A Quiet Vendetta (21 page)

Until finally Batista was defeated and fled to the Dominican Republic on New Year’s Day 1959, and we were there – my father and I – there in Havana when the victorious Castro entered the city, and the people believed, the people
really
believed that things would be different now.

And all I could think of was how my mother should have been with us, but by then she was dead, and how we had fled America, land of my birth, and made our way here to the country of my father’s birth.

So I will tell you about that night – a Friday night, 19 December 1958 – and you can ask yourself if what happened to my father could really be called anything but justice.

When the men came down to drag the body from the yard I remember thinking something.

What will happen to his wife? What will happen to his children
?

For I knew all of these men had wives and children, just like my own father. Just like the Havana Hurricane.

Less than a week to Christmas, and the dead man’s wife and children would be home even then, waiting for him to return. But that night he would not come stumbling through the door, red-faced, his fists bloody, his vest drenched with sweat. That night he would be dragged from a yard by three men, his body hefted with no more grace or respect than if it had been a side of beef, and bound tightly within a length of torn sacking, and thrown into the back of a flatbed truck. And men with callused hands and callous faces, men with no more soul than a stone, no more mercy or compunction than a lizard bathing itself on a sun-bleached rock, would drive that truck away, and for ten dollars, maybe less, they would strip the body and burn the clothes, cut the flesh and let it bleed some, and then sink it into the everglades where alligators would swiftly dissemble everything that could be identified.

And my father, the Hurricane, staggering home, his own vest spattered with a dead man’s blood, and roaring drunk in the doorway, and challenging the world to defy him, to tell him he was not the master of his own house, and my mother scared, pleading with him not to hold her so roughly, not to be so angry, so violent, so insatiable . . .

And me, crouching there behind the doorway of my own room, tears in my eyes as I heard her scream, and listening as she rallied all the prayers she could muster, and hearing her voice and knowing that such sounds would only incense him further, and feeling that somewhere in amongst all this madness there must be something that made sense.

But I didn’t find it – not then, not even now.

And then the silence.

Silence that seemed to bleed out from beneath the doorway of their room, and walk its soundless footsteps down towards me, and feeling with it the shadow of cold that could only be translated one way.

And the silence seemed to last for something close to an eternity, perhaps longer, and knowing that something was wrong.

Dead awful wrong.

And then the wailing scream of my father as he burst from the door of their room, and how he staggered down the corridor as if something had taken ahold of his soul and twisted it by its nerves into torment.

The vacancy of his eyes, the whiteness of his drawn, sweat-varnished skin, the way his hands gripped and relaxed, gripped and relaxed. Fighter’s fists. Killer’s fists. And waiting for him to open my door, to look down at me, and recognizing something in his eyes that I had seen only an hour before as he stood over the beaten body of a slain man, and seeing something else, something far worse, something akin to guilt and blame and regret and shame, and horror and despair and madness, moulded into one unholy indescribable emotion that said everything that could ever need saying without a single word.

I rose to my feet and pushed past him.

I ran down the corridor and heaved through the door of my mother’s room.

I saw her naked, more naked than I had seen her since my birth, and the blackened hollowness of her eyes, the way her head was twisted back upon itself at the most unnatural, awkward angle, and knowing . . .

Knowing that he had killed her.

Something rose inside me. Alongside the hatred and panic, alongside the revulsion and hysteria, something came that was close to a base impulse for survival. Something that told me that no matter what had happened here, no matter how this thing had come about, I had to escape. Murder had been committed, murder of my mother by my own father’s violent hand, and irrespective of my feeling towards him in that moment I was certain that to stay would have been the end of my life as I knew it.

Perhaps, in some dark way, it was everything I had been waiting for; something that was sufficiently powerful to drive me away.

I stepped forward.

I looked down at her.

Even as I stared at her cold and lifeless face I could hear her voice.

Could hear the songs she sang to me as a baby.

I turned back towards my father, his back towards me, his body rigid and yet shaking uncontrollably, his fists clenched, every muscle inside of him taut and stretched and painful, and I knew that I had to leave. Had to leave and take him with me.

I ran from the house. The street was deserted. I ran back without any comprehension of why I had left.

