R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

I took her to the Avenue of the Americas. We found a restaurant, and whether it was the most expensive one on the Avenue I don’t know, didn’t care, but I spent two hundred and eleven dollars on dinner and left a fifty-dollar tip.

I didn’t drive her back from the subway station to the house when we returned. I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could. I walked with her, it took a good twenty minutes, and when I stood on the stoop and told her I’d had the greatest night of my life she reached out and touched my face.

She did not kiss me, but that was okay. She did say I could call on her again, and I said I would.

I saw her most every day, except for those few days I was out of town on business, for the better part of eight months. In July of 1976 I asked her to marry me.

‘You want me to marry you?’ she asked.

I nodded. My throat was tight. I found it hard to breathe. The girl did the same thing to me as Ten Cent would do to someone who welched on a payback.

‘And why d’you wanna marry me?’

‘Because I love you,’ I said, and I meant it.

‘You love me?’

I nodded. ‘I do.’

‘And you understand that if I say no then you can’t ever come round here again. That’s the way it goes in this business… you ask a girl to marry you and she says no, then that’s the end of the matter. You know that right then it’s dead and gone to Hell. You understand that, Ernesto Perez?’

‘I understand that.’

‘So ask me properly.’

I frowned. ‘Whaddya mean, ask you properly? I just did ask you properly. I gotta ring here in my jacket pocket and everything.’

Angelina turned her mouth down at the edges and nodded her head approvingly. ‘You gotta ring?’

‘Sure. You didn’t think I’d come down here and ask you to marry me if I didn’t have a ring?’

‘Let me see it.’

‘Eh?’

‘Let me see the ring you brought.’

‘You’re serious?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘Sure I’m serious.’

I shook my head. This wasn’t going according to plan; this was getting an awful lot more awkward and complicated than I’d imagined. I reached into my jacket pocket and took out the ring. It was in a small black velvet box.

I handed it to Angelina.

She took it, opened it, removed the ring and held it up to the light. ‘Real diamonds?’ she asked.

I scowled. Now I was beginning to get pissed. ‘Sure it’s real diamonds. You think I’d bring something to get engaged that was some cheap piece of shit-’

‘Language, Ernesto.’

I nodded. ‘Sorry.’

‘And it’s legit?’

‘Angelina, for Christ’s sake-’

‘I gotta ask, right? I gotta ask. I’ve been living around people like you all my life. Don’t think there can be more than three or four things given to me in my life that weren’t stolen. Getting engaged is important, getting married even more so, and I wouldn’t wanna be making any vows to God and the Virgin Mary on something that was stolen from some poor widow down on 9th Street-’

‘Angelina, for fuck’s sake-’

‘Language-’

‘Screw the fucking language. Give me the fucking ring back. I’m going home. I’m gonna come back tomorrow when you’re a little less crazy.’

Angelina held the ring in her hand. She closed her fist around it. ‘But I thought you came down here to ask me to marry you?’

‘I did. I came down here to ask you to marry me, but you’re just standing there busting my goddamned balls for no reason.’

‘So do it properly,’ she said.

‘I just did for Christ’s sake!’

‘Down on one knee, Ernesto Perez… down on one knee and ask me properly with no cursing or taking the Lord’s name in vain.’

I sighed. I shook my head. I kneeled down on the stoop and looked up at her. I opened my mouth to speak.

‘Yes,’ she said, before I had a chance to say a word.

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, Ernesto Perez… I will marry you.’

‘But I haven’t even asked you yet!’ I said.

‘But I knew you were gonna ask me and I didn’t want to waste any more time.’

‘Aah Jesus, Angelina-’

‘Enough cursing Ernesto, enough cursing.’

‘Okay, okay… enough already.’

In November I suggested we get married in January of the following year. She put it off until May as she wanted to be married outside.

Three hundred people came to the party. It went on for two days. We took a honeymoon in California. We went to Disneyland. I did not have to learn to love her. I had loved her from a distance for a very long time. She was everything to me, and she knew it. Apart from the children she was the most important thing in my life. She made me important, that was how I felt, and that was a feeling I never believed possible.

In July of ’76 I had heard of Castro, how he had declared himself Head of State, President of the Council of State, also of the Council of Ministers. Word of him came from TV reports regarding the Senate Select Committee in Intelligence under Senator Frank Church and their investigations and inquiries regarding the alleged CIA involvement in the attempted assassination of Castro. It made me think of Cuba, of Havana, of my mother and father and all that had gone before. Of these things I said nothing to Angel, for that was what I called her, and that’s what she was.

In a way she was my salvation, and in some way my undoing, and but for the children there would have been nothing to show for any of it. But those things were later, so much later, and now is not the time to talk about such things.

By the time we talked about leaving New York I was forty-three years old. A second-rate B-movie actor had become president of the United States, and Angel Perez was pregnant. She did not want our children to grow up in New York, and with the family’s blessing we thought of moving to California, where the sun shone twenty-three hours of the day, three hundred and sixty-three days of the year. I cannot say that we existed together in a halcyon haze of contentment; I do not believe such a thing would be possible for a man with work such as mine, but the images and memories of my parents’ relationship were so far removed from what Angel and I had created that I was happy.

I did not believe, not for a heartbeat, that anything would go wrong, but then – in hindsight – I can honestly say that I was not a man who lived my life on the basis of belief.

New York became a closed chapter. We flew out in March of 1982, Angel was six months pregnant, and though it would be another fifteen years before I returned to New York I would never again look at that city with the same eyes.

The world changed, I changed with it, and if there was one thing I had learned it was that you could never go back.

The storm had not abated. Rain hammered down relentlessly, and when Hartmann was escorted from the FBI Field Office across town to the Royal Sonesta – a convoy of three cars, himself in the central vehicle with Woodroffe, Schaeffer and Sheldon Ross – he imagined himself more the guilty party than the confessor. For that’s what he was being, was he not? Confessor to Ernesto Perez, a man who had filled his life with as many nightmares as was perhaps possible for one human being.

‘I cannot believe this,’ Woodroffe had kept repeating, and was even now saying it again as they drove. ‘Jimmy Hoffa’s murder must be one of the most significant unsolved murders of all time-’

‘Apart from Kennedy,’ Ross had interjected, a comment that provoked scowls of disapproval from both Woodroffe and Schaeffer. Hartmann imagined that the party line in and amongst the Bureau was that J. Edgar Hoover and the Warren Commission had been right all along. It was, he could only suppose, one of those topics of conversation that did not occur among these people. They believed what they believed, but what they believed stayed inside their heads and did not venture from their lips.