R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

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?’