R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

‘Jimmy fucking Hoffa… Christ al-fucking-mighty,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I remember it. I remember it happening. I remember all the speculation, the newspaper reports, the theories about what had happened to him.’

‘You must have been in your teens,’ Schaeffer said.

‘Regardless,’ Woodroffe said. ‘I remember it well. And when I came into the Bureau and started reading files that related to organized crime that name came up again and again. That was the big question… what the hell happened to Jimmy Hoffa? I can’t believe that Perez was the one who actually killed him. And that Charles Ducane, the fucking governor of Louisiana, knew about it… in effect sanctioned it-’

‘And was gonna send Gerard McCahill down to do it,’ Hartmann said, which seemed to him the most relevant point, and the one everyone seemed to be unwilling to face.

‘Enough,’ Schaeffer said. ‘We have no evidence of that.’

‘But we know that pretty much everything Perez has said so far has proven to be true,’ Woodroffe retorted.

‘Supposition,’ Schaeffer replied. ‘We do not know that everything he has said is true, and right now we are investigating Ernesto Perez, not Charles Ducane. As far as I am concerned Charles Ducane and his daughter are the victims of a crime, as is Gerard McCahill, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.’

‘There’s also the fact of how McCahill’s body was found,’ Hartmann said.

‘How so?’ Woodroffe asked.

‘The drawing on his back… the constellation of Gemini. That was the word they used when they referred to the hit on Hoffa… they referred to it as Gemini. I figure that must have been done to remind Ducane that his involvement had not been forgotten.’

‘Again supposition,’ Schaeffer said. ‘We don’t know anything for a fact. All we have to go on is the word of one man, and he’s as crazy as they come.’

‘Well shit,’ Hartmann said. ‘There goes one of life’s great mysteries,’ and that seemed to kill the subject stone-dead. There was silence for a moment. Hartmann looked out of the window. In the back of his mind he could see the image of the constellation glowing on McCahill’s back, and then he thought of Ernesto Perez standing over the dead body of Stefano Cagnotto. For a heartbeat he was back in the motel with Luca Visceglia, a motel out near Calvary Cemetery the night before an affidavit was due to be sworn. He knew how someone looked when they’d been forcibly overdosed.

‘Now we gotta find the wife,’ Schaeffer said. He looked over at Hartmann in the back seat. ‘See if you can’t get him to tell you something more about the wife. She’s gotta be around somewhere.’

‘And the kid… boy, girl, whatever, they’ve gotta be in their early twenties now,’ Woodroffe said.

‘I’ve got FBI Trace alerted,’ Schaeffer added. ‘They’ll find her, we just don’t have a realistic estimate on how long it will take. They’ll go back as far as they need to. Fact of the matter is that there’s no-one in this country who can’t be traced eventually.’

‘Except for Perez himself,’ Woodroffe said, and Schaeffer cut him a look that silenced him immediately.

‘I don’t think we can rely on Perez’s wife being any part of this,’ Hartmann said.

‘And what brings you to that conclusion?’ Schaeffer asked.

‘Perez is too smart to involve his own family. That would be too close to home.’

‘Regardless, it’s something,’ Schaeffer said, ‘and in this situation we follow everything, no matter how unrelated it might seem right now.’

‘And that includes Charles Ducane?’ Hartmann asked, and though it was a question it was as good as rhetoric because he knew how Schaeffer would respond.

Schaeffer just turned and looked at him. The expression on the man’s face was cold and aloof, but beneath that there was something tired and beaten. ‘You wanna get into this again?’ he asked Hartmann.

‘Do I want to?’ Hartmann asked. ‘No, I sure as hell don’t. I don’t want to get into any of it. In fact I’d much prefer to just step away from the whole thing and go back to New York right now.’

‘We find the girl,’ Schaeffer said.

‘And then?’

Schaeffer raised his eyebrows.

‘And then someone is talking to Ducane?’ Hartmann asked.

Schaeffer closed his eyes and sighed. ‘Whether or not someone talks to Ducane is entirely up to someone else,’ he replied.

‘And none of us here are gonna take any responsibility for that at all, right? You’ve heard what I’ve heard-’

Schaeffer raised his hand. ‘Enough already,’ he said. ‘I’m doing one thing at a time, I’m following the brief I’ve been given… and right now the only thing that bears any relevance to anything is Catherine Ducane.’

‘So we’re gonna let it all slide once we find the girl?’

Woodroffe leaned forward. ‘Ray… just drop it for now, okay? We go do this meeting with Perez, we do everything we have to do until we’ve got the girl back, and then-’

Hartmann interjected. ‘It’s okay. I’m not saying anything else. It isn’t my job to decide who runs this country anyway.’

Schaeffer didn’t respond; figured it was better that he didn’t. This was a circular conversation, and right in the middle of it was a great number of things that none of them really wanted to know.

The journey was brief, made longer simply by the rainfall; the streets were flooding against the storm drains, and here and there Hartmann saw people hurrying through the downpour in some vain effort to avoid the worst of it. It was hopeless, the heavens had opened wide, and everything that was available was being focused on New Orleans. Perhaps God, in His infinite wisdom, was attempting to clean the place up. It wouldn’t work: too much blood had been spilled on this land for it to be anything other than a small reflection of Hell.

The convoy pulled up outside the Royal Sonesta. Hartmann was out and running towards the front entrance, and there he was met by three federal agents. Inside there were four more, all of them armed, all of them clones of one another, and Hartmann realized how much attention and money was being devoted to this operation.

Now he was being placed in a supremely untenable position. He knew, with more certainty than most other things in his life, that Perez was not here to barter for the life of the girl. That was the very least of his interests. Perez was not here to avoid jail or the death sentence or anything else the justice community could throw at him. Perez was here to tell a story and to make a point. What that point was, well that was anybody’s guess. Hartmann had reconciled himself to giving it the best he had, and if the best wasn’t good enough then they could have someone else come in and do the job.

One of the agents took his overcoat and handed him a towel.

‘Fucked-up weather,’ Hartmann said and started to dry his hair and the back of his neck.

The agent just looked back at him implacably and said nothing.

Where the fuck do they get these people ? Hartmann wondered. Maybe they have a factory out near Quantico where they just breed them from the same stem cells .

Hartmann returned the towel and straightened his hair.

Woodroffe appeared beside him, Schaeffer close behind.

‘You gonna give me a wire?’ Hartmann asked.

‘The entire fucking hotel is wired,’ Schaeffer said. ‘There are five floors to this place and Perez is up on top. We have to use the stairs because the elevators have been immobilized. The first four floors are locked at all exits and entries. All the windows are sealed from within, and up on the fifth there are something in the region of twenty agents spread out in the corridors and the rooms on either side of Perez. Inside Perez’s room there are three agents who keep watch from the main room. Perez uses the bedroom, the bathroom adjacent to it, and sometimes he comes into the front to watch TV and play cards with our people. Food is brought to him from the kitchens in the basement, and it goes up the stairs just like everything else.’