I shouted something at him and he looked at me with the eyes of an old man. A weak and defeated man. I hurried to my room and gathered some clothes, stuffed them into a hessian sack; from the kitchen I took what few provisions remained, wrapped them in a cloth and buried those in the sack also, and then I took a shirt and forced my father’s arms through the sleeves, buttoned it to the neck, and then walked him out, walked him as if I was marching with two bodies, and I took him down to the side of the road and left him standing there, gaunt and speechless.

I returned to the house, and after standing over the dead form of my mother for a minute further, after kneeling and touching her face, after leaning close and whispering to her that I loved her, I backed up and returned to the kitchen. I took a kerosene lamp and emptied its contents in a wide arc across the floor and the table, trailed it out through the doorway and down the hall, and with the last inch and a half of fuel I doused my mother’s body. I backed up, I closed my eyes, and then took a box of matches from my pocket and lit one. I stood there for a moment, the smell of sulphur and kerosene and death in my nostrils, and then I dropped the match and ran.

We had run a quarter of a mile before I saw the flames make their way to the sky.

We kept on running, and ever-present was the urge to run back, to douse the flames and drag her charred body from the ruins, to tell the world what had happened, and ask a God I didn’t believe in for forgiveness and sanctuary. But I did not stop, nor did my father beside me, and in some strange way I believed that that was the closest I had ever been to him, the closest I would ever come.

It was December of 1958, a week before Christmas, and we headed east towards the Mississippi state line, and when we reached it we headed still east towards Alabama, knowing full well that to stop was to see our destiny slip from our hands.

Seventeen days we walked, stopping only to lie at the edge of some field and snatch a broken handful of hours’ rest, to share the few mouthfuls of food that remained, to rise and ache through yet another day of passage.

Into Florida: Pensacola, Cape San Bias, Apalachee Bay; into Florida, where you could see the island of Cuba, the Keys, the Straits and the lights of Havana from the tip of Cape Sable. And knowing that we were merely a handful of miles from my father’s homeland.

We hid for three days straight. My father said nothing. Each day I would creep away at night and walk down to the beaches. I talked with people who spoke in broken-up Spanish, people who told me they could not help me time and time again, until finally, on the third night, I found a fisherman who would take us.

I will not tell you how I traded for our passage, but I closed my eyes and I paid the price, and I still believe that I carry the scars of my own fingernails in the flesh of my palms.

But we were away, the wind in our hair, the sea air like some cleansing absolution for the past, and I watched my father as he clung to the edge of the small craft, his eyes wide, his face haunted, his spirit broken.

That was my mother.

Her life and her death.

I was twenty-one years old, and in some way I believed my own life had come to an end. A chapter had closed with a sense of finality, and if ever I believed I could recover from what had happened, if ever I believed that there was some way back from the events of my childhood, from not only the murder that I had now committed, but also the murder I had witnessed, then I was mistaken.

My soul was lost; my destiny was closed and sealed and irreversibly decided; the world and all its madness had challenged me and I had succumbed.

If ever there was a Devil, I had accepted him as my bedfellow, my compadre, my blood-brother, my friend.

I had at first followed in my father’s footsteps, and then rescued him from justice for the killing of my mother.

In my mind was a darkness, and through my eyes I saw that same darkness everywhere I looked.

What was once within now became all that was without.

We landed at Cardenas. I brought with me a shadow that I carry to this day.

Of all the things he had learned, Ray Hartmann knew one thing for certain: that it was not possible to apply reason to an unreasonable action.

Perhaps in some dark and shadowed corner of his mind he could find some measure of understanding for these things that had been done – the killing of Perez’s mother, the burning of the body, the escape to Cardenas in Cuba, even the death of the salesman – but he could not begin to understand the man who had done them. Hartmann did not believe evil was hereditary, but just as he had studied before, just as he had learned in books by Stone and Deluca, the O’Haras and Geberth, he believed there were indeed
situational dynamics
. This was the territory of criminal profiling, and here he was, lost and without anchor, hurled headlong into something that he could never believe real.

‘You are somewhat introspective, Mr Hartmann,’ Perez said quietly, and leaning forward he took a cigarette from the packet on the table and lit it.

‘Introspective?’ Hartmann echoed.

Perez smiled. He drew on his cigarette and then issued two fine streams of smoke from his nostrils.

Like a dragon
, Hartmann thought.
A dragon with no soul
.

