A Quiet Vendetta (74 page)

He watched people run from the building to waiting cars. He heard the cars leaving, listened as they vanished into silence, and then he turned and looked towards the stairwell. Woodroffe was up there with Lester Kubis. Hartmann snatched a radio unit from the main desk to receive any calls from the recovery guys, and started up the stairs to find them.

Woodroffe was standing in the hallway with a single sheet of paper in his hands. The expression on his face was of a man lost. Completely and utterly lost.

‘What?’ Hartmann asked. ‘What did Quantico say?’

Woodroffe looked up. ‘They were cover names,’ he said quietly.

‘What were? Cover names for what? What in fuck’s name are you talking about?’

‘Emilie Devereau and David Carlyle.’

Hartmann shook his head and frowned.

Woodroffe held out the piece of paper. ‘They were cover names assigned by the security office of the Governor of Louisiana . . . cover names for Catherine Ducane and Gerard McCahill.’

Hartmann took a step back. There was something he didn’t understand, something that didn’t make sense. He opened his mouth to speak and silence issued forth.

‘Victor Perez was in love with Catherine Ducane all along,’ Woodroffe said. ‘What did he say? The two families that could never be together? It was Ducane’s family . . . his daughter was in love with Ernesto Perez’s son, and Victor asked his father to kill Ducane—’

Hartmann snatched the piece of paper from Woodroffe. His mind was reeling. He couldn’t grasp how this had been done. It was Perez all along. Perez had played them all. He had turned himself in to the FBI. He had shared his life with them, and in doing so had given evidence about Feraud and Ducane right to the director of the FBI. And Hartmann, in his eagerness to find the girl, had walked right out to Feraud’s house with John Verlaine and inadvertently informed Feraud of Perez’s location and intention.

Hartmann took a step back. He felt as if the whole world had tilted on its axis.

Antoine Feraud – believing perhaps that Ducane would be questioned and would implicate him – had sent his son to kill Ducane, and now Feraud himself would be taken in by the FBI. Both of the people responsible for the murder of Angelina and Lucia Perez would be delivered their own justice, and Perez . . .

‘Call the Recovery Unit,’ Hartmann said, his voice short, desperate-sounding. ‘Call the Recovery Unit and find out what the fuck has happened to Perez.’

‘The daughter was in on it, wasn’t she?’ Woodroffe was saying. ‘Catherine Ducane was in on it all along, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she?’

Hartmann shook his head. ‘I don’t know what the fuck has happened here,’ he said. ‘Right now I want to know what the fuck they’ve done with Schaeffer. Who sent these people from Langley? What were their names?’

‘McCormack and Van-something or other—’

‘Van Buren,’ Hartmann said. He turned to Kubis. ‘Call Quantico and find out if they sent people down to take Perez to Virginia.’

Kubis frowned. ‘Did no-one check already? Did no-one check the requisition paperwork?’

Woodroffe turned and looked at Kubis. ‘You see how many agents we had down there?’ he snapped angrily. ‘Did you see how many people were in and out the front of this building? This is one almighty fuck-up, I’ll tell you that much for nothing. Someone’s gonna lose their fucking head over this—’

‘Well, let’s hope to God it isn’t Schaeffer,’ Hartmann said, and once again told Kubis to call Langley and find out the names of the agents sent down to collect Perez.

Within a minute he turned and shook his head. ‘They didn’t send anyone yet,’ he said quietly, and then once again turned away from Woodroffe and Hartmann as if he did not wish to be involved in this any further.

Hartmann looked at Woodroffe.

Woodroffe stared back blankly, and then: ‘Schaeffer’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘I’m going,’ Hartmann said. ‘I’m going after them.’

‘You ain’t leaving me here,’ Woodroffe replied, and turning to Kubis he said, ‘We’re going after the Recovery Unit . . . if there’s any word on anything call me on the radio, okay?’

Kubis nodded, didn’t say a word, and watched silently as Hartmann and Woodroffe left the room and started down the stairwell.

‘This is beyond comprehension,’ Woodroffe was saying, but even as he said it he knew it was not. They had all been captivated by Perez’s performance, and there was the girl, always the girl . . . the promise that if they listened they would find the girl and she would be alive, and within hours she would be returned to the care of her father.

