had shared together for the better part of a decade and a half. And then there was Jess, all of twelve years old, nothing less than a woman in her own right, and how she had made everything they had worked for seem truly and eternally worthwhile.

He believed it was all there, every single moment of it, and now all he had to do was say the right thing at the right moment and he could take it all back.

And so he slept, once again fully clothed but for his shoes, and when he woke it was a little after six in the morning, and he stood on the balcony of his hotel room and watched as the sun rose and warmed and then bleached the landscape of shadows. This was the Big Easy, the Big Heartacher. New Orleans, where they buried the dead overground, where the guidebooks recommended you walk in groups, where everything slid over-easy, sunny-side down, where the Big George fell on eagles nine times out of ten.

This was the heart of it, the American Dream, and dreams never really changed, they just became faded and forgotten in the manic slow-motion slide of time.

Sometimes, out there, it was easier to choke than to breathe.

‘So you’re up for the last show,’ Schaeffer said as Hartmann appeared in the hotel room doorway.

Hartmann looked at Woodroffe and Schaeffer; they appeared as worn-out as he felt.

‘What happens when he’s done?’ he asked.

‘We got a couple of transporters who’ve come down,’ Woodroffe said. ‘Didn’t catch their names but they’re here from Quantico. That’s where he’s going after all is said and done.’

‘You were told that was gonna happen?’ Hartmann asked.

‘We were informed that people would be coming, of course,’ Schaeffer said. ‘They don’t send names or dates or anything, just that people would be coming to take Perez.’

Hartmann frowned.

Schaeffer laughed drily. ‘You don’t work for the FBI,’ he said. ‘Everything, and I mean everything, is on a strictly need-to-know basis. We’re just the babysitters. We’re just here to make sure he sings like a canary and doesn’t fly the coop. When our job’s done we get to go home and someone else takes Perez wherever the fuck he’s supposed to go.’

‘You’ll go with him to Quantico?’ Hartmann asked.

‘Sure we will,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I ain’t letting the guy disappear outta my life without saying goodbye.’

‘Me and Woodroffe will go with them,’ Schaeffer said, ‘and you, Mr Hartmann, you get to go back to the real world and fix this business with your wife.’

‘Any more news on Feraud and Ducane?’ Hartmann asked.

‘I haven’t heard anything else,’ Schaeffer said. ‘I imagine we’ll catch something on the news sooner or later.’

‘A statement will come from Ducane’s office that he has been taken ill and his doctor has consigned him to complete bed rest for a month. The month will pass by and another statement will come that he has been slow to recover, and this unfortunate situation has required him to graciously offer his resignation from the office of Governor of Louisiana.’

‘You are a dark-minded cynic, Bill Woodroffe,’ Schaeffer said.

‘No, I am a realist,’ Woodroffe said. ‘Even in the face of something like this these people will protect their own. Indirectly, of course, they will in fact be protecting themselves.’

‘These people, as you so diplomatically put it,’ Schaeffer said, ‘are the same people that sign your paycheck.’

Woodroffe shook his head and sighed. ‘I’ve had enough for one week,’ he said quietly. ‘I wanna go home and see my wife, eat a proper meal, watch a game on the tube, drink three cans of beer and sleep in my own bed.’

Schaeffer smiled. He turned and looked at Hartmann. ‘You call me in a couple of weeks,’ he said. ‘Call me at my office and I’ll tell you what I can about what happens with Perez, okay?’

‘Appreciated,’ Hartmann said.

‘And here we go,’ Schaeffer said, as a commotion of voices and noise was heard from the corridor.

Hartmann rose slowly from the chair. It seemed that every muscle, every bone, every sinew and nerve in his body was screaming at him to lie down. He fought the urge. He put one foot ahead of the other. He made it as far as the doorway, walked down the hallway and turned left.

He paused for a moment, closed his eyes for just a fraction of a second, and then he stepped into the room.

‘Mr Hartmann,’ Ernesto Perez said quietly.

‘Mr Perez,’ Hartmann replied.

‘I believe this will be the very last time that we speak face to face.’

‘I believe so.’

‘It has been a fascinating week, has it not?’

‘Not my choice of words, but I understand the sentiment.’

Perez smiled and reached for a cigarette. He lit it, inhaled, and then allowed the tendrils of smoke to escape from his nostrils. ‘And you… you will be returning to New York?’

Hartmann nodded. ‘Yes. I plan to leave for home as soon as we are done.’

‘Home?’ Perez asked, almost a rhetorical question. ‘I asked you whether you had managed to convince yourself that New York was your home, didn’t I?’

‘You did. Home is where the heart is, Mr Perez… and my heart is in New York.’

Perez looked down, and then turned slowly to the left. He spoke without looking directly at Hartmann, almost as if he was speaking to someone only he could see. ‘Age is a judge,’ he said quietly. ‘It is a judge and a court and a jury, and you stand before yourself and view your own life as if it was all evidence for a trial. You cross-examine yourself, you ask questions and wait for answers, and when you are done you deliver your own verdict.’

Hartmann was silent. He waited for Perez to continue. He watched him almost without breathing, for he did not wish to disturb the man. It was as if Perez had slipped into a reverie, viewing all that he had done, all he had spoken of, and was now allowing matters to reach their own natural conclusion.

‘I cannot say I have been right, and I cannot say I have been wrong,’ Perez said at last. ‘I find myself somewhere in between, and from this standpoint I can see how everything might have been different. Hindsight also is a judge, but he is biased and slanted towards a perspective that cannot be achieved without the luxury of hindsight. It is a paradox, Mr Hartmann, indeed it is.’

He turned back to face Hartmann. ‘We see everything so clearly once it has passed, do we not? I am sure there must be a hundred decisions you have made, and if given the time again you would have decided very differently. I am right?’

Hartmann nodded.

‘So we live our lives for the moment, it seems, and we base our decisions on the information we have, but it seems that at least fifty percent of the time the information we are given is incorrect or false, or based on someone’s opinion, someone with an ulterior motive or a vested interest. Life is not fair, Mr Hartmann. Life is neither just nor equitable, and unfortunately we are not provided with a guidebook or a manual of rules regarding how it should be lived. It seems a shame, does it not, that in fifty thousand years of history we have yet failed to understand even the simplest aspect of ourselves?’

Hartmann looked away himself then. Perez was right, and despite the horrors that Hartmann had listened to, despite the violence and bloodshed that Perez had both instigated and condoned, there was something about the man that seemed to command an element of respect. Abhorrence and repulsion had in some small way become supplanted by a degree of acceptance. For all that had been done, Perez had never pretended to be anything other than himself. Unlike Ducane, unlike even Feraud, Perez had worn his heart on his sleeve; he had shown his colors; he had cheated and deceived and murdered, but never failed to recognize that that was what he was doing. Even his wife had been aware of the man he was, and though they had never spoken openly of his life he had never directly lied to her.

Perez looked across the table at Hartmann. Hartmann looked back. There was silence between them for some seconds, but that silence was neither awkward nor tense. It seemed, after all these things, that each had accepted the other. This thought did not disturb Hartmann. He did not question his allegiances nor his feelings. It was what it was. Perez had spoken the truth, and for this, perhaps this alone, he had earned Hartmann’s respect.

‘So,’ Perez eventually said, his voice clear and precise. ‘Let me tell you what happened when I came home to New Orleans.’