A Quiet Vendetta (66 page)

‘For your son, Angelina,’ I whispered, ‘and for your brother, Lucia . . . for you I will do this thing so he can begin his own life free from the past.’

And then I pulled my collar up around my throat and started walking home.

That night I made my decision. To return to Cuba would have been madness. Chicago was out of the question also, for what was there in Chicago but the memory of a life I had chosen to leave? Los Angeles, Las Vegas, even Miami – all of them carried their own ghosts. It was when I thought of something Don Giancarlo Ceriano had told me so many years before that it came to me.

The thing that a man most fears will be the thing that eventually kills him
.

And I made my decision.

My life would end where it had begun: New Orleans, state of Louisiana.

It was the end of March, April would be upon us in days, and I broached the subject of a trip with Victor who seemed at once enthused.

‘The Mardi Gras?’ he said. ‘But why?’

I smiled. ‘We are here in America, Victor. You said you wanted to see the things I had seen. I was in New Orleans for some years when I was a very small boy and I saw the Mardi Gras. It is like seeing the Pope address the people in St Peter’s Square, like being in Times Square when the New Year turns . . . it is one of those things that you must witness to believe it can happen.’

‘And when would we go?’ he asked excitedly.

‘Almost at once . . . a couple of days perhaps. I have planned for you to go ahead without me—’

Victor frowned. ‘You’re not coming?’

I laughed. ‘Of course I will come. It will be a family holiday. But there is something I have to do that will take me a few days and then I will come down after you. We will meet there and stay for a week or so and then we will come back. Besides, there are so many things to do and see, so many places to go, I don’t think I would find the energy to keep up with you.’

Victor was nodding enthusiastically.

‘So you are pleased with this idea?’

‘Pleased? I think it’s a fantastic idea. Let me go tell the Martinellis.’

I shook my head. ‘Let me make arrangements,’ I said. ‘Until the arrangements are made I would ask you to say nothing of this to anyone, not even your friends the Martinellis.’

‘But—’

I raised my hand. ‘Remember the terrible trouble you caused for me in Havana when you wanted to come here?’

Victor smiled, looked a little embarrassed.

‘Well, we did as you wished. We came here. I did that for you even though I did not want to come, and now I am asking something of you. I do not want you to tell anyone where you are going, okay?’

Victor looked confused. ‘Are we in some trouble?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We are not in trouble, but there is a reason I want this to be only between you and me, and I want you to give me your word you will keep it a secret.’

Victor opened his mouth to say something.

‘Your word, Victor?’

He nodded. ‘I don’t understand, but if that’s the way you want it—’

‘I do, Victor.’

‘Then you have my word.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now go and prepare some things for your journey.’

And so it was done. On the third day of April I saw Victor board a train bound for New Orleans. He took with him clothes and money, one and a half thousand dollars in cash, and I had called ahead and made a hotel reservation for him in the center of the city. He would be there to see the beginning of the Mardi Gras. I prayed to a God in whom I did not believe that I would be there also.

I stood on the platform until the train had vanished from sight, and then I turned and walked back to my car. I drove to the Baxter Street house to collect my things, among them a suitcase containing half a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills. I carried my things to the car, stowed them in the trunk, and then I drove up through SoHo to the West Village, where I took a room in a cheap hotel, the fee paid in cash, a false name registered in the book.

I sat in the dank-smelling room for a little more than two hours. I waited until it was dark, and then retraced my journey back to the Bowery district.

At seventeen minutes past nine that evening, outside a small and fashionable Italian trattoria on Chrystie Street, eyewitnesses would say they saw a middle-aged man, graying hair, a long overcoat, step from the alleyway beside the building and open fire with two handguns. In a relentless hail of bullets three men would go down – James O’Neill, a second called Liam Flaherty, a third called Lonnie Duggan. Flaherty and Duggan were well-known boxing celebrities from the Lower East Side circuit. O’Neill was a multi-millionaire construction heavyweight on his way to the theater.

The man, he of the graying hair and long overcoat, did not so much as run from the scene as expertly dodge between the passing cars and disappear down a facing alleyway on the other side of the road. No-one could give a clear description, some said he looked Italian, others said he seemed more Greek or Cypriot. The guns were never found despite a three-day fine-tooth-comb scouring of the area by more than thirty policemen and a team from Manhattan’s 7th Precinct Crime Scene Investigation Unit. The man disappeared also, like a ghost, like a vague memory of himself, and those that mourned the loss of O’Neill, Flaherty and Duggan were as nothing amidst the vast rush of noise that was Manhattan.

Had you followed me that night you would have seen me hail a taxicab three blocks away. That taxicab took me back to the hotel, where I collected my things and left immediately, taking another cab ride across the Williamsburg Bridge and all the way to Brooklyn. There I took a train bound for Trenton, New Jersey, where I stayed for a further two days before leaving for New Orleans.

As I departed, I tried not to think about where I was going and what it would mean to me. I was away, I had done what I had promised and I had escaped. Victor was safe. No-one but I knew where he was, and that was enough for me. I knew I was entering the final chapter of my life, but I went without fear, without the sense of impending violence that had so often accompanied me, and safe in the knowledge that my son would survive me and know nothing of his father’s past.

To me that was the most important thing.

It was what his mother would have wished.

‘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.