R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

I raised my head.

‘I have done everything I can, Ernesto… everything.’

I looked at Don Calligaris as if he was a stranger. ‘And me? What of me and Victor?’ I asked.

‘I have money… we have money, more money than you could need, but it is time for change, Ernesto, and you must make whatever decision you feel is best for yourself and your son.’

I heard his words. They were swallowed into the vast dark silence that was my mind. I said nothing in return, for there was nothing to say.

Some days later I buried my wife and my daughter. Beside me stood my son, so in shock he had not spoken since the explosion. His sister and his mother had been murdered, by whom we did not know, but whoever it was had set their heart on killing Don Fabio Calligaris and had failed. Had Don Calligaris died there would have been retribution. Had Don Accardo still been boss perhaps he would have redressed the balance, because he knew who I was and would have made a case for me before the Council of la Cosa Nostra . But things had changed; there was a new godfather, and he believed that justice would be seen to be done in time. He was not a rash man; he was a strategist and a politician, and so early in his position he believed it would not be right to act on my behalf.

I never saw Don Giovannetti. I believed, and believe to this day, that he would not have been able to look me in the eye and tell me the lives of my wife and daughter meant nothing.

The following day, two days before Don Calligaris – fearing for his life – would leave for Italy, I boarded a family-owned ship bound for Havana. With me I took a suitcase crammed with fifty-dollar bills, how much in all I did not know, and beside me as we slipped away from the harbor was my eight-year-old son Victor.

He asked me only one question as we watched the land disappear behind us.

‘Will we ever come back home?’

I turned to look at him. I reached out my hand and finger-tipped away the tears from his cheeks.

‘Some day, Victor,’ I whispered. ‘Some day we will come home.’

‘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…