R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

‘Appreciated, Mr Hartmann.’

Schaeffer turned and walked away. Already Hartmann could hear the hubbub of voices gathering in the corridors as Woodroffe organized the briefing that would take place.

Hartmann left as inconspicuously as he could. He went on foot, walked down to the junction and turned right. No-one, as far as he knew, saw the way he went, and for this he was grateful.

He reached Verlaine’s Precinct at five after six. The evening was swollen with humidity; evidence of a storm on the way. Across the horizon loomed an ominous wide band of gray-green cloud. The atmosphere reflected Hartmann’s state of mind. He had listened to Perez speak of things he’d done here in New Orleans. He knew the Shell Beach Motel, no more than a mile or two from where he now stood, and the thought that this man had walked through this country just a handful of years before Hartmann himself was born, years when his mother was alive and within walking distance of what had happened, unnerved and disturbed him. Perhaps the reason Perez had chosen him was because they had both been born here, because they both understood something of the nature of Louisiana, for this country was owned by nothing but itself. Whatever was built here could be sucked right back into the filthy earth if Louisiana so desired.

Verlaine was waiting in the foyer.

Hartmann opened his mouth to speak and Verlaine shook his head. He crossed the foyer and showed Hartmann out of the building and down the steps. Only when they reached the sidewalk did he speak.

‘This isn’t happening,’ he said quietly. ‘You never came here and we never did this, understand?’

Hartmann nodded.

Verlaine took Hartmann’s arm and hurried him across the road and down half a block to where his car was parked. He climbed inside, released the catch for Hartmann to get in the passenger side, and then started the engine and pulled away. Twice he looked back over his shoulder, as if he was ensuring he wasn’t being followed.

‘You got your audience with Feraud,’ Verlaine said, ‘but I had to pay a tribute.’

‘A tribute?’

Verlaine nodded. There was tension in his voice, fear in his tone. ‘I had to make something disappear quietly, you get me?’

Hartmann realized what had happened: Verlaine had made a trade with Feraud.

‘Better that I don’t know anything,’ he said.

‘Too damned right,’ Verlaine replied, and eased the car off the main freeway and down a slip road that would take them towards Feraud’s territory.

Within half a mile Hartmann felt it: Feraud’s presence. Smells like Cipliano’s office, he thought. Smells like dead bodies, bloated and rank, and no matter if the air-con has been running all night it’s a smell that you can’t escape. Even when you leave it’s there on your clothes .

A quarter-mile from Feraud’s house and Hartmann felt a sudden and necessary urge to turn back, to tell Verlaine that he had been wrong, that he didn’t want to do this, that he’d decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to do anything that might jeopardize the federal investigation. The thought was there but the words didn’t come… and later he would think that even though he felt these things he also knew, in his heart of hearts, that he was prepared to do almost anything to see this come to an end.

And so he said nothing, and Verlaine kept driving, and before long they were slowing down and shuddering to a halt at the side of the mud-rutted road that ran alongside the edge of Feraud’s property.

‘You ready for this?’ Verlaine asked.

Hartmann shook his head. ‘No, and I don’t think I ever will be.’

‘Feeling’s mutual.’

Hartmann opened the door and stepped out. The clouds he’d seen on the horizon were now directly overhead. He shivered at the feeling that came with the smell, the breathlessness around him, the feeling that everything was tightening claustrophobically. This place had the power to invade the senses, to invade the mind and the heart. This place provoked images and sounds and memories that he had believed gone, but they were not gone, never had been, and he knew that Louisiana and all it represented would be eternally a part of who he was. Like a fingerprint on the soul. This was his past, and however hard and fast he might run from it, it would never leave him. The simplicity was that it was always one step ahead, and wherever he might turn it was there waiting.

‘You first,’ Hartmann said. ‘He knows you.’

‘Lucky for me,’ Verlaine cracked, but there was no humor in his tone. Once again Hartmann recognized that his companion was as scared as he was.

They took the path and cut through the trees. The light was bad, dense and forbidding, and Hartmann carried with him the image of Ernesto Perez sliding through this undergrowth on his way to the Shell Beach Motel.

… Sometimes I went under, walking out along the bottom of some stagnant riverbed, and then I surfaced, my hair slicked to my skull, my eyes white against the blackness of my face… such a high… like smoking something dead …

Hartmann felt a wave of nausea in his chest and clamped his hand to his mouth. He believed he had never been so afraid in his life.

And then Feraud’s place was ahead of them, a vast colonial mansion. There was a single lighted window visible on the ground floor, and up on the veranda a group of men stood talking and smoking. They carried carbines, they talked in low guttural Creole French, and when they saw Verlaine and Hartmann they stopped.

Half a dozen pairs of eyes watched them as they made their way up to the house.

None of them said a word, and this was in some way worse than being challenged. It meant that they were expected. That simple: he and Verlaine were expected.

One of the men stepped forward and held out his hand.

Verlaine turned to Hartmann. ‘My gun,’ he said quietly, and Hartmann didn’t even consider questioning him. Verlaine reached around back of his waist and released the catch on his holster. He handed over his.38 and waited patiently for their next instruction.

Another man stepped forward and frisked both of them, and then he turned and nodded.

The man who held Verlaine’s gun stepped forward and opened the front door of the house. He indicated with a swift nod of his head that they should go inside.

Rock and a hard place , Hartmann thought, and walked into the house behind Verlaine.

They waited for minutes that appeared to stretch into hours. Somewhere the sound of a grandfather clock, its ticking like the beating of some heart, echoed through the seeming emptiness of the house. It was all dark wood and thick rugs, and even Hartmann’s breathing seemed to come back at him in triplicate.

Eventually, even as Hartmann believed he couldn’t take a second more of the tension, there was the sound of footsteps. Coincidentally, the sky above them seemed to swell and rumble. Thunder was starting up somewhere, perhaps a mile, perhaps two, from where they stood. Soon the rain would come, the lightning illuminating the surrounding countryside in bright flashes of monochrome, the trees set in stark white silhouette like skeletons against the blackness of the horizon.

A Creole appeared, middle-aged, his hair graying at the temples, and stood for a moment at the end of the hall that ran from the main entranceway.

Hartmann remembered Perez speaking of an old man called Innocent, a man that must have been dead a considerable number of years by now. Perhaps this was his son. Perhaps employment in this particular line was inherited.

‘Come,’ the Creole said, and though his voice was barely a whisper it carried through the building and reached Hartmann as if the man had been standing right beside him.