But it had never been about that. It had been about revenge. Perez had dug two graves, and it seemed as if both of them would be filled one way or another.

*

They found the transporter and the Recovery Unit no more than five miles from the Royal Sonesta, outside of a small town called Violet on Highway 39. Hartmann skidded to a stop and he and Woodroffe went at a run towards the vehicles.

The Recovery Unit Chief was standing over someone, and for a moment Hartmann believed he would find Schaeffer lying there at the side of the road with a bullet hole in the back of his head, but as he came around the side of the vehicle he found Stanley Schaeffer standing there, very much alive, speechless but very much alive, and he was looking down at something he held in his hand.

Hartmann walked over slowly. On the ground at Schaeffer’s feet were torn strips of duct tape, tape that had been used to bind him, and to the side of that a canvas bag that – more than likely – had been put over his head.

Schaeffer saw Hartmann coming and held out his hand.

Hartmann approached slowly, almost afraid of what he might see.

Schaeffer’s hand opened, and there within – small and silver, reflecting what little light was left in the sky – was a single dime.

Hartmann shook his head. ‘Ten Cent,’ he said.

‘The older one,’ Schaeffer said almost disbelievingly, ‘and the younger one—’

‘Was Victor Perez,’ Hartmann interjected.

He turned and looked at Woodroffe. Woodroffe shook his head slowly and looked down at the ground.

‘There was someone here waiting for them,’ Schaeffer said. ‘There was a car here waiting for them. They taped my hands and feet, they put a bag over my head. I didn’t see them, but it was definitely a girl . . . definitely, definitely a girl.’

‘Catherine Ducane,’ Woodroffe said. ‘They took us, didn’t they? Perez and his son, the girl as well . . . they took us all completely.’

Hartmann stood there, his heart like a cold stone in the middle of his chest. He breathed deeply. He steadied himself against the threatened loss of balance that assaulted him, and then he walked to the side of the road and sat down. He put his hands over his face, he closed his eyes, and it was a long time before he could even consider what he was going to do next.

*

Reports came later, inconsistent, inconclusive – but for one key fact.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, members of the ATF and DEA had raided the property of Antoine Feraud.

Daddy Always.

Men had been killed on both sides. There were numerous fatalities and woundings. Even as those reports came in, even as Hartmann listened to the words that were relayed back to the Royal Sonesta through Lester Kubis, men were being ferried to the Emergency Room in New Orleans suffering gunshot wounds. But one thing was known for sure.

Daddy Always was dead. Standing at the top of the stairwell in his own house he had fired on FBI agents as they came in through the front door. He went down in a hail of gunfire. He went down fighting back, and even as his body fell down two flights of stairs, even as his old and broken form lay spread-eagled at the foot of the risers, blood making its cautious way from his head and out across the deep polished mahogany flooring, Governor Charles Ducane’s heart monitor flatlined while surgeons attempted to remove a third bullet from an arterial channel close to his heart.

They died within moments of one another, and had they known, had they been aware of that narrow coincidence, they might perhaps have been amused at the irony. As, undoubtedly, would Ernesto Perez, crossing the Louisiana stateline into Mississippi beside a tributary of the Amite River.

Night was closing in. The lights of the Royal Sonesta burned bright. Federal agents returning from the Feraud property were gathered and briefed. Even Verlaine was there, aware that all hell had broken loose and eager to understand what had happened in his territory.

And it was he who stood beside Ray Hartmann when Michael Cipliano showed up, beside him Jim Emerson and in his hand the report prepared from the clothes they had processed from the Shell Beach Motel.

‘Her clothes alright, no question about it,’ Cipliano told Hartmann. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, ’cept for this one little thing.’

Hartmann, his mind too overwhelmed with all that had happened to cope with anything else, merely looked back at Cipliano.

‘Back of her jeans we found some blood . . . tiny little spots of blood around the edge of the rivets—’

Hartmann knew what Cipliano was going to say before he uttered the words.

‘Except it wasn’t blood, Mr Hartmann . . . it was burgundy paint, the kind you’d find on a ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser.’

Cipliano was smiling, as if everything the world had to offer had now fallen into place.

