R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

Some hours passed, and as New Orleans greeted midnight Hartmann fell asleep fully clothed. He dreamed of Carol and Jess, he dreamed of himself and Danny running through the streets of New Orleans; dreamed of sailing away in 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…

Dreamed of these things, and yet beneath them, crawling in the shadows and the darker corners of his mind, he dreamed of a man lying dead in a pool of blood in a Havana motel cabin.

Monday morning, the first day of September. Incipient fall, and soon the wind would chill, the leaves would turn, and winter would make its gradual way towards even this part of America.

Hartmann arrived at the FBI office a good half an hour early. The tension was almost tangible, something perceivable from the street. They were all aware of the fact that they were together for no other reason than Perez and the kidnapping of Catherine Ducane, and they were acutely aware that Perez could be so easily wasting their time. The girl could be dead already.

‘We got the facts on this Pietro Silvino,’ Schaeffer told Hartmann, but Hartmann was of the belief that Perez was telling them nothing more or less than the facts as he knew them. He believed that Perez was here for his own catharsis, for the cleansing and absolution of his own conscience. It would serve no purpose to tell them lies, at least no purpose he could discern.

‘Found dead in a Havana motel room in February of 1960,’ Schaeffer said. ‘No-one was ever charged or convicted of the killing.’

Woodroffe nodded slowly. ‘I reckon there’s gonna be an awful lot more like that,’ he said. ‘He’s started right at the beginning and we’ve gotta listen to all of it before we even get an idea of what he’s done with Catherine Ducane.’

‘And for what?’ Schaeffer asked, the frustration evident in his tone. ‘Only to find out that the girl was dead a half hour after he took her?’

‘You cannot think that way,’ Woodroffe said, but in his voice Hartmann could tell that he had thought that way also. All of them had. It was inevitable and inescapable. They really had no idea who they were dealing with, and no real indication of which way this would go.

‘I’ll tell you something-’ Hartmann began, but suddenly there was a hubbub behind them, and looking down the length of the open-plan office he saw the first of the FBI escort team that would bring Perez in.

‘Well, we’ll see what he has to say for himself today,’ Hartmann said, and he turned and made his way towards the small office at the back of the building.

Perez seemed subdued when he sat down. He looked at Hartmann but said nothing at first. He reached for a polystyrene cup and filled it with water from a jug on the trolley. He drank slowly as if quenching his thirst, and then he set the cup down on the table and leaned back in his chair.

‘It is different now,’ he said. ‘You live this life, you do these things, and it is only when you talk about them that you feel anything at all. I have never spoken of these things before, and now I am hearing them I am beginning to understand that there were so many choices, so many directions I could have taken.’

‘Is it not the same with all of us?’ Hartmann asked, thinking at once of his own brother, of Carol and Jess.

Perez smiled. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘I think I am tired. I think I am old and tired, and I will be relieved when this comes to an end.’

‘We could end it now,’ Hartmann said. ‘You could tell us where you have hidden Catherine Ducane, and then you would have all the time in the world to confess.’

Perez laughed. ‘Confess? Is that what you think I am doing here, Mr Hartmann? You think I have come to confess to you like a priest?’ He shook his head. ‘I am not the penitent one, Mr Hartmann. I have not come here to tell the world of my own sins, but to tell of the sins of others.’

Hartmann frowned. ‘I don’t understand, Mr Perez.’

‘You will, Mr Hartmann, you will. But everything will come in its own time.’

‘But will you give us no indication of how much time we have?’

‘You have as much time as I am prepared to give you,’ Perez replied.

‘That is all you will say?’

‘It is.’

‘You understand the importance of this girl’s life?’

Perez smiled. ‘It is all leverage, Mr Hartmann. If I had taken a New Orleans restaurant waitress then you and I would not be sitting here in this room. I know who Catherine Ducane is. I have not done this without thought or planning-’

Perez fell silent.

Hartmann looked up.

‘She is not somewhere where she will easily be found, Mr Hartmann. She will be found when I decide to have her found. Where she is she will not be heard even if she screams continuously at the top of her voice. And if she does that she will only wear herself out and shorten her own lifespan. The road is long, Mr Hartmann, and she is already at the very end of it. We play this game the way I wish it to be played. We follow my rules… and perhaps, just perhaps, the Ducane girl might see daylight again.’

Perez paused for a moment, and then he looked up and smiled. ‘So we shall continue, eh?’

Hartmann nodded, and closed the door once again.

Miami is a noise: a perpetual thundering noise trapped against the coast of Florida between Biscayne Bay and Hialeah; beneath it Coral Gables, above it Fort Lauderdale; everywhere the smell of the everglades – rank, swollen and fetid in summer, cracked and featureless and unforgiving in winter.

Miami is a promise and an automatic betrayal; a catastrophe by the sea; perched there upon a finger of land that points accusingly at something that is altogether not to blame. And never was. And never will be.

Miami is a punctuation mark of dirt on a peninsula of misfortune; an appendage.

And now – of all places – my home.

Cuba was behind me, and with it the trials and tribulations of a land that still wrestled with its own conscience. 1960 folded up behind us, and looking back I saw events that somehow scarred a people’s history, Castro vacillating indecisively between the promise of a dollar-rich hedonistic west and the validation of political ideology presented by the USSR. Castro seized US-owned properties and made further agreements with communist governments. He agreed to buy Soviet oil, even as John Fitzgerald Kennedy assumed the presidency of the United States in January of 1961 and sanctioned the cessation of diplomatic relations with Cuba. On 16 April 1961 Fidel Castro Ruz declared Cuba a socialist state. Three days later, backed by CIA funding and US military support, one thousand three hundred Cuban exiles invaded Cuba at a southern coastal region called the Bay of Pigs. Khrushchev promised Castro all necessary aid. The United States government incorrectly assumed the invasion would inspire the people of Cuba to rise up and seize power from Castro, to instigate a coup d’état, but they assumed wrong. The Cuban populace supported Castro without question. The invaders were captured, and each of them was sentenced to thirty years in jail.

The United States, in its continued infinite wisdom, went on pouring the nation’s hard-earned dollars into military support for South Vietnam.

In February of ’62 Kennedy imposed a full trade embargo on Cuba. Two months later Castro offered to ransom one thousand, one hundred and seventy-nine of the Bay of Pigs invaders for sixty-two million dollars. Kennedy sent the Marines into Laos. Sonny Liston K.O.’d Floyd Patterson in two minutes and six seconds.

October brought the discovery that Castro was permitting the Soviets to establish long-range missile launch sites in Cuba, ninety miles from the American mainland. A blockade of Cuba was instigated that Jack Kennedy had every intention of maintaining until Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. Castro announced his commitment to a Marxist-Leninist ethos; he nationalized industry, confiscated property owned by non-Cuban nationals, collectivized agriculture and enacted policies designed to benefit the common man. Many of the middle classes fled Cuba and established a large anti-Castro community in Miami itself.