Perez shook his head. ‘You find such things difficult to comprehend?’

‘Yes, perhaps,’ Hartmann replied. ‘I have read thousands of pages, seen hundreds and hundreds of pictures of such things, the things men can do, but I don’t know that I am any the wiser as to motive and rationale.’

‘Survival,’ Perez stated matter-of-factly. ‘It always comes down to nothing more fundamental than survival.’

Hartmann shook his head. ‘That’s something I can’t agree with.’

‘I see,’ Perez replied. ‘I see.’

Hartmann leaned forward. ‘You truly believe that all the things that have been done have been in the name of survival?’

‘I do.’

‘How so? How could survival ever justify murder?’

‘That is easy, Mr Hartmann, because more often than not it is simply a matter of yourself or them. Faced with such a situation there are few that would be willing to sacrifice their own lives.’

Hartmann looked at Perez, looked right at him, and believed that this man was more animal than human being. ‘But what about paid killers . . . what about people who murder complete strangers simply for money?’

‘Or for knowledge?’ Perez asked, perhaps making reference to the death of Carryl Chevron.

‘Or for knowledge, yes.’

‘Knowledge is survival. Money is survival. The truth is that motive can never be truly appreciated by another. Motive is a personal thing, perhaps as personal and individual as the killer himself. He kills for some reason understood only by himself, and that reason can always be explained by the individual’s own perception of what will enable him to survive in the best manner at the time. Later, perhaps, in hindsight, a different viewpoint will lend itself to the situation and the perpetrator may believe that he has done wrong, but in the moment of the killing I can guarantee that it was adjudicated to be the most contributive to his own survival, or the survival of that which owned his loyalty.’

Hartmann was shaking his head. He could not stretch his mind wide enough to encompass what Perez was saying. Truth be known he was horrified by the man, and there was nothing he wished for more than to leave the room and never return.

He looked up, half-expecting Perez to continue, but Perez had finished talking. Hartmann was aware of the fact that every word the man had spoken was being recorded behind closed doors. Lester Kubis would be there, headphones clamped to his head, and over his shoulder would be Stanley Schaeffer and Bill Woodroffe, their brows sweating, listening to every word Perez uttered in the vain hope that it would give them some indication of where they might find Catherine Ducane.

But Perez had given them nothing but himself, and all of himself. Hartmann did not doubt that what Perez was telling him was the truth, and already he believed there was no easy way to understand the man’s motivation for his actions. How this man was connected to Charles Ducane Hartmann could only guess, but the corridors of power were lined with victims of men such as Ernesto Perez. Time would tell, of course it would, but Hartmann was aware that he had little time at all. A week from then, midday of Saturday 6 September, he was supposed to meet his wife and daughter. This event would be swept aside as irrelevant compared to what he was dealing with now. His own personal affairs were of no concern to either Schaeffer or Woodroffe or, least of all, to Attorney General Richard Seidler, FBI Director Bob Dohring and Governor Charles Ducane. Their sole concern, understandably, was the whereabouts and welfare of Catherine Ducane.

Later, lying on his bed at the Marriott Hotel, Hartmann would close his eyes and recall the man he had faced for the better part of two hours. Ernesto Perez, an old man, a man who had begun his life confronting the destructive nature of his own father and the violence he had wreaked through every aspect of his childhood. Perez was now sequestered on the top floor of the Royal Sonesta Hotel, the remainder of the lower four floors having been cleared of guests by the FBI. The Sonesta now housed in excess of fifty Bureau operatives, security could not have been tighter for the president himself, and in the penthouse suite Perez himself was guarded by twelve armed men. He had asked for a music system, CDs of Schubert, Shostakovich, Ravel, Louis Prima and Frank Sinatra, also for clean shirts and nightwear; and for his supper he’d requested fresh marlin, Viennese potatoes, a green salad and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. These things had been arranged, because for the brief while that he was the guest of the FBI as opposed to the Federal Penitentiary system, Ernesto Cabrera Perez would be given every accommodation and granted every wish. And then the girl would be found – dead or alive – and the party would be over. Hartmann felt certain Perez was aware of this fact, and thus he was sure he would take every advantage he could. The man, whoever he was, was evidently wise in the ways of the world, and that included the FBI and what they could provide.