‘We estimated the carrier’s height at maybe five-foot ten or eleven. Catherine Ducane was five-foot seven, but along with her jeans you brought a pair of three-inch high-heeled shoes . . .’

Hartmann closed his eyes. He stepped past Cipliano and Emerson and walked out into the street. He stood there on the sidewalk, the noise behind him blurring into nothing.

He inhaled, exhaled, inhaled once more . . . and then he found it: the ripe malodorous blend of smells and sounds and human syncopations; the heat of rare ribs scorching in oiled flames; the bay leaf and oregano and court bouillon and carbonara from Tortorici’s; the collected perfumes of a thousand million intersecting lives, and then each life intersecting yet another like six degrees of separation; a thousand million beating hearts, all here, here beneath the roof of the same sky where the stars were like dark eyes that saw everything . . . saw and remembered . . .

He thought of Danny, of looking out over the trees, out over the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, a band of clear dark blue, a stripe through the earth, a vein . . . how they used to dream of sailing away, a paper boat big enough for two, its seams sealed with wax and butter, their pockets filled with nickels and dimes and Susan B. Anthony dollars saved from scrubbing wheel arches and hub caps, from soaping windscreens and windows and porch stoops for the Rousseaus, the Buies, the Jeromes. Running away, running away with themselves from Dumaine, from the intersection where bigger kids challenged them, tugged their hair, pointed sharpened fingers into their chests and called them weirdo kids, where they ran until the breath burst from their chests in great whooping asthmatic heaving gusts, turning down alleyways, hiding in shadows, the reality of the world crowding the edges of the safe and insular shell they had created for themselves. Danny and Ray, Ray and Danny, an echo of itself; an echo of childhood . . .

Ray Hartmann felt that vague and indefinable sensation . . . believed that each time he thought of these things he was younger for the duration.

And then he saw his mother’s face, his father’s too, and within a moment he had to wipe the soft salt-sting of tears from his eyes.

‘It was always here,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Everything I ever was. It was always here.’

And then he turned. Quietly, step by step, he turned and left. Walking slowly now, carefully, each chosen step a moment of thought in itself, and made his way down to the junction.

It was there that he found a callbox, and with his quarters in his hand he dialed the number, a number he could never have forgotten if his life had depended on it.

And he almost broke down in tears when he heard her voice.

‘Ray? Ray, is that you?’

‘Yes, Carol, it’s me.’

New York would never be the same. At least not through Ray Hartmann’s eyes. The eyes that looked out over the skyline as the plane banked and veered towards the airport were different eyes now. It was early afternoon, Tuesday 10 September. Eleven days had passed, during which Hartmann had lived two lifetimes, his own and that of Ernesto Cabrera Perez.

The world had fallen apart behind him as he’d left Louisiana. Ducane was dead, Feraud also; and though all efforts were being made by the federal and intelligence communities within the mainland United States, Hartmann truly believed that Perez, his son Victor, Catherine Ducane and Samuel ‘Ten Cent’ Pagliaro had already left the United States behind. Perhaps they were in Cuba, or South America – it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were gone. And Ducane was a man who had died with his own reputation intact. He was acknowledged in the newspapers, on the TV; he was applauded as a man of vision, a man of the future. He went to his grave with his image unsullied by the ugly truth, for there were people above and behind him who knew that nothing would be gained by revealing that truth to the world. Charles Ducane had been murdered at the behest of Antoine Feraud, and now Feraud himself was dead. His son would be swiftly processed through the judicial system, and would irrevocably disappear. This was politics, the same politics that had given America Watergate and Vietnam, the deaths of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King. It was the public face of Charles Ducane that would be worn for the world: husband, father, governor, martyr.

These things did not concern Ray Hartmann. The sole and prevalent thought in his mind was his meeting at four p.m. in Tompkins Square Park. A little more than eight months he had been separated from his family. Jess would be different. It never ceased to amaze him how fast children ceased to be children and became young men and women. Carol would have changed too. You cannot spend two-thirds of a year away from your husband, away from the familiarity of the family you have created, and not be somehow changed. But he had changed too; Ray Hartmann knew that, and he hoped – against everything that previous experience had taught him – that he had changed enough.